A Princess of The Linear Jungle Read Free

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