The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 29

Shouters have been at each other’s 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.”

“But we learned so much.” I had a small briefcase which 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, Edith. 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 Edith. “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 focussed, 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, Edith. 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 are sitting around on Earth. Even politicians know we haven’t been here that long.”

Edith 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. Who knows how many other planets we lost in the past, consumed as weapons of forgotten wars? 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, Edith—”

“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 Edith 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 changed channels and forgotten already, but anybody with any imagination knows… 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, even on tremendous scales of space and time… Our ancestors understood that right back to the Ice Age, and venerated the animals they had to kill. They were 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, Edith. We’re going to have to work together if we’re to weather it, I think.”

She frowned. “What kind of storm?… Oh. Neptune.”

“Yeah. You can’t just delete a world without consequences. The planets’ orbits are singing like plucked strings. The asteroids and comets too, and those orphan moons wandering around. Some of the stirred-up debris is falling into the inner system.”

“And if we’re struck—”

I shrugged. “We’ll have to help each other. There’s nobody else to help us, that’s for sure. Look, Edith— maybe the Incoming and the Venusians are typical of what’s out there. But that doesn’t mean we have to be like them, does it? Maybe we’ll find others more like us. And if not, well, we can be the first. A spark to light a fire that