Robert Silverberg: The World Inside

She lets her free hand rest lightly on the curve of her belly. New life now sprouts within her. Each moment the cells divide and the little one grows. They have dated the hour of conception to the evening of the day when she was discharged by the consoler’s office. Conflict indeed sterilizes, Aurea has realized. Now the poison of negativeness has been drained from her; she is able to fulfill a woman’s proper destiny.

“It’ll be so different,” she says to Memnon, “living in such an empty building. Only 250,000! How long will it take for us to fill it?”

“Twelve or thirteen years,” he answers. “We’ll have few deaths, because we’re all young. And lots of births.”

She laughs. “Good. I hate an empty house.”

The quickboat’s voice says, “We now will turn to the southeast, and on the left to the rear you can catch a last glimpse of Urbmon 116.”

Her fellow passengers strain to see. Aurea does not make the effort. Urbmon 116 has ceased to concern her.

They are playing tonight in Rome, in the spishy new sonic center on the 530th level. Dillon Chrimes hasn’t been that far up in the building in weeks. Lately he and the group have been doing the grime stint: Reykjavik, Prague, Warsaw, down among the grubbos. Well, they’re entitled to some entertainment too. Dillon lives in San Francisco, not so lofty himself. The 370th floor; the heart of the cultural ghetto. But he doesn’t mind that. He isn’t deprived of variety. He gets around, everywhere from the bottom to the top in the course of a year, and it’s only a statistical anomaly that it’s been nothing but bottoms up for a while. The odds are he’ll be blowing Shanghai, Chicago, Edinburgh, that crowd, in the month to come. With all those clean long-limbed lovelies to spread for him after the show.

Dillon is seventeen. More than middle height, with silken blond hair to his shoulders. Traditional, the old Orpheus bit. Crystalline blue eyes. He loves staring at them in a round of polymirrors, seeing the icy spheres intersect. Happily married, and three Tittles already, god bless! His wife’s name is Electra. She paints psychedelic tapestries. Sometimes she accompanies him when he’s touring with the group, but not often. Not now. He has met only one woman who lights him nearly as much. A Shanghai slicko, wife of some Louisvillebound headknocker. Mamelon Kluver, her name. The other girls of the urbmon are just so many slots, Dillon often thinks, but Mamelon connects. He has never told Electra about her. Jealousy sterilizes.

He plays the vibrastar in a cosmos group. That makes him valuable personnel. “I’m unique, like a flow-sculpture,” he sometimes boasts. Actually there’s another vibrastar man in the building, but to be one out of merely two is still a decent accomplishment. There are only two cosmos groups in Urbmon 116; the building can’t really afford much redundancy in its entertainers. Dillon doesn’t think highly of the rival group, though his opinion is based more on prejudice than familiarity — he’s heard them three times, is all. There’s been talk of getting both groups together for an all-out headblaster of a joint concert, perhaps in Louisville, but no one takes such teasers seriously. Meanwhile they go their separately programmed ways, moving up and down through the urbmon as the spiritual weather dictates. The usual gig is five nights in a city. That allows everybody in, say, Bombay, who stones on cosmos groups to see them the same week, thereby providing conversation fodder for the general sharing. Then they move along, and, counting nights off, they theoretically can make the circuit of the whole building every six months. But sometimes gigs are extended. Do the lower levels need excesses of bread and circuses? The group may be handed fourteen nights running in Warsaw, then. Do the upper levels need psychic deconstipation in a big way? A twelve-night run in Chicago, maybe. Or the group itself may go sour and have to get its filters reamed, necessitating a layoff of two weeks or more. Allowing for all of these factors, there have to be two groups roaming the urbmon if every city is going to get a crack at a cosmos show at least once a year. Right now, Dillon thinks, the other operation is playing Boston for the third week. Some kind of problem with sexual turnoffs there, of all wildnesses!

He wakes at noon. Electra loyally beside him; the littles long gone to school, except for the baby, gurgling in its maintenance slot. Artists and performers keep their own hours. Her lips touch his. A torrent of fiery hair across his face. Her hand at his loins, wandering, grasping. Fingertips playfully rimming him. “Love me?” she sings. “Love me not? Love me? Love me not?”

“You medieval witch.”

“You look so pretty when you sleep, Dill. The long hair. The sweet skin. Like a girl, even. You bring out the sappho in me.”

“Do I?” he laughs and crams his genitals out of sight between his lean thighs. Clamps his legs. “Then do me!” He gouges his palms against his chest, trying to push up ersatz breasts. “Come on,” he says hoarsely. “Here’s your chance. Get on board. Flick that tongue.”

“Silly. Stop that!”

“I think I’d be very pretty as a girl.”

“Your hips are all wrong,” she says, and pulls his locked feet apart. Up pops penis, half- erect. She whangs it with the backs of two fingertips, gently. Further stiffening. But there will be no sex between them now. He rarely indulges at this time of day, with a performance coming up. And in any case the mood is wrong, too skittish, too brittle. She vaults off the sleeping platform and deflates it with a kick of the pedal while he is still on it. An airy whooshing. That sort of mood; presexual, childish. He watches her waltz to the cleanser. What a fine butt she has, he thinks. So pale. So full. The splendid deep cleft. The elegant dimples. He creeps toward her and stoops to nip a hinder cheek, carefully, not wanting to leave a blemish. They share the cleanser. The baby begins to yowl. Dillon glances over his shoulder. “God bless, god bless, god bless!” he sings, beginning basso, ending falsetto. What a good life, he thinks. How neat existence can be. Electra, pulling on her clothes, says, “Can I get you some fumes?” A transparent band over her breasts. Rosy nipples like little blind eyes. He is pleased that she has stopped nursing; biology is tremendously moving, yes, but the dribbles of bluish-white milk over everything annoyed him. Doubtless a failing to eradicate. Why be so fastidious? Electra enjoyed nursing. She still lets the little suck, saying it’s for the child’s pleasure, but there can hardly be much kick in a dry tit, so Dillon knows the locus of the joy in that particular transaction. He hunts for his clothing.

“Will you paint today?” he asks.

“Tonight. While you’re performing.”

“You haven’t worked much lately.”

“I haven’t felt the strings pulling.”

It is her special idiom. To practice her art she must feel rooted to the earth. Strings rising from the planet’s core, entering her body, snaking into her slot, slipping through the openings of her nipples. And then tugging. As the world turns, the imagery is wrenched from her blazing distended body. Or so she says; Dillon never questions the claims of a fellow artist, especially when she is his wife. He admires her accomplishments. It would have been madness to marry another cosmos-grouper, although when he was eleven he had just such a thing in mind. To share his destinies with the comet-harp girl. He’d be a widower now if he had. Down the chute, down the chute! What a flippy filther that one had been. And had wrecked a perfectly wonderful incantator, too, Peregrun Connelly. Could have been me. Could have been me. Marry outside your art, boys; avoid unblessworthy invidiousness.