Ashen Light

The village of Hartmann stands on the high milo plains of Ishtar Terra, a lonesome area that other Venusians call ‘out there.’ This area of the IT is called Lakshmi Planum. It is a little less that two and a half thousand kilometers across, and surrounded on all sides by mountains - the four main mountain ranges found on the planet. When, in 2392, planetary engineers finally managed to liquify Venus’ core, kickstarting the planet’s dynamo and strengthening its magnetic field enough to maintain an atmosphere and make terraforming feasible, the decision was made to colonize both Venus’ highland regions. Aphrodite Terra, warmer, larger and topographically rougher than its sister, was dedicated to mining. Ishtar Terra’s Lakshmi Planum, with its gently rolling wrinkle ridges and smooth plains, was deemed more suitable for agriculture. Following successful completion of the terraforming process, farming colonies were migrated to the IT from Earth. They dispersed to create widespread, albeit close-knit, communities, centered around small towns scattered seemingly at random across the Planum.
Hartmann was founded in 2498, although a small terraforming settlement had existed there for at least twenty years before. It is a strange assortment of buildings, none more than three stories tall, and home to only about 250 people. It is, generously, a suburb of Riccioli, a small city twenty-five kilometers away, but no one from Riccioli goes to Hartmann, unless it is to visit relatives, and most of the citizens of Hartmann tend to have little interest in Riccioli - except Hartmann’s teenagers, of course, who are drawn to Riccioli, Hartmann’s nearest neighbor for hundreds of kilometers, like moths to a candle’s flame.

    Despite the success of the terraforming project, and particularly the terraformers’ crowning achievement, the overdome, an artificial layer between the thermosphere and the mesosphere, Hartmann’s fortunes have risen and fallen with the same unpredictable regularity of any other farming community’s. Although the overdome, which mimics a consistent, Earth-like cycle of day and night and maintains Venus’ reasonably Earth-like atmospheric conditions, assists in regulating temperature and average rainfall on the Lakshmi Planum, it was nevertheless designed to allow for ‘natural’ variations, with the result that the Lakshmi Planum is prone to drought. Fortunately, however, the variation of milo that is grown in and around Hartmann was designed to be spectacularly drought-resistant, and so the little community is comfortable, if not prodigiously wealthy. They live their lives solidly, predictably, and comfortably. “No better place to live,” says the sign on the road leading into town. And, indeed, it’s a refrain often repeated after Hartmann’s citizens win pie-making contests at the county fair, or following a satisfying meal at Mrs. McCallan’s Shumai Shack.


    Until one morning in mid-November of 2519, few Venusians - in fact, few Ishtarians - had ever heard of Hartmann. At the time, those few souls awake in Hartmann at that hour saw it - the pale green light that warmed the dark sky and, all told, ended six lives. But afterward the townspeople, no longer content with Hartmann’s comfortable isolation, began to take stock of their lives, their decisions. To wonder if, perhaps, there wasn’t a better place to live, after all.

Extract from The Lowest Heaven

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