“What?” she says, putting both feet on the floor and stiffening her back. “I have to put up with him, and now I have to put up with you? What are you going to do, Rawley, run off with all of us when we get back to L. A.? You’re going to need a bigger car. You bastard.”
“No,” I grin, “just you. There’ll only be room for you.”
“You bastard,” she says after a moment. “You did me last night and you did the Japanese girl yesterday afternoon. Are you trying to set a record?”
“The Japanese girl was your surprise,” I remind her. She begins to glare at me. Since yesterday, there’s been a new electricity between us—her presence, the looks she gives me with her jade-green eyes, make me a little weak-kneed. And we seem to say less, communicate in glances that require no explanation. She is giving me one of her looks now—close-mouthed, haughty, her eyes wide and menacing.
“All right,” I say, “you just hang on. We won’t be on this trip forever. And I’ll talk to Taylor. I’ll talk to him myself.”
She actually smiles.
I rise and kiss her on the cheek, then begin helping her clear away the breakfast china. I want to get the console clear, to get started.
As Collette finishes in the kitchen, I punch a query through:
SEARCH PROGRAM SEARCH PROGRAM SEARCH
QUERY LOC.//
COL. R. TAYLOR//
SCICOM OFF./GUAM STA. REF.//
CABIN #/PT FLT 8//
CABIN LOC: ENTER ENTER ENTER
RETRIEVE RETRIEVE RETRIEVE
##################
RESET RESET RESET
Taylor’s presence doesn’t register on the ship’s roster; he must be under another name. I pull the list of names of passengers who boarded for the first time in LasVenus, think at first there can’t be many, but sixty-four names show up. In the end I try Werhner’s trick for limited-access material, but there’s no record of Taylor’s presence on any of the classified rosters. Now it’s Taylor locked into a private world to which I cannot find a seam, there’s no way for me to get to him short of searching the ship.
I start seething, decide to trace through to Guam. But now I find not a single line clear. Agana is apparently under a blackout, not even routine military or SciCom traffic getting through, not even a weather report coming out. Incredible, I think, how stupid. I should have put Collette in that goddamned car and taken off.
“You’re right,” Erica says two hours after lunch. “There’s more to do this leg. The program’s richer. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, has to be, I guess. You’d see it better if you weren’t so desynched.”
Erica is leaning with her hip on the couch, Collette is sitting alongside me as we watch what must be a women’s program, a cosmetics demonstration. The models are languid women, the voice-over throaty:
“On her face: veilessence cream makeup in copper with cedar mauve blushing pomade. On her eyes: powder eyeshadow in wood violet and hickory. On her lips: revenescence rose. Smoky grape satin-skin camisole leotard. And on the right, now. On her face, veilessence light ivory with blushing cream in glazed heather plum. Spun-gold pink, spun-gold cherry highlighting patina, frost-spun…”
With her own makeup, in her suede suit, Collette is as stunning as the models on the screen, smells gorgeously of frangipani. But the gloom clouds her face, a tired glaze in her eyes, and her shoulders sag. She and Erica are to report to Service Control. Their going is supposed to be routine, still we all wonder about it.
“It’s that time,” Erica says.
“I’ll be along,” Collette says glumly.
Erica kisses us both, says she’s going on ahead, leaves the two of us on the sofa. I shut down the screen.
“We would be in Mexico by now,” Collette says after a moment. “What an adventure it would have been.”
“Well, it’s still an adventure,” I say. “You’ll have to admit that.”
Collette slips her hand under mine and leans on my shoulder. I feel her warmth and my breath goes a little thin again with the presence and odor of her. I have asked myself if she might not still be in collusion with Taylor, or if she’s in love with me as she says; and I wonder now if it finally matters. I haven’t felt this way about a woman since Maxine came back to me, pleaded to come back, and I realized how much I needed her. My God, I wonder, looking at Collette, am I genuinely falling in love with her?
“We’ve been through a lot together,” Collette says; she’s saying exactly what’s on my own mind. “I’ll never forget the end of that afternoon in LasVenus.”
I won’t, either, and I sigh. I feel even worse because only now do I realize there wasn’t a way to pay my respects after Massimo’s death, no ceremony to attend, no way to think his passing through.
Alone. The window/wall fills the cabin with the kaleidoscopic colors of something called Pastoral Fantasy. The Beethoven is soothing, but the light show is just annoying. I clear the screen, punch up Guam again out of compulsion:
ATTN//GUAM STATUS//ALL TRAFFIC DOWN//ALL TRAFFIC DOWN
ATTN//GUAM STATUS//ALL TRAFFIC DOWN//ALL TRAFFIC DOWN
Nothing’s changed. Strange to think of Guam now; I recall some of its odors, the putrefaction of the base’s littered beach.
After ten minutes of playing around and using my sign key, I manage to reach into the databank of Medex. I poke around in passenger statistics and on the bottom line discover something that confirms what Collette mentioned early in the trip: the death rate on theTube is phenomenal, as high as two hundred per thousand on some all-third-class flights. That data leads me into failsafe programs for the total hologram, into my own failsafe program. I see that I am entered to disconnect and trauma detoxify if my heart beats at a rate of 145, or if my blood pressure reads 200 /145—I’m not sure what either really means, but both seem high. My palms get clammy at the idea of trauma and the thought of the mortality rate. I adjust my own tolerances down twenty percent, then post the entry to commit when I’m switched in, hide the entry in storage. I don’t want to leave footprints. The blue lights wink confirmation and I think to leave a memory code to remind Collette.
But I don’t punch a memory tape. I wonder. I still do feel the slight pull of distrust about her at times, like the partly corroded edge of a razor drawn against my feelings. I don’t know—I’ve been spooked before I came on the ship, thought it was the simple fact of my life. And yet… I punch up tonight’s dinner program, getting tired of this machine.
FIRST-CLASS SERVICE//
DINNER//DAY 9
Coq au Vin
Brussels Sprouts Bordelaise
Tarminochi Salad
Hot Bread
White Bordeaux
That’s it, I think. I’ll run a blind. Just what Werhner would do, I laugh to myself, I’ll have to tell him about this when I see him. If I see him. The laugh doesn’t last.
ENTER ENTER ENTER
PROGRAM CHANGE//MEAL SERVICE
SUBS.//new dinner program—day 9
SUBS.//new dinner program—Cannelloni
Green Salad
Chianti
It happens at the pool, just as I enter the water, naked today like the rest of the swimmers. My mind is blank. I am thinking only of the dive, oblivious to the colors and voices at poolside, the music. At the precise point of impact there is a burst of light, and I am diving through a hatch passageway, not through a ship, but into a white, whirling sun, flames at my feet, orange and red driven flames, the sound of rushing wind—the light alongside me is a blur of blue-white, ahead painfully white, bleached utterly, I am falling into it.