The Lowest Heaven Page 8

  “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 fra
ction 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.

  I’d be making charts of the things I saw there, the dark stars and explosions. There’d be worms the size of trains. I knew it, despairing with desire. There were mysteries in the Earth, and wonders.

  * * *

  Detail from one of a set of 12 hand-tinted astronomical prints with explanatory cards. This image represents a section of the Earth and its atmosphere at the equator, drawn by John Emslie and published by James Reynolds. The oceans and continents are indicated, as are some islands and volcanoes. (1846)

  THE KRAKATOAN

  MARIA DAHVANA HEADLEY

  The summer I was nine, my third mother took off, taking most of the house off with her. The night she left, I found my dad kneeling on the floor in front of the open refrigerator, and he looked at me for too long. He was supposed to be at work.

  “What’s wrong?” I finally asked, though I didn’t want to know.

  “No one’s in charge of you,” my dad told me. “No one’s in charge of anything. Haven’t you learned that yet?”

  The cold fell out of the fridge like something solid, and I edged closer, hoping it’d land on me and cling. I was still vulnerable to the possibility that one of the mothers would work out.

  “Alright then,” my dad said. He left the ice cream out on the counter, along with the contents of his pocket: three charred sticks, one of them short, two of them long, and a list of dead stars, as in celestial, his specialty.

  Then he went to work, driving in the dark up the spiral road to his job at the observatory. It was one of the great mysteries of the heavens that my father had been married three times. He only looked up, and he was awake all night. Each of my mothers had complained about this, and eventually I picked up some things about which direction you should be looking, and which hours you should be keeping if you wanted a woman to stay with you. I practiced eye contact. I practiced sleeping.

  I ate the entire carton of Neapolitan, beginning with the chocolate. I visited the top of my father’s closet, removed five Playboy magazines, and read them. I considered my three mothers, and compared them favorably to the naked women. I turned on the TV, and then turned it off. She’d taken the rabbit ears from the top, and now all we got was static. She’d taken the doorknob too. It was made of purple glass. When you put your eyeball up to it and looked in, it was like you’d arrived on Mars. I’d gotten a black eye that way, when she opened it accidentally into my face. Getting out of the house now required kicking and a coathanger pushed through the hole where the knob had been, and by the time I arrived outside, it was seven AM.

  My dad was sleeping at the observatory. There were bunks. The astronomers were like vampires, slinking around under the closed dome until the sun went down, at which point they swarmed out to look at their sky. My dad had once referred to the solar system as My Solar System. He seemed to consider himself the sun, but he
was not, and if he didn’t know that, I did.

  We lived at the bottom of Mount Palomar, where the spiral road started. If you stayed on our road, you’d eventually make it to the observatory, a big white snowball of a building on the top of the mountain, and inside it, a gigantic telescope. The observatory, with its open and shut rotating roof, was like a convertible car and the astronomers were teenagers in love with black holes. Their sky made me miserable. I wanted humans. There weren’t many of them on the mountain, and my options were limited. I rarely went up. I went down, if I was going anywhere, and that day I went to Mr. Loury’s house.

  Mr. Loury’s wife had, two years earlier, gone into the Great White Yonder. That was what my second mother, the hippie one who’d thought that astronomy and astrology were the same thing, had said about it. I don’t think she’d ever seen Jaws. I didn’t know what a Yonder was, and so in my mind, Mr. Loury’s young wife dove into the mouth of not just a great white shark, but a megalodon, every night for months. Then she got chewed up, and at the end she looked like canned spaghetti. My second mother hadn’t had much patience for a year of me retching over ravioli. I was pretty sure that was why she’d left.

  Mr. Loury, with his attempt at a handlebar mustache and his short-sleeved button-downs, with his sadness, was a human fender-bender. I couldn’t stay away from his property. Normally I paced the perimeter, feeling his woe, but today, I had woe of my own and it entitled me to trespass.