[03] Elite: Docking is Difficult (12 page)

‘It doesn’t make a
lot
of sense,’ said Phoebe.

‘Okay, well, you had your shot,’ said the editor, sounding a bit petulant. ‘I think I’m calling security now.’

He leaned forward to activate the intercom. Desperate, Phoebe decided to try a different, more direct tack.

‘I’m not an author. I’m with the police,’ she flashed her badge and hoped he didn’t have a chance to read the details too closely. ‘And before you call security, there’s something you should know.
We have the Lenslok box
.’ She paused, letting the significance of that sink in.

‘Do you?’ said the editor.

‘It’s in a very safe place, before you get any ideas.’

‘That’s good. I guess that it must be a really nice box, then? Do you have some special emotional attachment to it?’

Phoebe faltered for a moment. This wasn’t how this sort of conversation played out in the detective books.

‘I think you know what’s inside it,’ she said.

‘I do?’

‘Yes. And we know too,’ she lied.

They eyeballed each other wordlessly.

‘Anyhoo,’ the editor looked at his watch again after the eyeballing had reached the minute mark, ‘how long is this staring thing likely to take, by the way? I’ve got a two o’clock with Agatha Tate.’

‘The crime writer? Oh, is she doing another Inspector Moon-Squid? I love those,’ said Phoebe, momentarily forgetting herself. She paused, then fixed him once more with a serious stare. ‘Look. Do I have to say what’s in the box?’

The editor held his hands up. ‘If you must.’

Fine
, thought Phoebe,
he’s trying to bluff it
.
Two can play at that game
. ‘The box contains proof – hard irrefutable proof – that your experimental energy-boosting drug, known as “Knuckle Down”, has a horrific, fatal side effect. It makes people top themselves.’

‘Ah,’ said the editor. ‘Is that so?’

‘It is,’ said Phoebe.

The editor stood up, closed the blinds, and then came back to the desk. He waved a hand at the holo-display.

‘Jenkins, can you bring in the Knuckle Down File. The one we have for the Cliff Ganymede cross-promotion?’

An intern came in clutching a secure document ball. The editor flicked it on, and passed it over to Phoebe.

‘I’m under no obligation to share this with you. I’ve seen from your badge that you’re about five parsecs outside of your customs and excise jurisdiction, but we at Gollancz are an open, honest company with nothing to hide. Here, read it. Take your time.’

Phoebe looked at the file being projected by the ball into her lap. She read it for a few minutes. Then she read it again. The editor whistled to himself, and waited politely for her to finish.

‘Well …’ Phoebe stammered after a while. ‘It’s a fake. Same as the one Ganymede had. Obviously you’ve done a fake report.’

‘Look at the cover. It’s not even
our
report, Ms Clag, it’s the results of the GDA’s exhaustive and independently monitored tests.’

Phoebe stared at the Galactic Drug Administration’s seal. It seemed legit.

‘I’m not saying we’ve never released a drug that didn’t have an unpleasant pharmacological side effect,’ the editor continued. ‘I mean, good lord, we publish a sun-cream that’s left a dozen people pregnant. Our health and safety measures are not very rigorous at all. But Knuckle Down isn’t like that. It is one of the few drugs we’ve produced that has, in fact,
zero
chemical side effects.’

‘But Ganymede … he had the leaked report. And I’ve seen the graph. The suicide spike. The subjects all killed themselves.’

‘Yes, that’s true.’

Phoebe started to get the same feeling she got when talking to Glen.

‘Knuckle Down has zero
chemical
side effects. But that isn’t to say it’s flawless. It does, in fact, have one massive flaw.’

He paused, and gave her a slightly sad, sombre smile. ‘It works.’

Phoebe looked at him, confused. ‘It works? That’s the flaw?’

‘It’s not some common or garden
stimulant
. It’s not an energy booster. It’s a whole other kettle of fish.’ The editor downed his drink. He leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘The test subjects who took Knuckle Down stopped dithering. They stopped procrastinating. Instead of writing out lists of all the things they intended to do one day, they just did those things. Instead of drawing up fancy schedules for their revision, they revised. Instead of saying that from
tomorrow
morning I’m going to start running five miles a day, they just ran five miles. Straight away! No option, because the drug makes your hypothalamus itch like crazy if you procrastinate. See, human brains are actually pretty great at knowing what they should be doing, they’re just useless at acting on that knowledge for any timescale longer than about five minutes. But subjects on Knuckle Down focused and they worked hard. The results were –’ he actually shuddered at this point – ‘horrific.’ The editor opened a drawer in the desk, pulled out a packet of GABAN branded cigarettes and lit one. ‘The guy who’d always wanted to write his novel, but who had never been able to sit down and do it, did it. And when he’d done it, that novel turned out to be terrible. Poorly characterised nonsense. Or, worse, it turned out to be
pretty good
, but he didn’t know anybody who knew anybody in order to get an agent. The girl who’d wanted to take the legal exams so she could progress in her company took the exams, aced them even, but then it turned out that her company was run by dolts, and so she still didn’t get promoted. Or sometimes somebody
would
get the promotion, but it turned out the new job was just as pointless and unfulfilling as the old one, and the extra money didn’t make the girl in accounts fancy the guy in human resources like he thought it might. Neither did successfully losing a few pounds off some chunky thighs. You see, we’ve done a lot of research. We’ve combed through untold reams of data. And “hard work” isn’t the key to anything. The idiots and the affluent triumph regardless. I mean, maybe if we could develop a drug to turn people into egregious, grasping bastards, we’d be onto something. Believe me, we’ve probably got teams of R and D guys working on it.’

He took a long drag on the cigarette and then flicked it into a bin. ‘Knuckle Down is a drug that exposes a difficult truth. It turns out our collective sanity is preserved by a single, fragile concept – the idea that one day, if we could just get down to it, if we could just stop watching TV
for ten fucking minutes
, we could change everything for the better. Pull that rug out from under civilisation’s feet and everything goes to hell. Once someone knows that actually, this time, they really
did
try their best, and yet their lives are
still
a cosmic joke, they tend to lose perspective. Or gain perspective, I suppose you could argue. Whatever – the result is the same: they usually jump in front of the nearest hyperloop shuttle.’

‘So why are you releasing it?’ said Phoebe, boggling at him. ‘If you know it’s going to cause untold misery, why don’t you
do
something?’

‘What am
I
supposed to do?’

‘You could stop it! You’re in charge!’

‘Me?’ the editor laughed. ‘I’m an intern.’

‘But you’re the editor-in-chief.’

‘Yes, and I’ve been here forty years now, but nobody on the editorial side is
paid
anymore. It’s interns all the way up. Best not let on to everyone downstairs; they might find it demotivating. Knuckle Down is going ahead because Marketing says it’s going ahead. They’ve got the galaxywide roll-out planned. They’re the ones that call the shots. And they’ve run it past our guys in legal a hundred times. Legal says it’s fine. Gollancz will be completely blameless for any resulting suicidal activity. The culprit is the galaxy. The stupid, capricious, non-meritocratic galaxy.’

Phoebe looked despairingly at the floor. ‘Did you murder Cliff Ganymede?’ she asked quietly.

‘If you’re going to get your knickers in a twist each time a publisher happens to kill an author, we’ll be here all day. Not that I’m admitting anything. But Ganymede was going to cause us a PR headache. He was the kind of person people listened to. So my guess is Marketing … took steps. How they went about that is their own business. I’m not really minded to say anything more about the matter.’

The editor walked around the desk to Phoebe, and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Look, Officer Clag, my advice – leave well alone. The marketing people. Their
eyes.
Like looking into holes Satan pissed into a glacier. You don’t mess with them.’ He paused, then frowned. ‘By the way, did you see half a banana in here? I haven’t eaten for six days. I’ll swap you a corporate stress ball for any spare nutrient paste you happen to have. God, interning can be tough.’

‘… so that’s that,’ said Phoebe, as, back at the canteen, she gloomily finished recounting her run in with the editor. ‘There’s nothing we can do. Alicia was right. I haven’t got a clue about real police work. We’ve got exactly
nowhere
. We still don’t even know what’s in that dumb box, but whatever it is, it’s obviously not a top secret drugs report. I’m stumped.’ She tore off her intern badge and threw it at one of the buzzing security drones. ‘Let’s get back to the
Lili Damita
and go home, I’ve had it with this place.’

‘We can’t just give up,’ said Misha, anxious that the end of their investigation meant the end of his being able to hang out with her.

‘Phoebe’s right. It seems to me we’ve given it our best shot,’ said Glen, throwing his badge away too. ‘But there comes a point where you’ve just got to put your hands up and say – this will remain a mystery, same as magnets and wind and fish and all the other unexplainable wonders of the universe. No reason to beat ourselves up over it. And besides, you know what this means, dollface?’

Phoebe shook her head.

‘It means it’s time to fulfil your end of our bargain.’ He stood up, fished in his pocket for his keys and clicked the little fob that would get the
Lili Damita
warmed up ready for them. ‘Come on, I’m taking you to dinner.’

‘Glen, I’m not really in the mood.’

‘You promised. And a deal’s a deal. Besides, I know a really good place just down the coast from here. Best novelty fine-dining on the whole of Lansbury Five. Maurice, you’ll be okay to entertain yourself for the evening?’ He winked at Misha. ‘Don’t wait up or anything.’

Misha paced up and down the ship’s cabin, stared out of the window at the bleak concrete sprawl of the restaurant’s parking lot, and tried not to think about how the dinner date might be going.

He sat down on one of the couches and called up a title from the online Ganymede library. Then he digitally paid an extra credit and switched the Interactive Bonus Feature on. Cliff’s avuncular face appeared on the flight console’s holographic display.

‘Hello BULGAKOV, MISHA,’ said the Interactive Bonus Feature. ‘You’ve purchased one THREE MINUTE personalised advice session. What’s bothering you, son?’

‘Cliff,’ said Misha. ‘I’m having trouble. There’s a girl I like, but I don’t seem to be getting anywhere with her.’

‘I’m sorry to hear this BULGAKOV, MISHA,’ said the Interactive Bonus Feature. ‘Did you try to drop vibrant-sounding words into your conversation to emphasise your sexual potency?’

‘Yes, I already did that. And I told her about my unique snoring. All that stuff.’

The hologram nodded and did a knowledgeable frown. ‘Well BULGAKOV, MISHA, men and women are like bees. When bees seek a mating partner they’ll attempt to put on a courtship display. The bees will line up in the hive and each bee has thirty seconds – approximately a week in bee years – to really grab the attention of a panel of bee judges. The showiest bee will then get to mate with the Emperor or Empress Bee.’

‘So I should do some sort of waggle dance?’

‘Not a literal waggle dance. But something like a waggle dance. Something bold.’

‘Oh well, thanks Cliff. The trouble is,’ said Misha, switching the book off again with a doleful wave of his hand, ‘that doesn’t really sound like me at all.’

‘Pretty swish, right?’ said Glen, refilling Phoebe’s glass.

Phoebe looked around at the restaurant Glen had taken her to and grudgingly admitted to herself that it was, indeed, pretty swish. She picked up her knife, sliced another chunk off their table, and popped it into her mouth.

‘It’s certainly high concept,’ she said. ‘Carving out a restaurant from the inside of the biggest naturally occurring truffle ever found. The smell is slightly overpowering, though.’

‘Seriously, eat as much of the table as you want,’ said Glen, helping himself to a chunk of the wall. ‘My dad’s got an expense account here.’

‘You have a ridiculous lifestyle, Glen.’

‘Thank you,’ said Glen, with a serious nod. ‘But that’s not enough. I’m not content. The truth is, Pheebs, my days are a terrible, endless parade of meaningless encounters with svelte, model-quality women. But you’re different, you’re not like them.’

‘Thanks,’ said Phoebe. ‘I suppose.’

‘Also, and I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but I think it’s important to face facts. You’re not getting any younger. And your cybernetic leg is strange and off-putting to most people, though luckily I find it to be kind of a turn-on. That’s not a kink you can rely on finding in other guys,’ Glen leaned forward. ‘Look, I know you think I’m not a serious person, but that’s not the case. Sure, maybe you were right, maybe this pirate thing
was
a fad. But my next project isn’t a fad. And I want you to be a part of it.’

‘A part of what?’

Glen indicated the restaurant around them with an expansive sweep of his arm. ‘I’m seriously considering getting into the restaurant business.’

‘You’re buying this place?’

‘Not
this
– I think the giant fungus dining experience is close to being played out. But I’ve got some amazing ideas for an entire new chain. Do you want to hear about my concept?’ Glen waved her closer and lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘People send in pictures of their deceased loved ones when they make a booking. And I get all the waiters to undergo instamatic surgery to look
just like those dead relatives
. So you’ll get your main course served by your dear old grandma, and your pudding by your dead fiancé or something.’