never come here again. She will probably never use a sex club again. There is no need.
Lore makes several overflights of the Kazakhstan region three hundred miles north of the Aral Sea. The area is suffering from the Soviet Union’s disastrous attempts in the middle of the last century to turn the sun-drenched deserts of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenia, and Kirghizia into a vast cotton monoculture. The Aral Sea, once the largest body of water in Central Asia, is beyond immediate salvation. The Soviet regime drained the inland sea of two-thirds of its volume, diverting its sources, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, into thousands of miles of irrigation canals and ditches crisscrossing the new fields of cotton that stood where once there had been only arid steppe. Muynak, once the Aral’s largest fishing port, now stands forty-five miles from the water’s edge. Rusting hulls of abandoned vessels and barges line what was once the shore. When Lore orders the copter lower, she sees that many of the hulks have been scavenged for the metal.
The family has won the first of the multilevel, forty-year programs: to clean up the water table of Kirghizia and route the clean water back to the Aral. Marley has suggested that her initial brief should be the fertilizer, pesticide, and defoliant pollution resulting from wholesale crop spraying throughout the nineteen sixties, seventies, and eighties. He will deal with the biological contamination—bacteria, viruses, parasites, and algae. If she has any questions, all she has to do is ask. And he, of course, will have to approve any requisitions over ten million.
They are sitting in Marley’s project tent, which is actually a collapsible three-room stretch dome. Marley is drinking green tea, looking as sleek as a spaniel. Lore is impatient to get started. “What’s our plant and equipment budget?”
“One hundred and twenty million.”
“That’s not enough. . .” She thinks hard. “Labor?”
Marley smiles. His teeth are beautifully white. “I wondered how quickly you’d catch that. Almost one hundred million.”
Lore laughs out loud. “Then all we have to do is swap sixty or so from one to the other. Once we’ve got everything functioning, we don’t need much maintenance. Labor costs will be minimal.”
“Ah, but don’t forget that projects like this, for small countries, are as much about politics as pollution.” He raises his eyebrows, sips.
“I don’t understand.”
“Jobs.”
Lore sighs. Jobs. People. Votes. Much harder to deal with.
“However, that does not make the problem insurmountable. If you take the time to examine your budget sheet—”
“I’ve only just got here.”
“I wasn’t criticizing. If you take a look, you’ll see there’s a two million set-aside, labeled ‘misc.’ Some project leaders will use that as an emergency reserve, some will use it as a carrot in the form of bonuses to their labor force, others will use it in discreet bribes to local officials. Whatever is most expedient.”
“And you know some amenable local officials?” Lore is realizing that reality is not the same as designing systems on her screen. She is glad she is only the deputy.
“Let’s just say I know of them.”
“And you’ll . . . soothe their worries and smooth their palms?”
“No. You will.”
Lore knows she has asked for this responsibility. She also knows that her mother would not have given it to her if she was not ready. She does not feel ready, but she grits her teeth and begins.
She sweeps the minister for labor and the commissar of the treasury up in a whirl of lunches and dinners, gifts them with the latest in personal transport technology, and even gets one of her assistants to find the male minister a female companion. All the time that she nods and smiles and soothes and explains, while she dabs at her mouth or takes another sip of champagne, she frets. She wants to be working, to be building something, seeing her ideas take shape.
It takes nearly three days to get them both to sign off on the budget changes, and even then she has to promise to “forget” to post the changes with the relevant Kirghizi departments.
“Is it always like this?” she asks that evening in Marley’s tent.
“Usually worse,” he says. “It’s impossible to get everyone to agree. To get things to move and change, we need to bend the rules a little. Some of us enjoy it.”
“Do you?”
“No, but your uncle Willem—”
“Just call him Willem. You know he hates being an uncle.”
“—but Willem, I think, gets a secret pleasure from the wheeling and dealing. As does your sister Greta.”