The Pleasure Tube Read online

  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 sa
y 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// In my dream state I see Werhner vividly, straight, sandy hair, biting his lower lip as he punches a sequence through the console. I can hear voices. I feel my body shift on satin, feel a change in my weight as I sense a massive relocation. In my half sleep I'm not sure what's going on—a vivid memory of the Daedalus in the movement of this ship, in the metallic voices of dome control—I hear thruster corrections and vane angles traded between the bridge and propulsion, think this is not a liftoff but a course correction, a course change, vaguely think we launched yesterday, yes, remember the moving paintings. But there's something else.

  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.

  "M
mmm," 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."