A Princess of The Linear Jungle

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.
    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.
    Children raced out, the boys rats, the girls pigeons.
    The explorers stood gape-jawed. Merritt thought she had become innuredinured to strangeness, but evidently she had more capacity for shock than she had imagined.
    The humans were forgotten in the general exuberance of the homecoming. But none of them thought of fleeing, realizing the impossibility of escape.
    Suddenly a wave of agitation raced through the ratmen and pigeon-women, radiating from deeper within the village. All the villagers fell to their knees and bowed their hybrid heads to the ground, forming a defile.
    Down that corridor of obeisance walked a fully human woman, completely bare. Fully human, save for her crimson skin. In stature and proportion, she was magnificent, tall as Scoria or Pivot, more lush than Cady Rachis. Even her luxuriant tresses were a watermelon cascade.
    Here was the creature whose partial photograph had sparked their quest.
    Merritt, riveted by the sight, experienced a sourceless flash of knowledge: this woman was singular, unique. No others of her tribe existed.
    The living eidolon came right up to the stunned humans, regarding them with a keen and piercing gaze. Then she spoke, in dulcet tones.
    “I am the Princess of Vayavirunga. Welcome to you all. Especially to my heir.”
    And