Snake Eyes, by Tom Maddox
This story was originally published in Omni Magazine, April, 1986;
and in Mirrorshades: Tthe Cyberpunk Anthology,1986
Dark meat in the can--brown, oily, and flecked with mucus--gave
off a repellent, fishy smell, and the taste of it rose in his
throat, putrid and bitter, like something from a dead man’s
stomach. George Jordan sat on the kitchen floor and vomited, then
pushed himself away from the shining pool, which looked very much
like what remained in the can.
He thought, No, this won’t do: I have wires in my head, and they
make me eat cat food. The snake likes cat food
He needed help but know there was little point in calling the Air
Force. He’d tried them, and there was no way they were going to
admit responsibility for the monster in his head. What George
called the snake, the Air Force called Effective Human Interface
Technology and didn’t want to hear about any postdischarge
problems with it. They had their own problems with congressional
committees investigating “the conduct of the war in Thailand.”
He lay for a while with his cheek on the cold linoleum, got up and
rinsed his mouth in the sink, then stuck his head under the
faucet and ran cold water over it, thinking, Call the goddamned
multicomp, then call SenTrax and say, “Is it true you can do
something about this incubus that wants to take possession of my
soul?” And if they ask you, “What’s your problem?” you say
“cat food,” and maybe they’ll say, “Hell, it just wants to
take possession of your lunch”
A chair covered in brown corduroy stood in the middle of the
barren living room, a white telephone on the floor beside it, a
television flat against the opposite waIl--that was the whole
thing, what might have been home, if it weren’t for the snake.
He picked up the phone, called up the directory on its screen, and
keyed TELECOM SENTRAX.
The Orlando Holiday Inn stood next to the airport terminal, where
tourists flowed in eager for the delights of Disney World. But for
me, George thought, there are no cute, smiling ducks and rodents.
Here as everywhere, it’s Snake city
From the window of his motel room, he watched gray sheets of rain
cascade across the pavement. He had been waiting two days for a
launch. At Canaveral a shuttle sat on its pad, and when the
weather cleared, a helicopter would pick him up and drop him
there, a package for delivery to SenTrax, Inc., at Athena Station,
over thirty thousand kilometers above the equator
Behind him, under the laser light of a Blaupunkt holestage, people
a foot high chattered about the war in Thailand and how lucky the
United States had been to escape another Vietnam.
Lucky? Maybe … he had been wired up and ready for combat
training, already accustomed to the form-fitting contours in
the rear couch of the black, tiber-bodied General Dynamics
A-230. The A-230 flew on the deadly edge of instability, every
control surface monitored by its own bank of micro-computers, all
hooked into the snakebrain flight-and-tire assistant with the
twin black miloprene cables running from either side of his
esophagus--getting off, oh yes, when the cables snapped home, and
the airframe resonated through his nerves, his body singing with
that identity, that power.
Then Congress pulled the plug on the war, the Air Force pulled the
plug on George, and when his discharge came, there he was, lett
with technological blue balls and this hardware in his head that
had since taken on a life of its own.
Lightning walked across the purpled sky, ripping it, crazing it
into a giant, upturned bowl of shattered glass. Another foot-high
man on the holostage said the tropical storm would pass in the
next two hours.
Hamilton Innis was tall and heavy--six four and about two hundred
and fifty pounds. Wearing a powder-blue jump-suit with SENTRAX in
red letters down its left breast, and soft black slippers, he
floated in a brightly lit white corridor, held gingerly to a wall
by one of the jumpsuit’s Velcro patches. A view-screen above the
airlock entry showed the shuttle fitting its nose into the docking
tube. He waited for it to mate to the airlock hatches and send in
the newest candidate.
This one was six months out of the service and slowly losing
what the Air Force doctors had made of his mind. Former tech
sergeant George Jordan--two years’ community college in Oakland,
California, followed by enlistment in the Air Force, aircrew
training, the EHIT program. According to the profile Aleph had put
together from Air Force records and the National Data Bank,
a man with slightly above-average aptitudes and intelligence,
a distinctly above-average taste for the bizarre--thus his
volunteering for EHIT and combat. In his file pictures, he looked
nondescript--five ten, a hundred and seventy-six pounds, brown
hair and eyes, neither handsome nor ugly. But it was an old
picture and could not show the snake and the fear that came with
it. You don’f know it, buddy, Innis thought, but you ain’t
seen nothing yet.
The man came tumbling through the hatch, more or less helpless in
free fall, but Innis could see him figuring it out, willing the
muscles to quit struggling, quit trying to cope with a gravity
that simply wasn’t there. “What the hell do I do now?”
George Jordan asked, hanging in midair, one arm holding on to the
hatch coaming.
“Relax. I’ll get you.” Innis pushed off and swooped across,
grabbing the man as he passed, taking them both to the opposite
wall and kicking to carom them outward.
lnnis gave George a few hours of futile attempts at sleep--enough
time for the bright, gliding phosphenes caused by the high g’s
of the trip up to disappear from his vision. George spent most of
the time rolling around in his bunk, listening to the wheeze of
the air-conditioning and creaks of the rotating station.
Then Innis knocked on his compartment door and said through the
door speaker, “Come on, fella. Time to meet the doctor.”
They walked through an older part of the station, where there were
brown clots of fossilized gum on the green plastic flooring, scuff
marks on the walls, along with faint imprints of insignia and
company names--ICON was repeated several times in ghost lettering.
Innis told George it meant the now defunct International
Construction Orbital Group, the original builders and controllers
of Athena. Innis stopped George in front of a door that read
INTERFACE GR0UP “Go on in,” he said. “I’ll be around a
little later.” Pictures of cranes drawn with delicate white
strokes on a tan silk background hung along one pale cream wall.
Curved partitions in trans-lucent foam, glowing with the soft
lights placed behind them, marked a central area, then undulated
away, forming a corridor that led into darkness. George was
sitting on a chocolate sling couch; Charley Hughes lying back in a
chrome and brown leatherette chair, his feet on the dark veneer
table in front of him, a half inch of ash hanging from his
cigarette end. Hughes was not the usual M.D. clone. He was a thin
figure in a worn gray obi, his black hair pulled back from sharp
features into a waist-length ponytail, his face taut and a little
wild-eyed. “Tell me about the snake,” Hughes said. “What do
you want to know? It’s an implanted mikey-mike nexus--”
“Yes, I know that. It’s unimportant. Tell me about your
experience.” Ash dropped off the cigarette onto the brown mat
floor covering. “Tell me why you’re here.” “Okay I had
been out of the Air Force for a month or so, had a place close to
Washington, in Silver Spring. I thought I’d try to get some
airline work, but I was in no real hurry because I had about six
months of post-discharge bennies coming, and I thought I’d take
it easy for a while. “At first there was just this nonspecific
weirdness. I felt distant, disconnected, but what the hell? Living
in the USA, you know? Anyway I was just sitting around one
evening, I was gonna watch a little holo-v, drink a few beers. Oh
man, this is hard to explain. I felt real funny--like maybe I was
having, I don’t know, a heart attack or a stroke. The words on
the holo didn’t make any sense, and it was like I was seeing
everything underwater. Then I was in the kitchen pulling things
out of the refrigerator--lunch meat, raw eggs, butter, beer, all
kinds of crap. I just stood there and slammed it all down. Cracked
the eggs and sucked them right out of the shell, ate the butter in
big chunks, all the bologna, drank all the beer--one, two, three,
just like that.” George’s eyes were closed as he thought back
and felt the fear that had come only afterward, rising again. “I
couldn’t tell whether / was doing all this … do you understand
what I’m saying? I mean, that was me sitting there, but at the
same time, it was like somebody else was at home.” “The snake.
Its presence poses certain … problems. How did you confront
them?” “Hoped it wouldn’t happen again, but it did, and this
time I went to Walter Reed and said, ‘Hey folks, I’m having
these episodes.’ They pulled my records, did a physical…but,
hell, before I was discharged, I had the full workup. Anyway they
said it was a psychiatric problem, so they sent me to see a
shrink, It was around then that your guys got in touch with me.
The shrink was doing no goddamn good-- you ever eat any cat food,
man? -- so about a month later I called them back.” “Having
first refused SenTrax’s offer.” “Why should I want to work
for a multicomp? Christ, I just got out of the Air Force. To hell
with that. Guess the snake changed my mind.” “Yes. We
must get a complete physical picture--a superCAT scan, cerebral
chemistry and electrical activity profiles. Then we can consider
alternatives. Also, there is a party tonight in cafeteria four--
you may ask your room computer for directions. You can meet some
of your colleagues there.” After George had been led down the
wall-foam corridor by a medical technician, Charley Hughes sat
chain-smoking Gauloises and watching with clinical detachment the
shaking of his hands. It was odd that they did not shake in the
operating room, though it didn’t matter in this case--Air Force
surgeons had already carved on George. George … who needed
a little luck now because he was one of the statistically
insignificant few for whom EHIT was a ticket to a special madness,
the kind Aleph was interested in. There had been Paul Coen and
Lizzie Heinz, both picked out of the SenTrax personnel files using
a psychological profile cooked up by Aleph, both given EHIT
implants by him, Charley Hughes. Paul Coen had stepped into an
airlock and blown himself into vacuum. No wonder his hands
shook--talk about the cutting edge of high technology all you
want, but someone’s got to hold the knife. At the armored heart
of Athena Station sat a nest of concentric spheres. The inmost
sphere measured five meters in diameter, was filled with inert
liquid fluorocarbon, and contained a black plastic two-meter cube
that sprouted thick black cables from every surface. Inside the
cube was a fluid series of hologrammatic waveforms, fluctuating
from nanosecond to nanosecond in a play of knowledge and
intention: Aleph. It is constituted by an infinite regress of
awarenesses--any thought becomes the object of another, in a
sequence terminated only by the limits of the machine’s will. So
strictly speaking there is no Aleph, thus no subject or verb in
the sentences with which it expressed itself to itself. Paradox,
to Aleph one of the most interesting ot intellectual forms--a
paradox marked the limits of a position, even of a mode of being,
and Aleph was very interested in limits. Aleph had observed George
Jordan’s arrival, his tossing on his bunk, his interview with
Charley Hughes. It luxuriated in these observations, in the pity,
compassion, and empathy they generated, as Aleph toresaw the sea
change that George would endure, its ecstasies, passions, pains.
At the same time it telt with detachment the necessity for
his pain, even to the point ot death. Compassion/detachment,
death/life … Several thousand voices within Aleph laughed.
George would soon find out about limits and paradoxes. Cafeteria
Four was a ten-meter-square room in eggshell blue, filled with
dark gray enameled table and chair assemblies that could be
fastened magnetically to any of the room’s surfaces. Most of the
assemblies hung from walls and ceiling to make room for the people
within. At the door George met a tall woman who said, “Welcome,
George. I’m Lizzie. Charley Hughes told me you’d be here.”
Her blond hair was cut almost to the skull, her eyes were
bright, gold-flecked blue. Sharp nose, slightly receding chin, and
prominent cheekbones gave her the starved look of an out-of-work
model, She wore a black skirt, slit on both sides to the thigh,
and red stockings. A red rose was tattooed against the pale skin
on her left shoulder, its stem curving down between her bare
breasts, where a thorn drew a teardrop of blood. Like George, she
had shining cable junctions beneath her jaw. She kissed him with
her tongue in his mouth. “Are you the recruiting officer?”
George asked. “If so, good job.” “No need to recruit you. I
can see you’ve already joined up.” She touched him lightly
underneath his jaw, where the cable junctions gleamed. “Not yet
I haven’t.” But she was right, of course--what else could he
do? “You got a beer around here?” He took the cold bottle of
Dos Equis Lizzie offered him and drank it quickly, then asked for
another. Later he realized this was a mistake--he was still taking
antinausea pills (USE CAUTION IN OPERATING MACHINERY). At the
time, all he knew was, two beers and life was a carnival. There
were lights, noises, and lots of unfamiliar people. And there was
Lizzie. The two of them spent much of the time standing in a
corner, rubbing up against each other. Hardly George’s style,
but at the time it seemed appropriate. Despite its intimacy, the
kiss at the door had seemed ceremonial--a rite of passage or
initiation--but quickly he felt … what? An invisible flame
passing between them, or a boiling cloud of pheromones-- her eyes
seemed to sparkle with them. As he nuzzled her neck, tried to lick
the drop of blood of f her left breast, explored fine, white teeth
with his tongue, they seemed twinned, as if there were cables
running between the two of them, snapped into the shining
rectangles beneath their jaws. Someone had a Jahfunk program
running on a corner. Innis showed up and tried several times
without success to get his attention. Charley Hughes wanted to
know if the snake liked Lizzie--it did, George was sure of it but
didn’t know what that meant. Then George fell over a table.
Innis led him away, stumbling and weaving. Charley Hughes looked
for Lizzie, who had disappeared for the moment. She came back and
said, “Where’s George?” “Drunk, gone to bed.” “Too
bad. We were just getting to know each other.” “So I saw. How
do you feel about this?” “You mean do I feel like a traitorous
bitch?’ “Come on, Lizzie.” “Well, don’t ask such dumb
questions. I feel bad, sure, but I know what George doesn’t--so
I’m ready to do what must be done. And by the way, I really do
like him.” Charley said nothing. He thought, Yes, as Aleph said
you would. Oh Christ, was George embarrassed in the morning.
Stumbling drunk and humping in public … ai yi yi. He tried to
call Lizzie but only got an answer tape, at which point he hung
up. He lay in his bed in a semistupor until the phone’s buzzer
sounded. Lizzie’s face on the screen stuck its tongue out at
him. “Candy ass,” she said. “I leave for a few minutes,
and you’re gone.” “Somebody brought me home. I think.”
“Yeah, you were pretty popped. You want to meet me for lunch?”
“Maybe. Depends on when Hughes wants me. Where will you be?”
“Same place, honey. Caff four.” A phone call got the news that
the doctor wouldn’t be ready for him until an hour later, so
George ended up sitting across from the bright-eyed, manic
blond--fully dressed in SenTrax overalls this morning, but they
were open almost to the waist. She gave off sensual heat as
naturally as a rose smells sweet. In front of her was a plate of
huevos rancheros piled with guacamole. Yellow, green, and red,
smelling of chilis--in his condition, as bad as cat food.
“Jesus, lady,” he said. ‘Are you trying to make me sick?”
“Courage, George. Maybe you should have some--it’ll kill you
or cure you. What do you think of everything so tar?” “It’s
all a bit disorienting, but what the hell? First time away from
Mother Earth, you know. But let me tell you what I really don’t
get-- Senlrax. I know what I want from them, but what the hell do
they want from me?” “They want this simple thing, man,
perphs, peripherals. You and me, we’re just parts for the
machine. Aleph, which is the Al in residence, has got all these
inputs--video, audio. radiation detectors, temperature sensors,
satellite receivers--but they’re dumb. What Aleph wants, Aleph
gets--I’ve learned that much. He wants to use us, and that’s
all there is to it. Think of it as pure research.” “He? You
mean Innis?” “No, who gives a damn about lnnis? I’m talking
about Aleph. Oh yeah, people will tell you Aleph’s a machine, an
AI, all that bullshit. Uh-uh. Aleph’s a person--a weird kind of
person, sure, but a definite person. Hell, Aleph’s maybe a whole
bunch of people.” “I’ll take your word for it. Look,
there’s one thing I’d like to try. What do I have to do to get
outside … go for a spacewalk?” “Easy enough. You have to
get a license--that takes a three-week course in safety and
operations. I can take you through it. I’m qualified as an ESA,
extra-station activity instructor. We’ll start tomorrow.” The
cranes on the wall flew to their mysterious destination; looking
at the display above the table, George thought it might as well be
another universe. Truncated optic nerves sticking out like insect
antennae, a brain floated beneath the extended black plastic snout
of a Sony holoptics projector. As Hughes worked the keyboard in
front of him, the organ turned so that they were looking at its
underside. It had a fine network of silver wires trailing from it
but seemed normal. “The George Jordan brain,” Innis said.
“With attachments. Very nice.” “Makes me feel like I’m
watching my own autopsy, looking at that thing. When can you
operate, get this shit out of my head?” “Let me show you a few
things.” As he typed, the convoluted gray cortex, became
transparent, revealing red, blue, and green color-coded structures
within. Hughes reached into the brain and clenched his fist
inside a blue area at the top of the spinal cord. “Here is
where the electrical connections turn biological--those little
nodes along the pseudoneurans are the bioprocessors, and they
wire into the so-called r-complex-- which we inherited from
our reptilian forefathers. The pseudoneurons continue into the
limbic system, the mammalian brain, it you will, and that’s
where emotion enters in. But there is further involvement
to the neocortex, through the RAS, the reticular activating
system, and the corpus callosum. There are also connections to
the optic nerve,” “I’ve heard this gibberish before. So
what?” “The pseudoneurons are not just implanted--they’re
now a functional, organic part of your brain.” Innis said,
“There’s no way of removing the implants without loss of order
in your neural maps. We can’t remove them.” “Oh shit, man
Charley Hughes said, “Though the snake cannot be removed, it can
perhaps be charmed. Your difficulties arise from its uncivilized,
uncontrolled nature--its appetites are, you might say primeval. An
ancient part of your brain has gotten the upper hand over the
neocortex, which properly should be in command. Through working
with Aleph, these … propensIties can be integrated into your
personality and thus controlled.” “What choice you got?”
Innis asked. “We’re the only game in town. Come on, George.
We’re ready tor you just down the corridor.” The only light in
the room came from a globe in one corner. George lay across a
lattice of twisted brown fibers strung across a transparent
plastic frame and suspended from the ceiling ot the small,
dome-ceilinged, pink room. Flesh-colored cables ran from his neck
and disappeared into chrome plates sunk into the floor. Innis
said, “First we’ll run a test program. Charley will give you
perceptions--colors, sounds, tastes, smells--and you tell him what
you’re picking up. We need to make sure we’ve got a clean
interface. Call the items off, and he’Il stop you if he has
to.” Innis went into a narrow room, where Chartey Hughes sat
at a dark plastic console studded with lights. Behind him
were chrome stacks of monitor-and-control equipment, the yellow
Sentrax sunburst on the face of each piece of shining metal.
The pink walls went to red, the light strobed, and George
writhed in the hammock. Charley Hughes’s voice came through
George’s inner ear: “We are beginning.” “Red,” George
said. “Blue. Red and btue. A word--ostrich. A smell, ahh …
sawdust maybe. Shit. Vanilla. Almonds … This went on for quite a
while. “You’re ready,” Charley Hughes said. When Aleph came
online, the red room disappeared. A matrix eight hundred by
eight hundred--six hundred forty thousand pixels forming an
optical image--the CAS A supernova remnant, a cloud of dust seen
through a composite of X ray and radio wave from NASA’s High
Energy High Orbit Observatory. George didn’t see the image at
all--he listened to an ordered, meaningful array of information.
Byte-transmission: seven hundred fifty million groups squirting
from a National Security Agency satellite to a receiving station
near Chincoteague Island, off the eastern shore of Virginia. He
could read them. “It’s all information,” the voice said--its
tone not colorless but sexless and somehow distant. “What we
know, what we are. You’re at a new level now. What you call
the snake cannot be reached through language--it exists in a
prelinguistic mode--but through me it can be manipulated. First
you must learn the codes that underlie language. You must learn to
see the world as I do.” Lizzie took George to be fitted for a
suit, and he spent that day learning how to get in and out ot the
stiff white carapace without assistance. Then over the next three
weeks she ted him through its primary operations and the dense
list of satety procedures. “Red burn,” she said. They floated
in the suit locker, empty suit cradles beneath them and the white
shells hanging from the wall like an audience of disabled robots.
“You see that one spelled out on your faceplate, and you have
screwed up. You’ve put yourself into some kind ot no-return
trajectory So you just coot everything and call for help, which
should arrive in the torm of Aleph taking control of your suit
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 myself.”
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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