Free The Lowest Heaven by Alastair Reynolds, Adam Roberts, Sophia McDougall, Kaaron Warren, E.J. Swift, Kameron Hurley

Goya, the band teacher at Riccioli High, reporting that she and her daughter were concerned about the inexplicably unreachable Keck family. By 9.30 that same morning, Sheriff Philips was pulling up the long, plane tree–shadowed drive that led to Blackacre.
    Sloane and Griffith arrived in New Tahiti on Tuesday, November thirteenth, on a 4.32 pm transport. New Tahiti is, as the name suggests, a chain of spectacular resort islands off the coast of the AT, modeled to resemble their eponymous Earth siblings. Although the archipelago, designed and built at astronomical cost in the middle of the twenty–fifth century, is currently in dire economic straights, it was, in 2519, still a compelling vacation destination for a certain socioeconomic class. For Sloane Deeds, who had known only the rocky mountains and endless plains of the IT, New Tahiti represented the greatest achievement of human endeavor. She had dreamed of the turquoise seas and balmy tropical warmth the nights she spent shivering in the Maxwell Montes, imagined herself living in a place where perfectly ripe fruit with names from a fairytale – mango, persimmon, breadfruit, cloudberry, starfruit, papaya – could be plucked from the trees if she grew hungry. A place where she could spread a blanket across sand as white as sugar and fall asleep in the sun; where she could float among a million tropical fish with extraordinary names: clownfish, manta ray, golden shark, butterfly fish, flying fish, electric eel. For years Sloane had cherished two small notebooks, filled with lists of words: the names of flowers, of constellations, of cities in Europe, in Asia, in Australia. Her handwriting, round and childishly uncertain, began to fade underneath the repeated thumbing of the pages, for she would read her lists to herself, whispering the names, until she had them memorized, and then began again.
    Griffith, who liked to read and was proud of his vocabulary, generally spoke to Sloane, as to everyone else, in a mannered and slightly pretentious fashion. He encouraged Sloane’s recitations, telling her that she was a true innocent, a daughter of nature, filled with an unsullied childlike wonder. He would recite poetry to her – Kerouac and Tettenar and Ginsberg, Bukowski and Gorail and Khayyam – to which she would listen with sparkling eyes, forever uncertain about what such a man could find to love in her. And yet Sloane absorbed Griffith’s gentle condescension, believed him when he told her she was purer than any other girl he’d ever known, that her upbringing, rough as it had been, made her real in a way other people couldn’t ever be – people who passed their long, empty days unaware of the preternatural wonder of the Venusian world. “We’re living on a planet that couldn’t support life for billions of years,” he told her one evening. “The days and nights aren’t even real; they’re an lie, a lie within a lie. Everyone here lives these tiny lies all day long, thinking their petty lives and jobs and cares and thoughts and worries matter, and all of that within this one bigger lie. This willful delusion that day and night are the same here as they were on Earth. And all of these things together make them think everything matters. That it all means something, baby. Except we know the truth. We’re the only free ones on this whole planet, because we see through the deception. Every time we look up at the sky we know it’s a lie.
    “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