“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.
The naked back of a tall, thin man, his buttocks pinched together, standing facing a recliner, the roundish, flushed face of—by God, it is-—Erica, she is unmistakable—soft, wide mouth, blonde hair in thick curls down to her neck. She is seated on the recliner, just behind him. Cards lie on a small cubic table before her, she flips a card over, something happens with Tonio—impossible to tell precisely what, his back is to us, but I can see his leg muscles tense.
“Tape?” I say.
“Live.”
I look at Collette; she is watching intently with a smile. I look back again, look at Collette.