The World Inside (9 page)

Ah, now. Here they come. Gently the doppler-inverter noodles in with a theme of its own, catching something of the descending fervor of Dillon's stellar patterns. At once the comet-harp overlays this with a more sensational series of twanging tones that immediately transmute themselves into looping blares of green light. These are seized by the spectrum-rider, who climbs up on top of them and, grinning broadly, skis off toward the ultraviolet in a shower of hissing crispness. Old Sophro now does his orbital dives, a swoop and a pickup followed by a swoop and a pickup again, playing against the spectrum-rider in the kind of cunning way that only someone right inside the meshing group can appreciate. Then the incantator enters, portentous, booming, sending
reverberations shivering through the walls, heightening the significance of the tonal and astronomical patterns until the convergences become almost unbearably beautiful. It is the cue for the gravity-drinker, who disrupts everybody's stability with wonderful, wild liberating bursts of force. By this time Dillon has retreated to his proper place as the coordinator and unifier of the group, tossing a skein of melody to this one, a loop of light to that one, embellishing everything that passes near him. He fades into the undertones. His manic excitement passes; playing in a purely mechanical way, he is as much listener as performer, quietly appreciating the variations and divagations his partners are producing. He does not need to draw attention now. He can simply go
oomp oomp oomp
the rest of the night. Not that he will; the construct will tumble if he doesn't feed new data every ten or fifteen minutes. But this is his time to coast.

Each of the others takes a solo in turn. Dillon can no longer see the audience. He rocks, he pivots, he sweats, he sobs; he caresses the projectrons furiously; he seals himself in a cocoon of blazing light; he juggles alternations of light and darkness. The rod in his pants has softened. He is calm at the eye of the storm, fully professional, quietly doing his work. That moment of ecstasy seems to belong to some other day, even to some other man. How long had the solo lasted, anyway? He has lost track of the time. But the performance is going well, and he leaves it to methodical Nat to keep watch of the hour.

After its frenzied opening the concert has settled into routine. The center of the action has shifted to the doppler-inverter man, who is spinning off a series of formula flashes. Quite nice,
but stale stuff, over-rehearsed, unspontaneous. His offhandedness infects the others and the whole group vamps for perhaps twenty minutes, going through a set of changes that numb the ganglia and abort the soul, until finally Nat spectacularly shrieks through the whole spectrum from someplace south of infrared into what, as far as anyone can tell, may be the X-ray frequencies, and this wild takeoff not only stimulates a rebirth of inventiveness but also signals the end of the show. Everybody picks up on him and they blast free, swirling and floating and coming together, forming one entity with seven heads as they bombard the flaccid data-stoned audience with mountains of overload. Yes yes yes yes yes. Wow wow wow wow wow. Flash flash flash flash flash. Oh oh oh oh oh. Come come come come come. Dillon is at the heart of it, tossing off bright purple sparks, pulling down suns and chewing them up, and he feels even more plugged in than during his big solo, for this is a joint thing, a blending, a merging, and he knows that what he is feeling now explains everything: this is the purpose of life, this is the reason for it all. To tune in on beauty, to plunge right to the hot source of creation, to open your soul and let it all in and let it all out again, to give to give to give to give

to give

to give

and it ends. Pull the plug. They let him have the final chord and he cuts off with a skullblower, a five-way planetary conjunction and a triple fugue, the whole showoff burst lasting no more than ten seconds. Then down with the hands and off with the switch and a wall of silence rises ninety kilometers high. This time he's done it. He's emptied everybody's skull.
He sits there shivering, biting his lip, dazed by the house lights, wanting to cry. He dares not look at the others in the group. How much time is passing? Five minutes, five months, five centuries, five megayears? And at last the reaction. A stampede of applause. All of Rome on its feet, yelling, slapping cheeks—the ultimate tribute, 4,000 people struggling out of their comfortable webs to pound their palms against their faces—and Dillon laughs, throwing back his head, getting up himself, bowing, holding his hands out to Nat, to Sophro, to all six of them. Somehow it was better tonight. Even these Romans know it. What did they do to deserve it? By being such lumps, Dillon tells himself, they drew forth the best we had in us. To turn them on. And we did. We knocked them out of their miserable soggy skulls.

The cheering continues.

Fine. Fine. We are great artists. Now I've got to get out of here, before I come down from it all.

He never socializes with the rest of the group after a performance. They have all discovered that the less they see of each other in leisure hours, the more intimate their professional collaboration will be; there is no intragroup friendship, not even intragroup sex. They all feel that would be death, any kind of coupling, hetero, homo, triple-up—save that for outsiders. They have their music to unite them. So he goes off by himself. The audience starts to flow toward the exits, and, without saying good night to anybody, Dillon steps into the artists' trap door and makes his escape one level down. His clothes are stiff and wet with perspiration, clammy, uncomfortable. He must do something about that quickly. Prowling
along the 529th floor for a dropshaft, he opens the first apartment door he comes to and finds a couple, sixteen, seventeen years old, squatting before the screen. He naked, she wearing only breastcoils, both of them plainly soaring on one of the harder ones, but not so high that they can't recognize him. “Dillon Chrimes!” the girl gasps, her squeal waking two or three littles.

“Hey, hello,” he says. “I just have to use the cleanser, okay? Don't let me disturb you. I don't even want to talk, you know? I'm still way up.” He strips off his sodden clothes and gets under the cleanser. It hums and rumbles and peels his grime from him. He lets it work on his clothes next. The girl is creeping toward him. She has the breastcoils off; the white imprints of the metal on her pink dangling flesh are turning rapidly red. Kneeling before him. Hand goes to his thighs. Her lips heading for his loins. “No,” he says. “Don't.”

“No?”

“I can't do it here.”

“But why?”

“Just wanted to use the cleanser. Couldn't stand my own stink. I've got to do my nightwalking on 500 tonight.” Her fingers sliding between his legs. Gently he pries them. Back into his clothing; the girl looks on, astonished, as he covers himself.

“You aren't going to?” she asks.

“Not here. Not here.” She continues to blink at him as he goes out. Her look of shock saddens him. Tonight he must go to the middle of the building, but tomorrow, for sure, he will come to her, and he'll explain everything then. He makes a
note of the room number. 52908. Nightwalking is supposed to be random, but to hell with that; he owes her a thrill. Tomorrow.

In the hall he finds a groover dispenser and requisitions his pill, tapping his metabolic coefficient out on the console. The machine performs the necessary calculations and delivers a five-hour dose, timed to go off in twelve minutes. He swallows it and steps into the dropshaft.

Floor 500.

As close to halfway as he can get. A metaphysical fancy, but why not? He has not lost the capacity to play games. We artists remain happy because we remain as children. Eleven minutes to his high. He goes down the corridor, opening doors. In the first room he finds a man, a woman, another man. “Sorry,” he calls. In the second room three girls. Momentarily tempting, but only momentarily. Anyway, they look fully busied with each other. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” In the third room a middle-aged couple; they give him a hopeful stare, but he backs out.

Fourth time lucky. A dark-haired girl, alone, pouting a little. Obviously her husband is out nightwalking and no one has come to her, a statistical fluke that distresses her. Early twenties, Dillon guesses, with fine tapering nose, glossy eyes, elegant breasts, olive skin. The flesh over her eyelids is puffy, which may become a flaw of appearance ten years from now but which gives her a sultry, sensual look at the moment. She has been brooding for hours, he guesses, because her sullenness does not evaporate until he has actually been in the room fifteen seconds or so; she is slow to realize that she is being
nightwalked with. “Hello,” he says. “Smile? Won't you smile a little?”

“I know you. The cosmos group?”

“Dillon Chrimes, yes. On the vibrastar. We're playing Rome tonight.”

“Playing Rome and nightwalking Bombay?”

“What the hell. I have philosophical reasons. To be in the middle of the building, you know? Or as close as I can come. Don't ask me to explain.” He looks around the room. Six littles. One of them, awake, is at least nine years old, a skinny girl with her mother's olive skin. Mother isn't as young as she looks, then. At least twenty-five, maybe. Dillon doesn't mind. In a little while he'll be groping the whole urbmon, anyway, all the ages, sexes, shapes. He says, “I have to tell you about my trip. I'm on a multiplexer. It'll hit me in six minutes.”

She puts her hand to her lips. “We don't have much time, then. You ought to be inside me before you go up.”

“Is that the way they work?”

“Don't you know?”

“I've never gone that way before,” he confesses. “Never got around to it.”

“Neither have I. I didn't think anybody actually did take multiplexers, really. But I've heard of what you're supposed to do.” She is disrobing as she talks. Heavy breasts, big dark circles around the nipples. Her legs strangely thin; when she stands straight the insides of her thighs are far apart. There is a folkmyth of some sort about girls built that way, but Dillon cannot remember it. He drops his clothes. The drug has started to get to him, several minutes ahead of schedule—the walls
are shimmering, the lights look fuzzy. Odd. Unless the fact that he was already way up from performing should have been calculated into the dosage request. The metabolism turned to high, maybe, on nothing but sound and light. Well, no harm done. He moves toward the sleeping platform. “What's your name?” he asks.

“Alma Clune.”

“I like the sound of that. Alma.” She takes him into her arms. This will not be an extraordinary erotic experience for her, he fears. Once the multiplexer takes hold, he doubts that he can concentrate properly on her needs, and in any case the time element has made it necessary to skip all foreplay. But she seems to be understanding. She will not spoil his trip. “Get in,” she says. “It's all right. I get wet fast there.” He enters her. Her tongue against his; her sinewy thighs encircling him. He covers her body with his. “Are you grooving yet?” she asks.

He is silent a moment. In and out, in and out. “I feel it starting,” he tells her. “It's like having two girls at once. I'm getting echoes.” Tension. He doesn't want to wreck everything by coming before the effect hits him. On the other hand, if she's the quick-coming type, he'd be happy to let her have a spasm or two; the multiplexing must still be ninety seconds away. All these calculations chill him. And then they become pointless. “It's happening,” he whispers. “Oh, god, here I go up!”

“Easy,” Alma murmurs. “Don't rush anything. Slow . . . slow. . . . You're doing fine. You want this one to last. Don't worry about me. Just go on up.”

In and out. In and out. And multiplexing now. His spirit is
spreading out. The drug makes him psychosensitive; it breaks down his brain's chemical defenses against direct telepathic input, so that he can perceive the sensory intake of those around him. Reaching wider and wider, moment by moment. At the full high, they say, everyone's eyes and ears become your own; you pick up an infinity of responses, you are everywhere in the building at once. Is it true? Are other minds pouring their intake through his? It does seem so. He watches the fluttering fiery mantle of his soul engulf and absorb Alma, so that now he is face up as well as face down, and each time he thrusts deep into her hot cavern he can also feel the blunt sword sliding into his own vitals. That's just the beginning. He is spreading over Alma's littles now. The unfleeced nine-year-old. The gurgling baby. He is six children and their mother. How easy this is! He is the family next door. Eight littles, mother, nightwalker from the 495th floor. He extends his reach upward one level. And downward. And along the corridors. In dreamy multiplexication he is taking possession of the whole building. Layers of drifting images enshroud him: 500 floors above his head, 499 below, and he sees all 999 of them as a column of horizontal striations, tiny notches on a tall shaft. With ants. And he is all the ants at once. Why has he never done this before? To become an entire urbmon!

He must reach at least twenty floors in each direction now. And still spreading out. Tendrils of him going everywhere. Just the beginning. Intermingling his substance with the totality of the building.

With Alma rocking beneath him. Pelvis grinding against pelvis; he is dimly aware of her as she softly moans her pleasure. But only one atom of himself is occupied with her. The
rest is roaming the halls of the cities that make up Urban Monad 116. Entering every room. Part of him up in Boston, part of him down in London, and all of him in Rome and Bombay as well. Hundreds of rooms. Thousands. The swarm of biped bees. He is fifty squalling littles crammed into three London rooms. He is two doddering Bostonians entering upon their 5,000th sexual congress. He is a hot-blooded thirteen-year-old nightwalker prowling the 483rd floor. He is six swapping couples in a London dorm. Now he is into a wider range, reaching down to San Francisco, up to Nairobi. The farther he goes, the easier it gets. The hive. The mighty hive. He embraces Tokyo. He embraces Chicago. He embraces Prague. He touches Shanghai. He touches Vienna. He touches Warsaw. He touches Toledo. Paris! Reykjavik! Louisville!
Louisville!
Top to bottom, top to bottom! Now he is all 881,000 people on all thousand floors. His soul is stretched to its fullest. His skull is snapping. The images come and go across the screen of his mind, drifting films of reality, oily wisps of smoke bearing faces, eyes, fingers, genitals, smiles, tongues, elbows, profiles, sounds, textures. Gently they mesh and lock and drift apart. He is everywhere and everyone at once. God bless! For the first time he understands the nature of the delicate organism that is society; he sees the checks and balances, the quiet conspiracies of compromise that paste it all together. And it is wondrously beautiful. Tuning this vast city of many cities is just like tuning the cosmos group: everything must relate, everything must belong to everything else. The poet in San Francisco is part of the grubbo stoker in Reykjavik. The little snotty ambition-monger in Shanghai is part of the placid defeated Roman. How much of this, Dillon
wonders, will stay with him when he comes down? His spirit whirls. He grooves on thousands of souls at once.