Robert Silverberg: The World Inside

At last the names of the conscripts are released.

The screen’s cheerful voice announces, “From Chicago’s 735th floor dormitory the- following blessworthy ones have been chosen, and may god give them fertility in their new life:

“Brook, Aylward and Alison.

“Feuermann, Sterling and Natasha.

“Holston, Memnon and Aurea—”

She will be wrenched from her matrix. She will be tom from the pattern of memories and affections that defines her identity. She is terrified of going.

She will fight the order.

“Memnon, file an appeal! Do something, fast!” She kneads the gleaming wall of the dormitory. He looks at her blankly; he is about to leave for work. He has already said there is nothing they can do. He goes out.

Aurea follows him into the corridor. The morning rush has begun; the citizens of 735th- floor Chicago stream past. Aurea sobs. The eyes of others are averted from her. She knows nearly all of these people. She has spent her life among them. She tugs at Memnon’s hand. “Don’t just walk out on me!” she whispers harshly. “How can we let them throw us out of 116?”

“It’s the law, Aurea. People who don’t obey the law go down the chute. Is that what you want? To end up contributing combustion mass to the generators?”

“I won’t go! Memnon, I’ve always lived here! I—”

“You’re talking like a flippo,” he says, keeping his voice low. He pulls her back inside the dormitory. Staring up, she sees only cavernous dark nostrils. “Pop a pill, Aurea. Talk to the floor consoler, why don’t you? Stay calm and let’s adjust.”

“I want you to file an appeal.”

“There is no appeal.”

“I refuse to go.”

He seizes her shoulders. “Look at it rationally, Aurea. One building isn’t that different from another. We’ll have some of our friends there. We’ll make new friends. We—”

“No.”

“There’s no alternative,” he says. “Except down the chute.”

“I’d rather go down the chute, then!”

For the first time since they were married, she sees him regarding her contemptuously. He cannot abide irrationality. “Don’t heave nonsense,” he tells her. “See the consoler, pop a pill, think it through. I’ve got to leave now.”

He departs again, and this time she does not go after him. She slumps on the floor, feeling cold plastic against her bare skin. The others in the dorm tactfully ignore her. She sees fiery images: her schoolroom, her first lover, her parents, her sisters and brothers, all melting, flowing across the room, a blazing trickle of acrid fluid. She presses her thumbs to her eyes. She will not be cast out. Gradually she calms. I have influence, she tells herself. If Memnon will not act, I will act for us. She wonders if she can ever forgive Memnon for his cowardice. For his transparent opportunism. She will visit her uncle.

She strips off her morning robe and dons a chaste gray girlish cloak. From the hormone chest she selects a capsule that will cause her to emanate the odor that inspires men to act protectively toward her. She looks sweet, demure, virginal; but for the ripeness of her body she could pass for ten or eleven years of age.

The liftshaft takes her to the 975th floor, the throbbing heart of Louisville.

All is steel and spongeglass here. The corridors are spacious and lofty. There is no rush of people through the halls; the occasional human figure seems incongruous and superfluous, though silent machines glide on unfathomable errands. This is the abode of those who administer the plans. Designed to awe; calculated to overwhelm; the permissible mana of the ruling class. How comfortable here. How sleek. How self-contained. Rip away the lower 90 percent of the building and Louisville would drift in serene orbit, never missing a thing.

Aurea halts outside a glistening door inlaid with moirй-generating stripes of bright white metal. She is scanned by hidden sensors, asked to name her business, evaluated, shunted into a waiting room. At length her mother’s brother consents to see her.

His office is nearly as large as a private residential suite. He sits behind a broad polygonal desk from which protrudes a bank of shimmering monitor dials. He wears formal top-level clothes, a cascading gray tunic tipped with epaulets radiating in the infrared. Aurea feels the crisp blast of heat from where she stands. He is cool, distant, polite. His handsome face appears to have been fashioned from burnished copper.

“It’s been many months, hasn’t it, Aurea?” he says. A patronizing smile escapes him. “How have you been?”

“Fine, Uncle Lewis.”

“Your husband?”

“Fine.”

“Any tittles yet?”

Blurting. “Uncle Lewis, we’ve been picked to go to 158!”

His plastic smile does not waver. “How fortunate! God bless, you can start a new life right at the top!”

“I don’t want to go. Get me out of it. Somehow. Anyhow.” She rushes toward him, a frightened child, tears flowing, knees melting. A force-field captures her when she is two meters from the outer rim of his desk. Her breasts feel it first, and as they flatten painfully against the invisible barrier she averts her head and injures her cheek. She drops to her knees and whimpers.

He comes to her. He lifts her. He tells her to be brave, to do her duty to god. He is kind and calm at first, but as she goes on protesting, his voice turns cold, with a hard edge of irritation, and abruptly Aurea begins to feel unworthy of his attention. He reminds her of her obligations to society. He hints delicately that the chute awaits those who persist in abrading the smooth texture of community life. Then he smiles again, and his icy blue eyes meet hers and engulf them, and he tells her to be brave and go. She creeps away. She feels disgraced by her weakness.

As she plunges downward from Louisville, her uncle’s spell ebbs and her indignation revives. Perhaps she can get help elsewhere. The future is crashing around her, falling towers burying her in clouds of brick-black dust. A harsh wind blows out of tomorrow and the great building sways. She returns to the dorm and hastily changes her clothing. She alters her hormone balance too. A drop or two of golden fluid, sliding down to the mysterious coils of the female machinery. Now she is clad in iridescent mesh through which her breasts, thighs, and buttocks are intermittently visible, and she exudes an odor of distilled lust. She notifies the data terminal that she requests a private meeting with Siegmund Kluver of Shanghai. She paces the dorm, waiting. One of the young husbands comes to her, eyes gleaming. He grasps her haunch and gestures toward his sleeping platform. “Sorry,” she murmurs. “I’ll be’ going out.” Some refusals are allowed. He shrugs and goes away, pausing to glance back at her in a wistful way. Eight minutes later word comes that Siegmund has consented to meet with her in one of the rendezvous cubicles on the 790th floor. She goes up.

His face is smudged and memoranda bulge in his breast pocket. He seems cross and impatient. “Why did you pull me away from my work?” he asks.

“You know Memnon and I have been—”

“Yes, of course.” Brusquely. “Mamelon and I will be song to lose your friendship.”

Aurea attempts to assume a provocative stance. She knows she cannot win Siegmund’s aid merely by making herself available; he is hardly that easily swayed. Bodies are easily possessed here, career opportunities are few and not lightly jeopardized. Her aims are trivial. She feels rejection flowing out of the minutes just ahead. But perhaps she can recruit Siegmund’s influence. Perhaps she can lead him to feel such regret at her departure that he will aid her. She whispers, “Help us get out of going, Siegmund.”