Time to smooth some feathers, Elektra thought. Glorious Day was sometimes a bit touchy, and on his ministerial prerogatives that was doubly true. “Goddess forbid! I am already swamped dealing with my own responsibilities, not to mention daily reports from the Special Committee on Parliamentary Ethics.” She shook her head and took a bite of pastry. “However, I do read your notes every day, observing progress, or in this case the lack of progress. You kept asking the FTC faculty for the report, and kept getting …what you got.”
“Indeed,” Glorious Day intoned, “the FTC Faculty was remarkably slow to respond. Of course, they are mostly Social Democrats and Radicals, plus a few National Front supporters.”
“So I found out,” Elektra said, “who wrote the report. I gather that the Faculty was not pleased that the minority report authors were happy to hand a copy of the report over to me personally.”
“So that’s how you got it,” Michael said. “Both of our committees have been trying the correspondence with faculty committees approach, and repeatedly had the response there was no such report.”
“That was technically true,” Elektra said. “The relevant committees voted to reject the report and expunge all references to it from their minutes, as a result of which they could honestly say there was no sign of such a report, even though they had spent weeks arguing about it. Fortunately I have friends who knew who had written the report and asked me to contact them directly.”
“Might we please have copies of it?” Glorious Day said. “And please keep reaching over our heads?”
“Indeed, those two stacks of paper are the copies of the report,” Elektra answered, pointing at a side table. “The report is actually respectably short. I thought of particular note was the brief description of the student riot, though the students maintain that it was an entirely polite demonstration.”
“I think I am being out of date,” Michael said. “I have heard of student demonstrations, but didn’t realize there had been any in the recent century.”
