The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (55 page)

Here he shows us a future in which humans are bystanders to an immense cosmic battle between forces that, to our dismay, ignore us completely.

F
OR ME, THE
saga of the Incoming was above all Edith Black’s story. For she, more than anyone else I knew, was the one who had a problem with it.

When the news was made public I drove out of London to visit Edith at her country church. I had to cancel a dozen appointments to do it, including one with the Prime Minister’s office, but I knew, as soon as I got out of the car and stood in the soft September rain, that it had been the right thing to do.

Edith was pottering around outside the church, wearing overalls and rubber boots and wielding an alarming-looking industrial-strength jackhammer. But she had a radio blaring out a phone-in discussion, and indoors, out of the rain, I glimpsed a widescreen TV and laptop, both scrolling news – mostly fresh projections of where the Incoming’s decelerating trajectory might deliver them, and new deep-space images of their “craft,” if such it was, a massive block of ice like a comet nucleus, leaking very complex patterns of infrared radiation. Edith was plugged into the world, even out here in the wilds of Essex.

She approached me with a grin, pushing back goggles under a hard hat. “Toby.” I got a kiss on the cheek and a brief hug; she smelled of machine oil. We were easy with each other physically. Fifteen years earlier, in our last year at college, we’d been lovers, briefly; it had finished with a kind of regretful embarrassment – very English, said our American friends – but it had proven only a kind of speed bump in our relationship. “Glad to see you, if surprised. I thought all you civil service types would be locked down in emergency meetings.”

For a decade I’d been a civil servant in the environment ministry. “No, but old Thorp—” my minister “—has been in a continuous COBRA session for twenty-four hours. Much good it’s doing anybody.”

“I must say it’s not obvious to the layman what use an environment minister is when the aliens are coming.”

“Well, among the scenarios they’re discussing is some kind of attack from space. A lot of what we can dream up is similar to natural disasters – a meteor fall could be like a tsunami, a sunlight occlusion like a massive volcanic event. And so Thorp is in the mix, along with health, energy, transport. Of course we’re in contact with other governments – NATO, the UN. The most urgent issue right now is whether to signal or not.”

She frowned. “Why wouldn’t you?”

“Security. Edith, remember, we know absolutely nothing about these guys. What if our signal was interpreted as a threat? And there are tactical considerations. Any signal would give information to a potential enemy about our technical capabilities. It would also give away the very fact that we know they are here.”

She scoffed. “ ‘Tactical considerations.’ Paranoid bullshit! And besides, I bet every kid with a CB radio is beaming out her heart to ET right now. The whole planet’s alight.”

“Well, that’s true. You can’t stop it. But still, sending some kind of signal authorized by government or an intergovernment agency is another step entirely.”

“Oh, come on. You can’t really believe anybody is going to cross the stars to harm us. What could they possibly want that would justify the cost of an interstellar mission . . . ?”

So we argued. I’d only been out of the car for five minutes.

We’d had this kind of discussion all the way back to late nights in college, some of them in her bed, or mine. She’d always been drawn to the bigger issues – “to the context,” as she used to say. Though we’d both started out as maths students, her head had soon expanded in the exotic intellectual air of the college, and she’d moved on to study older ways of thinking than the scientific – older questions, still unanswered. Was there a God? If so, or if not, what was the point of our existence? Why did we, or indeed anything, exist at all? In her later college years she took theology options, but quickly burned through that discipline and was left unsatisfied. She was repelled too by the modern atheists, with their aggressive denials. So, after college, she had started her own journey through life – a journey in search of answers. Now, of course, maybe some of those answers had come swimming in from the stars in search of her.

This was why I’d felt drawn here, at this particular moment in my life. I needed her perspective. In the wan daylight I could see the fine patina of lines around the mouth I used to kiss, and the strands of grey in her red hair. I was sure she suspected, rightly, that I knew more than I was telling her – more than had been released to the public. But she didn’t follow that up for now.

“Come see what I’m doing,” she said, sharply breaking up the debate. “Watch your shoes.” We walked across muddy grass towards the main door. The core of that old church, dedicated to St. Cuthbert, was a Saxon-era tower; the rest of the fabric was mostly Norman, but there had been an extensive restoration in Victorian times. Within was a lovely space, if cold, the stone walls resonating. It was still consecrated, Church of England, but in this empty agricultural countryside it was one of a widespread string of churches united in a single parish, and rarely used.

Edith had never joined any of the established religions, but she had appropriated some of their infrastructure, she liked to say. And here she had gathered a group of volunteers, wandering souls more or less like-minded. They worked to maintain the fabric of the church. And within, she led her group through what you might think of as a mix of discussions, or prayers, or meditation, or yoga practices – whatever she could find that seemed to work. This was the way religions used to be before the big monotheistic creeds took over, she argued. “The only way to reach God, or anyhow the space beyond us where God ought to be, is by working hard, by helping other people – and by pushing your mind to the limit of its capability, and then going a little beyond, and just
listening.”
Beyond
logos
to
mythos.
She was always restless, always trying something new. Yet in some ways she was the most contented person I ever met – at least before the Incoming showed up.

Now, though, she wasn’t content about the state of the church’s foundations. She showed me where she had dug up flagstones to reveal sodden ground. “We’re digging out new drainage channels, but it’s a hell of a job. We may end up rebuilding the founds altogether. The very deepest level seems to be wood, huge piles of Saxon oak . . .” She eyed me. “This church has stood here for a thousand years, without, apparently, facing a threat such as this before. Some measure of climate change, right?”

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? For 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 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 when 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 rearview 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, that 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.”