Robert Silverberg - The World Inside

He dreams a great deal as he works.

He dreams of all the strange places outside Urban Monad 116, places that he has seen on the screen. He and his wife Stacion are devoted screen-viewers, and they rarely miss one of the travelog shows. The portrayals of the old pre-urbmon world, of the relicts, the dusty remnants. Jerusalem. Istanbul. Rome. The Taj Mahal. The stumps of New York. The tips of London’s buildings above the waves. All the bizarre, romantic, alien places beyond the urbmon’s skin. Mount Vesuvius. The geysers of Yellowstone. The African plains. The isles of the South Pacific. The Sahara. The North Pole. Vienna. Copenhagen. Moscow. Angkor Wat. The Great Pyramid and the Sphinx. The Grand Canyon. Chichйn Itzб. The Amazon jungle. The Great Wall of China.

Do any of these places still exist?

Michael has no idea. A lot of what they show on the screen is a hundred years old or older. He knows that the spread of urbmon civilization has required the demolition of much that is ancient. The wiping away of the cultured past. Everything carefully recorded in three dimensions first, of course. But gone. A puff of white smoke; the smell of pulverized stone, dry on the nostrils, bitter. Gone. Doubtless they’ve saved the famous monuments. No need to chew up the Pyramids just to make room for more urbmons. But the big sprawls must have been cleaned away. The former cities. After all, here we are in the Chipitts constellation, and he has heard his brother-in-law Jason Quevedo, the historian, say that once there were two cities called Chicago and Pittsburgh that marked the polar ends of the constellation, with a continuous strip of urban settlement between them. Where are Chicago and Pittsburgh now? Not a trace left, Michael knows; the fifty-one towers of the Chipitts constellation rise along that strip. Everything neat and well-organized. We eat our past and excrete urbmons. Poor Jason; he must miss the ancient world. As do I. As do I.

Michael dreams of adventure outside Urban Monad 116.

Why not go outside? Must he spend all his remaining years hanging here in a pushchair on the interface, tickling access nodes? To go out. To breathe the strange unfiltered air with the smell of green plants on it. To see a river. To fly, somehow, around this barbered planet, looking for the shaggy places. Climb the Great Pyramid! Swim in an ocean, any ocean! Salt water. How curious. Stand under the naked sky, exposing his skin to the dread solar blaze, letting the chilly moonlight bathe him. The orange glow of Mars. At dawn to blink at Venus.

“Look, I could do it,” he tells his wife. Placid bulgy Stacion. Carrying their fifth little, a girl, coming a few months hence. “It wouldn’t be any trouble at all to reprime a node so it would give me an egress pass. And down the shaft and out the building before anybody’s the wiser. Running in the grass. Traveling cross-country. I’d go east, I’d go to New York, right by the edge of the sea. They didn’t tear New York down, Jason says so. They just went right around it. A monument to the troubles.”

“How would you get food?” Stacion asks. A practical girl.

“I’d live off the land. Wild seeds and nuts, like the Indians did. Hunt! The herds of bison. Big, slow brown things; I’d come up behind one and jump on its back, right up there on the smelly greasy hump, and my hands into its throat, yank! It wouldn’t understand. No one hunts any more. Fall down dead, and I’d have meat for weeks. Even eat it raw.”

“There aren’t any bison, Michael. There aren’t any wild animals at all. You know that.”

“Wasn’t serious. Do you think I’d really kill? Kill? God bless, I may be peculiar, but I’m not crazy! No. Listen, I’d raid the communes. Sneak in at night, grab off vegetables, a load of proteoid steak, anything that’s loose. Those places aren’t guarded. They don’t expect urbmon folk to come sneaking around. I’d eat. And I’d see New York, Stacion, I’d see New York! Maybe even find a whole society of wild men there. With boats, planes, something to take me across the ocean. To Jerusalem! To London! To Africa!”

Stacion laughs. “I love you when you start going flippo like this,” she says, and pulls him down next to her. Rests his throbbing head on the smooth taut curve of her gravidity. “Do you hear the little yet?” Stacion asks. “Is she singing in there? God bless, Michael, how I love you.”

She doesn’t take him seriously. Who would? But he’ll go. Hanging there on the interface, flipping switches and palming shunt-plates, he envisions himself as a world traveler. A project: to visit all the real cities for which the cities of Urbmon 116 were named. As many as are left. Warsaw, Reykjavik, Louisville, Colombo, Boston, Rome, Tokyo, Toledo, Paris, Shanghai, Edinburgh, Nairobi. London. Madrid. San Francisco. Birmingham. Leningrad. Vienna, Seattle, Bombay, Prague. Even Chicago and Pittsburgh, unless they really are gone. And the others. Did I name them all? He tries to count up. Warsaw, Reykjavik, Vienna, Colombo. He loses track. But anyway, I’ll go out. Even if I can’t cover the world. Maybe it’s bigger than I imagine it is. But I’ll see something. I’ll feel rain on my face. Listen to the surf. My toes wriggling in cold wet sand. And the sun! The sun, the sun! Tanning my skin!

Supposedly, scholars still travel around, visiting the ancient places, but Michael doesn’t know of anyone who has. Jason, though he specializes in the twentieth century, certainly hasn’t gone. He could visit the ruins of New York, couldn’t he? Get a more vivid feel of what it was like. Of course, Jason is Jason, he wouldn’t go even if he could. But he ought to. I’d go in his place. Were we meant to spend all our lives inside a single building? He has seen some of Jason’s cubes of the old days, the open streets, the moving cars, the little buildings housing only a single family, three or four people. Incredibly strange. Irresistibly fascinating. Of course, it didn’t work; the whole scrambled society fell apart. We have to have something that’s better organized. But Michael understands the pull of that kind of life. He feels the centrifugal yank toward freedom, and wants to taste a bit of it. We don’t have to live the way they did, but we don’t have to live this way, either. Not all the time. To go out. To experience horizontality. Instead of up and down. Our thousand floors, our Somatic Fulfillment Halls, our sonic centers, our blessmen, our moral engineers, our consolers, our everything. There must be more. A short visit outside: the supreme sensation of my life. I’ll do it. Hanging on the interface, serenely nudging his nodes downspectrum as the priming impulses impinge on his reflexes, he promises himself that he won’t die with his dream unfulfilled. He’ll go out. Someday.

His brother-in-law Jason has unknowingly fed the fires of Michael’s secret yearning. His theories about a special race of urbmon people, expressed one night when Michael and Stacion were visiting the Quevedos. What had Jason said? I’m investigating the notion that urbmon life is breeding a new kind of human being. A type that adapts readily to relatively little living space and a low privacy quotient. Michael had had his doubts about that. It didn’t seem like so much of a genetic thing to him, that people were cooping themselves up in urban monads. More like psychological conditioning. Or even voluntary acceptance of the situation in general. But the more Jason spoke, the more sense his ideas made. Explaining why we don’t go outside the urbmons, even though there’s no real reason why we can’t. Because we recognize that that’s a hopeless fantasy. We stay here, whether we like it or not. And those who don’t like it, those who eventually can’t take it — well, you know what happens to them. Michael knows. Down the chute for the Hippos. Those who remain adapt to circumstances. Two centuries of selective breeding, pretty ruthlessly enforced. And all of us so well adapted now to this kind of life.