Read The Pleasure Tube for Free Online Page B

smile.
    "You'll survive."
    Collette wants to rub my back. She comes around behind me and massages first the nape of my neck as I look toward the light green meadow. I can feel a slight tightness in my muscles only begin to dissolve. I tell Collette I need some exercise.
    "Tomorrow we can take a hike if you want to," she says. "There's a trail right near here. Or you can shoot in the game harvest. Did you ever hunt? There are usually so many people."
    "A hike," I say, lying down, my face almost in the strawberries. "I don't want to shoot in a crowd. But don't prelog the trip, let's just see."
     
    I meet the European-looking man on the return tram. His name, he tells me, is Massimo Giroti—white-bearded, Italian, and a UN Governor in SoAm. He describes himself in a thick accent; he is a large man with steely eyes and an elegant handshake, and seems slightly bored. As the tram hums through the twilight, shadowy woods, Massimo tells me that no, he has not always been an administrator; when he was my age he had been an automobile driver on the world circuit, he had been a champion.
    I tell him that I have been on a starship and out of touch because of it; yet his name is familiar somehow.
    "Perhaps Fiat Massimo," he says. "They have name a car after me. Although it was never Fiat I drive. It was only Ferrari and Lancia. I drive the last Ferrari. But you were on starship? What position did you do?"
    I tell him that I was a Flight Vane Engineer.
    "Ah,
sorprendente!"
he says, the lines, on his face disappearing, his grin wide.
"Piloto,
pilot, you mean. That is like building the curves and driving them at once, you fly the starship! We are
simpatico,
my friend."
    He shakes my hand again. I laugh and say that control of the ship we are returning to seems more like building the curves and driving them with a car that had marshmallows for wheels.
    He laughs at that, he denies it. It turns out he has ridden the Tube before.
    "I suppose it depends on the program they run you through," I say. "I've never seen such tight programs for so many people."
    "Ah, like everywhere nowadays—but you do not program Giroti," he laughs. "Nor do I think they program you." And then he tells me that a PleasureTube program is unique and interesting for another reason. It must be looked at from some distance, I will see eventually. TheTube is a
process,
he goes on—you don't realize what's happening to you, it builds toward the total hologram. You don't understand thePleasureTube's dynamics until then.
    As we pass over the last rise before the cozily glittering terminal, I think of the strawberries. Collette had worn a strawberry scent in the morning—my appetite must have been focused on, intensified by, that scent to precondition my satisfaction in the strawberries we ate. In part the system of this ship proceeds from the appetites it creates and sustains, a kind of loop.
    The terminal we enter is as crowded as it was when we left it. Most of the people are third-class passengers who watch with the disdainful awe of the poor as our spun-steel tram hums in. What Collette says—let it happen, what does knowing the system change?—let's say I agree marginally. The knowledge of another system accounts for my being here, accounts for my presence on this class tram as well. Yet another kind of loop, I think, even as the tram quietly clicks to a stop at the very spot from which we had begun.
     
    After a shower under the whirlpool head I join Massimo at a small club on the A level of the ship. The out-cabin facilities of the ship have begun to operate: the club; a spa, Massimo advises, which opens tomorrow morning; a pool; an exercise room; another club; a D-bar. His second trip, Massimo complains about the out-cabin facilities: few, too small, hours irregular. The club is only the size of three or four cabins; tonight is India—three musicians in a dim recess, a triangle of sitar, sirode, drums. The service and the dinner are entirely Indian; we