FAMOUS FOR 15 MINUTES The next time I saw Andy Morlock he was shaving his legs because he was a she. It was on the evening Holo-Fax. I stared in shock at the familiar face: It was either Norea or Sophie. The sheer chic elegance of the slimchick that Morlock had been reanimated as might possibly have made her Sophie, but I thought I detected the muscles of the Androgyne. I was still having difficulties facing my own androgyny: I could sympathize with Andy's plight, I had also been resurrected from the dead as the Androgyne who proceeds from the First Great Alien, Life. This is regeneration, baby; don't try to dig what Norea say. Things had been going better for me since the last time I'd been in the Hotel Gonzo, the hallucinations came in like tides and no longer like storm waves, like a hurricane. When the moon was nearer to the earth you could reach it with a ladder on a rowboat; but the tide had been slowed with valproic acid and now you needed a $50,000,000 rocket. "Hello, I'm Barbara Foster. Tonight, Andy--I mean Norea--Morlock is going to be, in his...her...own words, famous for 15 minutes. Are you planning to go back into art? Do you really think there is room in the 21st Century for a burned-out Pop Artist?" Norea looked shyly into the camera and said, "There will always be people who value my work." I think the newscaster's tone was cuing her in on what had happened since his death.... Barbara pushed her blue tortoise-shell glasses back on her small, pointed nose, and said, "I hope you realize that since your flat-lining your paintings have been discredited by serious critics and aren't worth the canvas they're painted on...." Shock crossed Norea's face, yet not erasing that look of incredible knowledge and wisdom burning deeply into the eyes of the prettiest girl I had ever seen. I wondered if she was going to give up bodybuilding now that she was an artist. I'd hate to see her lose all those wonderful muscles... "I...I'm an artist. I'm one of the greatest artists of the 20th Century...and I am destined to be the greatest artist of the 21st Century--nano-technology opens up new frontiers; using computer heuristics I can..." "Sorry, your time is up." "That's only two minutes!" Norea exclaimed, on the verge of anger. The pretty newscaster, who had herself succumbed to the new beauty standard of androgyny, lipstick and leather, deluxe and delightful, said, "Sorry, we couldn't squeeze in 15 minutes of air-time for a reincarnated Pop Artist whose paintings aren't worth doodley-squat any more. Now, turning to other news....the brown acid that is circulating around us isn't particularly good for you...." In these visions of a a little bit of heaven in a disaster area I knew what I must do: Luna was only a few hours away by shuttle: REMAKE/REMODEL OF THE BOGUS MAN ...echoed in the cavernous amphitheater we had rented for the benefit concert for Andy Morlock's new studio in Night City, a bustling Lunar colony. Morlock art may have been dead on earth, but the moon was a new frontier: Sophie's band, the Mothers of Pearl, had reformed for a triumphant comeback; violin soared into a Slave to Love solo while the rhythms were pounded as though by computer. But no machine could equal my friend's flesh and blood. Midnight gamblers contributed to the pot for the construction of Andy's new studio while in the immense glass walls the craters of Mare Tranquilium could be seen. The mountains were not blue like the glacier-capped peaks of my home. A Gothic cathedral soared on the walls of a lunar crater. If you're from Montana everybody expects you to write stories about sheep ranches and logging and pimping. I had always longed for a different frontier: space. Freedom, freedom. The New Wave yet lived on the moon, a long, long way from my home; skinheads pogoed as they clapped their hands; others stood like statues while machines played computer games with them. A Nintendo wizard has such a supple wrist. Blue sunsets over gray lagoons which Andy had painted were displayed prominently throughout the tremendous amphitheater on pillars dissolving into fiction the same way God is fiction; God is a metaphor. I saw that the paintings were similes of my own Gnostic philosophy: The God of the Cosmos is dead: Evolution had stripped the world of a Creator. Morlock had painted the view from the time-machine; the end when everything merges with the night. There would be no Apocalypse of flame; Eros and Charmion had been silenced by the never-ending frontier of entification opened by the archons. And they couldn't stop Norea or the wars would stop her; the philosophy of racial purity hadn't yet been discredited and abandoned. And they couldn't prevent Morlock from being happy. Pray that we don't get fooled again. Suddenly there was a Bodanon from another lifetime. Sophie. Her breasts were bleeding limes. Her love was like a rainbow. She said, "You can't always get what you want except in my case. I know you've got a crush on Norea but it's about time you settle down with another New Wave artist. I want you because I admire a man who has every record Roxy Music ever made, not to mention Psychokiller. I have a place nearby; I can make your wildest dreams come true; I can take you up; I can bring you down; I can plant your feet back firmly on the ground...." I had been waiting for this moment all my life. Even the astral-planing of the moon couldn't dispel the need of the blind for the Orgasm Drug. I looped my arm around Soph-kid's neck. Her psychedelic +furs were like nova as an aging Lou Reed played Sunday Morning. See the way she walks; hear the way she talks. "Well...you're really making it obvious that you don't like me." It was Norea. She'd seen us leaving and gotten jealous. Norea's hormones were finally hitting her hypothalamus. No many how other cute thangs, my yes indeed! got in the way. The coy teasing that had appealed to the media was back. Strike, dear mistress, and cure my heart. A mind and a body are not two separate things: Morlock was being absorbed into Norea. Enzyme systems, the immune system, the nervous system spread throughout the body, the spinal cord...all this is part of Mind, not just the brain. Morlock had been resurrected to an inevitable death through absorption into the Androgyne. "I haven't done anything," I protested, as Sophie smiled on me seductively in blue jeans and green shirt while my submarine traced out madness. "Come on, Andy...Norea--it's none of your business," I protested, tired and weary, a thousand dreams that would awake me like her boots of shiny, shiny leather rippling with strobes. UV light making star-shine of her smile. "You're leaving with a fast and bulbous New Wave synthe-pop musician," Norea pouted. "And even worse--she's my twin sister. Was. The bodanon...I am no longer Norea; I am Morlock--but I have been changed by resurrection; I lust after men--and a friend is a friend and boys will be boys will be boy-oy-oys..." "And modern times the modern way," I replied, my goal now to be the next Ferry; I was already another Dick: Then I remembered the woman I'd came here with: Norea and I had spent hours preparing for the concert; as the pulsating spheres were set up she had smiled coyly at me, the perfect Androgyne, the physical union of man and woman in the same person. With lots of soul melancholy shimmering... Letting go of Sophie, kissing her on the cheek, I told her, "I guess you're going to have to be leaving solo. I...I'm in love with Norea." Sophie Rosencruetz said, "If it was Norea you were leaving with I'd understand; we're twins; it's easy to love the Two as One. But this isn't Norea! This is actually Andy Morlock! You've always been scared witless of being bi and now you're going to be sleeping with a man!" "I'm addicted to love," I said, body sweating, shak- ing--another kiss was all it took. I turned my back on cannon-fire Kinko sexual innuendos shooting up to a center in my head and I was better off than dead and I guess I just didn't know. Heroine, be the death of me! The strobelight took us. I left behind me a maze of mirrors: a Be-in sculpture where reflection competed with holo projection for reality, portraying Uncle Tim imprisoned in a sliced-crosswise black church against a day-glo background. Tripping on the escalator. The Lone Ranger walking down the hall with his death-angel. Overhead the Earth was shrouded in night, visible through the clear panels of the geodesic dome of Night City. The slidewalk system took us to the place where I would love her two times without even a stop-over in a whiskey bar. Milling throngs of spacers surrounded us, some on their way to the Morlock Benefit; others leaving there; others not knowing where they were going.... We came to a labyrinth of halls and doors; a conapt building. The portal irised open and I closed in on death, going to the sink for a glass of water to swallow my valproic acid. Cuz it makes me feel like I'm a man to put a trank into my brain. I turned, setting limpid crystal, icy green like the waters underground, back on the counter. What I saw astonished me: I confronted Norea in all her numinous splendor; she was more than Virgin, more even than the Serpent trampled by Eve: She was Wisdom. And the Andy tweak of the faithful shone in her chi-chi eyes. I realized that this had to be one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen--now that I was beholding her without the veil of illusion, my feet back firmly on the ground. I'd finally had another glaucoma surgery and no longer had a medical reason to play submarine; I had taken Timmy Lurie's advice and joined Narcoholics Numinous and was working on my 13th step. She put on some twilight lipstick between violet and purple; it made her look like the whore and the holy One: I have never married and many are my husbands....We were going to dance until sunrise opens up its gruesome doors. My vision fragmented, I was kissing Sophie and Sophie's Twin simultaneously. I was making love to a Mirror as Narcissus was tied to a flower. Then she turned her back on me. I watched the sinuous undulation of excellent muscles as she walked to the closet and flung it open: There, shrouded in darkness which vanished as she switched on a glo-tube, was an exact replica of the coat I had lost. It takes many archons to make a dark garment for Day. "Norea...thank you!!!!" I ejaculated, even as I put it on, then pressed forward to kiss her. Him. Whatever. "Andy," Norea said. I thought he/she was about ready to cry. "What's the matter, baby?" I asked, putting a little Camper van Beethoven on the DAT. Pop art is pop art and boys will be boys. But this boy was a girl. Yet she retreated. "Love of man would kill me," she said. "You're no longer a man. But I want you to make love to me like a man--you are Androgyne....Norea, I've always wanted you because you were a woman bodybuilder; I want..." "You want Norea, not me," Andy said, suddenly again with the coy pervasive teasing that had schiz-krieged the media. "Norea was an athlete; I'm an artist--though I do like to stay in shape; I've been jogging in a space suit all the way around the crater every morning...but the thought of macho celebrations of muscles...I can't get into it...." "I want you both....I am yours; you are mine--I am not dreaming," I said, stepping close to her to French kiss her. His/her tongue met mine; lizards wrestled in lunar twilight. He-man drag in the glittering conapt, ecstatic that my heroine was news. She licked her lips. Then she traced the outline with a little lipstick. Black lipstick. Like Superego wore when she was in her secret identity as a belly dancer. Black angel death song. In an instant she was topless. High-fashion in gay drag. Typical male. All I wanted was a little attraction; now I had twin handfuls. I descended Everest to her belly and there were worlds in generation there. I flung star-seed against distant atmospheres. In an instant she was Night, and I sacrif- iced myself to her by cutting Day's heart out. My heart. The Serpent taught Wisdom. The ritual knife plunged into my heart and I was dead. At the end of a long, dark tunnel was a neural net of archons: The Universal Mind. God was a material system, the way the beach is kissed by the sea. I saw Day and Night reconciled, indulging in the most sensual of caresses. Blackness entered the heart of the sun and solar flares erupted. Liquid shadow entered the Light above the All and conceived a higher Unity. But even as I became One with the Light I knew I was actually dying of a heart attack. Darkness grasped me. The stranglehold of Death was even tighter than my love/hate of Gravity. I fell into a vortex of magnetism in the wind of the climate control: Sex had been too much for me at my age. I felt just as though my chest had been hit by the hammer which knocks you to the grave; I drifted away into a long, dark tunnel-- Then I was on an operating table and was being resurrected from the dead. I had fallen through a time-warp; I was the Time-traveler in all his--her--paradoxes: I was the mother of my father and the sister of my husband and he was my offspring. My memories were being reanimated through nano-technological techniques--I had no idea how long my brain had been frozen as my vision cleared while a masked surgeon explained that I'd just risen from the dead.... I looked out the hospital window and beheld Phoenix. I looked in a mirror and beheld myself. Light reflected from a wall of glass, silver betrayed my body: A beautiful body. At last I was perfectly united with Sophie. I had been resurrected in her body. I was Androgyne: I was Andy's Twin. Well, hell, who can sleep in this heat/night and I'd always wanted to have a sex-change operation so I could turn into a lesbian. END End of file END OF BOOK Press the INS key to return to the INDEX MENU (To QUIT this program, enter a 0 (zero) at the INDEX MENU)