A Princess of The Linear Jungle (10 page)

Durian Vinnagar drily added, “Any fuller a life than the one we’re sharing now, I would be tempermentally forced to decline.”

Exhaustion overtook Merritt and her friends shortly after supper. Without manmade structures to retain the heat of the day, the Jungle Blocks experienced a drop in temperature after sunset, a phenomenon they had experienced earlier. All polite customs and differences for gotten, the blanketless explorers huddled in a pile to stay warm during the night.

The next day they resumed their march.

Vinnagar had retained his pedometer throughout the chaos and scuffle. Now he briefed the others.

“You recall that we had penetrated some sixty Blocks on our own, before being captured. Since then, we’ve made another thirty or so. We’ll begin to approach the center of Vayavirunga in another couple of days, if we continue apace.”

“That seems a logical destination,” Scoria confirmed.

That day’s travel passed in unremarkable fashion. But not so the following day. Merritt was the first to notice a change in the nature of Vayavirunga.

“We’re descending!”

Sure enough, every step confirmed her observation.

Broadway had turned into a shallow incline. But not a gentle, regular slope. Instead, beneath the turf, the terrain seemed pitted an driven, as if by titanic forces. The travelers had to watch their steps. Moreover, the former street seemed to widen out to either side. The land beyond the sidewalks, Riverside and Trackside, where once buildings would have stood, partook of the irregular sloping, sloping nature of the street.

“It’s as if we’re dropping down into a rough-hewn bowl,” said Merritt.

“But what caused it?” asked Ransome.

“The nature of this depression resembles that found when a stone is dropped into mud,” Vinnagar said. “If that configuration could be frozen in place.”

Down, down, down, they trooped, until they had to be below the level of Linear City’s Subway. The vegetation towering above them on the edges of the bowl added a sense of shadowy secrecy to their descent.

Scoria spied the settlement first. “Look, some kind of village!”

As they approached closer, the village revealed its true nature: simple, neat, smallish huts fashioned of local materials: no doors or windows blocking their openings.

The ratmen picked up their pace, exhibiting the familiar eagerness any sentient would show upon returning home.

From the huts poured welcoming family members.

But the women were not rats.

They were pigeons.

From the necks down as humanly female as the ratmen were male—and all their charms were on easy semi-nude display; Merritt saw Art’s eyes widen, and she registered surprise that he wasn’t drooling—the women of the village exhibited delicate avian visages, beginning with feather ruffs at their collarbones. They cooed their greetings to their men.

Children raced out, the boys rats, the girls pigeons.

The explorers stood gape-jawed. Merritt thought she had become innuredinured to strangeness, but evidently she had more capacity for shock than she had imagined.

The humans were forgotten in the general exuberance of the homecoming. But none of them thought of fleeing, realizing the impossibility of escape.

Suddenly a wave of agitation raced through the ratmen and pigeon-women, radiating from deeper within the village. All the villagers fell to their knees and bowed their hybrid heads to the ground, forming a defile.

Down that corridor of obeisance walked a fully human woman, completely bare. Fully human, save for her crimson skin. In stature and proportion, she was magnificent, tall as Scoria or Pivot, more lush than Cady Rachis. Even her luxuriant tresses were a watermelon cascade.

Here was the creature whose partial photograph had sparked their quest.

Merritt, riveted by the sight, experienced a sourceless flash of knowledge: this woman was singular, unique. No others of her tribe existed.

The living eidolon came right up to the stunned humans, regarding them with a keen and piercing gaze. Then she spoke, in dulcet tones.

“I am the Princess of Vayavirunga. Welcome to you all. Especially to my heir.”

And then the Princess of Vayavirunga kneeled gracefully at Merritt’s feet.

10.

NEW PRINCESS

“I’M GOING MAD! MAD, I TELL YOU! AS LOOPY AS THAT RED witch herself!”

Cady Rachis’s latest temper tantrum caused Merritt’s perpetually incipient headache to spike. Wouldn’t the woman ever shut up?

Three weeks of forced habitation in the boring and tranquil village of the hybrids had not completely agreed with any of the surviving members of the Scoria-Vinnagar Vayavirunga Expedition, but perhaps least of all with Cady Rachis. True, after the deadly rigors and confusion of their capture and transportation here, the security of knowing their status as privileged prisoners, as well as ready access to shelter, clean water, and decent food (admittedly, a monotonous vegetarian diet), had allowed Cady to relax and improve her appearance somewhat. Hair combed, face un-begrimed, tattered clothes washed and creatively rejiggered into a revealing playsuit fit for the tropical clime, the statuesque lounge singer easily assumed the role of next-most beautiful woman in all the Jungle Blocks.

But where was the large society of admirers she needed to affirm her erotic allure?

Ransome Pivot, of course, remained faithful and worshipful, but he was only one callow youth, however broad-shouldered, and no amount of adoration from such would suffice.

Durian Vinnagar and Dan Peart remained asexually immune to her charms, each fixated on other concerns.

Arturo Scoria exhibited a disgusting fidelity to Merritt, Cady’s one human rival. In fact, since her nomination as Princess-in-waiting, he seemed somewhat in awe of her, solicitous of her every comfort.

Even the ratmen—no longer quite so vile-seeming and reprehensible as initially deemed, and certainly modeling many desirable masculine traits, all on shameless display in frequent semi-public intercourse with their buxom avian mates—ignored Cady, refusing to accord her any of the lavish kowtowing they bestowed on the Princess of Vayavirunga.

And that red witch herself stood as the biggest roadblock to Cady’s rightful domination of this new social order she had been forced to inhabit, however temporarily. The self-annointed Princess of Vayavirunga ruled with a capricious yet iron hand, and her preternatural beauty and charisma represented an unassailable pinnacle from which nothing Cady did could dethrone her. At those infrequent intervals when the Princess manifested among the humans in her elusive fashion, she sucked all the erotic air out of the room and concentrated it in her naked form.

“We have to get out of here soon!” Cady exclaimed now, to whomever would listen. “Why aren’t you all doing something! Anything!”

The six travelers sat inside the large hut they had been assigned. Its shaded interior boasted few furnishings: really nothing more than six sleeping pallets of moss and palm fronds and a few withy baskets holding fruit.

Already, thought Merritt, trying to tune out Cady’s repetitive diatribe, it seemed they had inhabited this rude hut forever. What would their captivity feel like if it extended into months, or even years? Dan Peart was the only one to harken to Cady’s plaint, since it jibed with his own concerns. He began to go over his futile scheme once again.

“The key to getting out of here is the River. You might argue the Tracks’re just as likely an escape route, but no Train’s gonna stop for anyone trying to flag it down in the middle of the Jungle Blocks. Nope, it’s got to be the River. We climb out of this salad bowl at night, quiet-like. Then we find the nearest Cross Street and make our way out to the Slips. We hail a boat by day, or even swim out to one—”

Scoria interrupted this fantasy. “Do you recall, Dan, how incredibly difficult it was for us to beat our way from the Slip to Broadway, even with machetes? How could we penetrate such a tangle without a single tool? Do you imagine you could separate a ratman from his lance? No, the hybrids would be upon us before we even got to Broadway. I’ve said it a hundred times before: our only hope in seeing civilization again resides in Merritt, and her relationship to the Princess.”

Merritt squirmed uneasily as all eyes focused on her. She didn’t know what to say. Her situation and status were highly problematical and confusing, not mention embarrassing and scary.

Since that moment when the Princess had kneeled before Merritt, the ruler of Vayavirunga had continued to insist that Merritt was in some nebulous sense her heir, the next ruler of Vayavirunga. But what this meant on a practical level, no one could say, least of all Merritt.

This uncertainty stemmed from the fact that the Princess did indeed seem insane. Not all the time, and not in a manifestly dangerous way. But her thoughts and reminiscensesreminiscences followed odd, sometimes self-cancelling vectors, charting bizarre paths across fact and fiction…

Merritt had been invited, alone, to conduct several dialogues with the Princess in her private hut, which, democratically, was no more ostentatious or luxurious than any other. These talks left Merritt dizzy with their implications, consisting as they did of a welter of confessions, omissions, assertions and interpolations.

At the first such session, Merritt had not known what was in store.

Three days after their arrival in the village, bereft of further briefs from the Princess, they had all been wondering what was in store for them, when several ratmen approached the humans and culled Merritt out of the pack. Scoria and Pivot tried barging along as her protectors, but found themselves on the wrong end of a few spears.

Led to the Princess’s hut, Merritt came upon the mystery woman seated on the only article of furniture yet found in the village: a bamboo throne cushioned with a feather-stuffed, leaf-latticed pillow.

The Princess’s resonant voice was all honey, but Merritt could detect the steel beneath. The inside of the hut was warm and close, and filled with a potent, indefinable spicy scent.

“Sit at my feet, dear, and tell me your name.”

Merritt complied.

“Yes, that fits you perfectly. I had a dim sense of your name, which, after all, is but the most trivial part of your essence. But there could beno mistaking your glowing spirit, calling out to mine, mate to mate. I first saw it shining afar. A little flame, burning in my inner vision ever since you were born. Then, as you passed my domain some months ago, riding upon the waters, I sensed your closeness, your affinity. That was when I determined to bring you here, to end my long isolation.”

“You—you brought us here? How?”

“By allowing myself to be seen and photographed. Why should I appear only now, after all these centuries of secrecy, if not to lure you here?”

“But how could you know anything about Arturo and his plans? Do you visit other Boroughs? How could you ever pass unnoticed, looking as you do?”

The Princess laughed like a crystalline rill tumbling down the wall of the bowl they inhabited. “Not in the flesh, dear Merritt. But I apprehend many things nonetheless, both near and far. As you will, when you assume my mantle.”

Here the Princess of Vayavirunga seemed briefly to collapse a little bit into herself, as if allowing herself to register the full weight and despair of a burden long denied by sheer force of will. But then she resumed her magnificent manner.

“I am weary now. Leave me, and we shall talk more later.”

When Merritt returned to her fellows, they all surged around her in relief, even Cady. Arturo quizzed her about what had passed, and she tried to recount everything.

Ransome said, “What could she mean about centuries of secrecy? Is she implying that there’s been a succession of Princesses who have all kept hidden? She’s the latest, and you’re to follow?”

“That must be the case,” said Scoria.

But Merrit was not so sure.

Subsequent conversations with the Princess had touched upon many of the enigmas of the Jungle Blocks, but often without satisfactory or definitive results.

On the origin of Vayavirunga: “A piece of the sky fell down, detaching from where the Pompatics dwell. When it landed, all was changed.” Or: “There was an accident in Fogtown, the central Borough. Scientists were responsible. What they made escaped, and ate down and outward.” Or: “The Citybeast wept, and its tears transformed whatever they touched.”

On the origin of the hybrids: “They are the former human citizens of these Boroughs, transmuted.” Or: “I myself spliced them and taught them to breed true, so that I might have followers to keep me company and serve me.” Or: “They were seeds inherent upon the falling sky piece, that piece, which took root here and flourished.”

On why the Pompatics ignored the dead hybrids: “I have removed the entry for their species from the lookup table.”

On the Subway and the Discontinuity: “The Linear City automatically reroutes around damage.”

On her personal origin: “I rode down on the sky fragment’s back.” Or: “I was an infant castaway when the ship that carried my parent son the River crashed here in flinders, during a storm. The hybrids raised me.” Or: “I came here like yourself, on another expedition, when there was no Princess, and invented my role.” Or: “I was sent from the Borough of Narligrash, millions of Blocks from here, to monitor the situation, and I simply overstayed my remit.”

Finally, as to what fate lay in store for Merritt, the Princess would only say: “I shall take you to your destiny when the time is ripe for us both.”

During these interviews, Merritt would find herself experiencing the queerest affinity for and empathy with the Princess, almost as if she could experience the other woman’s thoughts and feelings directly. The hot, cloistered air inside the royal hut, thick with unknown perfume, conspired with Merritt’s anxiety and perpetual lack of sleep to induce in her a fugue state, where all her old life seemed unreal under the waterfall of seductive words tripping from the Princess’s tongue. This fugue state often passed over at night into odd, perfervid dreams. Orphaned since birth, had Merritt not indeed felt a special calling? Who was to say she was not indeed the next Princess of Vayavirunga?