Red Mars (52 page)

He had directed the installation of Underhill’s security system just a few years before. Pauline still had all the plans and codes, and it didn’t take long for her to replace the image on his wrist with that of the suite outside his room, seen from above. The suite’s lights were on, and in the camera’s sweeps he could see that his door was shut; that was all.

He let his wrist fall to his side and thought it over. Five minutes passed before he raised it again and began giving instructions through Pauline to the Underhill security system. Possession of the codes allowed him to instruct the entire camera system to erase its surveillance tapes, and then to run them in an hour loop rather than the usual eight-hours. Then he instructed two of the cleaning robots to come to his room and open its door. While they did that he stood shivering, waiting for them to make their slow roll through the vaults. When they opened his door, he saw them through Pauline’s little eye; light poured into the room and momentarily blazed, then adjusted, and he had a much clearer view. Yes, it was a man on his bed. John’s breath went shallow. He teleoperated the robots, using the minute button toggles on his wristpad. It was a jerky procedure, but if lifting the man woke him up, so much the better.

It didn’t. The man lolled down on both sides of the robots’ cradling arms, which lifted him with their algorithmic delicacy. A body hanging down. The man was dead.

John deliberately took a deep breath, then held it and continued the teleoperation, directing the first robot to deposit the body in the second robot’s big trash hopper. Sending the robots back down the hall to their storage vault was easy. Several people walked by them as they rolled along, but there was nothing he could do about that. The body was not visible except from above, and hopefully no one was paying enough attention to remember the robots later.

When he got them in their storage room, he hesitated. Should he take the body to the incinerators in the Alchemists’ Quarter? But no— now that it was out of his room, he didn’t need to get rid of the body. In fact he would need it later. For the first time he wondered who it was. He directed the first robot to put its extensor eye against the body’s right wrist, and read with its magnetic imager. It took a long time for the eye to hit the right spot on the wrist. Then it held fast. The tiny tag that everyone had implanted on a wristbone held information in the standard dot language, and it only took a minute for Pauline to get an ID. Yashika Mui, UNOMA auditor, based at Underhill, arrived 2050. An actual person. A man who might have lived a thousand years.

John began to shiver. He leaned against the glazed blue brick wall of Underhill. It would be an hour before he could go inside, or a little less. Impatiently he pushed off and walked around the quadrant. It took about fifteen minutes to walk around it usually, but now he found he was doing it in ten. After the second turn he walked over to the trailer park.

Only two of the old trailers were still there, and they were apparently abandoned or used only for storage. Figures loomed out of the night dust between them, and for a second he was afraid, but they passed on by. He returned to the quadrant and circled it again, then walked out the path to the Alchemists’ Quarter. He stood looking at the antiquated complex of tubes and piping and squat white buildings, all covered with their black calligraphic equations. He thought of their first years. And now it had come to this, in what seemed the blink of an eye. In the gloom of the Great Storm. Civilization, corruption, crisis. Murder on Mars. He gritted his teeth.

An hour had passed, it was nine p.m. He went back to the lock and went inside, took off his helmet and walker and boots in the changing room, and stripped, went into the showers and showered, dried off and put on a jumper, combed his hair. He took a deep breath and walked around the south side of the quadrant and up through the vaults to the one with his room. As he was opening his door he was not surprised to see four of the UNOMA investigators appear, but he tried to act surprised when they ordered him to stop. “What’s this?” he said.

It wasn’t Houston or Chang, but rather three men, with one of the women from that first group at Low Point. The men clustered at his sides without really responding to him, and pulled his door completely open and two of them went inside. John controlled the urge to punch them, or shout at them, or laugh at the expressions that came over their faces when they saw that his room was empty; he merely stared curiously at them, and tried to limit himself to the irritation he would have shown had he been ignorant of what was going on. This irritation would have been considerable of course, and once he opened that door inside himself it was hard indeed to keep all his fury from banging through, hard to keep it to an innocent’s level; they had to be snapped at as if they were overzealous policemen, rather than assaulted as murderous functionaries.

In their confusion at the unexpected situation he managed to drive them off with a few biting sentences, and when he had closed the door on them he stood in the middle of his room. “Pauline, transmit what’s happening on the security system to yourself, please, and record. Show me whatever cameras have those people.”

So Pauline tracked them. It only took a couple of minutes for them to go to the security control room, where they were joined by Chang and others. They went after the camera packs. John sat at Pauline’s screen and watched right along with them as they ran the loops back and found that they were only an hour long, and that the events of the afternoon had been erased. That would give them something to think about. He smiled grimly and told Pauline to get off the system.

A wave of exhaustion swept through him. It was only eleven, but all adrenaline and the morning’s dose of omegendorph had drained out of him, and he was tired. He sat on his bed, but then remembered what had last been there, and got up. In the end he slept on the floor.

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 eyed him warily. The diagnostic machinery was as good at autopsy as anything else, maybe better; tests of 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 against 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 gave 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 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 people’s 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. 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
Ares’
. Without a heat shield the aerobraking would burn it up. All looked well for a MOI ETA about six months away.
That
was 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 omegendorph 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 lightbulbs 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.

So John stayed and talked with the Egyptians for a while, and when he left them he was feeling better. He wandered back to his vault, listening to the rowdy voices pouring into the hallway from every room; shouts, shrieks, happy scientist talk, “these things are such halophytes that they don’t like brine because there’s too much water in it,” peals of laughter.