The Pleasure Tube Page 8

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Turns out there's something for everyone here after all," I tell her with a grin.

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

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

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

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

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

  "God knows," she sighs. "Please?"

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

  "I'll walk," I say as she slides into the back seat of a taxi.

  "To each his own. I think you're crazy."

  I laugh. I am a little drunk.

  She blows me a kiss as the cab drives away.

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

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

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

  "What do you want?"

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

  "That's not possible. Go away."

  "Hold on," I begin.

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

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

  The same uniformed woman orders me to come down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  DA6// The taxi lurches to a stop in the bright midday sun. "This is it," the young driver says, pointing. "That warehouse, next to the grandstand."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "This is at black hole," he says. "Fantastico."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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