He bowed again. “A case has been sent to you cah, Mistis . . . This way, if it please.”
Through rooms and courtyards, up a spiral staircase. Portrait busts in niches, von Shrakenberg ancestors from the time of the Land-Taking on.
Dead men, she thought flatly. All long dead; as useful as a plantation hand’s fetish.
Or perhaps not. Dead as human beings able to help or harm; powerfully alive as myths. The question being, is von Shrakenberg using the myths or being used?
The upper corridor ran the length of the building, glassed at both ends, with a strip of skylight above. The steward swung the door wide, stepped in to announce them.
“My Mastah, the Honorable Louise Gayner, Representative for Boma-North,” he said. “Centurion Charles McReady of the Directorate of Security.”
“Gayner,” Eric said.
They had met often enough at official functions that no more was necessary. She was a slight woman, a decade younger than he. Reddish-brown hair, hazel eyes, a sharp-featured foxy face, freckled and with a pallor that spoke of a life spent indoors. Nothing soft in her stance, though; she had the sort of wiry build that always seemed to quiver on the brink of motion. Dressed with almost ostentatious plainness in pale-green linen, no more than a single stickpin in her cravat. A statement, in a way: so was the gun. Not an ornamental dress weapon. A Virkin custom job, worn higher-slung than usual and canted forward in a cutaway holster, the molded grip polished with use. A duelist’s weapon, and the four tiny gold stars set into the crackle-finished black metal of the slide were a reminder of the ultimate argument in Draka politics.
Well, I’m not the only one who can deliver a hint, he thought with self-mockery, rising to grip forearms.
“Von Shrakenberg,” she replied. “Kind of you t’ make time fo’ me, Senator.”
Did I always dislike that Angolan accent? It was ugly, a nasal rasp under the usual soft-mouth drawl of the Domination’s dialect of English . . . but that might be subconscious transference from the decade they had spent in political sparring.
“No trouble at all,” he said, which was true enough; VTOL aircars cut the commuting time to his family’s plantation to less than an hour. Not like the old days . . . ox wagons then, a once-a-year trip. Moving the capital here from Capetown had been the first of the notorious Draka faits accomplis; the British governor-general had protested all the long wagon journey through the mountains of the Cape and across the high-veldt plateau. Unavailing protests, since the local Legislative Assembly held the power of the purse, a purse England needed desperately while locked in its death struggle with Napoleon.
The two leaders’ aides were laying out papers, treating each other with rather less courtesy than their elders. Eric watched in amusement as they bristled; his assistant was visibly looking down her well-bred nose, and the Security officer responded . . . exactly as you’d expect, the senator thought. He looked to be the sort of thug-intellectual the headhunters usually recruited, anyway.
“About the legislative docket—” Eric began, and halted as the doors swung open again.
“Oh, sorry, Pa.” A group of Draka adolescents in tennis whites or the loose bright-colored fashions the younger generation favored. Eric’s smile turned warm as he greeted his eldest.
“A last-minute appointment, Karl,” he said. Turning to Gayner: “My son, Karl. His aunt Natalia”—the politician blinked at the teeneged girl until she remembered that Eric’s father had remarried late in life—“my sister’s daughter Yolande and her friend Myfwany, down from Italy.” Eric’s eyes swung back to Gayner, narrowed slightly.
“Karl,” he continued, “Miz Gayner and I were just about to discuss somethin’ private. Why don’t you and you friends show Centurion McReady an’ Shirley around fo’ about an hour or two? We should be through by then, and we can be down to Oakenwald by dinnertime.”
Gayner stared back at him for an instant, then gave an imperceptible nod to her subordinate, waiting until the door shut before speaking.
“What’s y’ game, von Shrakenberg?”
“An end to games,” Eric replied. He walked to the desk, pressed a switch beside the retriever screen. “Private; my word on it.”
Gayner inclined her head: “I believe you,” she said neutrally. Fool was left unspoken.
“Gayner, between us we command the largest single voting blocs in the Party . . . That’s our power, and that’s our danger.”
“Party unity’s an overworked phrase,” she said.
“Because the Front has been in power too long; the other parties are shadows. Which means that everyone who wants office or powah crowds in, which undermines unity. But contemplate the consequences of an open split, and an electoral contest.”
She nodded warily. At the very least several years of uncertainty, while the factions settled who had most backing among the Citizen population. And it might not be her own group who came out ahead . . .
“What do y’ propose?” Gayner said.
Eric seated himself across from her and leaned forward, tapping one finger on the papers. “On the budget and the next six-year plan, we can compromise easily enough. It’s all technical, after all. I still think you radicals are too ready to approve megaprojects. The Gibraltar dam worked out, but we’re still patchin’ and fittin’ on the Ob-Yenisey diversion to the Aral Sea . . . Still, we’ll let it pass. We agree on shiftin’ mo’ of the military appropriations to the Aerospace Command; we can compromise on the amount. Let’s get on to the real matters, an’ start the horse tradin’.”
She tapped paired thumbs and looked aside for a moment. “Y’ right, dammit.” A long pause. “Of the truly difficult . . . the new Section fo’ serf education an’ selection.”
“You don’t think it’ll work?”
“Too well. We’re concerned with the long-term implications.”
Eric sighed and rubbed a hand across his face. “Look, Gayner, the pilot program has been yieldin’ excellent results; that’s why we got the votes to put it through. We need mo’ Specialists, we can’t raise them all from childhood in crèches, an’ psychological testing is a crude tool at best. Competition an’ selection are necessary if we’re to get results; we can only substitute quantity fo’ quality so far and no further.” A hard smile. “Or do you really think we can point to this one or that an’ say: ‘Drop the hoe, lay down that jackhammer, now go an’ write comp instructions fo’ our missile computers’?” He shrugged. “We’ve always picked out the mo’ promisin’ serfs for further training. This just systematizes it a little mo’ than the Classed Literate system.”
“What about those who get some trainin’ and then aren’t selected? What about ‘rousin’ expectations we can’t satisfy?”
“That’s what the Security Directorate is fo’; let the headhunters cut off a few mo’ heads, then. Thor’s balls, woman, we need those serfs trained! If fo’ nothin’ else, to increase automation. We’ve always tried to keep the urban workin’ class small as possible, here’s our chance.”
“Reducin’ total numbers at the cost of buildin’ up the most dangerous section. The fields we’re talkin’ shouldn’t be serf work at all, nohow. We Citizens’re producing too many architects, too many so-called artists who sit an’ draw their stipends and ‘create.’ ”
Eric raised his hands, palms up. “This is an aristocratic republic, not a despotism,” he said dryly. “Citizens are free to pick they own careers, providin’ they do their military service. We get enough career soldiers, enough administrators. Even enough scientists, usin’ the term strictly. It’s routine skullwork that’s unpopular, and which we’re short of. A matter of choice . . . unless you were plannin’ on makin’ some changes?”