A Princess of The Linear Jungle Read online

  But these old acquaintances meant nothing to her, really. Merritt was intent on immersing herself in her new milieu, making fresh friends and impressing smart people in vital positions with her own brilliance and talents. (And, oh yes, honing that native brilliance with scads of new knowledge.) Lacking the money and easy entrée of her more privileged peers—Ransome Pivot, for instance—she had to utilize her wiles and brains if she ever wished to get ahead.

  And now, passing through the employees’ entrance, she winced as she realized that doing so this morning primarily meant satisfying her exacting boss, Edgar Chambless. And she had not met yesterday’s deadline for preparing all the display cases in advance of tomorrow’sopening of the NikThek’s newest exhibit, “The Diaries of Cadwal Throy.”

  Merritt hastened to the big hall hosting the exhibit. Empty of visitors, its high-mounted, tall, waxed-fabric shades still drawn so that the only illumination came from sunlight leaking around their brown edges, the cavernous space, with its famous Essy Baniassad friezes, evoked the legacy of some forgotten, mysteriously extinct civilization. Merritt experienced a small frisson, then shook off the sensation and got to work.

  Cadwal Throy had flourished, up until his death fifty years ago, in the Borough of Zulma. An undistinguished civil servant, he had minutely chronicled his daily, unexceptional life in millions of scribbled words in identical bland accountant’s ledgers. Intriguingly odd behavior, yes—but worthy of inclusion in the vaunted archives of the NikThek? Not without the accompanying illustrations, nearly one per page, which represented an artistic vision that might best be characterized as that of a megalomaniacal erotomane. The fact that chemical analysis revealed the “ink” to have an admixture of blood only added to the academic attractiveness of the diaries.

  Of such myriad odd artifacts as the Throy oeuvre, organized into vast interlocking categories by theorems and paradigms, was the discipline of polypolisology compounded. The study and explication of the entire range of human behaviors as culturally modulated and channeled by conditions in all the varying segments of the linear metropolis.

  Donning her white cotton curatorial gloves and adjusting a portable goosenecked lamp that clipped to the table legs, Merritt began arranging the diary volumes in their display cases, first removing them from their elaborate packing cases, then turning to the pages selected by the curators, banding the pages open, propping the books artfully on their stands, positioning the explanatory typed cards on the velvet….

  By ten AM she had a sense that if she continued at the same pace, skipping lunch, she would be able to meet her deadline. She plunged ahead, insensible now to her surroundings. Throy’s disturbing drawings began to enmesh her in some alternate, not entirely comfortable world….

  After some nebulous interval, Merritt became aware that she was not alone in the room. Her ears acknowledged the sounds of lively patrons beyond the doors of this closed gallery. She looked up to confront her superior, Edgar Chambless.

  Having forgotten more polypolisological arcana than Merritt might ever hope to learn, the elderly Chambless had acquired a legendary status even so far away as Jermyn Rogers College in Stagwitz. Weedy as a mullein in stature and shabbily dressed in a wool suit, despite summer’s swelter, he owned the face of a lugubrious longshoreman, rather than that of any effete scholar.

  “Miss Abraham. I understood this exhibit was to be finalized by end of day yesterday, and that today you would be helping install the Squillacote scrimshaws.”

  Merritt gulped. “Ah, yes, sir, that was the plan. But you see, I got busy studying this fascinating material, and—”

  Merritt faltered to a stop. Chambless stared at her through the thick lenses of his rimless eyeglasses as if inspecting a shipment of obscene fetiches from Lesser Hutsong. Finally he said, “Miss Abraham, please accompany me back to my office.”

  “But the exhibit—”

  “It will be ready in time. Now, come.”

  He turned and walked away without waiting for Merritt’s acquiescence.

  Chambless’s office featured tottering piles of books and file folders, manuscripts and photographs, maps and charts, all topped with sculptures, paintings, handicrafts and jewelry—the exotic detritus of a thousand expeditions and professorial trades-by-mail up and down the length of the Linear City. The odor in the windowless chamber deep inside the NikThek spoke of strange spices and perfumes, the differently scented dust of far-off stretches of Broadway, realms beyond easy travel or effortless sympathetic ken.

  Chambless lifted a huge tangled heap of smelly hempen fishnet off a chair. “Recognize the knotting technique here, Miss Abraham?”

  Merritt studied the netting. “Fantino-style?”

  “Ah, an excellent eye. Have a seat, please.”

  Merritt sat. The chair cushion felt damp, but perhaps that was only her imagination.

  Chambless took up position behind his desk. Only his superior seated height allowed for eye-contact above the clutter. The administrator regarded Merritt for a time over steepled fingers, then spoke.

  “Miss Abraham, you are bright. Very bright. Why are you not enrolled in Swazeycape’s polypolisological graduate program, instead of toiling among the arrowheads and fertility talismans here, if I may employ that handy synecdoche?”

  Merritt’s face reddened, although she had no real reason for shame. “It’s money, Professor Chambless. Just money. I can’t afford the tuition. It took all my scraping and striving just to pay for my studies at Jermyn Rogers. That’s why I needed five years to finish. I was a waitress the whole time. And even then I had to take out several loans. I owe too much already to go further into debt. I never even applied here, though I’m sure my grades….”

  Merritt tailed off, wary of sounding boastful.

  “Our University offers no relevant grants or stipends?”

  “None that I qualified for. Believe me, I checked. And Swazeycapeis very expensive, as you well know.”

  “And so you took your position here at Nikolai Milyutin. Why is that?”

  “Well, I knew that as a University employee, I’d get to audit courses for free. That won’t lead to a degree, I know, but I’ll still learn a lot. When the semester starts next month, I intend to sit in on several sessions outside of working hours, including Professor Scoria’s of course.”

  “I note that your immediate answer to my last question did not involve any variant of the pious sentiment, ‘So that I could invest my whole heart and soul in the curatorial process, fashioning the most stimulating and enlightening exhibits possible for the curious and deserving public.’”

  Merritt realized she had made an impolitic gaffe. “But I do want to create wonderful exhibits, Professor, I really do.”

  “Miss Abraham, let us not dissemble. Your job here is merely a steppingstone to something greater. You have no real interest in making the NikThek your permanent career. You have hopes of achieving something greater with your life, ambitions to make a mark in your chosen field of study, and the talent to back up those dreams. You will stay with us just so long as it suits you, acquiring knowledge and contacts as a sponge soaks up spilled wine. Then you will depart, with nary a backward glance or thought for our fusty old museum. At least until some years have passed, whereupon you might experience some nostalgia for these early days of painful striving.”

  Flustered, Merritt pondered how to respond. Impulsively, she pinned Professor Chambless with a steely gaze and said boldly, “That is absolutely correct.”

  Chambless stood, and Merritt prepared to be informed of her dismissal.

  “Miss Abraham, you are precisely the kind of person I am happy tomentor. You may count on me for any assistance toward your noble goals. But please, I ask only that during our days together, of whatever duration, all your assignments be completed by deadline, and manifest all your considerable skills.”

  Merritt began to weep. Professor Chambless came around the desk and laid a companionable bony arm across her shoulders, and handed her a
square of embroidered fabric. Merritt mentally catalogued the piece as a ceremonial menstrual cloth from the Borough of Gartonstolz. She blew her nose on it nonetheless.

  “Dry your eyes, Miss Abraham. The Throy Diaries beckon, and there are still the Squillacote scrimshaws to consider.”

  Merritt complied. Professor Chambless said, “Do you have any family back in Stagwitz, my dear?”

  “No, none. I was orphaned from birth.”

  “And have you made many new friends here in Wharton?”

  “Not a one.”

  “Well, I suggest that you include a little room for fun and relaxation in your program, Miss Abraham. All work and no play makes Vasuki spew poison, as we all can attest.”

  3.

  OFF WORK

  AS A PRESTIGIOUS UNIVERSITY BOROUGH, WHOSE reputation had spread far Uptown and Downtown, Wharton drew newcomers from afar and boasted a decidedly heterogenous population, more so than many another segment of the Linear City, including Merritt’s stuffy home of Stagwitz. In her daily rounds—and this was an admittedly limited itinerary, generally including only her lonely, cloistered apartment, the NikThek, and either Marley’s corner grocery store (home to economical stuffed grape leaves and potent plonk atone bull the bottle) or a cheap greasyspoon such as the Termite Terrace—Merritt passed in the street dark-skinned natives of Alms-grave; almond-eyed, honey-complected expatriates of Bento; veiled men and topless women from Quercus Major; and a plethora of other exotic types, rendered so by appearance, accent, attitude, or some combination of the three.

  Given this wealth of potential comrades and lovers, representing a huge spectrum of congeniality and worldviews, Merritt initially felt that she should have no trouble finding a congenial social set. But for one reason or another—her own skittish hesitancy and vocational intensity, or the clannishness of those far from their own homes—she simply could not—at least in her first two months residence—make a dent in any of these convivial circles.

  Not being a student, she had no access to collegiate circuits, nor was she enticed by her fellow employees at the NikThek (a musty bunch, truth be told, too long immured in spider webbed archives).

  Consequently, when she sought to follow the advice of her newfound mentor, Professor Chambless, she wound up falling back on familiarity, in the form of Ransome Pivot.

  Merritt and Ransome had met late in their junior year at Jermyn Rogers, when Pivot had chanced to eat at the restaurant where Merritt waitressed, the Buenasuerte. Miscalculating the check in the favor of the handsome customer, and having him nobly point out her mistake, saving her money out of her own pauper’s pocket, made their initial connection, resulting in but one formal date, an evening at a concert by the legendary Jigsaw Five.

  Merritt felt no immediate romantic chemistry with Pivot, and so swiftly abandoned him. She soon learned that any neutrality was not mutual, as an infatuated Pivot haunted her path thereafter—in then on-threatening, addle-pated manner of some alien suitor out of Patchen’s Age of Swains. He was a pre-med student, following in the footsteps of his father, the well-known and wealthy Chamfort Pivot, and so he and Merritt shared no classroom time. But he made sure to engineer numerous encounters—right down to choosing Swazeycape’s med school as his post-graduate destination, and the Samuel Smallhorne as his transportation thereto.

  So when Merritt reluctantly but with a curious sense of anticipation sent Ransome Pivot a letter, asking if they could meet for lunch one day, she expected him to fall all over himself arranging the date. But his reply did not come for several days, and when they finally hooked up, Merritt found the doctor-in-training oddly distracted and inattentive. The cares of the world seemed to have descended on his broad shoulders, and it was all she could do to wrangle a date out of him.

  “I’d like to meet some of your new friends, Ransome. I’m sure the med school is full of bright lights just like you!”

  “Yes, of course, grand bunch of fellows. Wild parties every weekend.” Pivot examined the veins in his own wrist as if seeing them for the first time. “But look here, why don’t the two of us go out first alone? Just you and me. Maybe take in some music at a club.”

  “Well, all right, I suppose. But remember, I do need to broaden my horizons beyond the sons of Stagwitz.”

  Ransome smiled for the first time since he had shown up for lunch. “Sure, sure, we’re in the big leagues now, I know. Meet and greet, network, all that important stuff. Listen, Mer, I’ll pick you up at seven this Friday.”

  Merritt dressed in her classiest outfit for their date: stack-heeled shoes that gave her a little needed height; a black A-line skirt that helped diminish her hips; and an original Hazelgrove silk blouse in green that she had found on a sale rack back home (the price-cutting stain easily concealed under a neckerchief). Emerging from her brownstone on the arm of Ransome Pivot, she felt like a princess out of one of the semi-mythical kingdoms in the Hundred Thousand Blocks.

  When she saw that Ransome had rented their own private pedicab, she felt even more special. As the driver gracefully huffed and puffed them Uptown, Ransome chattered in a light-hearted manner.

  “Do you recall those Kynard impellers on the ship that brought us here? Someday soon you’ll see them installed in cabs. Just as quickly as the ingeniators get the battery problem licked. Weight and capacity, that’s the key. Mark my words, you can’t stop progress. Why, a couple of centuries ago, no one even knew that the Day sun broadcast power beams. It makes you wonder what else remains to be discovered about our world.”

  Merritt nodded, and enjoyed the ride. Oddly enough, and most unlike herself, she did not feel compelled to talk at all, beyond an occasional affirmative interjection, during the entire trip of nearly forty-five minutes. But this change did not bother her, and she was content to rest comfortably against Pivot’s big frame.

  They arrived at Wharton’s Block 52, well-known as a strip of luxe music clubs.

  “Which one are we going to?”

  “The Black Poblano. They have a new singer named Loona Poole. I’ve heard great things about her.”

  The scene outside the Black Poblano was hopping. A doorman ushered Merritt and her date inside, and Ransome tipped him with a bill large enough to furnish Merritt with a week’s worth of stuffed grape leaves for her suppers. A blonde hostess in a backless, sparkling crimson gown conducted them to a table. Ransome ordered champagne.

  The band went through several instrumental numbers, alternately lively or dreamy, including such imperishable standards as Rumbold Prague’s “Gone Scaling.” Dancers danced, drinkers drank, and diners dined. Merritt participated in everything, becoming gay and tipsy, and having a wonderful time. Professor Chambless had been so right!

  Then the lights went down, noise levels dropped, and Loona Poole emerged.

  A silvery cascade of thick hair fell nearly to her waist. Beneath the tresses, Poole’s abundant curves appeared naked—until Merritt detected flesh-colored tights.

  Ransome whispered, “The gimmick is, she’s supposed to be some kind of emissary from a far-off Borough much more advanced than ours.”

  Poole uncorked a vibrant contralto croon, employing a language which Merritt at first thought to be High Didierian, but which she soon realized was a clever kind of gibberish, or scat-singing. Swaying hypnotically, the singer stepped with high-heeled grace off the stage, microphone in hand, and began to circulate among the hushedpatrons.

  Merritt found herself responding to the singer’s self-possessed animal heat despite her rational analysis of the act’s tacky premise and tawdry execution.

  Poole finished her first song, began another, and soon stood close to Ransome and Merritt.

  Without warning she plopped herself in Ransome’s lap, never missing a note. Poole winked so that only Ransome and Merrit could see. With her free hand she slid back her hairpiece a fraction—a gesture easily interpreted by the remoter members of the audience as a smoothing of her locks—thus revealing her true dark hair beneath the silv
er wig.

  Merritt experienced a bomb-burst of recognition.

  Loona Poole and the detestable Cady Rachis were one and the same!

  Poole lifted herself up sinuously and sauntered on, still crooning her nonsense syllables.

  Merritt lurched clumsily to her feet, overturning her chair, and rushed toward the exit, provoking little notice, since all ardent eyes remained fixed on the singer.

  Ransome caught up with Merritt on the sidewalk.

  “What’s wrong, Mer? What’s the matter?”

  “You brought me here as a foil, just so you could see that—that sneaky sexy bitch!”

  “But I didn’t! I swear it! Why would I even involve you, if I only wanted to see Cady? I had no idea Loona was Cady. Everyone knows she signed that exclusive contract at Topandy’s! This must be a dodge to earn a little more money. I can’t help that she spotted us in the audience, Mer. Really, I’m not responsible. You must believe me!”

  Merritt began to calm down. She assessed the handsome ingenuous face of Mr. Ransome Pivot for signs of self-preserving prevarication, and found none. Nevertheless, she remained angry—until she suddenly deflated to weary, despairing dismay.

  “Please take me home, Ransome. I don’t feel like staying out any longer.”

  “But, Merritt— Oh—Oh, fine, whatever you want!”

  Nearly a month of dull uneventful evenings passed. The semester would soon commence. Merritt knew she’d have no free time, what with her work at the NikThek and auditing courses. If ever she planned to make some friends, she needed to start now.

  She wrote an apologetic letter to Ransome Pivot. In return, she got a scrawled invitation to a party that very Saturday night. BYOB, and meet you there.

  Well, Merritt mused, she probably would’ve responded the exact same way, if the shoe had been on the other foot.

  The address given was an unlikely one: a warehouse in the meat-packing district.