The Lowest Heaven (8 page)

“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.