A Princess of The Linear Jungle (11 page)
Read A Princess of The Linear Jungle Online
Authors: Paul Di Filippo
Back in the hut she shared, shaking herself out of her trance, Merritt and the others spent futile hours parsing these tidbits of contradictory information, nowise enlightened in the process.
At this moment Merritt could no longer stand the massed expectations of her fellows, all centered on her, thanks to Arturo’s assertion that she alone held the key to their release. She got to her feet and said, “I can’t think about any of this any longer. I’m tired, and I’ve got a headache. I’m going outside to play with the children.”
The ratboys and pigeongirls, from toddlers to adolescents, could generally be found running about, playing variations of simple games any human child would have found instantly familiar. They were used to Merritt’s company by now, for she delighted in being with them, and they welcomed her into their midst with chittering and cooing. Soon she was sitting cross-legged on the ground and holding and holding a pigeonbaby in each arm, while ratboys rested their heads in her lap to be petted.
Durian Vinnagar approached. “Merritt, let us go over again this matter of the Citybeast—Vasuki, of course, great be His Name. It’s truly the most vital matter of our quest. You claim the Princess said something about His tears—”
“Oh, Durian, please leave me alone! I’m so very tired. We’ll know everything there is to know when the Princess is ready to show us, and no sooner!”
And that day, as it happened, lay just beyond the following dawn.
When several ratmen came to the dwelling of the humans early that morning, Merritt resignedly rose to her feet and prepared to accompany them to see the Princess. But the ratmen were not satisfied with her individual compliance, and began chittering animatedly at the other explorers, urging them all to file out of the hut.
Outside, Merritt was astonished to see the whole population of the village awaiting them. A nearly palpable air of expectancy overlaid their alien stances.
The ratmen continued to chitter away, and suddenly Durian Vinnagar spoke, his voice laden with astonishment.
“I—I can understand some of what they’re saying. After all these weeks of blankfaced immersion. It’s as if a door suddenly opened in my mind….”
Arturo Scoria clapped his rival on the back with real affection. “Durian, I always said your linguistic skills were second-to-none! Give out with what you can decipher.”
“They say—they say we must all go to see She—She-Who-Needs-Be-Heeded. It is the time… the time of succession.”
Merritt’s guts clenched and knotted. What was expected of her, what trial would she face? Did she want whatever was about to be offered to her? Why now? No, she needed more time to think—
But the royal guardsrats brooked no dissent, and the six explorers were hastened deeper into the village, toward the hut of the Princess, the mass of hybrids trailing expectantly, as if at a carnival.
Dan Peart looked longingly at the Riverside slope. “I say we make our dash right now, chums.”
Ransome Pivot said, “And get a spear through the back? Leave Merritt alone to meet what awaits without help or encouragement? Is that really what you want, Dan?”
Peart slumped in defeat. “No, of course not.”
Durian Vinnagar did not join in the argument. Sparing him a look, Merritt thought she had never seen him more preoccupied. Surely even in these circumstances he would show a little academician’s pride at his translation accomplishments. But no, only obsessive worry clouded his features.
Cady Rachis, however, grinned with pure schadenfreude. “Whatever happens to Little Miss Genius, I’m sure she’ll derive at least her master’s thesis from it.”
Arturo Scoria gripped Merritt’s hand and squeezed. “Don’t pay her any mind, Mer, she’s simply jealous. We’re all standing behind you.”
“Jealous! Ha! Of this pale little wallflower! Why, I—”
Their arrival at the royal hut cut short Cady’s insults. There, they encountered a disturbing sight.
The Princess of the Linear Jungle was pacing up and down before her residence, muttering to herself and wringing her hands. Her thick melon-tinted hair was wildly tufted, as if she had been pulling at it. All her regal composure had evaporated.
“To die, to cease, to be no more! I want an end to my days, don’t I? I’ve yearned so for the last century. Insupportable! I know too much! The roots and branches of this world! Too much! But not to walk the earth, to smell the flowers, to hear a voice— What—What comes after? The bulls and wives will fight over me, won’t they? Behind the scrim of this world, what awaits? I thought I saw it once, all gears and pistons. Or was it a glittering net of diamonds? No! I cannot hesistate any longer! I brought my successor here! Let
her
worry about it all! Let
her
take up the scepter. Courage, Hareshar, courage! If it must be done, it must be done swiftly, and today!”
Visibly bucking herself up, as if slipping on an invisible corseting garment over her superb form, the Princess turned to confront her visitors, acting unconcerned, as if her most intimate vulnerabilities had not just been displayed for all to see.
“Welcome, Merritt, my young protégé, and welcome also to your comrades. Today is a day of solemn magnificence, but also of joy. Let us go forth, you and I, to exchange places. I will become mortal, and accept my instant demise, while you put on the raiment of eternity.”
Merritt struggled to understand. “What—what do you mean? Do you speak in symbols, or realities?”
“In both, dear. But come, time is ever-passing, and we should not waste it. I will explain as we go.”
Taking Merritt’s hand and separating her from Arturo, the Princess of Vayavirunga marched off past her hut, toward the center of the Jungle Blocks, heading for a part of the overgrown Borough the explorers had never yet seen.
Chivvied along by the ratmen, the humans perforce marched too.
The land continued to slope down.
“We are approaching the central cataclysm, Merritt, where the skyblock impacted, where the science creature escaped, where the City-beast shed Her tears.”
Durian Vinnagar pricked up his ears at mention of the Citybeast, and Merritt thought he murmured, “
His
tears…”
Ahead of the walkers stretched a barrier of trees and shrubs, cultivated rather than wild. The Princess called a halt. She turned to face her loyal hybrid subjects. Chittering and cooing and gesturing, she plainly bade them hang back.
“They are allowed no further. Come now, and you will see my secret.”
Merritt and the rest pushed through the sparse thicket and came to a stop.
They stood on a grassy marge margin at the edge of a wide pit formed of gently sloping sides of ragged raw stone. The bottom of the pit, however, contained liquid.
Crimson as the skin of the Princess, churning and bubblingand bubbling, the pool cast forth a radiance almost subliminal, a light no part of the common spectrum.
Merritt found the interplay of writhing matter and flickering radiation hypnotic. She could hardly look away, or hear the Princess’s nextwords.
“This is the Pit of Tears, where you must bathe, Merritt, to assume your new status. Eternal life and vast wisdom will be yours. And as you acquire these gifts, so I shall shed them, for only one woman at a time may hold the title of Princess of Vayavirunga. So does the mechanism demand.”
Scoria spoke with cool intellectual appreciation. “This liquid can only be the blood of Manasa. Self-limiting, but somehow self-renewing. The excavation has penetrated that deep, down to the Citybeast’s very hide. But it’s no regular exudation. I’ve seen what scale-hunting produces, and this is some admixture of Citybeast sanguinary fluids with an unknown tincture.”
Durian Vinnagar startled them all by shouting. “Not Manasa, dam you! That imaginary whore! Vasuki! Vasuki! The Citybeast is male! And His gifts must be mine!”
Before anyone could stop him, Vinnagar had dashed down into the pit!
“No!” warned the Princess. “You will not be accepted!”
But Vinnagar paid no heed. Careening just steps from the liquid, he hurled himself in with a violent splash!
The pool grew unnaturally still. Then, a big thick bubble formed, swelled, burst—
—and the body of Durian Vinnagar—the gelatinous, shapeless mass that remained of the professor—was cast back onto the slope.
Instantly, a flock of Fisherwives dove down and honored his passage from life.
Ransome Pivot was the first to speak. “Men and women do differ in their cellular and germinal composition, so I suppose….”
But no amount of scientific rationalization could sway Merritt one way or another. She realized that only faith mattered now. Faith, and her ambitions.
To live forever, to know much—
The Princess laid a hand on Merritt’s shoulder. “Go naked, Merritt, to your reward, as I do to mine.”
As if hypnotized, Merritt began to remove her clothes. Peart averted his eyes. Scoria and Ransome cast imploring looks at her, but did not interfere.
She was soon naked, and beginning her sedate walk down the slope. Sharp stones cut her feet, but the wounds meant less than nothing.
Closer, closer, she could feel an icy heat, smell the same foreign scent that clung to the Princess—
“Out of my way, loser!”
Shoved from behind, Merritt hit the ground hard, scoring her palms and knees. She saw a nude Cady Rachis race past her, and dive boldly into the red maw.
Jumping up, Merritt turned toward a human sound that was part exhalation, part keening, part sustained bell-like note of some ancient threnody.
The old Princess of Vayavirunga had aged beyond time, and crumpled in upon herself, collapsing downward to the earth in a pile of dessicated tissues.
A storm of Pompatics dropped down to bear her withered mortal vessel off to her long-delayed reward.
Merritt scrambled back up to the men. They stood frozen, the helpless idiots! She arrived in time just to witness the birth of the new Princess.
Out of the Pit of Tears, a transformed Cady Rachis strode, her skin and hair colored in shades of the ennobling, empowering fluids.
Smiling like a lottery winner, moving with sensuous grace, Cady attained the level ground. The men goggled at her redoubled beauty and majesty.
Merritt felt herself boiling over inside.
Cady began to utter her first royal pronouncement. “It pleases me now to choose a mate—”
“Aaargh!”
Unsuspecting, Cady went down easy under Merritt’s vicious assault. Straddling her opponent, Merritt grabbed Cady’s hair and began pounding Cady’s head into the turf.
“You! Damn! Dirty! Thieving! Bitch!”
Cady’s eyes rolled over to white, and she passed out.
Huffing and puffing, Merritt stood up and regarded her supine foe. For good measure, she delivered a kick to Cady’s ribs.
The men wore expressions of timid astonishment. At last Arturo spoke with mild advice.
“Perhaps if you took the treatment now, Mer, Cady would wither up and die…?
“Forget it! Who wants to spend a few centuries stuck in this green kindergarten! No, Art, the rest of us are all going home, with a hybrid escort, even if I have to lead Cady on a chain back to the Wall. And then, you know what?”
“What, dear?”
“You and I are going to write a book about all this, and it’s going to sell more damn copies than Diego Patchen’s
Bright Lights of the Big Town
!”
A PRINCESS OF THE LINEAR JUNGLE
Copyright © 2011 by PAUL DI FILIPPO
The right of Paul Di Filippo to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Originally published in printed book form by PS Publishing Ltd in November 2010. This electronic version published in January 2011 by PS by arrangement with the author. All rights reserved by the author.
FIRST EBOOK EDITION
ISBN 978-1-848632-32-5
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
PS Publishing Ltd
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East Yorkshire / England
www.pspublishing.co.uk
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