Robert Silverberg - The World Inside

“No fumarї” Electra asks. She has been studying ancient languages lately. “їPor queї”

“Working tonight. It spills the galactic juices if I indulge this early.”

“Mind if I?”

“Suit yourself.”

She takes a fume, nipping the cap neatly with a daggered forefingernail. Quickly her face flushes, her eyes dilate. A lovable quality about her: she is such an easy turnon. She puffs vapors at the baby, who chortles, while the maintenance slot’s field buzzes in a solemn attempt to purify the child’s atmosphere. “ Grazie mille, mama! ” Electra says, mimicking ventriloquy. “ E molto bello! E delicioso! Was fur schцnes Wetter! Quella gioia! ” She dances around the room, chanting fragments of exclamations in strange tongues, and tumbles, laughing, into the deflated sleeping platform. Her frilly frock blows up; he sees an auburn pubic glow and is tempted to top her despite his resolutions, but he regains his austerity and merely blows her a kiss. As if perceiving the phases of his mental processes, she piously closes her thighs and covers herself. He switches on the screen, selecting the abstract channel, and patterns blaze on the wall. “I love you,” he tells her. “Can I have something to eat?”

She breakfasts him. Afterward she goes out, saying that she is scheduled to visit the blessman this afternoon. He is privately glad to see her go, for just now her vitality is too much for him. He must slide into the mood of the concert, which requires some spartan denials from him. Once she has gone, he programs the terminal for a reverberant oscillation and, as the resonant tones march across his skull, he slips lightly into the proper frame of mind. The baby, meanwhile, remains in its slot, enjoying the best of care. He thinks nothing of leaving it alone when, at 1600 hours, he must go off to Rome to set up for the evening’s performance.

The liftshaft shoots him 160 levels heavenward. When he gets off, he is in Rome. Crowded halls, tight faces. The people here are mostly minor bureaucrats, a middle echelon of failed functionaries, those who would never get to Louisville except to deliver a report. They are not smart enough to hope for Chicago or Shanghai or Edinburgh. Here they will stay in this good gray city, frozen in hallowed stasis, doing dehumanized jobs that any computer could handle forty times as well. Dillon feels a cosmic pity for everyone who is not an artist, but he pities the people of Rome most of all, sometimes. Because they are nothing. Because they can use neither their brains nor their muscles. Crippled souls; walking zeros; better off down the chute. A Roman slams right into him as he stands outside the liftshaft bank, considering these things. Male, maybe forty, all the spirit drained from his eyes. The walking dead. The running dead. “Sorry,” the man mumbles, and speeds on. “Truth!” Dillon cries after him. “Love! Loosen up! Fuck a lot!” He laughs. But what good does it do; the Roman will not laugh with him. Others of his kind come rushing down the corridor, their leaden bodies absorbing the last vibrations of Dillon’s exclamations. “Truth! Love!” Blurred sounds, fading, graying, going. Gone. I will entertain you tonight, he tells them silently. I will drive you out of your wretched minds and you will love me for it. If I could only burn your brains! If I could only singe your souls!

He thinks of Orpheus. They would tear me apart, he realizes, if I ever really reached them.

He saunters toward the sonic center.

Pausing by the elbow bend of the corridor, still halfway around the building from the auditorium, Dillon feels a sudden ecstatic awareness of the splendor of the urbmon. A frenzied epiphany: he sees it as a spike suspended between heaven and earth. And he is almost at the midway point right now, with a little more than five hundred floors over his head, a little less than five hundred floors under his feet. People moving around, copulating, eating, giving birth, doing a million blessworthy things, each one out of 800-how-many- thousand traveling on his own orbit. Dillon loves the building. Right now he feels he could almost soar on its multiplicity the way others might soar on a drug. To be at the equator, to drink the divine equilibrium — oh, yes, yes! But of course there is a way to experience the whole complexity of the urbmon in one wild rush of information. He has never tried it; he is not really heavy on groovers, and has stayed away from the more elaborate drugs, the ones that open your mind so wide that anything can wander in. Nevertheless, here in the middle of the urbmon, he knows that this is the night to try the multiplexer. After the performance. To pop the pill that will allow him to drop the mental barriers, to let the full immensity of Urban Monad 116 interpenetrate his consciousness. Yes. He will go to the 500th floor to do it. If the performance goes well. Nightwalking in Bombay. He really should turn on in the city where tonight’s concert will be held, but Rome goes no farther down than the 521st floor, and he must go to the 500th. For the mystic symmetry of the thing. Even though it is still inexact. Where is the true midpoint in a building of a thousand floors? Somewhere between 499 and 500, no? But the 500th floor will have to do. We learn to live with approximations.

He enters the sonic center.

A fine new auditorium, three stories high, with a toadstool of a stage in the center and audience webs strung concentrically around it. Lightglow drifts in the air. The mouths of speakers, set into the domed rich-textured ceilings, pucker and gape. A warm room, a good room, placed here by the divine mercy of Louisville to bring a little joy into the lives of these bleak juiceless Romans. There is no better hall for a cosmos group in the entire urbmon. The other members of the group are here already, tuning in. The comet-harp, the incantator, the orbital diver, the gravity-drinker, the doppler-inverter, the spectrum-rider. Already the room trembles with shimmering plinks of sound and jolly blurts of color, and a shaft of pure no- referent texture, abstract and immanent, is rising from the doppler-inverter’s central cone. Everyone waves to him. “Late, man,” they say, and “Where you been?” and “We thought you were skimming out,” and he says, “I’ve been in the halls, peddling love to the Romans,” which shatters them into strands of screeching laughter. He clambers onto the stage. His instrument sits untended near the perimeter, its lattices dangling, its lovely gaudy skin unilluminated. A lifting machine stands by, waiting to help him put it in its proper place. The machine brought the vibrastar to the auditorium; it would also tune it in for him, if he asked it to, but of course he will not do that. Musicians have a mystique about tuning in their own instruments. Even though it will take him at least two hours to do it, and the machine could do it in ten minutes. Maintenance workers and other humbles of the grubbo class have the same mystique. Not strange: one must battle constantly against one’s own obsolescence if one is going to go on thinking of oneself as having a purpose in life.

“Over here,” Dillon tells the machine.

Delicately it brings his vibrastar to the output node and makes the connection. Dillon could not possibly have moved the immense instrument. He does not mind letting machines do the things humans were never meant to do, like lifting three-ton loads. Dillon puts his hands on the manipulatrix and feels the power thrumming through the keyboard. Good. “Go,” he tells the machine, and silently it slides away. He kneads and squeezes the projections of the manipulatrix. As if milking them. Sensual pleasure in making contact with the machine. A little orgasm with every crescendo. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

“Tuning in!” he warns the other musicians.