A Princess of The Linear Jungle

by Paul Di Filippo

  But the uncertain basis of the tradition did not hinder the Borough’s enjoyment of the fresh and limited amrita. The sweet golden liquor, priced minimally by University fiat to make it available to all classes, owed like the Lavender Family’s happy tears at the conclusion of Diego Patchen’s late-period masterpiece Glints from a Hidden Hearth. The tipple provided a particularly serene yet potent buzz, non-impairing and non-conducive to combativeness, melancholy or despair. For four days, until the rare booze was all consumed, business closed their doors and classes were suspended, with only clubs and restaurants still operating, as the entire population embarked on a joyous long weekend.

  Merritt relished the chance to be together with Art for this whole lazy stretch. What with his duties and hers, their assignations, although exciting, had been hasty and brief. She had seldom even stayed the night at his digs, and he had never yet been to her apartment. But now they’d raise their affair to new heights through constant companionship.

  Art appeared at first to accept this plan of Merritt’s with enthusiasm. “Wonderful! We’ll play Sermak and Gretchen, in our impoverished cold-water flat!” Merritt hugged and kissed him, relieved that he had accepted her attempt at deepening and strengthening their affair.

  On Thursday they hung out at Tupelo Park. A Block devoid of buildings and devoted to raising a manicured crop of grass still summer-green, Tupelo Park hosted live music, ball-playing and en plein air snogging in private gazebos. On Friday they went clubbing, with Merritt carefully avoiding any venues featuring Cady Rachis/Loona Poole.

  But by Saturday morning, Art seemed itchy and irritable with Merritt. He poked at his breakfast of buckwheat flapjacks with lingonberry syrup (lovingly cooked and served by Merritt); vented dramatic sighs without apparent provocation; refused to speculate on future polypolisological expeditions; and cursed disproportionately when he couldn’t find a certain book on his well-stocked shelves. Even knocking back a shot of amrita failed to mellow him out.

  Merritt felt nervous. Was she being too possessive? Did she perhaps not offer enough depth to captivate her man? After all, Arturo Scoria was a veteran of a hundred exotic milieus and encounters. How could her sole companionship hold a candle to associating with, say, the Jumblies of Jingly Hall?

  Desperate for some entertainment that would appeal to Art and reveal her own sophistication, Merritt hit upon the weekly medstudent party held at the meatpacking-district establishment district establishment of Yun and Adams.

  Her lover’s excited response to her proposal was both heartening and dismaying. “Excellent! It sounds like a stimulatingly louche affair among a vibrant subculture!”

  Merritt had no trouble finding the place. And with Art on her arm, she experienced no apprehension at shadowy alleyways.

  She half-expected to confront Yun’s unnervingly self-composed features upon the opening of the warehouse door. But instead, rather more disconcertingly, Merritt faced her one-off bed partner of weeks ago, the gracile, tat-patterned, coal-haired young woman. The nameless gal smiled at Merritt and Art without any apparent recognition of either, and invited them inside. Merritt sighed at having dodged that particular bullet.

  Searching for Ransome Pivot became Merritt’s next mission. She wanted to show off Art and see Ransome’s reaction. But not only could she not find her Stagwitz-born peer anywhere—he seemed among the entirely missing, as did Henry Yun and Goodge Adams themselves—but she also got separated from Art in the hullabaloo. The crowd here was louder and more aggressive, fueled by stronger drink than amrita, and Merritt thought to discern a clot of predatory, red-taloned women around her man.

  She was fighting her way to his side when with a tremendous percussive boom a pack of Wharton Constables inexplicably broke down the outer door and swarmed inside, at least a dozen buff-uniformed, strongarm, no-nonsense, ass-kicking name-takers.

  The partygoers shrieked and scattered aimlessly. Glasses crashed. Merritt was carried nearly off her feet and toward the back of the building. She felt her ankle twist in the process, and it instantly began to throb painfully.

  What was this assault all about? Retaliation against some mild, harmless dope-smoking? The raid made no sense….

  Now Merritt regained her feet, surrounded by single-minded Constables, these wordless enforcers ignoring her as they zeroed in on that mysterious door that Yun had steered her away from during her first visit. Two of the Constables carried a lock-puller like a lance. They rammed the barbed diamond tip home, and cranked its powerful gears to extract the door’s security mechanism. Then they rushed inside the private room, leaving Merritt and some other brave souls to follow tentatively behind.

  The cloistered, stagnant, stinking, formerly hidden space struck Merritt as part abbatoir, part hospital room. Several elevated padded tables loomed, stained and forbidding. On two of these sacrificial platforms, naked human bodies lay. The bodies were tethered to IV drips and arcane medical devices.

  And they were flayed open mercilessly, like fleshy wiring diagrams.

  And of course, these sexless, faceless victims still lived, else they’d be gone, transported to The Other Shore or The Wrong Side of the Tracks.

  Yun and Adams wore surgical attire: masks and gloves and rubber aprons. Each man had been interrupted with scalpel in hand.

  Somehow, the presence of familiar student notebooks opened for recording bloody observations made the whole shambles a hundred time more gruesome.

  Her painful ankle receding into the background of her attention, Merritt prayed feverishly and without conscious formulation, to both Manasa and Vasuki: Let Ransome not be here, let Ransome not be here …

  Her prayers were well-received: Ransome Pivot was nowhere to be seen.

  The constables quickly pinioned the two med students. Neither Yunnor Adams struggled. Adams sagged like a wet sack, while Yun ramrodded his spine.

  Only then did one of the enforcers speak, an older fellow with enormous muttonchop whiskers.

  “It’s just as we feared. No use for the ambulance. Pull the plugs, lads.”

  The vivisection victims were disconnected from their life-support apparatus. Within seconds, their labored breathing ceased.

  Despite knowing what was to come, Merritt flinched with everyone else at the noisy, atmosphere-displacing arrival of the Pompatics.

  Cutting down unimpeded through the ceiling and floor and walls of the building more effortlessly than a keel through spume or Trainwheel through smoke, the Pompatics came for the dead. Three ethereal Fisherwives for one victim, two marmoreal Yardbulls for the other. Brine and brimstone mingled into a heady incense.

  Lofting their now-incorporeal cargo, the Pompatics departed as they had come.

  Merritt found herself weeping violently. An arm suddenly draped around her shoulders provided unquestioned comfort. She looked upward through her misty veil to see Arturo Scoria sizing up the scene with dispassionate curiosity.

  “Hmmph! I would’ve sworn this kind of thing couldn’t occur in an ambilineal society with class stratification and distributive justice. Must’ve been the Bentoan influence, I suppose.”

  After the raid on the “Boy Docs’ Slaughterhouse” as the tabloids dubbed it, the biologist’s special and previously little-heard word for a hypothetical object—”corpse”—came to be bandied about in public discourse, printed and spoken both, so much so that Merritt had a hard time recalling the sensation of puzzlement she had experienced when she first heard the term from the lips of Goodge Adams during that first party she had attended. Source of much of the talk was the Medical School at Swazeycape U., which was dealing with a continual flood of requests for interviews and press conferences as they struggled to inform the public and counter the bad press their rogue students had brought down upon their august reputation.

  Everyone knew now of course that a corpse was a human turned into animal meat, a pile of bones and innards left behind after the essential motivating spark had fled, yet impossibly unclaimed by the Pompatics. Suc
h an object would, of course, were it a feature of nature, have proved most useful for medical study, allowing close and prolonged examination of organic structures with an eye toward training up future physicians. And while Adams and Yun had come close to producing corpses, they had not of course completely succeeded, as evidenced by the speedy reclamation of their victims once disconnected from the life-support apparatus.

  What the amoral students had done was to produce near-corpses, humans kept quivering by technology on the knife’s edge of death as their bodies were coolly and rationally dissected for anatomy’s sake. The pair had kidnapped their victims from the lowest levels of society—drunkards, prostitutes, drug addicts, immigrants, criminals—the type of citizen whose disappearance would generally go unremarked or uninvestigated. Rendered unconscious at the outset and continually thereafter, mercifully kept from sensing their excruciations by strong drugs, the victims never knew their sordid fate.

  Weeks into November, Merritt still shivered when she recalled how Yun had sized her up, as if measuring her for a slab. She felt grateful and lucky to have escaped.

  But she also felt sad for Ransome Pivot, who had, in a non-fatal way, not been so fortunate.

  The trial of the Boy Docs happened swiftly, in the wonted manner of the Wharton justice system. During the proceedings, Yun and Adams both affirmed without duress—one tearfully, the other icily—that although Pivot knew of their vivisections, he had resolutely declined to participate in any manner. His only crime lay in not informing on his comrades. Public sentiment was about equally divided for and against Pivot. But the officials of Swazeycape University could not be so lenient.

  Ransome Pivot was swiftly expelled. And he still faced possible criminal charges.

  Merritt’s heart went out to the big bumbling idiot. She braced Arturo Scoria for help.

  “Can’t you get him reinstated somehow, Arturo dear? Please? He’s too young to have his life ruined like this—even if it is his own dam fault!”

  Scoria sized up Merritt with wry discernment. “I don’t suppose you harbor any tender feelings for the fellow?”

  “No! Of course not! It’s just that he’s from my native Borough, and he’s got so much potential. Despite this failure of judgment and his all-round idiocy, he’s really quite brilliant, you know.”

  “Let me see what I can do. For your sake, dear Merritt.”

  But despite what Merritt believed were Professor Scoria’s sincere best efforts, the academic authorities remained unbending.

  “You realize it’s actually better that young Pivot remain expelled. There are plenty of other institutions of higher learning in Linear City after all, many in distant Boroughs where this scandal will not have penetrated. The public here will feel he’s gotten some measure of punishment, and might not press so hard for criminal charges against him. Those would be much more serious. In fact, let me call my friend, Chief Constable Ivan Leonidov and see what they intend.”

  Returned from this second errand, Scoria reported results more heartening.

  “I’ve convinced Leonidov to drop all further prosecution of your friend, under one condition. He’s got to leave Wharton soon, and never return.”

  Merritt threw herself at Arturo Scoria, hugged and kissed him. “Oh, Art, that’s wonderful! Thanks you so, so much!”

  But then she began to worry again. “Where will he go right now? He can’t return to Stagwitz in disgrace. It would kill his family, if it hasn’t already.”

  “Don’t concern yourself with that. There’s a possibility I might have the solution. Your Ransome Pivot might be of use to me. But it concerns a matter which is not settled yet. Just hang patient.”

  Reaching its inevitable conclusion, the trial of the Boy Docs resulted in the expected, non-appealable sentence—death by the traditional yet ironic mode of lethal injection.

  The day scheduled for the execution, the first of December, a Saturday, dawned grey, cold and wan. Merritt waked alone. Art had been very busy the past week, away on mysterious missions, some of which involved, she knew, high-level consultations at the University, but others of which saw the polypolisologist doing fieldwork of a sort among the local Trainmen. He adamantly refused to disclose the import of all these activities, nor how they interrelated.

  At first Merritt had been intent on staying as far away from Wharton Block 11, site of the Ludwig Hilberseimer Prison, as she could manage. But in the end, due to her intimate connection with the case, she felt compelled to attend the enactment of justice.

  Out on Broadway, where traffic had been temporarily halted due to the throngs, Merritt studied the grim façade of the prison. How often she had passed it, never remarking on the ugly building or its function. Now it possessed such supreme significance. There, except for chance and goodwill and some measure of inherent moral fiber, Ransom Pivot himself might have been lying on the death trolley.

  Just then, as if summoned by her thoughts, Merritt thought to catch a glimpse of a haggard Ransome himself through a momentary parting of the crowd. Did he have a woman with him? What did Merritt care?

  The crowd gasped as one. Merritt looked up.

  For decades afterwards the people of Wharton would talk about this moment, how they had never seen such a tangled mass of Pompatics, their numbers uncountable really, all contending in their descent on the Prison, as if each wished to bag the honor of carrying off the “corpses” of Henry Yun and Goodge Adams, those delayers and despoilers of natural death.

  That evening Merritt’s lovemaking with Arturo Scoria was vast and violent, as if to reaffirm her allegiance to life.

  After Art had relearned how to breathe and unrolled his eyes from the back of his head, he said, “Torture me as you will, fair Gretchen, you’ll not get the secrets of the last week from noble Sermak!”

  With its reference to torture, the joke caused Merritt to burst into a flood of bitter tears—but tears that proved ultimately cathartic.

  And just one day later, she had the secrets as well—albeit only twenty-four hours in advance of the rest of Wharton, which would soon be abuzz with the news.

  Professor Arturo Scoria galloped into the NikThek cafeteria that Monday, found Merritt, and dragged her willy- nilly, without securing permission, into Chambless’s empty office.

  “Look! Look at this!”

  He shoved a motion-blurred photograph under her nose. Merritt could discern only a welter of vegetation.

  “Closer! Use your eyes!”

  From between two tree boles poked a naked human arm and shoulder and bit of torso, the skin an astonishing brick-red.

  “What—what does it mean?”

  “The Trainmen snapped it during a run! It’s Vayavirunga! With human presence! Perfect polypolisological specimens! Untouched! And the University is funding my expedition there!”

  6.

  EXPEDITION HO!™

  TABLOIDS SUCH AS THE WHARTON YAWP AND THE BOROUGH Busybody, with their massive reading public, gobbled up news of the Scoria expedition to Vayavirunga like teething tots at a teat.

  JUNGLE JAUNT FOR FAMED EXPLORER!

  THE BOROUGHS THAT TIME FORGOT!

  RED NATIVES OF THE FORBIDDEN BLOCKS!

  PROBE OF THE MYSTERY MILES!

  This reaction was precisely what both Professor Arturo Scoria and the deans and trustees of Swazeycape University had been counting on. Instantly forgotten was the infamous scandal of the Boy Docs. Swazeycape’s reputation as an unimpeachable bastion of cerebral pursuits, flavored with daring forays into the unknown frontiers of knowledge, was restored, and even received a fresh burnishing.

  And Scoria’s personal reputation had never shone more scintillating or alluring. Feted by high society and besieged on campus by students and colleagues alike, Scoria basked in the attention, almost visibly plumping up like a pouter pigeon in Spring.

  Merritt, however, found her boyfriend’s new status annoying and confusing. In private, he remained the man she fancied and admired. (And loved? She continued
to be conflicted about using that loaded word, sometimes in her heart endorsing the emotion entirely, at other times finding the description overwrought. As for soliciting the expression of same from Scoria, she knew better than to demand or tease.) But in public he was nigh insufferable, preening and posturing and expostulating.

  They lay in bed talking half-pottedly one night, after returning from a bibulous party at the home of Charlotte Waybridge, a famous fashion designer. (Amidst all the decorative, emaciated and sleek female clothes-racks, Merritt had felt like a burlap bag of potatoes draped in a painter’s floorcloth.)

  “Arturo, is this really the way you’ve mounted all your other expeditions?”

  “No, it’s unprecedented! The level of public interest and enthusiasm is tremendous! And I’ve got total funding from the University without any codicils or caveats, whereas before I’ve had to beg for every bull and wife from the Board. What’s more, I’ve already signed a contract with Parsonage and Pickler for the book recounting our trip. An advance in the low six fig—”

  “‘Our trip!?!’”

  “Why of course, Mer! You’re coming along as my assistant! I’ve even arranged your leave from the NikThek. Old Chambless balked at first, but I talked him into it. Didn’t I tell you yet? I’ve been so busy—”

  There was no further conversation that night.

  In the morning, Merritt half-believed that the news of her promotion to expeditionary intern and factotum had been a drunken dream. After all, every polyp in the department would’ve killed for a chance to go along on this trip. But at breakfast a curt, absent-minded word from a tabloid-scanning Art affirmed it. And in fact her duties were to begin immediately.