Read Online The World Inside by Robert Silverberg - Free Book Online

and the service core and the conversion stations one final time.
    Meanwhile Memnon has been busy too. Each night he reports to her on that day’s accomplishments. The 5,202 citizens of Urban Monad 116 who are destined to transfer to thenew structure have elected twelve delegates to the steering committee of Urbmon 158, and Memnon is one of the twelve. It is a great honor. Night after night the delegates take part in a multiscreen linkage embracing all of Chipitts, so that they can plan the social framework of the building they are going to share. It has been decided, Memnon tells her, to have fifty cities of twenty floors apiece, and to name the cities not after the vanished cities of old Earth, as has been the general custom, but rather after distinguished men of the past: Newton, Einstein, Plato, Galileo, and so forth. Memnon will be given responsibility for an entire sector of heat-diffusion engineers. It will be administrative rather than technical work, and so he and Aurea will live in Newton, the highest city.
    Memnon expands and throbs with increased importance. He cannot wait for the hour of transfer to arrive. “We’ll be really influential people,” he tells Aurea exultantly. “And in ten or fifteen years we’ll be legendary figures in 158. The first settlers. The founders, the pioneers. They’ll be making up ballads about us in another century or so.”
    â€œAnd I was unwilling to go,” Aurea says mildly. “How strange to think of myself acting like that!”
    â€œIt’s an error to react with fear until you perceive the true shape of things,” Memnon replies. “The ancients thought it would be a calamity to have as many as 5,000,000,000 people in the world. Yet we have fifteen times as much and look how happy we are!”
    â€œYes. Very happy. And we’ll always be happy, Memnon.”
    The signal comes. The machines are at the door to fetch them. Memnon indicates the box that contains their fewpossessions. Aurea glows. She glances about the dorm, astonished by the crowdedness of it, the crush of couples in so little space. We will have our own room in 158, she reminds herself.
    Those members of the dorm who are not leaving form a line, and offer Memnon and Aurea one final embrace.
    Memnon follows the machines out, and Aurea follows Memnon. They go up to the landing stage on the thousandth floor. It is an hour past dawn and summer sunlight gleams in shining splotches on the tips of Chipitts’ towers. The transfer operation has already begun; quickboats capable of carrying 100 passengers each will be moving back and forth between Urbmons 116 and 158 all day.
    â€œAnd so we leave this place,” Memnon says. “We begin a new life. Bless god!”
    â€œGod bless!” cries Aurea.
    They enter the quickboat and it soars aloft. The pioneers bound for Urbmon 158 gasp as they see, for the first time, how their world really looks from above. The towers are beautiful, Aurea realizes. They glisten. On and on they stretch, fifty-one of them, like a ring of upraised spears in a broad green carpet. She is very happy. Memnon folds his hand over hers. She wonders how she could ever have feared this day. She wishes she could apologize to the universe for her foolishness.
    She lets her free hand rest lightly on the curve of her belly. New life now sprouts within her. Each moment the cells divide and the little one grows. They have dated the hour of conception to the evening of the day when she was discharged by the consoler’s office. Conflict indeed sterilizes, Aurea hasrealized. Now the poison of negativeness has been drained from her; she is able to fulfill a woman’s proper destiny.
    â€œIt’ll be so different,” she says to Memnon, “living in such an empty building. Only 250,000! How long will it take for us to fill it?”
    â€œTwelve or thirteen years,” he answers. “We’ll have few deaths, because we’re