Robert Silverberg - The World Inside

Siegmund was sexually precocious. He made his first erotic experiments in his seventh year, two years ahead of the urbmon norm. By the time he was nine he was familiar with the mechanics of intercourse, and consistently drew the highest marks in his physical relations class, doing so well that he was allowed to enroll with the eleven-year-olds. Puberty began for him at ten; at twelve he married Mamelon, who was more than a year his senior; shortly he had her pregnant and the Kluvers were on their way out of the Chicago newlywed dorm and off to an apartment of their own in Shanghai. Sex always has seemed agreeable to him for its own sake, but lately he has come to realize its value in building character.

He nightwalks assiduously. Young women bore him; he prefers those who are past twenty, like Principessa Mattern and Micaela Quevedo of Shanghai. Or Rhea Freehouse. Women of their experience tend to be better in bed than most adolescents, of course. Not that that is his prime concern. One slot isn’t ever that much better than another, and the pursuit of slot for its own sake is no longer very important to him; Mamelon can give him all the physical pleasure he needs. But he feels that these older women teach him a great deal about the world, sharing their experience with him in an implicit way. From them he draws subtle insights into the dynamics of adult life, the crises, conflicts, rewards, depths of character. He loves to learn. His own maturity, he is convinced, stems from his extensive sexual encounters with women of the older generation.

Mamelon tells him that he is generally believed to nightwalk even in Louisville. This is in fact not so. He had never dared. There are women up there who tempt him, women in their thirties and forties, even some younger ones, such as Nissim Shawke’s second wife, who is hardly older than Rhea. But the self-confidence that makes him seem so awesome to his peers vanishes at the thought of topping the wives of the administrators. It is bold enough for him to venture out of Shanghai to use women of Toledo or Paris. But Louisville? To slip into bed with Shawke’s wife, and then have Shawke himself arrive, smiling coldly, saluting, offering him a bowl of tingle-hello, Siegmund, are you having a good time? No. Maybe five years from now, when he’s living in Louisville himself. Not yet. But he does have Rhea Shawke Freehouse and some others of her stature. Not bad for a start.

In Nissim Shawke’s lavishly furnished office. There’s space to waste in Louisville. Shawke has no desk; he conducts his business, such that it is, from a gravity-web slung hammock fashion near the broad gleaming window. It is midmorning. The sun is high. From here one has a stunning view of the neighboring urbmons. Siegmund enters, having received a summons from Shawke five minutes before. Uneasily he meets Shawke’s cold gaze. Trying not to look too humble, too obsequious, too defensive, too hostile. “Closer,” Shawke orders. Playing his usual game. Siegmund crosses the immense room. He must stand virtually nose- to-nose with Shawke. A mockery of intimacy; instead of forcing Siegmund to remain at a distance, as one usually requires of subordinates, he brings him so close that it is impossible for Siegmund to keep his eyes locked on both of Shawke’s. The image wanders; the strain is painful. Sharp focus is lost and the features of the older man seem distorted. In a casual, barely audible voice, Shawke says, “Will you take care of this?” and flips a message cube to Siegmund. It is, Shawke explains, a petition from the civic council of Chicago requesting a liberalization of the urbmon’s sex-ratio restrictions. “They want more freedom to pick the sex of their children,” Shawke says. “Claiming that the present rules unnecessarily violate individual liberties and are generally unblessworthy. You can play it later for the details. What do you think, Siegmund?”

Siegmund examines his mind for whatever theoretical information it may contain on sex- ratio questions. Not much there. Work intuitively. What kind of advice does Shawke want? He usually wants to be told to leave things just as they are. All right. How, now, to justify the sex-ratio rules without seeming intellectually lazy? Siegmund improvises swiftly. His gift is an easy penetration into the logic of administration.

He says, “My impulse is to tell you to refuse the request.”

“Good. Why?”

“The basic dynamic thrust of an urban monad has to be toward stability and predictability, and away from randomness. The urbmon can’t expand physically, and our facilities for offloading surplus population aren’t all that flexible. So we need to program orderly growth, above all else.”

Shawke squints at him chillingly and says, “If you don’t mind the obscenity, let me tell you that you sound exactly like a propagandist for limiting births.”

“No!” Siegmund blurts. “God bless, no! Of course there’s got to be universal fertility!” Shawke is silently laughing at him again. Goading, baiting. A streak of sadism his main diversion in life. “What I was getting at,” Siegmund continues doggedly, “is that within the framework of a society that encourages unlimited reproduction, we’ve got to impose certain checks and balances to prevent disruptive destabilizing processes. If we allow people to pick the sex of their children themselves, we could very possibly get a generation that’s 65 percent male and 35 percent female. Or vice versa, depending on whims and fads of the moment. If that happened, how would we deal with the uncoupled surplus? Where would the extras go? Say, 15,000 males of the same age, all with no available mates. Not only would we have extraordinarily unblessworthy social tensions — imagine an epidemic of rape! — but those bachelors would be lost to the genetic pool. An unhealthy competitive aspect would establish itself. And such ancient customs as prostitution might have to be revived to meet the sexual needs of the unmated. The obvious consequences of an unbalanced sex ratio among a newborn generation are so serious that—”

“Obviously,” Shawke drawls, not hiding his boredom.

But Siegmund, wound up in an exposition of theory, cannot easily stop. “Freedom to choose your child’s sex would therefore be worse than having no sex-determination processes at all. In medieval times the ratios were governed by random biological events, and naturally tended to gravitate toward a 50-50 split, not taking into account such special factors as war or emigration, which of course would not concern us. But since we are able to control our society’s sex ratio, we must be careful not to allow the citizens to bring about an arbitrarily gross imbalance. We cannot afford the risk that in a given year an entire city may opt for female children, let’s say — and stranger phenomena of mass fancy than that have been known. On compassionate grounds we may allow a particular couple to request and receive permission for, say, a daughter as their next little, but such requests must be compensated for elsewhere in the city in order to ensure the desired overall 50-50 division, even if this causes some distress or inconvenience to certain citizens. Therefore I would recommend a continuation of our present policy of loose control over sex ratios, maintaining the established parameters for free choice but always working within an understood assumption that the good of the urbmon as a whole must be—”

“God bless, Siegmund, that’s enough.”

“Sir?”

“You’ve made your point. Over and over. I wasn’t asking for a dissertation, just an opinion.” Siegmund feels mashed. He steps back, unable to face Shawke’s stony, contemptuous eyes at such close range. “Yes, sir,” he murmurs. “What shall I do about this cube, then?”

“Prepare a reply to go out in my name. Covering basically what you’ve told me, only embellishing it a little, dragging in some scholarly authority. Talk to a sociocomputator and get him to give you a dozen impressive-sounding reasons why free choice of sex would probably lead to an imbalance. Get hold of some historian and ask for figures on what actually happened to society the last time sex-ratio freedom was allowed. Wrap it all up with an appeal to their loyalty to the larger community. Clear?”