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.