A Princess of The Linear Jungle

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