Robert Silverberg: The World Inside

“How can I—”

“You have connections. Amend the program somehow. Support our appeal. You’re -a rising man in the building. You have high friends. You can do it.”

“No one can do such a thing.”

“Please, Siegmund.” She approaches him, pulls her shoulders back, unsubtly lets her nipples come thrusting through her garment of mesh. Hopeless. How can she magic him with two pink nubs of stiff flesh? She moistens her lips, narrows her eyes to slits. Too stagy. He will laugh. Huskily she says, “Don’t you want me to stay? Wouldn’t you like to take a turn or two with me? You know I’d do anything if you’d help us get off that list. Anything !” Face eager. Nostrils flaring, offering promise of unimaginable erotic delights. She will do things not yet invented.

She sees his flickering momentary smile and knows that she has oversold herself; he is amused, not tempted, by her forwardness. Her face crumples. She turns away.

“You don’t want me,” she mutters.

“Aurea, please! You’re asking the impossible.” He catches her shoulders and pulls her toward him. His hands slip within the mesh and caress her flesh. She knows that he is merely consoling her with a counterfeit of desire. He says, “If there was any way I could fix things for you, I would. But we’d all get tossed down the chute.” His fingers find her body’s core. Moist, slippery, despite herself. She does not want him now, not this way. With a wriggle of her hips she tries to free herself. His embrace is mere kindness; he will take her out of pity. She pivots and stiffens.

“No,” she says, and then she realizes how hopeless everything is, and she yields to him only because she knows that there will never be another chance.

Memnon says, “I’ve heard from Siegmund about what happened today. And from your uncle. You’ve got to stop this, Aurea.”

“Let’s go down the chute, Memnon.”

“Come with me to the consoler. I’ve never seen you acting this way before.”

“I’ve never felt so threatened.”

“Why can’t you adjust to it?” he asks. “It’s really a grand chance for us.”

“I can’t. I can’t.” She slumps forward, defeated, broken.

“Stop it,” he tells her. “Brooding sterilizes. Won’t you cheer up a bit?”

She will not give way to chiding, however reasonable the tone. He summons the machines; they take her to the consoler. Soft rubbery orange pads gently grasping her arms all the way through the halls. In the consoler’s office she is examined and her metabolism is probed. He draws the story from her. He is an elderly man, kind, gentle, somewhat bored, with a cloud of white hair rimming a pink face. She wonders whether he hates her behind his sweetness. At the end he tells her, “Conflict sterilizes. You must lead to comply with the demands of society, for society will not nurture you unless you play the game.” He recommends treatment.

“I don’t want treatment,” she says thickly, but Memnon authorizes it, and they take her away. “Where am I going?” she asks. “For how long?”

“To the 780th floor, for about a week.”

“To the moral engineers?”

“Yes,” they tell her.

“Not there. Please, not there.”

“They are gentle. They heal the troubled.”

“They’ll change me.”

“They’ll improve you. Come. Come. Come.”

For a week she lives in a sealed chamber filled with warm, sparkling fluids. She floats idly in a pulsing tide, thinking of the huge urbmon as a wondrous pedestal on which she sits. Images soak from her mind and everything becomes deliciously cloudy. They speak to her over audio channels embedded in the walls of the chamber. Occasionally she glimpses an eye peering through an optical fiber dangling above her. They drain the tensions and resistances from her. On the eighth day Memnon comes for her. They open the chamber and she is lifted forth, nude, dripping, her skin puckered, little beads of glittering fluid clinging to her. The room is full of strange men. Everyone else is clothed; it is dreamlike to be bare in front of them, but she does not really mind. Her breasts are full, her belly is flat, why then be ashamed? Machines towel her dry and clothe her. Memnon leads her by the hand. Aurea smiles quite often. “I love you,” she tells Memnon softly.

“God bless,” he says. “I’ve missed you so much.”

The day is at hand, and she has paid her farewells. She has had two months to say good- bye, first to her blood kin, then to her friends in her village, then to others whom she has known within Chicago, and at last to Siegmund and Mamelon Kluver, her only acquaintances outside her native city. She has rewound her past into a tight coil. She has revisited the home of her parents and her old schoolroom, and she has even taken a tour of the urbmon, like a visitor from outbuilding, so that she may see the power plant and the service core and the conversion stations one final time.

Meanwhile Memnon has been busy too. Each night he reports to her on that day’s accomplishments. The 5,202 citizens of Urban Monad 116 who are destined to transfer to the new structure have elected twelve delegates to the steering committee of Urbmon 158, and Memnon is one of the twelve. It is a great honor. Night after night the delegates take part in a multiscreen linkage embracing all of Chipitts, so that they can plan the social framework of the building they are going to share. It has been decided, Memnon tells her, to have fifty cities of twenty floors apiece, and to name the cities not after the vanished cities of old Earth, as has been the general custom, but rather after distinguished men of the past: Newton, Einstein, Plato, Galileo, and so forth. Memnon will be given responsibility for an entire sector of heat-diffusion engineers. It will be administrative rather than technical work, and so he and Aurea will live in Newton, the highest city.

Memnon expands and throbs with increased importance. He cannot wait for the hour of transfer to arrive. “We’ll be really influential people,” he tells Aurea exultantly. ” And in ten or fifteen years we’ll be legendary figures in 158. The first settlers. The founders, the pioneers. They’ll be making up ballads about us in another century or so.”

“And I was unwilling to go,” Aurea says mildly. “How strange to think of myself acting like that!”

“It’s an error to react with fear until you perceive the true shape of things,” Memnon replies. “The ancients thought it would be a calamity to have as many as 5,000,000,000 people in the world. Yet we have fifteen times as much and look how happy we are!”

“Yes. Very happy. And we’ll always be happy, Memnon.”

The signal comes. The machines are at the door to fetch them. Memnon indicates the box that contains their few possessions. Aurea glows. She glances about the dorm, astonished by the crowdedness of it, the crush of couples in so little space. We will have our own room in 158, she reminds herself.

Those members of the dorm who are not leaving form a line, and offer Memnon and Aurea one final embrace.

Memnon follows the machines out, and Aurea follows Memnon. They go up to the landing stage on the thousandth floor. It is an hour past dawn and summer sunlight gleams in shining splotches on the tips of Chipitts’ towers. The transfer operation has already begun; quickboats capable of carrying 100 passengers each will be moving back and forth between Urbmons 116 and 158 all day.

“And so we leave this place,” Memnon says. “We begin a new life. Bless god!”

“God bless!” cries Aurea.

They enter the quickboat and it soars aloft. The pioneers bound for Urbmon 158 gasp as they see, for the first time, how their world really looks from above. The towers are beautiful, Aurea realizes. They glisten. On and on they stretch, fifty-one of them, like a ring of upraised spears in a broad green carpet. She is very happy. Memnon folds his hand over hers. She wonders how she could ever have feared this day. She wishes she could apologize to the universe for her foolishness.