The Pleasure Tube Read online

  Today we take what Collette calls a naturalized path on the mountain rather than the meadow side of the tramrun. At first it meanders steeply uphill along a face from which hulking slabs of granite protrude; the near vegetation is strewn with granite boulders and rubble. The vegetation is sparse, the sun warm. I carry a soft, insulated pack into which Collette has put our late lunch.

  The relative proximity of the ship, the fact that I spent the previous evening, night, and morning among spun-steel surfaces and machine hum, the sensation of these shoes, make me feel again as if we are exploring a planet from a landing site. I tell Collette how I spent my time. I expect her to tease me about the Spanish girl, but either her attention isn't that close or she doesn't care. She is taking in the meadow opening up as we ascend the switchback natural to the face; I can feel the climb opening up my lungs.

  We have been gaining distance and elevation on the rest house, the meadow farther beyond has been expanding, the face we are on remains barren. But once we come around the face of the switchback, we are facing a wide, deep draw, a valleylike draw, thick with trees. The trees are evergreen, pine, and fir, and the brush is many-layered, the tree branches umbrellas upon umbrellas. Some of the trees rise a hundred feet or more; their trunks rise from the tiers of brush.

  We stop at an outcropping and admire the view—we have it both ways here, the meadow and the draw. We have hiked three kilometers, judging from the distance we have gained on the meadow.

  "You went all the way down there?" I say to Collette. "Did you see anything?"

  "Just the woods. The sunset. I did my yoga for an hour and a half."

  On the far side of the meadow I can see an occasional flash of glass, the single roof of a cone-shaped pavilion just into the trees.

  Collette sits on a smooth rock and leans back. "Time to eat," she says. "This is as far as the trail goes."

  We sit at the outcropping and eat cold salmon again; the aspic has begun to run. I cannot resist the draw which spreads beneath an escarpment, out of sight of the meadow, the tramrun, the rest of the reserve. I wonder how many people have been into the small valley, I wonder when my next opportunity will come, if at all. Collette says it isn't safe. But when I tell her that I am going, she says she's coming along. We pack the food and leave it where we ate, the insulated carrier propped against a half-hidden signpost: DO NOT PROCEED.

  The face we descend is rust-swathed from decomposing pitons hammered in long ago, steep but negotiable hand under hand.

  The rock base is thick with brush, litter in fertile soil— the trash is ancient, soft-metal cans overgrown, rotted into fragments. I think we are the first here in some time. We catch our breath at what appears to be a cairn near the base. Collette confirms that it marks the limit of PleasureTube grounds. Then Collette smiles, looks up for a long moment; her smile fades.

  "No need to be grim," I say.

  "I'm thinking about our being off the reserve. Look at that face. We should have used a rope."

  "We made it down, we'll make it up."

  "Sometimes I just get depressed," Collette sighs, turning to walk. "I don't even know why I mention it."

  The stream bed, I discover, is not entirely dry, as it appears from a distance. The bed is wide enough to disguise a meter-wide stream meandering down its middle—the larger bed is a wash, eroded by heavy rains. We follow its surface slightly uphill and toward a woods. Collette walks alongside me; her wide-soled shoes, the PleasureTube insignia on her halter top, reinforce my initial feeling that we are on a planetary expedition. The unreality of what we are doing, the strangeness of the surroundings yesterday and today after all these years—I have an impulse to go back to the ship, to shower in my cabin's bath, to find a D-bar or club somewhere on the ship with spun-steel walls, artificial light. Both strange and familiar here.

  Like deep space.

  We hike into thicker woods and follow the stream to a clearing at the base of an outcropping perhaps ten meters high. The stream waterfalls down, misty, and with a peaceful rush of water. As we entered the woods we saw birds, a squirrel, no speakers in the trees, bushes with small red berries and black berries. Collette says she saw a snake or a lizard; it is gone when I turn my head.

  The ground on the high bank is soft; I lie down to rest my eyes, fall asleep for a time.

  When I awake, Collette is hovering a berry above my mouth. "Yes?" she says, the fruit, her face, a blur.

  Yellow-white. I blink into the sun coming through the trees, sink my teeth into the berry. It is soft and sweet, a ripe blackberry. I put my hands on Collette's rib cage, slide them up under her breasts; she lifts her head.

  "I'm figuring out the system," I tell her. "No speakers in the trees. Red berries modulate from strawberries; that started yesterday morning with your scent. As far into this draw as we can go. Now we make love."

  She slides her legs down, lies next to me after stopping to look at me wryly. I cradle her head in my arm. "What you're talking about is simple short lag," she says. "It gets a lot more complicated than that. Do you know about second stage?"

  "What's that?"

  "Just a more intense kind of pleasure, pleasure on a different level. I'll give you an example. A game. It's called 'I'll show you yours if you show me mine.'"

  "All right," I laugh, "I'll play. Let's see yours."

  "No, 'I'll show you yours if you show me mine.' That means you show me mine first, Voorst."

  I look into her green eyes, her spreading grin.

  "I'll let you think about it," she says, smiling, her hand moving over my stomach.

  Collette beside me, we hold each other, then doze again for a time.

  "Something is bothering you," Collette says. We are sitting together as we sat the day before, knees up, looking into the woods. "You know I never logged the hike; nobody knows we're here. Honest. Especially here."

  "It isn't that," I tell her, then go silent for a moment. "Let me describe to you a sequence," I finally say. "Or maybe you'll think I need a psychic screen."

  "No," she says, "tell me."

  "All right. Listen to my... visions—I have visions, nightmares, hallucinations, I don't know exactly what they are. Two especially: one is a woman floating in space, her arms outstretched. The other is a blue-black funnel, diamond points of stars in this kind of whirlpool—it lies in the direction of program—there's a glowing object, a spinning sun, approaching, coming very close, fading at the same time. And I dream about a man, see things from the blow sometimes."

  "Happened on the ship?"

  "Yes and no. Some are memories, but others aren't memories, exactly; when they occur it's as if I'm experiencing... very vivid memories, say. Or not memories at all. I know they're associated with one another, but I can't figure out how. I don't know if the sequence is real or a hallucination. It's very strange."

  "You'd know if they were all from the ship."

  "Yes and no again," I tell her. "It was confusing when we blew—Werhner insists on a time distortion, but I don't know. I'd say no, not exactly. The report says all the clocks agreed except one."

  Collette looks away for a long moment, into the woods. "What happens to the woman whom you see?"

  "Happens? Happened," I say. "She's dead. Motionless, frozen."

  Collette turns to me, places her hand on my cheek, and pivots my face so that she is looking into my eyes, I into hers.

  "Then don't think of her," she says. "Don't think about any of those things. Think about me instead, think about where we are and what we're going to do here. We can do anything, you know. We're going to have a real time together."

  Anyone who knew me well enough, I think, would know of my hallucinations, would know I'd take the faint trail into this draw. Collette didn't. There are some things, I think, that she doesn't know after all, and that alone makes me feel infinitely better. Perhaps her depression had been affecting me. But when I look at her—into her half-sleepy eyes, her wide, liquid smile—she doesn't seem depressed any more, a
nd that makes me feel better, too.

  Chapter 4

  Videon Spectacular

  DA4// On the wall-sized screen the holographic dancers fade—Tahitian dancers, men and women in mylar lava-lavas, their dance increasingly more furious and sexual as they move toward one another, almost touching, their bodies glistening, their eyes hypnotic, trancelike—the videon screen flushes in a long burst of deep, glowing red, modulates into a field of blue, then shimmers into a series of vague forms, false color separations. A scene finally appears: a studio set, a panel of three women, two men, in large, white padded chairs placed around a semicircular table.

  "What Dr. Buell calls a state of mind, I could reduce to physical contact," the white-haired woman says, pointing to one of the other panel members.

  "But no"—this from Dr. Buell—"think of anticipation and satisfaction, think of imagination. There's more than the operation of sensory apparatus in pleasure, and to think of it as... friction, even granting the metaphor ... makes a premise of the exclusivity of tactile sense data...."

  "Yet pleasure is a state of the body," the white-haired woman insists. "The entire epidermis is a sense organ into whose language all other pleasure eventually translates. Pleasure is a language the body knows."

  Holographic titles now stream across the screen:

  MAXIMUM MOMENTS//AN ANALYSIS ON THE THEORETICAL LEVEL.

  "Dr. Godwin's model is sex-generated, behavioral," a younger woman says, her voice hollow, eerie. "That makes sense to me. Think of the differences in tactile. surfaces, the electricity of contact. Think of silk on the skin, for example. When we refine a neurological language for that sensation, transpose it to other sense parallels, transmit this language, language as stimulation, into a body..."

  "Total hologram," Buell says. "Where the holographic vision has neurological substance. And yet less than the total hologram—because in the total hologram the mind is active, creating the language as well as receiving it. Thus the only sensible psychiatric conclusion is that pleasure is a state of mind."

  "Generated by a neurophysical signal," the white-haired woman says, throwing up her hands.

  "Think of what you're saying," Buell remarks. "Ultimately it violates the whole notion of pleasure as reward, as something achieved. You're saying in part that pleasure has no aim beyond itself, except to be itself in the body."

  "I'm not even certain that reward and achievement are related to pleasure," the white-haired woman says sharply, "pure, disinterested pleasure, pleasure which makes the orgiastic moment a moment outside of time.... I say that pleasure must have no goal—it simply is, without direction or limitation, without reference to a historical net."

  "Outside of time?"

  "And so, transcendental sense flight. The first model programs for theTube...."

  The screen fades and cuts to the image of a dark-haired woman sitting on a sofa in an apartment living room, intent on her half-wall videon, sitting tightly cross-legged, swinging one foot from the knee. Her screen shows the somewhat indistinct image of a young man in blue coveralls staring into the camera, his hands loosely in his lap. The image holds for a full minute. The young man moves only ever so slightly, beginning to smile. A sound from within the apartment.

  "Look, Kenneth, the oddest thing...."

  She is answered by the shutting of an interior door, the word "What?" then the sentence "I can get what I want across the line—I've got to go, anyway." The sound of a firmly shutting heavy door.

  She is half rising after the sound, she says, "Kenneth?" leaves the sofa, then turns quickly as if she has sensed the subtle change in light. The videon screen shows the same mauve background, but now the chair is empty. She stands, flushed.

  After a moment the doorbell rings. She sighs, strides to the door.

  It is a young man in blue coveralls—the same young man, now he's stretching.

  She says, "What do you want?"

  He answers slowly, a curl to his lips, "I've been watching you."

  "You?" She touches, merely touches, one of the straps of his coveralls; it falls from his shoulder. He begins undressing her—they eventually sink together onto the sofa, arms snaked in thighs, then thighs in thighs. Still shot.

  The screen fades again and cuts to tethered women, tethered men, the setting for some kind of game....

  Call it videon overload, call it saturation, the long series of programs induces in me a kind of waking sleep, there's a numbness in my forehead, my eyes. Collette tells me that average daily videon time is more than four hours. I suspect the average viewer is better conditioned than I am. Not that the programming isn't spectacular: holographic sunrises of the world, Japanese geishas singing, old footage of bullfights in Madrid, Balinese dancing... these narrative interludes, panels, training, and explanations.

  It seems as if I have been on theTube forever. The recliner has become familiar, this cabin, the videon itself, with its vivid colors and holographic capabilities, as ordinary as an idle terminal or the back of my hand. The idea of my being here, the surprise of the trip, are diminished—and yet when I calculate that I am well into my fourth day on the ship, and I try to remember what has happened, it seems I've been here no time at all, that the four days have passed with unaccountable swiftness: time frozen and accelerated at once.

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  The screen cuts again, to a woman seated before a table set with a half-dozen wine bottles. Title: TASTE TUNING//THE EXPERIENCE OF WINE. Voice-over: Stay tuned. Cuts to: a group of dancers, megastars. I find myself thinking of Knuth, the intense little man from Guam—how I'd like to put him in the wine woman's lap.

  I try to contact Giroti, but he is blocked off, we are all blocked off, privatized today. Lunch does not come until it is quite late, but the lunch is crepes, which Collette prepares—light, sweet, delicious—followed by pears and Brie.

  I convince Collette that I need some relief from the programming, and she sets up the videon for a MoonGame Co-op—an immensely complicated spinoff from sedentary tennis, played against the computer and other passengers. She is still explaining the rules when the ship jolts.

  I feel through the floor the metallic thud, the shudder; I see the draperies sway. We restabilize immediately. I look up at Collette, my heart pounding. The light seems brighter.

  "Moving an adjacent unit," she tells me. "Nothing to worry about."

  "Tricky business."

  "They don't make many mistakes." She grins.

  Yet before I can get my defense fully organized on the wall screen, she is pulling my channel, the screen flushes....

  "Sorry, you have to see this," she tells me. For a brief moment, still feeling the shudder, I am alarmed about the ship, I am conscious of my breathing, concentrate on steady inhalations, prepare to rise and...

  Collette wasn't kidding—the screen and audio don't display Damage Control, they display a VisEd whose subject is the total hologram.

  "Where brain-wave anticipation is immediately translated i
nto full spectrum sensation," a pleasant black man says soothingly.

  He is describing a loop.

  "Where, best of all, you are in control," adds a black woman so similar that she might be his sister. They are identically dressed in bright, burnt-orange body stockings, seated together on a lush sofa in an elegant cabin.

  "Sometimes," he laughs, they laugh together.

  "In the comfort of your cabin—chemical, electrical, visual, audio, tactile—all systems—full spectrum sensation responds to your deepest needs, an ecstasy beyond compare...."

  "The only such system in the cosmos is on this ship," she reminds the camera. "A hologram that's more than a hologram, controlled by you, automatically, unconsciously, instantaneously...."

  "Orgiastically," the young man adds. "In a way you've never experienced before, including direct electrical and chemical stimulation of the hypothalamic center of ecstasy. You are in control."

  "Or out of it," the woman laughs, her teeth sparkling white, her leg rising as she runs her hand from her knee down the back of her thigh.

  The screen dissolves into moving geometric figures— or parts of figures, shifting, a kaleidoscopic effect. The figures are vaguely genital. The sound of a beat—an exaggerated heartbeat.

  The couple begin to describe dosages and instrumentation. I wonder if what they say is true. Collette says that it is. They speak of direct electrical stimulation of the orgasm center of the brain.

  "That's dangerous," I say.

  "Which is why there's medical clearance," Collette tells me.

  "Mmmm. It seems to me that arrangement could, it could, kill you."

  "Some people it does." She shrugs. "Maybe that's why it's the only one, I mean, the circuits and apparatus are only on this kind of ship. Mostly it's heart attack; it happens."

  "What prevents it?"