The World Inside

by Robert Silverberg

  “God bless, fourteen weeks,” Michael says. “Number five. A girl, this time."

  “We'll name her Celeste,” Stacion puts in, patting her middle. Her maternity costume is a short yellow bolero and a loose brown waist sash. Leaving the bulging belly bare. The everted navel like the stem of the swollen fruit. Milky breasts swaying in and out of visibility under the open jacket. “We're talking about requesting twins for next year,” she adds. “A boy and a girl. Michael's always telling me about the good times he and Micaela used to have together when they were young. Like a special world for twins."

  Jason is caught unawares by the bringdown, and is plunged abruptly into feverish fantasy once more. He sees Micaela's spread legs sticking out from under Michael's lean pumping body, sees her childish ecstatic face looking up over his busy shoulder. The good times they used to have. Michael the first one into her. At nine, ten, maybe? Even younger? Their awkward experiments. Let me get on top of you this time, Michael. Oh, it's deeper this way. Do you think we're doing anything wrong? No, silly, didn't we sleep together for nine whole months? Put your hand here. And your mouth on me again. Yes. You're hurting my breasts, Michael. Oh. Oh, that's nice. But wait, just another few seconds. The good times they used to have. “Is something the matter, Jason?” Michael's voice. “You look so tight.” Jason forces himself to pull out of it. Hands trembling. Another fume. He rarely takes three before dinner.

  Stacion has gone to help Micaela unload the food from the delivery slot. Michael says to Jason, “I hear you've started a new research project. What's the basic theme?"

  Kind of him. Senses that I'm ill at ease. Draw me out of my morbid brooding. All these sick thoughts.

  Jason replies, “I'm investigating the notion that Urbmon life is breeding a new kind of human being. A type that adapts readily to relatively little living space and a low privacy quotient."

  “You mean a genetic mutation?” Michael asks, frowning. “Literally, an inherited social characteristic?"

  “So I believe."

  “Are such things possible, though? Can you call it a genetic trait, really, if people voluntarily decide to band together in a society like ours and—"

  “Voluntarily?"

  “Isn't it?"

  Jason smiles. “I doubt that it ever was. In the beginning, you know, it was a matter of necessity. Because of the chaos in the world. Seal yourself up in your building or be exposed to the food bandits. I'm talking about the famine years, now. And since then, since everything stabilized, has it been so voluntary? Do we have any choice about where we live?"

  “I suppose we could go outside if we really wanted to,” Michael says, “and live in whatever they've got out there."

  “But we don't. Because we recognize that that's a hopeless fantasy. We stay here, whether we like it or not. And those who don't like it, those who eventually can't take it—well, you know what happens to them."

  “But—"

  “Wait. Two centuries of selective breeding, Michael. Down the chute for the flippos. And no doubt some population loss through leaving the buildings, at least at the beginning. Those who remain adapt to circumstances. They like the Urbmon way. It seems altogether natural to them."

  “Is this really genetic, though? Couldn't you simply call it psychological conditioning? I mean, in the Asian countries, didn't people always live jammed together the way we do, only much worse, no sanitation, no regulation—and didn't they accept it as the natural order of things?''

  “Of course,” Jason says. “Because rebellion against the natural order of things had been bred out of them thousands of years ago. The ones who stayed, the ones who reproduced, were the ones who accepted things as they were. The same here."

  Doubtfully Michael says, “How can you draw the line between psychological conditioning and long-term selective breeding? How do you know what to attribute to which?"

  “I haven't faced that problem yet,” Jason admits.

  “Shouldn't you be working with a geneticist?"

  “Perhaps later I will. After I've established my parameters of inquiry. You know, I'm not ready to defend this thesis, yet. I'm just collecting data to discover if it can be defended. The scientific method. We don't make a priori assumptions and look around for supporting evidence; we examine the evidence first and—"

  “Yes, yes, I know. Just between us, though, you do think it's really happening, don't you? An Urbmon species."

  “I do. Yes. Two centuries of selective breeding, pretty ruthlessly enforced. And all of us so well adapted now to this kind of life."

  “Ah. Yes. All of us so well adapted."

  “With some exceptions,” Jason says, retreating a bit. He and Michael exchange wary glances. Jason wonders what thoughts lie behind his brother-in-law's cool eyes. “General acceptance, though. Where has the old Western expansionist philosophy gone? Bred out of the race, I say. The urge to power? The love of conquest? The hunger for land and property? Gone. Gone. Gone. I don't think that's just a conditioning process. I suspect it's a matter of stripping the race of certain genes that lead to—"

  “Dinner, professor,” Micaela calls.

  A costly meal. Proteoid steaks, root salad, bubble pudding, relishes, fish soup. Nothing reconstituted and hardly anything synthetic. For the next two weeks he and Micaela will have to go on short rations until they've made up the deficit in their luxury allotment. He conceals his annoyance. Michael always eats lavishly when he comes here; Jason wonders why, since Micaela is not nearly so solicitous of her seven other brothers and sisters. Scarcely ever invites two or three of them. But Michael here at least five times a year, always getting a feast. Jason's suspicions reawaken. Something ugly going on between those two? The childhood passions still smoldering? Perhaps it is cute for twelve-year-old twins to couple, but should they still be at it when twenty-three and married? Michael a nightwalker in my sleeping platform? Jason is annoyed at himself. Not bad enough that he has to fret over his idiotic homosexual fixation on Michael; now he has to torment himself with fears of an incestuous affair behind his back. Poisoning his hours of relaxation. What if they are? Nothing socially objectionable in it. Seek pleasure where you will. In your sister's slot if you be so moved. Shall all the men of Urban Monad 116 have access to Micaela Quevedo, save only the unfortunate Michael? Must his status as her wombmate deny her to him? Be realistic, Jason tells himself. Incest taboos make sense only where breeding is involved. Anyway, they probably aren't doing it, probably never have. He wonders why so much nastiness has sprouted in his soul lately. The frictions of living with Micaela, he decides. Her coldness is driving me into all kinds of unblessworthy attitudes, the bitch. If she doesn't stop goading me I'll—

  —I'll what? Seduce Michael away from her? He laughs at the intricacy of his own edifice of schemes.

  “Something funny?” Micaela asks. “Share it with us, Jason."

  He looks up, helpless. What shall he say? “A silly thought,” he improvises. “About you and Michael, how much you look like each other. I was thinking, perhaps some night you and he could switch rooms, and then a nightwalker would come here, looking for you, but when he actually got under the covers with you he'd discover that he was in bed with a man, and—and—” Jason is smitten with the overwhelming fatuity of what he is saying and descends into a feeble silence.

  “What a peculiar thing to imagine,” Micaela says.

  “Besides, so what?” Stacion asks. “The nightwalker might be a little surprised for a minute, maybe, but then he'd just go ahead and make it with Michael, wouldn't he? Rather than make a big scene or bother to go someplace else. So I don't see what's funny."

  “Forget it,” Jason growls. “I told you it was silly. Micaela insisted on knowing what was crossing my mind, and I told you, but I'm not responsible if it doesn't make any sense, am I? Am I?” He grabs the flask of wine and pours most of what remains into his cup. “This is good stuff,” he mutters.

  After dinner they share an expander, all but Stacion. They g
roove in silence for a couple of hours. Shortly before midnight, Michael and Stacion leave. Jason does not watch as his wife and her brother make their farewell embraces. As soon as the guests are gone, Micaela strips away her sarong and gives him a bright, fierce stare, almost defying him to have her tonight. But though he knows it is unkind to ignore her wordless invitation, he is so depressed by his own inner performance this evening that he feels he must flee. “Sorry,” he says. “I'm restless.” Her expression changes: desire fades and is replaced by bewilderment, and then by rage. He does not wait. Hastily he goes out, rushing to the dropshaft and plummeting to the 59th floor. Warsaw. He enters an apartment and finds a woman of about thirty, with fuzzy blond hair and a soft fleshy body, asleep alone on an unkempt sleeping platform. At least eight littles stacked up on cots in the corners. He wakes her. “Jason Quevedo,” he says. “I'm from Shanghai."

  She blinks. Having trouble focusing her eyes. “Shanghai? But are you supposed to be here?"

  “Who says I can't?"

  She ponders that. “Nobody says. But Shanghai never comes here. Really, Shanghai? You?"

  “Do I have to show you my identiplate?” he asks harshly. His educated inflections destroy her resistance. She begins to primp, arranging her hair, reaching for some kind of cosmetic spray for her face, while he drops his clothing. He mounts the platform. She draws her knees up almost to her breasts, presenting herself. Crudely, impatiently, he takes her. Michael, he thinks. Micaela. Michael. Micaela. Grunting, he floods her with his fluid.

  In the morning, at his office, he begins his newest line of inquiry, summoning up data on the sexual mores of ancient times. As usual, he concentrates on the twentieth century, which he regards as the climax of the ancient era, and therefore most significant, revealing as it does the entire cluster of attitudes and responses that had accumulated in the pre-urbmon industrial era. The twenty-first century is less useful for his purposes, being, like all transitional periods, essentially chaotic and unschematic, and the twenty-second century brings him into modern times with the beginning of the Urbmon age. So the twentieth is his favorite area of study. Seeds of the collapse, portents of doom running through it like bad-trip threads in a psychedelic tapestry.

  Jason is careful not to fall victim to the historian's fallacy of diminished perspective. Though the twentieth century, seen from this distance, seems to be a single seamless entity, he knows that this is an error of evaluation caused by overfacile abstracting; there may be certain apparent patterns that ride one unbroken curve across the ten decades, but he realizes that he must allow for certain qualitative changes in society that have created major historical discontinuities between decade and decade. The unleashing of atomic energy created one such discontinuity. The development of swift intercontinental transportation formed another. In the moral sphere, the availability of simple and reliable contraception caused a fundamental change in sexual attitudes, a revolution not to be ascribed to mere rebelliousness. The arrival of the psychedelic age, with its special problems and joys, marked one more great gulf, setting off part of the century from all that went before. So 1910 and 1930 and 1950 and 1970 and 1990 occupy individual summits in Jason's jagged image of the century, and in any sampling of its mentality that he takes, he draws evidence from each of its discrete subepochs.

  Plenty of evidence is available to him. Despite the dislocations caused by the collapse, an enormous weight of data on the eras of pre-urbmon time exists, stored in some subterranean vault, Jason knows not where. Certainly the central data bank (if there is indeed only one, and not a redundant series of them scattered through the world) is not anywhere in Urbmon 116, and he doubts that it is even in the Chipitts constellation. It does not matter. He can draw from that vast deposit any information that he requires, and it will come instantaneously. The trick lies in knowing what to ask for.

  He is familiar enough with the sources to be able to make intelligent data requisitions. He thumbs the keys and the new cubes arrive. Novels. Films. Television programs. Leaflets. Hand-bills. He knows that for more than half the century popular attitudes toward sexual matters were recorded both in licit and illicit channels: the ordinary novels and motion pictures of the day, and an underground stream of clandestine, “forbidden” erotic works. Jason draws from both groups. He must weigh the distortions of the erotica against the distortions of the legitimate material: only out of this Newtonian interplay of forces can the objective truth be mined. Then, too, he surveys the legal codes, making the appropriate allowances for laws observed only in the breach. What is this in the laws of New York: “A person who willfully and lewdly exposes his person or the private parts thereof, in any public place, or in any place where others are present, or procures another to so expose himself shall be guilty of..."? In the state of Georgia, he reads, any sleeping car passenger who remains in a compartment other than the one to which he is assigned is guilty of a misdemeanor and is subject to a maximum fine of $1000 or twelve months’ imprisonment. The laws of the state of Michigan tell him: “Any person who shall undertake to medically treat any female person, and while so treating her shall represent to such female that it is, or will be necessary, or beneficial to her health that she shall have sexual intercourse with a man, and any man, not being the husband of such female, who shall have sexual intercourse with her by reason of such representation, shall be guilty of a felony, and be punished by a maximum term of ten years.” Strange. Stranger still: “Every person who shall carnally know, or shall have sexual intercourse in any manner with any animal or bird, is guilty of sodomy....” No wonder everything's extinct! And this? “Whoever shall carnally know any male or female by the anus (rectum) or with the mouth or tongue, or who shall attempt intercourse with a dead body... $2000 and/or five years’ imprisonment....” Most chilling of all: in Connecticut the use of contraceptive articles is forbidden, under penalty of a minimum fine of $50 or sixty days to one year in prison, and in Massachusetts “whoever sells, lends, gives, exhibits (or offers to) any instrument or drug, or medicine, or any article whatever for the prevention of conception, shall be subject to a maximum term of five years in prison or a maximum fine of $1000.” What? What? Send a man to prison for decades for cunnilingualizing his wife, and impose so trifling a sentence on the spreaders of contraception? Where was Connecticut, anyway? Where was Massachusetts? Historian that he is, he is not sure. God bless, he thinks, but the doom that came upon them was well merited. A bizarre folk to deal so lightly with those who would limit births!

  He skims a few novels and dips into several films. Even though it is only the first day of his research, he perceives patterns, a fitful loosening of taboos throughout the century, accelerating greatly between 1920 and 1930 and again after 1960. Timid experiments in revealing the ankle lead, shortly, to bared breasts. The curious custom of prostitution erodes as liberties become more commonly obtained. The disappearance of taboos on the popular sexual vocabulary. He can barely believe some of what he learns. So compressed were their souls! So thwarted were their urges! And why? And why? Of course, they did grow looser. Yet terrible restraints prevail throughout that dark century, except toward the end, when the collapse was near and all limits burst. But even then there was something askew in their liberation. He sees a forced, self-conscious mode of amorality coming into being. The shy nudists. The guilt-wracked orgiasts. The apologetic adulterers. Strange, strange, strange. He is endlessly fascinated by the twentieth century's sexual concepts. The wife as husband's property. The premium on virginity: well, they seemed to get rid of that! Attempts by the state to dictate positions of sexual intercourse and to forbid certain supplementary acts. The restrictions even on words! A phrase leaps out of a supposedly serious twentieth-century work of social criticism: “Among the most significant developments of the decade was the attainment of the freedom, at last, for the responsible writer to use such words as fuck and cunt where necessary in his work.” Can that have been so? Such importance placed on mere words? Jason pronounces the odd
monosyllables aloud in his research cubicle. “Fuck. Cunt. Fuck. Cunt. Fuck.” They sound merely antiquated. Harmless, certainly. He tries the modern equivalents. ‘Top. Slot. Top. Slot. Top.” No impact. How can words ever have held such inflammatory content that an apparently penetrating scholar would feel it worthwhile to celebrate their free public use? Jason is aware of his limitations as a historian when he runs into such things. He simply cannot comprehend the twentieth century's obsession with words. To insist on giving God a capital letter, as though He might be displeased to be called a god! To suppress books for printing words like c-t and f-k and s-t!

  By the close of his day's work he is more convinced than ever of the validity of his thesis. There has been a monumental change in sexual morality in the past three hundred years, and it cannot be explained only on cultural grounds. We are different, he tells himself. We have changed, and it is a cellular change, a transformation of the body as well as the soul. They could not have permitted, let alone encouraged, our total-accessibility society. Our nightwalking, our nudity, our freedom from taboos, our lack of irrational jealousies, all of this would have been wholly alien to them, distasteful, abominable. Even those who lived in a way approaching ours, and there were a few, did so for the wrong reasons. They were responding not to a positive societal need but to an existing system of repression. We are different. We are fundamentally different.

  Weary, satisfied with what he has found, he leaves his office an hour ahead of time. When he returns to his apartment, Micaela is not there.