The Pleasure Tube

^{Chapter 7} Moonloop

Through the window/wall I see the latticework cradle move away, the wisps of preignition float up from beneath the ship.

“He wasn’t angry, then?”

“No, Taylor was. You should have seen him, talking with his teeth clenched. It was Mancek, the one who looks like a farmer, who didn’t say anything; he seemed to enjoy the news in a funny way. I still don’t know what to make of it, exactly. Wish I’d hear from Werhner. Something in me isn’t going to relax until I find out what’s going on at Agana.”

“Just be thankful for good news.” Collette grins, adjusting the last buckle of my liftoff rig, patting my stomach. “The next few days will take your mind off beige uniforms, you’ll see.” She kisses me with wet, big lips.

“What service,” I tease her. I’ve been teasing her because she’s still on the job after all.

She laughs along with me. “Today we celebrate,” she says. “I’ve got a surprise for you once we’re in orbit. And then I’ve already got the whole day planned. Notice anything different?”

I look around the bright cabin, the familiar brown couch, the deep brown rug with its faint hexagonal pattern. Collette’s sagging leather flight bag is stacked alongside the divider to the kitchen/bar; the other velvet lounging chair is reclined as her liftoff rig. “What do you mean?” I ask. The light from the LasVenus trans-port illuminates the Rubens behind her to a glow, warms the soft brown walls. Now I notice a halo around the painting, a rainbow halo.

“Just a drug.” She grins, easing into the lounging chair, strapping in. “We’re going to be high until tomorrow, higher than we are. Consider that an invitation to a party.”

A thunderous shake wallows through the ship, modulates into a sustained roar. The dusty LasVenus pads begin to slip away, low hills and desert form on the horizon to the sound of fine tinkling of equipment in the unit. A gravity grows in my blood, intensifies in the flesh of my forehead, chest, groin—the continent begins to shape itself, receding, and at the very center of the growing weight itself I begin to feel the sweet freedom of flight.

RESIDUAL ITINERARY,

RE.// FIRST-CLASS PASSAGE// Prog. 2ndCoord.

DA8/ //UKIYOE FLYAWAY bid 1/O-1100

DA9 MOONLOOP//SENS SEVEN SPEC bid i/f-cont

DA10 VIETAHITI bid i/f-cont

DA11 SINS SEVEN SPEC//AQUAPLEASE bid i/f-cont

DA12 HOLD PROG//MICROSSAGE bid i/f-cont

DA13 TOTAL HOLOGRAM//

    TRIP TO THE SUN bid i/f-cont

DA14 TRIP TO THE SUN4 bl- i/f——

CONTINUOUS VIDEON PROGRAMMING

THEPLEASURETUBE IS AN EXPERIENCE//INDIVIDUAL VARIATIONS ARE COMMON AND PRECISE DESTINATIONS VARY//

CONSULT YOUR SERVICE FOR DETAILS

4, MEDICAL CLEARANCE REQUIRED

VIETAHITI VENTURES’/PLAN YOUR LONGDAY NOW

//SOPAC TROPICAL RESERVE

//AQUAPLEASE SPECTACULAR

NEW FIRST-CLASS OPTIONS EVERY HOUR//CONSULT YOUR SERVICE FOR DETAILS

Our service is pleasure//Your pleasure our service

@ thePleasureTube corp.

The recliner doubled, the window/wall a spectacular view of deep space, Collette and I are playing shamelessly. I had a few moments of real depression when we came on, thinking of Massimo, how he would have appreciated the luck I’ve had using my military status, it’s the only thing that ever used to work, how he would have enjoyed another launch. But Collette’s been making me forget. I am on my stomach now, she is massaging my back after we’ve made love while the ship has been in preorbit maneuvers. Her fingers are working into the tight base of my skull.

“Let’s see,” she says. “If you understood these curves, you’d understand why you have back trouble. First, your spine curves in for seven vertebrae,” she says, tracing them with her stiff fingers. “This one’s your neck bump. Then your spine curves out, along the ribs, then in again at the lower back. And finally out again at the pelvis,” she continues, giving my butt a slap. “Twenty-four moving parts, the discs like little waterbeds between them. Your trouble might be spondylolythesis. Mmmm. Let me recommend treatment.”

I laugh. “That word. Look, I barely know you,” I say to Collette. “Watch what you say.”

She laughs, too, a quiet, low, sultry laugh. “I’ve known you forever, known these curves, these places,” she tells me, now running her hands up my sides, running them up along my bare muscles to hold me under my arms. Then she puts weight on my lower back, leans with the ship.

I laugh again, this time at myself, turn on my side, and trace a line on her body, from her chin down through her breasts to the flat surface of her stomach. I stop at her navel, touch it playfully. Sweet God, there is something so familiar about her now, the counterpart in a woman to some habits of mine, to a sense of touch and odor that I am only half aware of. “I feel I’ve known you,” I say, poking my finger into her navel, “right from the start.”

When we reach stable orbit, Collette tells me to put on my robe and come along. She leads me down the carpeted, spun-steel passageway to Tonio’s cabin, a cabin identical to mine except for the Japanese painting on the wall and its pale yellow furnishings. Tonio’s produced something for us to see, is busy with a console when we arrive. I offer my help—feel a little odd, still lazily euphoric from the drug—and recall he’s used male service in LasVenus, odd to be back into this. Tonio’s scent strikes me as feminine; so does his pale yellow pullover. I’m not sure what to think. Erica, arranging canapes and pouring warm sake with a ruddy glow, gives a satisfied wink to my puzzled look; I’m not sure I understand. Then when I ask about the Japanese painting on his wall—startlingly pornographic, a woman, legs fully spread, entangled with a standing man, which Tonio identifies as a classic of the eighteenth-century Ukiyoe school—Erica giggles. “Ask Tonio,” she says. “That works.” So they’re lovers again.

Once he has the programming straight, we first sit through a continuation of the Videon 33 discussion Collette and I watched on the first leg of the trip; his tape must follow. The subject has shifted to the role of fantasy in the programming on theTube; the same physicians lounge in plush white chairs. Given the last three days of my life, it’s hard for me to concentrate at first, but I listen. It brings me back to this whole world of pleasure I’ve returned to.

On the wall screen, a white-haired older man goes through a long analysis of model programs. Simple tactile-stimulation sequences yield diminishing returns, he says. In the end, the fantasy-fulfillment program is one of the richest models, which leads him to speculate that the locus of pleasure itself lies in the imagination.

The woman with the hollow voice disagrees. She says that pleasure is independent, absolute; she can prove that by putting any man or any woman into a grope suit, any time. She says that fantasy-fulfillment programs are provided only to keep the passengers sane.

“A wholly independent pleasure event, one entirely disconnected from a subject’s imaginative life, is a kind of mental short circuit,” she continues, leaning back. “If you introduce a series of disconnected pleasure events to a subject, the result is invariably dementia paranoides. TheTube structures fantasy and fulfillment in its programs to induce a kind of antiparanoia instead, a feeling that the world serves the subject’s motives and neurology in a soothing fashion. But pleasure? The pure experience of pleasure? It has a character that is independent, absolute. It remains one of our closest experiences of the absolute, though we cannot finally disengage it from a neurological signal. Whether that signal’s source is tactile stimulation or a surgical implant, it clearly comes from outside the imagination.”

“You’ve ignored the loop,” the white-haired physician points out, shaking his head. “For the true connoisseur of pleasure, we know very well that only the most suggestive, the most… imagination-producing, signal will do—the lightest touch, the most delicate flower, the most subtle scents. Think of the Japanese….”

“I don’t quite…” Erica begins to say. I am becoming nervous, remembering now the character of this place and thinking of Massimo and his blood-red Ferrari, but the screen fades through false color separations and reassembles to show a young woman, perhaps a scholar, looking at a series of paintings in a museum, Japanese paintings in the style of Tonio’s. Both Collette and Erica say “Ah!” at the same time, and I notice what they notice: the first painting is precisely the one on Tonio’s wall. Then Erica says, “Aha!” and in one of the paintings, in all of the paintings, the figures are beginning to move.

Tonio’s done an ingenious job of producing: a little story follows, the woman scholar’s fantasy. But I lose its thread, obsessed with something familiar about the half-dozen Japanese who act out the erotic scenes. I watch one couple move to climax before it comes to me. They are the Orientals I saw lounging at the ship’s pool on the first leg of the trip. Amazing—and their flexibility is amazing. In the loose abandonment of limbs, they all seem so flexible I wonder about their bones.

In the end, the woman scholar pulls her hair back up into a bun and puts her drab dress on again. She writes in her notebook that she’s discovered something about the truth of art. I look to Collette and Erica, not certain what we are now going to do. Tonio answers the question by saying that he and Erica are programmed for the VanWeck Sexuarium—tells us to make ourselves comfortable. Erica seems embarrassed, answers my look with a shrug.

“Which painting did you like best?” Collette is asking me.

I open my eyes. I have been dozing on the couch after Collette and I have made love; I wonder if it’s time we returned to my cabin. The light is dim; now I see she’s wearing a black and red kimono. “Mmmm,” I say, “…third from the left.” There’s a sexy look in her green eyes. I stir, think, Well, I’m not desynched from this part of her program, here she comes again.

“Surprise,” Collette says, stepping aside. The sight of another woman sends me awake. The other woman is Japanese, she’s from the third painting, dressed in a gold brocaded kimono. She looks at me sharply with wide almond eyes, tilts her head, and giggles, her hand over her mouth.

channel 393//IN IN IN

sign key 0208//SCHOLE

telex medium

route: Guam Agana

       Midway

       Honolulu

       SoCal Center

       LasVenus Local

       thePleasureTube fit. 8 (trace)

debugging rider: erase if intercept/only 393

ATTN: RAWLEY VOORST

TRIED LIVE LINE WITHOUT SUCCESS, WILL TRY AGAIN AT 1800 TOMORROW. FRIGHTENED DOWN TO HALF DOSE FEEL LIKE WE’VE JUST LANDED.

DEBRIEFING SUSPENDED 48 HOURS. REPEAT: DEBRIEFING SUSPENDED 48 HOURS. CREW RELEASED SCICOM AUTHORITY TWO-DAY LEAVES.

BUT LISTEN TO THIS: DID ROUTINE CHECK AND COOPER’S NAME NOT ON DEATH LIST. REPEAT: COOPER’S NAME NOT ON DEATH LIST. AND NO RECORD OF INTERNMENT. LAST GUAM PROGRAM ENTRIES SHOW INTERVIEW, THEN EVACUATION TO HOUSTON. THEN “APPARENT SUICIDE.” FINAL INTERVIEW GUAM IS ONLY ONE NOT IN TRANSCRIPT. MISSING TRANSCRIPT: ONLY KNOW INTERVIEWER WAS WOMAN. I TELL YOU MY DATA SHOWS COOPER MAY STILL BE ALIVE SOMEWHERE. KNUTH SAYS IMPOSSIBLE, BUT COOPER’S NAME IS NOT ON DEATH LIST.

MORE LATER IF I FIND SOMETHING. GETTING OUT OF HERE, LEAVING NOW HONG KONG.

WERHNER

I read the message again, my eyes racing through the words, my feelings shifting from relief to a crawling sensation, God, I don’t know what to think. I feel vindicated; at the same time there is a hollow itch in my chest, an overwhelming, crawling sensation at my sternum. Cooper’s name not on a death list?

I am confused and relieved at the same time. In the middle of my tumbling thoughts I find myself wishing Massimo were alive, that I could talk to him. The thought of his death makes me sigh audibly again; I’ve wondered if he was the one who saw to my appeal and didn’t tell me, that would be his way.

“Cooper,” I say to myself.

“Who is he, Rawley?”

I see Cooper in my mind, chewing on his mustache, forehead drawn tight, mulling over figures on his clipboard, looking up, his eyes for an instant meeting mine, looking away, his lips becoming motionless as he stares out a low porthole in the dome, something else on his mind. “He’s the one Taylor told me committed suicide in Houston, the program man who wrote up our report,” I tell Collette. “I… don’t like to think about Cooper. He did me over with a woman once. That got straightened out, but after that we avoided one another. They said he came in experiencing a gross psychotic episode—I tried to see him, but they shipped him almost straight to Houston. I thought he might know what was missing, what SciCom was after.”

“Does this make sense to you?” she asks; I can see my worry flooding onto her. “Do you know what’s going on?”

I clear the screen, obliterate the message and leave a blue-gray ground, start to unbutton my shirt; the crawling sensation is becoming unbearable. “Says the debriefing is suspended for forty-eight hours,” I say, scratching my chest. “Let’s call that good news. My leave was approved, Werhner’s probably in Hong Kong already. It looks to me,” I say deliberately, “as if I’m in the clear. I don’t see that anything can happen here.”

“What about… that program officer?” Collette asks, close to me, moving my hand and putting her own in its place.

“I don’t know, I just don’t know,” I say. Strange how quickly my relief at the approval of my appeal has passed; strange, the news about Cooper. Werhner might be wrong, I think, Cooper is not alive until one of us sees him. The last interview is puzzling—could he have told them something different from the report?

As if in response to the questions I have, a winking light appears on the console—incoming traffic.

My heart jumps; from her expression Collette feels it. I am thinking, Well, my leave is good, at least for the next few days, anticipating Werhner. I punch up the screen, reset the code channel. No, it doesn’t take, the traffic is local. I let the message come through.

The screen displays the tape of a very Swedish couple inviting Rawley Voorst and friend to a dinner party in the suite of Director Eva Steiner. As the woman speaks she slowly opens the silky black robe she is wearing. Beneath it she is wearing some sort of harness, she is writhing at her midsection—the man is tugging at the harness from behind as the woman goes through the menu in her heavily accented, sultry voice. “Come,” she says finally. Then she snaps her robe shut, stands stock-still, perspiring, saying, “Come. Come.”

I shut down the wall screen, clear to the view, and realize I’ve started to perspire myself. “Eva Steiner,” I mutter. “Jesus Christ.”

“She makes you nervous?” Collette responds. “God.” Collette asks what I’m going to do about the invitation.

“Ignore it,” I say flatly. “Just ignore it.”

“Look,” Collette says after a minute, “let’s go somewhere to relax, to the pool. Let’s go swimming, spend the rest of the day there.”

Very late. The hours since Werhner’s message have been so blessedly uneventful, my paranoia has collapsed of its own weight into heavy, jangled nerves. I adjust the screen to display the program/information channel, time it to run for a few minutes along with the lights, then move from the couch to the recliner, where Collette lies waiting for me under satin sheets.

On the screen a woman’s face is almost transparent, silvery, superimposed on the image of a receding earth. “For night owls,” she says, her voice soothing:

“thePleasureTube offers a variety of stimulating options. Martial arts competition continues in third class. In second class, couples can reestablish their pleasure bond with a hologram production that chases symptoms of sensory overload away, leaving you as fresh as the day you boarded. In first class, all the clubs are open, and there’s something new: a quick-cure plastic surgery that erases wrinkles and makes that new face you. A special Vietahiti options tape, BaliHi in the new Pacific, runs every two—”

The screen flashes on a beach just as the timer switches it off, the lights go. I sit in the darkness alongside Collette.

“Vietahiti?” I say, sliding down with Collette. “Tropical reserve?”

“Mmmm. We’ll be there for a day, the day after tomorrow.”

I close my eyes. I think of beaches, think of Utama Bay and the soft bulk of the ocean. I remember Werhner standing, staring out to sea in gray weather, the sea gray, the sky gray, the horizon impossible to distinguish in the distance. There are other possibilities, he said. You’re right not to think of them.

I touch Collette, run my hand up her back, circle the nape of her neck, feel her pulse in the soft hollow above her shoulder. At least we’ve been left alone, at least I’ve shaken Taylor. No nightmares tonight, I tell myself, curling up against her, my body warm against hers, no nightmares tonight.

DA9//

I can hear voices. As I open my eyes I am as sluggishly alert as a man coming up from underwater. I struggle to rise on the recliner, come awake, the sight of the cabin is a relief, though I don’t feel quite all here. Collette is at the foot in a white satin robe, her hair falling loose on her shoulders. Behind her is the window/wall’s display of the earth’s moon, it is moving onto the screen with the underwater motion of large bodies in deep space, it fills the screen. We are near enough to see the nested craters rising like islands in flat seas, near enough to distinguish volcanic masses from fields of thrown rubble.

Of course. Moonloop, day nine of the program. Through the fantasy co-op yesterday and overnight we have reached the tangent point for our orbit around the moon. The audio is traffic from theTube’s own dome, fixing the tangent angle. I am blinking awake to the sight of the full moon; we are close enough to see the large base at Tranquility, a gold-gray mass with a dull sheen punctuated by the amber double loops of SciCom’s insignia. What a vision—the huge, bright circle of the moon, blue-black deep space beyond, strange and familiar at once.

“Mornin’, lover,” Collette says as I sit up. “We have an orbit correction. Thought you’d like to watch.”

She runs her hand lightly over my thigh as she moves from the foot of the recliner toward me, moves her body, warm and soft, against mine. I look at the moon, the huge, luminous ball we are approaching, identify the vast seas: oceanus procellarum, mare nectaris, mare serenetatis. I realize with a start that it is not the vision which distracts me, not the way I came awake, but one of the voices which crackles through the cabin—yes, that’s it, the voice from propulsion sounds almost like Cooper’s. Its inflection, a slow American drawl, is smooth behind the static, and I can almost imagine Cooper speaking, his large frame leaning over the program table, his headset almost lost in his wild black hair and bushy beard. But the voice is definitely older, its roughness a deepening from age, another body.

Initial on number three.

Comin’ right along.

Mark.

Roger. Mark one.

“Lover, are you all right?”

The confusion is not unpleasant, but that voice like Cooper’s shakes me, makes me wonder where I am, gives me the sensation of floating free without a point of reference. I wonder what he told SciCom before he died, what he said in that last Guam interview; now I’m wondering if he’s alive.

“You don’t look well,” Collette says. “I’ve got something to tell you Rawley. But it had better wait. What’s wrong?”

Clean burn.

Number three, number three.

I ask Collette if she minds my switching off the audio. She says no, it doesn’t matter; starts to rise. I put my hand on her shoulder, get off the recliner, lean over, and hit the toggle on the small console myself. The crackling and the voices disappear. Soft music in the unit, the tape has looped back to Bartok. I settle back on the recliner, concentrate on the music, and my mind mercifully shifts to the first time I heard this music on this ship.

I look into Collette’s liquid green eyes.

She seems a little shaken herself. She slides one hand across my chest, the other around to the back of my neck, and sidles up half behind me. I sigh and feel the relief of it, the light pressure, the sexy warmth of her touch. The weight of her breasts moves across my back, settles as she sighs.

The moon’s bright image is still on the window/wall, and in its silvery light I turn to her, watch her full lips part as she lies back. She is stroking my chest with long, thin fingers, her nail polish as silver as the moon. Tracing patterns with her fingertips, her touch is now so light she barely bristles the ends of the hair; the sensation is extraordinary.

“Better?” she asks. She takes my hand and moves it beneath her breasts, presses upward into its firm weight.

“Mmmm,” I say. “Let’s imagine we took the Lancia. We’re about three hundred kilometers south of LasVenus, alone in the desert, we haven’t seen another vehicle for an hour. We’ve made it.”

“Nice thought,” she murmurs. “Nice to think of it here. Well, at least we’re together.”

Why, I begin to wonder, does she say that? But I am lost already. I sink to her, my hand drifting to the undulating firmness of her thighs, her mons, as she rises to meet me.

As she pours the coffee, aromatic and brown-black, Collette’s hand is slightly wobbly on the handle of the silver pot and she avoids my eye. Now I ask her what it is.

“I wish I didn’t have to tell you this,” she says quietly, sitting on the edge of the recliner; I am on the couch. “Rawley, that man, Taylor, he’s on the ship. Erica came in and woke me at five a.m. She said an early day-briefing, that’s what she’d been told. But it was him, he wanted to talk to both of us. I saw him, Rawley, on this ship.”

I moan. Tantalized by Werhner’s last message from Agana Base, growing smug over my appeal, I have kept Taylor out of my mind. For the life of me I can’t figure out what’s going on—and at the same time wonder about the voice like Cooper’s, wonder if the similarity was a hallucination on my part, triggered by the strange data Werhner reported yesterday, or now if Taylor might have had something to do with my hearing it.

“I hope he didn’t give you too bad a time,” I say finally. “I guess I really should have expected him to board the ship. But I didn’t think he’d bother you. They don’t give up,” I sigh. Then after a moment I ask Collette if there was anything in particular Taylor wanted to know.”

She shrugs, puts one knee over the other as she leans forward. She is still wearing her white satin robe, she’s barefoot, but now the robe seems to droop. “The same thing. Are you talking about the flight you were on, are you saying anything about your debriefing. I think he’s worried about you, maybe whether you’ll put him on report. He asked me if you were doing anything outside the program.”

“The debriefing’s suspended,” I say. “He doesn’t have the right.”

Collette nods, tight-lipped; there is an exhaustion in her green eyes. “He made me wish we had taken off in that beautiful car, just run from LasVenus. But what’s the use?”

“Taylor,” I say with a kind of nervous scorn. “What if you did go through with a resignation now, what if you did quit?”

“Now that we’re in flight, they’d, well… It’s what we talked about before. They’d put me in third class and make me pay. I suppose I could stay here with you. But they’d send you someone else, another woman.”

Despite my growing depression I can’t resist taking advantage of the look on Collette’s face, a hangdog disgust at both third class and the idea of another woman living in the cabin. “How do you know I’d mind?’ I ask with a smile.

“What?” she says, putting both feet on the floor and stiffening her back. “I have to put up with him, and now I have to put up with you? What are you going to do, Rawley, run off with all of us when we get back to L. A.? You’re going to need a bigger car. You bastard.”

“No,” I grin, “just you. There’ll only be room for you.”

“You bastard,” she says after a moment. “You did me last night and you did the Japanese girl yesterday afternoon. Are you trying to set a record?”

“The Japanese girl was your surprise,” I remind her. She begins to glare at me. Since yesterday, there’s been a new electricity between us—her presence, the looks she gives me with her jade-green eyes, make me a little weak-kneed. And we seem to say less, communicate in glances that require no explanation. She is giving me one of her looks now—close-mouthed, haughty, her eyes wide and menacing.

“All right,” I say, “you just hang on. We won’t be on this trip forever. And I’ll talk to Taylor. I’ll talk to him myself.”

She actually smiles.

I rise and kiss her on the cheek, then begin helping her clear away the breakfast china. I want to get the console clear, to get started.

As Collette finishes in the kitchen, I punch a query through:

SEARCH PROGRAM SEARCH PROGRAM SEARCH

QUERY LOC.//

COL. R. TAYLOR//

SCICOM OFF./GUAM STA. REF.//

CABIN #/PT FLT 8//

CABIN LOC: ENTER ENTER ENTER

RETRIEVE  RETRIEVE RETRIEVE

##################

RESET RESET RESET

Taylor’s presence doesn’t register on the ship’s roster; he must be under another name. I pull the list of names of passengers who boarded for the first time in LasVenus, think at first there can’t be many, but sixty-four names show up. In the end I try Werhner’s trick for limited-access material, but there’s no record of Taylor’s presence on any of the classified rosters. Now it’s Taylor locked into a private world to which I cannot find a seam, there’s no way for me to get to him short of searching the ship.

I start seething, decide to trace through to Guam. But now I find not a single line clear. Agana is apparently under a blackout, not even routine military or SciCom traffic getting through, not even a weather report coming out. Incredible, I think, how stupid. I should have put Collette in that goddamned car and taken off.

“You’re right,” Erica says two hours after lunch. “There’s more to do this leg. The program’s richer. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, has to be, I guess. You’d see it better if you weren’t so desynched.”

Erica is leaning with her hip on the couch, Collette is sitting alongside me as we watch what must be a women’s program, a cosmetics demonstration. The models are languid women, the voice-over throaty:

With her own makeup, in her suede suit, Collette is as stunning as the models on the screen, smells gorgeously of frangipani. But the gloom clouds her face, a tired glaze in her eyes, and her shoulders sag. She and Erica are to report to Service Control. Their going is supposed to be routine, still we all wonder about it.

“It’s that time,” Erica says.

“I’ll be along,” Collette says glumly.

Erica kisses us both, says she’s going on ahead, leaves the two of us on the sofa. I shut down the screen.

“We would be in Mexico by now,” Collette says after a moment. “What an adventure it would have been.”

“Well, it’s still an adventure,” I say. “You’ll have to admit that.”

Collette slips her hand under mine and leans on my shoulder. I feel her warmth and my breath goes a little thin again with the presence and odor of her. I have asked myself if she might not still be in collusion with Taylor, or if she’s in love with me as she says; and I wonder now if it finally matters. I haven’t felt this way about a woman since Maxine came back to me, pleaded to come back, and I realized how much I needed her. My God, I wonder, looking at Collette, am I genuinely falling in love with her?

“We’ve been through a lot together,” Collette says; she’s saying exactly what’s on my own mind. “I’ll never forget the end of that afternoon in LasVenus.”

I won’t, either, and I sigh. I feel even worse because only now do I realize there wasn’t a way to pay my respects after Massimo’s death, no ceremony to attend, no way to think his passing through.

Alone. The window/wall fills the cabin with the kaleidoscopic colors of something called Pastoral Fantasy. The Beethoven is soothing, but the light show is just annoying. I clear the screen, punch up Guam again out of compulsion:

ATTN//GUAM STATUS//ALL TRAFFIC DOWN//ALL TRAFFIC DOWN

ATTN//GUAM STATUS//ALL TRAFFIC DOWN//ALL TRAFFIC DOWN

Nothing’s changed. Strange to think of Guam now; I recall some of its odors, the putrefaction of the base’s littered beach.

After ten minutes of playing around and using my sign key, I manage to reach into the databank of Medex. I poke around in passenger statistics and on the bottom line discover something that confirms what Collette mentioned early in the trip: the death rate on theTube is phenomenal, as high as two hundred per thousand on some all-third-class flights. That data leads me into failsafe programs for the total hologram, into my own failsafe program. I see that I am entered to disconnect and trauma detoxify if my heart beats at a rate of 145, or if my blood pressure reads 200 /145—I’m not sure what either really means, but both seem high. My palms get clammy at the idea of trauma and the thought of the mortality rate. I adjust my own tolerances down twenty percent, then post the entry to commit when I’m switched in, hide the entry in storage. I don’t want to leave footprints. The blue lights wink confirmation and I think to leave a memory code to remind Collette.

But I don’t punch a memory tape. I wonder. I still do feel the slight pull of distrust about her at times, like the partly corroded edge of a razor drawn against my feelings. I don’t know—I’ve been spooked before I came on the ship, thought it was the simple fact of my life. And yet… I punch up tonight’s dinner program, getting tired of this machine.

FIRST-CLASS SERVICE//

DINNER//DAY 9

Coq au Vin

Brussels Sprouts Bordelaise

Tarminochi Salad

Hot Bread

White Bordeaux

That’s it, I think. I’ll run a blind. Just what Werhner would do, I laugh to myself, I’ll have to tell him about this when I see him. If I see him. The laugh doesn’t last.

ENTER ENTER ENTER

PROGRAM CHANGE//MEAL SERVICE

SUBS.//new dinner program—day 9

SUBS.//new dinner program—Cannelloni

Green Salad

Chianti

It happens at the pool, just as I enter the water, naked today like the rest of the swimmers. My mind is blank. I am thinking only of the dive, oblivious to the colors and voices at poolside, the music. At the precise point of impact there is a burst of light, and I am diving through a hatch passageway, not through a ship, but into a white, whirling sun, flames at my feet, orange and red driven flames, the sound of rushing wind—the light alongside me is a blur of blue-white, ahead painfully white, bleached utterly, I am falling into it.

My hand on something solid: the tile bottom of the pool. I push off with my palms, shoot upward to the silvery surface, through.

I float for a moment, breathing heavily, take in the people, hear the tropical music. I dive again, but all I see is the water, the sides and bottom of the pool, green tiles meticulously grouted, smooth to the touch, sloping upward from the deep bottom. Then I hang on at the pool’s gutter. An athletic woman asks me if I’m all right, is something wrong, asks if I need help.

When Collette finally returns in the late afternoon, she explains she’s had a long meeting on new options, hasn’t seen Taylor. She says she had some of her own business to attend to; she passes Taylor’s presence off as nothing. As a matter of fact, she is exuberant—she smiles broadly, there is a glow to her that wasn’t there at midday. It annoys me. I wonder if she’s lying.

“I have a gift for you,” she says, combing out her hair. “But you have to take a shower.”

“I’ve been to the pool,” I answer.

She puts the wide comb down, stares at me energetically. “Take a shower,” she says, turning me to the bath, pushing at my bottom. “And stay in there for at least fifteen minutes. Take some good drugs.”

“Collette…”

“Just do as I say. Please, Rawley?’

When I leave the bath, dressed only in a terry-cloth robe I haven’t tied, I find there are three attractive women in the cabin with Collette—dark-haired, Middle Eastern women with olive skin and rich brown eyes. One is as tall as Collette, the other two have their hair in pigtails, like twins. I am embarrassed for a moment, do up my robe. They are all looking at me with suppressed, sexual laughter.

Which leaves me awkwardly grinning. The cabin lights are dimmed and I detect a new scent, the scent of myrrh; I haven’t smelled myrrh since Hong Kong. Someone’s hung gauzy curtains by the recliner, and I realize I can see through the caftans the three women are wearing, they are virtually transparent.

“These are three of my friends from service,” Collette says softly. “I did the best I could.”

I start to speak, but Collette interrupts me. “Right”—she smiles—“and that’s good, Rawley. Your friend asks me strange questions, but my friends see me through. There isn’t anything they wouldn’t do for me.”

“Look, uh, who, uh…” I say a little breathlessly. The three women are flawless, stand with a deerlike sway watching me. Thank God, I think, I took some stimulants, not a time to feel sleepy. One of the women with pigtails crooks her mouth in a languid smile, reaches out and touches, strokes my arm under the terry cloth. “They’re your harem, Rawley,” Collette giggles, close to me, moving behind and rubbing my neck. “Mmmm. Your skin is dry. It’s this ship air, Rawley. Delia, bring some oil.” Her hands around my waist, Collette unties the firm knot of my robe, then begins to bring it down from my shoulders. The twins each kneel on one knee to guide the sleeves down my arms. “Sit the master down,” Collette says as the tall woman brings a cruet of oil, passes the vial unstoppered beneath my nose, then takes my hand. The smell is sweet and musky, slightly like that of bananas, it makes my head swim. One of the twins brings a long, ornate ivory pipe. Collette walks toward the door.

This moment, my mind entirely clear: one of the twins lights three candles, then draws her hands along my body, her hair brushing against my thighs. “So strong,” she says. “You look so strong, Rawley.” The new silk sheet beneath me is cool and the air a cool ache upon my genitals

I watch as the woman stands at the foot of the recliner, slowly pulls off her caftan, the candle shadows moving behind her. The sight of her nakedness pierces me: she is a smallish woman, but her breasts are large, their curves not the curves of a pitcher, but of a dome; she has a cleavage even when they are naked. Her nipples darken as they come erect, her curves and hollows lapped by candlelight. I feel a sweet shock as the two other women kneel astride me, the light playing over them, and begin to rub the sweet oil on my chest and stomach, their breasts swaying as they work, their hair spilling over me. My body is aswarm with breasts, with moving lips and hands.

I open my eyes and Collette’s face is near mine, her eyes slightly glazed and full of candlelight, she’s come back.

“Because I love you,” she says. “Because I love you, Rawley. And because we’re here. I wanted to show you what it can be like to be here.”

“Hungry?” Collette says later. “The girls left some food. Couscous. Lamb. But I made a special menu while waiting this afternoon, something just for you. You can ask for it any time.”

Collette hands me a pad of gold ship’s stationery; this is what she’s printed:

COLLETTE’S MENU

Dutch Pecks// Hot Buttered Kisses//

Salade//Fresh Green Kisses

Entree//Hot Passionate Kisses Francais

Vegetable Kisses//

Dessert//Whipped Cream Kisses//Chocolate Kisses//

Honey Kisses//

Kisses Espresso//

“And you can ask for anything,” I tell her, “anything you want.”

“It’s close by,” she whispers, touching my hand. “Love me, Rawley.”

Massimo’s “if one can trust such a woman” in my mind, I kiss her and tell her that I do.

Still later, after the women have gone, Collette calls me into the kitchen/bar of the cabin, she’s among the clutter at the service range.

She is looking at two trays of cannelloni. “I didn’t punch these up for dinner. Did you? I did a trace, there weren’t any entries showing. These came through on the dinner program. Did you punch them up?”

“No,” I say, my ears slightly burning. I have been mentally swimming in the self-indulgent way of a man who’s fallen in love; I’ve forgotten what I did this afternoon.

“I thought I canceled the coq au vin we were supposed to have, since Delia… I know I did.”

“Well,” I say, tentatively touching the sauce with my index finger, then touching the tip of my tongue. “The cannelloni looks good.”

She slaps at my hand. “Are you going to eat this?’ she asks. “Where did it come from? Somebody’s messing with the program, somebody who knows how to cover his tracks. I wouldn’t eat this food.”

“What do you mean, somebody?” I ask, reaching to pick up one of the cannelloni with my fingers. Collette grabs my wrist, squeezes hard.

“Rawley. Taylor—or who knows? That friend of yours died, Rawley.”

I look at Collette in puzzlement for an instant, but I’m shamed utterly. And to make it worse, the sauce is terrific.

“I’ll just take a bite,” I mutter, taking her hand from my wrist and reaching for a fork. Collette turns away, angry with me. With my back to her back I take a sizable bite. Absolutely delicious. “Incredible,” I say. “This cannelloni is incredible.” I keep eating.

After a minute Collette asks me quietly how I feel.

“Great,” I tell her. “I told you this was still an adventure. Try some pasta.”

“No,” she says balefully. “I don’t like cannelloni.”

“All right. I think I can eat them all.”

“Well,” she says after another minute, the odor of the sauce having completely filled the cabin and the cannelloni already half gone, “maybe just one.” I look at her; she has the beginnings of a resigned, chagrined smile on her lips. “An adventure, the man says. Hand me that silver fork on the counter, will you? I’ll eat my last meal in style.”

^{Chapter 8} Vietahiti

As we descend in the morning sun, the island Collette names Vietahiti is spread out beneath us as it would be on a chart, surrounded by a rich blue sea. It is shaped into a coarse figure eight by two volcanos, their craters among the clouds. A flat saddle lies between them and contains, I see, one long, wide runway, a starship launch tower, and a group of support buildings. It is a large island, at least five hundred kilometers square. Its entire windward coast is indented with bays and coves inside small islands, and a deep green jungle stretches inland on a rising plain. On the leeward side, steep valleys corrugate the slopes, rising to a band of light green on the easternmost volcano, a forest of tropical hardwoods, Collette says. There’s hardly a sign of human presence, the sight is almost breathtaking after LasVenus. We pass through the clouds just over a mawlike, moonlike crater, break through over continuous jungle, then swing back toward the saddle over the ocean to make a gliding approach. For a long moment the window/wall shows a view straight down into the reef; I see coral alleys racing by with sand bottom, like fine veins in a blue and emerald sea. Then a flash of beach, wide and almost white, then the jungle, dense and ripe, deep green.

Ah, I think, what Guam could be, without the base, without Agana—what Guam could be.

Before we leave the ship, the message pager starts right in, signals live line. I flip the toggle, speak, give in. There is only a simple audio patch through the electronics to the resort; the wall screen is out. “Two-nine-two. Rawley Voorst. Patching through. I’ll take what you have.”

“Negative message,” I hear the girl from traffic say, her voice crackling and hard to hear against the sound of steel guitars being piped through the ship. “There’s somebody waiting for you.”

“Traffic, this is two-nine-two. Do I read ‘someone waiting’? Please identify.”

“Two-nine-two, traffic. He won’t say who he is.”

I look at Collette, she has stopped packing and is watching me.

“What does he look like, traffic? Can you describe? A man with black hair, bushy black hair, glasses? Or short. You did say he.”

There is a crackling silence for a moment, then a small noise. “Oh, no. He says I can’t tell you what he looks like. He says he’ll meet you at your cabana.” “Traffic, what the hell kind of message is this?” There is another crackling silence, it sounds as if the operator is talking with someone standing offmike nearby. I swear she giggles. “Uh, that’s all I’m authorized to say,” I hear. “Uh, two-nine-two, traffic out.”

Once through the crowded disembarkation chute, into the terminal, a Polynesian longhouse, most of the passengers filter toward waiting NaturBuses, third-class program. An older man wearing a ragged straw hat is swaggering drunkenly, jostling the crowd—nervous, I think, without spun-steel surfaces. I’m not so calm myself, wonder if now I’m about to see Knuth instead of Taylor. In the adjacent tramrun lobby the atmosphere acquires the sweet weight of the air of the tropical Pacific, a lush, flowery odor. Collette and I board an A tram for the beach; evidently the island is shared by both the tropical reserve and a resort complex. A dark-eyed, golden-skinned girl waves, smiling, as we whir away.

The tram takes us through a dense jungle that muffles its machine hum. The jungle’s high canopy trees are entwined with lianas through which the sun filters down in sleepy patches the size of children. The green seems to go on and on, the air is marvelous. When we reach the palm-lined coast, the sun is barely obscured by the planet’s mantle of haze—it is brighter and clearer than even the sun over Guam. Who? I wonder.

We’re dropped at another Slot 9. A raffia-thatched cabana lies at the end of a synthetic path through a grove of very real palm trees and just above the high-tide line of a very real beach. Salt air. The ocean stretches away, blue and dazzling, to a vast horizon. As we approach the small cabana the sunlight pains my cabin-soft eyes.

He’s sitting on the lanai of the cabana, in the shade of the thatch, his tan so deep he looks as if he lives in the place. When he sees us his grin goes from ear to ear, his hands rise in greeting.

“Surprise,” he says, getting up to extend his hand in his old-fashioned way; he’s laughing.

I’m laughing, too. “Good to see you, Werhner. Good to see your face. How do you expect to get back on time? How in the hell did you get here?” I shake Werhner’s hand, we pump ridiculously, so dislocated yet so used to one another, we laugh at that, too. The beach stretches beyond us, the sea glassy in the morning sun, the air sweet. It’s like a pleasant dream.

“Getting here was the easy part,” Werhner laughs. “You loafers are resupplied through Hong Kong. I came to see your expression for myself. Have you heard the latest? Look at you, Rawley, I’ll bet you haven’t.”

I look into Werhner’s sharp, intelligent face; his smile is already hardening into something like pained relief. I tell him that Guam’s been under a communications blackout, the last I’ve heard has been from him. “Is it about Cooper?” I ask.

“Cooper.” He shrugs nervously, I notice exhaustion behind his smile now. “That’s still a mystery. No, it’s the whole debriefing. We’re finished.”

A small wave of electricity passes through my body. I ask him what he means.

“Just what I said. We’re finished with the debriefing, officially terminated. Came through from the East about 0300. Full leave, new assignments in eight months.” Now Werhner’s grinning sardonically, his sandy hair splayed out, the smile in his eyes.

“You mean we’re all through on Guam? We’re through?”

“Program terminated,” he laughs, pushing back his hair. “Don’t even have to go back. Can you believe it? Wait till you hear why. Got the story from Tamashiro. Our blow data was misplaced years ago—a generation ago here. So we’re coming back, the computer searches, the search gets nowhere—and the flow chart, a year before we land, triggers an investigation.”

“So the data does exist,” I say.

“The same data is in Cooper’s report.” Werhner shrugs. “So nobody looks to see why the investigation’s triggered, see, the data is buried. These SciCom men are well paid, right? They need something to do, important, busy. In the meantime, military does a trace, they’re paying our salaries. Turns out military has the data. Meanwhile, SciCom is conducting an investigation that has no terminus, looking for that data internally, eating its own tail, while we’re all drawing full military pay.”

“Ooooh,” I say, sitting down in a creaking wicker chair, feeling the light become brighter. “So military got us out? Is this true?”

Werhner nods.

“And what about Cooper?”

Werhner bites his lower lip. “That’s what makes me wonder. Look, Rawley, it’s very weird. He’s not on the death list, there’s no record of internment, there’s no record of his staying in Houston.”

“Then there’s a chance he’s alive. Now what in the hell…?”

“If you trace him, it goes Guam to Houston to Guam to Houston through L. A. A transit loop. That’s from closed SciCom program. Puzzling. Well…”

“But we’re really through on Guam?”

Even with his evident exhaustion, Werhner looks better than he has for years—deeply tanned, clear eyes. “That also checks out through closed SciCom program. I’m your navigator, Rawley, I don’t put you on. The results from the ship’s investigation stand: ‘Accidental collision with unknown interstellar material, forces tidal in nature.’ The report’s thin, sure. We lost all that data when program pontoon blew. But there is what there is, that’s all. Now everybody agrees.”

“Christ,” I say. I’m slightly giddy, run my hand over the caning in the arm of the chair. “I feel like we’ve just landed. These last two weeks have been very strange, it was strange enough on Guam, it never quit for me….”

Collette brought us tall mint juleps, we sit around a small wicker table in the shade. Palms rustle lazily, flap; the water gurgles at the intersection of sand and shallow bay.

“I actually worried about you,” Werhner says, glancing with raised eyebrows at Collette. “Now that I get here, I’m jealous. Hong Kong’s not like this.”

“Well, you’re here now,” Collette tells Werhner with a smile. “You ought to stay.”

I spend a few minutes telling Werhner how I’ve been chased by Taylor since Guam, how Collette’s been involved. Werhner surprises me again. He had a brief talk with Taylor when the ship landed, Taylor wants to see me at 1800 today in the console dome, Dome A of the ship, to hand me my official orders and to conduct an exit interview. Werhner went through his on the spot, waves his orders at me like a small fan.

“Dome A,” I say. “That’s fitting.” I mention to Collette that Dome A was the place we worked.

“So you get to see his ugly face one more time.” Werhner grins. “There’s a man,” he says, still talking about Taylor, “launched up his own asshole. Excuse me, Collette.”

Collette says no excuse is necessary, and thanks the high heavens she’s seen the last of Colonel T.

Werhner’s going to stay, leaves to arrange for a cabin for the last leg of theTube’s flight. After he processes in, he says, he’s going to find his cabin and go to sleep; up at 0300, he’s been in transit all night. We’ll see him again after lunch, maybe do some diving here.

Sitting in the warm shade with Collette, I take a deep breath of salt-rich, fresh air, look out to sea across the bright sand—a few scattered clouds on the horizon, snow-white, the sky brilliant, washed blue.

VIETAHITI VENTURES//

FIRST-CLASS PASSAGE//

//shuttle trams continuously between Vietahiti Beach/BaliHi/theTube//

//new options every hour

Vietahiti Beach//

—catamaran and trimaran sailing

—zodiac availability

—deep-sea transparent sub

—all aquaplease options continuous

BaliHi Mountain Palace//

—arboretum and jungle walk

—paradise park

—queen’s garden of delights

—epicurean consensus

//shuttle trams continuously between Vietahiti Beach/BaliHi/theTube//

//new options every hour//continuous programming in each cabana//

our service is your pleasure//your pleasure our service

@ thePleasureTube corp.

Collette and I join Erica and Tonio for an early lunch at the Palace Garden Club, an elegant restaurant set in the gardens alongside the large building with the red and gold roof tiles I saw when I swam out from the beach—the Mountain Palace. We are a few kilometers inland, up the slopes of the larger volcano, in a belt of high jungle. The air is noticeably cooler here, fresh and crystalline, the climate seems perfect. Peacocks strut among the tables, iridescent blue and green, clucking softly. Collette says we ought to bring Werhner here later to see.

Tonio is telling us how he managed to get an exceptional performance from a numb actress for a videon series he directed. She was, he says, the only zombied Juliet he’s ever seen—she had an expressionless face and a flat voice besides. “So I put her in a grope suit,” he explains, pushing back his hair with a well-manicured hand, grinning. “I had her wear a grope suit under her costume. She was fantastic—panting, her voice turned into honey—and her eyes, the color she got. She was just fantastic.”

“Sweet Juliet,” Collette says flatly. “Good God.”

I look at Tonio with puzzlement. “All right,” I ask. “What’s a grope suit? I heard a woman say she carried one in her luggage.”

“Tonio,” Collette says, “you are to-the-core decadent. To the core.”

Tonio gestures with his palms up, smiling. “Ah, but what an interesting play Romeo and Juliet turned out to be. You can appreciate that, Collette, try to imagine it.”

“A grope suit,” Erica tells me, sighing behind her sunburn, “is made out of latex, and where your erogenous zones are, there are bumps and things that squeeze you when you move, and mainly a knob, see, that goes in. And there are suits for men, too.”

“Indeed there are,” Tonio says quickly. “But look at this person—oops, he’s coming this way. She’s coming—no, don’t turn, you’ll embarrass me. Rawley, I think she knows you. She was looking for you.”

I do turn slowly to follow Tonio’s line of vision, toward the other tables between us and the bamboo bar, the monkey cages. Eva Steiner, dressed in a black jump suit, is striding our way. Beyond her, the pasty, fiftyish man with the thin hair I remember from the grandstands at LasVenus is seating two women at a circular table; they must have just come in.

“I thought it was you.” Eva Steiner smiles—she’s pale and a little drawn, obviously hasn’t yet been to the beach. “Though this dark one I recognized first,” she continues, her eyes flashing for an instant at Collette. “Captain Voorst. Rawley.”

Seeing her now brings back both the final moments of our race and the grim end for Massimo. For some reason, perhaps only because she knew Massimo, I feel a pull of sympathy for her, feel bad that I didn’t even respond to her invitation. I ask Steiner evenly if she’s having fun, introduce her around the table.

Tonio’s cocked head straightens and his slightly glazed eyes become businesslike. “Of course,” he says. “Director Steiner. What a pleasure. Do sit down. May I…?” Tonio goes on, giving Erica a wide-eyed glance. Eva Steiner ignores him.

“You must have heard the news by now,” Eva Steiner says to me. “Congratulations. Eight months until a new assignment? I envy you.”

“How do you know?” I wonder out loud. “I don’t even have the orders yet.”

“I was hoping you’d stop by my cabin the other day,” she goes on, ignoring my question. “I was hoping you’d come. We missed you.”

Who is this woman? I ask myself. Deliberately I tell her I’ve been concentrating on more relaxing things than she might have in mind. “I am on leave,” I say, then notice that, for all the politeness I am trying to generate, she still returns a strange electricity. My skin prickles as her expression changes to a wider smile.

“But you owe me,” she says. “It’s only fair. I wanted to talk to you about this yesterday. Listen to me, Captain Voorst. My hydroplanes are here. On the west end of this island there is a sheltered bay, perfectly flat. Ideal conditions. We can race.”

Collette’s stare is boring through me, she has gone a little rigid. The sensation of my skin makes me shift in my seat.

“I have to turn you down,” I say nervously, though she has made me feel somehow obligated. “Since Massimo died, I haven’t much felt the stomach for chance like that. You remember Massimo Giroti, Director Steiner.”

“You must call me Eva. Eva,” she says. Now I see her own nervousness; her eyes are red, twitching slightly. “I suspect he died as he would have preferred. Doesn’t the thought of how you might die excite you, Rawley?”

“No,” I tell her, my skin crawling, “not at all. And something tells me Massimo would rather be alive.”

She shrugs, her smile gone. “Pity you won’t. They are such sleek machines, Rawley. You’re making it very frustrating for me.”

“Answer my question,” I say. “Just how is it that you know about my orders? Just who are you?”

“Come to the bay,” she says after a moment, says with a smile for everyone. Then she looks at me with intense focus. “I do want to talk with you.”

“Say what’s on your mind,” I answer.

“I will,” she says after a long moment, says flatly. But then she wheels and walks away.

Once she’s well settled at her own table, I ask Collette what’s on the east end of the island.

“We are. Or were,” she says. “That’s where the cabana is. And there’s the bird preserve on the island offshore, the one they call Chinaman’s Hat. But she said the west end, Rawley, that’s where a bay is. Please don’t.”

“I heard what she said. That woman makes me nervous. No—and especially not in her boats.”

“God, she scares the hell out of me,” Tonio says quietly, his voice hushed in the way one speaks in the presence of a corpse. “How could you talk to her that way? What people say about her!”

“If we take off for that island this afternoon, say in a Zodiac, bring along Werhner… That island looks like a place to dive. Will we be off limits? Could we get away with it?”

Collette considers the question. “You can dive near it on an aquaplease program,” she says. “I think we could get away with landing—look, they’re pretty lax here. This is one place service personnel don’t much care about and security’s… well, security’s lazy.”

Beyond Erica, who begins to tell me much the same thing, lithe young women begin to slip among the tables, dancing to Balinese gamelan music, graceful as deer, finger cymbals tinkling like wind chimes. At her table, seated, Eva Steiner is keeping time to the music with her heel on the opposite woman’s outstretched leg.

An hour after we leave Erica and Tonio in the cool shade of the gardens, we’ve picked up Werhner from the ship and loaded a boat with the help of an obese Polynesian man at the boathouse. Werhner, Collette, and I are slipping over the small incoming swells in a four-man Zodiac, headed toward Chinaman’s Hat. We wind up going out past the first reef, Collette in the bow hanging on with both hands, laughing as we punch through the surf. The salty air and the spray are invigorating, the unhazed sun hot on my back as I maneuver the light boat lifting and falling with the swells. Werhner steadies the tanks; he’s got some of his own gear from Guam as well.

The windward side of Chinaman’s Hat turns out to be fully hollowed out, a small valley formed by prevailing weather, absolutely desolate. A white beach is at the mouth of the valley, protected by another reef farther out. Well offshore, Werhner puts on his gear and slips into the water to swim in. We power in the rest of the way, pull the boat up on the sand.

I hit the toggles on the electronics built into the center seat. Someone is paging me from the resort—my guess is Eva Steiner—has been paging me off and on for the last ten minutes.

Collette watches me unplugging the battery. “You mean business,” she says.

“I didn’t come here to be bothered,” I say, and look around the spot, what a spot. From here the resort has entirely disappeared. Pristine beach all to ourselves, a thick grove of coconut palms and sprawling sea grape leads up the small valley. A small fresh-water stream drains to the ocean two hundred meters away, then the ridge shoulders over the sand.

I can see the bright red of Werhner’s diving flag bobbing with his float on the swells; it appears, disappears, appears in the blue. The sun is booming at two o’clock, absolutely dazzling, a white-hot specter I can feel in my bones, tingling on my skin. The news about Guam is finally sinking in; I feel lighter, find myself starting to think ahead to what I might do when this trip is over. A trip to South America, I think?

“We won’t be able to tell what time it is,” Collette says amiably as she unloads the mats and the cooler.

“Best news I’ve heard all day,” I laugh.

White beach, warm sand, the surf a low roar since the tide’s come up. There are a few seabirds here, skimming the ocean, wheeling overhead to nesting sites on the rocky slopes behind us. We’ve had to move up the beach because of the rising tide, camp now on a cleared patch above the high-tide line. Collette’s pouring the last of our two bottles of champagne, Werhner lies flat on his back looking up into the sky. I’m still wet, just out of the diving gear. My ears ring slightly and I have a mild sense of unreality as I squat down, dripping, at the corner of the straw mat.

“Black holes,” Werhner says to the sky. “The most interesting phenomenon to a speculative mind. Rawley wisely just flew the ship. I think I began to think too much about them. I haven’t been the same since. Well, neither has he.”

“There’s something I don’t quite understand,” Collette says, passing Werhner a paper cup of warm champagne. “Rawley mentioned that within a black hole, a traveler, assuming there’s the slightest chance he’d live, would be free in time. Could you explain that?”

“That’s a theoretical premise based on what black holes do to light,” Werhner says, up on an elbow. “A black hole is so dense that it attracts rather than emanates light—and once you reverse the physics of light, you reverse the physics of space and time. Here we’re free in space—we can go back to the cabana, walk along the beach, go wherever we’d like. On the other hand, we’re trapped in time—we can’t go backward into the past or forward into the future.”

“Yes,” Collette says.

“Reverse the physics for a black hole and you find yourself like light trapped in its gravity field, trapped in space; but free in time instead, since time depends on the movement of light.”

“Feeling champagne,” Collette laughs. “Still, you’d be crushed, wouldn’t you, by its density, your own gravity? What did you call that state, Rawley? Naked singularity. You’d be pulled to the center of the collapsing black hole and crushed beyond the smallest particle of matter. Staggering to imagine.”

As Collette hands me my champagne I tell her about ring singularity, the kind of naked singularity exhibited by spinning black holes. Because they spin, their naked singularity is expressed along their pole axes. And presumably, along the equator, if the black hole were large enough, a traveler could enter and survive, with enough power to orbit within. One theory suggests passing through. “Though if he did pass through, a traveler would find himself in another universe, one that shares with his universe the identical black hole. And that’s not exactly passing through.”

“Or just be pulsed out somewhere, maybe, pure energy,” Werhner says, pushing back his hair. “I don’t agree that if the Daedalus had gotten into the rotational black hole we were surveying, we’d have wound up in another universe. Vaporized and pulsed out, maybe. Levsky’s idea—Levsky did the physics—is that in the right kind of black hole, with just the right orbit, you’d be caught up in some kind of loop, free in time, so your experience of the loop would be your experience of… Dead enough, Levsky used to say. Stone-cold dead.”

“Yet in some paradoxical way always alive,” I add; that’s also what Levsky used to say.

“Now I am feeling champagne,” Collette says. “The freedom reminds me of the hologram.”

Werhner holds up his paper cup, swirls the last of the champagne. “The hologram, yes, but the hologram you can shut down. You don’t come back from the black hole. Well, one last toast. Reunion of the crew. And thank God we did get back. Theoretical ideas don’t get to drink even warm champagne.”

After we drink the tart, flat remains of the champagne, we sit in silence for a time, listening to the surf. The rollers far out in the surf line crest and fall into themselves, one after the other, the sets growing with the rising tide. As I swam the outside reef I rose and fell with the waves, the surge and drop still with me. I am on the mat, barely touching Collette, watching a seabird skimming just over the water, so near the surface he disappears behind each crest. Collette asks me where I’d like to be, free in time. I laugh, push my hand through the sand, and say, just where I am. She says she’ll file that information for the hologram.

Collette’s arms are spidered behind her back, she’s untying the scanty top she’s wearing. Her breasts jostle free, dark nipples erect. Now she’s slipping off her string bottom. “Join me?” she asks, motioning with her eyes toward the calm water inside the near reel.

“Later,” I say, watching her rise, run in her side-to-side woman way to the sea. I grip the sand in my hand to feel its presence. It runs through my fingers, filters through in fine streams to the sand below. I grip so hard the sand which remains, the pain shoots through my wrist; squeeze it so tightly it is as if I want to fuse it into glass.

“Some woman,” Werhner says.

“I agree.” I am thinking about Taylor, though, as I watch Collette laze in the shallow water past the rubber boat, floating on her back, arms straight out, legs spread-eagled, glistening brown in the sun. “God, it’s good to be alive. Do you think we’re actually through with SciCom?” I ask Werhner.

“That’s my guess,” he says. “I’ve seen my new orders, so… You’ll feel a little more convinced when you’re holding that paper in your hands in another two hours. If nothing happens after a few days… then what difference does it make? SciCom’s always watching flight crew, you know that, we’ll never be through with that part of it. But this crap we’ve been going through? The only thing that still has me on edge is the data on Cooper. I don’t understand what’s going on.”

“They must know,” I say.

“Not according to Knuth. Knuth says if there was no transcript there was no interview, and what I pulled was probably a visit from a nurse,” Werhner shrugs. “A blind? Or a…” He sighs, then smiles, looking at the Zodiac, looking past it at Collette. “You know, this is some place, this whole arrangement.”

Handful by handful, I filter sand through my fingers. A woman, I think.

When I plug the electronics back together on the Zodiac, the message pager starts right in, almost as if on cue. It is the same traffic operator with a reminder from Taylor that I’m to meet him in Dome A at 1800 hours, he wants a confirmation.

“Tell him I’ll be there,” I say. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Tell him that.”

We have a small cocktail-hour snack, a party, at the Palace Garden Club; there are five of us; Collette and myself, Erica and Tonio, Werhner. I’m preoccupied with what I’d like to say to Taylor in an hour, but Werhner’s no help. He’s really taken by the place, the lush garden setting, the Balinese women dancing, the red snapper, which, he says, has never been frozen. I can see he’s also taken with Erica. I think she’s playing up to him, and she looks great, her blonde hair bleached by the sun, blown back. She looks as if she’s lost some weight; with the food set before us in the last two weeks I can’t figure out how, then I recall her bouts of flightsickness. Right now she doesn’t look as if she’s ever been flightsick: trim, smiling; the sun has given her a glow. She’s telling Werhner she spent the afternoon snorkeling, asking him if he’s ever been frightened by a shark.

“The only kind were SciCom sharks,” Werhner laughs, glancing at me. “I’ve seen some real sharks. They never bothered me.. Underwater, you have a different sense of danger, it’s less direct. I think that’s because the medium is heavier. Blue sharks, white tips—seen those, they’re pretty common. I expect they’re harmless.”

“Werhner lived in the water,” I tell Erica. “Look at his neck. Beginnings of gills.”

“Well, it happens to be very relaxing,” Erica says. “It eases your tensions. Your physical tensions.”

Tonio is distant, picking at a bright red lobster. There’s something as well between him and Erica. He did drag her over to the horseshoe bay at the west end of the island to watch the hydroplanes, but they only watched from a distance and went somewhere else, so that’s not it.

“I saw some eels once,” Collette says. “They gave me tensions. I’d like to try tanks someday, though.”

“Didn’t use tanks much on Guam,” Werhner tells her. “Body chemistry sets a three-hour limit—and, well, Rawley knows the swim off Utama Bay.”

“We’d always wonder if he’d come in at sundown.”

“It passed the time.” Werhner smiles. “The only advantage of tanks is that you can go deeper.”

I see Erica guzzle a full glass of champagne, set the glass down with decision. “Deeper. That’s something I’d like to try. Tonio didn’t even put on the fins I got for him. He was too busy chasing boys. That’s where we went. He said he wanted to tape the canoe racers, but he never left the beach. He barely left a certain beach blanket. Isn’t that right, Tonio?”

So that’s it, I think—Tonio barely looks up from his lobster, Collette is looking at me with wry, raised eyes. I am trying to stifle a smile, look at Werhner—he’s turned flush, hopelessly embarrassed. A kind of dead weight falls on the table. Poor Tonio clears his throat.

“So, ummm,” Collette begins. “Tell us more about, uh, Hong Kong.”

“Not much to tell,” Werhner says with relief. “Crowded, run-down. It’s not the same. And it smells like a sewer. I was sorry I went.”

“This is the place,” Erica says. “Hong Kong’s been out for years.”

“Sure, the women here, ahh…” Werhner begins. “I mean…”

Tonio has folded his napkin, he’s rising from his seat. He puts one palm up nervously, smiles, uses the other to smooth his white suit. “I do have to meet someone,” he says to us all. Erica rolls her eyes and he gives her a sharp look. “Bitch,” he mutters. “Bitch,” she answers back. He manages to smile at us all. “Good meeting you,” he tells Werhner. “See you again, perhaps.” Then Tonio, working his fingers, walks away.

Werhner smiles nervously at Erica, she smiles back. Then a long silence falls over the table as we eat. “How did you two meet?” Werhner finally says to me, nodding at Collette. “I don’t quite understand the, uh…”

“If a woman’s interested in you, she lets you know,” Erica says firmly, running her statement right into the middle of his sentence.

Werhner stops for a moment, grins weakly, clears his throat.

“I’d like to sleep with you tonight,” Erica says before he can say another word. “And see one of the shows.”

Werhner nods a little breathlessly, looks at me open-mouthed, looks at me as if to say, thank you, Rawley, you have somehow managed to set me up. I take the credit with a grin; of course, the credit isn’t mine.

“You take good care of this woman,” I tell him. “She’s a friend of mine, too, and she needs careful handling. Listen to what she says. There’s a real woman in that bikini.”

Now Erica looks at me with a grateful, romantic sigh. Collette gives me a soft punch in the ribs.

The ride up the crew elevator of the large ship is achingly familiar—twice during the thirty seconds I have the certainty I’m going on watch for the thousandth time. There’s a salt scum on the edges of my lips from this afternoon, I lick them to recall exactly where I am.

As usual, Dome A is almost empty—the circular room, twenty meters across, is ringed with electronics of the same order as the Daedalus—and the consoles grouped in the center still use whole rows for vanes. The transparent dome is canted toward the center of the three-cylindered ship. Through the slightly blue glass of the dome’s ground the tropical evening sky is just beginning to show; the day’s light is failing, but within this chamber there are no interior lights. I spot Taylor standing in the dimness at one of the consoles near the chart table.

“Does feel like home,” I say, walking over the familiar magnesium-alloy floor—and I am blithely there before I feel my blood come up, before I realize we aren’t alone.

“The technology has not changed very much,” the other party says crisply, her voice agonizingly familiar, absolute in the silence. “All new preprogramming, new autopilots over there. But technology develops only to a point. Beyond that point, the interesting instruments are human.”

It is Eva Steiner who steps from the vane consoles. Taylor clears his throat, sets down an amber envelope with my name on it, and takes off his glasses, begins wiping one lens. “You once were anxious to meet my commanding officer,” Taylor says flatly, nodding to Eva Steiner. “Well…”

The cutting edge of my feelings turns against myself. The sight of Eva Steiner, the dawning realization that she is Taylor’s superior, slice through me like a knife. I had never thought this through—feel myself flush, feel the anger I had earlier today bleed through and to the sight of her, standing with a tight, thin smile before me in a shiny black flight suit, the crop she held in Las Venus at her side, the amber double loops of SciCom insignia on her shoulder, faint on the handle of her crop.

“I’m glad you are surprised,” she says, her thin eyebrows raised, her nostrils wide. “So not even Massimo Giroti knew. Well, very good. I don’t go on vacations, Captain. Not even on this ship.”

“I don’t know if surprise is the right word,” I say, thinking, So that’s how she knew of my orders, that’s why Collette was transferred to her after the first leg. It stuns my imagination. My God, I think, the ship so familiar around me, thinking of the Daedalus crew, what did we do to unleash this?

“You look surprised,” Taylor says, his full eyebrows furrowing. “You’re right,” he says to Eva Steiner. “It was worth it to see his expression.”

I reach past him for the amber envelope he’s set on the navigator’s table. He draws away from my approach, as if my move were to grab him. A small wave of satisfaction’ runs through me, at least he knows my mind.

“We’re a little embarrassed at the way things have turned out,” Eva Steiner says in an oily voice as I break open the envelope’s seal. “I can’t tell you how much trouble this whole affair has caused between us and military.”

I pull out and unfold the stiff sheet within. Formal orders: through Washington via military cable, copies to SciCom. Clean leave orders; military’s worked again.

“So I’m authorized to tell you you’re officially on leave,” Taylor says as if he’s doing me a favor.

“I’ve been on leave since my appeal was approved,” I tell him, folding my orders, pulling on the fold, slipping the sheet into my breast pocket. “Neither of you seems to understand that. You’re going to hear from Flight, I can guarantee that.”

“Oh, Rawley,” Eva Steiner says, purring. “We’ve already heard from Flight.”

I look past her pale, lined face and down the row of vane consoles, light green instruments, winking lights at rest. Microweather systems look the same, the principle of propulsion and control identical. To work again, I think, to get away—I’ve had to put flying out of my mind, but in this instant I find myself wanting to work a ship again, to feel the bump and roll of light-speed flight, I’ve been away from it long enough. Yet how little difference there’s been, I think with a shock of recognition. On board the Daedalus, ship SciCom kept up a running battle with dome crew, bogged us down with Committee Pilot, multiple logs, redundant information, five-copy corrections. In the end it’s the same, I think, it’s an attitude. But at least we weren’t spied on then, not manipulated. Or were we? I wonder now, wonder about Cooper’s strangeness to all of us.

“So we’re through,” Taylor says. “I’m supposed to thank you for your cooperation. I don’t think I will.”

“Not through, exactly,” I tell him.

“I don’t think so, either, Voorst,” Taylor says, becoming engaged. “I’m not satisfied. There are just too many…”

“You’re finished here, Colonel,” Steiner says.

“We’re through on Guam,” Taylor says, slightly surly. “I don’t see what difference—”

“I want to know exactly what happened to Cooper,” I say firmly. “And I’m going to find out.”

Taylor takes a deep breath, exchanges hardening looks with Eva Steiner, then tells me he doesn’t doubt that I will. As for himself, he’s got nothing more to say. I bite my upper lip, my heart thumping. I stare blankly at the pastel charts laid out on the navigator’s table: tomorrow’s launch orbit and the sunloop are plotted, overlaid with interstellar courses. What’s going on? I look into Taylor’s eyes, they swim behind the thickness of his glasses as if underwater. I have the feeling I’ve been here before, looked into that face with the same exasperation, I have been here forever.

And then Taylor’s gone.

“You know something about Cooper,” I say, alone with Eva Steiner in the fading light, a mauve tropical sky huge through the dome above us, the consoles in deepening shadow.

Eva Steiner turns a little pale. “There are problems,” she says. “When Cooper came down, he was experiencing a gross psychotic episode. We held him on Guam for observation, then we had to ship him to Houston. He overdosed while he was there by ingesting a full gram of pure hallucinogens. We brought part of him back, part of him. And what there is of him is ours. He didn’t come back quite human. The man is not a human being.”

“He’s alive?”

“After a fashion.”

“What do you mean, after a fashion? What are you talking about? Cooper’s alive?”

“I can show you something,” she says with a thin smile. “Draw your own conclusions.” Steiner punches up a security code, then a video link, on the navigator’s rack of monitors. The small screen flips, then steadies in an eerie blue light to show what appears to be a cell, there’s a white-haired man sitting in a cell, broad shoulders, full bushy beard—the man is Cooper. His hair is white and he is slumped over on a stained cot, behind bars. The picture is fuzzy, its resolution poor, but there appear to be a series of dark patches on his exposed forearm, an ashtray overflowing with cigarettes on the floor beside the cot. He is slumped over, propped against a metal wall, his feet on a metal floor. No, Cooper never smoked, I am thinking as I watch him raise his face—he’s drooling, looks twenty years older, his eyes dark, blank sockets, horrifying.

“My God,” I say. “Where is he? Is this a tape?”

Steiner is looking at the monitor intently, small beads of perspiration show on her upper lip, her eyes are wide, filled with the eerie light. “Live,” she says.

“Live? Where is he?”

She switches the monitor off, leaves me looking at my reflection in the glass; before I turn away I see in my own face the horror I am trying to contain. Dear God, I think, the sight of him—think it could have been me as well, could have been Werhner. “Belowdecks,” I hear Eva Steiner say; can’t quite believe what I hear.

“I brought him along to question him myself, but it’s been… useless.”

“You’ve got him here? You’ve got him here in a damned cage?” I say. “You’ve got that man in a cage?”

“He’s in a security cell in detention,” she says flatly. “It’s for his own safety.”

“Taylor knew?”

“Colonel Taylor has been working since the beginning on the sensible theory that what’s been missing in the analysis of the blow has been double-blind evidence. And since he was coming here, I let him know Cooper would be… available.”

“You don’t have any right to hold him,” I say. “The crew’s on leave. As of today, the whole crew is on leave.” “If you can say that was a man whom you saw,” Eva Steiner says. “We brought him back. What’s left is ours. Look, Rawley, I know there was no love lost between you. He took your woman for a time, I know that.”

“You were the nurse,” I say, the pattern dawning on me. “You were the nurse who interviewed him on Guam. And Christ, that’s why his name never appeared on a death list. How in God’s name can you—”

“Yes, there are problems, I know there are problems,” Steiner says quickly. “Military’s inquired because of a tracer from someone on your ship—Schole, you know him, he’s a friend of yours. There are problems, but we can solve them.”

I can see a strange, smoldering look in Eva Steiner’s gray eyes. “Let’s say this,” she goes on. “He came in on a death list, he was already dead when you splashed down, a corpse in reentry. That would clear up the tracer.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Military is going to find him in a few days. But if we can show that he came in on a death list, say we simply forgot to post the data, if just one other crew member, like the pilot, will corroborate that he came in on a death list… Perhaps if you talked with him, you’d see. I’m making you a proposition. Name your next assignment, your own ship, if you want. Or this ship, you see what’s here. And there are more interesting places, special places.”

“Did he tell you something?” I ask, my heart thumping. “Did he tell you something different from what’s in the report?”

She says he told her nothing, says so flatly, begins saying that she wants to keep him, he belongs to her.

“I’ve heard enough,” I say.

“No, don’t go. Talk to me! Talk to me!”

My impulse descending in the hum of the dome lift is to leave the ship as quickly as possible, yet once in the secondary lift I punch the lower working lobby, leave the elevator there. There is only a skeleton crew for the layover; across the carpeted floor two service personnel are lazily chatting at the counter. If the ship is set up as I imagine, then the detention area is only one level up from here. I am almost right—up one level, but over in third-class hull, a man with small eyes tells me. With a coolness I did not think I still had, I turn him back to his word game with a casual wave of my hand and pass through the hatchway otherwise in his view, my mind racing as my legs carry me on what I hope looks like a visit to a drunken friend.

On the metal grating in the dim, low-ceilinged passageway between hulls, I am gripped for an instant by the sense that I am doing something foolish, that once I am in detention, the hatch lock could close with a firm click behind me and give Eva Steiner two of us to play with instead of one.

“Cooper!”

There he is, slumped against the metal wall in a poorly lit cell, his hair white, his broad face blotchy and drawn, his eyes glazed over, unfocused.

“Cooper!”

He looks up slowly, looks at me without comprehension, his mouth slowly coming open with drool in the corners, gravity in folds on his face as if he has aged terribly or has been beaten up, worked over, the look of a man lost from the world, lost beyond his ability to remember. Then, making me out, his eyes widen and he begins to grin—a terrible grin, his upper lip drawn back, stretched back. No, not a tape; I shudder, thinking, How long can he have been here?

“Do you recognize me? It’s Voorst, Rawley Voorst.” Now I see stains on his flight suit, the overflowing ashtray on the floor, crumpled papers—and there is an odor, an odor like ozone.

Cooper’s eyes are shining. “Voorst…” he says, his voice hollow, eerie, still grinning. “…you, too… dead.”

“Listen to me, Cooper. I’m as alive as I’m standing here,” I say tightly, gripping the cold steel bars, shaking them. “And so are you. I’ll try to get you out of here, get you to a hospital. Can you understand me?”

Cooper only looks at me, his eyes narrowing, wiping his hand across his mouth.

“Do you remember what happened on Guam? You talked with a woman. What happened then? Did you tell that woman something?”

Cooper smiles crookedly, raises his hand from his face to turn a forearm to me blotched with scars. A cackle runs through his voice. “I’m a corpse, Voorst. She burns me and… I can’t… feel it.”

I bang the steel bar with my fist; there is a low thud. “Cooper. Werhner Schole is here, too. We all came back. You’re as alive as I am, Cooper, there’s a world outside. Listen to me. Tell me what they’ve done to you.”

Cooper turns his haggard face away, he is chewing his lower lip, spittle at the corner of his mouth. He looks back at me; I hear him say: “Do you see things, Voorst?”

The hair rises on the back of my neck. Behind me there is a sound, quick footsteps padding on metal, nearing. Around the corner through the hatchway comes the small-eyed security man, rushing down the passageway, paling. “Hey, no visitors. I got a call down, no visitors. Get out, you gotta get out,” he says, shooing me with his hands.

It is as if there is something crawling on me, on my skin, crawling.

I take one last look at Cooper, his mouth awry with contempt, his eyes, dark with hate, directed at me or the warden, I cannot tell; I see the burns again on his forearm as Cooper raises his hands to his eyes and turns to the wall, the security man is pushing at me now.

The moon is spectral, huge. Werhner and I sit in the wicker chairs at the cabana, spooked into drinking rum, watching the almost full moon rising over the ocean. It has taken me a long time to tell the story, a long time to unwind. “It never did feel straight,” I tell Werhner finally. “And seeing him… My God, man, it was like seeing a ghost.”

“What did Cooper mean?” Werhner wonders aloud, wonders again. “How can he think he’s a corpse? What did they do, exactly? Well, not so much difference now. But if Eva Steiner hadn’t wound up needling you, if it wasn’t for that, who’d know about Cooper? Who’d know?”

“Your tracers,” I remind him. “She did say it seemed like a matter of days. But what might happen in the meantime?” I sigh. “Christ, am I glad we get our orders through military. Imagine what it would be like if SciCom was hooked into that.”

My visions of Cooper still haunt me, the shock of seeing him blue and eerie on the monitor in the dome, the greater shock of seeing him gaunt and ghostlike in the detention cell, the weight of his presence, the strange things he said, wondering if he knew what he was saying. Having seen him, I feel vindicated somehow, though shaken: as if a bridge over which I have just crossed has collapsed behind me.

But it’s hard to know what we can do for the man; I don’t want to see him again. It’s better, we decide, to let military handle his case than to try to do something ourselves. I really can’t bear the thought of seeing Cooper; can only think he belongs in a hospital. So Werhner leaves to see what he can do—a series of tracers, asking for replies with requests to expedite.

When he returns I am still sipping rum, still watching the full moon, its light a gleaming swath on the calming sea.

“It’ll take a little while,” he says. “All things considered, I think it’s the best we can do.”

“I wonder what he told her, if he told her something in that Guam interview.”

“Doesn’t matter now,” Werhner says quietly.

“God, I just want to forget,” I tell him, Cooper’s Do you see things, Voorst? running through my mind. I rise and stretch to shake it off. “Put this behind me. I just want to forget.”

Late in the evening we are lounging at the PastPacific Show, sitting on mats at long, low tables in the center of a mocked-up village of palm-thatched huts. A Balinese ceremony has just ended and the smell of incense hangs in the air, mingles with the odors of roast pig, fish, baked taro, fresh tropical fruits. A Polynesian troupe dances into the center circle, the men in mylar lava-lavas, the women’s hips furious and sensual to fast Tahitian drums, their long grass skirts small waves above their flower-circled feet. What a feast we have had, how it’s cleared my mind. Werhner reclines, nuzzling Erica. I haven’t felt so well in months. I lie with my head in Collette’s lap, among the layers of frangipani and pikake falling in strings from her neck, looking up into her face. She is illuminated by torchlight.

She is simply the most beautiful woman I’ve seen in this evening of beautiful women. Her high cheekbones, her sexy big lips, catch the light in ways that seem to me magical; she seems supernatural tonight. She looks down at me with a fine, tender smile, her eyes green-gold in the light. I mouth the words “I love you.” She is puzzled; I say the words. She understands and breaks into a wide grin. When she leans over to kiss my forehead, I am smothered in flowers for a delicious moment.

“You’ve been good to me,” I tell her, thinking back over this last leg of the trip.

“I’ve been trying my best,” she says. “Lover.”

“Tell me something I can do for you. Really. Take your turn for once, Collette. You show me yours.”

She laughs, looks away. The drums have shifted to a slower, sensuous rhythm, the light begins to flash as torches are whirled.

“There is something,” she says.

I ask her what.

“It’s something I’ve never done before, and I want to now, with you. It’s a marriage,” she says shyly. “Not a legal marriage, but a sort of wedding in the way of my ancestors. This place… well, this place makes me think of it. I have a few things my brother gave me, they’re very old. He told me what to do with them. Will you go through the ceremony with me, Rawley?”

“A tribal wedding?” I ask. I’m not quite certain what she means. “Here?”

“No, not here. I need the ocean, there isn’t anyone from my tribe. But you’ll be. We can go to the island, the island where we were this afternoon. That’d be perfect. I’d have to get some things from the ship—could we reach that island in the dark? We’d have to build a fire, I’ll need a fire. It’s such a nice night. Rawley?”

I look up through the smoky atmosphere and see the large moon poking through the fronds of coconut trees. Really, what Collette’s suggested thrills me to the bones. If we can get a Zodiac, I think, there’s no problem getting to the island in the moonlight. I look over at Werhner—both he and Erica are sound asleep, arms entwined, before a massive pile of pork bones and coconut pudding.

“It’s all right with me,” I say. “I’m ready to go.”

On the island’s beach, above lapping, low-tide waters, in the still beauty of the night, we make a small camp around the wide mats which Collette has brought along. Collette builds a small fire from scrub and hardwood she’s also brought along in the Zodiac. Once she lights it, we recline on the woven straw mat. She draws a diagram with a stick in the sand to show me what she’s done, where we find ourselves:

We are in the center of the four elements, the air above, the earth below, fire and water to either side.

She’s given me a loose thong, an animal-skin loincloth, to wear; she’s wearing a long, sheer embroidered robe, eggshell-white. She asks me to repeat a series of phrases in a language I’ve never heard before. I watch her bowed head as she speaks, her voice soft and guttural, as if she speaks from the origin of language itself. Her eyes are directed downward; as she lifts her face when she is finished, the fire behind me becomes an intense spot of light in her pupils.

Then she takes my hand, holds it palm upward in her lap, and makes a small, quick incision in my wrist with an old ivory knife. The blood comes. She cuts her own wrist, a precise centimeter cut, drops the knife, and firmly pulls our wrists together with her other hand. The sensation is warm, viscous; for a moment as I feel our pulses pounding in unison I experience a strange sense of oppression and joy at the same time.

After a minute Collette sprinkles a powder on both our wrists and the bleeding stops. As she does so she tells me that her people will stand by me until death, and I must stand by them; that with her people I will always find protection, food, drink, shelter, and warmth. Her people, I think… there is a sadness in her eyes as she speaks, but her smile is full and sexy when she finishes, the kind of wide smile that really shows her teeth. When we next make love, she says, we will be married.

I begin to reach for her, but she stops me with her hand. There is another step, she tells me, her eyes brightening. She removes a small drawstring pouch from the basket she is kneeling beside. She tells me she will speak the taala, a phrase she translates as “the words which must not be hesitantly spoken.” As she begins I have the feeling that she has known these words for a long time.

“This is the gift,” Collette says, her voice incantatory and distant, “given of the gods, which lets the eye see to behind the sun. It opens the ear to sounds which only the specters of the ancestors can hear. It opens the nose to smells which only the best of hunting dogs can smell, and, smelling, grow restless. This is the gift that gives wings to the feet for the journey to the unknown land where all totems are silent. Then shall the voice resound like the sound of the antelope and every gesture endure forever and the darkness shall be lifted and the great mysteries revealed….”

As she speaks I chew a powder that tastes of bone meal and seaweed, my mouth dry. I gesture to reach for her after a prolonged silence and she says, “Shut your eyes, Rawley. Shut your eyes.” When I open them again she has disappeared into the inky darkness; I didn’t hear her move. I sit absolutely still, listening, but I hear nothing. I close my eyes again.

My heart is pounding. I wait for minutes and the minutes stretch; I find myself wondering how long my eyes have been closed. I lose my grip on time, look up. The sky above is a vast well of darkness, a sea of stars, snow at the Milky Way. I see Vega, the first star of the evening, a star whose light I first saw appear through the ship’s dome as I talked with Taylor at sunset. And the first star of the navigator’s triangle. The points of light separate themselves, they lead me automatically to a search for the Crab nebula. It is directly overhead. I look, and in looking I begin to feel the sky widen and I begin to fall through it, falling among the stars as the infinity of space opens before me like a window, like a door. I can feel the blood coursing through my veins and arteries, the rhythm of my heart the rhythm of my body.

A sound nearby. Collette steps out of the dark, naked, glistening with oil, bright beads in her hair. She holds her arms close against her body, her breasts jutting out. She kneels before me and I loosen the loincloth. When I quickly thrust inside her, she wraps her arms around my head and only her fingers move through the hair on the back of my neck. A series of jolting shocks pass through my groin, a stream of delight which does not seem to belong to me but takes the last breath from my lungs. I make no sound, do not move. Within me, muscles relax and contract, I don’t even feel my breathing. Then Collette falls, lies by the fire, her eyes shut, the only sign of her orgasm an internal shudder.

After a long moment Collette rises to her feet, sends her arms outstretched to the stars. The posture resonates in my mind, brings back our first hours together. And my vision, the vision of a woman suspended in space, arms spread, enigmatic—she becomes all women, Maxine, Collette, the Spanish girl, Erica; the fright from Cooper means nothing to me now. The low fire gives Collette a golden glow, her skin glistening with the sheen of the fragrant oil as the light plays over the curves of her body. “Collette,” I say, my own voice slightly strange to me, as if from a distance, yet my mind so clear and my heart so taken with her that the voice speaks with affection and conviction. “Collette. You are a goddess.”

“A goddess,” she says softly, tenderly, looking at me with a gentle smile. “Yes. And you are a god, Rawley.”

I look down, gaze at the fire, watch it for a long moment. “I do feel like a new man.”

“You are a god, Rawley,” she laughs, holding out her hands. “You’ll see.”

Two hours later, long after midnight, a huge, rolling clap of thunder comes from a great distance. I turn and see a bank of faint lightning on the horizon, the first signs of a large storm that’s come from nowhere. The air remains still, but now I notice the sign of weather in it, a weight. I tell Collette we have to go now, we’d better load the Zodiac. It seems a shame to leave.

“What an adventure this has been,” I say.

“You think it’s over?” She grins, rolling the mat, laughs. “You think this is all? Oh, Rawley.”

^{Chapter 9} Trip to the Sun

We lift off through the glowering tropical storm that blew in from nowhere last night, its gusts buffeting the ship as we sat on the pad. Now, thirty seconds into launch, the winds have risen to gale force and theTube yaws and lurches through layers of low clouds, their light gray-green. At the same time the ship vibrates with the low howl of sustained acceleration in trying to shake loose. The layers of weather swirl past the window/wall as the tidal forces of acceleration build—we are shaken one way, then another, so many rattles in the cabin a loop of soft music is drowned in this other kind of music. Something crashes in the kitchen/bar, then something larger. I manage to turn my head to see Collette, strapped into a liftoff rig at the couch, a worried expression on her face. Heavy weather, dangerous to launch. My surprise that we have lifted off at all has melted into aggravated resignation. Too committed now to abort, hanging on, the weather beyond the skin of the ship palpable and thick.

Then we punch through the last heavy layer of cumulus—vibrate still, but it is as if we go from water to air. A nice sensation of lightness, made manifest in the yellow-white light of the naked sun through the window/wall. I am finally pressed so far back into the recliner that I can no longer see.

The first thing I do once we reach stable flight, the heel of my hand throbbing again, is to check the program through on Cooper’s status. I am relieved to find that military has a pair of high-priority tracers cross-checking their way along Cooper’s path since splashdown, SciCom slow in responding, but the tracers moving inexorably, step by step.

RESIDUAL ITINERARY//

FIRST-CLASS PASSAGE// Prog. 2NdCoord.

DA12 VIETAHITI LAUNCH/TRIP bid I/0-0600

    TO THE SUN

DA13 HOLD PREP/TOTAL HOLOGRAM, bid i/f-cont.

DA14 TRIP TO THE SUN bl- i/f-----

CONTINUOUS VIDEON PROGRAMMING

THE PLEASURE TUBE IS AN EXPERIENCE//INDIVIDUAL VARIATIONS ARE COMMON AND PRECISE DESTINATIONS VARY//

CONSULT YOUR SERVICE FOR DETAILS

2, MEDICAL CLEARANCE REQUIRED

TOTAL HOLOGRAM///TOTAL HOLOGRAM///TOTAL HOLOGRAM///

//the option that is extra and extra-ordinary///medically cleared passengers who have prereserved and preprogrammed arrangements will receive instructions DA12//passengers are encouraged to tune in to Videon 33 for continuous briefing on hologram procedures, options, and benefits//shipwide total hologram begins 0000 DA 14.

TRIP TO THE SUN//TRIP TO THE SUN//TRIP TO THE SUN//

//along with the culminating experience of the total hologram, to complete this flight thePleasureTube will fly in a deep-space orbit which will bring it within three million kilometers of the sun//this orbit course, impossible without the special facilities of theTube, is preprogrammed and self-correcting//the increasing blue-gray shade of theTube window/walls increases the reflectivity of the ship and should not be adjusted//this rare experience is a standard feature for all-class passengers//relax and enjoy the journey.

our service is pleasure//your pleasure our service

@ thePleasureTube corp.

Videon 33 displays a pleasant, young Oriental couple, identically dressed in white body stockings, seated together on a suede sofa in an elegant cabin—they’re describing the total hologram, a familiar sequence I think I’ve seen before.

“Where brain-wave anticipation is immediately translated into full spectrum sensation,” the male says soothingly, describing the hologram’s loop.

“Where, best of all, you are in control,” the woman adds.

“Sometimes,” he laughs; they laugh together.

“In the comfort of your cabin—chemical, electrical, visual, audio, tactile—all systems. Full spectrum sensation for an ecstasy beyond compare.”

“The only such system known to man is on this ship,” she reminds the camera. “A hologram that’s more than a hologram, controlled by you, automatically, unconsciously, instantaneously….”

“You are in control.”

“Or out of it,” the Oriental woman laughs, her teeth are sparkling white, her leg rising as she runs her hand from her knee down the back of her thigh, sensuous flesh electrically firm in the body stocking.

“Where brain-wave anticipation is immediately translated into full spectrum sensation,” the Oriental male is saying again on the screen.

“Not for everyone”—his twin smiles—“but…”

“But riding thePleasureTube without experiencing the total hologram is like climbing a mountain and not reaching its peak.”

“Like leaping from a precipice and never reaching the sea.”

“The option that is extra but extra-ordinary. Come with us to the sun.”

“Come with me.” The woman smiles lusciously, touching her teeth with her tongue, just touching them. “Come with me to the sun.”

We meet Werhner and Erica for lunch at the on-board club where Massimo and I had dinner the night he was drunk, teasing the dancer. During the day the small platform stage is replaced by more round tables, and its entire side wall opens into a bank of window/wall ports through which, now on the other side of the ship, we can view the receding sphere of the earth. Framed by bright blue seas, the storm we passed through at launch is visible as a macroweather whirlpool lying over the South Pacific—from our distance, easing into the lush-pillowed, hand-carved chairs, the storm seems as fierce as a white flower. The ship’s motion hasn’t quite smoothed out, though, and Erica looks a little pale, slightly glassy-eyed and staring, her lips tight. Feeling the motion, I think.

That becomes clear enough from her expression as Werhner starts raving about the looks of the curry brought to the adjacent table, nodding hello to the middle-aged couple seated there. It does look meaty, rich, though on the far side of green.

“Drink something,” Collette tells Erica. Collette herself is radiant, she’s been lost in her yoga all morning.

“Maybe I should,” Erica says, pulling down the zip-lock of her jump suit. “I’ll take another pill. Really, this leg of the flight…”

The service waitress arrives, a saronged woman with a ruby set in the middle of her forehead. Erica orders milk, Werhner his curry, Collette and I will split a rack of lamb.

“It’s the distance.” Erica takes it up again. “It’s bad enough in orbit. Flying across half the solar system—I don’t see why we have to. God, we’ve left orbit already, look,” she says, wincing at the receding earth through the restaurant’s window/wall. “So long to my nice, still beach. Land. Flat, steady land. Firm land.”

“Construct a point horizon,” I suggest, remembering how I’ve felt at times myself. “Watch something steady in space. Of course, that’s a lot easier to do in the dome.”

“You don’t want to spoil your trip,” Collette says. “You should eat something.”

Erica moans. “How many times have I been through this?” she sighs.

Werhner’s drumming his fingers on the table, says he’s been offered a chance to ride up in the dome himself for a while. He can understand why the launch was rough but is curious why we are now flying with noticeable pitch and yaw—this began a half hour ago.

“It starts in the stomach,” Erica says. “Then it’s like my whole body, it gets into my blood. I have a hard time focusing my eyes. God, and my stomach. My poor stomach.”

The saronged woman with the ruby brings our food over on a carved teak cart. Erica sips at her milk as it is handed to her, sets it down, then makes a face, a horrible face, when Werhner’s curry is put on the table, steaming and ripe.

“I can’t sit here,” Erica says as its odor spreads; her napkin to her lips, she’s rising. “I’m sorry. I have to go back to the cabin.”

We watch her leave, then Collette and I start carving up the lamb. In a minute Werhner is calling the service waitress over again, asking her to take the curry and transfer it, please, to a thermos container; he’s leaving, too.

“You haven’t even touched it,” Collette says.

“Ummm,” Werhner answers sheepishly, sipping Erica’s milk. Now he looks a little green himself. “Might be last night, uh, catching up with me. Going up to the dome for a while, have a look around. Anybody interested in coming?”

“Werhner,” Collette says with a smile, “we haven’t begun to eat.”

“Right,” he says, getting up with a lurch. “I’ll just get my… curry on the way out. S’long.”

Collette’s foot is stroking mine under the table, feels very nice. I’ve eaten most of the food, on the theory that a full stomach is a good way to face instability. A small, birdlike man with prominent ears comes through the restaurant with flowers, and I sign for a dozen roses for Collette, red roses. She’s touched, smiles against some nervousness that’s begun to show, her green eyes are flashing.

She’s explaining how one loses track of time in the hologram, how she’s pleased we’ll be able to share portions of the experience, it really is spectacular. I hope the instability of the ship doesn’t spoil anything for her, or for myself—I can just barely feel its effects now. And then I remember a third way to conquer motion sickness: to have sex; nothing takes your mind off a pitching ship like sex.

“It’s tomorrow that it begins,” she says. “So pay attention to Videon 33.”

I put my hand on Collette’s across the linen tablecloth. Her skin is smooth, warm, solid in a way the ship no longer seems to be.

“Let’s go back to the cabin,” I say.

The instability remains for hours on the ship, not a very smooth ride. I can’t understand it: we’re traveling rapidly, but not at speeds which create macroweather effect. Lost for a while at the window/wall, the earth’s sphere far gone by this time, I gaze into the blue-black reaches of deep space, the stars blue-white, red, and yellow diamonds in the vastness; can’t quite get my bearings. And then I realize the instability has gotten worse, it takes balance to walk from the recliner to the shower. In the rushing water of the shower I feel at sea, unhinged—like riding a working ship rather than a pleasure cruise. I begin to feel apprehensive, as if a chasm is opening beneath me in the white void of the cubicle. I don’t stay long. Just as I am toweling dry I swear I can feel the ship shudder, and there is a live line link coming through on the videon from the ship’s dome.

It’s Werhner. Bigger than life and in electronically vivid color; beyond him the head-high computers, the desklike, long vane consoles in pastel blues, greens, beige. The dome looks almost deserted, Werhner intense as always with a touch of motion sickness showing in the concentration he pays to his breathing. I can see his thermos of curry still unopened on the navigator’s chart table.

“Thought you’d like to know the reason we’re catching the bumps,” Werhner says. “You’re going to find this interesting. SciCom split the casing on an aft reactor jettisoning waste—they were launching the big dispoz cans out the port pontoon, then changing the whole damned course to avoid them. Timing themselves, like morons. And if that doesn’t shake things up enough, one of the cans hits the casing on that aft reactor, spills half the works into space. Remind you of something?”

I look up into the lens above the screen with a frown: “That happened to us once.”

Werhner looks at me with a shrug. “In the Pleiades,” he says. “Just like old times. Wish I would have known this was going to happen. I guess the joke’s on me. Hong Kong at least kept still.”

I want to ask Werhner whether he’s heard anything new on the military tracers after Cooper, but know he’d tell me if he had. It’s better unsaid for now, I think.

“So look what we’ve got,” Werhner sighs. “Everybody’s sick up here, we’re way the hell off course. You’re better off staying amidships, more stability there.”

“Thanks for telling me what’s going on,” I say. “At least it’s not serious. They should have things straightened out soon enough.”

“Soon enough,” Werhner agrees.

We eat again, caviar, canapes, and a very light champagne, watching the instructional transmission on Videon 33 to take our minds off the ride. The hologram’s electronics are contained in a velour headrest that plugs into the recliner. A dark-haired woman, dressed in a robin’s-egg-blue uniform, is stroking the forehead of a heavy, middle-aged man who’s just settled in the unit. Then the screen cuts to a stark printout and the audio to a soothing voice-over:

ALL CLASS//ALL CLASS//ALL CLASS//

NOTICE OF PROGRAM CHANGE//

NOTICE OF PROGRAM CHANGE//

ATTENTION ALL PASSENGERS AND SERVICE PERSONNEL//

NOTICE OF PROGRAM CHANGE//

NOTICE OF PROGRAM CHANGE//

//DUE TO TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES THE SHIP IS EXPERIENCING TEMPORARY INSTABILITY //THESE DIFFICULTIES ARE IN THE PROCESS OF BEING CORRECTED BY THE COMMITTEE PILOT//

//AS OUR WAY OF SAYING THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE, ALL-CLASS OPTIONS BECOME IMMEDIATELY AVAILABLE WITHOUT ADDITIONAL CHARGE FOR THE LENGTH OF THE DELAY//EARLY HOLOGRAM ENTRY IS ALSO AVAILABLE WITHOUT ADDITIONAL CHARGE//

Our service is your pleasure//Your pleasure our service

I moan; Collette asks if this means something else has gone wrong. She’s been annoyed with me because I haven’t taken the damage very seriously; but I know well enough that it can be fixed, they only need to blow that reactor away.

“It’s not that,” I tell her. “It’s just that they’ve started using the Committee Pilot. Now it’ll take a day to reach a half-hour decision.”

“Well, we can plug in,” she says. “We can enter the hologram now or just after dinner. We can eat and use the hologram all night.”

“Tonight, then,” I say.

Collette tells me that once we start, we’ll be consumed for the remainder of the trip. She asks me if there’s anything I want to do beforehand, if there’s one of the other programs I want to run through, anything else on the ship I want to try.

I mull the matter over for a long moment. “No,” I say. “The only thing that seems unfinished to me is Massimo’s death. I wish I had had the chance to pay my respects before we left Las Venus. I wasn’t thinking very clearly, I guess, too interested in getting out of there. But I wish I had gone to where they took his body.”

“I haven’t been thinking very clearly, either,” she says. “I should have thought to tell you. His body is probably on the ship.”

“On the ship?”

She nods, looks at me seriously. “Passenger remains are taken back to L.A. They always are.”

“Is there a way I can… see him? There must be.”

“There is a morgue on the ship, he’s probably there. But you have to get clearance, we’d have to make a request.”

Collette does the checking for me. Sure enough, Massimo’s remains are in the morgue. But she says no requests for downship activity are being authorized because the main lifts are out of operation for the duration of the instability.

“Is there a back way, a way through the superstructure of the ship? I’d like to go now,”

“Without clearance?” Collette asks, checking the time by punching it up into a corner of the screen. “Well… I suppose there’s no reason to worry now; what can they do, after all? Sure, there’s a way. I’d have to show you.”

“Just give me directions,” I tell her. “You can get the electronics set up for the hologram. I’ll go alone. I’ve been through ships before, just tell me where it is.”

“Well, I’d have to get you through a hatch. Are you sure you want to do this just before we plug in?”

“I’m sure,” I tell her, cracking off a piece of flat bread, spooning on the last of the caviar. “And the hologram after will be just the thing. I’m the sort who lays one on after a funeral.”

Before I leave the cabin, Collette pulls a soft, stylish leather coat from the narrow closet off the kitchen/bar in which she keeps her clothes. “It’s going to be cold,” she says, easing the coat from its hanger, passing it to me.

It is a man’s coat, a warm golden shade, like a flight jacket. It has the supple texture of glove leather, fits as if it had been cut for me, less a kilo or two. I admire the coat and thank Collette—it really fits well.

“It was my brother’s,” she says. “I didn’t want to sell it.”

I put my hand on the leather. I want to ask her about her brother, she’s mentioned him before, yet I can see pain in her eyes. I hesitate, but my curiosity is too great. I ask her why he didn’t want to keep the coat.

“He died,” she says quietly. “He was given the wrong drugs. Who knows why.”

The man who said that paranoids are survivors, I think.

Collette takes me back to the pool area, where the air turns chemical and humid. We pass the thinning crowd, slip into the locker room, and she leads me across the thick carpeting to a door marked SERVICE ONLY/DO NOT ENTER. She opens the heavy door by slipping her blue card into a lock slot on the satiny metal door frame, tells me to go all the way down, kisses me goodbye.

Once through the doorway, I pass from rug to metal grating, from the sleek redwood benches to ranks of bare metal pipes, valves, and scaffolding. The door shuts behind me with a slam. She was right when she said it was going to be cold: I can see my breath. I am in the cavernous maw of the interior of the ship, just alongside the works for the pool. Beyond the pumps lie vacant stretches of space between this first-class hull and the other two hulls that make up the second-class and third-class sectors of the ship. TheTube is constructed just like a tripled starship with a skin—three long starship cylinders, three domes, each with its port and starboard pontoons high overhead. I guessed something like this, seeing the ship on the pads in LasVenus; still, I am startled by the sight. When I consider for a moment where we will be flying, I know I shouldn’t be. Yet in the bowels of this ship, each hull so resembles the Daedalus that I have an eerie sense of never having touched down, of walking in space.

I’ve already climbed down the flight of steep metal stairs past the pool works, enter a series of hatch passageways in the hull on the next level; the stairway continues down, narrow, there are hatches at every level, stenciled numbers. I clamber down more steps, read 022. It is a long way to go, I guess two hundred meters beneath me.

I reenter the ship sector through the very last hatch. I open it, a little rubber-legged from the descent. The morgue is achingly stark white, dispassionately institutional. I am struck by its size once inside it, for the single level I’ve reached through the service door descends two levels further through wide inside elevators. Instead of two or three mordant attendants, I find the office area is staffed by a half-dozen people. I’m told to go below by an angular-faced, pale woman in white.

A chemical odor seems to radiate from the smooth walls and tile floors, from the interior of the elevator in which I descend. The lowest level is again dazzlingly white. Leaving the elevator, I have the sensation that I am inside the white heart of a vast machine—ducts, pipes, fittings, valves, line the ceiling of the hallways and the racks on the walls. I recognize hatchways leading to the engine room of the ship. A hum seems to come from everywhere—the long thin tubes of lighting, the machine fittings and ducts, the thick steel doors leading to rooms visible through small squares of wire-reinforced glass, rows upon rows of oversized drawers tagged at their handles. Collette was right about the number of deaths. I feel a formless blindness creeping into my vision, a nervous tremor runs through my body—slightly spooked, I guess, at the atmosphere of this place, raised to an unknown power by its size.

I cannot escape the notion that Massimo still has something to tell me. I recall our first meeting on the A-line tram, the sense I had then of being impelled with him toward something new to me yet known somehow; we never arrived at it, yet we seemed sure to, I could feel it in my bones. And the idea of his intercession intrigues me. Judging from the way he orchestrated a connection for me with Eva Steiner, he could very well have seen to my appeal without telling me, had it taken care of even though he didn’t know who Eva Steiner was. The hygienic chill seems cruel and unjust, just as his death still seems wrong, the gorgeous Ferrari smeared along the wall, its orange-red fireball a young, seething sun.

In C-l there is a two-man crew seated at a desk playing chess on a magnetic board—the vault beyond stacked ceiling-high with drawers that recede down a corridor bathed in light.

“Well, let’s see,” the older of the attendants says, moving his fingers through a card file. He looks queasy from the motion of the ship. “Giroti. G.G.G.G.G.G.G. You say you’re not a member of the immediate family?”

“I’d just like to pay my respects. The man was a friend of mine.”

“You can see what we have,” the older man says, peering at the card he’s pulled.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Looks like he was pretty well busted up. He’s in drawer thirty-three, right down there. I guess we have effects, says here personal effects are in there, too.”

I stare at the attendant blankly, stupidly; I don’t know what to think.

“Look,” he says, pulling his chair up against the desk so he can hunch over the chessboard, “you want an interfaith minister or something? We can call upstairs.”

“No,” I answer. “I’ll be just fine.”

In the chilly air I stare at the pathetic sack on the slab, the body bag from which wisps of CO₂ rise like smoke from a dying fire. I wonder why I’ve come. Now it seems so useless. I stand silently, lost in my thoughts. I recall Massimo’s kindness to me on the last day he was alive, the enthusiasm with which he seemed to lose himself in his cars—to be utterly lost, in the end, in a blur of acceleration in the Ferrari. That is what he might have preferred; I accept that, it makes his death sensible to me. Yet it reminds me of the ways in which I’ve lost myself, reminds me of the moments before the blow four year ago. In the instant before I blacked out I thought I was dying, remember experience becoming an all-consuming blur, passing into something from which I never thought I’d recover. I sigh. Well, friend, I think, peace be with you.

After a while I look through Massimo’s scattered effects. Behind the separator in the body drawer lie his tagged leather luggage, suit bags, several briefcases. I stare for a while at his unfamiliar things. There is a tagged video cassette lying alone, which I pick up, examine. It is dated the second day of the trip, and in the title box are written the words “To my survivors"; the handwriting must be Massimo’s.

I anticipate its contents, guess a dozen things on my short trip up to the morgue’s first level to run the tape, expect an explanation to a question I can’t quite formulate. I’m given a machine without signing for it; nothing I’ve done has been logged. When I run the tape I look with infinite sadness at Massimo’s smiling, animated face, see his sly kindness and sense of his own end evident even before he speaks. Of course, I think, he was coming on against medical advice, he knew that he might well die. What he has to say has nothing to do with his Governorship, or with SciCom, or with the trip; it is a message to his household, and to his friends. “You belong to a new age,” he says. “Go in pleasure and in peace.”

I stare at his still image fixed on the final frame.

I am passing back into the bowels of the ship when it happens. The chill intensifies, the brightness of the morgue goes, and in its place is the shaky dimness of the hatch passageways. I am lost in thought, vaguely wonder how Collette is making out. I still have a long way to go, stop at a hatch only one flight up to take another look at the superstructure of the ship.

I unseal the hatch, push to go through—and it swings open to a howling bright light, the white light of a whirling sun, intense, overwhelming, incredible. A screaming rings in my ears, the light is blinding me. I wonder if I’ve been hit, if the ship’s been hit, my arm is still on the hatch lock, I shade my eyes with my forearm and slam it closed.

Silence. The dim light. My heart is pounding, the blood banging in my ears.

A morgue attendant who’s heard the slam is at my side, asking me what happened, what’s wrong.

The hatch swings open at the touch of his hand. I had not set the lock. Beyond it lies another metal stairway, the dim light of the ship’s interior, the pall of machinery, nothing else.

“Look at you, man. What happened?”

“I don’t know,” I say, leaning back against a metal stair. “My God, I don’t know.”

The cabin’s soft brown walls, the faint hexagons of its carpet, the Rubens, pink and fleshy, comfort me with their familiarity. Collette is in the kitchen/bar assembling dinner. I catch a whiff of piquant sauce, feel my stomach tighten, put one hand on the couch to steady myself against the ship’s motion. God, what is it, I wonder, the instability of the ship, the last days of the trip, or what I saw, what I saw? I notice now the velour headrests for the hologram sitting on the carpet near the recliner; they connect to the recliner’s base through an array of gray cables.

“I’m really having problems,” Collette says, coming out empty-handed. “The bearnaise sauce keeps separating on me, it’s curdled twice.”

“I’m not really hungry,” I tell her, see now she seems a little pale herself.

So we sit on the couch sipping Cinzano for our appetites, watching the last of the instructional programs for the hologram on Videon 33. The white-haired physician I’ve seen twice before is summing up a long, personal theory. He says in the end, translating from archaic Greek, that the highest pleasure of an organism consists of its return to its own true nature.

“My nature at the moment doesn’t feel very steady,” I tell Collette, think I need to do something, to get myself occupied. I go with her to the kitchen and we try the sauce again—once more wind up with thickening butter and specks of egg. When I tell Collette I’m not interested in eating, anyway, she says the motion is getting to her as well, she isn’t particularly hungry herself. She says she thinks we ought just to enter the hologram, plug in. The electronics are ready and it’s always worked for motion sickness for her. I wash my hands at the metal sink. I just want to forget. I tell her that now seems as good a time as any other, and so we clear away the aperitif glasses, set the cables into their racks, change into robes.

I have a pleasant moment as Collette sets my head in the headrest before a pastoral videon screen, nervous as I am.

Then a severe, searing pain begins at the tips of my fingers, shoots straight to my sinuses and teeth, grips me in the spine. My stomach muscles contract to double me up, but I can’t move. The pain is razor-sharp, burning, takes my breath away, my fist flails out and slams into the side of the recliner. I am out of the headrest, doubled up now, gasping for breath, the pain receding. “…Jesus.”

“I’m sorry, Rawley,” Collette says, biting her lip. “That had to be done to clear your neurology for contrast. I’m sorry. But if I had told you, it would have been worse.”

“Worse?… Jesus.”

“Lie back,” she says.

“Oh, now…”

“Trust me,” she says. “Lie back.”

Collette self-induces her own initial neurological clearing with a timing mechanism—I can hear her catch her breath. Then she tells me everything is ready, makes herself comfortable on the couch, her full hair spilling over the headrest. I’m not at all certain what to expect. Despite my apprehension, with the ship unstable I do feel far more comfortable lying down, I’m sure now I won’t be sick. I lie there watching a pastoral scene on the videon screen, rolling hills, cultivated land, a farmhouse, and a young man and woman doing something by its door.

“Say, Collette, when will I—”

Suddenly there is a flash of white-yellow light, I am blinded, not unpleasantly, but I am consumed in light. The vision quickly passes, fades in diminishing visual echoes, then my mind, my senses, go blank—my vision utterly obliterated, I cannot hear or see a thing. Slowly my mind fills with a color, pure, throbbing red, then pure, cool blue, then a deep, iridescent green, the colors fill all of my senses, seem to saturate every cell in my body, I have never had a sensation such as this. It is both frightening and compelling at the same time. It goes on and on, the colors begin to mingle and shift, swirl into unutterable combinations.

The light shifts to yellow-white again, fades, and I find myself transported to a beach. A beach? I wonder, reach out and touch the sand. Its grains slide between my fingers, smooth, weightless as dust. I inhale—salt-rich air. I turn and Collette is lying on her side on a mat, boosted up on her elbow. She seems as vividly real to me as she did on the day we lay just this way on the beach of the island off Vietahiti; the surf is booming out at the reef with a deep roar I can feel in my bones. I reach out to touch her—she seems real, but my hand passes through her arm with a tingling sensation—not Collette, but a holographic representation.

“What would you do?” the specter of Collette asks in an eerie, hollow voice. “What would you do if you were utterly free in time?”

“I’d put myself somewhere pleasant,” I answer, laughing because I know we’ve had this conversation once before, giddy at the sound of my own voice, queerly unreal. “I’d put myself right on this spot.”

A feeling is spreading throughout my body, a rich, warm, pleasant feeling, a feeling like orgasm, but broader, wider, suffused into every limb, reaching into every part of me, permeating every cell.

I reach out to touch Collette again, concentrate—focus my eyes, move my arm slowly. There is a sensation in my hand, a sensation like the soft touch of her skin, but cooler. The moment of touch extends itself, seems to last forever as the warmth grows inside me, seems to lift me higher and higher….

I have no idea how much time passes—the moment of touch modulates, all my sensations undergo a shift through odd, funny exchanges with one another. I taste the color pink; a moving pattern of lines sounds like running deer. Then a series of scenes begin to pass through my mind, complete with all their sensations. One instant—or is it hours?—I am holding Collette for the first time, feeling the warmth and weight of her, the firmness of her back muscles, their modulation as she moves against me; then I am reclining with her on the soft loam of woods in broken sunlight, hear the murmur of a stream, feel the soft caress of her hand stroking the back of my neck, my shoulders. And then I am turning in my cabin, watching the window/wall open into another cabin, Erica turning simultaneously, Erica’s smile wide and arms rising; then I am moving toward Collette in the cabin, to music that is everywhere, above, beneath, beside me. Again I am pressed against the leather seat of the Ferrari as the car, its steering wheel in my hands, curls with smooth adhesion around the hairpin; the thrust of its acceleration coming out into the sun goes on forever; and I am sitting with Collette, her lips full and shiny, her loose hair backlit by the sun, her face inches from mine, the odor of gardenias everywhere. The experiences seem simultaneous, yet each has a full integrity, seems separate, through swimming in the soft bulk of the Pacific over an involuted reef, walking through the green mansions of palace gardens among rainbow blossoms and clucking, iridescent blue peacocks. At times they seem distant, at times so present in each detail the effect is overwhelming. In one sequence I bite into a piece of filet and see the fibers snap as in a blown-up picture, follow the process of its saturation with saliva, the chewed bit sliding with a scraping sound down my esophagus and falling with a splash into the cave where gastric juices swarm over it like foam from a wave. Collette hands me a glass of red wine and I smell sugar, grapes, the sunlight of the vineyards; she wipes my lips and the sound is like skis on fresh snow. And then I am watching myself from a distance again, the Ferrari from above a smooth blur of red, bright in the sun. The pleasures amplify, intensify, in these and other ways. The pleasures seem to grow, a surge of pleasure which, like my first moment of touch, extends itself, sweeps me away, loops me into whirlpools of memory, timelessness, sensation, a rush I have never known.

The scenes recur, roll into and through one another, green mansions and blue water, the curves of a woman, the sweet freedom of flight; they go on and on, I am in and out of them, they roll on and on.

The sky above is motionless, a sea of stars, snow at the Milky Way. The Crab nebula is overhead. I look up, and in looking I begin to feel the sky widen and begin to fall through it—falling into it, falling among the stars as the infinity of space opens before me like a window, like a door. I can feel the blood coursing through my veins, the rhythm of my heart the rhythm of my body.

A sound nearby. Collette steps out of the dark, naked, glistening with sweet oil, her breasts jutting out. She kneels before me, and when I quickly thrust inside her, she wraps her arms around my head and only her fingers move through the hair on the back of my neck. A series of jolting shocks pass through my groin, a stream of delight which does not seem to belong to me but takes the last breath from my lungs, continues, continues, continues.…

Finally Collette rises to her feet, sends her arms outstretched to the stars; the low fire gives her a golden glow, her skin glistening with the sheen of the fragrant oil as the light plays over the curves of her body.

“A goddess?” she says softly, tenderly, looking at me with a gentle smile. “Yes. And you are a god, Rawley.”

She laughs, wrinkles at her eyes, holds out her hands. “You are a god.”

Her eyes are jade-green, striking. Her broad face is framed by black, loosely waved hair. Her tongue touches the edges of her teeth as she laughs. I kiss the soft hollow between her shoulder and her neck, chocolate skin lushly warm, smooth, soft. She moves from me, whirls away, stops. “You think this is all? You think we’re finished?” she says breathlessly, Collette says breathlessly. “Oh, Rawley.”

Her eyes are jade-green, striking. Her broad face is framed by auburn, loosely waved hair. Her tongue touches the edges of her teeth as she laughs. I kiss the soft hollow between her shoulder and her neck, pinkwhite skin lushly warm, smooth, soft. She moves from me, whirls away, stops. “You think this is all? You think we’re finished?” she says breathlessly, Maxine says breathlessly. “Oh, Rawley.”

I see Massimo’s face, broad and radiant, the radiance seems to come from deep within his bones, his eyes smiling, his lips cherry-red, his shock of white hair and white beard brilliantly white.

“You belong to a new age,” he is telling me. “Go in pleasure and in peace.”

Each scene comes again, recedes, these and others, they shimmer through one another, whole scenes and fragments freeze, their images recombine: green mansions, summer wheat, the gulf of space, a sun of ice. They freeze again for a time I have no sense of, then expand into vivid swaths of pure, electric color, roll on, memory and desire mingled into a timeless rush of ecstasy and delight, roll on and on….

Then there is a jolt, a jolt like no other. It shakes me whole and violently, fixes itself in time to the thumping of my heart, reverberates intensely, then reverberates again. It is outside me, a severe jolt as from a ship, a jolt through the recliner, through my body, a jolt of massive weight and inertia.

For a moment I don’t know where I am. My heart is thudding in my chest, my blood is racing, a terror laces through the incredible sense of well-being that I have, my body feels lusciously pleasant but for the throbbing in my hand, the fright in my heart. I am struggling for consciousness, struggling to bring my dislocation under control. I feel the light pain my eyes as I open….

“Wake up,” Collette is saying, holding a glass of orange juice to my lips, her hand shaking. “Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong with the ship, there’s an alarm. Werhner called down from the dome.”

The cool liquid runs down my throat, its sweetness heavy on my tongue. “How… long…?”

“We’ve been under all night, it’s day fourteen, Rawley. Here, drink more. This will detoxify you. There’s an alarm. He wants you to come up to the dome.”

My eyes blink, I see Collette, robe open, perspiring, fear in her face, I reach out and touch the pulsing vein in her neck. Turn to see the cabin, its edges sharp—the paintings askew, utensils tumbled from drawers in the kitchen/bar, the closet door hanging open, the lights dim and flickering, coming steady.

“There was a jolt, Rawley.”

My mind comes awake; the drug, I wonder, the fright. I am sitting up and rubbing my face for a long minute, feel the blood rise to my cheeks and temples. I look up to the videon:

ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM

“He wants you to come up to Dome A.”

I have slipped off my robe, pulled open my bag, and am pulling on my flight suit, stop with one arm remaining to shove through and punch Dome A on the console:

ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM

TRAFFIC DOWN TRAFFIC DOWN TRAFFIC DOWN

ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM

The ship is terribly unsteady. I run my hands through my hair, the ship pitches, and I have to reach out for support against the recliner. I see Collette wiping her face with a towel, reaching for a silver jump suit.

“Look, Collette…”

“I’m coming along,” she says.

On the lift to Dome A I hold the cold handrail so tightly I know without looking that the back of my hand is white—with my other arm I hold Collette against me, her silver jump suit slides against the palm of my hand, her body warm beneath.

“Kiss me,” she says, her face close to mine, she’s barely smiling. I look down at the glistening of her lips, into her liquid green, frightened eyes.

I meet her lips, her tongue, lose myself for a moment in the flesh-and-blood warmth of her, run the back of my hand over the soft chocolate skin of her cheek. I don’t know what to tell her, how to articulate the terror I feel lacing through the pleasure of her presence. What was it that I saw, I am thinking now, what was it through the hatch, familiar and strange at once? The question mingles in my blood with echoes and reverberations from the hologram, the eerie sense of its unreality and the vividness of its visions.

My hand grips the handrail even more tightly, aches. The fingers of my other hand run their course through Collette’s black hair, twist together before they have passed through. I pull Collette’s head back by the hair down her back. Her eyes widen, her mouth opens, her gaze is directly into mine. Her neck muscles tense, her head seems an upward weight against the pull of my twisted fingers.

Smile lines creep from the corners of her eyes.” Ahhh,” she says, “You have an imagination.”

“I do,” I say, releasing my fingers, relaxing my hand. “I have an imagination, all right.” Collette shifts her weight against the accelerating upward pull of the lift, leans against the spun-steel wall still watching me, smiling. How odd, it wasn’t my imagination, but an impulse to feel the simple, present reality of her that made me cause her pain. Even as I think this I begin to lose it again in our distorted reflection on the opposite wall, the vague soft map of ourselves which moves even as we both move to unlock our knees and stand flat to the wall behind us against the abrupt deceleration of the lift as the panel light begins to flash DOME A.

Something’s wrong. As the lift doors open I am feeling the ship’s slow roll to steady, feel for a moment that odd sensation of leg muscles ready to move for balance when there is no need to, suddenly steady on, I almost fall stepping from the lift. As the lift doors close behind I can see in the amber light of the hatchway to port pontoon a large, blue-suited figure across in program, yet the dome seems deserted—a half-eaten sandwich on a near console, equipment out of place, a thick oil seeping over the magnesium-alloy floor from the high bank of condensers. As if by habit I close a slowly swinging locker door, only then look across and see Werhner seated at the navigator’s console, absorbed, intent on his instruments, digging into his curry, so absorbed he isn’t looking at his plate but eating heartily. I feel a temperature change on the exposed surfaces of my skin, cold. I look up.

Through the concave hexagons of the dome itself an expanse of spectral, brilliant light lies across the port quarter, something huge—and on the starboard side nothing, not a trace, starless, an inky void. A chill runs down my spine, I feel something crawl across my lower lip. The lull. The ship’s instability has passed; we are in a lull so motionless I can feel the blood coursing through my veins. Only once before have I had these sensations, seen what I am seeing now, only once and forever—four years ago.

“Rawley, look at the instruments. Look.”

Werhner is waving me over to the vane console without glancing up; in a daze I make it over to my station, lean on the vane console with both hands. Lull figures, absolute lull figures, the needle of each instrument pinned by its own thin weight at zero.

“SciCom circuits overloaded,” Werhner says. “Even Committee Pilot’s patched out to give them more room. Christ, Rawley—the ship was blind-sided. Something came up faster than we are, came up from behind us, the other two hulls are gone. The other two hulls are gone. And I show… this… configuration, a ring singularity entry horizon, that’s what I’m showing, Christ, just…”

Now when he looks at me I can see how wide Werhner’s eyes are, his cheeks seem stretched back, an aura of light around his head the wildness of his sandy hair. Neither of us wants to say it, to think it, but I can smell it in the burned insulation in the cold air, feel it as a tingling on the back of my neck, see it in the array of the dome: the presence of the Daedalus beneath my hands is as palpable as the pads on my fingertips; I can feel it in the rhythm of the faint vibrations running through the console.

A hand at my shoulder: Collette. I move my hand to her shoulder, squeeze. I can see my own distress in her face, my horror; she asks weakly, what’s wrong, what’s wrong. Yet I sense she sees in my face a staggering weight to the answer, doesn’t want an answer. For an instant an afterimage from the hologram returns to me, the metallic voice of a calm, old man, saying that the highest pleasure of an organism consists of its return to its own nature, the afterimage of a searing burn of launch seen up through a ship. Feel swept away, I am being swept away, feel obliterated as I felt in the early hours of the hologram today, or was it yesterday…. And why not the same trip? My experience with Maxine translated in Collette, an ongoing tension with SciCom, each launch a course correction to lead me here.

I am still holding Collette, she is pressed against me, her warm body tender and firm, the warm dampness of her breath on my neck.

I turn back to the instruments.

“It’s a flight simulation. Werhner, this is a flight simulation.”

“A flight simulation? God, I’ve been so damned sick, I… But Rawley…”

“We’re being set up, Werhner.”

“A program in the hologram,” Collette says breathlessly. “It isn’t possible, they can’t do this….”

“Rawley, if she’s right. But the hulls are gone, the other hulls.”

I release the thruster safety, switch toggles for alternate readings from secondary and tertiary mag and grav systems, stare, my eyes widening, at the readings: zero, null, zero, null; rap meter faces with my knuckles.

A high-pitched laugh pierces the faint machine hum from across the dome.

A man. Collette screams. Cooper. Cooper is in the dome, moving from the amber light of the hatch to program our way, Cooper, blue flight suit disheveled, the bulk of his form backlit by the amber light, his snow-white hair glowing like spectral flames.

The hair on the back of my neck rises at the sight of him. Werhner’s turning slowly, I can see the awe of recognition on his face. Collette stumbles alongside me, a blur of brown and silver, clings; a thumping begins somewhere deep in the ship. The thumping of overloaded reactors and slipped vanes, I’ve heard it only once before.

“Cooper,” I say. “Stand fast.”

Cooper is supporting himself at a low tape rack, his laugh maniacal. “They’re all below,” he says, a whine to his voice. “We’re the only ones up here.”

“They told us you were dead, Cooper,” Werhner says. “They told us you’d committed suicide in Houston.”

Cooper’s high-pitched laugh starts again; he looks mad, insane. “Look at your instruments, Voorst.”

“Coming up again,” Werhner says firmly, wide-eyed at his instruments, his fork suspended above his plate. “I show a pulse on the port side. Fucker’s coming up again.”

My eyes are wide on the monitors before me, grav and mag sensors show a massive, swift front near the center of the inky field starboard, we’re still otherwise blind. Something catches my eye from the periphery of my vision. Red, the blind-sided panel going red across the dome, the red sweeping across the consoles this way, Cooper five meters away clutching a downhatch ladder, the strap of a liftoff rig. “Thrusters,” I call to Werhner, urge Collette to hang on, the panel’s red—my stomach heaves and folds, snaps into a knot. I am blacking out, moving my hand in an impossible slow motion for the thrusters, suspended, the panel entirely red, a jolt, a bone-shaking jolt is beginning to run through the ship…

ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM

EVENT INTRUSION EVENT INTRUSION EVENT INTRUSION ALL AUXILIARY SYSTEMS A & B SEQUENCE ALL AUXILIARY SYSTEMS A & B SEQUENCE ALL AUXILIARY SYSTEMS A & B SEQUENCE DAMAGE CONTROL DAMAGE CONTROL DAMAGE CONTROL

ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM

I’ve blacked out, or close to it—my consciousness swims with fragmented visions, a nightmare of deja vu and the momentary conviction that I am coming awake in my cabin, a woman kneeling at my side, the sweet odor and warm sight of her—I reach out my hand to touch her face, feel the throbbing pain, see the blood running crimson as Collette grasps my wrist and turns my hand palm upward.

There is a gash in the heel of my hand, a deep gash, bleeding steadily; I touch the spot, am startled by its sticky warmth.

At Collette’s knee is the dome’s first-aid kit, scattered contents. She quickly pulls a wide bandage around the heel of my hand, thin, translucent, medicated—the pain sears to the bone, bone numbed.

“Rawley,” she says, her eyes moist, her long hair loose on her shoulders.

The ship is screaming under power. I rise groggily, see blood splattered at the thrusters, turn to the sight of Cooper grinning horribly five meters away, hear him grunt. “Now you know,” I think he says; there is a thumping. The ship’s gone rocky, unstable; Werhner’s curry and rice smear the navigator’s table, he stands at a console intent on a monitor, curry smears the chest of his flight suit. I look to the dome, check for port pontoon—still there—look into a foggy white field of radiating lines on the starboard side, upward, and a void, an inky black void, where the other hulls should be. I feel as if I’m falling, feel in this flash of time as I felt when I blacked out and came to in the Ferrari during the race, falling.

“And we die,” Cooper says hoarsely. I see Collette’s hand rising to her mouth. “And we die, we always die.”

Instinctively I key in the auxiliary thrusters, wondering what, what, an electricity in my body like I’ve never known, look to Collette, her living, breathing body, thinking, Cooper… “Know what? Did they tell you to say that, Cooper? Do you remember?”

“Get into program,” Werhner says to him sharply. “We need—”

“Yaas, we die,” Cooper says. “The loop, the same nowhere and everywhere, we always die—look where we are, Voorst, you can’t believe it. If you’d known you’d have paid, I’ve been paying. The data was wrong, Voorst. We were never well off.”

… here before, I am thinking, overcome by a sense of both pure freedom and crushing oppression at the same time, recalling my own log: holding vane angle in the lull and watching Werhner eat… violently ill, I first thought it was from watching him; then focusing on the panel, I saw lull figures then everything red—instantly, I don’t know if it was a trick of vision, but the red seemed to sweep the panels right to left along with the first strong jolt…

Collette’s horror mirrors my own, her green eyes welling with tears. “No, no,” she says. “It’s all in the program, it’s your imagination. It’s this place, Rawley….”

“I’m flying the ship,” I say, the pain in my hand the throb of my pulse, my body’s blood oozing at the bandage, warm at my palm, the ship under my hands.

“Yes, you’re always flying the ship,” Cooper says, “that’s one of the languages. We die, Voorst….”

“Damn it, coming up,” Werhner says firmly.

“I’ll prove it to you,” Collette says, out of breath. “It’s all in the program. We won’t die, Rawley, no, not us. They’ve put it in the program. We live, Rawley, don’t listen to him. This is just what they wanted….”

ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM

EVENT INTRUSION EVENT INTRUSION EVENT INTRUSION ALL AUXILIARY SYSTEMS C & D SEQUENCE ALL AUXILIARY SYSTEMS C & D SEQUENCE ALL AUXILIARY SYSTEMS C & D SEQUENCE DAMAGE CONTROL DAMAGE CONTROL DAMAGE CONTROL

ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM

EVENT INTRUSION EVENT INTRUSION EVENT INTRUSION ALL AUXILIARY SYSTEMS C & D SEQUENCE ALL AUXILIARY SYSTEMS C & D SEQUENCE ALL AUXILIARY SYSTEMS C & D SEQUENCE

ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM

“Where’s the woman? Where is she, Werhner?”

“She’s in the port pontoon, she ran into program.” Cooper laughs hoarsely. “She’s right, Voorst, the loop is your imagination. She’s your imagination.”

The hatch is sealed, the wide, ribbed hatch to program slammed by the blow or by Collette. I shunt up program on the monitor, there’s nothing showing but gray snow on the screen. I bang the key with my fist, the monitor hissing, showing nothing but gray snow.

“Clear the port pontoon,” Werhner shouts. “We have stress markers, another pulse in fifteen. Cooper, get your ass…”

I push past Cooper, stumble across the dome, pull with all my strength at the hatch lock. The hatch will not turn; I hear Werhner saying sharply that it’s sealed and won’t respond. Cooper is laughing low and hoarse behind me. I make for the thrusters, but reaching Cooper, stop short and grab him by the throat, the muscles and sinews of his neck tight but giving in to my clenched hand, the blood through the bandage bright red against his windpipe, I am straining, holding his weight. “What do you know, you bastard? What did you tell that woman?’

“Eight.”

“ We’re all on the death list” he says, his eyes widening, his teeth glistening white, eerie, his voice half choked. “ We’re all on the death list from the blow. That’s what else I destroyed.”

“Six.”

The ship is beginning its yaw, I can feel the pulse coming up beneath us, the console a phantasmagoria of lights.

“Initial on number three,” Werhner says. “Go with it.”

I lurch to the console, push the thrusters with my wounded hand, shove through the bandage into blood and bone, burned insulation in the atmosphere, my vision swimming, the pulse a mirror of the hologram, I think of Collette, Collette, Collette.

“Three, gonna hit it.”

“The woman, Werhner! The woman!”

“What… woman?” I hear Werhner say and I begin falling, falling. I see Cooper ripping at the cable rack from program, his large frame hunched in dim light, ripping.

“Two.”

“Alive!” I scream.

“One. Coming…”

ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM

IMPACT EVENT IMPACT EVENT IMPACT EVENT IMPACT EVENT INTRUSION EVENT INTRUSION EVENT INTRUSION DAMAGE CONTROL DAMAGE CONTROL DAMAGE CONTROL

ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM

IMPACT EVENT IMPACT EVENT IMPACT EVENT IMPACT EVENT IMPACT EVENT

ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM

IMPACT EVENT IMPACT EVENT IMPACT EVENT IMPACT EVENT IMPACT EVENT

ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM

The hatch to program blows open with a rushing scream, hangs open like a tongue. Through it I see a howling, whirling sun filling the gulf of night, a huge sun, growing larger, a whirlpool of light bleaching my vision in the fine atom snow of the cosmos into which I spin orange flames at my feet, falling, falling. My bones are exploding, yellow-white to white light vision, pure white, white light vision.