The Pleasure Tube (8 page)

"Look, Kenneth, the oddest thing...."

She is answered by the shutting of an interior door, the word "What?" then the sentence "I can get what I want across the line—I've got to go, anyway." The sound of a firmly shutting heavy door.

She is half rising after the sound, she says, "Kenneth?" leaves the sofa, then turns quickly as if she has sensed the subtle change in light. The videon screen shows the same mauve background, but now the chair is empty. She stands, flushed.

After a moment the doorbell rings. She sighs, strides to the door.

It is a young man in blue coveralls—the same young man, now he's stretching.

She says, "What do you want?"

He answers slowly, a curl to his lips, "I've been watching you."

"You?" She touches, merely touches, one of the straps of his coveralls; it falls from his shoulder. He begins undressing her—they eventually sink together onto the sofa, arms snaked in thighs, then thighs in thighs. Still shot.

The screen fades again and cuts to tethered women, tethered men, the setting for some kind of game....

Call it videon overload, call it saturation, the long series of programs induces in me a kind of waking sleep, there's a numbness in my forehead, my eyes. Collette tells me that average daily videon time is more than four hours. I suspect the average viewer is better conditioned than I am. Not that the programming isn't spectacular: holographic sunrises of the world, Japanese geishas singing, old footage of bullfights in Madrid, Balinese dancing... these narrative interludes, panels, training, and explanations.

It seems as if I have been on theTube forever. The recliner has become familiar, this cabin, the videon itself, with its vivid colors and holographic capabilities, as ordinary as an idle terminal or the back of my hand. The idea of my being here, the surprise of the trip, are diminished—and yet when I calculate that I am well into my fourth day on the ship, and I try to remember what has happened, it seems I've been here no time at all, that the four days have passed with unaccountable swiftness: time frozen and accelerated at once.

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The screen cuts again, to a woman seated before a table set with a half-dozen wine bottles. Title: TASTE TUNING//THE EXPERIENCE OF WINE. Voice-over: Stay
tuned.
Cuts to: a group of dancers, megastars. I find myself thinking of Knuth, the intense little man from Guam—how I'd like to put him in the wine woman's lap.

I try to contact Giroti, but he is blocked off, we are all blocked off, privatized today. Lunch does not come until it is quite late, but the lunch is crepes, which Collette prepares—light, sweet, delicious—followed by pears and Brie.

I convince Collette that I need some relief from the programming, and she sets up the videon for a MoonGame Co-op—an immensely complicated spinoff from sedentary tennis, played against the computer and other passengers. She is still explaining the rules when the ship jolts.

I feel through the floor the metallic thud, the shudder; I see the draperies sway. We restabilize immediately. I look up at Collette, my heart pounding. The light seems brighter.

"Moving an adjacent unit," she tells me. "Nothing to worry about."

"Tricky business."

"They don't make many mistakes." She grins.

Yet before I can get my defense fully organized on the wall screen, she is pulling my channel, the screen flushes....

"Sorry, you have to see this," she tells me. For a brief moment, still feeling the shudder, I am alarmed about the ship, I am conscious of my breathing, concentrate on steady inhalations, prepare to rise and...

Collette wasn't kidding—the screen and audio don't display Damage Control, they display a VisEd whose subject is the total hologram.

"Where brain-wave anticipation is immediately translated into full spectrum sensation," a pleasant black man says soothingly.

He is describing a loop.

"Where, best of all,
you
are in control," adds a black woman so similar that she might be his sister. They are identically dressed in bright, burnt-orange body stockings, seated together on a lush sofa in an elegant cabin.

"Sometimes," he laughs, they laugh together.

"In the comfort of your cabin—chemical, electrical, visual, audio, tactile—all systems—full spectrum sensation responds to your deepest needs, an ecstasy beyond compare...."

"The only such system in the cosmos is on this ship," she reminds the camera. "A hologram that's more than a hologram, controlled by you, automatically, unconsciously, instantaneously...."

"Orgiastically," the young man adds. "In a way you've never experienced before, including
direct
electrical and chemical stimulation of the hypothalamic center of ecstasy. You are in control."

"Or out of it," the woman laughs, her teeth sparkling white, her leg rising as she runs her hand from her knee down the back of her thigh.

The screen dissolves into moving geometric figures— or parts of figures, shifting, a kaleidoscopic effect. The figures are vaguely genital. The sound of a beat—an exaggerated heartbeat.

The couple begin to describe dosages and instrumentation. I wonder if what they say is true. Collette says that it is. They speak of direct electrical stimulation of the orgasm center of the brain.

"That's dangerous," I say.

"Which is why there's medical clearance," Collette tells me.

"Mmmm. It seems to me that arrangement could, it
could,
kill you."

"Some people it does." She shrugs. "Maybe that's why it's the only one, I mean, the circuits and apparatus are only on this kind of ship. Mostly it's heart attack; it happens."

"What prevents it?"

"Scanning. And limiting circuits for blood pressure, pulse rate. But it's a freewill choice; there's the risk, part of it is the risk,"

I run my hand along the brown velvet arm of the sofa and ask her if she's tried it, what it's like.

"Twice," she tells me. "It's scary, but... I felt as if I were... toasted; it was incredible and frightening, too, I felt obliterated. I was sick for a week. But God. I couldn't begin to do it justice."

"Though if people die..."

"You know," she says thoughtfully, "they say the deaths have something to do with population control. The managers don't care, they say it's up to Medex. It happens more than they say it does. I think you have to be really healthy, your dosages have to be right, and the scanning... That's what's important. Then it's not a problem, it's just... a special kind of trauma. You never want to come back." She grins. "It's so incredible, your mind is filled with the most exciting things, they seem to grow in there and pile up, and
then
you feel them in every cell of your body...."

"Where imagination is immediately translated into full spectrum sensation," the black man is saying again on the screen.

"Not for
everyone...
." His twin smiles. "But..."

"But riding thePleasureTube without a trip to the sun is like climbing a mountain and not reaching its peak."

"Like leaping from a cliff and never reaching the sea," the woman says.

"Twenty units for twenty-four hours," the man says. "Thirty-five units for two days. The option that is extra but extraordinary. Come with us to the sun."

"Come with me." The woman shows her teeth, she touches them with her tongue. "Come with me to the sun."

What follows is a preview to the hologram, the videon spectacular itself. Collette feeds me two capsules while the screen shows a test pattern. I sit watching; slowly the pattern—dome geometry, hexagons—is becoming holographic, shimmers, then my head, the top of my head, takes off. The images recombine and expand into vivid, electric swaths of pure color.... Intense, lush sounds surround me and something happens to the air: the odor of crushed grapes. I do not know, this has happened in moments, where my consciousness ends and hallucinations begin. In the end—I do not leave the cabin, I am certain, but I feel I have expended enormous amounts of energy—I finally close my eyes and count visions, I lose consciousness, fall asleep.

Awake, I chew cola nuts which Collette slices finely— plum-sized, white and washed red nuts, tart and effervescent on the tongue —she stabilizes my metabolism with another two capsules. Now I am bored, though oddly enough I feel well rested. The videon is showing the most recent WorldBowl clips split-screen. They are playing NewBali now, the game that has replaced almost all others. Sixty players, two soccer balls, fifteen referees—each side of the screen is following one of the balls, the violence is considerable—men kicking at the ball carrier, grabbing at receivers, satellite fights between offense men and defense men. The goal I watch seems to come on a fluke. A powerful kick grazes off a Red NoEast defense man; it was headed out of bounds. NoEast is running away with the game nonetheless; they lead at the half 9-3.

Collette asks me if I will try the hologram. I say of course. I have decided to look into the tolerances myself—enter control that way at the input and see what I can take. Each thing seems worth trying, if only once, if only to see. I wonder if I will ever be here or any place like this again.

Collette tells me that it is possible to pair on the hologram, that the effect is synergistic, but she has never tried it.

"Do you want to?"

She nods slowly, grins. "With a flier? Yes indeed," she says.

For a long moment we both sit there, oddly embarrassed, I think, staring at the WorldBowl violence. A Yellow SoCal player has just been kicked in the mouth, blood running through the fingers he holds up to his face. The camera is following him in close-up as he walks, hunched, toward the sidelines; no foul is being called.

"But this," I say. "Well, I can take only so much of this."

"Yes," Collette says. "It's too much."

We sit in silence for a while again. Now Yellow is driving behind a wedge, but they don't have the weight to punch through a bearish Red defense.

"Yes," Collette says, shutting down the audio. "I want to. The time I've spent with you has been good. That's an understatement—I mean, it's somewhere under the truth, the truth is a larger thing. That speaks well for the truth," she finally concludes, grinning at her logic.

"I didn't think you were so interested in the truth," I tell her with a smile.

"Not in the same way you are. Maybe that's what I like about you. I mean, it speaks well for you," she says, her grin really spreading.

Collette wants to show me something, something we are not programmed to see until eight in the evening. She says I have to leave the room, so I indulge myself in a long, relaxing shower. I feel deeply satisfied already; I cannot imagine more. What I do have to imagine, the hologram, does not interest me now. It will be something to tell Werhner about, but what he would not understand pleases me even more—Collette's openness, her warmth. I wish I could show her some skill of mine, some ability—to take a ship, perhaps, through a dazzling array of weather. I want to do something of that sort so badly it aches inside me—or is it my vanity? I find myself studying my shape before the mirror. No middle sag. I laugh. I left earth eighty years ago, earth time. Young forever.

What Collette has to show me is yet another transformation of the videon, different from anything we've seen before: the screen displays full-sized the interior of another cabin; this can't be a shipwide program. Its occupants are familiar.