Snake Eyes | Page 6

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,