Robert Silverberg - The World Inside

Judging him. Testing his compatibility: will he fit in with the elite, or must he be relegated to the ranks of the drudges, the middle-level bureaucracy? Siegmund sees himself demoted to Rome. His ambitions take over. If knowing how to play is the criterion for admission, he’ll play. Grins. “I’d like some tingle,” he says. Stick to what you know you can handle.

“Tingle, coming up!”

He makes the effort. A golden-hair nymph offers him the tingle bowl; he gulps, pinches her, gulps again. The sparkling fluid popping in his throat. A third gulp. Swill it down; you aren’t paying! They cheer him. Rhea nods approval. Clothes are coming off around the room. The amusements of the masters. There must be fifty people in here now. A clap on the back. Kipling Freehouse. Shouting, deafeningly hearty: “You’re all right, boy! Worried about you, you know! So serious, so dedicated! Not bad virtues to have, eh, but there’s got to be more, you follow? A playful spirit. Eh? Eh?”

“Yes, sir. I know what you mean, sir.”

Siegmund dives into the heap. Breasts, thighs, buttocks, tongues. Musky womansmells. A fountain of sensation. Someone pops something into his mouth. He swallows, and moments later feels the back of his skull lift. Laughter. He is being kissed. Forced down against the carpet by his assailant. Gropes and feels small hard breasts. Rhea? Yes. And her husband Paolo closing in on the other side of him. Music blaring from above. In the tangle he discovers himself sharing a girl with Nissim Shawke. A cold wink from him; an icy grin. Shawke testing his capacity for pleasure. Everyone watching him, seeing if he’s decadent enough to deserve promotion to their midst. Let yourself go! Let everything go!

Urgently he compels himself to revel. Much depends on this. Below him 974 wondrous floors of urbmon and if he wants to stay up here he must know how to play. Disillusioned that the administrators are like this. So common, so vulgar, the cheap hedonism of a ruling class. They could be Florentine dukes, Parisian grandees, Borgias, drunken boyars. Unable to accept this image of them, Siegmund constructs a fantasy: they have staged this revel solely to test his character, to determine whether he is indeed merely a dreary drudge or if he has the breadth of spirit a Louisville man needs. Folly to think they spend their priceless time swilling and topping like this; but they are flexible, they can enjoy life, they turn from work to play with equal gusto. And if he wants to live among them he must demonstrate equal many-sidedness. He will. He will.

His furry brain swirls with conflicting chemical messages.

“Let’s sing!” he yells desperately. “Everybody sing!” Bellowing:

They sing with him. He cannot hear his own voice. Dark eyes peer into his. “God bless,” a long rippling lass murmurs. “You’re cute. The famous Siegmund Kluver.” She belches tingle- bubbles.

“We’ve met before, haven’t we?”

“Once, I think, in Nissim’s office. Scylla Shawke.”

The great man’s wife. Startling in her beauty. Young. Young. No more than twenty-five. He had heard a rumor that the first Mrs. Shawke, Rhea’s mother, went down the chute, flippo. Someday he must check on the truth of that. Scylla Shawke wriggles close to him. Her soft black hair dangling in his face. He is almost paralyzed with fear. The consequences; can this be going too far? Recklessly he grabs her and plunges his hand into her tunic. She cooperates. Full warm breasts. Soft moist lips. Can he fail this test, by an excess of shamelessness? Never mind. Never mind. Happy Somatic Fulfillment Day! Her body grinds against his, and he realizes, in shock, that it would be no problem to top her right now, here, in this heaving mass of high-level humanity on the floor of Kipling Freehouse’s sprawling office. Too far, too fast. He slides free of her grasp. Catching the single flicker of disappointment and reproach in her eyes at his withdrawal. Rolls over: Rhea. “Why didn’t you?” she whispers. And Siegmund says, “I couldn’t,” just before another girl, straddling him, kneels and pours something sweet and sticky into his mouth. He whirls within his skull. “It was a mistake,” Rhea tells him. “She was being set up for you.” Her words fracture and the pieces rebound, soaring high and drifting about the room. Something strange has happened to the lights; everything has become prismatic, and from all plane surfaces an eerie radiance is streaming. Siegmund crawls through the tumult, searching for Scylla Shawke. Instead he finds Nissim.

“I’d like to discuss the business of the Chicago sex-ratio petition with you now,” the administrator tells him.

When Siegmund returns to his apartment hours later, he finds Mamelon pacing grimly about. “Where have you been?” she demands. “Somatic Fulfillment Day’s almost over. I’ve called the access nexus, I’ve had tracers all over the building, I’ve-”

“I was in Louisville,” Siegmund says. “Kipling Freehouse had a party.” Stumbles past her. Drops face-down on the sleeping platform. First come the dry sobs, then the tears, and by the time they stop flowing Somatic Fulfillment Day might just as well be over.

Interface Crew Nine works in a flat, high strip of gloomy space stretching along the outside of the service core of Urban Monad 116 from the 700th to the 730th floors. Though the work area is lofty, it is scarcely more than five meters deep, a skimpy envelope through which dust motes dance toward sucking filters. Standing within it, the ten men of Interface Crew Nine are sandwiched between the urbmon’s outlayer of residential and commercial sectors and its hidden heart, the service core, in which the computers are housed.

The crewmen rarely enter the core itself. They function on its periphery, keeping watch over the looming wall that bears the access nodes of the building’s master computer nexus. Soft green and yellow lights gleam on the nodes, constantly relaying information about the health of the unseen mechanisms.-The men of Interface Crew Mine serve as the ultimate backup for the platoons of self-regulating devices that monitor the workings of the computers. Whenever heavy load causes some facet of the control system to sag, the crewmen quickly prime it so that it can go on bearing its burden. It is not difficult work, but it is vital to the life of the entire gigantic building.

Each day at 1230, when their shift-time begins, Michael Statler and his nine crewmates crawl through the Edinburgh irishatch on 700 and make their way into the perpetual dusk of the interface to take up their primer stations. Pushchairs carry them to their assigned levels — Michael starts by monitoring the nodes spanning floors 709 to 712 — and as the day progresses they slide up and down the interface to the changing zones of trouble.

Michael is twenty-three years old. He has been a computer primer in this interface crew for eleven years. By now the work is purely automatic for him; he has become simply an extension of the machinery. Drifting along the interface, he boosts or drains, shunts or couples, blends or splits, meeting every need of the computer he serves, and does it all in cool mindless efficiency, operating on reflex alone. There is nothing reprehensible about this. It is not desirable for a primer to think, merely to act correctly; even here in the fifth century of computer technology the human brain is still given a high rating for its information-handling capacity per cubic centimeter, and a properly trained interface crew is in effect a group of ten of these excellent little organically grown computers jacked into the main unit. So Michael follows the shifting patterns of lights, making all necessary adjustments, and the cerebral centers of his mind are left free for other things.