Articles of the Federation - Keith R. A. DeCandido [8]
Nan held up a hand. She had a shuttle trip to Luna this evening, so she could look over the recommendations then. “Fine, fine, I’ll decide by the time I get back from the moon tonight-make sure Sivak gets ‘em before the shuttle takes off. Anything else?”
Xeldara tugged on her ear again. “I think we need to talk about the travel office again.”
Nan rolled her eyes.
Esperanza quickly said, “I think we’ve covered that.”
“I don’t think we have, Esperanza.” Xeldara leaned forward. “Jorel told the entire press room that the president was meeting with Archpriest Tamok. Ambassador T’Kala assured us up, down, backwards, and sideways that she’d arranged with the council travel office and with what was left of her government to get Tamok here. And what happened? He never left Romulus-he didn’t even plan to come to Federation space to meet. It made us look like idiots when we hadn’t been in office for five minutes. There need to be some kind of consequences.”
Nan let out a long breath. “We’ve suffered the consequences. The press laughed at us, T’Kala looked like a devious schemer out to make the Federation look bad-which puts her in company with every other Romulan politician I’m aware of-and we apologized.”
“The people in the travel office- ” Xeldara started, but Nan refused to let her repeat herself. Xeldara had been bringing this up in every meeting since it happened, and it was wearing on Nan’s last remaining nerve ending.
“I’m not about to fire people for honest mistakes. This wasn’t the fault of anyone in the travel office, and I’m not about to make scapegoats out of them. We screwed up, we said we screwed up, and even if we didn’t, lots of other people were standing in line to tell us we did. We try to make some kind of restitution now, it’ll look petty. Given a choice between looking stupid for trying to do something right and looking nasty for doing something wrong, I’ll go with option number one. What else?”
“Ma’am, I think- “
The nerve ending finally snapped. Nan glowered at the Tiburonian. “I know what you think, Xeldara, I’ve been listening to what you think for the last month. Say it again, and you can explain it to the press when you announce your resignation as deputy COS.”
Esperanza stood up. “I think we’re done.”
“Damn right,” Nan muttered.
Fred, Ashante, Z4, and Myk rose from their chairs. After a moment, Xeldara did, too. Each of them said, “Thank you, Madam President.”
“Xeldara,” Esperanza said, “wait in my office, all right? We need to go over some things.”
She nodded. “Sure.”
When they were all gone, Nan fixed Esperanza with a cheeky grin. “Can I assume the ‘things’ you’re going to go over are when to shut the hell up in a meeting with the president?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Nan laughed. “I’ll take that as a yes.” She got up from her chair and looked out at the vista of Paris. “Look at that.”
Esperanza moved to stand next to her. “Look at what?”
“That.” Nan pointed at the Champs Elysees. “You know, until the seventeenth century, it was just fields. Then Marie de Medici made a tree-lined path. It was named after the Elysian Fields in Greek mythology, which was where good people went after they died. By the eighteenth century, that path was a fashionable avenue-Marie Antoinette used to stroll it with her friends all the time.”
Esperanza smiled. “Was that before or after she ate all the cake and got her head cut off?”
“Not sure, but I’m guessing before.”
“Right, because she wasn’t doing much walking after the decapitation.”
“The point is- “
“There’s a point?” Esperanza grinned. “Trying something new, are we, ma’am?”
“Hush, you. The point is that the Champs Elysees has remained Paris’s main thoroughfare for seven hundred years. The Louvre, the Hotel de Ville, the Arc de Triomphe, the Batiment Vingt-Troisieme Siecle, the Place de Cochrane, they’re all here. The Tour de France has been run here for centuries, every parade in Paris comes down here, and it’s on this very spot that the Traite d’Unification was signed by all the governments on this planet two hundred and fifty years ago.”
Esperanza