A Princess of The Linear Jungle Read online

  Half past nine, and the designated Block stretched as lonely, sad and empty as a drunkard’s beer keg. Broken streetlights outnumbered functioning ones. Rats dashed from the Riverside of Broadway to the Trackside as if conducting a relay race. Holding her bottle of cheap plonk ready for use as a cudgel, Merritt stayed close to the walls of the buildings, instinctively seeking protection, although against just what, she could not have said. Studying the posted address numbers—when available—she reached the relevant structure. From beyond its thick, humidity-slimed, glazed cinderblock walls, music thumped faintly, and Merritt relaxed a little.

  Her knock on a big metal-sheathed, riveted door eventually brought a response. She expected wariness, but instead the door swung wide, spilling out light and sound.

  A thin Bentoan fellow, amazingly composed despite his sweat-slicked golden face, regarded her with impartial suspicion. “Yes?”

  Merritt had to shout. “Ransome Pivot invited me!”

  The Bentoan nodded politely. “Certainly. Come in.”

  The door swung shut behind her, and Merritt found herself in a vast tall open space, pulsing with music, chatter and odd lighting effects, and festooned with a hundred madcap amateurish decorations. Scattered seating and other furniture seemed lost across the huge, people-packed floorspace. She smelled spilled liquor and dope smoke and a hundred cheap perfumes.

  “I am Henry Yun. Ransome and I are both pre-med. Goodge Adams and I own this joint. Please make yourself at home.”

  Yun left Merritt then, and she stepped with tentative enthusiasm into the scrum.

  Merritt never encountered Ransome that whole evening. But she chatted with dozens of strangers, gradually loosening up with every sip of free-flowing gin. After a while, she realized she was having a great time.

  Goodge Adams proved to be a chubby, excitable short guy, the antithesis to his roommate Henry Yun’s slim sangfroid: earnest and bright-eyed at the moment in an intoxicated fashion. He trapped Merritt in a corner on a broke back sofa, her on the cushions and him perched above on the arm, and bent her ear about the rigors of med school.

  “Nothing but work, endless work! Swotting up awesome big books. And the lab hours. Endless! Not to mention anatomy! And try practicing anatomy without corpses! It’s the essential medical conundrum!”

  One word in the tirade made no sense to Merritt, and not merely because she was very drunk herself. “Corpses? What’s that?”

  Goodge ignored her, or perhaps did not hear her. “And all that competition and struggle, just to graduate at the top of your class. Gotta get hired by the richest hospital, the chicest practice.”

  Here Goodge displayed a sly look for which Merritt could discern no reason. “But Yun and I have a leg-up on the others. Oh, yes, we do! We’re learning anatomy all right, ‘way deeper than the university allows!”

  Goodge leaned forward and ran a hand up Merritt’s leg to her thigh. In her alcoholic haze, she figured she was intended to provide the extra anatomy lesson he refered to. She brusquely displaced his groping paw, causing him to fall drunkenly off the arm of the sofa and lie peacefully on the filthy floor.

  Subsequent hours could only be reassembled in fragments, with many segments missing. But one incident stood out.

  Merritt was in search of the WC. She had wandered far from the crowd, toward the back of the huge building, and had her hand on a doorknob. But the door was locked. She struggled with it, convinced for some unfathomable reason that this room contained the sought-after toilet.

  Then a steely hand clamped her wrist.

  Henry Yun’s face resembled stone. “What are you looking for?”

  “The—the toilet! Let me go, you’re hurting me!”

  Yun released her. “This is the wrong room. Very private. Please follow me.”

  Seated on the toilet, Merritt was unaccountably almost too frightened to pee.

  Full sober awareness returned to her only when she awoke with the light of dawn.

  Merritt sized up her situation with slow horror. She had certainly made some good friends, albeit anonymous ones.

  She lay naked between two other unclothed bodies. One body belonged to a rangy young woman with bobbed black hair and a plethora of tattoos. The other carnal bookend could be claimed by a middle-aged, balding fellow whose potbelly failed to diminish a penis easily twice as large, even flaccid, as any it had previously been Merritt’s privilege to inspect up close. Both her bedmates were snoring contentedly.

  Merritt slithered out silently from under the covers via the foot of the bed, gathered up her clothes, and exited the foreign apartment. She found herself many Blocks from her own place, feeling both sleazy, repentant and proud.

  4.

  ACADEMIC RIVALS

  THE CAMPUS OF SWAZEYCAPE UNIVERSITY COMPRISED THE entirety of Blocks 70 through 100 of Wharton Borough, halting only at the Uptown border with Mechanicsville. Building after building of antique or modern mien, all wreathed in white-berried ivy (Merritt recalled the lush viridian virility of Vayavirunga as seen from the Samuel Smallhorne) and bearing the signage appropriate to that particular structure’s intellectual or administrative purpose, each otherwise uniform blue enamel panel stamped with the collegiate crest in yellow: pen, paintbrush, statue and book hovering in a triumphant arc above stylized fisherwife and yardbull trammelled in unlikely defeat: art and knowledge stronger than death. (And of course, Merritt’s own massive NikThek anchored the lower end of the campus like the prize in a holiday pudding.)

  Autumn ghosted the air this month. Leaving Wharton behind, the diurnally dwindling Season sun was rising further and further Uptown each day, contributing less and less heat, and a smaller share of the Borough’s doubled shadows. Seasons traversed the Linear City from Downtown to Uptown like a very slow Train.

  But Merritt welcomed the Fall, a reflective, nostalgia-inducing period, conducive to indoor pursuits such as study.

  This crisp late-September evening Merritt intended to grab a bite to eat at the Essy Baniassad Memorial Student Union before hastening to Professor Arturo Scoria’s graduate class, “Trends and Debates in Polypolisology.” Despite a certain measure of weariness and mental fatigue—she had spent all day at the NikThek cataloguing a newly received shipment of Sarfatti netsuke no bigger than her thumb—she had no intention of missing this class, her favorite out of the two she was auditing this semester.

  Professor Scoria’s intelligence and lively irreverence fascinated and provoked Merritt, as it did the other “polyps.” No romantic rebel such as he had ever disturbed the slumbers of Jermyn Rogers College. The legends of his daring and revelatory field expeditions lent a glow to his dashing, handsome figure, even behind the lectern, where his frosted temples bespoke academic probity while his brawny physique emanated adventure.

  Merritt experienced small ripples of excitement that traversed her from groin to brain and back again. The memory of Professor Scoria’s praise for several of her classroom responses, his seemingly burgeoning interest in her particular case, was enough to dispel all fatigue.

  Inside the Union she snaffled up a hot catfish sandwich on sourdough bread with extra tartar sauce, complemented by a bottle of Tannhauser’s Treacle Pop. Seated alone at a table, she perused her text for tonight’s lecture, Scoria’s own Exploits Among the Gay Papoons. Far from a dry monograph, the book had been a bestseller some years ago, written in a light and breezy manner that cloaked the hard science in whimsy, self-mocking braggadocio and glamour.

  In the middle of her reading and sandwich, Merritt looked up to spot a familiar trio crossing the refectory: Ransome Pivot, Henry Yunand Goodge Adams. Plump Adams looked manic; raggedly handsome Ransome glum; and exotic Bentoan Yun imperturbable. On impulse, Merritt hailed them, and they detoured somewhat reluctantly to her table.

  Ransome could not meet her eyes, merely nodding and saying, Mer.” Adams eyed her sandwich as if famished. Yun spoke with frosty precision. “Miss Abraham, did you need us for anything in particular?”

/>   “No. Just a friendly hello.”

  “Appreciated, I’m sure.” Yun sized her up with chilly clinical exactitude, as if she were a bug pinned to a tray. “Perhaps we’ll have the chance to host you at another party soon. But meanwhile, we have our anatomy homework to attend to. Goodbye.”

  As the three med students departed, Ransome cast a forlorn backwards glance at Merritt that seemed to implore her for some sort of nebulous help. She did not know how to respond.

  The small conference room in Gilles Gauthier Hall hosted only twelve or so of Merritt’s fellow polyps—this was a grad-level course after all, no auditorium-filling “Polypolisology 101”—seated down one side of a long battered wooden table bearing pen-knife carvings from several generations of daydreaming students. Steam radiators feebly practiced their hissing against the mild chill, as if gaining confidence for the winter ahead. The lectern at the front of the room stood yet untenanted.

  Merritt settled down in an empty chair positioned conspicuously atone short end of the table. She lofted her hair with her fingers, wishing she had had time to go home and wash it after work, and perhaps change her top to something less NikThek drone.

  Professor Arturo Scoria entered just as she finished primping.

  Wearing a scratched leather vest over a blue denim shirt (unbuttoned enough to reveal copious chest hair), a pair of hemp duck-cloth pants and scuffed boots appropriated from a Trainman’s uniform, Professor Scoria more resembled some roustabout with one of the traveling sideshows that went up and down the Linear City than he did a respected maven of that essential discipline which scientifically weighed and categorized all the million cultures of the Linear City against each other.

  Professor Scoria possessed a booming voice and informal tone. “Evening, polyps!”

  The class responded pleasantly and heartily. Merritt, lagging a bit behind the others due to excessive staring at her teacher, was disconcerted to hear her unwontedly high-pitched voice continuing to squeak out alone at the end of the mass greeting. But Professor Scoria just smiled benignly right at her, and made no reference to her faux pas.

  “I hope you all read as far as Chapter Ten, ‘Ritual Scarification and Me…’ Excellent! Well, let’s talk a little about the clan-bonding index and exogamy among the Papoons and similar cultures.”

  Leaning forward and gripping the sides of his lectern as if clutching one of the Wild Sacristans of Syndicus who had famously attacked the visiting polypolisologist for unintentionally making heretical comments, as described in Seven Scandalous Weeks in Syndicus, Professor Arturo Scoria launched into an elaborate and fascinating disquisition on his topic, sans notes of any sort.

  Merritt raised her hand at one point and, receiving a nod, asked, “Professor Scoria, isn’t that type of behavior most vividly exemplified by the Amaury of Newelpost?”

  Professor Scoria slapped the lectern with open palm, producing a boom that made everyone jump. “Precisely the best exemplum! Miss Abraham, you have a mind like a Strathspey mantrap! And packaged even more alluringly, if I may say so.”

  Scoria winked broadly, as if to defuse the compliment and render it just a genial witticism, but Merritt still blushed.

  When the lecture had ended, and the rest of the students were filing out, Merritt hung back. Professor Scoria seemed eagerly to anticipate this action. He stepped intimately close to Merritt before speaking. She smelled leather and a unique spicy cologne.

  “Miss Abraham, have I told you yet how much I admire your dedication to polypolisology? If only the paying students exhibited half as much enthusiasm and zeal as you do. I realize that you come here after a long day’s work under the exacting rod of old Chambless. Did you know he was my mentor? Yes, it’s hard to believe, but Edgar was once the feistiest and bravest polypolisologist under the two suns. It was he who brought back the first hard evidence of cannibalism in Angle poise, at no small peril to his own skin. But anyhow, I have to admire your love for learning, as well as the copious stock of facts, intuitions and insights you already plainly possess, and all so readily to hand. Your general confidence and brilliance impress me mightily, Miss Abraham. In fact, I’d like to take you under my wing. Now, I know there can be no formal departmental bond between us, since you’re not actually enrolled at Swazeycape U. Nothing on paper or in the eyes of the administration. But I think that’s even better. Kick over all the paperwork and grades and assignments! Toss aside the overly rigid handbook that guides student-teacher relations! Just mind-to-mind encounters—even perhaps some hand-in-hand fieldwork together! I have a lead right now on something revolutionary that very well might— But—But enough of that. Who knows where our partnership could lead? What do you say, Miss Abraham? Are you game?”

  Merritt swallowed a sudden ectoplasmic lump. “Please—call me Merritt.”

  Professor Scoria beamed. “And I’m Arturo! Now, let’s adjourn to the Burncoat Pub and celebrate our new relationship, Merritt.”

  Six Bohm-Moravia Pale Ales apiece later, leaning in practically cheek-to-cheek with Merritt, Arturo said, “Would you like to see those hideous, libidinous scars the savage Papoons inditedindicted indited upon my very flesh, Mer?”

  “Yes, Art! Yes, I would!”

  The next day at the NikThek, Merritt caught her boss Edgar Cham-bless scrutinizing her oddly from time to time. She did not think the old man was savvy enough to recognize that she still wore yesterday’s exact outfit, since, truth to tell, she often dressed identically from day to day. But then she realized that she still bore and disseminated Art’s signature aftershave scent straight to the nose of his ex-mentor.

  Although the taciturn and crusty old fellow did not promulgate his views in the classroom unless pressed—at which time he was forthright and unapologetic about his beliefs—Merritt knew that Professor Durian Vinnagar was a devout Vasukian. The stout, short, gruff academic wore a small lapel pin on his omnipresent tweed coat that symbolized his dogma that the Citybeast—that half-legendary, seldom apprehended, never utterly totalized serpentine entity that underpinned the Linear City, and whose riskily purloined scales stoked a thousand thousand superstitions—was male in gender, and dubbed Vasuki. Vinnagar’s golden Ouroboros jewelry jetted a tiny static spurt of metallic semen.

  This affiliation alone would have set Professor Vinnagar against his colleague Arturo Scoria, who was a Reform Manasan, and who therefore doctrinally maintained in a quasi-agnostic fashion that the Citybeast was female and prefered the cognomen of Manasa. (The silver pin of the Reform Manasans showed the tail-in-mouth serpent girdling an egg.)

  But the two rivals bore animosity toward each other on sundry professional levels as well. Outside the classroom, among their peers, Vinnagar had been heard to call Scoria a “showboater,” a “dilettante,” and a “sensationalist.” Scoria in turn labeled Vinnagar an “antiquarian,” a “retrogradist,” and a “doctrinaire Diffusionist,” this latter insult attacking Vinnagar’s old-fashioned, out-of-style belief that there was one ur-Borough from which all others had been populated millennia ago.

  But even given her new amorous and professional affiliation with Professor Arturo Scoria, Merritt could not find it in herself to dislike or discredit Vinnagar and his teachings. The man housed in his head a huge stock of valuable polypolisological information, much of it derived from ancient tomes too little consulted these days. He also exhibited a dry wit and genuine pedagogical talent and enthusiasm.

  Vinnagar’s course that Merritt was auditing in parallel this semester with Scoria’s was “Statistical Tools for Polypolisology.” It appealed to her linear, rational side just as much as Arturo’s story-telling appealed to her romantic visions, and she strove to do well in “Polyp Stats.”

  The week after she had cemented in his messy bachelor bedroom her new relationship with Art, Merritt found herself in Vinnagar’s classroom. Throughout the lecture the man seemed to cast a dubious eye upon Merritt. Her suspicions as to a shift in Vinnagar’s attitude were borne out when he detained her after c
lass.

  Merritt had to stifle a giggle at the sudden notion that Vinnagar would ask her to become his lover as well. But predictably, her teacher took not a seductive but a monitory tone.

  “Miss Abraham, I am not one to spread or encourage rumors. But reliable reports inform me that you and Professor Scoria have formed a bond both intellectual and, ahem, physical that bodes ill toward your professional career. Surely you can see that tight allegiance with anyone faction in the department—especially such a shallow and academically dishonest member of our staff—can only result in skewing your future path. You owe it to your own considerable talents to maintain a studious neutrality—at least until you are more advanced in your studies, say at the time of choosing your thesis topic.”

  Here Durian Vinnagar essayed a small smile. “I had even hoped that perhaps if your status at the University became more normalized, you would consider having me as your advisor.”

  Merritt hardly knew how to respond. “Professor Vinnagar, I’m genuinely flattered and honored. But all of this seems premature. Right now, I just want to soak up as much knowledge as I can. Professor Scoria offers me that opportunity. I hope I won’t have to abandon all the wisdom you offer either, just because of my, ah, closeness to one of your respected colleagues.”

  Professor Vinnagar sat back in his chair and sighed. “As Emil Fourcade says in Patchen’s Last Horizon, ‘Against youth and heart follies, Vasuki Himself contends in vain.’ No, Miss Abraham, you may rest assured of my continued respect and guidance. But mark my words, Scoria is going to lead you into trouble—and quite soon, if my spies speak the truth.”

  More than this vague warning, Merritt could not pry from the man.

  5.

  CAMPUS BUZZ

  WHARTON CELEBRATED A HOLIDAY IN MID-OCTOBER THAT Stagwitz did not: the Festival of Amrita. The holiday marked the arrival by Train each year of the lone shipment of a certain seasonal liquor obtained from the Borough of Tocktock, some fifty thousand Blocks Uptown, well beyond any facile travel. The liquor—four thousand jeroboams, no more, no less—had been arriving each year during the same week for the past two centuries, as a tribute to Swazeycape University. No one had any notion of the origin of the arrangement, even such antiquarians as Chambless and Vinnagar.