Urbis

Crispin pounded the pavements for a fortnight, sector by sector, until his boots wore out and he had to throw them away: his last link with his old life. He acquired a new pair of walking shoes and continued the quest, hoping, against all the odds, that he might one day turn a corner somewhere and perhaps catch a fleeting glimpse of his beloved Tana.

All the while, an acid tide of seething anger slopped about in his guts. He used his search for Tana on the streets of Urbis as a reason studiously to avoid Josie. He felt misused, abused: these people who were feeding and sheltering him were also using him as their puppet. Perhaps that was their way of extracting payment. They certainly seemed not to care about his wife. Resentfully, he conceded that he was only stopping around with the Underground because he had no idea where else to go.

And then, time and again, Josie’s words came back to him: She’s not here. But I am.

“Well, I couldn’t force him, could I?” Josie reported to Lyall and the rest of the group.

Lyall shook his head in disbelief. “Most men I know would give their right arm to get in the sack with you, Josie. But Crispin? He runs away.”

Josie bridled. “Look at it from his point of view. He sees us as a people of enormous sexual licence who don’t understand his fixation with his partner for life.”

Charlie arrived, and the others shifted their chairs to make room for him in their midst.

“I just wish I could re-establish the bond of trust with him,” said Josie. “But he won’t let me near him.”

“I think he’s weakening a bit,” said Charlie. “But we can help it along. I’ve got some news for him, and he might like to hear it from you, Josie.”

Crispin was taking a nap when there came a muffled rap on his door. He wasn’t sure at first whether he had heard it or not. Then it came again. He put on the light.

“Come in,” he called.

Josie entered, a hopeful, expectant, repentant expression on her face. “Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” said Crispin. He tried to sound sullen, but it wasn’t convincing.

Josie wrung her hands. “I... I’ve come to apologise. I behaved badly. Atrociously. And I should never have spiked your drink.”

“I... shouldn’t have hit you. I’m sorry about that.”

“It was the booze made you do that. I’ve only got myself to blame.”

“It’s funny,” Crispin said slowly.

“What?”

“Well, isn’t it usually the other way round? The man puts something into the woman’s drink to get her into bed.”

“How did you know that?”

“I saw it on some junky show on television.”

Josie laughed. “You are learning. And you’re starting to talk like one of us.”

It was true. Crispin had taken pains to disguise his accent, and now the patois of the city came almost naturally to him. He felt he was starting to blend in.

“Can we be friends again?” said Josie.

“I hope so,” said Crispin. “I like having you for my friend.”

“Crispin, there’s some news.”

His eyes widened. “Tana?”

“No. Not Tana. But one of the others. A girl called Greta...”

Greta wondered when her torture was going to end. She had been living on the 144th level of a sector six skyscraper. “Come to the 144th for gross indecency,” the ads ran. The man who had bought her, a Mr Head, ran his “superior gentlemen’s leisure facility” from the place.

The first thing they had done when she arrived was to secure a thin metal band around her left ankle. This, she was told, would tell them immediately where she was if she should be successful in escaping. It would also sound an alarm if she attempted to remove it. It was stressed to her that any such foolishness would bring dreadful retribution: not death, but a punishment that would make her wish for death as a release. Did she understand? Yes, she understood.

The day after her arrival they had woken her and given her breakfast. Then they had dressed her for work. A miniscule gold lame top which was tied around her biceps, leaving her shoulders bare, and which hung from her adolescent breasts in a fringe, and a matching G-string, made up her costume.

Thus attired, she had been taken by an older girl, Clarissa, who wore an identical outfit, into a cubicle where a naked man lay stretched out on a padded table, face down, like a beached whale, reflected in a mirror on the ceiling. Greta had never seen a naked man before, and she stared, mortified, at the specimen before her, scarcely attending to the other girl’s patter. And then the girl roughly grabbed her hands, smeared them with warm perfumed oil, and planted them on the man’s shoulderblades, demonstrating with her own practised fingers how to work the muscles and sinews. It was an action that reminded Greta of nothing so much as the dough she had been kneading in her mother’s kitchen when the machine had arrived. The previous day.

Together they had worked over the man’s body: the neck, the upper arms, the broad expanse of back, the flabby rump, the legs and the feet. Then Clarissa had asked the man to turn over, and with a leer at Greta the man had cheerfully obeyed.

Greta had stared at the man’s flaccid, circumcised member, unaware that Clarissa in turn was staring impatiently at her.

“Come on, Greta,” Clarissa snapped, tossing her thick dark locks skittishly. “Don’t act like you’ve never seen one before.”

Greta turned wide blue eyes on her. “I... haven’t.”

Both Clarissa and the man laughed heartily. Until it dawned on Clarissa that Greta was speaking in earnest.

They continued the massage, teasingly skirting the man’s private parts. Then when they had finished, Clarissa dismissed Greta, saying she could do the rest on her own, and began untying the cords on her arms.

Head came to inspect Greta for himself. She was lying on her bed, wearing a light cotton smock. Head made some indecipherable gesture over her with his hands.

Sarah, the madam of the 144th, a venomous little harridan, hovering at Head’s side, interpreted. “Mr Head wants you to remove your smock, dear.” Greta showed the slightest reluctance. “Come on,” said Sarah. “We haven’t got all day.”

Greta stood up, unlaced the bodice of the garment and pulled it over her head.

“Open your lips,” said Mr. Head. Greta bared her teeth for him. Mr. Head winced. “Give me strength. Not those lips.”

Greta looked at him dumbfoundedly, helpless and imploring in her confusion. She pointed downwards. Those lips?

“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently.

She parted her labiae. Coldly professional, he inserted his index finger between them and confirmed that her hymen was still intact.

He immediately consulted his list of most distinguished clients to see whom he could offer the rare privilege of a deflowering, a privilege that would command a special price. Civic dignitaries, senior Security Commission men and Members of the Inner Cabinet of the Presidium all scrolled across his screen, and one fairly leapt off it at him: Donald Shah, the new Security Minister. Such an honour would ensure a steady flow of custom from the upper echelons of society for years to come. Head could already see his rivals going simply green with envy.

Meanwhile, Greta spent her first week on the 144th doing massages, and two or three times a day she was escorted to the 145th to look down through the mirrorplex set into the ceiling of each massage chamber and observe the coupling which took place after the massage. This, it was made plain to her, was what she would be doing shortly. The finer points of position and technique were emphasised, and she would ultimately be initiated into various shades of kink, she was told. She vomited, and they took her away.

During the second week she massaged in only the G-string, and during the third she was entirely unclothed. Forced to be charming to the customers and beaten if she was not, she learned to smile sweetly when they became aroused, and to laugh a girlish laughter at their obscenities.

And then during the fourth week she was required to do very little at all. She was given a programme of callisthenics which emphasised the strengthening of the pelvic muscles, and otherwise permitted to relax and entertain herself as best she could.

“Make the most of it,” said Clarissa enviously. “It will never happen again.”

And then early in the evening of the Friday, Sarah summoned Greta to her personal boudoir, where a number of girls set to work on her, stripping her, shampooing her and setting her honey-coloured hair into corkscrew ringlets, manicuring, pedicuring, shaving and clipping her pubic hair into a perfect heart shape, anointing her from head to toe with strongly musk-scented lotion, dressing her in a floor-length robe of diaphanous white chiffon embroidered with pink rosebuds, and tied with a girdle of silk flowers.

“A veritable Queen of the May,” said Sarah admiringly when the work was done. “You’ve done an excellent job, ladies.”

An intercom bleeped. “Yes?” said Sarah. Her jaw dropped open. “Fuck me with a wet willy,” she moaned. “He’s here already. Pat, quick, get Greta into the red room. Danny, go and see to the gentleman, get him whatever he asks for. I will be there in a moment.”

The red room was a scarlet cocoon, tricked out in scarlet velvet draperies, thick pile scarlet carpet, scarlet flock on the walls, a scarlet bath, bidet and toilet, and scarlet chrome accessories. The focal point of the room was a monstrous circular bed lit by scarlet lighting and dressed with scarlet bedclothes. Greta was almost nauseous at the sight of it, but remembered the beating such a display attracted.

Donald Shah, a huge, bronzed captain of a man, swathed in alcohol fumes, swaggered over to Greta. He pressed his hands to her cheeks and kissed her, slavering, his prehensile tongue probing every corner of her mouth.

Without further ado, he untied her flower girdle and ripped her gown in two, then tossed her onto the bed. In a well-practised manoeuvre, he shucked his clothes and pounced like a mad dog.

With clenched jaws and fingers clawing the sheets, she endured the violation. He was mercifully quick, his orgasm announced by a triumphant cry from one end and a sonorous fart from the other. Moments later, he was asleep.

After extracting herself from under his gross, sticky form, Greta ran around the room in a frenzy, tearing her hair before finally curling up in a foetal position on the floor, as far away from the bed as she could contrive.

Custom from Sector One, the administrative centre of the city, on its island in the bay, came thick and fast, and Sarah and her women were kept busy. And sore.

Greta was given little time to think about her lost virginity, that precious gift that she would have willingly bestowed on the right man, and which had now been stolen from her. To make up for her previous week’s idleness, she was given more than her fair share of clients in the weeks that followed.

She was exposed to, and made a reluctant practitioner of every imaginable fetish and quirk in the vocabulary of sex. Her formerly carefree spirit was crushed as her body became the plaything of an endless stream of men, and she became like the other women in the brothel: a lonely, melancholy ghost, staring all day out of the windows of her prison at the free world beyond, wondering why it had been her fate to endure such degradation and misery.

One afternoon, Clarissa took Greta on one side. “I have something to tell you,” she whispered, looking about anxiously. Making sure she had Greta’s full attention, she went on. “I don’t have to tell you there are a lot of things about this place that really suck. And I don’t just mean Head’s chamber of horrors here. I mean Urbis.”

Greta nodded.

Clarissa lowered her voice even further. “Well, there are some people who are doing something about it. They’re called the Underground.”

“I’ve heard them talked about on TV,” said Greta. “They...”

Clarissa silenced her with a hand across her mouth. “What I’m trying to say is that we girls try and help them out with titbits of information we pick up here. Are you game to join us?”

Greta didn’t give it a second thought. Any way of getting back at the tyrants who ruled this place was welcome. “Of course.”

Denny showed the customer into the massage cubicle. “If you’d like to get your duds off and make yourself comfortable on the bench,” she smiled, “I’ll just go and get Greta to come and look after you.”

When Greta arrived a minute later, she looked at the man lying prone before her. His face was concealed in the crook of his arm. The revulsion she had felt at first had not diminished - only come under control. She saw a head covered in reddish bristles, and a musculature uncorrupted by luxury and a sedentary lifestyle, unlike the majority of the visitors to the 144th. No, this man was lean, no flab on him anywhere.

“You keep yourself well, sir,” she observed as she started to work on him.

“Yes, Greta, I do.”

Greta froze. Her brain was no longer sending any message to her arms. That voice... but it couldn’t be. Not here. Not like this!

“Crispin?” Her voice was no more than a whisper.

“Keep working,” Crispin hissed. “Sarah or Head might be watching from upstairs.”

Greta jerked her unwilling arms back to life. “You... know?”

“They teach us well in the Underground.”

“The Underground? You are in...”

“Sssh! Not so loud,” Crispin hissed. “There’s not a lot of time. I came to the city to find you, and Sasha, and Melissa, and Tana. Do you know where they are?”

Greta sighed. “I did not... I don’t remember much from that night. It’s a blur in my mind. Sasha and Melissa went to... places like this, I think. The men who bought them were dressed like Mr Head.”

“Bought?” Crispin sighed heavily. “And Tana?”

“No. Tana was bought by one of the ones in green.”

“Security?” Crispin gasped. “Tana was bought by a Security man?”

Greta could only nod.

For a time, Crispin lay fuming, while Greta kneaded his flesh, burning with shame that he should see her like this.

“T-turn over.” She could scarcely get the words out. Crispin turned over onto his back. He hardly recognised her. The once-demure, pale child had been tarted up with gross make-up, jewellery and a silly, gaudy costume. Shame for her overwhelmed him, and he imagined Tana in the same position. But what was she doing as the property of a Security man? “Tell me what you’ve been doing,” she said.

He recounted to her in low tones all about travelling to the city, the journey that had taken him days and her hours, about being found by Marlon and taken in by Bernard and the rest of the Sector Three Underground, about his rescue of Bernard and Bernard’s suicide, about Lily’s death at the convocation, and about his training. He said nothing at all about Josie.

Greta sat by her window, her cheeks drenched in bitter tears, and she thought about the man Bernard and what he had done. She wondered why she hadn’t thought of it herself. Crispin had assured her he would do everything possible to free her and all the others, but she did not believe it would ever happen. She felt desperately ashamed at being seen by him: Greta, Ulf’s daughter, whoring.

There was only one honourable course of action open to her. She would endure this place no longer.

She overturned a table, sending flasks of perfume, tubs of powder, tubes of lip gloss tumbling to the floor. The months of massage work had built up her muscles - lifting the table was easy. She let an end of it fall through the window, shattering the glass. The table sloped into the room like a ramp. She stepped back a few paces, conscious that people were running up behind her. She ran, bounded onto the lower end of the table as if it were her springboard to freedom, and dived through the window.

She dropped five floors before an updraught of the type commonly occurring around tall structures snatched it up and slammed it sideways through the window of a video dating agency, much to the astonishment of the clerk on duty, and to the chagrin of Greta. She had nothing more than minor abrasions.

Sarah had been the first to the window after Greta had jumped, and had seen what had happened. She and Denny and Clarissa had run down and gathered Greta up and had bundled her out of the dating agency before the clerk could react.

As they hurried her back upstairs, Greta’s mind was still in turmoil. She couldn’t believe that it hadn’t worked, that she was still alive. Was there no escape?

“I warned you,” Clarissa hissed in her ear. “Now they’ll put you in the tank.”

Greta felt grim misgivings. “What’s the tank?”

“Head’s showcase, down in the foyer. They’ll put you in it to be admired by the passers by. Stark bloody naked!”

“No...” Greta moaned. “No... please...”

Sarah and Denny dragged her away.