Looking out from the viewing platform at the far end of the atrium one was able to see, when the sky had darkened and only a faint orange rim remained around the horizon, the stars emerge onto the sky, dusted like tinselled specks across the black expanse. It was always a strange feeling that washed into me when I looked out and knew that one of those bright sparkling lights was our former home, the one place we would forever hold dear in our hearts, tainted with a shadowing melancholy, as where we used to live.
We had left the Earth, gladly leaving the malaise of corruption, pain and suffering behind. In that place, mankind had been bestowed with an indescribable bounty of life and beauty and natural wonders. Yet, even when I reflect upon it now, it still does not cease to amaze me how that gift had been squandered, how we had drained our well of life and filled it with filthy rotten sin, a cesspool of cold heartedness. I had to leave. How could I have stayed? In a world of plenty how can it be that some live with everything and others with nothing at all?
It had been several hundred years since the first moon colony - Luna base - today known as Luna city, had been established. Then Mars and the asteroid belt were developed, and by the time I had left the Earth even the moons of Jupiter were being inhabited. Never had humankind looked the other way, toward the sun, other than to marvel at the bejewelling beauty of the feminine planet. That disregard had been for practical reasons you see, because Venus is not a welcoming place, even less so than the icy coldness of Mars. Beneath the dense thick carbon dioxide atmosphere blotted by the yellowish sulphuric clouds the surface of Venus is more welcoming to a viscous molten flow of lead than human habitation. It was not possible to live on the surface there.
So, when we first proposed the idea of building a new colony, one of peace, love and togetherness, on Venus the first reaction was to ridicule us. We were labelled as idealistic dreamers, who would be toasted alive on the surface of the hottest planet in the solar system. It came to pass that in fact our idea wasn't so naive after all.
We were going to build a cloud city floating 55 km above the surface of Venus buoyed by the dense atmosphere. Up there, the flaming inferno below was nothing but a distant observation. In the clouds the surrounding scenery gave way to a new kind of paradise. Who would have thought that heaven would have caressed the depths of hell so intimately.
There were ten thousand of us who were chosen. The righteous ones, who had elected to flee the degradation and lechery of the Earth. Sure there had been many more who wanted to join us, and the financing had been made with the backing of several millions of like-minded individuals, who hoped for a different future for humanity. But in the end it was only a selected few who gained the privilege to take the ten thousand berths aboard our ship, and one of them was me.
Terra Two was built in orbit around planet Earth, in total it had taken more than five years to complete. A great space city, the craft was designed to house all the amenities that a human society would require to live in peace. There were large covered parks, filled with trees and animals sourced from around Earth, lakes and rugged terrain for swimming, sailing or trekking. Inside the vessel all of the necessary capacity for food had been integral to the design, with ultraviolet plant warehouses constructed to grow enough fresh fruit and vegetables for everyone. The craft was intended to be able to house up to twenty thousand people without any external deliveries of food, water or resources. Terra Two was to be a closed system, a self contained economy. Because, I should mention, this was the other thing about this new society, we were going to be different, there was going to be no more hunger, no more greed, and above all else no more hate. This new world was going to be one built on love. As a matter of fact the motto of Terra Two was etched onto the great marble floor surrounding the central fountain in the atrium. Each morning before breakfast the inhabitants would gather in the atrium and chant the motto together:
We all love each other here
There is no place for hate
We abhor hate
We all love each other here
And so everyone who came to live in the wild skies above Venus agreed on this point, and a new society was born.
When Terra Two settled into its orbit above Venus we had already travelled on a nine month voyage from Earth. Up there we cruised at over 300 km/h around the planet, driven forward by the violent atmospheric winds. The craft was covered in solar panels and there were several turbines protruding from the sides which were rotated by the prevailing air flow. It took four Earth days to orbit Venus at that speed, so if you can imagine for a moment, that meant we had a day of dawn, a day of daylight, a day of dusk and a day of night. I’m sure you will agree that that would have taken some getting used to, and it did. When the dawn lasts for a full twenty-four hours, the rarity begins to wane a little. Nonetheless, it was an enormous pleasure to pass by the atrium and watch the pinkish hue shade over the golden fluffy clouds, peacefully bobbing past our gaze. In those early days it truly was a paradise to be aboard Terra Two.