A Princess of The Linear Jungle (2 page)

“Shall we go below for a demonstration of your new maturity?”

“Yes—yes!”

In the cramped belowdecks, Merritt and Troutwine made for the women’s cabin.

“I’ve got a pessary,” said Merritt.

“Splendid,” said Troutwine.

But outside the door they were halted by energetic rutting noises. Cady Rachis and Ransome Pivot had established their claim first.

“No matter,” Troutwine whispered. “I’m prepared.” He dug out a whole lithographed tin of
Bettie Blaze
-brand sheaths and showed it to Merritt. She wondered how many encounters he had in mind.

They moved a short distance away to the men’s cabin. But somehow Dan Peart had beaten them there. Shirtless, huffing, he was performing sit-ups with his toes hooked under a bunk.

Troutwine’s hand on her rump induced vertigo. More than a week’s celibacy disinclined Merritt to hesitate longer.

The rope locker proved not unpleasantly aromatic, smelling like hemp and tar, albeit a bit cramped for anything other than the most rudimentary positions. And Merritt was left with mild abrasions on knees and palms.

Eventually, towards dusk, the five passengers found themselves again on deck, all rather whiffy and disarrayed from their various exertions.

Merritt was the first to see Captain Canebrake approach across the brilliantly white holystoned deck. The barrel-bellied, nattily jacketed skipper puffed heavily on his pipe.

“Hello, Captain! Where do we eat tonight?”

“Tonight? Why, right here on the
Smallhorne
! Would you have me put ashore in the Jungle, for hippogriff steaks? Tonight, and the next two, we make do with what’s in our larders.”

No one had really anticipated this necessity before now.

“No hot baths?” Cady Rachis peevishly exclaimed.

“Not unless you jump overboard into the impeller waste stream. Or perhaps you want to put in at the Other Shore, for the delicate attentions of the Fisherwives?”

Everyone looked instinctively toward the misty afterlife precincts and shivered. Discussion was effectively ended.

The three days it took to crawl past the Jungle seemed endless. At the end of that interval, when the Uptown Borough of Hakelight appeared beyond its Wall, Merritt was thoroughly tired of the exotic scenery of Vayavirunga.

And after a further two days of travel, she was heartily wearied of the attentions of Balsam Troutwine.

Thank Manasa she’d never have to see either again!

2.

BOTTOM RUNG

THE NIKOLAI MILYUTIN PINAKOTHEK AND WUNDERKAMMER occupied a six-story building in the 73rd Block of Wharton, on the Trackside stretch of Broadway. Besides being one of the tallest structures in Wharton, the museum was one of the most expansive, stretching all the way back to the Tracks, and the entire distance from Cross Street 73 to Cross Street 74. Rife with all the architectural gimcracks beloved of its old-school designer, Rufo Guereschi, from architraves to aedicules, vermiculations to verandas, the elderly edifice resembled the wedding cake enjoyed by the goblin bride and groom in Patchen’s
Eyebrows of the Extramundane
. From its rear to its front, the sides of the old the old building mapped a centuries-old gradient of caked Train soot. Its rearmost windows had been rendered more or less permanently opaque.

The front façade of the “NikThek,” as its staff fondly called the old grand dame, was kept better cleaned, being the plane-tree-shaded public face of the museum, familiar to generations of school children and casual visitors. And while the NikThek maintained a quasi-independent existence, with its own fund-raising, programming, publicity, and Board of Directors, it was still officially affiliated with proud and prestigious Swazeycape University. As a pendant of that sprawling chandelier of a school, whose buildings occupied fully forty percent of the Borough of Wharton, the NikThek had to uphold a certain level of virtue and pomp.

Early on this rain-washed, bright July morning, before its opening hour, the NikThek seemed simultaneously antique and youthful, as if its high-minded and not entirely sane or practical dedication to cataloguing and presenting the oddities of the Linear City had kept the museum young beyond its actual age.

Or so Merritt Abraham fancifully imagined, as she approached her place of work, a convenient three-Block stroll from the nearest Subway exit. (And that exit itself only a half-hour Subway commute from her studio apartment down in the Wharton 20’s.)

She stopped at the foot of the wide set of time-worn stairs leading up to the multiple doors of the main entrance. Listening to the wind-stirred leaves of the famous plane trees, she once again pondered the words of the founder engraved above the broad lintel:

YOU MUST HAVE THE PIGEON IN YOUR HEART

BEFORE YOU CAN FIND IT IN THE GUTTER

Quite a character, that Milyutin, one of the founders of polypolisology, and yet something of a mystic to boot. She wondered if that metaphysical strain did not still lurk below the skin of her chosen discipline, like a subliminal tattoo.

As Merritt broke her moment of still introspection and moved toward the employees’ entrance on 73rd, she was startled by the urgent chiming of a small bell, and she darted to one side just in time to avoid being run over by a commuting cyclist illegally using the sidewalk, as he sought to outmaneuver a big delivery van blocking his path on Broadway.

The incident caused Merritt to hark back to the last time she had seen Dan Peart. The wheelman had been the first one off the
Samuel Smallhorne
upon its May seventeenth arrival at Wharton Slip 18. After offering perfunctory good wishes to the others, he had ushered his precious Calloway Tempesta down the gangplank, whereupon he had been engulfed by a small claque of autograph-seeking cycling fans.

Cady Rachis had enlisted Ransome Pivot to carry her extensive luggage and to engage a pedicab. Complying somewhat reluctantly, Ransome kept casting apologetic backward glances at Merritt, but she haughtily ignored them.

That morning she had impulsively engineered a decisive blowup with Balsam Troutwine, complaining of his maddening combination of insincerity and fawning over-attentiveness, and the lovers were no longer on speaking terms. Seemingly uninjured, the liquor distributor had swaggered complacently away with his veteran salesman’s small daypack, leaving Merritt to shuffle her own bags and trunks off the ship and to her new, unseen home.

Since then, Merritt had encountered neither Peart nor Troutwine nor Rachis (though the last-named simpered down in effigy from posters everywhere, advertising her exclusive stint at Topandy’s Song Loft). As for Ransome Pivot—well, it was impossible not to bump into the irritating overgrown juvenile now and again, when visiting various Swazeycape University offices and facilities. And he
had
shown up once or twice in the NikThek cafeteria during her lunch hour….

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.”