The Pleasure Tube (11 page)

When I key into the computer, a message jumps up right into video, a short tape loop waiting for me from Massimo Giroti. He asks me to meet him tomorrow, about noon, at an address which reads like a warehouse number. He doesn't say why, fades out with a grin. Working for a while at the small console which lifts from a coffee table, I discover that outside communication is not well developed here, and when I look through my bag for the routing book I decided to take along, I have the feeling someone's been through my things again. Why, I wonder, is the LasVenus page smudged? Even with the routings and the traffic channel I secured just before we landed, I cannot raise Werhner on a live line—one routing I try lists Werhner as off station, the other as on station but unavailable for outside calls. I think they both amount to the same thing. A little later, I decide, I will compose a message, key in, and route it as a teletype, not to Guam's SciCom base at Agana, but rather to the maintenance station at Utama Bay, where Werhner dives. A debugging rider will make it disappear if someone listens in.

I doze on the couch, and when I fall hard asleep something wakes me—as if the darkness of sleep carried with it something monstrous, something unformed, a nightmare. I recall the darkness, but I don't remember a single detail of whatever it was that woke me until I am seeing it all—Cooper's tight lips, his narrowed eyes as he tells me, Let her go, and Maxine's flushed face, her vacant, embarrassed smile, her watery eyes. Erica is in the bath. Now I am angry, I want to throw that door at Taylor. The thought of Collette makes me sigh audibly.

channel 393/7

sign key 0202/Voorst//

telex medium//

route:   SoCal Center

           
Honolulu

           
Midway

           
Guam Utama Sta, (des.)

           
debugging rider: erase if intercept

ATTN:   WERHNER SCHOLE

QUERY: DO YOU KNOW ANY INFORMATION ANOMALIES OUR DAEDALUS MISSION? EXCEPT FOR THE MISSING, AM NOT AWARE OF ONE IN COOPER'S REPORT. BUT SEE WHAT YOU CAN FIND: CHECK WHAT SCICOM IS HOLDING IN ITS BANKS, COMPARE WITH C'S REPORT, WOULD YOU? THE CIRCUS HAS COME TO TOWN, HAD A TALK WITH TAYLOR, REPEAT, TAYLOR HERE. SEE WHAT YOU CAN FiND.

RAWLEY

Once I punch that through I begin getting nervous, my palms sweating—I am always nervous when I compose one of these:

channel  393// 0202/

sign key  Voorst//

telex medium//

route: local

           
local

           
Military Flight HQ

ATTN: MILITARY CMDR, FLIGHT

APPEAL SCICOM ORIG.  RECLASSIFICATION TO GUAM SCICOM, EFFECTIVE 10-24.

APPEAL BASIS: ACCUMULATED LEAVE TIME.

S/Voorst,   Rawley//Flt   Vane   Eng.   Class   2//codex 292//sign key 0202//

"Too many drugs," Erica is saying from the kitchen/bar; she is taking one capsule as we settle in before dinner. She is telling me about an older woman she saw while waiting for me. The woman staggered out of a D-bar down the way and fell at the cement curbing of a ramp, fracturing her skull.

"And in a SectorGold street," she goes on. "I say that's not her fault, she should have been better taken care of. The thing is not to take so many. I happen to be a moderate person. I mean, I don't believe in the drugs themselves, just what they open up inside you, it has to be there already. Do you know what I mean? God, she wouldn't have known if somebody was
doing
her from the way she was walking. I saw it a block away."

When Erica comes to the couch, she is stirring Viennese coffee with cinnamon sticks, still talking. She is wearing the tight silver halter she wore when I first saw her in the L.A. trans-port, still slightly flushed from the bath, sweet-smelling.

As she settles next to me I point out that she took a handful of pills this morning—a handful. At the console I have begun retrieving some of the coded information I've assembled on Eva Steiner, beginning with a map array from Las Venus DataBase. We both watch it click into place on the smoky bronze window/wall:

"But that's when I'm flying," Erica says. "I only do that many when I'm terrified. Taking off. Landing. Cruising. My stomach goes up to here," she says, pointing to the level of her breasts. "My nipples go crazy. I think it's all in my mind. I mean, I have to concentrate on getting the ship up, keeping it up. Which suits me for another kind of work, I guess," she giggles. "But otherwise, I'm very careful. I'm like a monk about what I put in my mouth." She giggles again. "Though we could try a little D-Pharmacon for kicks tonight." She focuses on the map, then asks what I'm looking at.

"A local residence," I say. Then, using Werhner's trick, I retrieve the personnel file I saw but didn't closely study before—the listing on Eva Steiner. The data on the screen describes a busy executive, but something is confusing. I can't determine whether she is an executive in security for EnergyWest, or whether she is given special security facilities for her EnergyWest work. The second, I think— or are they both blinds, covers for something else? She had originally been trained as a nuclear engineer, and seems to fly regularly on the ship.

"My God," Erica says when she realizes what she is seeing. "What are you doing reading that, how did you
retrieve
that? Eva Steiner—she's a
Director,
look, I told you about her. Oh, Rawley, lover, you ought to just forget it, you're going to get into trouble. What are you going to do?"

"I'm not sure," I say, switching off and letting the window/wall clear to show the city beyond. "Don't you have a report to make?"

Erica raises her hands. "Not me," she says, then sighs. "All right, look,
I
told you about her. I'll tell you everything else I know. This hairy man with glasses talked to me..."

"Taylor."

"That's his name. But all he said was to keep you in sight and in good health. Lover, I'm on your side. I told him that's exactly what I'd do, that's what I'm supposed to do. That's all. I think they treated Collette pretty rottenly, I told him that, too. I saw the way they took her. I don't know what this is all about, except that with people like Eva Steiner, you might get into trouble, so between you and me... I've been in trouble myself. It's not worth it."

I ask Erica what kind of trouble she's been in,

"They caught me getting off in L.A. six months ago with a suitcase full of brandy and ampules," she says, flushing with embarrassment. "I'm still on probation."

I punch up Erica's file, run through the security sheet; what she says is true. Courvoisier, Five Star, twenty-four bottles. I could use some right now. "You know," I say, half to myself, settling back on the sofa, "all I wanted to do when I came here was to get away."

"Honestly, I didn't know you were being screened till this morning," Erica says quietly. "I can't tell you what Collette's up to, but I know what I am. I mean, why am I here with you? That's what I told that man. This is
thePleasureTube
, I have a job to do, and look, I should be taking better care of you."

I look into Erica's slightly glazed blue eyes and laugh.

She laughs, too, pushes back her blonde hair, and sidles near me on the couch. "Well, actually, it doesn't seem much like work today," she says, putting her hands around my neck, then trailing one hand across my shoulder. "You have a nice body." She grins, moving her hips so that her skirt rides up her thighs, still moving her hips. Her other hand has slid down my spine and I can feel my back loosen up. "It's whatever you want, you know. Don't forget that. You're your own worst enemy if you forget that. Anything. Anything you want."

Her breast cupped in my hand, a nipple in relief on the lame halter, I feel a kind of sad detachment even as my sexuality responds to the touch and the soft weight of her. I ask myself what I have to regret—and as if in answer, Erica's head falls back, her eyes open wide and their pupils roll back as her mouth hangs open in heavy, self-absorbed breathing. Her legs come up across my lap and she opens her thighs. How overripe, how voluptuous, how enormously sexy she is, I think. And how enormously empty and alone I feel at this moment.

I roll her from me, rise, and ask her to help me strip for a bath.

We go to the Tower Complex to do a little gambling before dinner—risk ventures, Erica calls it. We pass through the viny, damp jungle lobby of a hunting game, the pornographic lobby of a population game—stills of couples having sex flash on the ceilings and walls; their juxtaposition with the formal, ornate chandeliers makes me laugh. We bypass the command center lobby of a game called WorldWarInfinity, curious as I am to know what's involved. At the moment I have an aversion to uniforms, and there are enough costume generals, both male and female, at the entrance to a bunker mock-up to make me instinctively turn away from the place itself. The game, it turns out, occupies the entire three-floor sector of the complex.

Erica says she enjoys the lavish display here in SectorGold but personally finds it more exciting in the other sectors, where popular games have at stake first-class tickets for the winners, while the losers drop a class. For the losers in the third-class martial arts competition, along with the beating comes a mandatory service assignment for two flights—without the good pay.

I mean to know where I am at all times, but soon enough, in the maze of corridors, intertower ramps, moving sidewalks, different scenes, and bright lights, I lose sense of where we are. There's something appealing about the traditional gaming rooms; perhaps it is the familiarity of their atmosphere. Finally we begin to gamble, spend a while at a green velvet table in a hushed, mahogany inlay room playing baccarat with couples dressed for the evening. The game quickens my pulse, and it is satisfying to come out a few hundred ahead, a quarter unit, after an hour.

We are looking for a D-bar when we come across StarFlightVenture on the seventieth floor. The hallways of the entire floor are designed to look like hatch passageways, and behind each thick glass door is a computer-linked starship console. The ship is of the newer Eagle class; I toyed with one on Guam and found it almost a duplicate of the Daedalus. Ah, I think, a setup, a piece of cake. All I need to do is shake the bank. I sign up for a unit with a sparrowlike, small woman at the control desk.

The game turns out to be work, but the work is worth about two thousand an hour. I stand just as I had on the Daedalus, at the three-meter-wide central console cluttered with monitors, vane keys, thruster links, and microweather sequence units; a dome ceiling follows the flight. Erica's pretty excited when I stop just over three thousand ahead. I'm a little swept away by my luck—over half the money, according to my own calculations, I owe to luck—and when the money's presented at the control desk, she does a little dance of ecstasy when I give it to her. Then she calls upstairs to the roof garden from the desk attendant's phone, asks for "something very nice, we aren't counting the small change tonight. The
very
best," and says that tonight an option dinner is on her.

"Turns out there's something for everyone here after all," I tell her with a grin.

We eat at one of the smaller, though the most expensive, of the rooftop restaurants of the Tower Complex, teahouses in the garden of a temple. The garden is sculptured, its air rich with the exotic odors of jasmine and ginger. We are bathed and clothed in kimonos, wrapped with obis, and taken by the hand by geishas to our separate teahouse on a knoll from which the stage of the Tower Shell is visible a half kilometer away, in the Moorish garden. And we see some artificial weather, a misty, thirty-second thunderstorm just as we finish our first round of warm sake.