The Pleasure Tube

^{Chapter 5} Welcome to LasVenus

I sit at the oblong window of this pale green cushiony room, my head throbbing. I am watching the ships being serviced on concrete pads and the light traffic on the trans-port runways. Shuttles sail in on the long glide path on seagull wings past this thick, tinted glass; I watch yet another offload then towed to a pad for dismemberment into units by the cranes. Behind me the wall screen displays the single readout I have been able to punch through. Even with my sign key, every query I make comes to the same thing, the computer’s wink for computation and the identical display I have been sitting with for more than two hours. The pale green figures pain my eyes. I can’t shake a strange feeling that I’ve sat here before, waiting, just this way, waiting.

LasVenus DataBase Information Service/7

Current DataBase Information//

Voorst, Rawley//

your local residence is ------------

SectorGold Casa del Sol 202//Suite 3

your local program instructs you to -------

YOU ARE RESTRICTED

PLEASE REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE

PLEASE REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE

PLEASE REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE

Program LasVenus DataBase//"We serve your need to know"// thePleasureTube corp.

And so I sit staring in the other direction, wondering what part of my headache I owe to this morning, what part to last night, watching one ship in particular, which could only be our ship. Massive, dull silver, wings barely wings in retraction, its fuselage apart in sections now, sections from which units protrude for service, the area a forest of cranes and hydraulics. How similar and much simpler by comparison the Daedalus was—an even larger ship, but one whose mass was formed by the circular clarity of a single propulsion system, one hull to these three, each dome a dragonfly’s eye—and how much simpler it was to fly straight out.

Something nibbles at the edge of my mind, that sense of having been here before. I want to get in touch with Werhner, I know that is my right.

The shock of seeing Taylor clears my head. In the past week I’ve been surprised more than once, but I had not prepared myself to see him here, his bushy eyebrows rising as I enter this cold conference room, the air sweet with the odor of his pipe tobacco. My chemistry had been shifting back to Guam, and this settles it. Sitting at the far edge of the long, transparent table, his elbows on its surface, his hands resting on amber SciCom files, Taylor nods, smiles at another man I only now notice standing by the other door. He is someone I have never seen, a brown-haired man with a farmer’s build. Taylor rises from his chair and points the stem of his pipe at a seat midway down the table, says to me, “That’s quite a chase you led us on.”

I feel my palms becoming clammy and the atmosphere acquiring the weight of Guam between Taylor and myself. Taylor here; yet this is just like Guam, him standing up as he sits me down, the mechanics of his practiced insecurity. I sit, shifting my feet apart on the rug. I know where my center is, anyhow; I lean back in the chair.

“It’d be a chase only if I were running,” I suggest. “I had the right to leave time under military procedure and I exercised it.”

“That’s under review,” replies Taylor, packing his pipe with a blunt finger. “For the moment, you’re coming back with me to Pacific SciCom. The sooner we start back the better. Where are your things? Your ticket will say. Show it to Mancek, he’ll get them for you.” Taylor looks at me as he relights his pipe, his gold lighter tight in his hand, hissing.

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I say evenly, “unless you have a criminal arrest warrant and he’s got status to serve it. In that case, I want to see a local attorney.”

“No, now, I…” Taylor murmurs, the faint smile that had shaped his thick lips fading.

“Then show me the orders you have. I’d like to see the authority flow on this one.”

“I make the orders,” Taylor says, setting his lighter down, his face reddening.

“Not for me you don’t,” I say evenly. “I have military status and I’m exercising my leave time.”

“That’s a technicality, Voorst.”

“I’m staying here,” I say.

“For the life of me,” Taylor sighs, “I can’t find out why the military office let you go. I’ll concede the technical grounds of your presence here, but we’ve lost a week already. Let’s get on with it.” Taylor’s bushy eyebrows come together, he punches something through a table console and calls Mancek over. “SectorGold. Casa del… Christ, Voorst, what are you doing with a local residence in SectorGold? I’m in Green, what are you doing in SectorGold?”

It is a nice moment. Taylor sucks on his pipe, glaring at the screen.

“I was with a woman,” I say. “She was taken away from me. What do you know about that?’

“…well, I’m in Green,” Taylor says, expelling a breath. “Christ, Voorst.” He looks at me and his expression twists another way. “That black girl, West Indian? She was working for us.”

“She was?” I ask, my heart sinking. “She was working for you?”

“I’m not saying,” Taylor tells me, beginning to drum his fingers on the table, “that she was doing a very good job. Look, Voorst, SciCom takes precedence over military, let’s not press it. They obviously resent that fact, they’re always splitting hairs over authority flows. We don’t like to abuse our prerogative.”

“Well, you have been,” I say, thinking, She lied—straight-faced lied.

“I’m going to insist on your cooperation. This is an important enough project, a project everyone, even the military, eventually benefits from….”

“Would you say Cooper benefited?’ I ask, my anger rising. “I’m fed up. You ask questions you have no right to ask; my personal belongings have been searched. Maybe you benefit from that, but I don’t see what you’ve done for anyone’s welfare. Cooper was a little odd, but he was no suicidal psychotic.”

“We had no control over that. He did it himself, Voorst.”

“Whose care was he under, Taylor? I’ve felt different since I left Guam, you know that? I’m not so tired any more. Cooper’s whole boring report identified the cause of the accident as an impact event, unknown interstellar material. Why do you need another report? We had that from the beginning. You can find it in every tape from the mission. I’ve told you time and time again that squares with my recollection, and Werhner’s, and Tamashiro’s, and Levsky’s. And Cooper’s, right? But Cooper’s not alive to defend his report.”

“You jump to conclusions, Voorst. Your conclusions color everything you say. You’re a walking example of Heisenberg’s Effect, I’ve observed that, though for your sake I haven’t put it on record. Let me remind you that we draw the conclusions. Of course there was an impact event. What I’m concerned about is why there was impact.”

Then Werhner’s right, I think, it’s SciCom itself, not the dome crew, that should be investigated. Which Taylor must know as well as I do. “It’s my conclusions about what you’re doing that bother you,” I say, “not my conclusions about what happened. Look, have you ever actually finished a debriefing? Or does the crew finally die of old age?”

Taylor tells Mancek to get my things from the local residence, to which they’ve been transferred. I think how I might have been going there with Collette; sigh.

“Don’t touch my bag,” I say to them both, “or you’re going to deal with military police. It may be only a technicality, but I’m staying here.”

“Voorst, you don’t want to do that,” Taylor says angrily, his forehead tightening. My bluff hand—and thinking of it that way, I raise the stakes.

“Don’t tell me what I want. Release my program or you’re going to have to restrain me from using that alarm console outside. I’m serious, Taylor, I mean what I say. It’s already serious enough for me.”

There is another long moment of silence. Taylor glares at me but then leans back. “You really want to stay here,” he sighs. “I can countermand your status, Voorst, I can have that done.” Forward again over the console, Taylor looks at his wristwatch, punches through a program, scowls. “Well, it’s going to take three more days. So Monday. In three days’ time I can wallpaper you with authorizations.”

Taylor looks at me blackly. He has said it himself; three days’ time. I look him straight in the eye; we both know I am not going with him until Monday.

“And I’ll file an appeal to sustain leave,” I say.

“Good luck,” Taylor says flatly, whacking his cold pipe against the ceramic ashtray. “You’re too arrogant, Voorst. You have no respect for us.”

“Maybe because Daedalus SciCom doesn’t know its ass from a wall screen,” I say as I rise to leave.

In the pastel room, Taylor is telling me that he is going to see to it that I won’t fly again, not even out of the service, until he and I are through, not if it takes until the end of his career. Blood rushes to my neck—no bureaucrat can cashier flight crew, what an ugly thing to say—my anger is palpable to me, a thickening of my blood. I slam the door behind me with both hands, as if I want to throw it in his face.

At one time—it was when Maxine was sleeping in my cabin on the Daedalus, and I realized she was seeing Cooper all along—I told myself I wouldn’t let a woman make me feel this way again. Now the woman is Collette, and I am again depressed by the sticky gloom, the heart-thumping mud of betrayal. Seeing Maxine with Cooper—well, they say the first cut is the deepest. I’m not sure. There might be another explanation for the way Collette’s behaved toward me, but I shouldn’t delude myself. I’m certain now that she lied to me about where she was the night she was gone, lied through her soft lips. I know she was in touch with SciCom at least from the third night.

Erica meets me at a D-bar in the trans-port and I am finally able to leave the terminal. It is already midafternoon. On our way to the local residence LasVenus sprawls before us from the elevated freeway, bright in the three o’clock sun. The city, Erica tells me, is a layover for sections of theTube and a separate resort complex, the largest of its kind. I am almost too low to appreciate the spectacle. Glittering casinos, a floating Hong Kong nightclub on an artificial lake, three domed stadiums, emerge miragelike in the distance, along with sports and racing circuits, in a high-rise clutter whose buildings shine like mica sheets under the bright haze of the sun. The centerpiece of LasVenus is a massive new club with a forty-acre garden on its roof, complete with artificial weather—occasional summer storms with lightning streak across its sky, thunder rolls in as if from a distance, rain pours into its ponds. From our distance driving in I can only see the Tower as a beige, transparent high-rise. The shimmering movement of its sides, Erica explains, comes from its elevators; the first twenty floors, which shimmer more than the rest, house an administrative core. In the other direction must lie the ongoing city of permanent residents—rows of drab, blocklike buildings stretch into the desert.

How can I sort out my feelings? It seems useless to try. I miss Collette even as I think, The bitch, the manipulating bitch. Massimo is probably right about these women. And yet…

We take the exit, offramp through a greenbelt separating sectors, cross over a wide, banked track for land-vehicle racing. From the overpass I glimpse two Formula E’s, flywheel-propulsion racing machines I’ve only seen on the videon. Toadlike, awkward in shape, their power is tremendous. I remember hearing they don’t handle well as I watch the lead car lumber into a curve. The oddest thing is the high whistle of their passing.

Our taxi swoops beneath pedestrian level for a kilometer, then ascends for a slow drive down a boulevard lined with shiny, artificial trees and pastel buildings which flash above like gems set in gems. Erica is telling me about shows she wants to see as we drive on. It is the overall effect that I am still trying to absorb. The size still impresses me, not only the size of this district, but of the other LasVenus, I cannot have seen the end of the residence blocks stretching into the desert.

“We’ll have to play it by ear. I’m sorry,” Erica says. “You’re entirely desynched from the program. We could stop somewhere if you like.”

“Why not,” I say.

We wind up at a place in the Tower Complex called the Club Erotica, a big, shimmering bar of several levels, with men and women suspended on small stages, outrageously dressed, some completely naked, some in intimate heterosexual and homosexual pairs. Erica and I sit at a long walnut bar, talk for a while. I feel preoccupied. I am looking for someone in the mirrors, I realize, looking among the scattered blacks. I am embarrassed, angry, and humiliated at the same time.

The suite is laid out like the cabin unit on theTube, a couch/recliner, a window/wall, a kitchen/bar. But here space is tripled and the furniture is larger: a huge, tiered sofa; a white, circular dining table. In place of a shower, there is a lavish bath with a sunken marble tub, the bath illuminated by thin mauve neon tubes which skirt the mirrored walls. From a balcony beyond the sliding window/wall I can see the whole of SectorGold and beyond its freeway border the vast rows of drab, identical residence blocks of the other city. Even from this elevation they fade into the brownish haze of late afternoon without visible end.

When I key into the computer, a message jumps up right into video, a short tape loop waiting for me from Massimo Giroti. He asks me to meet him tomorrow, about noon, at an address which reads like a warehouse number. He doesn’t say why, fades out with a grin. Working for a while at the small console which lifts from a coffee table, I discover that outside communication is not well developed here, and when I look through my bag for the routing book I decided to take along, I have the feeling someone’s been through my things again. Why, I wonder, is the LasVenus page smudged? Even with the routings and the traffic channel I secured just before we landed, I cannot raise Werhner on a live line—one routing I try lists Werhner as off station, the other as on station but unavailable for outside calls. I think they both amount to the same thing. A little later, I decide, I will compose a message, key in, and route it as a teletype, not to Guam’s SciCom base at Agana, but rather to the maintenance station at Utama Bay, where Werhner dives. A debugging rider will make it disappear if someone listens in.

I doze on the couch, and when I fall hard asleep something wakes me—as if the darkness of sleep carried with it something monstrous, something unformed, a nightmare. I recall the darkness, but I don’t remember a single detail of whatever it was that woke me until I am seeing it all—Cooper’s tight lips, his narrowed eyes as he tells me, Let her go, and Maxine’s flushed face, her vacant, embarrassed smile, her watery eyes. Erica is in the bath. Now I am angry, I want to throw that door at Taylor. The thought of Collette makes me sigh audibly.

channel 393/7

sign key 0202/Voorst//

telex medium//

route:  SoCal Center

       Honolulu

       Midway

       Guam Utama Sta, (des.)

       debugging rider: erase if intercept

ATTN:  WERHNER SCHOLE

QUERY: DO YOU KNOW ANY INFORMATION ANOMALIES OUR DAEDALUS MISSION? EXCEPT FOR THE MISSING, AM NOT AWARE OF ONE IN COOPER’S REPORT. BUT SEE WHAT YOU CAN FIND: CHECK WHAT SCICOM IS HOLDING IN ITS BANKS, COMPARE WITH C’S REPORT, WOULD YOU? THE CIRCUS HAS COME TO TOWN, HAD A TALK WITH TAYLOR, REPEAT, TAYLOR HERE. SEE WHAT YOU CAN FiND.

RAWLEY

Once I punch that through I begin getting nervous, my palms sweating—I am always nervous when I compose one of these:

channel 393// 0202/

sign key Voorst//

telex medium//

route: local

       local

       Military Flight HQ

ATTN: MILITARY CMDR, FLIGHT

APPEAL SCICOM ORIG. RECLASSIFICATION TO GUAM SCICOM, EFFECTIVE 10-24.

APPEAL BASIS: ACCUMULATED LEAVE TIME.

S/Voorst, Rawley//Flt Vane Eng. Class 2//codex 292//sign key 0202//

“Too many drugs,” Erica is saying from the kitchen/bar; she is taking one capsule as we settle in before dinner. She is telling me about an older woman she saw while waiting for me. The woman staggered out of a D-bar down the way and fell at the cement curbing of a ramp, fracturing her skull.

“And in a SectorGold street,” she goes on. “I say that’s not her fault, she should have been better taken care of. The thing is not to take so many. I happen to be a moderate person. I mean, I don’t believe in the drugs themselves, just what they open up inside you, it has to be there already. Do you know what I mean? God, she wouldn’t have known if somebody was doing her from the way she was walking. I saw it a block away.”

When Erica comes to the couch, she is stirring Viennese coffee with cinnamon sticks, still talking. She is wearing the tight silver halter she wore when I first saw her in the L.A. trans-port, still slightly flushed from the bath, sweet-smelling.

As she settles next to me I point out that she took a handful of pills this morning—a handful. At the console I have begun retrieving some of the coded information I’ve assembled on Eva Steiner, beginning with a map array from Las Venus DataBase. We both watch it click into place on the smoky bronze window/wall:

“But that’s when I’m flying,” Erica says. “I only do that many when I’m terrified. Taking off. Landing. Cruising. My stomach goes up to here,” she says, pointing to the level of her breasts. “My nipples go crazy. I think it’s all in my mind. I mean, I have to concentrate on getting the ship up, keeping it up. Which suits me for another kind of work, I guess,” she giggles. “But otherwise, I’m very careful. I’m like a monk about what I put in my mouth.” She giggles again. “Though we could try a little D-Pharmacon for kicks tonight.” She focuses on the map, then asks what I’m looking at.

“A local residence,” I say. Then, using Werhner’s trick, I retrieve the personnel file I saw but didn’t closely study before—the listing on Eva Steiner. The data on the screen describes a busy executive, but something is confusing. I can’t determine whether she is an executive in security for EnergyWest, or whether she is given special security facilities for her EnergyWest work. The second, I think—or are they both blinds, covers for something else? She had originally been trained as a nuclear engineer, and seems to fly regularly on the ship.

“My God,” Erica says when she realizes what she is seeing. “What are you doing reading that, how did you retrieve that? Eva Steiner—she’s a Director, look, I told you about her. Oh, Rawley, lover, you ought to just forget it, you’re going to get into trouble. What are you going to do?”

“I’m not sure,” I say, switching off and letting the window/wall clear to show the city beyond. “Don’t you have a report to make?”

Erica raises her hands. “Not me,” she says, then sighs. “All right, look, I told you about her. I’ll tell you everything else I know. This hairy man with glasses talked to me…”

“Taylor.”

“That’s his name. But all he said was to keep you in sight and in good health. Lover, I’m on your side. I told him that’s exactly what I’d do, that’s what I’m supposed to do. That’s all. I think they treated Collette pretty rottenly, I told him that, too. I saw the way they took her. I don’t know what this is all about, except that with people like Eva Steiner, you might get into trouble, so between you and me… I’ve been in trouble myself. It’s not worth it.”

I ask Erica what kind of trouble she’s been in,

“They caught me getting off in L.A. six months ago with a suitcase full of brandy and ampules,” she says, flushing with embarrassment. “I’m still on probation.”

I punch up Erica’s file, run through the security sheet; what she says is true. Courvoisier, Five Star, twenty-four bottles. I could use some right now. “You know,” I say, half to myself, settling back on the sofa, “all I wanted to do when I came here was to get away.”

“Honestly, I didn’t know you were being screened till this morning,” Erica says quietly. “I can’t tell you what Collette’s up to, but I know what I am. I mean, why am I here with you? That’s what I told that man. This is thePleasureTube, I have a job to do, and look, I should be taking better care of you.”

I look into Erica’s slightly glazed blue eyes and laugh.

She laughs, too, pushes back her blonde hair, and sidles near me on the couch. “Well, actually, it doesn’t seem much like work today,” she says, putting her hands around my neck, then trailing one hand across my shoulder. “You have a nice body.” She grins, moving her hips so that her skirt rides up her thighs, still moving her hips. Her other hand has slid down my spine and I can feel my back loosen up. “It’s whatever you want, you know. Don’t forget that. You’re your own worst enemy if you forget that. Anything. Anything you want.”

Her breast cupped in my hand, a nipple in relief on the lame halter, I feel a kind of sad detachment even as my sexuality responds to the touch and the soft weight of her. I ask myself what I have to regret—and as if in answer, Erica’s head falls back, her eyes open wide and their pupils roll back as her mouth hangs open in heavy, self-absorbed breathing. Her legs come up across my lap and she opens her thighs. How overripe, how voluptuous, how enormously sexy she is, I think. And how enormously empty and alone I feel at this moment.

I roll her from me, rise, and ask her to help me strip for a bath.

We go to the Tower Complex to do a little gambling before dinner—risk ventures, Erica calls it. We pass through the viny, damp jungle lobby of a hunting game, the pornographic lobby of a population game—stills of couples having sex flash on the ceilings and walls; their juxtaposition with the formal, ornate chandeliers makes me laugh. We bypass the command center lobby of a game called WorldWarInfinity, curious as I am to know what’s involved. At the moment I have an aversion to uniforms, and there are enough costume generals, both male and female, at the entrance to a bunker mock-up to make me instinctively turn away from the place itself. The game, it turns out, occupies the entire three-floor sector of the complex.

Erica says she enjoys the lavish display here in SectorGold but personally finds it more exciting in the other sectors, where popular games have at stake first-class tickets for the winners, while the losers drop a class. For the losers in the third-class martial arts competition, along with the beating comes a mandatory service assignment for two flights—without the good pay.

I mean to know where I am at all times, but soon enough, in the maze of corridors, intertower ramps, moving sidewalks, different scenes, and bright lights, I lose sense of where we are. There’s something appealing about the traditional gaming rooms; perhaps it is the familiarity of their atmosphere. Finally we begin to gamble, spend a while at a green velvet table in a hushed, mahogany inlay room playing baccarat with couples dressed for the evening. The game quickens my pulse, and it is satisfying to come out a few hundred ahead, a quarter unit, after an hour.

We are looking for a D-bar when we come across StarFlightVenture on the seventieth floor. The hallways of the entire floor are designed to look like hatch passageways, and behind each thick glass door is a computer-linked starship console. The ship is of the newer Eagle class; I toyed with one on Guam and found it almost a duplicate of the Daedalus. Ah, I think, a setup, a piece of cake. All I need to do is shake the bank. I sign up for a unit with a sparrowlike, small woman at the control desk.

The game turns out to be work, but the work is worth about two thousand an hour. I stand just as I had on the Daedalus, at the three-meter-wide central console cluttered with monitors, vane keys, thruster links, and microweather sequence units; a dome ceiling follows the flight. Erica’s pretty excited when I stop just over three thousand ahead. I’m a little swept away by my luck—over half the money, according to my own calculations, I owe to luck—and when the money’s presented at the control desk, she does a little dance of ecstasy when I give it to her. Then she calls upstairs to the roof garden from the desk attendant’s phone, asks for “something very nice, we aren’t counting the small change tonight. The very best,” and says that tonight an option dinner is on her.

“Turns out there’s something for everyone here after all,” I tell her with a grin.

We eat at one of the smaller, though the most expensive, of the rooftop restaurants of the Tower Complex, teahouses in the garden of a temple. The garden is sculptured, its air rich with the exotic odors of jasmine and ginger. We are bathed and clothed in kimonos, wrapped with obis, and taken by the hand by geishas to our separate teahouse on a knoll from which the stage of the Tower Shell is visible a half kilometer away, in the Moorish garden. And we see some artificial weather, a misty, thirty-second thunderstorm just as we finish our first round of warm sake.

Erica is flushed with pleasure, eating oysters. The last time she ate oysters, she tells me, was at her second wedding, when she was married to a Japanese linguist in New York. This brings it all back, she says.

Earlier, as my back was being scrubbed by a young, tittering Japanese girl, I had genuinely relaxed for the second time today, but again the comfort doesn’t last any longer than the money I won. What a day. The more spectacular, the more dreamlike, LasVenus has become, the angrier a part of me feels—anger at myself, at what this trip has become, at SciCom most of all. It’s so easy to lie back and let it happen here. Erica is rambling on, telling me about her love affairs. The memory of her second husband and a half liter of sake lead to a train of thought which makes her conclude that men have disappointed her over the years. Her first marriage, she tells me, was to a psychologist. Perhaps that accounts for the sheer quantity of her talk; she really has been talking incessantly. What, I wonder, can I do? I know very well from the maps I pulled this afternoon that Eva Steiner is probably less than a kilometer away, Collette in her vicinity; there’s been someone at her suite all day, but I can’t get a live line through.

After sashimi, tempura, Kobe beef, greens the like of which I’ve never seen, I suggest that we walk back to our suite. Erica has stuffed herself, and she tries to beg off with a painful moan. I tell her a little exercise is just what she needs, let’s walk.

After only a few blocks, Erica is dogging it; she complains that she’s already taken one long walk today, fetching me at the trans-port. I ask her if she’d like to take a cab—hoping she will; what I have in mind does depend on her wanting to go away.

“God knows,” she sighs. “Please?”

We cross an interbuilding ramp, descend a set of elevators to transportation level.

“I’ll walk,” I say as she slides into the back seat of a taxi.

“To each his own. I think you’re crazy.”

I laugh. I am a little drunk.

She blows me a kiss as the cab drives away.

And so I go alone to the dark-glassed, curve-sided high-rise that contains Eva Steiner’s penthouse. In cross section the building is a cloverleaf. I enter the main door—security in the lobby is satisfied only to see my green card, the class identifier —and I’m in before I can wonder about it. I find C leaf on the building plan, look up and think eighty floors up, a little drunkenly looking up, trying to picture Eva Steiner in my mind. According to her personnel readout she is 5’2” and dark, not the blonde bulk I had first imagined when I heard her name.

The doors of an express elevator open and I lift up the first sixty flights like a launch, the place close, the rug-covered walls smelling new. Then local elevator service takes me to seventy-eight and the small, elegant, and empty transfer lobby for the penthouse elevators. I signal for the penthouse lift without hesitation—there are two cameras in the hall above the French mirrors—the quicker the better, I think. It arrives in an instant, I begin to step in even as its doors begin to open—then step back toward the Louis XIV furniture; to my surprise the elevator is occupied.

A brawny, uniformed woman with short hair stares sharply at me, then slaps the inside STOP button of the machine.

“What do you want?”

“I’m here to, uh, check some of your secondary circuits,” I say. “Sorry, we’ve got some out on the lower floors.”

“That’s not possible. Go away.”

“Hold on,” I begin.

But already the doors are closing and she disappears. The elevator no longer responds.

Alone in the lobby, I use my stiff green card to slip the lock of the service-stairway door. I climb the dim stairway up its one flight and wind up in a small area facing a freight elevator—it doesn’t respond, either. I am standing absorbed in thought when a shaft of light floods the stairway from below.

The same uniformed woman orders me to come down.

When in my embarrassment I reach the doorway where she is standing, she shoves something into my chest, a tubular metal frame—she has a rifle jammed in my ribs, she’s as strong as a man.

“Hey,” I say, backing up against the doorframe. It seems important to me at least to stay in sight of the lobby, the service stairway is too much like a dark alley, I can’t get over her strength.

“That’s twice,” she says. “The third time you try to penetrate this security barrier, somebody’s going to shoot.”

“Closed party, huh?” I try to say with a smile.

She glares at me, perspiration in the hair on her upper lip, eases the weapon back, and I turn to walk slowly away. Then the back of my skull explodes, white like a huge wave broken just behind me, sense falling forward, see in the instant before my palms cushion against the carpet, looking back, rolling, the butt of her weapon raised like a sledge.

I am up, seething, as she pulls it back, a malicious smile on her face. “Get out,” she mutters. “I mean what I say.”

While Erica sleeps, her black satin robe collapsed beside me on the couch, I sort through my flight bag, folding my shirts, my blue flight suit, my old leather trousers. I’ve turned numb, my head throbs. Sitting on the edge of the couch, I take out the small package of photographs that had just been processed when I was leaving Guam. Most are from Utama Bay, photographs of Werhner with arms spread on the beach, the reef from the hills above, the Magellan statue, the base. One photograph of me before our shoebox, dingy cottage; I can almost see the heat of the dusty flat of the base rising beyond it. But I had begun the cassette of film months ago, and at its end, the sequence reversed in my looking, are the three photographs I had quickly put aside when I had first seen them as I waited for the flight out of the military terminal at Agana on Guam. Cooper, whose voice still rings in my ears, grins behind his beard in two, and in the third he is standing in the background, behind the three women who tended the program console, worry lines creasing his face. I stare at the photograph, stare at Cooper there still alive, wish the photograph could speak. Where was he in the ship then, at the blow? I vaguely recall seeing him, so he wasn’t in the program wing—obviously, since it was the small program pontoon that was seared off at its hatch. Though why wasn’t he where he belonged when we blew? That never seemed to matter on the way back—and, I think with a sigh, doesn’t matter very much now.

I shuffle aimlessly through the photographs of the vivid, bright green and yellow hills above Utama Bay, the soft blue of the Pacific; Magellan’s statue, a memorial to his landing at Utama Bay, is before my eyes. I think of his circumnavigation, the first loop, of the two unknown Portuguese sailors, the only two to survive the trip, Magellan dead in the Philippines. Those two Portuguese sailors, unknown: the first men to circumnavigate the earth and know in their bones how going straight out, sailing dead away, leads you back to where you began. Magellan’s face is blank, his gray stone eyes without pupils. I consider what a vast ocean the Pacific, uncharted, was to those frail wooden ships, sailing straight out. How impossible, how simple, it seems.

It happens at night, in memory, dream, and darkness. When I come awake, my own perspiration cools the sheets, but my skin is burning. I remember this: a woman floating in space, then a funnel of light, deep, blue light, into which I am falling, and it brightens, brightens into white as I fall faster and faster, and it is as if my bones explode, my body one with the vision of white light, a howling sun, a whirling sun.

I rise from the bed, stand naked on the small balcony,and watch the constellations of lights from the city, a dull thumping at the back of my head, the night air a cool ache over my body.

DA6//

Erica steps out the opposite door, and I’m wondering just how discreet I have to be with her. We are on an industrial road off SectorBlue, but close to the automobile track. I can hear the whine of Formula E.

I try the door at the nondescript metal hangar whose address Massimo gave me. It is locked. I lead Erica into the grandstand to look over the side of the building—and the racing circuit opens up as we climb into the seating tier, a broad green expanse, a patch of woods, the track weaving out into the sector and back again. The seating tier angles along an S curve in the track, looks obliquely into the trackside of the warehouse: open hangar doors. Not a warehouse after all, but a cavernous garage whose business end is a series of busy pits, wide tires stacked four high, sleek cars. I decide to leave Erica in the third row, tell her she doesn’t have to stay if she doesn’t want to, then slip down through an unlocked gate to trackside.

Massimo, a big man, is easy enough to spot on the near side of the garage. At first glance I think he’s organized a cafe, but there he is behind canopies and tables, between two blood-red cars of immaculate presence. They are antiques, elegant cars without a blister of corrosion on their lacquer-smooth surfaces. The cars obviously aren’t Formula E, their design is so much older; one is a racer and the other a coupe. Massimo is talking with two technicians in red jump suits, his flushed face almost matching the color of the cars.

He grins when he sees me, opens his arms in greeting, then they open more broadly to the cars. Of course. They are the surprise he predicted the day before yesterday, what he’d had flown in.

“These come from Milano,” he says expansively, “only for these days.” The larger of the machines, he says, is the only surviving Ferrari Bianco del Guidici. It is low, combustion-powered by a V-16 slung between fat rear tires and topped by mirror-shiny exhaust stacks. The car radiates speed and quality, gives me a strange elation that seems to please Massimo as much as it pleases me. In this world of the videon, there is something familiar about the Ferrari, a world which seems more like home.

“And other,” he says, showing me the smaller but equally striking two-seater coupe, “is Lancia. Not the power, but with Lancia—ah, with Lancia you are making love with young Neapolitan woman,” he laughs. Massimo shows me the Lancia’s unique strut suspension, and we look under its hood as he describes its antiskid braking console. More than a coupe, it has run at Le Mans. He describes the Lancia’s ability to slide as a lover might describe the curves of his woman. The sculptured surface is so mirror-smooth that the Lancia reflects itself reflected in the Ferrari, translated through the Ferrari and transposed again into the parabolas and loops of its sleek lines. The technicians are sloping off the Ferrari’s tune; it takes another ten minutes for its thunderous rumble to meet the test of Massimo’s ear.

We wind up sipping Campari and waiting for lunch under a trackside canopy, my head finally coming right. I guess I hope Erica will just get bored and leave, though when I check she seems to be enjoying the show. Giroti’s pit is just at the beginning of the S curve, and from our folding chairs we can watch the new Formula E’s, looping the track in practice for the Energy West Grand Prix, whistle toward us, braking furiously, enter the chute, then chatter away. Massimo explains that, Formula E aside, with what his mechanics have been able to do, the Ferrari can hold its own on a track as tight and curvy as this one. His Bianco, as a matter of fact, held the standing lap record at Monza until a mere ten years ago.

Massimo wants to hear about Collette, he wants the story from its beginning. “With all sexy detail. Do not spare an old man.” He smiles. I begin telling him, and we soon get sidetracked in SciCom’s interest in me. So I tell him what I know about that, too, grateful that he’s willing to listen. In the shade of the canopy, eating a Roman squid salad, I relate my interview with Taylor yesterday, my confusion about Collette as well as my confusion about why they want me back on Guam.

He’s amused by my feelings for Collette, fascinated by our first meeting in what I had thought was the VIP lounge of the L.A. trans-port. A wonderful story; he smiles. He thinks Collette is probably not a malicious woman, but that I was a madman to trust her. The key, he tells me, to seeing her again, if that’s what I really want, is SciCom’s interest in her, which hinges back again on their deepest interest in me. So we loop even further back and I begin another story, the one which begins more than four years ago, out on range with the Daedalus.

I tell him how SciCom left us flying, for all practical purposes, blind; how the Committee Pilot, unable to decide on anything but the most general direction of our survey, left the tangent angle of event-horizon approach to the dome crew’s day-by-day response to prevailing macroweather. I tell him how we nervously sat out the lull, the circumstances I recall at the blow, the three who died, Maxine included.

“This is at black hole,” he says. “Fantastico.”

“Well off,” I tell him. “Theoretically, had we been near the event horizon, or blown there… well, I wouldn’t be telling the story. Of course we took precautions, we had a safety factor of more than ten. It’s only speculation, but do you know what the physicists say?”

“Yes, I know black hole. Prego, this is what I, Giroti, say—a star described by a poet, poeta romantico—where a traveler can lose his freedom in space and become trapped forever—where the traveler is given freedom in time instead. Amazing possibility.”

“We came as close as anyone has,” I tell him. “It was a pretty hairy trip—it’s still hairy.” I explain how Cooper, who had written up our report, became separated from us at recovery in the Pacific and later died, how the rest of us have been kept on Guam for a pointless month. Massimo is charmed by the way I managed to slip away, and we drink a toast to that day—for what it’s worth now, I think.

In the end, given the circumstances, he doesn’t think that Collette is a SciCom employee assigned to watch me from the beginning of the trip; rather, someone they’ve used, who used me in turn.

“But who can finally tell?” he wonders. “Only this woman knows, if she would tell you. If you could trust her.”

When I tell him that I’ve tried to get in touch with Collette by trying to get in touch with Eva Steiner, and that there is a barrier around that woman, whether it’s private sex or security, I don’t know—he lifts his hands palms upward and sighs.

“Both,” he says. “And then we come back to SciCom. After I talk with you I remember this woman’s name. She is well known. This woman is like a man, she walk like a man, she wear clothes like a man. She is Director of EnergyWest—but that is like saying SciCom, they are together like a hand which slide into fitted glove. Perhaps they are using her, I think, using the strangeness of this woman to see that you don’t talk with Collette. This is a circle we are making, now I see. I tell you I have seen things with SciCom which frighten me—things like this. I will give example how it works. We have plutonium plant in Brazil with terrible discharge for a week—one week, I tell you. The river entirely dead, the people downstream sick, for a hundred kilometers, some die. Why is this? SciCom data overrides discharge controls, everyone knows this is so. But investigation goes on for six years now. I give you another example. In Argentina, two thousand cattle die from a wrong inoculation; it is SciCom instructions again. That investigation is lasting eight years, this is joke to me, but it is not joke to SciCom. For yourself, they cannot question your competence, since you have flown your ship back. But if they have made a mistake, they will never take responsibility. They never admit mistake. You know what my agriculture man says in Argentina? ‘Until they have other explanation, they have only investigation.’”

“My navigator thinks they’re trying to set us up. I don’t know,” I say, rubbing my chin. “I would really like to talk to the woman.”

“Non pensarci piu,” Massimo says, waving a fly from its loop around the salad. “Forget this one—you will see, there are others. And in this place? The man who wrote your ship’s report, dead—ahhh. For your sake, I do not think it best you see this woman they take from you. Perhaps you will have luck with appeal—then, maybe. Almost always these people in SciCom are harmless, castrati—no, like men who play with themselves, masturbati. But if you catch them—ahhh. They do have… power,” Massimo says quietly, his hands flat on the table. “They protect themselves, like Mafiosi. They do what they want.”

A white Formula E whistles past as I lean toward Massimo; a shiver runs down my spine. For an instant I see Cooper’s face in Massimo’s, they share the same broad nose, the same thick hair. “You’re afraid of them, too?” I ask, thinking of my run-in with security last night. “Do you think Werhner’s right? He thinks that Cooper’s death…”

“All right.” Massimo nods, smiling to himself. “I exaggerate. A man dead—this frightens me. But yes, I exaggerate. This is only my advice, to leave them alone—what can you do, a pilot? Ah, Rawley, let us not think on these things for now, let us forget them for a time.”

“I’ve been…” I start to say, then notice Massimo is looking at the cars.

“You think you can handle Lancia?’

My pulse quickens, I tell Massimo I’d like to try.

“Well, come, I am going to run Ferrari. We shall see if perhaps you can drive, too.”

The pleasant coolness of its leather upholstery aside, my immediate impression of the Lancia is that its steering is too tight and its suspension very stiff; I can feel every bump in the track, the car seems jittery. But as I learn the course, its straights, banks, and S’s, I pick up speed and with a rising howl I enter a tunnel of motion and the machine itself seems to smooth the ride. The cockpit becomes comfortable in the moving air, and the car begins to feel the way hand-cut clothing feels—close, comfortable, another skin—seems more like flying than the days in theTube. The sunny track is a good, long ride—over ten kilometers—on a banked, twisting surface like an idealized freeway through the city. I roar past separate grandstands in different sectors, through a tunnel of high-rises, down a straight through a greenbelt with a murderous, decreasing radius hairpin at its end, accelerate up into a set of elevated S’s whose edges raise the hair on the back of my neck the first time through. In the curves the Lancia resists braking, it wants the line, it propels itself through a corner with its own fine calculus of speed, weight, and cohesion into a beautiful slide.

The Formula E drivers practicing the course for the EnergyWest Grand Prix make for fast traffic. Massimo laps me twice, then I hang on his tail to catch the pull of his slipstream and sail with him through the turns, feeling the G’s accumulate, feeling the car adjust to sustain them just on the line. He shows me some very nice driving, takes us both past two Formula E cars in the tight S’s by finding and holding a deeper line of descent at a higher entrance speed. I learn something in ten laps, the tranquility of Massimo’s driving. Despite our speed, his driving seems unhurried, an exercise in simple grace.

We pull into the pits, talk about the track, then switch machines. The balance and the instinct for the line are the same for the Ferrari, but what a powerful racing machine. When I’d floor the accelerator in the Lancia, the car would dig in, push me back into the seat, and go; in the Ferrari in any gear the wide rear tires burn blue, and I am slapped back into the seat as acceleration forces my breath. Until I get its feel, the Ferrari is too slippery for me; once I make speed I lose it completely in an embarrassingly long slide out of the wide S’s near Massimo’s pit. Then finally it comes on the roller coaster of the final turns. I get the feel of the car, or it gets the feel of me, and I’m able to bear down the straights almost with the Formula E’s and slip past the slower ones in the S’s and hairpin.

When we are finally flagged off the track to accommodate Formula E time trials, Massimo is pleased. A hundred meters from the exit gate of the tight S’s, he was still nose ahead of a Formula E whose driver, he tells me, looked at him and checked his gauges, then nearly lost it on the next embankment—where Massimo was able to slip under him again.

“How can those cars have a soul,” he asks as we wash at the mechanic’s sink, “if driver can know how he is driving only by watching numbers?” He tells me that when he was racing, he would practice with the tachometer of his Ferrari taped over. That kept his mechanics awake nights, he laughs. He was with his Ferrari like this, he says, snaking one finger around the other.

“But now”—Massimo smiles—“I prefer Lancia. She forgives, like a woman she forgives. At my age, a man need forgiving, yes?”

I laugh and tell him I’ll count having driven the Ferrari among the genuine pleasures of my life.

“Ah, yes,” Massimo says. “This is like hologram, everything comes true. I think you are right for that car, reckless enough to run too fast into a turn to begin with. How old are you—I mean, you tell me proper time.”

“Thirty-five.”

Massimo nods; his age exactly when he drove the first Ferrari Bianco.

“What’s the right age for Formula E?”

“Fifteen,” he says with a sneer, his eyebrows raised in irony. “The car has two gears—two gears!”

Before I leave we sit under the canopy again for a time, and I ask Massimo if he can do something for me.

“Of course,” Massimo answers with a wry smile.

“I’d like to meet Eva Steiner,” I say. “Just to talk. You never know. You’re a UN Governor—is there something you could do?”

Massimo fills his wine glass, fills mine, then lifts his and drinks. “Worse than myself,” he says with a grin. “I’ve told you about Eva Steiner. And you could not get a single live line to her? Rawley, I don’t know.”

“Will you try?” I ask. “This isn’t SciCom, just one woman.”

“Well, I will see. Domani,” he says. “Tomorrow. We will talk more then. And do more driving. Agreed?”

When I look for Erica, I check the time and realize that half my stay in LasVenus is gone already. I have one tomorrow left—two, if I can count a morning a day. I find Erica almost in the top row of the grandstand seats. She has a sunburn and has had, she tells me, a very nice sleep.

After a relaxing hour in the aquaplease whirlpools, Erica and I have dinner again at the temple garden, the Japanese restaurant on the roof of the Tower Complex. I haven’t done justice to the rooftop—we are tucked in a small corner where the temple rises on an artificial hill beyond carp ponds, the night sky is beyond, the impression is one of a mountaintop. In the other direction, the Japanese garden shades into an orchid grove, which melts into a tropical garden of ferns, fan palms, royal palms, MacArthur palms, butterfly palms, queen palms. Today I notice people milling around in English, French, Dutch, gardens, other restaurants and clubs, of course, and a central Moorish garden with its show. We can take part in gaming and risk ventures through a plug-in console that is now on our low table; it seems people are arranging to meet one another through the consoles as well. Erica is absorbed in a complicated, penny-ante card game through it—bureaucrat’s bridge, she mutters. Different strains of music float through the air, in our cubicle the Bartok I program. Directly above us, the sky is being used as a holographic projection screen for cloud displays to complement the artificial weather. Between weather displays, the clouds are dreamlike, suggestive, shaped into stories both fantastic and erotic—it would be pleasure enough to lie back and watch.

This whole affair—not only LasVenus, but theTube as well—is easy enough to understand in terms of technology, but harder and harder for me to comprehend after what I saw today walking back from the track with Erica to Casa del Sol, a walk that consumed an hour. I kept along the perimeter; the other city is separated from this resort by highway, mostly, or by high fencing in two rows with a bleak no man’s land of fifty meters between. On the other side the housing was crowded, steamy—there is no dome here as there is over L.A.—and the city seemed to stretch away interminably, A population problem exists there; the contrast with LasVenus resort is immense. The air even in SectorGold has a kind of acid smell to it at street level, masked by gardenia and jasmine here so far above.

I am getting my bearings here, yet time seems to be slipping away too quickly for me to make use of my temporary stability. In the end I find Werhner still impossible to raise, Eva Steiner locked into a private world whose surfaces seem without seams.

I find myself sitting on the edge of my low chair, not following what Erica is saying about the plot of a narrative cloudshow, evidently an erotic version of a popular daytime serial. Erica, it turns out, has been married four times in all, each marriage more a disaster than the last, at least from the way she tells the story through dinner.

Finally I suggest we go—my appetite is back, but I have to move to work off this nervous energy. Erica ate too much, I think, she moans painfully at the idea of getting up, her sunburn is bothering her, too. It doesn’t make any sense to do something stupid again, I suppose, and I think that if I walked home alone again, I might. And so we go down to the lobby to look for a cab.

“Rawley Voorst.”

We are passing leather couches in the lobby near the activities screens when I hear my name. I see the older man, Mancek, first, before I see Taylor himself, rising from one of the couches by the bright show-program screen.

“Enjoying yourself?” I ask halfheartedly.

“Quite a place.” Taylor smiles. “Quite a place, don’t you think? They have everything here.”

“Everything,” I say. “Including people following you around.”

“Don’t be so hostile, Voorst. The Tower Complex is open to anyone who can afford it,” Taylor says calmly. “We’re just looking around, I thought I’d let you know we were waiting. Won’t be long.”

Taylor is looking at Erica; her tight dress is tighter still after dinner. His thick lips are slightly parted, he’s leering, if you ask me; his eyes wander from her breasts to her belly to her breasts, straining under the silver lame. When he asks what we’ve been doing, he asks her.

“Look,” Erica says, “I told you yesterday I’m assigned to him and not to you. We’re doing just fine.”

Taylor’s face reddens, he looks as if he wants to say something, but his lips tighten and he doesn’t. Behind him, in the sleek lobby, the rainbow-hued screen displays show programs: two women dancing with one another; behind them the same, increasingly sexual movements are being followed by a dozen pairs of men:

SIDEREAL CONCERT/SIDEREAL CONCERT/CONCERT

DUNES/DUNES/DUNES/DUNES/DUNES/

SHOWTIMES// 10/12/2/4/6/8/10 10/12/2/4/6/8/10

As we climb into a small, elegant cab I thank Erica for the way she behaved.

She shrugs, adjusting her skirt under her thighs, letting her hand slip over to my leg. “I don’t blame you for not trusting me,” she says, “but I meant what I said. I’m on your side, Rawley. I like you, that’s all—and so long as you don’t complain about how I treat you, there’s nothing they can do to me. There’s something with him, anyway—did you see the way he looked at me? He’s got about as much tact as a truck. What a creep.”

“You would have liked the debriefing,” I said sardonically. “He was the one who told me that a guy I knew pretty well from the ship—a big, healthy, part-Indian guy named Cooper—killed himself. Told me with a kind of grin.”

“He could work for Service Control,” she sighs. “Same type. I can just see my next assignment, some dried-up old cheapskate who doesn’t need an hour’s sleep for two weeks.”

“Well, thanks again,” I say, kissing her on the cheek and drawing her closer to me in the lush darkness of gold sector local transport.

^{Chapter 6} Risk Venture Vector

What I will always owe Erica is this massage. Her hands are strong and confident as she flexes the contours of my neck muscles, straightens something in my back I didn’t even know was out of place, cures my headache for good. But I feel a little depressed this morning after, awake again in the middle of the night—I feel as if it’s a morning after, that says enough.

Silk sheets again. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to sleep on a cot after this. I’d settle instead for my old bunk on the Daedalus, or even a freighter’s gravity hammock. Here I have silk sheets and a triple-sized recliner that adjusts to my weight like a lover. I remember the first morning of this trip waking on silk sheets, opening my eyes, and the odor of Collette, so pleased that she hadn’t disappeared in my sleep.

Erica is telling me that Tonio is guest-producing a videon special from the Moorish garden tonight. He called this morning to invite us both to the sound stage for the secondary shots he will be setting up all afternoon—says, moreover, that he’s dropping the male service he picked up in coming here.

“Go if you want to,” I say. “I’m going to do a little more driving.”

Erica is pleased that I don’t mind. “Just promise you won’t get into any trouble,” she says, her hands slipping upward on my neck to ease the base of my skull.

“Well, I could lose it in the S’s like I did yesterday,” I say.

“Keep your head down. Drive carefully, will you? I do feel responsible for your health, special instructions or no. Promise?”

The seating tier adjacent to Giroti’s pits is virtually empty again today, except for a young, stylish camera crew in the top row and a middle-aged couple who seem to be curious about taping. We are on the very edge of SectorBlue, I think; from the plastic-backed seats of the tier the S’s stretch away to the right along the green swath of infield, toward one of the stadiums. When I turn to the gate, the pits obliquely to the left, the line of cars seem like patients in a trauma center linked to electronics consoles and plastic tubes among the stacked tires.

Once through the chain link, I see that Massimo is with someone, a shorter man, I judge automatically from the soft black leather suit; then when I get closer, I realize from the turning profile the someone is a woman—straight forehead, angular chin, fiftyish. They are talking and I stop ten meters away, wave hello to Massimo’s mechanic. The woman with Massimo has her hair short-cropped, she is aiming some sort of pointer at the Ferrari’s cockpit.

Massimo sees me, calls “Ciao, Raoul-lay,” his hand comes up in the air to wave me over to the Ferrari. Halfway the engine starts up with a rumble, then a mean crack of revolutions. The smell of nitro exhaust slices through the thick odors of oil and rubber.

The woman seems transfixed by the car—she doesn’t even notice my joining them. She hugs herself to the sound of the engine—Massimo has the oddest look on his face; his eyebrows are raised nervously and his cheeks are reddening as if he wants to shout something but knows he won’t be heard above the engine.

It shuts down quickly at the wave of his hand.

“Director Steiner,” he says to the woman, then turns to me. I can see the smile on his face. He started talking too loud, his voice drops dramatically: “Allow me to introduce a friend, Rawley Voorst. He is pilot and driver. Rawley—Eva Steiner.”

Massimo looks at me through his polite laugh, I look at the woman again—her gray eyes take me in without recognition or interest. She nods, then moves next to the Ferrari, putting out her hand. “Feel the heat,” she says to herself; “there is nothing like this, nothing.”

Of course. Her hair is black, but it’s been dyed black. In every other way she fits the description of her personnel readout, though I don’t think I would have recognized her. She has a small, straight nose, thin lips. Something’s not right about her eyes. There is a glaze to them, or a sheen. Drugs, I think. D-Pharmacon. I look at Massimo, he looks as uncomfortable in her presence as I’ve become, his smile seems as uncertain as mine.

“Director Steiner is a great admirer of all Formula cars—and she has hydroplane, think of that, Rawley,” Massimo says, trying to start a conversation, but Eva Steiner is absorbed in the cars—the feel of their metal, their leather interiors, the sound of their engines. She acts as if I’m not there, barely Giroti, and I think he shuts the Ferrari cockpit from her approach for just that reason.

“It was really kind of you to let me come,” she says to Massimo. “I should have shipped in my own Formula E—my delicious Formula E. But even that’s not quite the same. There’s something wonderfully cruel about the Ferrari, don’t you think? You should have it painted black—everything black.”

Massimo’s forehead creases in annoyance. “My country, Director Steiner, you see…” Before he can even begin to explain racing colors, she has moved around to the rear of the car, where she squats down and rubs her hand across the surface of the wide rear tires.

“Very good,” she says, stroking.

Massimo is livid. “Would you like to drive the car, Director Steiner? Perhaps then you can get what you came for. Take it on the track, I don’t care. Perhaps you can even drive it.”

“Can I drive it,” she says flatly, rising and flexing her back. “Yes, I can drive it. I’ve driven Formula E in competition.” Then she smiles thinly. “You really are a darling man, Governor Giroti, don’t be upset by a… fantasy. I would love to drive it.” It is a pointer that she has—or something like one, a thin black cylinder about a half-meter long—and her hand has been gripping it so tightly that her knuckles are white.

Then she relaxes; and I can see Massimo relax, too.

In a few minutes Eva Steiner is checked out in the blood-red Bianco, takes some stimulants, and moves loudly onto the track. My hearing is numbed by the noise and for a minute we can’t quite talk.

“I’m sorry I get angry,” Massimo begins sheepishly. “I do not like that woman.”

“I don’t, either. But look, I appreciate your getting her here.”

“I find out last night she has a passion for such things,” Massimo says. “I tell you she has hydroplane also, can you imagine? She is worse than they say—in this place, yes, she can do these things.”

At the rising whistle I look out toward the track and follow a wedged Formula E skittering through the S’s.

“But as you say, what a woman this is,” Massimo begins in a tone that sounds strange. “Skin the color of life.”

“Of death, you mean,” I say, turning to see what he is talking about, seeing that he is looking over to the seating tier. Three women dressed in charcoal suits are being seated by an older man dressed in the same style.

“No, not Steiner.” Massimo is laughing, beginning really to laugh, “Rawley…” he says.

In profile she is unmistakable—perfect forehead, aquiline nose, full lips that pout a little, skin the color of cafe latta.

The woman is Collette.

She is staring ahead, oddly inert; when she looks our way from twenty meters distance, her face is slack. She meets my gaze with a blank stare and a faint movement of her lips; doesn’t really seem to know who I am.

“Yes, yet it is true, they all look, for this time of day, Rawley, troppo imbalsamara—what you say, em-balmed.”

She doesn’t seem to know quite who I am even as I point my index finger at her and gently pull the trigger of an imaginary pistol. I hear the low whine and rumble of the Ferrari, look to see the bright red car pounding too high toward us in the S’s. Eva Steiner is visible for an instant, fighting the wheel. She skids along the fence dangerously high, makes it down for the first turn, but the Ferrari is pointed sideways, and she has to let the car slide itself up and out into the far curve, almost to a stop, a dead stop, before she is downshifted and fishtailing into the straight, hard after a Formula E that had blown by her in the second turn.

“Porca madonna,’” Massimo says in disgust. “She thinks she is driving Formula E. My car!”

When I saunter over to the gate, the older man with Collette and the other two women comes over and puts his fingers through the steel links, keeping the gate between us.

“We’re just fine,” he says. He is older, but he isn’t as old as Eva Steiner. His combed black hair is thinning and his complexion is pasty, his eyes watery. “We’re all taken care of.”

“I didn’t ask,” I say. Collette and the other two women are staring ahead at the track. “What are their names?’

“Private party.” He smiles. “That’s just the way it is.”

“Oh, I’m just looking.” I smile back amiably. “I see they’re all dressed the same way. Attractive, really attractive.”

“They’re all named Max, actually,” he tells me with a smile, moving aside a little to show the women off.

“Max?”

“That’s what Eva calls them,” he says, putting himself in my way again, the nervousness returning to his smile.

An irony compounds itself; Max is what we used to call Maxine. Up in the stands the film crew has a telephoto trained on the chute to the S’s, I hear the Ferrari, turn to see. Eva Steiner is too high again. She loses a tenth coming in, two tenths in the way she sets up for the next curve, she still doesn’t quite have the feel of the car.

Collette never takes her eyes off the track—but it doesn’t look as if she’s following any of the cars, either. Or maybe it’s me; when she seems to start to turn my way, I avoid her. She knew all along, I think, she knew all along. Collette looks like heaven in a waiting room of hell.

When the rumbling Bianco del Guidici eases into the pits, Eva Steiner is peeved, her face wet with perspiration, her makeup smeared. She grants the Ferrari its balance but claims the car is too light, says so even as she is climbing from the cockpit.

“I prefer Formula E,” she states once her helmet is off and she drinks some ice water—she scoffs at her lap times, the last few of which weren’t that bad. “It is a matter of power over style. I prefer the power of Formula E to this relic.”

I think Massimo, who has been looking with worry at the Ferrari, has had about enough from Eva Steiner. I can smell the car now—the sharp, overripe odor of nitrogasoline, the heat of it. There is a long, embarrassed silence, Massimo is simply refusing to speak, looking past Eva Steiner’s smile and mocking eyes.

“I could beat you in the Ferrari,” I say evenly. “I don’t think it’s the car.”

The space between us for a moment turns electric. Eva Steiner raises her eyebrows, Massimo falls a step back and looks at me with surprise. Eva Steiner says she considers my remark a challenge; her nostrils flare slightly as she says that.

“I don’t know.” I shrug, thinking, Push this woman, not knowing quite where this is going to go. “I don’t have much time for games.”

“Men only say that when they’re not very good at… games,” she snaps. “I think, with the Governor here as a witness, you’re obliged to prove what you say or retract it. Apologize.”

“I don’t see I have to do either,” I say, rubbing the back of my neck.

Now Massimo’s jaw has gone slack, he is looking at me in wonder—and I’m wondering again what I’m going to say next. If anything is going to happen, it had better be soon.

“Not interested,” she sneers. “Not much of a man, either.”

“Well, what’s at stake here?” I say. “Let’s get this straight. If you’d like to race, fine—that’s about a twenty-five-second handicap I’ve offered you, each lap. But there had damned well better be something on the line. I don’t race for kicks.”

“Ah, straordinario, fantastico!” Massimo exclaims. “I forget I am in LasVenus, yes—there is something in the air of this place!”

“Perhaps you’ll wind up as one of my slaves,” Eva Steiner scowls at me.

“Or you one of mine,” I answer even as I am trying to be certain I’ve heard what she’s said.

The silence of our circle is filled with the noises from pit crew and track, but it is a silence that is charged and palpable. Eva Steiner is appraising me, looking me over from my forehead to my flight shoes, looking straight into my eyes with a slight squint to her own. “I didn’t know you were so inclined,” she says slowly, her pale lips curling into a thin smile.

I say nothing, only raise my eyebrows slightly to suggest that she hasn’t begun to guess the range of my inclinations.

“Very well,” she says, reddening slightly. “I can have a decent car here in two hours. Governor Giroti, I would be pleased if you’d act as our witness. The young man has named the stakes. The loser will become the winner’s slave for a day—until theTube lifts off. Those are my terms. We’ll race one lap from a flying start. Acceptable?’ she asks. “You’ve named the stakes,” she says without really waiting for my answer, verging on anger. “We’ll see who can drive.”

“It is because of this place—do you know we are between two large fault lines in the earth? There is something in the seismicity of this place,” Massimo says after the woman and her service leave abruptly. “The risks men take here are exceptional. I have seen it, that’s why I come. The air here smells of ozone from burning dreams.”

Technicians are pulling the hood on the Ferrari in the cool shade of the metal and concrete building; there is an odor here, the odor of the heated engine, the burning smell is familiar. It takes me back somewhere, pulls me inexorably; yes, I think—the odor of seared cables, of metal too hot to touch, of the last time I saw Maxine. Now to think of Maxine is to think of Collette.

“How far can Steiner go?” I ask. “Let’s say if I can’t catch her. I figure she does have fifteen seconds, maybe seventeen. What can she do to me if I can’t make those up?”

Massimo shrugs. “Who can tell? This is why I wonder if I should have stopped you. The flying start is bad for you, good for her. As for your wager? She is Tube passenger, she cannot be controlled; you see how it is. So I think you know what it means to make this wager with such a woman. Her slave for a day—enough. But to take that risk—this is beautiful, it is passion—for a woman, Rawley…”

“Well, I’m in it for a while now,” I say. I tell Massimo I’d like to take the Ferrari out for a few laps. It’s amazing how my head has cleared.

Later, I determine the optimum fuel load for the Ferrari on the full-sized terminal in the air-conditioned office/console room, separated from the pits by a glass wall. Since we’ll be racing only one lap, I will be able to save eighty kilos in gasoline weight, I realize. I plug that figure into a formula and find I will pick up ten or eleven seconds over a full tank. I’m going to need those ten seconds. I know I will lose almost that much time to the more powerful Formula E in the first long straight following the initial S’s, and I’ll be too far behind by the back straight to use the pull from her slipstream—so I’ll have to count on being close enough at the final turns to win.

Mulling over the formula, I punch up channel 393 and do a double take at the screen when I realize there is traffic for me—something from Guam through a debugging rider.

Something from Werhner. I set the printer to relieve debug, the message is holding as a blur, waiting for the proper decoding signal—I key in and watch it appear quickly, letter by letter, on the screen:

channel 393//IN IN IN IN IN IN

sign key 02087/Schole

telex medium//

route:  Guam Utama Sta.

       Midway

       Honolulu

       SoCal Center

       LasVenus Local (des.)

debugging rider:  erase if intercept//only 393

ATTN:   RAWLEY VOORST

ACKNOWLEDGE QUERY 7-8. SO NOW YOU THINK I WAS RIGHT, YOU SKEPTIC.

YOUR SUGGESTION TO CHECK WHAT SCICOM IS ACTUALLY HOLDING LEADS TO INTERESTING RESULTS, FRIEND.

TWO GROSS ANOMALIES—MESSY BOOKKEEPING OR A BLIND.

FIRST// THERE IS NO OUTGOING DATA ENCODED UNDER DAEDALUS TITLE IN GUAM DATABASE—OTHER THAN THE DATA IN COOPER’S REPORT. SECOND//DATA CONFORMING TO FLIGHT PLAN, EXCEPT FOR DATES, ENCODED IN PAIR WITH INCOMING DATA, SHIP TITLE ICARUS, TOUCHED DOWN FOUR YEARS AGO.

LOOKS LIKE A BLIND? I WILL TRY AND SORT OUT THIS SPAGHETTI.

YOU GOT ME OUT OF THE WATER. I’M FOR SEEING THIS THROUGH, ADVISE YOUR END. ESTIMATE HERE TWO DAYS FOR SEARCH PROGRAM.

WERHNER.

My blood pressure is up, adrenalin into my system for the fifth or sixth time today, my right hand is throbbing. Down from my palm the two scars describe a lazy figure eight lying on its side across a descending lifeline; the dull pain is a kind of stiffness to the heel of my hand, I feel it at each heartbeat. Beyond the thick glass wall of the office, mechanics seem to swim over the Ferrari, the two Formula E cars up on hydraulics beyond it as if floating in a vivid dream. There is a light change in the glass and the scene looks unreal to me.

channel 393//BREAK BREAK BREAK BREAK BREAK

routing: Pre 1

        debugging rider Pre 1

ATTN: WERHNER SCHOLE

TAYLOR HERE FORCING MY TRANSFER GUAM MONDAY. APPEAL TO MILITARY DOESN’T LOOK GOOD. I WILL TRY TO CHART ONE LINE FROM HERE, PERHAPS WE CAN GET A FIX IF YOUR DATA CHARTS.

CROSS-CHECK ICARUS PERSONNEL AGAINST SERVICE RECORDS, OMEGA SYSTEM AGAINST DATE OF MANUFACTURE, ETC. THIS ONE REALLY LOOKS LIKE A BLIND.

COULD USE YOUR BRINE-SOAKED SKIN, I MAY BE IN FOR A FEW WELTS. WAIT UNTIL YOU HEAR ABOUT THIS ONE. MAKES VIVIAN FROM PROGRAM LOOK LIKE FABLED JEANNIE D—REMEMBER HER?

RAWLEY

I clear the terminal and sit with the fuel formula I have written on a pad, the cold white dancing in my vision. Vivian, the lady with the whip, and fabled Jeannie D., the milk-white English girl—I wonder again if Werhner remembers Jeannie D. from the other leave in Hong Kong.

CLEAR TRACK/ /CLEAR TRACK/ /CLEAR TRACK/ /

RISK VENTURE VECTOR/ /RISK VENTURE VECTOR/ /RISK VENTURE VECTOR/ /RISK VENTURE VECTOR/ /RISK VENTURE VECTOR/ / / / TWO PARTICIPANT ONE LAP RACE AFTER FLYING START/ / TWO PARTICIPANT ONE LAP RACE AFTER FLYING START/ / / / SPECTATOR WAGERS CONCOURSE NINE/ /SPECTATOR WAGERS CONCOURSE NINE/ /SPECTATOR WAGERS CONCOURSE NINE/ / CLEAR TRACK/ /CLEAR TRACK/ /CLEAR TRACK/ /CLEAR TRACK

“All system go? Ready?”

“Si.”

“Buona fortuna.”

“Grazie,” I say to Massimo.

My knees are rubbery, but that will pass once we’re moving—sucked into the Ferrari, that’s how it feels, my legs extended, the seat cradled around me, belts snug. Massimo signals the starting cart, a thunder cracks the air just behind my head, the cockpit is lowering, and I secure the releases with both hands, lean back into the headrest. Alongside me on both sides the bulbous fuel tanks. This is driving a bomb, I think; what it would be like to crawl out of here. Not a car to crawl from, but to race in; what an idea, just what Massimo would say, cosi simpatico.

I ease the tight gearbox into its high first, let out the clutch and the Ferrari staggers into the sunlight. Massimo has for us ten minutes of empty track, his contribution at an enormous price. Eva Steiner’s Formula E is angled on the first bank of the S’s, ass end up for the roll to start. I roll to a stop just at the end of the pits and work the choppy engine. As it warms it smooths from velvet to silk; higher on the track I watch the black, squat flywheel car shimmer in the heat, Eva Steiner absolutely motionless within, glaring at me.

Massimo walks past with the white starting flags, gives me a high sign. I signal ready, thumbs up. Eva Steiner begins to creep down the track when he raises the flags—we will roll through a lap together and then take the flying start from this point, race to this point again for a finish.

I think of Collette for an instant—then I get angry as hell.

A flag points at each of us and we go.

In a moment I am traveling through the blurred tunnel of rapid motion, hard on the right rear tire of Eva Steiner’s broad, squat machine, the eerie high whistle of her engine audible through the bone-shaking roar of the Ferrari’s V-16 and the whine of its gears. Once out of the S’s, we boom into the straight alongside one another and she picks it up. Halfway through the greenbelt she pushes the pace of the prerace lap almost to the Ferrari’s top end. She is pushing it in the pickup lap, why, I wonder—for a startled moment I think we might have actually begun the race.

But no. I ignore the line for the decreasing radius hairpin and position myself at her right rear tire again—she’s passed me—she’s in the high chute faster than she’s prepared for, judging by the way her rear end is chattering, almost a skid. Ah, the speed she made in the straight was meant to spook me, but she wasn’t ready for my being so close, it’s spooked her instead.

Coming out, I squeeze into second and roll to the inside, blow by the wallowing Formula E.

For the rest of the lap—through the short straight, the elevated S’s, the back straight, and reentry turns—we run at a smooth and even hundred, she wants me alongside and I accede. Without turning I can see in the periphery of my vision her helmet turned toward me. Coming into the flying start the tunnel of motion surrounds us both, I concentrate on my breathing, take it down from fifth to slow us both, I know this is annoying her. She does seem shaken by her mistake—but she can afford a mistake and still take the lap we are about to run.

A hundred meters from Massimo, who’s energetically waving the flags, I brake hard, pop behind, and switch sides, jam the throttle. As we cross Massimo’s lap line and the race begins I am above Steiner on the track. She’s lost me until she looks for her own line in the S’s—but that’s where I am, up on her right, the Ferrari doesn’t belong up here and the wheel fights the track. But the Formula E has to slow, and I drop in front of it.

My mirror shows her inches behind—and I tap the brakes. The Ferrari weaves and her pass is disabled; I downshift, downshift, tap the brakes again, take us out of the S’s in what seems like slow motion, is slow motion, down to forty. We begin the run at the straight, but this time she is far below her torque range. I have the Ferrari’s sweet spot in third, then fourth, and before she can catch me I’ve picked up a few seconds, then move up behind to get sucked into her slipstream, the hairpin ahead.

We are both sliding too much in this turn, its radius decreasing, becoming sharper and sharper, I bang my hand and jam a shift, the wheel is pulling fiercely. Still, I get below and out again, the Ferrari so flawlessly smooth as I get on it that the blur of acceleration makes me feel as if I am flying over the track, flying toward the elevated S’s.

I almost lose control—wind, a gust of wind?—my mind registered nothing, had to have been blank—the Ferrari breaks loose, I feel a stab of panic drifting up to the Formula E, passing but then behind in its slipstream inches behind the black car, the Ferrari straightens out and Eva pulls the two of us tail to nose into the approaching curves.

Ice grips my heart—for an instant out of control, had I not been caught by the Formula E’s slipstream, who knows, I don’t remember just why I broke loose—but now, surfing through the elevated S’s, the car is in full communication with the paving, responds perfectly, tracks its line as a sailboat in perfect trim sails itself. My breathing settles back to something like normal. Inches behind the Formula E, these turns so wide my advantage is to use her greater speed by riding her vacuum, I gain seconds this way and I ride close, the inch between us a static moment amid the smear we scream through, so close that she cannot shake me until two hundred meters into the back straight. She begins to pull away meter by meter, the distance between us increasing more and more rapidly when I lose the vacuum from her tail. But I think she is too late, the straight won’t be long enough for her to get what she needs for the last rights and lefts that will finish the race.

By turn eight, three to go, I am back at her right rear wheel, up on the high side of the track, teasing her line and watching her rear end chatter and slip. I can take it down to the Ferrari’s proper line and get by, but I wait, want her higher still, push her through the next two turns.

I know I’ve won; I tell myself, Easy, now, as we perch up for the last left, shift down a gear and right into the center of the sweet spot of maximum torque as I aim the nose for the lowest line I can imagine and slip by her, through the chute and thrown out by its massive G’s propelled dead center on the track, booming toward the checkered flag, Eva Steiner a length or more behind—like tick-tack-toe, lady, and I had the first move—cross the line, I am exhilarated, high out of my mind, float through a victory lap on the sunbathed track, barely make that on the gas I’ve got remaining.

I guzzle from a split of Asti Spumanti, accepting Massimo’s congratulations, I am radiant. What driverly moves in the final turns, Massimo tells me, not a mistake. Why did I drift up in the first straight? Reckless but somehow right, since I gained time. What a triumph for the Ferrari, he laughs expansively, trionfo, vittoria.

This is genuine pleasure, I tell him, impossible to program, dazzling to grasp.

Pulling into the pits, I saw Collette in the first row of the grandstand, wide-eyed and carriage erect as I have not seen her since our first meeting.

Helped from the cockpit of the black Formula E, Eva Steiner is ashen, a pallor to her face visible under the sweat-smeared grime.

“Si raccoglie quel che si semina,” Massimo says.

“Which means?”

“How you say? If you dig the pit, you will fall into the pit.”

She pulls her racing helmet from her head, swings it by its chin strap, arches, and slams it into the car—then lets the helmet fall clattering to the concrete floor.

“You drove well, Eva,” Massimo says kindly.

She takes a long breath and glares at him, at me. “I’m mortified, of course,” she says to me. “But you’re reckless. I didn’t see that in you, but you’re reckless, you’re dangerous, now I can see that in your eyes. You nearly killed us both in the first straight.”

I slosh some wine in my mouth and watch her expression. I still don’t know what happened there, and it seems inconsequential; something happened, yes, the Ferrari was out of control, but from that error I locked into her slipstream and perhaps won the race because of it.

The skin surrounding her gray eyes is creased with fatigue, but her head is erect and her lips tight. “I might have won with my own car,” she says bitterly. “I could have pulled far enough away from you. Such a race isn’t worth my life.” She is motioning toward the chain-link gate, to the pasty, older man looking after the women of her entourage.

“Campari?” Massimo offers. “Eva, you drove well, you have no need to be ashamed. Rawley has run the lap in 202. 202!! That is faster than my own best time.”

“Perhaps you will allow me to make some arrangements,” she says to me. “I’m not so sure I feel bound by our agreement. You’re a dangerous man, I can see it in your eyes, I don’t trust you. You tried to kill me in the straight.”

“Now, Eva,” Massimo says, “such things can be in a race, do not misunderstand—”

“Prego,” I say, interrupting him, I talk to Eva Steiner. “I never did like your game. You’re about as interesting a prize as a lovesick Doberman. Tell your man to bring those women over here. Maybe we can reach a compromise.”

An anger rises in my blood as I stand before Collette, look from her body to her face. Her hair is tucked under a vaguely military hat the same charcoal as the severe suit she wears; she looks severe, but passion and fright bleed through the glaze of her green eyes. Her lips—her lips are in almost an inviting smile, full and glossy, they compress as I squint every so slightly at her. When I ask her to turn and she does, she ends up facing me but not looking at me now, her lips tightly drawn, her face paling. Her whole bearing, the scent of her, the warm familiarity of her face so close to mine, make my heart skip a beat. I exhale nervously and turn away.

“This one,” I say. I’ve gone slightly out of breath and look to Massimo, whose thick features are flushed, whose suppressed grin begins to move my own.

In the end I listen to Eva Steiner nervously asking that what happened this afternoon, our agreement, the race and its outcome, be kept confidential. What she does on theTube as a passenger is a private matter, she says—this affair might be a disaster for her on the outside, it would be a humiliation.

She is relieved when I tell her I wasn’t thinking of filing any codex numbers to make official Collette’s transfer, manages a thin smile when she suggests that there are ways in which we might enjoy one another after all. “It is your recklessness,” she says. “I didn’t know. If I had, I wouldn’t have raced you. There are other games we might have played,” she goes on, her smile actually widening.

What a strange thing for her to say—to a pilot whose last eight years have depended on control in the face of default, on total attention to the operation of a flight to return a lame ship. She is a small and insecure woman, finally—at least that’s what shows in her when I tell her I don’t think she’d enjoy what I have in mind, and I laugh.

“Yet we might see one another again after all,” she says before she leaves. I send Collette over to the canopied trackside table where Massimo and I had lunch; la fortuna mei, Massimo keeps saying. He is going out in the Ferrari to better my lap time “as act of love,” he laughs. In which case, he says, still laughing, maybe it is he who should see Eva Steiner again.

“It is the magic of this place,” he tells me. “Everywhere else is like Rome now—so many people, barely the food, there is no joy in life. This place. Ah, if all the world could be so.”

An Italian steward is adjusting a sun screen as I sit across from Collette, cappuccino for her and pastries between us. She won’t look up, but I can see that her eyes have become wet, and the long, thin fingers of her right hand tremble as she takes her coffee.

“Well, you sure do look familiar,” I say. “But I’m not sure I know who you are. Max, is it’?”

She looks up, hurt, her breasts are heaving. “My name’s Collette,” she says. “Service codex 782, service codex.” She’s gorgeous, the bitch. Her face is flushed, her head is uncovered now and her hair blown back, her lips are shiny.

“Look here, Max,” I say, “tell me about SciCom retirement pay. Is it as good as they say it is?”

“My name is Collette,” she pleads, biting her lip. “My codex is a service codex, a service codex.”

I tell her that she talks exactly like a computer terminal. I mean to make her smile, but her eyes close and her face pinches up and she begins to cry, tears slipping down her high, flushed cheeks, her breath coming in sobs, a napkin in front of her nose. For a minute it seems she wants to bury herself in its fabric. Her shoulders shake, her breath becomes a gasp, and she turns her face down toward her knee—too much for me to bear. I sigh, move my chair over next to hers, and put my hand on her shoulder, try to calm her down.

“I’d like to hear the story,” I say. “You can still talk to me.”

“Please don’t make me talk about that woman. Please don’t send me back to her.”

“I don’t see that anybody deserves her,” I say, half to myself. “I just thought we could talk about the time we spent together. I’d just like to know the truth, Collette.”

“Oh, Rawley, I have so much to say to you. I should never have lied to you in the first place. God, how stupid. And that woman, too, she’s part of it. Service Control transferred me to her for discipline. They knew we went off the grounds when we went hiking—they were watching us, Rawley, I didn’t know what to do.”

I lean back in the chair—well, I fall back, too, trying to comprehend. This is new—watching us; I think: That pavilion. A blue-white Formula E approaches through the near turn, the rising and falling whistle of its passing bringing a chill down my spine.

“I didn’t know if the man I saw was really you this morning,” she says. “It was like a dream. We had just been woken, and the drugs…” Collette drinks half her coffee at once, puts the cup down, and looks at me tearfully. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” she says, her breasts heaving with a deep breath. “Oh, Rawley, you drove so well.”

There is such a look to her face that I can do nothing but lean closer and kiss her warm, damp lips—and so taste the salt of her tears. “Thanks,” I say. “Erica said you didn’t leave, they… took you away. Whichever, I felt pretty bad to find you gone.”

“Oh, this job,” she says, squeezing the napkin in her fist. “How I hate this job. That woman and her games—God, what a pain in the ass being a slave—every time something like this happens, I say to myself…”

I give Collette my napkin to wipe her face. Her lower lip is quivering as she tries to laugh at what she’s said; her makeup is smeared. I don’t quite know what to think. Everything’s become so complicated in the last two days, and Collette—well, what has she been through? What, exactly? I can’t take my eyes off her.

“I need to know how you’re involved with SciCom,” I say. “I need to know what they’re after.”

“I want to tell you, Rawley. I want to tell you everything. Can we talk here? God, how I wish I’d told you the truth. I lied to you and then… Do you know why I lied to you? I lied to protect this job, this lousy job, this ugly job. How stupid I am. You trusted me and I fell for you. I had already lied, and the things you told me about yourself that afternoon… meant you really trusted me. I felt so bad. But I didn’t tell them anything. I said we talked about sex, we spent the whole time talking about sex. God, it was awful.”

’Told whom?”

“I was straight with you until I was missing that night, believe me. I swear to you, Rawley. Do you remember? The third night, at the rest house? There was a signal from Service Control for me to remain, you left… and these two men came in an electric cart and took me across the meadow. They questioned me and questioned me and told me I had to report on you. They weren’t just interested in that, either. There was one with bushy hair and glasses, he’s as bad as Eva Steiner, he’s…”

“Taylor,” I say. “Taylor was at the biosphere reserve.”

“That’s right,” she says. “Taylor. And the other one’s name was Mancek. They had just come in, I think they had just found out where you were, because they wanted to know what we had been doing since Thursday. I don’t think they knew where you had gone from Guam.”

But they knew exactly where I was then, I think, yet didn’t approach me.

I stare at the track at the sound of Massimo’s passing, see the Ferrari as a red blur. What do they want? I told Collette about my hallucinations, my nightmares, that second afternoon. They are a personal key to something, I’m certain of that—the horror of the experience, I think, though that doesn’t seem right. Is that what they want? Do they want to destroy me with the horror of the blow? Is that what they did with Cooper, was that his psychotic episode? My visions aren’t horrible, only having them is…. It’s spooky, not right.

“And then after the fantasy co-op. It was about four a.m. I didn’t betray you, Rawley. I made up some stories, and that’s when they knew I was lying. I told them we never left the grounds on the day we had. They knew we had hiked off. They turned me over to Service Control. He told them to ‘see that I’m taken care of,’ that’s what Taylor said. The next thing I knew, there was Eva Steiner….”

I bite my lip and look around, look up into the stands and see the videotape crew still at work, shooting across the track, some people in the stands. It is becoming like the ship again, life on the Daedalus, my life consumed by problems of navigation and confrontations with SciCom, looking for a way to go but not drifting—as I have been, I think, as I have been since we touched down in the Pacific a little more than a month ago.

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?’

“Please,” Collette says. “Please don’t be like them. I am telling you the truth. Rawley, they’re going to try to take you back to Guam. I thought they had.”

“You don’t say,” I mutter.

“Oh, Rawley, please, I’m telling you everything I know. Believe me, in the end I wanted to protect you. Please let me stay with you. I’ll do anything you want me to. Even if I only have a day—you’ll see. I just want to be with you again. I want to sleep in your bed. Maybe there’s a way we can spend the rest of the trip together. In more time I can show you. I love you. When I thought I’d never see you again, I kept saying to myself, ‘Oh, shit, Collette, you dummy, oh, shit, you did it so wrong….’”

I take her smooth hand and move the gold bracelet at her wrist, feel the warmth of her skin, she’s feverish. “I saw the same men two days ago,” I tell her. “I’ve filed an appeal, but they’ve set up orders that ship me back to Guam tomorrow morning. They’re pulling me back.”

“God, how I hate this world,” Collette says in a shaky voice, looking away. Then she sobs.

I squeeze her hand and there is a distant siren, then a siren close at hand. Yellow lights begin to flash along the track, the scattered crowd is climbing the grandstand to see something in the distance, I rise, I can see it from where I stand—a column of dirty black smoke mushrooming from the far side of the course. Massimo’s pit crew is up and phoning, his car lapped a few minutes ago, he is still on the track. Nothing’s come by under the yellow—and now the track lights flash red and stay red as the fire-crew alarm moans a kilometer away and sirens whine and scream from all directions.

I see the Lancia coupe still in the shade, the chief mechanic begins telling me to go, I am going, anyway. I clamber into the cockpit and fire up the engine, rap it to a purr. Collette is standing where I left her, tall and erect, her dancer’s body motionless, her hand over her mouth. I sigh; it still makes me angry to see her. I motion her in.

There are cars scattered, stopped here and there on the course under the flashing red warning lights. I weave the Lancia through the turns cautiously in second and third, watching for Massimo’s Guidici. A red and white ambulance moves a half kilometer ahead, full speed, the wail of its siren blending with the sirens farther off.

We pass down the main straight. The pits are filled with cars, jump-suited mechanics, spectators. The crowd in the grandstand is up, watching the distance. The black smoke rises off to the west, not far off to the west now, a narrow column near the ground fanning into a growing cloud.

We swing through a wide left. Ahead is the shorter straight, the chute of its exit hairpin blocked by a welter of emergency vehicles, more than fifty people milling on the track, the brake lights of the ambulance flash red. Beyond is wreckage. I cannot see Massimo’s car; every racer on the infield border is squat Formula E.

The smoke is deeply black, dense, rising slowly in its own weight. Chemicals ooze over the road surface at the inner edge of the crowd down from the crown of the track. I slide the Lancia, barely moving, through on the infield edge, on the infield. There is a single, burning car on end against the concrete outer wall of the curve, the wall itself is smeared black for a distance, the flames are orange-red, searing, the car itself invisible in its compact fireball, the acrid smoke wafts around—and whump, there is a minor explosion. I think, Fuel, combustion, Massimo, while a piece of crumpled sheet metal catches the periphery of my vision. Clambering out of the cockpit, I see scattered fragments on the infield. Blood-red. Ferrari.

I push my way through the crowd, spectators have somehow gotten onto the track, the car is still burning, upended and burning with orange-red flames, the heat is palpable and intense. Chemicals now plume toward the track wall in arcs, the fireball abating, but the smoke for a minute becomes a dense gray fog in which we are all consumed.

The car falls to its side, its cockpit creased, charred metal unmistakably the Ferrari—its frame folded on its driver’s side—the flames begin to settle under the load of foam. I have searched the crowd with a sinking heart for Massimo, don’t want to look at the wreckage, but do, and focus, and see: the mangled sleeve of a jump suit protruding from the wrenched metal, limp as if empty. Metal crushed like wadded paper. I have to turn away.

“Who is it?” Collette is asking. “Rawley, is it that man?”

I stumble past and she turns from the fire, I feel myself gagging from the sharp odor, look into the blank reflective faces of vehicle crews, see in their faces the strange mixture of satisfaction and awe in the face of destruction so complete.

I have walked down the track. Higher toward the wall at the chute to the turn there are two wide black swaths smeared on the concrete. Someone is moving toward me through the thin edge of the crowd, a technician rolling an instrument along the road surface with fierce attention. The technician wears thin-rimmed glasses, steps carefully, absorbed in following the dead center of the lower swath along the banked surface, the ticks of his instrument just audible through the welter of other noise.

“Skid?” I yell to him, my voice uncontrollably cracking. “A hundred meters of skid?”

“More than that,” he yells back without looking up. “Don’t look like near enough, wasn’t near enough. That machine was at two hundred when it hit.”

At the hairpin, I am thinking, the decreasing radius hairpin, the slowest curve on the track.

A hundred meters away the wreckage is still smoldering; ash and acrid smoke hang in the air. The site is encircled by red flashing lights, yellow lights, blue lights, while eerie figures in silver flameproof suits approach behind their own chemical clouds, making a way for a white van backing perpendicularly up the track to the Ferrari.

I look down at my feet. Squat down, look closely in a numb daze at the wide, distinct tire marks on the road surface—rubber seared onto concrete, welded. I see only waste at first, then for an instant I am frighteningly disoriented. The rubber fragments vulcanized into oozing tar masses gather on the wreckage side of the texture of the concrete; I feel reversed on the track.

No, I think, this is not exactly a skid.

I try to follow the line with my eyes: it weaves twice, then disappears at the thin edge of the crowd. I look beyond at the wreckage from a higher point of the track.

The flames have abated, but not the smoke. Two of the men in fireproof suits are bringing the body out while the other two ease the creased cockpit with long rods as tall as they are used as levers. The body: limbs hang loose, the flameproof driving suit is streaked with char. For one wild moment I am thinking, Survived, survived, but before I can even move, the ambulance attendants have opened a large dark bag, a body bag. Massimo is laid within, his lifeless body sealed by one of the white-suited figure’s long pull of a cord.

Collette is kneeling on the infield edge of the track, up from her heels as if in prayer. Her body shakes and she sways, shudders. Her hands at her stomach, she leans forward and vomits, not once but again and again and again, shuddering and swaying, again and again and again.

“Better? Better now?” I am wiping Collette’s forehead with linen from the ambulance, soothing her and cooling her face with the wet cloth. Her hair has gone stringy, lipstick gone, we are both of us sweating from the sun and our states at the grass of the infield—she is sitting now, quietly sobbing, her face warm, slightly puffy.

“This goddamned place,” Collette sobs in sudden anger. “I hate this place, I hate this place.”

Her dark clothes are in disarray, she lifts her knees and sobs into her hands. She has long passed the point of caring about herself, her naked legs glistening brown in the sun.

“You’ve been through enough,” I say. “Come.”

“Oh, Rawley,” she sobs.

“Lean on me,” I say. I want to walk her away, but she seems not to want to move. I hold her warm body next to mine—she is pressed against me and clings, I can feel her breasts pressed against me, I can feel her heart beating heavily.

“I’m through,” she says. “I’m going to quit. I don’t care what they make me do, this is my last trip. I can’t take it any more, I just can’t take it. Rawley, I’ve seen too much of this. I don’t want to ever see people destroying themselves again. Never again.”

I wonder. I think about getting on as a commercial pilot somewhere—SoAm, Africa. A different future. Not like this, I’ve had enough of this, this place, my life since Guam.

Collette is turning hysterical now, her chest is shuddering with sobs. I hold her tightly, as if to make my strength her own. The smoldering, steaming wreckage, white wisps of chemical fumes, fill me with a sinister chill, anger. Collette is shaking against me. “Oh, God, oh, Jesus Jesus God, woman,” she says to herself, “does it have to be this way?”

I help her up and toward the Lancia, walk her slowly a few steps, and she wants to walk on her own, then leans on me. She is a tall woman, her shoulders only a flat hand lower than mine—my arm around her, she naturally turns into me. Beyond her distress her womanhood bleeds into her walk, her hip rhythm against mine, her breasts palpable through my thin shirt. Her breathing is regular now, the wreckage behind us. Rich liquid red in the hazy sun, the Lancia makes me think of her and Massimo at once, the feel of her warm body, his blood burned black on the legs of his driving suit.

I could go, I think. I could stash the Lancia, be on the road at first light tomorrow morning and through the perimeter before Taylor was ever awake, long before the office end-processing my appeal could act.

I wonder what’s out there. My impulse is to run south. The location maps I’ve seen show wide access through the perimeter west of the trans-port, heavy traffic to the adjoining city; once through, just trust my sense of direction and hope for Mexico. I remember stories of a dried-up Rio Grande, a border like Swiss cheese—it excites me wondering what it’s like out there.

At the car I kiss Collette to comfort her, and myself, I suppose; once our lips touch, the kiss becomes deeper, longer, a loss into one another. She whispers that she wants me, more than anything she wants me.

We make love in a private lounge in the warehouse, lock ourselves in. We hold each other, have sex with a passion that can only come from such close pain. We quietly shower together, and afterward, sitting in the silence of the room, I tell Collette of my idea to bolt from LasVenus once I’m ordered back to Guam tomorrow morning—to stash the Lancia tonight and to take it through the perimeter before Taylor even knows I’m packed.

As I tell her, her expression changes from loss to determination, and a brightness comes into her eyes. She takes a deep breath. “I’m coming along,” she says. “If you’ll let me, if you want me, I’m coming along.”

In the middle of the night I wake from a deep sleep, shivering and sweating at once. I’ve seen something. The vision of the woman suspended in space, arms spread as if crucified, her features indistinguishable, but the void beyond as vividly present as the sink I lean over now, its presence palpable and vast, cold and endless.

I look up into the mirror, the blood has gone from my face. The mirror reflects the mirrored wall behind me, the back of my head, and I watch the mirror in horror as the room in the room in the room becomes a corridor of infinite regress.

I sink to my knees, shaking, my hands slipping on the cold rim of the sink. I fight to catch my breath, suck in a draft of chemical air, and vomit into the john.

DA8// 5:42:19… 20… 21… 22—the digits blink from my chronometer as I adjust its strap on my wrist, its grasp the pull of a familiar hand; I have not worn the Seiko since Guam. I awoke twenty minutes ago at first light, Erica facing the window/wall with her back to me, her arm cantered over her face, one knee up and her foot hanging over the edge of the recliner. Collette lies toward me, the flat of her hand on my chest, her breathing almost inaudible, twisted toward me so we lie thigh against thigh—yet her touch is as light as the thin blanket’s. Her lips are vaguely pursed in sleep, and as I kiss her, her eyes come open and she slowly, languidly, smiles, then moves against me; the two of us are naked under the satin sheet. We make slow and quiet love without waking Erica, who tosses once, moves with a muffled grunt when we leave the recliner, who lies there still sprawled on her stomach deep in her rest. I feel good now—so much better in general, I think, since I’ve decided to go. Collette moves toward the kitchen, she wants to put together a basket of chicken, fruit, cheese, wine, and the rest, enough for a few days.

Erica doesn’t know our plans. I agree with Collette that Erica might try to cover for us if she did know. We will tell her that we are going to spend the early morning watching the Grand Prix and boarding theTube for today’s late-morning liftoff from there.

The sun is rising and I go out to the small balcony to look beyond the city as Collette wakes her. The air is still and the haze light as the sun shows a liquid and brilliant line on the rough horizon, its enormous mass tucked behind a range of mountains, the line rising into a dome above them with the incipient thrust of a launch. The atmosphere is shifting from gray to spectral and vivid red. This is the farthest I have been able to see. The city in its low urban fog stretches far into what looks to be scrubby low hills rising to foothills to a mountain range in the east, forming a north-south line of ridge. To the southeast, roadways are obscured in the steel-gray fog, but the land looks ripe for a road laid flat through opening desert country.

Collette is wearing a pale green bandana, a pale green blouse, and dark shorts, a walking snapshot from a picnic. I tell her to pack some stimulants in case we need them. She already has.

channel 393//IN IN IN

sign key 0208//SCHOLE

telex medium//

route: Guam Utama Sta.

       Midway

       Honolulu

       SoCal Center

       LasVenus Local (des.)

debugging rider: erase if intercept//only 393

ATTN: RAWLEY VOORST

FIRST//ICARUS ENCODING IS CLEARLY A BLIND. SECOND//SOMETHING IS BREAKING HERE. I THINK SOMETHING HAS CRACKED.

ALL SCICOM SCREENING TEAMS IN CONFERENCE UNDER SECURITY, NOT MILITARY SECURITY BUT SCICOM’S. YOU REMEMBER THOSE NAZIS.

BASE CONFINEMENT FOR ALL DAEDALUS CONSOLE PERSONNEL LIFTED BUT NO RUMORS FROM PERSONNEL OFFICE OF LEAVES. SAW KNUTH, HE SAYS ALL FUTURE INTERVIEWS RESCHEDULED.

OF COURSE I REMEMBER JEANNIE D.

WERHNER

“What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know,” I tell Collette. “Makes me nervous. I’d like to know before we take off. But I don’t think we have a choice about waiting. Wait another hour, maybe.” I honestly don’t know what to do. I know we’ll have to pass a gate on the way out, I have tried to put running it out of my mind. I tell Collette she could always stay. “For what?” she says. “Stay for what?”

They are just opening the Administrative Center at the Tower when I run up, deep in the bowels of Personnel Section, Military Concourse, Flight Assignment, Force 8A—sleepy uniformed clerks unlocking doors and files, switching on machines, arranging their desks. A minute ago I had a terrible scare: down in the lobby I’m certain I saw Mancek, his shoulders slumped with fatigue, I’m certain he didn’t see me. I don’t want to be here long—I’ll have to disappear until something comes through the line. I wonder if I can talk one of the clerks into a discreet call up to the roof garden, perhaps—I don’t want Mancek to see me here. I’m more certain the information about the appeal will have to sit and process here before Taylor sees it.

I have to fill out a tedious form for an inquiry; the yawning clerk who leans over the counter on his elbows to watch me is only eighteen or nineteen. This is taking too long. I look into his slightly glazed, innocent eyes and wonder about an approach. Not money but a favor; he looks decent enough, pink-faced and earnest, to respond.

“Mmmm,” he says as I turn the form around to him. “Appeal. Already filed. You need to enter your local residence… here. And sign line three.”

He laughs at my birth date and says I must have been out on a long one, laughs again. I ask him if he can do a personal favor for me—I need to know the appeal result before SciCom does, it’s a problem with my commanding officer, he’s going to be pissed when he finds out about this and I want to talk to him in case it’s denied.

The boy scratches his head, says, “Hold on. I think we had some stuff come through in the last hour—you know, time lag from the East. I bet nobody’s even picked it up yet.”

He is gone for a minute that seems like forever: 07:33:13… 14… 15. Clerks move papers across their desks in slow motion, I move out of sight of the door, watch the clerk through another wide doorway in the next room reading down a yellow teletype sheet he is picking up from the floor behind the printer.

He saunters back, still looking sleepy. The counter is cold under my hand.

“Voorst. Rawley? Codex 02-292. I mean, Captain, sir. Captain Voorst.”

I look at him and the door at the same time.

“Wanna see for yourself? This is supposed to go through channels, but I don’t see any harm in your looking at it, got a local rider.”

He hands me the tear sheet:

sign category//002

message category//MILITARY ORDERS/MILITARY ORDERS

SUBJECT//LEAVE STATUS, VOORST, RAWLEY, SIGN KEY 0202, FLT VANE ENG CLASS TWO, RANK CAPTAIN

COPIES TO//LOCAL FLIGHT ASSIGNMENT, LASVENUS FLT ASSIGNMENT CENTER, HOUSTON LOCAL SCICOM OFFICE, LASVENUS SCICOM HQ, GUAM BASE

ORIGINATING OFFICE//FLIGHT PERSONNEL ASSIGNMENT, WASHNGTON

ORDERS FOLLOW ORDERS FOLLOW ORDERS FOLLOW ORDERS

APPEAL OF REASSIGNMENT FROM LEAVE TO GUAM SCICOM

STATUS: 

APPROVED APPROVED APPROVED

DECISION BASIS/ACCUMULATED LEAVE TIME

ADVISORY//GUAM SCICOM, PERSONNEL OFFICE

PREDICTIVE ATTACHED FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES:

VOORST, RAWLEY, TO REMAIN ON LEAVE FOR THIRTY-DAY PERIOD BEGINNING 7-10 ENDING 8-09. ELIGIBILITY FOR LEAVE EXTENSIONS TOTALING 120 DAYS FLT CREW HNDBK 17.442 REV. #2332.

ORDERS END////LOCAL RIDER FOLLOWS LOCAL RIDER FOLLOWS

*********** ADD ADD ADD ADD ADD ADD ADD ADD ADD ADD ADD ADD

********** LOCAL RIDER LOCAL RIDER LOCAL RIDER LOCAL RIDER

COPIES TO//VOORST, RAWLEY

LASVENUS SERVICE CONTROL ALL CODEX PERSONNEL OFF.

ORIGINATING OFFICE//PROGRAM OFFICE, CENTRAL

THEPLEASURETUBE, LASVENUS

VOORST, RAWLEY, RESTORED TO CLASS ONE PRIVILEGES THEPLEASURETUBE FLIGHT 8 LIFTOFF 1100 7-18//SERVICE RESTORED EFF. 0900 7-18.

QUESTIONS CONTACT CENTRAL OFFICE/////////

YOUR PLEASURE IS OUR SERVICE//OUR SERVICE IS YOUR PLEASURE

I scan back through the appeal result, can barely believe my eyes:

APPROVED APPROVED APPROVED