A Princess of The Linear Jungle

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….”