The Pleasure Tube Page 3

  "Do I—I mean, is this my cabin?"

  Only when she puts her hand on my shoulder to make me lie back do I realize that I am naked. I inhale deeply, and the rich, sweet odor of gardenias fills my lungs.

  "Drink this," she says, passing me the orange juice again.

  "Where are we going?"

  "You'll see tomorrow. Where doesn't matter, does it?"

  For the moment I can't think of an answer. I close my eyes as Collette makes me promise to tell her stories from my trip, where the Daedalus expedition went, what we saw on survey. Her asking me, the Bartok, this peculiar motion, tug at my concentration, and for a frightening moment I feel myself on the precipice of my nightmare on the Daedalus, my mind's eye beginning to shape the awesome figure of a howling, whirling sun....

  As I struggle for consciousness I breathe an odor of Guam, tropically rich, ripening. Guam: the drowsy questions, the limpid air. Knuth smiling at my requests for leave, not a smile of sympathy, but a smile of collusion with a pattern that will not let me go. I cannot rise past the same numbness I felt weighing on me then.

  "The exact position of the thrusters?"

  "No readings on any of the mag sensors, Rawley? Let's go over them one by one."

  "Don't blame me, Rawley, this is a slow process. This is how it has to be."

  "Let's consider analogies, Voorst. What was your personal relationship with each of the other members of the dome crew? How would you describe your feelings toward the Committee Pilot? Let's begin with them."

  I feel about them as I feel about you, runs through my mind. Don't you ever act?

  "Dead in Houston," Taylor says finally to a question about Cooper one day, his voice flat and even, his gold lighter hissing as he pauses to light his pipe. "Cached his drugs." The news of Cooper's suicide slices through my numbness like a razor through my flesh, Cooper perhaps psychotic, I believe, but suicide doesn't seem right; and Taylor had known for two days.

  I can feel anxiety rising as a presence within me, my heart is pounding, and Yes, I want to say to Collette, it does matter where, I want to wake....

  Then I feel her silky hand slipping across my chest, a satin sheet pulled across my midsection, her lips beginning to nibble at my thighs.

  The image of the cold, howling sun, the memories of Cooper howling at Committee Pilot from Damage Control, of Guam, recede from my mind and I am transported. I smile a smile of satisfaction which Collette could only partially translate, as the last music I remember from the lull becomes, not a vivid memory, but simply present Bartok and the piercing sweetness of violins.

  "Yes," I whisper, running my hand through the lush softness of her hair, "I like to touch." The tropical odor refines itself, it is hers. Gardenias are everywhere.

  Chapter 3

  Biosphere Reserve

  ITINERARY//

  FIRST-CLASS PASSAGE// Prog. 2NdCoord.

  DA1 WELCOME AND FLYAWAY --- I/o-0926

  DA2 FLT TO OE//DTRIP//LAYOVER 2, 3 bid i/f-1021

  DA3 BIOS RESERVE//MOVALLEY bid i/f-1951

  DA4 SYNESTHETIC HARMON//VIDEON bid i/f-cont

  SPEC

  DA5 FANT CO-OP//EPICUREAN bid i/f-cont

  CONSENSUS

  DA6 ARR LASVENUS//CLUB EROTICA bid i/f-0900

  DA7 LAYOVER//RISK VENTURE VECT bid cont

  DAS RISK FEST2, 3 //SIDEREAL CONC bid cont

  DA9 UKIYOE FLYAWAY bid I/O-0623

  DA10 SENS SEVEN SPEC//MOONLOOP bid i/f-cont

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

  DA12 AQUAPLEASE//HOLO PREP bid i/f-cont

  DA13 HOLD PROG//TOTAL HOLO4 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, INTERSECTION ITIN CLASS 2

  3, INTERSECTION ITIN CLASS 3

  4, MEDICAL CLEARANCE REQUIRED

  OUR SERVICE IS PLEASURE//YOUR PLEASURE OUR SERVICE

  LIE BACK // RELAX

  thePleasureTube corp.@ 106codex

  Light in the unit. My body slides, stretching on satin sheets, muscle pulling against muscle in an envelope of warmth—I stretch my back and a few cot-twisted vertebrae quietly pop into place, finally straightening out.

  Morning light. Through the window/wall the sun is hovering on the arc of an horizon. It looks to be earth a hundred or more kilometers away. The entire window/wall holds a planet's arc in two separating horizons, dark below, bright on a line above. The sun shoots orange-yellow fans through the atmosphere—yellow-brown fans.

  "Something bothered you, didn't it?"

  I couldn't speak if I wanted to; a thermometer is beneath my tongue.

  "You came right up through the drug again. Nightmare?"

  A sequence, I think; which? Key on a color, Werhner says, you remember everything.

  The girl—Collette—draws a last drop of blood into a vial. I am in program for tests, final readings to establish my circadian rhythms for the trip, my own day, she tells me. Another way to say proper time.

  Remember everything? Or is it a memory at all? Werhner also says that dreams are predictions. The woman frozen in space, the whirlpooling sun: these are not simple memories, they are not sequential points in a time line. My teeth grate the glass of the thermometer, my tongue slides along its side. I remember... yesterday, Collette on my thighs. And now she is wearing a light green satin robe, barefoot. I am still slightly groggy.

  Collette finally slides the thermometer from my mouth and gently tugs at the tiny suction electrodes on my wrist, massages the puckered skin. "Anyway," she says, "you've got good figures so far. You're a healthy man, you have healthy appetites, you can pretty much do as you like. You're cleared for total hologram, no restrictions."

  I ask her what a total hologram is, exactly. She tells me it's a holographic projection system whose image, is actual, substantial, to the user, not just an optical effect. There is a feedback connection with the user's neurology.

  "I'm willing to try anything," I say. Like Werhner's water, the recliner module gives, floats with my weight. When I woke at first light, I remembered no dream, felt only the floating in space, slept again.

  "Do you want to talk about it?" Collette asks, adjusting the fall of her robe at her knee.

  "About... ?"

  "What made your EEG go bump in the night."

  She sounds like a member of the screening committee back on Guam. What I want is breakfast. "I'm fine," I tell her. "I haven't felt so well in weeks."

  "Then how's your appetite for breakfast?"

  I laugh at how she anticipates me. "Ravenous," I say.

  A sweet juice, purplish and thick, guava, Collette suggests. An egg on thick bacon and a scone. The mild bite of a sauce balances the buttery slide of the egg. Melon, cheese, coffee. I ask Collette for another egg, she answers there are only so many eggs in the world, I eat scones and butter, drink glass after glass of guava juice.

  Already the cabin seems familiar—perhaps because its spaces analogue starship quarters. This recliner module is set against a side wall, halfway between a dark velvet couch and the window/wall. Like a coffee table, the inlaid table which opens into an ivory-keyed computer and codex terminal sits before the couch.

  The rich furnishings are washed now in the atmosphereless spacelight. On the wall opposite the window/wall the fleshy pinks of the Rubens are radiant, and the painting's stark, black frame casts a rhomboid shadow on the wall's soft, textured surface. I notice only now a subtle geometry in the dark brown rug—hexagons with shared lines. The figures are the barest tone lighter—the precise shade of the draperies—and outline a reversed dome. Ghostly, soft, optically active. Off this lounge, or living-room arrangement, the kitchen/bar behind a divider of shelving modules glows with the spun-steel finish of instrumentation and machinery. I can see Collette through the divider, holding a dish in one hand, licking a cre
am-colored sauce from two fingers of the other.

  Werhner, I think, what are you doing? Taylor, what questions are you imagining for me now?

  I almost lose myself in the bath: its ceiling and walls are mirrored, a lush green rug is on the floor, and the fixtures are cast in the shape of seashells. The sink is a giant, opening scallop, its surface iridescent, the john a tun shell with its operculum hinged. The shower water has a faint aromatic oil added to it, as rich as cinnamon but lighter. The shower head pulsates, massages as it runs, with a half-dozen different rhythms. I could spend my two weeks standing in that one spot.

  Collette is laughing at a chart she is showing me:

  MEDEX// CODEX292VOORST// CIRCADIAN RHYTHM

  INTERNAL DESYNCH= -2.7

  Not at the chart, it turns out, only at the first peak on the red-orange line.

  I ask her what it means. She says, "I'll show you in a minute."

  I am laughing, too—was I asleep again? Werhner wouldn't believe this. Collette is my luck, she is what's so pleasant here. I tell her that the smoothness of this ship is uncanny, that speed compresses otherwise undetectable forces to make a kind of weather, a series of fronts, turbulent, there's always pitch and yaw. A smoothness here, as if traveling some other way. I can feel our motion only as a slight vibration, see it in the concentric rings on the surface of my coffee.

  "Can you feel it... here?" she asks as she takes my right hand and guides it toward her heart, releases my hand at her breast, her nipple stiff under satin.

  "Very sexy," I say. "But all I feel is, ummm, a pounding heart."

  "Mmmm," she giggles, "that's what it does. That orange line signals an early peak in your hormone level. I can't get over it, you turn me on. What a luxury."

  Beneath her robe, Collette has the odor of strawberries; the sweet, piquant taste of strawberries is on her shoulder. She slides alongside me—satin on satin sheets. I stroke her lower back, send my hand flat over the firm swell of her bottom. I can feel her muscles tighten and move beneath my hands, her tongue sliding warm on my lips.

  She is naked beneath her robe. As I enter her she uses its folds to surround me. The sensation spreads throughout my body, sliding into satin, sliding into her. The perfect smoothness of her skin.

  After lunch. We are gliding powerdown in a slow trajectory of apparent descent, perhaps thirty kilometers above a landscape visible through the window/wall. The macroweather is flat, and only a few scattered clouds float over the mountains—the long, vast range of gray mountains that stretch along the horizon. Toward what may be a coast in one direction, the atmosphere there the brownish side of yellow, the surface suggesting an elaborate quilt of cultivation. Directly beneath us the rising topography of foothills—they must be deep green beneath the atmosphere's filtering effect. I hear Collette saying daytrip brightly, she is at machinery in the kitchen/bar, tidying up after the cold crab she served. I have been studying the landscape for ten minutes, idling over the last of the Jamaican coffee—Blue Mountain, Collette named it. Have we been continuously suborbital? Daytrip?

  "I never saw anything like this. Where are we going?"

  "Biosphere reserve. Beautiful, isn't it?"

  I watch the foothills, try to sort out the different shades of green. Even in the thickening atmosphere this flight remains velvet-smooth, as if cushioned, its motion translated now into a barely perceptible sway of the heavy draperies pulled back along the window/wall. At the juncture with the ceiling the sun flashes, recedes: slight yaw. I notice for the first time a series of fine lines suspended in the material of the window, lines as fine as human hair. Perhaps that is how the window became a filter earlier today.

  Collette comes to the window. She is dressed in her skirt and halter of the day before, cocoa leather, gold PleasureTube insignia—she is pulling the strap of a shoulder bag over her right shoulder.

  "You never saw anything like this?"

  "Not on the expedition," I tell her. "Nothing quite like this. You can tell those greens are conifer; there's botany down there."

  "It's a biosphere reserve. That's where we're going to lay over."

  "Do we disembark?"

  "For two four-hour trips," she says. "Today and tomorrow. You'll like it here. When we arrive at the terminal, follow the signs to the tramrun. Take the A tram from the terminal, exit at Slot Nine. I'll be waiting for you there. We're due in just an hour; there's really only one way they'll let you go with the ticket."

  Collette's hair is pulled up, backlit in a kind of aura. She hands me a green card, the ticket.

  "I have to check in," she says. "Is there anything I can do before I go?"

  "Do you have a minute?"

  "Sure," she says.

  I sit her beside me on the large velvet couch and open the inlaid table setting before it; the console is half-sized only in the button shape of its controls. I switch PowerOn, punch out three sequences in a simple Retrieve/Inquiry code, Uniform Ship Program. Collette is looking out the window; she smells of heather now. I am getting a blur of flashing numbers on the digital readout bar, just a blur.

  "All right," I say. "Where did I go wrong?" I have a print light, positive readout function—but I can't get the display to hold.

  "Well..." she muses, looking at the console. "You're holding something big. You need more than digital. God, for a Flight Vane Engineer, Voorst, you don't know much." Collette punches BACK/PRINT/FUNCTION, then a bar marked VID.

  The window/wall darkens instantly; the landscape blurs, is obliterated. The window/wall becomes a screen, not projected upon, but emanating a huge, dense list of codex numbers followed by program codes, now the brightest field in the cabin, all other lights have dimmed.

  "What happened to the wall?" I ask.

  "That's the videon. There'll be a big show day four, after we leave the reserve. Then every fourth day."

  "The videon." I stare for a moment longer, my eyes adjusting as the smaller figures focus.

  "It reads the computer for certain things, visual display."

  "You know how to make it work. That's resourceful."

  "I also know that's the ship's manifest." Collette smiles. "Looking for someone?"

  "Uh..." I start to answer, hesitate. I can't even find my own codex, there are a thousand listed. "Just looking."

  "Then look at something that moves." Collette punches in an entry and the screen changes to display a life-size group of people in bright yellow body stockings moving in unison on mats; they are doing stretching exercises—an exercise class?

  Blonde woman in the front row.

  "Say, Collette..."

  Collette looks at me evenly, her eyebrows raised, the trace of a smile tightening her lips. I have a flash of embarrassment, feel strangely free-floating. One of the women on the screen is Erica. Standing in the front row, doing leg exercises. Standing on one leg, bringing her other foot up to her knee. She has a unique exaggerated pelvic thrust; there is a beatific smile on her face, faint perspiration on her forehead.

  Collette is telling me that I am seeing the VID/ACTION sub of her program. "Some people have them made up. Punch codex plus 302, then integrate back to VID."

  I am watching Erica pulling her knee to her chest; I am blushing, I think. "How did you know about her?"

  "She put in your codex this morning," Collette says, getting up. "Let's just say it's part of my job." She is adjusting the shoulder strap of her sagging leather bag; she is leaving. "Line A, Slot 9," she says with a wry smile. "You can't miss it."

  The computer works on Uniform Ship Program for major functions, translates from its own cybernetic language for internal systems into a half-dozen major languages, very well engineered. I find there's no local file under my codex number, then inquire and find that local vane angle confirms touchdown in forty-two minutes. I try to relax by setting up a tennis game through the console. Two sets and I lose interest; an overhand to an unstable backhand is the obvious key.

  I punch through Collette's program into her
personnel file, find I can retrieve limited access material on Collette by using Werhner's trick, coding the system in a classic Fibonacci Series—1,1,2,3,5,8....She begins//27 CORETTA KING SCHOOL L.A. SoCal//31 UCAL BERKELEY NoCal P.E. M.S.//SOCIOBIONICS CORP TRAINEE....I look through with a kind of unfocused intensity, why I am not certain, I am slightly unsettled. No real hint of any SciCom connection, but I am beginning to think I might have seen Collette before, just as I've seen Erica, where? Is it her face? That's what it is, I think, not so much her as the possibility. Strange how that unsettles me.

  Through the crowded disembarkation chute, into the rough-hewn wood, post, and beam terminal, most of the passengers head toward waiting NaturBuses; that appears to be the third-class program. People are nervous at being off the ship; even here the air is noticeably different—once outdoors among the tramrun sheds, there is a kind of sweet rot to it. On the small A trams there are only first-class passengers. The tram I board is empty in the rear, where I sit, except for a heavyset, well-dressed, European-looking man. Forward a small group laughs at an older woman's story; she had the wrong luggage, didn't know until she opened the first case and found a grope suit. I'll have to find out what a grope suit is.

  I sit by a rectangular window and watch our rubber-tire progress, first uphill, then down through faintly groomed, quite real, thickening woods. I lay my hand flat on the spun steel of the tram body; it feels queerly unreal, or I do, suddenly moving through these woods under a hazy sun. Insects in the overgrowth, reflections from the guardrail along the tramrun, no breeze. I see a small animal clinging to the lowest branch of a tree as we pass. Squirrel, moving, alive.

  Slot 7 is a pavilion where the forward group disembarks. Slot 9, a kilometer beyond, deposits me at a simulated stone walk where Collette is waiting. She's wearing white shorts and a halter top. We follow the walk eighty meters to a small prefab structure, half porch with a large plastic table, plastic/wicker chairs. There is a small brazier in the corner; inside, a cooking unit, a refrigeration unit, cabinets.