The Obsidian Stairway

by Bibi Rizer

  I take the hanky and blow my nose, trying to gather myself. “Is it always you?” The hanky is the same color satin as the sheets on the bed. “Was it you? I mean did we actually do those things?” It is a horrifying thought, a sense of invasion I hadn’t anticipated. Even though I came to the Pleasures fully prepared to have sex with someone, what happened here feels like more, like something intimate I hadn’t agreed to share with him, or anyone.

  “We didn’t do anything. I held your hand and talked to you a bit. That’s all.”

  I search his face. Could he be lying? I was so deeply asleep he could have done anything to me. I lift the blanket and look at my body. Fully clothed. Everything still neatly tucked in and tidy. I feel wet and aroused but not…I’m not sure what it would feel like anyway. I can barely remember. Tully sits back with a sigh as I check the readout on my wrist pass. It shows higher than normal heart rate and breathing, but no trauma. Usually intercourse registers as mild internal trauma. Not often enough to set off an alarm, but enough to measure and record. It’s a way of keeping harem wives faithful, but all citizen passes have this option.

  “You don’t trust me.” He says it like a statement of fact.

  “It’s just – ”

  “Never mind. I’m not a citizen. No one trusts us.”

  “It’s not that.” I shake my head. The fog that I woke up with is starting to drift away. “It felt so real. I’m sorry, I’m not thinking.”

  Tully smiles and takes my hand again, rubbing warmth into it. “It’s really fine. Don’t worry about it.”

  “So it wasn’t you?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Some kind of dream then?” I ask. “Can you tell me how you accomplish it?”

  Tully gets up and sits on his stool, spinning as he indicates the machinery. “It’s basically an electro-magnetic field generator. The electrodes trick your brain into a state called ‘lucid dreaming’. Because people come here expecting sex and this place is so sexually charged – rife with pheromones and sights and smells of sex – the lucid dreamer usually falls into a sex dream. I can guide you a little bit by adjusting the field and by spoken prompts. Sometimes I prime guests with…” He looks at the floor, sheepish.

  “Kissing?”

  “I only do that sometimes. With the nicer women.”

  I talk through the humiliating blush of heat that rises in my face. “And is it always you in the dream then? If it’s your voice and your kissing?”

  Tully spins his chair. Now he’s blushing, two pink patches rising on his cheeks. “Sometimes it is. Not always.”

  I realize the implications of this too late. Covering my face with my hands, I speak through my fingers. “But you knew it was you with me in the dream?”

  “Not until the end. Dreamers talk out loud. I heard you say my name.” I can’t look at him. He heard everything. All the vulgar things I said. All the begging to be fucked harder. And worst of all, he heard me tell him I loved him with all my heart. It’s too mortifying for words. “Don’t be embarrassed,” he says. “It’s only natural. Many women who come here have never had a proper conversation with a man, much less one who seems to care about them and value them. It’s…that’s all it is.”

  Is that all it is? The lingering sense that we are in love is still there, like a faint whiff of perfume after someone has left a room. I feel paralyzed by it, as though I can’t move until I’ve come completely back to my senses. Only the journalist in me saves me.

  “Did you build this…machine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? What possessed you to create this service? What do you get out of it?”

  “Money.” He grins a little wickedly, looking at me through lowered lashes. “And it was fun watching you come.”

  “If you want to make women come, why don’t you work on the sky level? At least then you’d be able to come too.” I sit up, shaking off the blanket and standing. If I’m to get out of here with any dignity left at all, I need to get my shit together. Tully is silent as I deactivate my data-stick and tuck it into my pocket. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  He looks down at the floor. And the answer comes to me so quickly and clearly that I feel a rush of shame and horror that I could be so blind. His slender almost hairless body. His youthful looks despite being nearly thirty. His soft voice.

  “Oh, my god.” I take a step towards him, reaching out without thinking. To hold him. To comfort him. “You’re a Cull.”

  He nods without looking up.

  I want to say a million things to him then, but only the journalist in me is able to form words. “Can I put that in my story?” Callous. Focused. My professors would be proud.

  “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  I take another step towards him, observing him with fresh eyes. “You don’t look like other Culls I’ve seen.”

  “I was older when they did it. Pretty much fully developed.”

  “Didn’t the cut gangs kill the older boys?”

  Tully shrugs. “The cutters who caught me tried. They didn’t live.”

  It’s simple the way he says it. As though it’s much less than what it is. He was set upon by a cut gang and managed to kill them all before they finished the job. I’ve heard stories like this, but I never thought they were true. Then what happened? He staggered, bleeding and mutilated until he found someone willing to stitch him up? A sympathetic female doctor was a hard thing to find in those dark days. The male doctors were all dead, hiding or in collusion with the Expiation. Many of the colluders have large harems now.

  Suddenly I’m overcome with grief, because this really can’t be the Tully from my dream, whose beautiful cock filled me so exquisitely. This Tully has no cock – none of the manly parts that are so rare in this world now. None of the parts so valuable on the Sky Level, or in the harem wife trade. This is why he’s not a citizen. The cut gangs were disbanded, disappearing into myth as the frenzy of the Expiation relented at last. The Culls that survived were cared for, given drugs to help them develop as much as possible, but no one was prepared to welcome them back into society. Not after everything that had happened. Not when we were so unstable, our population so unbalanced. Men needed to be fathers and leaders. Culls only interfered with that, begging for rights to love and marry. They needed to be contained. So they lost their citizen rights. It makes me sick to think of it. To think our species could have sunk so low.

  It sickens everyone, which is why it’s hardly ever discussed or written about.

  “I’m so sorry, Tully.”

  “It’s not your fault. You must have just been a child when it ended.”

  “I was eight. I barely remember it.” I shiver, and hug my arms around myself. “My father was killed. And my older brother was kidnapped and cut. He was twelve when he committed suicide a year later.” Do I expect sympathy? Some indication that he accepts that dire offering? But I think he’s done pandering to his client. Something has changed in him. A grimness has replaced his previous affability.

  “You should go. It’s only going to get colder down here. Go and have a soak in the Emerald Waters.”

  “I think I’ll just go home.”

  He nods, not looking at me, busying himself with machinery switches. The glowing screens flick off one by one.

  “Tully? Can I ask you one more question? For my story?”

  He pours the last inch of wine into a glass and sips it, turning back to me. “Sure.”

  “Is it true that servants can’t leave the Pleasures? I mean I’ve heard that you seldom leave, but some people think you can’t leave. Is that true?”

  He swallows the last of the wine and sets his glass down. “What did you have to do to get in tonight? To get through the gate?”

  “Scan my pass.”

  “There. I don’t have a pass. If I leave, I can’t get back in. I would have nowhere to go. This is our home, such as it is.”

  I look around the room. Despite the ornate fixtures and the soft chai
r, it’s oddly sterile. Like a medical clinic more than somewhere to live. “Do you sleep down here?”

  “Sometimes. Not tonight though. It’s too cold.” I notice for the first time that I can see his breath as he talks. It has gotten much colder just in the last few minutes. “I’ll clean up then find a boudoir upstairs. The female servants don’t mind someone like me for company.”

  Someone like me. A Cull he means. Someone warm to curl up with, and no expectation of sex. Strange how in this lopsided world, such a thing is so rare. I find myself longing to curl up with Tully myself, to sleep with him draped around my back like a protective blanket. But the journalist in me is now fully awake, and putting up a fight against the tragic, romantic heroine.

  “How did you get into the Pleasures in the first place, without a pass?” I ask. “How do any of you get in?”

  He approaches me, putting his hands lightly on my arms. “That’s a long story. I’m tired and cold.” As we look at each other something passes between us. His caramel eyes fix on mine. Maybe I only imagine the sadness in them, the yearning. He pulls me forward and hugs me. I turn my head and lay my cheek on his shoulder. “It was lovely to meet you, O’Mara,” he says. “You’re really very sweet.”

  I try to respond but nothing comes out.

  Tully steps back and presses the door release panel. The door lock clicks and he swings it open, revealing the empty landing behind it, and the obsidian stairs leading up to the sky level. I walk through the door, feeling heavy, burdened with everything that happened down here.

  When I reach the stairs, laying my hand on the cold polished bannister, Tully calls after me.

  “O’Mara?” he says, his voice soft as velvet. I turn to look back at him. “No one has ever said they loved me before.”

  I open my mouth, to clarify if he means in the service or in his whole life. Or both. But I decide to accept his offering for what it is. A confidence. A moment of friendship in a pathologically unfriendly world.

  “It felt real, in the moment,” I say.

  “It sounded real,” he says with a smile. “I’m going to put your pass code into my auto-approve list. You can make an appointment anytime without an invitation. If you want.”

  I nod and take the first step upwards, away from him. When I reach the tenth stair, I hear his door click shut behind me.

  On the fifth landing, I stop, leaning over with my hands on my knees, fighting for breath. The floor is strewn with broken liquor bottles, rubber gloves, empty lube tubes and half eaten things. A silver bridal veil lies mashed in the corner, smeared with something that might be blood. There’s an air of permanence to the desertion, as though this place has been vacant and unused for centuries. As though the debris on the floor is nothing but a relic of a long-past time when desperate, lonely people sought amusement in such a bleak, unholy place.

  But it was only hours ago this floor was crowded with clients and servants, all in a futile search for a kind of fulfillment that is only a dream. Once again I ache with envy at the women who find love together. They cozy up in large houses in the sat-subs, visit the top DNA vendors with special grants from our government and bank large checks whenever they bear a son.

  I know what I need to do. Apply for a grant to pay a DNA vendor. I’m young and healthy so I know I’ll be approved for a mid-grade one anyway. Get pregnant. Hope it’s a boy. My mother raised a child alone. So did many others like her. She even bore someone else’s twins to pay for my journalism course. If I had a child, I would be loved. Motherhood is a blessing. So say the posters on the magways.

  Or I could join a harem and marry. There are harems forming now that have themes – areas of interest that are shared by all the wives. I could find a writing harem. We could start our own publishing company. Write rambling poems of love and devotion to a husband we barely know.

  I trudge upwards to the fourth landing, then the third. On the second landing I admit to myself that I’ve been dawdling because I thought Tully might catch up with me. But maybe servants have their own stairs and secret passageways. He might already be curled up with some Tommy-girl or Licker, snickering as they share stories about their pitiful clients.

  On the second landing the noises of the sky level begin to drift down. Though it’s late, the activity in the Pleasures will likely continue all night. If I had the money I might seek out the tattooed bear who deflowered me and engage him for a repeat performance. Maybe a real cock would make me forget the one in my dream. The one I can certainly never have.

  I emerge on to the sky level into a crowd of colorful harem wives, all hovering like bees around their fat husband as he consumes an ice-cream cone, a bored expression on his face.

  I look up at the clear night sky. No stars are visible over the glaring neon of the Obsidian sign, but I can see the moon. Not full as it was in my dream, but slivered in a delicate crescent.

  None of it was real. Not the moon, not the room, not me, not Tully.

  Not love. Love is not real. Not anymore.

  If I file my review the way Goldwyn wants it, a salacious tale of lust and carnality, Tully’s business will increase tenfold. And dozens of women a week will experience what I did, or something like it. What will that accomplish? How many broken-hearted women am I prepared to take responsibility for?

  Or I could tell the truth.

  I pull the data-stick from my pocket and toss it into a nearby trash crusher. Goldwyn will get a story. I’ll make something up. Something carnal. Just what she wants. Maybe Tully’s business will improve, maybe it won’t. He doesn’t seem the type to care.

  As for me, I’m an ambitious journalist, driven but not callous. At least not callous enough to bare the most private part of me, my most vulnerable moment, all in the name of clicks and up-votes.

  The gate of The City of Dark Pleasures beckons, offering me escape back into the civilized world of work and progress and duty. As I pass under the glaring pink lights, waving my wrist over the scanner so it can record my departure, I make a silent vow.

  I won’t come back to the Pleasures, ever. There is nothing here for me. I know what I want now, and it is not to be found, not here. Not anywhere.

  It’s time I accept that.

  Yes. It’s time.

  The End of Part One

  If you enjoyed this book please consider taking the time to leave a review. You can also keep up to date with Bibi Rizer’s latest publications at her website www.BibiRizer.com.

  Watch out for the next book in the The City of Dark Pleasures – The Emerald Waters, coming Summer 2015.