The Pleasure Tube (27 page)

"On the ship?"

She nods, looks at me seriously. "Passenger remains are taken back to L.A. They always are."

"Is there a way I can... see him? There must be."

"There is a morgue on the ship, he's probably there. But you have to get clearance, we'd have to make a request."

Collette does the checking for me. Sure enough, Massimo's remains are in the morgue. But she says no requests for downship activity are being authorized because the main lifts are out of operation for the duration of the instability.

"Is there a back way, a way through the superstructure of the ship? I'd like to go now,"

"Without clearance?" Collette asks, checking the time by punching it up into a corner of the screen. "Well... I suppose there's no reason to worry now; what can they do, after all? Sure, there's a way. I'd have to show you."

"Just give me directions," I tell her. "You can get the electronics set up for the hologram. I'll go alone. I've been through ships before, just tell me where it is."

"Well, I'd have to get you through a hatch. Are you sure you want to do this just before we plug in?"

"I'm sure," I tell her, cracking off a piece of flat bread, spooning on the last of the caviar. "And the hologram after will be just the thing. I'm the sort who lays one on after a funeral."

Before I leave the cabin, Collette pulls a soft, stylish leather coat from the narrow closet off the kitchen/bar in which she keeps her clothes. "It's going to be cold," she says, easing the coat from its hanger, passing it to me.

It is a man's coat, a warm golden shade, like a flight jacket. It has the supple texture of glove leather, fits as if it had been cut for me, less a kilo or two. I admire the coat and thank Collette—it really fits well.

"It was my brother's," she says. "I didn't want to sell it."

I put my hand on the leather. I want to ask her about her brother, she's mentioned him before, yet I can see pain in her eyes. I hesitate, but my curiosity is too great. I ask her why he didn't want to keep the coat.

"He died," she says quietly. "He was given the wrong drugs. Who knows why."

The man who said that paranoids are survivors, I think.

Collette takes me back to the pool area, where the air turns chemical and humid. We pass the thinning crowd, slip into the locker room, and she leads me across the thick carpeting to a door marked SERVICE ONLY/DO NOT ENTER. She opens the heavy door by slipping her blue card into a lock slot on the satiny metal door frame, tells me to go all the way down, kisses me goodbye.

Once through the doorway, I pass from rug to metal grating, from the sleek redwood benches to ranks of bare metal pipes, valves, and scaffolding. The door shuts behind me with a slam. She was right when she said it was going to be cold: I can see my breath. I am in the cavernous maw of the interior of the ship, just alongside the works for the pool. Beyond the pumps lie vacant stretches of space between this first-class hull and the other two hulls that make up the second-class and third-class sectors of the ship. TheTube is constructed just like a tripled starship with a skin—three long starship cylinders, three domes, each with its port and starboard pontoons high overhead. I guessed something like this, seeing the ship on the pads in LasVenus; still, I am startled by the sight. When I consider for a moment where we will be flying, I know I shouldn't be. Yet in the bowels of this ship, each hull so resembles the Daedalus that I have an eerie sense of never having touched down, of walking in space.

I've already climbed down the flight of steep metal stairs past the pool works, enter a series of hatch passageways in the hull on the next level; the stairway continues down, narrow, there are hatches at every level, stenciled numbers. I clamber down more steps, read 022. It is a long way to go, I guess two hundred meters beneath me.

I reenter the ship sector through the very last hatch. I open it, a little rubber-legged from the descent. The morgue is achingly stark white, dispassionately institutional. I am struck by its size once inside it, for the single level I've reached through the service door descends two levels further through wide inside elevators. Instead of two or three mordant attendants, I find the office area is staffed by a half-dozen people. I'm told to go below by an angular-faced, pale woman in white.

A chemical odor seems to radiate from the smooth walls and tile floors, from the interior of the elevator in which I descend. The lowest level is again dazzlingly white. Leaving the elevator, I have the sensation that I am inside the white heart of a vast machine—ducts, pipes, fittings, valves, line the ceiling of the hallways and the racks on the walls. I recognize hatchways leading to the engine room of the ship. A hum seems to come from everywhere—the long thin tubes of lighting, the machine fittings and ducts, the thick steel doors leading to rooms visible through small squares of wire-reinforced glass, rows upon rows of oversized drawers tagged at their handles. Collette was right about the number of deaths. I feel a formless blindness creeping into my vision, a nervous tremor runs through my body—slightly spooked, I guess, at the atmosphere of this place, raised to an unknown power by its size.

I cannot escape the notion that Massimo still has something to tell me. I recall our first meeting on the A-line tram, the sense I had then of being impelled with him toward something new to me yet known somehow; we never arrived at it, yet we seemed sure to, I could feel it in my bones. And the idea of his intercession intrigues me. Judging from the way he orchestrated a connection for me with Eva Steiner, he could very well have seen to my appeal without telling me, had it taken care of even though he didn't know who Eva Steiner was. The hygienic chill seems cruel and unjust, just as his death still seems wrong, the gorgeous Ferrari smeared along the wall, its orange-red fireball a young, seething sun.

In C-l there is a two-man crew seated at a desk playing chess on a magnetic board—the vault beyond stacked ceiling-high with drawers that recede down a corridor bathed in light.

"Well, let's see," the older of the attendants says, moving his fingers through a card file. He looks queasy from the motion of the ship. "Giroti. G.G.G.G.G.G.G. You say you're not a member of the immediate family?"

"I'd just like to pay my respects. The man was a friend of mine."

"You can see what we have," the older man says, peering at the card he's pulled.

"What do you mean by that?"

"Looks like he was pretty well busted up. He's in drawer thirty-three, right down there. I guess we have effects, says here personal effects are in there, too."

I stare at the attendant blankly, stupidly; I don't know what to think.

"Look," he says, pulling his chair up against the desk so he can hunch over the chessboard, "you want an interfaith minister or something? We can call upstairs."

"No," I answer. "I'll be just fine."

In the chilly air I stare at the pathetic sack on the slab, the body bag from which wisps of CO
₂
 rise like smoke from a dying fire. I wonder why I've come. Now it seems so useless. I stand silently, lost in my thoughts. I recall Massimo's kindness to me on the last day he was alive, the enthusiasm with which he seemed to lose himself in his cars—to be utterly lost, in the end, in a blur of acceleration in the Ferrari. That is what he might have preferred; I accept that, it makes his death sensible to me. Yet it reminds me of the ways in which I've lost myself, reminds me of the moments before the blow four year ago. In the instant before I blacked out I thought I was dying, remember experience becoming an all-consuming blur, passing into something from which I never thought I'd recover. I sigh. Well, friend, I think, peace be with you.

After a while I look through Massimo's scattered effects. Behind the separator in the body drawer lie his tagged leather luggage, suit bags, several briefcases. I stare for a while at his unfamiliar things. There is a tagged video cassette lying alone, which I pick up, examine. It is dated the second day of the trip, and in the title box are written the words "To my survivors"; the handwriting must be Massimo's.

I anticipate its contents, guess a dozen things on my short trip up to the morgue's first level to run the tape, expect an explanation to a question I can't quite formulate. I'm given a machine without signing for it; nothing I've done has been logged. When I run the tape I look with infinite sadness at Massimo's smiling, animated face, see his sly kindness and sense of his own end evident even before he speaks. Of course, I think, he was coming on against medical advice, he knew that he might well die. What he has to say has nothing to do with his Governorship, or with SciCom, or with the trip; it is a message to his household, and to his friends. "You belong to a new age," he says. "Go in pleasure and in peace."

I stare at his still image fixed on the final frame.

I am passing back into the bowels of the ship when it happens. The chill intensifies, the brightness of the morgue goes, and in its place is the shaky dimness of the hatch passageways. I am lost in thought, vaguely wonder how Collette is making out. I still have a long way to go, stop at a hatch only one flight up to take another look at the superstructure of the ship.

I unseal the hatch, push to go through—and it swings open to a howling bright light, the white light of a whirling sun, intense, overwhelming, incredible. A screaming rings in my ears, the light is blinding me. I wonder if I've been hit, if the ship's been hit, my arm is still on the hatch lock, I shade my eyes with my forearm and slam it closed.

Silence. The dim light. My heart is pounding, the blood banging in my ears.

A morgue attendant who's heard the slam is at my side, asking me what happened, what's wrong.

The hatch swings open at the touch of his hand. I had not set the lock. Beyond it lies another metal stairway, the dim light of the ship's interior, the pall of machinery, nothing else.

"Look at you, man. What happened?"

"I don't know," I say, leaning back against a metal stair. "My God, I don't know."

The cabin's soft brown walls, the faint hexagons of its carpet, the Rubens, pink and fleshy, comfort me with their familiarity. Collette is in the kitchen/bar assembling dinner. I catch a whiff of piquant sauce, feel my stomach tighten, put one hand on the couch to steady myself against the ship's motion. God, what is it, I wonder, the instability of the ship, the last days of the trip, or what I saw, what I saw? I notice now the velour headrests for the hologram sitting on the carpet near the recliner; they connect to the recliner's base through an array of gray cables.

"I'm really having problems," Collette says, coming out empty-handed. "The bearnaise sauce keeps separating on me, it's curdled twice."

"I'm not really hungry," I tell her, see now she seems a little pale herself.

So we sit on the couch sipping Cinzano for our appetites, watching the last of the instructional programs for the hologram on Videon 33. The white-haired physician I've seen twice before is summing up a long, personal theory. He says in the end, translating from archaic Greek, that the highest pleasure of an organism consists of its return to its own true nature.

"My nature at the moment doesn't feel very steady," I tell Collette, think I need to do something, to get myself occupied. I go with her to the kitchen and we try the sauce again—once more wind up with thickening butter and specks of egg. When I tell Collette I'm not interested in eating, anyway, she says the motion is getting to her as well, she isn't particularly hungry herself. She says she thinks we ought just to enter the hologram, plug in. The electronics are ready and it's always worked for motion sickness for her. I wash my hands at the metal sink. I just want to forget. I tell her that now seems as good a time as any other, and so we clear away the aperitif glasses, set the cables into their racks, change into robes.

I have a pleasant moment as Collette sets my head in the headrest before a pastoral videon screen, nervous as I am.

Then a severe, searing pain begins at the tips of my fingers, shoots straight to my sinuses and teeth, grips me in the spine. My stomach muscles contract to double me up, but I can't move. The pain is razor-sharp, burning, takes my breath away, my fist flails out and slams into the side of the recliner. I am out of the headrest, doubled up now, gasping for breath, the pain receding. "... Jesus."

"I'm sorry, Rawley," Collette says, biting her lip. "That had to be done to clear your neurology for contrast. I'm sorry. But if I had told you, it would have been worse."

"Worse?... Jesus."

"Lie back," she says.

"Oh, now..."

"Trust me," she says. "Lie back."

Collette self-induces her own initial neurological clearing with a timing mechanism—I can hear her catch her breath. Then she tells me everything is ready, makes herself comfortable on the couch, her full hair spilling over the headrest. I'm not at all certain what to expect. Despite my apprehension, with the ship unstable I do feel far more comfortable lying down, I'm sure now I won't be sick. I lie there watching a pastoral scene on the videon screen, rolling hills, cultivated land, a farmhouse, and a young man and woman doing something by its door.

"Say, Collette, when will I—"