ALL CLASS//ALL CLASS//ALL CLASS//
NOTICE OF PROGRAM CHANGE//
NOTICE OF PROGRAM CHANGE//
ATTENTION ALL PASSENGERS AND SERVICE PERSONNEL//
NOTICE OF PROGRAM CHANGE//
NOTICE OF PROGRAM CHANGE//
//DUE TO TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES THE SHIP IS EXPERIENCING TEMPORARY INSTABILITY //THESE DIFFICULTIES ARE IN THE PROCESS OF BEING CORRECTED BY THE COMMITTEE PILOT//
//AS OUR WAY OF SAYING THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE, ALL-CLASS OPTIONS BECOME IMMEDIATELY AVAILABLE WITHOUT ADDITIONAL CHARGE FOR THE LENGTH OF THE DELAY//EARLY HOLOGRAM ENTRY IS ALSO AVAILABLE WITHOUT ADDITIONAL CHARGE//
Our service is your pleasure//Your pleasure our service
I moan; Collette asks if this means something else has gone wrong. She’s been annoyed with me because I haven’t taken the damage very seriously; but I know well enough that it can be fixed, they only need to blow that reactor away.
“It’s not that,” I tell her. “It’s just that they’ve started using the Committee Pilot. Now it’ll take a day to reach a half-hour decision.”
“Well, we can plug in,” she says. “We can enter the hologram now or just after dinner. We can eat and use the hologram all night.”
“Tonight, then,” I say.
Collette tells me that once we start, we’ll be consumed for the remainder of the trip. She asks me if there’s anything I want to do beforehand, if there’s one of the other programs I want to run through, anything else on the ship I want to try.
I mull the matter over for a long moment. “No,” I say. “The only thing that seems unfinished to me is Massimo’s death. I wish I had had the chance to pay my respects before we left Las Venus. I wasn’t thinking very clearly, I guess, too interested in getting out of there. But I wish I had gone to where they took his body.”
“I haven’t been thinking very clearly, either,” she says. “I should have thought to tell you. His body is probably on the ship.”
“On the ship?”
She nods, looks at me seriously. “Passenger remains are taken back to L.A. They always are.”
“Is there a way I can… see him? There must be.”
“There is a morgue on the ship, he’s probably there. But you have to get clearance, we’d have to make a request.”
Collette does the checking for me. Sure enough, Massimo’s remains are in the morgue. But she says no requests for downship activity are being authorized because the main lifts are out of operation for the duration of the instability.
“Is there a back way, a way through the superstructure of the ship? I’d like to go now,”
“Without clearance?” Collette asks, checking the time by punching it up into a corner of the screen. “Well… I suppose there’s no reason to worry now; what can they do, after all? Sure, there’s a way. I’d have to show you.”
“Just give me directions,” I tell her. “You can get the electronics set up for the hologram. I’ll go alone. I’ve been through ships before, just tell me where it is.”
“Well, I’d have to get you through a hatch. Are you sure you want to do this just before we plug in?”
“I’m sure,” I tell her, cracking off a piece of flat bread, spooning on the last of the caviar. “And the hologram after will be just the thing. I’m the sort who lays one on after a funeral.”
Before I leave the cabin, Collette pulls a soft, stylish leather coat from the narrow closet off the kitchen/bar in which she keeps her clothes. “It’s going to be cold,” she says, easing the coat from its hanger, passing it to me.
It is a man’s coat, a warm golden shade, like a flight jacket. It has the supple texture of glove leather, fits as if it had been cut for me, less a kilo or two. I admire the coat and thank Collette—it really fits well.
“It was my brother’s,” she says. “I didn’t want to sell it.”
I put my hand on the leather. I want to ask her about her brother, she’s mentioned him before, yet I can see pain in her eyes. I hesitate, but my curiosity is too great. I ask her why he didn’t want to keep the coat.
“He died,” she says quietly. “He was given the wrong drugs. Who knows why.”
The man who said that paranoids are survivors, I think.
Collette takes me back to the pool area, where the air turns chemical and humid. We pass the thinning crowd, slip into the locker room, and she leads me across the thick carpeting to a door marked SERVICE ONLY/DO NOT ENTER. She opens the heavy door by slipping her blue card into a lock slot on the satiny metal door frame, tells me to go all the way down, kisses me goodbye.
Once through the doorway, I pass from rug to metal grating, from the sleek redwood benches to ranks of bare metal pipes, valves, and scaffolding. The door shuts behind me with a slam. She was right when she said it was going to be cold: I can see my breath. I am in the cavernous maw of the interior of the ship, just alongside the works for the pool. Beyond the pumps lie vacant stretches of space between this first-class hull and the other two hulls that make up the second-class and third-class sectors of the ship. TheTube is constructed just like a tripled starship with a skin—three long starship cylinders, three domes, each with its port and starboard pontoons high overhead. I guessed something like this, seeing the ship on the pads in LasVenus; still, I am startled by the sight. When I consider for a moment where we will be flying, I know I shouldn’t be. Yet in the bowels of this ship, each hull so resembles the Daedalus that I have an eerie sense of never having touched down, of walking in space.
I’ve already climbed down the flight of steep metal stairs past the pool works, enter a series of hatch passageways in the hull on the next level; the stairway continues down, narrow, there are hatches at every level, stenciled numbers. I clamber down more steps, read 022. It is a long way to go, I guess two hundred meters beneath me.
I reenter the ship sector through the very last hatch. I open it, a little rubber-legged from the descent. The morgue is achingly stark white, dispassionately institutional. I am struck by its size once inside it, for the single level I’ve reached through the service door descends two levels further through wide inside elevators. Instead of two or three mordant attendants, I find the office area is staffed by a half-dozen people. I’m told to go below by an angular-faced, pale woman in white.
A chemical odor seems to radiate from the smooth walls and tile floors, from the interior of the elevator in which I descend. The lowest level is again dazzlingly white. Leaving the elevator, I have the sensation that I am inside the white heart of a vast machine—ducts, pipes, fittings, valves, line the ceiling of the hallways and the racks on the walls. I recognize hatchways leading to the engine room of the ship. A hum seems to come from everywhere—the long thin tubes of lighting, the machine fittings and ducts, the thick steel doors leading to rooms visible through small squares of wire-reinforced glass, rows upon rows of oversized drawers tagged at their handles. Collette was right about the number of deaths. I feel a formless blindness creeping into my vision, a nervous tremor runs through my body—slightly spooked, I guess, at the atmosphere of this place, raised to an unknown power by its size.
I cannot escape the notion that Massimo still has something to tell me. I recall our first meeting on the A-line tram, the sense I had then of being impelled with him toward something new to me yet known somehow; we never arrived at it, yet we seemed sure to, I could feel it in my bones. And the idea of his intercession intrigues me. Judging from the way he orchestrated a connection for me with Eva Steiner, he could very well have seen to my appeal without telling me, had it taken care of even though he didn’t know who Eva Steiner was. The hygienic chill seems cruel and unjust, just as his death still seems wrong, the gorgeous Ferrari smeared along the wall, its orange-red fireball a young, seething sun.