The World Inside (10 page)

And the sexual thing. The hundred thousand copulatory transactions taking place behind his forehead. The spread thighs, the offered rumps, the parted lips. He loses his virginity; he takes a virginity; he surrenders to men, women, boys, girls; he is aggressor and aggressed; he spurts ecstasy, he narrowly misses orgasm, he triumphantly impales, he shamefully suffers loss of erection, he enters, he is entered, he takes pleasure, he gives pleasure, he retreats from pleasure, he denies pleasure.

He rides the liftshafts of his mind. Going up! 501, 502, 503, 504, 505! 600! 700! 800! 900! He stands on the landing stage at the summit of the urbmon, staring out into the night. Towers all around him, the neighboring monads, 115, 117, 118, the whole crowd of them. Occasionally he has wondered what life is like in the other buildings that make up the Chipitts constellation. Now he does not care. There is wonder enough in 116. More than 800,000 intersecting lives. He has heard some of his friends say, in San Francisco, that it was an evil deed to change the world this way, to pile up thousands of people in a single colossal building, to create this beehive life. But how wrong those mutterers are! If they could only multiplex and get true perspective. Taste the rich complexity of our vertical existence. Going down! 480, 479, 476, 475! City upon city. Each floor holding a thousand puzzle-boxes of pure delight. Hello, I'm Dillon Chrimes, can I be you for a while? And you? And you? And you? Are you happy? Why not? Have you
seen
this gorgeous world you live in?

What? You'd like a bigger room? You want to travel? You
don't like your littles? You're bored with your work? You're full of vague unfocused discontent? Idiot. Come up here with me, fly from floor to floor,
see!
And groove on it. And love it.

“Is it really good?” Alma asks. “Your eyes are shining!”

“I can't describe it,” Dillon murmurs, soaring, threading himself down the service core to the levels below Reykjavik, then floating up to Louisville again, and simultaneously intersecting every point between root and tip. An ocean of broiling minds. A sizzle of snarled identities. He wonders what time it is. The trip is supposed to last five hours. His body is still joined to Alma's, which leads him to think he has not been up more than ten or fifteen minutes, but perhaps it is more than that. Things are becoming very tactile now. As he drifts through the building he touches walls, floors, screens, faces, fabrics. He suspects he may be coming down. But no. No. Still on his way up. The simultaneity increases. He is flooded with percepts. People moving, talking, sleeping, dancing, coupling, bending, reaching, eating, reading. I am all of you. You are all parts of me. He can focus sharply on individual identities. Here is Electra, here is Nat the spectrum-rider, here is Mamelon Kluver, here is a tight-souled sociocomputator named Charles Mattern, here is a Louisville administrator, here is a Warsaw grubbo, here is. Here is. Here are. Here am I. The whole blessing building.

Oh what a beautiful place. Oh how I love it here. Oh this is the real thing. Oh!

 

When he comes down, he sees the dark-haired woman curled in a corner of the sleeping platform, asleep. He cannot remember
her name. He touches her thigh and she awakes quickly, eyes fluttering. “Hello,” she says. “Welcome back.”

“What's your name?”

“Alma. Clune. Your eyes are all red.”

He nods. He feels the weight of the whole building on him: 500 floors jamming down on his head, 499 floors pressing up against his feet. The meeting place of the two forces is somewhere close to his pancreas. If he does not leave here quickly, his internal organs must surely pop. Only shreds of his trip remain. Straggly streamers of debris clutter his mind. Vaguely he feels columns of ants trekking from level to level behind his eyes.

Alma reaches for him. To comfort him. He shakes her off and hunts for his clothing. A cone of silence surrounds him. He will go back to Electra, he thinks, and try to tell her where he has been and what has been happening to him, and then perhaps he will cry and feel better. He leaves without thanking Alma for her hospitality and looks for a dropshaft. Instead he finds a liftshaft, and somehow, pretending it is an accident, he gets off at 530. Heading for Rome's sonic center. Dark there. The instruments still on stage. Quietly he slips down in front of the vibrastar. Switches it on. His eyes are wet. He dredges up some phantom images of his trip. The faces, the thousand floors. The ecstasy. Oh what a beautiful place. Oh how I love it here. Oh this is the real thing. Oh! Certainly he felt that way. But no longer. A thin sediment of doubt is all that remains. Asking himself: Is this how it was meant to be? Is this how it has to be? Is this the best we can do? This building. This mighty hive. Dillon's hands caress the projectrons, which feel prickly and hot; he depresses them at random and
sour colors drift out of the instrument. He cuts in the audio and gets sounds that remind him of the shifting of old bones within flabby flesh. What went wrong? He should have expected it. You go all the way up, then you come all the way down. But why does down have to be so far down? He cannot bear to play. After ten minutes he switches the vibrastar off and goes out. He will walk to San Francisco. 160 floors down. That's not too many levels; he'll be there before dawn.

Jason Quevedo lives in Shanghai, though just barely: his apartment is on the 761st floor, and if he lived only one level lower he would be in Chicago, which is no place for a scholar. His wife Micaela frequently tells him that their lowly status in Shanghai is a direct reflection of the quality of his work. Micaela is the sort of wife who often says things like that to her husband.

Jason spends most of his working time down in Pittsburgh, where the archives are. He is a historian and needs to consult the documents, the records of how it used to be. He does his research in a clammy little cubicle on the urbmon's 185th floor, almost in the middle of Pittsburgh. He does not really have to work down there, since anything in the archives can easily be piped up to the data terminal in his own apartment. But he feels it is a matter of professional pride to have an office where he can file and arrange and handle the source materials. He said as much when he was
pulling strings to have the office assigned to him: “The task of recreating previous eras is a delicate and complex one, which must be performed under optimal circumstances, or—”

The truth is that if he didn't escape from Micaela and their five littles every day, he'd go flippo. That is, accumulated frustration and humiliation would cause him to commit nonsocial acts, perhaps violent ones. He is aware that there is no room for the nonsocial person in an urban monad. He knows that if he loses his temper and behaves in a seriously unblessworthy way they will simply throw him down the chute and turn his mass into energy. So he is careful.

He is a short, soft-spoken man with mild green eyes and thinning sandy hair. “Your meek exterior is deceptive,” lovely Mamelon Kluver told him throatily at a party last summer. “Your type is like a sleeping volcano. You explode suddenly, astonishingly, passionately.” He thinks she may be right. He fears the possibilities.

He has been desperately in love with Mamelon Kluver for perhaps the last three years, and certainly since the night of that party. He has never dared to touch her. Mamelon's husband is the celebrated Siegmund Kluver, who though not yet fifteen is universally recognized as one of the urbmon's future leaders. Jason is not afraid that Siegmund would object. In an urban monad, naturally, no man has a right to withhold his wife from anyone who desires her. Nor is Jason afraid of what Micaela would say. He knows his privileges. He is simply afraid of Mamelon. And perhaps of himself.

For ref. only. Urbmon sex mores.

Univ. sex. accessibility. Trace decline of proprietary
marriage, end of adultery concept. Nightwalkers: when first socially acceptable? Limit of allowable frustration: how determined? Sex as panacea. Sex as compensation for lessened quality of life under urbmon conditions. Query: was quality of life really lessened by triumph of urbmon system? (Careful—beware the chute!) Separation of sex & procreation. Value of max. interchange of partners in high-density culture. Problem: what is still forbidden (any thing?) Examine taboo on extracity nightwalking. How powerful? How widely observed? Check effects of univ. permiss. on contemp. fiction. Loss of dramatic tension? Erosion of raw material of narr. conflict? Query: is urbmon moral struc. amoral, post-moral, per-, im-?

Jason dictates such memoranda whenever and wherever some new structural hypothesis enters his mind. These are thoughts that come to him during a nightwalking excursion on the 155th floor, in Tokyo. He is with a thickset young brunette named Gretl when the sequence of ideas arrives. He has been fondling her for some minutes and she is panting, ready, her hips pumping, her eyes narrowed to steamy slits.

“Excuse me,” he says, and reaches across her heavy quivering breasts for a stylus. “I have to write something down.” He activates the data terminal's input screen and punches the button that will relay a printout of his memorandum to his desk at his research cubicle in Pittsburgh. Then, quickly pursing his lips and scowling, he begins to make his notations.

He frequently goes nightwalking, but never in his own city of Shanghai. Jason's one audacity: boldly he flouts the
tradition that one should stay close to home during one's nocturnal prowls. No one will punish him for his unconventional behavior, since it is merely a violation of accepted custom, not of urban law. No one will even criticize him to his face for doing it. Yet his wanderings give him the mild thrill of doing the forbidden. Jason explains his habit to himself by saying that he prefers the crosscultural enrichment that comes from sleeping with women of other cities. Privately he suspects that he is just uneasy about getting mixed up with women he knows, such as Mamelon Kluver. Especially Mamelon Kluver.

So on his nightwalking nights he takes the dropshafts far into the depths of the building, to such cities as Pittsburgh or Tokyo, even to squalid Prague or grubby Reykjavik. He pushes open strange doors, lockless by statute, and takes his place on the sleeping platforms of unknown women smelling of mysterious lower-class vegetables. By law they must embrace him willingly. “I am from Shanghai,” he tells them, and they go “Ooooh!” in awe, and he mounts them tigerishly, contemptuously, swollen with status.

Breasty Gretl waits patiently while Jason records his latest notions. Then he turns toward her again. Her husband, bloated on whatever the local equivalent of tingle or mindblot may be, lies belly-up at the far side of the sleeping platform, ignoring them. Gretl's large dark eyes glow with admiration. “You Shanghai boys sure got brains,” she says, as Jason pounces and takes her in a single fierce thrust.

Later he returns to the 761st floor. Wraiths flit through the dim corridors: other citizens of Shanghai, back from their own nightwalking rounds. He enters his apartment. Jason has forty-five
square meters of floor space, not really enough for a man with a wife and five littles, but he does not complain. God bless, you take what you get: others have less. Micaela is asleep, or pretends to be. She is a long-legged, tawny-skinned woman of twenty-three, still quite attractive, though quirky lines are beginning to appear in her face. She frowns too much. She lies half uncovered, her long black glossy hair spread out wildly around her. Her breasts are small but perfect; Jason compares them favorably to the udders of Tokyo's Gretl. He and Micaela have been married nine years. Once he loved her a great deal, before he discovered the gritty residue of bitter shrewishness at the bottom of her soul.

She smiles an inward smile, stirs, still sleeping, brushes her hair back from her eyes. She has the look of a woman who has just had a thoroughly satisfactory sexual experience. Jason has no way of knowing whether some nightwalker visited Micaela tonight while he was gone, and, of course, he cannot ask. (Search for evidence? Stains on the sleeping platform? Stickiness on her thighs? Don't be barbaric!) He suspects that even if no one had come to her tonight, she would try to make him think that someone had; and if someone had come and had given her only modest pleasure, she would nevertheless smile for her husband's benefit as though she has been embraced by Zeus. He knows his wife's style.

The children seem peaceful. They range in age from two to eight. Soon he and Micaela will have to think about having another. Five littles is a fair-sized family, but Jason understands his duty to serve life by creating life. When one ceases to grow, one begins to die; it is true of a human being and also of the population of an urban monad, of an urbmon
constellation, of a continent, of a world. God is life and life is god.

He lies down beside his wife.

He sleeps.

He dreams that Micaela has been sentenced to the chute for countersocial behavior.

Down she goes! Mamelon Kluver makes a condolence call. “Poor Jason,” she murmurs. Her pale skin is cool against him. The musky fragrance of her. The elegance of her features. The look of total mastery of self. Not even seventeen; how can she be so imperiously complete? “Help me dispose of Siegmund and we'll belong to each other,” Mamelon says. Eyes bright, mischievous, goading him to be her creature. “Jason,” she whispers. “Jason, Jason, Jason.” Her tone a caress. Her hand on his manhood. He wakes, trembling, sweating, horrified, half an inch from messy ecstasy. He sits up and goes through one of the forgiveness modes for improper thoughts. God bless, he thinks, god bless, god bless, god bless. I did not mean such things. It was my mind. My monstrous mind free of shackles. He completes the spiritual exercise and lies down once more. He sleeps and dreams more harmless dreams.

 

In the morning the littles run madly off to school and Jason prepares to go to his office. Micaela says suddenly, “Isn't it interesting that you go 600 floors
down
when you go to work, and Siegmund Kluver goes up on top, to Louisville?”