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sleep control.
    My preference is still a half-dozen beauties, but these days I'm always looking over my shoulder for Papa's spies. He's got a million of 'em. Let me make it clear: You don't want his disapproval. He never forgets these things. If he needs to, he hires other people to carry his grudges for him.
    The advantages of the situation, however, are many. Take the bed, for instance. I've never had a bed before, ' ist a mattress thrown on the floor in the corner of a room. Now I can kick dirty socks and underwear under something, and if something falls on the floor and gets lost I know just where it'll be, although I won't be able to reach it. I still fall out of the damn bed a couple of times a week, but because of the sleep control, I don't wake up. I just lie there in a heap on the floor until morning.
    So I got out of bed on this Sunday morning, took a hot shower, washed my hair, trimmed my beard, and brushed my teeth. I'm supposed to be at my desk in the police station by nine o'clock, but one of the ways I assert my independence is by ignoring the time. I didn't hurry getting dressed. I chose a pair of khaki trousers, a pale blue shirt, a dark blue tie, and a white linen jacket. All the civilian employees in the copshop dress like that, and I'm glad. Arab dress reminds me too much of the life I left behind when I came to the city.
    "So you've been planted here to snoop on me," I said while I tried to get the ends of my necktie to come out even.
    "I am here to be your friend, yaa Sidi," said Kmuzu.
    I smiled at that. Before I came to live in Friedlander Bey's palace, I was lonely a lot. I lived in a bare one-room flat with nothing but my pillcase for company. I had some friends, of course, but not the kind who dropped over all the time because they missed me so much. There was Yasmin, whom I suppose I loved a little. She spent the night with me occasionally, but now she looked the other way when we bumped into each other. I think she held it against me that I've killed a few people. "What if I beat you?" I asked Kmuzu. "Would you still be my friend?"
    I was trying to be sarcastic, but it was definitely the wrong thing to say. "I would make you stop," said Kmuzu, and his voice was as cold as any I've ever heard.
    I think my jaw dropped. "I didn't mean that, you know," I said. Kmuzu gave a slight nod of his head, and the tension passed. "Help me with this, will you? I think the necktie is winning."
    Kmuzu's expression softened a little, and he seemed glad to perform this little service for me. "It is fine now," he said when he finished. "I will get your breakfast."
    "I don't eat breakfast."
    "Yaa Sidi, the master of the house directed me to make sure that you eat breakfast from now on. He believes that breakfast is the most important meal of the day."
    Allah save me from nutrition fascists! "If I eat in the morning, I feel like a lump of lead for hours."
    It didn't make any difference to Kmuzu what I thought. "I will get your breakfast," he said.
    "Don't you have to go to church or something?"
    He looked at me calmly. "I have already been to worship," he said. "Now I will get your breakfast." I'm sure he'd note every calorie I took in and file a report with Friedlander Bey. It was just another example of how much influence Papa exerted.
    I may have felt a little like a prisoner, but I'd certainly been given compensations. I had a spacious suite in the west wing of Friedlander Bey's great house, on the second floor near Papa's own private quarters. My closet was filled with many suits of clothes in different styles and fashions—Western, Arab, casual, formal. Papa gave me a lot of sophisticated high-tech hardware, from a new Chhindwara constrained-AI data deck to an Esmeraldas holo system with Libertad screens and a Ruy Challenger argon solipsizer. I never worried about money. Once a week, one of the Stones That Speak left a fat envelope stuffed with cash on my desk.
    All in all, my life had changed so much that my