Collected Short Fiction, page 790
Which is Urbmon 116?
The towers bear no numbers. Those who live inside them know where they live. Half staggering, Michael approaches the nearest building. Its flanks illuminated with radiant dawnlight. Looking up a thousand floors. The delicacy, the complexity, of its myriad tiny chambers. Beneath him the mysterious underground roots, the power plants, the waste-processing plants, the hidden computers, all the concealed wonders that give the urbmon its life. And above, rising like some immense vegetable growth, its sides marvelously intricate, a hatchwork of textures, the urbmon. Within the hundreds of thousands of interwoven lives, artists and scholars, musicians and sculptors, welders and janitors. His eyes are moist. Home. Home. But is it? He goes to the hatch. Holds up his wrist, shows the egress pass. The computer authorized to admit him on demand. “If this is Urbmon 116, open up! I’m Michael Statler.” Nothing happening. Scanners scanning him, but all stays sealed. “What building is this?” he asks. Silence. “Come on,” he says. “Tell me where I am!”
A voice from an invisible speaker says, “This is Urban Monad 123 of the Chipitts constellation.”
123! So many kilometers from home!
But he can only continue. Now the sun is above the horizon and turning quickly from red to gold. If that is the east, then where is Urbmon 116? He calculates with a numbed mind. He must go east. Yes? No? He plods through the interminable series of gardens separating 123 from its eastern neighbor, and interrogates the speaker at the hatch. Yes: this is Urbmon 122. He proceeds. The buildings are set at long diagonals, so that one will not shade the next, and he moves down the center of the constellation, keeping careful count, while the sun climbs and swarms over him. Dizzy, now, with hunger and exhaustion. Is this 116? No, he must have lost count; it will not open for him. Then this?
YES. The hatch slides back as he offers his pass. Michael clambers in. Waiting as the door rolls shut behind him. Now the inner door to open. Waiting. Well? “Why don’t you open?” he asks. “Here. Here. Scan this.” Holding up his pass. Perhaps some kind of decontamination procedure. No telling what he’s brought in from outside. And now the door opens.
Lights in his eyes. A dazzling glare. “Remain where you are. Make no attempt to leave the entryway.” The cold metallic voice nailing him where he stands. Blinking, Michael takes half a step forward, then realizes it might be unwise and stops. A sweet-smelling cloud engulfs him. They have sprayed him with something. Congealing fast, forming a security cocoon. The lights now go down. Figures blocking his path: four, five of them. Police. “Michael Statler?” one of them asks.
“I have a pass,” he says uncertainly. “It’s all quite legitimate. You can check the records. I—”
“Under arrest. Alteration of program, illicit departure from building, undesirable harboring of countersocial tendencies. Orders to immobilize you immediately upon your return to building. Now carried out. Mandatory sentence of erasure to follow.”
“Wait a minute. I have the right of appeal, don’t I? I demand to see—”
“Case has already been considered and referred to us for final disposition.” A note of inexorability in the policeman’s tone. They are at his sides, now. He cannot move. Sealed within the hardening spray. Whatever alien microorganisms he has collected are sealed in it with him. To the chute? No. No. Please. But what else did he expect? What other outcome could there be? Did he think he had fooled the urbmon? Can you repudiate an entire civilization and hope to slip yourself smoothly back into it? They have loaded him aboard some kind of dolly. Dim shapes outside the cocoon. “Let’s get a detailed print of this on the record, boys. Move him toward the scanners. Yes. That’s it.”
“Can’t I see my wife, at least? My sister? I mean, what harm will it do if I just talk to them one last time—”
“Menace to harmony and stability, dangerous countersocial tendencies, immediate removal from environment to prevent spreading of reactive pattern.” As though he carries a plague of rebelliousness. He has seen this before: the summary judgment, the instant execution. And never really understood. And never imagined.
Micaela. Stacion. Artha.
Now the cocoon is fully hardened. He sees nothing outside it.
“Listen to me,” he says, “whatever you’re going to do, I want you to know that I’ve been there. I’ve seen the sun and the moon and the stars. It wasn’t Jerusalem, it wasn’t the Taj Mahal, but it was something. That you never saw. That you never will. The possibilities out there. The hope of enlarging your soul. What would you understand about that?”
Droning sounds from the far side of the milky web that contains him. They are reading him the relevant sections of the legal code. Explaining how he threatens the structure of society. Necessary to eradicate the source of peril. The words blend and mingle and are lost to him. The dolly begins to roll forward again.
Micaela. Stacion. Artha.
I love you.
“Okay, open the chute.” Clear, unmistakable, unambiguous.
He hears the rushing of the tide. He feels the crash of the waves against the sleek shining sands. He tastes salt water. The sun is high; the sky is aglow, a flawless blue. He has no regrets. It would have been impossible ever to leave the building again; if they had let him live, it would be only under conditions of constant surveillance. The urbmon’s million million watching eyes. A lifetime hanging on the interface. What for? This is better. To have lived a little bit, just once. To have seen. The dancing, the bonfire, the smell of growing things. And now he is so tired, anyway. Rest will be welcome. He feels a sense of movement. Pushing the dolly again. In and then down. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Calmly descending. In his mind the leafy cliffs of Capri, the boy, the goat, the flask of cool golden wine. Fog and dolphins, thorns and pebbles. God bless! He laughs within his cocoon. Going down. Good-bye. Micaela. Stacion. Artha. A final vision of the building comes to him, its 885,000 people moving blankfaced through the crowded corridors, floating upward or downward in the transportation shafts, jamming themselves into the sonic centers and the Somatic Fulfillment Halls, sending a myriad messages along the communications nexus as they ask for their meals, talk with one another, make assignations, negotiate. Breeding. Fruitful and multiply. Hundreds of thousands of people on interlocking orbits, each traveling his own little circuit within the mighty tower. How beautiful the world is, and all that is in it. The urbmons at sunrise. The farmers’ fields. Good-bye.
Darkness.
The journey is over. The source of peril has been eradicated. The urbmon has taken the necessary protective steps, and an enemy of civilization has been removed.
Ringing the Changes
Does the Future, itself a magical prospect to lure us unsuspecting to “live another day,” offer hope to the hopeless, solution to the insoluble, or academic—and alchemical—justice?
There has been a transmission error in the shunt room, and several dozen bodies have been left without minds, while several dozen minds are held in the stasis net, unassigned and, for the moment, unassignable. Things like this have happened before, which is why changers take out identity insurance, but never has it happened to so many individuals at the same time. The shunt is postponed. Everyone must be returned to his original identity; then they will start over. Suppressing the news has proved to be impossible. The area around the hospital has been besieged by the news media. Hover-cameras stare rudely at the building at every altitude from twelve to twelve hundred feet. Trucks are angle-parked in the street. Journalists trade tips, haggle with hospital personnel for the names of the bereaved, and seek to learn the identities of those involved in the mishap. “If I knew, I’d tell you,” says Jaime Rodriguez, twenty-seven. “Don’t you think I could use the money? But we don’t know. That’s the whole trouble, we don’t know. The data tank was the first thing to blow.”
The shunt room has two antechambers, one on the west side of the building, the other facing Broadway; one is occupied by those who believe they are related to the victims, while in the other can be found the men from the insurance companies. Like everyone else, the insurance men have no real idea of the victims’ names, but they do know that various clients of theirs were due for shunting today, and with so many changers snarled up at once, the identity-insurance claims may ultimately run into the millions. The insurance men confer agitatedly with one another, dictate muttered memoranda, scream telephone calls into their cufflinks, and show other signs of distress, although several of them remain cool enough to conduct ordinary business while here; they place stock market orders and negotiate assignations with nurses. It is, however, a tense and difficult situation, whose final implications are yet unknown.
Dr. Vardaman appears, perspired, paternal. “We’re making every effort,” he says, “to reunite each changer with the proper identity matrix. I’m fully confident. Only a matter of time. Your loved ones, safe and sound.”
“We aren’t the relatives,” says one of the insurance men.
“Excuse me,” says Dr. Vardaman, and leaves.
The insurance men wink and tap their temples knowingly. They peer beyond the antechamber door.
“Cost us a fortune,” one broker says.
“Not your money,” an adjuster points out.
“Raise premiums, I guess.”
“Lousy thing. Lousy thing. Lousy thing. Could have been me.”
“You a changer?”
“Due for a shunt next Tuesday.”
“Tough luck, man. You could have used a vacation.”
The antechamber door opens. A plump woman with dark-shadowed eyes enters. “Where are they?” she asks. “I want to see them! My husband was shunting today!”
She begins to sob and then to shriek. The insurance men rush to comfort her. It will be a long and somber day.
NOW GO ON WITH THE STORY
After a long time in the stasis net, the changer decides that something must have gone wrong with the shunt. It has never taken this long before. Something as simple as a shift of persona should be accomplished quickly, like the pulling of a tooth: out, shunt, in. Yet minutes or possibly hours have gone by, and the shunt has not come. What are they waiting for? I paid good money for a shunt. Something wrong somewhere, I bet.
Get me out of here. Change me.
The changer has no way of communicating with the hospital personnel. The changer, at present, exists only as a pattern of electrical impulses held in the stasis net. In theory it is possible for an expert to communicate in code even across the stasis gap, lighting up nodes on a talkboard; it was in this way that preliminary research into changing was carried out. But this changer has no such skills, being merely a member of the lay public seeking temporary identity transformation, a holiday sojourn in another’s skull. The changer must wait in limbo.
A voice impinges. “This is Dr. Vardaman, addressing all changers in the net. There’s been a little technical difficulty, here. What we need to do now is put you all back in the bodies you started from, which is just a routine reverse shunt, as you know, and when everybody is sorted out we can begin again. Clear? So the next thing that’s going to happen to you is that you’ll get shunted, only you won’t be changed, heh-heh, at least we don’t want you to be changed. As soon as you’re able to speak to us, please tell your nurse if you’re back in the right body, so we can disconnect you from the master switchboard, all right? Here we go, now, one, two, three—”
—Shunt.
This body is clearly the wrong one, for it is female. The changer trembles, taking possession of the cerebral fibers and driving pitons into the autonomic nervous system. A hand rises and touches a breast. Erectile tissue responds. The skin is soft and the flesh is firm. The changer strokes a cheek. Beardless. He searches now for vestigial personality traces. He finds a name, Vonda Lou, and the image of a street, wide and dusty, a small town in a flat region, with squat square-fronted buildings set well back from the pavement, and gaudy automobiles parked sparsely in front of them. Beyond the town the zone of dry red earth begins; far away are the bare brown mountains. This is no place for the restless. A soothing voice says, “They catch us, Vonda Lou, they gonna take a baseball bat, jam it you know where,” and Vonda Lou replies, “They ain’t gone catch us anyway,” and the other voice says, “But if they do, but if they do?” The room is warm but not humid. There are crickets outside. Cars without mufflers roar by. Vonda Lou says, “Stop worrying and put your head here. Here. That’s it. Oh, nice—” There is a giggle. They change positions. Vonda Lou says, “No fellow ever did that to you, right?” The soft voice says, “Oh, Vonda Lou—” And Vonda Lou says, “One of these days we gone get out of this dime-store town—” Her hands clutch yielding flesh. In her mind dances the image of a drum majorette parading down the dusty main street, twirling a baton, lifting knees high and pulling the white shorts tight over the smug little rump, yes, yes, look at those things jiggle up there, look all the nice stuff, and the band plays Dixie and the football team comes marching by, and Vonda Lou laughs, thinking of that big hulking moron and how he had tried to dirty her, putting his paws all over her, that dumb Billy Joe who figured he was going to score, and all the time Vonda Lou was laughing at him inside, because it wasn’t the halfback but the drum majorette who had what she wanted, and—
Voice: “Can you hear me? If there has been a proper matching of body and mind, please raise your right hand.”
The changer lifts left hand.
—shunt
The world here is dark green within a fifty-yard radius of the helmet lamp, black beyond. The temperature is 38 degrees F. The pressure is six atmospheres. One moves like a crab within one’s jointed suit, scuttling along the bottom. Isolated clumps of gorgonians wave in the current. To the left, one can see as though through a funnel the cone of light that rises to the surface, where the water is blue. Along the face of the submerged cliff are coral outcroppings, but not here, not this deep, where sunlight is of a primal coldness.
One moves cautiously, bothered by the pressure drag. One clutches one’s collecting rod tightly, stepping over nodules of manganese and silicon, swinging the lamp in several directions, searching for the places where the bottom drops away. One is uneasy and edgy here, not because of the pressure or the dark or the chill, but because one is cursed with an imagination, and one cannot help but think of the kraken in the pit. One dreams of Tennyson’s dreamless beast, below the thunders of the upper deep. Faintest sunlights flee about his shadowy sides: above him swell huge sponges of millennial growth and height.
One comes now to the brink of the abyss.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie, battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep, until the latter fire shall heat the deep; then once by man and angels to be seen, in roaring he shall rise and on the surface die. Yes. One is moved, yes. One inclines one’s lamp, hoping its beam will strike a cold glittering eye below. Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea. There is no sign of the thick ropy tentacles, the mighty beak.
“Going down in, now,” one says to those above.
One has humor as well as imagination. One pauses at the brink, picks up a chalky stone, inscribes on a boulder crusted with the tracks of worms the single word:
NEMO
One laughs and flips aside the stone, and launches one’s self into the abyss, kicking off hard against the continental shelf. Down. And down. Seeking wondrous grot and secret cell.
The changer sighs, thinking of debentures floated on the Zurich exchange, of contracts for future delivery of helium and plutonium, of puts and calls and margins. He will not enter the abyss; he will not see the kraken; feebly he signals with his left hand.
—shunt
A middle-aged male, at least. There’s hope in that. A distinct paunch at the middle. Some shortness of breath. Faint stubble on face. The legs feel heavy, with swollen feet; a man gets tired easily at a certain age, when his responsibilities are heavy. The sound of unanswered telephones rings in his ears. Everything is familiar: the tensions, the frustrations, the fatigue, the sense of things unfinished and things uncommenced, the staleness in the mouth, the emptiness in the gut. This must be the one. Home again, all too soon?
Q: Sir, in the event of an escalation of the crisis, would you request an immediate meeting of the Security Council, or would you attempt to settle matters through quasidiplomatic means as was done in the case of the dispute between Syria and the Maldive Islands?
A: Let’s not put the horse in the cart, shall we?
Q: According to last Monday’s statement by the Bureau of the Budget, this year’s deficit is already running twelve billion ahead of last, and we’re only halfway through the second quarter. Have you given any concern to the accusation of the Fiscal Responsibility Party that this is the result of a deliberate Communist-dictated plan to demoralize the economy?
A: What do you think?
Q: Is there any thought of raising the tax on personality-shunting?
A: Well, now, there’s already a pretty steep tax on that, and we don’t want to do anything that’ll interfere with the rights of American citizens to move around from body to body, as is their God-given and constitutional right. So I don’t think we’ll change that tax any.
Q: Sir, we understand that you yourself have done some shunting. We—
A: Where’d you hear that?
Q: I think it was Representative Spear, of Iowa, who said the other day that it’s well known that the President visits a shunt room every time he’s in New York, and—
A: You know these Republicans. They’ll say anything at all about a Democrat.
Q: Mr. President, does the Administration have any plans for ending sexual discrimination in public washrooms?
