Robert Silverberg - The World Inside

The cheering continues.

Fine. Fine. We are great artists. Now I’ve got to get out of here, before I come down from it all.

He never socializes with the rest of the group after a performance. They have all discovered that the less they see of each other in leisure hours, the more intimate their professional collaboration will be; there is no intragroup friendship, not even intragroup sex. They all feel that would be death, any kind of coupling, hetero, homo, triple-up — save that for outsiders. They have their music to unite them. So he goes off by himself. The audience starts to flow toward the exits, and, without saying good night to anybody, Dillon steps into the artists’ trap door and makes his escape one level down. His clothes are stiff and wet with perspiration, clammy, uncomfortable. He must do something about that quickly. Prowling along the 529th floor for a dropshaft, he opens the first apartment door he comes to and finds a couple, sixteen, seventeen years old, squatting before the screen. He naked, she wearing only breastcoils, both of them plainly soaring on one of the harder ones, but not so high that they can’t recognize him. “Dillon Chrimes!” the girl gasps, her squeal waking two or three littles.

“Hey, hello,” he says. “I just have to use the cleanser, okay? Don’t let me disturb you. I don’t even want to talk, you know? I’m still way up.” He strips off his sodden clothes and gets under the cleanser. It hums and rumbles and peels his grime from him. He lets it work on his clothes next. The girl is creeping toward him. She has the breastcoils off; the white imprints of the metal on her pink dangling flesh are turning rapidly red. Kneeling before him. Hand goes to his thighs. Her lips heading for his loins. “No,” he says. “Don’t.”

“No?”

“I can’t do it here.”

“But why?”

“Just wanted to use the cleanser. Couldn’t stand my own stink. I’ve got to do my nightwalking on 500 tonight.” Her fingers sliding between his legs. Gently he pries them. Back into his clothing; the girl looks on, astonished, as he covers himself.

“You aren’t going to?” she asks.

“Not here. Not here.” She continues to blink at him as he goes out. Her look of shock saddens him. Tonight he must go to the middle of the building, but tomorrow, for sure, he will come to her, and he’ll explain everything then. He makes a note of the room number. 52908. Nightwalking is supposed to be random, but to hell with that; he owes her a thrill. Tomorrow.

In the hall he finds a grooves dispenser and requisitions his pill, tapping his metabolic coefficient out on the console. The machine performs the necessary calculations and delivers a five-hour dose, timed to go off in twelve minutes. He swallows it and steps into the dropshaft.

Floor 500.

As close to halfway as he can get. A metaphysical fancy, but why not? He has not lost the capacity to play games. We artists remain happy because we remain as children. Eleven minutes to his high. He goes down the corridor, opening doors. In the first room he finds a man, a woman, another man. “Sorry,” he calls. In the second room three girls. Momentarily tempting, but only momentarily. Anyway, they look fully busied with each other. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” In the third room a middle-aged couple; they give him a hopeful stare, but he backs out.

Fourth time lucky. A dark-haired girl, alone, pouting a little. Obviously her husband is out nightwalking and no one has come to her, a statistical fluke that distresses her. Early twenties, Dillon guesses, with fine tapering nose, glossy eyes, elegant breasts, olive skin. The flesh over her eyelids is puffy, which may become a flaw of appearance ten years from now but which gives her a sultry, sensual look at the moment. She has been brooding for hours, he guesses, because her sullenness does not evaporate until he has actually been in the room fifteen seconds or so; she is slow to realize that she is being nightwalked with. “Hello,” he says. “Smile? Won’t you smile a little?”

“I know you. The cosmos group?”

“Dillon Chrimes, yes. On the vibrastar. We’re playing Rome tonight.”

“Playing Rome and nightwalking Bombay?”

“What the hell. I have philosophical reasons. To be in the middle of the building, you know? Or as close as I can come. Don’t ask me to explain.” He looks around the room. Six riffles. One of them, awake, is at least nine years old, a skinny girl with her mother’s olive skin. Mother isn’t as young as she looks, then. At least twenty-five, maybe. Dillon doesn’t mind. In a little while he’ll be groping the whole urbmon, anyway, all the ages, sexes, shapes. He says, “I have to tell you about my trip. I’m on a multiplexes. It’ll hit me in six minutes.”

She puts her hand to her lips. “We don’t have much time, then. You ought to be inside me before you go up.”

“Is that the way they work?”

“Don’t you know?”

“I’ve never gone that way before,” he confesses. “Never got around to it.”

“Neither have I. I didn’t think anybody actually did take multiplexers, really. But I’ve heard of what you’re supposed to do.” She is disrobing as she talks. Heavy breasts, big dark circles around the nipples. Her legs strangely thin; when she stands straight the insides of her thighs are far apart. There is a folkmyth of some sort about girls built that way, but Dillon cannot remember it. He drops his clothes. The drug has started to get to him, several minutes ahead of schedule-the walls are shimmering, the lights look fuzzy. Odd. Unless the fact that he was already way up from performing should have been calculated into the dosage request. The metabolism turned to high, maybe, on nothing but sound and light. Well, no harm done. He moves toward the sleeping platform. “What’s your name?” he asks.

“Alma Clune.”

“I like the sound of that. Alma.” She takes him into her arms. This will not be an extraordinary erotic experience for her, he fears. Once the multiplexes takes hold, he doubts that he can concentrate properly on her needs, and in any case the time element has made it necessary to skip all foreplay. But she seems to be understanding. She will not spoil his trip. “Get in,” she says. “It’s all right. I get wet fast there.” He enters her. Her tongue against his; her sinewy thighs encircling him. He covers her body with his. “Are you grooving yet?” she asks.

He is silent a moment. In and out, in and out. “I feel it starting,” he tells her. “It’s like having two girls at once. I’m getting echoes.” Tension. He doesn’t want to wreck everything by coming before the effect hits him. On the other hand, if she’s the quick-coming type, he’d be happy to let her have a spasm or two; the multiplexing must still be ninety seconds away. All these calculations chill him. And then they become pointless. “It’s happening,” he whispers. “Oh, god, here I go up!”

“Easy,” Alma murmurs. “Don’t rush anything. Slow . . . slow… You’re doing fine. You want this one to last. Don’t worry about me. Just go on up.”

In and out. In and out. And multiplexing now. His spirit is spreading out. The drug makes him psychosensitive; it breaks down his brain’s chemical defenses against direct telepathic input, so that he can perceive the sensory intake of those around him. Reaching wider and wider, moment by moment. At the full high, they say, everyone’s eyes and ears become your own; you pick up an infinity of responses, you are everywhere in the building at once. Is it true? Are other minds pouring their intake through his? It does seem so. He watches the fluttering fiery mantle of his soul engulf and absorb Alma, so that now he is face up as well as face down, and each time he thrusts deep into her hot cavern he can also feel the blunt sword sliding into his own vitals. That’s just the beginning. He is spreading over Alma’s tittles now. The unfleeced nine-year-old. The gurgling baby. He is six children and their mother. How easy this is! He is the family next door. Eight tittles, mother, nightwalker from the 495th floor. He extends his reach upward one level. And downward. And along the corridors. In dreamy multiplexication he is taking possession of the whole building. Layers of drifting images enshroud him: 500 floors above his head, 499 below, and he sees all 999 of them as a column of horizontal striations, tiny notches on a tall shaft. With ants. And he is all the ants at once. Why has he never done this before? To become an entire urbmon!