Engineering Infinity (11 page)

I shrugged. “I suppose you’d say
we arseholes in the environment ministry should be concentrating on stuff like
this rather than preparing to fight interstellar wars.”

“Well, so you should. And maybe a
more mature species would be preparing for positive outcomes. Think of it,
Tobe! There are now creatures in this solar system who are
smarter
than us
. They have to be, or they wouldn’t be here - right? Somewhere between
us and the angels. Who knows what they can tell us? What is their science,
their art - their theology?”

I frowned. “But what do they
want? That’s what may count from now on -
their
agenda, not ours.”

“There you are being paranoid
again.” But she hesitated. “What about Meryl and the kids?”

“Meryl’s at home. Mark and Sophie
at school.” I shrugged. “Life as normal.”

“Some people are freaking out.
Raiding the supermarkets.”

“Some people always do. We want
things to continue as normally as possible, as long as possible. Modern society
is efficient, you know, Edith, but not very resilient. A fuel strike could
cripple us in a week, let alone alien invaders.”

She pushed a loose grey hair back
under her hard hat, and looked at me suspiciously. “But you seem very calm,
considering. You know something. Don’t you, you bastard?”

I grinned. “And you know me.”

“Spill it.”

“Two things. We picked up
signals. Or, more likely, leakage. You know about the infrared stuff we’ve seen
for a while, coming from the nucleus. Now we’ve detected radio noise, faint,
clearly structured, very complex. It may be some kind of internal channel
rather than anything meant for us. But if we can figure anything out from it -”

“Well, that’s exciting. And the
second thing? Come on, Miller.”

“We have more refined trajectory
data. All this will be released soon - it’s probably leaked already.”

“Yes?”

“The Incoming
are
heading for the inner solar system. But they aren’t
coming here - not to Earth.”

She frowned. “Then where?”

I dropped my bombshell. “Venus.
Not Earth. They’re heading for Venus, Edith.”

She looked into the clouded sky,
the bright patch that marked the position of the sun, and the inner planets. “Venus?
That’s a cloudy hellhole. What would they want there?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“Well, I’m used to living with
questions I’ll never be able to answer. Let’s hope this isn’t one of them. In
the meantime, let’s make ourselves useful.” She eyed my crumpled Whitehall
suit, my patent leather shoes already splashed with mud. “Have you got time to
stay? You want to help out with my drain? I’ve a spare overall that might fit.”

Talking, speculating, we walked
through the church.

We used the excuse of Edith’s
Goonhilly event to make a family trip to Cornwall.

We took the A-road snaking west
down the spine of the Cornish peninsula, and stopped at a small hotel in
Helston. The pretty little town was decked out that day for the annual Furry
Dance, an ancient, eccentric carnival in which the local children would weave
in and out of the houses on the hilly streets. The next morning Meryl was to
take the kids to the beach, further up the coast.

And, just about at dawn, I set
off alone in a hired car for the A-road to the south-east, towards Goonhilly
Down. It was a clear May morning. As I drove I was aware of Venus, rising in
the eastern sky and clearly visible in my rear view mirror, a lamp shining
steadily even as the day brightened.

Goonhilly is a stretch of high
open land, a windy place. Its claim to fame is that at one time it hosted the
largest telecoms satellite earth station in the world - it picked up the first
live transatlantic TV broadcast, via Telstar. It was decommissioned years ago,
but its oldest dish, a thousand-tonne parabolic bowl called “Arthur” after the
king, became a listed building, and so was preserved. And that was how it was
available for Edith and her committee of messagers to get hold of, when they,
or rather she, grew impatient with the government’s continuing reticence.
Because of the official policy I had to help with smoothing through the
permissions, all behind the scenes.

Just after my first glimpse of
the surviving dishes on the skyline I came up against a police cordon, a
hastily erected plastic fence that excluded a few groups of chanting Shouters
and a fundamentalist-religious group protesting that the messagers were
communicating with the Devil. My ministry card helped me get through.

Edith was waiting for me at the
old site’s visitors’ centre, opened up that morning for breakfast, coffee and
cereals and toast. Her volunteers cleared up dirty dishes under a big wall
screen showing a live feed from a space telescope - the best images available
right now, though every major space agency had a probe to Venus in preparation,
and NASA had already fired one off. The Incoming nucleus (it seemed
inappropriate to call that lump of dirty ice a “craft,” though such it clearly
was) was a brilliant star, too small to show a disc, swinging in its wide orbit
above a half-moon Venus. And on the planet’s night side you could clearly make
out the Patch, the strange, complicated glow in the cloud banks tracking the
Incoming’s orbit precisely. It was strange to gaze upon that choreography in
space, and then to turn to the east and see Venus with the naked eye.

And Edith’s volunteers, a few
dozen earnest men, women and children who looked like they had gathered for a
village show, had the audacity to believe they could speak to these godlike
forms in the sky.

There was a terrific metallic
groan. We turned, and saw that Arthur was turning on his concrete pivot. The
volunteers cheered, and a general drift towards the monument began.

Edith walked with me, cradling a
polystyrene tea cup in the palms of fingerless gloves. “I’m glad you could make
it down. Should have brought the kids. Some of the locals from Helston are
here; they’ve made the whole stunt part of their Furry Dance celebration. Did
you see the preparations in town? Supposed to celebrate St Michael beating up
on the Devil - I wonder how appropriate
that
symbolism
is. Anyhow, this ought to be a fun day. Later there’ll be a barn dance.”

“Meryl thought it was safer to
take the kids to the beach. Just in case anything gets upsetting here - you
know.” That was most of the truth. There was a subtext that Meryl had never
much enjoyed being in the same room as my ex.

“Probably wise. Our British
Shouters are a mild bunch, but in rowdier parts of the world there has been
trouble.” The loose international coalition of groups called the Shouters was
paradoxically named, because they campaigned for silence; they argued that “shouting
in the jungle” by sending signals to the Incoming or the Venusians was taking
an irresponsible risk. Of course they could do nothing about the low-level
chatter that had been targeted at the Incoming since it had first been sighted,
nearly a year ago already. Edith waved a hand at Arthur. “If I were a Shouter,
I’d be here today. This will be by far the most powerful message sent from the
British Isles.”

I’d seen and heard roughs of
Edith’s message. In with a Carl Sagan-style prime number lexicon, there was
digitised music from Bach to Zulu chants, and art from cave paintings to
Warhol, and images of mankind featuring a lot of smiling children, and
astronauts on the Moon. There was even a copy of the old Pioneer spaceprobe
plaque from the seventies, with the smiling naked couple. At least, I thought
cynically, all that fluffy stuff would provide a counterpoint to the images of
war, murder, famine, plague and other sufferings that the Incoming had no doubt
sampled by now, if they’d chosen to.

I said, “But I get the feeling
they’re just not interested. Neither the Incoming nor the Venusians. Sorry to
rain on your parade.”

“I take it the cryptolinguists
aren’t getting anywhere decoding the signals?”

“They’re not so much ‘signals’ as
leakage from internal processes, we think. In both cases, the nucleus and the
Patch.” I rubbed my face; I was tired after the previous day’s long drive. “In
the case of the nucleus, some kind of organic chemistry seems to be mediating
powerful magnetic fields - and the Incoming seem to swarm within. I don’t think
we’ve really any idea what’s going on in there. We’re actually making more
progress with the science of the Venusian biosphere...”

If the arrival of the Incoming
had been astonishing, the evidence of intelligence on Venus, entirely
unexpected, was stunning. Nobody had expected the clouds to part right under
the orbiting Incoming nucleus - like a deep storm system, kilometres deep in
that thick ocean of an atmosphere - and nobody had expected to see the Patch
revealed, swirling mist banks where lights flickered tantalisingly, like
organised lightning.

“With retrospect, given the
results from the old space probes, we might have guessed there was something on
Venus - life, if not intelligent life. There were always unexplained
deficiencies and surpluses of various compounds. We think the Venusians live in
the clouds, far enough above the red-hot ground that the temperature is low
enough for liquid water to exist. They ingest carbon monoxide and excrete
sulphur compounds, living off the sun’s ultraviolet.”

“And they’re smart.”

“Oh, yes.” The astronomers,
already recording the complex signals coming out of the Incoming nucleus, had
started to discern rich patterns in the Venusian Patch too. “You can tell how
complicated a message is even if you don’t know anything about the content. You
measure entropy orders, which are like correlation measures, mapping structures
on various scales embedded in the transmission -”

“You don’t understand any of what
you just said, do you?”

I smiled. “Not a word. But I do
know this. Going by their data structures, the Venusians are smarter than us as
we are smarter than the chimps. And the Incoming are smarter again.”

Edith turned to face the sky, the
brilliant spark of Venus. “But you say the scientists still believe all this
chatter is just - what was your word?”

“Leakage. Edith, the Incoming and
the Venusians aren’t speaking to us. They aren’t even speaking to each other.
What we’re observing is a kind of internal dialogue, in each case. The two are
talking to themselves, not each other. One theorist briefed the PM that perhaps
both these entities are more like hives than human communities.”

“Hives?” She looked troubled. “Hives
are
different
. They can be purposeful, but they don’t
have consciousness as we have it. They aren’t finite as we are; their edges are
much more blurred. They aren’t even mortal; individuals can die, but the hives
live on.”

“I wonder what their theology
will be, then.”

“It’s all so strange. These
aliens just don’t fit any category we expected, or even that we share. Not
mortal, not communicative - and not interested in us. What do they
want
? What
can
they want?” Her
tone wasn’t like her; she sounded bewildered to be facing open questions,
rather than exhilarated as usual.

I tried to reassure her. “Maybe
your signal will provoke some answers.”

She checked her watch, and looked
up again towards Venus. “Well, we’ve only got five minutes to wait before -”
Her eyes widened, and she fell silent.

I turned to look the way she was,
to the east.

Venus was flaring. Sputtering
like a dying candle.

People started to react. They
shouted, pointed, or they just stood there, staring, as I did. I couldn’t move.
I felt a deep, awed fear. Then people called, pointing at the big screen in the
visitors’ centre, where, it seemed, the space telescopes were returning a very
strange set of images indeed.

Edith’s hand crept into mine.
Suddenly I was very glad I hadn’t brought my kids that day.

I heard angrier shouting, and a
police siren, and I smelled burning.

Once I’d finished making my
police statement I went back to the hotel in Helston, where Meryl was angry and
relieved to see me, and the kids bewildered and vaguely frightened. I couldn’t
believe that after all that had happened - the strange events at Venus, the
assaults by Shouters on messagers and vice versa, the arson, Edith’s injury,
the police crackdown - it was not yet eleven in the morning.

That same day I took the family
back to London, and called in at work. Then, three days after the incident, I
got away again and commandeered a ministry car and driver to take me back to
Cornwall.

Edith was out of intensive care,
but she’d been kept in the hospital at Truro. She had a TV stand before her
face, the screen dark. I carefully kissed her on the unburnt side of her face,
and sat down, handing over books, newspapers and flowers. “Thought you might be
bored.”

“You never were any good with the
sick, were you, Tobe?”

“Sorry.” I opened up one of the
newspapers. “But there’s some good news. They caught the arsonists.”

She grunted, her distorted mouth
barely opening. “So what? It doesn’t matter who they were. Messagers and
Shouters have been at each others’ throats all over the world. People like that
are interchangeable... But did we all have to behave so badly? I mean, they
even wrecked Arthur.”

“And he was Grade II listed!”

She laughed, then regretted it,
for she winced with the pain. “But why shouldn’t we smash everything up down
here? After all, that’s all they seem to be interested in up
there
. The Incoming assaulted Venus, and the Venusians
struck back. We all saw it, live on TV - it was nothing more than
War of the Worlds
.” She sounded disappointed. “These
creatures are our superiors, Toby. All your signal analysis stuff proved it.
And yet they haven’t transcended war and destruction.”