The Pleasure Tube Page 9

  "My navigator thinks they're trying to set us up. I don't know," I say, rubbing my chin. "I would really like to talk to the woman."

  "Non pensarci piu," Massimo says, waving a fly from its loop around the salad. "Forget this one—you will see, there are others. And in this place? The man who wrote your ship's report, dead—ahhh. For your sake, I do not think it best you see this woman they take from you. Perhaps you will have luck with appeal—then, maybe. Almost always these people in SciCom are harmless, castrati—no, like men who play with themselves, masturbati. But if you catch them—ahhh. They do have... power," Massimo says quietly, his hands flat on the table. "They protect themselves, like Mafiosi. They do what they want."

  A white Formula E whistles past as I lean toward Massimo; a shiver runs down my spine. For an instant I see Cooper's face in Massimo's, they share the same broad nose, the same thick hair. "You're afraid of them, too?" I ask, thinking of my run-in with security last night. "Do you think Werhner's right? He thinks that Cooper's death..."

  "All right." Massimo nods, smiling to himself. "I exaggerate. A man dead—this frightens me. But yes, I exaggerate. This is only my advice, to leave them alone— what can you do, a pilot? Ah, Rawley, let us not think on these things for now, let us forget them for a time."

  "I've been..." I start to say, then notice Massimo is looking at the cars.

  "You think you can handle Lancia?'

  My pulse quickens, I tell Massimo I'd like to try.

  "Well, come, I am going to run Ferrari. We shall see if perhaps you can drive, too."

  The pleasant coolness of its leather upholstery aside, my immediate impression of the Lancia is that its steering is too tight and its suspension very stiff; I can feel every bump in the track, the car seems jittery. But as I learn the course, its straights, banks, and S's, I pick up speed and with a rising howl I enter a tunnel of motion and the machine itself seems to smooth the ride. The cockpit becomes comfortable in the moving air, and the car begins to feel the way hand-cut clothing feels—close, comfortable, another skin—seems more like flying than the days in theTube. The sunny track is a good, long ride—over ten kilometers—on a banked, twisting surface like an idealized freeway through the city. I roar past separate grandstands in different sectors, through a tunnel of high-rises, down a straight through a greenbelt with a murderous, decreasing radius hairpin at its end, accelerate up into a set of elevated S's whose edges raise the hair on the back of my neck the first time through. In the curves the Lancia resists braking, it wants the line, it propels itself through a corner with its own fine calculus of speed, weight, and cohesion into a beautiful slide.

  The Formula E drivers practicing the course for the EnergyWest Grand Prix make for fast traffic. Massimo laps me twice, then I hang on his tail to catch the pull of his slipstream and sail with him through the turns, feeling the G's accumulate, feeling the car adjust to sustain them just on the line. He shows me some very nice driving, takes us both past two Formula E cars in the tight S's by finding and holding a deeper line of descent at a higher entrance speed. I learn something in ten laps, the tranquility of Massimo's driving. Despite our speed, his driving seems unhurried, an exercise in simple grace.

  We pull into the pits, talk about the track, then switch machines. The balance and the instinct for the line are the same for the Ferrari, but what a powerful racing machine. When I'd floor the accelerator in the Lancia, the car would dig in, push me back into the seat, and go; in the Ferrari in any gear the wide rear tires burn blue, and I am slapped back into the seat as acceleration forces my breath. Until I get its feel, the Ferrari is too slippery for me; once I make speed I lose it completely in an embarrassingly long slide out of the wide S's near Massimo's pit. Then finally it comes on the roller coaster of the final turns. I get the feel of the car, or it gets the feel of me, and I'm able to bear down the straights almost with the Formula E's and slip past the slower ones in the S's and hairpin.

  When we are finally flagged off the track to accommodate Formula E time trials, Massimo is pleased. A hundred meters from the exit gate of the tight S's, he was still nose ahead of a Formula E whose driver, he tells me, looked at him and checked his gauges, then nearly lost it on the next embankment—where Massimo was able to slip under him again.

  "How can those cars have a soul," he asks as we wash at the mechanic's sink, "if driver can know how he is driving only by watching numbers?" He tells me that when he was racing, he would practice with the tachometer of his Ferrari taped over. That kept his mechanics awake nights, he laughs. He was with his Ferrari like this, he says, snaking one finger around the other.

  "But now"—Massimo smiles—"I prefer Lancia. She forgives, like a woman she forgives. At my age, a man need forgiving, yes?"

  I laugh and tell him I'll count having driven the Ferrari among the genuine pleasures of my life.

  "Ah, yes," Massimo says. "This is like hologram, everything comes true. I think you are right for that car, reckless enough to run too fast into a turn to begin with. How old are you—I mean, you tell me proper time."

  "Thirty-five."

  Massimo nods; his age exactly when he drove the first Ferrari Bianco.

  "What's the right age for Formula E?"

  "Fifteen," he says with a sneer, his eyebrows raised in irony. "The car has two gears—two gears!"

  Before I leave we sit under the canopy again for a time, and I ask Massimo if he can do something for me.

  "Of course," Massimo answers with a wry smile.

  "I'd like to meet Eva Steiner," I say. "Just to talk. You never know. You're a UN Governor—is there something you could do?"

  Massimo fills his wine glass, fills mine, then lifts his and drinks. "Worse than myself," he says with a grin. "I've told you about Eva Steiner. And you could not get a single live line to her? Rawley, I don't know."

  "Will you try?" I ask. "This isn't SciCom, just one woman."

  "Well, I will see. Domani," he says. "Tomorrow. We will talk more then. And do more driving. Agreed?"

  When I look for Erica, I check the time and realize that half my stay in LasVenus is gone already. I have one tomorrow left—two, if I can count a morning a day. I find Erica almost in the top row of the grandstand seats. She has a sunburn and has had, she tells me, a very nice sleep.

  After a relaxing hour in the aquaplease whirlpools, Erica and I have dinner again at the temple garden, the Japanese restaurant on the roof of the Tower Complex. I haven't done justice to the rooftop—we are tucked in a small corner where the temple rises on an artificial hill beyond carp ponds, the night sky is beyond, the impression is one of a mountaintop. In the other direction, the Japanese garden shades into an orchid grove, which melts into a tropical garden of ferns, fan palms, royal palms, MacArthur palms, butterfly palms, queen palms. Today I notice people milling around in English, French, Dutch, gardens, other restaurants and clubs, of course, and a central Moorish garden with its show. We can take part in gaming and risk ventures through a plug-in console that is now on our low table; it seems people are arranging to meet one another through the consoles as well. Erica is absorbed in a complicated, penny-ante card game through it—bureaucrat's bridge, she mutters. Different strains of music float through the air, in our cubicle the Bartok I program. Directly above us, the sky is being used as a holographic projection screen for cloud displays to complement the artificial weather. Between weather displays, the clouds are dreamlike, suggestive, shaped into stories both fantastic and erotic—it would be pleasure enough to lie back and watch.

  This whole affair—not only LasVenus, but theTube as well—is easy enough to understand in terms of technology, but harder and harder for me to comprehend after what I saw today walking back from the track with Erica to Casa del Sol, a walk that consumed an hour. I kept along the perimeter; the other city is separated from this resort by highway, mostly, or by high fencing in two rows with a bleak no man's land of fifty meters between. On the other side the housing was crowded, steamy—there i
s no dome here as there is over L.A.—and the city seemed to stretch away interminably, A population problem exists there; the contrast with LasVenus resort is immense. The air even in SectorGold has a kind of acid smell to it at street level, masked by gardenia and jasmine here so far above.

  I am getting my bearings here, yet time seems to be slipping away too quickly for me to make use of my temporary stability. In the end I find Werhner still impossible to raise, Eva Steiner locked into a private world whose surfaces seem without seams.

  I find myself sitting on the edge of my low chair, not following what Erica is saying about the plot of a narrative cloudshow, evidently an erotic version of a popular daytime serial. Erica, it turns out, has been married four times in all, each marriage more a disaster than the last, at least from the way she tells the story through dinner.

  Finally I suggest we go—my appetite is back, but I have to move to work off this nervous energy. Erica ate too much, I think, she moans painfully at the idea of getting up, her sunburn is bothering her, too. It doesn't make any sense to do something stupid again, I suppose, and I think that if I walked home alone again, I might. And so we go down to the lobby to look for a cab.

  "Rawley Voorst."

  We are passing leather couches in the lobby near the activities screens when I hear my name. I see the older man, Mancek, first, before I see Taylor himself, rising from one of the couches by the bright show-program screen.

  "Enjoying yourself?" I ask halfheartedly.

  "Quite a place." Taylor smiles. "Quite a place, don't you think? They have everything here."

  "Everything," I say. "Including people following you around."

  "Don't be so hostile, Voorst. The Tower Complex is open to anyone who can afford it," Taylor says calmly. "We're just looking around, I thought I'd let you know we were waiting. Won't be long."

  Taylor is looking at Erica; her tight dress is tighter still after dinner. His thick lips are slightly parted, he's leering, if you ask me; his eyes wander from her breasts to her belly to her breasts, straining under the silver lame. When he asks what we've been doing, he asks her.

  "Look," Erica says, "I told you yesterday I'm assigned to him and not to you. We're doing just fine."

  Taylor's face reddens, he looks as if he wants to say something, but his lips tighten and he doesn't. Behind him, in the sleek lobby, the rainbow-hued screen displays show programs: two women dancing with one another; behind them the same, increasingly sexual movements are being followed by a dozen pairs of men:

  SIDEREAL CONCERT/SIDEREAL CONCERT/CONCERT

  DUNES/DUNES/DUNES/DUNES/DUNES/

  SHOWTIMES// 10/12/2/4/6/8/10 10/12/2/4/6/8/10

  As we climb into a small, elegant cab I thank Erica for the way she behaved.

  She shrugs, adjusting her skirt under her thighs, letting her hand slip over to my leg. "I don't blame you for not trusting me," she says, "but I meant what I said. I'm on your side, Rawley. I like you, that's all—and so long as you don't complain about how I treat you, there's nothing they can do to me. There's something with him, anyway— did you see the way he looked at me? He's got about as much tact as a truck. What a creep."

  "You would have liked the debriefing," I said sardonically. "He was the one who told me that a guy I knew pretty well from the ship—a big, healthy, part-Indian guy named Cooper—killed himself. Told me with a kind of grin."

  "He could work for Service Control," she sighs. "Same type. I can just see my next assignment, some dried-up old cheapskate who doesn't need an hour's sleep for two weeks."

  "Well, thanks again," I say, kissing her on the cheek and drawing her closer to me in the lush darkness of gold sector local transport.

  Chapter 6

  Risk Venture Vector

  What I will always owe Erica is this massage. Her hands are strong and confident as she flexes the contours of my neck muscles, straightens something in my back I didn't even know was out of place, cures my headache for good. But I feel a little depressed this morning after, awake again in the middle of the night—I feel as if it's a morning after, that says enough.

  Silk sheets again. I don't know if I'm going to be able to sleep on a cot after this. I'd settle instead for my old bunk on the Daedalus, or even a freighter's gravity hammock. Here I have silk sheets and a triple-sized recliner that adjusts to my weight like a lover. I remember the first morning of this trip waking on silk sheets, opening my eyes, and the odor of Collette, so pleased that she hadn't disappeared in my sleep.

  Erica is telling me that Tonio is guest-producing a videon special from the Moorish garden tonight. He called this morning to invite us both to the sound stage for the secondary shots he will be setting up all afternoon— says, moreover, that he's dropping the male service he picked up in coming here.

  "Go if you want to," I say. "I'm going to do a little more driving."

  Erica is pleased that I don't mind. "Just promise you won't get into any trouble," she says, her hands slipping upward on my neck to ease the base of my skull.

  "Well, I could lose it in the S's like I did yesterday," I say.

  "Keep your head down. Drive carefully, will you? I do feel responsible for your health, special instructions or no. Promise?"

  The seating tier adjacent to Giroti's pits is virtually empty again today, except for a young, stylish camera crew in the top row and a middle-aged couple who seem to be curious about taping. We are on the very edge of SectorBlue, I think; from the plastic-backed seats of the tier the S's stretch away to the right along the green swath of infield, toward one of the stadiums. When I turn to the gate, the pits obliquely to the left, the line of cars seem like patients in a trauma center linked to electronics consoles and plastic tubes among the stacked tires.

  Once through the chain link, I see that Massimo is with someone, a shorter man, I judge automatically from the soft black leather suit; then when I get closer, I realize from the turning profile the someone is a woman— straight forehead, angular chin, fiftyish. They are talking and I stop ten meters away, wave hello to Massimo's mechanic. The woman with Massimo has her hair short-cropped, she is aiming some sort of pointer at the Ferrari's cockpit.

  Massimo sees me, calls "Ciao, Raoul-lay," his hand comes up in the air to wave me over to the Ferrari. Halfway the engine starts up with a rumble, then a mean crack of revolutions. The smell of nitro exhaust slices through the thick odors of oil and rubber.

  The woman seems transfixed by the car—she doesn't even notice my joining them. She hugs herself to the sound of the engine—Massimo has the oddest look on his face; his eyebrows are raised nervously and his cheeks are reddening as if he wants to shout something but knows he won't be heard above the engine.

  It shuts down quickly at the wave of his hand.

  "Director Steiner," he says to the woman, then turns to me. I can see the smile on his face. He started talking too loud, his voice drops dramatically: "Allow me to introduce a friend, Rawley Voorst. He is pilot and driver. Rawley—Eva Steiner."

  Massimo looks at me through his polite laugh, I look at the woman again—her gray eyes take me in without recognition or interest. She nods, then moves next to the Ferrari, putting out her hand. "Feel the heat," she says to herself; "there is nothing like this, nothing."

  Of course. Her hair is black, but it's been dyed black. In every other way she fits the description of her personnel readout, though I don't think I would have recognized her. She has a small, straight nose, thin lips. Something's not right about her eyes. There is a glaze to them, or a sheen. Drugs, I think. D-Pharmacon. I look at Massimo, he looks as uncomfortable in her presence as I've become, his smile seems as uncertain as mine.

  "Director Steiner is a great admirer of all Formula cars—and she has hydroplane, think of that, Rawley," Massimo says, trying to start a conversation, but Eva Steiner is absorbed in the cars—the feel of their metal, their leather interiors, the sound of their engines. She acts as if I'm not there, barely Giroti, and I think he shuts the Ferrari cockp
it from her approach for just that reason.

  "It was really kind of you to let me come," she says to Massimo. "I should have shipped in my own Formula E—my delicious Formula E. But even that's not quite the same. There's something wonderfully cruel about the Ferrari, don't you think? You should have it painted black—everything black."

  Massimo's forehead creases in annoyance. "My country, Director Steiner, you see..." Before he can even begin to explain racing colors, she has moved around to the rear of the car, where she squats down and rubs her hand across the surface of the wide rear tires.

  "Very good," she says, stroking.

  Massimo is livid. "Would you like to drive the car, Director Steiner? Perhaps then you can get what you came for. Take it on the track, I don't care. Perhaps you can even drive it."

  "Can I drive it," she says flatly, rising and flexing her back. "Yes, I can drive it. I've driven Formula E in competition." Then she smiles thinly. "You really are a darling man, Governor Giroti, don't be upset by a... fantasy. I would love to drive it." It is a pointer that she has—or something like one, a thin black cylinder about a half-meter long—and her hand has been gripping it so tightly that her knuckles are white.