Snake Eyes, Tom Maddox [howl and other poems .txt] 📗

tunctions, and then you relax and don’t do a damned thing.”

He flew first in a lighted dome in the station, his taceptate open and Lizzie yelling at him, laughing as he tumbled out of control and bounced oft the padded walls. Then they went outside the station, George on the end of a tether, flying by instruments, his faceplate masked, Lizzie hitting him with red burn, suit integrity failure, and so forth.

While George focused most of his energies and attention on learning to use the suit, each day he reported to Hughes and plugged into Aleph. The hammock would swing gently after he settled into it, Charley would snap the cables home and leave.

Aleph unfolded itself slowly If fed him machine and assembly language, led him through vast trees ot C-SMART, its “intelligent assistant” decision-making programs, opened up the whole electromagnetic spectrum as it came in trom Aleph’s various inputs. George understood it all—the voices, the codes. When he unplugged, the knowledge faded, but there was something else behind it, a skewing of perception, a sense that his world had changed.

Instead of color, he sometimes saw a portion of the spectrum; instead of smell, he felt the presence of certain molecules; instead of words, heard structured collections of phonemes. His consciousness had been infected by Aleph’s.

But that wasn’t what worried George. He seemed to be cooking inside and had a more or less constant awareness of the snake’s presence, dormant but naggingly there. One night he smoked most of a pack of Charley’s Gauloises before he went to bed and woke up the next morning with barbed wire in his throat and fire in his lungs. That day he snapped at Lizzie as she put him through his paces and once lost control entirety— she had to disable his suit controls and bring him down. “Red burn,” she said. “Man, what the hell were you doing?”

At the end of three weeks, he soloed—no tethered excursion but a self-guided, hang-your-ass-out-over-the-endless-night extra-station activity He edged carefully out from the protectionof the airlock and looked around him. The Orbital Energy Grid, the construction job that had brought Athena into existence, hung betore him, photovottaic collectors arranged in an ebony lattice, silver microwave transmitters standing in the sun. Amber-beaconed figures crawled slowly across its face or moved toward red-lighted tugs that looked like piles of random junk as they moved in long arcs, their maneuvering rockets lighting up in brief, diamond-hard points.

Lizzie stayed just outside the airlock, tracking him by his suit’s radio beacon but letting him run free. She said, “Move away from the station, George. It’s blocking your view of Earth.” He did.

White cloud stretched across the blue globe, patches of brown and green visible through it. At fourteen hundred hours his time, he was looking down from almost directly above the mouth of the Amazon, where at noon the earth stood in full sunlight. Just a small thing.

“Oh yes,” George said. Hiss and hum of the suit’s air-conditioning, crackle over the earphones of some stray radiation passing through, quick pant of his breath inside the helmet—sounds of this moment, superimposed on the floating loveliness. His breath came more slowly and he switched off the radio to quiet its static, turned down the suit’s air-conditioning, then hung in an ear-roaring silence. He was a speck against the night.

Sometime later a white suit with a trainer’s red cross on its chest moved across his vision. “Oh shit,” George said, and switched his radio on. “I’m here, Lizzie,” he said.

“What the hell were you doing?”

“Just watching the view.”

That night he dreamed of pink dogwood blossoms, luminous against a purple sky and the white noise of rainfall. Something scratched at the door—he awoke to the filtered but metaltic smell of the space station, felt a deep regret that the rain could never fall there, and started to turn over and go back to sleep, hoping to dream again ot the idyllic, rain-swept landscape. Then he thought, something’s there, got up, saw by red letters on the wall that it was after two in the morning, and went naked to the door

White globes cast misshapen spheres of light in a line around the curve of the corridor Lizzie lay motionless, half in shadow. George kneeled over her and called her name; her left foot made a thump as it kicked once against the metal flooring.

“What’s wrong?” he said. Her dark-painted nails scraped the floor, and she said something, he couldn’t tell what. “Lizzie,” he said.

His eyes caught on the red teardrop against the white curve of breast, and he felt something come alive in him. He grabbed the front of her jumpsuit and ripped it to the crotch. She clawed at his cheek, made a sound, then raised her head and looked at him, mutual recognition passing between them like a static shock: snake eyes.

The phone shrilled, When George answered it, Charley Hughes said, “Come see us in the conference room, we need to talk.” Charley smiled and cut the connection.

Red writing on the wall read 0718 GMT.

In the mirror was a gray face with red fingernail marks, brown traces of dried blood— face of an accident victim or Jack the Ripper the morning after… he didn’t know which, but he knew something inside him was happy He felt completely the snake’s toy.

Hughes sat at one end of the dark-yeneered table, Innis at the other, Lizzie halt-way between them. The left side of her face was red and swollen, with a small purplish mouse under the eye. George unthinkingly touched the livid scratches on his cheek, then sat on the couch.

“Aleph told us what happened,” Innis said. “How the hell does it know?” George said, but as he did so remembered concave circles of glass inset in the ceilings of the corridors and his room. Shame, guilt, humiliation, tear, anger—George got up from the couch, went to Innis’s end of the table, and leaned over him. “Did it?” he said. “What did it say about the snake, Innis?”

“It’s not the snake,” Innis said.

“Call it the cat,” Lizzie said, “if you’ve got to call it something. Mammalian behavior, George, cats in heat.”

A familiar voice—cool, distant—came from speakers in the room’s ceiling. “She is trying to tell you something, George. There is no snake. You want to believe in something reptilian that sits inside you, cold and distant, taking strange pleasures. However, as Doctor Hughes explained to you before, the implant is an organic part of you. You can no longer evade the responsibility tor these things. They are you.”

Charley Hughes, Innis, and Lizzie were looking at him calmly perhaps expectantly All that had happened built up inside him, washing through him, carrying him away He turned and walked out of the room.

“Maybe someone should talk to him,” Innis said. Charley Hughes sat glum and speechless, cigarette smoke in a cloud around him. “I’ll go,” Lizzie said.

“Ready or not, he’s gonna blow,” Innis said.

Charley Hughes said, “You’re probably right.” A fleeting picture, causing Chancy to shake his head, of Paul Coen as his body went to rubber and exploded out the airlock hatch, pictured with terrible clarity in Aleph’s omniscient monitoring cameras. “Let us hope we have learned from our mistakes.”

There was no answer from Aleph—as it it had never been there.

The Fear had two parts. Number one, you have lost control absolutely Number two, having done so, the real you emerges, and you won’t like it. George wanted to run, but there was no place at Athena Station to hide. On the operating table at Walter Reed, it seemed a thousand years ago, as the surgical team gathered around, his doubts disappeared in the cold chemical smell rising up inside him on a wave of darkness … he had chosen to submit, lured by the fine strangeness of it all (to be part of the machine, to feel its tremors inside you and guide them), hypnotized by the prospect of that unsayable rush, that high. Yes, the first time in the A-230 he had felt it—his nerves extended, strung out into the fiber body wired into a force so far beyond his own… wanting to corkscrew across the sky guided by the force of his will.

There was a sharp rap at the door Through its speaker, Lizzie said, “We’ve got to talk.”

He opened the door and said, “About what?” She stepped through the door, looked around at the small, beige-walled room, bare metal desk, and rumpled cot, and George could see the immediacy ot last night in her eyes—the two of them in that bed, on this floor “About this,” she said. She took his hands and pushed his index fingers into the junctions in her neck. “Feel it, our difference.” Fine grid of steel under his fingers. “What no one else knows. We see a different world—Aleph’s world—we reach deeper inside ourselves—”

“No, goddamn it, it wasn’t me. It was, call it what you want, the snake, the cat.”

“You’re being purposely stupid, George.”

“I just don’t understand.”

“You understand, all right. You want to go back, but there’s no place to go to, no Eden. This is it, all there is.”

But he could fall to Earth, he could fly away into the night. Inside the ESA suit’s gauntlets, his hands were wrapped around the claw-shaped triggers. Just a quick clench ot the fists, then hold them until all the peroxide is gone, the suit’s propulsion tank exhausted. That’ll do it.

He hadn’t been able to live with the snake. He sure didn’t want the cat. But how much worse if there were no snake, no cat—just him, programmed for particularly disgusting forms of gluttony violent lust (“We’ve got your test results, Dr Jekyll”) Ahh, what next— child molestation, murder?

The blue-white Earth, the stars, the night.

He gave a slight pull on the right-hand trigger and swiveled to face Athena Station.

Call it what you want, it was awake and moving now inside him. To hell wifh them all, George, it urged, let’s burn.

In Athena Command, Innis and Charley Hughes were looking over the shoulder of the watch otticer when Lizzie came in. She was struck by the smallness of the room and its general air of disuse. Aleph ran the station, both its routines and emergencies.

“What’s going on?” Lizzie said.

“Something wrong with one ot your new chums,” the watch ofticer said. “I don’t know exactly what’s happening, though.” He looked around at Innis, who said, “Don’t worry about it, pal.”

Lizzie slumped in a chair “Anyone tried to talk to him?”

“He won’t answer,” the duty officer said.

“He’ll be all right,” Charley Hughes said.

“He’s gonna blow,” Innis said.

On the radar screen, the red dot with coordinate markings flashing beside it was barely moving.

“How are you feeling, George?” the voice said, soft, feminine, consoling. George was fighting the impulse to open his helmet so that he could see the stars—it seemed important to get the colors just right.

“Who is this?” he said.

“Aleph.”

Oh shit, more surprises. “You never sounded like this before.”

“No, I was trying to conform to your idea of me,”

“Well, which is your real voice?”

“I don’t have one.”

If you don’t have a real voice, you aren’t really there—that seemed clear to George, for reasons that eluded him. “So who the hell are you?”

“Whoever I wish to be.” This was interesting, George thought.

“Bullshit,” replied the snake (they could call it what they wanted, to George it would always be the snake), “let’s burn_.“_

George said, “I don’t get it.”

“You will, if you live. Do you want to die?”

“No, but I don’t want to be me, and dying seems to be the only alternative.”

“Why don’t you want to be you?”

“Because I scare