The face we descend is rust-swathed from decomposing pitons hammered in long ago, steep but negotiable hand under hand.
The rock base is thick with brush, litter in fertile soil—the trash is ancient, soft-metal cans overgrown, rotted into fragments. I think we are the first here in some time. We catch our breath at what appears to be a cairn near the base. Collette confirms that it marks the limit of PleasureTube grounds. Then Collette smiles, looks up for a long moment; her smile fades.
“No need to be grim,” I say.
“I’m thinking about our being off the reserve. Look at that face. We should have used a rope.”
“We made it down, we’ll make it up.”
“Sometimes I just get depressed,” Collette sighs, turning to walk. “I don’t even know why I mention it.”
The stream bed, I discover, is not entirely dry, as it appears from a distance. The bed is wide enough to disguise a meter-wide stream meandering down its middle—the larger bed is a wash, eroded by heavy rains. We follow its surface slightly uphill and toward a woods. Collette walks alongside me; her wide-soled shoes, the PleasureTube insignia on her halter top, reinforce my initial feeling that we are on a planetary expedition. The unreality of what we are doing, the strangeness of the surroundings yesterday and today after all these years—I have an impulse to go back to the ship, to shower in my cabin’s bath, to find a D-bar or club somewhere on the ship with spun-steel walls, artificial light. Both strange and familiar here.
Like deep space.
We hike into thicker woods and follow the stream to a clearing at the base of an outcropping perhaps ten meters high. The stream waterfalls down, misty, and with a peaceful rush of water. As we entered the woods we saw birds, a squirrel, no speakers in the trees, bushes with small red berries and black berries. Collette says she saw a snake or a lizard; it is gone when I turn my head.
The ground on the high bank is soft; I lie down to rest my eyes, fall asleep for a time.
When I awake, Collette is hovering a berry above my mouth. “Yes?” she says, the fruit, her face, a blur.
Yellow-white. I blink into the sun coming through the trees, sink my teeth into the berry. It is soft and sweet, a ripe blackberry. I put my hands on Collette’s rib cage, slide them up under her breasts; she lifts her head.
“I’m figuring out the system,” I tell her. “No speakers in the trees. Red berries modulate from strawberries; that started yesterday morning with your scent. As far into this draw as we can go. Now we make love.”
She slides her legs down, lies next to me after stopping to look at me wryly. I cradle her head in my arm. “What you’re talking about is simple short lag,” she says. “It gets a lot more complicated than that. Do you know about second stage?”
“What’s that?”
“Just a more intense kind of pleasure, pleasure on a different level. I’ll give you an example. A game. It’s called ‘I’ll show you yours if you show me mine.’”
“All right,” I laugh, “I’ll play. Let’s see yours.”
“No, ‘I’ll show you yours if you show me mine.’ That means you show me mine first, Voorst.”
I look into her green eyes, her spreading grin.
“I’ll let you think about it,” she says, smiling, her hand moving over my stomach.
Collette beside me, we hold each other, then doze again for a time.
“Something is bothering you,” Collette says. We are sitting together as we sat the day before, knees up, looking into the woods. “You know I never logged the hike; nobody knows we’re here. Honest. Especially here.”
“It isn’t that,” I tell her, then go silent for a moment. “Let me describe to you a sequence,” I finally say. “Or maybe you’ll think I need a psychic screen.”
“No,” she says, “tell me.”
“All right. Listen to my… visions—I have visions, nightmares, hallucinations, I don’t know exactly what they are. Two especially: one is a woman floating in space, her arms outstretched. The other is a blue-black funnel, diamond points of stars in this kind of whirlpool—it lies in the direction of program—there’s a glowing object, a spinning sun, approaching, coming very close, fading at the same time. And I dream about a man, see things from the blow sometimes.”
“Happened on the ship?”
“Yes and no. Some are memories, but others aren’t memories, exactly; when they occur it’s as if I’m experiencing… very vivid memories, say. Or not memories at all. I know they’re associated with one another, but I can’t figure out how. I don’t know if the sequence is real or a hallucination. It’s very strange.”
“You’d know if they were all from the ship.”
“Yes and no again,” I tell her. “It was confusing when we blew—Werhner insists on a time distortion, but I don’t know. I’d say no, not exactly. The report says all the clocks agreed except one.”
Collette looks away for a long moment, into the woods. “What happens to the woman whom you see?”
“Happens? Happened,” I say. “She’s dead. Motionless, frozen.”
Collette turns to me, places her hand on my cheek, and pivots my face so that she is looking into my eyes, I into hers.
“Then don’t think of her,” she says. “Don’t think about any of those things. Think about me instead, think about where we are and what we’re going to do here. We can do anything, you know. We’re going to have a real time together.”
Anyone who knew me well enough, I think, would know of my hallucinations, would know I’d take the faint trail into this draw. Collette didn’t. There are some things, I think, that she doesn’t know after all, and that alone makes me feel infinitely better. Perhaps her depression had been affecting me. But when I look at her—into her half-sleepy eyes, her wide, liquid smile—she doesn’t seem depressed any more, and that makes me feel better, too.
Chapter 4
Videon Spectacular
DA4// On the wall-sized screen the holographic dancers fade—Tahitian dancers, men and women in mylar lava-lavas, their dance increasingly more furious and sexual as they move toward one another, almost touching, their bodies glistening, their eyes hypnotic, trancelike—the videon screen flushes in a long burst of deep, glowing red, modulates into a field of blue, then shimmers into a series of vague forms, false color separations. A scene finally appears: a studio set, a panel of three women, two men, in large, white padded chairs placed around a semicircular table.
“What Dr. Buell calls a state of mind, I could reduce to physical contact,” the white-haired woman says, pointing to one of the other panel members.
“But no”—this from Dr. Buell—“think of anticipation and satisfaction, think of imagination. There’s more than the operation of sensory apparatus in pleasure, and to think of it as… friction, even granting the metaphor… makes a premise of the exclusivity of tactile sense data….”
“Yet pleasure is a state of the body,” the white-haired woman insists. “The entire epidermis is a sense organ into whose language all other pleasure eventually translates. Pleasure is a language the body knows.”
Holographic titles now stream across the screen:
MAXIMUM MOMENTS//AN ANALYSIS ON THE THEORETICAL LEVEL.
“Dr. Godwin’s model is sex-generated, behavioral,” a younger woman says, her voice hollow, eerie. “That makes sense to me. Think of the differences in tactile. surfaces, the electricity of contact. Think of silk on the skin, for example. When we refine a neurological language for that sensation, transpose it to other sense parallels, transmit this language, language as stimulation, into a body…”