Iain Banks - The Business

I suggested they might call it a Lumpen Crowd Display, or possibly Large Ego Display; LCD or LED. This they thought a hoot, and only encouraged them. What would be their refreshment rate? Could you use all raster-farians? Hey, what if they all wanted a screen dump?

While the technical guys got on with this, Dessous was chairing another discussion group, which was trying to work out what images you could show on this widest of wide screens. Great sporting moments seemed to feature strongly.

I slipped away, stayed longer in the toilets than I really needed to, then stepped into the street outside where no one from the party could see me and checked my phone's signal strength.

'Hi, Kate. How are you?'

'Oh, sorry, Stephen, I…I didn't mean to call you,' I lied. 'Wrong button.'

'That's okay. You all right?'

'Yeah, yeah. You?'

'Fine.'

'Okay, then, sorry.'

'No problem. Where are you, anyway?'

'Place called Sheridan. Wyoming, I think.'

'You skiing with Dessous?'

'Yup. How'd you know?'

'Ah, just masculine intuition. I've been there myself.'

'Where are you now?'

'Ah, still in DC…And it looks like I've got where I'm supposed to be.' I heard the noise of traffic behind his voice as he said, 'Yeah, okay,' to somebody else, then, 'I've got to go,' to me. 'You take care now, okay?'

'Okay.'

'Don't break anything.'

'Yeah, you too,' I said.

Only my heart, I thought.

The following day I took the same Huey back to Omaha (those big olive-green headphones again — for someone who tried to avoid helicopters I seemed to be spending a lot of time on the damn things), then a United 757 to LAX (stodgy muffin, steward with neat butt, brief snooze) and a Braniff 737 to San Francisco (mercifully quiet but overflowingly obese woman in seat alongside — smelled strongly of French fries). A hired car took me home to Woodside.

The place was warmer than Nebraska but the house felt cold.

I watered my long-suffering cactuses and made a few calls. I met with some old friends in Quadrus, a Menlo Park restaurant popular with some of the PARC guys. I ate too much, drank too much and smoked too much, and babbled happily about nothing of consequence at all.

I invited Pete Wells back to my place. He's a research analyst and an old pal/lover, still a good-time guy and up for the occasional friendly fuck, though he is engaged to some lucky lass in Marin and so not for much longer. We made hazy, stoned, well-tempered love to Glen Gould playing J. S. Bach, listening to the man humming and singing along.

I slept well, apart from a weird dream about Mike Daniels searching my garden for his missing teeth.

The next morning, with Pete already gone and me both a little bleary and not particularly well rested, I repacked my bags — with DKNY, mostly — and took the Buick back to meet its buddies at San Francisco International's Alamo, then it was a JAL 747-400 to Tokyo via Hawaii (twenty minutes late leaving due to two tardy suits; I joined in the Mean Group Stare when they finally stumbled into First trying not to look sheepish and studiously avoiding everybody's eyes. Sushi very good. Played both Garbage albums, separated by Madonna's Ray of Light. Slept well). Cathay Pacific Airbus 400 from Tokyo to Karachi (shown how to play with game console in seat by Japanese kid; very good sleep later — worry that I may be turning into woman in a song I heard once who only slept on planes. Bumpy landing).

I had a feeling that whatever passport I chose for Karachi it would be the wrong one, but I decided on the British one and was pleasantly surprised: whisked through. The place was packed, the air was thick with a medley of smells, the humidity was stifling and the lighting in the arrivals hall was terrible. Over the crowds I spotted a board being held up with a rough approximation of my name on it. I hadn't been able to find a trolley so I held my suit carrier out in front of me and used it to work open a path in the right direction.

'Mrs Telman!' said the young Pakistani man holding the sign up. 'I am Mo Meridalawah. Very pleased to meet you!'

'It's Ms Telman, but thank you. How do you do.'

'Very well, thank you. Let me…' He took my bags off me. 'Follow me, please! This way. Out of the way there, coarse fellow!'

No, really, he did.

Hiltonised overnight, and restless, I got up, kicked the previous day's newspapers out of the way, booted the ThinkPad and spent some time on a few techy-oriented news groups before going back to more disturbed sleep. Mo Meridalawah reappeared mid-morning and drove me back to the airport through some of the most chaotic traffic I had ever seen. It had been just as bad the evening before but I had assumed then it was rush-hour.

There was no such excuse now, and it was even more terrifying in daylight; unbelievable numbers of bicycles, trucks belching black diesel fumes, garish buses, motorised trikes and cars driven seemingly at random in any direction as long as it was either directly across our path or on a collision course. Mo Meridalawah waved his hands about and chattered ceaselessly about his family, cricket and the incompetence of his fellow road users. Karachi airport was almost a relief.

Yet another helicopter: one of those ancient, tall Sikorskys with the engine in the bulbous nose and the flight deck up a ladder. The cabin was actually quite comfortably kitted out, but it all looked worryingly old-fashioned and well worn. Mo Meridalawah waved goodbye from the tarmac with a white handkerchief as though he for one never expected to see me again. We chopped out over the city, across dense green mangrove swamps, along the coast and then across the lines of surf and out over the Arabian Sea.

The Lorenzo Uffizi had been a cruise ship for nearly thirty years; before that it had been one of the last transatlantic liners. Now it was out of date, its powerful but old engines were hopelessly inefficient and the vessel as a whole was just too old to refit again economically. It was only worth scrapping, and it was to complete that process that it had come here from the yard in Genoa where its more valuable and salvageable fittings had been removed.

Sonmiani Bay is where a lot of the world's ships end up. The broad beach slopes smoothly into the sea, so that the vessels can be aimed at the sands, put to full speed ahead and then just run aground. On the vast beach there's plenty of room for whole fleets of obsolete ships, and in the countryside around there are hordes of impoverished people willing to work for a pittance, cutting the ships up with torches, attaching chains and hawsers to sections of hull and then — if they're quick enough — getting out the way in time when the giant winches further up the shore haul the pieces of ship off. More cutting, more dragging by winches, then the bits are craned on to rail flatcars and hauled to a quay side thirty miles away, where the scrap is loaded aboard ships bound for anyone of a dozen steel mills throughout the world.

I had heard of Sonmiani Bay, I had read about it in a magazine twenty years earlier and just a couple of years ago I'd seen some TV footage, but I'd never been there. Now I was going to get to see it first hand, and I'd be arriving by ship. Tommy Cholongai was a Level One exec who could fairly be described as a shipping magnate. The first time I'd used this phrase in front of Luce she'd asked, did that make him anything like a fridge magnate. Normally I'd have said something, but as I recall I'd just asked her if she was still looking for Mr Cannon, and so my lips were tied. Today, I'd been told, Mr Cholongai was going to fulfil a lifelong ambition by being at the controls when the Lorenzo Uffizi hit the beach at full speed.

The Lorenzo Uffizi was still an impressive sight. It was about fifty klicks offshore, lying still in the water a few hundred metres from the comparatively toy-like shape of Mr Cholongai's own motor yacht. We circled the liner, level with its two tall funnels. The ship was creamy white, streaked here and there with rust; the funnels were blue and red and the stern funnel was the source of a thin streamer of grey smoke. Windows glittered with reflected sunlight. Empty lifeboat derricks stood like lamp-posts along the boat deck — there was just one lifeboat left on each side, up near the bridge — and its two drained swimming-pools gaped pale blue beneath the dazzling cloudless sky, Ballardesque.