The Lowest Heaven

by Alastair Reynolds

  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.”

  II

  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 di
sembarking 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.