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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 Miyke
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. Miyke
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 fu
The Entraxrln of Miyke
It had been five mille
The Entraxrln was a plant; a single vast vegetable which must have been growing on Miyke
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 Miyke
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 mille
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 cha
She walked towards the i
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 i