Каарон Уоррен - The Lowest Heaven

“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.