Free Lost Harvest: Book One of the Harvest Trilogy by Joe Pace Page B

structure, and this balcony was his alone. Sometimes he would stand here, as he did now, as the day was waning, and try to imagine his predecessors from long ago, standing in the same spot, peering across the greensward at the Palace. It seemed undignified, somehow, unseemly, as if the thought of so much grass and water and sky were not already enough to make him shudder. There was still a St. James Park, but it was so much more efficiently used now. Not for the first time, the Lord Chancellor of the Exchequer lauded the wisdom of those planners who converted all that useless space into retail stores and commercial offices and housing for the ever-teeming Londoners. The buildings rose high overhead, nearly touching at their apex, a tiny square of darkening blue at the top. It was progress and commerce and rents, and Lord Djimonsu loved it.
    Eventually, he retreated through massive glass doors to the interior. If he was not the most powerful subject of the King in the whole of the Empire, he was in the conversation, and there was always more work to be done. One does not control the world by daydreaming on balconies . The doors shut behind him with an audible click. They were old doors, and he liked the way they made that sound of finality as they closed, proof positive that a barrier existed between him and the outside. The gentle hiss of automatic sliders was so much less satisfying.
    Djimonsu moved to his desk, a silvery metallic island in a sea of sharp edges, reflective glass and white furniture. When he first ascended to this post, he had found his immediate predecessor had left behind an office weighed down by the traditional wood-paneling and leather-upholstery that was so favored by the upper officers of Government and the old moneyed class. He had ordered it all torn out at once. He had seen enough of that staid taste as a young man in the India Department, where all the bureaucrats tried so hard to out-British the British. It was always the nineteenth century somewhere in New Delhi, always the past. Here, in the beating commercial heart of the United Kingdom of Earth, the future was what mattered.
    The Lord Chancellor stood, as he always did while working. He did not like the feeling of being motionless. His dark eyes tracked the twenty monitors arrayed around the walls of the long, narrow, gleaming office. Each display was tuned to constant analysis of the most important markets across the Empire, both here on Earth and across the known galaxy. Graphs flashed past, highlighting textile production in the East Asia Department, mineral commodities in Africa, luxury pharmaceutical imports from Sirius, worldwide agrifactory output. Djimonsu touched the panels on his desk, moving the Crown’s resources into one sector and out of another, manipulating a price here and dumping a rotten stock there. This was his primary element, the high purpose to which he was eminently suited. If he had been forced to develop a certain political aptitude to enhance and enable his economic genius, so be it.
    His attention moved back to the screen showing the price trendlines for grain. Yet again, he wondered if John Banks might somehow be right. The Minister of Science was undeniably brilliant, though with an irksome tendency to assume disasters always lurked just over the horizon. He didn’t want Banks to be right. The nutrition industry was a uniquely mature and lucrative enterprise, and had been for many years. It was a key profit center for many of the companies that made up the Chamber, one that required limited investments in research, maintenance, or marketing. The collapse of the sector would be highly inconvenient, perhaps even ruinous, for some extremely powerful people. Dramatic change to accommodate the new realities Banks foretold would be expensive.
    Still, his own inclination to disbelieve the Minister of Science did not stop Djimonsu from conducting his own inquiries into the matter. If anything, it made him more diligent.