Urbis

The following morning Crispin was awoken by general hubbub outside his door. He had no way of knowing it was morning: his room was windowless. He snapped on the light and surveyed the room. He was lying on an old angle iron bed which occupied a large portion of the room. In the corner was a jumble of cable, meters, screwdrivers, drills, light fittings, rolls of tape and other electricians’ clutter. A cupboard in another corner contained his clothes, old and new, and his knapsack was stowed in the bottom. A plastic stool was the only other item of furniture in the room.

He dressed and was just about to go out of the door when something in a corner caught his eye. A white rectangle on the floor. He picked it up and turned it over. It was a photograph of Bernard with his arm round a well-built woman with fair hair whom Crispin judged to be in her mid thirties. Olive, without a doubt. He slipped the photo into his pocket.

Below him, Lyall was looking at a small screen on a long laminated table, while close to him Mina was having breakfast.

Following the cues of others in the place, Crispin made his way to the bathroom, still wondering at the amount of washing that these people did. When he came out he found that Lyall and Mina had been joined at the breakfast table by Josie. Again he felt the unwanted tingling sensation, the unlooked for quickening of the pulse. She turned at the sound of his approach, and her face was radiant.

“Hello, Crispin.”

“Hello, Josie.”

Lyall pulled out a vacant seat between Josie and himself, and motioned for Crispin to be seated.

“You’re honoured,” said Lyall. “Josie’s not normally what you’d call an early riser. Particularly not after a show.”

“But here I am,” she grinned infectiously. “Up at dawn and ready to show you the sights of the metropolis. Or some of them, anyway. I guess there’s no point asking you what you want to see as you don’t know what there is to be seen.”

Bernard appeared. “Morning all.” He sat down and turned the screen on the table so he could read it while he breakfasted. “Off for a ramble today, huh?” he said breezily.

“That’s right,” said Josie.

Crispin pulled out the photo. “Bernard, I found this in the room.”

Bernard looked at it, and his face clouded momentarily, then he slipped it into an inside pocket of the jerkin he was wearing. “Thanks.” He gave a wan smile. “It’s been six weeks now.”

He lapsed into silence and turned his attention again to the news on the screen.

When Crispin had finished eating, Josie led him out through the door into the tunnel.

“Poor sucker,” said Lyall after the door had closed. “He’s hooked.”

“You think so?” said Bernard.

“No question. Give it a week and he’ll have forgotten he ever had a wife.”

“Seems a shame,” Mina mused.

“Yeah,” Bernard concurred, still partly lost in his own thoughts. “But if he’s going to be useful to us, we can’t have him wasting his time running off on a wild goose chase.”

“Crispin. That’s an unusual name,” Josie observed as they walked along the tunnel. “We can’t call you Crisp, that sounds silly. How about just Cris?”

“How about Crispin?” Crispin said, a little more tartly than he had intended. “It’s my name.”

Josie was a little taken aback. “I’m sorry. It’s just that most people round here get their names shortened. I started life as Josephine, but nobody except my dear old mother would dream of calling me that.”

“Is it not a sign of disrespect?” Crispin asked. “Do you not reduce a person’s status by reducing their name?”

Josie laughed. “No, not at all. It’s a sign of affection. If you call someone by their full name, you’re being very formal, somehow keeping some distance from them.” She chuckled. “A shortened version of their name lets you get closer to them.”

“I would still like you to call me Crispin,” said Crispin. “You can show me your affection in other ways.”

“Like this?” said Josie, and, on impulse, gave him a peck on the cheek. Crispin blushed.

They had reached the railway tracks. The bass rumble from their right heralded a train.

“Okay,” said Josie. “If it stops, jump on the back like I do. But be quick. It only stops for a few seconds.”

The sleek white worm that was the train slid past them, slowing, slowing, until its tail was level with them, when it stopped.

“Come on,” said Josie.

There was a narrow platform across the rear to give maintenance engineers access to its generators. For Josie it was almost at shoulder height, but she swung herself expertly up onto it, then reached down to help Crispin on board. He was scarcely there when the train began moving again.

He gasped. “How did you know it was going to stop?”

Josie did not answer for a while. “When we get to the station,” she said finally, “be cool. Most of the people who work there are well disposed towards us, but there’s always the occasional jobsworth. They’re the ones who won’t bend the rules by a millimetre for fear of being found out by the boss. We call them jobsworths because if you ask them to do anything at all they always whine, ‘Nah, it’s more than me job’s worth’.”

When the train pulled into a station, there was just enough room for Josie and Crispin to squeeze past the end of the tunnel onto the platform.

“Doesn’t do to be overweight playing this game,” Josie grinned as she sauntered towards the exit, mingling with the crowd of fare-paying passengers. In the crush he became parted from her, trying to keep the back of her head in sight.

Suddenly there was a cry of pain, a masculine voice, close to where Josie was. Gradually the crowds parted, and he could see Josie and a man on his knees next to her. She was twisting his arm behind his back until it looked as if it would break.

“I’ll teach you to dip your sticky fingers in my pouch,” she snarled.

The man, a wiry little fellow in shabby clothing, howled. “I’m sorry, Josie. I didn’t see it was you.”

“It doesn’t matter that it’s me. Go uptown and steal from people who can afford to lose a few units, mongrel.”

She released her grip and turned to Crispin. “Let’s go.”

Crispin was gaping at this extraordinary woman who obviously thought nothing of tackling and besting a man in such an encounter. Her ability to look after herself struck him as admirable, even though he felt it would take some getting used to.

At the exit there were twenty gates, each wide enough to let a single person through. As each passenger delivered up his or her ticket and passed through, horizontal bars about twenty centimetres apart slid across. The altercation with the pickpouch meant that Crispin and Josie were among the last passengers to pass through. Josie inserted a shiny ticket with a wire attached to it into the slot in the wall, then with a practiced flick of the wrist retrieved it again and passed through the gate. The bars moved across, and she passed the ticket back between them to Crispin. He in turn slipped the ticket into the slot and pulled it back out again. The bars retracted, and he passed through the gate.

“Well done,” Josie beamed. “I was sure you’d lose it.”

“So was I,” Crispin conceded. “That man,” he added after a moment. “He knew you. You’re quite famous.”

She stepped aside as a sweeping robot hummed past sucking up litter. “Around here I’m pretty well known, yes.” She waved to two uniformed men behind a window. “But it’s somewhat localised fame. And it has its drawbacks. I probably get more hassles from the Security guys than most, because they know who I am and where my sympathies lie. But I’m careful not to give them anything to pin on me. Once they get you inside their dungeons, you can kiss your tail goodbye.”

At a ticket machine she stopped and bought a ticket. “This one’s for you,” she smiled. We’ll doctor it when we get home.”

Then they rose up on a long escalator to where the warm sunshine of early summer was waiting to greet them.

They stepped out onto the street. The roar of the traffic, the speed it travelled, the press of the crowds Crispin found terrifying at first. He felt a sensation akin to drowning, and pressed close to Josie in the throng as he might to a lifebelt in a stormy sea. To his dismay, the proximity to her produced a tingling sensation in his loins, and he felt himself rising to the occasion.

“Now,” said Josie, slipping into her role as tour guide, “what can we show you?”

“Show me how to find Tana,” he commanded.

Tana averted her eyes from his penetrating gaze. “I can’t,” she answered softly. “It’s like the others said. It’s not that easy.”

“Then you can do nothing for me,” Crispin retorted huffily, and began to walk away.

Josie grabbed his sleeve. “Wait,” she implored. She looked up into his face. “We’ll find a way to reach her. I promise. But you must give us some time.”

Crispin gave a jerky little nod of the head.

Josie walked two or three hundred metres and went into a shop. Crispin followed. The shelves in its interior were lined with a variety of gadgets in a range of colours.

“The latest craze with these gizmos is to have them looking about two hundred years old,” Josie explained. “It’s what they call a retro-boom. They have one every now and then, when they are stuck for an idea. I can’t hack it myself. I don’t like things that pretend to be something they’re not.”

A bored-looking saleswoman approached.

“Hi,” said Josie. “We’d like to buy a reader.”

“Sure,” said the woman. She brought out a box measuring about twenty centimetres by fourteen by one, with a panel of greenish glass taking up most of one face. “The card comes with it, and there’s a money back guarantee.”

“5.5 units,” said the woman.

“Okay,” said Josie. She handed over her card and the woman flipped it onto her card reader.

The new friends were back out in the sunshine. They walked a little further, and came to a quiet square, in the centre of which was a large plinth with machines set into its faces.

“You can get any book in the city data banks from here,” said Josie.

“But there is a problem here,” said Crispin. “I don’t know how to read. Only a very few of my people have preserved the skill, and none at all in my village.”

Josie was unperturbed. “It’s not a problem. The term `reader’ is a bit of a misnomer. You don’t actually read the words as they used to do in the old days of printed books. The reader reads the text to you, accompanied by pictures on this screen. See this little thing on the side here? Well, if you detach that and put it in your ear, you can listen without anyone else hearing. It comes in handy in crowded places. But you’ll find it hard to get by here without reading at all. We’ll have to make literacy a priority for you.”

Crispin didn’t know quite what to make of it all. He was impressed not only by the technology, but also by Josie’s gay, unflappable determination to help him settle in. It was as if she and the others wanted to integrate him regardless of the effort. He wondered what they might be expecting of him in return.

Josie took the card that had accompanied the box and fed it into a slot in the plinth, while Crispin watched with avid attention.

“General history of Urbis,” said Josie.

The names of some fifteen books scrolled across the screen. “I’m no expert,” said Josie, “so I guess we just pick one at random.” She pressed a key.

“Miraculous,” said Crispin, his eyes aglow with wonder. “And you can obtain any knowledge this way?”

“Yes,” said Josie.

“But Bernard said education was neglected.”

“Look,” Josie replied. “There ought to be long queues in front of these things. But this place is deserted.”

He settled down with his reader and continued to familiarise himself with the city’s past. The reader’s neutral, carefully modulated voice continued its narrative. A vast war had ravaged an entire continent, it explained, fought between the armies of an autocrat named Sharman and a rebellious nascent social democracy. Urbis, capital of the social democrats, had become the site for a last stand.

There was the story of a man named McDermott, a leading light in the social democrats’ camp whom even Sharman’s followers accorded grudging respect. McDermott approached Sharman’s right-hand man, named Tyler, by a back door approach, and persuaded him that the only road forward lay in talking. Tyler was inclined to agree, and a peace conference was arranged. Sharman’s hard-liners, however, had no interest in peace, indeed, the whole justification for their existence - as they saw it - lay in the continuation of hostilities. McDermott had a fatal stubborn streak, and regardless of the fact that he was an obvious target for an assassin, he continued to appear publicly ( “If we must continually skulk indoors, the forces of oppression have already won the day,” he was heard to remark ). On the eve of the conference, he was ambushed while walking in a city park, Phoenix Park, and together with his secretary and a single bodyguard, he was brutally slain, stripped and butchered, his head being impaled on the park railings.

Crispin shuddered.

He had accessed maps which had shown how the city occupied a long, narrow coastal plain, no more than twenty kilometres across at its widest point, but well over a hundred in length. They showed how the war had progressed. The mountain chain had offered a natural bastion on one side, and the sea had offered protection on its other flank. There had been a spirited defence, but it had all been in vain. The demagogue and his shock troops had claimed the day.

Holographic illustrations showed the principal battles, and the reader offered a re-enactment of an aerial dogfight. Crispin reeled in bewilderment as he was put into a virtual pilot’s seat. A five-megaton airburst had been the coup de grace, practically wiping the city from the face of the earth. An armistice was declared, the antagonists finally found their way to the conference table and settled their differences, while shattered survivors picked up the pieces and began to rebuild.

The reader continued on, mouthing platitudes about the intervening centuries of peace and stability. There was no mention of anyone living beyond the mountains, indeed, there was no reference at all to the world beyond. Urbis represented a totally inward-looking civilisation. Bernard had been right: it was exactly how those in power wanted it.

He suddenly thought of Torfinn, and his plot to have Crispin killed. The village elder’s secrets were the other half of the equation. And with a sudden chill Crispin realised that he was the one person in all of this who had the whole picture.