The World Inside by Robert Silverberg

contributing combustion mass to the generators?”
    â€œI won’t go! Memnon, I’ve always lived here! I—”
    â€œYou’re talking like a flippo,” he says, keeping his voice low. He pulls her back inside the dormitory. Staring up, she sees only cavernous dark nostrils. “Pop a pill, Aurea. Talk to the floor consoler, why don’t you? Stay calm and let’s adjust.”
    â€œI want you to file an appeal.”
    â€œThere is no appeal.”
    â€œI refuse to go.”
    He seizes her shoulders. “Look at it rationally, Aurea. One building isn’t that different from another. We’ll have some of our friends there. We’ll make new friends. We—”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œThere’s no alternative,” he says. “Except down the chute.”
    â€œI’d rather go down the chute, then!”
    For the first time since they were married, she sees him regarding her contemptuously. He cannot abide irrationality. “Don’t heave nonsense,” he tells her. “See the consoler, pop a pill, think it through. I’ve got to leave now.”
    He departs again, and this time she does not go after him. She slumps on the floor, feeling cold plastic against her bare skin. The others in the dorm tactfully ignore her. She sees fiery images: her schoolroom, her first lover, her parents, her sisters and brothers, all melting, flowing across the room, a blazing trickle of acrid fluid. She presses her thumbs to her eyes. She will not be cast out. Gradually she calms. I have influence, she tells herself. If Memnon will not act, I will act for us. She wonders if she can ever forgive Memnon for his cowardice. For his transparent opportunism. She will visit her uncle.
    She strips off her morning robe and dons a chaste gray girlish cloak. From the hormone chest she selects a capsule that will cause her to emanate the odor that inspires men to act protectively toward her. She looks sweet, demure, virginal; but for the ripeness of her body she could pass for ten or eleven years of age.
    The liftshaft takes her to the 975th floor, the throbbing heart of Louisville.
    All is steel and spongeglass here. The corridors are spacious and lofty. There is no rush of people through the halls; the occasional human figure seems incongruous and superfluous, though silent machines glide on unfathomable errands. This is the abode of those who administer the plans. Designed to awe; calculated to overwhelm; the permissible
mana
of the ruling class. How comfortable here. How sleek. How self-contained. Rip away the lower 90 percent of the building and Louisville would drift in serene orbit, never missing a thing.
    Aurea halts outside a glistening door inlaid with moiré-generating stripes of bright white metal. She is scanned by hidden sensors, asked to name her business, evaluated, shunted into a waiting room. At length her mother’s brother consents to see her.
    His office is nearly as large as a private residential suite. He sits behind a broad polygonal desk from which protrudes a bank of shimmering monitor dials. He wears formal top-level clothes, a cascading gray tunic tipped with epaulets radiating in the infrared. Aurea feels the crisp blast of heat from where she stands. He is cool, distant, polite. His handsome face appears to have been fashioned from burnished copper.
    â€œIt’s been many months, hasn’t it, Aurea?” he says. A patronizing smile escapes him. “How have you been?”
    â€œFine, Uncle Lewis.”
    â€œYour husband?”
    â€œFine.”
    â€œAny littles yet?”
    Blurting. “Uncle Lewis, we’ve been picked to go to 158!”
    His plastic smile does not waver. “How fortunate! God bless, you can start a new life right at the top!”
    â€œI don’t want to go. Get me out of it. Somehow. Anyhow.” She rushes toward him, a frightened child, tears flowing, knees melting. A force-field captures her when