The World Inside by Robert Silverberg Page B

hands slip within the mesh and caress her flesh. She knows that he is merely consoling her with a counterfeit of desire. He says, “If there was any way I could fix things for you, I would. But we’d all get tossed down the chute.” His fingers find her body’s core. Moist, slippery, despite herself. She does not want him now, not this way. With a wriggle of her hips she tries to free herself. His embrace is mere kindness; he will take her out of pity. She pivots and stiffens.
    â€œNo,” she says, and then she realizes how hopeless everything is, and she yields to him only because she knows that there will never be another chance.
    Memnon says, “I’ve heard from Siegmund about what happened today. And from your uncle. You’ve got to stop this, Aurea.”
    â€œLet’s go down the chute, Memnon.”
    â€œCome with me to the consoler. I’ve never seen you acting this way before.”
    â€œI’ve never felt so threatened.”
    â€œWhy can’t you adjust to it?” he asks. “It’s really a grand chance for us.”
    â€œI can’t. I can’t.” She slumps forward, defeated, broken.
    â€œStop it,” he tells her. “Brooding sterilizes. Won’t you cheer up a bit?”
    She will not give way to chiding, however reasonable the tone. He summons the machines; they take her to the consoler. Soft rubbery orange pads gently grasping her arms all the way through the halls. In the consoler’s office she is examined and her metabolism is probed. He draws the story from her. He is an elderly man, kind, gentle, somewhat bored, with a cloud of white hair rimming a pink face. She wonders whether he hates her behind his sweetness. At the end he tells her, “Conflict sterilizes. You must learn to comply with the demands of society, for society will not nurture you unless you play the game.” He recommends treatment.
    â€œI don’t want treatment,” she says thickly, but Memnon authorizes it, and they take her away. “Where am I going?” she asks. “For how long?”
    â€œTo the 780th floor, for about a week.”
    â€œTo the moral engineers?”
    â€œYes,” they tell her.
    â€œNot there. Please, not there.”
    â€œThey are gentle. They heal the troubled.”
    â€œThey’ll change me.”
    â€œThey’ll improve you. Come. Come. Come.”
    For a week she lives in a sealed chamber filled with warm, sparkling fluids. She floats idly in a pulsing tide, thinking of the huge urbmon as a wondrous pedestal on which she sits.Images soak from her mind and everything becomes deliciously cloudy. They speak to her over audio channels embedded in the walls of the chamber. Occasionally she glimpses an eye peering through an optical fiber dangling above her. They drain the tensions and resistances from her. On the eighth day Memnon comes for her. They open the chamber and she is lifted forth, nude, dripping, her skin puckered, little beads of glittering fluid clinging to her. The room is full of strange men. Everyone else is clothed; it is dreamlike to be bare in front of them, but she does not really mind. Her breasts are full, her belly is flat, why then be ashamed? Machines towel her dry and clothe her. Memnon leads her by the hand. Aurea smiles quite often. “I love you,” she tells Memnon softly.
    â€œGod bless,” he says. “I’ve missed you so much.”
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    The day is at hand, and she has paid her farewells. She has had two months to say good-bye, first to her blood kin, then to her friends in her village, then to others whom she has known within Chicago, and at last to Siegmund and Mamelon Kluver, her only acquaintances outside her native city. She has rewound her past into a tight coil. She has revisited the home of her parents and her old schoolroom, and she has even taken a tour of the urbmon, like a visitor from outbuilding, so that she may see the power plant