The World Inside

by Robert Silverberg

  Where shall I go now?

  He realizes that he has been standing by the window for more than an hour. He stumbles toward the stairs and jogs down twelve levels to his own. Mattern and Mamelon lie sleeping side by side. Siegmund drops his clothing and joins them on the platform. Coming apart. Dislocation. Finally he sleeps too.

  The solace of religion. Siegmund has gone to see a blessman. The chapel is on the 770th floor: a small room off a commercial arcade, decorated with fertility symbols and incrustations of captive light. Entering, he feels like an intruder. Never any religious impulses before. His mother's grandfather was a Christer, but everyone in the family assumed it was because the old man had antiquarian instincts. The ancient religions have few followers, and even the cult of god's blessing, which is officially supported by Louisville, can claim no more than a third of the building's adult population, according to the last figures Siegmund has seen. Though perhaps things are changing lately.

  “God bless,” the blessman says, “what is your pain?"

  He is plump, smooth-skinned, with a round complacent face and cheerily shining eyes. At least forty years old. What does he know of pain?

  “I have begun not to belong,” Siegmund says. “My future is unraveling. I am coming unplugged. Everything has lost its meaning and my soul is hollow."

  “Ah. Angst. Anomie. Dissociation. Identity drain. Familiar complaints, my son. How old are you?"

  “Past fifteen."

  “Career profile?"

  “Shanghai going on Louisville. Perhaps you know of me. Siegmund Kluver."

  The blessman's lips go taut. The eyes veil themselves. He toys with sacred emblems on his tunic's collar. He has heard of Siegmund, yes.

  He says, “Are you fulfilled in your marriage?"

  “I have the most blessworthy wife imaginable."

  “Littles?"

  “A boy and a girl. We will have a second girl next year."

  “Friends?"

  “Sufficient,” Siegmund says. “And yet this feeling of decomposition. Sometimes my skin itchy all over. Films of decay drifting through the building and wrapping themselves about me. A great restlessness. What's happening to me?"

  “Sometimes,” the blessman says, “those of us who live in the urban monads experience what is called the crisis of spiritual confinement. The boundaries of our world, that is to say our building, seem too narrow. Our inner resources become inadequate. We are grievously disappointed in our relationships with those we have always loved and admired. The result of such a crisis is often violent: hence the flippo phenomenon. Others may actually leave the Urbmon and seek a new life in the communes, which, of course, is a form of suicide, since we are incapable of adapting to that harsh environment. Now, those who neither go berserk nor separate themselves physically from the Urbmon occasionally undertake an internal migration, drawing into their own souls and, in effect, contracting as a response to the impingement of adjacent individuals on their psychic space. Does this have any meaning for you?” As Siegmund nods doubtfully, the blessman goes smoothly on, saying, “Among the leaders of this building, the executive class, those who have been propelled upward by the blessworthy drive to serve their fellow men, this process is particularly painful, bringing about as it does a collapse of values and a loss of motivation. But it can be easily cured."

  “Easily?"

  “I assure you."

  “Cured? How?"

  “We will do it at once, and you will go out of here healthy and whole, Siegmund. The way to health is through kinship with god, you see, god being considered in our view the integrative force giving wholeness to the universe. And I will show you god."

  “You will show me god,” Siegmund repeats, uncomprehending.

  “Yes. Yes.” The blessman, bustling around, is busy darkening the chapel, switching off lights and cutting in opaquers. From the floor sprouts a cup-shaped web-seat into which Siegmund is gently nudged. Lying there looking up. The chapel's ceiling, he discovers, is a single broad screen. In its glassy green depths an image of the heavens appears. Stars strewn like sand. A billion billion points of light. Music issues from concealed speakers: the plashy plinks of a cosmos group. He makes out the magical sounds of a vibrastar, the dark twangs of a comet-harp, the wild lurches of an orbital diver. Then the whole group going at once. Perhaps Dillon Chrimes is playing. His friend of that dismal night. Overhead the depth of the perceptive field is deepening; Siegmund sees the orange glint of Mars, the pearly blaze of Jupiter. So god is a light-show plus a cosmos group? How shallow. How empty.

  The blessman, speaking over the music, says, “What you see is a direct relay from the thousandth floor. This is the sky over our Urbmon at our present moment. Look into the black cone of night. Accept the cool light of the stars. Open yourself to the immensity. What you see is god. What you see is god."

  “Where?"

  “Everywhere. Immanent and all-enduing."

  “I don't see."

  The music is turned up. Siegmund now is surrounded by a cage of heavy sound. The astronomical scene takes on a greater intensity. The blessman directs Siegmund's attention to this group of stars and to that, urging him to merge with the galaxy. The Urbmon is not the universe, he murmurs. Beyond these shining walls lies an awesome vastness that is god. Let him take you into himself and heal you. Yield. Yield. Yield. But Siegmund cannot yield. He wonders if the blessman should have given him some sort of drug, a multiplexer of some kind that would make it easier for him to open himself to the universe. But the blessman scoffs at the idea. One can reach god without chemical assistance. Simply stare. Contemplate. Peer into infinity. Search for the divine pattern. Meditate on the forces in balance, the beauties of celestial mechanics. God is within and without us. Yield. Yield. Yield. “I still don't feel it,” Siegmund says. “I'm locked up inside my own head.” A note of impatience enters the blessman's tone. What's wrong with you, he seems to be saying. Why can't you? It's a perfectly good religious experience. But it is no use. After half an hour Siegmund sits up, shaking his head. His eyes hurt from staring at the stars. He cannot make the mystical leap. He authorizes a credit transfer to the blessman's account, thanks him, and goes out of the chapel. Perhaps god was somewhere else today.

  The solace of the consoler. A purely secular therapist, relying heavily on metabolic adjustments. Siegmund is apprehensive about seeing him; he has always regarded those who have to go to a consoler as somehow defective, and it pains him to be joining that group. Yet he must end this inner turmoil. And Mamelon insists. The consoler he visits is surprisingly young, perhaps thirty-three, with a pinched, bleak face and frosty, ungenerous eyes. He knows the nature of Siegmund's complaint almost before it is described to him. “And when you attended this party in Louisville,” he asks, “what effect did it have on you to learn that your idols weren't quite the men you thought they were?"

  “It emptied me out,” Siegmund says. “My ideals, my values, my guiding images. To see them cavorting like that. Never having imagined they did. I think that's where all the trouble started."

  “No,” says the consoler, “that's merely where the trouble surfaced. It was there before. In you, deep, waiting for something to push it up into view."

  “How can I learn to cope with it?"

  “You can't. You'll have to be sent into therapy. I'm going to turn you over to the moral engineers. You can use a reality adjustment."

  He is afraid of being changed. They will put him into a tank and let him drift there for days or weeks, while they cloud his mind with their mysterious substances and whisper things to him and massage his aching body and alter the imprinting of his brain. And he will come forth healthy and stable and different. Another person. All his Siegmundness lost along with his anguish. He remembers Aurea Holston, whose number came up in the lottery for the stocking of the new Urbmon 158, and who did not want to go, and who was persuaded by the moral engineers that it would not be so bad to leave her native Urbmon. And came forth from her tank docile a
nd placid, a vegetable in place of a neurotic. Not for me, Siegmund thinks.

  It will be the end of his career, too. Louisville does not want men who have had crises. They will find some middle-rung post for him in Boston or Seattle, some tepid minor administrative job, and forget about him. A formerly promising young man. Full reports on reality adjustments are placed each week before Monroe Stevis. Stevis will tell Shawke and Freehouse. Have you heard about poor Siegmund? Two weeks in the tank. Some sort of breakdown. Yes, sad. Very sad. We'll drop him, of course.

  No.

  What can he do? The consoler has already made up the adjustment request and filed it with one of the computer nodes. Sparkling impulses of neural energy are traveling through the information system, bearing his name. Time is being cleared for him on the 780th floor, among the moral engineers. Soon his screen will tell him the hour of his appointment. And if he does not go to them, they will come for him. The machines with soft rubbery pads on their arms, gathering him up, pushing him along.

  No.

  He tells Rhea of his predicament. Not even Mamelon knows yet, but Rhea. He can trust her. His best interests at heart. “Don't go to the engineers,” she advises.

  “Don't go? How? The order's already in."

  “Have it countermanded."

  He looks at her as though she has recommended demolition of the Chipitts Urbmon constellation.

  “Pull it out of the computer,” she tells him. “Get one of the interface men to do it for you. Use your influence. Nobody'll find out."

  “I couldn't do that."

  “You'll go to the moral engineers, then. And you know what that means."

  The Urbmon is toppling. Clouds of debris swirl in his brain.

  Who would arrange such a thing for him?

  Micaela Quevedo's brother worked in an interface crew, didn't he? But he's gone now. There must be others within his grasp, though. When he leaves Rhea, Siegmund consults the records in the access nexus. The virus of unblessworthiness already at work in his soul. Then he realizes he doesn't even need to use his influence. Merely make it a matter of professional routine. In his office he taps out a data requisition: status of Siegmund Kluver, remanded for therapy on 780th floor. Instantly comes the information that Kluver is due for therapy in seventeen days. The computer does not withhold data from Louisville Access Nexus. The presumption exists that anyone who asks, using the equipment in the nexus, has the right to do so. Very well. The vital next step. Siegmund instructs the computer to yank the therapy assignment for Siegmund Kluver. This time there is a bit of resistance: the computer wants to know who authorizes the yanking. Siegmund meditates on that for a moment. Then inspiration comes. The therapy of Siegmund Kluver, he informs the machine, is being canceled by order of Siegmund Kluver of the Louisville Access Nexus. Will it work? “No,” the machine may say, “you can't cancel your own therapy appointment. Do you think I'm stupid?” But the mighty computer is stupid. Thinking with the speed of light but unable to cross the gaps of intuition. Does Siegmund Kluver of Louisville Access Nexus have the right to cancel a therapy appointment? Yes, certainly; he must be acting on behalf of Louisville itself. Therefore let it be canceled. The instructions flicker through the proper node. No matter whose appointment it is, as long as authority to cancel can be attributed properly. It is done, Siegmund taps out a data requisition: status of Siegmund Kluver, remanded for therapy on 780th floor. Instantly comes the information that Kluver's appointment for therapy has been canceled. His career is safe, then. But he is left with his anguish. There is that to consider.

  This is the bottom. Siegmund Kluver prowls uneasily among the generators. The weight of the building presses crushingly on him. The whining song of the turbines troubles him. He feels disoriented, a wanderer in the depths. How huge this room is.

  He enters apartment 6029, Warsaw. “Ellen?” he says. “Listen, I've come back. I want to apologize for the last time. It was all a tremendous mistake.” She shakes her head. She has already forgotten him. But she is willing to accept him, naturally. The universal custom. Her legs parted, her knees flexed. Instead he kisses her hand. “I love you,” he whispers, and flees.

  This is the office of Jason Quevedo, historian, on the 185th floor, Pittsburgh. Where the archives are. Jason sits before his desk, manipulating data cubes, as Siegmund enters. “It's all here, isn't it?” Siegmund asks. “The story of the collapse of civilization. And how we rebuilt it again. Verticality as the central philosophical thrust of human congruence patterns. Tell me the story, Jason. Tell me.” Jason looking at him strangely. “Are you ill, Siegmund?” And Siegmund: “No, not at all. How perfectly healthy I am. Micaela's been explaining your thesis to me. The genetic adaptation of humanity to Urbmon life. I'd like more details. How we've been bred to be what we are. We happy many.” Siegmund picks up two of Jason's cubes and fondles them, almost sexually, leaving fingerprints on their sensitive surfaces. Tactfully Jason takes them from him. “Show me the ancient world,” Siegmund says, but as Jason slips a cube into the playback slot, Siegmund goes out.

  This is the great industrial city of Birmingham. Pale, sweating, Siegmund Kluver watches machines stamping out machines. While slumped and sullen human handlers supervise the work. This thing with arms will help in next autumn's harvest at a commune. This dark glossy tube will fly above the fields, spraying insects with poison. Siegmund finds himself weeping. He will never see the communes. He will never dig his fingers into the rich brown soil. The beautiful meshing ecology of the modern world. The poetic interplay of commune and Urbmon for the benefit of all. How lovely. How lovely. Then why am I weeping?

  San Francisco is where the musicians and artists and writers live. The cultural ghetto. Dillon Chrimes is rehearsing with his cosmos group. The thunderous web of sounds. An intruder. “Siegmund?” Chrimes says, breaking his concentration. “How are you getting along, Siegmund? Good to see you.” Siegmund laughs. He gestures at the vibrastar, the comet-harp, the incantator, and the other instruments. “Please,” he murmurs, “keep on playing. I'm simply looking for god. You don't mind if I listen? Maybe he's here. Play some more."

  On the 761st floor, Shanghai's bottom level, he finds Micaela Quevedo. She does not look well. Her black hair is dull and stringy, her eyes are bitter, her lips are clamped. Seeing Siegmund in midday startles her. He says quickly, “Can we talk awhile? I want to ask you some things about your brother Michael. Why he left the building. What he hoped to find out there. Can you give me any information?” Micaela's expression grows even harder. Coldly she says, “I don't know a thing. Michael went flippo, that's all that matters. He didn't explain himself to me.” Siegmund knows that this is untrue. Micaela is concealing vital data. “Don't be unblessworthy,” he urges. “I need to know. Not for Louisville. Just for myself.” His hand on her thin wrist. “I'm thinking of leaving the building too,” Siegmund confides.

  He halts at his own apartment on the 787th floor. Mamelon is not there. As usual, she is at the Somatic Fulfillment Hall, enhancing her supple body. Siegmund records a brief message for her. “I loved you,” he says. “I loved you. I loved you."

  He meets Charles Mattern in a Shanghai hallway. “Come have dinner with us,” the sociocomputator says. “Principessa's always happy to see you. And the children. Indra and Sandor talk about you. Even Marx. When's Siegmund coming again, they say? We like Siegmund so much.” Siegmund shakes his head. “I'm sorry, Charles. Not tonight. But thanks for asking.” Mattern shrugs. “God bless, we'll get together soon, eh?” he says, and strolls away, leaving Siegmund in the midst of the flow of pedestrian traffic.