“Seems silly to me. I mean, I got a good fifty thousand square feet at Roxanna’s place. Why should we bother with getting more?”
“I’m not saying it makes sense, I’m saying we got to do it or we’ll eventually have a female explosion on our hands. I don’t want to lose mine, and after last night, you don’t want to lose yours, either. So be reasonable and do it my way.”
“If you say so. Anyway, we’re rich. You can afford it.”
Supper that night was quiet and subdued.
* * *
The next morning, Roxanna invited me to the local bathhouse, a weekly bath being the local norm. I’d gotten to looking forward to the sponge baths she’d been giving me, but I was out of quarantine now and I wasn’t an invalid any more. Also, I thought that I’d better look my best, if I was to meet a warlock in the afternoon.
The public baths turned out to be as big an eye- opener as the party had been. There was something almost schizophrenic about the way these people were super strait-laced at some times and totally uninhibited at others.
Roxanna and I went through a curtained doorway into a small changing room. Without any preamble, Roxanna promptly stripped herself completely naked. Just not what I had expected, at all.
Her actions, that is, not her appearance. She looked just like what I’d been dreaming of for weeks. Fine, firm breasts with tiny pink nipples, a very small waist, nicely flaring hips and wonderfully long legs that went all the way down to the floor. Like the dancers of a few nights before, she was completely depilated, a custom that I found myself liking.
But this was not the right place for an erection, not when I could hear a crowd of people on the other side of the curtain. There was nothing for it but for me to strip down as well, hang my clothes up beside hers, and hope that my body wouldn’t do anything embarrassing.
We went into a huge room full of naked people, and I soon started to feel less awkward. I mean, if everybody was doing it, well, why not? After a bit, I realized that I would probably have felt more awkward if I had been the only one who had clothes on.
In some ways, the bath was sort of Japanesey. I mean, you washed up first, and then you took a bath. Roxanna led the way to where a fountain squirted warm, fresh water into the air almost like a shower. We wet ourselves down, and went to the side to suds down with a soft, brown soap. She scrubbed down my newly healed back, so I returned the favor by doing the same to her back.
And to both sides, and to her front. She took it as nothing out of the ordinary, as did the people all around us. She was even talking to a lady friend of hers as I finished up. I don’t know why I was so forward. I mean, I’m usually rather shy. But it seemed like a good idea at the time so I did it. After rinsing off at the fountain, we went to something that was halfway between a small swimming pool and a monster Jacuzzi.
Once we were sitting in the almost too warm water, I said, “Roxanna, why were you walking different?”
“Walking different? What do you mean?”
“Well, when you women are wearing a long dress, you sort of glide along, as if you were on skids, or skates, or wheels. Now that you’re naked, you walk like everybody else I’ve ever known. Why is that?”
“You don’t like the way I walk?”
“I absolutely love the way you walk. I only want to know why you walk one way some times, and another way at other times.”
“Oh. Well, it looks nicer that way.”
“I don’t understand.”
“All right. Look.” She got out of the pool and walked away. “When your legs aren’t covered, you want them to look as nice as possible, yes?”
She walked towards me in a normal fashion, her feet pointed straight forward.
“Yes, Roxanna, you have very lovely legs.”
She accepted the compliment as only being her due. She walked away again, and came back walking like some comedian from a silent movie, with her toes spread out almost sideways and her knees slightly bent. It looked absolutely ridiculous, but after a bit I realized that this strange method of locomotion made her body above the waist absolutely motionless.
“You’re right,” I said. “I can see now why you’d want a thing like that covered by a long dress.”
She had really been walking like that all the time? Well, some cultures think that a bone through the nose is the high point of beauty, and by comparison, I suppose that I lucked out.
After a long soak, Roxanna asked me if I felt like a massage, and I said yes, hoping that she meant to do it herself. Unfortunately, such things were done here by professionals, and I soon found myself stretched out on the table next to hers. The masseurs were both men, I suppose because it takes strong arms to do the job properly. I am nonetheless convinced that sometimes there is much to be said for inefficiency. After that, we took a swim in a larger, cooler pool.
Perhaps I had a misspent childhood, and was entirely too serious and formal myself, but this was my first actual experience with public nudity, at least when I was one of the nudes.
It’s a very odd thing. At a stag party, where the ladies aren’t wearing clothes and you are, you just naturally feel lecherous towards them. But when you’re naked too, and in public, you just don’t feel that way anymore. Oh, you can certainly appreciate a beautiful body, in an intellectual sort of way, but the sexy feeling isn’t there anymore. Maybe that’s why less than one American in a thousand is a nudist. It’s not that nudists are being overly sexual with each other, but the precise opposite. And most people, given the choice, would really rather be lecherous.
Which launches another thought. In most countries in the civilized world, church and state agree vigorously in condemning public nakedness. They instill this taboo into their people with great vigor and effectiveness, to the point that people have been known to choose death by fire rather than leave a burning building naked. Many men (and some women, although they seem to be less effected than we are) would prefer torture, mutilation, and bankruptcy to walking down the street without their pants on. The prohibition of nakedness seems to be stronger than that condemning theft, or even violence. Being naked in public is probably the most common childhood nightmare, far more prevalent than bad dreams about, say, stealing from the neighbors.
I suspect that the reason for this is that the leaders of both church and state desperately want to increase the size of the populations subordinate to them. More people means more taxpayers, more cannon fodder, and more contributors to the holy cause. They say that whenever the old Indian chiefs got together, the main topic of conversation was always the relative lack of Indians.
The best way to make more people is by keeping your men sexually frustrated most of the time, and then permitting them to release those frustrations when they are locked away in private with their wives. Forcing people to cover their bodies increases the level of frustration, and thus, from a ruler’s point of view, it must be a good thing.
Consider the way the populations of the Arab countries, where women are often forced to wear mobile tents, are exploding. On the other hand, in the Scandinavian countries, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, where public nudity is common, populations are actually declining.
The next time you see a particularly attractive young person undulating along across the street, and you wish that she was wearing a whole lot less, just remember that you are but the victim of yet another wretched government plot.
NINETEEN
His Royal Grace Duke Guilhem Alberigo XXI sat with one hip on the corner of the desk of Tom Strong, E.E., Warlock of the Western Islands.
“So, Tom. What have you and your people learned about the various equipments our visitors have brought to my island?”
“Less than I’d hoped, Your Grace. Over the shortwave, they have been talking for fifty years about the rapid progress that has been made outside in electronics, but it wasn’t until I actually saw some of it that I realized, on a gut level, just how much has really been accomplished. Everything is a thousand times smaller than what we used in the war. It does a thousand times more, and seems to use less than one hundredth of the power to do it with. With most of the devices I’ve opened up, the truth is that I don’t have any idea of how they work. I often don’t even see how they could be built in the first place. Wires almost too tiny to be seen are somehow glued to thin sheets of hard plastic, and then soldered somehow to the legs of other devices as small as insects. I daren’t try to unsolder anything, for my own equipment is so crude by comparison that I would surely do damage. And my understanding is far cruder than my equipment!”