City on Fire (Metropolitan 2) by Walter Jon Williams

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