He was awakened in the timeslip by Spencer Jackson, with news of a body discovered in a robot hopper. He went and stood wearily beside Spencer in the clinic, staring at the body of Yashika Mui while several of the investigators eyes him warily. The diagnostic machinery was as good at autopsy as anything else, maybe better; tests of minute samples were indicating a blood coagulant. Somberly John ordered a full criminal autopsy; Mui’s body and clothes had to be scanned, and all microscopic particles read again his genome, and all foreign particles read against the list of people who were currently in Underhill. John stared at the UNOMA investigators as he made this instruction, but they didn’t blink. Probably they had been wearing gloves and walkers, or teleoperated the whole thing as he had. He had to turn away to his hide his disgust; he couldn’t let on that he knew!
But then of course they knew that they had put the body there; and so they must suspect that he was the one who had removed it, and erased the camera tapes. So they already knew that he knew, or suspected he did. But they couldn’t be sure; and there was no reason to give anything away.
An hour later he went back to his room, and lay on the floor again. Although he was still exhausted, he could no longer sleep. He stared at the ceiling, thinking it over. Thinking over everything that he had learned.
Near dawn he felt he had things sorted out. He gave up on sleep, and got up to go out for another walk; he needed to be outside, away from the human world and all its sickening corruption, out into the great rush of the wind, made so dramatically visible by the storm’s flying dust.
But when he got out of the lock door, there were stars overhead. The complete net of them-all the thousands burning as of old, without the slightest twinkle or flicker, the faint ones so dense that the black sky itself appeared slightly whitish, as if the whole sky were the Milky Way.
When he had recovered from his astonishment, and the almost-forgotten wonder of the stars, he got on his intercom and called in the news.
It caused pandemonium; people heard and woke their friends, and rushed down to the changing rooms to grab a walker before the supply was exhausted. And the lock doors started opening and spewing out crowds.
The sky to the east turned a blackish red, and then lightened quickly. The whole sky shifted to a dark rose shade, and then began to glow. The stars disappeared by the hundreds, until only Venus and the Earth hung in the east, over a growing intensity of light. The sky in the east grew brighter, and brighter again, until it seemed brighter than day could ever get; even behind faceplates their eyes watered, and some cried out over the common band at the sight. There were figures scampering around, the intercom babbling, the sky growing impossibly brighter, and brighter, and brighter yet, until it seemed it would burst, it pulsated with glowing pink light, the dots that were Venus and Earth overwhelmed by it. And then the sun cracked the horizon and fountained across the plain like a thermonuclear bomb, and the people roared and jumped up and down and ran among the long black shadows of the rocks and the buildings. All east-facing walls were great blocks of Fauvist color, their glaze mosaics stunning, hard to look at directly. The air was clear as glass and indeed seemed a solid substance, imbuing the things stuck in it with razor-edged clarity.
John walked out away from the crowds, east toward Chernobyl. He turned his intercom off. The sky was a darker pink than he remembered, with a touch of purple at the zenith. Everyone in Underhill was going crazy; many of the people there had never seen the sun shine on Mars, and no doubt it felt like they had lived their whole lives in the Great Storm. And now it was over, and they were wandering out in the sunshine drunk with it, slipping on pink ice left and right, getting in yellow snowball fights, climbing the frosted pyramids. When John saw that he turned, and went up the steps of the last pyramid himself, to have a look at the tors and hollows around Underhill. They were somewhat frosted and silted over, but otherwise just the same. He turned on the common band, but turned it back off; people still inside were howling for walkers, and no one outside was paying any attention to them. It had been an hour since sunrise, one cried, though John found that hard to believe. He shook his head; the raucous voices, and the memory of the body on his bed, made it hard to feel much joy in the end of the storm.
Eventually he went back inside, and gave his walker over to a pair of women his size who were squabbling over who got to use it next, and he went down to the comm center and called Sax in Echus Overlook. When he got him he congratulated him on the end of the storm.
Sax waved this away brusquely, as if it had happened years before. “They’ve boarded Amor 2051B,” he said. This was the ice asteroid they had found for insertion into Martian orbit. They were in the process of installing rockets on it, which would knock it onto a course that would bring it in on a trajectory similar to the the Ares ’; without a heat shield the aerobraking would burn it up. All looked well for a MOI ETA about six months away. Thatwas the big news, Sax implied in his blinking, calm way. The Great Storm was history.
John had to laugh. But then he thought of Yashika Mui, and he told Sax about it because he wanted someone else’s celebration to be ruined as well. Sax only blinked. ““They’re getting serious,” he finally said. Disgusted, John said good-bye and got off.
He wandered back out through the vaults, disturbed by a fiercely clashing mix of good and bad emotions. He returned to his room and took an omegandorph and one of the new pandorphs Spencer had given him, and then he went out into the quadrant’s central atrium, and wandered among the plants, all skinny storm spawn, troping toward the light bulbs running overhead. The sky was still a clear dark pink, still very bright. A lot of the people who had gone out first were now back and in the atrium between the rows of crops, partying. He ran into a few friends, some acquaintances, mostly strangers. He went back into the vaults, through rooms full of strangers who sometimes cheered when he walked in. If they yelled “Speech!” long enough he would stand on a chair and rattle something off, feeling the endorphins, which today were rendered unpredictable in their effect by the thought of the murdered man. Sometimes he was pretty vehement, and he never knew what he was going to say until it came out of him. We saw John Boone drunk on his ass, they would say, the day the Great Storm ended. Fine, he thought, let them say what they wanted. It never mattered what he did anymore anyway, as far as the legend was concerned.
One room contained a crowd of Egyptians, not like his Sufis but orthodox Moslems, talking like the wind and drinking cups of coffee, high on caffeine and sunlight, flashing white smiles under their moustaches, extremely cordial for once, in fact pleased to see him there. He warmed to that, and flying on the momentum of the day he said, “Look, we’re part of a new world. If you don’t base your actions on martian reality then you become a kind of schizophrenic, with your body on one planet and your spirit on another. No society split like that can function for long.”
“Well, well,” one of them said with a smile. “You must understand we have traveled before. We are a traveling people. But wherever we are, Mecca is our spirit’s home. We could fly to the other side of the universe and that would still be true.”
Nothing to say to that; and in fact such direct honesty was so much cleaner than what he had been dealing with through the night that he nodded, and said, “I see. I understand.” Compare that after all to the hypocrisy of the West, where people talked of profit at prayer breakfasts, people who couldn’t articulate a single belief they had; people who thought their values were physical constants, who would say “That’s just the way things are,” like Frank so often did.