Collected Short Fiction, page 791
A: I’ve asked the Secretary of the Interior to look into that, inasmuch as it might involve interstate commerce and also being on Federal property, and we expect a report at a later date.
Q: Thank you, Mr. President.
The left hand stirs and rises. Not this one, obviously. The hand requests a new phase-shift. The body is properly soggy and decayed, yes. But one must not be deceived by superficialities. This is the wrong one. Out, please. Out.
—shunt
The crowd stirred in anticipation as Bernie Kingston left the on-deck circle and moved toward the plate, and by the time he was in the batter’s box they were standing.
Kingston glanced out at the imposing figure of Ham Fillmore, the lanky Hawks southpaw on the mound. Go ahead, Bernie thought, I’m ready for you.
He wiggled the bat back and forth two or three times and dug in hard, waiting for the pitch. It was a low, hard fastball, delivered by way of first base, and it shot past him before he had a chance to offer. “Strike one,” he heard. He looked down toward third to see if the manager had any sign for him.
But Danner was staring at him blankly. You’re on your own, he seemed to be saying.
The next pitch was right in the groove, and Bernie lined it effortlessly past the big hurler’s nose and on into right field for a single. The crowd roared its approval as he trotted down to first.
“Good going, kid,” said Jake Edwards, the first-base coach, when Bernie got there. Bernie grinned. Base hits always felt good, and he loved to hear the crowd yell.
The Hawks’ catcher came out to the mound and called a conference. Bernie wandered around first, doing some gardening with his spikes. With one out and the score tied in the eighth, he couldn’t blame the Hawks for wanting to play it close to the belt.
As soon as the mound conference broke up it was the Stags’ turn to call time. “Come here, kid,” Jake Edwards called.
“What’s the big strategy this time?” Bernie asked boredly.
“No lip, kid. Just go down on the second pitch.”
Bernie shrugged and edged a few feet off the base. Ham Fillmore was still staring down at his catcher, shaking off signs, and Karl Folsom, the Stag cleanup man, was waiting impatiently at the plate.
“Take a lead,” the coach whispered harshly. “Go on, Kingston—get down that line.”
The hurler finally was satisfied with his sign, and he swung into the windup. The pitch was a curve, breaking far outside. Folsom didn’t venture at it, and the ball hit the dirt and squirted through the catcher’s big mitt. It trickled about fifteen feet back of the plate.
Immediately the Hawks’ shortstop moved in to cover second in case Bernie might be going. But Bernie had no such ideas. He stayed put at first.
“What’s the matter, lead in ya pants?” called a derisive voice from the Hawk dugout.
Bernie snarled something and returned to the base. He glanced over at third, and saw Danner flash the steal sign.
He leaned away from first cautiously, five, six steps, keeping an eye cocked at the mound.
The pitcher swung into a half-windup—Bernie broke for second—his spikes dug furiously into the dusty basepath—
Out! Out! Out! The left hand upraised! Not this one, either! Out! Get me out!
—shunt
Through this mind go dreams of dollars, and the changer believes they have finally made the right match-up. He takes the soundings and finds much here that is familiar. Dow-Jones Industrials 1453.28, down 8.29. Confirmation of the bear signal by the rails. Penetration of the August 13 lows. Watch the arbitrage spread you get by going short on the common while picking up 10,000 of the $1.50 convertible preferred at—
The substance is right; so is the context. But the tone is wrong, the changer realizes. This man loves his work.
The changer tours this man’s mind from the visitors’ gallery.
—we can unload 800 shares in Milan at 48, which gives us two and a half points right there, and then after they announce the change in redemption ratio I think we ought to drop another thousand on the Zurich board—
—give me those Tokyo quotes! Damn you, you sleepy bastard, don’t slow me up! Here, here, Kansai Electric Power, I want the price in yen, not the American Depositary crap—
—pick up twenty-two percent of the voting shares through street names before we announce the tender offer, that’s the right way to do it, then hit them hard from a position of strength and watch the board of directors fold up in two days—
—I think we can work it with the participating preference stock, if we give them just a little hint that the dividend might go up in January, and of course they don’t have to know that after the merger we’re going to throw them all out anyway, so—
—why am I in it? Why, for the fun of it!—
Yes. The sheer joy of wielding power. The changer lingers here, sadly wondering why it is that this man, who after all functions in the same environment as the changer himself, shows such fierce gusto, such delight in finance for the sake of finance, while the changer derives only sour tastes and dull aches from all his getting. It’s because he’s so young, the changer decides. The thrill hasn’t yet worn off for him. The changer surveys the body in which he is temporarily a resident. He makes himself aware of the flat belly’s firm musculature, of the even rhythms of the heart, of the lean flanks. This man is at most forty years old, the changer concludes. Give him thirty more years and ten million more dollars and he’ll know how hollow it all is. The futility of existence, the changer thinks. You feel it at seventeen, you feel it at seventy, but often you fail to feel it in between. I feel it. I feel it. And so this body can’t be mine. Lift the left hand. Out.
“We are having some difficulties,” Dr. Vardaman confesses, “in achieving accurate pairings of bodies and minds.” He tells this to the insurance men, for there is every reason to be frank with them. “At the time of the transmission error we were left with—ah—twenty-nine minds in the stasis net. So far we’ve returned eleven of them to their proper bodies. The others—”
“Where are the eleven?” asks an adjuster.
“They’re recuperating in the isolation ward,” Dr. Vardaman replies. “You understand, they’ve been through three or four shunts apiece today, and that’s pretty strenuous. After they’ve rested, we’ll offer them the option to undergo the contracted-for change as scheduled, or to take a full refund.”
“Meanwhile we got eighteen possible identity-insurance claims,” says another of the insurance men. “That’s something like fifteen million bucks. We got to know what you’re doing to get the others back in the right bodies.”
“Our efforts are continuing. It’s merely a matter of time until everyone is properly matched.”
“And if some of them die while you’re shunting them?”
“What can I say?” Dr. Vardaman says. “We’re making every attempt.”
To the relatives he says, “There’s absolutely no cause for alarm. Another two hours and we’ll have it all straightened out. Please be assured that none of the clients involved are suffering any hardship or inconvenience, and in fact this may be a highly interesting and entertaining experience for them.”
“My husband,” the plump woman says. “Where’s my husband?”
—shunt
The changer is growing weary of this. They have had him in five bodies, now. How many more times will they shove him about? Ten? Twenty? Sixteen thousand? He knows that he can free himself from this wheel of transformations at any time. Merely raise the right hand, claim a body as one’s own. They’d never know. Walk right out of the hospital, threatening to sue everybody in sight; they scare easily and won’t interfere. Pick your body. Be anyone who appeals to you. Pick fast, though, because if you wait too long they’ll hit the right combination and twitch you back into the body you started from. Tired, defeated, old, do you want that?
Here’s your chance, changer. Steal another man’s body. Another woman’s if that’s your kick. You could have walked out of here as that dyke from Texas. Or that diver. That ballplayer. That hard young market sharpie. Or the President. Or this new one, now—take your pick, changer.
What do you want to be? Essence precedes existence. They offer you your choice of bodies. Why go back to your own? Why pick up a stale identity, full of old griefs?
The changer considers the morality of such a deed.
The chances are good of getting away with it. Others in this mess are probably doing the same thing; it’s musical chairs with souls, and if eight or nine take the wrong bodies, they’ll never get it untangled. Of course, if I switch, someone else switches and gets stuck with my body. Aging. Decrepit. Who wants to be a used-up stockbroker? On the other hand, the changer realizes, there are consolations. The body he wishes to abandon is wealthy, and that wealth would go to the body’s claimant. Maybe someone thought of that already, and grabbed my identity. Maybe that’s why I’m being shunted so often into these others. The shunt-room people can’t find the right one.
The changer asks himself what his desires are.
To be young again? To play Faust? No. Not really. He wants to rest. He wants peace. There is no peace for him in returning to his proper self. Too many ghosts await him there. The changer’s needs are special.
The changer examines this latest body into which he has been shunted.
Quite young. Male. Undergraduate, mind stuffed full of Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Kierkegaard. Wealthy family. Curling red hair; sleek limbs; thoughts of willing girls, holidays in Hawaii, final exams, next fall’s clothing styles. Adonis on a lark, getting himself changed as a respite from the academic pace? But no: the changer probes more deeply and finds a flaw, a fatal one. There is anguish beneath the young man’s self-satisfaction, and rightly so, for this body is defective, it is gravely marred. The changer is surprised and saddened, and then feels joy and relief, for this body fills his very need and more. He sees for himself the hope of peace with honor, a speedier exit, a good deed. It is a far, far better thing. He will volunteer.
His right hand rises. His eyes open.
“This is the one,” he announces. “I’m home again!” His conscience is clear.
Once the young man was restored to his body, the doctors asked him if he still wished to undergo the change he had contracted for. He was entitled to this one final adventure, which they all knew would have to be his last changing, since the destruction of the young man’s white corpuscles was nearly complete. No, he said, he had had enough excitement during the mixup in the shunt room, and craved no further changes. His doctors agreed he was wise, for his body might not be able to stand the strain of another shunt; and they took him back to the terminal ward. Death came two weeks later, peacefully, very peacefully.
In the Beginning
Overpopulation seems the most pressing problem that we have visited on ourselves. The horrific social implications of overcrowding have already received ample attention from science fiction writers—most notably in Harry Harrison’s MAKE ROOM, MAKE ROOM and John Brunner’s less digestible STAND ON ZANZIBAR.
ROBERT SILVERBERG’S IN THE BEGINNING is anything but a straight-forward catalogue of social horrors. But the author’s restraint makes the final message even more shattering.
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. 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. But Aurea does not really care to travel. She loves her own city very much.
Chicago is the city that occupies the 721st through 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 31 coupes, 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 here! 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, earnest expression. Aurea feels weak and fragile beside him, although 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 lips 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 it 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 urbmon’s central service core. 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 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 is a member of a post-privacy culture. One cannot hold oneself apart from people while simultaneously living among them.
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 piles of superstressed concrete, each three kilometers high, each housing some 800,000 human beings, each a self-contained entity. 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 14, Siegmund has fathered two children. His son is called Janus and his newborn daughter has been named Persephone. Siegmund lives in a handsome 50-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 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; in a dormitory such excursions are common, unremarkable, and socially approved. 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. Sexual relationships between people of different cities are currently considered improper.
Now Siegmund 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 Louisville. Already Siegmund spends much time with the leaders of the urbmon; and with their wives as well, Aurea has heard.
Q: Thank you, Mr. President.
The left hand stirs and rises. Not this one, obviously. The hand requests a new phase-shift. The body is properly soggy and decayed, yes. But one must not be deceived by superficialities. This is the wrong one. Out, please. Out.
—shunt
The crowd stirred in anticipation as Bernie Kingston left the on-deck circle and moved toward the plate, and by the time he was in the batter’s box they were standing.
Kingston glanced out at the imposing figure of Ham Fillmore, the lanky Hawks southpaw on the mound. Go ahead, Bernie thought, I’m ready for you.
He wiggled the bat back and forth two or three times and dug in hard, waiting for the pitch. It was a low, hard fastball, delivered by way of first base, and it shot past him before he had a chance to offer. “Strike one,” he heard. He looked down toward third to see if the manager had any sign for him.
But Danner was staring at him blankly. You’re on your own, he seemed to be saying.
The next pitch was right in the groove, and Bernie lined it effortlessly past the big hurler’s nose and on into right field for a single. The crowd roared its approval as he trotted down to first.
“Good going, kid,” said Jake Edwards, the first-base coach, when Bernie got there. Bernie grinned. Base hits always felt good, and he loved to hear the crowd yell.
The Hawks’ catcher came out to the mound and called a conference. Bernie wandered around first, doing some gardening with his spikes. With one out and the score tied in the eighth, he couldn’t blame the Hawks for wanting to play it close to the belt.
As soon as the mound conference broke up it was the Stags’ turn to call time. “Come here, kid,” Jake Edwards called.
“What’s the big strategy this time?” Bernie asked boredly.
“No lip, kid. Just go down on the second pitch.”
Bernie shrugged and edged a few feet off the base. Ham Fillmore was still staring down at his catcher, shaking off signs, and Karl Folsom, the Stag cleanup man, was waiting impatiently at the plate.
“Take a lead,” the coach whispered harshly. “Go on, Kingston—get down that line.”
The hurler finally was satisfied with his sign, and he swung into the windup. The pitch was a curve, breaking far outside. Folsom didn’t venture at it, and the ball hit the dirt and squirted through the catcher’s big mitt. It trickled about fifteen feet back of the plate.
Immediately the Hawks’ shortstop moved in to cover second in case Bernie might be going. But Bernie had no such ideas. He stayed put at first.
“What’s the matter, lead in ya pants?” called a derisive voice from the Hawk dugout.
Bernie snarled something and returned to the base. He glanced over at third, and saw Danner flash the steal sign.
He leaned away from first cautiously, five, six steps, keeping an eye cocked at the mound.
The pitcher swung into a half-windup—Bernie broke for second—his spikes dug furiously into the dusty basepath—
Out! Out! Out! The left hand upraised! Not this one, either! Out! Get me out!
—shunt
Through this mind go dreams of dollars, and the changer believes they have finally made the right match-up. He takes the soundings and finds much here that is familiar. Dow-Jones Industrials 1453.28, down 8.29. Confirmation of the bear signal by the rails. Penetration of the August 13 lows. Watch the arbitrage spread you get by going short on the common while picking up 10,000 of the $1.50 convertible preferred at—
The substance is right; so is the context. But the tone is wrong, the changer realizes. This man loves his work.
The changer tours this man’s mind from the visitors’ gallery.
—we can unload 800 shares in Milan at 48, which gives us two and a half points right there, and then after they announce the change in redemption ratio I think we ought to drop another thousand on the Zurich board—
—give me those Tokyo quotes! Damn you, you sleepy bastard, don’t slow me up! Here, here, Kansai Electric Power, I want the price in yen, not the American Depositary crap—
—pick up twenty-two percent of the voting shares through street names before we announce the tender offer, that’s the right way to do it, then hit them hard from a position of strength and watch the board of directors fold up in two days—
—I think we can work it with the participating preference stock, if we give them just a little hint that the dividend might go up in January, and of course they don’t have to know that after the merger we’re going to throw them all out anyway, so—
—why am I in it? Why, for the fun of it!—
Yes. The sheer joy of wielding power. The changer lingers here, sadly wondering why it is that this man, who after all functions in the same environment as the changer himself, shows such fierce gusto, such delight in finance for the sake of finance, while the changer derives only sour tastes and dull aches from all his getting. It’s because he’s so young, the changer decides. The thrill hasn’t yet worn off for him. The changer surveys the body in which he is temporarily a resident. He makes himself aware of the flat belly’s firm musculature, of the even rhythms of the heart, of the lean flanks. This man is at most forty years old, the changer concludes. Give him thirty more years and ten million more dollars and he’ll know how hollow it all is. The futility of existence, the changer thinks. You feel it at seventeen, you feel it at seventy, but often you fail to feel it in between. I feel it. I feel it. And so this body can’t be mine. Lift the left hand. Out.
“We are having some difficulties,” Dr. Vardaman confesses, “in achieving accurate pairings of bodies and minds.” He tells this to the insurance men, for there is every reason to be frank with them. “At the time of the transmission error we were left with—ah—twenty-nine minds in the stasis net. So far we’ve returned eleven of them to their proper bodies. The others—”
“Where are the eleven?” asks an adjuster.
“They’re recuperating in the isolation ward,” Dr. Vardaman replies. “You understand, they’ve been through three or four shunts apiece today, and that’s pretty strenuous. After they’ve rested, we’ll offer them the option to undergo the contracted-for change as scheduled, or to take a full refund.”
“Meanwhile we got eighteen possible identity-insurance claims,” says another of the insurance men. “That’s something like fifteen million bucks. We got to know what you’re doing to get the others back in the right bodies.”
“Our efforts are continuing. It’s merely a matter of time until everyone is properly matched.”
“And if some of them die while you’re shunting them?”
“What can I say?” Dr. Vardaman says. “We’re making every attempt.”
To the relatives he says, “There’s absolutely no cause for alarm. Another two hours and we’ll have it all straightened out. Please be assured that none of the clients involved are suffering any hardship or inconvenience, and in fact this may be a highly interesting and entertaining experience for them.”
“My husband,” the plump woman says. “Where’s my husband?”
—shunt
The changer is growing weary of this. They have had him in five bodies, now. How many more times will they shove him about? Ten? Twenty? Sixteen thousand? He knows that he can free himself from this wheel of transformations at any time. Merely raise the right hand, claim a body as one’s own. They’d never know. Walk right out of the hospital, threatening to sue everybody in sight; they scare easily and won’t interfere. Pick your body. Be anyone who appeals to you. Pick fast, though, because if you wait too long they’ll hit the right combination and twitch you back into the body you started from. Tired, defeated, old, do you want that?
Here’s your chance, changer. Steal another man’s body. Another woman’s if that’s your kick. You could have walked out of here as that dyke from Texas. Or that diver. That ballplayer. That hard young market sharpie. Or the President. Or this new one, now—take your pick, changer.
What do you want to be? Essence precedes existence. They offer you your choice of bodies. Why go back to your own? Why pick up a stale identity, full of old griefs?
The changer considers the morality of such a deed.
The chances are good of getting away with it. Others in this mess are probably doing the same thing; it’s musical chairs with souls, and if eight or nine take the wrong bodies, they’ll never get it untangled. Of course, if I switch, someone else switches and gets stuck with my body. Aging. Decrepit. Who wants to be a used-up stockbroker? On the other hand, the changer realizes, there are consolations. The body he wishes to abandon is wealthy, and that wealth would go to the body’s claimant. Maybe someone thought of that already, and grabbed my identity. Maybe that’s why I’m being shunted so often into these others. The shunt-room people can’t find the right one.
The changer asks himself what his desires are.
To be young again? To play Faust? No. Not really. He wants to rest. He wants peace. There is no peace for him in returning to his proper self. Too many ghosts await him there. The changer’s needs are special.
The changer examines this latest body into which he has been shunted.
Quite young. Male. Undergraduate, mind stuffed full of Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Kierkegaard. Wealthy family. Curling red hair; sleek limbs; thoughts of willing girls, holidays in Hawaii, final exams, next fall’s clothing styles. Adonis on a lark, getting himself changed as a respite from the academic pace? But no: the changer probes more deeply and finds a flaw, a fatal one. There is anguish beneath the young man’s self-satisfaction, and rightly so, for this body is defective, it is gravely marred. The changer is surprised and saddened, and then feels joy and relief, for this body fills his very need and more. He sees for himself the hope of peace with honor, a speedier exit, a good deed. It is a far, far better thing. He will volunteer.
His right hand rises. His eyes open.
“This is the one,” he announces. “I’m home again!” His conscience is clear.
Once the young man was restored to his body, the doctors asked him if he still wished to undergo the change he had contracted for. He was entitled to this one final adventure, which they all knew would have to be his last changing, since the destruction of the young man’s white corpuscles was nearly complete. No, he said, he had had enough excitement during the mixup in the shunt room, and craved no further changes. His doctors agreed he was wise, for his body might not be able to stand the strain of another shunt; and they took him back to the terminal ward. Death came two weeks later, peacefully, very peacefully.
In the Beginning
Overpopulation seems the most pressing problem that we have visited on ourselves. The horrific social implications of overcrowding have already received ample attention from science fiction writers—most notably in Harry Harrison’s MAKE ROOM, MAKE ROOM and John Brunner’s less digestible STAND ON ZANZIBAR.
ROBERT SILVERBERG’S IN THE BEGINNING is anything but a straight-forward catalogue of social horrors. But the author’s restraint makes the final message even more shattering.
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. 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. But Aurea does not really care to travel. She loves her own city very much.
Chicago is the city that occupies the 721st through 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 31 coupes, 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 here! 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, earnest expression. Aurea feels weak and fragile beside him, although 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 lips 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 it 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 urbmon’s central service core. 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 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 is a member of a post-privacy culture. One cannot hold oneself apart from people while simultaneously living among them.
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 piles of superstressed concrete, each three kilometers high, each housing some 800,000 human beings, each a self-contained entity. 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 14, Siegmund has fathered two children. His son is called Janus and his newborn daughter has been named Persephone. Siegmund lives in a handsome 50-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 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; in a dormitory such excursions are common, unremarkable, and socially approved. 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. Sexual relationships between people of different cities are currently considered improper.
Now Siegmund 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 Louisville. Already Siegmund spends much time with the leaders of the urbmon; and with their wives as well, Aurea has heard.
