Ministry of Disturbance | Page 3

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