[03] Elite: Docking is Difficult (14 page)

The next morning the entire population of Gippsworld – along with Phoebe, Glen, and the Gollancz Senior Head of Marketing – huddled by the entrance to the mineshaft. They shivered in the perma-drizzle and tetchily complained to each other about what could be so important that they had to be out of bed at this time of day. Misha stood on an old packing crate, cleared his throat and waved.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’d like to thank you all for coming, even though I realise most of you are here because you didn’t have anything else to do now that you’re unemployed and destitute.’

Some of the Gippsworldians loudly wondered why the speeches directed at them always had to start on such a negative note.

‘I know we normally have city meetings in the municipal centre,’ Misha continued, ‘but seeing as that’s being repurposed as an abattoir by the new owners, this seemed the obvious place, given that it’s our only real landmark. I’d especially like to thank the Head of Marketing from the Gollancz publishing group for taking time out of his busy schedule to be with us.’

The man in the white suit waved, yawned and looked at his watch.

‘As you know, GABAN Corp have offered us the generous opportunity to all go back to our old jobs as pig farmers, though this would be as unpaid interns working on what is now their land. Of course, pig farming on Gippsworld has recently become a vital cog in their drugs production business, so this is, after a fashion, a rare chance to get a toehold in the competitive world of narcotics publishing. As I understand it they’ve even offered free surgery to fit us all with nutrient pipes, to negate the need for us to take a lunch break. Is that right?’

The Senior Head of Marketing nodded. Some of the more easily impressed Gippsworldians applauded.

‘However, thrilled though we are with this offer, I am here today to make a counter offer. My proposal is this: that the publishers recognise that they took unfair advantage of our natural trusting natures and surprisingly low IQ scores, hand back the deeds to our pig farms and leave Gippsworld forever. In return we offer nothing but our gratitude and a solemn promise that no more will be said about the whole sorry business.’

The Senior Head of Marketing folded his arms and arched an eyebrow. ‘Really?’ he said, laughing. ‘
That
’s your counter offer?’

‘It is, yes.’

‘Well, I am afraid that on behalf of my company, I must regretfully decline.’

‘I thought you would probably say that,’ said Misha, with a sad nod. He turned to the President, who was sitting on a chair off to one side.

‘Mister President, could you do the honours?’

The President got to his feet, saluted a bit pointlessly, did his noble middle-distance stare thing again, and then pressed the button on a small control pad.

The faint echoing crackle of a trillion circuits warming up for the very first time made everybody jump. There was a brief, distant hum. The crowd craned their heads towards the clouds. There was a pause, and then, high above them, up in the troposphere, the three-mile wide advertising hoarding blazed on, the countless hyper-LEDs that made up the screen all suddenly pulsing with their maximum wattage.

It was as if Gippsworld suddenly had a second, less embarrassed sun.

The Senior Head of Marketing stared up at it, puzzled. Every single Gippsworldian stared up at it as well. They gawped at the first bright sky they’d ever seen. Marvelling, they looked at each other happily, and then they quickly looked away again, because it turned out most Gippsworldians looked slightly better in the gloom. The light from the billboard fell with an ersatz heavenly glow on the mineshaft. It fell on the spaceport. It fell on the claggy fields of mud and on the municipal centre and on the closed-down artisanal bakery. For a minute, nothing much happened.

Then, like a dawn chorus comprised of gloopy ‘pops’, every single pig on Gippsworld exploded.

‘Did you just wipe out an entire species?’ said Glen, shielding his eyes against the glare and fishing about in his pocket for a pair of shades. ‘Did you just commit mass pig genocide?’

Misha looked a bit guiltily at the ground. ‘I guess I did, yes.’

Everybody went very quiet for a moment.

‘Don’t worry, I think genocide is okay, ethically speaking, so long as the creatures aren’t very lovable,’ said Phoebe reassuringly. ‘I’m pretty sure I read that somewhere.’

‘WHAT DID YOU DO?’ screamed the Senior Head of Marketing, who had suddenly stopped seeming quite so urbane and had turned a shade of pink that didn’t go with his phosphorescent cravat at all. ‘WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO?’

‘He killed your pigs, bro,’ said Glen.

‘Do you have ANY idea what I’ve gone through?’ the man raved, grabbing Misha by the collar and shaking him. ‘Do you have any CLUE what it’s been like, getting this
fucking
assignment?’ He threw his hat on the ground and stamped on it in a fury. ‘Two months I’ve been here. Two months! It should have been a three-day turn around. And we’ve been working on our campaign for SIX YEARS. The sponsorship deals … the non-refundable media buy-ins …’

He slumped onto a Gippsworld rock, held his face in his hands, and babbled softly to himself about his job issues.

‘I’m sorry you’ve had a bit of a setback,’ said Misha. ‘But obviously there’s nothing here for you now, so perhaps you’d best be off. I’m sure Vitali would be happy to drive you to the spaceport.’

The Senior Head of Marketing squinted at him. He breathed deeply, held his own wrist and counted out his pulse for a few seconds. Then he reached into his suit jacket and pulled out a dangerous-looking cylinder, evil black and yellow stripes running down its length. Most of the Gippsworldians, who had been enjoying the scene up to that point, chose this moment to remember some other work they had on, and slunk away in different directions. The publisher levelled the cylinder at the trio of Misha, Phoebe and Glen. They edged backwards, but found themselves right at the lip of the formerly-famous Gippsworld mineshaft.

‘I’ve really had it with you
hicks,
’ said the Senior Head of Marketing.

‘Hey, is that a Mallowiser
4000
?’ said Glen.

‘It’s a Face Repurposer.’

‘Oh,’ said Glen, disappointed. ‘I was hoping you’d go with Mallowiser
4000
.’

‘They were both good names,’ said the Senior Head of Marketing. ‘It was a toss-up.’

‘Sure, no, don’t worry, I understand. But listen, buddy,’ said Glen, holding his hands up. ‘I’m not really anything to do with this whole enterprise. I’m the innocent hired gun with no vested interest. So if it’s all the same, I’ll step out of the current imbroglio and let you guys work it out.’

Glen shuffled off to the side. ‘Sorry,’ he whispered to Phoebe. ‘I just really like my face. I don’t want it repurposed. Whereas your face, though kind of nice, could probably be rebuilt even better than before, if it came to it. It’s a very illegible situation.’

‘You are so fucking dumped,’ said Phoebe.

‘Don’t be like that. Why are you being like that?’

‘PROBABLY ON THE RAG,’ said the hen.

‘Oh, that’s
it
.’

Phoebe, overcome with the unexpected calm born from having a really terrible day, suddenly dived sideways into the mud, and in one fluid movement scooped up the hen by its neck and flung it into the air. The hen squawked, alarmed. Then, with a quick internal adjustment to her cybernetic power output, Phoebe booted it right at the Senior Head of Marketing. Caught off guard, he clumsily set off the Face Repurposer at point blank range, and got a big cloud of feathers and beak bits in his face for his trouble. He gazed down at his ruined suit, and turned an even grimmer shade of purple than he had been before. Phoebe took advantage of his momentary lapse of concentration to leap back up and smack him round the head with her sonic truncheon. He crumpled to the ground in a heap.

‘You’re under arrest for threatening a police officer – and hen murder,’ said Phoebe, clipping some handcuffs on him.

‘Hen murder isn’t a thing,’ said the Senior Head of Marketing.

‘I could make it a thing,’ said the President, who had been watching from behind his chair. ‘That’s one of the perks of being president.’

The few Gippsworldians who hadn’t already drifted off – not really sure what was going on, but sensing a happy ending – broke into a spontaneous round of applause.

Phoebe bowed, dusted herself down, turned to Misha and beamed.

‘That was great!’ said Misha. ‘I really didn’t like that hen.’

‘You were great too!’ said Phoebe. ‘Earlier, I mean, the stuff with the advertising hoarding and the pigs.’

‘Oh, well. Actually, on that note, there’s something else.’ Misha grinned sheepishly. He pointed up at the billboard. Then he gave a swift thumbs up to the President, who hit another button on his control panel. The blaze of light gradually dimmed, and formed itself into words. Kilometre-high letters started to spell out a sentence:

Phoebe, slack-jawed in disbelief, stared at it. A few members of the crowd made ‘wooo’ noises. Somewhere a strained plasma generator fizzed. Phoebe grimaced.

‘Too much?’ said Misha, suddenly anxious.

‘A little bit,’ said Phoebe, with an apologetic nod. ‘It’s … it’s kind of over the top.’

‘Yes, even I can see that just comes across as quite
creepy
,’ said Glen, shaking his head.

Misha deflated. ‘In his book,
Be My Hyperspace
–
Wooing Across The Spacelanes
, Cliff Ganymede says bold romantic gestures in public settings are one of the best ways of impressing a girl. Like a bee’s waggle dance.’

‘You should stop reading those books, Misha. They’re not very good.’

There was a long, difficult pause.

‘Well,’ said the President. ‘This is awkward.’

Phoebe and Misha did their best not to look at each other. They hovered by the edge of the mineshaft as the rain kept coming down in slabs. Somewhere deep inside Phoebe a neural link misfired. A tiny hydraulic motor whirred. Her cybernetic leg spasmed. And for the second time, though with the power now turned right up to its maximum, she kicked Misha hard in the shin.

He hopped backwards. He wobbled. Then – almost in slow motion, as it seemed to the onlookers, his mouth making a soundless, surprised ‘O’ – he lost his footing on the slippery Gippsworld mud. Phoebe gasped, frozen to the spot in horror. She watched Misha crash through the poor-quality safety barrier and tumble over the edge of the fifth-deepest mineshaft in the galaxy. He disappeared into the bowels of the planet, spinning helplessly towards his certain doom.

‘Whoops,’ said the Senior Head of Marketing.

‘Oh dear,’ said the President.

‘You should probably think about getting that fixed,’ said Glen.

‘Listen, lover,’ said the Thargoid Queen, propping herself up on a pillow and exhaling a languorous, noxious gas cloud through one of her mucus vents. ‘It’s a crying shame things didn’t work out with you and the police lady, but at least we found each other.’

She extended her glistening proboscis and ruffled Misha’s hair. Misha winced. He couldn’t really remember how they’d started dating. ‘It’s odd,’ he hissed out of the side of his mouth, leaning over towards the President, who for some reason was in bed with them. ‘As a type, I don’t usually go for clacking mandibles and chitinous exoskeletons and deathly, inhuman compound eyes.’

‘But you really
get
each other. Isn’t that the important thing?’ said the President. ‘You like all the same films. You’ve got the same taste in soft furnishings. Besides which, she’s smart! And
royalty
.’

‘I guess,’ whispered Misha. ‘I’m just not sure I’m into her in
that
way. Does that sound shallow?’

‘After we copulate, I will devour your head,’ said the Thargoid Queen, giving him a saucy unblinking stare, ‘as is the tradition amongst my race.’

Misha sighed. ‘Can’t mess with tradition, I suppose.’

He opened his eyes, and found that he was still in bed, but the Thargoid Queen seemed to have morphed into a bunch of tubes and a drip and an uncomfortable catheter. He could smell antiseptic and chip fat.

‘Where am I?’ he said, his voice coming out like a croak.

‘Hey! You’re awake!’ Phoebe exclaimed, tearing her gaze away from something on the holographic display above her. She was sitting in a chair next to his bed, magazines and empty noodle pots piled up in her lap. ‘How are you feeling? Don’t try to move too much – you shattered quite a lot of bones. You’re in the
Jim Bergerac
hospital pod. It’s next to the Omar Sharif Jazz Lounge, which is why it smells of chip fat. Your health insurance is pretty lousy, I’m afraid.’

‘What happened?’ said Misha. He rubbed his eyes, trying to shake off a fog of painkillers. ‘That mineshaft is two miles deep. There’s no way I could have survived the fall.’

‘You caught a break!’ Phoebe grinned at him. ‘You were saved by an entire population’s complete lack of artistic talent.’

‘I don’t think I understand that statement,’ said Misha.

‘Remember how I told you I kept on finding ships that were
supposed
to be transporting Gippsworld artworks but which didn’t have anything in their holds? Well, now I know why. The marketing guy pretty much spilled the beans on the whole deal. Not the first time they’ve tried to pull this scam, you see.’ She leant over and fed him a grape. ‘Basically, the publisher’s plan was pretty simple: they turn up, start an economic bubble – tulips, hats, art, whatever – and use that to get the locals to sell them whatever the
really
valuable resource is for chump change. Usually it’s a breeze, by all accounts. They plant a few articles in trend-setting publications, get a couple of movers and shakers to endorse the “product”, and the fad hungry populace of the galaxy do the rest. Except, this time, it didn’t work.’

‘What do you mean “it didn’t work”? People went mad for Gippsworld art.’

‘No. You see, it turns out the Gippsworldians were all so
preternaturally untalented
that even the art world – the art world, for crying out loud! – even they couldn’t be persuaded to collect the stuff. So our poor marketing guy, sweating it by this point, had to bribe all these traders to ship the stuff out. Lucky for him Gippsworld was daft enough to pay for it themselves, via this ridiculous Outsider Art Fund. But anyhow, all these traders were being bribed to export it, but they knew that they didn’t have anywhere to export it
to
. So, to save a bit of time and fuel, they all just started dumping it down the mineshaft when nobody was looking. Tons of the stuff! So much, they clogged up the hole. And as a result, instead of falling two miles to your certain doom, you fell about a hundred feet onto a cushion of mud sculptures. Apparently you landed directly on top of
Prometheus, Reclining, Contemplates The Howling Void
, and one of its knobbly bits got embedded in your spleen. The bonus of all this is that I got to solve my Case of the Missing Cargo. Which is going to get written up in the departmental newsletter as Investigation of the Month! That’s kind of a big deal, and has put Alicia’s nose properly out of joint.’

‘What about the Ganymede case?’ said Misha, struggling to sit up.

Phoebe shrugged. ‘Still down as a suicide, officially. But the marketing guy is serving ten years, after the Gippsworld President retroactively made hen murder a Class One Offence. And look, you’re famous.’ She passed him a magazine.

‘AREA MAN DESTROYS ENTIRE SPECIES’ read the headline, ‘“KNUCKLE DOWN” DRUG MARKETING CAMPAIGN CANCELLED AT ENORMOUS EX- PENSE, GABAN CONGLOMERATE SHARE PRICE TUMBLES.’

‘I still feel bad about the pigs,’ said Misha, looking at the magazine sadly. ‘I mean, what’s Gippsworld going to do now? Without pigs there’s just the methane. And that’s, you know,
methane
. Nobody is really crying out for it.’

‘Come on, Misha, you stopped half the galaxy topping themselves! Give yourself some credit. And besides – tourism is through the roof,’ she wiped a hand across the magazine and the headline changed to ‘GIPPSWORLD GENOCIDE A-GO-GO’ above a picture of the smiling President cutting a ribbon. ‘It turns out people really DO like to visit places where famous atrocities have happened. You can buy “Butcher of Gippsworld” tea towels now with a photograph of you on them.’

‘Oh, well. That’s nice, I suppose.’

‘And that’s not all: one of the news crews covering the pig genocide noticed that the stain in my shirt looked a lot like Vladimir Putin’s face. It’s being hailed as some sort of miracle.’

‘You mean like a Virgin-Mary-appearing-on-a-Taco sort of deal?’

‘Exactly! I donated it to the newly created Gippsworld Miracle Stain museum, and now there are queues round the block to see it. It’s a double whammy.’

‘How’s, um, Glen doing?’

Phoebe wrinkled her nose, and went back to concentrating on some strange flickering shapes on the holographic display. ‘He’s given up pirating for the moment, and his restaurant idea, and has turned his hand to recording an album of acoustic songs about how much he misses his dead hen. Marty Zeevon is going to represent him. Says it’s going to be big, but I’m not so sure.’

Misha shifted around uncomfortably. He bit his lip. ‘Did you change your mind about … you know,
us
?’

‘Not really,’ said Phoebe, giving him a sisterly pat on the head. ‘It’s still hard to see you as a viable sexual partner after your appallingly misjudged billboard stunt.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Misha, with a resigned nod.

‘But oh, yeah – I almost forgot, I’ve got something for you,’ Phoebe reached down under the little table by the side of his bed, and pulled out the Lenslok box. ‘The guys up in IT support managed to crack it. Turns out Lenslok technology is, rather than being impregnable, actually
rubbish
. Who knew!’

‘So what’s in it?’

‘Open it.’

With a little difficulty Misha reached across, and took the box from her. He clicked open the catch and pushed back the lid.

‘Oh,’ he said, peering inside.

He pulled out a heavy beige rectangle, about the size of a large food printer. It had an incomprehensible-looking keyboard. A hieroglyph of a bird in one corner was the only bit of decoration. It made his hand tingle, because the entire thing was encased in a preservation field, like those he’d felt around old comics in museums.

‘Congratulations,’ said Phoebe. ‘You are now guilty of antiquity smuggling. There’s usually a ten credit fine, but I think I can let you off with a warning for a first time offence.’

‘What is it? Some sort of loom? It looks ancient.’

‘Almost. It’s a primitive computer. About a thousand years old.’

‘Wow. Is it valuable?’

‘No, not particularly. Probably the only reason it was being smuggled by your mysterious platinum blonde is it fell foul of Placet-B’s nostalgia law.’

‘Well,’ said Misha, putting the box down again. ‘That’s disappointing.’

‘Yes, but them’s the breaks – oh god
damn
.’ Phoebe suddenly punched the arm of her chair and glowered at the hologram.

Misha looked up at it. A few lo-fi, sketchy polygons were bobbing about. ‘What are you
doing
?’

‘Sorry. It’s some dumb old game, or flight simulator software or something, I started playing it whilst I was waiting for you to come round. Guess they used it for training the early cosmonauts. I found it in an online archive when I was doing a background search to work out exactly what that thing was,’ Phoebe jabbed her thumb at the blocky antique computer. ‘It’s really crazy. Everything’s just …
flat
. I can’t get the hang of it. You have a go.’

She handed him her control pad.

‘You know,’ said Misha, clicking a few buttons randomly, ‘a near death experience like falling into a mineshaft makes you have something of an epiphany.’

‘How so?’

‘You suddenly look at life in a whole new way. The sheer wonder of it all.’

‘Oh god. You’re sounding like Glen.’

‘No. I mean it. It’s like I’ve been given a second chance. Seriously, Phoebe, from this point on I’m going to really make a go of things.’

‘Okay,’ said Phoebe, frowning. ‘But, doesn’t that sort of fly in the face of everything we discovered about the cold brutality of the universe? The sheer unremitting unfairness of the system? The pointlessness of trying?’

Misha pulled a face. ‘How do we really
know
there wasn’t some sort of chemical side effect to Knuckle Down? We don’t! Besides which, even it was true that things didn’t work out for
those
people, I don’t think it’s necessarily true for
me
. I just haven’t ever given my full potential a chance.’

‘That editor would probably tell you it’s that kind of deluded thinking which is the whole problem in the first place.’

Misha cursed as something went wrong on the screen above him.

‘I’m a changed man. It’s a brand new Misha. And not because of some stupid pill.’

‘So. What’s the first step towards the new you?’

‘For a start, I’m going to write that novel. This past week has given me a lot of material. And I’m going to do it right now. Not tomorrow, not in a little while. Right this instant. No more messing about. No more procrastinating.’

Phoebe frowned as the two dimensional image above Misha’s head flashed.

‘I think you’ve got to try to line up the hole in the polygon with the cross hairs.’

‘Yes, thanks, I’ve worked that out.’

They sat there in silence for a while. Phoebe yawned.

‘Can I have another go? It’s quite boring just watching.’

‘Sure,’ said Misha, starting the game up again. ‘Just give me another ten minutes.’