A Princess of The Linear Jungle

by Paul Di Filippo

  “I immediately questioned how this boulevard was maintained. By rudimentary scything, perhaps? Or was the grass a self-limiting variety? But close inspection reveals, in my best estimation, that neither is the case.”

  Vinnagar paused for dramatic effect, but Scoria would not give his rival the satisfaction of a prompt, and so the savant eventually came forth unaided with his revelation.

  “It’s been chewed. The marks of tearing and mastication are unmistakable.”

  Merritt studied the wide long trail. Peart spoke her thoughts for her.

  “Mighty lot of chewing, Professor. If you’re right.”

  The party soon assembled in the defensive order denominated by Scoria and moved down the green street, warily but with some relief at the easier passage.

  Merritt noted right away that narrower side trails forked left and right off the main branch, toward Tracks and River. Not every Cross Street featured such, but only random ones. She directed Art’s attention to this fact, and received an “attagirl” that caused Cady Rachis to sniff in exaggerated fashion.

  When the Daysun was directly overhead, Scoria called a stop for lunch.

  One of the bike boys, a wiry blond chap, spotted a novel-looking fruit tree showing boldly along the alley’s perimeter. Before he could be cautioned otherwise, he had scrambled up its bole and had his hand upon a globular crimson pod.

  “No!” shouted Durian.

  Too late.

  The thin-skinned pod burst, drenching the lad. He fell screaming to the turf.

  Merritt and the others raced to the boy, but hung back at Vinnagar’s command.

  “Don’t touch him, or you’ll suffer the same fate!”

  The skin of the writhing lad bubbled and melted. His throat collapsing inward and exposing a segment of his spine, he died of asphyxiation complicated by shock seconds thereafter.

  Two Fisherwives boomed down and made off with the unlucky boy.

  “Bunyan. BuynyanBunyan Breedlove was his name,” said Dan Peart softly. “Had a sweetie back home smart as a Hornbucklea Hornbuckle derailleur.”

  Scoria confronted Vinnagar. “How did you know of the danger?”

  “Have you ever consulted Brion Allardyce’s Hortus Botanicus? No? An omission you must someday repair. Allardyce lived in Greendale five hundred years ago, and was in charge of the Mayoral Hothouses of that Borough. He describes a plant he called ‘the saliva tree’ for its digestive properties, and provided an illustration. Current authorities deem the species extinct. But I recognized the original just before poor Bunyan reached his deadly prize.”

  The expeditionaries returned to their meal, but with hardly any appetite left. This first fatality had unnerved them mightily, especially due to its preventability. Nonetheless, under Scoria’s urging, they ate to keep up their strength, before resuming their walk.

  Toward the middle of the afternoon, Merritt was the first to detect an odd, almost subliminal noise.

  “Art, stop a minute!”

  Halted and shushed, they all heard the growing noise.

  “Sounds like a thousand air hoses filling a thousand bike tires,” said Peart.

  Now, away down the transmogrified Broadway, something loomed. A moving line composed of barely discernible identical parts.

  “Rifles up!” commanded Arturo Scoria.

  Four bike boys formed the front ranks. Peart and the fifth faced rearward, just in case, sandwiching the remaining five explorers.

  Ransome and Scoria were both tall enough to peer over the bike boys, and so they alerted the others to the nature of the approaching creatures.

  “Roaches! Giant roaches!”

  Her heart thumping like mad, her mouth gone dry, Merritt nevertheless bulled past her chivalrous protectors to see for herself.

  Each cockroach was the size of a sofa, and moving about as fast as a human’s easy walking pace. Hissing contentedly, they munched the turf as they advanced, filling the passage “shoulder to shoulder.” They seemed oblivious of any object in their way, including the Scoria-Vinnagar Vayavirunga Expedition.

  “Shoot!” Scoria ordered.

  A volley of pneumatic shots pfffted out, bringing the lead roaches down in a mortal tumble. Finding a heap of their dead fellows blocking their path, the roaches behind halted in evident confusion, milling about and hissing in annoyance, antennae waggling.

  Scoria seemed about to give another order—perhaps, thought Merritt, to slaughter the rest of the roaches—when from a side trail emerged those in charge of the cockroaches.

  Cady Rachis screamed, “Rats!”

  But they were not rats, thought Merritt with absurd composure. They were ratmen.

  Entirely human and male from the neck down, wearing naught but skirts fashioned of lanceolate leaves, the masters of the roaches featured completely rodential phizzes, furred and snouted and whiskered. It was as if, thought Merritt, a human had donned an elaborate full hollow-head mask that rested firmly upon the clavicle.

  But when the ratmen snarled, revealing wet pink tongues and sharp yellow teeth, the sense of harmless masquerade was shattered.

  And the ratmen carried long-shafted, wicked-looking spears.

  Without prompting, the bike boys fired at the natives. Scoria yelled, “Stop!” But the damage was done.

  Ratmen fell dead, but more poured from the Cross Street and surged toward the humans.

  “Fall back!”

  The explorers began to retreat—

  —but found ratmen emerging to their rear!

  All they could do was form a circle and keep firing.

  But the ratmen vastly outnumbered the humans, and soon fell upon them.

  Merritt had her big knife in her hand. She closed with a ratman, grappled it, smelled the musk of glands beneath coarse fur at its neck, stabbed upwards into its ribs, felt blood gush, heard the arrival of Pompatics—

  —and then she took a hard clout upside her head, shunting the Subway of her consciousness down its own personal Discontinuity.

  9.

  OLD PRINCESS

  TALKING. PEOPLE WERE TALKING. SHE HAD TO GET UP FOR work. This mattress felt so wrong. Skittery. Hard and swaying. Swaying like a ship. The Samuel Smallhorne was taking her to Wharton, her new home. How exciting! She’d meet new people, make new friends, learn so much. Who was crowding her? Bodies on either side. That woman with all the tattoos, and the old guy with the big cock. She had to get up! Chambless was urging her! Get up, or be cut up! Slicedopen and gutted while still alive! Yun and Adams had her! Words so hard to get out—

  “Help….h Help me….”

  Merritt felt strong hands grip her under her armpits and shift her to her feet. She cracked open gummy eyes.

  The middle of Vayavirunga’s grassy Broadway.

  Daysun higher in the sky than when they had been attacked.

  The next day then?

  A single file of charabanc-sized roaches, companioned by ratmen, ambled unconcernedly down the trail, every second pulling away further from the static tableaux of which she formed a part.

  And holding her up, Arturo Scoria. Hovering close by with concern, Ransome Pivot and Durian Vinnagar.

  But where were all the others?

  Merritt looked back over her shoulder.

  A giant roach stood patiently, an imperturbable ratman gentling its head. Atop its chitinous back lay Dan Peart and Cady Rachis, with a gap separating their bodies where Merritt had reposed. They still had not recovered their wits.

  But had Merritt truly recovered hers? This was all so strange.

  Arturo hugged her so tightly all her bruises and sore muscles winged. Riding the hard back of the cockroach had done her body no good.

  “You’re awake, and sound!” Art exclaimed. “Thank Manasa! We thought maybe you wouldn’t recover from that blow.”

  “Blow?”

  Durian Vinnagar spoke. “In the final stages of the battle, despite the mortal damage we did to them, the ratmen took pains to knock us unconscious with t
he shafts of their spears. None too gently though. Yet it’s as if they had orders….”

  Vinnagar considerately left off his theorizing, evidently to allow Merritt a chance to re-establish her bearings further. She detached herself from Scoria, clapped the shorter rival savant on his shoulders, fiercely kissed both of Vinnagar’s unshaven cheeks, then turned to Ransome Pivot.

  The ex-student’s familiar face, wearing a brave grin, plucked at her heart.

  “Hello, Mer. Good to have you back. Let me check your pupil dilation for concussion, will you please?”

  She embraced Ransome fervently, causing him to wince and yelp. Only then did Merritt register the wounds her companions bore.

  Ransome Pivot cradled his left arm in a sling fashioned from his ripped shirt. Arturo Scoria wore a bloody rag around his forehead. Durian Vinnagar employed a stick as a clumsy crutch, to aid a swollen ankle.

  She supposed she looked a sight too, bruised and caked with ratman blood. Cady and Dan doubtlessly would exhibit their own battle damage.

  “The bike boys! Where are the bike boys?”

  “All dead, alas,” said Scoria, “and visiting their ancestors on the Wrong Side of the Tracks or the Other Shore. The ratmen made the boys an exception to their mercy, perhaps because they caused the most deaths among them. It’s just the six of us left, I fear. No supplies either. At the mercy of these creatures.”

  A storm of hissing sounded, and Merritt saw that their temporary immobility had brought to a halt another dozen or so roaches and twice as many ratmen making up the back portion of their Jungle train. The ratman in charge of the roach bearing Cady and Dan now chittered in a complex fashion, both at the humans and the roach, and the caravan got underway.

  “Definite semantic structures,” mused Vinnagar. “I’m sure with a little time I could begin to translate….”

  Merritt found she could walk all right, and in fact continued exercise seemed to improve her initial stiffness.

  The humans said nothing amongst themselves for a time, until, by some mild trotting, they had rejoined the forepart of the slow-moving caravan.

  Merritt noticed then that some of the other roaches bore supine, incognizant riders as well: ratmen injured in the battle.

  “They show some human qualities,” said Merritt. “Caring for their injured and all.”

  Ransome laughed with an edge of hysterical bitterness. “Oh, yes, they’re really quite human. In most ways.”

  Merritt looked inquiringly at Arturo, but he defered to Professor Vinnagar.

  “Those ratmen are not merely injured, Miss Abraham. They are thoroughly dead. Corpses, in other words. The Pompatics, it appears, hold no dominion over their empty vessels.”

  Both Daysun and Seasonsun were descending, minting paired purple viridian shadows aslant the treetops, when the caravan came to a stop. By curt but no hostile gestures, the ratmen induced the humans to sit in a tolerably comfortable cluster on the soft fragrant turf.

  Cady Rachis and Dan Peart now numbered among the conscious. The pampered torchsinger—no longer quite so glamorous as when onstage as Loona Poole—was bearing up better than Merritt had anticipated. Comforting noises and stroking from Ransome Pivot achieved the same effect on her that the ratman’s solicitations worked on the cargo roach, thought Merritt, before mentally criticizing herself as bitchily uncharitable.

  Cady glared at the ratmen, then spat onto the grass. “Flea-bitten murderous bastards! Eat poison and die!”

  Dan Peart, noted Merritt, was actually suffering more acutely than Cady. A long, crusted cut from a ratman lance blade ran from his temple, down the side of his face to his jaw. But although undoubtedly painful, the cut must have paled when compared to Peart’s remorse at his inability to protect his cyclist comrades. He clucked his tongue and muttered their names over and over as a sad litany.

  “Bunyan and Hunko. Darcy and Sickafoose. Lorne and Ross. All gone now….”

  As soon as they had composed themselves on the grass, the humans were encircled within a living barricade of roaches made to lie head to butt. This softly hissing, waist-high barrier discouraged escape very effectively. Within minutes, two ratmen returned to their captives and dumped big armfuls of fruit within their pen.

  Everyone looked to Professor Durian Vinnagar.

  “I don’t recognize these species, but they’re not saliva tree pods. And I cannot imagine our hosts would choose such a contrived way to slay us, after taking care to capture us alive.”

  With that reassurance, the famished humans fell upon the feast. Merritt found that the delicious fruit slaked her thirst as well as filled her stomach.

  Arturo Scoria wiped his pulp-smeared drippy face with the back of one hand, then cleaned the hand upon the grass. “Any of these fruits would fetch a high price on a Wharton greengrocer’s stand, if they could be cultivated. Perhaps we should save the seeds….”

  Cady looked incredulously at Scoria, as if at an addle-pated child. “Do you really believe we’re ever going to leave this horrible green prison alive?”

  “Oh, I’ve been in bad fixes before—maybe none worse than this, I admit—and I’ve come out of ‘em just fine. Once Durian susses out the palaver of these rats, we’ll have them eating out of our hands.”

  “Now then, Scoria, you’re making a non-trivial task sound as easy as Patchen famously knocking out his Bluesong’s Dilemma novella in a week.”

  “I have immense faith in you, Durian!”

  Even after living with the man for months, Merritt could not discern if Art’s bravado was a calculated sham, or authentic. In either case, his bold tone and sangfroid seemed just the antidote to despair. Even Peart perked up, availing himself of a second helping of fruit.

  “Can’t bring them back, nope. Just gotta get home to comfort the widows. Maybe stage a memorial race….”

  Ransome Pivot wore a serious mien. “If you really think we could get home safely, and establish some kind of trade with Vayavirunga, then I predict a medical revolution. Corpses of these ratmen would allow us to perfect the study of anatomy. Assuming they are as human inside as out. Brain and skull anatomy are out the window, of course, but otherwise—Poor Henry and Goodge! If only they had restrained their impetuousness just a bit longer.”

  Merritt chimed into the discussion with a genuine and burgeoning curiosity. “What are we to make of their hybrid nature, Art? How did their race ever arise? Some kind of perverse interbreeding? How would that even be possible? Or do they derive from artificial grafting of some sort? The combination of parts seems rather arbitrary. Where are their females? And why don’t the Pompatics claim the bodies of the dead ratmen?”

  Art cast an admiring glance at Merritt. “Ever the bright student, my dear, even amidst the wreckage of our expedition. You justify my estimation of your potential and your brilliance every day. Old Cham-bless would be proud of you as well, I’m sure. Your intriguing questions are all germane. But I’m afraid I have no immediate answers.”

  Cady Rachis said, “Little Miss Genius has forgotten to ask one important question. Where’re the red-skinned natives who sparked this whole crazy trip?”

  Merritt glared at Cady, but could not dispute that the older woman had pointed her chipped manicured fingernail directly at a key mystery.

  Peart said, “This whole world of ours is a right pickle in many ways, when you come down to it. A fellow could go mad trying to unriddle it. Best just to accept it all, and strive to live a full life, I say.”

  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.<
br />
  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.