It must have been a profoundly nervous existence, to be Solomon Kedir or one of those other ministers, but I think that what it did to us who had no such prominence was more terrible, if more diffuse. We lived in the Panopticon, and Bentham was entirely wrong about how it works. The watchers, watching one another, became increasingly desperate and paranoid lest they miss something, while we, constantly observed, became almost exhibitionistic of our sins. We flaunted them and dared our master to take offence at our juvenile conspiracies and excesses of the flesh. One way and another, we were frantic with designs. The Emperor should have taken counsel from those founding fathers of America, who knew that the sacrifice of freedom for security is a devil’s compact. He was, after all, the creator of our newspapers, because he deemed them modern and necessary. He founded our banks so that we would have somewhere safe to put our money, and somewhere reputable where we might borrow capital to make the business that would build the future Aksum, that would be the first African nation to build its own cars, its own planes, to join that ultimate grasp of mankind: the space race. In the one arena of spying, however, he drew on the ancient heritage of the land rather than the new thinking, and contrived an aura of total surveillance. Myriad plans were hatched each month in Addis Ababa when I was a boy, that were never put into action because some slight utterance or glance of the Emperor implied to the guilty that he knew all and was offering one last chance at the appearance of loyal compliance—but some survived, and caused him great sorrow and setback, in the end. Him, and many others, and me.