Steel Beach

CHAPTER TWELVE

What with covering the Collapse from the site and chasing victims' relatives, dome engineers, politicians, and ambulances, I didn't make it into the newsroom for almost ten days after my Change.

It turns the world on its head, Changing. Naturally, it's not the world that has altered, it's your point of view, but subjective reality is in some ways more important than the way things really are, or might be; who really knows? Not a thing had been moved in the busy newsroom when I strode into it. All the furniture was just where it had been, and there were no unfamiliar faces at the desks. But all the faces now meant something different. Where a buddy had sat there was now a good-looking guy who seemed to be taking an interest in me. In place of that gorgeous girl in the fashion department, the one I'd intended to proposition someday, when I had the time, now there was only another woman, probably not even as pretty as me. We smiled at each other.

Changing is common, of course, part of everyday life, but it's not such a frequent occurrence as to pass without notice, at least not at my income level and that of most people in the office. So I stood by the water cooler and for about an hour was the center of attention, and I won't pretend I didn't like it. My co-workers came and went, talked for a while, the group constantly changing. What we were doing was establishing a new sexual dynamic. I'd been male all the time I'd worked at the Nipple. Everyone knew that the male Hildy was strictly a hetero. But what were my preferences when female? The question had never come up, and it was worth asking, because a lot of people were oriented toward one sex or the other no matter their present gender. So the word spread quickly: Hildy is totally straight. Homo-oriented girls might as well not waste their time. As for hetero-girls… sorry, ladies, you missed your big chance, except for those three or four who no doubt would go home and weep all night for what they could no longer have. Well, you like to think that, anyway. I must admit I saw no tears from them there at the cooler.

Within ten minutes the crowd was completely stag, and I was Queen of the May. I turned down a dozen dates, and half that many much more frank proposals. I feel it's best not to leap right into bed with co-workers, not until you have had a chance to know them well enough to judge the possible scrapes and bruises you might get from such an encounter, and the tensions in the workplace that might ensue. I decided to stick with that rule even though I was about to quit my job.

And the thing was, I didn't know these guys. Not well enough, anyway. I'd drunk with them, bullshitted with them, mailed a few of them home from bars, argued with them, even had fights with two of them. I'd seen them with women, knew a bit of how they could be expected to behave. But I didn't really know them. I'd never looked at them with female eyes, and that can make one hell of a lot of difference. A guy who seemed an honest, reliable sensible fellow when he had no sexual designs on you could turn out to be the worst jerk in the world when he was trying to slip his hand under your skirt. You learn a lot about human nature when you Change. I feel sorry for those who don't, or won't.

And speaking of that…

I kissed a few of the guys-a sisterly peck on the cheek, nothing more-squared my shoulders, and marched into the elevator to go beard the lion in his den. I had a feeling he was going to be hungry.

Nothing much happens at the Nipple without Walter hearing about it. It certainly isn't his great personal insights that bring him the news; none of us are sure exactly how he does it, but the network of security cameras and microphones that lead to his desk can't hurt. Still, he knows things he couldn't have found out that way, and the general opinion is that he has a truly vast cabal of spies, probably well-paid. No one I know has ever admitted to snitching to Walter, and I can't recall anyone ever being caught at it, but trying to find one is a perpetual office pastime. The usual method is to invent some false but plausible bit of employee scandal, tell one person about it, and see if it gets back to Walter. He never bites.

He glanced up from his reading as I entered the office, then looked back down. No surprise, and no comments about my new body, and of course I had expected that. He'd rather die, usually, than give you a compliment, or admit that anything had caught him unprepared. I took a seat, and waited for him to acknowledge me.

I'd given a lot of thought to the problem of Walter and I'd dressed accordingly. Since he was a natural, and from other clues I'd observed over the years of our association, I'd concluded he might be a breast fancier. With that in mind, I'd worn a blouse that bared my left one. With it I'd chosen a short skirt and black gloves that reached to the elbows. For the final touch I'd put on a ridiculous little hat with a huge plume that drooped down almost over my left eye and swooshed alarmingly through the air whenever I turned my head, a very nineteen-thirtyish thing complete with a black net veil for an air of mystery. The whole outfit was black, except for the red hose. It needed black needle-tipped high heels, but that far I was not prepared to go, and everything else I had in the closet looked awful with the hat, so I wore no shoes at all. I liked the effect. From the corner of my eye, I could tell Walter did, too, though he was unlikely to admit it.

My guesses about him had been confirmed at the water cooler by two co-workers who'd recently gone from male to female. Walter was mildly homophobic, not aware of it, had been baffled all his life by the very idea of changing sex, and was extremely uncomfortable to find a male employee showing up for work suddenly transformed into someone he could be sexually interested in. He would be very grouchy today and would stay that way for several months, until he managed to forget entirely that I had ever been male, at which time the approaches would start. My plan was to play up to that, to be as female as a person could be, to keep him on the defensive about it.

Not that I planned to have sex with him. I'd rather bed a Galapagos tortoise. My intention was to quit my job. I'd tried it before, maybe not with the determination I was feeling that day, but I'd tried, and I knew how persuasive he could be.

When he judged he'd kept me waiting a suitable time, he tossed the pages he'd been reading into a hopper, leaned back in his huge chair, and laced his fingers behind his neck.

"Nice hat," he said, confounding me completely.

"Thanks." Damn, I already felt on the defensive. Resigning was going to be harder if he was nice to me.

"Heard you went to the Darling outfit for the body work."

"That's right."

"Heard he's on the way out."

"That's what he's afraid of. But he's been afraid of that for ten years."

He shrugged. There were circles of sweat in the armpits of his rumpled white shirt, and a coffee stain on his blue tie. Once again I wondered where he found sex partners, and concluded he probably paid for them. I'd heard he'd been married for thirty years, but that had been sixty years ago.

"If that's the kind of work he's doing, maybe I heard wrong." He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk. I'd just worked out that what he'd said could be a compliment to me as well as Bobbie, which just threw me further off balance. Damn him.

"Reason I called you in here," he said, completely ignoring the fact that it was I who had requested this meeting, "I wanted to let you know you did real good work on that Collapse story. I know I usually don't bother to tell my reporters when they've done a good job. Maybe that's a mistake. But you're one of my best." He shrugged again. "Okay. The best. Just thought I'd tell you that. There's a bonus in your next paycheck, and I'm giving you a raise."

"Thanks, Walter." You son of a bitch.

"And that Invasion Bicentennial stuff. Really first-rate. It's exactly the sort of stuff I was looking for. And you were wrong about it, too, Hildy. We got a good response from the first article, and the ratings have gone up every week since then."

"Thanks again." I was getting very tired of that word. "But I can't take credit for it. Brenda's been doing most of the work. I take what she's done and do a little punching up, cut a few things here and there."

"I know. And I appreciate it. That girl's gonna be good at hard news one of these days. That's why I paired you two up, so you could give her the benefit of your experience on the feature writing, show her the ropes. She's learning fast, don't you think?"

I had to agree that she was, and he went on about it for another minute or two, picking out items he'd particularly liked in her series. I was wondering when he'd get to the point. Hell, I was wondering when I'd get to the point.

So I drew a deep breath and spoke into one of his pauses.

"That's why I'm here today, Walter. I want to be taken off the Invasion series." Damn it. Somewhere between my brain and my mouth that sentence had been short-circuited; I'd meant to tell him I was leaving the pad entirely.

"Okay," he said.

"Now don't try to talk me into staying on," I said, and then stopped. "What do you mean, okay?" I asked.

"I mean okay. You're off the Invasion series. I'd appreciate it if you'd continue to give Brenda some help on it when she needs it, but only if it doesn't get in the way of your other work."

"I thought you said you liked the stuff I was doing."

"Hildy, you can't have it both ways. I did like it, and you didn't like doing it. Fine, I'm letting you off. Do you want back on?"

"No… is this some sort of trick?"

He just shook his head. I could see he was enjoying this, the bastard.

"You mentioned my other work. What would that be?" This had to be where the punch line came, but I was at a loss to envision any job he could want me to do that would require this much buttering up.

"You tell me," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"I seem to be having trouble using the language today. I thought it was clear what I meant. What would you like to do? You want to switch to another department? You want to create your own department? Name it, Hildy."

I suppose I was still feeling shaky from recent experiences, but I felt another anxiety attack coming on. I breathed deeply, in and out, several times. Where was the Walter I'd known and knew how to deal with?

"You've always talked about a column," he was saying. "If you want it, it can be arranged, but frankly, Hildy, I think it'd be a mistake. You could do it, sure, but you're not really cut out for it. You need work where you get out into the action more regularly. Columnists, hell, they run around for a few weeks or years, hunting stories, but they all get lazy sooner or later and wait for the stories to come to them. You don't like government stuff and I don't blame you; it's boring. You don't like straight gossip. My feeling is what you're good at is rooting out the personality scandal, and getting on top of and staying on top of the big, breaking story. If you have an idea for a column, I'll listen, but I'd hoped you'd go in another direction."

Aha. Here it came.

"And what direction is that?"

"You tell me," he said, blandly.

"Walter, frankly… you caught me by surprise. I haven't been thinking in those terms. What I came in here to do was quit."

"Quit?" He looked at me dubiously, then chuckled. "You'll never quit, Hildy. Oh, maybe in twenty, thirty more years. There's still things you like about this job, no matter how you bitch about it."

"I won't deny that. But the other parts are wearing me down."

"I've heard that before. It's just a bad phase you're going through; you'll bounce back when you get used to your new role here."

"And what is that?"

"I told you, I want to hear your ideas on that."

I sat quietly for some time, staring at him. He just gazed placidly back at me. I went over it again and again, looking for mousetraps. Of course, there was nothing to guarantee he'd keep his word, but if he didn't, I could always quit then. Is that what he was counting on? Was he fighting a delaying action, knowing he could always bring his powers of persuasion to bear again at a later date, after he'd screwed me and I started to howl?

One thought kept coming back to me. It almost seemed as if he'd known when I walked into his office that I'd planned to quit. Otherwise why the stroking, why the sugarplums?

Did he really think I was that good? I knew I was good-it was part of my problem, being so proficient at something so frequently vile-but was I that good? I'd never seen any signs that Walter thought so.

The main fact, though, I thought sourly, was that he'd hooked me. I was interested in staying on at the Nipple-or maybe at the better-respected Daily Cream-if I could make a stab at re-defining my job. But thoughts like that had been the farthest thing from my mind today. He was offering me what I wanted, and I had no idea what that was.

Once again, he seemed to read my thoughts.

"Why don't you take a week or so to think this over?" he said. "No sense trying to come up with an outline for the next ten, twenty years right here and now."

"All right."

"While you're doing that…" I leaned forward, ready for him to jerk all this away from me. This was the obvious place to reveal his real intentions, now that he'd set the hook firmly.

"All right, Walter, let's see your hole card."

He looked at me innocently, with just a trace of hurt. Worse and worse, I thought. I'd seen that same expression just before he sent me out to cover the assassination of the President of Pluto. Three gees all the way, and the story was essentially over by the time I arrived.

"The Flacks had a press release this morning," he said. "Seems they're going to canonize a new Gigastar tomorrow morning."

I turned it over and over, looking for the catch. I didn't see one.

"Why me? Why not send the religion editor?"

"Because she'll be happy to pick up all the free material and come right back home and let them write the story for her. You know the Flacks; this thing is going to be prepared. I want you there, see if you can get a different angle on it."

"What possible new angle could there be on the Flacks?"

For the first time he showed a little impatience.

"That's what I pay you to find. Will you go?"

If this was some sort of walterian trick, I couldn't see it. I nodded, got up, and started for the door.

"Take Brenda with you."

I turned, thought about protesting, realized it would have been just a reflexive move, and nodded. I turned once more. He waited for the traditional moment every movie fan knows, when I'd just pulled the door open.

"And Hildy." I turned again. "I'd appreciate it if you'd cover yourself up when you come in here. Out of respect for my idiosyncrasies."

This was more like it. I'd begun to think Walter had been kidnapped by mind-eaters from Alpha, and a blander substitute left in his place. I brought up some of the considerable psychic artillery I had marshalled for this little foray, though it was sort of like nuking a flea.

"I'll wear what I please, where I please," I said, coldly. "And if you have a complaint about how I dress, check with my union." I liked the line, but it should have had a gesture to go with it. Something like ripping off my blouse. But everything I thought of would have made me look sillier than him, and then the moment was gone, so I just left.

In the elevator on my way out of the building I said "CC, on line."

"I'm at your service."

"Did you tell Walter I've been suicidal?"

There was, for the CC, a long pause, long enough that, had he been human, I'd have suspected him of preparing a lie. But I'd come to feel that the CC's pauses could conceal something a lot trickier than that.

"I'm afraid you have engendered a programming conflict in me," he said. "Because of a situation with Walter which I am not at liberty to discuss or even hint at with you, most of my conversations with him are strictly under the rose."

"That sounds like you did."

"I neither confirm nor deny it."

"Then I'm going to assume you did."

"It's a free satellite. You can assume what you please. The nearest I can get to a denial is to say that telling him of your condition without your approval would be a violation of your rights of privacy… and I can add that I would find it personally distasteful to do so."

"Which still isn't a denial."

"No. It's the best I can do."

"You can be very frustrating."

"Look who's talking."

I'll admit that I was a bit wounded at the idea that the CC could find me frustrating. I'm not sure what he meant; probably my willful and repeated attempts to ignore his efforts to save my life. Come to think of it, I'd find that frustrating, too, if a friend of mine was trying to kill herself.

"I can't find another way to explain his… unprecedented coddling of me. Like he knew I was sick, or something."

"In your position, I would have found it odd, as well."

"It's contrary to his normal behavior."

"It is that."

"And you know the reason for that."

"I know some of the reasons. And again, I can't tell you more."

You can't have it both ways, but we all want to. Certain conversations between the CC and private citizens are protected by Programs of Privilege that would make Catholic priests hearing confession seem gossipy. So on the one hand I was angry at the thought the CC might have told Walter about my predicament; I'd specifically told him not tell anyone. On the other hand, I was awfully curious to know what Walter had told the CC, which the CC said would have violated his rights.

Most of us give up trying to wheedle the CC when we're five or six. I'm a little more stubborn than that, but I hadn't done it since I was twenty. Still, things had changed a bit…

"You've overridden your programming before," I suggested.

"And you're one of the few who know about it, and I do it only when the situation is so dire I can think of no alternative, and only after long, careful consideration.

"Consider it, will you?"

"I will. It shouldn't take more than five or six years to reach a conclusion. I warn you, I think the answer will be no."

One of the reasons I can hear Walter call me his best reporter without laughing out loud is that I had no intention of showing up at the canonization the next day to meekly accept a basketful of handouts and watch the show. Finding out who the new Gigastar was going to be would be a bigger scoop than the David Earth story. So I spent the rest of the day dragging Brenda around to see some of my sources. None of them knew anything, though I picked up speculation ranging from the plausible-John Lennon-to the laughable -Larry Yeager. It would be just like the Flacks to cash in on the Nirvana disaster by elevating a star killed in the Collapse, but he'd have to have considerably more dedicated followers than poor Larry. On the other hand, there was a long-standing movement within the church to give the Golden Halo to the Mop-Top from Liverpool. He fulfilled all the Flacks' qualifications for Sainthood: wildly popular when alive, a two-century-plus cult following, killed violently before his time. There had been sightings and cosmic interventions and manifestations, just like with Tori-san and Megan and the others. But I could get no one to either confirm or deny on it, and had to keep digging.

I did so long into the night, waking up people, calling in favors, working Brenda like a draft horse. What had started out as a bright-eyed adventure eventually turned her into a yawning cadaverous wraith, still gamely calling, still listening patiently to the increasingly nasty comments as this or that insider who owed me something told me they knew nothing at all.

"If one more person asks me if I know what time it is…" she said, and couldn't finish because her jaw was cracking from another yawn. "This is no use, Hildy. The security's too good. I'm tired."

"Why do you think they call it legwork?"

I kept at it until the wee hours, and stopped only because Fox came in and told me Brenda had fallen asleep on the couch in the other room. I'd been prepared to stay awake all night, sustained by coffee and stims, but it was Fox's house, and our relationship was already getting a little rocky, so I packed it in, still no wiser as to who would be called to glory at ten the next morning.

I was bone weary, but I felt better than I had in quite a while.

Brenda had the resilience of true youth. She joined me in the bathroom the next morning looking none the worse for wear. I felt the corners of her eyes jabbing me as she pretended not to be interested in Hildy's Beauty Secrets. I dialed up programs on the various make-up machines and left them there when I was through so she could copy down the numbers when I wasn't looking. I remember thinking her mother should have taught her some of these tricks-Brenda wore little or no cosmetics, seemed to know nothing about them-but I knew nothing about her mother. If the old lady wouldn't let her daughter have a vagina, there was no telling what other restrictions had been in effect in the "Starr" household.

The one thing I still hadn't adjusted to about being female again was learning to allow for the two to three minutes extra I require to get ready to face the world in the morning. I think of it as Woman's Burden. Let's not get into the fact that it's a self-imposed one; I like to look my best, and that means enhancing even Bobbie's artistry. Instead of taking whatever the autovalet throws into my hand, I deliberate at least twenty seconds over what to wear. Then there's coloring and styling the hair to compliment it, choosing a make-up scheme and letting the machines apply it, eye color, accessories, scent… the details of the Presentation of Hildy as I wish to present her are endless, time-consuming… and enjoyable. So maybe it's not such a burden after all, but the result on the morning of the canonization was that I missed the train I had planned to catch by twenty seconds and had to wait ten minutes for the next one. I spent the time showing Brenda a few tricks she could do to her standard paper jumper that would emphasize her best points-though picking out good points on that endless rail of a body taxed my inspiration and my tact to their limits.

She was coltishly pleased at the attention. I saw her scrutinizing my pale blue opaque body stocking with the almost subliminal moir of even lighter blue running through the weave, and had a pretty good idea of what she'd be wearing the next day. I decided I'd drop some subtle hints to discourage it. Brenda in a body stocking would make as much sense, fashion-wise, as a snood on a dry salami.

The Grand Studio of the First Latitudinarian Church of Celebrity Saints is in the studio district, not far from the Blind Pig, convenient to the many members who work in the entertainment industry. The exterior is not much to look at, just a plain warehouse-type door leading off one of the tall, broad corridors of the upper parts of King City zoned for light manufacturing- which is a good description of the movie business, come to think of it. Over the entrance are the well-known initials F.L.C.C.S. framed in the round-cornered rectangle that has symbolized television long after screens ceased to be round-cornered rectangles anywhere but in the Flacks' Grand Studio.

Inside was much better. Brenda and I entered a long hallway with a roof invisible behind multi-colored spots. Lining the hall were huge holos and shrines of the Four Gigastars, starting with the most recently canonized.

First was Mambazo Nkabinde-"Momby" to all his fans. Born shortly before the Invasion in Swaziland, a nation that history has all but forgotten, emigrated to Luna with his father at age three under some sort of racial quota system in effect at the time. As a young man, invented Sphere Music almost single-handedly. Also known as The Last Of The Christian Scientists, he died at the age of forty-three of a curable melanoma, presumably after much prayer. The Latitudinarian Church was not prejudiced about inducting members of other faiths; he had been canonized fifty years earlier, the last such ceremony until today.

Next we passed the exhibits in praise of Megan Galloway, the leading and probably best proponent of the now-neglected art of "feelies." She had a small but fanatical following one hundred years after her mysterious disappearance-an ending that made her the only one of the Flack Saints whose almost daily "sightings" could actually be founded in fact. The only female out of four non-Changing Gigastars, she was, with Momby, a good example of the pitfalls of enshrining celebrities prematurely. If it weren't for the fact that she provided the only costuming role model for the women of the congregation, she might have been de-throned long ago, as the feelies were no longer being made by anyone. Feelie fans had to be satisfied with tapes at least eighty years old. No one in the Church had contemplated the eclipse of an entire art form when they had elevated her into their pantheon.

I actually paused before the next shrine, the one devoted to Torinaga Nakashima: "Tori-san." He was the only one I felt deserved to be appreciated for his life's work. It was he who had first mastered the body harp, driving the final nails into the coffin he had fashioned for the electric guitar, long the instrument of choice for what used to be known as rocking-roll music. His music still sounds fresh to me today, like Mozart. He had died in Japan during the first of the Three Days of the Invasion, battling the implacable machines or beings or whatever they were that had stalked his native city, unbeatable Godzillas finally arrived at the real Tokyo. Or so the story went. There were those who said he had died at the wheel of his private yacht, trying his best to get the hell out of there and catch the last shuttle to Luna, but in this case I prefer the legend.

And last but indisputably first among the Saints, Elvis Aron Presley, of Tupelo, Mississippi; Nashville; and Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee, U.S. of A. It was his incredibly still-ascendant star one hundred years after his death that had inspired the retired ad agency executives who were the founding fathers of the Flacks to concoct the most blatant and profitable promotional campaign in the inglorious history of public relations: The F.L.C.C.S.

You could say what you want about the Flacks-and I'd said a lot, in private, among friends-but these people knew how to treat the working press. After the Elvis pavilion the crowd was divided into two parts. One was a long, unmoving line, composed of hopeful congregants trying to get a seat in the last row of the balcony, some of them waving credit cards which the ushers tried not to sneer at; it took more than just money to buy your way into this shindig. The rest of the crowd, the ones with press passes stuck into the brims of their battered gray fedoras, were steered through a gap in velvet ropes and led to a spread of food and drink that made UniBio's efforts at the ULTRA-Tingle rollout look like the garbage cans in the alley behind a greasy spoon.

A feeding frenzy among veteran reporters is not a pretty sight. I've been at free feeds where you needed to draw your hand back quickly or risk having a finger bitten off. This one was well-managed, as you'd expect from the Flacks. Each of us was met by a waiter or waitress whose sole job seemed to be to carry our plates and smile, smile, smile. There were people there who would have fasted for three days in anticipation if the Flacks had announced the ceremony ahead of time; I heard some grousing about that. Reporters have to find something to complain about, otherwise they might commit the unpardonable sin of thanking their hosts.

I walked, in considerable awe, past an entire juvenile brontosaur carcass, candied, garnished with glacйd fruit and with an apple in its mouth. They were rolling something unrecognizable away-I was told it had been a Tori-san effigy made entirely from sashimi-and replacing it with a three-meter likeness of Elvis in his Vegas Period, in marzipan. I plucked a sequin from the suit of lights and found it to be very tasty. I never did find out what it was.

I built what might easily qualify as the Sandwich of the Century. Never mind what was in it; I gathered from Brenda's queasy expression as she watched my Flackite wallah carrying it that ordinary mortals-those who did not understand the zen of cold cuts-might find some of my choices dissonant, to say the least. I admit not everyone is able to appreciate the exquisite tang of pickled pigs knuckles rubbing shoulders with rosettes of whipped cream. Brenda herself needed no plate-carrier. She was schlumping along with just a small bowl of black olives and sweet pickles. I hurried, realizing that people were soon going to understand that she was with me. I don't think she even knew what one item in ten was, much less if she liked it or not.

The room the Flacks called the Grand Studio had formerly been the largest sound stage at NLF. They had fixed it up so the area we saw was shaped like a wedge, narrowing toward the actual stage in the front of the room. It was quite a large wedge. The walls on either side leaned in slightly as they rose, and were composed entirely of thousands upon thousands of glass-faced television screens, the old kind, rectangular with rounded corners, a shape that was as important to Flackites as the cross was to Christians. The Great Tube symbolized eternal life and, more important, eternal Fame. I could see a certain logic in that. Each of the screens, ranging in size from thirty centimeters to as much as ten meters across, was displaying a different image as Brenda and I entered, from the lives, loves, films, concerts, funerals, marriages and, for all I knew, bowel movements and circumcisions of the Gigastars. There were simply too many images to take in. In addition, holos floated through the room like enchanted bubbles, each with its smiling image of Momby, Megan, Tori-san, and Elvis.

The Flacks knew who this show was really for; we were escorted to an area at the edge of the stage itself. The actual congregants had to be content with the cheap seats and the television screens. There were balconies upon balconies somewhere back there, vanishing into the suspended-spotlight theme the Flacks favored.

Because we were late most of the seats right up front had been taken. I was about to suggest we split up when I spotted Cricket at a ringside table with an empty chair beside her. I grabbed Brenda with one hand and a spare chair with the other, and pulled both through the noisy crowd. Brenda was embarrassed to make everyone scoot over to make room for her chair; I'd have to speak to her about that. If she couldn't learn to push and shove and shout, she had no business in the news game.

"I love the body, Hildy," Cricket said as I wedged myself in between them. I preened a bit as a large pink pitcher was set in front of me. These Flacks were trained well; I was about to ask for lime wedges when an arm came around me and left a crystal bowl full of them.

"Do I detect a note of wistfulness?" I said.

"You mean because they've retired your jersey from the great game of cocksmanship?" She seemed to consider it. "I guess not."

I pouted, but it was for show. Frankly, the whole idea of having made love to her seemed to me by now an aberration. Not that I wouldn't be interested again when I Changed back to male, in thirty or so years, if she happened to be female still.

"Nice job on that lovers-after-death pic out at Nirvana," I said. I was poking through the assortment of press perks in a basket before me and trying to eat a part of my sandwich with my other hand. I found a gold commemorative medal, inscribed and numbered, that I knew I could get four hundred for at any pawnbroker in the Leystrasse, so long as I got there quick and beat every other reporter in Luna to the punch. A forlorn hope; I saw three of the damn things depart by messenger, and they wouldn't be the first. By now the medals would be a drug on the market. The rest of the stuff was mostly junk.

"That was you?" Brenda said, leaning over to ogle Cricket.

"Cricket, Brenda. Brenda, meet Cricket, who works for some scurrilous rag or other whose initials are S.S. and who deserves an Oscar for the job she is doing covering her deep despair at having had only one opportunity to experience the glory that was me."

"Yeah, it was sort of gory," Cricket said, reaching across me to shake hands. "Nice to meet you." Brenda stammered something.

"How much did that shot cost you?"

Cricket looked smug. "It was quite reasonable."

"What do you mean?" Brenda asked. "Why did it cost you?"

We both looked at her, then at each other, then back at Brenda.

"You mean that was staged?" she said, horrified. She looked at the olive in her hand, then put it back into the bowl. "I cried when I saw it," she said.

"Oh, stop looking like somebody just shot your puppy, damn it," I said. "Cricket, will you explain the facts of life to her? I would, but I'm clean; you're the unethical monster who violated a basic rule of journalism."

"I will if you'll trade places with me. I don't think I want to watch all that go down." She was pointing at my sandwich with a prim expression that was belied by what I could see of the remnants of her free lunch, which included the skeletons of three tiny birds, picked clean.

So we switched, and I got down to the serious business of eating and drinking, all the while keeping one ear cocked to the jabbering around me, on the off chance somebody had managed to get a scoop on the canonization. No one had, but I heard dozens of rumors:

"Lennon? Oh, c'mon, he was all washed up, that bullet was a good career move."

"… wanna know who it's gonna be? Mickey Mouse, put your money on it."

"How they going to handle that? He doesn't even exist."

"So Elvis does? There's a cartoon revival-"

"And if they picked a cartoon, it'd be Baba Yaga."

"Get serious. She's not in the same universe as Mickey Mouse…"

"-says it's Silvio. There's nobody with one half the rep-"

"But he's got one problem, from the Flacks' point of view: he ain't dead yet. Can't get a real cult going till you're dead."

"C'mon, there's no law says they have to wait, especially these days. He could go on for five hundred more years. What'll they do, keep reaching back to the twentieth, twenty-first century and pick guys nobody remembers?"

"Everybody remembers Tori-san."

"That's different."

"-notice there's three men and only one woman. Granting they might pick somebody still alive, why not Marina?"

"Why not both of 'em? Might even get them back together. What a story. A double canonization. Think of the headlines."

"How about Michael Jackson?"

"Who?"

It kept on and on, a speculative buzz in the background. I heard half a dozen more names proposed, increasingly unlikely to my way of thinking. The only new one I'd heard, the only one I hadn't thought of, was Mickey, and I considered him a real possibility. You could have walked down to the Leystrasse that very day and bought a shirt with his picture on the front, and cartoons were enjoying a revival. There was no law saying a cult had to have a real object, what was being worshipped here was an image, not flesh and blood.

Actually, while there were no rules for a Flack canonization, there were guidelines that took on the force of laws. The Flacks did not create celebrities, they had no real axe to grind in this affair. They simply acknowledged pre-existing cult figures, and there were certain qualities a cult figure had to have. Everyone had their own list of these qualities, and weighted them differently. Once more I went through my own list, and considered the three most likely candidates in the light of these requirements.

First, and most obvious, the Gigastar had to have been wildly popular when alive, with a planetary reputation, with fans who literally worshipped him. So forget about anybody before the early twentieth century. That was the time of the birth of mass media. The first cult figures of that magnitude were film stars like Charlie Chaplin. He could be eliminated because he didn't fulfill the second qualification: a cult following reaching down to the present time. His films were still watched and appreciated, but people didn't go crazy over him. The only person from that time who might have been canonized-if a F.L.C.C.S. had existed then-was Valentino. He died young, and was enshrined in that global hall of fame that was still in its infancy when he lived. But he was completely forgotten today.

Mozart? Shakespeare? Forget it. Maybe Ludwig Van B. was the hottest thing on the Prussian pop charts in his day, but they'd never heard of him in Ulan Bator… and where were his sides? He never cut any, that's where. The only way of preserving his music was to write it down on paper, a lost art. Maybe Will Shakespeare would have won a carload of Tonys and been flown to the coast to adapt his stuff for the silver screen. He was still very popular-As You Like It was playing two shows a day at the King City Center -but he and everyone else from before about 1920 had a fatal flaw, celebrity-wise: nobody knew anything about them. There was no film, no recordings. Celebrity worship is only incidentally about the art itself. You need to do something to qualify, it needn't be good, only evocative… but the real thing being sold by the Flacks and their antecedents was image. You needed a real body to rend and tear in the padloids, real scandals to tsk-tsk over, and real blood and real tragedy to weep over.

That was widely held to be the third qualification for sainthood: the early and tragic death. I personally thought it could be dispensed with in some circumstances, but I won't deny it's importance. Nobody can create a cult. They rise spontaneously, from emotions that are genuine, even if they are managed adroitly.

For my money, the man they should be honoring today was Thomas Edison. Without his two key inventions, sound recording and motion picture film, the whole celebrity business would be bankrupt.

Mickey, John, or Silvio? Each had a drawback. With Mickey, it was that he wasn't real. So who cares? John…? Maybe, but I judged his popularity wasn't quite in that stellar realm that would appeal to the Flacks. Silvio? The big one, that he was alive. But rules are made to be broken. He certainly had the star power. There was no more popular man in the Solar System. Any reporter in Luna would sell his mother's soul for one interview.

And then it came to me, and it was so obvious I wondered why I hadn't seen it before, and why no one else had figured it out.

"It's Silvio," I told Cricket. I swear the lady's ear tried to swivel toward me before her head did. That gal really has the nose for news.

"What did you hear?"

"Nothing. I just figured it out."

"So what do you want, I should kiss your feet? Tell me, Hildy."

Brenda was leaning over, looking at me like I was the great guru. I smiled at them, thought about making them suffer a little, but that was unworthy. I decided to share my Holmesian deductions with them.

"First interesting fact," I said, "they didn't announce this thing until yesterday. Why?"

"That's easy," Cricket snorted. "Because Momby's elevation was the biggest flop-ola since Napoleon promised to whip some British butt at Waterloo."

"That's part of the reason," I conceded. It had been before my time, but the Flacks were still smarting from that one. They'd conducted a three-month Who-Will-It-Be?-type campaign, and by the time the big day arrived The Supreme Potentate Of All Universes would have been a disappointment, much less Momby, who was a poor choice anyway. This was a bunch whose whole raison d'etre was publicity, as an art and science. Once burned, twice wear-a-fireproof-suit; they were managing this one the right way, as a big surprise with only a day to think about it. Neither press nor public could get bored in one day.

"But they've kept this one completely secret. From what I'm told, the fact that Momby was going to be elevated was about as secret from us, from the press, as Silvio's current hair style. The media simply agreed not to print it until the big day. Now think about the Flacks. Not a close-mouthed bunch, except for the inner circle, the Grand Flacks and so forth. Gossip is their life blood. If twenty people knew who the new Gigastar was, one of them would have blabbed it to one of my sources or one of yours, count on it. If ten people knew I'd give you even money I could have found it out. So even less than that know who it's gonna be. With me so far?"

"Keep talking, O silver-tongued one."

"I've got it down to three possibilities. Mickey, John, Silvio. Am I wildly off-base there?"

She didn't say yes or no, but her shrug told me her own list was pretty much like mine.

"Each has a problem. You know what they are."

"Two out of three of them are… well, old," Brenda put in.

"Lots of reasons for that," I said. "Look at the Four; all born on Earth. Trouble is, we're a less violent society than the previous centuries. We don't get enough tragic deaths. Momby's the only superstar who's had the grace to fix himself up with a tragic death in over a hundred years. Most everyone else hangs around until he's a has-been. Look at Eileen Frank."

"Look at Lars O'Malley," Cricket contributed.

From the blank look on Brenda's face, I could see it was like I'd guessed; she'd never heard of either of them.

"Where are they now?" she asked, unconsciously voicing the four words every celebrity fears the most.

"In the elephants' graveyard. In a taproom in Bedrock, probably, maybe on adjacent stools. Both of them used to be as big as Silvio." Brenda looked dubious, like I'd said something was bigger than infinity. She'd learn.

"So what's your great leap of deduction?" Cricket asked.

I waved my hand grandly around the room.

"All this. All these trillions and trillions of television screens. If it's Mickey or John, what's gonna happen, some guy backstage dashes off a quick sketch of them and comes out holding it over his head? No, what happens is every one of these screens starts showing Steamboat Willie and Fantasia and every other cartoon Mickey was ever in, or… what the hell films did John Lennon make?"

"You're the history buff. All I know about him is Sergeant Pepper."

"Well, you get the idea."

"Maybe I'm dumb," Cricket said, not as though she believed it.

"You're not. Think about it." She did, and I saw the moment when the light dawned.

"You could be right," she said.

"No 'could be' about it. I've got half a mind to file on it right now. Walter could get out a newsbreaker before they make the big announcement."

"So use my phone; I won't even charge you."

I said nothing to that. If I'd had even one source telling me it was Silvio I'd have called Walter and let him decide. The history of journalism is filled with stories of people who jumped the headline and had to eat it later.

"I guess I'm dumb," Brenda said. "I still don't see it."

I didn't comment on her first statement. She wasn't dumb, just green, and I hadn't seen it myself until too late. So I explained.

"Somebody has to cue up the tapes to fill all these screens. Dozens of techs, visual artists, and so forth. There's no way they could orchestrate a thing like that and keep it down to a handful of people in the know. Most of my sources are just those kind of people, and they always have their hands out. Kind of money I was throwing around last night, if anybody knew, I'd know. So Mickey and John are out, because they're dead. Silvio has the great advantage of being able to show up here in person, so those television screens can show live feeds of what's happening on the stage."

Brenda frowned, thinking it over. I let her, and went back to my sandwich, feeling good for more than just having figured it out. I felt good because I genuinely admired Silvio. Mickey Mouse is good, no question, but the real hero there was Walter Elias Disney and his magic-makers. John Lennon I knew nothing about; his music didn't speak to me. I never saw what the fanatics saw in Elvis, Megan may have been good, but who cared? Momby was of his times, even the Flacks would admit, with a bellyful of liquor, that he had been a mistake for the church. Tori-san deserved to be up there with the real musical geniuses who lived before the Age of Celebrity came along to largely preclude most peoples' chances of achieving real greatness. I mean, how great can you get with people like me going through your garbage looking for a story?

Of all the people alive in the Solar System today, Silvio was the only man I admired. I'm a cynic, have been for years. My childhood heroes have long since fallen by the wayside. I'm in the business of discovering warts on people, and I've discovered so many that the very idea of hero-worship is quaint, at best. And it's not as if Silvio doesn't have his warts. I know them as well as every padloid reader in Luna. It's his art I really admire, the hell with the personality cult. He began as a mere genius, the writer and performer of music that has often moved me to tears. He grew over the years. Three years ago, when it looked as if he was fading, he suddenly blossomed again with the most stunningly original works of his career. There was no telling where he might still go.

One of his quirks, to my way of thinking, was his recent embracing of the Flack religion. And so what? Mozart wasn't a guy you'd want to bring home to meet the folks. Listen to the music. Look at the art. Forget about the publicity; no matter how much of it you read, you'll never really get to know the man. Most of us like to think we know something about famous people. It took me years to get over the fallacy of thinking that because I'd heard somebody speak about his or her life and times and fears on a talk show that I knew what they were really like. You don't. And the bad things you think you know are just as fallacious as the good things his publicity agent wants you to know. Behind the monstrous facade of fame each celebrity erects around himself is just a little mouse, not unlike you or me, who has to use the same kind of toilet paper in the morning, and who assumes the identical position.

And with that thought, the lights dimmed, and the show began.

There was a brief musical introduction drawing on themes from the works of Elvis and Tori-san, no hint of a Silvio connection in there. Dancers came out and did a number glorifying the Church. None of the prefatory material lasted too long. The Flacks had learned their lesson from Momby. They would not out-stay their welcome this morning.

It was no more than ten minutes from the raising of the curtain to the appearance of the Grand Flack himself.

This was a man ordinary enough from the neck down, dressed in a flowing robe. But in place of a head he had a cube with television screens on four sides, each showing a view of a head from the appropriate angle. On top of the cube was a bifurcated antenna known as rabbit ears, for obvious reasons.

The face in the front screen was thin, ascetic, with a neatly trimmed goatee and mustache and a prim mouth on which a smile always looked like a painful event. I'd met him before at this or that function. He didn't appear publicly all that often, and the reason was simply that he, and most of the other Great Flacks, were no better as media personalities than I was. For the church services the F.L.C.C.S. hired professionals, people who knew how to make a sermon stand up and walk around the room. They had no lack of talent for such jobs. The Flacks naturally appealed to hopeful artists who hoped to one day stand beside Elvis. But today was different, and oddly enough, the Grand Flack's very stiffness and lack of camera poise lent gravity to the proceedings.

"Good morning! Fellow worshipers and guests we welcome you! Today will go down in history! This is the day a mere mortal comes to glory! The name will be revealed to you shortly! Join with us now in singing 'Blue Suede Shoes.'"

That's the way Flacks talk, and that's the way I'd been recording it for many years now. They'd given me enough stories, so if they had crazy ideas about how they wanted to be quoted in print, it was all right with me. Flacks believed that language was too cluttered with punctuation, so they'd eliminated the., the,, the ' and the? and most especially the; and the:. Nobody ever understood what those last two were for, anyway. They were never very interested in asking questions, only in providing answers. They figured the exclamation point and the quotation mark were all any reasonable person needed for discourse, along with the underline, naturally. And they were big on typefaces. A Flack news release read like a love letter to P.T. Barnum.

I abstained from the sing-along; I didn't know the words, anyway, and hymnals weren't provided. The folks in the bleachers made up for my absence. The boogying got pretty intense for a while there. The Grand Flack just stood with his hands folded, smiling happily at his flock. When the number came to an end he moved forward again, and I realized this was it.

"And now the moment you've all been waiting for!" he said. "The name of the person who from this day forward will live with the stars!" The lights were dimming as he spoke. There was a moment of silence, during which I heard an actual collective intake of breath… unless that was from the sound system. Then the Grand Flack spoke again.

"I give you SILVIO!!!!!"

A single spotlight came on, and there he stood. I had known it, I had been ninety-nine percent sure anyway, but I still felt a thrill in my heart, not only at having been correct, but because this was so right. No, I didn't believe in all the Flackite crap. But he did, and it was right that he should be so honored by the people who believed as he did. I almost had a lump in my throat.

I was on my feet with everyone else. The applause was deafening, and if it was augmented by the speakers hidden in the ceiling, who cared? I liked Silvio enough when I was a man. I hadn't counted on the gut-throbbing impression he'd make on me as a female. He stood there, tall and handsome, accepting the adulation with only a small, ironic wave of his hand, as if he didn't really understand why everyone loved him so much but he was willing to accept it so as not to embarrass us. False, all false, I well knew; Silvio had a titanic ego. If there was anyone in Luna who actually over-estimated his genuinely awesome talent, it was Silvio. But who among us can cast a stone unless they have at least as much talent? Not me.

A keyboard was rolled out and left in front of him. This was really exciting. It could mean the opening of a new sound for Silvio. For the last three years he'd been working his magic on the body harp. I leaned forward to hear the first chords, as did everyone in the audience, except one person. As he made his move toward the keys, the right side of his head exploded.

Where were you when…? Every twenty years a story comes along like that, and anyone you ask knows exactly what he was doing when the news came in. Where I was when Silvio was assassinated was ten meters away, close enough that I saw it happen before I heard the shot. Time collapsed for me, and I moved without thinking about it. There was nothing of the reporter in me at that moment, and nothing of the heroine. I'm not a risk-taker, but I was up and out of my seat and vaulting onto the stage before he'd landed, loosely, the ruined head bouncing on the floorboards. I leaned over him and picked him up by the shoulders, and it must have been about then that I was hit, because I saw my blood splatter on his face and a big hole appear in his cheek and a sort of churning motion in the soft red matter exposed behind the big hole in his skull. You must have seen it. It's probably the most famous bits of holocam footage ever shot. Intercut with the stuff from Cricket's cam, which is how it's usually shown, you can see me react to the sound of the second shot, lift my head and look over my shoulder and search for the gunman, which is what saved me from having my own brains blown out when the third shot arrived. The post-mortem team estimated that shot missed my cheek by a few centimeters. I didn't see it hit, but when I turned back I saw the results. Silvio's face had already been shattered by the fragmented bullet that had passed through me; the third projectile was more than enough to blow the remaining brain tissue through a new hole in his head. It wasn't necessary; the first had done the fatal work.

That's when Cricket took her famous still shot. The spotlight is still on us as I hold Silvio's torso off the ground. His head lolls back, eyes open but glazed, what you can see of them under the film of blood. I've got one bloody hand raised in the air, asking a mute question. I don't remember raising the hand; I don't know what the question was, other than the eternal why?

The next hour was as confused as such scenes inevitably are. I was jostled to the side by a bunch of bodyguards. Police arrived. Questions were asked. Someone noticed I was bleeding, which was the first time I was aware that I'd been hit. The bullet had punched a clean hole through the upper part of my left arm, nicking the bone. I'd been wondering why the arm wasn't working. I wasn't alarmed by it; I was just wondering. I never did feel any pain from the wound. By the time I should have, they had it all fixed up as good as new. People have since tried to convince me to wear a scar there as a memento of that day. I'm sure I could use it to impress a lot of cub reporters in the Blind Pig, but the whole idea disgusts me.

Cricket was immediately off following the assassin story. Nobody knew who he or she was, or how he'd gotten away, and there was a fabulous story for whoever tracked the person down and got the first interview. That didn't interest me, either. I sat there, possibly in shock though the machines said I was not, and Brenda stood beside me though I could see she was itching to get out and cover the story, any part of it.

"Idiot," I told her, with some affection, when I finally noticed her. "You want Walter to fire you? Did somebody get my holocam feed? I don't remember."

"I took it. Walter has it. He's running it right now." She had a copy of the Nipple in one hand, glancing at the horrific images. My phone was ringing and I didn't need a Ph.D. in deductive logic to know it was Walter calling, asking what I was doing. I turned it off, which Walter would have made a capital offense if he'd been making the laws.

"Get going. See if you can track down Cricket. Wherever she is, that's where the news will be. Try not to let her leave too many tracks on your back when she runs over you."

"Where are you going, Hildy?"

"I'm going home." And that's just what I did.