Robert Silverberg - The World Inside

He must reach at least twenty floors in each direction now. And still spreading out. Tendrils of him going everywhere. Just the beginning. Intermingling his substance with the totality of the building.

With Alma rocking beneath him. Pelvis grinding against pelvis; he is dimly aware of her as she softly moans her pleasure. But only one atom of himself is occupied with her. The rest is roaming the halls of the cities that make up Urban Monad 116. Entering every room. Part of him up in Boston, part of him down in London, and all of him in Rome and Bombay as well. Hundreds of rooms. Thousands. The swarm of biped bees. He is fifty squalling tittles crammed into three London rooms. He is two doddering Bostonians entering upon their 5,000th sexual congress. He is a hot-blooded thirteen-year-old nightwalker prowling the 483rd floor. He is six swapping couples in a London dorm. Now he is into a wider range, reaching down to San Francisco, up to Nairobi. The farther he goes, the easier it gets. The hive. The mighty hive. He embraces Tokyo. He embraces Chicago. He embraces Prague. He touches Shanghai. He touches Vienna. He touches Warsaw. He touches Toledo. Paris! Reykjavik! Louisville! Louisville! Top to bottom, top to bottom! Now he is all 881,000 people on all thousand floors. His soul is stretched to its fullest. His skull is snapping. The images come and go across the screen of his mind, drifting films of reality, oily wisps of smoke bearing faces, eyes, fingers, genitals, smiles, tongues, elbows, profiles, sounds, textures. Gently they mesh and lock and drift apart. He is everywhere and everyone at once. God bless! For the first time he understands the nature of the delicate organism that is society; he sees the checks and balances, the quiet conspiracies of compromise that paste it all together. And it is wondrously beautiful. Tuning this vast city of many cities is just like tuning the cosmos group: everything must relate, everything must belong to everything else. The poet in San Francisco is part of the grubbo stoker in Reykjavik. The little snotty ambition-monger in Shanghai is part of the placid defeated Roman. How much of this, Dillon wonders, will stay with him when he comes down? His spirit whirls. He grooves on thousands of souls at once.

And the sexual thing. The hundred thousand copulatory transactions taking place behind his forehead. The spread thighs, the offered rumps, the parted lips. He loses his virginity; he takes a virginity; he surrenders to men, women, boys, girls; he is agressor and aggressed; he spurts ecstasy, he narrowly misses orgasm, he triumphantly impales, he shamefully suffers loss of erection, he enters, he is entered, he takes pleasure, he gives pleasure, he retreats from pleasure, he denies pleasure.

He rides the liftshafts of his mind. Going up! 501, 502, 503, 504, 505! 600! 700! 800! 900! He stands on the landing stage at the summit of the urbmon, staring out into the night. Towers all around him, the neighboring monads, 115, 117, 118, the whole crowd of them. Occasionally he has wondered what life is like in the other buildings that make up the Chipitts constellation. Now he does not care. There is wonder enough in 116. More than 800,000 intersecting lives. He has heard some of his friends say, in San Francisco, that it was an evil deed to change the world this way, to pile up thousands of people in a single colossal building, to create this beehive life. But how wrong those mutterers are! If they could only multiplex and get true perspective. Taste the rich complexity of our vertical existence. Going down! 480, 479, 476, 475! City upon city. Each floor holding a thousand puzzleboxes of pure delight. Hello, I’m Dillon Chrimes, can I be you for a while? And you? And you? And you? Are you happy? Why not? Have you seen this gorgeous world you live in?

What? You’d like a bigger room? You want to travel? You don’t like your littles? You’re bored with your work? You’re full of vague unfocused discontent? Idiot. Come up here with me, fly from floor to floor, see! And groove on it. And love it.

“Is it really good?” Alma asks. “Your eyes are shining!”

“I can’t describe it,” Dillon murmurs, soaring, threading himself down the service core to the levels below Reykjavik, then floating up to Louisville again, and simultaneously intersecting every point between root and tip. An ocean of broiling minds. A sizzle of snarled identities. He wonders what time it is. The trip is supposed to last five hours. His body is still joined to Alma’s, which leads him to think he has not been up more than ten or fifteen minutes, but perhaps it is more than that. Things are becoming very tactile now. As he drifts through the building he touches walls, floors, screens, faces, fabrics. He suspects he may be coming down. But no. No. Still on his way up. The simultaneity increases. He is flooded with percepts. People moving, talking, sleeping, dancing, coupling, bending, reaching, eating, reading. I am all of you. You are all parts of me. He can focus sharply on individual identities. Here is Electra, here is Nat the spectrum-rider, here is Mamelon Kluver, here is a tight-souled sociocomputator named Charles Mattern, here is a Louisville administrator, here is a Warsaw grubbo, here is. Here is. Here are. Here am I. The whole blessing building.

Oh what a beautiful place. Oh how I love it here. Oh this is the real thing. Oh!

When he comes down, he sees the dark-haired woman curled in a comer of the sleeping platform, asleep. He cannot remember her name. He touches her thigh and she awakes quickly, eyes fluttering. “Hello,” she says. “Welcome back.”

“What’s your name?”

“Alma. Clune. Your eyes are all red.”

He nods. He feels the weight of the whole building on him: 500 floors jamming down on his head, 499 floors pressing up against his feet. The meeting place of the two forces is somewhere close to his pancreas. If he does not leave here quickly, his internal organs must surely pop. Only shreds of his trip remain. Straggly streamers of debris clutter his mind. Vaguely he feels columns of ants trekking from level to level behind his eyes.

Alma reaches for him. To comfort him. He shakes her off and hunts for his clothing. A cone of silence surrounds him. He will go back to Electra, he thinks, and try to tell her where he has been and what has been happening to him, and then perhaps he will cry and feel better. He leaves without thanking Alma for her hospitality and looks for a dropshaft. Instead he finds a liftshaft, and somehow, pretending it is an accident, he gets off at 530. Heading for Rome’s sonic center. Dark there. The instruments still on stage. Quietly he slips down in front of the vibrastar. Switches it on. His eyes are wet. He dredges up some phantom images of his trip. The faces, the thousand floors. The ecstasy. Oh what a beautiful place. Oh how I love it here. Oh this is the real thing. Oh! Certainly he felt that way. But no longer. A thin sediment of doubt is all that remains. Asking himself: Is this how it was meant to be? Is this how it has to be? Is this the best we can do? This building. This mighty hive. Dillon’s hands caress the projectrons, which feel prickly and hot; he depresses them at random and sour colors drift out of the instrument. He cuts in the audio and gets sounds that remind him of the shifting of old bones within flabby flesh. What went wrong? He should have expected it. You go all the way up, then you come all the way down. But why does down have to be so far down? He cannot bear to play. After ten minutes he switches the vibrastar off and goes out. He will walk to San Francisco. 160 floors down. That’s not too many levels; he’ll be there before dawn.

Jason Quevedo lives in Shanghai, though just barely: his apartment is on the 761st floor, and if he lived only one level lower he would be in Chicago, which is no place for a scholar. His wife Micaela frequently tells him that their lowly status in Shanghai is a direct reflection of the quality of his work. Micaela is the sort of wife who often says things like that to her husband.