“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.