Obelisk

by Stephen Baxter

  Talking, speculating, we walked through the church.

  We used the excuse of Elspeth’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, skipping, 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, and, I reflected, about eight months since I’d seen Elspeth at her church. 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 Elspeth and her committee of messagers to get hold of, when they, or rather she, grew impatient with the government’s continuing reticence over sending signals to the Incoming. Because of the official policy I’d 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 cabal protesting that the messagers were communicating with the Devil. My ministry card helped me get through.

  Elspeth 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 Venus: a live feed from a space telescope – the best images available right now, though every major space agency had a probe to the planet 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 – evidence, it seemed, of Venusians, evidence of intelligence on the planet responding to the visitor from the skies. 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 Elspeth’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.

  Elspeth walked with me, cradling a polystyrene teacup 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 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 (if they existed) 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.

  Elspeth waved a hand at Arthur. ‘Well, 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 Elspeth’s message. As well as 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 happy children and astronauts on the moon. There was even a copy of the old Pioneer space probe plaque from the seventies, the one 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?’

  ‘We still think they’re not so much “signals” as leakage from internal processes. 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 much as we are smarter than the chimps. And the Incoming are smarter again.’

  Elspeth 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. Elspeth, 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 gods will be like, 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?’ This tone wasn’t like her; she sounded bewildered to be facing open questions, rather than exhilarated by mystery as she normally was.

  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.

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

  Then 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, Elspeth’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.

  Elspeth 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 Goonhilly 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 it all 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 sophisticated than The 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.’

  ‘But we learned so much.’ I had a small briefcase that I opened now, and pulled out printouts that I spread over her bed. ‘The screen images are better, but you know how it is; they won’t let me use my laptop or my phone in here … Look, Elspeth. It was incredible. The Incoming assault on Venus lasted hours. Their weapon, whatever it was, burned its way through the Patch, and right down through an atmosphere a hundred times thicker than Earth’s. We even glimpsed the surface—’

  ‘Now melted to slag.’

  ‘Much of it … But then the acid-munchers in the clouds struck back. We think we know what they did.’

  That caught her interest. ‘How can we know that?’

  ‘Sheer luck. That NASA probe, heading for Venus, happened to be in the way …’

  The probe had detected a wash of electromagnetic radiation coming from the planet.

  ‘A signal,’ breathed Elspeth. ‘Heading which way?’

  ‘Out from the sun. And then, eight hours later, the probe sensed another signal, coming the other way. I say “sensed”. It bobbed about like a cork on a pond. We think it was a gravity wave – very sharply focused, very intense.’

  ‘And when the wave hit the Incoming nucleus—’

  ‘Well, you saw the pictures. The last fragments have burned up in Venus’s atmosphere.’

  She lay back on her reef of pillows. ‘Eight hours,’ she mused. ‘Gravity waves travel at lightspeed. Four hours out, four hours back … Earth’s about eight light-minutes from the sun. What’s four light-hours out from Venus? Jupiter, Saturn—’

  ‘Neptune. Neptune was four light-hours out.’

  ‘Was?’

  ‘It’s gone, Elspeth. Almost all of it – the moons are still there, a few chunks of core ice and rock, slowly dispersing. The Venusians used the planet to create their gravity-wave pulse—’

  ‘They used it. Are you telling me this to cheer me up? A gas giant, a significant chunk of the solar system’s budget of mass–energy, sacrificed for a single warlike gesture.’ She laughed, bitter. ‘Oh, God!’

  ‘Of course we’ve no idea how they did it.’ I put away my images. ‘If we were scared of the Incoming, now we’re terrified of the Venusians. That NASA probe has been shut down. We don’t want anything to look like a threat … You know, I heard the PM herself ask why it was that this space war should break out now, just when we humans show up on Earth. Even politicians know we haven’t been here that long.’

  Elspeth shook her head, wincing again. ‘The final vanity. This whole episode has never been about us. Can’t you see? If this is happening now, it must have happened over and over. Maybe all we see, the planets and stars and galaxies, is just the debris of huge wars – on and on, up to scales we can barely imagine. And we’re just weeds growing in the rubble. Tell that to the Prime Minister. And I thought we might ask them about their gods! What a fool I’ve been – the questions on which I’ve wasted my life, and here are my answers – what a fool.’ She was growing agitated.

  ‘Take it easy, Elspeth—’

  ‘Oh, just go. I’ll be fine. It’s the universe that’s broken, not me.’ She turned away on her pillow, as if to sleep.

  The next time I saw Elspeth she was out of hospital and back at her church.

  It was another September day, like the first time I visited her after the Incoming appeared in our telescopes, and at least it wasn’t raining. There was a bite in the breeze, but I imagined it soothed her damaged skin. And here she was, digging in the mud before her church.

  ‘Equinox season,’ she said. ‘Rain coming. Best to get this fixed before we have another flash flood. And before you ask, the doctors cleared me. It’s my face that’s buggered, not the rest of me.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to ask.’

  ‘OK, then. How’s Meryl, the kids?’

  ‘Fine. Meryl’s at work, the kids back at school. Life goes on.’

  ‘It must, I suppose. What else is there? No, by the way.’

  ‘No what?’

  ‘No, I won’t come serve on your minister’s think tank.’

  ‘At least consider it. You’d be ideal. Look, we’re all trying to figure out where we go from here. The arrival of the Incoming, the war on Venus – it was like a religious revelation. That’s how it’s being described. A revelation witnessed by all mankind, on TV. Suddenly we’ve got an entirely different view of the universe out there. And we have to figure out how we go forward, in a whole number of dimensions – political, scientific, economic, social, religious.’

  ‘I’ll tell you how we go forward. In despair. Religions are imploding.’

  ‘No, they’re not.’

  ‘OK. Theology is imploding. Philosophy. The rest of the world has change
d channels and forgotten already, but anybody with any imagination knows the truth … In a way, this has been the final demotion, the end of the process that started with Copernicus and Darwin. Now we know there are creatures in the universe much smarter than we’ll ever be, and we know they don’t care a damn about us. It’s the indifference that’s the killer – don’t you think? All our futile agitation about if they’d attack us and whether we should signal … And they did nothing but smash each other up. With that above us, what can we do but turn away?’

  ‘You’re not turning away.’

  She leaned on her shovel. ‘I’m not religious; I don’t count. My congregation turned away. Here I am, alone.’ She glanced at the clear sky. ‘Maybe solitude is the key to it all. A galactic isolation imposed by the vast gulfs between the stars, the lightspeed limit. As a species develops you might have a brief phase of individuality, of innovation and technological achievement. But then, when the universe gives you nothing back, you turn in on yourself, and slide into the milky embrace of eusociality – the hive.

  ‘But what then? How would it be for a mass mind to emerge, alone? Maybe that’s why the Incoming went to war. Because they were outraged to discover, by some chance, they weren’t alone in the universe.’

  ‘Most commentators think it was about resources. Most of our wars are about that, in the end.’

  ‘Yes. Depressingly true. All life is based on the destruction of other life, it seems, even on tremendous scales of space and time … But our ancestors understood that right back to the Ice Age, and venerated the animals they had to kill. They are so far above us, the Incoming and the Venusians alike, yet maybe we, at our best, are morally superior to them.’

  I touched her arm. ‘This is why we need you. For your insights. There’s a storm coming, Elspeth. We’re going to have to work together if we’re to weather it, I think.’