Nova 1 Read online

  They peer at the electrical system for a while. Then Mattern leads the way to the reprocessing plant. Several hundred schoolchildren are touring it; silently they join the tour.

  The teacher says, “Here’s where the urine comes down, see?” She points to gigantic plastic pipes. “It passes through the flash chamber to be distilled, and the pure water is drawn off here— follow me, now—you remember from the flow chart, about how we recover the chemicals and sell them to the farming communes—”

  Mattern and his guest inspect the fertilizer plant, too, where fecal reconversion is taking place. Gortman asks a number of questions. He seems deeply interested. Mattern is pleased; there is nothing more significant to him than the details of the urbmon way of life, and he had feared that this stranger from Venus, where men live in private houses and walk around in the open, would regard the urbmon way as repugnant or hideous.

  They go onward. Mattern speaks of air-conditioning, the system of dropshafts and liftshafts, and other such topics.

  “It’s all wonderful,” Gortman says. “I couldn’t imagine how one little planet with 75,000,000,000 people could even survive, but you’ve turned it into—into—”

  “Utopia?” Mattern suggests.

  “I meant to say that, yes,” says Gortman.

  Power production and waste disposal are not really Mattern’s specialties. He knows how such things are handled here, but only because the workings of the urbmon are so enthralling to him. His real field of study is sociocomputation, naturally, and he has been asked to show the visitor how the social structure of the giant building is organized. Now they go up, into the residential levels.

  “This is Reykjavik,” Mattern announces. “Populated chiefly by maintenance workers. We try not to have too much status stratification, but each city does have its predominant populations— engineers, academics, entertainers, you know. My Shanghai is mosdy academic. Each profession is clannish.” They walk down the hall. Mattern feels edgy here, and he keeps talking to cover his nervousness. He tells how each city within the urbmon develops its characteristic slang, its way of dressing, its folklore and heroes.

  “Is there much contact between cities?” Gortman asks.

  “We try to encourage it. Sports, exchange students, regular mixer evenings.”

  “Wouldn’t it be even better if you encouraged intercity night-walking?”

  Mattern frowns. “We prefer to stick to our propinquity groups for that. Casual sex with people from other cities is a mark of a sloppy soul.”

  “I see.”

  They enter a large room. Mattern says, “This is a newlywed dorm. We have them every five or six levels. When adolescents mate, they leave their family homes and move in here. After they have their first child they are assigned to homes of their own.” Puzzled, Gortman asks, “But where do you find room for them all? I assume that every room in the building is full, and you can’t possibly have as many deaths as births, so—how—?”

  “Deaths do create vacancies, of course. If your mate dies and your children are grown, you go to a senior citizen dorm, creating room for establishment of a new family unit. But you’re correct that most of our young people don’t get accommodations in the building, since we form new families at about two percent a year and deaths are far below that. As new urbmons are built, the overflow from the newlywed dorms is sent to them. By lot. It’s hard to adjust to being expelled, they say, but there are compensations in being among the first group into a new building. You acquire automatic status. And so we’re constantly overflowing, casting out our young, creating new combinations of social units—utterly fascinating, eh? Have you read my paper, ‘Structural Metamorphosis in the Urbmon Population?’”

  “I know it well,” Gortman replies. He looks about the dorm. A dozen couples are having intercourse on a nearby platform. “They seem so young,” he says.

  “Puberty comes early among us. Girls generally marry at twelve, boys at thirteen. First child about a year later, God blessing.”

  “And nobody tries to control fertility at all.”

  “Control fertility?” Mattern clutches his genitals in shock at the unexpected obscenity. Several copulating couples look up, amazed. Someone giggles. Mattern says, “Please don’t use that phrase again. Particularly if you’re near children. We don’t—ah— think in terms of control.”

  “But—”

  “We hold that life is sacred. Making new life is blessed. One does one’s duty to God by reproducing.” Mattern smiles. “To be human is to meet challenges through the exercise of intelligence, right? And one challenge is the multiplication of inhabitants in a world that has seen the conquest of disease and the elimination of war. We could limit births, I suppose, but that would be sick, a cheap way out. Instead we’ve met the challenge of overpopulation triumphantly, wouldn’t you say? And so we go on and on, multiplying joyously, our numbers increasing by three billion a year, and we find room for everyone, and food for everyone. Few die, and many are born, and the world fills up, and God is blessed, and life is rich and pleasant, and as you see we are all quite happy. We have matured beyond the infantile need to place insulation between man and man. Why go outdoors? Why yeam for forests and deserts? Urbmon 116 holds universes enough for us. The warnings of the prophets of doom have proved hollow. Can you deny that we are happy here? Come with me. We will see a school now.”

  The school Mattern has chosen is in a working-class district of Prague, on the 108th floor. He thinks Gortman will find it particularly interesting, since the Prague people have the highest reproductive rate in Urban Monad 116, and families of twelve or fifteen are not at all unusual. Approaching the school door, they hear the clear treble voices singing of the blessedness of God. Mattern joins the singing; it is a hymn he sang too, when he was their age, dreaming of the big family he would have:

  “And now he plants the holy seed,

  That grows in Mommo’s womb,

  And now a little sibling comes—”

  There is an unpleasant and unscheduled interruption. A woman rushes toward Mattern and Gortman in the corridor. She is young, untidy, wearing only a flimsy gray wrap; her hair is loose; she is well along in pregnancy. “Help!” she shrieks. “My husband’s gone flippo!” She hurls herself, trembling, into Gortman’s arms. The visitor looks bewildered.

  Behind her there runs a man in his early twenties, haggard, bloodshot eyes. He carries a fabricator torch whose tip glows with heat. “Goddam bitch,” he mumbles. “Allatime babies! Seven babies already and now number eight and I gonna go off my head!” Mattern is appalled. He pulls the woman away from Gortman and shoves the visitor through the door of the school.

  “Tell them there’s a flippo out here,” Mattern says. “Get help, fast!” He is furious that Gortman should witness so atypical a scene, and wishes to get him away from it.

  The trembling girl cowers behind Mattern. Quietly, Mattern says, “Let’s be reasonable, young man. You’ve spent your whole life in urbmons, haven’t you? You understand that it’s blessed to create. Why do you suddenly repudiate the principles on which—”

  “Get the hell away from her or I gonna bum you too!”

  The young man feints with the torch, straight at Mattern’s face. Mattern feels the heat and flinches. The young man swipes past him at the woman. She leaps away, but she is clumsy with girth, and the torch slices her garment. Pale white flesh is exposed with a brilliant burn-streak down it. She cups her jutting belly and falls, screaming. The young man jostles Mattern aside and prepares to thrust the torch into her side. Mattern tries to seize his arm. He deflects the torch; it chars the floor. The young man, cursing, drops it and throws himself on Mattern, pounding in frenzy with his fists. “Help me!” Mattern calls. “Help!”

  Into the corridor erupt dozens of schoolchildren. They are between eight and eleven years old, and they continue to sing their hymn as they pour forth. They pull Mattern’s assailant away. Swiftly, smoothly, they cover him with their bodies. He can dimly be seen
beneath the flailing, thrashing mass. Dozens more pour from the schoolroom and join the heap. A siren wails. A whistle blows. The teacher’s amplified voice booms, “The police are here! Everyone off!”

  Four men in uniform have arrived. They survey the situation. The injured woman lies groaning, rubbing her bum. The insane man is unconscious; his face is bloody and one eye appears to be destroyed. “What happened?” a policeman asks. “Who are you?”

  “Charles Mattern, sociocomputator, 799th level, Shanghai. The man’s a flippo. Attacked his pregnant wife with the torch. Attempted to attack me.”

  The policemen haul the flippo to his feet. He sags in their midst. The police leader says, rattling the words into one another, “Guilty of atrocious assault on woman of childbearing years currently carrying unborn life, dangerous antisocial tendencies, by virtue of authority vested in me I pronounce sentence of erasure, carry out immediately. Down the chute with the bastard, boys!” They haul the flippo away. Medics arrive to care for the woman. The children, once again singing, return to the classroom. Nicanor Gortman looks dazed and shaken. Mattern seizes his arm and whispers fiercely, “All right, those things happen sometimes. But it was a billion to one against having it happen where you’d see it! It isn’t typical! It isn’t typical!”

  They enter the classroom.

  The sun is setting. The western face of the neighboring urban monad is streaked with red. Nicanor Gortman sits quietly at dinner with the members of the Mattern family. The children, voices tumbling one over another, talk of their day at school. The evening news comes on the screen; the announcer mentions the unfortunate event on the 108th floor. “The mother was not seriously injured,” he says, “and no harm came to her unborn child.” Principessa murmurs, “Bless God.” After dinner Mattern requests copies of his most recent technical papers from the data terminal and gives them to Gortman to read at his leisure. Gortman thanks him.

  “You look tired,” Mattern says.

  “It was a busy day. And a rewarding one.”

  “Yes. We really traveled, didn’t we?”

  Mattern is tired too. They have visited nearly three dozen levels already; he has shown Gortman town meetings, fertility clinics, religious services, business offices. Tomorrow there will be much more to see. Urban Monad u 6 is a varied, complex community. And a happy one, Mattern tells himself firmly. We have a few little incidents from time to time, but we’re happy.

  The children, one by one, go to sleep, charmingly kissing Daddo and Mommo and the visitor good night and running across the room, sweet nude little pixies, to their cots. The lights automatically dim. Mattern feels faintly depressed; the unpleasantness on 108 has spoiled what was otherwise an excellent day. Yet he still thinks that he has succeeded in helping Gortman see past the superficialities to the innate harmony and serenity of the urbmon way. And now he will allow the guest to experience for himself one of their techniques for minimizing the interpersonal conflicts that could be so destructive to their kind of society. Mattern rises.

  “It’s nightwalking time,” he says. “I’ll go. You stay here . . . with Principessa.” He suspects that the visitor would appreciate some privacy.

  Gortman looks uneasy.

  “Go on,” Mattern says. “Enjoy yourself. People don’t deny happiness to people, here. We weed the selfish ones out early. Please. What I have is yours. Isn’t that so, Principessa?”

  “Certainly,” she says.

  Mattern steps out of the room, walks quickly down the corridor, enters the dropshaft and descends to the 770th floor. As he steps out he hears sudden angry shouts, and he stiffens, fearing that he will become involved in another nasty episode, but no one appears. He walks on. He passes the black door of a chute access door and shivers a little, and suddenly he thinks of the young man with the fabricator torch, and where that young man probably is now. And then, without warning, there swims up from memory the face of the brother he had once had who had gone down that same chute, the brother one year his senior, Jeffrey, the whiner, the stealer, Jeffrey the selfish, Jeffrey the unadaptable, Jeffrey who had had to be given to the chute. For an instant Mattern is stunned and sickened, and he seizes a doorknob in his dizziness.

  The door opens. He goes in. He has never been a nightwalker on this floor before. Five children lie asleep in their cots, and on the sleeping platform are a man and a woman, both younger than he is, both asleep. Mattern removes his clothing and lies down on the woman’s left side. He touches her thigh, then her breast. She opens her eyes and he says, “Hello. Charles Mattern, 799.”

  “Gina Burke,” she says. “My husband Lenny.”

  Lenny awakens. He sees Mattern, nods, turns over and returns to sleep. Mattern kisses Gina Burke lightly on the lips. She opens her arms to him. He shivers a little in his need, and sighs as she receives him. God bless, he thinks. It has been a happy day in 2381, and now it is over.

  TERMINUS EST

  by Barry N. Malzberg

  We have photographed it, dropped rockets onto it, and flown around it. And now we have landed on it. After exploration we will surely have to establish the Lunar settlements so dear to the hearts of the science fiction writers. This is a classic theme of SF, and it has not been ignored by the newer writers—of which Malzberg is one of the absolute best. Most of his work has been done under a pen name, so it is pleasant to welcome the author out of the shadows of anonymity with this nice, though more than a little gruesome story of our airless satellite.

  There’s nothing really doing on the Moon. Hasn’t been for some time, you know; the resort business was good for a while and there was a certain novelty appeal to the whole gig—expanding the frontiers of the universe, and all that—but it faded away rapidly. Nowadays, the city itself is practically vacant, except for the hundred or so (it’s a pretty stable population) who hang on for their subsidized make-it and the outlaw colonies who are rumored to be in the craters. Me, I can’t stand the place; I haven’t even been off the ship to see it for the last six months, due to certain events. This may be unusual, considering the fact that we make the jaunt three times a week, back and forth, with a two-hour layover time.

  The Moon might have been something in the old days: it has the look. Some of the cabins and villas under the Dome have a rococo elegance and, even through the masks, one can smell the residue of old litter through the surrounding spaces. It has the aspect—the whole thing—of Coney Island late on a July Sunday after a particularly crowded weekend, and although I’m hardly an expert on the Moon—just the motorman on the shuttle, that’s me —I sure as hell know about Coney Island. I went there often, years ago, and I still try to get out once a month or so when it’s in season. There’s more action there on a bad Friday than there has ever been in the whole history of the Moon, and I’m not averse to action. Of most kinds.

  The trouble with the Moon is that it was a fad and like most crazes it ran out quickly past a point of diminishing return. A lot of people who I know personally got sunk in real estate and various kinds of speculation, which surrounded the nonsense of 2080—the Moon as the New Frontier, the Moon as the next barrier for tourism and so on. The whole campaign was, of course, cooked up by no more than twelve clever people in a total of maybe four offices and after they cleaned out, there was very little left. Certainly, little enough left on the Moon. The entire experience of commutation is depressing, and although I tell my wife I’m lucky to have it—I’m thirty-five and that means I’m washed up in the airlines; it’s either this or some kind of control job at Kennedy—the fact is that I do look forward, very much, to mandatory retirement at the end of the year. I won’t quit because it might blow the pension, but I’m not going to ask for any extensions. The retirement pay will be pretty fair and what I actually want to do is to retire to the country and raise pigs.

  Pigs as companions would compare favorably with the bohemian colonies which are the last outpost of human energy on the Moon. As I say, there are about a hundred of these people— loosely organized into
ten of what they call “clans”—living under the Dome in all kinds of peculiar relationships, and with little references to the realities which left them there in the first place. Generally speaking, these are the children of the resort people who went broke; they hang on because they had been raised there and staying was easier than going back to Earth and making something of themselves. Despite the huge costs of maintenance under the Dome, the Government is largely willing to foot the expense because, for whatever reason, the bohemians keep us short of total evacuation, and it’s not in human nature to admit to a disaster as total as the Moon boondoggle was. Congress some years ago cheerfully voted the massive appropriations that keep my little crew, my ship and myself trundling in the darkness to drop off supplies and good news at their end, and to bring home an occasional corpse and a lot of bad news from there. Bohemians are all the time getting cut up in their so-called feuds and the Government has been very strict on the matter of Moon burials: there will be none. Perhaps the true horror of the swindle only assaults us at the moment of someone’s death there; to bury on the Moon would be a complete severance from our history. Just a speculation; I’m not very good at this sort of thing.

  The reason I have not been out on the Moon for six months has to do with events occurring the last time I went out. As a matter of fact, it was an experience which made me swear off the Moon forever. I’m perfectly willing to sweat out a pension by running a messenger service, but there is no reason at all to get involved with the subjects on one end, and I came to that decision without any regrets the time I saw the bohemian couple lying locked with one another on the very edges of the Dome. I found myself walking right toward them on my last time through and I was damned if I was going to turn to their convenience.