The World Inside

SEVEN

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: an immense box far below the ground, so big that the globes of light in its ceiling are barely able to illuminate the distant concrete floor. Siegmund creeps along a catwalk midway between floor and ceiling. Palatial Louisville three kilometers above his head. Carpets and draperies, inlays of rare woods, the trappings of power, very far away now. He hadn’t meant to come here, not this far down. Warsaw was his intended destination tonight. But somehow first here. Stalling for time. Siegmund is frightened. Searching for an excuse not to do it. If they only knew. The cowardice within. UnSiegmundlike.

He rubs his hands along the catwalk railing. Cold metal, shaky fingers. A constant throbbing boom running through the building here. He is not far from the terminus of the chutes that convey solid wastes to the power plant: discards of all kinds, old clothes, used data cubes, wrappers and packages, the bodies of the dead, occasionally the bodies of the living, coursing down the spiraling slideways and tumbling into the compactors. And moving thence on gliding belts into the combustion chambers. The liberation of heat for electrical generation: waste not, want not. The electrical load is heavy at this hour. Every apartment is lit. Siegmund closes his eyes and receives a vision of Urban Monad 116’s 885,000 people linked by an enormous tangle of wiring. A giant human switchboard. And I am no longer plugged into it. Why am I no longer plugged into it? What has happened to me? What is happening to me? What is about to happen to me?

Sluggishly he moves along the catwalk and passes out of the generating room. Entering a sleek-walled tunnel; behind its glossy paneled sides, he knows, run the transmission lines along which power flows toward the debooster circuitry. And here the reprocessing plant — urine pipes, fecal reconversion chambers. All the wondrous stuff by which the urbmon lives. Ho other human being in sight. The heavy weight of the solitude. Siegmund shivers. He must go up to Warsaw soon. Yet he continues to drift like a touring schoolchild through the utility center at the urbmon’s lowest level. Hiding here from himself. The cold eyes of electronic scanners staring at him out of hundreds of shielded openings in floors and walls and ceilings. I am Siegmund Kluver of Shanghai, 787th floor. I am fifteen years and five months old. My wife’s name is Mamelon, my son is Janus, my daughter is Persephone. I am assigned to work duty as a consultant in Louisville Access Nexus and within the next twelve months I will undoubtedly receive notice of my promotion to the highest administrative levels of this urban monad. Therefore shall I rejoice. I am Siegmund Kluver of Shanghai, 787th floor. He bows to the scanners. All hail. All hail. The future leader. Passing his hand nervously through his coarse bushy hair. For an hour now he has wandered about down here. You should go up. What are you afraid of? To Warsaw. To Warsaw.

He hears the voice of Rhea Shawke Freehouse, coming as though from a recording mounted at the core of his brain. If I were you, Siegmund, I’d relax and try to enjoy myself more. Don’t worry about what people think, or seem to think, about you. Soak up human nature, work at being more human yourself. Go around the building; do some nightwalking in Warsaw or Prague, maybe. See how simpler people live. Shrewd words. Wise woman. Why be afraid? Go up. Go up. It’s getting late.

Standing outside a NO ADMITTANCE hatch leading to one of the computer ganglia, Siegmund spends several minutes studying the tremor of his right hand. Then he hurries to the liftshaft and tells it to take him to the sixtieth floor. The middle of Warsaw.

Narrow corridors, here. Many doors. A compressed quality to the atmosphere. This is a city of extraordinarily high population density, not only because the inhabitants are so blessworthy in their fecundity, but also because much of the city’s area is given over to industrial plants. Even though the building is much broader here than in its upper reaches, the citizens of Warsaw are pushed together into a relatively small residential zone. Here are the machines that stamp out machines. Dies, lathes, templates, reciprocators, positioners, fabrication plaques. Much of the work is computerized and automated, but there is plenty for human beings to do: feeding the conveyors, guiding and positioning, driving the fork-lifts, tagging the finished work for its destination. Late last year Siegmund pointed out to Nissim Shawke and Kipling Freehouse that nearly everything being done by human labor in the industrial levels could be handled by machines; instead of employing thousands of people in Warsaw, Prague, and Birmingham, they could set up a totally automated output program, with a few supervisors to keep watch over the inventory homeostasis, and a few maintenance men to handle emergencies, such as repairing the repair machines. Shawke gave him a patronizing smile. “But if they had no work, what would all those poor people do with their lives?” he asked. “Do you think we can turn them into poets, Siegmund? Professors of urban history? We deliberately devise labor for them, don’t you see?” And Siegmund embarrassed by his naivete. A rare failure, for him, of insight into the methodology of government. He still feels uncomfortable about that conversation. In an ideal commonwealth, he believes, every person should have meaningful work to do. He wishes the urban monad to be an ideal commonwealth. But yet certain practical considerations of human limitations interpose themselves. But yet. But yet. The makework in Warsaw is a blot on the theory.

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 Tittles 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 is 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 fury. “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 arid 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.

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 Holson, 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 and 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 5hawke 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.

This is Toledo, where the pampered children of the administrative caste make their homes. Rhea Shawke Freehouse lives here. Siegmund does not dare pay a call on her. She is too perceptive; she will understand at once that he is in a terminal phase of collapse, and undoubtedly will take preventive action. But yet he must make some move in her direction. Siegmund pauses outside her apartment and tenderly presses his lips to the door. Rhea. Rhea. Rhea. I loved you too. He goes up.

Nor does he make any visits in Louisville, though it would please him to see some of the masters of the urbmon tonight, Nissim Shawke or Monroe Stevis or Kipling Freehouse. Magical names, names that resonate in his soul. Best to bypass them. He goes directly to the landing stage on the thousandth floor. Stepping out on the flat breeze-swept platform. Night, now. The stars glittering fiercely. Up there is god, immanent and all-enduing, floating serenely amidst the celestial mechanics. Below Siegmund’s feet is the totality of Urban Monad 116. What is today’s population? 888,904. Or some such. + 131 since yesterday and +9,902 since the first of the year, adjusted for the departure of those who went to stock the new Urbmon 158. Maybe he has the figures all wrong. It hardly matters. The building is athrob with life, at any rate. Fruitful and multiplying. God bless! So many servants of god. Shanghai’s 34,000 souls. Warsaw. Prague. Tokyo. The ecstasy of verticality. In this single slender tower we compress so many thousands of lives. Plugged into the same switchboard. Homeostasis, and the defeat of entropy. We are well organized here. All thanks to our dedicated administrators.

And look, look there! The neighboring urbmons! The wondrous row of them! Urbmon 117, 118, 119, 120. The fifty-one towers of the Chipitts constellation. Total population now 41,516,883. Or some such. And east of Chipitts lies Boshwash. And west of Chipitts is Sansan. And across the sea is Berpar and Wienbud and Shankong and Bocarac. And more. Each cluster of towers with its millions of encapsulated souls. What is the population of our world now? Has it reached 76,000,000,000 yet? They project 100,000,000,000 for the not too distant future. Many new urbmons must be built to house those added billions. Plenty of land left though. And they can put platforms on the sea.

To the north, on the horizon, he imagines he can see the blaze of a commune’s bonfires. Like the flash of a diamond in sunlight. The farmers dancing. Their grotesque rites. Bringing fertility to the fields. God bless! It is all for the best. Siegmund smiles. He stretches forth his arms. If he could only embrace the stars, he might find god. He walks to the very edge of the landing stage. A railing and a force-field protect him against the vagrant gusts of wind that might hurl him to his death. It is very windy here. Three kilometers high, after all. A needle sticking into god’s eye. If he could only spring into the heavens. Looking down as he coats past, seeing Chipitts below, the rows of towers, the farmland surrounding them, the miraculous urban rhythm of verticality plotted against the miraculous commune rhythm of horizontality. How beautiful the world is tonight. Siegmund throws his head back. Eyes shining. And there is god. The blessman was right. There! There! Wait, I’m coming! Siegmund mounts the railing. Teeters a little. Currents of wind buffeting him. He has risen above the protective forcefield. It seems almost as though the whole building is swaying. Think of the body heat that 888,904 human beings under the same roof must generate. Think of the waste products they daily send down the chute. All these linked lives. The switchboard. And god watching over us. I’m coming! I’m coming. Siegmund flexes his knees, gathers his strength, sucks air deep into his lungs. And sails toward god in a splendid leap.

Now the morning sun is high enough to touch the uppermost fifty stories of Urban Monad 116. Soon the building’s entire eastern face will glitter like the bosom of the sea at daybreak. Thousands of windows, activated by the dawn’s early photons, deopaque. Sleepers stir. Life goes on. God bless! Here begins another happy day.