Robert Silverberg: The World Inside

“You look tired,” Mattern says.

“It was a busy day. And a rewarding one.”

“Yes. We really covered ground, didn’t we?”

Mattern is tired too. They have visited nearly three dozen levels already; he has shown Gortman town meetings, fertility clinics, religious services, business offices, all on this first day. Tomorrow there will be much more to see. Urban Monad 116 is a varied, complex community. And a happy one, Mattern tells himself firmly. We have a few little incidents from time to time, but we’re happy .

The children, one by one, go to sleep, charmingly kissing Daddo and Mommo and the visitor good night and running across the room, sweet nude little pixies, to their cots. The lights automatically dim. Mattern feels faintly depressed; the unpleasantness on 108 has spoiled what was otherwise an excellent day. Yet he still thinks that he has succeeded in helping Gortman see past the superficialities to the innate harmony and serenity of the urbmon way. And now he will allow the guest to experience for himself one of their most useful techniques for minimizing the interpersonal conflicts that could be so destructive to their kind of society. Mattern rises.

“It’s nightwalking time,” he says. “I’ll go. You stay here … with Principessa.” He suspects that the visitor would appreciate some privacy.

Gortman looks uneasy.

“Go on,” Mattern says. “Enjoy yourself. People don’t deny pleasure to people, here. We weed the selfish ones out early. Please. What I have is yours. Isn’t that so, Principessa?”

“Certainly,” she says.

Mattern steps out of the room, walks quickly down the corridor, enters the dropshaft, and descends to the 770th floor. As he gets out he hears sudden angry shouts, and he stiffens, fearing that he will become involved in another nasty episode, but no one appears. He walks on. He passes the black door of a chute access and shivers a little, and he cannot avoid thinking of the young man with the fabricator torch, and what has become of him. And then, without warning, there swims up from memory the face of the brother he had once had who had gone down that same chute, the brother one year his senior, Jeffrey, the whiner, the stealer, Jeffrey the selfish, Jeffrey the unadaptable, Jeffrey who had had to be given to a chute. For an instant Mattern is sickened and dizzied. He starts to fall, and wildly seizes a doorknob to steady himself.

The door opens. He goes in. He has never been a nightwalker on this floor before. Five children lie asleep in their cots, and on the sleeping platform are a man and a woman, both younger than he is, both asleep. Mattern removes his clothing and lies down by the woman’s left side. He touches her thigh, then her small cool breast. She opens her eyes and he says, “Hello. Charles Mattern, 799.”

“Gins Burke,” she says. “My husband Lenny.”

Lenny awakens. He sees Mattern, nods, turns over, and returns to sleep. Mattern kisses Gina Burke lightly on the lips. She opens her arms to him. He trembles in his need, and sighs as she receives him. God bless, he thinks. It has been a happy day in 2381, and now it is over.

The city of Chicago is bounded on the north by Shanghai and on the south by Edinburgh. Chicago currently has 37,402 people, and is undergoing a mild crisis of population that will have to be alleviated in the customary manner. Its dominant profession is engineering. Above, in Shanghai, they are mostly scholars; below, in Edinburgh, computer men cluster.

Aurea Holston was born in Chicago in 2368 and has lived there all of her life. Aurea is now fourteen years old. Her husband, Memnon, is nearly fifteen. They have been married almost two years. God has not blessed them with children. Memnon has traveled through the entire building, but Aurea has scarcely ever been out of Chicago. Once she went to visit a fertility expert, an old midwife down in Prague, and once she went up to Louisville, where her powerful uncle, an urban administrator, lives. Many times she and Memnon have been to their friend Siegmund Kluver’s apartment in Shanghai. Other than that she has not seen much of the building. Aurea does not really care to travel. She loves her own city very much.

Chicago is the city that occupies the 721st through the 760th floors of Urban Monad 116. Memnon and Aurea Holston live in a dormitory for childless young couples on the 735th floor. The dorm is currently shared by thirty-one couples, eight above optimum.

“There’s got to be a thinning soon,” Memnon says. “We’re starting to bulge at the seams. People will have to go.”

“Many?” Aurea asks.

“Three couples here, five there — a slice from each dorm. I suppose Urbmon 116 will lose about two thousand couples. That’s how many went the last time they thinned.”

Aurea trembles. “Where will they go?”

“They tell me that the new urbmon is almost ready. Number 158.”

Her soul floods with pity and terror. “How horrid to be sent somewhere else! Memnon, they wouldn’t make us leave here!”

“Of course not. God bless, we’re valuable people! I have a skill rating of—”

“But we have no children. That kind goes first, doesn’t it?”

“God will bless us soon.” Memnon takes her in his arms. He is strong and tall and lean, with rippling scarlet hair and a taut, solemn expression. Aurea feels weak and fragile beside him, although in fact she is sturdy and supple. Her crown of golden hair is deepening in tone. Her eyes are pale green. Her breasts are full and her hips are broad. Siegmund Kluver says she looks like a goddess of motherhood. Most men desire her and nightwalkers come frequently to share her sleeping platform. Yet she remains barren. Lately she has become quite sensitive about that. The irony. of her wasted voluptuousness is not lost on her.

Memnon releases her and she walks wearily through the dormitory. It is a long, narrow room that makes a right-angle bend around the central service core of the urbmon. Its walls glow with changing inlaid patterns of blue and gold and green. Rows of sleeping platforms, some deflated, some in use, cover the floor. The furniture is stark and simple and the lighting, though indirectly suffused from the entire area of the floor and the ceiling, is bright almost to harshness. Several viewscreens and three data terminals are mounted on the room’s eastern wall. There are five excretion areas, three communal recreation areas, two cleanser stations, and two privacy areas.

By unspoken custom the privacy shields are never turned on in this dormitory. What one does, one does before the others. The total accessibility of all persons to all other persons is the only rule by which the civilization of the urbmon can survive, and in a mass residence hall such as this the rule is all the more vital.

Aurea halts by the majestic window at the dormitory’s western end, and stares out. The sunset is beginning. Across the way, the magnificent bulk of Urban Monad 117 seems stained with golden red. Aurea follows the shaft of the great tower with her eyes, down from the landing stage at its thousandth-floor tip, down to the building’s broad waist. She cannot see, at this angle, very far below the 400th floor of the adjoining structure.

What is it like, she wonders, to live in Urbmon 117? Or 115, or 110, or 140? She has never left the urbmon of her birth. All about her, to the horizon, sprawl the towers of the Chipitts constellation, fifty mighty concrete piles, each three kilometers high, each a self- contained entity housing some 800,000 human beings. In Urbmon 117, Aurea tells herself, there are people who look just like us. They walk, talk, dress, think, love, just like ourselves. Urbmon 117 is not another world. It is only the building next door. We are not unique. We are not unique. We are not unique.