My anxiety levels were seriously raised and the regressive side
effects of my wigging had reduced me to a state of passive
acceptance, on the surface of Europa or wherever, it hardly seemed
to matter any more, in which I felt like a southern mud oyster that is
about to be harvested. You make your living, I kept reminding myself,
by being professionally annoying not by emulating the supine
passivity of a victim of mariculture. I am not a filter feeder, I kept
repeating to myself, I am not sessile! I'm nekton rather than plankton.
And yet the more I prodded myself the weaker I became, a mere
pillar of guts, a sea squirt without even the merit of culinary allure.
They must be pumping me full of some subtle infusion so they can
work their appalling will upon me. I was the object of employee
abuse! Once I had access to legal means I would take them to court
and sue them for the whole of Mirfaq! M'lud, they've made me run the
gauntlet of terror birds, they've forced me to masquerade as the
Queen, they've caused footmen and crocodiles to assault me, they've
set fire to my clothes, even my handbag! They've staked me out for
ants and subjected me to a humiliating wigging on the surface of
Europa! But before I could reflect further on the successful outcome
of my litigation (I had already put myself down for a palace in a
rainforest and a whole floor, perhaps two, no three, in One57, ah how
easy it is to spend!) I was dug out of my mud bank by my guide.
"I thought you might like to return in this," he said in the tone of voice
you would be tempted to use on a child who's been exhausted by a
Christmas shopping trip gone horribly wrong, and he indicated a
duchesse brisŽe upholstered in dŽvorŽ velvet displaying, for reasons
unfathomable to me though I was unable to help feeling that they
could not be flattering, the emblem of Anne of Bohemia: a chained
ostrich encumbered with a crown. It looked far too small for the two of
us, at the best a sarcophagal squeeze, at the worst an unwanted
vascal intimacy for a journey that could last for months or minutes,
there was simply no telling with my technically advantaged crew, and
for one whose status had been reduced to the level of a maturated
Ostrea angasi individual I was certain that I would have no choice in
the matter.
"How kind of you to ask," I replied, "but charming as it is, and the
ostrich is delightfully mild-eyed for such a direct descendant of a
major theropod, I can scarcely believe that there is room for two in
such a vehicle or are you intending to recline on its ventral surface?"
