Red Mars(147)

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.