PART I: EVENT HORIZON[1]
Chapter 1 Recovery
DAEDALUS SEQUENCE 33.2871//SPLASHDOWN//12 August 06:42:19//We hit the water and penetrate for what seems a minute and surge back up, as if pushed by an immense hand.
My stomach cringes and folds, snaps into a knot. I black out for the blink of an eye.
I think: four years ago.
Salt-rich air spills in as the hatch is blown. How I know we are upside down, not the entering divers: my spittle ascends; hints of my digestion swirl on the roof of my mouth.
The motion of the sea is weather of a heavy medium. In the reentry capsule’s aquarium light, I am lowered like a child from the liftoff rig by four hands, guided through the hatch to a rubber boat.
Huge sea, small voices, wind in the face, the light enormous.
Helped into the launch. There is a large, sleek carrier on station kilometers off.
I try my voice: “Everyone all right?”
“Pretty much, sir, welcome back. We do have one anomaly in the first rig we are listing as a psychotic episode. One man is in very bad shape.”
“Who? Is he hurt physically?”
“Negative, they’re only listing psychotic episode; his name is Cooper. Which one are you?”
An image of Cooper runs through my mind, his large frame hunched in dim light. “My name is Voorst,” I tell the J.G. “Rawley Voorst.”
“You’re the other one they want to talk to, sir. They’re waiting for you on deck. Prepare to winch up.”
We were almost four years out on the Daedalus; now four years have passed since then. Yet those days stay with me: a looping program whose features I also recall in daydreams, nightmares, sudden visions which paralyze me with their simultaneous confusion and clarity. During those days time itself seemed to coincide with computer-maddening formulas for conic distortions, whirlpools, spirals of decreasing radius and increasing range—a terrifyingly simple future compounded now by its existence in the past. SciCom’s report identified in our point of entry an incipient parabola of return. That seems only information produced by the channel to contain it, the wormhole’s shape the girth of the worm. There must be more to it: consider the formula for a single wormhole which leads simultaneously to the worm’s both ends. Spooked then, spooked now.
///thePleasureTube//thePleasureTube//thePleasureTube///light sensuous saunafantasy co-oplubricious service personnelfoods of the worldaquaplease paradisegarden tactile videon///thePleasureTube//thePleasureTube//thePleasureTube///“Let’s put it this way,” Taylor says loudly into the wind, pointing with the stem of his pipe at a hull section being towed in between hovering tugs. “Who punched the code for impact event after the blow? Just who made the decision?”
The carrier deck is landlike, a metal field on the sea with only the slightest roll. I am still wet from the transfer, my feet sog in my boots, my flight suit clings to my thighs. “Look,” I say, “you’ll have to ask Werhner, he does those things. I was busy with the ship. Or ask Cooper.”
“Yes, but…”
“The investigation was finished on range close to four years ago. You have those tapes.” I squint into the sunlight in the direction of the hull section and the tugs, watch an intense gold-silver reflection that rolls to show a wide swath of charred metal along the hull section’s side.
“We’ll debrief on Guam at SciCom—Agana Base,” Taylor says. “What you’re going to need is patience, this is a slow process. Maybe think about the event, just what you were doing at the event, we’ll start from there.”
“That’s all in the log,” I tell him. “I put everything I know into the log. What I need is a vacation. I’ve got it coming.”
“Your hand is bleeding.”
“What?”
“You must have cut your hand,” Taylor says, pointing his pipestem to my side. “How did that happen?’
I look down and see a trickle of blood spreading onto my palm, the heel of my hand is nicked open, I lick it with my tongue. “Must have jammed it on a vane key when we splashed down,” I tell him, tasting the salt of my blood, the salt of the sea. “That’s happened before.”
He is still looking at me. I notice the bushiness of his eyebrows, the thickness of his lips. “How do you feel about being back?” he asks flatly. “All that relative earth time, eight years your own—how do you feel?”
“Fine,” I say. “Just fine.” I am still thinking: four years ago.
RETRIEVE//R/V Daedalus//Flt Vane Eng Class 2//Station/Rawley Voorst//Log Entry 1441-44//Flt yr 3/Day 349+//Codex 292-1441-1444+//RETRIEVE IN FULL BEGIN BEGIN BEGINProper Time: 16:23:08//I fly by default another day. I wonder who really knows.
Shift one/neg grav intrudes//CONT. 1442 CONT CONT CONTProper Time: 20:17:53//Shift one/time distor//CONT. 1443 CONT CONT CONTProper Time: SEE CODEX//END R,//CODEX??//SEE CODEX SEE CODEXALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARMEVENT INTRUSION EVENT INTRUSION EVENT INTRUSION EVENT ALL AUXILIARY SYSTEMS A & B SEQ ALL AUXILIARY SYSTEMS DAMAGE CONTROL DAMAGE CONTROL DAMAGE CONTROLALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARMEVENT INTRUSION EVENT INTRUSION EVENT INTRUSION EVENTThe Guam sun floods through the dusty window.
“Why can’t I see Cooper?”
“Partly it’s quarantine, standard procedure. Partly it’s because today he’s in Houston. He’s been transferred to Houston.”
Smug bastard; I have been asking to see Cooper for a week. He wrote the report; I cannot imagine what SciCom is after that’s not in the report. Cooper and I avoided one another on the way back—there was the affair with Maxine, and he always seemed to me odd, reclusive, a huge, bearded man who never said what was on his mind—but I never saw him break. Where was he in the ship then? Does it matter?
It has taken me a day to see this information officer. Guam is a morass of requisition systems, authority flows, activity program officers; bad enough before, incredible now. The island landscape—lazy, flapping palms, eroded red hills patched with dusty green scrub, an absolute sun—only fertilizes my growing boredom. Houston. Werhner will sigh and shrug.
///thePleasureTube//thePleasureTube//thePleasureTube///reserve nowfourteen days and nightsa world of your owntwenty-eight to two-eighty creditsorgo-totothree separate program classesCONTINUOUS MOVEMENTLasVenussuborbitai/deep spaceLA SoCalolde earthe/moonloopTRIP TO THE SUNrisk venture vectorsymphonic synesthetic harmonicsthe EnergyWest grand prixmegastars in sidereal concertNoAm biosphere reserveSoPac tropical reserveTHE PLEASURE TUBEdial from any codex terminal//106pleasuretube//dial from any codex terminal tubes daily//1.a. trans-port//tubes daily//1.a trans-port//tubes daily////thePleasureTube//thePleasureTube//thePleasureTube/thePleasureTube////It is Taylor I see one day; his dark, bushy eyebrows never move. He alternates with Knuth, an intense little man who acts as if he were a foot taller—I wonder if his neck hurts sometimes. Today Knuth.
“The exact sequence,” he begins, tapping his pencil. Several times before he has asked the same question, in precisely the same way, with the identical emphasis on exact.
I tell him what he can read in the log, what he has read in the log, everything is there. I remember hearing Werhner saying, seeing the silver-blue ball of earth, how lucky we were to have come back. Lucky?
RETRIEVE//R/V Daedalus//Station/Rawley Voorst//Log Entry 1446//Flt yr 3/Day 350+//Codex 292-1446+//RETRIEVE IN FULL BEGIN BEGIN BEGINProper Time: See Codex//Postevent record.Werhner is lying on his back, staring at the ceiling in the cottage we have been assigned on Guam. The air is heavy, the light trade winds ripe. He is still wearing his bathing suit. Sweat beads on his chest, runs as he raises himself on his elbow.
“Somebody went through my things,” he says. “Somebody went through your things. Nothing missing, but somebody was in here.”
I have just returned from another series of encephalograms, kinesthograms, redundant examinations. My torpor dissipates. I fold through my clothes, my books, my papers…. “What the hell?” The cover of Dean’s Deep Space Transpositions is creased; my clothes are in disarray.
Werhner is sitting on the edge of the cot now, popping a pinkish pill into his mouth, swallowing it without water.
“I’m going to get out of here,” I tell him. “This is too much. We’ve been here three weeks.”
“Cooper’s the only one who’s left the base,” Werhner says flatly. “I don’t know what the hell is going on—these goons spend half their time questioning each other about procedure, the whole dome crew is still here on Guam—Tamashiro, Levsky, Dawes. I think… Look, Rawley, I think they’re trying to set us up, to stick the blow on us. What did your tests show?”
“Nothing abnormal. The same readings as last week. And the week before. And the day after we landed.”
“Still having those nightmares?”
“Werhner,” I say, “they go away. This is a nightmare, this place. Who can live this way? The same questions, steamed food, and look at that cot, that cot’s killing my back. I’m going to get out of here.”
“Me, too,” Werhner says—he is picking up his diving mask and snorkel and fins. “To the reef? Utama Bay?’
“Not now. I’ve got something to do.”
“No swim? Gonna watch the vidi?”
“I wish I were flying,” I tell him. “I didn’t think I’d ever miss it, but I do now. I need to get out of this place.”
“Good luck.” He smiles sardonically.
Chapter 2 Welcome to thePleasureTube
light sensuous saunafantasy co-oplubricious service personnelfoods of the worldaquaplease paradise gardentactile videonTHE PLEASURE TUBEreserve nowfourteen days and nightsa world of your owntwenty-eight to two-eighty creditsorgo-totothree separate program classesCONTINUOUS MOVEMENTLasVenussuborbitai/deep spaceLA SoCalolde earthe/moonloopTRIP TO THE SUNrisk venture vectorsymphonic synesthetic harmonicsthe EnergyWest grand prixmegastars in sidereal concertNoAm biosphere reserveSoPac tropical reserveTOTAL HOLOGRAMtactile reflexivetranscendental sense flightthe world’s onlyTOTAL HOLOGRAMour service is pleasure//your pleasure our servicereserve//lie back//relaxtubes dailythePleasureTube corp.l.a. trans-porta division of EnergyWest106PLEASURETUBE//dial from any codex terminal//106PLEASURETUBEitem 14: If you have only recently learned of thePleasureTube, how did you do so?[_] nat. videon[_] travel agent[_] automag[X ] other (enter)leave programmerSciCom rec areaSciCom.Guamitem 15: Your PleasureTube credits will come from which account?[_] prog, vacation[_] personal savings[X ] GTR[_] gift or employee bonusitem 16: Please enter your beta function code in the boxes provided below:[ 2][ 9][ 2][ F][ L][ T][ V][ N][ E][ N][ G][ ]our service is pleasure / / your pleasure our servicethePleasureTube corp.Movement itself has made me feel better—and for the last few minutes more exhilarated than I have been since we danced back into the silvery upper atmosphere with our microweather show a month ago, the tenuous landing of our lame ship. I can’t say much for the lower atmosphere of the continent, it is on the brownish side of yellow, but now in descent I can see L.A. through the window rolling from hill to hill, its traffic pattern elegant and intestinal from our altitude, its air light haze beneath its dome. My hand throbs as we lose altitude quickly, the stretched skin of the old scar, hidden in the healing of the new cut, changing cabin pressure.
Werhner is spooked, too—in the month back on Guam he’s left his data entirely to others and now just drifts all the time, psychologically and physically. He spends his days diving around the reef—not fishing or collecting shells—just floating around, swimming past the breakers at Utama Bay and coming in slowly only when the light is almost gone. I told him he should come along, but he said no, he was on too high a dosage. He wasn’t about to go through what I did, and even if he had, there was no guarantee they would have let him go.
My guess is that he’s out there right now, suspended in the blue-green water. I wonder if we’re doing such different things after all. That’s ironic—all the trouble I went through, those obtuse bastards.
As I pass through X-ray and security a bored Oriental asks to see my papers. When he spots my green card, he waves me through without looking at my ticket. Nor does he open my bag—my one leather bag. I’ve only brought a few sets of casual clothes—old blue flight clothes, mostly—I intend to relax. One blonde woman, she looks about thirty, has eight bags. When I ask her what she is carrying, her broad face flushes and she laughs; finally she says clothes, mostly, some tennis gear, wig racks, magazines, cosmetics. I wind up helping her guide her luggage on a cart.
I hadn’t realized theTube was so large—this terminal occupies an entire wing of the Trans-Port. Crowded, all kinds of people, some as young as eighteen, others are eighty. I see a number of very attractive women with men, both sexes in jump suits. Some of the women are wearing tight leather skirts and halters; this must be the latest fashion for women trim enough. The blonde I’m walking with is perhaps ten pounds too heavy for the pastel leather outfit she has on; she is attractive, though, in a fleshy way. I wonder if her nervousness is sexual, like mine, or simply the anxiety of travel. Her luggage is new, covered all over with broad rainbows. I like it and tell her so, her face opens with the flattery, and I ask if she’ll have some free time tonight on the ship.
She giggles. “I’m paired,” she says. “I’m meeting Tonio at my gate, we’re almost there.”
“Paired?” I say, braking the luggage cart to a stop.
“Aren’t you? Not even on your first night? Tonio’s an old friend, but everybody…”
“I don’t know,” I tell her. Then I say: “That should be interesting.”
“It’s on your ticket,” she tells me.
I show her my ticket. My reservation impresses her; I’m going first class on government money. But her forehead wrinkles.
“It doesn’t list anyone,” she says. “Still,” she goes on breathlessly, apparently not knowing what to make of me, “you’ll have fun.”
A tall, thin man with angular shoulders and a sheaf of black hair is making his way toward us against the stream of people. It must be Tonio—as she sees him she puts her hand on my arm.
“Look,” she says, “I’ve got an idea. Let’s do a fantasy co-op some night on the ship.”
“What?”
“Just give me your codex number. I’ll get in touch.”
I recite my codex, she closes her eyes to remember, then guides the cart away.
“My name is Erica,” she calls back.
“Rawley Voorst,” I say, raising my hand to wave. But she is too quickly submerged in the crowd, disappears. Tonio is up on his toes.
I have to change levels, backtrack through a lounge concourse, then walk a kilometer or so before I arrive at the gate coded on my ticket. Alongside a squinting young man, a tall, gorgeous black girl, whose eyes are so distinctly green that I can see their color from the end of the line, is behind a counter punching ticket codes against space as the young man checks in luggage. Passengers leave the counter following pastel stripes on the floor. I loiter in line for ten minutes, shoving my flight bag ahead with my foot.
Finally the black girl begins punching my ticket into a terminal. She looks up at me, narrows her eyes, punches it in again. The green of her eyes is the green of the deep sea off Guam, jade pale, striking, accentuated by iridescent eye shadow. She really is lovely, the loveliest woman I’ve seen in the terminal. I watch her fingers: thin, long; her fingernails are a beige two tones lighter than the cafe au lait of her skin. She wears a silver name tag bearing the name Collette.
“There’ll be a slight delay in boarding your section,” she tells me with a practiced smile, suggesting in the same breath that I wait in the VIP lounge, first door to the right.
I ask her what’s wrong.
“We’re having an equipment malfunction in your section. They’re replacing a unit.”
“What unit?”
“The malfunctioning unit,” she says tightly.
When I tell her that she talks exactly like a computer terminal, I can see a vein jump in her neck, she tells me that’s all she knows. I am annoyed only because until now there has been no break in my motion—she is more embarrassed than angry.
“But you don’t exactly look like a terminal,” I laugh, “not at all.”
She shakes her head and her smile is spontaneous. Her face is aristocratic, her skin healthy. She has large eyes and long lashes that are real.
“Next, please,” she says, still smiling.
The light through the lounge window/wall is washed, watery. It seems like night because of the artificial quality of the light outside, but that may be distortion from the dome. Nothing to read; I am alone in the lounge. I wonder if it is because my leave was entered only yesterday that I am not “paired” for the trip; wonder what that means. Will my company be holograms? I wonder, too, if the blonde woman I met in the terminal will get in touch, will remember my codex. I should have asked her number as well. But then she had a friend.
The lounge is a room larger than the twin studio on Guam, though really just a room. But it’s luxurious, especially to a man used to bare floors and cots. Velvet couches, a small kitchen/bar off a divider on the rear wall, paintings on the side walls, one a massive Rubens that astonishes me because it looks real. Mirrors cover part of the ceiling, this entire wall a window overlooking the space shuttles on the tarmac. I fix myself Zubrowka on ice and watch the traffic from a reclining chair. The heel of my hand is bothering me, throbbing with the rhythm of my blood. I hold it to the icy glass of vodka until I feel nothing but the cold.
The girl from the ticket counter comes through the door when my glass is almost empty. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I called for staff, but we’re running behind. They’re still moving the new unit in.”
“What unit?” I say to tease her.
“We’ll be boarding at the first opportunity.”
“Computer,” I say again to tease her. But she turns to leave and I have to quickly take it back. “No, I didn’t mean that.”
She relents and rests her back against the wall next to a painting of two women lost in an embrace. “Look,” she says, “you have an hour at least. VIP section is always late, the last to board. There’s all that loading—you can’t imagine all the things they bring on. You’re anomalous for VIP, you know; usually we have managers, administrators, older men or women.”
“I had an overload of leave time,” I tell her. “They said anything goes.”
“Lucky you.”
“I suppose. You look a little tired. Is it that busy every day out there?”
“It’s getting toward the end of my shift.” She smiles again. She is a high-cheeked woman of extraordinary bearing. The tight cocoa halter she wears outlines the curve of full, dome-shaped breasts, and I wonder if she isn’t padded as part of her uniform. Her legs aren’t only possible, though—long, finely muscled, sleek above her pearl-colored shoes; she has a dancer’s legs.
“Do you mind if I walk around the terminal?”
She pushes herself loosely from the wall, then shakes her head. “No, you’d better not leave. I punched your whole program, your birth date seemed wrong, I thought we’d have to rewrite your ticket. You’ve been away for a really long time. You should just stay here.”
“I’m not a child,” I tell her.
“So I’ve noticed.” She smiles. “But there’s plenty you don’t know.” She comes toward me, bends down, and for an instant I think she is going to touch my knee. But what she does is pull up the inlaid top of the elegant, low wooden table I am sitting by. Inside—I laugh when I see it—is an entire computer console, miniaturized, with ivory keys. She punches a few buttons, guitar music fills the room, and the large glass wall becomes slightly darker. My chair reclines and the whole room seems to soften.
“Just relax,” she smiles. “It won’t be all that long.”
I think about the blonde woman I met on the lower level of the terminal and recall a vague, fleeting familiarity about her. Will I see her again? What is it she wants to do? I assume anything goes on this ship, but I had better be discreet. The ticket agent was right; there are some things I don’t know.
I do know this, though: this waiting, this lack of motion, magnifies the anxiety which I came all this way to smother and forget. Outside, the daylight is failing and ship lights, lane lights, begin to twinkle and glow. The view from the window brings to mind the array from the Daedalus dome I so often stood watching; the blue-gray shade of the glass is so like the color of the dome when we were cruising that the sight through it is uncanny. And yet we do not move. I slump back into the chair, close my eyes—a lushly comfortable chair whose designer must have had an affection for the small of the back.
In my half sleep I am again at the console of the Daedalus. In the stillness I am again at the lull, an incredible lull so motionless that I can feel the blood coursing through my veins. My mind shunts on, so trained by Taylor’s questioning; I recall shutting down and hoping for drift to pick up energy from the front that visually howls on the starboard side of the dome. Nothing shows on the instruments in the lull. My hands sweat. Motionless, I feel queasy, my stomach confused by the sudden end to turbulence. The memory of Werhner’s fork dripping sauce, an odor, the odor of curry—there is a shudder in the ship—I turn to grimace at Werhner. He has disappeared. Beyond his station the port hatch to SciCom hangs open like a tongue, through the opening, not the blue-green glow of SciCom computers or pale-blue-uniformed technicians working or the air lock beyond them, but deep space, blue-black space—there is a shock wave—in my body, through the ship. Hurtling at me is a spinning, growing ball of light, the howling sight of a raging sun….
I awake perspiring, startled; instinctively I stroke the heel of my hand. Through the waiting-lounge window the landing lights of a shuttle sever the deep night, sweep toward me, turn away. I sigh and walk off my anxiety, wish we would board and move.
The girl returns, the door hushes closed behind her.
“Ten minutes,” she says pleasantly, her voice with a different edge than it had when I first heard her speak. Her hands are at the back of her neck undoing a braid in her hair—she has redone her makeup, I think; her face looks fresher, more natural. As she shakes her hair loose it falls in long curls to her shoulders. “Free at last,” she says.
“Time to go home?”
“Time to stop working, anyway.” She joins me at the window overlooking the transport runways. “You should see home, I live next to a freeway.” She, too, looks out over the tarmac and the winking, high-rise city far beyond it. On the tarmac the hulking fuselages of the shuttles wait in trainlike rows. One larger ship, which I had seen attached to a booster, is taxiing toward the far runway whose blue lights stretch away, converging into nothingness.
“You’re one of those rare people,” she tells my reflection in the window—I can see her looking at me—“who go to the stars.” I look directly at her and her vision shifts, she looks out to the night sky. She slowly spreads her arms and stretches them above her head. “To fly,” she says, and she turns to me, “to fly like a god.”
Her halter has risen and I can see her naked belly, a flat expanse. She closes her eyes and hugs herself. When she opens them I look out at the taxiing shuttle, a little embarrassed.
“Don’t you find me attractive?” she asks; she has a kind of nervous glow. She spreads her arms again, and as I watch her she brings them down as a dancer might, her hands coming across her body—they seem to linger for an instant at her breasts.
I tell her, “Yes, of course. Very.” I laugh and add, “Collette,” only then notice that her name tag is gone.
“You remembered my name,” she says, smiling broadly. “You really are rare. I went through your program, everywhere you’ve been.”
She moves even closer to me, or I to her, and I am near enough to see the glistening of moisture on her lips, to sense a weight to her breathing.
“Listen,” she says, “we have some time.”
I want to look at my watch, my wrist naked. I remember that my instructions were to pack the watch in my luggage. “Time… for…”
“Here,” she says, tugging gently at my arm to draw me against her. She has soft lips, her lipstick is flavored cinnamon.
I am grinning, my mouth has gone dry, her warm body is pressed against mine, and my hands pull flat against the small of her back. “Can we do this?” I wonder, half to myself. “What if…?” My hands are on her bottom, she is silky and firm at once. Her curves are breathtaking, as if beneath my hands her shape conforms to a dream I’ve never quite had but now want.
“If we’re quick we won’t get caught,” she whispers. “Before you go.”
When I kiss her again, her tongue outlines my lips. I can feel her body trembling, no dream but alive. She pushes me away, smiling.
“Wait,” she says quietly, unbuttoning her skirt. “I want to show you something.” Her skirt falls to the carpet. She wears tiny black panties whose lower edges she traces with the tip of each index finger before she slips them off, saying as she lets them fall on her skirt, she is giggling, “Part of my uniform—they make ticket agents wear satin so we feel sexy. I…”
She doesn’t let me undress. She straddles me as I lie back on the recliner. Her halter falls open and I see her moving breasts, full and real, her rhythm and mine accelerating, like the whine of the space shuttle thrusting off beyond the darkening window in a blur of light and motion, lifting higher in the blackness of the sky.
Moments later I am waiting for the energy to move again, the quease entirely gone from my stomach. I think Collette is moving my belt in a notch, but then she says, “Welcome to thePleasureTube,” and I see that her hands are at my waist, adjusting a safety belt—no, a liftoff rig.
“To the…?” I can feel the jiggle of hydraulics, the entire lounge is moving. Lights through the window slip by, some disappear—we are being moved into a ship.
Collette strokes my forehead and offers me a drink that looks like orange juice. “Take some of this,” she says.
“I, mmm, don’t think I need…”
“Take it,” she says; “you’ll feel better.”
The lounge thumps into position, loose equipment rattles, she giggles and kisses me. She puts her tongue between my teeth, then moves away toward her clothing. I want to say thank you, but my mouth is going numb with a feeling that is spreading through my body. I am blacking out even as I feel the pressure of a vast and tidal acceleration.
I am asleep but then vaguely aware of a sensation in my fingers and palms. I inhale the rich odor of gardenias and come awake enough to make out Collette kneeling beside the recliner, massaging my hands. Through ship noise I can hear Bartok violins—my own favorite from the Daedalus library.
“Time to get up?” I say, though the room is dim, and no light comes through the window. The ship vibrates with the low howl of sustained acceleration.
“No,” Collette says. “I’m going to bed. I just wanted to tuck you in.”
I rise on an elbow. “What are you doing here? Are you coming along?”
“I’m your service.” She grins. “Lie back.”
“I’m not sleepy.”
“You’ve passed through five time zones and you surely are sleepy. The computer and I know all your body rhythms. Just listen to me.”
“My service?”
“Mmmm. You like to touch, too. I think we’re going to enjoy each other. I like you,” she says, her hand drifting up, stroking my temple. “The way your hair curls here at your ears.”
The lounge has changed—my recliner doubled into a bed, the couches rearranged, draperies along the window/wall. A light illuminates the large painting of pink, fleshy women in an embrace.
“Do I—I mean, is this my cabin?”
Only when she puts her hand on my shoulder to make me lie back do I realize that I am naked. I inhale deeply, and the rich, sweet odor of gardenias fills my lungs.
“Drink this,” she says, passing me the orange juice again.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see tomorrow. Where doesn’t matter, does it?”
For the moment I can’t think of an answer. I close my eyes as Collette makes me promise to tell her stories from my trip, where the Daedalus expedition went, what we saw on survey. Her asking me, the Bartok, this peculiar motion, tug at my concentration, and for a frightening moment I feel myself on the precipice of my nightmare on the Daedalus, my mind’s eye beginning to shape the awesome figure of a howling, whirling sun….
As I struggle for consciousness I breathe an odor of Guam, tropically rich, ripening. Guam: the drowsy questions, the limpid air. Knuth smiling at my requests for leave, not a smile of sympathy, but a smile of collusion with a pattern that will not let me go. I cannot rise past the same numbness I felt weighing on me then.
“The exact position of the thrusters?”
“No readings on any of the mag sensors, Rawley? Let’s go over them one by one.”
“Don’t blame me, Rawley, this is a slow process. This is how it has to be.”
“Let’s consider analogies, Voorst. What was your personal relationship with each of the other members of the dome crew? How would you describe your feelings toward the Committee Pilot? Let’s begin with them.”
I feel about them as I feel about you, runs through my mind. Don’t you ever act?
“Dead in Houston,” Taylor says finally to a question about Cooper one day, his voice flat and even, his gold lighter hissing as he pauses to light his pipe. “Cached his drugs.” The news of Cooper’s suicide slices through my numbness like a razor through my flesh, Cooper perhaps psychotic, I believe, but suicide doesn’t seem right; and Taylor had known for two days.
I can feel anxiety rising as a presence within me, my heart is pounding, and Yes, I want to say to Collette, it does matter where, I want to wake….
Then I feel her silky hand slipping across my chest, a satin sheet pulled across my midsection, her lips beginning to nibble at my thighs.
The image of the cold, howling sun, the memories of Cooper howling at Committee Pilot from Damage Control, of Guam, recede from my mind and I am transported. I smile a smile of satisfaction which Collette could only partially translate, as the last music I remember from the lull becomes, not a vivid memory, but simply present Bartok and the piercing sweetness of violins.
“Yes,” I whisper, running my hand through the lush softness of her hair, “I like to touch.” The tropical odor refines itself, it is hers. Gardenias are everywhere.
Chapter 3 Biosphere Reserve
ITINERARY//FIRST-CLASS PASSAGE// Prog. 2NdCoord.DA1 WELCOME AND FLYAWAY --- I/o-0926DA2 FLT TO OE//DTRIP//LAYOVER 2, 3 bid i/f-1021DA3 BIOS RESERVE//MOVALLEY bid i/f-1951DA4 SYNESTHETIC HARMON//VIDEON bid i/f-cont SPECDA5 FANT CO-OP//EPICUREAN bid i/f-cont CONSENSUSDA6 ARR LASVENUS//CLUB EROTICA bid i/f-0900DA7 LAYOVER//RISK VENTURE VECT bid contDAS RISK FEST2, 3 //SIDEREAL CONC bid contDA9 UKIYOE FLYAWAY bid I/O-0623DA10 SENS SEVEN SPEC//MOONLOOP bid i/f-contDA11 SINS SEVEN SPEC//VIETAHITI bid i/f-contDA12 AQUAPLEASE//HOLO PREP bid i/f-contDA13 HOLD PROG//TOTAL HOLO4 bid i/f-contDA14 TRIP TO THE SUN bl- i/f-----CONTINUOUS VIDEON PROGRAMMINGTHE PLEASURE TUBE IS AN EXPERIENCE/INDIVIDUAL VARIATIONS ARE COMMON AND PRECISE DESTINATIONS VARY//CONSULT YOUR SERVICE FOR DETAILS2, INTERSECTION ITIN CLASS 23, INTERSECTION ITIN CLASS 34, MEDICAL CLEARANCE REQUIREDOUR SERVICE IS PLEASURE//YOUR PLEASURE OUR SERVICELIE BACK // RELAXthePleasureTube corp.@ 106codexLight in the unit. My body slides, stretching on satin sheets, muscle pulling against muscle in an envelope of warmth—I stretch my back and a few cot-twisted vertebrae quietly pop into place, finally straightening out.
Morning light. Through the window/wall the sun is hovering on the arc of an horizon. It looks to be earth a hundred or more kilometers away. The entire window/wall holds a planet’s arc in two separating horizons, dark below, bright on a line above. The sun shoots orange-yellow fans through the atmosphere—yellow-brown fans.
“Something bothered you, didn’t it?”
I couldn’t speak if I wanted to; a thermometer is beneath my tongue.
“You came right up through the drug again. Nightmare?”
A sequence, I think; which? Key on a color, Werhner says, you remember everything.
The girl—Collette—draws a last drop of blood into a vial. I am in program for tests, final readings to establish my circadian rhythms for the trip, my own day, she tells me. Another way to say proper time.
Remember everything? Or is it a memory at all? Werhner also says that dreams are predictions. The woman frozen in space, the whirlpooling sun: these are not simple memories, they are not sequential points in a time line. My teeth grate the glass of the thermometer, my tongue slides along its side. I remember… yesterday, Collette on my thighs. And now she is wearing a light green satin robe, barefoot. I am still slightly groggy.
Collette finally slides the thermometer from my mouth and gently tugs at the tiny suction electrodes on my wrist, massages the puckered skin. “Anyway,” she says, “you’ve got good figures so far. You’re a healthy man, you have healthy appetites, you can pretty much do as you like. You’re cleared for total hologram, no restrictions.”
I ask her what a total hologram is, exactly. She tells me it’s a holographic projection system whose image, is actual, substantial, to the user, not just an optical effect. There is a feedback connection with the user’s neurology.
“I’m willing to try anything,” I say. Like Werhner’s water, the recliner module gives, floats with my weight. When I woke at first light, I remembered no dream, felt only the floating in space, slept again.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Collette asks, adjusting the fall of her robe at her knee.
“About…?”
“What made your EEG go bump in the night.”
She sounds like a member of the screening committee back on Guam. What I want is breakfast. “I’m fine,” I tell her. “I haven’t felt so well in weeks.”
“Then how’s your appetite for breakfast?”
I laugh at how she anticipates me. “Ravenous,” I say.
A sweet juice, purplish and thick, guava, Collette suggests. An egg on thick bacon and a scone. The mild bite of a sauce balances the buttery slide of the egg. Melon, cheese, coffee. I ask Collette for another egg, she answers there are only so many eggs in the world, I eat scones and butter, drink glass after glass of guava juice.
Already the cabin seems familiar—perhaps because its spaces analogue starship quarters. This recliner module is set against a side wall, halfway between a dark velvet couch and the window/wall. Like a coffee table, the inlaid table which opens into an ivory-keyed computer and codex terminal sits before the couch.
The rich furnishings are washed now in the atmosphereless spacelight. On the wall opposite the window/wall the fleshy pinks of the Rubens are radiant, and the painting’s stark, black frame casts a rhomboid shadow on the wall’s soft, textured surface. I notice only now a subtle geometry in the dark brown rug—hexagons with shared lines. The figures are the barest tone lighter—the precise shade of the draperies—and outline a reversed dome. Ghostly, soft, optically active. Off this lounge, or living-room arrangement, the kitchen/bar behind a divider of shelving modules glows with the spun-steel finish of instrumentation and machinery. I can see Collette through the divider, holding a dish in one hand, licking a cream-colored sauce from two fingers of the other.
Werhner, I think, what are you doing? Taylor, what questions are you imagining for me now?
I almost lose myself in the bath: its ceiling and walls are mirrored, a lush green rug is on the floor, and the fixtures are cast in the shape of seashells. The sink is a giant, opening scallop, its surface iridescent, the john a tun shell with its operculum hinged. The shower water has a faint aromatic oil added to it, as rich as cinnamon but lighter. The shower head pulsates, massages as it runs, with a half-dozen different rhythms. I could spend my two weeks standing in that one spot.
Collette is laughing at a chart she is showing me:
MEDEX// CODEX292VOORST// CIRCADIAN RHYTHMINTERNAL DESYNCH= -2.7
Not at the chart, it turns out, only at the first peak on the red-orange line.
I ask her what it means. She says, “I’ll show you in a minute.”
I am laughing, too—was I asleep again? Werhner wouldn’t believe this. Collette is my luck, she is what’s so pleasant here. I tell her that the smoothness of this ship is uncanny, that speed compresses otherwise undetectable forces to make a kind of weather, a series of fronts, turbulent, there’s always pitch and yaw. A smoothness here, as if traveling some other way. I can feel our motion only as a slight vibration, see it in the concentric rings on the surface of my coffee.
“Can you feel it… here?” she asks as she takes my right hand and guides it toward her heart, releases my hand at her breast, her nipple stiff under satin.
“Very sexy,” I say. “But all I feel is, ummm, a pounding heart.”
“Mmmm,” she giggles, “that’s what it does. That orange line signals an early peak in your hormone level. I can’t get over it, you turn me on. What a luxury.”
Beneath her robe, Collette has the odor of strawberries; the sweet, piquant taste of strawberries is on her shoulder. She slides alongside me—satin on satin sheets. I stroke her lower back, send my hand flat over the firm swell of her bottom. I can feel her muscles tighten and move beneath my hands, her tongue sliding warm on my lips.
She is naked beneath her robe. As I enter her she uses its folds to surround me. The sensation spreads throughout my body, sliding into satin, sliding into her. The perfect smoothness of her skin.
After lunch. We are gliding powerdown in a slow trajectory of apparent descent, perhaps thirty kilometers above a landscape visible through the window/wall. The macroweather is flat, and only a few scattered clouds float over the mountains—the long, vast range of gray mountains that stretch along the horizon. Toward what may be a coast in one direction, the atmosphere there the brownish side of yellow, the surface suggesting an elaborate quilt of cultivation. Directly beneath us the rising topography of foothills—they must be deep green beneath the atmosphere’s filtering effect. I hear Collette saying daytrip brightly, she is at machinery in the kitchen/bar, tidying up after the cold crab she served. I have been studying the landscape for ten minutes, idling over the last of the Jamaican coffee—Blue Mountain, Collette named it. Have we been continuously suborbital? Daytrip?
“I never saw anything like this. Where are we going?”
“Biosphere reserve. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
I watch the foothills, try to sort out the different shades of green. Even in the thickening atmosphere this flight remains velvet-smooth, as if cushioned, its motion translated now into a barely perceptible sway of the heavy draperies pulled back along the window/wall. At the juncture with the ceiling the sun flashes, recedes: slight yaw. I notice for the first time a series of fine lines suspended in the material of the window, lines as fine as human hair. Perhaps that is how the window became a filter earlier today.
Collette comes to the window. She is dressed in her skirt and halter of the day before, cocoa leather, gold PleasureTube insignia—she is pulling the strap of a shoulder bag over her right shoulder.
“You never saw anything like this?”
“Not on the expedition,” I tell her. “Nothing quite like this. You can tell those greens are conifer; there’s botany down there.”
“It’s a biosphere reserve. That’s where we’re going to lay over.”
“Do we disembark?”
“For two four-hour trips,” she says. “Today and tomorrow. You’ll like it here. When we arrive at the terminal, follow the signs to the tramrun. Take the A tram from the terminal, exit at Slot Nine. I’ll be waiting for you there. We’re due in just an hour; there’s really only one way they’ll let you go with the ticket.”
Collette’s hair is pulled up, backlit in a kind of aura. She hands me a green card, the ticket.
“I have to check in,” she says. “Is there anything I can do before I go?”
“Do you have a minute?”
“Sure,” she says.
I sit her beside me on the large velvet couch and open the inlaid table setting before it; the console is half-sized only in the button shape of its controls. I switch PowerOn, punch out three sequences in a simple Retrieve/Inquiry code, Uniform Ship Program. Collette is looking out the window; she smells of heather now. I am getting a blur of flashing numbers on the digital readout bar, just a blur.
“All right,” I say. “Where did I go wrong?” I have a print light, positive readout function—but I can’t get the display to hold.
“Well…” she muses, looking at the console. “You’re holding something big. You need more than digital. God, for a Flight Vane Engineer, Voorst, you don’t know much.” Collette punches BACK/PRINT/FUNCTION, then a bar marked VID.
The window/wall darkens instantly; the landscape blurs, is obliterated. The window/wall becomes a screen, not projected upon, but emanating a huge, dense list of codex numbers followed by program codes, now the brightest field in the cabin, all other lights have dimmed.
“What happened to the wall?” I ask.
“That’s the videon. There’ll be a big show day four, after we leave the reserve. Then every fourth day.”
“The videon.” I stare for a moment longer, my eyes adjusting as the smaller figures focus.
“It reads the computer for certain things, visual display.”
“You know how to make it work. That’s resourceful.”
“I also know that’s the ship’s manifest.” Collette smiles. “Looking for someone?”
“Uh…” I start to answer, hesitate. I can’t even find my own codex, there are a thousand listed. “Just looking.”
“Then look at something that moves.” Collette punches in an entry and the screen changes to display a life-size group of people in bright yellow body stockings moving in unison on mats; they are doing stretching exercises—an exercise class?
Blonde woman in the front row.
“Say, Collette…”
Collette looks at me evenly, her eyebrows raised, the trace of a smile tightening her lips. I have a flash of embarrassment, feel strangely free-floating. One of the women on the screen is Erica. Standing in the front row, doing leg exercises. Standing on one leg, bringing her other foot up to her knee. She has a unique exaggerated pelvic thrust; there is a beatific smile on her face, faint perspiration on her forehead.
Collette is telling me that I am seeing the VID/ACTION sub of her program. “Some people have them made up. Punch codex plus 302, then integrate back to VID.”
I am watching Erica pulling her knee to her chest; I am blushing, I think. “How did you know about her?”
“She put in your codex this morning,” Collette says, getting up. “Let’s just say it’s part of my job.” She is adjusting the shoulder strap of her sagging leather bag; she is leaving. “Line A, Slot 9,” she says with a wry smile. “You can’t miss it.”
The computer works on Uniform Ship Program for major functions, translates from its own cybernetic language for internal systems into a half-dozen major languages, very well engineered. I find there’s no local file under my codex number, then inquire and find that local vane angle confirms touchdown in forty-two minutes. I try to relax by setting up a tennis game through the console. Two sets and I lose interest; an overhand to an unstable backhand is the obvious key.
I punch through Collette’s program into her personnel file, find I can retrieve limited access material on Collette by using Werhner’s trick, coding the system in a classic Fibonacci Series—1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8…. She begins
//27 CORETTA KING SCHOOL L.A. SoCal//31 UCAL BERKELEY NoCal P.E. M.S.//SOCIOBIONICS CORP TRAINEE….
Through the crowded disembarkation chute, into the rough-hewn wood, post, and beam terminal, most of the passengers head toward waiting NaturBuses; that appears to be the third-class program. People are nervous at being off the ship; even here the air is noticeably different—once outdoors among the tramrun sheds, there is a kind of sweet rot to it. On the small A trams there are only first-class passengers. The tram I board is empty in the rear, where I sit, except for a heavyset, well-dressed, European-looking man. Forward a small group laughs at an older woman’s story; she had the wrong luggage, didn’t know until she opened the first case and found a grope suit. I’ll have to find out what a grope suit is.
I sit by a rectangular window and watch our rubber-tire progress, first uphill, then down through faintly groomed, quite real, thickening woods. I lay my hand flat on the spun steel of the tram body; it feels queerly unreal, or I do, suddenly moving through these woods under a hazy sun. Insects in the overgrowth, reflections from the guardrail along the tramrun, no breeze. I see a small animal clinging to the lowest branch of a tree as we pass. Squirrel, moving, alive.
Slot 7 is a pavilion where the forward group disembarks. Slot 9, a kilometer beyond, deposits me at a simulated stone walk where Collette is waiting. She’s wearing white shorts and a halter top. We follow the walk eighty meters to a small prefab structure, half porch with a large plastic table, plastic/wicker chairs. There is a small brazier in the corner; inside, a cooking unit, a refrigeration unit, cabinets.
The rest house—what Collette calls it—is protected by woods on three sides. We are on a gentle rise on rocky ground. Behind us the land slopes uphill to a series of granite bedrock faces which rise from the ground; around the base of the nearest is apparently the tramrun. Ahead the landscape runs downhill and opens in a widening swath to a meadow, a vast, parklike space, again only barely groomed, perhaps three or four kilometers off. I can just make out a series of pavilions on the meadow’s far side, perhaps eight kilometers away.
Since the tram whined away, the air has seemed soundlessly light. The absence of machine hum recalls the beach at Utama Bay on Guam; this kind of stillness is unnerving. I pick out the possible sound of wind in the taller trees, insects, and the faint songs of birds. The sun is a sun of late earth afternoon, bright but hazed over; its light falls into the woods in patches the size of children. In the woods the greenery collides, tumbles over itself. I feel both tranquil here and apprehensive—how can that be?
Collette and I drink champagne and pick at a whole salmon, poached, cold. The salmon is delicate and clean-tasting, the champagne light. She knows of a strawberry patch just downhill, we are going to pick dessert.
The strawberries grow near the edge of the sparser woods to our left, downhill. Small strawberries, but they are exceptional: bright red, tantalizing in texture, ripe, sweet, firm. We eat them out of our hands, propped up against a thick tree, sitting on the soft loam.
“Perfect,” I say. “Paradise.”
“To me,” Collette says, putting strawberries in a ceramic can to take back to the ship, “this is as perfect as a place can be. We’ll stop again at a tropical reserve, but there’s too much to do there to actually relax. This place… There aren’t many people who get the chance to be here, you know. I have a plant room at home, a small one. I wish I had this. It’s so peaceful—you’re right, perfect.”
“Just like my last twenty-four hours,” I say. “Everything’s seemed… to click into place. Spooky. The first music I heard in the cabin? My space music, Bartok, I wore out a tape of it once. I must have wanted just that breakfast for a year. And a woman like you. It’s as if you remember things I’ve forgotten I really wanted…”
Collette smiles, passes me a strawberry. “You’re a pleasure,” she says. “There’s something about you, it’s your tan, the way you look at me. I’d like to do you any time.”
I bite into the fruit and feel its juices pique my tongue. Sweet, sticky, almost tart enough to be dry, but sweet nonetheless. “Mmmm. And that blonde woman. Yet… something about her is familiar.”
I lean back on my elbows in the softness of the earth, layers of decaying leaves and loam among thinning vines along the shady edge of the woods, at the foot of this tree. “There are moments,” I tell her, “when I don’t feel very far from the screening committee that kept me on Guam. Taylor and Knuth; then Birnbaum, Lodge…. They think I know something I know I don’t.”
“A SciCom screening committee?’ Collette asks, sitting up straight.
“Yes.”
“Are you in trouble?”
“Am I?” I ask after a moment. “You tell me.”
Collette is reading my face, I am trying to read hers, she sets down the half-filled container. “Not that I’m aware of,” she says, moving forward onto her knees. “Well, you’re not in any trouble with me.”
I shrug and suggest that what data there is on me, she’s probably seen.
“I saw the program we retrieved,” she says, “and I sure can’t recall any screening-committee report.” Collette pauses. “But I’ll guess. Something happened to you on the expedition, didn’t it?”
“To the ship,” I tell her after a moment. “We blew part of the ship. Three people died—then there was a suicide.”
“My God,” Collette says. Could she have known? Her expression denies it utterly; she sees my own pain, I think. No, I’ve never met her before. I want to tell her what happened; I can feel her sympathy.
“We were tracking energy source off the entry horizon of a black hole, near the Crab. We went as far as anyone’s gone. Did you know that?”
“No,” she says, blushing a little. “The Crab nebula? That’s some way. And a black hole? I’m not really sure…”
“A black hole is an old star that’s fallen in on itself, collapsed,” I tell her. “It’s so dense its own light doesn’t escape, so dense its gravity attracts light. The physics is still speculation—one theory has it that within a black hole the laws of physics are reversed, and a traveler, say, becomes trapped—trapped in space, and free in time instead. Another theory has it that each is a throat to another universe, another a loop in time—well, that’s all on the other side. I don’t want to exaggerate. We were tracking well off an edge. Spinning black holes might be a cost-free energy source, that’s why we were tracking. That’s where it was that we blew.”
“Blew? Out there? My God,” Collette says, goes silent for a moment. “How lucky you are to be back, alive and back. There’s an investigation?”
“The investigation was finished almost four years ago, out on range. But since I’ve been back, maybe it’s just bureaucracy, it’s like thick glue in gears on Guam. They don’t want me to leave. At all. I’ve filed a dozen reports, answered every question. But still…”
Collette looks away, she picks at grassy weeds growing among the strawberries. “There’s truth to that anywhere, nowadays,” she says. “My brother used to say that soon enough nothing will happen. Maybe it’s already gotten to the point where there are so many administrative strata to go through that nothing happens, nothing changes. That’s the way it seems. An investigation can last forever. But look,” she says, turning her palms up, tossing grass into a breeze, “right now you’re here. You’re traveling first class. People wait months for this, people who can afford it. You came right on. Somebody must be looking out for you.”
I push my hand at the soil and run my fingers through—dank, spongy, sweet. I did that myself, I think. I rewrote my program at the military office, punched it through while the wormy program clerk was at morning meditation. Technically I have military status. I had such an overload of leave time I went right out. I wonder if SciCom even knows yet; by now there is nothing they can do. I tell Collette just how it was that I got here.
She looks at me for a long moment. “You really entered your own leave program?”
“I was only a member of the Committee Pilot, but I flew the ship,” I tell her. “So that was by default. Same thing. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve defaulted ever since I’ve gotten back to Guam. They write off the suicide, they’re encouraging a friend of mine to kill himself, I think, they don’t seem to care. Except they do want to keep their hands on me—I’ve got that pretty clear.”
“And why am I assigned to you?” Collette asks slowly, asks herself. “There’s security on the ship, you had to clear it, you may not even have known when you were…”
“The blonde woman…?”
Collette stares at me hard. “She’s just one of the things that happen here,” she says. “They happen all the time—casual pairs, we call them. I can’t conceive that it’s anything else; I cannot conceive of the possibility.”
I sigh and apologize for the question.
“You don’t have to apologize,” Collette says quietly. “It’s all right with me. You can ask questions if you want to, but if you just let things happen here, it works out just as well. Knowing isn’t going to make a difference.” She pauses, looks at her still hands, at me. “I live by what’s inside a program,” she continues. “I don’t go any further than that. I live by what’s inside. Like coming to this place, eating these strawberries, sitting here with you. I like you.”
“Thanks,” I say, wondering—am I being entirely fair to her?—if that isn’t just what she should say, would say, to anyone? I ask Collette if she felt that way—to live only by what’s programmed, no matter what—when she was a kid.
“No.” Collette smiles, leans back. “I was going to be a volleyball player, an Olympic volleyball player. Then I was going to fly, as a vane analyst, or… Well, I fly. I wound up one day assigned to do this.”
“And that’s all right?”
Now Collette shrugs. “The flying I like, the food is good, I’m done by someone almost every day. But, well, the truth is, I usually feel like a nurse. First-class passengers run pretty old.”
“That puts my self-image back into perspective.” I smile.
“You’ll survive.”
Collette wants to rub my back. She comes around behind me and massages first the nape of my neck as I look toward the light green meadow. I can feel a slight tightness in my muscles only begin to dissolve. I tell Collette I need some exercise.
“Tomorrow we can take a hike if you want to,” she says. “There’s a trail right near here. Or you can shoot in the game harvest. Did you ever hunt? There are usually so many people.”
“A hike,” I say, lying down, my face almost in the strawberries. “I don’t want to shoot in a crowd. But don’t prelog the trip, let’s just see.”
I meet the European-looking man on the return tram. His name, he tells me, is Massimo Giroti—white-bearded, Italian, and a UN Governor in SoAm. He describes himself in a thick accent; he is a large man with steely eyes and an elegant handshake, and seems slightly bored. As the tram hums through the twilight, shadowy woods, Massimo tells me that no, he has not always been an administrator; when he was my age he had been an automobile driver on the world circuit, he had been a champion.
I tell him that I have been on a starship and out of touch because of it; yet his name is familiar somehow.
“Perhaps Fiat Massimo,” he says. “They have name a car after me. Although it was never Fiat I drive. It was only Ferrari and Lancia. I drive the last Ferrari. But you were on starship? What position did you do?”
I tell him that I was a Flight Vane Engineer.
“Ah, sorprendente!” he says, the lines, on his face disappearing, his grin wide. “Piloto, pilot, you mean. That is like building the curves and driving them at once, you fly the starship! We are simpatico, my friend.”
He shakes my hand again. I laugh and say that control of the ship we are returning to seems more like building the curves and driving them with a car that had marshmallows for wheels.
He laughs at that, he denies it. It turns out he has ridden the Tube before.
“I suppose it depends on the program they run you through,” I say. “I’ve never seen such tight programs for so many people.”
“Ah, like everywhere nowadays—but you do not program Giroti,” he laughs. “Nor do I think they program you.” And then he tells me that a PleasureTube program is unique and interesting for another reason. It must be looked at from some distance, I will see eventually. TheTube is a process, he goes on—you don’t realize what’s happening to you, it builds toward the total hologram. You don’t understand thePleasureTube’s dynamics until then.
As we pass over the last rise before the cozily glittering terminal, I think of the strawberries. Collette had worn a strawberry scent in the morning—my appetite must have been focused on, intensified by, that scent to precondition my satisfaction in the strawberries we ate. In part the system of this ship proceeds from the appetites it creates and sustains, a kind of loop.
The terminal we enter is as crowded as it was when we left it. Most of the people are third-class passengers who watch with the disdainful awe of the poor as our spun-steel tram hums in. What Collette says—let it happen, what does knowing the system change?—let’s say I agree marginally. The knowledge of another system accounts for my being here, accounts for my presence on this class tram as well. Yet another kind of loop, I think, even as the tram quietly clicks to a stop at the very spot from which we had begun.
After a shower under the whirlpool head I join Massimo at a small club on the A level of the ship. The out-cabin facilities of the ship have begun to operate: the club; a spa, Massimo advises, which opens tomorrow morning; a pool; an exercise room; another club; a D-bar. His second trip, Massimo complains about the out-cabin facilities: few, too small, hours irregular. The club is only the size of three or four cabins; tonight is India—three musicians in a dim recess, a triangle of sitar, sirode, drums. The service and the dinner are entirely Indian; we eat pandoor fowl as a well-muscled woman dances the “dance for Vishnu” behind a gauze curtain. Backlit, dusky and sensual, after a time she is joined by a man, then the curtain parts and he dances alone.
Massimo is already slightly drunk when the food is served. He’s on a high dosage as well—as he came in I saw him put four pills on his tongue to bait the club’s stuffy manager; he swallowed the pills conspicuously and with a grin. This trip, as a matter of fact, he is using the hologram against medical advice. We talk about women, he has some outrageous stories about Buenos Aires to tell. By the time we are finished eating he is calling for the Vishnu dancer again, insisting that he’s seen her before, fueling the ship. With the gauze curtain gone, the lines of her muscles clearly show—Massimo announces loudly that he will be ready to wrestle after dessert. She glares at him; she is, in fact, attractive; we laugh for a long time—but I rise to leave before the second cup of thick, black coffee, still slightly desynched from Guam. Massimo becomes concerned. He checks the time with the waiter, then he insists, in a drunken, fatherly way, that yes, I must return to my cabin to keep up my strength.
When I return to my cabin, I find an Indian girl in a gauze and silk sarong waiting for me. Collette hasn’t returned. A raga is on the audio. The girl—who, I wonder, is she?—weaves, smiling, toward me right at the door, slowly places the palm of her warm hand on my stomach, slides it fingers downward beneath my belt. As I start to speak she opens her other hand to reveal a vial of snowy-white crystals and a tarry black ball, like a soft pebble. “Compliments,” she says, “of Governor Giroti.” Her accent hints at something other than Indian. When I look closely I see she is Spanish, not Indian, perhaps South American. One of Giroti’s women, of course.
“Colombian cocaine, Afghan hashish, both extremely rare. You are not getting your service,” she adds. “I need a pipe for the hashish. The woman should be here.”
“Collette?”
“Whoever, handsome man. I’d take better care of you. I will.”
“I can’t complain,” I say with a smile.
“You could not only complain, you could have her transferred. She should be here. I need body oil; the recliner should be turned. We need a pipe.” She inhales the odor of the hashish, offers it for me to smell.
“I have a small tobacco pipe in my bag,” I say. “It’ll do.”
“Very interesting,” the girl says—she is small-boned, dark-eyed; the sarong gives her a doll-like presence. “Just like kiddies playing with daddy’s drugs.”
I raise my hand, I don’t know why, maybe the idea that she is so young—or is it the sneer that has come to her lips, her fleshy, glistening, and sensual lips?
“Slap me if you want to,” she whispers. “Slap my bare skin, I’ll undress. I want to be your slave.”
DA3//Back at my cabin, I cannot resist the whirlpool shower head again. I towel off before the blank window/wall, then punch through the videon and do sit-ups with Erica’s exercise class, Collette’s and my private joke. Collette has left instructions to meet her at the biosphere rest house where we spent yesterday. I’ll be late enough. Yet I frankly wonder where she’s been.
Collette is standing outside the screened porch in the early-afternoon sun; evidently she heard the tram. She’s tall, has a dancer’s body, both more graceful and slimmer than the Vishnu dancer at the club. But she is better filled out than the Spanish girl from last night, an entirely different body under her halter and sleek denim pants. Collette is woman to that girl: her cheekbones are as high as the girl’s were shallow. Collette has the slightest scar above her lip, thin, obviously well sutured; it gives a sense of mystery to her face, to the cafe au lait of her skin. Her hair is drawn back under a silver bandana pulled around her forehead and tied at the nape of her neck; her green eyes are catlike; she has the most gorgeous smile.
“I did the craziest thing,” she tells me. “I missed the crew tram last night, called in O.D. I stayed out here last night.”
“Alone?” I say.
She nods, she is grinning.
“You’ll get paranoid, too,” I tell her with a smile.
“Paranoids are survivors.” She shrugs. “That’s what my brother used to say.”
“Where did you sleep?” I ask, then see a set of rumpled sheets on the daybed. I kiss her neck, stop her answer; somehow I’ve begun to trust her implicitly, anyway. “Is it serious?”
“Cold poached salmon again. Short on champagne. Were you lonely?”
“Not exactly,” I admit. Paranoid? I think. What spooks me? It’s not her. But now I have the feeling that I’ve been here before.
Today we take what Collette calls a naturalized path on the mountain rather than the meadow side of the tramrun. At first it meanders steeply uphill along a face from which hulking slabs of granite protrude; the near vegetation is strewn with granite boulders and rubble. The vegetation is sparse, the sun warm. I carry a soft, insulated pack into which Collette has put our late lunch.
The relative proximity of the ship, the fact that I spent the previous evening, night, and morning among spun-steel surfaces and machine hum, the sensation of these shoes, make me feel again as if we are exploring a planet from a landing site. I tell Collette how I spent my time. I expect her to tease me about the Spanish girl, but either her attention isn’t that close or she doesn’t care. She is taking in the meadow opening up as we ascend the switchback natural to the face; I can feel the climb opening up my lungs.
We have been gaining distance and elevation on the rest house, the meadow farther beyond has been expanding, the face we are on remains barren. But once we come around the face of the switchback, we are facing a wide, deep draw, a valleylike draw, thick with trees. The trees are evergreen, pine, and fir, and the brush is many-layered, the tree branches umbrellas upon umbrellas. Some of the trees rise a hundred feet or more; their trunks rise from the tiers of brush.
We stop at an outcropping and admire the view—we have it both ways here, the meadow and the draw. We have hiked three kilometers, judging from the distance we have gained on the meadow.
“You went all the way down there?” I say to Collette. “Did you see anything?”
“Just the woods. The sunset. I did my yoga for an hour and a half.”
On the far side of the meadow I can see an occasional flash of glass, the single roof of a cone-shaped pavilion just into the trees.
Collette sits on a smooth rock and leans back. “Time to eat,” she says. “This is as far as the trail goes.”
We sit at the outcropping and eat cold salmon again; the aspic has begun to run. I cannot resist the draw which spreads beneath an escarpment, out of sight of the meadow, the tramrun, the rest of the reserve. I wonder how many people have been into the small valley, I wonder when my next opportunity will come, if at all. Collette says it isn’t safe. But when I tell her that I am going, she says she’s coming along. We pack the food and leave it where we ate, the insulated carrier propped against a half-hidden signpost: DO NOT PROCEED.
The face we descend is rust-swathed from decomposing pitons hammered in long ago, steep but negotiable hand under hand.
The rock base is thick with brush, litter in fertile soil—the trash is ancient, soft-metal cans overgrown, rotted into fragments. I think we are the first here in some time. We catch our breath at what appears to be a cairn near the base. Collette confirms that it marks the limit of PleasureTube grounds. Then Collette smiles, looks up for a long moment; her smile fades.
“No need to be grim,” I say.
“I’m thinking about our being off the reserve. Look at that face. We should have used a rope.”
“We made it down, we’ll make it up.”
“Sometimes I just get depressed,” Collette sighs, turning to walk. “I don’t even know why I mention it.”
The stream bed, I discover, is not entirely dry, as it appears from a distance. The bed is wide enough to disguise a meter-wide stream meandering down its middle—the larger bed is a wash, eroded by heavy rains. We follow its surface slightly uphill and toward a woods. Collette walks alongside me; her wide-soled shoes, the PleasureTube insignia on her halter top, reinforce my initial feeling that we are on a planetary expedition. The unreality of what we are doing, the strangeness of the surroundings yesterday and today after all these years—I have an impulse to go back to the ship, to shower in my cabin’s bath, to find a D-bar or club somewhere on the ship with spun-steel walls, artificial light. Both strange and familiar here.
Like deep space.
We hike into thicker woods and follow the stream to a clearing at the base of an outcropping perhaps ten meters high. The stream waterfalls down, misty, and with a peaceful rush of water. As we entered the woods we saw birds, a squirrel, no speakers in the trees, bushes with small red berries and black berries. Collette says she saw a snake or a lizard; it is gone when I turn my head.
The ground on the high bank is soft; I lie down to rest my eyes, fall asleep for a time.
When I awake, Collette is hovering a berry above my mouth. “Yes?” she says, the fruit, her face, a blur.
Yellow-white. I blink into the sun coming through the trees, sink my teeth into the berry. It is soft and sweet, a ripe blackberry. I put my hands on Collette’s rib cage, slide them up under her breasts; she lifts her head.
“I’m figuring out the system,” I tell her. “No speakers in the trees. Red berries modulate from strawberries; that started yesterday morning with your scent. As far into this draw as we can go. Now we make love.”
She slides her legs down, lies next to me after stopping to look at me wryly. I cradle her head in my arm. “What you’re talking about is simple short lag,” she says. “It gets a lot more complicated than that. Do you know about second stage?”
“What’s that?”
“Just a more intense kind of pleasure, pleasure on a different level. I’ll give you an example. A game. It’s called ‘I’ll show you yours if you show me mine.’”
“All right,” I laugh, “I’ll play. Let’s see yours.”
“No, ‘I’ll show you yours if you show me mine.’ That means you show me mine first, Voorst.”
I look into her green eyes, her spreading grin.
“I’ll let you think about it,” she says, smiling, her hand moving over my stomach.
Collette beside me, we hold each other, then doze again for a time.
“Something is bothering you,” Collette says. We are sitting together as we sat the day before, knees up, looking into the woods. “You know I never logged the hike; nobody knows we’re here. Honest. Especially here.”
“It isn’t that,” I tell her, then go silent for a moment. “Let me describe to you a sequence,” I finally say. “Or maybe you’ll think I need a psychic screen.”
“No,” she says, “tell me.”
“All right. Listen to my… visions—I have visions, nightmares, hallucinations, I don’t know exactly what they are. Two especially: one is a woman floating in space, her arms outstretched. The other is a blue-black funnel, diamond points of stars in this kind of whirlpool—it lies in the direction of program—there’s a glowing object, a spinning sun, approaching, coming very close, fading at the same time. And I dream about a man, see things from the blow sometimes.”
“Happened on the ship?”
“Yes and no. Some are memories, but others aren’t memories, exactly; when they occur it’s as if I’m experiencing… very vivid memories, say. Or not memories at all. I know they’re associated with one another, but I can’t figure out how. I don’t know if the sequence is real or a hallucination. It’s very strange.”
“You’d know if they were all from the ship.”
“Yes and no again,” I tell her. “It was confusing when we blew—Werhner insists on a time distortion, but I don’t know. I’d say no, not exactly. The report says all the clocks agreed except one.”
Collette looks away for a long moment, into the woods. “What happens to the woman whom you see?”
“Happens? Happened,” I say. “She’s dead. Motionless, frozen.”
Collette turns to me, places her hand on my cheek, and pivots my face so that she is looking into my eyes, I into hers.
“Then don’t think of her,” she says. “Don’t think about any of those things. Think about me instead, think about where we are and what we’re going to do here. We can do anything, you know. We’re going to have a real time together.”
Anyone who knew me well enough, I think, would know of my hallucinations, would know I’d take the faint trail into this draw. Collette didn’t. There are some things, I think, that she doesn’t know after all, and that alone makes me feel infinitely better. Perhaps her depression had been affecting me. But when I look at her—into her half-sleepy eyes, her wide, liquid smile—she doesn’t seem depressed any more, and that makes me feel better, too.
Chapter 4 Videon Spectacular
DA4//“What Dr. Buell calls a state of mind, I could reduce to physical contact,” the white-haired woman says, pointing to one of the other panel members.
“But no”—this from Dr. Buell—“think of anticipation and satisfaction, think of imagination. There’s more than the operation of sensory apparatus in pleasure, and to think of it as… friction, even granting the metaphor… makes a premise of the exclusivity of tactile sense data….”
“Yet pleasure is a state of the body,” the white-haired woman insists. “The entire epidermis is a sense organ into whose language all other pleasure eventually translates. Pleasure is a language the body knows.”
Holographic titles now stream across the screen:
MAXIMUM MOMENTS//AN ANALYSIS ON THE THEORETICAL LEVEL.“Dr. Godwin’s model is sex-generated, behavioral,” a younger woman says, her voice hollow, eerie. “That makes sense to me. Think of the differences in tactile. surfaces, the electricity of contact. Think of silk on the skin, for example. When we refine a neurological language for that sensation, transpose it to other sense parallels, transmit this language, language as stimulation, into a body…”
“Total hologram,” Buell says. “Where the holographic vision has neurological substance. And yet less than the total hologram—because in the total hologram the mind is active, creating the language as well as receiving it. Thus the only sensible psychiatric conclusion is that pleasure is a state of mind.”
“Generated by a neurophysical signal,” the white-haired woman says, throwing up her hands.
“Think of what you’re saying,” Buell remarks. “Ultimately it violates the whole notion of pleasure as reward, as something achieved. You’re saying in part that pleasure has no aim beyond itself, except to be itself in the body.”
“I’m not even certain that reward and achievement are related to pleasure,” the white-haired woman says sharply, “pure, disinterested pleasure, pleasure which makes the orgiastic moment a moment outside of time…. I say that pleasure must have no goal—it simply is, without direction or limitation, without reference to a historical net.”
“Outside of time?”
“And so, transcendental sense flight. The first model programs for theTube….”
The screen fades and cuts to the image of a dark-haired woman sitting on a sofa in an apartment living room, intent on her half-wall videon, sitting tightly cross-legged, swinging one foot from the knee. Her screen shows the somewhat indistinct image of a young man in blue coveralls staring into the camera, his hands loosely in his lap. The image holds for a full minute. The young man moves only ever so slightly, beginning to smile. A sound from within the apartment.
“Look, Kenneth, the oddest thing….”
She is answered by the shutting of an interior door, the word “What?” then the sentence “I can get what I want across the line—I’ve got to go, anyway.” The sound of a firmly shutting heavy door.
She is half rising after the sound, she says, “Kenneth?” leaves the sofa, then turns quickly as if she has sensed the subtle change in light. The videon screen shows the same mauve background, but now the chair is empty. She stands, flushed.
After a moment the doorbell rings. She sighs, strides to the door.
It is a young man in blue coveralls—the same young man, now he’s stretching.
She says, “What do you want?”
He answers slowly, a curl to his lips, “I’ve been watching you.”
“You?” She touches, merely touches, one of the straps of his coveralls; it falls from his shoulder. He begins undressing her—they eventually sink together onto the sofa, arms snaked in thighs, then thighs in thighs. Still shot.
The screen fades again and cuts to tethered women, tethered men, the setting for some kind of game….
Call it videon overload, call it saturation, the long series of programs induces in me a kind of waking sleep, there’s a numbness in my forehead, my eyes. Collette tells me that average daily videon time is more than four hours. I suspect the average viewer is better conditioned than I am. Not that the programming isn’t spectacular: holographic sunrises of the world, Japanese geishas singing, old footage of bullfights in Madrid, Balinese dancing… these narrative interludes, panels, training, and explanations.
It seems as if I have been on theTube forever. The recliner has become familiar, this cabin, the videon itself, with its vivid colors and holographic capabilities, as ordinary as an idle terminal or the back of my hand. The idea of my being here, the surprise of the trip, are diminished—and yet when I calculate that I am well into my fourth day on the ship, and I try to remember what has happened, it seems I’ve been here no time at all, that the four days have passed with unaccountable swiftness: time frozen and accelerated at once.
LASVENUS VENTURES//PLAN YOUR MINIWEEK NOWNEW BREAKFAST OPTIONS//LASVENUS ONLYFigs and ProsciuttoRhubarb CompoteFettuccine AlfredoKedgeree with Curry SauceCelery GrissiniToast MarmaladeEspressoPrunes in MadeiraRed Caviar and Sour CreamSauteed Calf’s LiverOmeletsBaconCrisp Hot Rolls, ButterBoiled New PotatoesCream CheeseToasted RollsStrawberry PreservesMarmaladeTHREE-DAY RACING PACKAGE////Two Liter Two Hundred //The EnergyWest Grand PrixLASVENUS VENTURES PRERESERVATION//NEW OPTIONS EVERY HOUR// FOR FIRST-CLASS PASSAGE//PLAN YOUR MINIWEEK NOW//DAYS 6-9, THEPLEASURE TUBE//Consult your service for detailsThe screen cuts again, to a woman seated before a table set with a half-dozen wine bottles. Title: TASTE TUNING//THE EXPERIENCE OF WINE. Voice-over: Stay tuned. Cuts to: a group of dancers, megastars. I find myself thinking of Knuth, the intense little man from Guam—how I’d like to put him in the wine woman’s lap.
I try to contact Giroti, but he is blocked off, we are all blocked off, privatized today. Lunch does not come until it is quite late, but the lunch is crepes, which Collette prepares—light, sweet, delicious—followed by pears and Brie.
I convince Collette that I need some relief from the programming, and she sets up the videon for a MoonGame Co-op—an immensely complicated spinoff from sedentary tennis, played against the computer and other passengers. She is still explaining the rules when the ship jolts.
I feel through the floor the metallic thud, the shudder; I see the draperies sway. We restabilize immediately. I look up at Collette, my heart pounding. The light seems brighter.
“Moving an adjacent unit,” she tells me. “Nothing to worry about.”
“Tricky business.”
“They don’t make many mistakes.” She grins.
Yet before I can get my defense fully organized on the wall screen, she is pulling my channel, the screen flushes….
“Sorry, you have to see this,” she tells me. For a brief moment, still feeling the shudder, I am alarmed about the ship, I am conscious of my breathing, concentrate on steady inhalations, prepare to rise and…
Collette wasn’t kidding—the screen and audio don’t display Damage Control, they display a VisEd whose subject is the total hologram.
“Where brain-wave anticipation is immediately translated into full spectrum sensation,” a pleasant black man says soothingly.
He is describing a loop.
“Where, best of all, you are in control,” adds a black woman so similar that she might be his sister. They are identically dressed in bright, burnt-orange body stockings, seated together on a lush sofa in an elegant cabin.
“Sometimes,” he laughs, they laugh together.
“In the comfort of your cabin—chemical, electrical, visual, audio, tactile—all systems—full spectrum sensation responds to your deepest needs, an ecstasy beyond compare….”
“The only such system in the cosmos is on this ship,” she reminds the camera. “A hologram that’s more than a hologram, controlled by you, automatically, unconsciously, instantaneously….”
“Orgiastically,” the young man adds. “In a way you’ve never experienced before, including direct electrical and chemical stimulation of the hypothalamic center of ecstasy. You are in control.”
“Or out of it,” the woman laughs, her teeth sparkling white, her leg rising as she runs her hand from her knee down the back of her thigh.
The screen dissolves into moving geometric figures—or parts of figures, shifting, a kaleidoscopic effect. The figures are vaguely genital. The sound of a beat—an exaggerated heartbeat.
The couple begin to describe dosages and instrumentation. I wonder if what they say is true. Collette says that it is. They speak of direct electrical stimulation of the orgasm center of the brain.
“That’s dangerous,” I say.
“Which is why there’s medical clearance,” Collette tells me.
“Mmmm. It seems to me that arrangement could, it could, kill you.”
“Some people it does.” She shrugs. “Maybe that’s why it’s the only one, I mean, the circuits and apparatus are only on this kind of ship. Mostly it’s heart attack; it happens.”
“What prevents it?”
“Scanning. And limiting circuits for blood pressure, pulse rate. But it’s a freewill choice; there’s the risk, part of it is the risk,”
I run my hand along the brown velvet arm of the sofa and ask her if she’s tried it, what it’s like.
“Twice,” she tells me. “It’s scary, but… I felt as if I were… toasted; it was incredible and frightening, too, I felt obliterated. I was sick for a week. But God. I couldn’t begin to do it justice.”
“Though if people die…”
“You know,” she says thoughtfully, “they say the deaths have something to do with population control. The managers don’t care, they say it’s up to Medex. It happens more than they say it does. I think you have to be really healthy, your dosages have to be right, and the scanning… That’s what’s important. Then it’s not a problem, it’s just… a special kind of trauma. You never want to come back.” She grins. “It’s so incredible, your mind is filled with the most exciting things, they seem to grow in there and pile up, and then you feel them in every cell of your body….”
“Where imagination is immediately translated into full spectrum sensation,” the black man is saying again on the screen.
“Not for everyone….” His twin smiles. “But…”
“But riding thePleasureTube without a trip to the sun is like climbing a mountain and not reaching its peak.”
“Like leaping from a cliff and never reaching the sea,” the woman says.
“Twenty units for twenty-four hours,” the man says. “Thirty-five units for two days. The option that is extra but extraordinary. Come with us to the sun.”
“Come with me.” The woman shows her teeth, she touches them with her tongue. “Come with me to the sun.”
What follows is a preview to the hologram, the videon spectacular itself. Collette feeds me two capsules while the screen shows a test pattern. I sit watching; slowly the pattern—dome geometry, hexagons—is becoming holographic, shimmers, then my head, the top of my head, takes off. The images recombine and expand into vivid, electric swaths of pure color…. Intense, lush sounds surround me and something happens to the air: the odor of crushed grapes. I do not know, this has happened in moments, where my consciousness ends and hallucinations begin. In the end—I do not leave the cabin, I am certain, but I feel I have expended enormous amounts of energy—I finally close my eyes and count visions, I lose consciousness, fall asleep.
Awake, I chew cola nuts which Collette slices finely—plum-sized, white and washed red nuts, tart and effervescent on the tongue —she stabilizes my metabolism with another two capsules. Now I am bored, though oddly enough I feel well rested. The videon is showing the most recent WorldBowl clips split-screen. They are playing NewBali now, the game that has replaced almost all others. Sixty players, two soccer balls, fifteen referees—each side of the screen is following one of the balls, the violence is considerable—men kicking at the ball carrier, grabbing at receivers, satellite fights between offense men and defense men. The goal I watch seems to come on a fluke. A powerful kick grazes off a Red NoEast defense man; it was headed out of bounds. NoEast is running away with the game nonetheless; they lead at the half 9-3.
Collette asks me if I will try the hologram. I say of course. I have decided to look into the tolerances myself—enter control that way at the input and see what I can take. Each thing seems worth trying, if only once, if only to see. I wonder if I will ever be here or any place like this again.
Collette tells me that it is possible to pair on the hologram, that the effect is synergistic, but she has never tried it.
“Do you want to?”
She nods slowly, grins. “With a flier? Yes indeed,” she says.
For a long moment we both sit there, oddly embarrassed, I think, staring at the WorldBowl violence. A Yellow SoCal player has just been kicked in the mouth, blood running through the fingers he holds up to his face. The camera is following him in close-up as he walks, hunched, toward the sidelines; no foul is being called.
“But this,” I say. “Well, I can take only so much of this.”
“Yes,” Collette says. “It’s too much.”
We sit in silence for a while again. Now Yellow is driving behind a wedge, but they don’t have the weight to punch through a bearish Red defense.
“Yes,” Collette says, shutting down the audio. “I want to. The time I’ve spent with you has been good. That’s an understatement—I mean, it’s somewhere under the truth, the truth is a larger thing. That speaks well for the truth,” she finally concludes, grinning at her logic.
“I didn’t think you were so interested in the truth,” I tell her with a smile.
“Not in the same way you are. Maybe that’s what I like about you. I mean, it speaks well for you,” she says, her grin really spreading.
Collette wants to show me something, something we are not programmed to see until eight in the evening. She says I have to leave the room, so I indulge myself in a long, relaxing shower. I feel deeply satisfied already; I cannot imagine more. What I do have to imagine, the hologram, does not interest me now. It will be something to tell Werhner about, but what he would not understand pleases me even more—Collette’s openness, her warmth. I wish I could show her some skill of mine, some ability—to take a ship, perhaps, through a dazzling array of weather. I want to do something of that sort so badly it aches inside me—or is it my vanity? I find myself studying my shape before the mirror. No middle sag. I laugh. I left earth eighty years ago, earth time. Young forever.
What Collette has to show me is yet another transformation of the videon, different from anything we’ve seen before: the screen displays full-sized the interior of another cabin; this can’t be a shipwide program. Its occupants are familiar.
The naked back of a tall, thin man, his buttocks pinched together, standing facing a recliner, the roundish, flushed face of—by God, it is-—Erica, she is unmistakable—soft, wide mouth, blonde hair in thick curls down to her neck. She is seated on the recliner, just behind him. Cards lie on a small cubic table before her, she flips a card over, something happens with Tonio—impossible to tell precisely what, his back is to us, but I can see his leg muscles tense.
“Tape?” I say.
“Live.”
I look at Collette; she is watching intently with a smile. I look back again, look at Collette.
“Do they know? Good God,” I say, “doesn’t this make you feel—I mean, aren’t we invading their privacy?”
“No,” she laughs. “If we were on another kind of ship—but not here. We’re free here. We can do anything.”
I watch, Erica’s hands are up, Tonio leans over. “You’re right.” I grin. “I feel free here. I’ve never felt so free before. It’s amazing.”
What I can’t do justice to is the next stage in the transformation. After we watch for a time, Collette becomes anxious about something. I am aroused, but she will not let me touch her. “It’s better to wait,” she says. Yet she is anxious.
Wait for what?
She punches up the console inlaid in the table—Erica and Tonio turn toward us as if on signal, and—the screen tracks apart from its middle; the cabin doubles; Erica and Tonio stand before us, not holographically, but in their perfumed, perspiring flesh. The fantasy co-op: a moving wall. My disorientation is given another turn, Collette is hugging Erica, they know one another.
Erica turns out to be Tonio’s service, Tonio a videon producer; he’s anxious to know how I liked the day’s show! I’m anxious to get my hands on Erica. I do. We all do, and on one another. This goes on through dinner.
Whenever dinner is. Tonio is directing Collette in a masturbation sequence he is videotaping; he says she inspires him. Erica and I are in the kitchen/bar, Erica has begun to microwave coquilles Saint-Jacques, I had to help her set the unit. She has located a steel can of whipping cream and has laid a line of it around my midsection; she licks it slowly, holding my legs and pressing her large breasts against my thighs—the effect is extraordinary. I can watch Collette through the divider. Erica is a fleshy woman, moans with me in her mouth, Tonio’s “Now lean farther, Collette” behind her.
The window/wall is a mirror and Tonio has Collette alongside it moving her hands over her body, leaning back, leaning down, leaning back as she moves in time to Jamaican music. She is leaning down as Erica and I come in with the food—Tonio is masturbating. I cannot resist entering Collette from behind. After a minute we tumble to the rug and Erica is somehow beneath Collette and Collette begins licking Erica’s breasts, running circles around the nipples, taking them full into her mouth. Finally I roll from Collette and as Tonio enters her I enter Erica from above. By the time we finish, the scallops need reheating, but they are delicious, the wine has gone flat, but Collette, gorgeous woman, has found some champagne.
It is much later. We have all taken waferlike dosages of D-Pharmacon. I am on the recliner with Erica, Tonio is fixing a snack.
Collette comes to the recliner. “Room for me?” she says.
Erica shifts over, slips away to Tonio.
Collette takes my face in her warm hands and kisses me with a wide mouth and a flashing tongue. “You luscious man, you,” she whispers. “Mountain climber. Why don’t you just program yourself on a continuous circuit here, ride with me all the time?”
“And what if I get bored?” I say.
Collette kisses me again. “Do I bore you?”
I laugh.
“No,” she says, “you’re right. We ought to go alpine climbing together, to the Andes.”
“Or sign on for the next research ship, fly to the stars. You could be my aide.”
“What a dream,” she giggles. “I thought of something else I like about you. You don’t hold your breath. Watch Tonio, he does. You don’t, you just breathe when it happens. You know how to fly.”
“That’s something I’ve missed, flying. This ship rides like a barge.”
“What’s it really like?”
“Like this,” I say, cupping her breast in my hand. “Like this,” I say, kissing her nipple, sliding my hand up her thigh.
When I wake the next morning, Erica is preparing breakfast in the kitchen/bar, has an accident with the range, that’s what wakes me.
“I wish Collette were here,” I hear her saying. “She knows how to run this mother-fucking thing.”
I look around the cabin, stretch, and yawn. I see Tonio isn’t here, either; the cabin, my cabin, has been tidied up—the videon again a window/wall, now showing suborbital flight, though we are still quite a distance from the planet. “She’ll be back,” I say.
“No, she won’t,” I think I hear.
“What?”
“She won’t be back,” Erica says very clearly; now she is leaning around the divider. “She’s been transferred.”
“What?”
“Transferred. They came for her last night. You were out like a stone; she was, too, really. Well, nobody wanted to wake you.”
“Tonio?” I say.
“No, no,” Erica is saying, she’s almost laughing. “Tonic’s switched to male service for LasVenus. No, I’m going to take care of you.”
She brings the tray and sets it down on the coffee table, strokes my chest. “Your coun is a love root, my couillon its flower,” she says. Apropos of what? “Wait and you’ll see,” she tells me. “Eat.”
“How can she be transferred? That isn’t the understanding I had.”
“It happens,” Erica mutters through a fistful of pills she is taking one at a time. “I think she may have gotten herself in a little bit of trouble, but it can’t be serious. Not where to, but whom to, and how should I know?” She is downing pills one after the other, she must have five more left in her hand.
I ask her why the drugs.
“We’re on a downangle already, I just know it. I can’t stand landing or taking off.”
The coffee boils over in the kitchen, Erica lurches up. “Goddammit.”
“Can you find out?”
“What?”
“Where she went, whom she was transferred to.”
“You know, you’d better watch your step,” Erica says from the kitchen/bar. “One of the security men last night said there was a tracer out on you.”
I feel blood rush to my neck, my heart beginning to pound.
“Whom to, Erica?” She says nothing. “If you don’t tell me, I’m going to find out for myself.”
“Shit,” she says. “Look at this mess. I’m on your side, lover, but you’re not going to get anywhere on this one. Steiner,” she says. “Steiner, Eva B. That’s who.”
I reach Giroti on audio—he has been awake for hours, he encourages me to pack all of my clothes. The next three days we will spend at LasVenus, he wants to show me something he’s had flown in.
I tell him my service has been transferred, I want her back. Is there anything he can do?
“Ahhh,” he says. “Did she do something special? Tell me about it.”
“I’m not sure that’s it, Massimo, it’s more complicated.”
“A man as young as you, don’t get attached,” he tells me. “You must be part Italian.”
“I want to find out why,” I tell him. “And I want her back. Is there a way I can make an inquiry?’
“Ahhh, passion, to be so young. In the circuits of the ship—well, a man like you can find out almost anything. But to get her back… No, if I were you I’d give it some serious thinking. Since it wasn’t your request, it was handled from the outside. That’s very unusual.”
“Then you know nothing about it?’
“Nooo, I heard nothing. You didn’t mention this, my friend.”
It could have been his woman, I think. Massimo and I will talk later, after disembarkation. At the moment I need to make a computer search before we land; the landing could change everything. I ask one more question.
“Who runs the ship, Massimo? I mean, what organization?”
“The corporation,” Massimo says. “Which is controlled by EnergyWest. Which is controlled by NoAm Congress. From that you could say SciCom, but with SciCom, who knows?”
“SciCom? Did you say SciCom?”
“Ah, but who knows with them, whether they run anything or not?”
“SciCom.”
“Rawley, my friend, good luck. Until we see one another—LasVenus, ah, fantastico. Ciao, my friend, ciao. Drink to poor Italy.”
“Patching in.”
“This is traffic. How did you…”
“Do you have an open line?”
“Iden, please.” Another voice crackles: “He can use 363.” First voice: “I’ll need an authorization figure, or do you want this through control? I can give you a circuit in the console dome.”
“No, patch me through this terminal, identify as deadheading. What you can do instead of an authorization figure is give me a line through Guam SciCom.”
“That’s like Sunday at the zoo—uh, look, use 363, it’ll be open. How long do you want it?”
“Indef. Let’s say a ten-day parameter.”
“It’s yours. I’ll just vacate. That’s a big ship—you’ve got a downangle, LasVenus arrival in less than an hour. Look, when you touch down, you’re going to have to loop the channel through ground.”
“Affirmative. And in the meantime, how about a sixty-second display on PT/coord. 1427-82, location map LASVENUS, then sixty more, personnel write on Steiner, Eva B., codex 1819-79, passenger PT class one.”
“Eva Steiner? The EnergyWest VP, a Director, that one?”
“Eva B.”
“Roger and out. Traffic series 300.”
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