Robert Silverberg - The World Inside

Micaela looks rewardingly worried. “Where have you been?” she asks the instant he appears.

“Oh, around. Around.”

“You weren’t working late. I called you there. I had tracers on you.”

“As if I were a lost boy.”

“It wasn’t like you. You don’t just disappear in the middle of the afternoon.”

“Have you had dinner yet?”

“I’ve been waiting,” she says sourly.

“Let’s eat, then. I’m starved.”

“You won’t explain?”

“Later.” Working hard at an air of mystery.

He scarcely notices his food. Afterward, he spends the usual time with the littles. They go off to sleep. He rehearses what he will say to Micaela, arranging the words in various patterns. He tries inwardly to practice a self-satisfied smirk. For once he will be the aggressor. For once he will hurt her.

She has become absorbed in the screen transmission. Her earlier anxiety about his disapperance seems to have vanished. Finally he is forced to say, “Do you want to discuss what I did today?”

She looks up. “What you did? Oh, you mean this afternoon?” She no longer cares, it appears. “Well?”

“I went to Mamelon Kluver.”

“Daywalking? You?”

“Me.”

“Was she good?”

“She was superb,” he says, puzzled by Micaela’s air of unconcern. “She was everything I imagined she’d be.”

Micaela laughs.

“Is it funny?” he asks.

“It isn’t. You are.”

“Tell me what you mean by that.”

“All these years you deny yourself nightwalking in Shanghai, and go off to the grubbos. Now, for the stupidest possible reason, you finally allow yourself Mamelon—”

“You knew I never nightwalked here?”

“Of course I knew,” she says. “Women talk. I ask my friends. You never topped any of them. So I started to wonder. I had some checking done on you. Warsaw. Prague. Why did you have to go down there, Jason?”

“That doesn’t matter now.”

“What does?”

“That I spent the afternoon on Mamelon’s sleeping platform.”

“You idiot.”

“Bitch.”

“Failure.”

“Sterilizer!”

“Grubbo!”

“Wait,” he says. “Wait. Why did you go to Siegmund?”

“To annoy you,” she admits. “Because he’s a rung-grabber, and you aren’t. I wanted to get you excited. To make you move.”

“So you violated all custom and aggressively daywalked with the man of your choice. Not pretty, Micaela. Not at all feminine, I might add.”

“That keeps things even, then. A female husband and a mannish wife.”

“You’re quick with the insults, aren’t you?”

“Why did you go to Mamelon?”

“To get you angry. To pay you back for Siegmund. Not that I give a damn about your letting him top you. We can take that stuff for granted, I think. But your motives. Using sex as a weapon. Deliberately playing the wrong role. Trying to stir me up. It was ugly, Micaela.”

“And your motives? Sex as revenge? Nightwalking is supposed to reduce tensions, not create them. Regardless of the time of day you do it. You want Mamelon, fine; she’s a lovely girl. But to come here and brag about it, as if you think I care whose slot you plow—”

“Don’t be a filther, Micaela.”

“Listen to him! Listen to him! Puritan! Moralist!”

The littles begin to cry. They have never heard shouting before. Micaela makes a hushing gesture at them behind her back.

“At least I have morals,” he says. “What about you and your brother Michael?”

“What about us?”

“Do you deny you’ve let him top you?”

“When we were kids, yes, a couple of times,” she says, flushing. “So? You never put it up your sisters, I suppose?”

“Not only when you were kids. You’re still making it with him.”

“I think you’re insane, Jason.”

“You deny it?”

“Michael hasn’t touched me in ten years. Not that I see anything wrong with his doing it, except that it hasn’t happened. Oh, Jason, Jason, Jason! You’ve spent so much time mucking around in your archives that you’ve turned yourself into a twentieth-century man. You’re jealous, Jason. Worried about incest, no less. And whether I obey the rules about female initiative. What about you and your Warsaw nightwalking? Don’t we have a propinquity custom? Are you imposing a double standard, Jason? You do what you like, and I observe custom? And upset about Siegmund. Michael. You’re jealous, Jason. Jealous. We abolished jealousy a hundred fifty years ago!”

“And you’re a social climber. A would-be slicko. You aren’t satisfied with Shanghai, you want Louisville. Well, ambition is obsolete too, Micaela. Besides, you were the one who started this whole business of using sex to score debating points. By going to Siegmund and making sure I knew it. You think I’m a puritan? You’re a throwback, Micaela. You’re full of pre-urbmon morality.”

“If I am, I got that way from you,” she cries.

“No. I got that way from you. You cant’ the poison around in you! When you—”

The door opens. A man looks in. Charles Mattern, from 799. The sleek, fast-talking sociocomputator; Jason has worked with him on several research projects. Evidently he has overheard the unblessworthy furor going on in here, for he is frowning in embarrassment. “God bless,” he says softly, “I’m just out nightwalking, and I thought I’d—”

“No,” Micaela screams. “Not now! Go away!”

Mattern shows his shock. He starts to say something, then shakes his head and ducks out of the room, muttering an apology for his intrusion.

Jason is appalled. To turn away a legitimate nightwalker? To order him out of the room?

“Savage!” he cries, and slaps her across the face. “How could you have done that?”

She recoils, rubbing her cheek. “Savage? Me? And you hitting? I could have you thrown down the chute for—”

“I could have you thrown down the chute for—”

He stops. They both are silent.

“You shouldn’t have sent Mattern away,” he says quietly, a little later.

“You shouldn’t have hit me.”

“I was worked up. Some rules just mustn’t be broken. If he reports you—”

“He won’t. He could see we were having an argument. That I wasn’t exactly available to him right then.”

“Even having an argument,” he says. “Screaming like that. Both of us. At the very least it could get us sent to the moral engineers.”

“I’ll fix things with Mattern, Jason. Leave it to me. I’ll get him back here and explain, and I’ll give him the topping of his life.” She laughs gently. “You dumb flippo.” There is affection in her voice. “We probably sterilized half the floor with our screeching. What was the sense, Jason?”

“I was trying to make you understand something about yourself. Your essentially archaic psychological makeup, Micaela. If you could only see yourself objectively, the pettiness of a lot of your motivations lately — I don’t want to start another fight, I’m just trying to explain things now—”

“And your motivations, Jason? You’re just as archaic as I am. We’re both throwbacks. Our heads are both full of primitive moralistic reflexes. Isn’t that so? Can’t you see it?”

He walks away from her. Standing with his back to her, he fingers the rubbing-node set into the wall near the cleanser, and lets some of the tensions flow from him into it. “Yes,” he says after a long while. “Yes, I see it. We have a veneer of urbmonism. But underneath — jealousy, envy, possessiveness—”

“Yes. Yes.”

“And you see what discovering this does to my work, of course?” He manages a chuckle. “My thesis that selective breeding has produced a new species of human in the urbmons? Maybe so, but I don’t belong to the species. You don’t belong. Maybe they do, some of them. But how many? How many, really?”