[03] Elite: Docking is Difficult (10 page)

‘Okay, great, well, there you go everybody, that’s the end of the performance,’ he said.

The audience debated amongst themselves for a moment, but – seemingly satisfied with this new romantic pairing – they eventually gave a halting round of applause. There was some grumbling about the pacing, and about some glaring continuity issues, and about how Phoebe had pronounced the name of the planet ‘Temabilis’. Most of them agreed that the hen was the best bit. ‘A solid seven,’ was the general consensus.

Denise hurried back on to the stage. ‘Well, ladies and gentlemen, I hope you enjoyed that. An unusual interpretation of how the season finale might have gone, and one that inexplicably deviated quite radically from the script I provided some weeks ago.’ She shot Misha a testy look. ‘But a very entertaining way to kick off our evening, nonetheless. We’ve got the after-show party and Marty Zeevon himself in a little while, but first we’ll be judging the baking competition to see who has managed to produce a show stopper loaf that most embodies the message from Cliff’s penultimate book,
When Life Gives You Biomechanoid Bore-Slugs, Make Disgusting Bore-Slugade
.’

‘Well, that was pretty intense,’ said Glen, as they stood in the queue of fans waiting to get Marty Zeevon’s signature. ‘Nifty bit of writing there, Tolstoy.’

‘Sorry,’ said Misha, still trying to wipe off his stage makeup, worrying now that it was going to bring him out in one of his rashes. The line shuffled forward a few inches.

‘You did really well, Misha,’ said Phoebe, patting his shoulder. ‘It wasn’t your fault. I thought your script was actually quite moving.’

‘And at least the G-Dog was there with some mad improvising skills,’ said Glen. He made little pointy gun shapes with his hands and fired imaginary bullets at his own nipples.

‘It was very brave, Glen, the way you just stood up like that. Those laser bolts going off all over the place. You could have been
killed
,’ said Misha, with a wistful sigh, imagining for a fleeting, happy moment Glen’s head exploding across the convention hall like a watermelon dropped off a pig silo.

Glen laughed, and looked slightly confused. ‘Laser bolts? What are you talking about?’

Phoebe stared at him. ‘They were
shooting
at us, Glen. How could you not have noticed that?’

‘Jesus Christ, seriously? I just saw them lob a few figurines,’ he rubbed his chin. ‘Oh, man, I forgot – it’ll be the eye surgery. I can’t really see any bright colours. Had a guy in the Malpha system scrape most of the cones out from my retinas. It’s like
the
most hip procedure these days: gives everything a washed out, cinematic look. Makes it seem like you’re in an independently produced movie all the time. You should try it.’

‘Good grief.’

‘By the way, pretty good “acting” on that kiss there, cupcake.’

‘Well, that’s what it was. Acting,’ said Phoebe, shooting Misha a quick, anxious glance. ‘Let’s just be really clear on that.’

‘Sure it was, Pheebs. Sure it was. You know, I think I might keep this costume when we’re done.’ Glen rubbed his square jaw and gazed appreciatively at his own reflection in one of the room’s portholes. Then he looked at the fans ahead of them in the queue and rolled his eyes. ‘Come on, losers, keep it moving along here.’ He turned back to Phoebe and Misha with an exasperated shake of his head. ‘Have you noticed how, despite what it says on the posters, nobody here really
looks
particularly dynamic and goal orientated?’

They finally got to the front of the queue. Marty Zeevon, looking like an impossibly wrinkled human walnut in thick pebble spectacles, peered myopically up at them from where he sat behind his desk, next to a big stack of glossy photographs. The photographs showed Marty with his arm around Cliff. It had obviously been taken a few decades before, because, wrinkle-wise, Marty looked less like a walnut, more like a pug.

‘It’s two credits a signature,’ he rasped. ‘Three, if you want it personalised in any way. If your name has more than six letters I charge an extra credit.’

‘Mister Zeevon, we were hoping to talk to you about Cliff Ganymede’s murder,’ said Phoebe, deciding to cut straight to the point.

‘It was a real shame – Cliff was a swell guy. Didn’t they decide it was suicide? There – that’s an extra credit for small talk.’

‘Could we ask you a few questions? In private, perhaps?’

Marty nodded at his stack of ten by eights. ‘I’m not going anywhere until I’ve got through this lot.’

‘It won’t take long.’

‘No dice, honeybunch.’

‘Look,’ said Glen, taking out a very shiny credit card. ‘What if we just bought all of these? Sign the whole lot to Maurice, he’s a big fan.’

‘All of them?’ Zeevon narrowed his eyes for a moment. He sat back and folded his arms. ‘If you want to talk, I’m going to need to eat.’

‘Great. Let’s do that.’

‘You guys will pay for dinner?’

‘Sure,’ said Phoebe, keen to try to move things along.

‘And I can have anything on the menu? The full menu, not the fixed thing – they give you smaller portions on the fixed thing.’

‘Yeah, whatever.’

‘Starters, cheese platter, the works?’

‘
Fine.
’

‘Hot-dog,’ said Marty, breaking out into a grin. ‘And they said old Marty Zeevon was washed up.’

‘You know, I already talked to the cops,’ said Zeevon, through a mouthful of Ganymede-themed self-worth burger and positivity fries. ‘Nice girl. Alicia something.’ He nodded at Phoebe. ‘Your sort of age, but better conditioned hair.’

Phoebe smiled through slightly gritted teeth, and took a long drag on her Dynamism Root Beer. ‘This is just a follow-up visit,’ she explained. ‘We’re very thorough. Can you tell me about the last time you saw Cliff?’

‘Not much to tell. He was on his book tour. I hadn’t seen him for months, because by that point the guy was a virtual recluse. I don’t exactly mean “wearing shoeboxes on his feet”, but getting that way. At the half box/half shoe stage. So, when he sends me a message, suggests a drink, I’m surprised, you know? To be honest I should still be mad after he dumped me for Strickson, Sutton & Fielding, but what the hell, I figure: free drink. By the way, are you going to eat that?’ he pointed at Glen’s jacket potato.

‘Be my guest,’ said Glen, pushing it towards him.

‘I get there, and I’m thinking maybe he wants to take me back. Not that I needed him. I’ve got a lot of great clients. People say Cliff was my one big client, and that I got lucky, but those people don’t know what they’re talking about. Where was I?’

‘Seeing Cliff for the first time in months.’

‘Right, so we met at this bar, same place he’s staying – one of those upscale hotels with the name-brand hair products in the bathroom. Tip – when you check in to a place like that, you instantly hide the toiletries in your suitcase, and then call down to reception, like the cleaners just forgot to put them there in the first place. Double portions. Anyway – Cliff was pretty jumpy. He was moaning about his new publishers. That’s what authors do, they
moan
, so I didn’t really listen too closely. He said that he was having difficulties with them. Something about not being comfortable with the stuff they were trying to get him to do. The more he drank, the more paranoid the guy starts to sound. Shadowy forces out to get him, secret dossiers, the usual ravings. Honestly, I kind of drifted off. Things got cut short, because there was a bit of a scene.’

‘What kind of a scene?’

‘They had a fill-your-own plate salad bar. The baristabot got shirty about me building a tower to fit more food into, said it went against the spirit of the buffet. I say, if you provide a solid building block like parsnips you’ve got to expect a bit of architectural innovation – it’s like they’re penalising me for creativity. So we left and I took Cliff back to his room. He mumbled some stuff about having proof that would bring them all down, whoever “them” were, and that was the last time I spoke to him. When I came back the next morning to see why he hadn’t shown for breakfast, I found the door ajar and Cliff out cold on the carpet.’

‘Can you think of any significance the words “knuckle down” might have had?’ asked Phoebe. ‘He wrote that in his own blood, which is the sort of behaviour that usually constitutes a clue.’

‘I figured it was a last message to his fans. Typical Cliff, telling everyone to work hard, when he was literally the laziest man you could ever meet.’

‘Cliff Ganymede wasn’t lazy!’ Misha protested. ‘He had harnessed his inner dynamo.’

Zeevon laughed. ‘He was lazy. He was a lazy, lazy man. I never met anyone like him. I once saw the guy refresh a gossip site two hundred times in the space of an hour rather than actually type a sentence. He had twelve scheduled naps per day. You know, the only reason he even wrote his breakthrough book in the first place is because he had two commissions, a self-help book and a crime novel, and he thought by combining them he could get away with half the word-count.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Misha, crossing his arms. ‘He published hundreds of books. That’s not lazy.’

‘Procedural generation.’

‘Pardon?’

‘They were all procedurally generated. Computer games and movies have been using procedural generation for centuries, but it’s still a bit frowned upon in the book world. That didn’t stop Cliff, though. There was a list of about twenty phrases, and like a five-line algorithm. Didn’t you ever notice that book-to-book they’d just give completely conflicting advice? So yeah, his usual working day was like this: set the computer going by six, it would have generated most of a book by six-oh-two. Then he’d spend the next hour and a half “adding the Ganymede magic”, which basically meant he’d put in a few laboured beehive metaphors. Back in the day, back when he could still be vaguely bothered, he’d do other sorts of metaphor too, but in the end he felt bees were easiest.’

Misha nodded. ‘For maximum productivity the working day should be structured like a beehive, with the legs in the morning, the main bit where the bees live in the afternoon, and the top part, the lid that stops the bees from flying off, that’s the evening,’ he recited.

‘Goals are like honeycomb, hard to reach because they are surrounded by bees. Goals are hexagonal,’ Marty sighed. ‘He doesn’t even bother to explain that one.’

Phoebe surreptitiously blinked on her Police Interview Facial Coding Polygraph. ‘Mister Zeevon, we’re in possession of a box. We think the contents are in some way linked to Cliff’s murder. Do you have any idea what could be in there?’

‘Sorry, not a clue.’

‘And you yourself didn’t have anything to do with Cliff’s death?’

‘I’m an upstanding citizen! I’m shocked you’d even suggest such a thing.’

‘Perhaps you were upset Cliff had gone to a new agency?’

‘I told you – I didn’t need the guy. I’ve got lots of top-tier clients. You ever heard of the band I represent, the Asteroid Belts? They’re great. They’ve got an amazing gimmick. They wear really big belts. That’s what you need in this business, a nice gimmick.’

Phoebe sighed. The polygraph scan didn’t show anything untoward. She was fairly certain Zeevon wasn’t much of an agent, but he didn’t seem like much of a murderer either.

‘Where did Cliff live?’ she asked. ‘We couldn’t find anything for him on the database.’

‘Yeah, it’s tricky. See, along with the moaning, and the laziness, and the unhealthy pallor, the other thing about authors is: they really hate paying taxes. So, after the first few million rolled in, he bought himself one of those Bernal Spheres. You spin them right, you can get pretty nice gravity going, almost like the proper stuff, better than living on a regular space station. Feels like you’re outside on the inside, if that makes sense. He fixed a big hyperspace generator to the side of it, and set it to randomly jump around. Not totally random, obviously, he didn’t want to end up anywhere
risky.
Not much point hiding your gold under the mattress so the governments can’t get it if you’re just going to get it thieved by pirates. But he had, I don’t know, I guess a few dozen places round the galaxy he’d pop out on. A few days later, the whole place jumps to somewhere new. Overkill, if you ask me. A bit tin-foil hat.’

‘Do you know where we could find it?’

‘I’ve got an address for one of the spots it appears at, but it’s just some coordinates out in deep space. The thing should turn up sooner or later, but you could be there ten minutes, you could be there a week. No way of telling.’ Zeevon shrugged and emptied a little tray of condiments into his pockets. ‘You’ll need to pack some board games.’