The World Inside

TWO

The city of Chicago is bounded on the north by Shanghai and on the south by Edinburgh. Chicago currently has 37,402 people, and is undergoing a mild crisis of population that will have to be alleviated in the customary manner. Its dominant profession is engineering. Above, in Shanghai, they are mostly scholars; below, in Edinburgh, computer men cluster.

Aurea Holston was born in Chicago in 2368 and has lived there all of her life. Aurea is now fourteen years old. Her husband, Memnon, is nearly fifteen. They have been married almost two years. God has not blessed them with children. Memnon has traveled through the entire building, but Aurea has scarcely ever been out of Chicago. Once she went to visit a fertility expert, an old midwife down in Prague, and once she went up to Louisville, where her powerful uncle, an urban administrator, lives. Many times she and Memnon have been to their friend Siegmund Kluver’s apartment in Shanghai. Other than that she has not seen much of the building. Aurea does not really care to travel. She loves her own city very much.

Chicago is the city that occupies the 721st through the 760th floors of Urban Monad 116. Memnon and Aurea Holston live in a dormitory for childless young couples on the 735th floor. The dorm is currently shared by thirty-one couples, eight above optimum.

“There’s got to be a thinning soon,” Memnon says. “We’re starting to bulge at the seams. People will have to go.”

“Many?” Aurea asks.

“Three couples here, five there — a slice from each dorm. I suppose Urbmon 116 will lose about two thousand couples. That’s how many went the last time they thinned.”

Aurea trembles. “Where will they go?”

“They tell me that the new urbmon is almost ready. Number 158.”

Her soul floods with pity and terror. “How horrid to be sent somewhere else! Memnon, they wouldn’t make us leave here!”

“Of course not. God bless, we’re valuable people! I have a skill rating of—”

“But we have no children. That kind goes first, doesn’t it?”

“God will bless us soon.” Memnon takes her in his arms. He is strong and tall and lean, with rippling scarlet hair and a taut, solemn expression. Aurea feels weak and fragile beside him, although in fact she is sturdy and supple. Her crown of golden hair is deepening in tone. Her eyes are pale green. Her breasts are full and her hips are broad. Siegmund Kluver says she looks like a goddess of motherhood. Most men desire her and nightwalkers come frequently to share her sleeping platform. Yet she remains barren. Lately she has become quite sensitive about that. The irony. of her wasted voluptuousness is not lost on her.

Memnon releases her and she walks wearily through the dormitory. It is a long, narrow room that makes a right-angle bend around the central service core of the urbmon. Its walls glow with changing inlaid patterns of blue and gold and green. Rows of sleeping platforms, some deflated, some in use, cover the floor. The furniture is stark and simple and the lighting, though indirectly suffused from the entire area of the floor and the ceiling, is bright almost to harshness. Several viewscreens and three data terminals are mounted on the room’s eastern wall. There are five excretion areas, three communal recreation areas, two cleanser stations, and two privacy areas.

By unspoken custom the privacy shields are never turned on in this dormitory. What one does, one does before the others. The total accessibility of all persons to all other persons is the only rule by which the civilization of the urbmon can survive, and in a mass residence hall such as this the rule is all the more vital.

Aurea halts by the majestic window at the dormitory’s western end, and stares out. The sunset is beginning. Across the way, the magnificent bulk of Urban Monad 117 seems stained with golden red. Aurea follows the shaft of the great tower with her eyes, down from the landing stage at its thousandth-floor tip, down to the building’s broad waist. She cannot see, at this angle, very far below the 400th floor of the adjoining structure.

What is it like, she wonders, to live in Urbmon 117? Or 115, or 110, or 140? She has never left the urbmon of her birth. All about her, to the horizon, sprawl the towers of the Chipitts constellation, fifty mighty concrete piles, each three kilometers high, each a self- contained entity housing some 800,000 human beings. In Urbmon 117, Aurea tells herself, there are people who look just like us. They walk, talk, dress, think, love, just like ourselves. Urbmon 117 is not another world. It is only the building next door. We are not unique. We are not unique. We are not unique.

Fear engulfs her.

“Memnon,” she says raggedly, “when the thinning time comes, they’re going to send us to Urbmon 158.”

Siegmund Kluver is one of the lucky ones. His fertility has won him an unimpeachable place in Urbmon 116. His status is secure.

Though he is just past fourteen, Siegmund has fathered two children. His son is called Janus and his newborn daughter has been named Persephone. Siegmund lives in a handsome fifty-square-meter home on the 787th floor, slightly more than midway up in Shanghai. His specialty is the theory of urban administration, and despite his youth he already spends much of his time as a consultant to the administrators in Louisville. He is short, finely made, quite strong, with a large head and thick curling hair. In boyhood he lived in Chicago and was one of Memnon’s closest friends. They still see each other quite often; the fact that they now live in different cities is no bar to their friendship.

Social encounters between the Holstons and the Kluvers always take place at Siegmund’s apartment. The Kluvers never come down to Chicago to visit Aurea and Memnon. Siegmund claims there is no snobbery in this. “Why should the four of us sit around a noisy dorm,” he asks, “when we can get together comfortably in the privacy of my apartment?” Aurea is suspicious of this attitude. Urbmon people are not supposed to place such a premium on privacy. Is the dorm not a good enough place for Siegmund Kluver?

Siegmund once lived in the same dorm as Aurea and Memnon. That was two years ago, when they all were newly married. Several times, in those long-ago days, Aurea yielded her body to Siegmund. She was flattered by his attentions. But very swiftly Siegmund’s wife became pregnant, qualifying the Kluvers to apply for an apartment of their own, and the progress he was making in his profession permitted him to find room in the city of Shanghai. Aurea has not shared her sleeping platform with Siegmund since he left the dormitory. She is distressed by this, for she enjoyed Siegmund’s embraces, but there is little she can do about it. The chance that he will come to her as a nightwalker is slight. Sexual relationships between people of different cities are currently considered improper, and Siegmund abides by custom. He may nightwalk in cities above his own, but he is not likely to go lower.

Siegmund now is evidently bound for higher things. Memnon says that by the time he is seventeen he will be, not a specialist in the theory of urban administration, but an actual administrator, and will live in lofty Louisville. Already Siegmund spends much time with the leaders of the urbmon. And with their wives as well, Aurea has heard.

He is an excellent host. His apartment is warm and agreeable, and two of its walls glisten with panels of one of the new decorative materials, which emits a soft hum keyed to the spectral pattern its owner has chosen. Tonight Siegmund has turned the panels almost into the ultraviolet and the audio emission is pitched close to the supersonic; the effect is to strain the senses, pushing them toward their maximum receptivity, a stimulating challenge. He has exquisite taste in handling the room’s scent apertures too: jasmine and hyacinth flavor the air. “Care for some tingle?” he asks. “Just in from Venus. Quite blessworthy.” Aurea and Memnon smile and nod. Siegmund fills a large fluted silver bowl with the costly scintillant fluid and places it on the pedestal-table. A touch of the floor pedal and the table rises to a height of 150 centimeters.

“Mamelon?” he says. “Will you join us?”

Siegmund’s wife slides her baby into the maintenance slot near the sleeping platform and crosses the room to her guests. Mamelon Kluver is quite tall, dark of complexion and hair, elegantly beautiful in a haggard way. Her forehead is high, her cheekbones prominent, her chin sharp; her eyes, alert and glossy and wide-set, seem almost too big, too dominant, in her pale and tapering face. The delicacy of Mamelon’s beauty makes Aurea feel defensive about her own soft features: her snub nose, her rounded cheeks, her full lips, the light dusting of freckles over tawny skin. Mamelon is the oldest person in the room, almost sixteen. Her breasts are swollen with milk; she is only eleven days up from childbed, and she is nursing. Aurea has never known anyone else who chose to nurse. Mamelon has always been different, though. Aurea is still somewhat frightened of Siegmund’s wife, who is so cool, so self- possessed, so mature. So passionate too. At twelve, a new bride, Aurea found her sleep broken again and again by Mamelon’s cries of ecstasy, echoing through the dormitory.

Now Mamelon bends forward and puts her lips to the tingle bowl. The four of them drink at the same moment. Tiny bubbles dance on Aurea’s lips. The bouquet dizzies her. She peers into the depths of the bowl and sees abstract patterns forming and sundering. Tingle is faintly intoxicating, faintly hallucinogenic, an enhancer of vision, a suppressant of inner disturbance. It comes from certain musky swamps in the lowlands of Venus; the serving Siegmund has offered contains billions of alien microorganisms, fermenting and fissioning even as they are digested and absorbed. Aurea feels them spreading out through her, taking possession of her lungs, her ovaries, her liver. They make her lips slippery. They detach her from her sorrows. But the high is also a low; she gets through the early visionary moments and emerges tranquil and resigned. A spurious happiness possesses her as the last coils of color slide behind her eyelids and disappear.

After the ritual of drinking, they talk. Siegmund and Memnon discuss world events: the new urbmons, the agricultural statistics, the rumor of a spreading zone of disurbanized life outside the communes, and so forth. Mamelon shows Aurea her baby. The little girl lies within the maintenance slot, drooling, gurgling, cooing. Aurea says, “What a relief it must be not to be carrying her any longer!”

“One enjoys being able to see one’s feet again, yes,” Mamelon says.

“Is it very uncomfortable, being pregnant?”

“There are annoyances.”

“The stretching? How can you puff up that way and stand it? The skin like going to burst any minute.” Aurea shudders. “And everything getting pushed around inside your body. Your kidneys rammed up into your lungs, that’s how I always think of it. Pardon me. I guess I’m exaggerating. I mean, I don’t really know.”

“It’s not that bad,” says Mamelon. “Though of course it’s strange and a little bothersome. Yet there are positive aspects. The moment of birth itself—”

“Does it hurt terribly?” Aurea asks. “I imagine it would. Something that big, ripping through your body, popping right out of your—”

“Gloriously blessful. One’s entire nervous system awakens. A baby coming out is like a man going in, only twenty times as thrilling. It’s impossible to describe the sensation. You must experience it for yourself.”

“I wish I could,” says Aurea, downcast, groping for the last shreds of her high. She slips a hand into the maintenance slot to touch Mamelon’s child. A quick burst of ions purifies her skin before she makes contact with little Persephone’s downy cheek. Aurea says, “God bless, I want to do my duty! The medics say there’s nothing wrong with either of us. But—”

“You must be patient, love.” Mamelon embraces Aurea lightly. “Bless god, your moment will come.”

Aurea is skeptical. For twenty months she has surveyed her flat belly, waiting for it to begin to bulge. It is blessed to create life, she knows. If everyone were as sterile as she, who would fill the urbmons? She has a sudden terrifying vision of the colossal towers nearly empty, whole cities sealed off, power failing, walls cracking, just a few shriveled old women shuffling through halls once thronged with happy multitudes.

Her one obsession has led her to the other one, and she turns to Siegmund, breaking into the conversation of the men to say, “Siegmund, is it true that they’ll be opening Urbmon 158 soon?”

“So I hear, yes.”

“What will it be like?”

“Very much like 116, I imagine. A thousand floors, the usual services. I suppose seventy families per floor, at first, maybe 250,000 people altogether, but it won’t take long to bring it up to par.”

Aurea clamps her palms together. “How many people will be sent there from here, Siegmund?”

“I’m sure I don’t know that.”

“There’ll be some, won’t there?”

Memnon says mildly, “Aurea, why don’t we talk about something pleasant.”

“Some people will be sent there from here,” she persists. “Come on, Siegmund. You’re up in Louisville with the bosses all the time. How many?”

Siegmund laughs. “You’ve really got an exaggerated idea of my significance in this place, Aurea. Nobody’s said a word to me about how Urbmon 158 will be stocked.”

“You know the theory of these things, though. You can project the data.”

“Well, yes.” Siegmund is quite cool; this subject has a purely impersonal interest for him. He seems unaware of the source of Aurea’s agitation. “Naturally, if we’re going to do our duty to god by creating life, we’ve also got to be sure that there’s a place for everyone to live,” he says. Hand flicks a vagrant lock of hair into place. Eyes glow; Siegmund loves to lecture. “So we go on building urban monads, and, naturally, whenever a new urbmon is added to the Chipitts constellation, it has to be stocked from the other Chipitts buildings. That makes good genetic sense. Even though each urbmon is big enough to provide an adequate gene-mix, our tendency to stratify into cities and villages within the building leads to a good deal of inbreeding, which they say isn’t healthy for the species on a long-term basis. But if we take five thousand people from each of fifty urbmons, say, and toss them together into a new urbmon, it gives us a pooled gene-mix of 250,000 individuals that we didn’t have before. Actually, though, easing population pressure is the most urgent reason for erecting new buildings.”

“Keep it clean, Siegmund,” Memnon warns.

Siegmund grins. “No, I mean it. Oh, sure, there’s a cultural imperative telling us to breed and breed and breed. That’s natural, after the agonies of the pre-urbmon days, when everybody went around wondering where we were going to put all the people. But even in a world of urban monads we have to plan in an orderly way. The excess of births over deaths is pretty consistent. Each urbmon is designed to hold 800,000 people comfortably, with room to pack in maybe 100,000 more, but that’s the top. At the moment, you know, every urbmon more than twenty years old in the Chipitts constellation is at least 10,000 people above maximum, and a couple are pushing maximum. Things aren’t too bad yet in 116, but you know yourselves that there are trouble spots. Why Chicago has 38,000—”

“37,402 this morning,” Aurea says.

“Whatever. That’s close to a thousand people a floor. The programed optimum density for Chicago is only 32,000, though. That means that the waiting list in your city for a private apartment is getting close to a full generation long. The dorms are packed, and people aren’t dying fast enough to make room for the new families, which is why Chicago is offloading some of its best people to places like Edinburgh and Boston and — well, Shanghai. Once the new building is open—”

Aurea says, steely-voiced, “How many from 116 are going to be sent there?”

“The theory is, 5,000 from each monad, at current levels,” Siegmund says. “It’ll be adjusted slightly to compensate for population variations in different buildings, but figure on 5,000. Now there’ll be about a thousand people in 116 who’ll volunteer to go—”

“Volunteer?” Aurea gasps. It is inconceivable to her that anyone will want to leave his native urbmon.

Siegmund smiles. “Older people, love. In their twenties and thirties. Bored, maybe stalemated in their careers, tired of their neighbors, who knows? It sounds obscene, yes. But there’ll be a thousand volunteers. That means that about 4,000 more will have to be picked by lot.”

“I told you so this morning,” Memnon says.

“Will these 4,000 be taken at random throughout the whole urbmon?” Aurea asks.

Gently Siegmund says, “At random, yes. From the newlywed dorms. From the childless.”

At last. The truth revealed.

“Why from us?” Aurea wails.

“Kindest and most blessworthy way,” says Siegmund. “We can’t uproot small children from their urbmon matrix. Dorm couples haven’t the same kind of community ties that we- that others — that—” He falters, as if recognizing for the first time that he is not speaking of hypothetical individuals, but of Aurea and her own calamity. Aurea starts to sob. He says, “Love, I’m song. It’s the system, and it’s a good system. Ideal, in fact.”

“Memnon, we’re going to be expelled!”

Siegmund tries to reassure her. She and Memnon have only a slim chance of being chosen, he insists. In this urbmon thousands upon thousands of people are eligible for transfer. And so many variable factors exist, he maintains-but she will not be consoled. Unashamed, she lets geysers of raw emotion spew into the room, and then she feels shame. She knows she has spoiled the evening for everyone. But Siegmund and Mamelon are kind about it, and Memnon does not chide her as he hurries her out, into the dropshaft, down fifty- two floors to their home in Chicago.

That night, although she wants him intensely, she turns her back on Memnon when he reaches for her. She lies awake listening a long time to the gasps and happy groans of the couples sprawled on the sleeping platforms about her, and then sleep comes. Aurea dreams of being born. She is down in the power plant of Urban Monad 116, 400 meters underground, and they are sealing her into a liftshaft capsule. The building throbs. She is close to the heat- sink and the urine-reprocessing plant and the refuse compactors and all the rest of the service gear that keeps the structure alive, all those dark, hidden sectors of the urbmon that she had to tour when she was a schoolgirl. Now the liftshaft carries her up, up through Reykjavik where the maintenance people live, up through brawling Prague where everyone has ten babies, up through Rome, Boston, Edinburgh, Chicago, Shanghai, even through Louisville where the administrators dwell in unimaginable luxury, and now she is at the summit of the building, at the landing stage where the quickboats fly in from distant towers, and a hatch opens in the landing stage and Aurea is ejected. She soars into the sky, safe within her snug capsule while the cold winds of the upper atmosphere buffet it. She is six kilometers above the ground, looking down for the first time on the entire urbmon world. So this is how it is, she thinks. So many buildings. And yet so much open space!

She drifts across the constellation of towers. It is early spring, and Chipitts is greening. Below her are the tapered structures that hold the 40,000,000 + people of this urban cluster. She is awed by the neatness of the constellation, the geometrical placement of the buildings to form a series of hexagons within the larger area. Green plazas separate the buildings. No one enters the plazas, ever, but their well-manicured lawns are a delight to behold from the windows of the urbmon, and at this height they seem wondrously smooth, as if painted against the ground. The lower-class people on the lower floors have the best views of the gardens and pools, which is a compensation of sorts. From her vantage point high above, Aurea does not expect to see the details of the plazas well, but her dreaming mind suddenly gives her an intense clarity of vision and she discerns small golden floral heads; she smells the tang of floral fragrance.

Her brain whirls as she engorges herself on the complexities of Chipitts. How many cities at twenty-five to an urban monad? 1,250. Now many villages at seven or eight to a city? More than 10,000. How many families? How many nightwalkers now prowling, now slipping into available beds? How many births a day? How many deaths? How many joys? How many sorrows?

She rises effortlessly to a height of ten kilometers. She wishes to behold the agricultural communes that lie beyond the urban constellation.

She sees them now, stretching to the horizon, neat flat bands of green bordered in brown. Seven eighths of the land area of the continent, she has been told endlessly, is used for the production of food. Or is it nine tenths? Five eighths? Twelve thirteenths? Busy little men and women oversee the machines that till the fertile fields. Aurea has heard tales of the terrible rites of the farming folk, the bizarre and primitive customs of those who must live outside the civilized urban world. Perhaps that is all fantasy; no one she knows has ever visited the communes. No one she knows has ever set foot outside Urban Monad 116. The courier pods trundle endlessly and without supervision toward the urbmons, carrying produce through subterranean channels. Food in; machinery and other manufactured goods out. A balanced economy. Aurea is borne upward on a transport of joy. How miraculous it is that there can be 75,000,000,000 people living harmoniously on one small world! God bless, she thinks. A full room for every family. A meaningful and enriching city life. Friends, lovers, mates, children.

Children. Dismay seizes her and she begins to spin.

In her dizziness she seems to vault to the edge of space, so that she sees the entire planet; all of its urban constellations are jutting toward her like spikes. She sees not only Chipitts but also Sansan and Boswash, and Berpar, Wienbud, Shankong, Bocarac, every gathering of mighty towers. And also she sees the plains teeming with food, the former deserts, the former savannas, the former forests. It is all quite wonderful, but it is terrifying as well, and she is uncertain for a moment whether the way man has reshaped his environment is the best of all possible ways. Yes, she tells herself, yes; we are servants of god this way, we avoid strife and greed and turmoil, we bring new life into the world, we thrive, we multiply. We multiply. We multiply. And doubt smites her and she begins to fall, and the capsule splits and releases her, leaving her bare body unprotected as it tumbles through the cold air. And she sees the spiky tips of Chipitts’ fifty towers below her, but now there is a new tower, a fifty-first, and she drops toward it, toward a gleaming bronzed needle-sharp summit, and she cries out as it penetrates her and she is impaled. And she wakes, sweating and shaking, her tongue dry, her mind dazed by a vision beyond her grasp, and she clutches Memnon, who murmurs sleepily and sleepily enters her.

They are beginning now to tell the people of Urban Monad 116 about the new building. Aurea hears it from the wallscreen as she does her morning chores in the dormitory: Out of the patterns of light and color on the wall there congeals a view of an unfinished tower. Construction machines swarm over it, metal arms moving frantically, welding arcs glimmering off octagonal steel-paneled torsos. The familiar voice of the screen says, “Friends, what you see is Urbmon 158, one month eleven days from completion. God willing, it’ll shortly be the home of a great many happy Chipittsians who will have the honor of establishing first-generation status there. The news from Louisville is that 802 residents of your own Urbmon 116 have already signed up for transfer to the new building, as soon as—”

Next, a day later, comes an interview with Mr. and Mrs. Dismas Cullinan of Boston, who, with their nine littles, were the very first people in 116 to request transfer. Mr. Cullinan, a meaty, red-faced man, is a specialist in sanitary engineering. He explains, “I see a real opportunity for me to move up to the planning level over in 158. I figure I can jump eighty, ninety Boors in status in one hell of a hurry.” Mrs. Cullinan complacently pats her middle. Number ten is on the way. She purrs over the immense social advantages the move will confer on her children. Her eyes are too bright; her upper lip is thicker than the lower one and her nose is sharp. “She looks like a bird of prey,” someone in the dorm comments. Someone else says, “She’s obviously miserable here. Hoping to grab rungs fast over there.” The Cullinan children range from two to thirteen years of age. Unfortunately, they resemble their parents. A runny-nosed girl claws at her brother while on screen. Aurea says firmly, “The building’s better off without the lot of them.”

Interviews with other transferees follow. On the fourth day of the campaign, the screen offers an extensive tour of the interior of 158, showing the ultramodern conveniences it will offer. Thermal irrigation for everybody, superspeed liftshafts and dropshafts, three-wall screens, a novel programing system for delivery of meals from the central kitchens, and many other wonders, representing the finest examples of urban progress. The number of volunteers for transfer is up now to 914.

Perhaps, Aurea thinks giddily, they will fill the entire quota with volunteers.

Memnon says, “The figure is fake. Siegmund tells me they’ve got only ninety-one volunteers so far.”

“Then why—”

“To encourage the others.”

In the second week, the transmissions dealing with the new building now indicate that the number of volunteers has leveled off at 1,060. Siegmund admits privately that the actual figure is somewhat less than this, although surprisingly not much less. Few additional volunteers are expected. The screen begins gently to introduce the possibility that conscription of transferees will be necessary. Two management men from Louisville and a pair of helix adjusters from Chicago are shown discussing the need for a proper genetic mix at the new building. A moral. engineer from Shanghai speaks about the importance of being blessworthy under all circumstances. It is blessworthy to obey the divine plan and its representatives on Earth, he says. God is your friend and will not harm you. God loves the blessworthy. The quality of life in Urbmon 158 will be diminished if its initial population does not reach planned levels. This would be a crime against those who have volunteered to go to 158. A crime against your fellow man is a crime against god, and who wants to injure him? Therefore it is each man’s duty to society to accept transfer if transfer is offered.

Next there is an interview with Kimon and Freya Kurtz, ages fourteen and thirteen, from a dorm in Bombay. Recently married. They are not about to volunteer, they admit, but they wouldn’t mind being conscripted. “The way we look at it,” Kimon Kurtz declares, “it could be a great opportunity. I mean, once we have some children, we’d be able to find top status for them right away. It’s a brand new world over there — no limits on how fast you can rise, no one in the way. The readjustment of going over would be a little nudgy at first, but we’d be jumping soon enough. And we’d know that our littles wouldn’t have to enter a dorm when they got old enough to marry. They could get rooms of their own without waiting, even before they had littles too. So even though we’re not eager to leave our friends and all, we’re ready to go if the wheel points to us.” Freya Kurtz, ecstatic, breathless, says, “Yes. That’s right.”

The softening-up process continues with an account of how the conscriptees will be chosen: 3,878 in all, no more than 200 from any one city or thirty from any one dorm. The pool of eligibles consists of married men and women between the ages of twelve and seventeen who have no children, a current pregnancy not being counted as a child. Selection will be by random lot.

At last the names of the conscripts are released.

The screen’s cheerful voice announces, “From Chicago’s 735th floor dormitory the- following blessworthy ones have been chosen, and may god give them fertility in their new life:

“Brook, Aylward and Alison.

“Feuermann, Sterling and Natasha.

“Holston, Memnon and Aurea—”

She will be wrenched from her matrix. She will be tom from the pattern of memories and affections that defines her identity. She is terrified of going.

She will fight the order.

“Memnon, file an appeal! Do something, fast!” She kneads the gleaming wall of the dormitory. He looks at her blankly; he is about to leave for work. He has already said there is nothing they can do. He goes out.

Aurea follows him into the corridor. The morning rush has begun; the citizens of 735th- floor Chicago stream past. Aurea sobs. The eyes of others are averted from her. She knows nearly all of these people. She has spent her life among them. She tugs at Memnon’s hand. “Don’t just walk out on me!” she whispers harshly. “How can we let them throw us out of 116?”

“It’s the law, Aurea. People who don’t obey the law go down the chute. Is that what you want? To end up contributing combustion mass to the generators?”

“I won’t go! Memnon, I’ve always lived here! I—”

“You’re talking like a flippo,” he says, keeping his voice low. He pulls her back inside the dormitory. Staring up, she sees only cavernous dark nostrils. “Pop a pill, Aurea. Talk to the floor consoler, why don’t you? Stay calm and let’s adjust.”

“I want you to file an appeal.”

“There is no appeal.”

“I refuse to go.”

He seizes her shoulders. “Look at it rationally, Aurea. One building isn’t that different from another. We’ll have some of our friends there. We’ll make new friends. We—”

“No.”

“There’s no alternative,” he says. “Except down the chute.”

“I’d rather go down the chute, then!”

For the first time since they were married, she sees him regarding her contemptuously. He cannot abide irrationality. “Don’t heave nonsense,” he tells her. “See the consoler, pop a pill, think it through. I’ve got to leave now.”

He departs again, and this time she does not go after him. She slumps on the floor, feeling cold plastic against her bare skin. The others in the dorm tactfully ignore her. She sees fiery images: her schoolroom, her first lover, her parents, her sisters and brothers, all melting, flowing across the room, a blazing trickle of acrid fluid. She presses her thumbs to her eyes. She will not be cast out. Gradually she calms. I have influence, she tells herself. If Memnon will not act, I will act for us. She wonders if she can ever forgive Memnon for his cowardice. For his transparent opportunism. She will visit her uncle.

She strips off her morning robe and dons a chaste gray girlish cloak. From the hormone chest she selects a capsule that will cause her to emanate the odor that inspires men to act protectively toward her. She looks sweet, demure, virginal; but for the ripeness of her body she could pass for ten or eleven years of age.

The liftshaft takes her to the 975th floor, the throbbing heart of Louisville.

All is steel and spongeglass here. The corridors are spacious and lofty. There is no rush of people through the halls; the occasional human figure seems incongruous and superfluous, though silent machines glide on unfathomable errands. This is the abode of those who administer the plans. Designed to awe; calculated to overwhelm; the permissible mana of the ruling class. How comfortable here. How sleek. How self-contained. Rip away the lower 90 percent of the building and Louisville would drift in serene orbit, never missing a thing.

Aurea halts outside a glistening door inlaid with moirй-generating stripes of bright white metal. She is scanned by hidden sensors, asked to name her business, evaluated, shunted into a waiting room. At length her mother’s brother consents to see her.

His office is nearly as large as a private residential suite. He sits behind a broad polygonal desk from which protrudes a bank of shimmering monitor dials. He wears formal top-level clothes, a cascading gray tunic tipped with epaulets radiating in the infrared. Aurea feels the crisp blast of heat from where she stands. He is cool, distant, polite. His handsome face appears to have been fashioned from burnished copper.

“It’s been many months, hasn’t it, Aurea?” he says. A patronizing smile escapes him. “How have you been?”

“Fine, Uncle Lewis.”

“Your husband?”

“Fine.”

“Any tittles yet?”

Blurting. “Uncle Lewis, we’ve been picked to go to 158!”

His plastic smile does not waver. “How fortunate! God bless, you can start a new life right at the top!”

“I don’t want to go. Get me out of it. Somehow. Anyhow.” She rushes toward him, a frightened child, tears flowing, knees melting. A force-field captures her when she is two meters from the outer rim of his desk. Her breasts feel it first, and as they flatten painfully against the invisible barrier she averts her head and injures her cheek. She drops to her knees and whimpers.

He comes to her. He lifts her. He tells her to be brave, to do her duty to god. He is kind and calm at first, but as she goes on protesting, his voice turns cold, with a hard edge of irritation, and abruptly Aurea begins to feel unworthy of his attention. He reminds her of her obligations to society. He hints delicately that the chute awaits those who persist in abrading the smooth texture of community life. Then he smiles again, and his icy blue eyes meet hers and engulf them, and he tells her to be brave and go. She creeps away. She feels disgraced by her weakness.

As she plunges downward from Louisville, her uncle’s spell ebbs and her indignation revives. Perhaps she can get help elsewhere. The future is crashing around her, falling towers burying her in clouds of brick-black dust. A harsh wind blows out of tomorrow and the great building sways. She returns to the dorm and hastily changes her clothing. She alters her hormone balance too. A drop or two of golden fluid, sliding down to the mysterious coils of the female machinery. Now she is clad in iridescent mesh through which her breasts, thighs, and buttocks are intermittently visible, and she exudes an odor of distilled lust. She notifies the data terminal that she requests a private meeting with Siegmund Kluver of Shanghai. She paces the dorm, waiting. One of the young husbands comes to her, eyes gleaming. He grasps her haunch and gestures toward his sleeping platform. “Sorry,” she murmurs. “I’ll be’ going out.” Some refusals are allowed. He shrugs and goes away, pausing to glance back at her in a wistful way. Eight minutes later word comes that Siegmund has consented to meet with her in one of the rendezvous cubicles on the 790th floor. She goes up.

His face is smudged and memoranda bulge in his breast pocket. He seems cross and impatient. “Why did you pull me away from my work?” he asks.

“You know Memnon and I have been—”

“Yes, of course.” Brusquely. “Mamelon and I will be song to lose your friendship.”

Aurea attempts to assume a provocative stance. She knows she cannot win Siegmund’s aid merely by making herself available; he is hardly that easily swayed. Bodies are easily possessed here, career opportunities are few and not lightly jeopardized. Her aims are trivial. She feels rejection flowing out of the minutes just ahead. But perhaps she can recruit Siegmund’s influence. Perhaps she can lead him to feel such regret at her departure that he will aid her. She whispers, “Help us get out of going, Siegmund.”

“How can I—”

“You have connections. Amend the program somehow. Support our appeal. You’re -a rising man in the building. You have high friends. You can do it.”

“No one can do such a thing.”

“Please, Siegmund.” She approaches him, pulls her shoulders back, unsubtly lets her nipples come thrusting through her garment of mesh. Hopeless. How can she magic him with two pink nubs of stiff flesh? She moistens her lips, narrows her eyes to slits. Too stagy. He will laugh. Huskily she says, “Don’t you want me to stay? Wouldn’t you like to take a turn or two with me? You know I’d do anything if you’d help us get off that list. Anything!” Face eager. Nostrils flaring, offering promise of unimaginable erotic delights. She will do things not yet invented.

She sees his flickering momentary smile and knows that she has oversold herself; he is amused, not tempted, by her forwardness. Her face crumples. She turns away.

“You don’t want me,” she mutters.

“Aurea, please! You’re asking the impossible.” He catches her shoulders and pulls her toward him. His hands slip within the mesh and caress her flesh. She knows that he is merely consoling her with a counterfeit of desire. He says, “If there was any way I could fix things for you, I would. But we’d all get tossed down the chute.” His fingers find her body’s core. Moist, slippery, despite herself. She does not want him now, not this way. With a wriggle of her hips she tries to free herself. His embrace is mere kindness; he will take her out of pity. She pivots and stiffens.

“No,” she says, and then she realizes how hopeless everything is, and she yields to him only because she knows that there will never be another chance.

Memnon says, “I’ve heard from Siegmund about what happened today. And from your uncle. You’ve got to stop this, Aurea.”

“Let’s go down the chute, Memnon.”

“Come with me to the consoler. I’ve never seen you acting this way before.”

“I’ve never felt so threatened.”

“Why can’t you adjust to it?” he asks. “It’s really a grand chance for us.”

“I can’t. I can’t.” She slumps forward, defeated, broken.

“Stop it,” he tells her. “Brooding sterilizes. Won’t you cheer up a bit?”

She will not give way to chiding, however reasonable the tone. He summons the machines; they take her to the consoler. Soft rubbery orange pads gently grasping her arms all the way through the halls. In the consoler’s office she is examined and her metabolism is probed. He draws the story from her. He is an elderly man, kind, gentle, somewhat bored, with a cloud of white hair rimming a pink face. She wonders whether he hates her behind his sweetness. At the end he tells her, “Conflict sterilizes. You must lead to comply with the demands of society, for society will not nurture you unless you play the game.” He recommends treatment.

“I don’t want treatment,” she says thickly, but Memnon authorizes it, and they take her away. “Where am I going?” she asks. “For how long?”

“To the 780th floor, for about a week.”

“To the moral engineers?”

“Yes,” they tell her.

“Not there. Please, not there.”

“They are gentle. They heal the troubled.”

“They’ll change me.”

“They’ll improve you. Come. Come. Come.”

For a week she lives in a sealed chamber filled with warm, sparkling fluids. She floats idly in a pulsing tide, thinking of the huge urbmon as a wondrous pedestal on which she sits. Images soak from her mind and everything becomes deliciously cloudy. They speak to her over audio channels embedded in the walls of the chamber. Occasionally she glimpses an eye peering through an optical fiber dangling above her. They drain the tensions and resistances from her. On the eighth day Memnon comes for her. They open the chamber and she is lifted forth, nude, dripping, her skin puckered, little beads of glittering fluid clinging to her. The room is full of strange men. Everyone else is clothed; it is dreamlike to be bare in front of them, but she does not really mind. Her breasts are full, her belly is flat, why then be ashamed? Machines towel her dry and clothe her. Memnon leads her by the hand. Aurea smiles quite often. “I love you,” she tells Memnon softly.

“God bless,” he says. “I’ve missed you so much.”

The day is at hand, and she has paid her farewells. She has had two months to say good- bye, first to her blood kin, then to her friends in her village, then to others whom she has known within Chicago, and at last to Siegmund and Mamelon Kluver, her only acquaintances outside her native city. She has rewound her past into a tight coil. She has revisited the home of her parents and her old schoolroom, and she has even taken a tour of the urbmon, like a visitor from outbuilding, so that she may see the power plant and the service core and the conversion stations one final time.

Meanwhile Memnon has been busy too. Each night he reports to her on that day’s accomplishments. The 5,202 citizens of Urban Monad 116 who are destined to transfer to the new structure have elected twelve delegates to the steering committee of Urbmon 158, and Memnon is one of the twelve. It is a great honor. Night after night the delegates take part in a multiscreen linkage embracing all of Chipitts, so that they can plan the social framework of the building they are going to share. It has been decided, Memnon tells her, to have fifty cities of twenty floors apiece, and to name the cities not after the vanished cities of old Earth, as has been the general custom, but rather after distinguished men of the past: Newton, Einstein, Plato, Galileo, and so forth. Memnon will be given responsibility for an entire sector of heat-diffusion engineers. It will be administrative rather than technical work, and so he and Aurea will live in Newton, the highest city.

Memnon expands and throbs with increased importance. He cannot wait for the hour of transfer to arrive. “We’ll be really influential people,” he tells Aurea exultantly. ” And in ten or fifteen years we’ll be legendary figures in 158. The first settlers. The founders, the pioneers. They’ll be making up ballads about us in another century or so.”

“And I was unwilling to go,” Aurea says mildly. “How strange to think of myself acting like that!”

“It’s an error to react with fear until you perceive the true shape of things,” Memnon replies. “The ancients thought it would be a calamity to have as many as 5,000,000,000 people in the world. Yet we have fifteen times as much and look how happy we are!”

“Yes. Very happy. And we’ll always be happy, Memnon.”

The signal comes. The machines are at the door to fetch them. Memnon indicates the box that contains their few possessions. Aurea glows. She glances about the dorm, astonished by the crowdedness of it, the crush of couples in so little space. We will have our own room in 158, she reminds herself.

Those members of the dorm who are not leaving form a line, and offer Memnon and Aurea one final embrace.

Memnon follows the machines out, and Aurea follows Memnon. They go up to the landing stage on the thousandth floor. It is an hour past dawn and summer sunlight gleams in shining splotches on the tips of Chipitts’ towers. The transfer operation has already begun; quickboats capable of carrying 100 passengers each will be moving back and forth between Urbmons 116 and 158 all day.

“And so we leave this place,” Memnon says. “We begin a new life. Bless god!”

“God bless!” cries Aurea.

They enter the quickboat and it soars aloft. The pioneers bound for Urbmon 158 gasp as they see, for the first time, how their world really looks from above. The towers are beautiful, Aurea realizes. They glisten. On and on they stretch, fifty-one of them, like a ring of upraised spears in a broad green carpet. She is very happy. Memnon folds his hand over hers. She wonders how she could ever have feared this day. She wishes she could apologize to the universe for her foolishness.

She lets her free hand rest lightly on the curve of her belly. New life now sprouts within her. Each moment the cells divide and the little one grows. They have dated the hour of conception to the evening of the day when she was discharged by the consoler’s office. Conflict indeed sterilizes, Aurea has realized. Now the poison of negativeness has been drained from her; she is able to fulfill a woman’s proper destiny.

“It’ll be so different,” she says to Memnon, “living in such an empty building. Only 250,000! How long will it take for us to fill it?”

“Twelve or thirteen years,” he answers. “We’ll have few deaths, because we’re all young. And lots of births.”

She laughs. “Good. I hate an empty house.”

The quickboat’s voice says, “We now will turn to the southeast, and on the left to the rear you can catch a last glimpse of Urbmon 116.”

Her fellow passengers strain to see. Aurea does not make the effort. Urbmon 116 has ceased to concern her.