"What about that black market crap?"
"I agree with Robin."
"Are you trying to needle me, or what? I agree with her, too, but I don't come to you for theories, Conal. I come to you for reality."
Conal was a little surprised at her reaction. Looking closely, he saw she was under a great deal of strain.
"The black market is not the problem Nova's building it up to be. There's not much stuff, and the prices are very high."
"Which means," Cirocco said, "that very little food is being diverted at the docks, and we've still got shortages. So the shortages are real."
"Nobody's going hungry. But a lot of folks wish the manna was still falling."
Cirocco brooded about that for a while.
"How about the Buck?"
Conal laughed.
"The word is, a Buck makes a good coffee filter. Use five or ten of them, and when you're done the brown stains might be worth something. They're also useful rolled up to snort coke with."
"Wastepaper, in other words."
"It's that law Nova was talking about. Robin said it meant bad money drove out good money."
"No," Cirocco said. "That's what's forcing the gold coins into mattresses and old socks. People save the stuff that has value and spend the stuff that inflates."
"Whatever. I don't think the school problem is as bad as they made out tonight. It's true there's some resentment. But most of the folks here were learning English, anyway, or enough to get by on. The thing that really jerks 'em off is having to learn good English."
"What do you suggest?"
"Lowering the literacy requirement. Let 'em out of class when they can read a campaign poster, and don't worry about teaching them the past perfect tense. Of course, coming from a guy who was illiterate when he got here and ain't much of a reader even yet, maybe-"
"Come off it, Conal." Cirocco chewed a knuckle. "You're right. We can let the non-English-speaking adults get by with pidgen. Their kids will learn more than they did. I shouldn't have pushed it so hard."
"Nobody's perfect."
"Don't remind me. What else do you know?"
"Most people prefer barter. I'd say sixty percent of the business done in town is barter. But there is another currency coming up fast, and that's alcohol. There's been beer for a long time. The wine is actually getting tolerable, but most of the time I can't tell what it's made from-and I probably don't want to know. But we're seeing more of the hard stuff."
"Distilled spirits. That scares me."
"Me, too. There's some methanol going the rounds. Some people have gone blind."
Cirocco sighed.
"Do we need another law?"
"Forbidding home-made hootch?" Conal frowned, and shook his head. "I'm applying your golden rule here. The minimum law to correct the problem. Instead of banning good liquor-which, believe me, is a contradiction in terms in Bellinzona-just ban the poison."
"Won't work. Not if it's being used as money. It gets passed back and forth so many times how do we know where it came from?"
"There's that problem," Conal conceded. "And even the good distilleries use labels that are easy to counterfeit ... and people water it."
"It's not a very good currency," Cirocco said. "I think the best thing is to start a public education campaign. I don't know much about methanol. Isn't it pretty easy to tell? Can't you smell it?"
"I'm never sure. First you have to get past the stink of the booze."
They brooded about it in silence for a time. Conal was inclined to let it go. He didn't believe in protecting people from themselves. His own solution was to drink only from sealed bottles he had received from the hands of a distiller he trusted. It seemed to him everyone else should do the same. But maybe a law was needed, after all.
He was ambivalent about the whole thing. It was not that he had loved Bellinzona before. He knew the place was vastly improved. You could walk the streets unarmed with reasonable safety.
But every time you turned around, you ran into a law. After living seven years without laws, it was hard to get your head back in gear to think about them.
Which brought him to the question he was sure Cirocco would ask next. She did not disappoint him.
"What about me? How's the Conal-meter rating?"
He held out a hand and rocked it back and forth.
"You're better. Ten or fifteen percent like you well enough. Maybe thirty percent tolerate you and will admit, with a few beers in them, that you've made things better. But the rest really don't like you at all. Either you upset their wagons, or they don't think you're doing enough. There's lots of folks out there who'd feel better if somebody told them what to do from the time they woke up to the time you put 'em to bed."
"Maybe they'll get their wish," Cirocco muttered.
Conal waited for her to go on, but she didn't. So he took another puff on his cigar and tried to pick his words carefully. "There's something else. It's ... image, I guess. You're a face on the side of a blimp. Not really real."
"My media team has made that abundantly clear," she said, sourly. "I come across as a stiff-necked bitch on television."
"I don't know about normal TV," Conal said. "But on those big screens on Whistlestop they just don't like you. You're above them. You're not one of the people ... and you're not strong enough, if that's the word, to inspire the kind of fear... or, I don't know, maybe it's respect... "He trailed off, unable to express what he felt.
"Once again, you're confirming my media studies. On the one hand, I'm Olympian and Draconian-and people hate that-and on the other, I'm insufficient as an authority-figure."
"People don't believe in you," Conal said. "They believe in Gaea more than in you."
"And they haven't even seen Gaea."
"Most of 'em haven't seen you, either."
Again she brooded. It was clear to Conal she was coming to a decision she found distasteful, but unavoidable. He waited, patiently, knowing that whatever she decided he would do his best to fulfill his part in it.
"Okay," she said, putting her feet up on the table. "Here's what we're going to do."
He listened. Pretty soon he was grinning.
NINETEEN
When the meeting was over, Conal went out into the unfailing light of Dione and turned left on the Oppenheimer Boulevard causeway.
Bellinzona was a city that never slept. There were three rush hours each "day," signaled by a massive toot from Whistlestop. During those times people would go from their jobs to their homes, or vice versa. Somebody was in charge of scheduling everything, Conal knew, so that about a third of the city was always relatively quiet, its residents sleeping, while another third hummed with the sounds of commerce, and yet another with the sounds of Bellinzona's meager amusements. Many people worked two shifts, or one and a half, to make ends meet. But there were taverns and casinos and whorehouses and meeting rooms to provide the necessary social life. All work and no play would have been a dismal way to run a city, in Conal's opinion.
The river docks and the wharves where the fishing fleet tied up were busy around the clock. The shipyards were always busy, as well. And others of the city's infant industries worked on three shifts. But the main reason for the staggered working hours was to keep the city from seeming too crowded. The plain fact was there was not enough housing if everyone tried to bed down at once. Cooperative living was the norm.
It worked fairly well. But the birth rate was rising and the infant-mortality rate falling and the carpenters were always busy at the Terminal Wharves and high in the hills building new housing.
Conal had decided he liked the city. It breathed new life. It was vital and alive, as he remembered Fort Reliance before the war. You heard a lot of gripes in the taprooms, but the very fact they felt free to gripe counted for something, he felt. It meant they had hope of improving those things they didn't like.