The Pleasure Tube (5 page)

Not at the chart, it turns out, only at the first peak on the red-orange line.

I ask her what it means. She says, "I'll show you in a minute."

I am laughing, too—was I asleep again? Werhner wouldn't believe this. Collette is my luck, she is what's so pleasant here. I tell her that the smoothness of this ship is uncanny, that speed compresses otherwise undetectable forces to make a kind of weather, a series of fronts, turbulent, there's always pitch and yaw. A smoothness here, as if traveling some other way. I can feel our motion only as a slight vibration, see it in the concentric rings on the surface of my coffee.

"Can you feel it... here?" she asks as she takes my right hand and guides it toward her heart, releases my hand at her breast, her nipple stiff under satin.

"Very sexy," I say. "But all I feel is, ummm, a pounding heart."

"Mmmm," she giggles, "that's what it does. That orange line signals an early peak in your hormone level. I can't get over it, you turn
me
on. What a luxury."

Beneath her robe, Collette has the odor of strawberries; the sweet, piquant taste of strawberries is on her shoulder. She slides alongside me—satin on satin sheets. I stroke her lower back, send my hand flat over the firm swell of her bottom. I can feel her muscles tighten and move beneath my hands, her tongue sliding warm on my lips.

She is naked beneath her robe. As I enter her she uses its folds to surround me. The sensation spreads throughout my body, sliding into satin, sliding into her. The perfect smoothness of her skin.

After lunch. We are gliding powerdown in a slow trajectory of apparent descent, perhaps thirty kilometers above a landscape visible through the window/wall. The macroweather is flat, and only a few scattered clouds float over the mountains—the long, vast range of gray mountains that stretch along the horizon. Toward what may be a coast in one direction, the atmosphere there the brownish side of yellow, the surface suggesting an elaborate quilt of cultivation. Directly beneath us the rising topography of foothills—they must be deep green beneath the atmosphere's filtering effect. I hear Collette saying
daytrip
brightly, she is at machinery in the kitchen/bar, tidying up after the cold crab she served. I have been studying the landscape for ten minutes, idling over the last of the Jamaican coffee—Blue Mountain, Collette named it. Have we been continuously suborbital? Daytrip?

"I never saw anything like this. Where are we going?"

"Biosphere reserve. Beautiful, isn't it?"

I watch the foothills, try to sort out the different shades of green. Even in the thickening atmosphere this flight remains velvet-smooth, as if cushioned, its motion translated now into a barely perceptible sway of the heavy draperies pulled back along the window/wall. At the juncture with the ceiling the sun flashes, recedes: slight yaw. I notice for the first time a series of fine lines suspended in the material of the window, lines as fine as human hair. Perhaps that is how the window became a filter earlier today.

Collette comes to the window. She is dressed in her skirt and halter of the day before, cocoa leather, gold PleasureTube insignia—she is pulling the strap of a shoulder bag over her right shoulder.

"You never saw anything like this?"

"Not on the expedition," I tell her. "Nothing quite like this. You can tell those greens are conifer; there's botany down there."

"It's a biosphere reserve. That's where we're going to lay over."

"Do we disembark?"

"For two four-hour trips," she says. "Today and tomorrow. You'll like it here. When we arrive at the terminal, follow the signs to the tramrun. Take the A tram from the terminal, exit at Slot Nine. I'll be waiting for you there. We're due in just an hour; there's really only one way they'll let you go with the ticket."

Collette's hair is pulled up, backlit in a kind of aura. She hands me a green card, the ticket.

"I have to check in," she says. "Is there anything I can do before I go?"

"Do you have a minute?"

"Sure," she says.

I sit her beside me on the large velvet couch and open the inlaid table setting before it; the console is half-sized only in the button shape of its controls. I switch PowerOn, punch out three sequences in a simple Retrieve/Inquiry code, Uniform Ship Program. Collette is looking out the window; she smells of heather now. I am getting a blur of flashing numbers on the digital readout bar, just a blur.

"All right," I say. "Where did I go wrong?" I have a print light, positive readout function—but I can't get the display to hold.

"Well..." she muses, looking at the console. "You're holding something big. You need more than digital. God, for a Flight Vane Engineer, Voorst, you don't know much." Collette punches BACK/PRINT/FUNCTION, then a bar marked VID.

The window/wall darkens instantly; the landscape blurs, is obliterated. The window/wall becomes a screen, not projected upon, but emanating a huge, dense list of codex numbers followed by program codes, now the brightest field in the cabin, all other lights have dimmed.

"What happened to the wall?" I ask.

"That's the videon. There'll be a big show day four, after we leave the reserve. Then every fourth day."

"The videon." I stare for a moment longer, my eyes adjusting as the smaller figures focus.

"It reads the computer for certain things, visual display."

"You know how to make it work. That's resourceful."

"I also know that's the ship's manifest." Collette smiles. "Looking for someone?"

"Uh..." I start to answer, hesitate. I can't even find my own codex, there are a thousand listed. "Just looking."

"Then look at something that moves." Collette punches in an entry and the screen changes to display a life-size group of people in bright yellow body stockings moving in unison on mats; they are doing stretching exercises—an exercise class?

Blonde woman in the front row.

"Say, Collette..."

Collette looks at me evenly, her eyebrows raised, the trace of a smile tightening her lips. I have a flash of embarrassment, feel strangely free-floating. One of the women on the screen is Erica. Standing in the front row, doing leg exercises. Standing on one leg, bringing her other foot up to her knee. She has a unique exaggerated pelvic thrust; there is a beatific smile on her face, faint perspiration on her forehead.

Collette is telling me that I am seeing the VID/ACTION sub of her program. "Some people have them made up. Punch codex plus 302, then integrate back to VID."

I am watching Erica pulling her knee to her chest; I am blushing, I think. "How did you know about her?"

"She put in your codex this morning," Collette says, getting up. "Let's just say it's part of my job." She is adjusting the shoulder strap of her sagging leather bag; she is leaving. "Line A, Slot 9," she says with a wry smile. "You can't miss it."

The computer works on Uniform Ship Program for major functions, translates from its own cybernetic language for internal systems into a half-dozen major languages, very well engineered. I find there's no local file under my codex number, then inquire and find that local vane angle confirms touchdown in forty-two minutes. I try to relax by setting up a tennis game through the console. Two sets and I lose interest; an overhand to an unstable backhand is the obvious key.

I punch through Collette's program into her personnel file, find I can retrieve limited access material on Collette by using Werhner's trick, coding the system in a classic Fibonacci Series—1,1,2,3,5,8....She begins
//27 CORETTA KING SCHOOL L.A. SoCal//31 UCAL BERKELEY NoCal P.E. M.S.//SOCIOBIONICS CORP TRAINEE
....I look through with a kind of unfocused intensity, why I am not certain, I am slightly unsettled. No real hint of any SciCom connection, but I am beginning to think I might have seen Collette before, just as I've seen Erica, where? Is it her face? That's what it is, I think, not so much her as the possibility. Strange how that unsettles me.

Through the crowded disembarkation chute, into the rough-hewn wood, post, and beam terminal, most of the passengers head toward waiting NaturBuses; that appears to be the third-class program. People are nervous at being off the ship; even here the air is noticeably different—once outdoors among the tramrun sheds, there is a kind of sweet rot to it. On the small A trams there are only first-class passengers. The tram I board is empty in the rear, where I sit, except for a heavyset, well-dressed, European-looking man. Forward a small group laughs at an older woman's story; she had the wrong luggage, didn't know until she opened the first case and found a grope suit. I'll have to find out what a grope suit is.

I sit by a rectangular window and watch our rubber-tire progress, first uphill, then down through faintly groomed, quite real, thickening woods. I lay my hand flat on the spun steel of the tram body; it feels queerly unreal, or I do, suddenly moving through these woods under a hazy sun. Insects in the overgrowth, reflections from the guardrail along the tramrun, no breeze. I see a small animal clinging to the lowest branch of a tree as we pass. Squirrel, moving, alive.

Slot 7 is a pavilion where the forward group disembarks. Slot 9, a kilometer beyond, deposits me at a simulated stone walk where Collette is waiting. She's wearing white shorts and a halter top. We follow the walk eighty meters to a small prefab structure, half porch with a large plastic table, plastic/wicker chairs. There is a small brazier in the corner; inside, a cooking unit, a refrigeration unit, cabinets.

The rest house—what Collette calls it—is protected by woods on three sides. We are on a gentle rise on rocky ground. Behind us the land slopes uphill to a series of granite bedrock faces which rise from the ground; around the base of the nearest is apparently the tramrun. Ahead the landscape runs downhill and opens in a widening swath to a meadow, a vast, parklike space, again only barely groomed, perhaps three or four kilometers off. I can just make out a series of pavilions on the meadow's far side, perhaps eight kilometers away.

Since the tram whined away, the air has seemed soundlessly light. The absence of machine hum recalls the beach at Utama Bay on Guam; this kind of stillness is unnerving. I pick out the possible sound of wind in the taller trees, insects, and the faint songs of birds. The sun is a sun of late earth afternoon, bright but hazed over; its light falls into the woods in patches the size of children. In the woods the greenery collides, tumbles over itself. I feel both tranquil here and apprehensive—how can that be?

Collette and I drink champagne and pick at a whole salmon, poached, cold. The salmon is delicate and clean-tasting, the champagne light. She knows of a strawberry patch just downhill, we are going to pick dessert.

*    *    *

The strawberries grow near the edge of the sparser woods to our left, downhill. Small strawberries, but they are exceptional: bright red, tantalizing in texture, ripe, sweet, firm. We eat them out of our hands, propped up against a thick tree, sitting on the soft loam.

"Perfect," I say. "Paradise."

"To me," Collette says, putting strawberries in a ceramic can to take back to the ship, "this is as perfect as a place can be. We'll stop again at a tropical reserve, but there's too much to do there to actually relax. This place... There aren't many people who get the chance to be here, you know. I have a plant room at home, a small one. I wish I had this. It's so peaceful—you're right, perfect."