The Pleasure Tube (18 page)

They are just opening the Administrative Center at the Tower when I run up, deep in the bowels of Personnel Section, Military Concourse, Flight Assignment, Force 8A—sleepy uniformed clerks unlocking doors and files, switching on machines, arranging their desks. A minute ago I had a terrible scare: down in the lobby I'm certain I saw Mancek, his shoulders slumped with fatigue, I'm certain he didn't see me. I don't want to be here long—I'll have to disappear until something comes through the line. I wonder if I can talk one of the clerks into a discreet call up to the roof garden, perhaps—I don't want Mancek to see me here. I'm more certain the information about the appeal will have to sit and process here before Taylor sees it.

I have to fill out a tedious form for an inquiry; the yawning clerk who leans over the counter on his elbows to watch me is only eighteen or nineteen. This is taking too long. I look into his slightly glazed, innocent eyes and wonder about an approach. Not money but a favor; he looks decent enough, pink-faced and earnest, to respond.

"Mmmm," he says as I turn the form around to him. "Appeal. Already filed. You need to enter your local residence... here. And sign line three."

He laughs at my birth date and says I must have been out on a long one, laughs again. I ask him if he can do a personal favor for me—I need to know the appeal result before SciCom does, it's a problem with my commanding officer, he's going to be pissed when he finds out about this and I want to talk to him in case it's denied.

The boy scratches his head, says, "Hold on. I think we had some stuff come through in the last hour—you know, time lag from the East. I bet nobody's even picked it up yet."

He is gone for a minute that seems like forever: 07:33:13... 14... 15. Clerks move papers across their desks in slow motion, I move out of sight of the door, watch the clerk through another wide doorway in the next room reading down a yellow teletype sheet he is picking up from the floor behind the printer.

He saunters back, still looking sleepy. The counter is cold under my hand.

"Voorst. Rawley? Codex 02-292. I mean, Captain, sir. Captain Voorst."

I look at him and the door at the same time.

"Wanna see for yourself? This is supposed to go through channels, but I don't see any harm in your looking at it, got a local rider."

He hands me the tear sheet:

sign category//002

message category//MILITARY ORDERS/MILITARY ORDERS

SUBJECT//LEAVE STATUS, VOORST, RAWLEY, SIGN KEY 0202, FLT VANE ENG CLASS TWO, RANK CAPTAIN

COPIES TO//LOCAL FLIGHT ASSIGNMENT, LASVENUS FLT ASSIGNMENT CENTER, HOUSTON LOCAL SCICOM OFFICE, LASVENUS SCICOM HQ, GUAM BASE

ORIGINATING OFFICE//FLIGHT PERSONNEL ASSIGNMENT, WASHNGTON

ORDERS FOLLOW ORDERS FOLLOW ORDERS FOLLOW ORDERS

APPEAL OF REASSIGNMENT FROM LEAVE TO GUAM SCICOM

STATUS
:

APPROVED APPROVED APPROVED

DECISION BASIS/ACCUMULATED LEAVE TIME

ADVISORY//GUAM SCICOM, PERSONNEL OFFICE

PREDICTIVE ATTACHED FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES:

VOORST, RAWLEY, TO REMAIN ON LEAVE FOR THIRTY-DAY PERIOD BEGINNING 7-10 ENDING 8-09. ELIGIBILITY FOR LEAVE EXTENSIONS TOTALING 120 DAYS FLT CREW HNDBK 17.442 REV. #2332.

ORDERS END////LOCAL RIDER FOLLOWS LOCAL RIDER FOLLOWS

*********** ADD ADD ADD ADD ADD ADD ADD ADD ADD ADD ADD ADD

********** LOCAL RIDER LOCAL RIDER LOCAL RIDER LOCAL RIDER

COPIES TO//VOORST, RAWLEY

LASVENUS SERVICE CONTROL ALL CODEX PERSONNEL OFF.

ORIGINATING OFFICE//PROGRAM OFFICE, CENTRAL

THEPLEASURETUBE, LASVENUS

VOORST, RAWLEY, RESTORED TO CLASS ONE PRIVILEGES THEPLEASURETUBE FLIGHT 8 LIFTOFF 1100 7-18//SERVICE RESTORED EFF. 0900 7-18.

QUESTIONS CONTACT CENTRAL OFFICE/////////

YOUR PLEASURE IS OUR SERVICE//OUR SERVICE IS YOUR PLEASURE

I scan back through the appeal result, can barely believe my eyes:

APPROVED  APPROVED  APPROVED

NAKED SINGULARITY [=df product of tidally infinite forces manifest within collapsar; condition of irreducibility.]

Through the window/wall I see the latticework cradle move away, the wisps of preignition float up from beneath the ship.

"He wasn't angry, then?"

"No, Taylor was. You should have seen him, talking with his teeth clenched. It was Mancek, the one who looks like a farmer, who didn't say anything; he seemed to enjoy the news in a funny way. I still don't know what to make of it, exactly. Wish I'd hear from Werhner. Something in me isn't going to relax until I find out what's going on at Agana."

"Just be thankful for good news." Collette grins, adjusting the last buckle of my liftoff rig, patting my stomach. "The next few days will take your mind off beige uniforms, you'll see." She kisses me with wet, big lips.

"What service," I tease her. I've been teasing her because she's still on the job after all.

She laughs along with me. "Today we celebrate," she says. "I've got a surprise for you once we're in orbit. And then I've already got the whole day planned. Notice anything different?"

I look around the bright cabin, the familiar brown couch, the deep brown rug with its faint hexagonal pattern. Collette's sagging leather flight bag is stacked alongside the divider to the kitchen/bar; the other velvet lounging chair is reclined as her liftoff rig. "What do you mean?" I ask. The light from the LasVenus trans-port illuminates the Rubens behind her to a glow, warms the soft brown walls. Now I notice a halo around the painting, a rainbow halo.

"Just a drug." She grins, easing into the lounging chair, strapping in. "We're going to be high until tomorrow, higher than we are. Consider that an invitation to a party."

A thunderous shake wallows through the ship, modulates into a sustained roar. The dusty LasVenus pads begin to slip away, low hills and desert form on the horizon to the sound of fine tinkling of equipment in the unit. A gravity grows in my blood, intensifies in the flesh of my forehead, chest, groin—the continent begins to shape itself, receding, and at the very center of the growing weight itself I begin to feel the sweet freedom of flight.

RESIDUAL ITINERARY,
RE.// FIRST-CLASS PASSAGE// Prog. 2ndCoord.

DA8/ //UKIYOE FLYAWAY bid 1/O-1100

DA9 MOONLOOP//SENS SEVEN SPEC bid i/f-cont

DA10 VIETAHITI bid i/f-cont

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

DA12 HOLD PROG//MICROSSAGE bid i/f-cont

DA13 TOTAL HOLOGRAM//
      TRIP TO
THE SUN bid i/f-cont

DA14 TRIP TO THE SUN4 bl- i/f——

CONTINUOUS VIDEON PROGRAMMING

THEPLEASURETUBE IS AN EXPERIENCE//INDIVIDUAL VARIATIONS ARE COMMON AND PRECISE DESTINATIONS VARY//

CONSULT YOUR SERVICE FOR DETAILS

4, MEDICAL CLEARANCE REQUIRED

VIETAHITI VENTURES'/PLAN YOUR LONGDAY NOW

//SOPAC TROPICAL RESERVE

//AQUAPLEASE SPECTACULAR

NEW FIRST-CLASS OPTIONS EVERY HOUR//CONSULT YOUR SERVICE FOR DETAILS

Our service is pleasure//Your pleasure our service

@ thePleasureTube corp.

The recliner doubled, the window/wall a spectacular view of deep space, Collette and I are playing shamelessly. I had a few moments of real depression when we came on, thinking of Massimo, how he would have appreciated the luck I've had using my military status, it's the only thing that ever used to work, how he would have enjoyed another launch. But Collette's been making me forget. I am on my stomach now, she is massaging my back after we've made love while the ship has been in preorbit maneuvers. Her fingers are working into the tight base of my skull.

"Let's see," she says. "If you understood these curves, you'd understand why you have back trouble. First, your spine curves in for seven vertebrae," she says, tracing them with her stiff fingers. "This one's your neck bump. Then your spine curves out, along the ribs, then in again at the lower back. And finally out again at the pelvis," she continues, giving my butt a slap. "Twenty-four moving parts, the discs like little waterbeds between them. Your trouble might be spondylolythesis. Mmmm. Let me recommend treatment."

I laugh. "That word. Look, I barely know you," I say to Collette. "Watch what you say."

She laughs, too, a quiet, low, sultry laugh. "I've known you forever, known these curves, these places," she tells me, now running her hands up my sides, running them up along my bare muscles to hold me under my arms. Then she puts weight on my lower back, leans with the ship.

I laugh again, this time at myself, turn on my side, and trace a line on her body, from her chin down through her breasts to the flat surface of her stomach. I stop at her navel, touch it playfully. Sweet God, there is something so familiar about her now, the counterpart in a woman to some habits of mine, to a sense of touch and odor that I am only half aware of. "I feel I've known you," I say, poking my finger into her navel, "right from the start."

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."