The Pleasure Tube (10 page)

your local residence is ------------

SectorGold Casa del Sol 202//Suite 3

your local program instructs you to -------

YOU ARE RESTRICTED

PLEASE REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE

PLEASE REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE

PLEASE REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE

Program LasVenus DataBase//"We serve your need to know"// thePleasureTube corp.

And so I sit staring in the other direction, wondering what part of my headache I owe to this morning, what part to last night, watching one ship in particular, which could only be our ship. Massive, dull silver, wings barely wings in retraction, its fuselage apart in sections now, sections from which units protrude for service, the area a forest of cranes and hydraulics. How similar and much simpler by comparison the Daedalus was—an even larger ship, but one whose mass was formed by the circular clarity of a single propulsion system, one hull to these three, each dome a dragonfly's eye—and how much simpler it was to fly straight out.

Something nibbles at the edge of my mind, that sense of having been here before. I want to get in touch with Werhner, I know that is my right.

The shock of seeing Taylor clears my head. In the past week I've been surprised more than once, but I had not prepared myself to see him here, his bushy eyebrows rising as I enter this cold conference room, the air sweet with the odor of his pipe tobacco. My chemistry had been shifting back to Guam, and this settles it. Sitting at the far edge of the long, transparent table, his elbows on its surface, his hands resting on amber SciCom files, Taylor nods, smiles at another man I only now notice standing by the other door. He is someone I have never seen, a brown-haired man with a farmer's build. Taylor rises from his chair and points the stem of his pipe at a seat midway down the table, says to me, "That's quite a chase you led us on."

I feel my palms becoming clammy and the atmosphere acquiring the weight of Guam between Taylor and myself. Taylor
here;
yet this is just like Guam, him standing up as he sits me down, the mechanics of his practiced insecurity. I sit, shifting my feet apart on the rug. I know where my center is, anyhow; I lean back in the chair.

"It'd be a chase only if I were running," I suggest. "I had the right to leave time under military procedure and I exercised it."

"That's under review," replies Taylor, packing his pipe with a blunt finger. "For the moment, you're coming back with me to Pacific SciCom. The sooner we start back the better. Where are your things? Your ticket will say. Show it to Mancek, he'll get them for you." Taylor looks at me as he relights his pipe, his gold lighter tight in his hand, hissing.

"I'm not going anywhere with you," I say evenly, "unless you have a criminal arrest warrant and he's got status to serve it. In that case, I want to see a local attorney."

"No, now, I..." Taylor murmurs, the faint smile that had shaped his thick lips fading.

"Then show me the orders you have. I'd like to see the authority flow on this one."

"I
make
the orders," Taylor says, setting his lighter down, his face reddening.

"Not for me you don't," I say evenly. "I have military status and I'm exercising my leave time."

"That's a technicality, Voorst."

"I'm staying here," I say.

"For the life of me," Taylor sighs, "I can't find out why the military office let you go. I'll concede the technical grounds of your presence here, but we've lost a week already. Let's get on with it." Taylor's bushy eyebrows come together, he punches something through a table console and calls Mancek over. "SectorGold. Casa del... Christ, Voorst, what are you doing with a local residence in SectorGold? I'm in Green, what are you doing in SectorGold?"

It is a nice moment. Taylor sucks on his pipe, glaring at the screen.

"I was with a woman," I say. "She was taken away from me. What do you know about that?'

"... well, I'm in Green," Taylor says, expelling a breath. "Christ, Voorst." He looks at me and his expression twists another way. "That black girl, West Indian? She was working for us."

"She was?" I ask, my heart sinking. "She was working for you?"

"I'm not saying," Taylor tells me, beginning to drum his fingers on the table, "that she was doing a very good job. Look, Voorst, SciCom takes precedence over military, let's not press it. They obviously resent that fact, they're always splitting hairs over authority flows. We don't like to abuse our prerogative."

"Well, you have been," I say, thinking, She lied— straight-faced lied.

"I'm going to insist on your cooperation. This is an important enough project, a project everyone, even the military, eventually benefits from...."

"Would you say Cooper benefited?' I ask, my anger rising. "I'm fed up. You ask questions you have no right to ask; my personal belongings have been searched. Maybe you benefit from that, but I don't see what you've done for anyone's welfare. Cooper was a little odd, but he was no suicidal psychotic."

"We had no control over that. He did it himself, Voorst."

"Whose care was he under, Taylor? I've felt different since I left Guam, you know that? I'm not so tired any more. Cooper's whole boring report identified the cause of the accident as an impact event, unknown interstellar material. Why do you need another report? We had that from the beginning. You can find it in every tape from the mission. I've told you time and time again that squares with my recollection, and Werhner's, and Tamashiro's, and Levsky's. And Cooper's, right? But Cooper's not alive to defend his report."

"You jump to conclusions, Voorst. Your conclusions color everything you say. You're a walking example of Heisenberg's Effect, I've observed that, though for your sake I haven't put it on record. Let me remind you that we draw the conclusions. Of course there was an impact event. What I'm concerned about is why there was impact."

Then Werhner's right, I think, it's SciCom itself, not the dome crew, that should be investigated. Which Taylor must know as well as I do. "It's my conclusions about what you're doing that bother you," I say, "not my conclusions about what happened. Look, have you ever actually finished a debriefing? Or does the crew finally die of old age?"

Taylor tells Mancek to get my things from the local residence, to which they've been transferred. I think how I might have been going there with Collette; sigh.

"Don't touch my bag," I say to them both, "or you're going to deal with military police. It may be only a technicality, but I'm staying here."

"Voorst, you don't want to do that," Taylor says angrily, his forehead tightening. My bluff hand—and thinking of it that way, I raise the stakes.

"Don't tell me what I want. Release my program or you're going to have to restrain me from using that alarm console outside. I'm serious, Taylor, I mean what I say. It's already serious enough for me."

There is another long moment of silence. Taylor glares at me but then leans back. "You really want to stay here," he sighs. "I can countermand your status, Voorst, I can have that done." Forward again over the console, Taylor looks at his wristwatch, punches through a program, scowls. "Well, it's going to take three more days. So Monday. In three days' time I can wallpaper you with authorizations."

Taylor looks at me blackly. He has said it himself; three days' time. I look him straight in the eye; we both know I am not going with him until Monday.

"And I'll file an appeal to sustain leave," I say.

"Good luck," Taylor says flatly, whacking his cold pipe against the ceramic ashtray. "You're too arrogant, Voorst. You have no respect for us."

"Maybe because Daedalus SciCom doesn't know its ass from a wall screen," I say as I rise to leave.

In the pastel room, Taylor is telling me that he is going to see to it that I won't fly again, not even out of the service, until he and I are through, not if it takes until the end of his career. Blood rushes to my neck—no bureaucrat can cashier flight crew, what an ugly thing to say—my anger is palpable to me, a thickening of my blood. I slam the door behind me with both hands, as if I want to throw it in his face.

At one time—it was when Maxine was sleeping in my cabin on the Daedalus, and I realized she was seeing Cooper all along—I told myself I wouldn't let a woman make me feel this way again. Now the woman is Collette, and I am again depressed by the sticky gloom, the heart-thumping mud of betrayal. Seeing Maxine with Cooper—well, they say the first cut is the deepest. I'm not sure. There might be another explanation for the way Collette's behaved toward me, but I shouldn't delude myself. I'm certain now that she lied to me about where she was the night she was gone, lied through her soft lips. I know she was in touch with SciCom at least from the third night.

Erica meets me at a D-bar in the trans-port and I am finally able to leave the terminal. It is already midafternoon. On our way to the local residence LasVenus sprawls before us from the elevated freeway, bright in the three o'clock sun. The city, Erica tells me, is a layover for sections of theTube and a separate resort complex, the largest of its kind. I am almost too low to appreciate the spectacle. Glittering casinos, a floating Hong Kong nightclub on an artificial lake, three domed stadiums, emerge miragelike in the distance, along with sports and racing circuits, in a high-rise clutter whose buildings shine like mica sheets under the bright haze of the sun. The centerpiece of LasVenus is a massive new club with a forty-acre garden on its roof, complete with artificial weather—occasional summer storms with lightning streak across its sky, thunder rolls in as if from a distance, rain pours into its ponds. From our distance driving in I can only see the Tower as a beige, transparent high-rise. The shimmering movement of its sides, Erica explains, comes from its elevators; the first twenty floors, which shimmer more than the rest, house an administrative core. In the other direction must lie the ongoing city of permanent residents—rows of drab, blocklike buildings stretch into the desert.

How can I sort out my feelings? It seems useless to try. I miss Collette even as I think, The bitch, the manipulating bitch. Massimo is probably right about these women. And yet...

We take the exit, offramp through a greenbelt separating sectors, cross over a wide, banked track for land-vehicle racing. From the overpass I glimpse two Formula E's, flywheel-propulsion racing machines I've only seen on the videon. Toadlike, awkward in shape, their power is tremendous. I remember hearing they don't handle well as I watch the lead car lumber into a curve. The oddest thing is the high whistle of their passing.

Our taxi swoops beneath pedestrian level for a kilometer, then ascends for a slow drive down a boulevard lined with shiny, artificial trees and pastel buildings which flash above like gems set in gems. Erica is telling me about shows she wants to see as we drive on. It is the overall effect that I am still trying to absorb. The size still impresses me, not only the size of this district, but of the other LasVenus, I cannot have seen the end of the residence blocks stretching into the desert.

"We'll have to play it by ear. I'm sorry," Erica says. "You're entirely desynched from the program. We could stop somewhere if you like."

"Why not," I say.

We wind up at a place in the Tower Complex called the Club Erotica, a big, shimmering bar of several levels, with men and women suspended on small stages, outrageously dressed, some completely naked, some in intimate heterosexual and homosexual pairs. Erica and I sit at a
long walnut bar, talk for a while. I feel preoccupied. I am looking for someone in the mirrors, I realize, looking among the scattered blacks. I am embarrassed, angry, and humiliated at the same time.

The suite is laid out like the cabin unit on theTube, a couch/recliner, a window/wall, a kitchen/bar. But here space is tripled and the furniture is larger: a huge, tiered sofa; a white, circular dining table. In place of a shower, there is a lavish bath with a sunken marble tub, the bath illuminated by thin mauve neon tubes which skirt the mirrored walls. From a balcony beyond the sliding window/wall I can see the whole of SectorGold and beyond its freeway border the vast rows of drab, identical residence blocks of the other city. Even from this elevation they fade into the brownish haze of late afternoon without visible end.