The World Inside Page 4

  Children. Dismay seizes her and she begins to spin.

  In her dizziness she seems to vault to the edge of space, so that she sees the entire planet; all of its urban constellations are jutting toward her like spikes. She sees not only Chipitts but also Sansan and Boswash, and Berpar, Wienbud, Shankong, Bocarac, every gathering of mighty towers. And also she sees the plains teeming with food, the former deserts, the former savannas, the former forests. It is all quite wonderful, but it is terrifying as well, and she is uncertain for a moment whether the way man has reshaped his environment is the best of all possible ways. Yes, she tells herself, yes; we are servants of god this way, we avoid strife and greed and turmoil, we bring new life into the world, we thrive, we multiply. We multiply. We multiply. And doubt smites her and she begins to fall, and the capsule splits and releases her, leaving her bare body unprotected as it tumbles through the cold air. And she sees the spiky tips of Chipitts’ fifty towers below her, but now there is a new tower, a fifty-first, and she drops toward it, toward a gleaming bronzed needle-sharp summit, and she cries out as it penetrates her and she is impaled. And she wakes, sweating and shaking, her tongue dry, her mind dazed by a vision beyond her grasp, and she clutches Memnon, who murmurs sleepily and sleepily enters her.

  They are beginning now to tell the people of Urban Monad 116 about the new building. Aurea hears it from the wallscreen as she does her morning chores in the dormitory. Out of the patterns of light and color on the wall there congeals a view of an unfinished tower. Construction machines swarm over it, metal arms moving frantically, welding arcs glimmering off octagonal steel-paneled torsos. The familiar voice of the screen says, “Friends, what you see is Urbmon 158, one month eleven days from completion. God willing, it'll shortly be the home of a great many happy Chipittsians who will have the honor of establishing first-generation status there. The news from Louisville is that 802 residents of your own Urbmon 116 have already signed up for transfer to the new building, as soon as—"

  Next, a day later, comes an interview with Mr. and Mrs. Dismas Cullinan of Boston, who, with their nine littles, were the very first people in 116 to request transfer. Mr. Cullinan, a meaty, red-faced man, is a specialist in sanitary engineering. He explains, “I see a real opportunity for me to move up to the planning level over in 158. I figure I can jump eighty, ninety floors in status in one hell of a hurry.” Mrs. Cullinan complacently pats her middle. Number ten is on the way. She purrs over the immense social advantages the move will confer on her children. Her eyes are too bright; her upper lip is thicker than the lower one and her nose is sharp. “She looks like a bird of prey,” someone in the dorm comments. Someone else says, “She's obviously miserable here. Hoping to grab rungs fast over there.” The Cullinan children range from two to thirteen years of age. Unfortunately, they resemble their parents. A runny-nosed girl claws at her brother while on screen. Aurea says firmly, “The building's better off without the lot of them."

  Interviews with other transferees follow. On the fourth day of the campaign, the screen offers an extensive tour of the interior of 158, showing the ultramodern conveniences it will offer. Thermal irrigation for everybody, superspeed liftshafts and dropshafts, three-wall screens, a novel programing system for delivery of meals from the central kitchens, and many other wonders, representing the finest examples of urban progress. The number of volunteers for transfer is up now to 914.

  Perhaps, Aurea thinks giddily, they will fill the entire quota with volunteers.

  Memnon says, “The figure is fake. Siegmund tells me they've got only ninety-one volunteers so far."

  “Then why—"

  “To encourage the others."

  In the second week, the transmissions dealing with the new building now indicate that the number of volunteers has leveled off at 1,060. Siegmund admits privately that the actual figure is somewhat less than this, although surprisingly not much less. Few additional volunteers are expected. The screen begins gently to introduce the possibility that conscription of transferees will be necessary. Two management men from Louisville and a pair of helix adjusters from Chicago are shown discussing the need for a proper genetic mix at the new building. A moral engineer from Shanghai speaks about the importance of being blessworthy under all circumstances. It is blessworthy to obey the divine plan and its representatives on Earth, he says. God is your friend and will not harm you. God loves the blessworthy. The quality of life in Urbmon 158 will be diminished if its initial population does not reach planned levels. This would be a crime against those who have volunteered to go to 158. A crime against your fellow man is a crime against god, and who wants to injure him? Therefore it is each man's duty to society to accept transfer if transfer is offered.

  Next there is an interview with Kimon and Freya Kurtz, ages fourteen and thirteen, from a dorm in Bombay. Recently married. They are not about to volunteer, they admit, but they wouldn't mind being conscripted, “The way we look at it,” Kimon Kurtz declares, “it could be a great opportunity. I mean, once we have some children, we'd be able to find top status for them right away. It's a brand new world over there—no limits on how fast you can rise, no one in the way. The readjustment of going over would be a little nudgy at first, but we'd be jumping soon enough. And we'd know that our littles wouldn't have to enter a dorm when they got old enough to marry. They could get rooms of their own without waiting, even before they had littles too. So even though we're not eager to leave our friends and all, we're ready to go if the wheel points to us.” Freya Kurtz, ecstatic, breathless, says, “Yes. That's right."

  The softening-up process continues with an account of how the conscriptees will be chosen: 3,878 in all, no more than 200 from any one city or thirty from any one dorm. The pool of eligibles consists of married men and women between the ages of twelve and seventeen who have no children, a current pregnancy not being counted as a child. Selection will be by random lot.

  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:

  “Brock, Aylward and Alison.

  “Feuermann, Sterling and Natasha.

  “Holston, Memnon and Aurea—"

  She will be wrenched from her matrix. She will be torn 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 see
s 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 moire-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 littles 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 sorry 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."

  “How can I—"

  “You have connections. Amend the program somehow. Support our appeal. You're a rising man in the building. You have high friends. You can do it."

  “No one can do such a thing."

  “Please, Siegmund.” She approaches him, pulls her shoulders back, unsubtly lets her nipples come thrusting through her garment of mesh. Hopeless. How can she magic him with two pink nubs of stiff flesh? She moistens her lips, narrows her eyes to slits. Too stagy. He will laugh. Huskily she says, “Don't you want me to stay? Wouldn't you like to take a turn or two with me? You know I'd do anything if you'd help us get off that list. Anything!” Face eager. Nostrils flaring, offering promise of unimaginable erotic delights. She will do things not yet invented.

  She sees his flickering momentary smile and knows that she has oversold herself; he is amused, not tempted, by her forwardness. Her face crumples. She turns away.

  “You don't want me,” she mutters.

  “Aurea, please! You're asking the impossible.” He catches her shoulders and pulls her toward him. His hands slip within the mesh and caress her flesh. She knows that he is merely consoling her with a counterfeit of desire. He says, “If there was any way I could fix things for you, I would. But we'd all get tossed down the chute.” His fingers find her body's core. Moist, slippery, despite herself. She does not want him now, not this way. With a wriggle of her hips she tries to free herself. His embrace is mere kindness; he will take her out of pity. She pivots and stiffens.

  “No,” she says, and then she realizes how hopeless everything is, and she yields to him only because she knows that there will never be another chance.

  Memnon says, “I've heard from Siegmund about what happened today. And from your uncle. You've got to stop this, Aurea."

  “Let's go down the chute, Memnon."

  “Come with me to the consoler. I've never seen you acting this way before."

  “I've never felt so threatened."

  “Why can't you adjust to it?” he asks. “It's really a grand chance for us."

  “I can't. I can't.” She slumps forward, defeated, broken.

  “Stop it,” he tells her. “Brooding sterilizes. Won't you cheer up a bit?"

  She will not give way to chiding, however reasonable the tone. He summons the machines; they take her to the consoler. Soft rubbery orange pads gently grasping her arms all the way through the halls. In the consoler's office she is examined and her metabolism is probed. He draws the story from her. He is an elderly man, kind, gentle, somewhat bored, with a cloud of white hair rimming a pink face. She wonders wheth
er he hates her behind his sweetness. At the end he tells her, “Conflict sterilizes. You must learn to comply with the demands of society, for society will not nurture you unless you play the game.” He recommends treatment.

  “I don't want treatment,” she says thickly, but Memnon authorizes it, and they take her away. “Where am I going?” she asks. “For how long?"

  “To the 780th floor, for about a week."

  “To the moral engineers?"

  “Yes,” they tell her.

  “Not there. Please, not there."

  “They are gentle. They heal the troubled."

  “They'll change me."

  “They'll improve you. Come. Come. Come."

  For a week she lives in a sealed chamber filled with warm, sparkling fluids. She floats idly in a pulsing tide, thinking of the huge urbmon as a wondrous pedestal on which she sits. Images soak from her mind and everything becomes deliciously cloudy. They speak to her over audio channels embedded in the walls of the chamber. Occasionally she glimpses an eye peering through an optical fiber dangling above her. They drain the tensions and resistances from her. On the eighth day Memnon comes for her. They open the chamber and she is lifted forth, nude, dripping, her skin puckered, little beads of glittering fluid clinging to her. The room is full of strange men. Everyone else is clothed; it is dreamlike to be bare in front of them, but she does not really mind. Her breasts are full, her belly is flat, why then be ashamed? Machines towel her dry and clothe her. Memnon leads her by the hand. Aurea smiles quite often. “I love you,” she tells Memnon softly.