embarrassed, I think, staring at the WorldBowl violence. A Yellow SoCal player has just been kicked in the mouth, blood running through the fingers he holds up to his face. The camera is following him in close-up as he walks, hunched, toward the sidelines; no foul is being called.
"But this," I say. "Well, I can take only so much of this."
"Yes," Collette says. "It's too much."
We sit in silence for a while again. Now Yellow is driving behind a wedge, but they don't have the weight to punch through a bearish Red defense.
"Yes," Collette says, shutting down the audio. "I want to. The time I've spent with you has been good. That's an understatement—I mean, it's somewhere under the truth, the truth is a larger thing. That speaks well for the truth," she finally concludes, grinning at her logic.
"I didn't think you were so interested in the truth," I tell her with a smile.
"Not in the same way you are. Maybe that's what I like about you. I mean, it speaks well for you," she says, her grin really spreading.
Collette wants to show me something, something we are not programmed to see until eight in the evening. She says I have to leave the room, so I indulge myself in a long, relaxing shower. I feel deeply satisfied already; I cannot imagine more. What I do have to imagine, the hologram, does not interest me now. It will be something to tell Werhner about, but what he would not understand pleases me even more—Collette's openness, her warmth. I wish I could show her some skill of mine, some ability—to take a ship, perhaps, through a dazzling array of weather. I want to do something of that sort so badly it aches inside me—or is it my vanity? I find myself studying my shape before the mirror. No middle sag. I laugh. I left earth eighty years ago, earth time. Young forever.
What Collette has to show me is yet another transformation of the videon, different from anything we've seen before: the screen displays full-sized the interior of another cabin; this can't be a shipwide program. Its occupants are familiar.
The naked back of a tall, thin man, his buttocks pinched together, standing facing a recliner, the roundish, flushed face of—by God, it is-—Erica, she is unmistakable—soft, wide mouth, blonde hair in thick curls down to her neck. She is seated on the recliner, just behind him. Cards lie on a small cubic table before her, she flips a card over, something happens with Tonio— impossible to tell precisely what, his back is to us, but I can see his leg muscles tense.
"Tape?" I say.
"Live."
I look at Collette; she is watching intently with a smile. I look back again, look at Collette.
"Do they know? Good God," I say, "doesn't this make you feel—I mean, aren't we invading their privacy?"
"No," she laughs. "If we were on another kind of ship—but not here. We're free here. We can do anything."
I watch, Erica's hands are up, Tonio leans over. "You're right." I grin. "I feel free here. I've never felt so free before. It's amazing."
What I can't do justice to is the next stage in the transformation. After we watch for a time, Collette becomes anxious about something. I am aroused, but she will not let me touch her. "It's better to wait," she says. Yet she is anxious.
Wait for what?
She punches up the console inlaid in the table—Erica and Tonio turn toward us as if on signal, and—
the screen tracks apart from its middle;
the cabin doubles; Erica and Tonio stand before us, not holographically, but in their perfumed, perspiring flesh. The fantasy co-op: a moving wall. My disorientation is given another turn, Collette is hugging Erica, they know one another.
Erica turns out to be Tonio's service, Tonio a videon producer; he's anxious to know how I liked the day's show! I'm anxious to get my hands on Erica. I do. We all do, and on one another. This goes on through dinner.
Whenever dinner is. Tonio is directing Collette in a masturbation sequence he is videotaping; he says she inspires him.
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