But not all Undergrounds are the same. There are differences, and not just of depth: the Main Tunnel here, longer than day and wider than fecund womanly hips, seemed in its enormity the work of an unholy, mythical earthworm that’d been burrowing ever since the crack of Creation, and not the hard-won product of thousands of hours of digging with the dulling spoons they’d scooped from the drawers of their Hosts’ fine silver. As far down in the world as Undergrounds go, this was domesticated, even luxury, exceptionally lit with equidistantly staggered fluorescents, its floors lavishly tiled in alternating hexagons of royal blue and the baring whites of their incredulous eyes, decadently furnished with oversized, overstuffed settees set on both sides of the Tunnel against walls slathered by Maintenance with vast murals tending toward the idyllically socialized realist, pastelly archetypal depictions of the happy domestic, overflowed with pillows fat with feather their covers kept immaculate through regular launderings conducted topside, the responsibility for which would lovingly revolve amongst all.
No Siburban legend, digging began on the Underground immediately following the passage, which has it been three years ago already, of the infamous Stay At Home Legislation (Stahl, named after its sponsor, first name Sandra, it’s said), a for your own safety ordinance applying to all aliens living and working within One Thousand limits. Apparently, in years past there had been a number of escapes, not a little scandal attendant. Lawyerhusbands advised not to mention it, lawyerwives invariably agreed. The Development only said we couldn’t go outside, Adela often remarked, after dark with a meal hot in her stomach and a drink in her hand, the smoke of a cigarette burning low, they never said nothing about not taking ourselves Underground.
Though only this past summer did Adela finally receive majority approval to commission an investigative committee tasked with exploring the possibility of an extension, for purposes of access both emergency and daily, her envisioning an eventual network of Undergrounds leading outside the planned community (to be known as OUTCOM — and even now they have a host of personal gardeners divided into Nippers and Tuckers, Landscape Engineers, Pool Scoopers, Odd Jobbers, and I’ve come to fix your cable Repairmen, as illegal here as anyone else, working hard on seven outlying passages when sober, inclined), by this past fall the entire InCommunity (INCOM) project had already been realized, all Domestics now connected, all husbands notified in writing then after thirty days duly billed. The last and largest of INCOM’s major modules was dedicated just the first of last month, in a glorious ceremony ruined only by its policy of compulsory attendance: the Underground Social Union set three floors into earth, deep amid the graves and the plumbing, an auditorium and meeting hall allpurpose, in which Domestics were free to socialize and organize, coordinate coverage, appointments and playdates for their kinder, or just relax, stress down over a tall glass of the house kvass and what would begin as a friendly game of clobyosh.
