A Princess of The Linear Jungle Read online

  A PRINCESS OF THE LINEAR JUNGLE

  by

  Paul Di Filippo

  For Deborah, Princess of Poplar Street

  “Dejah Thoris related many interesting facts and legends concerning this lost race of noble and kindly people. She said that the city in which we were camping was supposed to have been a center of commerce and culture known as Korad. It had been built upon a beautiful, natural harbor, landlocked by magnificent hills. The little valley on the west front of the city, she explained, was all that remained of the harbor, while the pass through the hills to the old sea bottom had been the channel through which the shipping passed up to the city’s gates.

  “The shores of the ancient seas were dotted with just such cities, and lesser ones, in diminishing numbers, were to be found converging toward the center of the oceans, as the people had found it necessary to follow the receding waters until necessity had forced upon them their ultimate salvation, the so-called Martian canals.”

  —A Princess of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs

  1.

  GRADUATION TRIP

  BEATING SLOWLY UP RIVER AT A MERE TWO KNOTS, OR EIGHT Blocks per hour, mainly under sails bellying with a warm, maritime-perfumed wind, yet also employing two small supplemental engines, these impellers being the latest invention of Roger Kynard & Progeny, Ingeniators, running on a few hundred watts of beamed power from the Day sun, the Samuel Smallhorne, far from its home Slip of number 42 in the Borough of Stagwitz (Blocks 33,011,576 through 33,011,676 of the Linear City), pulled abreast of the Down town border of the legendary Jungle Blocks of Vayavirunga at approximately ten AM on May the twelfth.

  All the passengers, a mere five travelers, raced to the Broadway-facing side of the mid-sized sturdy ketch, clustering at the bow near its figurehead, a bare-breasted representation of the heroine of Diego Patchen’s novel Arianna of the Skystreets (two-hundred-years old that tale, and a beloved classic), there to hang upon the taffrail of the momentarily imbalanced, listing ship and to marvel, with wordless exclamations like those from flustered pigeons, at the sight of the chromatically brilliant and overripe vegetation hoisting itself sky ward upon the mostly concealed armatures of ruined buildings, like a snapshot of frenzied River crawdaddies struggling to escape a pot of boiling water, each climbing atop another.

  The cloudless, azure skies above the enigmatic expanse of Vayavirunga seemed to contain fewer Pompatics than anywhere else in the City, as if a postulated and likely sparse human population in that wilderness required fewer shepherds of the dead. Those filmy Fisherwives and marmoreal Yard bulls that could be seen aloft appeared bored and listless at their lack of employment, if such human emotions could plausibly be attributed to those numinous, incommunicative beings.

  The lazy ketch, favored method for multi-Borough travel among those with enough time who sought to avoid the cindery trains or cloistered Subway, sauntered UpRiver at its contemplation-favoring, unvarying pace. (The Samuel Smallhorne took approximately twelve hours to traverse the one hundred blocks of any given Borough. But, lacking full facilites for dining or ablutions, the ship put into Slips regularly, and docked firmly for each night, cautious Captain Canebrake wary of sharing dark waters with the big freighters.)

  Merritt Abraham studied the jungle scene with bright-eyed intensity; excitement, awe and reverent fear filled her veins in equal measure. This was surely the most exotic sight she had ever witnessed in her twenty-two years. How marvelous this trip was proving to be! How right she had been, some months back, to apply for her first real job, contingent upon graduation, so far from her home in Stagwitz. And how lucky she had been to receive, just after commencement two weeks ago, the acceptance letter for that desirable position.

  The lush riot of foliage and flower, creeper and vine, rising where normally only a segment of the endless human habitations of the Linear City would appear, reminded Merritt of the paintings of Rosalba Lucerne, the primitivist artist on whom she had written one of her best papers while attending Jermyn Rogers College in Stagwitz, and she felt compelled to share this esthetic insight with her fellows.

  “Doesn’t that whole panorama look just like the imaginary jungle in Lucerne’s ‘The Sleeping Trackman?’”

  Merritt’s rhetorical exclamation produced a variety of reactions in her companions.

  To her immediate left stood Balsam Troutwine, a sleek, middle-aged but still trim and attractive fellow who, in as pure a case of nominative determinism as Merritt had ever encountered, performed as a liquor distributor across a territory of two dozen Boroughs centered around Merritt’s new home, the Borough of Wharton. Next to him leaned Dan Peart, a professional cyclist who had just won the Leyden frost Memorial KiloBlock Heat, and whose leg muscles, displayed perennially in varicolored silk shorts, resembled anatomical models of perfection, steel simulacra covered in vellum.

  On Merritt’s other side were to be found Cady Rachis, a glamorous, statuesque, dark-haired and dark-eyed woman some dozen years older than Merritt. Cady’s worldliness and fashion sense—she was a nightclub singer of some renown—made Merritt feel awkward and foolish. Cady’s looks always urged Merritt to smooth down her usual floral blouse or tunic over her generous hips in their standard khaki slacks, and to stare into a mirror for signs of any feature that could be deemed “sexy” rather than “cute.”

  Finally, beyond Cady loomed Ransome Pivot, gangly, large-featured, an untameable wing of tawny hair perpetually obscuring one eye: Merritt’s romance-besotted peer and, to her chagrin, also an affiliate of her future institutional home, Swazeycape University of Wharton Borough.

  Dan Peart spat into the River. “Never had much truck with anything that smacks of wild-eyed fabulism. Give me hard pavement and greased drive chains over all such nonsense.”

  Ransome rushed to Merritt’s defense in a scholarly fashion. “I think the coincidental likeness is remarkable, considering that Lucerne never actually saw Vayavirunga. I believe a catalogue for a recent exhibition of her work even commented so.”

  “I’ve heard there are all sorts of monsters in those savage Blocks,” contributed Troutwine. “Three whole Boroughs nearly, that’s how far the blight spread before they got it under control. Seventy-five miles of Vasuki-knows-what.”

  “Was that an enormous wall I saw, across the Downtown end?” asked Cady Rachis.

  “Yes,” said the ever-knowledgable and eager-to-impress Ransome. “The Wall stretches from the Slips on the River’s shore, over whatever’s left of Broadway, and then all the way across the Tracks, and even some distance into the middens beyond. Nothing will grow in the middens—too much industrial waste. And any bizarre creatures in the Jungle seem to shy away from crossing both water and the dumps. There’s a gate in the Wall that opens automatically for Trains. And when the trains pass through Vayavirunga, the engineer lowers steel shutters over the passenger-car windows.”

  “Same Wall arrangement at the Uptown end, I expect,” Peart offered clinically.

  “So no one’s ever really seen the Jungle up close, to report on it?” Cady said.

  “Well,” continued Ransome Pivot as if Peart had not interrupted at all, “the Trackmen in each engine’s cab see the fringes of the place as they rush by, but not the interior of Vayavirunga. And they’re understandably close-mouthed about even the glimpses they get, lest they stoke fears of the neighboring citizens.”

  Cady grabbed one of Ransome Pivot’s biceps with both her hands. “Oh, Ransome, you make such an extravagant topic so clear and exciting!”

  Pivot blushed like a child; Rachis batted her lashes and pressed her shapely breasts provocatively against the youth’s arm.

  “Come with me, Ransome, and we’ll discuss this
at length out of the sun.”

  The torchsinger and graduate student strolled off, arm-in-arm.

  Merritt was disgusted. Ransome Pivot, like all men, apparently possessed two competing somatic centers of volition, and the lower was always higher, so to speak.

  Not that he even radiated an iota of allure for her. She had barely known him at Jermyn Rogers College, where he had conceived a crush on her somehow, and considered him a callow pudding head and bumblepuppy. She resented the fact that, deliberately or accidentally, he had followed her along to her new job. She had wanted the sensation of a complete break with her boring past.

  In any case, older men intrigued her more. Men like Troutwine, or even Peart. But in the case of the latter, sports had apparently rendered him asexual. The cyclist’s immaculate and superbly toned body was reserved for one lover alone, his lightweight Calloway Tempesta, now lashed down on deck at the stern of the Samuel Smallhorne.

  As if to verify his neutered condition, Peart said, “Well, all that celery and lettuce of old Vayavirunga is odd enough, but it palls pretty fast. I’m off to polish my bike. This damp ain’t good for her.”

  Peart’s departure left Merritt in suddenly intimate circumstances with Balsam Troutwine.

  She expected him immediately to proposition her.

  The trip from Stagwitz had been underway a week now, seven Boroughs passed, with five more days yet to come before arrival in Wharton. During this first part of the trip, sexual tension had been fairly thick. But the small size of the ketch precluded much extensive fooling around, as did the sleeping arrangements, with the men sharing one small cabin and the women another. (Captain Canebrake and his crew inhabited even tighter digs.)

  Yet, unlike cautious and circumspect Merritt Abraham, bold Cad Rachis had not been stymied in her quest for carnal opportunity. Merritt had seen her emerging more than once from the big rope locker, with her hair and expensive clothing mussed, followed out the locker door at a hypocritical interval by either Troutwine or Pivot.

  Now the liquor man turned toward her. “Your savantical friend neglected to mention the oddest thing about the Jungle Blocks.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Discontinuity. Down below Broadway the Subway judders when you cross the line into Vayavirunga. Motion seems unaffected. But everything goes black outside the windows—blacker even than inside a simple Subway tunnel with its utility lights, that is. One imagines a similar un-witnessed transition occurs with all the utilities, pipes, cables, whatnot. On the Uptown end, likewise.”

  “Are you saying the Jungle is somehow rooted deep below Broadway, and the Discontinuity veers strangely around it?”

  Now Troutwine made his move, a play Merritt did not resist. He sidled closer and placed an arm low down around her waist, his hand ending up on a hip he plainly did not find distastefully broad.

  Troutwine’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Many things run deeper than their surface appearance would indicate, my dear. Including, I suspect, demure female students of polypolisology.”

  Merritt experienced palpitations of her heart and a faltering of speech. “I—I’m not a student anymore…Not since the semester ended….”

  “Shall we go below for a demonstration of your new maturity?”

  “Yes—yes!”

  In the cramped belowdecks, Merritt and Troutwine made for the women’s cabin.

  “I’ve got a pessary,” said Merritt.

  “Splendid,” said Troutwine.

  But outside the door they were halted by energetic rutting noises. Cady Rachis and Ransome Pivot had established their claim first.

  “No matter,” Troutwine whispered. “I’m prepared.” He dug out a whole lithographed tin of Bettie Blaze-brand sheaths and showed it to Merritt. She wondered how many encounters he had in mind.

  They moved a short distance away to the men’s cabin. But somehow Dan Peart had beaten them there. Shirtless, huffing, he was performing sit-ups with his toes hooked under a bunk.

  Troutwine’s hand on her rump induced vertigo. More than a week’s celibacy disinclined Merritt to hesitate longer.

  The rope locker proved not unpleasantly aromatic, smelling like hemp and tar, albeit a bit cramped for anything other than the most rudimentary positions. And Merritt was left with mild abrasions on knees and palms.

  Eventually, towards dusk, the five passengers found themselves again on deck, all rather whiffy and disarrayed from their various exertions.

  Merritt was the first to see Captain Canebrake approach across the brilliantly white holystoned deck. The barrel-bellied, nattily jacketed skipper puffed heavily on his pipe.

  “Hello, Captain! Where do we eat tonight?”

  “Tonight? Why, right here on the Smallhorne! Would you have me put ashore in the Jungle, for hippogriff steaks? Tonight, and the next two, we make do with what’s in our larders.”

  No one had really anticipated this necessity before now.

  “No hot baths?” Cady Rachis peevishly exclaimed.

  “Not unless you jump overboard into the impeller waste stream. Or perhaps you want to put in at the Other Shore, for the delicate attentions of the Fisherwives?”

  Everyone looked instinctively toward the misty afterlife precincts and shivered. Discussion was effectively ended.

  The three days it took to crawl past the Jungle seemed endless. At the end of that interval, when the Uptown Borough of Hakelight appeared beyond its Wall, Merritt was thoroughly tired of the exotic scenery of Vayavirunga.

  And after a further two days of travel, she was heartily wearied of the attentions of Balsam Troutwine.

  Thank Manasa she’d never have to see either again!

  2.

  BOTTOM RUNG

  THE NIKOLAI MILYUTIN PINAKOTHEK AND WUNDERKAMMER occupied a six-story building in the 73rd Block of Wharton, on the Trackside stretch of Broadway. Besides being one of the tallest structures in Wharton, the museum was one of the most expansive, stretching all the way back to the Tracks, and the entire distance from Cross Street 73 to Cross Street 74. Rife with all the architectural gimcracks beloved of its old-school designer, Rufo Guereschi, from architraves to aedicules, vermiculations to verandas, the elderly edifice resembled the wedding cake enjoyed by the goblin bride and groom in Patchen’s Eyebrows of the Extramundane. From its rear to its front, the sides of the old the old building mapped a centuries-old gradient of caked Train soot. Its rearmost windows had been rendered more or less permanently opaque.

  The front façade of the “NikThek,” as its staff fondly called the old grand dame, was kept better cleaned, being the plane-tree-shaded public face of the museum, familiar to generations of school children and casual visitors. And while the NikThek maintained a quasi-independent existence, with its own fund-raising, programming, publicity, and Board of Directors, it was still officially affiliated with proud and prestigious Swazeycape University. As a pendant of that sprawling chandelier of a school, whose buildings occupied fully forty percent of the Borough of Wharton, the NikThek had to uphold a certain level of virtue and pomp.

  Early on this rain-washed, bright July morning, before its opening hour, the NikThek seemed simultaneously antique and youthful, as if its high-minded and not entirely sane or practical dedication to cataloguing and presenting the oddities of the Linear City had kept the museum young beyond its actual age.

  Or so Merritt Abraham fancifully imagined, as she approached her place of work, a convenient three-Block stroll from the nearest Subway exit. (And that exit itself only a half-hour Subway commute from her studio apartment down in the Wharton 20’s.)

  She stopped at the foot of the wide set of time-worn stairs leading up to the multiple doors of the main entrance. Listening to the wind-stirred leaves of the famous plane trees, she once again pondered the words of the founder engraved above the broad lintel:

  YOU MUST HAVE THE PIGEON IN YOUR HEART

  BEFORE YOU CAN FIND IT IN THE GUTTER

  Quite a character, that Milyutin, one
of the founders of polypolisology, and yet something of a mystic to boot. She wondered if that metaphysical strain did not still lurk below the skin of her chosen discipline, like a subliminal tattoo.

  As Merritt broke her moment of still introspection and moved toward the employees’ entrance on 73rd, she was startled by the urgent chiming of a small bell, and she darted to one side just in time to avoid being run over by a commuting cyclist illegally using the sidewalk, as he sought to outmaneuver a big delivery van blocking his path on Broadway.

  The incident caused Merritt to hark back to the last time she had seen Dan Peart. The wheelman had been the first one off the Samuel Smallhorne upon its May seventeenth arrival at Wharton Slip 18. After offering perfunctory good wishes to the others, he had ushered his precious Calloway Tempesta down the gangplank, whereupon he had been engulfed by a small claque of autograph-seeking cycling fans.

  Cady Rachis had enlisted Ransome Pivot to carry her extensive luggage and to engage a pedicab. Complying somewhat reluctantly, Ransome kept casting apologetic backward glances at Merritt, but she haughtily ignored them.

  That morning she had impulsively engineered a decisive blowup with Balsam Troutwine, complaining of his maddening combination of insincerity and fawning over-attentiveness, and the lovers were no longer on speaking terms. Seemingly uninjured, the liquor distributor had swaggered complacently away with his veteran salesman’s small daypack, leaving Merritt to shuffle her own bags and trunks off the ship and to her new, unseen home.

  Since then, Merritt had encountered neither Peart nor Troutwine nor Rachis (though the last-named simpered down in effigy from posters everywhere, advertising her exclusive stint at Topandy’s Song Loft). As for Ransome Pivot—well, it was impossible not to bump into the irritating overgrown juvenile now and again, when visiting various Swazeycape University offices and facilities. And he had shown up once or twice in the NikThek cafeteria during her lunch hour….