“Yes. Of course.”
“I’m just a few corridors away. I’ll see you in a couple of minutes.”
He presses the disconnect button, and Aiah jumps for the switch to connect herself to Galaiah. No time to bathe and change. Damn it. “Nana? That was business. I’ve got to go.” “Give me your phone number!” “Yes.” She gives it. “I got a question!” the old lady says. “Yes. Quickly.”
“Can you get jobs for some of your family?”
The question stops her dead. “I don’t know,” she says.
“Most of us have never had a good job.”
“Let me think. I’ll call you again. Okay?”
“Call your mother!”
The imperious command rings out just as Aiah presses the disconnect button. She brushes her hair, checks herself in the mirror, wishes again there was time for at least a shower. She puts on the priceless ivory necklace that Constantine bestowed upon her, then anoints herself with the Cedralla perfume Constantine gave to her their last time together, before he flew off to Caraqui and the coup.
Memories, scent and sensation, worn about her body like little charms. She can only hope the tiny magics will do the job.
When she opens the door to his knock, Constantine rolls into the room like the irresistible tide. He’s no longer wearing the proper velvet suit of the minister, but clothing meant for ease and comfort: a blousy black shirt, a jacket of soft black suede imprinted with a design of geomantic foci, suede boots, no lace. The clothing suits him better than the confining garb of the politician, provides him a physical scope to match the ranging of his mind.
“The cabinet meets daily,” he says, “and all the news is good.”
“Would you like to tell me the details over a bottle of wine?”
“And food, if you’ve got it.” He prowls to the kitchen, opens the refrigerator, gazes inside.
Aiah scurries after. “I can throw something together, if you like.”
He turns, his massive hands close on her shoulders, and he propels her firmly to a chair next to the dining room table. His scent eddies along her nerves.
“Sit,” he says. “I’ll cook.”
“You don’t know where—”
“Yes I do. All these suites are built alike.”
Aiah surrenders—the fact of his touch, this near-embrace, make surrender all too easy—and allows herself to sit. She has been in the kitchen so little she has no real notion it’s hers. She cocks her head and regards him from this new angle. “I didn’t know you could cook, Minister.”
An amused glow warms his brown eyes. “I didn’t say I could cook well. But I have absorbed at least a few principles of cooking which I hope, in this case, will prove universal.”
He takes off his jacket, opens the pantry door, gazes in thoughtfully. Plucks things from the shelf and finds a saucepan. He cocks an eye at her.
“I take it all this dates from the previous administration?”
Aiah shrugs. “Who has time to shop?”
“I wish you would remember to eat from time to time.” His big body prowls the confined kitchen with perfect assurance. He surveys his finds, then reaches for a knife.
“Our main course will have to come out of cans. And the vegetables are far from fresh, but I will try to make do.”
“There are few sights as attractive,” Aiah observes, “as that of a man cooking.”
“Wait till you see how dinner turns out before you judge how attractive I am.”
He sets water boiling, opens cans, and finds a bottle of wine on the built-in rack. “Do you know,” he says, looking in drawers for a tool to remove the bottle cap, “that thirty percent of the population of Caraqui are on the government payroll?”
“The drawer on your left, Minister. We have that many civil servants?”
“Civil servants plus the dole, yes. Besides a civil service so bloated that it defies comprehension—the Keremaths wanted everyone on their payroll—the government owns a surprising number of commercial firms. All the communications companies save for the broadcast station controlled by the Dalavans, the Worldwide News Service, the video networks, construction and shipping firms. Factories. Fisheries. Office buildings. Even restaurants! And if you add the firms that the Keremaths owned personally, the total is even higher.” He gives a knowing smile as he opens the wine bottle and pours. “They arranged things with a certain criminal inevitability,” he says. “I find the pattern familiar—my own family in Cheloki were no better. There was a law that all streets had to be paved with a certain grade of concrete, but the only company offering such a grade was owned by the Keremaths. And another special type of nonporous concrete was required for the pontoons that underlie all the buildings, and again the Keremaths’ company was the only company that offered it. To prevent dependence on foreign energy sources, only domestically produced hydrogen is permitted in the metropolis, but the New Theory Hydrogen Company, the only one in Caraqui, was owned by the Keremaths…” A laugh rumbles deep in his barrel chest. “The only New Theory, so far as I can tell, was that the Keremaths got everything.” He touches glasses. “To your health.”
“To yours.” The amber wine tastes of smoke and walnuts.
“Have you seen the news? How one scandal after another is being revealed?”
“I have been a little busy, and haven’t watched the news.”
“It is the function of a new government to discredit the old, and fortunately in our case we have but to tell the truth.” He tilts his head back, savoring the wine. “Within a few months the scandals will multiply, and the Keremaths will be so discredited that no one will want them back.”
Constantine returns to the kitchen, and gives a cynical smile. “Last shift the cabinet reacted to these continuing scandalous revelations, and have annexed the Keremaths’ companies, personal property, and bank accounts.”
“And thus the state acquires that many more civil servants. Was that one of the triumphs you mentioned?”
Constantine smiles coldly. His bright steel knife slices onions as if they were Keremath livers. “No. Acquiring the companies was not a difficult decision—we could hardly leave them under the Keremaths’ ownership, after all. It was in deciding the companies’ ultimate fate wherein my brilliant political talents were fully deployed.”
“You wanted to sell the companies,” Aiah says. “And others wished to keep them.”
Constantine gives an impatient smile. “It is a source of astonishment to me that such things are even matters for debate,” he says. “The state should be an instrument of evolution, not a bank, a stock exchange, or a nursery for inefficient enterprises. But—” He shrugs. “Not all the cabinet members are soldiers or idealists. Some have political instincts that are quite sound, in their fashion. And the possibility of employing the New Theory Hydrogen Company and the other concerns as a source for patronage was, I suspect, a temptation to more than one.”
“And the triumvirate?”
“Parq was anxious to stuff the companies with his retainers. Colonel Drumbeth was of a mind with me. And Hilthi—an interesting man, Hilthi—seemed to have no interest whatever in the economic issues, but rather a care for the companies’ moral health.” He laughs. Chopped onions fly from his fingers and fall hissing into the pan. “An unusual attitude for a journalist, don’t you think?” “I know nothing of Hilthi.”
“A noble man, truly. The greatest enemy the Keremaths had—” His eyes turn to Aiah, glittering. “Until myself,” he adds. Steam rises as he throws noodles into the boiling water and stirs things in the pan. His voice turns reflective. “In a tyranny, a single dissenting individual can sometimes engage in a dialogue with the entire government. Hilthi was raised in Caraqui and found the Keremaths repulsive and denounced them. Was sent to prison, came out, and denounced them again, after having sensibly put a border or two between himself and the Specials. He made it his life’s work to expose the Keremaths for what they were. He meticulously gathered facts, published them, made brilliant propaganda. It is a monument to his skill that the Keremaths referred to dissidents as ‘Hilthists.’ ”