Robert Onopa - The Pleasure Tube

I sit by a rectangular window and watch our rubber-tire progress, first uphill, then down through faintly groomed, quite real, thickening woods. I lay my hand flat on the spun steel of the tram body; it feels queerly unreal, or I do, suddenly moving through these woods under a hazy sun. Insects in the overgrowth, reflections from the guardrail along the tramrun, no breeze. I see a small animal clinging to the lowest branch of a tree as we pass. Squirrel, moving, alive.

Slot 7 is a pavilion where the forward group disembarks. Slot 9, a kilometer beyond, deposits me at a simulated stone walk where Collette is waiting. She’s wearing white shorts and a halter top. We follow the walk eighty meters to a small prefab structure, half porch with a large plastic table, plastic/wicker chairs. There is a small brazier in the corner; inside, a cooking unit, a refrigeration unit, cabinets.

The rest house—what Collette calls it—is protected by woods on three sides. We are on a gentle rise on rocky ground. Behind us the land slopes uphill to a series of granite bedrock faces which rise from the ground; around the base of the nearest is apparently the tramrun. Ahead the landscape runs downhill and opens in a widening swath to a meadow, a vast, parklike space, again only barely groomed, perhaps three or four kilometers off. I can just make out a series of pavilions on the meadow’s far side, perhaps eight kilometers away.

Since the tram whined away, the air has seemed soundlessly light. The absence of machine hum recalls the beach at Utama Bay on Guam; this kind of stillness is unnerving. I pick out the possible sound of wind in the taller trees, insects, and the faint songs of birds. The sun is a sun of late earth afternoon, bright but hazed over; its light falls into the woods in patches the size of children. In the woods the greenery collides, tumbles over itself. I feel both tranquil here and apprehensive—how can that be?

Collette and I drink champagne and pick at a whole salmon, poached, cold. The salmon is delicate and clean-tasting, the champagne light. She knows of a strawberry patch just downhill, we are going to pick dessert.

The strawberries grow near the edge of the sparser woods to our left, downhill. Small strawberries, but they are exceptional: bright red, tantalizing in texture, ripe, sweet, firm. We eat them out of our hands, propped up against a thick tree, sitting on the soft loam.

“Perfect,” I say. “Paradise.”

“To me,” Collette says, putting strawberries in a ceramic can to take back to the ship, “this is as perfect as a place can be. We’ll stop again at a tropical reserve, but there’s too much to do there to actually relax. This place… There aren’t many people who get the chance to be here, you know. I have a plant room at home, a small one. I wish I had this. It’s so peaceful—you’re right, perfect.”

“Just like my last twenty-four hours,” I say. “Everything’s seemed… to click into place. Spooky. The first music I heard in the cabin? My space music, Bartok, I wore out a tape of it once. I must have wanted just that breakfast for a year. And a woman like you. It’s as if you remember things I’ve forgotten I really wanted…”

Collette smiles, passes me a strawberry. “You’re a pleasure,” she says. “There’s something about you, it’s your tan, the way you look at me. I’d like to do you any time.”

I bite into the fruit and feel its juices pique my tongue. Sweet, sticky, almost tart enough to be dry, but sweet nonetheless. “Mmmm. And that blonde woman. Yet… something about her is familiar.”

I lean back on my elbows in the softness of the earth, layers of decaying leaves and loam among thinning vines along the shady edge of the woods, at the foot of this tree. “There are moments,” I tell her, “when I don’t feel very far from the screening committee that kept me on Guam. Taylor and Knuth; then Birnbaum, Lodge…. They think I know something I know I don’t.”

“A SciCom screening committee?’ Collette asks, sitting up straight.

“Yes.”

“Are you in trouble?”

“Am I?” I ask after a moment. “You tell me.”

Collette is reading my face, I am trying to read hers, she sets down the half-filled container. “Not that I’m aware of,” she says, moving forward onto her knees. “Well, you’re not in any trouble with me.”

I shrug and suggest that what data there is on me, she’s probably seen.

“I saw the program we retrieved,” she says, “and I sure can’t recall any screening-committee report.” Collette pauses. “But I’ll guess. Something happened to you on the expedition, didn’t it?”

“To the ship,” I tell her after a moment. “We blew part of the ship. Three people died—then there was a suicide.”

“My God,” Collette says. Could she have known? Her expression denies it utterly; she sees my own pain, I think. No, I’ve never met her before. I want to tell her what happened; I can feel her sympathy.

“We were tracking energy source off the entry horizon of a black hole, near the Crab. We went as far as anyone’s gone. Did you know that?”

“No,” she says, blushing a little. “The Crab nebula? That’s some way. And a black hole? I’m not really sure…”

“A black hole is an old star that’s fallen in on itself, collapsed,” I tell her. “It’s so dense its own light doesn’t escape, so dense its gravity attracts light. The physics is still speculation—one theory has it that within a black hole the laws of physics are reversed, and a traveler, say, becomes trapped—trapped in space, and free in time instead. Another theory has it that each is a throat to another universe, another a loop in time—well, that’s all on the other side. I don’t want to exaggerate. We were tracking well off an edge. Spinning black holes might be a cost-free energy source, that’s why we were tracking. That’s where it was that we blew.”

“Blew? Out there? My God,” Collette says, goes silent for a moment. “How lucky you are to be back, alive and back. There’s an investigation?”

“The investigation was finished almost four years ago, out on range. But since I’ve been back, maybe it’s just bureaucracy, it’s like thick glue in gears on Guam. They don’t want me to leave. At all. I’ve filed a dozen reports, answered every question. But still…”

Collette looks away, she picks at grassy weeds growing among the strawberries. “There’s truth to that anywhere, nowadays,” she says. “My brother used to say that soon enough nothing will happen. Maybe it’s already gotten to the point where there are so many administrative strata to go through that nothing happens, nothing changes. That’s the way it seems. An investigation can last forever. But look,” she says, turning her palms up, tossing grass into a breeze, “right now you’re here. You’re traveling first class. People wait months for this, people who can afford it. You came right on. Somebody must be looking out for you.”

I push my hand at the soil and run my fingers through—dank, spongy, sweet. I did that myself, I think. I rewrote my program at the military office, punched it through while the wormy program clerk was at morning meditation. Technically I have military status. I had such an overload of leave time I went right out. I wonder if SciCom even knows yet; by now there is nothing they can do. I tell Collette just how it was that I got here.

She looks at me for a long moment. “You really entered your own leave program?”

“I was only a member of the Committee Pilot, but I flew the ship,” I tell her. “So that was by default. Same thing. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve defaulted ever since I’ve gotten back to Guam. They write off the suicide, they’re encouraging a friend of mine to kill himself, I think, they don’t seem to care. Except they do want to keep their hands on me—I’ve got that pretty clear.”