Robert Silverberg - The World Inside

Jason spends most of his working time down in Pittsburgh. where the archives are. He is a historian and needs to consult the documents, the records of how it used to be. He does his research in a clammy little cubicle on the urbmon’s 185th floor almost in the middle of Pittsburgh. He does not really have to work down there, since anything in the archives can easily be piped up to the data terminal in his own apartment. But he feels it is a matter of professional pride to have an office where he can file and arrange and handle the source materials. He said as much when he was pulling strings to have the office assigned to him: “The task of recreating previous eras is a delicate and complex one, which must be performed under optimal circumstances, or—”

The truth is that if he didn’t escape from Micaela and their five littles every day, he’d go flippo. That is, accumulated frustration and humiliation would cause him to commit nonsocial acts, perhaps violent ones. He is aware that there is no room for the nonsocial person in an urban monad. He knows that if he loses his temper and behaves in a seriously unblessworthy way they will simply throw him down the chute and turn his mass into energy. So he is careful.

He is a short, soft-spoken man with mild green eyes and thinning sandy hair. “Your meek exterior is deceptive,” lovely Mamelon Kluver told him throatily at a party last summer. “Your type is like a sleeping volcano. You explode suddenly, astonishingly, passionately.” He thinks she may be right. He fears the possibilities.

He has been desperately in love with Mamelon Kluver for perhaps the last three years, and certainly since the night of that party. He has never dared to touch her. Mamelon’s husband is the celebrated Siegmund Kluver, who though not yet fifteen is universally recognized as one of the urbmon’s future leaders. Jason is not afraid that Siegmund would object. In an urban monad, naturally, no man has a right to withhold his wife from anyone who desires her. Nor is Jason afraid of what Micaela would say. He knows his privileges. He is simply afraid of Mamelon. And perhaps of himself.

For ref. only. Urbmon sex mores.

Univ. sex. accessibility. Trace decline of proprietary marriage, end of adultery concept. Nightwalkers: when first socially acceptable? Limit of allowable frustration: how determined? Sex as panacea. Sex as compensation for lessened quality of life under urbmon conditions. Query: was quality of life really lessened by triumph of urbmon system? (Careful- beware the chute!) Separation of sex procreation. Value of max. interchange of partners in high-density culture. Problem: what is .still forbidden (any thing?). Examine taboo on extracity nightwalking. How powerful? How widely observed? Check effects of univ. permiss. on contemp. fiction. Loss of dramatic tension? Erosion of raw material of nary. conflict? Query: is urbmon moral struc. amoral, postmoral, per-, im-?

Jason dictates such memoranda whenever and wherever some new structural hypothesis enters his mind. These are thoughts that come to him during a nightwalking excursion on the 155th floor, in Tokyo. He is with a thickset young brunette named Gretl when the sequence of ideas arrives. He has been fondling her for some minutes and she is panting, ready, her hips pumping, her eyes narrowed to steamy slits.

“Excuse me,” he says, and reaches across her heavy quivering breasts for a stylus. “I have to write something down.” He activates the data terminal’s input screen and punches the button that will relay a printout of his memorandum to his desk at his research cubicle in Pittsburgh. Then, quickly pursing his lips and scowling, he begins to make his notations.

He frequently goes nightwalking, but never in his own city of Shanghai. Jason’s one audacity: boldly he flouts the tradition that one should stay close to home during one’s nocturnal prowls. No one will punish him for his unconventional behavior, since it is merely a violation of accepted custom, not of urban law. No one will even criticize him to his face for doing it. Yet his wanderings give him the mild thrill of doing the forbidden. Jason explains his habit to himself by saying that he prefers the crosscultural enrichment that comes from sleeping with women of other cities. Privately he suspects that he is just uneasy about getting mixed up with women he knows, such as Mamelon Kluver. Especially Mamelon Kluver.

So on his nightwalking nights he takes the dropshafts far into the depths of the building, to such cities as Pittsburgh or Tokyo, even to squalid Prague or grubby Reykjavik. He pushes open strange doors, luckless by statute, and takes his place on the sleeping platforms of unknown women smelling of mysterious lower-class vegetables. By law they must embrace him willingly. “I am from Shanghai,” he tells them, and they go “Ooooh!” in awe, and he mounts them tigerishly, contemptuously, swollen with status.

Breasty Gretl waits patiently while Jason records his latest notions. Then he turns toward her again. Her husband, bloated on whatever the local equivalent of tingle or mindblot may be, lies belly-up at the far side of the sleeping platform, ignoring them. Gretl’s large dark eyes glow with admiration. “You Shanghai boys sure got brains,” she says, as Jason pounces and takes her in a single fierce thrust.

Later he returns to the 761st floor. Wraiths flit through the dim corridors: other citizens of Shanghai, back from their own nightwalking rounds. He enters his apartment. Jason has forty-five square meters of floor space, not really enough for a man with a wife and five Tittles, but he does not complain. God bless, you take what you get: others have less. Micaela is asleep, or pretends to be. She is a long-legged, tawny-skinned woman of twenty-three, still quite attractive, though quirky lines are beginning to appear in her face. She frowns too much. She lies half uncovered, her long black glossy hair spread out wildly around her. Her breasts are small but perfect; Jason compares them favorably to the udders of Tokyo’s Gretl. He and Micaela have been married nine years. Once he loved her a great deal, before he discovered the gritty residue of bitter shrewishness at the bottom of her soul.

She smiles an inward smile, stirs, still sleeping, brushes her hair back from her eyes. She has the look of a woman who has just had a thoroughly satisfactory sexual experience. Jason has no way of knowing whether some nightwalker visited Micaela tonight while he was gone, and, of course, he cannot ask. (Search for evidence? Stains on the sleeping platform? Stickiness on her thighs? Don’t be barbaric!) He suspects that even if no one had come to her tonight, she would try to make him think that someone had; and if someone had come and had given her only modest pleasure, she would nevertheless smile for her husband’s benefit as though she had been embraced by Zeus. He knows his wife’s style.

The children seem peaceful. They range in age from two to eight. Soon he, and Micaela will have to think about having another. Five tittles is a fair-sized family, but Jason understands his duty to serve life by creating life. When one ceases to grow, one begins to die; it is true of a human being and also of the population of an urban monad, of an urbmon constellation, of a continent, of a world. God is life and life is god.

He lies down beside his wife.

He sleeps.

He dreams that Micaela has been sentenced to the chute for countersocial behavior.

Down she goes! Mamelon Kluver makes a condolence call. “Poor Jason,” she murmurs. Her pale skin is cool against him. The musky fragrance of her. The elegance of her features. The look of total mastery of self. Not even seventeen; how can she be so imperiously complete? “Help me dispose of Siegmund and we’ll belong to each other,” Mamelon says. Eyes bright, mischievous, goading him to be her creature. “Jason,” she whispers. “Jason, Jason, Jason.” Her tone a caress. Her hand on his manhood. He wakes, trembling, sweating, horrified, half an inch from messy ecstasy. He sits up and goes through one of the forgiveness modes for improper thoughts. God bless, he thinks, god bless, god bless, god bless. I did not mean such things. It was my mind. My monstrous mind free of shackles. He completes the spiritual exercise and lies down once more. He sleeps and dreams more harmless dreams.