She looked up, tracing again the route she’d taken to the Franck’s home, then on to Lip City.
“Did I?” she said. “Damn. I hate it when that happens.”
“And instead you’re off to Trontsephori, isn’t that right?”
She looked down the long coast of Piphram, straining to make out the lagoons and the dot that was the Log-Jam.
“Am I?” she said.
“No, Ysul,” the young man said almost gently. “No, you’re not.” He sighed. “You’re Phrastesis bound, according to your ticket. But somehow I don’t think you’ll make it all the way there.”
She looked from the burning bright heart of Jonolrey’s Mel desert into his eyes.
“You’re very well informed for a messenger boy,” she said. “You should be in the travel business.”
He smiled coldly at her. “Don’t be unpleasant, Lady Sharrow,” he said. He put out his hand and stroked her upper arm with one finger. “We can be so much more unpleasant to you than you can be to us.”
She looked down at the slowly stroking finger, then back to his eyes. He watched his finger too, as though it didn’t belong to him. “Not even,” he said quietly, “that greasy little over-achiever of a cousin of yours will be able to help you, if we decide to be really unpleasant to you… Lady Sharrow.”
She reached out to take hold of his stroking finger, but he took it away, folding his arms.
“You know,” she said. “I’m really getting a little fed up with you and all your attentions.” She frowned at him. “Just who are you? Why are you doing this? What sort of weird enjoyment do you get from it? Or do you just do whatever you’re told?”
He smiled tolerantly. “Let me give you a word of advice-”
“No,” she said. “Let me give you a word of advice.” She leant towards him, away from the gun. “Stop doing this, or I’ll hurt you-if you can be hurt-or I’ll kill you; kill or destroy both of you-”
The young man was pretending to look frightened; he was pulling faces at his twin sitting on her other side. The gun was stuck harder under her ribs. She ignored the gun and reached out with her left hand and took the other young man’s chin in her hand.
“No, listen to me,” she said, gripping his chin hard, feeling the warm smoothness of it, and forcing one finger into the side of his neck, to touch the beat of blood beneath his skin. He smelled of cheap scent. He looked at her and tried to smirk, but the way she was holding his chin made it difficult. The gun was a sharp pain under her ribs, but she couldn’t really care just at that point. She shook his chin a little.
“I’ll do whatever I can to both of you,” she said. “And I don’t give a flying fuck what you or your employers do to me; I’ve never liked being treated the way you miserable little pricks have been treating me, and I don’t respond well to that sort of persuasion, understand? You getting all this?”
She made a play of searching his eyes. “Are you? Whoever I’m talking to in there? Comprehend? You’ve made your point and you’ll get your Gun. Now just fuck off; or we’ll all suffer.” She smiled bleakly. “Yes, I’ll suffer most, I don’t doubt.” The bleak smile faded. “But at least I won’t be alone.”
She let go of his chin slowly, pushing his head away a little with her last touch.
The young man smoothed a hand over his scalp and readjusted his jacket collar. He cleared his throat, glancing at his image on her other side. “Your talent for destruction extends to yourself I see, Lady Sharrow,” he said. “How democratic in one so noble.”
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.