Another Story of the Myth of Eve

by Willie Smith

Table of Contents
Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

The robot monkeyed with the incinerator’s knife switch. It was one of the latest models, but two of its capacitors had frazzled overnight. Now it couldn’t remember how to make that one last connection.

“Bill,” Betty said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I have his birth cert electrodes and his computer pass file — his med alert is upstairs all in order... Honey, I don’t remember ever getting a receipt...”

The kid fell to blubbering and cursing. He hated it when his mother talked to herself. Other guys didn’t have mothers. Nobody had a mother. Why the hell did he have to be saddled with this dingy bitch? As the tears tore down his downy pink face, the kid thought briefly of smashing his guitar module to bits in a desperate effort to allay his bitter frustration. Instead he picked up the module from where it lay on the cushion beside him, rammed it into his mouth and began to play as he had never played before, which was the way he always played, which was why everybody always despised his playing; everybody, that is, except his knuckleheaded mother. The kid played his guts out.

Mucus dripped off the polyester onto the parquet, as the robot described a helpless circle around the knife switch. Bill made another effort to express himself. This time the remainder of his ears slid down his neck like soggy figs or plastic licked by flame. Betty buried her face in her hands and sobbed. Like so many people interviewing a ghost or listening to original music, she just didn’t understand. The kid at that moment understood he wanted his mother to die. The kid reverbed repeated attacks of tacks scattered at windowpanes.

“The seed!” her husband bugled behind Betty’s pupils. “It’s the sacred conductor needed to complete the cosmic circuit. I’ve been lying around rusting out in the junkheap so I can finally come get the receipt for my Bill. Honey, I need our son’s semen, the first of it! All of it!”

“Oh, Bill,” Betty brought her reddened face up from her hands, derailing her dead husband’s caboose of thought, “that’s disgusting!”

“It’s the way the cosmos works: one part shit, one part gold — the alchemists knew that, I’m not telling you anything new, you dumb slut. Why’d you have to talk me into vaginal intercourse in the first damn place?”

“I needed it!” she gritted through a teary view of her husband’s erect putrescent corpse. “Deep down I needed you buried inside. I just had to take something of you directly in!”

“It gave me the cancer.”

“Honey, we both knew you never had a chance. You know as well as I do how juice from the vagina... I mean, there’s an article out in this month’s Science Overview about how they’ve all but proven mathematically that juice from the vagina... I mean in penile contact outside the laboratory...”

“And why didn’t we discuss the consequences that afternoon before you coaxed me into your slimy snailshell? You could’ve reminded me it spelled death!”

It was hard maintaining this dialogue, even though it all originated inside Betty’s head, because Bill Junior kept screeching and squawking all the while his mother yelled at herself. Betty had to scream at the top of her lungs.

Outside the living module, neighbors were trundling home from work, shaking their heads in unanimous resignation to yet another night of pandemonium howling out of that dump where crazy Betty and her boy-in-a-box hang out. They secretly wished Betty would hang herself. Openly, the voiced concern. They renewed the rumor that Junior was a robot. A few of the more disgruntled scoffed at the obvious lack of humanity in what the “child” advertized with its filthy robot voice as Oscillator Bop. They condemned O. B. to hell — along with corroded batteries, burnt transformers, dead solenoids and the mindless nerds in other countries who were openly destroying the language.

“There wasn’t time! I felt you and you felt me and then our clothes were off and it was all over. Neither of us said a word, Bill. We were silent the entire time!”

“Look, I don’t have time for chronology — I need the boy’s seed and I need it now. If I don’t get it — I lie out here in the electronic graveyard for eons, until all the slime that is me is finally gone. You think I like hanging around stinking and oozing? One part jazz, one part jizz. Honey — I need our Bill’s receipt! Once I get that, the whole account’s settled; I can loop through the nearest hole. So fetch that seed, you dumb slut! You never could do anything right. You ruined our marriage. Our child’s a freak, thanks to your sick appetite. You killed your own husband. Now just don’t blow it this once, and maybe you can at least make it possible for me to get some peace and quiet out here!”

Betty knew what she had to do. She blinked. Sniffed away lachrimosity.

Gave one last glance at her Bill, as his rib cage sank into his liquefying abdominal cavity. Dropped to her knees. Applied lips to the kid’s intake.

Junior Bill peered down the length of his guitar module in shock. He almost stopped osculating the contraption. He’d never seen his nutty mother quite do this before. Looked hazardous. He well knew the spit of others to be venomous. Any school kid savvies that, even one raised in an incubator. And there leaked mother’s spittle around the loose fit of the rubber nipple. His playing slowed, a la dying pendulum. The bubbles fascinated him. Bopping one-handedly, he arced his free hand over to the nipple. Batted it off the housing of the titanium tube protruded into his airspace.

Sucking, soughing, sighing noises from his mother’s mouth gurgled out of the intake. In a compulsive act of neurotic gobbletygook, the kid wiggled his pelvis off the cushion to guide his pubic symphisis down at the slurp vortex. He was excited. Thoughts of death evaporated inside his adolescent brain concentrating on the maelstrom aimed at his groin. The guitar module slumped from his lips. Tumbled against the glass.

By the time the neighbors were pounding on the door, the kid was hurling his death throes, screams shattering all conveniences not of metallic construction; Betty in the midst of transferring semen into the stump of her nonexistent husband’s neck. An embarrassing scene. Although Betty by now exempt from guilt syntax, as from shame’s paradigms.

Jim, a foreman in the chip mill out on Silicon Valley Way, was the first to force his way into the fateful kitchen and its allegory of repugnance. To everyone’s nausea, it became blatant Betty had reverted to her perverted ways. Not only had she murdered her own boy with saliva, but here she was spewing his semen all over the parquet! Three fullgrown men took ill. The robot continued orbiting the knife switch, the polyester nearly drip-dry. The spinster nextdoor, who slaved in a warhead factory, was appalled. She had never before stood in so much puke.

“The receipt!” her husband sobbed inside Betty’s head. “Honey, you’re such a good slut. Such, a, goo...” and the voice exited like a snipped polyp.

The day was clean. The spectral non-electric sun of a full moon shone in through the window. The burglar alarm at last going off — a dead spider re-insulating the short. The lights were all broken. Powdered glass twinkled on the parquet, glistened on top of the vomit. She listened. Her son was dead. No — he spoke. Distorted, choked with blood; but the scribes later recorded it thus:

“After this, let every man be cursed with a mother. May all men be hereafter hovered over and falsely protected by the suffocating wings of a personal mother.”

Then the kid fell silent. The spit had taken its toll. A shudder crossed the group of neighbors packed into the moonlit kitchen. Betty grinned. A moonbeam caught her semen-gooped molars. Acting on his first impulse in over forty years of dedication, Jim spat at Betty. The crowd heard the goo hit home. Betty’s grin widened. Other men spat on the shadowy target. Brave men, like Andy from the nonosecond plant out on Skyline, Herb the janitor from down at Inter-racial Semiconductor and Bob the howitzer manufacturer from out along Long Beach. A beer brawl of heroes — all ptui-ing furiously at the half-seen form of a smirking vicious pervert.

Somebody got a flashlight robot working. A lotta work; but he or she somehow or other managed to reactivate one of the stalled bastards out on the back porch. Mechanically incandescent light creeped into the shattered sticky kitchen. Revealing Betty grinning — spit flecking her face, her dress. The kid lay dead in his box, twisted horribly. The burglar alarm whooped and clanged like a turning point in history.

“You OK, Betty?” said Jim. “We heard something. Figured maybe...”

“Yeah,” echoed Andy.

“Yeah,” Bob echoed Andy.

The spinster cleared her throat. Stamped nervously in regurgitation. Betty was alive, and nobody could understand. There she stood, crawling with saliva. And yet she breathed. Jim got a hardon. So did Andy, Herb, Bob. They at once mated with Betty. Several of the women present gobbled up the subsequent corpses. General copulation ensued. And thus was born the Legend; the inception that night however murky.

It came to pass that well before the light of this Electronic Dark Age was extinguished by the spectacular eruption of WW XL, men learned to survive inserting their penises into vaginas. Also, saliva lost its ability to kill. And every man soon had his own personal mother.

It was part of the nebulosity of that evening in Betty’s kitchen that her name was misconstrued; furthermore that the boy Bill Junior’s curse was liberally interpreted to mean that women could still be manufactured in test tubes. The flesh of female babies born of live mothers began to fetch a high price. Special robots had to be computer-architected to deal with the crisis. But by then war, brought on by the eventual total corruption of the language, had come.

All this today is history. Even the myth.