[03] Elite: Docking is Difficult Read Online Free PDF

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