The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [98]
“Tell us more,” Myra said quickly, before Ranjit had a chance to speak. “What would you want Ranjit to do?”
Gamini grinned. “Well, not what we were going to offer you way back when. What I was thinking of then was that you could help me be an assistant to my father, but you weren’t famous then.”
“But now?” Myra prompted.
“Actually, we’ll have to work that out,” Gamini confessed. “You’d go to work for the council and they would probably have some requests to make of you—speak for them at press conferences, sell the idea of Pax per Fidem to the world—”
Ranjit gave his friend a mock-frown that was not entirely imitation. “Wouldn’t I have to know more about it to do that?”
Gamini sighed. “Good old Ranjit,” he said. “I was hoping you’d see the light and sign up right away, but, yes, I suppose that, you being you, you certainly would need to know more. So I brought some reading for you.”
He reached into his briefcase and pulled out an envelope of papers. “Let’s call this your homework, Ranj. I guess the best thing would be for you to read it—both of you—and talk it over tonight, and then tomorrow I’ll come by to take you to breakfast, and then I’ll ask you the big question.”
“And what question is that?” Ranjit asked.
“Why, whether you want to help us save the world. What did you think?”
Natasha got a little less playtime that night than she was used to. She gave her parents a few little wails to show that she had noticed the lack, but two minutes later she was asleep and Myra and Ranjit could go back to studying their homework.
There were two sets of papers. One seemed to be a sort of proposed constitution for (they supposed) the land that had formerly been the North Korea of one dictator or another. Both Ranjit and Myra read it attentively, of course, but most of it was procedural stuff—like the American constitution that both had read in school. Not entirely like the American, though. There were several paragraphs unlike anything in that document. One stated that the country would never go to war under any circumstances—that sounded more like the post–World War II Japanese constitution the Americans had written for them. Another wasn’t in any constitution they had ever heard of before; it described some rather unusual methods of selecting their officeholders that involved heavy usage of computers. And a third pledged that every institution in the country—including not just their government legislatures at all levels, but educational, scientific, and even religious institutions—had to permit access of observers at all of their functions. (“I guess that’s the ‘transparency’ Gamini was talking about,” Ranjit observed.)
The other document was about more tangible things. It described how the secretary-general, with maximum secrecy, had set about creating his twenty-member independent council to run Pax per Fidem. It listed the members, ranging from the Bahamas, Brunei, and Cuba to Tonga and Vanuatu (with Sri Lanka tucked in just before). And it was a little more specific about the concept of transparency. In the interests of this “transparency” Pax per Fidem was charged to create an independent inspectorate for which the organization was pledged to offer that same transparency. “I guess that ‘inspectorate’ would be where you would go,” Myra said as they turned the light out.
Ranjit yawned. “Maybe so, but I’m going to need a clearer picture of what I’d be supposed to do before I say I’ll do it.”
The next morning Gamini did his best to answer all their questions. “I talked to my father a little bit about how much freedom you’d have. It’s a lot, Ranj. He’s sure that you could go anywhere in Pax per Fidem and see anything we’re doing, with the single exception of anything to do with Silent Thunder: You won’t know how many of the weapons we have or what we’d like to do with them, because nobody below the council itself will. But anything else, sure. You can sit in on most council meetings, and if you’ve seen anything that you think is wrong, you can