The Lowest Heaven

ASHEN LIGHT ^{ARCHIE BLACK}

The village of Hartmann stands on the high sorghum plains of Ishtar Terra, a lonesome area that other Venusians call “out there.” This area of the IT is known as the Lakshmi Planum. It is a little less that two and a half thousand kilometers across, and surrounded on all sides by mountains◦– the four main mountain ranges found on the planet. When, in 2392, planetary engineers finally liquified Venus’ core, kickstarting the planet’s dynamo and strengthening its magnetic field enough to maintain an atmosphere and make terraforming feasible, the decision was made to begin the planet-wide colonization process on Venus’ highland regions. Aphrodite Terra, warmer, larger and topographically rougher than its sister, was dedicated to mining. Ishtar Terra’s Lakshmi Planum, with its smooth plains and gently rolling wrinkle ridges, was deemed more suitable for agriculture. Following successful completion of the terraforming process, farming colonies were migrated to the IT from Earth. They dispersed to create widespread, albeit close–knit, communities, centered around small towns scattered seemingly at random across the planum.

Hartmann was founded in 2448, one of a hundred roughly nucleated villages developed on the IT by the Venusian terraformers. Farms, it had been decided, would most closely mimic the comfortable terrestrial existences that the colonists would be forsaking and create the powerful sense of community the terraformers believed necessary to their long-term colonial agenda: the creation of a self-sustaining second Earth.

Hartmann is a strange assortment of buildings, none more than three stories tall, and home to only about two hundred and fifty people. It is, generously, a suburb of Riccioli, a small city twenty–five kilometers away, but, by 2519, no one from Riccioli went to Hartmann, unless to visit relatives, and most of the citizens of Hartmann tended to have little interest in Riccioli◦– except Hartmann’s teenagers, of course, who were drawn to Riccioli, Hartmann’s only significant neighbor for hundreds of kilometers, like moths to a candle’s flame.

Despite the success of the terraforming project, and particularly the terraformers’ crowning achievement, the Overdome, an artificial layer between Venus’ thermosphere and mesosphere, Hartmann’s fortunes have risen and fallen with the same unpredictable regularity of any other farming community’s. Although the Overdome, which mimics a consistent, Earth–like cycle of day and night and maintains Venus’ reasonably Earth–like atmospheric conditions, assists in regulating temperature and average rainfall on the Lakshmi Planum, it was nevertheless designed to allow for ‘natural’ variations, with the result that the Lakshmi Planum is prone to drought. Fortunately, however, the variation of sorghum that is grown in and around Hartmann was designed to be spectacularly drought–resistant, and so the little community is well enough off, if not prodigiously wealthy. They live their lives solidly, predictably, and comfortably. “No better place to live,” says the sign on the road leading into town. And, indeed, it’s a refrain often repeated after Hartmann’s citizens win pie–making contests at the county fair, or following a satisfying meal at Mrs. McCallan’s Shumai Shack.

Until one morning in early November of 2519, few Venusians◦– in fact, few Ishtarians◦– had ever heard of Hartmann. At the time, those few souls awake in Hartmann at that hour saw it◦– the pale green light that warmed the dark sky and, all told, heralded the end of eight lives. But afterward the townspeople, no longer content with Hartmann’s comfortable isolation, began to take stock of their lives, their decisions. To wonder if, perhaps, there wasn’t a better place to live, after all.

Michelle Keck was forty–nine years old. A third–generation Venusian, she had been born in IT’s capital city, Helios, the only daughter of a banker and a lawyer. Despite her white–collar upbringing, Keck found herself drawn to Lakshmi’s wide–open spaces and, to the surprise of all, took her degrees in geoplanetary physics and agriculture. While at college she was introduced to Franz Van, the younger brother of a classmate, and found herself immediately drawn to the sensitive young man, whose retiring personality and love of the ancient poets contrasted so starkly with her own robust practicality. Following a swift courtship, the two married and left Helios upon her graduation. Keck took a farming apprenticeship in Riccioli and, within five years, had taken over management of one of Lakshmi’s larger farming collectives. Keck, however, wished to own her own farm. After saving up enough money to buy property outside Hartmann, Shelly and Franz packed up their young children and Franz’s beloved collection of ancient books and moved to the little town. They lived in a two–room apartment above the local grocery store while Keck oversaw the construction of their house, out on a parcel of land she’d taken to calling Blackacre. In fall of 2507, the family had installed itself in its new home, a large and comfortable farmhouse set far off the road, down an avenue of London plane trees, their growth artificially accelerated to provide shade within a year of planting.

Hartmann agreed with Keck, whom many townsfolk already knew personally from her activities in Riccioli. After leaving the farming collective, Keck took a chair on the collective’s governing board and remained deeply involved in Riccioli’s politics. In Hartmann, her first act, after purchasing Blackacre, was to join the local council. Within six months she had established herself as a likable, dependable, and recognizable personality in Hartmann’s close–knit community.

While the relocation suited Keck and her children, Franz had already begun to struggle. Rural life did not suit him quite as neatly as it had his wife, and while he found Riccioli difficult, life in Hartmann was even more of a struggle. The shy, sensitive man, so different from his outgoing partner in both temperament and personality, began to withdraw, spending long hours in his study translating passages from the Vedas with, he claimed, an eye toward publishing the definitive examination of the ancient texts. His databites grew and grew, but the intended book never materialized. People in Hartmann spoke gently of him among themselves, generally with reference to his wife and children, and praising Keck’s unflagging support of and loyalty to a man who had, it was clear, would never realize his potential.

The younger Kecks, meanwhile, received no such side–eyed commentary, being both intelligent and well–liked children. Although the son, Hershel, took a little after his father in terms of his interests in ancient works, he was, by his fifteenth birthday, a healthy young man with a string of accolades, both intellectual and active, to his name. His sister, Jen, shared her mother’s robust enthusiasm for life and, in her sixteenth year, was both class president and on a clear path towards becoming class valedictorian.

By 2519, the Keck family was firmly established in Hartmann, their farm having grown to more than a thousand acres, and employing no fewer than eighteen laborers. Although by no means the wealthiest family in town, the Kecks were nonetheless comfortable. Shelly was known for, among other things, her habit of never paying for anything in cash. She claimed that using credits for everything, down to the smallest purchases, was the most efficient way for her to keep track of her expenditures. “I remember the lean years,” she often explained, “when I had to budget down to the last penny. I picked up the habit of only paying in credits then, and it’s served me well ever since.” Although her children found her insistence on paying in credits only◦– including their allowances◦– frustrating, they, and the rest of Hartmann, nevertheless accepted the habit with a shrug and a shake of the head. After all, Keck was one of Hartmann’s most prominent citizens; considering all she did for the local economy, she could be allowed her few eccentricities.

And, moreover, considering the number of drifters who wander the IT, robbing the occasional isolated farmhouse, it was only reasonable to keep the cash on hand to a minimum. Although Hartmann was itself so isolated that it entertained very little crime, there was no reason not to be sensible about the issue.

Sloane Deeds was eighteen years old in November of 2519. Born in Kitt, a hardscrabble community on the slopes of Ioligam, a mountain in the Maxwell Montes on the eastern edge of the IT, Sloane was the outcome of the short union between two prospectors. Initially developed as an outpost to monitor volcanic activity in the years following the dynamo’s reactivation, the town of Kitt had, by the end of the twenty–fifth century, been entirely abandoned by its scientific personnel. By the year of Sloane’s birth, Kitt was made up of no more than twenty–seven souls, their number seasonally padded by itinerant prospectors. Sloane’s own parents had both abandoned the town by 2512, leaving their daughter in the care of a local who abused the girl physically and sexually. One stormy night in 2516, the then–fourteen year old stole a knife from a neighbor and hid it under her bed. On the night of April seventh, 2516, she stabbed him five times while he slept and fled the town. It took her twelve days to hitchhike to Helios, during which time she first met Griffith Sinkman.

Griffith was twenty–seven in 2516, the second of five children born to an Aphrodite Terra couple. Aphrodite Terra had, in the decades since the dynamo’s activation and the installation of the Overdome, developed from a large–scale mining colonization project into the most notorious resort settlement of the inner planets. The Sinkman family was, like most residents of the AT, peripherally involved in the resort/casino–driven economy, the family business being a small motel on the outskirts of Eos. All five Sinkman children received decent primary educations, but only Griffith, with his love of reading and movie–star good looks, seemed to be college material. So his mother and father invested their small savings in Griffith’s potential and sent him to the University of Aphrodite Terra, Aethon. Eight months later Griffith was back home, recuperating from the helibike accident that had nearly killed him. When it was discovered that he had been on academic probation for a semester, and was near to flunking out, Griffith’s parents withdrew him from the university. Following his recovery, a process of nearly a year, Griffith, scarred and newly jittery, stole what remained of his parents’ savings and left home.

For nearly three years Griffith moved from city to city on the AT, regularly landing jobs and just as regularly losing them, thanks to his violent and unpredictable temper. In 2512, the same year that Sloane’s parents abandoned her in Kitt, Griffith stole an old woman’s purse, knocking her down and breaking her hip in the process. When he was caught, seven hours later, it was discovered the old woman had had only four dollars in change, half of which Griffith had already spent on gum. Griffith was sent up to Garden City, a prison on the outskirts of Aethon, and served four years.

Upon his release, Griffith returned home, borrowed $300 from his family, and took a transport to the IT in violation of his parole. Within four hours of his arrival in Helios, Griffith had stolen a car and driven out into the Lakshmi Planum. It was on one of those long, empty roads, about a week after he’d first landed on the IT, that he picked up a fourteen–year–old girl who was looking for a ride to Helios.

Sloane and Griffith were immediately attracted to one another. Sloane, who’d never been more than twenty kilometers from Kitt, was enchanted by the handsome older man’s descriptions of the bright lights of the AT: the glittering casino–cities, the tropical island–resorts situated off the coast of the AT’s artificial sea, the endless excitement. For his part, Griffith was delighted by the pretty girl’s instantaneous adoration. The two became lovers within days of meeting, and spent no more than two years apart for the rest of their lives.

Hartmann on Thursday, November 8, 2519, dawned clear, cold and bright. Venus’ terraformers had made every effort to mimic the Earth’s abiotic environment, so fall in Hartmann is as fall on a planet 261 million kilometers away. November is the last gasp of a dying year; the days are short and dry and the light is pure, cold white. The few leaves left on the trees rattle in the light breeze and the world feels used up and empty. Shelly Keck stood on a low hill looking out over her lands, watching the birds flutter among the plowed and broken grain fields. The wildlife of the IT were introduced by the terraformers to maintain the illusion of Earth for the first colonists, and had adapted more successfully than anyone could have hoped; on that cold day, Keck might have seen up to fifty-seven distinct species of bird alone.

That morning Keck stood, calculating the profit the year’s harvest would bring her. Her daughter had received her early acceptance to UIT the week before, and Hershel had already expressed interest in attending the more expensive private University of Helios. In the unlikely event that neither child received any scholarships, Keck wanted to be certain that she had saved enough to send both to whichever college they chose to attend. She had been speaking of the cost of college education to other Hartmann parents nearly non–stop since Jen’s acceptance letter arrived. She planned a trip into town that day, to go over her finances with her accountant and discuss whether a new thresher was a practicable investment, or whether she ought to wait another year.

But this early morning stroll was a daily habit; up before dawn no matter what the season, Keck would spend the first hour of the day walking her property. “It makes me feel that I’ll catch any problem, anything not right, first thing,” she would explain. “And,” she would chuckle, “it lets everyone else get up without having me harangue them.” And so the day began as such days always did: Keck took her constitutional, her husband woke and retreated to his study, and her children got ready for school. They carpooled to Riccioli with one of Hershel’s schoolmates, a young woman named Alia Goya, whose mother was the band teacher and could be depended upon to get the children there on time. Jen and Hershel, the latter of whom had cherished a secret crush on Alia for at least a year, were, as usual, waiting outside at 6.50 when the Goyas pulled up.

At the same time, on the other side of the planum, Sloane and Griffith were sitting in a diner on the outskirts of Helios, eating pancakes and discussing the day’s plans. Sloane, who had never left the IT and wished desperately to do so, had instigated an argument with Griffith two months before. Despite three years spent roaming the Lakshmi Planum, engaging in both casual work and casual crime, the two were once again down to their last dollars. This, Sloane had noted, made even taking a transport to the AT impossible, much less would it allow for the life of sun–bathing on the resort islands off the AT coast she had dreamed of since first meeting Griffith. Following their argument the two had drifted apart for a few days, until Griffith tracked her down and promised her a big score, a sure–fire half–million in cash. A cell–mate up at Garden City had told him about the rural towns on the outskirts of the planum, in the west, about as far from Helios as you could get without leaving the IT. “All those farmers, they don’t trust banks,” he had said, leaning forward and dropping his voice. Sloane hung on to his every word. The itinerant prospectors she’d known had hoarded what little cash they had, afraid that putting it in a bank would result in taxes, in fines, in who knew what else. “So they just keep all their cash in their houses,” Griffith continued. “And I know one where it’s just a rich old man living by himself. Richest old man in the area, apparently. So we get ourselves an alibi◦– I already got one cooked up◦– and we zip over. Grab the cash, get back to Helios, and take the very next transport out.”

That morning, over their pancakes, the two went over the plan for the last time.

“New Tahiti by tomorrow?” Sloane asked.

“New Tahiti by tomorrow,” he said. “Only, baby, no witnesses.”

Sloane shrugged.

Jen and Hershel made their separate ways home that night. Jen spent the afternoon studying for a calculus final with a friend in the school library, and Hershel hitched a ride home with a teammate on the school’s varsity baseball team. Jen finished late, and her friend tried to talk her into staying in Riccioli for the evening, but Jen’s father had called earlier to say a promisingly large envelope had come for her from another college, and Jen wanted to get home and open it. Her friend, who had known Jen since the fifth grade, would never forgive herself for not insisting that Jen spend the night. But Jen insisted, and took the bus back to Hartmann where she was given a lift home by Mychael Ticoe, a family acquaintance who happened to be passing by when Jen stepped off the bus. He drove them slowly along the darkened avenue of plane trees, wary of hitting rabbits or deer, and dropped Jen off in front of the house◦– waiting until she opened the door and waved at him before putting his car into reverse and driving away. He recalled nothing unusual about the house. It was ten thirty.

At about 2.30 am, the small hours of Friday, November ninth, Alvin Go got up to use the bathroom. Go lived in a cabin approximately two kilometers to the east from Blackacre, down a long, tree–lined drive. He remembered well that the dark living room of his cabin was lit with a soft greenish light, that he looked out the window at the pale glow coming from the west and wondered at it. “There were no clouds in the sky,” he said later. “But I didn’t think too hard about that. I was glad I was awake to see it. I just thought it was the ashen light.”

That Friday, the ninth of November, 2519, was another gloriously bright day on the high plains of Ishtar Terra. Before the activation of the dynamo in 2392, Venus had the slowest rotation period of any planet in the solar system. A Venusian day lasted two hundred and forty–three Earth days, nearly twenty days longer than the time it took to complete an orbit around the sun. Activating Venus’ dynamo required solidifying some portion of the entirely liquid core of the planet, and restarting the convection of liquid iron from the core to the surface◦– the geodynamo◦– and the creation of an artificial atmosphere◦– the Overdome. Activation, it was proposed, would speed up the planet’s rotation, creating not just shorter days but, eventually, a self–sustaining atmosphere. Twenty–five years after activation, Venus’ rotation period was a quarter of what it had been: approximately sixty Earth days. The Overdome was programmed to simulate a conventional Earth sidereal day of about twenty–four hours, but some concession to Venus’ unique rotational properties, it was felt, must be maintained. Venus is the only planet in the solar system to rotate in a clockwise direction, so that, to a person standing on the planet’s surface, the sun appears to rise in the west and set in the east. The Overdome was, therefore, set to mimic the same pattern; on Venus, now as then, the sun appears to rise in the west and sets in the east.

The Keck children were not standing outside waiting when the Goyas pulled up to the family farm at 6.50 am, on Friday the ninth of November. It was early, and the shadows the farmhouse cast were long, stretching east across the gold and brown fields. Alia hopped out and rang the doorbell several times, but to no avail. She tried calling both Jen and Hershel, but both times got only their voicemail. Although the Keck children were dependable, it was not entirely unreasonable to suppose that something unexpected had happened◦– perhaps Shelly Keck’s elderly mother had taken sick in the night, and the family had left without thinking to let the Goyas know. Or perhaps there had simply been a prior engagement◦– they’d had to leave unusually early, say◦– and they’d neglected to mention their plans to her. Alia got back into the car and drove to school with her mother.

Both Jen and Hershel were absent from school that day without an excuse. When the school’s secretary called their mother, the phone went straight to voicemail. The secretary made a note to call again on Monday.

No one saw Shelly Keck in Hartmann all day Friday, but that was not, in and of itself, notable. Keck’s visits to town were regular but not so frequent that she was missed. And her husband rarely ventured off the Keck property; no one remarked his absence.

It wasn’t until Monday the twelfth of November that anyone became concerned. The Goyas called before driving to Blackacre, and again got only voicemail. Both mother and daughter left concerned messages, but did not drop by the farm on their way to school. The Keck children were, again, absent without excuse or explanation; the school secretary called every phone number she had for the Keck family, and received no answer. Most alarmingly, perhaps, was when Shelly Keck missed a council meeting on Monday evening. Shelly, who had never missed a single appointment for anything, as far as anyone could remember, was a no–show.

Friday the ninth of November found Sloane and Griffith disembarking from an all–night transport to the AT. Caps from the transport hall’s CCTV show the pair red–eyed and slouching, staggering as though very tired. Neither carries much baggage.

They landed at the major transport hall in Eos, Griffith’s hometown, and made their way to his family’s motel. His parents and one sibling remained at the Eos Express Inn, his mother and brother operating the rundown little motel to the best of their abilities while his father, half–paralyzed by stroke, spent his days propped up in their private quarters, watching TV. Griffith introduced his family to Sloane, and promised to repay them the three hundred dollars he’d borrowed three years earlier. His mother in particular noted how “high on themselves” the pair seemed. Sloane in particular “wouldn’t stop talking about New Tahiti. How they were going to go there and stay as long as three months, or maybe forever.” When questioned as to how the pair could afford such an extravagant trip as Sloane proposed, Griffith smiled his big, bright, handsome smile, and told his mother not to worry about it.

The couple spent four nights with Griffith’s family. The first day there they vanished for about an hour, taking their luggage with them. Griffith claimed he wanted to show Sloane around the motel complex. His mother remembered that they had very little baggage despite having been living on another continent for three years and, she noted particularly, almost no clothing. Griffith took showers almost compulsively during his stay in Eos, she recalled, three or four times a day. “And they were tired, both of them,” she maintained. “Slept twelve, fourteen hours that first day.”

On November the thirteenth, Griffith borrowed another four hundred and fifty dollars from his mother and took off, Sloane by his side. She didn’t expect to hear from them again anytime soon, or to see the money she’d given him. “But he’s my son,” she said. “I gave him what I had to give.”

On Tuesday, November thirteenth, at 8.15 am, the secretary at Riccioli High School called the county sheriff, Jamee Philips, to report the continued truancy of the Keck children. The day before Philips had taken a call from Mrs. Hope Goya, the band teacher at Riccioli High, reporting that she and her daughter were concerned about the inexplicably unreachable Keck family. By 9.30 that same morning, Sheriff Philips was pulling up the long, plane tree–shadowed drive that led to Blackacre.

Sloane and Griffith arrived in New Tahiti on Tuesday, November thirteenth, on a 4.32 pm transport. New Tahiti is, as the name suggests, a chain of spectacular resort islands off the coast of the AT, modeled to resemble their eponymous Earth siblings. Although the archipelago, designed and built at astronomical cost in the middle of the twenty–fifth century, is currently in dire economic straights, it was, in 2519, still a compelling vacation destination for a certain socioeconomic class. For Sloane Deeds, who had known only the rocky mountains and endless plains of the IT, New Tahiti represented the greatest achievement of human endeavor. She had dreamed of the turquoise seas and balmy tropical warmth the nights she spent shivering in the Maxwell Montes, imagined herself living in a place where perfectly ripe fruit with names from a fairytale◦– mango, persimmon, breadfruit, cloudberry, starfruit, papaya◦– could be plucked from the trees if she grew hungry. A place where she could spread a blanket across sand as white as sugar and fall asleep in the sun; where she could float among a million tropical fish with extraordinary names: clownfish, manta ray, golden shark, butterfly fish, flying fish, electric eel. For years Sloane had cherished two small notebooks, filled with lists of words: the names of flowers, of constellations, of cities in Europe, in Asia, in Australia. Her handwriting, round and childishly uncertain, began to fade underneath the repeated thumbing of the pages, for she would read her lists to herself, whispering the names, until she had them memorized, and then began again.

Griffith, who liked to read and was proud of his vocabulary, generally spoke to Sloane, as to everyone else, in a mannered and slightly pretentious fashion. He encouraged Sloane’s recitations, telling her that she was a true innocent, a daughter of nature, filled with an unsullied childlike wonder. He would recite poetry to her◦– Kerouac and Tettenar and Ginsberg, Bukowski and Gorail and Khayyam◦– to which she would listen with sparkling eyes, forever uncertain about what such a man could find to love in her. And yet Sloane absorbed Griffith’s gentle condescension, believed him when he told her she was purer than any other girl he’d ever known, that her upbringing, rough as it had been, made her real in a way other people couldn’t ever be◦– people who passed their long, empty days unaware of the preternatural wonder of the Venusian world. “We’re living on a planet that couldn’t support life for billions of years,” he told her one evening. “The days and nights aren’t even real; they’re an lie, a lie within a lie. Everyone here lives these tiny lies all day long, thinking their petty lives and jobs and cares and thoughts and worries matter, and all of that within this one bigger lie. This willful delusion that day and night are the same here as they were on Earth. And all of these things together make them think everything matters. That it all means something, baby. Except we know the truth. We’re the only free ones on this whole planet, because we see through the deception. Every time we look up at the sky we know it’s a lie.

“None of the rest of it matters. Whether they live or die, they don’t matter. We know we don’t matter either. And that gives us freedom none of the rest of them will ever have.”

They were lying on a beach, exactly as Sloane had imagined, a warm breeze washing over them, while they gazed up at the deceiving sky.

“We’re the only ones, baby,” Griffith said. “The only real things on this whole lying planet.”

The front and back doors to the farmhouse was locked, and the windows were unbreakable. Philips had signed out the Keck override key◦– a key to the house that Shelly Keck had deposited for safekeeping at the Hartmann police department, in keeping with local custom◦– before heading out to the farm. It took her only a few moments to get the front door open. She unclipped her holster and put her hand over her gun, then stepped inside.

The front room was neat, and empty. “And it smelled empty,” Philips still recalls. “A little like walking into an antique store. Full of things, but nobody lives there.” Philips called out Shelly’s name softly, then Franz’s, then the names of the children, to no response. She moved slowly into the big dining room, stepping carefully, an intruder in a sacred space. The table was clean and set neatly, awaiting the next meal. Philips moved into the kitchen. There were no dishes in the sink. She used a towel to pull open the dishwasher. It was half–full, and the dishes were dirty. There was no moisture, no humidity emanating from it. It had not been run for several days. Philips closed the dishwasher again. She stepped around the small kitchen table and kicked something. Leaning down, Philips could see a purse◦– Jen’s, she thought, judging from the patches and pins on it◦– lying open and half–hidden in the shadow beneath the table. Philips did not touch it.

She left the kitchen and walked down the long hall to the stairs. There she paused, her hand still hovering over her gun, and listened. There was nothing to hear beyond the settling of the house, the faint whittering of a bird outside. She walked up the stairs slowly, letting each step absorb her weight, carefully and deliberately. She had been to the house before, but never on the second floor. She was not certain of the layout.

The stairs led to a landing illuminated by a large window, curtained with a light and flimsy gauze that let soft, grey daylight through. There was a long hallway, with several doors, all closed. The nearest was one of the children’s; it was festooned with band stickers and warning signs. Philips stopped before it and listened◦– again, nothing◦– then took a pair of latex gloves out of her pocket and pulled them on.

She could smell it as soon as she pushed the door open, old blood and flesh just beginning to decay. Jen Keck lay in bed, curled up on her side, her blankets drawn up around her shoulders. Half her head was gone, splattered across the walls and the pillow. Hershel was in the next room, seated cross–legged on the floor, leaning against his bed at a drunken angle. His hands and feet were bound, and tied to the bedpost. He was wearing a white t–shirt and boxers, both covered in flaking, rusty brownish–red where he’d bled to death after his throat had been slit.

Franz Van lay on the bed in the master bedroom, atop the covers, bound as his son had been. His eyes were frozen open. He had been shot at point–blank range through the left temple.

Sheriff Philips had tried to call the homicide in upon first entering Jen Keck’s bedroom, but had found she couldn’t get a signal. She continued through the house, room by room. Shelly Keck she finally found in the ground–floor study, a room Philips had forgotten about during her initial movement through the house. Keck lay slumped in a corner in a dried puddle of blood, having been shot at least twice. Keck’s hands were raw and twisted and the post–mortem would later reveal that her fingernails had been torn off and her fingers broken before she died.

Finally, having explored the entire house and found nothing except the four bodies, Sheriff Philips stepped outside and made her call. She went over to her car and sat on the passenger’s side seat with her head in her hands while she waited for the response unit to arrive.

Later, after the scene had been photographed and modeled and the bodies removed, the forensics team began its long and thankless task, gathering the hundred million shreds of DNA◦– strands of hair, flakes of skin, eyelashes, traces of blood, of sweat, of saliva, of semen, dried mucous, brain matter, fecal matter◦– that had drifted about the house and grounds to settle in cracks and corners and the quiet, dark spaces. They found DNA from more than five hundred and fifty discrete human beings, an astonishing number of people to have left evidence of themselves in an isolated farmhouse on the edge of the Lakshmi Planum. There were, moreover, no fewer than ninety–eight usable finger– and palm–prints from separate people and fifty–seven different sets of footprints, as well as traces of twelve unique tire–tracks on the driveway. Even using the planet’s central biometric database, the majority of the DNA evidence could not be easily identified.

There were no shotgun casings◦– the killers must have removed them◦– and the knife used to slit Hershel Keck’s throat could not be found.

The forensics team did find something, however; something Philips specifically asked them to search for. At six separate locations outside the house, nestled up against the wall, the forensics team found powerful, non–brand, professional–grade dampers◦– those clever little machines that schools use to block radio and electromagnetic signals from wireless devices, preventing their students from calling or texting or in any way interacting with each other or with the outside world when they should be listening to their lectures. Back in the forensics lab at Riccioli, it was discovered that the six dampers interfaced in such a way as to emit a pale green glow.

Ashen light is the name a seventeenth–century astronomer gave the soft, greenish glow he detected emanating from the dark side of Venus. Although a number of astronomers, both amateur and professional had, over the centuries, claimed to observe the ashen light, sightings remained rare enough that it was generally considered a fluke, a phantom of wishful thinking and unrelated, easily explained, phenomena. An early observer argued that the light came from the fires Venusians lit to celebrate the crowing of a new emperor. Once it was determined that Venus was neither habited nor habitable, and, in fact, that its atmospheric composition was so inimical to life as we understand it that it is improbable to the extreme that biological life ever existed there, other hypotheses were proposed to explain the occasional soft green glow of which some few observers caught sight. Perhaps, some suggested, it was caused by carbon dioxide being torn apart into carbon monoxide and oxygen, the process of which splitting emits a faint green light. Or, it was proposed, the greenish light could have been nothing more than the glow of lightning from Venus’ many electrical storms, diffused through carbon dioxide and nitrogen clouds that suffocated the planet pre–activation. Whether the effect was even real remained a topic of heated debate well into the twenty–second century.

When the dynamo was activated and the terraforming project began in earnest, a strange and entirely unexpected effect was noted. Although the planet’s atmosphere, both real and artificial, was configured to resemble the Earth’s, something about the way sunlight refracted off the Overdome meant that, very rarely, on dark, cloudy nights, a faint greenish glow could be seen on the horizon. Papers were written, doctorates were awarded, and academic conferences were convened to discuss and dissect the new ashen light, but the majority of Venusians cared not one whit about official explanations. They were content in the knowledge that Venus’ Overdome, the greatest feat of engineering in all human history, which was otherwise wholly invisible, had this single, rare, beautiful manifestation. That it was something unique to their planet. To them.

The Keck family, Riccioli’s forensics team determined, died several hours after they’d first been tied up. To this day, Alvin Go, the man who lives in the cabin east of the Keck family farm, who couldn’t sleep the night they died, who looked out the window and congratulated himself for having been awake to see the rare glow of the ashen light, says only one thing. “If I’d have known. If I’d have had any idea. Maybe I could have saved them.

“But I thought it was the ashen light.”

For a while, Sloane and Griffith lived well in New Tahiti, having taken a secluded cabin on an atoll well away from the busier tourist resorts. They coexisted peacefully for three and a half weeks, Sloane sunbathing and swimming and wandering the little island, running her fingers across the lush green leaves as she passed through the jungle, whispering the names of the plants to herself. There’s a photo of her from this period, recovered from Griffith’s phone, showing a small woman in a bikini standing thigh–deep in unnaturally blue waters, her face glowing with joy. When the money ran out, Griffith, already bored with island life, proposed they find a mark at one of the resorts◦– a rich old woman, he suggested, who might be interested in maintaining a healthy and handsome young man for some period. Sexual jealousy was beneath the two of them, he reminded Sloane; the province of middling, lesser people who cared more about possessions than about freedom. Sloane acquiesced more or less gracefully, unwilling to be parted from Griffith. But once they’d returned to Tiare, New Tahiti’s primary island, Griffith found inveigling his way into the good graces of a wealthier older patron more difficult than he’d imagined. It fell to Sloane to take up the casual prostitution that paid for their cramped two–room apartment on the outskirts of town while Griffith slipped around the resorts during the day, creeping into empty rooms to rummage through colorful baggage for money and valuables as the tourists to which the luggage belonged snorkeled, oblivious, off the coast of Tiare.

The first lead came from the dampers, which yielded no fingerprints or DNA evidence, but proved to be the property of three different institutions, all in or around Helios. Over time, too, the forensics team accumulated enough data to indicate that the majority of DNA found at the scene of the crime but not connected to the Keck family or any regular visitors to the farmhouse could be traced to hundreds of people who had, at some point in the recent past, been in Helios. Much of the hair, moreover, had the blunt edges characteristic of recent cutting. Philips’ response unit, with Philips taking lead, went to Helios in early January 2520, to begin the arduous task of visiting Helios’ seven hundred and twelve salons and barber shops to request security footage. They were able to locate the correct salon, an establishment serving commuters on the edge of Helios’ financial district, within ten days. But there the trail went cold. No security cameras had caught anything in the least suspicious, and Sheriff Philips wasn’t sure what gender the Keck family murderers were, much less how many people had been involved in the killings◦– although she felt reasonably certain there had been two.

Philips had arrived at the conclusion that two people had murdered the family on a hunch: the blanket drawn over Jen’s corpse. The ropes binding the bodies◦– Jen had also been bound, they discovered, when they pulled the blanket away from her◦– had been tied with the same type of knot, and three of the murders had been carried out with the same weapon, probably a 12–gauge shotgun. But the act of kindness toward the teenaged girl, and the ragged cut had that severed Hershel’s jugular, suggested to Philips that there were multiple perpetrators.

The second lead came from a call Philips received two weeks after the murder of the Keck family. A middle–aged couple, Alice and Farouk Smith, who’d left their hometown on the southern edge of the Lakshmi Planum three weeks earlier to take a much–anticipated cross–planum vacation, had never come home. Three days after the Kecks were killed, the couple was found stuffed into the handicapped stall of an isolated roadside rest–stop. The husband had had his skull crushed with a heavy, jagged object◦– likely a stone◦– and both had been strangled. Time of death was determined to have been somewhere between 2.30 and 4 am on Friday, the ninth of November. Their car and possessions were missing. Ten days after the Kecks were killed, a passenger manifest for an IT/AT transport pinged; the couple had, apparently, taken a transport to Eos on the AT several hours after their deaths.

The team investigating the Smith murders learned that, all told, the killers had made off with their car, their clothes, and a card with a $7000 credit limit. $275 had been spent on the transport to the AT; from there, the trail went cold. The lead detective on the case, Coulter Russell of the IT regional police, was forced to let the case lie fallow.

Three months passed between the night the Keck family was murdered and the morning that Griffith’s mother, Elin Sinkman found a wallet on her property, the grounds outside the Eos Express Inn. Although the wallet itself was empty, it was microchipped; when Mrs. Sinkman dropped it off at the local library and the library personnel ran it through the scanning database, an alert was triggered. Within twelve hours detective Russell had flown down to the AT to take Mrs. Sinkman’s statement. The wallet had, as the alert notified Russell, belonged to one Alice Smith, late of Bastet, Lakshmi Planum, Ishtar Terra; murdered on or about 3.30 am, Friday the ninth of November, 2519, by person or persons unknown. Apparent motive: robbery.

Mrs. Sinkman had a son, Russell learned. By curious coincidence, that son had been the part–time employee of a down–market barber shop implicated in another unsolved case: the murder of Michelle Keck and her family on or about two am, the ninth of November, 2519, by person or persons unknown.

Russell and Philips met on February twenty–second, 2520, at a small bar in Helios, IT. They exchanged notes on their respective cases, discussing the hunches and proposals they had not included in their official case–files. Russell had also generated a detailed report on Griffith Sinkman, and in the course of the investigation into Griffith’s background and movements turned up not only his three–year stint in Garden City, but that he had, at some point after his release, travelled to the IT and begun travelling with a young woman, identity unknown.

When, three days following their first meeting another of Alice Smith’s microchipped belongings set off an alert, this one on the resort island of Tiare, in New Tahiti, Russell and Philips took an emergency transport to the AT. Within seven hours of the alert the two and their combined response team was stepping off the inter–AT transport that moved between Tiare and the mainland. Sheriff Philips had never been to New Tahiti before, nor has she been since, and recalls with perfect clarity the island’s strange atmosphere. “It was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen,” she recalls, “warm and sunny and incredibly green. The ocean was so clear you could see the fish swimming in it. But a quarter of the hotels were closed◦– these huge, beautiful buildings just shut-up walls and chains and barbed wire. All that potential just dying on the vine.”

Russell and Philips traced Griffith to a small apartment on the outskirts of Tiare. Images of his companion, clearly the same woman with whom he’d travelled to the AT the night of the Keck murders, was identified as Sloane Deeds, only suspect in the stabbing death three years earlier of a man named Brackett Jones, a store–owner in a small town on the slopes of the Maxwell Montes.

Russell and Philips tracked the pair down and observed them for two days before making their move. Griffth Sinkman, they learned during those forty–eight hours, was restless, getting up early to wander about the resort–town and spending the better part of every day away from his partner. Sloane Deeds, however, seemed more or less content to spend her days sunbathing on the beach.

They arrested Deeds first, approaching her as she lay napping on a red towel. A team of twelve armed officers surrounded the sleeping woman, Philips taking lead. When Philips said Deeds’ name, the young woman sat up, observed the twelve officers with their guns trained on her, and said “well, okay then.” She gathered up her things and went without a struggle.

Griffith Sinkman proved more problematic to arrest. Russell and his team descended on Sinkman as he was leaving a small diner; Sinkman ran. It took three shots to bring him down; none fatal. He was transported to a local hospital where his condition was stabilized. In the days before Sinkman was well enough to be transported back to the IT, Philips and Russell went through the couple’s meager belongings: some clothing, a piece of jewelry identified as belonging to Jen Keck, and seventeen dollars in cash. A response team sent to the Sinkman family motel outside Eos discovered the charred remains of more clothing, tentatively identified as belonging to Alice and Farouk Smith.

The two were tried separately. Griffith Sinkman pled not guilty by reason of insanity, the prosecution now faced with proving beyond a reasonable doubt not only that he committed the crimes, but that he did so with a full and complete understanding of the difference between right and wrong, an ancient but still robust legal definition of sanity. Sloane Deeds pled guilty to four counts of murder in the first degree. When informed that she would be eligible for the death penalty even if she gave a full confession and implicated Sinkman in her crimes, Deeds shrugged. Although she had given complete and entirely useable evidence of both Sinkman’s sanity and his guilt during her own arraignment, the prosecution at Sinkman’s trial put her on the stand to give her testimony in person, believing that having her describe the murders in front of a jury would be more powerful than merely reading aloud her confession for the record.

The entirety of her testimony was recorded and broadcast in near–delaycast to an audience of four billion.

“It started in 2016, I guess,” she begins. Her voice is flat, steady. “I had just come off the mountain, and was trying to get to Helios. I only had a few bucks, but I figured men are men anywhere, so I could get there somehow.

“I was standing by the side of the road when this car pulls up, and he◦– Griffith◦– is behind the wheel. He asked me if I wanted a ride, so I said sure, and where he was going, and he said wherever I was going. So that’s how me and him hooked up.

“We palled around for three years, more or less. We didn’t ever have any steady jobs, but we’d get part–time work here and there, and case joints to steal stuff. We moved around the IT a lot. Every time somewhere got a little hot for us, after we’d been there a while, we’d pack up and move on. We changed cars a lot; we’d steal a car then switch out plates, then switch them out again. It’s easy if you know how to jack the plate operating systems, which Griff did, and he showed me, so we did it all the time. I guess he learned up in Garden City.

“Griff liked the IT a lot, because it’s so big and empty and we could just move and move, but sometimes we were living on nothing at all, and I was getting tired of it. Every time he talked about the AT, about all the casinos and stuff, I’d be like ‘I want to try it there.’ I never been off the IT before, and the planum’s about as boring as the Max mountains. I wanted to see a real city, and go someplace fun, but Griff was always like ‘it sucks just as much there as here, and they’re all big fakes, and it sucks even more if you don’t have any money, and here it’s easier not to have money’ so we never went.

“And then finally I got real tired of it, and all his crap about how we were ‘realer people’ than everyone else, like being poor was this noble thing, and I told him I was going to go no matter what, and he could come or not. He was like ‘I’ve been poor my whole life!’ but he’s full of crap. I’ve seen where he lived, and he went to college, too. We had a big old bust–up about it and then a couple days later he said he was sorry and I was right, it was time to leave the IT, and explained that when he was down at Garden City he met a guy who had been a worker out on the farms all over the IT. He said how people there don’t believe in banks so they keep their money in the house in cash, and it was a real cinch to just knock over a house and make off with all the money, and it was pretty untraceable and everything. So this guy in Garden City had worked out in this town in the middle of nowhere, but everyone was super well–off, and in particular there was this old guy who was super, super rich and kept all his money in a safe in his office at home.

“So Griff said we should go knock over this old guy. He◦– Griff, I mean◦– knew all about the old guy, because he’d made the Garden City guy tell him everything, like where exactly the house was and how to get there. And we went to the library and learned all about the town, Hartmann, and studied maps so that we knew how to get there and back again, all the different ways. And he got a job in a salon in Helios so that he could collect random hair DNA so we could confuse the crime scene. He collected it over a long time, because we planned carefully and took our time to make sure we got everything right. We stole dampers from all over, a few from Helios and one from somewhere else, even, and rigged them up to work together so the old guy couldn’t call anyone while we were robbing him

“And we set up an alibi, too. There are some homeless guys who sleep outside the [Helios] city hall and Griff started sleeping there at night, ‘cause there’s a camera that watches them and they all sleep huddled up, and he got good at joining them and then slipping away so you couldn’t see he wasn’t there anymore. I used to watch him to make sure he was doing it right. And I went into one of those all–night moviedromes, but it was one with a broken window, so I’d be recorded going in but I could sneak in and out without anyone seeing.

“So we decided on a night. It wasn’t supposed to be that night [Thursday the eighth], because Griff wanted to do it on a Friday thinking no one would notice anything if the old guy didn’t show up anywhere over a weekend, but the night we picked out to do it we got into an argument and so we didn’t go. Then when we made up Griff was like ‘we got to do it now, I’m tired of this place’ so we just left. That was that Thursday, I guess.

“We stole a car and then exchanged plates every two hundred kilometers. It took us four hours to drive to Hartmann, and it went perfect. We drove through the town, and Griff was like ‘there’s the school, turn right at the hardware store, three kilometers past.’ We came to the tree–lined drive, and it was dark as I ever saw. We killed the headlights once we were out of town and drove slow, but we didn’t see a single person. The town was totally empty, and there wasn’t anyone on the roads, not one person. So we drive slow down the tree–lined street, and as we pull up we can see the house in the sort of dim light. It was huge and white and looked real cozy. Griff keeps saying ‘look how big that fucker is; this old fart must be loaded.’

“We pulled off the driveway a little and got out really quiet, but couldn’t hear a thing. So we snuck around and put the dampers out and set them off, and it was the most beautiful thing I ever saw, to watch them do their thing. They buzzed a little then this green glow spreads up and out from them and meets up and then there’s this soft green light shaped like a bowl, covering the whole house. I could put my hand through it like it was the ocean. I told Griff I didn’t know it would make light but he said we were super far from anyone else and if anyone saw anything they’d think it was the ashen light. So we went inside.

“We had a shotgun Griff made from three different guns. He said it would mess up the ballistics. We had a knife, too. I think it was one I stole from somewhere. We go in and there’s a nightlight shining, so we kill it; just unplug it. I pull out my phone and sure enough, no signal, so we know the damper’s working. No phones, no computers, nothing will get signals out. We have little flashlights, but we don’t need them because of the green light coming through the windows.

“We had decided before to find the old guy first and make him tell us where the money was. So we walk around the ground floor really fast, to make sure there’s nothing obvious, and find the office, but can’t see a safe or anything. So we go down the hall and toward the stairs, and I’m first, and as we walk toward the stairs I look up and I see someone standing there at the top of the stairs. There’s a window there and the green light is coming through bright enough to make the outline of the person really clear. It doesn’t look like an old guy. I stop and look up, and the person freezes and looks down at me, and then sort of slips away, out of the light, so I grab Griff and we go upstairs.

“The first door has stuff all over it, but there’s no lock. We go in and there’s this girl standing there in the corner, by the window. I didn’t know why she didn’t break the window or anything, but I guess it was unbreakable glass. She had her phone in her hand but of course it wasn’t working. She sets it down asks what we want and Griff says, really nice, we’re just there for some money. She’s also being really nice and says ‘we don’t keep money in the house,’ but Griff tells her it’s okay and says he needs to tie her up so he can check. She’s like, ‘okay,’ really cheerful, and she’s really scared but trying to be nice. So Griff ties her up and puts her on the bed, and we leave her.

“So we know there’s more than an old guy in the house now. The next room there’s a boy sleeping, and he sort of wakes up when we come in and shoots right up out of bed, but Griff points the gun at him and tells him to sit, and we tie him up and gag him next to his bed.

“Then there’s the big bedroom, and two grownups sleeping in it. We wake them up really gentle and tell them we’re there for the money and we’re not going to hurt anyone. The woman says ‘there’s no money,’ just like the girl, and the man pissed his pants. We tell the man to show us where the safe is, because we know there is one, and the woman keeps talking, like saying that there’s no money and no safe but she can give us all the credit she has and won’t report us or anything and I can see Griff is getting real unhappy. He always gets jiggly when he thinks someone is lying and he was, like, bouncing now. So we tell the man again to show us where the money is, and the woman is still like ‘he doesn’t know anything, please talk to me and I can help,’ so we tie the man up to the bed and take the woman downstairs to the office. The entire time she’s talking to us real calm, saying she’ll give us whatever she can, and to take anything in the house, but obviously we’re not going to do that because it’ll all be chipped. We pass by the kids’ rooms and she says can she see them to make sure they’re all right and tell them to be good, but we say no.

“We take her downstairs into the office and I can see Griff is getting super freaked out now, because he hates it when things don’t go exactly the way he planned, and you can see she can see he’s freaking, but she stays totally calm and walks around the room being like ‘there’s nothing here, nothing behind the picture, no secret places or anything’ and I was like ‘ugh, Griff, this is stupid, let’s just go’ and he’s all ‘no, no, she’s lying I know it’s here,’ and I didn’t want to be all ‘maybe the guy at Garden City was full of shit’ but obviously this wasn’t some old fart with a mattress full of money, but a whole family. And I can see she’s starting to get really scared as we’re talking, I guess because we’re using our names, and everyone knows you don’t do that around someone unless you’re going to kill them. And anyway Griff is almost screaming now he’s so pissed. And then he hits her, and I’m like ‘I don’t want to see this,’ so I leave and walk around the house and look for stuff. I find a purse and there’s a couple of bucks in it, so I take that. I can still hear Griff beating up on that woman, she starts making more and more noise. You could hear everything in that house, it was so quiet, and then finally I hear the gunshot.

“I go back into the office and she’s a mess in the corner, and Griff’s standing there, so I take the gun and go upstairs. I go into the girl’s room and she starts by saying ‘what’d you do to my mom’ and then she starts crying and I shoot her. I look around but there’s nothing to take in her room, so I leave. And then I feel sorry for her because we told her it would be okay, and she’s like my age. So I pull the blanket over so it just looks like she’s sleeping. Griff’s in the boy’s room and has already killed him, though he’s not dead yet when I go in. Griff’s sort of tearing around looking for valuables so I go kill the father while he does, ‘cause I do it faster and I didn’t want him to suffer any more than he had to, already hearing his wife and kids go. While I was looking around the house earlier I saw all their pictures and stuff, and they seemed pretty nice, even though Griff always calls people like that fake bourgeois pigs. I didn’t see that they were any worse than anyone else, though.

“So we cleaned up around the house ‘cause Griff really tore it apart, and left all that hair Griff had collected and picked up the shell casings, but we never found any money. When we finally leave Griff is so freaked out he’s just, like, ‘get in the car, we gotta go, we gotta go,’ so we left the dampers.

“We drove out of town on a different road than we came in on, and I noticed when we were leaving that lots of places had long tree–lined drives, so maybe we hit up the wrong place and the old fart with all the money was still out there or whatever. As we drove back to Helios we took the gun apart and threw it out the window at different points. And like an hour or so after we saw a car pulled up at a rest–stop and Griff said ‘let’s pull up real quiet and see what’s there’ and there was a couple asleep in it so we tap on the window real nice and wake them up and say our car stalled out, and when the guy gets out to help jump it I smashed his head in with a rock and then we killed them and put the bodies in the bathroom. They had a lot of stuff in their car and some cash, six or seven grand, so we took everything and split up, and I drove the new car following Griff and then we ditched both outside Helios in a bad part of town and I went back to the moviedrome and Griff went back to the hobos and we pretended to wake up the next morning so the cameras could see us. We split up the stuff we got from the people in the car and fenced it for some more money and then got the first transport to the AT. When we finally got to Griff’s family’s place I was so tired I could die. We slept for, like, ever. Then we walked around and hid the stuff from the couple in the car that we couldn’t fence that probably had chips. And then later we went to New Tahiti.”

A question from the prosecution. Deeds is silent for a moment.

“Probably about twenty bucks,” she says.

Evidence of Sloane Deeds’ years of profound abuse, of Griffith Sinkman’s terrible injuries, sustained during the helibike crash in which he’d been involved seven years earlier, were not deemed sufficiently compelling to suggest even diminished responsibility, much less insanity. On February twenty–first, 2521, a little more than a year after they’d killed six people in the space of about four hours, Sloane Deeds and Griffith Sinkman were sentenced to death. They were sent to the Berkeley Maximum Security Prison, where they spent the next twenty–four years in neighboring cells on Death Row.

Reactivating Venus’ dynamo sped up the planet’s axial rotation rate over twenty–five years until it was a quarter of what it had been. From that time, the rotational increase stopped; Venus appeared to have settled into its new rotational period and the terraforming project continued unabated.

Sixty–three years after activation, however, scientists measured a tiny decrease in Venus’ rotation rate. From that year the rotation period decreased by a fraction more roughly every two hundred Earth days, and showed no signs of stopping. The planet’s liquid core was solidifying faster than anyone had speculated it would. The dynamo was decaying.

Newspapers declaimed the failure of man’s greatest feat of engineering, but the group responsible for the terraforming took a more practical view of the matter. The planet was habitable, and would remain so for centuries, regardless of the dynamo’s decay; there was no reason not to continue to colonize, to mine, to farm, and to maximize profits from the planet for as long as possible.

The night that Deeds and Sinkman killed the Kecks and the Smiths, Venus’ rotation period was 97% of what it had been at peak rotation. Twenty–two years later, after they had exhausted the appeals process, the law banning capital punishment was found constitutionally unsound and overturned. Their sentences were commuted to life without parole and the two were sent to separate correctional facilities, to live out the rest of their lives as part of Venus’ ever–growing prison population. Venus’ rotation period was by then an alarming 94% of what it had been at peak rotation. A little less than three weeks later, a documentary about the Keck and Smith killings, containing all of Deeds’ testimony about the murders, was aired. The documentary, funded by an extreme right–wing organization known as the Coalition for Humanity, inspired a huge public outcry and, in an unprecedented political coup, six of the ten death penalty–adverse justices were removed from office and six more conservative justices installed. The second case the new court heard was a death penalty case; within two years of Venus’ death penalty having been found unconstitutionally inhumane it was reinstated ex post facto, meaning that the death penalty was reinstated for those Death Row inmates who had had their sentences commuted. They further decreed that all sentences be carried out within six months of being handed down. Deeds and Sinkman were sent back to Berkeley to await their executions.

Following a final appeal, this one by a left–wing human rights organization who argued that repealing the death penalty and then reinstating it constituted cruel and unusual punishment under the Interplanetary Convention on Human Rights, Deeds and Sinkman were scheduled for execution at midnight, Tuesday the twenty–sixth of April, 2545.

Detective Coulton Russell and Sheriff Jamee Philips were present for the executions. Russell, who was badly injured in a shoot–out in 2534, walks with a limp. Philips looks much the same as she did twenty–four years earlier, whip–thin and a little stooped, although her hair is grey now. Both are retired. Russell moved to the AT in ’37, to live near his daughter and grandchildren, but Philips still lives in Hartmann, on a little property she bought fifteen years before. Following the executions, Philips drove Russell to Hartmann to visit the graves.

“Hartmann was never the same after the murders,” she tells Russell, as they stand in the little cemetery, looking down at the tombstones. “At first they thought it had to be someone in town who did it. Because who would come all the way out here, just to kill someone? And then, even after everyone knew it was random, that it even might have been an accident, people just couldn’t stand it. ‘It’s not the kind of place I want to raise my kids anymore,’ I heard that a lot. And then as the crops began to fail◦– well, that was pretty much the death–knell for this place. Lots of people left, for Riccioli, or for the AT, or even for Earth. They keep telling us the decay won’t matter for centuries, but you can already see it changing things.”

She looks away, across the sorghum fields. “The house went into foreclosure a few weeks ago,” she says, meaning the Keck family farmhouse.

“What’ll happen to it, do you think?” Russell asks. They move away from the Keck graves, down a path worn through the grass by hundreds of sight–seekers.

Philips shrugs. “Probably get torn down, I imagine.” She’s silent for a moment. “They built a meat–packing factory up on the other side of town couple of years back; everyone’s giving ranching a try now. Everyone who’s left, I mean. They’ll tear down the house and put cattle on the fields for a few years. Until the decay can’t sustain that anymore either, I guess.”

They stop before another grave, this one belonging to Alvin Go, likely Deeds’ and Sinkman’s intended target. “Is it true they found two million dollars hidden around Go’s property after he died?” Russell asks.

Philips chuckles. “Not quite that much.” A true–crime book, For Love Alone, written by a notorious Venusian novelist and published seven years after the murders, was the first to propose that Alvin Go, who lived in a cabin at the end of a plane–tree–lined drive adjacent to the Keck property, was the miserly old man whom the murderers had set out planning to kill.

The two complete their amble through the little cemetery and walk out to the road, where Russell’s car is parked. “Can I give you a ride?” he asks.

“Thanks, but no,” she says. “I can walk from here.” They shake hands and Philips watches Russell get into the car and drive away. She waves at him as he pulls away, and can see his hand raised in response. Then, starting home, she walks toward the town and through it, leaving behind the big sky, the whisper of wind voices through the plane trees.