She got up slowly, holding her satchel. “Eat my shit, you puppet,” she told him. She paused as she moved past the one with the gun, looking into his eyes and then glancing at his lap. “I trust the rest of your weaponry is rather more intimidating.”
She walked, trying not to limp, along the aisle towards the gangway, the back of her naked scalp and the area between her shoulder blades itching and tingling, waiting for the shot that would kill her, or just the start of the pain again, but she made it to the end of the aisle, then down the steps, then through the double doors without anything happening.
In the corridor outside she collapsed back against the wall, swallowing, breathing heavily and putting her head back against the soft bulkhead. She closed her eyes for a moment.
Then she made her eyes go as wide as they could, blew her cheeks out, and with a slight shake of her head, walked away.
She landed on Miykenns three days later. The shuttle bellied down onto the wide, calm waters of Lake Malishu, its still hot hull creating bursts of steam with each skimming kiss so that its progress was marked by a series of small, distinct clouds, each curling round itself like a gauzy leaf and rising into the warm, still air while the craft whizzed on, finally settling onto the lake’s mirror-surface in a long, unzipping trail of white.
Beyond the early-morning coastal mists, the Entraxrln towered distantly on all sides, as though the lake existed in the eye of some vast purple storm.
She stepped lightly onto the jetty on Embarkation Island. Miykenns’ gravity was barely seventy per cent of Golter’s; the ship she’d journeyed on had maintained one Golter-g during acceleration and deceleration, and so Miykenns gave her the delicious feeling that she was about to float away all the time; it was a sensation that had led to more than a few broken limbs and heads over the time that people from Golter had been landing on Miykenns and suddenly feeling as though they could leap tall buildings.
She looked around and breathed deeply. The heady, fruity air filled her instantly with a careless, dizzy optimism, and an aching nostalgia that was sweet and poignant at once.
She and her fellow passengers were presented with flowers by tall, smiling Tourist Agency youngsters and shown the way to the maglev terminal; Malishu’s usual informality manifested itself in a total lack of any visible officials between the shuttle jetty and the maglev platform, and its renowned organisational prowess was demonstrated in the fact that an empty train had departed just before the passengers got there.
People stood on the open platform watching the winking light at the rear of the train as it disappeared down the causeway heading across the misty lake for the city.
Then groans turned to cheers as it became obvious the slowly flashing light had stopped and was coming nearer. Applause greeted the returning train.
She sat in the nose of the observation car, a huge smile on her face as she watched the great towers and sheet-membranes of the Entraxrln draw nearer while flocks of birds drifted across the lake on either side like huge clouds of lazy snowflakes under the clearing morning mists.
The Entraxrln was a couple of kilometres tall around the lake; by the time the city became evident, nestled, packed and crusted around and inside its vast dark trunks and cables, she had to lean forward in her seat and crane her neck to see the pale reaches of the topmost spindles and the slowly swell-waving membranes of the vast structure.
She sat back in her seat, still smiling. “Welcome to Embarkation Island,” said a recorded voice as they hurtled, slowing, into Malishu Central Rail Station. It shouldn’t have been that funny, but she found herself laughing along with everybody else.
The Entraxrln of Miykenns had fascinated astronomers on Golter for millennia before people ever set foot on the globe. Observatory records written on clay tablets thirteen thousand years earlier, which by some miracle had survived all of Golter’s frenetic history in between and even remained translatable, spoke of the several theories attempting to account for Miykenns’s strange appearance; white and blue swirls on one side, and a strange, dark, slowly-changing aspect on the other, rarely obscured by the white marks that always dotted what was assumed to be the ocean, and on which-with a good telescope on a high mountain on a calm night-distinct and swirling patterns could just be made out, like drips of pale-hued paints dropped onto the surface of a darker tint, and stirred into thin lines and creamy whorls.
It had been five millennia from the season that tablet had been fired to the day when people finally set foot on Miykenns and discovered the truth.
The Entraxrln was a plant; a single vast vegetable which must have been growing on Miykenns for at least two million years; it was, by several orders of magnitude, both the oldest and the largest living thing in the entire system.
It covered three continents, two oceans, five sizeable seas and thousands of islands. It controlled the weather, it withstood tsunami, it tamed volcanoes, it diverted glaciers, it mined minerals, it irrigated the desert, it drained seas and it levelled mountains. It grew up to three kilometres tall on land, had covered mountains eight thousand metres high, and tendrils had been found buried in volcanic vents in the deepest ocean trenches.
Its roots, trunks, leaf-membranes and anchor-cables covered the land beneath like an enormous, airy mat, producing something that looked vaguely like a forest-with trunks and layers of canopy-but built on the scale of a planet-wide weather system. Consequently, a physical map of Miykenns was as bafflingly complex as a political chart of Golter.
Humanity had been colonising the Entraxrln’s great domatium for seven thousand years, spreading out amongst its mountainous trunks and beneath its dim, diminishing layers, heading away from the clearings where they had landed to inhabit the plant’s bounteous commonwealth of levels and carve and work its trunks for dwellings and artifacts, and to trap or farm its various parasitic and symbiotic fauna and flora for food. Malishu, favoured by the great lake the Entraxrln had left uncovered for its own mysterious reasons-and by its almost central position in the vast plant-had been the planet’s capital for most of those seven millennia.
She hired a tri-shaw with a breezily prolix driver and found a small pension in the Artists’ Quarter, at the base of one of the city’s eleven great composite trunks. The fluted slope of the helically netted column rose into the haze and mists above, the houses and narrow, zig-zagging streets and bridges petering out as the gradient grew steeper.
She screened the city news channel before she went out; it held nothing about her or the Huhsz.
She walked towards the inner city through the lunch-time crowds inundating the markets and marquee an galleries; her nose was assaulted by smells she’d forgotten she knew; of the fruits, bulbs, flowers and tubers of the various plants that coexisted with the Entraxrln; of the rainbow-skinned fish and spike-mouth crustaceans from the lake, and of the cooked meats and potages made from the animals that lived within the great plant; jelly-birds, glide-monkeys, bell-mouths, cable-runners, trap-blossoms, tunnel-slugs and a hundred others. Painters and sculptors, silhouettists and aurists, scentifiers and holo artists called out to her from their stalls and tents, telling her-as they told everybody-that she had an interesting profile or skull or aura or scent.
A few stares and a couple of shouts convinced her that baldness wasn’t a major fashion feature in Malishu this season, so she found a drug store and bought a wig and some eyebrow spray, then continued.
She grew tired after a while and paid a few coins for the one-way hire of a bike into the inner city, riding a little shakily and trying not to be too touristically distracted by the gradually heightening buildings and. the cloudy canopies of Entraxrln membranes fifteen hundred metres above while the half-kilometre-wide trunk column around which the inner city had grown up-like dolls’ houses at the base of a great tree-drew slowly closer.