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.
“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 two-piece. 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 loop-holes; 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 hot-shots 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?”