RE.// FIRST-CLASS PASSAGE// Prog. 2ndCoord.
DA8/ //UKIYOE FLYAWAY bid 1/O-1100
DA9 MOONLOOP//SENS SEVEN SPEC bid i/f-cont
DA10 VIETAHITI bid i/f-cont
DA11 SINS SEVEN SPEC//AQUAPLEASE bid i/f-cont
DA12 HOLD PROG//MICROSSAGE bid i/f-cont
DA13 TOTAL HOLOGRAM//
TRIP TO THE SUN bid i/f-cont
DA14 TRIP TO THE SUN4 bl- i/f——
CONTINUOUS VIDEON PROGRAMMING
THEPLEASURETUBE IS AN EXPERIENCE//INDIVIDUAL VARIATIONS ARE COMMON AND PRECISE DESTINATIONS VARY//
CONSULT YOUR SERVICE FOR DETAILS
4, MEDICAL CLEARANCE REQUIRED
VIETAHITI VENTURES’/PLAN YOUR LONGDAY NOW
//SOPAC TROPICAL RESERVE
//AQUAPLEASE SPECTACULAR
NEW FIRST-CLASS OPTIONS EVERY HOUR//CONSULT YOUR SERVICE FOR DETAILS
Our service is pleasure//Your pleasure our service
@ thePleasureTube corp.
The recliner doubled, the window/wall a spectacular view of deep space, Collette and I are playing shamelessly. I had a few moments of real depression when we came on, thinking of Massimo, how he would have appreciated the luck I’ve had using my military status, it’s the only thing that ever used to work, how he would have enjoyed another launch. But Collette’s been making me forget. I am on my stomach now, she is massaging my back after we’ve made love while the ship has been in preorbit maneuvers. Her fingers are working into the tight base of my skull.
“Let’s see,” she says. “If you understood these curves, you’d understand why you have back trouble. First, your spine curves in for seven vertebrae,” she says, tracing them with her stiff fingers. “This one’s your neck bump. Then your spine curves out, along the ribs, then in again at the lower back. And finally out again at the pelvis,” she continues, giving my butt a slap. “Twenty-four moving parts, the discs like little waterbeds between them. Your trouble might be spondylolythesis. Mmmm. Let me recommend treatment.”
I laugh. “That word. Look, I barely know you,” I say to Collette. “Watch what you say.”
She laughs, too, a quiet, low, sultry laugh. “I’ve known you forever, known these curves, these places,” she tells me, now running her hands up my sides, running them up along my bare muscles to hold me under my arms. Then she puts weight on my lower back, leans with the ship.
I laugh again, this time at myself, turn on my side, and trace a line on her body, from her chin down through her breasts to the flat surface of her stomach. I stop at her navel, touch it playfully. Sweet God, there is something so familiar about her now, the counterpart in a woman to some habits of mine, to a sense of touch and odor that I am only half aware of. “I feel I’ve known you,” I say, poking my finger into her navel, “right from the start.”
When we reach stable orbit, Collette tells me to put on my robe and come along. She leads me down the carpeted, spun-steel passageway to Tonio’s cabin, a cabin identical to mine except for the Japanese painting on the wall and its pale yellow furnishings. Tonio’s produced something for us to see, is busy with a console when we arrive. I offer my help—feel a little odd, still lazily euphoric from the drug—and recall he’s used male service in LasVenus, odd to be back into this. Tonio’s scent strikes me as feminine; so does his pale yellow pullover. I’m not sure what to think. Erica, arranging canapes and pouring warm sake with a ruddy glow, gives a satisfied wink to my puzzled look; I’m not sure I understand. Then when I ask about the Japanese painting on his wall—startlingly pornographic, a woman, legs fully spread, entangled with a standing man, which Tonio identifies as a classic of the eighteenth-century Ukiyoe school—Erica giggles. “Ask Tonio,” she says. “That works.” So they’re lovers again.
Once he has the programming straight, we first sit through a continuation of the Videon 33 discussion Collette and I watched on the first leg of the trip; his tape must follow. The subject has shifted to the role of fantasy in the programming on theTube; the same physicians lounge in plush white chairs. Given the last three days of my life, it’s hard for me to concentrate at first, but I listen. It brings me back to this whole world of pleasure I’ve returned to.
On the wall screen, a white-haired older man goes through a long analysis of model programs. Simple tactile-stimulation sequences yield diminishing returns, he says. In the end, the fantasy-fulfillment program is one of the richest models, which leads him to speculate that the locus of pleasure itself lies in the imagination.
The woman with the hollow voice disagrees. She says that pleasure is independent, absolute; she can prove that by putting any man or any woman into a grope suit, any time. She says that fantasy-fulfillment programs are provided only to keep the passengers sane.
“A wholly independent pleasure event, one entirely disconnected from a subject’s imaginative life, is a kind of mental short circuit,” she continues, leaning back. “If you introduce a series of disconnected pleasure events to a subject, the result is invariably dementia paranoides. TheTube structures fantasy and fulfillment in its programs to induce a kind of antiparanoia instead, a feeling that the world serves the subject’s motives and neurology in a soothing fashion. But pleasure? The pure experience of pleasure? It has a character that is independent, absolute. It remains one of our closest experiences of the absolute, though we cannot finally disengage it from a neurological signal. Whether that signal’s source is tactile stimulation or a surgical implant, it clearly comes from outside the imagination.”
“You’ve ignored the loop,” the white-haired physician points out, shaking his head. “For the true connoisseur of pleasure, we know very well that only the most suggestive, the most… imagination-producing, signal will do—the lightest touch, the most delicate flower, the most subtle scents. Think of the Japanese….”
“I don’t quite…” Erica begins to say. I am becoming nervous, remembering now the character of this place and thinking of Massimo and his blood-red Ferrari, but the screen fades through false color separations and reassembles to show a young woman, perhaps a scholar, looking at a series of paintings in a museum, Japanese paintings in the style of Tonio’s. Both Collette and Erica say “Ah!” at the same time, and I notice what they notice: the first painting is precisely the one on Tonio’s wall. Then Erica says, “Aha!” and in one of the paintings, in all of the paintings, the figures are beginning to move.
Tonio’s done an ingenious job of producing: a little story follows, the woman scholar’s fantasy. But I lose its thread, obsessed with something familiar about the half-dozen Japanese who act out the erotic scenes. I watch one couple move to climax before it comes to me. They are the Orientals I saw lounging at the ship’s pool on the first leg of the trip. Amazing—and their flexibility is amazing. In the loose abandonment of limbs, they all seem so flexible I wonder about their bones.
In the end, the woman scholar pulls her hair back up into a bun and puts her drab dress on again. She writes in her notebook that she’s discovered something about the truth of art. I look to Collette and Erica, not certain what we are now going to do. Tonio answers the question by saying that he and Erica are programmed for the VanWeck Sexuarium—tells us to make ourselves comfortable. Erica seems embarrassed, answers my look with a shrug.