A Princess of The Linear Jungle

Leave Merritt alone to meet what awaits without help or encouragement? Is that really what you want, Dan?”
    Peart slumped in defeat. “No, of course not.”
    Durian Vinnagar did not join in the argument. Sparing him a look, Merritt thought she had never seen him more preoccupied. Surely even in these circumstances he would show a little academician’s pride at his translation accomplishments. But no, only obsessive worry clouded his features.
    Cady Rachis, however, grinned with pure schadenfreude. “Whatever happens to Little Miss Genius, I’m sure she’ll derive at least her master’s thesis from it.”
    Arturo Scoria gripped Merritt’s hand and squeezed. “Don’t pay her any mind, Mer, she’s simply jealous. We’re all standing behind you.”
    “Jealous! Ha! Of this pale little wallflower! Why, I—”
    Their arrival at the royal hut cut short Cady’s insults. There, they encountered a disturbing sight.
    The Princess of the Linear Jungle was pacing up and down before her residence, muttering to herself and wringing her hands. Her thick melon-tinted hair was wildly tufted, as if she had been pulling at it. All her regal composure had evaporated.
    “To die, to cease, to be no more! I want an end to my days, don’t I? I’ve yearned so for the last century. Insupportable! I know too much! The roots and branches of this world! Too much! But not to walk the earth, to smell the flowers, to hear a voice— What—What comes after? The bulls and wives will fight over me, won’t they? Behind the scrim of this world, what awaits? I thought I saw it once, all gears and pistons. Or was it a glittering net of diamonds? No! I cannot hesistate any longer! I brought my successor here! Let her worry about it all! Let her take up the scepter. Courage, Hareshar, courage! If it must be done, it must be done swiftly, and today!”
    Visibly bucking herself up, as if slipping on an invisible corseting garment over her superb form, the Princess turned to confront her visitors, acting unconcerned, as if her most intimate vulnerabilities had not just been displayed for all to see.
    “Welcome, Merritt, my young protégé, and welcome also to your comrades. Today is a day of solemn magnificence, but also of joy. Let us go forth, you and I, to exchange places. I will become mortal, and accept my instant demise, while you put on the raiment of eternity.”
    Merritt struggled to understand. “What—what do you mean? Do you speak in symbols, or realities?”
    “In both, dear. But come, time is ever-passing, and we should not waste it. I will explain as we go.”
    Taking Merritt’s hand and separating her from Arturo, the Princess of Vayavirunga marched off past her hut, toward the center of the Jungle Blocks, heading for a part of the overgrown Borough the explorers had never yet seen.
    Chivvied along by the ratmen, the humans perforce marched too.
    The land continued to slope down.
    “We are approaching the central cataclysm, Merritt, where the skyblock impacted, where the science creature escaped, where the City-beast shed Her tears.”
    Durian Vinnagar pricked up his ears at mention of the Citybeast, and Merritt thought he murmured, “ His tears…”
    Ahead of the walkers stretched a barrier of trees and shrubs, cultivated rather than wild. The Princess called a halt. She turned to face her loyal hybrid subjects. Chittering and cooing and gesturing, she plainly bade them hang back.
    “They are allowed no further. Come now, and you will see my secret.”
    Merritt and the rest pushed through the sparse thicket and came to a stop.
    They stood on a grassy marge margin at the edge of a wide pit formed of gently sloping sides of ragged raw stone. The bottom of the pit, however, contained liquid.
    Crimson as the skin of the Princess, churning and bubblingand bubbling, the pool cast forth a radiance almost subliminal, a light no part of the common spectrum.
    Merritt found the interplay of writhing matter and flickering radiation hypnotic. She could hardly look away, or hear the Princess’s nextwords.
    “This is the Pit of Tears, where you must bathe, Merritt, to assume your new status. Eternal life and vast wisdom will be yours. And as you acquire these gifts, so I shall shed them, for only one woman at a time may hold the title of Princess of Vayavirunga. So does the mechanism demand.”
    Scoria spoke with cool intellectual appreciation. “This liquid can only be the blood of Manasa. Self-limiting, but somehow