Ministry of Disturbance

Ministry of Disturbance, by
Henry Beam Piper

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Title: Ministry of Disturbance
Author: Henry Beam Piper
Release Date: February 24, 2007 [EBook #20659]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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[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 pæan 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 João 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