Against A Dark Background (25 page)

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, zigzagging 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.

‘You just walked out?’ Zefla giggled, a hand over her mouth. They were sitting in a lunchbar at the foot of a Corp tower in Malishu’s central business district.

Sharrow shrugged. ‘Oh, I was just getting fed up with it all. I don’t even know what they were supposed to tell me.’ She stirred her salty soup. ‘Maybe they just wanted to show me how clever they were, that we hadn’t fooled them.’

‘But no more of those pains?’ Zefla said.

‘Not so far.’

Zefla nodded. She had dressed as soberly as she could, in a dark twopiece. Her height didn’t attract attention in Malishu, where most people were around two metres tall. She’d tied her hair up and wore a rather dowdy hat. ‘You got a gun yet?’

‘That’s next,’ Sharrow said. ‘How’s the Central?’

‘Comfortable.’ Zefla smiled. ‘Been done out since, but the Bole bar is still the same.’ Zefla’s smile widened. ‘Hey, Grappsle’s still there. He remembered us. Asked after you.’

Sharrow grinned. ‘That was good of him.’

‘Yeah; we told him you were on the run.’ Zefla bit into her sandwich.

‘Oh, thanks.’

‘Obviously hadn’t heard the news,’ Zefla continued, chewing. ‘He just seemed to assume it was a jealous wife.’ She shrugged. ‘Men, eh?’

‘Hmm.’ Sharrow sipped her soup. ‘And where are the boys?’

‘Cenny marched Miz and Dlo down the City Library before they could unpack properly. They’re trying to find out more about this Pharpech place; a lot of stuff’s only available on non-standard format DBs, and some of it’s on flimsies and paper, for Fate’s sake.’ Zefla shook her head at such incontinent archaicism and tore another bite from her sandwich. ‘Probably hit the University stacks tomorrow,’ she mumbled through a mouthful of food.

Sharrow sipped her soup until Zefla swallowed, then said, ‘Had a chance to screen the legal situation?’

Zefla shook her head. ‘Got all I’m ever going to get from the public data bases in about five minutes. Under System law the Kingdom of Pharpech doesn’t exist; the area around it’s still theoretically Settlement Territory under the auspices of the (First) Colonial Settlement Board, Defunct. That takes us back to the thirty-three hundreds, and it’s got much more complicated since; there are at least fifteen competing and mutually aggravational land-title disputes, all dormant for way over a century so technically moribund, but there are just bound to be loopholes; I can smell them.

‘Going as far back as it’s sensible to go, the Kingdom was created as a Dukedom by the Ladyrs in return for tap-mining rights on the territory outskirts; it was declared capital when the Ladyrs needed a casting vote on the Planetary Board and the burgers of Malishu weren’t being cooperative. The then Duke declared himself King when the Ladyr dynasty collapsed, the Conglomerate that fell heir to the tap-mining rights got a Title by Use deed over their patch, which seems to have been the only bit anyone really cared about-and which has been closed down for three hundred years anyway-and . . . well, apart from removing its status as planetary capital, nobody ever got round to sorting out Pharpech’s legal status.

‘If you want an opinion, with eight cents of de facto existence the Kingdom’s been going so long a decent gang of greased-up legal hotshots could swing Full Diplomatic Acceptance and even a seat on the Miykenns World Council under Common Law in under a year. But in the meantime,’ Zefla said, `it’s in Nowhere Territory.’ She smiled happily and waved her arms. ‘Just one of those little legal oxbows on the great flood-plain of System law. There are zillions.’

‘You got all that in five minutes?’ Sharrow grinned.

`Maybe ten; I lose track when I’m enjoying myself.’ Zefla shrugged. ‘Anyway, I’ll be heading for the Uni Legal Faculty myself soon. See if there’s anything the public DBs have missed.’

‘You don’t think there’s anything we’ll be able to use?’

‘No,’ Zefla said. ‘Buying some defunct mining claim, forging docs and pretending to the throne …’ She shook her head. ‘Pharpech’s complexities all seem to be in the distant past; there’s no confusion recent enough to exploit. Unless I can dig up something very unexpected indeed, we aren’t going to crack this one via the legal route. I’ll keep looking, though.’

‘Okay,’ Sharrow said. `I’ll check out the travel possibilities, but assuming that doesn’t take long, let me know if I can help you or the boys.’ She reached into her satchel. ‘Here, I got this phone…’

Right.’ Zefla tapped the code for Sharrow’s disposable phone into her own.
How’s your hotel?’

`Comfortable. In the Artists’ Quarter.’

`What’s it like these days?’

`Full of artists.’

‘No improvement, then.’

`Even more twee, if anything.’

‘And the hunkies?’

‘I have a horrible feeling nothing’s changed there either; the good-looking ones are gay and the interesting ones turn out to be mad.’

`Hard times,’ Zefla agreed.

`Hmm.’ Sharrow nodded, a pained expression on her face. ‘It’s been too long,’ she said. ‘I hear words like “hard” and I’m in danger of sliding off my seat.’ She looked out at the gentle, filtered light of afternoon.. ‘Doesn’t help having all these huge fucking towering columns rearing up all over the place here, either . . .’ She sighed. ‘I may be forced to desperate measures; I haven’t seen one for so long I’m starting to forget what they look like.’

‘Well, hey,’ Zefla said, looking amused. ‘There’s always Miz. He’d be up for it.’

She shook her head. ‘I know. But. . .’She looked away.

‘Old wounds, eh?’ Zefla said, washing her sandwich down with some wine.

Sharrow gazed away with a lost expression Zefla knew from over a decade and a half earlier. ‘Yeah, old wounds,’ she said quietly.

‘Good afternoon, Madam. How may I help you?’

‘Good afternoon. I’d like a FrintArms HandCannon, please.’

‘A-? Oh, now; that’s an awfully big gun for such a lovely lady. I mean, not everybody thinks ladies should carry guns at all, though I say they have a right to. But I think . . . I might . . . Let’s have a look down here. I might have just the thing for you. Yes; here we are! Look at that, isn’t it neat? Now, that is a FrintArms product as well, but it’s what’s called a laser; a light-pistol some people call them. Very small, as you see; fits easily into a pocket or bag; won’t spoil the line of a jacket and you won’t feel you’re lugging half a tonne of iron around with you. We do a range of matching accessories, including - if I may say so - a rather saucy garter holster; wish I got to do the fitting for that! Ha; just my little joke. And there’s even . . . here we are; this special presentation pack; gun, charged battery, charging unit, beautiful glider-hide shoulder holster with adjustable fitting and contrast stitching, and a discount on your next battery. Full instructions, of course, and a voucher for free lessons at your local gun club or range. Or there’s the special presentation pack; it has all the other one’s got but with tyro charged batteries and a nightsight, too. Here; feel that-don’t worry; it’s a dummy battery -isn t it neat? Feel how light it is? Smooth; see? No bits to stick out and catch on your clothes, and beautifully balanced. And of course the beauty of a laser is, there’s no recoil. Because it’s shooting fight, you see? Beautiful gun, beautiful gun; my wife has one. Really. That’s not a line; she really has. Now, I can do you that one - with a battery and a free charge - for ninety-five; or the presentation pack on a special offer for one-nineteen, or this, the special presentation pack for one-forty-nine.’

‘I’ll take the special.’

‘Sound choice, madam, sound choice. Now, do-?’

`And a HandCannon, with the eighty-mill silencer, five GP clips, three six-five AP/wire-flechettes clips, two bi-propellant HE clips, two incendiary clips, and a Special Projectile Pack if you have one; the one with the embedding homing rounds, not the signallers. I assume the nightsight on this toy is compatible.’

`Aah . . . Yes, and how does madam wish to pay?’

She slapped her credit card on the counter. `Eventually.’

She walked away from the gun shop, the satchel heavy on her shoulder. She bought a newssheet and read it on the open-top deck of the tram she took back to the Artists’ Quarter.

She scanned the flimsy, thumbing through its stored pages on fast-forward and stopping to look closely at something only once.

She’d glanced at the race results from Tile.

One of the runners-up the day before had been Dance of Death.

`Mmm. Hello?’

`Hiya, doll. Oh. “Doll”, that wasn’t very . . . Shit.’

‘Get on with it, Zef.’

‘Sorry. Meet me at the Crying Statue in an hour; how’s that?’

`Too damn succinct for a lawyer.’

`I’m out of practice.’

`I know the feeling. The Crying Statue, in an hour.’

‘See you there, doll . . . Shit.’

Two women made their way from the Crying Statue in Malishu’s Tourist Quarter across the carved-open arc of Tube Bridge to the University Precincts. Above them, the mid-morning mists were lifting into the air amongst the stalk towers and stay-cables of the Entraxrln, obscuring the distant, under-ocean view of the highest membrane layers.

They walked quickly along pavements still damp from the morning smir. Sharrow, in a long dark dress and jacket and the high-heeled boots she tended to favour when going anywhere with Zefla, strode determinedly with her head up, a severe, slightly forbidding look on her face, discouraging contact. The striking, sternly poised face, dramatic auburn hair and precise, upright carriage almost disguised the fact that every second step was a slight fall, a tiny flaw in the pattern, a misplaced beat in the rhythm of her body.