The World Inside

by Robert Silverberg

  Pick a door. Say, 6021. 6023. 6025. Strange to see the apartments bearing four-digit numbers. 6027. 6029. Siegmund puts his hand to the knob. Hesitates. A rush of sudden timidity. Imagining, within, a brawny hairy growling sullen working-class husband, a shapeless weary working-class wife. And he must intrude on their intimacies. Their resentful glare upon seeing his upper-level clothing. What is this Shanghai dandy doing here? Doesn't he have any regard for decency? And so forth. And so forth. Siegmund almost flees. Then he takes hold of himself. They dare not refuse. They dare not be sullen. He opens the door.

  The room is dark. Only the nightglow on; his eyes adjust and he sees a couple on the sleeping platform and five or six littles on cots. He approaches the platform. Stands over the sleepers. His imagined portrait of the room's occupants altogether inaccurate. They could be any young married pair of Shanghai, Chicago, Edinburgh. Strip away the clothes, let sleep eradicate the facial expressions denoting position in the social matrix, and distinctions of class and city perhaps disappear. The naked sleepers are only a few years older than Siegmund—he maybe nineteen, she possibly eighteen. The man slender, narrow shoulders, unspectacular muscles. The woman trim, standard, agreeable body, soft yellow hair. Siegmund lightly touches her shoulder. A ridge of bone lying close beneath the skin. Blue eyes flickering open. Fear giving way to understanding: oh, a nightwalker. And understanding giving way to confusion: the nightwalker wears upper-building clothes. Etiquette demands an introduction. “Siegmund Kluver,” he says. “Shanghai."

  The girl's tongue passes hurriedly over her lips. “Shanghai? Really?” The husband awakes. Blinking, puzzled. “Shanghai?” he says. “What for, down here, huh?” Not hostile, just wondering. Siegmund shrugs, as if to say a whim, a fancy. The husband gets off the platform. Siegmund assures him that it isn't necessary for him to leave, that it'll be quite all right to have him here, but that kind of thing evidently isn't practiced in Warsaw: the arrival of the nightwalker is the signal for the husband to clear out. Loose cotton wrap already over his pale, almost hairless body. A nervous smile: see you later, love. And out. Siegmund alone with the woman. “I never met anybody from Shanghai before,” she says.

  “You haven't told me your name."

  “Ellen."

  He lies down beside her. Stroking her smooth skin. Rhea's words echo. Soak up human nature. See how simpler people live. He is so tightly drawn. His flesh mysteriously invaded by a spreading network of fine golden wires. Penetrating the lobes of his brain. “What does your husband do, Ellen?"

  “He's on fork-lift now. Used to be a cabler, but he got hurt sheathing. The whiplash."

  “He works hard, doesn't he?"

  “The sector boss says he's one of the best. I think he's okay, too.” A sniggering little giggle. “What floors are Shanghai, anyway? That's someplace around 700, isn't it?"

  “761 to 800.” Caressing her haunches. Her body quivers—fear or desire? Shyly her hand goes to his clothing. Maybe just eager to get him in and out and gone. The frightening stranger from the upper levels. Or else not accustomed to foreplay. A different milieu. He'd rather talk awhile first. See how simpler people live. He's here to learn, not merely to top. Looking around the room: the furnishings drab and crude, no grace, no style. Yet designed by the same craftsmen who furnish Louisville and Toledo. Obviously aiming for a lower taste. A prevailing film of grayness over everything. Even the girl. I could be with Micaela Quevedo now. I could be with Principessa. Or with. Or perhaps with. But I am here. He searches for probing questions to ask. To bring out the essential humanity of this obscure person over whom he one day will help to rule. Do you read much? What are your favorite screen shows? What sort of foods do you like? Are you doing what you can to help your littles rise in the building? What do you think of the people down in Reykjavik? And those in Prague? But he says nothing. What's the use? What can he learn? Impassable barriers between person and person. Touching her here and here and here. Her fingers on him. He is still soft.

  “You don't like me,” she says sadly.

  He wonders how often she uses the cleanser. “Maybe I'm a little tired,” he says. “So busy these days.” Pressing his body against hers. The warmth of her possibly will resurrect him. Her eyes staring into his. Blue lenses over inner emptiness. He kisses the hollow of her throat. “Hey, that tickles!” she says, wriggling. He trails his fingers down her belly. To the core of her. Hot and moist and ready. But he isn't. Can't. “Is there anything special?” she asks. “If it isn't too complicated maybe I could.” He shakes his head. He isn't interested in whips and chains and thongs. Just the usual. But he can't. His fatigue only a pretense; what cripples him is his sense of isolation. Alone among 885,000 people. And I can't reach her. Not even with this. Pushing the limp rod against her gate. The Shanghai swell, incapable, unmanned. Now she is no longer afraid of him and not very sympathetic. She takes his failure as a sign of his contempt for her. He wants to tell her how many hundreds of women he has topped in Shanghai and Chicago, and even Toledo. Where he is regarded as devilishly virile. Desperately he turns her over. His sweaty belly against her cool buttocks. “Listen, I don't know what you think you're doing, but—” Even this won't help. She squirms indignantly. He releases her. Rises, adjusts himself. Face blazing. As he goes to the door he looks back. She is sitting up wantonly, looking mockery at him. Makes a gesture with three fingers, no doubt a scabrous obscenity here. He says, “I just want you to know. The name I gave you when I came in—it isn't mine. That's not me at all.” And goes hastily out. So much for soaking up human nature. So much for Warsaw.

  He takes the liftshaft randomly to 118, Prague, gets out, walks halfway around the building without entering any apartment or speaking to anyone he meets; gets into a different liftshaft; goes up to 173 in Pittsburgh; stands for a while in a corridor, listening to the pounding of the blood in the capillaries of his temples. Then he steps into a Somatic Fulfillment Hall. Even at this late hour there are people making use of its facilities: a dozen or so in the whirl-pool tumbler, five or six prancing on the treadmill, a few couples in the copulatorium. His Shanghai clothes earn him some curious stares but no one approaches him. Feeling desire return, Siegmund moves vaguely toward the copulatorium, but at its entrance he loses heart and turns aside. Shoulders slumping, he goes slowly out of the Somatic Fulfillment Hall. Now he takes to the stairs, plodding up the great coil that runs the whole thousand-floor height of Urban Monad 116. He looks up the mighty helix and sees the levels stretching toward infinity, with banks of lights glittering above him to denote each landing. Birmingham, San Francisco, Colombo, Madrid. He grasps the rail and looks down. Eyes spiraling along the descending path. Prague, Warsaw, Reykjavik. A dizzying vortex; a monstrous well through which the light of a million globes drifts from above like snowflakes. He clambers doggedly up the myriad steps. Hypnotized by his own mechanical movements. Before he realizes it, he has climbed forty floors. Sweat drenches him and the muscles of his calves are bunching and knotting. He yanks open the doorway and lurches out into the main corridor. This is the 213th floor. Birmingham. Two men with the smirking look of nightwalkers on their way home stop him and offer him some kind of groover, a small translucent capsule containing a dark, oily orange fluid. Siegmund accepts the capsule without a word and swallows it unquestioningly. They tap his biceps in a show of good fellowship and go on their way. Almost at once he feels nausea. Then blurred red and blue lights sway before his eyes. He wonders dimly what they have given him. He waits for the ecstasy. He waits. He waits.

  The next thing he knows, the thin light of dawn is in his eyes and he is sitting in an unfamiliar room, sprawled out in a web of oscillating, twanging metal mesh. A tall young man with long golden hair stands over him, and Siegmund can hear his own voice saying, “Now I know why they go flippo. One day it just gets to be too much for you. The people right up against your skin. You can feel them. And—"

  “Easy. Back it up a little. You're overloading."

  “My head i
s about to explode.” Siegmund sees an attractive red-haired woman moving around in the far corner of the room. He is having difficulty focusing his eyes. “I'm not sure I know where I am,” he says.

  “370th. That's San Francisco. You're really sectioned off, aren't you?"

  “My head. As if it needs to be pumped out."

  “I'm Dillon Chrimes. My wife, Electra. She found you wandering in the halls.” His host's friendly face smiling into his. Strange blue eyes, like plaques of polished stone. “About the building,” Chrimes says. “You know, one night not too long ago I took a multiplexer and I became the whole crotting building. And really flew on it. You know, seeing it as one big organism, a mosaic of thousands of minds. Beautiful. Until I started to come down, and on the downside it struck me as just an awful hideous beehive of a place. You lose your perspective when you mess your mind with chemicals. But then you regain it."

  “I can't regain it."

  “What's the good of hating the building? I mean, the Urbmon's a real solution to real problems, isn't it?"

  “I know."

  “And most of the time it works. So it's a sterilizer to waste your time hating it."

  “I don't hate it,” Siegmund says. “I've always admired the theory of verticality in urban thrust. My specialty is Urbmon administration. Was. Is. But suddenly everything's all wrong, and I don't know where the wrongness is. In me or in the whole system? And maybe not so suddenly."

  “There's no real alternative to the Urbmon,” Dillon Chrimes says. “I mean, you can jump down the chute, I guess, or run off to the communes, but those aren't sensible alternatives. So we stay here. And groove on the richness of it all. You must just have been working too hard. Look, you want something cold to drink?"

  “Please. Yes,” Siegmund says.

  The red-haired woman puts a flask in his hand. As she leans toward him, her breasts sway out, tolling like fleshy bells. She is quite beautiful. A tiny spurt of hormones within him. Reminding him of how this night had begun. Nightwalking in Warsaw. A girl. He has forgotten her name. His failure to top her.

  Dillon Chrimes says, “The screen's been broadcasting an alarm for Siegmund Kluver of Shanghai. Tracers out for him since 0400. Is that you?"

  Siegmund nods.

  “I know your wife. Mamelon, right?” Chrimes shoots a glance at his own wife. As if there is a jealousy problem here. In a lower tone he says to Siegmund, “Once when I was doing a performance in Shanghai I met her on a nightwalk. Lovely. That cool grace of hers. A statue full of passion. Probably very worried about you right now, Siegmund,"

  “Performance?"

  “I play the vibrastar in one of the cosmos groups.” Chrimes makes ecstatic keyboard gestures with his fingers. “You've probably seen me. How about letting me put through a call to your wife, all right?"

  Siegmund says, “A purely personal thing. A sense of coming apart. Or breaking loose from my roots."

  “What?"

  “A kind of rootlessness. As though not belonging in Shanghai, not belonging in Louisville, not belonging in Warsaw, not belonging anywhere. Just a cluster of ambitions and inhibitions, no real self. And I'm lost inside."

  “Inside what?"

  “Inside myself. Inside the building. A sense of coming apart. Leaving pieces of me all over the place. Films of self peeling away, drifting off.” Siegmund realizes that Electra Chrimes is staring at him. Appalled. He struggles for self-control. Sees himself stripped down to the bone. Spinal column exposed, the comb of vertebrae, the oddly angular cranium. Siegmund. Siegmund. Dillon Chrimes’ earnest, troubled face. A handsome apartment. Polymirrors, psychedelic tapestries. These happy people. Fulfilled in their art. Plugged into the switchboard. “Lost,” Siegmund says.

  “Transfer to San Francisco,” Chrimes suggests. “We don't push hard here. We can make room. Maybe you'll discover artistic talent. You could write programs for the screen shows, maybe. Or—"

  Siegmund laughs harshly. His throat is furry. “I'll write this show about the hungry rung-grabber who gets almost to the top and decides he doesn't want it. I'll—no, I won't. I don't mean any of this. It's the groover talking out of my mouth. Those two slipped me a filther, that's all. You'd better call Mamelon.” Getting to his feet. Trembling. A sensation of being at least ninety years old. He starts to fall. Chrimes and his wife catch him. His cheek against Electra's swaying breasts. Siegmund manages a smile. “It's the groover talking out of my mouth,” he says again.

  “It's a long dull story,” he tells Mamelon. “I got into a place where I didn't want to be, and somehow I took a capsule without knowing what I was taking, and everything got confused after that. But I'm all right now. I'm all right."

  After a day's medical absence he returns to his desk in Louisville Access Nexus. A pile of memoranda awaits him. Much need of his services by the great men of the administrative class. Nissim Shawke wants him to do a follow-up reply to the petitioners from Chicago, on that business of asking for freedom to determine the sex of one's offspring. Kipling Freehouse requests an intuitive interpretation of certain figures in next quarter's production-balance estimates. Monroe Stevis is after a double flow-chart showing attendance at sonic centers plotted against visits to blessmen and consolers: a psychological profile of the populations of six cities. And so on. Picking his brains. How blessworthy to be useful. How wearying to be used.

  He does his best, laboring under his handicap. A sense of coming apart. A dislocation of the soul.

  Midnight. Sleep will not come. He lies beside Mamelon, tossing. He has topped her, and still his nerves rustle in the darkness. She knows he is awake. Her soothing hand roams him. “Can't you relax?” she asks.

  “It gets harder."

  “Would you like some tingle? Or even mindblot."

  “No. Nothing."

  “Go nightwalking then,” she suggests. “Burn up some of that energy. You're all wired up, Siegmund."

  Held together by golden thread. Coming apart. Coming apart.

  Go up to Toledo, maybe? Seek consolation in Rhea's arms. She always is helpful. Or even nightwalk Louisville. Drop in on Nissim Shawke's wife Scylla. The audacity of it. But they were trying to push me onto her at that party, Somatic Fulfillment Day. Seeing whether I had the blessmanship to deserve promotion to Louisville. Siegmund knows he failed a test that day. But maybe it is not too late to undo that. He will go to Scylla. Even if Nissim's there. See, I have the requisite amorality! See, I defy all bounds. Why should a Louisville wife not be accessible to me? We all live under the same code of law, regardless of the inhibitions of custom that we have lately imposed upon ourselves. So he will say if he finds Nissim. And Nissim will applaud his bravado.

  “Yes,” he tells Mamelon. “I think I'll nightwalk."

  But he remains on the sleeping platform. Some minutes go by. A failure of impulse. He does not want to go; he pretends to be asleep, hoping Mamelon will doze. Some minutes more. Cautiously he opens one eye, slit-wide. Yes, she sleeps. How beautiful she is, how noble even while asleep. The fine bones, the pale skin, the jet-black hair. My Mamelon. My treasure. Lately he has felt little desire even for her. Boredom born of fatigue? Fatigue born of boredom?

  The door opens and Charles Mattern comes in.

  Siegmund watches the sociocomputator tiptoe toward the platform and silently undress. Mattern's lips are tightly compressed, his nostrils flaring. Signs of yearning. His penis already half erect. Mattern hungers for Mamelon; something has been developing between them over the past two months, Siegmund suspects, something more than mere nightwalking. Siegmund hardly cares. Just so she is happy. Mattern's harsh breathing loud in the room. He starts to awaken Mamelon.

  “Hello, Charles,” Siegmund says.

  Mattern, caught by surprise, flinches and laughs nervously. “I was trying not to wake you, Siegmund."

  “I've been up. Watching you."

  “You might have said something, then. To save me all this stealthing around."

  “I'm sorry. It didn
't occur to me."

  Mamelon is awake now too. Sitting up, bare to the waist. A stray coil of ebony hair passing deliciously across her pink left nipple. The whiteness of her skin illuminated by the faint glow of the nightlight. Smiling chastely at Mattern: the dutiful female citizen, ready to accept her nocturnal visitor.

  Siegmund says, “Charles, as long as you're here, I can tell you that I've got an assignment to do that'll involve working with you. For Stevis, He wants to see if people are spending more time than usual with blessmen and consolers, and less in sonic centers. A double flow-chart that—"

  “It's late, Siegmund.” Curtly. “Why don't you tell me about it in the morning."

  “Yes. All right. All right.” Flushing, Siegmund rises from the sleeping platform. He does not have to leave, even with a nightwalker here for Mamelon, but he does not want to stay. Like a Warsaw husband, granting a superfluous and unasked privacy to the other two. He hurriedly finds some clothing. Mattern reminds him that he's free to remain. But no. Siegmund leaves, a little wildly. Almost running down the hall. I will go up to Louisville, to Scylla Shawke. However, instead of asking the liftshaft to take him to the level where the Shawkes live, he calls out a Shanghai floor, 799. Charles and Principessa Mattern live there. He does not dare risk attempting Scylla while he is in this jangled state. Failure could be costly. Principessa will do. A tigress, she is. A savage. Her sheer animal vigor may restore his well-being. She is the most passionate woman he knows, short of Mamelon. And a good age, ripe but not overripe. Siegmund halts outside Principessa's door. It strikes him that it is somewhat bourgeois, something of a pre-urbmon thing, for him to be seeking the wife of the man who is now with his own wife. Nightwalking should be more random, less structured, merely a way of extending the range of one's life-experiences. Nevertheless. He nudges the door open. Relieved and dismayed to hear sounds of ecstasy from within. Two people on the platform: he sees arms and legs that must be Principessa's, and, covering her, emitting earnest grunts, is Jason Quevedo, thrusting and pumping. Siegmund quickly ducks out. Alone in the corridor. Where to, now? The world is too complicated for him tonight. The obvious next destination is Quevedo's apartment. For Micaela. But no doubt she will have a visitor too. Siegmund's forehead begins to throb. He does not want to roam the Urbmon endlessly. He wants only to go to sleep. Nightwalking suddenly seems an abomination to him: forced, unnatural, compulsive. The slavery of absolute freedom. At this moment thousands of men roam the titanic building. Each determined to do the blessworthy thing. Siegmund, scuffing at the floor, strolls along the corridor and halts by a window. Outside, a moonless night. The sky ablaze with stars. The neighboring Urbmons seeming farther away than usual. Their windows bright, thousands of them. He wonders if it is possible to see a commune, far to the north. The crazy farmers. Micaela Quevedo's brother Michael, the one who went flippo, supposedly visited a commune. At least so the story goes. Micaela still brooding about her brother's fate. Down the chute with him as soon as he stuck his head back inside the Urbmon. But of course a man like that can't be permitted to resume his former life here. An obvious malcontent, spreading poisons of dissatisfaction and unblessworthiness. A hard thing for Micaela, though. Very close to her brother, she says. Her twin. Thinks he should have had a formal hearing in Louisville. He did, though. She won't believe it, but he did. Siegmund remembers when the papers came through. Nissim Shawke issuing the decree: if this man ever returns to 116, dispose of him at once. Poor Micaela. Something unhealthy going on, maybe, between her and her brother. I might ask Jason. I might.