Venus Envy

It had been nighttime now for months. No promise of dawn lay over the horizon until several more had passed. Those unable to cope with the constant murky atmosphere, lit only feebly and intermittently by the streetlights had long since fled. For many, even the prospect of a cramped and tiresome six-week journey back to Earth was surely better than staying for another Venusian night. Genetically refactored body clocks were too expensive and too unreliable for most workers, so it was only those with the stamina and determination to make it that persisted. And of course the convicts. Official stats were all but useless, but it was generally accepted that at least 80% of those that stayed were criminal outcasts from Earth. There was minimal security, other than at the starports – there would never be enough wardens willing to stay in those conditions, no matter what the pay. So for the equivalent of almost 20 Earth weeks at a time, little more than anarchy ruled. Then finally the sunlight would return, and with it the starships, and in them the millions that couldn’t make it full time on Earth, but had the numbers and the firepower to restore some peace and order again.

Until then, Venus was a dangerous place.

Hollow winds swept the alleyways: on occasions, without warning, they would surge to tornado force, and fling about the flotsam and jetsam of discarded litter at random, occasionally maiming and even killing the few who spent any time outdoors, unprotected by their p-shuttles. Even those vehicles, the only reliable means of transport on the planet, could be knocked out of flight by particularly energetic gusts. Banks of computers sat munching away on numbers, attempting to determine algorithms to predict the next wave, but almost always the warning klaxons would go off too late, and with no-one left to repair the damaged sensors, the computers would eventually sit idle, helpless until the engineers returned.

Even worse than the winds were the atmos rips. The huge Cotoxy processors that rimmed the small cities weren’t able to reliably maintain the necessary uniform CO2 density to protect the planet against the violent streams of UV light that flooded in from the too-close-for-comfort Sun. Ironically, because before they were installed, Venus had as much CO2 blanket as a planet could ever need. But a superheated greenhouse with no oxygen wasn’t much use to even the most genetically-refactored humans, so it had to go. The Cotoxies pulled out enough carbon to leave breathable air and reduce the atmospheric density enough to let millions of years of trapped in heat to escape. But sometimes they were just too effective, and left gaping holes in the atmosphere, exposing the surface to the raw power of the sun’s rays. No human, even in a p-shuttle, could be expected to survive that.

So mostly, the prisoners stayed in their dorms, and the free citizens kept themselves busy in their dens. There was little to see or do outside anyway.

All that changed when...