Priest fended her off with a practiced jesture that looked affectionate but actually stopped her from taking over the two shot. The credits started to roll, and the crowd howl swamped everything. Wanda-Jean suddenly looked puzzled. There seemed to be an undertow of boos beneath the general zoo hooting. What had she done? Bobby Priest lowered his mike and whispered in her ear without the slightest slip in his perfect professional smile.

"Don't worry about those morons, honey. You won, didn't you?"

Her confusion was suddenly compounded by a strong, if unfocused, sense of foreboding.

"I'M HARDLY GETTING ANYTHING, Connie. Perhaps you ought to try a little harder.''

Connie Starr raised her head. "For your information, I've been coming so hard I'm starting to feel dizzy."

"Not so I've been able to notice."

"Don't make me the scapegoat for your inadequacies."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It must be hard to be a dyke and frigid at the same time."

"You're quite replaceable, Connie."

"So replace me. Just try it."

"Tantrums aren't going to help."

"Perhaps a director who isn't dead from the neck down might."

"Shall we just calm down and try it again?"

Connie sighed and let her head fall back onto the pillow. She was lying on her back on a large translucent block of soft plastic that supported her weight but had sufficient elasticity to allow a high-quality electrostatic induction with the areas of her body that came in contact with it. It looked like a bed from some particularly perverse theme room in a love motel, or maybe a highly specialized gynecological operating table. In the business, the thing was known as the altar, which was a little more manageable than its official title, the Krupp Full Body Sense Receptor. Naked, Connie lay with her legs spread and one knee slightly raised. A mosaic of contact nerve pickups covered the upper half of her prone body, but they had been arranged in a way that gave her room for a good deal of movement. As Connie always said, "You can't keep still when you're coming." Two lightweight recording snakes ran to the permanently implanted receptors behind her ears. Nestled between her spread legs was a heavily customized Panasonic XC 400, the one with the multiform mushroom cushion head.

In the control room, behind the airtight double glazing, the technical crew watched the exchange in silence, avoiding looking directly at either of the two women. They ran checks and fine-tuned the settings on the big board; anything to avoid being embroiled in the confrontation. The crew had known from the outset that the match between performer Connie Starr and director Felicity Springer was a bad one. Felicity Springer simply wasn't good at orgasms. Action sequences, sure. Drugs and hallucinations were a piece of cake to Felicity. But either because of some built-in lack of sensitivity or an inability to truly connect, she had serious problems with getting down a memorable orgasm.

Felicity Springer sat in the rear of the control room in what was known as the director's throne. The throne was directly connected to the altar. In theory, everything that Connie felt, Felicity should have felt, too. Feeder lines ran to implants in her neck and also to suction contacts at her wrists and fitted in a band around her head. She was slim and boyish with rather masculine features and close-cropped blond hair. Corporation gossip had her running with a procession of pretty if airheaded starlets, none of whom seemed to last for more than a couple of weeks. Her girlfriends may have come and gone at an alarming rate, but where her work was concerned she was a painstaking perfectionist. Even her enemies admitted that she did appear to have infinite patience.

"Shall we go for another?" she suggested.

Connie, on the other hand, had no patience at all and was far from through bitching. "Do you realize that I've laid down the orgasms for ninety-three programs? Ninety-three fucking programs and no one else has ever complained."

Connie had been discovered during the early days of feelie experiments. She had been an unsuccessful stripper who had been coerced by an eager young researcher to try to get an orgasm on tape. She had taken to it like a duck to water. To everyone's amazement she seemed able to produce awesome, shuddering reactions almost to order with a minimum of help and encouragement. As the feelies went commercial, she rapidly became the uncrowned queen of computerized sex.

"I'm the best. You can't sit there and tell me I'm not getting it on. I'm Connie fucking Starr. I always get it on. Ask anyone. That's why I get forty thousand per, plus residuals."

"That's why I haven't thrown you off the set and brought in a replacement. That's why I'm putting up with all your shit."

"You wait until I see Renfield. You'll find out what shit is."

"All I've got to do is play him the tape. So far you've come up with nothing. Nada, zilch."

"That's a lie."

"All you have to do is play back the tape. You'll feel it for yourself. We're supposed to be doing Catherine the Great. The stuff you've been giving me could be dubbed into Rebecca of Sunny brook Farm."

Ahmed, the chief engineer on this session of orgasm inserts, made the mistake of trying to act as mediator. "Maybe this just isn't happening. Perhaps the basic chemistry isn't there. We could just use an orgasm out of stock. I doubt anyone would notice if we juiced the sample enough."

He immediately became the object of both women's scorn.

Connie's face twisted into a sneer. "There's nothing wrong with my chemistry."

Felicity shook her head. "I don't use stock material."

Connie reached for the remote to the XC 400. "What the hell, let's give it one more try. This time I'll take this thing off stun."

Felicity was immediately encouraging. "All we need is one good solid teeth rattler and we're out of here."

The control room was filled with the soft hum of the vibrator as it was picked up by the talkback mike. It went on for a full ten minutes before Felicity angrily shook her head.

"It just isn't happening."

Out on the altar, Connie cursed loudly. "Maybe it's a goddamned technical fault."

In the control room Ahmed shook his head. "Everything registers on line, Connie. In fact, I'm getting good levels on everything you're doing. In fact, the only problem…"

He glanced back at Felicity, leaving the sentence hanging. Ahmed seemed to have decided that he was in a no-win situation. He probably wouldn't work with Felicity Springer again anyway, so he might as well keep in with Connie. Connie wielded a good deal of power around the corridors of IE.

Connie raised herself on one elbow. "Hey, Felicity, maybe you oughta go with the levels and just admit that you ain't getting close to it."

Felicity's face seemed stretched by keeping her anger under control. "Listen, eventually I'm going to have to mix this thing, and I can't mix what I can't feel."

Connie laughed. "You never said a truer word, dearie."

"Don't call me dearie, goddamn it."

Connie stretched lazily on the altar. "I'll tell you what I'll do, honey. I'll give it one more shot, and if that doesn't work, we're all going to have to do some radical rethinking." She turned her attention to Ahmed. "You better be paying attention, handsome, because I'm only going to do this once." She again picked up the remote on the XC 400. "This time I'm really going to take this sucker off stun, so be ready for the maximum. Okay?"

Ahmed nodded. "Okay."

Again the soft whine of the vibrator came over the talkback speakers. Connie's eyes closed; her hips began to rotate with a circular motion. The vibrator sound was augmented by small gasps of pleasure. Her raised knee was slowly swinging from side to side.