Collected Short Fiction, page 781
His friends stood watching him until he was out of sight.
“He has become a madman,” said Prewger.
“A dangerous madman,” Glorr said.
“Would you do such a thing?” Simit asked.
“Do you mean, go into the machine, or go to another city?” said Derk.
“Either one.”
“Of course not,” said Derk.
“Of course not,” said Glorr as well. “I know who I am. I know what I want to be.”
“Yes,” Simit said, shuddering. “Why should we do such things? We know who we are.”
“We know what we want to be,” said Prewger.
The Throwbacks
I
JASON QUEVEDO lives in Shanghai, though just barely: his apartment is on the 761st floor, and if he lived only one level lower he would be in Chicago, which is no place for a scholar. His wife Micaela frequently tells him that their lowly status in Shanghai is a direct reflection of the quality of his work. Micaela is the sort of wife who often says things like that.
Jason spends most of his working time down in Pittsburgh, where the archives are. He is a historian and needs to consult the documents, the records of how it used to be. He does his research in a clammy little cubicle on the urbmon’s 185th floor, almost in the middle of Pittsburgh. He does not really have to work down there, since anything in the archives can easily be piped up to the data terminal in his own apartment. But he feels it is a matter of professional pride to have an office where he can file and arrange and handle the source materials. He said as much when he was pulling strings to have the office assigned to him: “The task of recreating previous eras is a delicate and complex one, which must be performed under optimal circumstances, or—”
The truth is that if he didn’t escape from Micaela and their five littles every day, he’d go flippo. That is, accumulated frustration and humiliation would cause him to commit nonsocial acts, perhaps violent ones. He is aware that there is no room for the nonsocial person in an urban monad. When more than 800,000 people live under the same roof, absolute social harmony is essential. He knows that if he loses his temper and behaves in a seriously unblessworthy way they simply throw him down the chute and turn his mass into energy. So he is careful.
He is a short, soft-spoken man with mild green eyes and thinning sandy hair. “Your meek exterior is deceptive,” lovely Mamelon Kluver told him throatily at a party last summer. “Your type is like a sleeping volcano. You explode suddenly, astonishingly, passionately.” He thinks she may be right. He fears the possibilities.
He has been desperately in love with Mamelon Kluver for perhaps the last three years, and certainly since the night of that party. He has never dared to touch her. Mamelon’s husband is the celebrated Siegmund Kluver, who though not yet fifteen is universally recognized as one of the urbmon’s future leaders. Jason is not afraid that Siegmund would object. In an urban monad, naturally, no man has a right to withhold his wife from anyone who desires her. Nor is Jason afraid of what Micaela would say. He knows his privileges. He is simply afraid of Mamelon. And perhaps of himself.
For sref. only. Urbmon sex mores.
Univ. sex. accessibility. Trace decline of proprietary marriage, end of adultery concept. Nightwalkers: when first socially acceptable? Limit of-allowable frustration: how determined? Sex as panacea. Sex as compensation for lessened quality of life under urbmon conditions. Query: was quality of life really lessened by triumph of urbmon system? (Careful—beware the chute!) Separation of sex & procreation. Value of max. interchange of partners in high-density culture. Problem: what is still forbidden (anything?) Examine taboo on extracity nightwalking. How powerful? How widely observed? Check effects of univ. permiss. on comtemp. fiction. Loss of dramatic tension? Erosion of raw material of narr. conflict? Query: is urbmon moral struc. amoral, postmoral, pre-, im-?
JASON dictates such memoranda whenever and wherever some new structural hypothesis enters his mind. These are thoughts that come to him during a nightwalking excursion on the 155th floor, in Tokyo. He is with a thickset young brunette named Gretl when the sequence of ideas arrives. He has been fondling her for some minutes and she is panting, ready, her hips pumping, her eyes narrowed to steamy slits.
“Excuse me,” he says and reaches across her heavy quivering breasts for a stylus. “I have to write something down.” He activates the data terminal’s input screen and punches the button that will relay a printout of his memorandum to his desk at his research cubicle in Pittsburgh. Then, quickly pursing his lips and scowling, he begins to make his notations.
He frequently goes nightwalking but never in his own city of Shanghai. Jason’s one audacity: boldly he flouts the tradition that one should stay close to home during one’s nocturnal prowls. No one will punish him for his unconventional behavior, since it is merely a violation of accepted custom, not of urban law. No one will even criticize him to his face for doing it. Yet his wanderings give him the mild thrill of the forbidden. Jason explains his habit to himself by saying that he prefers the crosscultural enrichment that comes from sleeping with women of other cities. Privately he suspects that he is just uneasy about getting mixed up with women he knows, such as Mamelon Kluver. Especially Mamelon Kluver.
So on his nightwalking nights he takes the dropshafts far into the depths of the building, to such cities as Pittsburgh or Tokyo, even to squalid Prague or grubby Reykjavik. He pushes open strange doors, lockless by statute, and takes his place on the sleeping platforms of unknown women smelling of mysterious lower-class vegetables. By law they must embrace him willingly. “I am from Shanghai,” he tells them, and they go, “Ooooh!” in awe and he mounts them tigerishly, contemptuously, swollen with status.
Breasty Gretl waits patiently while Jason records his latest notions. Then he turns toward her again. Her husband, bloated on whatever the local equivalent of tingle or mindblot may be, lies belly-up at the far side of the sleeping platform, ignoring them. Gretl’s large dark eyes glow with admiration. “You Shanghai boys sure got brains,” she says as Jason pounces and takes her in a single fierce act.
Later he returns to the 761st floor. Wraiths flit through the dim corridors: other citizens of Shanghai, back from their own nightwalking rounds. He enters his apartment. Jason has forty-five square meters of floor space, not really enough for a man with a wife and five littles, but he does not complain. God bless, you take what you get; others have less. Micaela is asleep, or pretends to be. She is a long-legged, tawny-skinned woman of twenty-three, still quite attractive, though quirky lines are beginning to appear in her face. She frowns too much. She lies half uncovered, her long black glossy hair spread out wildly around her. Her breasts are small but perfect; Jason compares them favorably to the udders of Tokyo’s Gretl. He and Micaela have been married nine years. Once he loved her a great deal—before he discovered the gritty residue of bitter shrewishness at the bottom of her soul.
She smiles an inward smile, stirs, still sleeping, brushes her hair back from her eyes. She has the look of a woman who has just had a thoroughly satisfactory sexual experience. Jason has no way of knowing whether some nightwalker visited Micaela tonight while he was gone and, of course, he cannot ask. (Search for evidence? Stains on the sleeping platform? Stickiness on her thighs? Don’t be barbaric!) He suspects that even if no one had come to her tonight, she would try to make him think that someone had; and if someone had come and had given her only modest pleasure, she would nevertheless smile for her husband’s benefit as though she has been embraced by Zeus. He knows his wife’s style.
The children seem peaceful. They range in age from two to eight. Soon he and Micaela will have to think about having another. Five littles is a fair-sized family but Jason understands his duty to serve life by creating life. When one ceases to grow, one begins to die; it is true of a human being and also of the population of an urban monad, of an urbmon constellation, of a continent, of a world. God is life and life is god.
He lies down beside his wife.
He sleeps.
He dreams that Micaela has been sentenced to the chute for countersocial behavior.
Down she goes! Mamelon Kluver makes a condolence call. “Poor Jason,” she murmurs. Her pale skin is cool against him. The musky fragrance of her. The elegance of her features. The look of total mastery of self. Not even seventeen; how can she be so imperiously complete? “Help me dispose of Siegmund and we’ll belong to each other,” Mamelon says. Eyes bright, mischievous, goading him to be her creature. “Jason,” she whispers. “Jason, Jason, Jason.” Her tone a caress. Her hands on him. He wakes, trembling, sweating, horrified, half an inch from messy ecstasy. He sits up and goes through one of the forgiveness modes for improper thoughts.
God bless, he thinks, god bless, god bless, god bless. I did not mean such things. It was my mind. My monstrous mind free of shackles. He completes the spiritual exercise and lies down once more. He sleeps and dreams harmlessly.
IN THE morning the littles run madly off to school and Jason prepares to go to his office. Micaela says suddenly, “Isn’t it interesting that you go six hundred floors down when you go to work, and Siegmund Kluver goes up on top, to Louisville?”
“What the god bless do you mean by that?”
“I see symbolic meaning in it.”
“Symbolic garbage. Siegmund’s in urban administration—he goes up where the administrators are. I’m in history—I go down where the history is. So?”
“Wouldn’t you like to live in Louisville some day?”
“No.”
“Why don’t you have any ambition?”
“Is your life so miserable here?” he asks, holding himself tensely in check.
“Why has Siegmund made so much of himself at the age of fourteen or fifteen and here you are at twenty-six and you’re still just an input-pusher?”
“Siegmund is ambitious,” Jason replies evenly, “and I’m merely a time-server. I don’t deny it. Maybe it’s genetic. Siegmund strives and gets away with it. Most men don’t. Striving sterilizes, Micaela. Striving is primitive. God bless, what’s wrong with my career? What’s wrong with living in Shanghai?”
“One floor lower and we’d be living in—”
“—Chicago,” he says. “I know. But we aren’t. May I go to my office now?”
He leaves. He wonders whether he ought to send Micaela to the consoler’s office for a reality adjustment. Her threshold of thwarting-acceptance has dipped alarmingly of late; her expectations-level has risen just as disturbingly. Jason is well aware that such things should be dealt with at once, before they become uncontrollable and lead to countersocial behavior and the chute. Probably Micaela needs the services of the moral engineers. But he puts aside the idea of calling the consoler.
It is because I dislike the idea of having anyone tamper with my wife’s mind.
He tells himself this piously and a mocking inner voice tells him that he is taking no action because he secretly wishes to see Micaela become so countersocial that she must be thrown down the chute.
He enters the dropshaft and programs for the 185th floor. Down he goes to Pittsburgh. He sinks, inertia-free, through the cities that make up Urbmon 116. Down he goes through Chicago, through Edinburgh, through Nairobi, through Colombo.
Forty floors constitute one city. The twenty-five cities of Urbmon 116 comprise the successive layers of a single great urban monad, a tower of super-stressed concrete three kilometers high, a self-contained unit housing more than 800,000 human beings. Most cities within the urbmon have between 30,000 and 40,000 people but there are exceptions. Louisville, the high-prestige abode of the urban administrators, is sparsely populated; luxury is the compensation one is given for the burdens of such responsibility. Reykjavik, Warsaw and Prague, the three bottom cities where the maintenance workers and other humble grubbers live, are overpopulated; crowding is considered beneficial there. Everything is conceived for the greater good.
Urbmon 116 looks after itself. Its central service core provides light, fresh air, heating, cooling and other essentials. Central kitchens handle most of the food-processing chores. Below ground level, 400 meters down, is found the utilities substructure: refuse compactors, the plants for the reprocessing of wastes, the heat-sink, the power generators and everything else on which the life of the urbmon depends. Food is the only thing that must come from outside—from the agricultural communes that lie beyond the urban area. Jason’s building is one of fifty-odd identical structures making up the Chipitts urban constellation, which in this year of 2382 has a population of close to 41,000,000. There are many other such urban constellations in the world—Boshwash, Sansan, Shankong, Bocarac, Wienbud—and the aggregate human population of Earth has risen well past 75,000, 000,000. Because of the new verticality of urban housing patterns, there is ample land for meeting the food requirements of that many people and more.
He feels the comforting solidity of the building about him as he descends. The urbmon is his world. He has never been outside it. Why should he go out? His friends, his family, his whole life, are here.
His urbmon is adequately supplied with theaters, sports arenas, schools, hospitals, houses of worship. His data terminal gives him access to any work of art that is considered blessworthy for human consumption. No one he knows has ever left the building, except for the people who were chosen by lot to settle in the newly opened Urbmon 158 a few months ago and they, of course, will never come back. There are rumors that urban administrators sometimes go from building to building on business but Jason is not sure that this is true and he does not see why such travel would be necessary or desirable. Are there not systems of instantaneous communication linking the urbmons, capable of transmitting all relevant data?
IT IS a splendid system. As a historian, privileged to explore the records of the pre-urbmon world, he knows more fully than most people how splendid it is. He understands the awful chaos of the past. The terrifying freedoms; the hideous necessity of making choices. The insecurity. The confusion. The lack of plan. The formlessness of contexts.
He reaches the 185th floor. He makes his way through the sleepy corridors of Pittsburgh to his office. A modest room but he loves it. Glistening walls. A wet mural over his desk. The necessary terminals and screens.
Five small glistening cubes lie on his desk. Each holds the contents of several libraries. He has been working with these cubes for two years, now. His theme is The Urban Monad as Social Evolution: Parameters of the Spirit Defined by Community Structure. He is attempting to show that the transition to an urbmon society has brought about a fundamental transformation of the human soul. Of the soul of western man, at any rate. An orientalization of the occidentals, as formerly aggressive people accept the yoke of the new environment. A more pliant, more acquiescent mode of response to events; a turning away from the old expansionist-individualist philosophy, as marked by territorial ambition, the conquistador mentality and the pioneering way, toward a kind of communal expansionism centered in the orderly and unlimited growth of the human race. Definitely a psychic evolution of some sort, a shift toward graceful acceptance of hive-life. The malcontents bred out of the system generations ago. We who have not gone down the chute accept the inexorabilities. Yes. Yes. Jason believes that he has struck upon a significant subject. Micaela disparaged the theme when he announced it: “You mean you’re going to write a book showing that people who live in different kinds of cities are different? That urbmon people have a different attitude than jungle people? Some scholar. I could prove your point in six sentences.” Nor was there much enthusiasm for the subject when he proposed it at a staff meeting, although he did manage to get clearance for it. His technique so far has been to steep himself in the images of the past, to turn himself, so far as is possible, into a citizen of the pre-urbmon society. He hopes that that will give him the essential parallax, the perspective on his own society, that he will need when he begins to write his study. He expects to start writing in two or three years.
He consults a memorandum, chooses a cube.
A kind of ecstasy comes over him as scenes out of the ancient world materialize. He leans close to his input speaker and begins to dictate. Frantically, frenziedly, Jason Quevedo sets down notes on the way it used to be.
II
HOUSES and streets. A horizontal world. Individual family shelter units: this is my house, this is my castle. Fantastic! Three people, taking up maybe a thousand square meters of surface. Roads. Concept of road hard for us to understand. Like a hallway going on and on. Private vehicles. Where are they all going? Why so fast? Why not stay home? Crash! Blood. Head goes through glass. Crash again! In the rear. Dark combustible fluid flows in street. Middle of day, springtime, major city. Street scene. Which city? Chicago, New York, Instanbul, Cairo. People walking about IN THE OPEN. Paved streets. This for walkers, this for drivers. Filth. Estimated grid reading: 10,000 pedestrians this sector alone, in strip 8 meters wide and 80 meters long. Is that figure right? Check it. Elbow to elbow. And they’d think our world was overcrowded? At least we don’t impinge on each other like that. We know how to keep our distances within the overall structure of urbmon life. Vehicles move down middle of street.
The good old chaos. Chief activity: the purchase of goods. Private consumption. Cube 11Ab8 shows interior vector of a shop. Exchanging of money for merchandise. Not much difference there except a random nature of transaction. Do they need what they buy? Where do they PUT it all?
This cube holds nothing new for him. Jason has seen such city scenes many times before. Yet the fascination is ever fresh. He is tense, sweat flowing freely, as he strains to comprehend a world in which people may live where they please, where they move about on foot or in vehicles in the open, where there is no planning, no order, no restraint. He must perform a double act of imagination: it is necessary for him to see that vanished world from within, as though he lived in it and then he must try to see the urbmon society as it might seem to someone wafted forward from the twentieth century. The magnitude of the task dismays him. He knows roughly how an ancient would feel about Urbmon 116: it is a hellish place, the ancient would say, in which people live hideously cramped and brutal lives, in which every civilized philosophy is turned on its head, in which uncontrolled breeding is nightmarishly encouraged to serve some incredible concept of a deity eternally demanding more worshipers, in which dissent is ruthlessly stifled and dissenters are peremptorily destroyed. Jason knows the right phrases, the sort of words an intelligent liberal American of, say, 1958 would use. But the inner spirit is missing. He tries to see his own world as a species of hell and fails. To him it is not hellish. He is a logical man; he knows why the vertical society had to evolve out of the old horizontal one and why it then became obligatory to eliminate—preferably before they were old enough to reproduce—all those who would not adapt or could not be adapted to the fabric of society. How could troublemakers be allowed to remain in the tight, intimate, carefully balanced structure of an urbmon? He knows that the probable result of tossing flippos down the chute has been, over a couple of centuries, the creation of a new style of human being through selective breeding. Is there now a Homo urbmonensis, placid, adjusted, fully content? These are topics he means to explore intensively when he writes his book. But it is so hard, so absurdly hard, to grasp them from the viewpoint of ancient man!
