Urbis

Crispin left the brothel, his head buzzing with the implications of what he had learned from Greta. He was little further forward in his search, except that he now knew that Tana had been taken by the Security Commission for their own devious purposes. It was late summer. It had been three months, more or less, since the abduction. So much had happened to him since then. What could have happened to her in the same time - to Tana?

He wandered the streets aimlessly for hours, turning every notion over in his head, inspecting it from every angle, and when he approached the warehouse he was still none the wiser.

It was surrounded by Security vehicles of various descriptions, including armoured trucks with barred window panels, and dozens of Security men milling about. As he watched, an ultralight aircraft came in low and landed on the flat roof.

As he looked on his arms and shoulders were seized from behind in a vice-like grip, and he was dragged bodily through a wicket gate set into a large roller door. He had been bundled into a darkened loading bay, with conveyor belts dimly perceived, extending out from a floor on a higher level. The wicket gate clanged shut, extinguishing the sole source of light.

“What’re you doing, you idiot?” demanded a voice close beside him. It was identifiable as Ron’s.

“Why don’t you wave a flag to them, let them all know we’re here?” said another voice sardonically. Crispin recognised it as belonging to a member of the group called Gerry.

“Cut the chat and let’s get out of here,” said Mina from a short distance away.

They turned on torches, and hastened away through the building, Crispin in tow.

They came to a place where the grille on a large air conditioning duct had been jemmied off. Mina flicked off her torch and stuffed it in her coat pocket. She led them into the tube, crawling on hands and knees.

“Watch out for bugs,” she called back to the others, her voice echoing and metallic.

Gerry followed her, then Crispin, with Ron bringing up the rear. They heard the whirring of insect wings, and felt the draught fan their faces as they progressed laboriously in pitch darkness. Every now and then, something feathery would brush their cheeks, or one of them would recoil in disgust as something ran ticklishly over a hand.

They advanced thus for what seemed to Crispin an inordinately long time, but bereft of any visual cues, it was impossible for him to tell how far they had gone. Deviations to left or right were seldom encountered, and they followed none, proceeding always in a straight line.

At last the shuffling stopped.

“Going down,” said Mina. A clanking sound ensued, descending, becoming more muffled. “Next,” she called up from the bottom of a long shaft.

Gerry took his turn.

“You wouldn’t want to be claustrophobic in this game, would you?” said Ron. Crispin didn’t know the meaning of the word, but he got Ron’s drift nevertheless.

At a word from Gerry, Crispin made his way down the ladder, sure-footed as a mountain goat on the slippery treads, and quickly reached the bottom. Mina snapped her torch on again and directed the beam up the shaft to aid his descent.

When all four were at the bottom, they set off again along a pathway that ran through a dank, slimy-walled tunnel alongside a putrid watercourse.

“This is our new home, Crispin,” Mina announced jovially. “The main stormwater network of Urbis.”

“But... what happened to the warehouse?” said Crispin.

“Somebody grassed.” Crispin looked confused at the term. “Gave us away. Fortunately, though we appear to have enemies in our midst, we also have one or two friends in Security. We got a warning to get out. But the three of us stayed back to keep a lookout for you, hoping like crazy you wouldn’t take the train, because then you would have walked right into their open arms, and there was no way we could have warned you. By the way, why didn’t you take the train?”

“I wanted to walk,” said Crispin. “I had to think. And I’m still not used to the way you `hitch rides’. Do you know who... grassed? Or why?”

“No. But we’ll find out,” Mina said with grim conviction. “We’ll find out.” And she marched on in appropriately stony silence.

Crispin watched with admiration the cooperative action that filled the tunnels in the weeks that followed. Two villages getting together to rebuild a longhouse seemed paltry compared with the way in which teams from Underground units all over the city swept in to build Sector Three’s new home. Like troglodytes in a time warp, they settled into a chain of burrows dug on either side of one of the principal storm drain arteries of the city, supported by reinforced steel joists, and lit by a mixture of candles, oil and bottled gas lamps and electricity from portable generators. Excavated at different periods in the past in times of need, the warren now stretched for several kilometres, opening via concealed doors into a variety of cellars, elevator wells, underground car parks and reservoirs and offering a wealth of bolt holes for those privileged to know of their existence. In order to keep the health risks at a manageable level, nurses in the Underground maintained a programme of regular booster shots to fortify the tunnel-dwellers’ immune systems. Entrances from Underground living areas into the drains themselves all had barriers of some sort: metal doors where possible, otherwise heavy duty PVC curtains. Further, the wearing of Breathaids at all times was de rigeur in the tunnels, as protection against infection and the otherwise overwhelming stench. The smell was not discouraged, as it was a further disincentive to too much investigation by Security.

When Mina, Crispin, Gerry and Ron arrived in a chamber earmarked as a conference room, another of the group, a woman named Emily who worked in telecommunications, was just completing the installation of a `liberated’ fibre optic junction box and showing Lyall how to use a doctored tone sender to make free calls.

“Tomorrow I’ll get you fixed up with a number for incoming calls,” she said. “On the company, of course.”

Lyall noted the arrival of the newcomers. “Ah,” he beamed, “more moles come to join us in our new lair. Now you see, Crispin, why we are called the Underground. It’s a name we have to live up to between surface squats.”

“Yes,” said Crispin. “I see.”

“Do we know who ratted on us?” Mina asked.

Her question was answered when Charlie and two others, Keith and Ralph entered with a blindfolded boy, and steered him through the assembled throng. He looked cowed..

“Kill the lights,” said Lyall. With the exception of a kerosine lamp Lyall kept on the table beside him, all lamps were extinguished.

“He had an `ear’ planted on him,” Charlie said. “But he volunteered it himself.”

“Sit yourself down, Marlon,” said Lyall. The teenager sat, his shoulders hunched, his arms dangling limply at his sides. “Tell us what happened.”

“I was at home. First thing I knew, the door was being forced open, and four Security guys were there - senior guys, judging from their rank badges - and they just stood there pointing their blasters at me. They waited till Mum got home, then they tied her up. One of them showed me his blaster. It was some sort of custom made job. He said if I didn’t tell them what I knew, they’d carve Mum’s face up a treat.” He sniffed loudly and searched for sympathy. “What could I do?”

“What did you tell them, Marlon?” Lyall said softly. Marlon didn’t answer. “Just the location of the warehouse?”

“Yes!” Marlon dissolved into a paroxysm of sobbing. “But they put a big slash on her cheek anyway! ‘As a reminder’, they said!”

“So Tana was bought by a Security man?” said Lyall. His tone was heavy.

“What does that mean?” said Crispin.

Lyall racked his brains to find some way to tell this man what it would mean for his wife to have become the toy of a Security man. “You’ve seen what they’re like,” he sighed.

It was left to Crispin to draw his own conclusion. “You think she’s... dead?”

A barely perceptible twitch of Lyall’s head, such as he might have made if an insect had bitten him on the nape, was all there was to indicate that such was not merely Lyall’s suspicion, but his belief.

When he arrived at Josie’s apartment, clutching a single long-stemmed red rose, she opened the door, wearing a long dress that was made entirely of cream-coloured lace, interwoven with a fine tracery of silver filigree like dragonfly wings. He felt like an absurd, lumbering thing in his workday coveralls as he stood before her.

He stared at her in disbelief. She was an apparition of loveliness, of womanliness, beyond anything he had ever dreamed of. “I’ve never seen you in that before,” he remarked. It was all he could think of to say.

“I should think not indeed,” she grinned, taking the rose from his quivering outstretched hand. “This is reserved for very special occasions.”

She padded through the apartment and stood by the bedroom window, bathed in the light of the rising moon. He followed her over, and she turned to him. His hand raised slowly. With the most delicate touch he placed a finger on her cheek. She melted into his embrace, folded into his kiss, and felt a surge of triumph as his hands alternately roamed across her back and luxuriated in her hair.

His hands then moved to the yoke of her dress and undid its three pearly buttons. He brushed the gown off her shoulders and it fell at her feet.

“I never do seem to wear it for any length of time,” she murmured as she stepped over it.

She had an expertise, a virtuosity, that astounded him. She pampered him, pleasured him in every way, and she knew a remarkable number, until he was moaning in ecstasy, building him up by degrees, a gifted masseuse coaxing tension out through every pore, a maestro playing him like an orchestra, fingering him through fleshly arpeggios to a sensual crescendo. She navigated him through the uncharted, unplumbed deeps of his own physicality, she conjured up tactile visions, a sexual synaesthesia, from a kind of somnolent delirium through to the primal throb of a fertility ritual. The pent up malevolence of a capped volcano rose in him, magma coursed in his veins, lava quested through his system for an outlet, and when it seemed he was about to expire of joy, she took him into her, his carnal sting searing the fibres of her, his orgasm a supernova, chasing through her to her last neuron, and the ululation which burst from their throats simultaneously felt as though it would reverberate around the world for ever.

And then he came down from the high, deflated, collapsing on top of her, his face in her hair, nibbling her collarbone.

She watched his eyelids flickering in rem-sleep, and drowsily tapped her fingernail on the bottle of lotion with its magic mixture of hallucinogenic ingredients that acted with the body’s own chemistry to amplify enormously the sensations of lovemaking.