The Pleasure Tube (20 page)

I look into Collette's liquid green eyes.

She seems a little shaken herself. She slides one hand across my chest, the other around to the back of my neck, and sidles up half behind me. I sigh and feel the relief of it, the light pressure, the sexy warmth of her touch. The weight of her breasts moves across my back, settles as she sighs.

The moon's bright image is still on the window/wall, and in its silvery light I turn to her, watch her full lips part as she lies back. She is stroking my chest with long, thin fingers, her nail polish as silver as the moon. Tracing patterns with her fingertips, her touch is now so light she barely bristles the ends of the hair; the sensation is extraordinary.

"Better?" she asks. She takes my hand and moves it beneath her breasts, presses upward into its firm weight.

"Mmmm," I say. "Let's imagine we took the Lancia. We're about three hundred kilometers south of LasVenus, alone in the desert, we haven't seen another vehicle for an hour. We've made it."

"Nice thought," she murmurs. "Nice to think of it here. Well, at least we're together."

Why, I begin to wonder, does she say that? But I am lost already. I sink to her, my hand drifting to the undulating firmness of her thighs, her mons, as she rises to meet me.

As she pours the coffee, aromatic and brown-black, Collette's hand is slightly wobbly on the handle of the silver pot and she avoids my eye. Now I ask her what it is.

"I wish I didn't have to tell you this," she says quietly, sitting on the edge of the recliner; I am on the couch. "Rawley, that man, Taylor, he's on the ship. Erica came in and woke me at five a.m. She said an early day-briefing, that's what she'd been told. But it was him, he wanted to talk to both of us. I saw him, Rawley, on this ship."

I moan. Tantalized by Werhner's last message from Agana Base, growing smug over my appeal, I have kept Taylor out of my mind. For the life of me I can't figure out what's going on—and at the same time wonder about the voice like Cooper's, wonder if the similarity was a hallucination on my part, triggered by the strange data Werhner reported yesterday, or now if Taylor might have had something to do with my hearing it.

"I hope he didn't give you too bad a time," I say finally. "I guess I really should have expected him to board the ship. But I didn't think he'd bother you. They don't give up," I sigh. Then after a moment I ask Collette if there was anything in particular Taylor wanted to know."

She shrugs, puts one knee over the other as she leans forward. She is still wearing her white satin robe, she's barefoot, but now the robe seems to droop. "The same thing. Are you talking about the flight you were on, are you saying anything about your debriefing. I think he's worried about you, maybe whether you'll put him on report. He asked me if you were doing anything outside the program."

"The debriefing's suspended," I say. "He doesn't have the right."

Collette nods, tight-lipped; there is an exhaustion in her green eyes. "He made me wish we had taken off in that beautiful car, just run from LasVenus. But what's the use?"

"Taylor," I say with a kind of nervous scorn. "What if you did go through with a resignation now, what if you did quit?"

"Now that we're in flight, they'd, well... It's what we talked about before. They'd put me in third class and make me pay. I suppose I could stay here with you. But they'd send you someone else, another woman."

Despite my growing depression I can't resist taking advantage of the look on Collette's face, a hangdog disgust at both third class and the idea of another woman living in the cabin. "How do you know I'd mind?' I ask with a smile.

"What?" she says, putting both feet on the floor and stiffening her back. "I have to put up with him, and now I have to put up with you? What are you going to do, Rawley, run off with all of us when we get back to L. A.? You're going to need a bigger car. You bastard."

"No," I grin, "just you. There'll only be room for you."

"You bastard," she says after a moment. "You did me last night and you did the Japanese girl yesterday afternoon. Are you trying to set a record?"

"The Japanese girl was your surprise," I remind her. She begins to glare at me. Since yesterday, there's been a new electricity between us—her presence, the looks she gives me with her jade-green eyes, make me a little weak-kneed. And we seem to say less, communicate in glances that require no explanation. She is giving me one of her looks now—close-mouthed, haughty, her eyes wide and menacing.

"All right," I say, "you just hang on. We won't be on this trip forever. And I'll talk to Taylor. I'll talk to him myself."

She actually smiles.

I rise and kiss her on the cheek, then begin helping her clear away the breakfast china. I want to get the console clear, to get started.

As Collette finishes in the kitchen, I punch a query through:

SEARCH PROGRAM SEARCH PROGRAM SEARCH

QUERY LOC.//

COL. R. TAYLOR//

SCICOM OFF./GUAM STA. REF.//

CABIN #/PT FLT 8//

CABIN LOC: ENTER ENTER ENTER

RETRIEVE  RETRIEVE  RETRIEVE

##################

RESET RESET RESET

Taylor's presence doesn't register on the ship's roster; he must be under another name. I pull the list of names of passengers who boarded for the first time in LasVenus, think at first there can't be many, but sixty-four names show up. In the end I try Werhner's trick for limited-access material, but there's no record of Taylor's presence on any of the classified rosters. Now it's Taylor locked into a private world to which I cannot find a seam, there's no way for me to get to him short of searching the ship.

I start seething, decide to trace through to Guam. But now I find not a single line clear. Agana is apparently under a blackout, not even routine military or SciCom traffic getting through, not even a weather report coming out. Incredible, I think, how stupid. I should have put Collette in that goddamned car and taken off.

"You're right," Erica says two hours after lunch. "There's more to do this leg. The program's richer. That's the way it's supposed to be, has to be, I guess. You'd see it better if you weren't so desynched."

Erica is leaning with her hip on the couch, Collette is sitting alongside me as we watch what must be a women's program, a cosmetics demonstration. The models are languid women, the voice-over throaty:

"On her face: veilessence cream makeup in copper with cedar mauve blushing pomade. On her eyes: powder eyeshadow in wood violet and hickory. On her lips: revenescence rose. Smoky grape satin-skin camisole leotard. And on the right, now. On her face, veilessence light ivory with blushing cream in glazed heather plum. Spun-gold pink, spun-gold cherry highlighting patina, frost-spun..."

With her own makeup, in her suede suit, Collette is as stunning as the models on the screen, smells gorgeously of frangipani. But the gloom clouds her face, a tired glaze in her eyes, and her shoulders sag. She and Erica are to report to Service Control. Their going is supposed to be routine, still we all wonder about it.

"It's that time," Erica says.

"I'll be along," Collette says glumly.

Erica kisses us both, says she's going on ahead, leaves the two of us on the sofa. I shut down the screen.

"We
would be
in Mexico by now," Collette says after a moment. "What an adventure it would have been."

"Well, it's still an adventure," I say. "You'll have to admit that."

Collette slips her hand under mine and leans on my shoulder. I feel her warmth and my breath goes a little thin again with the presence and odor of her. I have asked myself if she might not still be in collusion with Taylor, or if she's in love with me as she says; and I wonder now if it finally matters. I haven't felt this way about a woman since Maxine came back to me, pleaded to come back, and I realized how much I needed her. My God, I wonder, looking at Collette, am I genuinely falling in love with her?

"We've been through a lot together," Collette says; she's saying exactly what's on my own mind. "I'll never forget the end of that afternoon in LasVenus."

I won't, either, and I sigh. I feel even worse because only now do I realize there wasn't a way to pay my respects after Massimo's death, no ceremony to attend, no way to think his passing through.

Alone. The window/wall fills the cabin with the kaleidoscopic colors of something called Pastoral Fantasy. The Beethoven is soothing, but the light show is just annoying. I clear the screen, punch up Guam again out of compulsion:

ATTN//GUAM STATUS//ALL TRAFFIC DOWN//ALL TRAFFIC DOWN

ATTN//GUAM STATUS//ALL TRAFFIC DOWN//ALL TRAFFIC DOWN

Nothing's changed. Strange to think of Guam now; I recall some of its odors, the putrefaction of the base's littered beach.

After ten minutes of playing around and using my sign key, I manage to reach into the databank of Medex. I poke around in passenger statistics and on the bottom line discover something that confirms what Collette mentioned early in the trip: the death rate on theTube is phenomenal, as high as two hundred per thousand on some all-third-class flights. That data leads me into failsafe programs for the total hologram, into my own failsafe program. I see that I am entered to disconnect and trauma detoxify if my heart beats at a rate of 145, or if my blood pressure reads 200 /145—I'm not sure what either really means, but both seem high. My palms get clammy at the idea of trauma and the thought of the mortality rate. I adjust my own tolerances down twenty percent, then post the entry to commit when I'm switched in, hide the entry in storage. I don't want to leave footprints. The blue lights wink confirmation and I think to leave a memory code to remind Collette.

But I don't punch a memory tape. I wonder. I still do feel the slight pull of distrust about her at times, like the partly corroded edge of a razor drawn against my feelings. I don't know—I've been spooked before I came on the ship, thought it was the simple fact of my life. And yet... I punch up tonight's dinner program, getting tired of this machine.

FIRST-CLASS SERVICE//

DINNER//DAY 9     

Coq au Vin

Brussels Sprouts Bordelaise

Tarminochi Salad

Hot Bread

White Bordeaux

That's it, I think. I'll run a blind. Just what Werhner would do, I laugh to myself, I'll have to tell him about this when I see him. If I see him. The laugh doesn't last.

ENTER ENTER ENTER

PROGRAM CHANGE//MEAL SERVICE

SUBS.//new dinner program—day 9

SUBS.//new dinner program—Cannelloni

Green Salad

Chianti

It happens at the pool, just as I enter the water, naked today like the rest of the swimmers. My mind is blank. I am thinking only of the dive, oblivious to the colors and voices at poolside, the music. At the precise point of impact there is a burst of light, and I am diving through a hatch passageway, not through a ship, but into a white, whirling sun, flames at my feet, orange and red driven flames, the sound of rushing wind—the light alongside me is a blur of blue-white, ahead painfully white, bleached utterly, I am falling into it.

My hand on something solid: the tile bottom of the pool. I push off with my palms, shoot upward to the silvery surface, through.

I float for a moment, breathing heavily, take in the people, hear the tropical music. I dive again, but all I see is the water, the sides and bottom of the pool, green tiles meticulously grouted, smooth to the touch, sloping upward from the deep bottom. Then I hang on at the pool's gutter. An athletic woman asks me if I'm all right, is something wrong, asks if I need help.

When Collette finally returns in the late afternoon, she explains she's had a long meeting on new options, hasn't seen Taylor. She says she had some of  her own business to attend to; she passes Taylor's presence off as nothing. As a matter of fact, she is exuberant—she smiles broadly, there is a glow to her that wasn't there at midday. It annoys me. I wonder if she's lying.

"I have a gift for you," she says, combing out her hair. "But you have to take a shower."

"I've been to the pool," I answer.

She puts the wide comb down, stares at me energetically. "Take a shower," she says, turning me to the bath, pushing at my bottom. "And stay in there for at least fifteen minutes. Take some good drugs."