Ministry of Disturbance
H >>
Henry Beam Piper >> Ministry of Disturbance
[Illustration]
MINISTRY ... OF DISTURBANCE
BY H. BEAM PIPER
Illustrated by van Dongen
+----------------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| Transcriber's Note |
| |
| This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction |
| December 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence |
| that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. |
+----------------------------------------------------------------+
_Sometimes getting a job is harder than the job after you get
it--and sometimes getting out of a job is harder than either!_
[Illustration]
The symphony was ending, the final triumphant paean soaring up and up,
beyond the limit of audibility. For a moment, after the last notes had
gone away, Paul sat motionless, as though some part of him had followed.
Then he roused himself and finished his coffee and cigarette, looking
out the wide window across the city below--treetops and towers, roofs
and domes and arching skyways, busy swarms of aircars glinting in the
early sunlight. Not many people cared for Joao Coelho's music, now, and
least of all for the Eighth Symphony. It was the music of another time,
a thousand years ago, when the Empire was blazing into being out of the
long night and hammering back the Neobarbarians from world after world.
Today people found it perturbing.
He smiled faintly at the vacant chair opposite him, and lit another
cigarette before putting the breakfast dishes on the serving-robot's
tray, and, after a while, realized that the robot was still beside his
chair, waiting for dismissal. He gave it an instruction to summon the
cleaning robots and sent it away. He could as easily have summoned them
himself, or let the guards who would be in checking the room do it for
him, but maybe it made a robot feel trusted and important to relay
orders to other robots.
Then he smiled again, this time in self-derision. A robot couldn't feel
important, or anything else. A robot was nothing but steel and plastic
and magnetized tape and photo-micro-positronic circuits, whereas a
man--His Imperial Majesty Paul XXII, for instance--was nothing but
tissues and cells and colloids and electro-neuronic circuits. There was
a difference; anybody knew that. The trouble was that he had never met
anybody--which included physicists, biologists, psychologists,
psionicists, philosophers and theologians--who could define the
difference in satisfactorily exact terms. He watched the robot pivot on
its treads and glide away, trailing steam from its coffee pot. It might
be silly to treat robots like people, but that wasn't as bad as treating
people like robots, an attitude which was becoming entirely too
prevalent. If only so many people didn't act like robots!
He crossed to the elevator and stood in front of it until a tiny
electroencephalograph inside recognized his distinctive brain-wave
pattern. Across the room, another door was popping open in response to
the robot's distinctive wave pattern. He stepped inside and flipped a
switch--there were still a few things around that had to be manually
operated--and the door closed behind him and the elevator gave him an
instant's weightlessness as it started to drop forty floors.
When it opened, Captain-General Dorflay of the Household Guard was
waiting for him, with a captain and ten privates. General Dorflay was
human. The captain and his ten soldiers weren't. They wore helmets,
emblazoned with the golden sun and superimposed black cogwheel of the
Empire, and red kilts and black ankle boots and weapons belts, and the
captain had a narrow gold-laced cape over his shoulders, but for the
rest, their bodies were covered with a stiff mat of black hair, and
their faces were slightly like terriers'. (For all his humanity,
Captain-General Dorflay's face was more like a bulldog's.) They were
hillmen from the southern hemisphere of Thor, and as a people they made
excellent mercenaries. They were crack shots, brave and crafty fighters,
totally uninterested in politics off their own planet, and, because they
had grown up in a patriarchial-clan society, they were fanatically loyal
to anybody whom they accepted as their chieftain. Paul stepped out and
gave them an inclusive nod.
* * * * *
"Good morning, gentlemen."
"Good morning, Your Imperial Majesty," General Dorflay said, bowing the
couple of inches consistent with military dignity. The Thoran captain
saluted by touching his forehead, his heart, which was on the right
side, and the butt of his pistol. Paul complimented him on the smart
appearance of his detail, and the captain asked how it could be
otherwise, with the example and inspiration of his imperial majesty.
Compliment and response could have been a playback from every morning of
the ten years of his reign. So could Dorflay's question: "Your Majesty
will proceed to his study?"
He wanted to say, "No, to Niffelheim with it; let's get an aircar and
fly a million miles somewhere," and watch the look of shocked
incomprehension on the captain-general's face. He couldn't do that,
though; poor old Harv Dorflay might have a heart attack. He nodded
slowly.
"If you please, general."
Dorflay nodded to the Thoran captain, who nodded to his men. Four of
them took two paces forward; the rest, unslinging weapons, went
scurrying up the corridor, some posting themselves along the way and the
rest continuing to the main hallway. The captain and two of his men
started forward slowly; after they had gone twenty feet, Paul and
General Dorflay fell in behind them, and the other two brought up the
rear.
"Your Majesty," Dorflay said, in a low voice, "let me beg you to be most
cautious. I have just discovered that there exists a treasonous plot
against your life."
Paul nodded. Dorflay was more than due to discover another treasonous
plot; it had been ten days since the last one.
"I believe you mentioned it, general. Something about planting loose
strontium-90 in the upholstery of the Audience Throne, wasn't it?"
And before that, somebody had been trying to smuggle a fission bomb into
the Palace in a wine cask, and before that, it was a booby trap in the
elevator, and before that, somebody was planning to build a submachine
gun into the viewscreen in the study, and--
"Oh, no, Your Majesty; that was--Well, the persons involved in that plot
became alarmed and fled the planet before I could arrest them. This is
something different, Your Majesty. I have learned that unauthorized
alterations have been made on one of the cooking-robots in your private
kitchen, and I am positive that the object is to poison Your Majesty."
They were turning into the main hallway, between the rows of portraits
of past emperors, Paul and Rodrik, Paul and Rodrik, alternating over and
over on both walls. He felt a smile growing on his face, and banished
it.
"The robot for the meat sauces, wasn't it?" he asked.
"Why--! Yes, Your Majesty."
"I'm sorry, general. I should have warned you. Those alterations were
made by roboticists from the Ministry of Security; they were installing
an adaptation of a device used in the criminalistics-labs, to insure
more uniform measurements. They'd done that already for Prince Travann,
the Minister, and he'd recommended it to me."
That was a shame, spoiling poor Harv Dorflay's murder plot. It had been
such a nice little plot, too; he must have had a lot of fun inventing
it. But a line had to be drawn somewhere. Let him turn the Palace upside
down hunting for bombs; harass ladies-in-waiting whose lovers he
suspected of being hired assassins; hound musicians into whose
instruments he imagined firearms had been built; the emperor's private
kitchen would have to be off limits.
Dorflay, who should have been looking crestfallen but relieved, stopped
short--shocking breach of Court etiquette--and was staring in horror.
"Your Majesty! Prince Travann did that openly and with your consent?
But, Your Majesty, I am convinced that it is Prince Travann himself who
is the instigator of every one of these diabolical schemes. In the case
of the elevator, I became suspicious of a man named Samml Ganner, one of
Prince Travann's secret police agents. In the case of the gun in the
viewscreen, it was a technician whose sister is a member of the
household of Countess Yirzy, Prince Travann's mistress. In the case of
the fission bomb----"
The two Thorans and their captain had kept on for some distance before
they had discovered that they were no longer being followed, and were
returning. He put his hand on General Dorflay's shoulder and urged him
forward.
"Have you mentioned this to anybody?"
"Not a word, Your Majesty. This Court is so full of treachery that I can
trust no one, and we must never warn the villain that he is suspected--"
"Good. Say nothing to anybody." They had reached the door of the study,
now. "I think I'll be here until noon. If I leave earlier, I'll flash
you a signal."
* * * * *
He entered the big oval room, lighted from overhead by the great
star-map in the ceiling, and crossed to his desk, with the viewscreens
and reading screens and communications screens around it, and as he sat
down, he cursed angrily, first at Harv Dorflay and then, after a
moment's reflection, at himself. He was the one to blame; he'd known
Dorflay's paranoid condition for years. Have to do something about it.
Any psycho-medic would certify him; be no problem at all to have him put
away. But be blasted if he'd do that. That was no way to repay loyalty,
even insane loyalty. Well, he'd find a way.
He lit a cigarette and leaned back, looking up at the glowing swirl of
billions of billions of tiny lights in the ceiling. At least, there were
supposed to be billions of billions of them; he'd never counted them,
and neither had any of the seventeen Rodriks and sixteen Pauls before
him who had sat under them. His hand moved to a control button on his
chair arm, and a red patch, roughly the shape of a pork chop, appeared
on the western side.
That was the Empire. Every one of the thousand three hundred and
sixty-five inhabited worlds, a trillion and a half intelligent beings,
fourteen races--fifteen if you counted the Zarathustran Fuzzies, who
were almost able to qualify under the talk-and-build-a-fire rule. And
that had been the Empire when Rodrik VI had seen the map completed, and
when Paul II had built the Palace, and when Stevan IV, the grandfather
of Paul I, had proclaimed Odin the Imperial planet and Asgard the
capital city. There had been some excuse for staying inside that patch
of stars then; a newly won Empire must be consolidated within before it
can safely be expanded. But that had been over eight centuries ago.
He looked at the Daily Schedule, beautifully embossed and neatly slipped
under his desk glass. Luncheon on the South Upper Terrace, with the
Prime Minister and the Bench of Imperial Counselors. Yes, it was time
for that again; that happened as inevitably and regularly as Harv
Dorflay's murder plots. And in the afternoon, a Plenary Session, Cabinet
and Counselors. Was he going to have to endure the Bench of Counselors
twice in the same day? Then the vexation was washed out of his face by a
spreading grin. Bench of Counselors; that was the answer! Elevate Harv
Dorflay to the Bench. That was what the Bench was for, a gold-plated
dustbin for the disposal of superannuated dignitaries. He'd do no harm
there, and a touch of outright lunacy might enliven and even improve the
Bench.
And in the evening, a banquet, and a reception and ball, in honor of His
Majesty Ranulf XIV, Planetary King of Durendal, and First Citizen Zhorzh
Yaggo, People's Manager-in-Chief of and for the Planetary Commonwealth
of Aditya. Bargain day; two planetary chiefs of state in one big
combination deal. He wondered what sort of prizes he had drawn this
time, and closed his eyes, trying to remember. Durendal, of course, was
one of the Sword-Worlds, settled by refugees from the losing side of the
System States War in the time of the old Terran Federation, who had
reappeared in Galactic history a few centuries later as the Space
Vikings. They all had monarchial and rather picturesque governments;
Durendal, he seemed to recall, was a sort of quasi-feudalism. About
Aditya he was less sure. Something unpleasant, he thought; the titles of
the government and its head were suggestive.
He lit another cigarette and snapped on the reading screen to see what
they had piled onto him this morning, and then swore when a graph chart,
with jiggling red and blue and green lines, appeared. Chart day, too.
Everything happens at once.
* * * * *
It was the interstellar trade situation chart from Economics. Red line
for production, green line for exports, blue for imports, sectioned
vertically for the ten Viceroyalties and sub-sectioned for the
Prefectures, and with the magnification and focus controls he could even
get data for individual planets. He didn't bother with that, and
wondered why he bothered with the charts at all. The stuff was all at
least twenty days behind date, and not uniformly so, which accounted for
much of the jiggling. It had been transmitted from Planetary
Proconsulate to Prefecture, and from Prefecture to Viceroyalty, and from
there to Odin, all by ship. A ship on hyperdrive could log light-years
an hour, but radio waves still had to travel 186,000 mps. The
supplementary chart for the past five centuries told the real
story--three perfectly level and perfectly parallel lines.
It was the same on all the other charts. Population fluctuating slightly
at the moment, completely static for the past five centuries. A slight
decrease in agriculture, matched by an increase in synthetic food
production. A slight population movement toward the more urban planets
and the more densely populated centers. A trend downward in
employment--nonworking population increasing by about .0001 per cent
annually. Not that they were building better robots; they were just
building them faster than they wore out. They all told the same story--a
stable economy, a static population, a peaceful and undisturbed Empire;
eight centuries, five at least, of historyless tranquility. Well, that
was what everybody wanted, wasn't it?
He flipped through the rest of the charts, and began getting summarized
Ministry reports. Economics had denied a request from the Mining Cartel
to authorize operations on a couple of uninhabited planets; danger of
local market gluts and overstimulation of manufacturing. Permission
granted to Robotics Cartel to---- Request from planetary government of
Durendal for increase of cereal export quotas under consideration--they
wouldn't want to turn that down while King Ranulf was here. Impulsively,
he punched out a combination on the communication screen and got Count
Duklass, Minister of Economics.
Count Duklass had thinning red hair and a plump, agreeable, extrovert's
face. He smiled and waited to be addressed.
"Sorry to bother Your Lordship," Paul greeted him. "What's the story on
this export quota request from Durendal? We have their king here, now.
Think he's come to lobby for it?"
Count Duklass chuckled. "He's not doing anything about it, himself. Have
you met him yet, sir?"
"Not yet. He's to be presented this evening."
"Well, when you see him--I think the masculine pronoun is
permissible--you'll see what I mean, sir. It's this Lord Koreff, the
Marshal. He came here on business, and had to bring the king along, for
fear somebody else would grab him while he was gone. The whole object of
Durendalian politics, as I understand, is to get possession of the
person of the king. Koreff was on my screen for half an hour; I just got
rid of him. Planet's pretty heavily agricultural, they had a couple of
very good crop years in a row, and now they have grain running out their
ears, and they want to export it and cash in."
"Well?"
"Can't let them do it, Your Majesty. They're not suffering any hardship;
they're just not making as much money as they think they ought to. If
they start dumping their surplus into interstellar trade, they'll cause
all kinds of dislocations on other agricultural planets. At least,
that's what our computers all say."
And that, of course, was gospel. He nodded.
"Why don't they turn their surplus into whisky? Age it five or six years
and it'd be on the luxury goods schedule and they could sell it
anywhere."
Count Duklass' eyes widened. "I never thought of that, Your Majesty.
Just a microsec; I want to make a note of that. Pass it down to somebody
who could deal with it. That's a wonderful idea, Your Majesty!"
* * * * *
He finally got the conversation to an end, and went back to the reports.
Security, as usual, had a few items above the dead level of bureaucratic
procedure. The planetary king of Excalibur had been assassinated by his
brother and two nephews, all three of whom were now fighting among
themselves. As nobody had anything to fight with except small arms and a
few light cannon, there would be no intervention. There had been
intervention on Behemoth, however, where a whole continent had tried to
secede from the planetary republic and the Imperial Navy had been
requested to send a task force. That was all right, in both cases. No
interference with anything that passed for a planetary government, but
only one sovereignty on any planet with nuclear weapons, and only one
supreme sovereignty in a galaxy with hyperdrive ships.
And there was rioting on Amaterasu, because of public indignation over a
fraudulent election. He looked at that in incredulous delight. Why, here
on Odin there hadn't been an election in the past six centuries that
hadn't been utterly fraudulent. Nobody voted except the nonworkers,
whose votes were bought and sold wholesale, by gangster bosses to
pressure groups, and no decent person would be caught within a hundred
yards of a polling place on an election day. He called the Minister of
Security.
Prince Travann was a man of his own age--they had been classmates at the
University--but he looked older. His thin face was lined, and his hair
was almost completely white. He was at his desk, with the Sun and
Cogwheel of the Empire on the wall behind him, but on the breast of his
black tunic he wore the badge of his family, a silver planet with three
silver moons. Unlike Count Duklass, he didn't wait to be spoken to.
"Good morning, Your Majesty."
"Good morning, Your Highness; sorry to bother you. I just caught an
interesting item in your report. This business on Amaterasu. What sort
of a planet is it, politically? I don't seem to recall."
"Why, they have a republican government, sir; a very complicated setup.
Really, it's a junk heap. When anything goes badly, they always build
something new into the government, but they never abolish anything. They
have a president, a premier, and an executive cabinet, and a tricameral
legislature, and two complete and distinct judiciaries. The premier is
always the presidential candidate getting the next highest number of
votes. In the present instance, the president, who controls the
planetary militia, is accusing the premier, who controls the police, of
fraud in the election of the middle house of the legislature. Each is
supported by the judiciary he controls. Practically every citizen
belongs either to the militia or the police auxiliaries. I am looking
forward to further reports from Amaterasu," he added dryly.
"I daresay they'll be interesting. Send them to me in full, and red-star
them, if you please, Prince Travann."
He went back to the reports. The Ministry of Science and Technology had
sent up a lengthy one. The only trouble with it was that everything
reported was duplication of work that had been done centuries before.
Well, no. A Dr. Dandrik, of the physics department of the Imperial
University here in Asgard announced that a definite limit of accuracy in
measuring the velocity of accelerated subnucleonic particles had been
established--16.067543333--times light-speed. That seemed to be typical;
the frontiers of science, now, were all decimal points. The Ministry of
Education had a little to offer; historical scholarship was still
active, at least. He was reading about a new trove of source-material
that had come to light on Uller, from the Sixth Century Atomic Era, when
the door screen buzzed and flashed.
* * * * *
He lit it, and his son Rodrik appeared in it, with Snooks, the little
red hound, squirming excitedly in the Crown Prince's arms. The dog began
barking at once, and the boy called through the phone:
"Good morning, father; are you busy?"
"Oh, not at all." He pressed the release button. "Come on in."
Immediately, the little hound leaped out of the princely arms and came
dashing into the study and around the desk, jumping onto his lap. The
boy followed more slowly, sitting down in the deskside chair and drawing
his foot up under him. Paul greeted Snooks first--people can wait, but
for little dogs everything has to be right now--and rummaged in a drawer
until he found some wafers, holding one for Snooks to nibble. Then he
became aware that his son was wearing leather shorts and tall buskins.
"Going out somewhere?" he asked, a trifle enviously.
"Up in the mountains, for a picnic. Olva's going along."
And his tutor, and his esquire, and Olva's companion-lady, and a dozen
Thoran riflemen, of course, and they'd be in continuous screen-contact
with the Palace.
"That ought to be a lot of fun. Did you get all your lessons done?"
"Physics and math and galactiography," Rodrik told him. "And Professor
Guilsan's going to give me and Olva our history after lunch."
They talked about lessons, and about the picnic. Of course, Snooks was
going on the picnic, too. It was evident, though, that Rodrik had
something else on his mind. After a while, he came out with it.
"Father, you know I've been a little afraid, lately," he said.
"Well, tell me about it, son. It isn't anything about you and Olva, is
it?"
Rod was fourteen; the little Princess Olva thirteen. They would be
marriageable in six years. As far as anybody could tell, they were both
quite happy about the marriage which had been arranged for them years
ago.
"Oh, no; nothing like that. But Olva's sister and a couple others of
mother's ladies-in-waiting were to a psi-medium, and the medium told
them that there were going to be changes. Great and frightening changes
was what she said."
"She didn't specify?"
"No. Just that: great and frightening changes. But the only change of
that kind I can think of would be ... well, something happening to you."
Snooks, having eaten three wafers, was trying to lick his ear. He pushed
the little dog back into his lap and pummeled him gently with his left
hand.
"You mustn't let mediums' gabble worry you, son. These psi-mediums have
real powers, but they can't turn them off and on like a water tap. When
they don't get anything, they don't like to admit it, and they invent
things. Always generalities like that; never anything specific."
"I know all that." The boy seemed offended, as though somebody were
explaining that his mother hadn't really found him out in the rose
garden. "But they talked about it to some of their friends, and it seems
that other mediums are saying the same thing. Father, do you remember
when the Haval Valley reactor blew up? All over Odin, the mediums had
been talking about a terrible accident, for a month before that
happened."
"I remember that." Harv Dorflay believed that somebody had been falsely
informed that the emperor would visit the plant that day. "These great
and frightening changes will probably turn out to be a new fad in
abstract sculpture. Any change frightens most people."
They talked more about mediums, and then about aircars and aircar
racing, and about the Emperor's Cup race that was to be flown in a
month. The communications screen began flashing and buzzing, and after
he had silenced it with the busy-button for the third time, Rodrik said
that it was time for him to go, came around to gather up Snooks, and
went out, saying that he'd be home in time for the banquet. The screen
began to flash again as he went out.
* * * * *
It was Prince Ganzay, the Prime Minister. He looked as though he had a
persistent low-level toothache, but that was his ordinary expression.
"Sorry to bother Your Majesty. It's about these chiefs-of-state. Count
Gadvan, the Chamberlain, appealed to me, and I feel I should ask your
advice. It's the matter of precedence."
"Well, we have a fixed rule on that. Which one arrived first?"
"Why, the Adityan, but it seems King Ranulf insists that he's entitled
to precedence, or, rather, his Lord Marshal does. This Lord Koreff
insists that his king is not going to yield precedence to a commoner."