Articles of the Federation - Keith R. A. DeCandido [37]
“I’ll look into that, ma’am,” Esperanza deadpanned. “You want me or one of the guys here when you talk to Fred about the speech?” Esperanza had taken to referring to her four deputies as “the guys.”
“Send Ashante-she’s better at keeping Fred focused. Besides, they make a cute couple, and after eight hours with the council, I need all the cute I can get.”
Chuckling, Esperanza turned to leave. “Thank you, Madam President.”
Chapter Nine
BEY TOH’S STOMACH was growling and his head was pounding as he entered Sisko’s Creole Kitchen in New Orleans. As he walked in, the smell of cayenne peppers and Cajun spices and tomato sauce managed to at once alleviate the headache and make the stomach growl more.
When Fred MacDougan had offered him the job as a member of President Bacco’s speechwriting staff, he had done so in this restaurant. Toh had been serving as the speechwriter for the Federation ambassador to the Klingon Empire, but when Fred had made the job offer, he’d found it irresistible.
It hadn’t hurt that Fred had made the offer in this restaurant. Until that interview, Toh, a Bajoran by birth, had never set foot on Earth, and had had no idea that they had such magnificent cuisine.
Sisko’s was therapy for Toh, and right now he needed it.
“Toh! How’s it going?” The always-happy voice of the restaurant’s owner, Joseph Sisko, cut through the chatter of the early lunch crowd, though it was dinnertime for Toh, still on Paris time as he was. He turned to see Joseph’s ever-smiling visage, white teeth shining in his dark face. As ever, he wore a brightly colored shirt and dark pants, greeting the guests as they walked in as if he’d been waiting all day for them.
“It’s been better. Did you know that tomorrow’s the assistant technology secretary’s hundredth birthday?”
Joseph’s grin widened as he put his hand on Toh’s shoulder. “Toh, I hate to tell you this-but I didn’t even know there was an assistant technology secretary.”
Toh laughed. “Yeah, well, the president’s supposed to give a short birthday greeting to him tomorrow.”
“So?”
Grimacing, Toh said, “Guess who gets to write it?”
Leading him to a table in the corner, Joseph said, “So what’s the problem? You can do this sort of thing in your sleep.”
“That is the problem-I am doing it in my sleep, because the assistant technology secretary is quite possibly the single most boring individual in the entire galaxy. To make matters worse, I have to write this for the president.”
“Isn’t that what you do?”
Toh sat down in a chair that faced the giant alligator that hung from the ceiling. Joseph said it guarded the restaurant at night, and that it always was a pain to wrestle it back to the ceiling before he opened, a story that everyone accepted without question. Toh had thought it odd at first, until he’d spent some time in New Orleans; something about the city fostered the absurd, the paranormal, and the ridiculous, so that you accepted even the most outlandish notions as fact.
“It is what I do, yeah, but- ” He sighed. “For three years, I wrote speeches for Ambassador Worf. It was the easiest work of my life-the man is the most taciturn Klingon in existence. Verbose for him is six words. Now I’m writing for Nan Bacco. Did you see her speech about the Aligar a couple months back?”
“Saw bits of it on FNS,” Joseph said. “My grandson wrote for them, you know.”
Toh plowed on, having heard Joseph talk about his son, his daughter, his two grandchildren, and his daughter-in-law plenty of times over the four months that he’d been coming here. “Well, nobody wrote that speech for her. She did that on her own, off the cuff. I don’t know why she even bothers with a speechwriting staff. She’s one of the most eloquent people in modern politics, and I have to make her sound interesting when wishing a hundredth birthday to the most spectacularly uninteresting person in the cosmos.” He looked up at Joseph plaintively.