'Hmm.' The Queen put her glasses away again. 'Why are you here, Miss Telman?'

'I thought I had been summoned, Your Highness.'

'I meant here in Thulahn, you idiot!' Then she sighed and her eyelids fluttered closed for a moment. 'I beg your pardon, Miss Telman.  I should not have called you an idiot.  Do forgive me.'

'Of course, ma'am.  I am here in Thulahn to decide whether I ought to accept a post which will mean coming here to live.'

'Yes, you are one of these mysterious business people my son talks about in such admiring tones.  Who are you really?  Are you the Mafia?'

I smiled. 'No, ma'am.  We are a commercial concern, not a criminal one.'

'My son says that you want to invest what sound to me like most unlikely amounts of money in our country.  What's in it for you?'

'We'd like to use Thulahn as a sort of base, Your Highness,' I said, trying to choose my words with care. 'We'd hope that we might be welcomed by your people and that some of us might become citizens.  There would be more trade and more dealings in general with other countries, thanks to the improvements and investments we'd like to offer, and so we hope, and we think, it would be appropriate that some us might be allowed certain diplomatic posts so that we could represent Thulahn abroad.'

'You're not backed by those bloody Chinese, are you?'

I wondered if Mihu, still standing by the door, understood English. 'No, ma'am.  We're not backed by anybody, in the way I think you mean.' If anything, I thought, we were the ones who tended to do the backing.

'Hmm.  Well, it all sounds jolly fishy to me.'

'We mean only to help Thulahn, Your Highness.  The improvements to the infrastructure and so on would be offered, not —'

'Family, faith, farms and fealty,' the dowager Queen said, releasing one arm to wag a finger at me.

'I beg your pardon, ma'am?'

'You heard.  That's what matters to these people.  Those four things.  Nothing else.  Everything else is irrelevant.'

'Well, perhaps better water supplies, a few more primary schools, more primary health care, too, and —'

'They have water.  No one dies of thirst.  They have all the education they need.  Do you need a degree to walk behind a plough?  No.  And health?  It will always be hard to live here.  It's no place for the weak.  We all have to die, young woman.  Better to work hard, accept the consolation of one's faith and then go quickly.  All this hanging around's just vulgar.  People are so greedy these days.  Accept your lot and don't insist on extending the misery of those who'd be better off dead.  There.  That's what I believe.  Oh, and you needn't try to hide your feelings.  I know what you're thinking.  Well, for your information, I have not seen a doctor since I took to my bed, and I will not in the future, no matter what.  I've been waiting to die for a quarter of a century, Miss Telman.  I believe the good Lord is keeping me alive for his own good reasons and so I shan't hasten the process of dying, but I shan't do anything to delay it, either, once it begins.'

I nodded. 'That's very stoic of you, ma'am.  I hope anybody would respect your choice.'

'Yes?' she said slowly, suspiciously. 'But?'

'I…think it would only be right to offer the Thulahnese people a choice as well.'

'A choice of what?  Will they want television?  Burger bars?  Jobs in factories and supermarkets?  Salaries in offices?  Motor cars?  They will doubtless choose all that, if they're offered it.  And before you know it we will be just the same as everywhere else and we'll have homosexuals, AIDS, socialists, drug-dealers, prostitutes and muggers.  That will be progress, won't it, Miss Telman?'

By now even I was beginning to suspect that there was no point in continuing this argument.  I said, 'I'm sorry you feel that way, Your Highness.'

'Are you?  Are you really?  Try telling the truth.'

'I am.  Truly.'

The Queen looked down at me for a while.  Then she nodded.  She leaned fractionally towards me. 'It is a hateful thing to grow old, Miss Telman.  It is not an enjoyable process, and it will come to you one day.  I don't doubt you think me an appalling old reactionary, but there is this consolation for me that there may not be for you:  I will be glad to leave this stupid, hurtful, degrading world.' She straightened again. 'Thank you for coming to see me.  I am tired now.  Goodbye.  Mihu?'

I turned round to see the big Chinese man silently opening the doors for me.  I looked back to say goodbye to the Queen, but she had closed her eyes and her head had drooped, as though she had been a marionette in a fairground booth all the time and now my money had run out.  I took a last look round the strange room with its glittering, whispering walls of flaking leaf over black wooden flesh, then turned and left.

Langtuhn Hemblu almost had to run to keep up with me as I strode back to the car.

'My, you had quite a long time with the Queen Mother!'

'Did I?'

'Yes!  You are very privileged.  Isn't she a treasure?'

'Oh, yes, a treasure,' I said.  Pity she's not buried, I thought.

When I got back to my room in the palace at Thuhn, all my stuff had gone.

I stood in the doorway and looked around.  The little cot bed in the alcove had been made up.  The cupboard where I'd hung my suit carrier and clothes was open and empty.  The satellite phone, my computer, my toiletries; all gone.  The little table by the bed had been cleared too; my netsuke monkey had disappeared with everything else.

A swimmy sort of feeling came over me.  No phone, no contact.  Just what I stood up in.  In my pockets, a billfold and two shiny discs.

Had I been robbed?  I'd assumed this was one of those places where you didn't need to lock anything, and that was why there was no way of securing the room door.  But, then, how much were the satellite phone and the ThinkPad worth, compared to what the average person here made in a year?  Maybe somebody had been just too tempted, and I too careless.

Or had I made that bad an impression on the Queen Mother?  Was this some sort of instant revenge of hers for speaking back to her?  I turned to try and find somebody to help, and heard a voice in the distance coming closer.  The little quilted lady who didn't stop talking appeared at the end of the corridor.  She came up, took my hand and, still talking, led me off to another part of the palace.

The door had a lock.  The floor was carpeted.  My suit carrier hung in a wardrobe that could have come out of a Holiday Inn.  The window was a triple-glazed sealed unit.  Under the window was a radiator, plumbed into pipes which disappeared discreetly through the carpet.  The bed was a standard double with ordinary pillows.  The netsuke monkey had been placed alongside my flashlight on the bedside table.  The computer and satellite phone sat on a little writing table with a mirror over it.  Through an open door I could see a tiled bathroom with a shower and — glory be — a bidet.  Still no TV , mind you.

The little quilted lady bowed and left, talking.

There was a business card on the writing table beside the sat. phone.  Joshua Levitsen, honorary US consul, would like to meet me tomorrow; he suggested breakfasting at the Heavenly Luck Tea House at eight.

I went to the window.  Same view, a storey higher.  The room was warm; a faint thermal was drifting up from the radiator.  I turned it off and tilted the heavy window open.

My e-mail included a plaintive note from Dwight Litton reminding me that I was missing the première of his Broadway play.  I didn't bother to reply.

How you doin?

That line work on all the girls?

So they say. I wouldn't know.

No, of course not, Stephen.

So how is Shangri-La?

Cool.