Robert Silverberg - In the Group

It was a restless time for Murray. He spent the morning sand-trawling on the beach at Acapulco. When it began to seem like lunchtime he popped over to Nairobi for mutton curry at the Three Bells. It wasn’t lunchtime in Nairobi, but these days any restaurant worth eating at stayed open around the clock. In late afternoon, subjectivewise, he paused for pastis and water in Marseilles, and toward psychological twilight he buzzed back home to California. His inner clock was set to Pacific Time, so reality corresponded to mood: night was falling, San Francisco glittered like a mound of jewels across the bay. He was going to do Group tonight. He got Kay on the screen and said, “Come down to my place tonight, yes?”

“What for?”

“What else? Group.”

She lay in a dewy bower of young redwoods, three hundred miles up the coast from him. Torrents of unbound milk-white hair cascaded over her slender, bare, honey-colored body. A multi-carat glitterstone sparkled fraudulently between her flawless little breasts. Looking at her, he felt his hands tightening into desperate fists, his nails ravaging his palms. He loved her beyond all measure. The intensity of his love overwhelmed and embarrassed him.

“You want to do Group together tonight?” she asked. “You and me?” She didn’t sound pleased.

“Why not? Closeness is more fun than apartness.”

“Nobody’s ever apart in Group. What does mere you-and-me physical proximity matter? It’s irrelevant. It’s obsolete.”

“I miss you.”

“You’re with me right now,” she pointed out.

“I want to touch you. I want to inhale you. I want to taste you.”

“Punch for tactile, then. Punch for olfactory. Punch for any input you think you want.”

“I've got all sensory channels open already,” Murray said. “I’m flooded with delicious input. It still isn’t the same thing. It isn’t enough, Kay.”

She rose and walked slowly toward the ocean. His eyes tracked her across the screen. He heard the pounding of the surf.

“I want you right beside me when Group starts tonight,” he told her. “Look, if you don’t feel like coming here, I’ll go to your place.”

“You’re being boringly persistent.”

He winced. “I can’t help it. I like being close to you.”

“You have a lot of old-fashioned attitudes, Murray.” Her voice was so cool. “Are you aware of that?”

“I’m aware that my emotional drives are very strong. That’s all. Is that such a sin?” Careful, Murray. A serious error in tactics just then. This whole conversation a huge mistake, most likely. He was running big risks with her by pushing too hard, letting too much of his crazy romanticism reveal itself so early. His obsession with her, his impossible new possessiveness, his weird ego-driven exclusivism. His love. Yes; his love. She was absolutely right, of course. He was basically old-fashioned. Wallowing in emotional atavism. You-and-me stuff. I, me, me, mine. This unwillingness to share her fully in Group. As though he had some special claim. He was pure nineteenth century underneath it all. He had only just discovered that, and it had come as a surprise to him. His sick archaic fantasies aside, there was no reason for the two of them to be side by side in the same room during Group, not unless they were the ones who were screwing, and the copulation schedule showed Nate and Serena on tonight’s ticket. Drop it, Murray. But he couldn’t drop it. He said into her stony silence, “All right, but at least let me set up an inner intersex connection for you and me. So I can feel what you’re feeling when Nate and Serena get it on.”

“Why this frantic need to reach inside my head?” she asked.

“I love you.”

“Of course you do. We all love all of Us. But still, when you try to relate to me one-on-one like this, you injure Group.”

“No inner connection, then?”

“No.”

“Do you love me?”

A sigh. “I love Us, Murray.”

That was likely to be the best he’d get from her this evening. All right. All right. He’d settle for that, if he had to. A crumb here, a crumb there. She smiled, blew him an amiable kiss, broke the contact. He stared moodily at the dead screen. All right. Time to get ready for Group. He turned to the life-size screen on the east wall and keyed in the visuals for preliminary alignment. Right now Group Central was sending its test pattern, stills of all of tonight’s couples. Nate and Serena were in the centre, haloed by the glowing nimbus that marked them as this evening’s performers. Around the periphery Murray saw images of himself, Kay, Van, JoJo, Nikki, Dirk, Conrad, Finn, Lanelle, and Maria. Bruce, Klaus, Mindy, and Lois weren’t there. Too busy, maybe. Or too tired. Or perhaps they were in the grip of negative unGrouplike vibes just at the moment. You didn’t have to do Group every night, if you didn’t feel into it. Murray averaged four nights a week. Only the real bulls, like Dirk and Nate, routinely hit seven out of seven. Also JoJo, Lanelle, Nikki—the Very Hot Ladies, he liked to call them.

He opened up the audio. “This is Murray,” he announced. “I’m starting to synchronize.”

Group Central gave him a sweet unwavering A for calibration. He tuned his receiver to match the note. “You’re at four hundred and thirty-two,” Group Central said. “Bring your pitch up a little. There. There. Steady. Four hundred and forty, fine.” The tones locked perfectly. He was synched in for sound. A little fine tuning on the visuals, next. The test pattern vanished and the screen showed only Nate, naked, a big cocky rockjawed man with a thick mat of curly black hair covering him from thighs to throat. He grinned, bowed, preened. Murray made adjustments until it was all but impossible to distinguish the three-dimensional holographic projection of Nate from the actual Nate, hundreds of miles away in his San Diego bedroom. Murray was fastidious about these adjustments. Any perceptible drop-off in reality approximation dampened the pleasure Group gave him. For some moments he watched Nate striding bouncily back and forth, working off excess energy, fining himself down to performance level; a minor element of distortion crept into the margins of the image, and, cutting in the manual override, Murray fed his own corrections to Central until all was well.

Next came the main brain-wave amplification, delivering data in the emotional sphere: endocrine feeds, neural set, epithelial appercept, erogenous uptake. Diligently Murray keyed in each one. At first he received only a vague undifferentiated blur of formless background cerebration, but then, like intricate figures becoming clear in an elaborate oriental carpet, the specific characteristics of Nate’s mental output began to clarify themselves; edginess, eagerness, horniness, alertness, intensity. A sense of Nate’s formidable masculine strength came through. At this stage of the evening Murray still had a distinct awareness of himself as an entity independent of Nate, but that would change soon enough.

“Ready,” Murray reported. “Holding awaiting Group cut-in.”

He had to hold for fifteen intolerable minutes. He was always the quickest to synchronize. Then he had to sit and sweat, hanging on desperately to his balances and lineups while he waited for the others. All around the circuit, the rest of them were still tinkering with their rigs, adjusting them with varying degrees of competence. He thought of Kay. At this moment making frantic adjustments, tuning herself to Serena as he had done to Nate.

“Group cut-in,” Central said finally.

Murray closed the last circuits. Into his consciousness poured, in one wild rush, the mingled consciousnesses of Van, Dirk, Conrad, and Finn, hooked into him via Nate, and, less intensely because less directly, the consciousnesses of Kay, Maria, Lanelle, JoJo, and Nikki, funnelled to him by way of their link to Serena. So all twelve of them were in sync. They had attained Group once again. Now the revels could begin.