…And to Debbie Sturrock, a trainee firefighter based along the coast in Dunbar, Venus was invisible, a light in the sky masked by the tower of flame she and her fellow students were trying to control, under the growling command of an unsympathetic station master. Fire in the sky meant nothing when you were confronted by fire on Earth…

…And in Glasgow, Scotland’s biggest city, Jenny Calder had tried to follow the news — she had been interested in astronomy and science and stuff as a kid, and the Venus incident was strange and somehow disturbing — but now the kids were fighting again, this flat in the Gorbals, renovated or not, was just too small for all of them, and William, her husband, was worrying that if his new employers found out about his record he’d be kicked off the oil rig again, and so she pushed her hair from her eyes and stumbled from crisis to crisis, never quite falling over, and Venus was just too far away and too strange to deserve her attention…

…And around the world, in the US, an Air Force pilot called Garry Beus test-flew an enhanced F-16 over the baked desert of California and looked up at Venus, smeared and distorted by his canopy in an eggshell sky, and thought with wistful sadness of his dying mother Monica, and how she must be fascinated by this… And in Los Angeles, a journalist called Joely Stern, dismayed by yet another rejected job application, stared up at a Venus made Mars-red by filthy LA smog, and she stared at it, wishing she was up there, up in space, anywhere but here…

…And in Japan, a geologist called Blue Ishiguro watched the evolving light in the sky, fascinated, and wondered if he should call his friend Henry Meacher at NASA who might know more about this — but then he’d heard Henry was leaving NASA, not to mention Geena, and it mightn’t be a good time… And, atop a Japanese mountain called Nantai, a Buddhist monk — originally from Ireland, called Declan Hague — stared at the strange light and wondered what it might mean for his self-imposed exile and the guilt that still racked him…