The World Inside (14 page)

Out with it in a rush.

“Let me top you, Mamelon!”

A surprised laugh from her. “Now? Middle of the afternoon?”

“Is that so wicked?”

“It's unusual,” she says. “Especially coming from a man who hasn't ever been to me as a nightwalker. But I suppose there's no harm in it. All right: come on.”

As simple as that. She takes off the housecoat and inflates the sleeping platform. Of course; she will not frustrate him, for that would be unblessworthy. The hour is strange, but Mamelon understands the code by which they live, and does not hold him strictly to the rules. She is his. The white skin, the high full breasts. Deep-set navel. Black matted thatch curling lavishly onto her thighs. She beckons to him from the platform, smiles, rubs her knees together to ready herself. He removes his clothing, carefully folding everything. He lies down beside her, takes one of her breasts nervously in his
hand, lightly nips her earlobe. He wants desperately to tell her that he loves her. But that would be a breach of custom far more serious than any he has committed thus far. In a sense, not the twentieth-century sense, she belongs to Siegmund, and he has no right to intrude his emotions between them, only his rigid organ. With a quick tense leap he climbs her. As usual, panic makes him hurry. He goes into her and they begin to move. I'm topping Mamelon Kluver. Actually. At last. He gains control of himself and slows it down. He dares to open his eyes and is gratified to find that hers are closed. The nostrils flared, the lips drawn back. Such perfect white teeth. She seems to be purring. He moves a little faster. Clasping her in his arms; the mounds of her breasts flattening against him. Abruptly, amazingly, something extraordinary is kindled within her, and she shrieks and pumps her hips and makes hoarse animal noises as she claws at him. He is so astonished by the fury of her coming that he forgets to notice his own. So it ends. Exhausted, he clings to her a little while after, and she strokes his sweaty shoulders. Analyzing it in the afterward coolness, he realizes that it was not so very different from what he has experienced elsewhere. One wilder-than-usual moment, perhaps. But otherwise only the familiar process. Even with Mamelon Kluver, the object of his incandescent imaginings for three years, it was only the old two-backed beast: I thrust and she thrusts and up we go. So much for romanticism. In the dark all cats are gray: old twentieth-century proverb. So now I've topped her. He withdraws and they go to the cleanser together.

She says, “Better, now?”

“I think so.”

“You were terribly tight when I came in.”

“I'm sorry,” he says.

“Can I get you anything?”

“No.”

“Would you like to talk about it?”

“No. No.” He is averting his eyes from her body again. He searches for his clothing. She does not bother to dress. “I guess I'll go,” he says.

“Come back some time. Perhaps during regular nightwalking hours. I don't mean that I really mind your coming in the afternoon, Jason, but it might be more relaxed at night. Do you follow what I'm saying?”

She is frighteningly casual. Does she realize that this is the first time he has topped a woman of his own city? What if he told her that all his other adventures had been in Warsaw and Reykjavik and Prague and the other grubbo levels? He wonders now what he had feared. He will come back to her, he is sure. He makes his exit amid a flurry of grins, nods, half winks, and furtive direct glances. Mamelon blows him a kiss.

In the corridor. Still early afternoon. The whole point of this excursion will be lost if he comes home on time. He takes the dropshaft to his office and consumes two futile hours there. Even so, too early. Returning to Shanghai a little past 1800, he enters the Somatic Fulfillment Hall and dumps himself into an image-bath; the warm undulating currents are soothing, but he responds badly to the psychedelic vibrations from below and his mind fills with visions of shattered, blackened urbmons, all girders and skewed concrete. When he comes up it is 1920 and the screen in the dressing room, picking up his emanations, says, “Jason Quevedo, your wife is trying to trace you.” Fine.
Late for dinner. Let her squirm. He nods to the screen and goes out. After walking the halls for close to an hour, beginning at the 770th floor and snaking his way up to 792, he drops to his own level and heads for home. A screen in the hall outside the shaft tells him again that tracers are out for him. “I'm coming, I'm coming,” he mutters, irritated.

Micaela looks rewardingly worried. “Where have you been?” she asks the instant he appears.

“Oh, around. Around.”

“You weren't working late. I called you there. I had tracers on you.”

“As if I were a lost boy.”

“It wasn't like you. You don't just disappear in the middle of the afternoon.”

“Have you had dinner yet?”

“I've been waiting,” she says sourly.

“Let's eat, then. I'm starved.”

“You won't explain?”

“Later.” Working hard at an air of mystery.

He scarcely notices his food. Afterward, he spends the usual time with the littles. They go off to sleep. He rehearses what he will say to Micaela, arranging the words in various patterns. He tries inwardly to practice a self-satisfied smirk. For once he will be the aggressor. For once he will hurt
her.

She has become absorbed in the screen transmission. Her earlier anxiety about his disapperance seems to have vanished. Finally he is forced to say, “Do you want to discuss what I did today?”

She looks up. “What you did? Oh, you mean this afternoon?” She no longer cares, it appears. “Well?”

“I went to Mamelon Kluver.”

“Daywalking? You?”

“Me.”

“Was she good?”

“She was superb,” he says, puzzled by Micaela's air of unconcern. “She was everything I imagined she'd be.”

Micaela laughs.

“Is it funny?” he asks.

“It isn't.
You
are.”

“Tell me what you mean by that.”

“All these years you deny yourself nightwalking in Shanghai, and go off to the grubbos. Now, for the stupidest possible reason, you finally allow yourself Mamelon—”

“You knew I never nightwalked here?”

“Of course I knew,” she says. “Women talk. I ask my friends. You never topped any of them. So I started to wonder. I had some checking done on you. Warsaw. Prague. Why did you have to go down
there
, Jason?”

“That doesn't matter now.”

“What does?”

“That I spent the afternoon on Mamelon's sleeping platform.”

“You idiot.”

“Bitch.”

“Failure.”

“Sterilizer!”

“Grubbo!”

“Wait,” he says. “Wait. Why did you go to Siegmund?”

“To annoy you,” she admits. “Because he's a rung-grabber,
and you aren't. I wanted to get you excited. To make you move.”

“So you violated all custom and aggressively daywalked with the man of your choice. Not pretty, Micaela. Not at all feminine, I might add.”

“That keeps things even, then. A female husband and a mannish wife.”

“You're quick with the insults, aren't you?”

“Why did you go to Mamelon?”

“To get you angry. To pay you back for Siegmund. Not that I give a damn about your letting him top you. We can take that stuff for granted, I think. But your
motives.
Using sex as a weapon. Deliberately playing the wrong role. Trying to stir me up. It was ugly, Micaela.”

“And
your
motives? Sex as revenge? Nightwalking is supposed to reduce tensions, not create them. Regardless of the time of day you do it. You want Mamelon, fine; she's a lovely girl. But to come here and
brag
about it, as if you think I care whose slot you plow—”

“Don't be a filther, Micaela.”

“Listen to him! Listen to him! Puritan! Moralist!”

The littles begin to cry. They have never heard shouting before. Micaela makes a hushing gesture at them behind her back.

“At least I
have
morals,” he says. “What about you and your brother Michael?”

“What about us?”

“Do you deny you've let him top you?”

“When we were kids, yes, a couple of times,” she says, flushing. “So? You never put it up your sisters, I suppose?”

“Not only when you were kids. You're still making it with him.”

“I think you're insane, Jason.”

“You deny it?”

“Michael hasn't touched me in ten years. Not that I see anything wrong with his doing it, except that it hasn't happened. Oh, Jason, Jason, Jason! You've spent so much time mucking around in your archives that you've turned yourself into a twentieth-century man. You're jealous, Jason. Worried about incest, no less. And whether I obey the rules about female initiative. What about you and your Warsaw nightwalking? Don't we have a propinquity custom? Are you imposing a double standard, Jason? You do what you like, and I observe custom? And upset about Siegmund. Michael. You're jealous, Jason.
Jealous.
We abolished jealousy a hundred fifty years ago!”

“And you're a social climber. A would-be slicko. You aren't satisfied with Shanghai, you want Louisville. Well, ambition is obsolete too, Micaela. Besides, you were the one who started this whole business of using sex to score debating points. By going to Siegmund and making sure I knew it. You think
I'm
a puritan? You're a throwback, Micaela. You're full of pre-urbmon morality.”

“If I am, I got that way from you,” she cries.

“No. I got that way from you. You carry the poison around in you! When you—”

The door opens. A man looks in. Charles Mattern, from 799. The sleek, fast-talking sociocomputator; Jason has worked with him on several research projects. Evidently he has overheard the unblessworthy furor going on in here, for he is
frowning in embarrassment. “God bless,” he says softly, “I'm just out nightwalking, and I thought I'd—”

“No,” Micaela screams. “Not now! Go away!”

Mattern shows his shock. He starts to say something, then shakes his head and ducks out of the room, muttering an apology for his intrusion.

Jason is appalled. To turn away a legitimate nightwalker? To order him out of the room?

“Savage!” he cries, and slaps her across the face. “How could you have done that?”

She recoils, rubbing her cheek. “Savage? Me? And you hitting? I could have you thrown down the chute for—”

“I could have
you
thrown down the chute for—”

He stops. They both are silent.

 

“You shouldn't have sent Mattern away,” he says quietly, a little later.

“You shouldn't have hit me.”

“I was worked up. Some rules just mustn't be broken. If he reports you—”

“He won't. He could see we were having an argument. That I wasn't exactly available to him right then.”

“Even having an argument,” he says. “Screaming like that. Both of us. At the very least it could get us sent to the moral engineers.”

“I'll fix things with Mattern, Jason. Leave it to me. I'll get him back here and explain, and I'll give him the topping of his life.” She laughs gently. “You dumb flippo.” There is affection
in her voice. “We probably sterilized half the floor with our screeching. What was the sense, Jason?”

“I was trying to make you understand something about yourself. Your essentially archaic psychological makeup, Micaela. If you could only see yourself objectively, the pettiness of a lot of your motivations lately—I don't want to start another fight, I'm just trying to explain things now—”

“And your motivations, Jason? You're just as archaic as I am. We're both throwbacks. Our heads are both full of primitive moralistic reflexes. Isn't that so? Can't you see it?”

He walks away from her. Standing with his back to her, he fingers the rubbing-node set into the wall near the cleanser, and lets some of the tensions flow from him into it. “Yes,” he says after a long while. “Yes, I see it. We have a veneer of urbmonism. But underneath—jealousy, envy, possessiveness—”

“Yes. Yes.”

“And you see what discovering this does to my work, of course?” He manages a chuckle. “My thesis that selective breeding has produced a new species of human in the urbmons? Maybe so, but
I
don't belong to the species.
You
don't belong. Maybe
they
do, some of them. But how many? How many, really?”

She comes up behind him and leans close. He feels her nipples against his back. Hard, tickling him. “Most of them, perhaps,” she says. “Your thesis may still be right. But we're wrong. We're out of place.”

“Yes.”

“Throwbacks to an uglier age.”

“Yes.”

“So we've got to stop torturing each other, Jason. We have to wear better camouflage. Do you see?”

“Yes. Otherwise we'll end up going down the chute. We're unblessworthy, Micaela.”

“Both of us.”

“Both of us.”

He turns. His arms surround her. He winks. She winks.

“Vengeful barbarian,” she says tenderly.

“Spiteful savage,” he whispers, kissing her earlobe.

They slip together onto the sleeping platform. The nightwalkers will simply have to wait.

He has never loved her as much as he does this minute.

In Louisville, Siegmund Kluver still feels like a very small boy. He cannot persuade himself that he has any rightful business up there. A prowling stranger. An illicit intruder. When he goes up to the city of the urbmon's masters a strange boyish shyness settles over him that he must consciously strive to hide. He finds himself forever wanting to peer nervously over his shoulder. Looking for the patrols that he fears will intercept him. The stern brawny figure blocking the wide corridor. What are you doing here, son? You shouldn't be wandering around on these floors. Louisville is for the administrators, don't you know that? And Siegmund will babble excuses, his face blazing. And rush for the dropshaft.