[03] Elite: Docking is Difficult (3 page)

Anyone landing on Gippsworld who wasn’t drunk or lost or trying to sell encyclopaedias would have caused a stir, but the stranger who turned up at the spaceport that morning left an actual audible thrum of excitement in his wake. The ship he climbed out from was sleek and expensive-looking and had jazzy blue zigzags down the side. The man himself was even more sleek and expensive-looking. He wore a glittering, phosphorescent cravat and an old-fashioned, white Zirconium suit. It looked handmade rather than printed. Misha had never seen a handmade suit before. He’d also never seen such a daringly pointless little beard, or such a thrillingly asymmetrical haircut. He’d been hosing down the pig transport when the stranger doffed his hat at him. Not having a hat to doff himself, he waggled his hose awkwardly in reply, because he didn’t know what else to do.

When the stranger stopped off at the spaceport’s greasy bar and grill, Rita Korolev, who always had a tendency to start drinking early, reported breathlessly that he’d ordered a type of coffee none of the baristabots had ever heard of. And as he then proceeded to wander the streets, past the now-mostly-crumbling local architecture, the wave of gossip swelled. He kept stopping and taking pictures of things that didn’t look as if they needed to have their pictures taken: broken masonry, abandoned plasma silos, dead birds. When the locals, pretending they just happened to be out for a stroll or had dropped something in his vicinity, sidled up as close as they dared, they’d noticed him muttering into his sleeve. Someone reported hearing the phrase ‘unique cultural mindset’. Somebody else was sure he’d also said ‘rich tapestry’. It was confusing. Usually when an off-worlder accidentally landed on Gippsworld they stuck to phrases like ‘
Jesus Christ
’ and ‘
I swear to god, Gavin, if you don’t fix that navigation unit I’m taking the kids and moving back to Phobos
’.

Occasionally, the man would stop and ask people something about their lives, but then, instead of rolling his eyes and yawning at the inevitable boring pig- or methane-based anecdote – like a normal person would – he’d say, “
Fascinating!
” and compliment them on their unspoilt, earthy charm.

One of the methane farm girls said that she’d heard he was an anthropologist. Another said that they’d heard a rumour he was something big in marketing. Rita claimed she had it on good authority that he was a high-powered mineral trader. From one of the core worlds. Maybe the
empire,
even. Certainly somewhere very cosmopolitan,
you can just tell from his bearing
, she added, knowledgeably.

The thing that really got everyone worked up was what happened when the stranger bumped into Mad Vladimir, the city’s resident hobo. Mad Vladimir, as usual, was seated outside the never-completed fifth-deepest mine in the galaxy, next to a trestle table piled high with his weird, shapeless sculptures. These were things he made out of Gippsworld’s thick, grey, ubiquitous mud. Nobody knew what they were meant to be. Occasionally, someone would speculate that one looked a bit like a golem, or an ant, or possibly a figurative representation of despair. But if they asked Mad Vladimir what it was he’d just bark or grunt and ask for some vodka.

This didn’t seem to put the stranger off at all. When he saw the pile of sculptures, he almost bounced up and down with excitement.

‘These are astounding,’ proclaimed the stranger, seizing one of the lumpier efforts and holding it reverentially up to the light as if it was some sort of relic. ‘The genuine article.’ Then he said a lot more stuff about ‘pure primitive lines’ and the ‘searing truth of the untrained hand’. He asked Mad Vladimir if his art was for sale. Mad Vladimir grunted. Not to be deterred, the stranger pulled out a pile of pre-loaded credits, and pressed them into Vladimir’s hand.

‘There you go,’ he said, loud enough for all the eavesdropping locals who were still loitering about nearby to hear. ‘Ten credits for the lot. And I’ll return tomorrow to purchase any more that you happen to have produced.’

A few Gippsworldians argued that the stranger must be nuts. Rita, whom people were starting to find kind of irritating, said that in fact she’d long been a fan of Vladimir’s work, and was surprised that it had gone unappreciated for all this while. There was some debate about whether they should start referring to Mad Vladimir as Affluent Vladimir now. More than a couple of the locals reasoned that if Affluent Vladimir, a certified bum, could produce sculptures that lunatic off-worlders wanted to buy, then how hard could this art lark be?

As promised, the next day the man in the white suit returned, only to find, now waiting for him along with Vladimir, another half dozen Gippsworldians who had discovered hitherto unseen outsider art skills, their various pots and sculptures piled high on more tables. Without missing a beat, the stranger surveyed these new artworks, proclaimed them good, and purchased them all on the spot, for even more than he’d paid before. This time, before disappearing back to his ship, he hung up a little sign by the entrance to the mineshaft:

Gippsworld went crazy.

‘This once sleepy backwater is abuzz—’

‘
…
it’s a new sensation shaking up the art establishment—’

‘
…
sure to be this year’s must-have gift—’

‘
…
Cliff Ganymede murder, still unsolved, almost forgotten about in all this hubbub—’

Misha kept flicking through the newsfeeds, but they were all full of the same excited babble they’d been plastered with for weeks. Mud sculpture this. Mud sculpture that. In the space of a month just about everybody on Gippsworld had forgotten about pigs and methane altogether and set themselves up as Indigenous Artists. The stranger had kept coming back – every afternoon without fail – buying up sculptures by the skip-load. Before long he was joined by other strangers, who did the same. Then the news crews had turned up. Soon there were lots of charts with arrows pointing upwards and serious jowly-necked experts explaining that they’d always suspected this exact thing might happen.

Misha stopped on one of the channels for a moment. His neighbour Nikolai was being interviewed by a skinny woman who seemed to enjoy nodding. It took Misha a moment to recognise Nikolai, because instead of the usual filthy coveralls he wore to unblock the New Vladimir-Putingrad silage gullies, he now had a pipe in his mouth and was wearing a billowy sort of smock. According to the caption on the picture he was ‘At the forefront of the Gippsworld Outsider Art Movement’.

‘Well, the thing is, Diane,’
Nikolai was saying to the reporter,
‘it’s not about the subject
per se
, it’s about recontextualising the imagery associated with that subject.’

‘Which is why your work, Horse 1, doesn’t actually look like a horse?’

‘Exactly.’

‘So tell me, Nicky. Your overnight artistic success has led to you becoming, along with many other residents of New Vladimir-Putingrad, incredibly rich. Have you got any plans as to how you’re going to spend that money?’

‘Diane, an artist like me isn’t really interested in the vulgar products of the military-industrial complex, but I thought I might buy a yacht and a platinum hat.’

Misha flicked again. An academic with unruly eyebrows was in the middle of explaining how the Gippsworld outsider art movement was
authentic
because the Gippsworldians were more naturally attuned to nature than inhabitants of other, more developed planets. Misha scratched his head. He vaguely remembered Nikolai getting arrested for trying to do something nobody liked to talk about to one of the pig-plants the previous winter. He guessed that counted as being attuned to nature.

‘Are you watching your programs all day,’ said Misha’s father, sticking his head round the door, ‘or are you going to get off spherical lazy arse and do works? These pigs do not harvest themselves.’

‘So, I was thinking,’ said Misha, as he and his father waded out into the boggy field and started to round up the latest pig crop, ‘that I might try my hand at a bit of this sculpture making. It really seems to have caught on.’

‘We had this conversation. No more schemes.’

‘It’s not a “scheme”. And it’s actually kind of crazy not to. Literally everybody is doing it. You know Sergey?’

‘Latvian-faced Sergey?’

‘Yes, Latvian-faced Sergey. His last piece went for nineteen credits. NINETEEN. That’s more than our truck cost.’

‘Is fad.’ Misha’s father made a dismissive snorting noise, and went on prodding livestock out of the curdling mud, up a ramp and into a cargo container, which bobbed around in an ungainly way as it hovered on a cushion of dirty air a couple of feet above the ground. ‘We are proud pig people.’

‘We had a leaflet through the door just yesterday offering to take the farm off our hands.’

‘Yes, I saw. To turn into parking lot. Why do we need new parking lot?’

‘Because the economy is booming! You know, even the Melnikovs sold up.’ Misha shook his head sadly. ‘They’ve opened a gallery space. It has its own juice-bar. Soon we’ll be the only ones left in pigs.’

‘Good, less competition. We’ll have cornered the market.’

‘We’ll have cornered the market in a product nobody wants.’

Misha sulkily used his plasma-lasso to yank one of the plant-pigs, straggling away from the herd, back into line. ‘Besides. I think I’d have a natural flair for it.’

‘You say this because you have womanish hands, like a methane farmer. You are oddly proud of these womanish hands of yours.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with having some
ambition
, dad. Think what we could do with the money. Even you must occasionally
covet
something.’

Misha Senior paused for a moment, and stroked his beard. After a while he said, ‘I would like to have lunch with Zargella Lombard.’

‘The movie star?’

‘She has fine, broad hips. Free from childhood disease, I think.’

‘Okay, sure, but, I mean, apart from that?’

‘Hush, Misha. The wittering is making me tired.’

As the last of the plant-pigs snorted and shuffled into the floating box, Misha’s father banged the door shut and bolted it with a firm
clang
that also signified the end of any conversation.

‘No son of mine makes pottery knick-knacks. There is no future in this.’ He handed Misha the keys to the hover truck.

‘You take pigs to space station. Sell pigs. Do not moon over the girls.’

Gippsworld’s spaceport, like everywhere else on Gippsworld, was starting to go up in the world. It still looked like a toilet, but a bit of effort had gone into making everything slightly less bleak. The windows on the control tower had been cleaned for the first time in years. A banner above the arrivals lounge, which previously had just displayed a contact number for the Galactic Samaritans, now wished arrivals a happy stay and pointed towards the array of new art galleries and an artisanal bakery.

Misha finished transferring sixty recalcitrant plant-pigs from the shipping container into the big square bulk of the
Malkovich
’s cargo hold and punched a few details into the automatic air traffic control unit. It bleeped at him, letting him know that a take-off slot wouldn’t be ready for another hour. Misha swore and puffed out his cheeks. A month ago he wouldn’t have had to wait at all. But where once the departure gates had been empty except for the odd broken-down shuttle bus, now he counted at least a dozen shimmering out-of-town ships. Some of them looked as if they’d come from a really long way away. Actual proper space traders with thousand-yard stares and the hunched shoulders that resulted from a hard life of interminable hyperspace jumps loitered around, looking surly. Misha wanted to talk to them. He wanted to ask if they’d ever seen a supernova, or a building with more than three storeys, or if it was true that on some planets there was enough sunlight for men and women to wander around with no tops on. But he didn’t dare, so instead he just satisfied himself with ticking off a Lakon Spaceways Type
6
Transporter and a Core Dynamics Python in his
Gollancz Bumper Book Of Space Going Vessels
, and decided to get some lunch at the café whilst he waited.

‘Up a bit. No, it’s still not straight.’

The President was standing by the spaceport café entrance supervising two baristabots who were in the process of hanging a painting above the sandwich bar. The painting, a lurid triptych, showed the President wrestling with a Jovian moontiger, an eagle and a mule.

‘Misha, isn’t it?’ said the President, spinning around as Misha came in through the door. The President was good with names, which was half the reason he was president.

‘Take five, guys,’ he said, clicking his fingers at the bots. He beamed. ‘Mind if I sit with you?’ he asked, already sliding into the booth opposite Misha. ‘Word of advice, don’t have the eggs.’

Misha picked up a menu, and nodded appreciatively at the painting. ‘You’ve wrestled a lot of creatures, Mister President.’

‘Oh, well, you know,’ the President waved away the compliment, even though he was obviously pleased the subject had come up. ‘Some of them are a bit exaggerated. But it’s important to maintain a dynamic image. I find pictures of me wrestling creatures whilst shirtless is one of the best ways to communicate that. Lesson one from Putin’s classic work on political leadership. Putin was a famous old-world Russian dictator. One of my historical heroes.’

‘Oh yes, we did him at school. And he gets a few mentions in Cliff Ganymede’s book on
Getting Your Message Across – What I learnt About PR from Mass Thargoid Genocide.
’ Misha studied the picture a bit more closely. ‘Did eagles really used to have two heads?’

‘Apparently the old Russian ones did,’ the President said with a shrug.

‘I wonder how it ate? What if the heads had a difference of opinion? What if one head wanted worms and the other head wanted mouse guts?’