[03] Elite: Docking is Difficult (11 page)

Cliff Ganymede’s former home popped out of hyperspace next to the
Lili Damita
just as Glen was halfway through performing his new self-penned song,
‘I Smuggled Furs And Alloys To Xeaan, But You Smuggled Feelings Straight To My Heart’
. Both Phoebe and Misha made a show of trying to look disappointed that they wouldn’t get to hear the remaining nine verses, and then hurriedly busied themselves getting ready for docking. They touched down on the outer landing pad with a blast of the retro-boosters, strapped on masks in case the atmospheric filters weren’t working anymore, and rode an automated little monorail down through a hole in the sphere’s metal crust.

‘This guy must have sold a
lot
of books,’ said Glen, whistling appreciatively as they stepped onto the tiny inside-out world. ‘You know there’s a five-year waiting list to get one of these things? I’ve never seen my dad get so mad with a shop assistant as when he realised he couldn’t just buy one on the spot.’

A bucolic landscape of rivers and fields and trees rose up dizzyingly all around them. It covered the entire inner surface of the sphere, the only break a big set of mirrors running along the length of the equator, reflecting enough light in from the nearest star to give everything a warm late-afternoon glow. It made Misha feel sick.

‘It’s not right,’ he said, looking up at where, instead of sky, the landscape arched around in a continuous loop. ‘I don’t like it at all.’ Somewhere a babbling brook burbled. A colourful songbird swooped, and crashed right into his head.

‘Yeah, it’s a nightmare for birds. Watch out for that,’ said Glen. ‘The gravity dissipates away from the surface, and then gets stronger again. Messes them up.’ He turned to the hen, who was peering out from a backpack. ‘Don’t try to fly off, hen.’

‘Hens don’t fly, Glen,’ said Phoebe.

‘Really?’ Glen stared at his hen again. ‘Why have you got wings? Why are animals so unfathomable?’

‘Come on,’ said Phoebe, pointing at a house that would have been on the horizon if there had been a horizon, which there wasn’t. ‘That must be his place over there.’

They started to trek across the field, hacking through lush, knotted alien vegetation. A few incredibly good-looking insects buzzed past them. Topiary cut into the shape of Old Masters gave off the relaxing smell of money. Cliff obviously hadn’t spared any expense when it came to decking the place out. As Phoebe pushed on a little way ahead, Glen hung back and waited for Misha to catch up.

‘She’s a great girl,’ said Glen, watching Phoebe go.

‘Yes,’ agreed Misha.

‘Tell me, Maurice: do you ever feel that there’s more to life than bedding an endless succession of glossy, lithe-limbed beauties?’

Misha made a non-committal grunting noise.

Glen nodded. ‘I’ve been contemplating that a lot, recently. You know how it goes – you’re out at a club, or at a film premiere, or at an exclusive hover-car dealership or someplace, and
yet another
impossibly hot, fawn-like nymph starts cracking on to you, and you chat for a while, and then, inevitably, half an hour later you end up back at her place, and you have this crazy, untrammelled hyper-sex. And then you’re lying there, drenched in sweat, and she’s asleep next to you, the sheets not quite covering her perfect, honey-coloured thighs, and you just find yourself wondering: is this
really
all there is? Isn’t there
something
more significant than all these exhausting erotic encounters? I mean, we’ve all felt it, right?’

‘Yes,’ said Misha, biting his lip. ‘I guess we have.’

‘Exactly, you get what I’m talking about. But here’s the thing: I think maybe Phoebe is the woman to save me from all that. I really think she could be the one.’

Misha didn’t say anything. Another confused bird flew into his face.

They weren’t really expecting to find anyone at home, but Phoebe rang the doorbell of Cliff’s whitewashed neo- classical mansion just in case. To her surprise she heard a clopping sound and then a muffled voice from inside shouted, ‘Coming! Hang on. Oh for pity’s sake. Oh. Oh goddamn. Jesus.’

Finally, the door swung open and a horse in a satin dressing gown looked out at her.

‘Hi. Can I help you?’ said the horse.

‘AN ABOMINATION! SCIENCE GONE MAD,’ said the hen.

‘You’re one to talk.’

‘Hi,’ said Phoebe, who was starting to take unexpectedly chatty creatures in her stride now, even if she still found the entire concept slightly irritating. ‘We’re here about Cliff.’

‘You’d better come in, then.’

The horse showed them through into a dining room which would have been delicately tasteful if it hadn’t been for the huge murals of a semi-naked Cliff Ganymede in amorous clinches with giant, highly-muscled bees.

‘Cliff really did like bees, didn’t he?’ said Phoebe, wide-eyed.

‘Yes, sorry about those,’ said the horse. ‘I realise that they’re a
bit much
. Help yourself to drinks, by the way. I’d fix you them myself, but we’d be here all day.’ The horse nodded at his hooves and rolled his eyes. ‘I’m Cliff’s automated diary,’ he went on. ‘In case you were wondering.’

‘Oh, of
course
, you’re the next model up from my hen,’ said Glen, patting him on the neck. ‘I read about these. It’s really nifty. Wherever you are in the universe, a wireless link downloads all your experiences into your diary’s genetically augmented brain. You can get it implanted in cats, dogs, dolphins. Never seen a horse version before.’

‘The speech augmentation is very tricky with horses,’ explained the horse. ‘It’s some very pricey vivisection.’

Phoebe rubbed her chin thoughtfully. ‘So – you’ve got all of Cliff’s memories?’

‘That’s right,’ said the horse. ‘To all intents and purposes I have lived all the things Cliff lived, known all the things he knew. I can also sync up to his appointment calendar and download financial spreadsheets.’

The horse tried awkwardly to sit down in a big, leather-backed armchair, then attempted to pull a cigar from his dressing gown. He instantly dropped the cigar on the floor and groaned.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said. Phoebe went over, picked the cigar up, put it in the horse’s mouth and lit it for him.

‘Thank you, my dear,’ said the horse, puffing out a smoke ring. ‘I’ve been
gasping.
So, anyway, are you friends of Cliff’s? I don’t recall you from any of the memory dumps. But then, I haven’t downloaded any updates for over a couple of months now. I’m beginning to think something might have happened to him. He was due back from the book tour ages ago.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘Know what?’

Phoebe started to say something, but then changed her mind. She couldn’t quite bring herself to break it to him.

‘You’ve just been here, alone, waiting for him? Why didn’t you try to raise the alarm?’

‘I’m a horse. I don’t contain any artificial intelligence. I just record Cliff’s memories. I mean, I
say
I’m just a horse. There’s some brain/CPU leakage, obviously. I’ve developed a taste for these cigars and some of the finer whiskeys. Or rather, I would have done, if I could ever get the tops off the bottles.’ The horse did a whinnying sigh. ‘You people, with your hands, you don’t know you’re born.’

‘Listen, horse,’ said Phoebe, gently. ‘Could you maybe help us with a few questions?’

‘I’ll certainly do my best.’

‘Do you have any idea what the significance might be of the phrase “knuckle down”?’

‘Oh dear. Yes. I was afraid it might be something to do with this,’ the horse puffed on his cigar and gazed out of the window. ‘Poor Cliff, I’d rather hoped he
was
just being paranoid. You see, a little while back he moved publishers. Looking for a new stable, you could say, if you’ll excuse my horse-based humour. Ended up at GABAN. Do you know them? They’re one of the big six, based over on Lansbury Five – the Gollancz Arms, Books and Narcotics publishing conglomerate. At first everything was fine. The books were doing well, Cliff was really feeling like he’d hit a groove with the bee metaphors; it was all roses and extra sugar-lumps for me. But then his editor turned up one day, wanting an “important chat”. Cliff had assumed it was going to be about his latest novel, but instead, they start telling him about this new wonder drug they’d got planned, some kind of energy pill. They were going to call it “Knuckle Down”. Good, catchy name. And they wanted Cliff to be the face of it in their upcoming advertising campaign. There was a lot of talk about “synergy” and “cross market fertilisation”. Of course, Cliff was delighted. Money for old rope so far as he was concerned. Didn’t even have to get out of bed. But then, a couple of weeks later, he started hearing … rumours.’

‘What kind of rumours?’

‘They’d been doing this big drugs trial out on Proxima Twelve. And the word on the publishing grapevine was that things hadn’t gone well. There’d been deaths. Lots of deaths. Look, Cliff wasn’t a saint, and he’d put his name to some pretty shoddy quality merchandise – there’s a Ganymede lunchbox that will take your fingers right off – but he had a
few
scruples. He wasn’t going to endorse anything really dodgy. So he dug about for a bit, got a couple of old publishing contacts to ask around, and he managed to get hold of something. Here, I’ll show you.’

The horse slid out of the chair and clip clopped over to a computer terminal set into the wall. He mashed the display with his nose for a bit, cursed under his breath, and eventually a file popped up. Phoebe, Glen and Misha crowded around to look at it. They read the title:
PRELIMINARY DATA ON THE ARBITRATAZINE (‘KNUCKLE DOWN’) TRIAL.

‘It’s a confidential in-house report, not for general consumption. You’re welcome to take it with you. There’s a lot of technical jargon in there about how they make the drug that I don’t understand – I am, after all, just a horse – but, skip to page twenty, the section that’s supposed to detail the side effects. There – look!’

Phoebe frowned. ‘It’s empty.’

‘Exactly,’ said the horse. ‘No side effects listed at all! Well, Cliff’s not an idiot. As soon as he saw that, it was pretty obvious what had happened. They’d
redacted
it! There was a cover-up afoot. So, he did some more digging, and then he found
this
.’

The horse bumped and licked the display until a graph popped up.

‘That’s the suicide rate on Proxima Twelve, and
that
’s the six months when they were running the drugs trial.’

‘Good grief,’ said Phoebe. ‘It goes through the roof.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Misha. ‘I remember now. That was big news back on Gippsworld. We’ve had the highest per capita suicide rate of all the planets in the system for as long as anyone can remember – it’s one of the statistics we’re most proud of – so this year, when Proxima Twelve knocked us off the top of the table, it was a real blow.’

The horse nodded. ‘It’s not
proof
, of course. There’s no paper trail between the suicide spike and Knuckle Down. But Cliff took one look at that graph and decided he wanted out of the contract. Except it turned out old Marty Zeevon had done a pretty terrible deal back when he negotiated it. GABAN owned image, personality, appearance and opinion rights in perpetuity. Cliff retained T-shirt rights. Marty was always weirdly hot on T-shirt rights, you’ve got to give him that. Anyway, I’m afraid that’s as much as I know. Cliff disappeared on the book tour, but I never received any more memories. Like I said, very strange.’

‘You think that could be what’s inside our mysterious box?’ said Glen, rubbing his chin in an unintentional pantomime of a Person Having A Rare Important Thought. ‘The paper trail? The dirty on this drug?’

‘Makes sense,’ said Misha. ‘You can see why they’d want to keep it quiet.’

‘Well, thanks horse,’ said Phoebe. ‘You’ve been extremely helpful.’

‘So what do we do now?’ said Misha. Glen poured himself another drink.

‘I vote to stay here and pet the horse, drink the wine cellar dry.’

‘I’d certainly welcome the company,’ said the horse. ‘Tell me – do you think Cliff is coming back any time soon?’

Phoebe and Misha both looked a bit uncomfortable.

‘I’m afraid not, horse,’ said Phoebe, after a difficult pause.

‘Oh. I
see
,’ said the horse, sadly. ‘Was it peaceful?’

‘Not very peaceful, no. Actually, we think he was murdered. But don’t worry – I’m a trained police officer and I’m going to get to the bottom of this. And from what you’ve said it looks like we need to pay a visit to his publisher.’

‘But Cliff was a cash cow,’ said Glen. ‘A publisher wouldn’t murder a cash cow if they could help it, would they?’

The horse pondered that for a moment and sighed. ‘I think the young lady might be right. To be honest, “being alive” isn’t very high up on the list of desirable traits an author can have. These days it’s more of a nuisance than anything. I mean, look at Robert Ludlum. The man has been dead for a millennium, but that hasn’t seemed to get in the way of him knocking out a new book every year.’

‘So you’re the new interns?’ said the receptionist.

‘Yes, we are,’ said Glen, doing his grinning trick again. ‘The three of us are very keen to break into the cosmopolitan and rewarding world of publishing.’

They were standing in the cheerless glass and steel lobby of the GABAN Conglomerate’s headquarters, a building that, according to the plaques on the door, had won
Architectural Exercises In Narcissism
’s Best Monolithic Embodiment of Dystopian Ennui Award six years running. Busy-looking people hurried back and forth. Lansbury Five’s fluffy cyan clouds drifted past the windows in an unnecessarily smug way. Misha gazed up at a wall plastered with pictures of books he recognised from the bestseller lists. Next to those were pictures of popular drugs he recognised from the chemists. And next to those were a whole load of famous cluster bombs and landmines he recognised from various blood-drenched news reports.

‘You’ll need to sign here.’ The receptionist hit a button and beamed a pop-up to their retina displays. ‘It’s a simple waiver saying that we’re not responsible for any workplace deaths, including but not limited to your getting mashed up by giant cogs, toxic fume inhalation, and basic exhaustion. Here are your badges. Orientation is up on level two. I hope you have a long and prolific career!’

The trio followed the signs marked ‘Orientation Seminar’ and took their seats at the back of an over-lit conference room stuffed full of other, actual, bright-eyed young interns. A looping holographic recording played in the air above them. The familiar fist-shaped GABAN Conglomerate logo spun across the room and then dissolved into the image of a young woman, pretty and emaciated, as she approached a young man, slightly less emaciated, by a water cooler.

‘Hi! First day at Gollancz?’
said the man.

‘It is, yes! I’m raring to go! My name’s Marcy!’
said the woman.

‘Nice to meet you, Marcy! I’m Mike! You’re going to love it here. Perhaps you’d like to hear a little bit about the company?’

‘That would be super!’

‘Well, GABAN Corp was one of the survivors of the Lansbury System’s media conflagration from all the way back in the
25
th century. We started off as a boutique publishing imprint, specialising in romance fiction, but over the years we’ve branched out into arms dealing, fashion, and legal narcotics.’

‘That sounds like quite a departure, Mike!’

‘Not really, Marcy. You see, whether you’re trying to sell a novel, a lipstick, a K-
30
Assault Rifle, or a new type of sobriety pill, ultimately, it all comes down to two things – good marketing and a flexible moral outlook. And those are qualities we in the book trade already had in spades.’

‘So let me get one thing straight – as an intern, am I technically a slave?’

‘I’m afraid not, Marcy! As you know, slavery IS legal in this system, but there’s a lot of annoying red tape involved, and slaves have many rights for the duration of their service that just aren’t practical in a forward-facing business like publishing. Don’t worry, though! Things might seem tough at first, but work hard and there’s a swift career progression. I used to be a regular intern just like you, but now, after a mere sixteen years, I’m a level two intern, so in addition to travel expenses I receive a weekly allocation of nutrient paste deemed sufficient to sustain virtually all necessary life functions.’

Marcy turned to the camera, and gave it a cheery grin.

‘Great! That’s something to aspire to! No more working bleak nights near the underpass for me!’

‘Do you have any other questions, Marcy?’

‘What’s the health plan like, Mike?’

‘It’s very comprehensive. The basic gist is that if you die, you’ll agree to let us use your organs, bones and general viscera for the production of glue, paper and other essential office supplies. Because we care about the environment, the GABAN promise is that none of our intern’s spent carcasses go to waste.’

Marcy and Mike gabbed on chirpily for a little while, then the display flicked off again and an elderly man with a stoop stood up at the front of the room and coughed. ‘Under your seats you’ll find a slip. The colour of that slip indicates which department you’ve been assigned to,’ he said, in a bored monotone. ‘Report to the relevant duty manager, and welcome to your new lives of being able to tell people at parties that you’ve got a job in the media.’

He sat back down again. Phoebe looked at her slip, which was green. ‘I’m in Design. How about you two?’

‘Correspondence,’ said Misha.

‘Innovation strategy,’ said Glen.

‘Okay, we’ll meet back at the canteen at lunch. Try to find out whatever you can. But be
subtle
about it.’ Phoebe shot Glen a pointed look. ‘We don’t want to make people suspicious.’

Phoebe followed the rest of the green slip interns down to a vast basement lined with row upon row of input terminals. A thousand sets of eyes momentarily flicked up from a sea of wan faces illuminated only by the glow of their screens, and then instantly flicked back down again. An officious senior intern with a greyish sheen to his skin sat Phoebe down at a desk and pointed at her terminal. ‘Intern Clag,’ he said, checking his notes. ‘You’ve been assigned to poignant shoe duty.’

‘Great,’ said Phoebe. ‘What’s poignant shoe duty?’

‘It’s what it sounds like. You locate copyright-free images of children’s empty shoes. You then tint those images sepia. We’re a big publisher, and that means we require a minimum of five hundred new sepia images of poignant empty shoes for our fiction and memoir covers every day. If you fail to meet that target you will be docked an hour’s rest period. Bear in mind that as a level one intern you have a forty minute total rest allocation for the week. Stimulants may be taken, but please note that only GABAN branded narcotics are allowed on site.’

Nine hours later Phoebe slumped onto an uncomfortable canteen bench and put her head on the table. She groaned. When she managed to sit up again, she saw that Misha was there, covered in cuts and soot. Glen was there too, and he, inevitably, looked fine.

‘So many shoes,’ said Phoebe. ‘I can’t feel my fingers.’

‘This place is terrible,’ said Misha, nodding miserably.

‘What have they got you doing?’

‘I’m on the slush pile.’

‘Reading manuscripts? That doesn’t sound so bad.’

‘We don’t
read
them,’ said Misha with a hollow-sounding laugh. ‘There’s sixteen billion sent in from across the galaxy every minute. They all get instantly wiped from the mail system. But to delete that amount of data means the server runs incredibly hot. It’s my job to help keep the cooling pipes unclogged. There’s a lot of shovelling heavy blocks of ice, but we still had six fires before midday.’

‘How about you, Glen?’

‘Mine isn’t too bad,’ said Glen, with a relaxed shrug. ‘Up in innovation strategy we just have to make up new names for products that haven’t worked out for some reason or another. Like, we had this prototype that was meant to be a ‘My First Chemical Peel’ sort of thing. You know, for kids, right? But it kept on melting the test subject’s faces. So they flipped it over to the arms division, and we got tasked with coming up with an exciting-sounding name for it. I got highly commended for “Mallowiser
4000
”, because it kind of leaves you looking like a marshmallow. Similar texture, too. They’re trying to choose between that and “Face Repurposer”.’

‘I don’t suppose either of you actually
found out
anything?’ said Phoebe.

‘I didn’t have a chance,’ said Misha.

‘I clean forgot,’ said Glen.

Phoebe sighed. ‘I didn’t have much luck, either. I talked to a couple of people, in the few seconds when the senior intern had his back turned, but nobody has even
met
anyone from editorial. They’re on the
17
^th
floor apparently, and nobody ever gets to go up there. The place is riddled with security drones.’

A klaxon sounded to indicate the end of their three-minute lunch break.

‘Okay,’ said Phoebe. ‘Let’s try again. See you in nine hours.’

Phoebe rejoined the shuffling queue of interns heading back down towards the design gulag. Feeling slightly light-headed, she found herself drifting into the middle of a daydream in which Sergeant Peterson was pinning a medal to her shirt.
‘You’ve done a fantastic job cracking the Ganymede case wide open,’
he was saying.
‘And to mark this glorious day for our little police force we will be stuffing your colleague Alicia into a cannon and firing her at the nearest sun. That’s not excessive – that’s the least you deserve, Officer Clag.’
Peterson smiled, and then he morphed into a stream of dancing noodle pots.

A little way ahead of her a commotion and a strangulated cry brought her back to the moment. One of the interns, a skinny, curly-haired youth who had a face the colour of dead jellyfish, had collapsed to the floor. ‘I can’t do it,’ the intern wailed. ‘I can’t look at
one
more picture of an empty swing or a pensive woman’s back.’ Other interns tried to drag him to his feet, but he went on sobbing. The constantly hovering security drones all surged towards him. Phoebe suddenly realised that, for the next few seconds at least, nobody was watching her. She tiptoed across the corridor and ducked into a stairwell. Behind her she heard a zapping sound and a scream and a request for the cleaner to mop up a spillage.

Seventeen flights of stairs later Phoebe paused, dry-heaved a bit, contemplated the wisdom of what her diet was doing for her in terms of cardio-vascular fitness, and then slipped through a door and onto the editorial floor. Another flinty-looking receptionist blocked her way.

‘Hi there,’ said Phoebe, thinking on her feet and waving her green slip. ‘I’m from design.’ She rummaged in her pocket and held up an old noodle wrapper. ‘Got a couple of covers to run past the editor of the Cliff Ganymede
In Memoriam
anthology.’

The receptionist pursed his lips. ‘There’s no appointment in the book. And editors don’t usually get bothered with that kind of thing.’

‘I know – it’s just there’s been a hiccup. Hard to believe, but we’ve completely run out of images of poignant empty shoes.’

‘Good grief,’ said the receptionist, looking alarmed.

‘Exactly. So we were thinking of going with either a sad bee or the silhouette of a sad bee. My boss is keen to move this along, and you’d be doing me a real favour; we’ve got a backlog as long as your arm – that time of year, I guess – and so I
hoped
—’

‘Fine, fine,’ said the receptionist, cutting her off and waving her down the hallway. ‘He’s at lunch at the moment, but you can leave it on his desk.’

Phoebe found the office with a pile of old Cliff Ganymede books stacked up under a glass coffee table, and darted inside. She was so pleased to have got this far that it was only now, when confronted with working out her next move, that she found herself yet again at a bit of a loss.

‘Come on, Clag,’ she said out loud to herself. ‘This is your big chance to prove your detectiving skills. Find some evidence. Something incriminating.’

She glanced around for anything that looked incriminating, and instantly realised that she didn’t really know what incriminating things looked like. She sat down at the editor’s desk, and tapped the built-in display, but, predictably, it asked for a password. From what Phoebe could remember of those pulpy detective shows, a clue to the password was usually
hidden in plain sight
. All she could see was a half-eaten banana. She shrugged and decided to eat the rest of it. Then she typed ‘BANANA’. Nothing happened.

‘Why is this all so much more
difficult
than on TV?’ she muttered.

‘Excuse me.’

Phoebe swallowed hard, looked up and saw a man with a nice suit and a slick haircut leaning against the doorframe.

‘Ah,’ said Phoebe, wondering if she had any chance of reaching the elevators before the security drones vaporised her. ‘I realise this probably seems bad, but it’s not what it looks like.’

‘I know who you are,’ said the man, laughing.

‘You do?’

‘Don’t worry, I’m not calling security. Not yet, anyway,’ he closed the door behind him and walked over to a drinks cabinet. ‘This happens from time to time. Truth is, I admire your moxy.’ The man poured out a tumbler of gin and looked at his watch. ‘Okay, you’ve got ten seconds to impress me, let’s hear it.’

‘Hear what?’

‘Your
pitch
. I assume, from the condition of your hair and the stains on your shirt, that you’re an aspiring author, right? Sneaking in here to wow me with your precious idea that you are convinced is unique as a snowflake. So, what is it?’

Phoebe thought for a moment. ‘It’s about a murder,’ she said.

‘A kid?’

‘Not a kid, no.’

‘Make it a kid. Murdered kids are always a draw. People can’t get enough of murdered kids.’

‘Fair enough. Anyway, there’s this girl trying to solve the case …’

‘What’s the girl’s job?’

‘Police woman?’

‘Can we make her an archaeologist?’

‘Sure.’

‘But she’s got issues, right? Something relatable like OCD, or mild Asperger’s?’

‘She has some body image issues.’

‘That’s good. And has she got a hot beefcake secretary?’

‘Do archaeologists have secretaries?’

‘You tell me, kid, you’re the author,’ the editor frowned. ‘Five more seconds before I throw you out, by the way.’

‘Okay, yes, she has a hot secretary and, uh, she discovers a plot involving a terrible new narcotic that has awful side effects.’

‘Eh,’ the editor pulled a face. ‘Drug fiction isn’t that exciting in the current market-place. You know what sells? Thargoids. Look, you’re the writer – it’s not my place to suggest things, but let me just throw this out there: she’s got body image issues, but she’s
also
got OCD. And there’s this Thargoid gang, who have OCD themselves, and they’re killing the kids in alphabetical order. Only our heroine can spot the pattern, because – I don’t know – something archaeological. How about that?’