Robert Silverberg - The World Inside

Her one obsession has led her to the other one, and she turns to Siegmund, breaking into the conversation of the men to say, “Siegmund, is it true that they’ll be opening Urbmon 158 soon?”

“So I hear, yes.”

“What will it be like?”

“Very much like 116, I imagine. A thousand floors, the usual services. I suppose seventy families per floor, at first, maybe 250,000 people altogether, but it won’t take long to bring it up to par.”

Aurea clamps her palms together. “How many people will be sent there from here, Siegmund?”

“I’m sure I don’t know that.”

“There’ll be some, won’t there?”

Memnon says mildly, “Aurea, why don’t we talk about something pleasant.”

“Some people will be sent there from here,” she persists. “Come on, Siegmund. You’re up in Louisville with the bosses all the time. How many? ”

Siegmund laughs. “You’ve really got an exaggerated idea of my significance in this place, Aurea. Nobody’s said a word to me about how Urbmon 158 will be stocked.”

“You know the theory of these things, though. You can project the data.”

“Well, yes.” Siegmund is quite cool; this subject has a purely impersonal interest for him. He seems unaware of the source of Aurea’s agitation. “Naturally, if we’re going to do our duty to god by creating life, we’ve also got to be sure that there’s a place for everyone to live,” he says. Hand flicks a vagrant lock of hair into place. Eyes glow; Siegmund loves to lecture. “So we go on building urban monads, and, naturally, whenever a new urbmon is added to the Chipitts constellation, it has to be stocked from the other Chipitts buildings. That makes good genetic sense. Even though each urbmon is big enough to provide an adequate gene-mix, our tendency to stratify into cities and villages within the building leads to a good deal of inbreeding, which they say isn’t healthy for the species on a long-term basis. But if we take five thousand people from each of fifty urbmons, say, and toss them together into a new urbmon, it gives us a pooled gene-mix of 250,000 individuals that we didn’t have before. Actually, though, easing population pressure is the most urgent reason for erecting new buildings.”

“Keep it clean, Siegmund,” Memnon warns.

Siegmund grins. “No, I mean it. Oh, sure, there’s a cultural imperative telling us to breed and breed and breed. That’s natural, after the agonies of the pre-urbmon days, when everybody went around wondering where we were going to put all the people. But even in a world of urban monads we have to plan in an orderly way. The excess of births over deaths is pretty consistent. Each urbmon is designed to hold 800,000 people comfortably, with room to pack in maybe 100,000 more, but that’s the top. At the moment, you know, every urbmon more than twenty years old in the Chipitts constellation is at least 10,000 people above maximum, and a couple are pushing maximum. Things aren’t too bad yet in 116, but you know yourselves that there are trouble spots. Why Chicago has 38,000—”

“37,402 this morning,” Aurea says.

“Whatever. That’s close to a thousand people a floor. The programed optimum density for Chicago is only 32,000, though. That means that the waiting list in your city for a private apartment is getting close to a full generation long. The dorms are packed, and people aren’t dying fast enough to make room for the new families, which is why Chicago is offloading some of its best people to places like Edinburgh and Boston and — well, Shanghai. Once the new building is open—”

Aurea says, steely-voiced, “How many from 116 are going to be sent there?”

“The theory is, 5,000 from each monad, at current levels,” Siegmund says. “It’ll be adjusted slightly to compensate for population variations in different buildings, but figure on 5,000. Now there’ll be about a thousand people in 116 who’ll volunteer to go—”

“Volunteer?” Aurea gasps. It is inconceivable to her that anyone will want to leave his native urbmon.

Siegmund smiles. “Older people, love. In their twenties and thirties. Bored, maybe stalemated in their careers, tired of their neighbors, who knows? It sounds obscene, yes. But there’ll be a thousand volunteers. That means that about 4,000 more will have to be picked by lot.”

“I told you so this morning,” Memnon says.

“Will these 4,000 be taken at random throughout the whole urbmon?” Aurea asks.

Gently Siegmund says, “At random, yes. From the newlywed dorms. From the childless.”

At last. The truth revealed.

“Why from us?” Aurea wails.

“Kindest and most blessworthy way,” says Siegmund. “We can’t uproot small children from their urbmon matrix. Dorm couples haven’t the same kind of community ties that we- that others — that—” He falters, as if recognizing for the first time that he is not speaking of hypothetical individuals, but of Aurea and her own calamity. Aurea starts to sob. He says, “Love, I’m song. It’s the system, and it’s a good system. Ideal, in fact.”

“Memnon, we’re going to be expelled!”

Siegmund tries to reassure her. She and Memnon have only a slim chance of being chosen, he insists. In this urbmon thousands upon thousands of people are eligible for transfer. And so many variable factors exist, he maintains-but she will not be consoled. Unashamed, she lets geysers of raw emotion spew into the room, and then she feels shame. She knows she has spoiled the evening for everyone. But Siegmund and Mamelon are kind about it, and Memnon does not chide her as he hurries her out, into the dropshaft, down fifty- two floors to their home in Chicago.

That night, although she wants him intensely, she turns her back on Memnon when he reaches for her. She lies awake listening a long time to the gasps and happy groans of the couples sprawled on the sleeping platforms about her, and then sleep comes. Aurea dreams of being born. She is down in the power plant of Urban Monad 116, 400 meters underground, and they are sealing her into a liftshaft capsule. The building throbs. She is close to the heat- sink and the urine-reprocessing plant and the refuse compactors and all the rest of the service gear that keeps the structure alive, all those dark, hidden sectors of the urbmon that she had to tour when she was a schoolgirl. Now the liftshaft carries her up, up through Reykjavik where the maintenance people live, up through brawling Prague where everyone has ten babies, up through Rome, Boston, Edinburgh, Chicago, Shanghai, even through Louisville where the administrators dwell in unimaginable luxury, and now she is at the summit of the building, at the landing stage where the quickboats fly in from distant towers, and a hatch opens in the landing stage and Aurea is ejected. She soars into the sky, safe within her snug capsule while the cold winds of the upper atmosphere buffet it. She is six kilometers above the ground, looking down for the first time on the entire urbmon world. So this is how it is, she thinks. So many buildings. And yet so much open space!

She drifts across the constellation of towers. It is early spring, and Chipitts is greening. Below her are the tapered structures that hold the 40,000,000 + people of this urban cluster. She is awed by the neatness of the constellation, the geometrical placement of the buildings to form a series of hexagons within the larger area. Green plazas separate the buildings. No one enters the plazas, ever, but their well-manicured lawns are a delight to behold from the windows of the urbmon, and at this height they seem wondrously smooth, as if painted against the ground. The lower-class people on the lower floors have the best views of the gardens and pools, which is a compensation of sorts. From her vantage point high above, Aurea does not expect to see the details of the plazas well, but her dreaming mind suddenly gives her an intense clarity of vision and she discerns small golden floral heads; she smells the tang of floral fragrance.