From: sabbott@nmsu.edu (SDA)
Subject: Recollections of Lady Liberty and the joys of being an American VII
Organization: WHorshipers of Lady LibertY (WHoLLY)
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1992 22:04:28 GMT


It was perhaps inevitable that Ripley should die; the queen
in her chest could not be allowed back to Earth, the queen
would never let her live.  But in the final moments of her
perfect reverse swan dive towards white-hot metal, many in
the vault-like chamber thought they might have seen a faint
blue spark, bordering on the invisible, arc away from her
plummetting form and rise through the ceiling.  None would
include the vision in their reports, none would speak to
the others about it, but all would remember it very clearly
for the rest of their lives.

     		  * * *

Three months later, a small group of gang members hung-out
at the base of the Statue of Liberty.  They called them-
selves "The Lady's Torch" and this was their turf.  By a
fluke, Riko, the red-haired gang-leader was the only one who
witnessed the blue flame descend from the summer prune sky and
strike the Lady's head.  For a moment the sky became blue,
then dissipated into normalcy.  Riko didn't mention it.  There
was partying to do.

Any casual observer would be astonished to learn that, apart from "The
Lady's Torch," Riko was a relatively well-heeled young man. Unbeknownst
to his fellow gang members, Riko would sneak textbooks home from
school to his mother's grimy apartment on the lower east side, where
diligent study would take his mind away from the conspicuous absence
of his father.

Riko had another reason to be literate, and that reason was his
brother Jefe, two years in his grave. Jefe was 15 when he died, gunned
down in a convenience store 2 blocks from home. Jefe had gone in to
buy some milk for his family, and unwittingly intruded on an armed
robbery in progress. The gunman, by some morbid twist of fate, was a
deaf-mute, and had pre-written his requests on 3x5 file cards to save
time during the hold-up. When Jefe walked in obliviously, the man
whirled and held up to Jefe's wide-eyed face a card which read "Hit
the ground, asshole!" The only word Jefe recognized was "asshole."
Jefe, enraged, reached for the lapels of the man's jacket. He never
saw the Beretta 9-mm. Three seconds later Jefe's nearly lifeless body
sought a position of lowest potential energy on the floor of the store
next to the Cheetos, his lifeblood gushing out of 8 wounds to his
abdomen (4 entry, 4 exit). Because he couldn't read.

Riko's vocabulary had improved in recent months.  He now could easily
translate most street signs, including Stop and Yield, though
Railroad Crossing still seemed an insurmountable mountain in the
landscape of his intellect.  He had faith in his own abilities,
however, and looked forward to one day being able to hold his
head up high and recite accurately "The Pledge of Allegiance", for
Riko had another secret, unbeknownst to his fellows, one which
he had held since even before Jefe's tragic death: he was a 
flaming patriot of the first order.  Indeed, he would sneak away
from the gang during the National Anthem at Mets games just to
get near to the flag.  Then, hand at chest, tears often streaming
from his eyes, he would sing:

Oh, say can you see,
By the Don's squirrelly light,
What so proudly we failed,
By the trilobite's last reaming.

By the rocket's deep blare,
The commies bursting in air,
Gave truth through the bright
That George Bush was right.

And on and on....the pride swelling in his chest until he very
nearly choked.  And then, at the peak of the song, as all the
voices in the stadium reached the unnaturally high crescendo, 
he would fart, just audibly, the fervor of his spirit being
so great that control of his sphincter relaxed--just for the
briefest instant--and a tiny odiferous wind would leak out.
He had always been embarrassed by this, from the time he was
a young child.

But flatulence in the zealous heat of patriotic passion was far from
his mind now. Since seeing the strange point of blue light enter the
great green dome of Lady Liberty's head not 2 hours ago, he had grown
more and more anxious. Certainly he continued his farting, more now
really than he ever had before, but he simply didn't think about it.
The excruciatingly loud rap music that his friends were playing while
they partied provided the perfect audio cover for his barely audible
eruptions, and the various assaults on everyone's olfactory abilities
by the various liquid and gaseous substances of abuse and the
emunctory results of their use masked his stench. Something important
was happening to Lady Liberty.

He left the dilapidated cinderblock cubicle that his gang had taken
over for their party, and started off on foot for the 20 minute walk
to the base of Lady Liberty. By the time he reached his destination he
was shivering in the cold March night, and in fact a light, whispy
snow had begun to fall. Hearkening back to his childhood, he threw his
head back and stuck out his tongue to catch a crystalline flake.

When one landed on his tongue, he quickly spat it out onto the ground.
The snowflake tasted musty, almost putrid. He knelt to get a closer
look at the snow that had accumulated on the ground. Slowly, the
realization dawned on him that this was not snow at all. The ground
all around Lady Liberty was being covered by the pale lichens which
had been growing on her coppery surfaces.

He turned his wondering gaze Lady-Libertyward and promptly fell back
on his hands, simultaneously beginning a shockingly loud round of
flatulence. With slow, faltering strokes of her powerful green arms,
the Great Lady was flicking the parasites from her skin, creating a
flurry of algae and fungus.

He knew then with full certainty that Lady Liberty, his life's great
love, had been animated by that mysterious blue light.

     		  * * *

(I am falling.  The beast stirs in me.  The ribs shatter.  I hold
her to me like a newborn child.  She will become lead on this
forsaken prison planet and Earth will never know the horror of
the bitch's children.  Newt is still, now, in final peace.  I fall.
The light grows until it is all.  And then....)

She falls through the white, luminous veil into a grainy, black-and-
white film of democrats, Dealy plaza, witch-trials in some ancient
past.  Then a new light stirs, warm and coaxing, and she is
drawn towards it.  Is this the end?  She begins to see shapes,
shadowy, ghostlike forms in the light.  She feels happy, loved as she
moves towards the light, upward and upward.  Newt is here, and
all the Nostromo crew.  They beckon her towards the light.  But
there is something else as well...something greater than all of
them.  She rises upwards, she is home at last.  But what is that?
It emerges from the shadows, gradually solidifying into....
Ed McMahon.  She is truly home...

Then she holds an envelope in her hand.  She's a winner.  And
suddenly she is accelerating backwards, back through the veil,
back, back, back to Earth.  She is a winner, and it's the
grand prize.

     		 * * *

Riko was unable to contain is patriotic musings. He climbed into the
ventilation-trap busted open earilier by one of his compadres. He was
inside Lady Liberty, but with a alternate vantage from the one
afforded to most tourists. These were the bowels of Lady Liberty, the
grey-black underside of gigantic fittings, valves and galley-walks. A
throbbing-hissing sound rattled throughout the Giegeresque
construction. Ventilation feeder tubes spiraled up to her torso.
moisture collected on the pipes delivering the wastes of the visitors
traveled back down. Occasional windows into the ever-running furnace
provided quiet orange glows in otherwise dimly-lit recesses around the
complex.

Riko climbed upward.

     		 * * *

The view from outside was astonishing. More accustomed now to the
hugely powerful nuclear machinery afforded her by Lady Liberty's
structure, Ripley took her first steps. Triumph-sized clods of earth
and concrete were torn up and flung aside as her massive feet freed
themselves from their I-beam anchoring posts. Ripley couldn't help but
be reminded of her long hours using the loaders with the Marines, the
same muscle-amplification machines she used against the queen. The
sensations were similar, although now it was her mental energies that
were amplified; she had no body now except Lady Liberty.

Ripley stopped and clutched the hem of her robe, bringing her graceful
arms up and over her head. The robe flowed up and over her head,
shredding itself on the spikes of her headdress which she had only
just noticed. The copper of her panties and form-hugging tank top was
completely devoid of oxidation, retaining its sheen and fairly glowing
in the night air. The sweet-sharp smell of ozone was everywhere.

By sheer force of habit, Ripley scanned the terrain with Liberty's
eyes looking for weapons. Then, in a single cold moment of paralyzing,
ghastly terror, Ripley became aware that there was a living thing
inside her.

     		 * * *

She was vexed.  What had happened?  How could she be here, alongside
Manhattan in a huge statue?  And if she really had died, how could the
bitch have come along for the ride?  It was a highly unusual set of
circumstances, she knew, but she had certainly dealt with worse in her
last three encounters with the creatures.

There was something slightly different about what was inside her now,
however, for she didn't feel threatened.  In fact, she somewhat
enjoyed the movement of the thing around inside her.  It seemed to
provide a tingly sensation in her groin area.  She stopped, quieted
and let the sensations ripple through her giant copper form.
Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, very nice indeed.

     		 * * *

Riko had stripped off his clothes and was springing up the stairs with
insane abandon.  He felt enervated by the form around him for some
strange reason, and though the farting would not abate, the odor had
lost some of its rankness.

Breathing hard now, he stopped climbing at a steel deck somewhere in
Ripley's torso. In front of him was a black steel cage with a heavily
bolted door. Thousands of lights blinked on and off from within the
cage, and a warm equipment hum vibrated the steel floor beneath his
naked feet. He reached for the doorknob...

     		 * * *

Ripley felt it with utter clarity the moment Riko's hand touched
something deep inside her. Yes, she knew his name then, knew
everything about him.

But more than anything else, she knew she must let him in...

     		 * * *

The door swung open on well-oiled hinges at Riko's barest touch, and
he stepped into the cage. He didn't know it at the time, but the room
contained the computers which controlled Lady Liberty's massive and
powerful nuclear reactors. Seated now at the helm of Ripley's heart,
he had full reign over the movements of the barium control rods
through the reactor core.

     		 * * *

General Milton J. Forcerod, hagridden commander of the First 
Tactical Nuclear Space Wing checked the readings one more time.
He had to be absolutely certain of this.  In Manhattan, a
radioactive source had suddenly appeared to the unblinking
gaze of the satelites.

Gen. Forcerod broke the seal on the PHONE, the candy-apple-red phone
that had never been used.  A tired old man with an underdeveloped
conscience picked up the other line. 

"Sir, we are picking up something rather bizarre"

"Is it that pesky Saddam?  He's gotta learn to quit messing with the 
big boys now . . ."

"Mr President, we have picked up a radioactive. . ."

". . . I'm personally fed up with that darn bully and I think the American
people are fed up with . . ."

" . . . around Manhattan, we can send a recon. . ."

" . . . I'm gonna press that red button marked Iraq, I think history
will show I'm not a wimp and the American People are not wimps. . ."

The phone went dead.  General Forcerod hung up in haggard dismay.

     		   * * *

To say that Ripley brought about the end of the world, the same
world she had fought the aliens so valiantly across half the
universe for, would be to misplace responsibility.  She is, if
anything, simply guilty of perpetuating an unreal mythology about
her continued existence which became such a preoccupation for
so many young men who worshipped her pantied, manish person, that
she was suddenly projected into their metaphorical ultimate
fantasy.  It is clear, however, that with the conflagration that
occured, spreading outwards from the suburbs of Baghdad, next
evaporating Tel Aviv, then shredding all of Manhattan and
ultimately the entire world, that Ripley was finally dead, for
those adolescent minds which held her flashed out of existence
too.  

The universe is a very quiet place now.  Only weak
electromagnetic spew from Earth remains of that once very-well
entertained civilization which appeared to worship their
nervous systems as gods.  It was a strange preoccupation, where
space horrors and crafty survivalist women in panties were
more important than their own starving children, where
for the price of one motion picture thousands of dying could
be saved.  And one thing is now clear:

Ripley is dead.

<mark:ted:owee:sean>

--

	\\\\\sean/////
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