Robert Silverberg: The World Inside

“You have always valued large families here?”

“We value life. To create new life is the highest virtue. To prevent life from coming into being is the darkest sin. We all love our big bustling world. Does it seem unendurable to you? Do we seem unhappy?”

“You seem surprisingly well adjusted,” Gortman says. “Considering that—” He stops.

“Go on.”

“Considering that there are so many of you. And that you spend your whole lives inside a single colossal building. You never do go out, do you?”

“Most of us never do,” Mattern admits. “I have traveled, of course — a sociocomputator needs perspective, obviously. But Principessa has never left the building. I believe she has never been below the 350th floor, except when she was taken to see the lower levels while she was in school. Why should she go anywhere? The secret of our happiness is to create self-contained villages of five or six. floors within the cities of forty floors, within the urbmons of a thousand floors. We have no sensation of being overcrowded or cramped. We know our neighbors, we have hundreds of dear friends; we are kind and loyal and blessworthy to one another.”

“And everybody remains happy forever?”

“Nearly everybody.”

“Who are the exceptions?” Gortman asks.

“The flippos,” says Mattern. “We endeavor to minimize the friction of living in such an environment; as you see, we never deny one another anything, we never thwart a reasonable desire. But sometimes there are those who abruptly decide they can no longer abide by our principles. They flip; they thwart others; they rebel. It is quite sad.”

“What do you do with flippos?”

“We remove them, of course,” Mattern says. He smiles, and they enter the dropshaft once again.

Mattern has been authorized to show Gortman the entire urbmon, a tour, that will take several days. He is a little apprehensive; he is not as familiar with some parts of the structure as a guide should be. But he will do his best.

“The building,” he says, “is made of superstressed concrete. It is constructed about a central service core two hundred meters square. Originally, the plan was to have fifty families per floor, but we average about 120 today, and the old apartments have all been subdivided into single-room occupancies. We are wholly self-sufficient, with our own schools, hospitals, sports arenas, houses of worship, and theaters.”

“Food?”

“We produce none, of course. But we have contractual access to the agricultural communes. I’m sure you’ve seen that nearly nine tenths of the land area of this continent is used for food production; and then there are the marine farms. Oh, we have plenty of food on this planet, now that we no longer waste space by spreading out horizontally over good land.”

“But aren’t you at the mercy of the food-producing communes?”

“When were city-dwellers not at the mercy of farmers?” Mattern asks. “But you seem to regard life on Earth as an affair of fang and claw. Actually the ecology of our world is neatly in mesh. We are vital to the farmer — their only market, their only source of manufactured goods. They are vital to us — our only source of food. Reciprocal indispensabilities, eh? And the system works. We could support many billions of additional people. Someday, god blessing, we will.”

The dropshaft, coasting downward through the building, glides into its anvil at the very bottom. Mattern feels the oppressive bulk of the whole urbmon over him, and is vaguely surprised by the intensity of his distress; he tries not to show that he is uneasy. He says, “The foundation of the structure is four hundred meters deep. We are now at the lowest level. Here we generate our power.” They cross a catwalk and peer into an immense generating room, forty meters from floor to ceiling, in which sleek green turbines whirl. “Most of our power is obtained,” he points out, “through combustion of compacted solid refuse. We burn everything we don’t need, and sell the residue as fertilizer. We have auxiliary generators that work on accumulated body heat, also.”

“I was wondering about that,” Gortman murmurs. “What you do with the heat.”

Cheerily Mattern says, “Obviously 800,000 people within one sealed enclosure will produce an immense thermal surplus. Some of this heat is directly radiated from the building through cooling fins along the outer surface. Some is piped down here and used to run the generator. In winter, of course, we pump it evenly through the building to maintain temperature. The rest of the excess heat is used in water purification and similar things.”

They peer at the electrical system for a while. Then Mattern leads the way to the reprocessing plant. Several hundred schoolchildren are touring it; silently the two men join the tour.

The teacher says, “Here’s where the urine comes down, see?” She points to gigantic plastic pipes. “It passes through the flash chamber to be distilled, and the pure water is drawn off here — follow me, now — you remember from the flow chart, the part about how we recover the chemicals and sell them to the farming communes—”

Mattern and his guest inspect the fertilizer plant, too, where fecal reconversion is taking place. Gortman asks a number of questions. He seems deeply interested. Mattern is pleased; there is nothing more significant to him than the details of the urbmon way of life, and he had feared that this stranger from Venus, from a place where men live in private houses and walk around in the open, would regard the urbmon way as repugnant or hideous.

They go onward. Mattern speaks of air-conditioning, the system of dropshafts and liftshafts, and other such topics.

“It’s all wonderful,” Gortman says. “I couldn’t imagine how one little planet with 75,000,000,000 people could even survive, but you’ve turned it into — into—”

“Utopia?” Mattern suggests.

“I meant to say that, yes,” says Gortman.

Power production and waste disposal are not really Mattern’s specialties. He knows how such things are handled here, but only because the workings of the urbmon are so enthralling to him. His real field of study is sociocomputation, after all, and he has been asked to show the visitor how the social structure of the giant building is organized. Now they go up, into the residential levels.

“This is Reykjavik,” Mattern announces. “Populated chiefly by maintenance workers. We try not to have too much status stratification, but each city does have its predominant populations — engineers, academics, entertainers, you know. My Shanghai is mostly academic. Each profession is clannish.” They walk down the hall. Mattern feels edgy in this low level, and he keeps talking to cover his nervousness. He describes how each city within the urbmon develops its characteristic slang, its way of dressing, its folklore, and heroes.

“Is there much contact between cities?” Gortman asks.

“We try to encourage it. Sports, exchange students, regular mixer evenings. Within reason, that is. We don’t have people from the working-class levels mixing with those from the academic levels, much. It would make everyone unhappy, eh? But we attempt to get a decent flow between cities of roughly similar intellectual level. We think it’s healthy.”

“Wouldn’t it help the mixing process if you encouraged intercity nightwalking?”

Mattern frowns. “We prefer to stick to our propinquity groups for that. Casual sex with people from other cities is a mark of a sloppy soul.”

“I see.”

They enter a large room. Mattern says, “This is a newlywed down. We have them every five or six levels. When adolescents mate, they leave their family homes and move in here. After they have their first child they are assigned to homes of their own.”