A Princess of The Linear Jungle Read Online Free PDF Page B

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