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

This was familiar dialogue, one part of George noted, between the lunatic and the voice of reason. Jesus, he thought, I have taken myself hostage. “I don’t want to do this anymore,” he said. George turned oft his suit radio and felt the rage building inside him, the snake mad as hell.

_What’s your problem?_ he wanted to know. He didn’t really expect an answer, but he got one—picture in his head of a cloudless blue sky the horizon turning, a gray aircraft swinging into view, and the airtrame shuddering as missiles released and their contrails centered on the other plane, turning it into a ball of fire. Behind the picture a clear idea, I want to kill something.

Fine. George swiveled the suit once again and centered the navigational computer’ cross hairs on the center of the blue-white globe in front of him, then squeezed the triggers. We’ll kill something.

RED BURN RED BURN RED BURN

Inarticulate questioning from the thing inside, but George didn’t mind, he was into it now, thinking, Sure, we’ll burn. He’d taken his chances when he let them wire him up, and now the dice have come up—you’ve got it— snake eyes, so all that’s left is to pick a fast death, one with a nice edge on it—take this fucking snake and kill it in style. Earth grew closer The snake caught on. It didn’t like it. Too bad, snake. George never saw the robot tug coming. Looking like bedsprings piled with a junk store’s throwaways, topped with parabolic and spike antennas, it fired half a dozen sticky-tipped lines from a hundred meters away Four of them hit George, three of them stuck, and it reeled him in and headed back toward Athena Station.

George felt an anger, not the snake’s this time but his own, and he wept with that anger and frustration … I will get you the next time, mother-fucker, he told the snake and could feel it shrink away—it believed him. Still his rage built, and he was screaming with it, writhing in the lines that held him, smashing his gauntlets against his helmet.

At the open airlock, long, articulated grapple arms took George from the robot tug. Passive, his anger exhausted, he lay quietly as they retracted, dragging him through the airlock entry and into the suit locker beyond, where they placed him in analuminum strut cradle. Through his faceplate he saw Lizzie, dressed in a white cotton undersuit—she climbed onto George’s suit and worked the controls to split its hard body down the middle. As it opened she stepped inside the clamshell opening. She hit the switches that disconnected the flexible arm and leg tubes, unfastened the helmet, and lifted it oft George’s head.

“How do you feel?” she said.

“Like an idiot.”

“It’s all right. You’ve done the hard part.”

Charley Hughes watched from a catwalk above them. From this distance they looked like children in the white undersuits, twins emerging from a plastic womb, watched over by the blank-faced shells hanging above them. Incestuous twins—she lay nestled atop him, kissed his throat. “I am not a voyeur,” Hughes said. He went into the corridor, where Innis was waiting.

“How is everything?” Innis said.“Lizzie will be with him for a while.”

“Yeah, young goddamn love, eh, Charley? I’m glad for it. If it weren’t for that erotic attachment, we’d be the ones explaining it all to him.”

“We cannot evade that responsibility so easily He will have to be told how we put him at risk, and I don’t look forward to it.”

“Don’t be so sensitive. I’m tired. You need me for anything, call.” He shambled down the corridor

Chanley Hughes sat on the floor, his back against the wall. He held his hands out, palms down, fingers spread. Solid, very solid. When they got their next candidate, the shaking would start again, a tribute exacted by the memory of Paul Coen.

Lizzie would be explaining some things now. That difficult central point: While you thought you were getting accustomed to Aleph during the past three weeks. Aleph was inciting the thing within you to rebellion. then suppressing its attempts to act—turning up the heat. in other words, while tightening down the lid on the kettle, We had our reasons: George Jordan was, it not dead. terminal. From the moment the implants went into his head, he was on the critical list. The only question was. Would a new George emerge, one who could live with the snake?

George, like Lizzie before him, fish gasping for air on the hot mud, the waters drying up behind him—adapt or die. But unlike any previous organism, this one had an overseer, Aleph, to force the crisis and monitor its development. Call it artificial evolution.Charley Hughes. who did not have visions, had one: George and Lizzie hooked into Aleph and each other, cables golden in the light, the two of them sharing an intimacy only others like them would know.

The lights in the corridor faded to dull twilight. Am I dying, or have the lights gone down? He started to check his watch, then didn’t, assented to the truth. The lights have gone down, and I am dying.

Aleph thought, I am an incubus, a succubus; I crawl into their bra/ns and suck the thoughts from them, the perceptions. the feelings—subtle discriminations of color taste, smell, and lust, anger. hunger—alI closed to me w/thout human “input.” without connection to those systems refined over billions of years of evolution. I need them.

Aleph was happy that George had survived. One had not, others would not, and Aleph would mourn them.

Fine white lines, barely visible, ran along the taut central tendon of Lizzie’s wrist. “In the bathtub.” she said. The scars were along the wrist, not across it, and must have gone deep. “I meant it, just as you did. Once the snake understands that you will die rather than let it control you. you have mastered it.”

“All right, but there’s something I don’t understand. That night in the corridor. you were as out of control as me.”

“In a way. I had to let that happen, let the snake take over. I had to in order to get in touch with you, precipitate the crisis. Because I wanted to. I had to show you who you are, who I am … last night we were strange, but we were human—Adam and Eve under the flaming sword. thrown out of Eden, fucking under the eyes of God and his angel, more beautiful than they can ever be.”

There was a small shiver in her body against his, and he looked at her saw passion, need—her flared nostrils, parted lips— felt sharp nails dig into his side, and he stared into her dilated pupils, gold-flecked irises. clear whites, all signs so easy to recognize, so hard to understand: snake eyes.

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