The Pleasure Tube (13 page)

In the end, given the circumstances, he doesn't think that Collette is a SciCom employee assigned to watch me from the beginning of the trip; rather, someone they've used, who used me in turn.

"But who can finally tell?" he wonders. "Only this woman knows, if she would tell you. If you could trust her."

When I tell him that I've tried to get in touch with Collette by trying to get in touch with Eva Steiner, and that there is a barrier around that woman, whether it's private sex or security, I don't know—he lifts his hands palms upward and sighs.

"Both," he says. "And then we come back to SciCom. After I talk with you I remember this woman's name. She is well known. This woman is like a man, she walk like a man, she wear clothes like a man. She is Director of EnergyWest—but that is like saying SciCom, they are together like a hand which slide into fitted glove. Perhaps they are using her, I think, using the strangeness of this woman to see that you don't talk with Collette. This is a circle we are making, now I see. I tell you I have seen things with SciCom which frighten me—things like this. I will give example how it works. We have plutonium plant in Brazil with terrible discharge for a week—one week, I tell you. The river entirely dead, the people downstream sick, for a hundred kilometers, some die. Why is this? SciCom data overrides discharge controls, everyone knows this is so. But investigation goes on for six years now. I give you another example. In Argentina, two thousand cattle die from a wrong inoculation; it is SciCom instructions again. That investigation is lasting eight years, this is joke to me, but it is not joke to SciCom. For yourself, they cannot question your competence, since you have flown your ship back. But if
they
have made a mistake, they will never take responsibility. They never admit mistake. You know what my agriculture man says in Argentina? 'Until they have other explanation, they have only investigation.'"

"My navigator thinks they're trying to set us up. I don't know," I say, rubbing my chin. "I would really like to talk to the woman."

"Non pensarci piu,"
Massimo says, waving a fly from its loop around the salad. "Forget this one—you will see, there are others. And in this place? The man who wrote your ship's report, dead—ahhh. For your sake, I do not think it best you see this woman they take from you. Perhaps you will have luck with appeal—then, maybe. Almost always these people in SciCom are harmless,
castrati
—no, like men who play with themselves,
masturbati.
But if you catch them—ahhh. They do have... power," Massimo says quietly, his hands flat on the table. "They protect themselves, like Mafiosi. They do what they want."

A white Formula E whistles past as I lean toward Massimo; a shiver runs down my spine. For an instant I see Cooper's face in Massimo's, they share the same broad nose, the same thick hair. "You're afraid of them, too?" I ask, thinking of my run-in with security last night. "Do you think Werhner's right? He thinks that Cooper's death..."

"All right." Massimo nods, smiling to himself. "I exaggerate. A man dead—this frightens me. But yes, I exaggerate. This is only my advice, to leave them alone— what can you do, a pilot? Ah, Rawley, let us not think on these things for now, let us forget them for a time."

"I've been..." I start to say, then notice Massimo is looking at the cars.

"You think you can handle Lancia?'

My pulse quickens, I tell Massimo I'd like to try.

"Well, come, I am going to run Ferrari. We shall see if perhaps you can drive, too."

The pleasant coolness of its leather upholstery aside, my immediate impression of the Lancia is that its steering is too tight and its suspension very stiff; I can feel every bump in the track, the car seems jittery. But as I learn the course, its straights, banks, and S's, I pick up speed and with a rising howl I enter a tunnel of motion and the machine itself seems to smooth the ride. The cockpit becomes comfortable in the moving air, and the car begins to feel the way hand-cut clothing feels—close, comfortable, another skin—seems more like flying than the days in theTube. The sunny track is a good, long ride—over ten kilometers—on a banked, twisting surface like an idealized freeway through the city. I roar past separate grandstands in different sectors, through a tunnel of high-rises, down a straight through a greenbelt with a murderous, decreasing radius hairpin at its end, accelerate up into a set of elevated S's whose edges raise the hair on the back of my neck the first time through. In the curves the Lancia resists braking, it wants the line, it propels itself through a corner with its own fine calculus of speed, weight, and cohesion into a beautiful slide.

The Formula E drivers practicing the course for the EnergyWest Grand Prix make for fast traffic. Massimo laps me twice, then I hang on his tail to catch the pull of his slipstream and sail with him through the turns, feeling the G's accumulate, feeling the car adjust to sustain them just on the line. He shows me some very nice driving, takes us both past two Formula E cars in the tight S's by finding and holding a deeper line of descent at a higher entrance speed. I learn something in ten laps, the tranquility of Massimo's driving. Despite our speed, his driving seems unhurried, an exercise in simple grace.

We pull into the pits, talk about the track, then switch machines. The balance and the instinct for the line are the same for the Ferrari, but what a powerful racing machine. When I'd floor the accelerator in the Lancia, the car would dig in, push me back into the seat, and go; in the Ferrari in any gear the wide rear tires burn blue, and I am slapped back into the seat as acceleration forces my breath. Until I get its feel, the Ferrari is too slippery for me; once I make speed I lose it completely in an embarrassingly long slide out of the wide S's near Massimo's pit. Then finally it comes on the roller coaster of the final turns. I get the feel of the car, or it gets the feel of me, and I'm able to bear down the straights almost with the Formula E's and slip past the slower ones in the S's and hairpin.

When   we   are   finally  flagged   off  the   track  to accommodate Formula E time trials, Massimo is pleased. A hundred meters from the exit gate of the tight S's, he was still nose ahead of a Formula E whose driver, he tells me, looked at him and checked his gauges, then nearly lost it on the next embankment—where Massimo was able to slip under him again.

"How can those cars have a soul," he asks as we wash at the mechanic's sink, "if driver can know how he is driving only by watching numbers?" He tells me that when he was racing, he would practice with the tachometer of his Ferrari taped over. That kept his mechanics awake nights, he laughs. He was with his Ferrari like this, he says, snaking one finger around the other.

"But now"—Massimo smiles—"I prefer Lancia. She forgives, like a woman she forgives. At my age, a man need forgiving, yes?"

I laugh and tell him I'll count having driven the Ferrari among the genuine pleasures of my life.

"Ah, yes," Massimo says. "This is like hologram, everything comes true. I think you are right for that car, reckless enough to run too fast into a turn to begin with. How old are you—I mean, you tell me proper time."

"Thirty-five."

Massimo nods; his age exactly when he drove the first Ferrari Bianco.

"What's the right age for Formula E?"

"Fifteen," he says with a sneer, his eyebrows raised in irony. "The car has two gears—two gears!"

Before I leave we sit under the canopy again for a time, and I ask Massimo if he can do something for me.

"Of course," Massimo answers with a wry smile.

"I'd like to meet Eva Steiner," I say. "Just to talk. You never know. You're a UN Governor—is there something you could do?"

Massimo fills his wine glass, fills mine, then lifts his and drinks. "Worse than myself," he says with a grin. "I've told you about Eva Steiner. And you could not get a single live line to her? Rawley, I don't know."

"Will you try?" I ask. "This isn't SciCom, just one woman."

"Well, I will see.
Domani,"
he says. "Tomorrow. We will talk more then. And do more driving. Agreed?"

When I look for Erica, I check the time and realize that half my stay in LasVenus is gone already. I have one tomorrow left—two, if I can count a morning a day. I find Erica almost in the top row of the grandstand seats. She has a sunburn and has had, she tells me, a very nice sleep.

After a relaxing hour in the aquaplease whirlpools, Erica and I have dinner again at the temple garden, the Japanese restaurant on the roof of the Tower Complex. I haven't done justice to the rooftop—we are tucked in a small corner where the temple rises on an artificial hill beyond carp ponds, the night sky is beyond, the impression is one of a mountaintop. In the other direction, the Japanese garden shades into an orchid grove, which melts into a tropical garden of ferns, fan palms, royal palms, MacArthur palms, butterfly palms, queen palms. Today I notice people milling around in English, French, Dutch, gardens, other restaurants and clubs, of course, and a central Moorish garden with its show. We can take part in gaming and risk ventures through a plug-in console that is now on our low table; it seems people are arranging to meet one another through the consoles as well. Erica is absorbed in a complicated, penny-ante card game through it—bureaucrat's bridge, she mutters. Different strains of music float through the air, in our cubicle the Bartok I program. Directly above us, the sky is being used as a holographic projection screen for cloud displays to complement the artificial weather. Between weather displays, the clouds are dreamlike, suggestive, shaped into stories both fantastic and erotic—it would be pleasure enough to lie back and watch.

This whole affair—not only LasVenus, but theTube as well—is easy enough to understand in terms of technology, but harder and harder for me to comprehend after what I saw today walking back from the track with Erica to Casa del Sol, a walk that consumed an hour. I kept along the perimeter; the other city is separated from this resort by highway, mostly, or by high fencing in two rows with a bleak no man's land of fifty meters between. On the other side the housing was crowded, steamy—there is no dome here as there is over L.A.—and the city seemed to stretch away interminably, A population problem exists there; the contrast with LasVenus resort is immense. The air even in SectorGold has a kind of acid smell to it at street level, masked by gardenia and jasmine here so far above.

I am getting my bearings here, yet time seems to be slipping away too quickly for me to make use of my temporary stability. In the end I find Werhner still impossible to raise, Eva Steiner locked into a private world whose surfaces seem without seams.

I find myself sitting on the edge of my low chair, not following what Erica is saying about the plot of a narrative cloudshow, evidently an erotic version of a popular daytime serial. Erica, it turns out, has been married four times in all, each marriage more a disaster than the last, at least from the way she tells the story through dinner.

Finally I suggest we go—my appetite is back, but I have to move to work off this nervous energy. Erica ate too much, I think, she moans painfully at the idea of getting up, her sunburn is bothering her, too. It doesn't make any sense to do something stupid again, I suppose, and I think that if I walked home alone again, I might. And so we go down to the lobby to look for a cab.

"Rawley Voorst."

We are passing leather couches in the lobby near the activities screens when I hear my name. I see the older man, Mancek, first, before I see Taylor himself, rising from one of the couches by the bright show-program screen.

"Enjoying yourself?" I ask halfheartedly.

"Quite a place." Taylor smiles. "Quite a place, don't you think? They have everything here."

"Everything," I say. "Including people following you around."

"Don't be so hostile, Voorst. The Tower Complex is open to anyone who can afford it," Taylor says calmly. "We're just looking around, I thought I'd let you know we were waiting. Won't be long."

Taylor is looking at Erica; her tight dress is tighter still after dinner. His thick lips are slightly parted, he's leering, if you ask me; his eyes wander from her breasts to her belly to her breasts, straining under the silver lame. When he asks what we've been doing, he asks her.

"Look," Erica says, "I told you yesterday I'm assigned to him and not to you. We're doing just fine."

Taylor's face reddens, he looks as if he wants to say something, but his lips tighten and he doesn't. Behind him, in the sleek lobby, the rainbow-hued screen displays show programs: two women dancing with one another; behind them the same, increasingly sexual movements are being followed by a dozen pairs of men:

SIDEREAL CONCERT/SIDEREAL CONCERT/CONCERT

DUNES/DUNES/DUNES/DUNES/DUNES/

SHOWTIMES// 10/12/2/4/6/8/10    10/12/2/4/6/8/10

As we climb into a small, elegant cab I thank Erica for the way she behaved.

She shrugs, adjusting her skirt under her thighs, letting her hand slip over to my leg. "I don't blame you for not trusting me," she says, "but I meant what I said. I'm on your side, Rawley. I like you, that's all—and so long as you don't complain about how I treat you, there's nothing they can do to me. There's something with him, anyway— did you see the way he looked at me? He's got about as much tact as a truck. What a creep."