To The Dark Star

by Silverberg, Robert

  Gortman says, “What is the population of the 799th floor?”

  “805, last I heard.”

  “And of Shanghai?”

  “About 33,000.”

  “And of Urbmon 116?”

  “881,000.”

  “And there are fifty urban monads in this constellation of houses.”

  “Yes.”

  “Making some forty million people,” Gortman says. “Or somewhat more then than the entire human population of Venus. Remarkable!”

  “And this isn’t the biggest constellation, not by any means!” Mattern’s voice rings with pride. “Sansan is bigger, and so is Boswash. And there are several bigger ones in Europe—Berpar, Wienbud, I think two others. With more being planned!”

  “A global population of—”

  “—Seventy-five billion,” Mattern cries. “God bless! There’s never been anything like it! No one goes hungry! Everybody happy! Plenty of open space! God’s been good to us, Nicanor!” He pauses before a door labeled 79915. “Here’s my home. What I have is yours, dear guest.” They go in.

  Mattern’s home is quite adequate. He has nearly ninety square meters of floor space. The sleeping platform deflates; the children’s cots retract; the furniture can easily be moved to provide play area. Most of the room, in fact, is empty. The screen and the data terminal occupy two-dimensional areas of wall that once had to be taken up by television sets, bookcases, desks, file drawers, and other encumbrances. It is an airy, spacious environment, particularly for a family of just six.

  The children have not yet left for school; Principessa has held them back, to meet the guest, and so they are restless. As Mattern enters, Sandor and Indra are struggling over a cherished toy, the dream stirrer. Mattern is astounded. Conflict in the home? Silently, so their mother will not notice, they fight. Sandor hammers his shoes into his sister’s shins. Indra, wincing, claws her brother’s cheek. “God bless,” Mattern says sharply. “Somebody wants to go down the chute, eh?” The children gasp. The toy drops. Everyone stands at attention. Principessa looks up, brushing a lock of dark hair from her eyes; she has been busy with the youngest child and has not even heard them come in.

  Mattern says, “Conflict sterilizes. Apologize to each other.”

  Indra and Sandor kiss and smile. Meekly Indra picks up the toy and hands it to Mattern, who gives it to his younger son Marx. They are all staring now at the guest. Mattern says to him, “What I have is yours, friend:” He makes introductions. Wife, children. The scene of conflict has unnerved him a little, but he is relieved when Gortman produces four small boxes and distributes them to the children. Toys. A blessful gesture. Mattern points to the deflated sleeping platform. “This is where we sleep. There’s ample room for three. We wash at the cleanser, here. Do you like privacy when voiding waste matter?”

  “Please, yes.”

  “You press this button for the privacy shield. We excrete in this. Urine here, feces here. Everything is reprocessed, you understand. We’re a thrifty folk in the urbmons.”

  “Of course,” Gortman says.

  Principessa says, “Do you prefer that we use the shield when we excrete? I understand some outbuilding people do.”

  “I would not want to impose my customs on you,” says Gortman.

  Smiling, Mattern says, “We’re a post-privacy culture, of course. But it wouldn’t be any trouble for us to press the button if—” He falters. “There’s no general nudity taboo on Venus, is there? I mean, we have only this one room, and—”

  “I am adaptable,” Gortman insists. “A trained sociocomputator must be a cultural relativist, of course!”

  “Of course,” Mattern agrees, and he laughs nervously.

  Principessa excuses herself from the conversation and sends the children, still clutching their new toys, off to school.

  Mattern says, “Forgive me for being over-obvious, but I must bring up the matter of your sexual prerogatives. We three will share a single platform. My wife is available to you, as am I. Avoidance of frustration, you see, is the primary rule of a society such as ours. And do you know our custom of nightwalking?”

  “I’m afraid I—”

  “Doors are not locked in Urbmon 116. We have no personal property worth mentioning, and we all are socially adjusted. At night it is quite proper to enter other homes. We exchange partners in this way all the time; usually wives stay home and husbands migrate, though not necessarily. Each of us has access at any time to any other adult member of our community.”

  “Strange,” says Gortman. “I’d think that in a society where there are so many people, an exaggerated respect for privacy would develop, not a communal freedom.”

  “In the beginning we had many notions of privacy. They were allowed to erode, god bless! Avoidance of frustration must be our goal, otherwise impossible tensions develop. And privacy is frustration.”

  “So you can go into any room in this whole gigantic building and sleep with—”

  “Not the whole building,” Mattern interrupts. “Only Shanghai. We frown on nightwalking beyond one’s own city.” He chuckles. “We do impose a few little restrictions on ourselves, so that our freedoms don’t pall.”

  Gortman looks at Principessa. She wears a loinband and a metallic cup over her left breast. She is slender but voluptuously constructed, and even though her childbearing days are over she has not lost the sensual glow of young womanhood. Mattern is proud of her, despite everything.

  Mattern says, “Shall we begin our tour of the building?”

  They go out. Gortman bows gracefully to Principessa as they leave. In the corridor, the visitor says, “Your family is smaller than the norm, I see.”

  It is an excruciatingly impolite statement, but Mattern is tolerant of his guest’s faux pas. Mildly he replies, “We would have had more children, but my wife’s fertility had to be terminated surgically. It was a great tragedy for us.”

  “You value large families here?”

  “We value life. To create new life is the highest virtue. To prevent life from coming into being is the darkest sin. We all love our big bustling world. Does it seem unendurable to you? Do we seem unhappy?”

  “You seem surprisingly well adjusted,” Gorman says. “Considering that—” He stops.

  “Go on.”

  “Considering that there are so many of you. And that you spend your whole lives inside a single colossal building. You never do go out, do you?”

  “Most of us never do,” Mattern admits. “I have traveled, of course— a sociocomputator needs perspective, obviously. But Principessa has never been below the 350th floor. Why should she go anywhere? The secret of our happiness is to create self-contained villages of five or six floors within the cities of forty floors within the urbmons of 1000 floors. We have no sensation of being overcrowded or cramped. We know our neighbors; we have hundreds of dear friends; we are kind and loyal and blessworthy to one another.”

  “And everybody remains happy forever?”

  “Nearly everybody.”

  “Who are the exceptions?” Gortman asks.

  “The flippos,” says Mattern. “We endeavor to minimize the frictions of living in such an environment; as you see, we never refuse a reasonable request, we never deny one another anything. But sometimes there are those who abruptly can no longer abide by our principles. They flip; they thwart others; they rebel. It is quite sad.”

  “What do you do with flippos?”

  “We remove them of course,” Mattern says. He smiles, and they enter the dropshaft once again.

  Mattern has been authorized to show Gortman the entire urbmon, a tour that will take several days. He is a little apprehensive; he is not as familiar with some parts of the structure as a guide should be. But he will do his best.

  “The building,” he says, “is made of superstressed concrete. It is constructed about a central service core 200 meters square, . Originally, the plan was to have fifty families per floor, but we average about 120 today, and the old apa
rtments have all been subdivided into single-room occupancies. We are wholly self-sufficient, with our own schools, hospitals, sports arenas, houses of worship, and theaters.”

  “Food?”

  “We produce none, of course. But we have contractual access to the agricultural communes. I’m sure you’ve seen that nearly seven eighths of the land area of this continent is used for food-production; and then there are the marine farms. There’s plenty of food, now that we no longer waste space by spreading out horizontally over good land.”

  “But aren’t you at the mercy of the food-producing communes?”

  “When were city-dwellers not at the mercy of farmers?” Mattern asks. “But you seem to regard life on Earth as a thing of fang and claw. We are vital to them—their only market. They are vital to us—our only source of food. Also we provide necessary services to them, such as repair of their machines. The ecology of this planet is neatly in mesh. We can support many billions of additional people. Some day, god blessing, we will.”

  The dropshaft, coasting downward through the building, glides into its anvil at the bottom. Mattern feels the oppressive bulk of the whole urbmon over him, and tries not to show his uneasiness. He says, “The foundation of the building is 400 meters deep. We are now at the lowest level. Here we generate our power.” They cross a catwalk and peer into an immense generating room, forty meters from floor to ceiling, in which sleek turbines whirl. “Most of our power is obtained,” he explains, “through combustion of compacted solid refuse. We burn everything we don’t need, and sell the residue as fertilizer. We have auxiliary generators that work on accumulated body heat, also.”

  “I was wondering about that,” Gortman murmurs.

  Cheerily Mattern says, “Obviously 800,000 people within one sealed enclosure will produce an immense quantity of heat. Some of this is directly radiated from the building through cooling fins along the outer surface. Some is piped down here and used to run the generators. In winter, of course, we pump it evenly through the building to maintain temperature. The rest of the excess heat is used in water purification and similar things.”

  They peer at the electrical system for a while. Then Mattern leads the way to the reprocessing plant. Several hundred schoolchildren are touring it; silently they join the tour.

  The teacher says, “‘Here’s where the urine comes down, see?” She points to gigantic plastic pipes. “It passes through the flash chamber to be distilled, and the pure water is drawn off here—follow me, now—you remember from the flow chart, about how we recover the chemicals and sell them to the farming communes—”

  Mattern and his guest inspect the fertilizer plant, too, where fecal reconversion is taking place. Gortman asks a number of questions. He seems deeply interested. Mattern is pleased; there is nothing more significant to him than the details of the urbmon way of life, and he had feared that this stranger from Venus, where men live in private houses and walk around in the open, would regard the urbmon way as repugnant or hideous.

  They go onward. Mattern speaks of air-conditioning, the system of dropshafts and liftshafts, and other such topics.

  “It’s all wonderful,” Gore says. “I couldn’t imagine how one little planet with seventy-five billion people could even survive, but you’ve turned it into—into—”

  “Utopia?” Mattern suggests.

  “I meant to say that, yes,” says Gorman.

  Power production and waste disposal are not really Mattern’s specialties. He knows how such things are handled, here, but only because the workings of the urbmon are so enthralling to him. His real field of study is sociocomputation, naturally, and he has been asked to show the visitor how the social structure of the giant building is organized. Now they go up, into the residential levels.

  “This is Reykjavik,” Mattern announces. “‘Populated chiefly by maintenance workers. We try not to have too much status stratification, but each city does have its predominant populations—engineers, academics, entertainers, you know. My Shanghai is mostly academic. Each profession is clannish.” They walk down the hall. Mattern feels edgy here, and he keeps talking to cover his nervousness. He tells how each city within the urbmon develops its characteristic slang, its way of dressing, its folklore and heroes.

  “Is there much contact between cities?” Gortman asks.

  “We try to encourage it. Sports, exchange students, regular mixer evenings.”

  “Wouldn’t it be even better if you encouraged intercity nightwalking?”

  Mattern frowns. “We prefer to stick to our propinquity groups for that. Casual sex with people from other cities is a mark of a sloppy soul.”

  “I see.”

  They enter a large room. Mattern says, “This is a newlywed dorm. We have them every five or six levels. When adolescents mate, they leave their family homes and move in here. After they have their first child they are assigned to homes of their own.”

  Puzzled, Gortman asks, “But where do you find room for them all? I assume that every room in the building is full, and you can’t possibly have as many deaths as births, so—how—?”

  “Deaths do create vacancies, of course. If your mate dies and your children are grown, you go to a senior citizen dorm, creating room for establishment of a new family unit. But you’re correct that most of our young people don’t get accommodations in the building, since we form new families at about two percent a year and deaths are far below that. As new urbmons are built, the overflow from the newlywed dorms is sent to them. By lot. It’s hard to adjust to being expelled, they say, but there are compensations in being among the first group into a new building, you acquire automatic status. And so we’re constantly overflowing, casting out our young, creating new combinations of social units—utterly fascinating, eh? Have you read my paper, Structural Metamorphosis in the Urbmon Population?”

  “I know it well,” Gortman replies. He looks about tine the dorm. A dozen couples are having intercourse on a nearby platform. “They seem so young,” he says.

  “Puberty comes early among us. Girls generally marry at twelve, boys at thirteen. First child about a year later, god blessing.”

  “And nobody tries to control fertility at all.”

  “Control fertility?” Mattern clutches his genitals in shock at the unexpected obscenity. Several copulating couples look up, amazed. Someone giggles. Mattern says, “Please don’t use that phrase again. Particularly if you’re near children. We don’t—ah—think in terms of control.”

  “But—”

  “We hold that life is sacred. Making new life is blessed. One does one’s duty to god by reproducing.” Mattern smiles. “To be human is to meet challenges through the exercise of intelligence, right? And one challenge is the multiplication of inhabitants in a world that has seen the conquest of disease and the elimination of war. We could limit births, I suppose, but that would be sick, a cheap way out. Instead we’ve met the challenge of overpopulation triumphantly, wouldn’t you say? And so we go on and on, multiplying joyously, our numbers increasing by three billion a year, and we find room for everyone, and food for everyone. Few die, and many are born, and the world fills up, and god is blessed, and life is rich and pleasant, and as you see we are all quite happy. We have matured beyond the infantile need to place insulation between man and man. Why go outdoors? Why yearn for forests and deserts? Urbmon 116 holds universes enough for us. The warnings of the prophets of doom have proved hollow. Can you deny that we are happy here? Come with me. We will see a school now.”

  The school Mattern has chosen is in a working-class district of Prague, on the 108th floor. He thinks Gortman will find it particularly interesting, since the Prague people have the highest reproductive rate in Urban Monad 116, and families of twelve or fifteen are not at all unusual. Approaching the school door, they hear the clear treble voices singing of the blessedness of god. Mattern joins the singing; it is a hymn he sang too, when he was their age dreaming of the big family he would have:

  “And now he pla
nts the holy seed,

  That grows in Mommo’s womb,

  And now a little sibling comes—”

  There is an unpleasant and unscheduled interruption. A woman rushes toward Mattern and Gortman in the corridor. She is young, untidy, wearing only a flimsy gray wrap; her hair is loose; she is well along in pregnancy. “Help!” she shrieks. “My husband’s gone flippo!” She hurls herself, trembling, into Gortman’s arms. The visitor looks bewildered.

  Behind her there runs a man in his early twenties, haggard, bloodshot. He carries a fabricator torch whose tip glows with heat. “Goddam bitch,” he mumbles. “Allatime babies! Seven babies already and now number eight and I gonna go off my head!” Mattern is appalled. He pulls the woman away from Gortman and shoves the visitor through the door of the school.

  “Tell them there’s a flippo out here,” Mattern says. “Get help, fast!” He is furious that Gortman should witness so atypical a scene, and wishes to get him away from it.

  The trembling girl cowers behind Mattern. Quietly Mattern says, “Let’s be reasonable, young man. You’ve spent your whole life in urbmons, haven’t you? You understand that it’s blessed to create. Why do you suddenly repudiate the principles on which—”

  “Get the hell away from her or I gonna burn you too!”

  The young man feints with the torch, straight at Mattern’s face. Mattern feels the heat and flinches. The young man swipes past him at the woman. She leaps away, but she is clumsy with girth, and the torch slices her garment. Pale white flesh is exposed with a brilliant burn-streak down it. She cups her jutting belly and falls, screaming. The young man jostles Mattern aside and prepares to thrust the torch into her side. Mattern tries to seize his arm. He deflects the torch; it chars the floor. The young man, cursing, drops it and throws himself on Mattern, pounding in frenzy with his fists. “Help me!” Mattern calls. “Help!”

  Into the corridor erupt dozens of schoolchildren. They are between eight and eleven years old, and they continue to sing their hymn as they pour forth. They pull Mattern’s assailant away. Swiftly, smoothly, they cover him with their bodies. He can dimly be seen beneath the flailing, thrashing mass. Dozens more pour from the schoolroom and join the heap. A siren wails. A whistle blows. The teacher’s amplified voice booms, “The police are here! Everyone off!”