A Princess of The Linear Jungle

khaki slacks, and to stare into a mirror for signs of any feature that could be deemed “sexy” rather than “cute.”
    Finally, beyond Cady loomed Ransome Pivot, gangly, large-featured, an untameable wing of tawny hair perpetually obscuring one eye: Merritt’s romance-besotted peer and, to her chagrin, also an affiliate of her future institutional home, Swazeycape University of Wharton Borough.
    Dan Peart spat into the River. “Never had much truck with anything that smacks of wild-eyed fabulism. Give me hard pavement and greased drive chains over all such nonsense.”
    Ransome rushed to Merritt’s defense in a scholarly fashion. “I think the coincidental likeness is remarkable, considering that Lucerne never actually saw Vayavirunga. I believe a catalogue for a recent exhibition of her work even commented so.”
    “I’ve heard there are all sorts of monsters in those savage Blocks,” contributed Troutwine. “Three whole Boroughs nearly, that’s how far the blight spread before they got it under control. Seventy-five miles of Vasuki-knows-what.”
    “Was that an enormous wall I saw, across the Downtown end?” asked Cady Rachis.
    “Yes,” said the ever-knowledgable and eager-to-impress Ransome. “The Wall stretches from the Slips on the River’s shore, over whatever’s left of Broadway, and then all the way across the Tracks, and even some distance into the middens beyond. Nothing will grow in the middens—too much industrial waste. And any bizarre creatures in the Jungle seem to shy away from crossing both water and the dumps. There’s a gate in the Wall that opens automatically for Trains. And when the trains pass through Vayavirunga, the engineer lowers steel shutters over the passenger-car windows.”
    “Same Wall arrangement at the Uptown end, I expect,” Peart offered clinically.
    “So no one’s ever really seen the Jungle up close, to report on it?” Cady said.
    “Well,” continued Ransome Pivot as if Peart had not interrupted at all, “the Trackmen in each engine’s cab see the fringes of the place as they rush by, but not the interior of Vayavirunga. And they’re understandably close-mouthed about even the glimpses they get, lest they stoke fears of the neighboring citizens.”
    Cady grabbed one of Ransome Pivot’s biceps with both her hands. “Oh, Ransome, you make such an extravagant topic so clear and exciting!”
    Pivot blushed like a child; Rachis batted her lashes and pressed her shapely breasts provocatively against the youth’s arm.
    “Come with me, Ransome, and we’ll discuss this at length out of the sun.”
    The torchsinger and graduate student strolled off, arm-in-arm.
    Merritt was disgusted. Ransome Pivot, like all men, apparently possessed two competing somatic centers of volition, and the lower was always higher, so to speak.
    Not that he even radiated an iota of allure for her. She had barely known him at Jermyn Rogers College, where he had conceived a crush on her somehow, and considered him a callow pudding head and bumblepuppy. She resented the fact that, deliberately or accidentally, he had followed her along to her new job. She had wanted the sensation of a complete break with her boring past.
    In any case, older men intrigued her more. Men like Troutwine, or even Peart. But in the case of the latter, sports had apparently rendered him asexual. The cyclist’s immaculate and superbly toned body was reserved for one lover alone, his lightweight Calloway Tempesta, now lashed down on deck at the stern of the Samuel Smallhorne .
    As if to verify his neutered condition, Peart said, “Well, all that celery and lettuce of old Vayavirunga is odd enough, but it palls pretty fast. I’m off to polish my bike. This damp ain’t good for her.”
    Peart’s departure left Merritt in suddenly intimate circumstances with Balsam Troutwine.
    She expected him immediately to proposition her.
    The trip from Stagwitz had been underway a week now, seven Boroughs passed, with five more days yet to come before arrival in Wharton. During this first part of the trip, sexual tension had been fairly thick. But the small size of the ketch precluded much extensive fooling around, as did the sleeping arrangements, with the men sharing one small cabin and the women another. (Captain Canebrake and his crew inhabited even tighter digs.)
    Yet, unlike cautious and circumspect Merritt Abraham, bold Cad Rachis had not been stymied in her quest for carnal opportunity. Merritt had seen her