Engineering Infinity by Jonathan Strahan

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