The Pleasure Tube (3 page)

As I pass through X-ray and security a bored Oriental asks to see my papers. When he spots my green card, he waves me through without looking at my ticket. Nor does he open my bag—my one leather bag. I've only brought a few sets of casual clothes—old blue flight clothes, mostly—I intend to relax. One blonde woman, she looks about thirty, has eight bags. When I ask her what she is carrying, her broad face flushes and she laughs; finally she says clothes, mostly, some tennis gear, wig racks, magazines, cosmetics. I wind up helping her guide her luggage on a cart.

I hadn't realized theTube was so large—this terminal occupies an entire wing of the Trans-Port. Crowded, all kinds of people, some as young as eighteen, others are eighty. I see a number of very attractive women with men, both sexes in jump suits. Some of the women are wearing tight leather skirts and halters; this must be the latest fashion for women trim enough. The blonde I'm walking with is perhaps ten pounds too heavy for the pastel leather outfit she has on; she is attractive, though, in a fleshy way. I wonder if her nervousness is sexual, like mine, or simply the anxiety of travel. Her luggage is new, covered all over with broad rainbows. I like it and tell her so, her face opens with the flattery, and I ask if she'll have some free time tonight on the ship.

She giggles. "I'm paired," she says. "I'm meeting Tonio at my gate, we're almost there."

"Paired?" I say, braking the luggage cart to a stop.

"Aren't you? Not even on your first night? Tonio's an old friend, but everybody..."

"I don't know," I tell her. Then I say: "That should be interesting."

"It's on your ticket," she tells me.

I show her my ticket. My reservation impresses her; I'm going first class on government money. But her forehead wrinkles.

"It doesn't list anyone," she says. "Still," she goes on breathlessly, apparently not knowing what to make of me, "you'll have fun."

A tall, thin man with angular shoulders and a sheaf of black hair is making his way toward us against the stream of people. It must be Tonio—as she sees him she puts her hand on my arm.

"Look," she says, "I've got an idea. Let's do a fantasy co-op some night on the ship."

"What?"

"Just give me your codex number. I'll get in touch."

I recite my codex, she closes her eyes to remember, then guides the cart away.

"My name is Erica," she calls back.

"Rawley Voorst," I say, raising my hand to wave. But she is too quickly submerged in the crowd, disappears. Tonio is up on his toes.

I have to change levels, backtrack through a lounge concourse, then walk a kilometer or so before I arrive at the gate coded on my ticket. Alongside a squinting young man, a tall, gorgeous black girl, whose eyes are so distinctly green that I can see their color from the end of the line, is behind a counter punching ticket codes against space as the young man checks in luggage. Passengers leave the counter following pastel stripes on the floor. I loiter in line for ten minutes, shoving my flight bag ahead with my foot.

Finally the black girl begins punching my ticket into a terminal. She looks up at me, narrows her eyes, punches it in again. The green of her eyes is the green of the deep sea off Guam, jade pale, striking, accentuated by iridescent eye shadow. She really is lovely, the loveliest woman I've seen in the terminal. I watch her fingers: thin, long; her fingernails are a beige two tones lighter than the cafe au lait of her skin. She wears a silver name tag bearing the name Collette.

"There'll be a slight delay in boarding your section," she tells me with a practiced smile, suggesting in the same breath that I wait in the VIP lounge, first door to the right.

I ask her what's wrong.

"We're having an equipment malfunction in your section. They're replacing a unit."

"What unit?"

"The malfunctioning unit," she says tightly.

When I tell her that she talks exactly like a computer terminal, I can see a vein jump in her neck, she tells me that's all she knows. I am annoyed only because until now there has been no break in my motion—she is more embarrassed than angry.

"But you don't exactly look like a terminal," I laugh, "not at all."

She shakes her head and her smile is spontaneous. Her face is aristocratic, her skin healthy. She has large eyes and long lashes that are real.

"Next, please," she says, still smiling.

The light through the lounge window/wall is washed, watery. It seems like night because of the artificial quality of the light outside, but that may be distortion from the dome. Nothing to read; I am alone in the lounge. I wonder if it is because my leave was entered only yesterday that I am not "paired" for the trip; wonder what that means. Will my company be holograms? I wonder, too, if the blonde woman I met in the terminal will get in touch, will remember my codex. I should have asked her number as well. But then she had a friend.

The lounge is a room larger than the twin studio on Guam, though really just a room. But it's luxurious, especially to a man used to bare floors and cots. Velvet couches, a small kitchen/bar off a divider on the rear wall, paintings on the side walls, one a massive Rubens that astonishes me because it looks real. Mirrors cover part of the ceiling, this entire wall a window overlooking the space shuttles on the tarmac. I fix myself Zubrowka on ice and watch the traffic from a reclining chair. The heel of my hand is bothering me, throbbing with the rhythm of my blood. I hold it to the icy glass of vodka until I feel nothing but the cold.

The girl from the ticket counter comes through the door when my glass is almost empty. "I'm sorry," she says. "I called for staff, but we're running behind. They're still moving the new unit in."

"What unit?" I say to tease her.

"We'll be boarding at the first opportunity."

"Computer," I say again to tease her. But she turns to leave and I have to quickly take it back. "No, I didn't mean that."

She relents and rests her back against the wall next to a painting of two women lost in an embrace. "Look," she says, "you have an hour at least. VIP section is always late, the last to board. There's all that loading—you can't imagine all the things they bring on. You're anomalous for VIP, you know; usually we have managers, administrators, older men or women."

"I had an overload of leave time," I tell her. "They said anything goes."

"Lucky you."

"I suppose. You look a little tired. Is it that busy every day out there?"

"It's getting toward the end of my shift." She smiles again. She is a high-cheeked woman of extraordinary bearing. The tight cocoa halter she wears outlines the curve of full, dome-shaped breasts, and I wonder if she isn't padded as part of her uniform. Her legs aren't only possible, though—long, finely muscled, sleek above her pearl-colored shoes; she has a dancer's legs.

"Do you mind if I walk around the terminal?"

She pushes herself loosely from the wall, then shakes her head. "No, you'd better not leave. I punched your whole program, your birth date seemed wrong, I thought we'd have to rewrite your ticket. You've been away for a really long time. You should just stay here."

"I'm not a child," I tell her.

"So I've noticed." She smiles. "But there's plenty you don't know." She comes toward me, bends down, and for an instant I think she is going to touch my knee. But what she does is pull up the inlaid top of the elegant, low wooden table I am sitting by. Inside—I laugh when I see it—is an entire computer console, miniaturized, with ivory keys. She punches a few buttons, guitar music fills the room, and the large glass wall becomes slightly darker. My chair reclines and the whole room seems to soften.

"Just relax," she smiles. "It won't be all that long."

I think about the blonde woman I met on the lower level of the terminal and recall a vague, fleeting familiarity about her. Will I see her again? What is it she wants to do? I assume anything goes on this ship, but I had better be discreet. The ticket agent was right; there are some things I don't know.

I do know this, though: this waiting, this lack of motion, magnifies the anxiety which I came all this way to smother and forget. Outside, the daylight is failing and ship lights, lane lights, begin to twinkle and glow. The view from the window brings to mind the array from the Daedalus dome I so often stood watching; the blue-gray shade of the glass is so like the color of the dome when we were cruising that the sight through it is uncanny. And yet we do not move. I slump back into the chair, close my eyes—a lushly comfortable chair whose designer must have had an affection for the small of the back.

In my half sleep I am again at the console of the Daedalus. In the stillness I am again at the lull, an incredible lull so motionless that I can feel the blood coursing through my veins. My mind shunts on, so trained by Taylor's questioning; I recall shutting down and hoping for drift to pick up energy from the front that visually howls on the starboard side of the dome. Nothing shows on the instruments in the lull. My hands sweat. Motionless, I feel queasy, my stomach confused by the sudden end to turbulence. The memory of Werhner's fork dripping sauce, an odor, the odor of curry—there is a shudder in the ship—I turn to grimace at Werhner. He has disappeared. Beyond his station the port hatch to SciCom hangs open like a tongue, through the opening, not the blue-green glow of SciCom computers or pale-blue-uniformed technicians working or the air lock beyond them, but deep space, blue-black space—there is a shock wave—in my body, through the ship. Hurtling at me is a spinning, growing ball of light, the howling sight of a raging sun....

I awake perspiring, startled; instinctively I stroke the heel of my hand. Through the waiting-lounge window the landing lights of a shuttle sever the deep night, sweep toward me, turn away. I sigh and walk off my anxiety, wish we would board and move.

The girl returns, the door hushes closed behind her.

"Ten minutes," she says pleasantly, her voice with a different edge than it had when I first heard her speak. Her hands are at the back of her neck undoing a braid in her hair—she has redone her makeup, I think; her face looks fresher, more natural. As she shakes her hair loose it falls in long curls to her shoulders. "Free at last," she says.

"Time to go home?"

"Time to stop working, anyway." She joins me at the window overlooking the transport runways. "You should see home, I live next to a freeway." She, too, looks out over the tarmac and the winking, high-rise city far beyond it. On the tarmac the hulking fuselages of the shuttles wait in trainlike rows. One larger ship, which I had seen attached to a booster, is taxiing toward the far runway whose blue lights stretch away, converging into nothingness.

"You're one of those rare people," she tells my reflection in the window—I can see her looking at me— "who go to the stars." I look directly at her and her vision shifts, she looks out to the night sky. She slowly spreads her arms and stretches them above her head. "To fly," she says, and she turns to me, "to fly like a god."

Her halter has risen and I can see her naked belly, a flat expanse. She closes her eyes and hugs herself. When she opens them I look out at the taxiing shuttle, a little embarrassed.

"Don't you find me attractive?" she asks; she has a kind of nervous glow. She spreads her arms again, and as I watch her she brings them down as a dancer might, her hands coming across her body—they seem to linger for an instant at her breasts.

I tell her, "Yes, of course. Very." I laugh and add, "Collette," only then notice that her name tag is gone.

"You remembered my name," she says, smiling broadly. "You really are rare. I went through your program, everywhere you've been."

She moves even closer to me, or I to her, and I am near enough to see the glistening of moisture on her lips, to sense a weight to her breathing.

"Listen," she says, "we have some time."

I want to look at my watch, my wrist naked. I remember that my instructions were to pack the watch in my luggage. "Time... for..."

"Here," she says, tugging gently at my arm to draw me against her. She has soft lips, her lipstick is flavored cinnamon.

I am grinning, my mouth has gone dry, her warm body is pressed against mine, and my hands pull flat against the small of her back. "Can we do this?" I wonder, half to myself. "What if... ?" My hands are on her bottom, she is silky and firm at once. Her curves are breathtaking, as if beneath my hands her shape conforms to a dream I've never quite had but now want.

"If we're quick we won't get caught," she whispers. "Before you go."

When I kiss her again, her tongue outlines my lips. I can feel her body trembling, no dream but alive. She pushes me away, smiling.

"Wait," she says quietly, unbuttoning her skirt. "I want to show you something." Her skirt falls to the carpet. She wears tiny black panties whose lower edges she traces with the tip of each index finger before she slips them off, saying as she lets them fall on her skirt, she is giggling, "Part of my uniform—they make ticket agents wear satin so we feel sexy. I..."

She doesn't let me undress. She straddles me as I lie back on the recliner. Her halter falls open and I see her moving breasts, full and real, her rhythm and mine accelerating, like the whine of the space shuttle thrusting off beyond the darkening window in a blur of light and motion, lifting higher in the blackness of the sky.