The World Inside

by Robert Silverberg

  “Over here,” Dillon tells the machine.

  Delicately it brings his vibrastar to the output node and makes the connection. Dillon could not possibly have moved the immense instrument. He does not mind letting machines do the things humans were never meant to do, like lifting three-ton loads. Dillon puts his hands on the manipulatrix and feels the power thrumming through the keyboard. Good. “Go,” he tells the machine, and silently it slides away. He kneads and squeezes the projectrons of the manipulatrix. As if milking them. Sensual pleasure in making contact with the machine. A little orgasm with every crescendo. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

  “Tuning in!” he warns the other musicians.

  They make feedback adjustments in their own instruments; otherwise the sudden surge of his entrance might damage both instruments and players. One by one they nod their readiness to him, with the gravity-drinker lad chiming in last, and finally Dillon can let out the clutch. Yeah! The hall fills with light. Stars stream from the walls. He coats the ceiling with dripping nebulae. He is the basic instrument of the group, the all-important continuo, providing the foundation against which the others will do their things. With a practiced eye he checks the focus. Everything sharp. Nat the spectrum-rider says, “Mars is a little off-color, Dill.” Dillon hunts for Mars. Yes. Yes. He feeds it an extra jolt of orange. And Jupiter? A shining globe of white fire. Venus. Saturn. And all the stars. He is satisfied with the visuals.

  “Bringing up the sound, now,” he says.

  The heels of his hands hit the control panel. From the gaping speakers comes a tender blade of white noise. The music of the spheres. He colors it now, bringing up the gain on the galactic side, letting the stellar drift impart plangent hues to the tone. Then, with a quick downward stab on the projectrons, he kicks in the planetary sounds. Saturn whirls like a belt of knives. Jupiter booms. “Are you getting it?” he calls out. “How's the clarity?” Sophro the orbital diver says, “Fat up the asteroids, Dill,” and he does it, and Sophro nods, happy, his chins trembling in pleasure.

  After half an hour of preliminary maneuvers Dillon has his primary tuning finished. So far, though, he has done only the solo work. Now to coordinate with the others. Slow, delicate work: to reach reciprocity with them one by one, building a web of interrelationship, a seven-way union. Plagued all the way by heisenberging effects, so that a whole new cluster of adjustments has to be made each time another instrument is added to the set. Change one factor, you change everything; you can't just hold your own while keying in more and more and more output. He takes on the spectrum-rider first. Easy. Dillon gives forth a shower of comets and Nat modulates them pleasantly into suns. Then they add the incantator. A slight stridency at first, quickly corrected. Good going. Then the gravity-drinker. No problem. The comet-harp, now. Rasp! Rasp! The receptors go bleary and the entire thing falls apart. He and the incantator have to retune separately, rejoin, bring the comet-harp into the net again. This time all right. Great plumey curves of tone go lalloping through the hall. Then the orbital diver. Fifteen sweaty minutes; the balances keep souring. Dillon expects a system collapse any second, but no, they hang on and finally get the levels even. And now the really tough one, the doppler-inverter, which threatens always to clash with his own instrument because both rely as much on visuals as audio, and both are generators, not just modulators of someone else's playing. He almost gets it. But they lose the comet-harp. It makes a thin edgy whining sound and drops out. So they go back two steps and try again. Precarious balance, constantly falling off. Up till five years ago, there had been only five instruments in cosmos groups; it was simply too difficult to hold more than that together. Like adding a fourth actor in Greek tragedy: an impossible technical feat, or so it must have seemed to Aeschylus. Now they were able to coordinate six instruments reasonably well, and a seventh with some effort, by sending the circuit bouncing up to a computer nexus in Edinburgh, but it is still a filther to put them all in synch. Dillon gestures madly with his left shoulder, encouraging the doppler-inverter to get with it. “Come on, come on, come on, come on!” and this time they make it. The time is 1840. Everything sticks together.

  “Let's run it through, now,” Nat sings out. “Give us an A for tuning, maestro."

  Dillon hunches forward and clutches the projectrons. Feeds power. Gets a sensory shift; the knobs abruptly feel like the cheeks of Electra's buttocks in his hands. Smiles at the sensation. Firm, bouncy, cool. Up we go! And gives them the universe in one sizzling blare of light and sound. The hall swims with images. The stars leap and cross and mate. The incantator man picks up his sonics and does his trick, enhancing, multiplying, intensifying, until the whole Urbmon shakes. The comet-harp makes bleeping blurting loops of dizzying counterpoint and starts to rearrange Dillon's constellations. The orbital diver, hanging back, makes a sudden plunge at an unexpected moment, and dials spin on everybody's control panel, but it is such a devastating entry that Dillon inwardly applauds it. The gravity-drinker smoothly sucks tone. Now the doppler-inverter goes at it, shooting up its own shaft of light, which sizzles and steams for perhaps thirty seconds before the spectrum-rider grabs it and runs with it, and now all seven of them are jamming madly, each trying to put the others on, shooting forth such a welter of signals that the sight must surely be visible from Boswash to Sansan.

  “Hold it! Hold it! Hold it!” Nat screams. “Don't waste it! Man, don't waste it!"

  And they cut out of phase and go down, and sit there idling, sweaty, nerves twinkling. Withdrawal pains; it hurts to step away from such beauty. But Nat is right: they mustn't use themselves up before the audience gets here.

  Dinner break, right on stage. No one eats much. They leave the instruments tuned and running, of course. Lunacy to disrupt the synch after working so hard to get it right. Now and then one of the idling instruments flares past its threshold and emits a blob of light or a squeak of sound. They'd play themselves if we'd only let them, Dillon thinks. It might just be a wild soar to turn everything on and sit back, doing nothing, while the instruments themselves give the concert, self-programed. You'd get some strange percepts then. The mind of the machine. On the other hand it might be a hell of a dropper to find out you were superfluous. How frail is our prestige. Celebrated artists today, but let the secret sneak out and we'll all be pushing junk-buckets in Reykjavik tomorrow.

  The audience begins to show up at 1945. An older crowd; since this is the first night of the Rome run, the rules of seniority have governed the distribution of tickets and the undertwenties have been left out. Dillon, midstage, does not trouble to hide his scorn for the gray, baggy people settling into the audience webs all around him. Will the music reach them? Can anything reach them? Or will they sit passively, not even going halfway out to the performance? Dreaming of making more littles. Ignoring the sweating artists; taking up a good seat and getting nothing from the fireworks about them. We throw you the whole universe, and you don't catch. Is it because you're old? How much can a plumpish many-mother, thirty-three years old, pull from a cosmos show? No, it isn't age. In the more sophisticated cities there's no problem of audience response, young or old. No, it's a matter of your basic attitude toward the world of art. At the bottom of the building, the grubbos respond with their eyes, their guts, their balls. Either they're fascinated by the colored lights and the wild sounds, or else they're baffled and hostile, but they aren't indifferent. In the top levels, where the use of the mind is not only permitted but desired, they reach out for the show, knowing that the more they bring to it the more they get from it. And isn't that what life is all about, to wring all the sensory percepts you can out of the outputs drifting past your head? What else is there? But here, here in the middle levels, all the responses are dulled. The walking dead. The important thing is being present in the auditorium, grabbing that ticket away from someone else, showing off. The performance itself doesn't matter. That's just noise and light, some crazy kids from San Francisco having a workout. So there they sit, these Romans, disconnected fro
m skull to crotch. What a joke. Romans? The real Rome wasn't like that, you bet. Calling their city Rome is a crime against history. Dillon glares at them. Then, overfocusing his eyes, he deliberately blurs them out; he does not want to see their flabby gray faces, for fear the sight of them will color his performance. He is here to give. If they aren't capable of taking, tough.

  “Let's go up now,” Nat murmurs. “Ready, Dill?"

  He is ready. He brings his hands up for a virtuoso pounce and slams them down on the projectrons. The old headblaster! Moon and sun and planets and stars come roaring out of his instrument. The whole glittering universe erupts in the hall. He doesn't dare look at the audience. Did he rock them? Are they gasping and tugging at their droopy lower lips? Come on, come on, come on! The others, as if sensing that he's into something special, let him take an introductory solo. Furies fly through his brain. He jabs the manipulatrix. Pluto! Saturn! Betelgeuse! Deneb! Here sit people who spend their whole lives locked inside a single building; give them the stars in one skullblowing rush. Who says you can't start with your climax? The power drain must be immense; lights must be dimming all the way to Chicago. What of it? Did Beethoven give a fart about the power drain? There. There. There. Throw stars around. Make them shimmer and shake. An eclipse of the sun—why not? Let the corona crackle and fry. Make the moon dance. And bring up the sound, too, a great heaving pedal-point that sneaks up the webbing at them, a spear of fifty-cycle vibration nailing them in their assholes. Help them digest their dinner. Shake up all the old shit clogging the colon. Dillon laughs. He wishes he could see his face now; something demonic, maybe. How long is the solo going to last? Why don't they pick up on him, now? He's going to burn out. He doesn't mind, throwing himself into the machine like that, except for the faint paranoid feeling that the others are deliberately allowing him to strain past his limits so he'll injure himself. The rest of his life sitting like a slug, going booble-booble-booble. Not me! He pulls out all the stops. Fantastic! He's never done things like this before. It must be his rage at these dull Romans that is inspiring him. And all of it wasted on them. Slot that, though: what counts is what's happening inside him, his own artistic fulfillment. If he can blow their skulls, that's a bonus. But this is ecstasy. The whole universe is vibrating around him. A gigantic solo. God himself must have felt this way when he got to work on the first day. Needles of sound descending from the speakers. A mighty crescendo of light and tone. He feels the power surging through him; he is so happy with what he is doing that he grows hard below, and tips himself back in his seat to make it ram more visibly against his clothes. Has anyone ever done something like this before, this improvised symphony for solo vibrastar? Hello, Bach! Hello, Mick! Hello, Wagner! Shoot your skulls! Let it all fly! He is past the crest, starting to come down now, no longer relying on raw energy but dabbling in subtler things, splashing Jupiter with golden splotches, turning the stars into icy white points, bringing up little noodling ostinatos. He makes Saturn trill: a signal to the others. Who ever heard of opening a concert with a cadenza? But they pick up on it.

  Ah, now. Here they come. Gently the doppler-inverter noodles in with a theme of its own, catching something of the descending fervor of Dillon's stellar patterns. At once the comet-harp overlays this with a more sensational series of twanging tones that immediately transmute themselves into looping blares of green light. These are seized by the spectrum-rider, who climbs up on top of them and, grinning broadly, skis off toward the ultraviolet in a shower of hissing crispness. Old Sophro now does his orbital dives, a swoop and a pickup followed by a swoop and a pickup again, playing against the spectrum-rider in the kind of cunning way that only someone right inside the meshing group can appreciate. Then the incantator enters, portentous, booming, sending reverberations shivering through the walls, heightening the significance of the tonal and astronomical patterns until the convergences become almost unbearably beautiful. It is the cue for the gravity-drinker, who disrupts everybody's stability with wonderful, wild liberating bursts of force. By this time Dillon has retreated to his proper place as the coordinator and unifier of the group, tossing a skein of melody to this one, a loop of light to that one, embellishing everything that passes near him. He fades into the undertones. His manic excitement passes; playing in a purely mechanical way, he is as much listener as performer, quietly appreciating the variations and divagations his partners are producing. He does not need to draw attention now. He can simply go oomp oomp oomp the rest of the night. Not that he will; the construct will tumble if he doesn't feed new data every ten or fifteen minutes, But this is his time to coast.

  Each of the others takes a solo in turn. Dillon can no longer see the audience. He rocks, he pivots, he sweats, he sobs; he caresses the projectrons furiously; he seals himself in a cocoon of blazing light; he juggles alternations of light and darkness. The rod in his pants has softened. He is calm at the eye of the storm, fully professional, quietly doing his work. That moment of ecstasy seems to belong to some other day, even to some other man. How long had the solo lasted, anyway? He has lost track of the time. But the performance is going well, and he leaves it to methodical Nat to keep watch of the hour.

  After its frenzied opening the concert has settled into routine. The center of the action has shifted to the doppler-inverter man, who is spinning off a series of formula flashes. Quite nice, but stale stuff, over-rehearsed, unspontaneous. His offhandedness infects the others and the whole group vamps for perhaps twenty minutes, going through a set of changes that numb the ganglia and abort the soul, until finally Nat spectacularly shrieks through the whole spectrum from someplace south of infrared into what, as far as anyone can tell, may be the X-ray frequencies, and this wild takeoff not only stimulates a rebirth of inventiveness but also signals the end of the show. Everybody picks up on him and they blast free, swirling and floating and coming together, forming one entity with seven heads as they bombard the flaccid data-stoned audience with mountains of overload. Yes yes yes yes yes. Wow wow wow wow wow. Flash flash flash flash flash. Oh oh oh oh oh. Come come come come come. Dillon is at the heart of it, tossing off bright purple sparks, pulling down suns and chewing them up, and he feels even more plugged in than during his big solo, for this is a joint thing, a blending, a merging, and he knows that what he is feeling now explains everything: this is the purpose of life, this is the reason for it all. To tune in on beauty, to plunge right to the hot source of creation, to open your soul and let it all in and let it all out again, to give to give to give to give

  to give

  to give

  and it ends. Pull the plug. They let him have the final chord and he cuts off with a skullblower, a five-way planetary conjunction and a triple fugue, the whole showoff burst lasting no more than ten seconds. Then down with the hands and off with the switch and a wall of silence rises ninety kilometers high. This time he's done it. He's emptied everybody's skull. He sits there shivering, biting his lip, dazed by the house lights, wanting to cry. He dares not look at the others in the group. How much time is passing? Five minutes, five months, five centuries, five megayears? And at last the reaction. A stampede of applause. All of Rome on its feet, yelling slapping cheeks—the ultimate tribute, 4,000 people struggling out of their comfortable webs to pound their palms against their faces—and Dillon laughs, throwing back his head, getting up himself, bowing, holding his hands out to Nat, to Sophro, to all six of them. Somehow it was better tonight. Even these Romans know it. What did they do to deserve it? By being such lumps, Dillon tells himself, they drew forth the best we had in us. To turn them on. And we did. We knocked them out of their miserable soggy skulls.

  The cheering continues.

  Fine. Fine. We are great artists. Now I've got to get out of here, before I come down from it all.

  He never socializes with the rest of the group after a performance. They have all discovered that the less they see of each other in leisure hours, the more intimate their professional collaboration will be; there is no intragro
up friendship, not even intragroup sex. They all feel that would be death, any kind of coupling, hetero, homo, triple-up—save that for outsiders. They have their music to unite them. So he goes off by himself. The audience starts to flow toward the exits, and, without saying good night to anybody, Dillon steps into the artists’ trap door and makes his escape one level down. His clothes are stiff and wet with perspiration, clammy, uncomfortable. He must do something about that quickly. Prowling along the 529th floor for a dropshaft, he opens the first apartment door he comes to and finds a couple, sixteen, seventeen years old, squatting before the screen. He naked, she wearing only breastcoils, both of them plainly soaring on one of the harder ones, but not so high that they can't recognize him. “Dillon Chrimes!” the girl gasps, her squeal waking two or three littles.

  “Hey, hello,” he says. “I just have to use the cleanser, okay? Don't let me disturb you. I don't even want to talk, you know? I'm still way up.” He strips off his sodden clothes and gets under the cleanser. It hums and rumbles and peels his grime from him. He lets it work on his clothes next. The girl is creeping toward him. She has the breastcoils off; the white imprints of the metal on her pink dangling flesh are turning rapidly red. Kneeling before him. Hand goes to his thighs. Her lips heading for his loins. “No,” he says. “Don't."

  “No?"

  “I can't do it here."

  “But why?"

  “Just wanted to use the cleanser. Couldn't stand my own stink. I've got to do my nightwalking on 500 tonight.” Her fingers sliding between his legs. Gently he pries them. Back into his clothing; the girl looks on, astonished, as he covers himself.

  “You aren't going to?” she asks.

  “Not here. Not here.” She continues to blink at him as he goes out. Her look of shock saddens him. Tonight he must go to the middle of the building, but tomorrow, for sure, he will come to her, and he'll explain everything then. He makes a note of the room number. 52908. Nightwalking is supposed to be random, but to hell with that; he owes her a thrill. Tomorrow.