Читать книгу The Book of Strange New Things - Michel Faber - Страница 12
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‘Hello everybody,’ he said
Dear Bea,
Finally, a chance to communicate with you properly! Shall we call this my First Epistle to the Joshuans? Oh, I know we both have our misgivings about St Paul and his slant on things, but the guy sure knew how to write a good letter and I’m going to need all the inspiration I can get, especially in my current state. (Half-delirious with exhaustion.) So, until I can come up with something wonderfully original: ‘Grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ.’ I doubt whether Paul had any women in mind when he wrote that greeting, given his problems with females, but maybe if he’d known YOU, he would have!
I would love to put you in the picture, but there’s not much to describe yet. No windows in this ship. There are millions of stars out there and possibly other amazing sights, but all I can see is the walls, the ceiling and the floor. It’s a good thing I’m not claustrophobic.
I’m writing this with pencil and paper. (I had a bunch of pens but they must have exploded during the Jump – there’s ink all over the insides of my bag. No surprise they didn’t survive the trip, given how my own head felt . . . !) Anyway, when sophisticated technology fails, primitive technology steps in to do the job. Back to the sharpened stick with the sliver of graphite inside, and the sheets of pressed wood-pulp . . .
Have I gone insane, you’re wondering? No, don’t worry (yet). I’m not under the delusion I can put this letter in an envelope and stick a stamp on it. I’m still in transit – we’ve got about 25 hours’ journey left to go. As soon as I’m on Oasis and settled in, I’ll transcribe these jottings. Someone will plug me into the network and I’ll be able to send a message to the thing that USIC installed in our house. And you can forget about calling it a ‘Zhou-23 Messenger Mainframe’ like we were told to. I mentioned that term to the guys here and they just laughed. They refer to it as a Shoot. Typical of Americans to shorten everything to a monosyllable. (It’s catchy, though.)
I suppose, instead of waiting a whole day, I could use the Shoot that’s here on board, especially since I’m too wound up to sleep and it would be a good way of filling the time until we land. But it wouldn’t be private, and I need privacy for what I’m going to say next. The other men on this ship are – how can I put this? – not exactly models of discretion and sensitivity. If I wrote this on their machine, I can just imagine one of them retrieving my message and reading it out loud, to general hilarity.
Bea, forgive me for not being able to let this go, but I’m still upset about what happened in the car. I feel I let you down. I wish I could take you in my arms and make it right. It’s a silly thing to obsess about, I know. I suppose it just makes me confront how far away we are from each other now. Have any husband and wife ever been separated by so vast a distance? It seems like only yesterday I could reach out my arm and you’d be right there. On our last morning in bed together, you looked so satisfied and serene. But in the car you looked distraught.
As well as being shaken about that, I can’t say I’m feeling confident about my mission. It’s probably just physical and temporary, but I wonder if I’m up to it. The other men on the ship, raucous though they are, have been very nice to me, in a condescending sort of way. But I’m sure they’re wondering why USIC would pay a fortune to transport me to Oasis, and I must admit I’m confused myself. Each member of the team has a clearly defined role. Tuska (not sure of his Christian name) is the pilot, and on Oasis he works with computers. Billy Graham, nicknamed BG, is an engineer with huge experience in the oilmining industry. Arthur Severin is another sort of engineer, something to do with hydro-metallurgical processes; it’s way above my head. In conversation, these guys come across like construction workers (and I suppose they are!) but they’re a lot cleverer than they appear and, unlike me, they are supremely qualified for their assignments.
Well, I think that’s enough self-doubt for one day!
The part of this letter that I scribbled on the ship has now come to an end – I didn’t manage to achieve much with my pencil and paper, did I? Everything from here on is written (well, typed) on Oasis. Yes, I’ve arrived, I’m here! And the first thing I’m doing is writing to you.
It was a safe landing – weirdly smooth in fact, not even the shuddery bump you get when an aeroplane’s wheels hit the ground. More like a lift arriving at the correct floor. I would have preferred something more dramatic, or even frightening, to dispel the sense of unreality. Instead, you’re told that you’ve landed, the doors open, and you walk out into one of those tube-tunnel things just like at an airport, and then you’re in a big ugly building that looks like any other big ugly building you’ve ever been in. I expected something more exotic, something architecturally outlandish. But maybe the same people designed this place as designed USIC’s facilities in Florida.
Anyway, I’m in my quarters now. I’d assumed that upon arrival I would immediately have to be ferried somewhere else, a journey across some amazing terrain. But the airport – if you can call it that, it’s more like a huge car park – has several wings of accommodation facilities attached to it. I’ve been shunted from one box to another.
Not that my quarters are small. In fact the bedroom is bigger than our bedroom, there’s a proper bathroom/shower (which I’m too tired to use yet), a fridge (completely empty except for a plastic ice-cube tray, also empty), a table, two chairs and, of course, the Shoot that I’m typing this on. The ambience is very ‘hotel chain’; I could be in a conference centre in Watford. But I expect I’ll be asleep very soon. Severin told me that it’s quite common for people to experience insomnia for a couple of days after the Jump, and then to sleep for 24 hours straight. I’m sure he knows what he’s talking about.
We parted on slightly awkward terms, Severin and I. The fact that the Jump’s aim was more accurate than expected meant that, even with unrestricted use of fuel to get us to Oasis in the fastest possible time, we still had a huge amount left over. So we just jettisoned it all before arrival. Can you imagine? Thousands of litres of fuel squirted out into space, along with our body wastes, dirty tissues, empty noodle containers. I couldn’t help saying, Surely there must be a better way. Severin took offence (I think he was sticking up for Tuska, who was technically responsible for the decision – those two have a love/hate thing going). Anyway, Severin asked me if I thought I could land a ship with that much fuel ‘hanging off its ass’. He said it was like tossing a bottle of milk off a skyscraper and hoping it wouldn’t come to any harm when it reached the ground. I said that if science could come up with something like the Jump it could surely solve a problem like that. Severin seized hold of that word, ‘science’. Science, he said, is not some mysterious larger-than-life force, it’s just the name we give to the bright ideas that individual guys have when they’re lying in bed at night, and that if the fuel thing bothered me so much, there was nothing stopping me from having a bright idea to solve it and submitting it to USIC. He said it in an off-hand sort of tone but there was aggression behind it. You know how men can be.
I can’t believe I’m talking about a spat I had with an engineer! By the grace of God I’ve been sent to another world, the first Christian missionary ever to do so, and here I am gossiping about my fellow travellers!
My dear Beatrice, please regard this First Epistle as a prelude, a trial run, a rough turning over of the soil before I plant something beautiful in it. That’s partly why I decided to transcribe the pencilled scribblings I wrote on the ship, and type them unchanged and unedited into this Shoot message to you. If I changed one sentence I would be tempted to change them all; if I gave myself permission to omit one dull detail I’d probably end up discarding the whole thing. Better that you get these jetlagged, barely coherent ramblings than nothing.
I’m going to go to bed now. It’s night. It will be night for the next three days, if you know what I mean. I haven’t seen the sky yet, not properly, just a glimpse through the transparent ceiling of the arrivals hall as I was being escorted to my quarters. A very solicitous USIC liaison officer whose name I’ve forgotten was chattering at me and trying to carry my bag and I just sort of got swept along. My quarters have big windows but they’re shuttered with a Venetian blind that’s presumably electronic and I’m too tired & disoriented to figure out how it works. I should get some sleep before I start pressing buttons. Except, of course, for the button I will now press to send this message to you.
Shoot through space, little light beams, and bounce off all the right satellites to reach the woman I love! But how can these words, translated into blinks of binary code, travel so impossibly far? I won’t quite believe it until I get a reply from you. If I can be granted that one small miracle, all the others will follow, I’m sure.
Love,
Peter
He slept, and awoke to the sound of rain.
For a long time he lay in the dark, too weary to stir, listening. The rain sounded different from rain back home. Its intensity waxed and waned in a rapid cyclical rhythm, three seconds at most between surges. He synchronised the fluctuations with his own breathing, inhaling when the rain fell softer, exhaling when it fell hard. What made the rain do that? Was it natural, or was it caused by the design of the building: a wind-trap, an exhaust fan, a faulty portal opening and closing? Could it be something as mundane as his own window flapping in the breeze? He could see no further than the slats of the Venetian blind.
Eventually his curiosity got the better of his fatigue. He staggered out of bed, fumbled for the bathroom light, was momentarily blinded by halogen overkill. He squinted at his watch, the only item of apparel he’d kept on when he’d gone to bed. He’d slept . . . how long? . . . only seven hours . . . unless he’d slept thirty-one. He checked the date. No, only seven. What had woken him? His erection, perhaps.
The bathroom was in all respects identical to a bathroom one might expect to find in a hotel, except that the toilet, instead of employing a flush mechanism, was the kind that sucked out its contents in a whoosh of compressed air. Peter pissed slowly and with some discomfort, waiting for his penis to unstiffen. His urine was dark orange. Alarmed, he filled a glass with water from the tap. The liquid was pale green. Clean and transparent, but pale green. Stuck to the wall above the sink was a printed notice: COLOR OF WATER IS GREEN. THIS IS NORMAL AND CERTIFIED SAFE. IF IN DOUBT, BOTTLED WATER & SOFT DRINKS ARE AVAILABLE, SUBJECT TO AVAILABILITY, FROM USIC STORE, $50 PER 300ml.
Peter stared at the glass of green liquid, parched but wary. All those stories of British tourists drinking foreign water while on holiday and getting poisoned. Delhi belly and all that. Two reassuring Scripture quotations came to his mind, ‘Take no thought for what ye shall drink’ from Matthew 6:25 and ‘To the pure, all things are pure’ from Titus 1:15, but those were clearly meant for other contexts. He looked again at the placard for the bottled alternative: $50 PER 300ml. Out of the question. He and Bea had already discussed what they would do with the money he earned on this mission. Pay off their mortgage. Rebuild the nursery room of their church so the children had more light and sunshine. Buy a van adapted for wheel-chairs. The list went on and on. Every dollar he spent here would cross something worthwhile off it. He lifted the glass and drank.
It tasted good. Divine, in fact. Was that a blasphemous thought? ‘Oh, give it a rest,’ Beatrice would no doubt advise him. ‘There are more important things in the world to fret about.’ What things might there be to fret about in this world? He would find out soon enough. He stood up, flushed the toilet, drank more of the green water. It tasted ever-so-slightly of honeydew melon, or maybe he was imagining that.
Still naked, he walked to the bedroom window. There must be a way of raising the blind, even though there were no switches or buttons in sight. He felt around the edges of the slats, and his fingers snagged in a cord. He tugged on it and the blind lifted. It occurred to him as he continued pulling on the cord that he might be exposing his nakedness to anyone who happened to be passing by, but it was too late to worry about that now. The window – one large pane of Plexiglass – was wholly revealed.
Outside, darkness still ruled. The area surrounding the USIC airport complex was a wasteland, a dead zone of featureless bitumen, dismal shed-like buildings, and spindly steel lamps. It was like a supermarket car park that went on for ever. And yet Peter’s heart pumped hard, and he breathed shallowly in his excitement. The rain! The rain wasn’t falling in straight lines, it was . . . dancing! Could one say that about rainfall? Water had no intelligence. And yet, this rainfall swept from side to side, hundreds of thousands of silvery lines all describing the same elegant arcs. It was nothing like when rain back home was flung around erratically by gusts of wind. No, the air here seemed calm, and the rain’s motion was graceful, a leisurely sweeping from one side of the sky to the other – hence the rhythmic spattering against his window.
He pressed his forehead to the glass. It was blessedly cool. He realised he was running a slight fever, wondered if he was hallucinating the curvature of the rainfall. Peering out into the dark, he made an effort to focus on the hazes of light around the lamp-posts. Inside these halo-like spheres of illumination, the raindrops were picked out bright as tinfoil confetti. Their sensuous, undulating pattern could not be clearer.
Peter stepped back from the window. His reflection was ghostly, criss-crossed by the unearthly rain. His normally rosy-cheeked, cheerful face had a haunted look, and the tungsten glow of a distant lamppost blazed inside his abdomen. His genitals had the sculptured, alabaster appearance of Greek statuary. He raised his hand, to break the spell, to reorient himself to his own familiar humanity. But it might as well have been a stranger waving back.
My dear Beatrice,
No word from you. I feel as though I’m literally suspended – as though I can’t let out my breath until I have proof that we can communicate with each other. I once read a Science Fiction story in which a young man travelled to an alien planet, leaving his wife behind. He was only away for a few weeks and then he returned to Earth. But the punchline of the story was that Time passed at a different rate for her than it did for him. So when he got back home, he discovered that 75 earth years had sped by, and his wife had died the week before. He arrived just in time to attend the funeral, and all the old folks were wondering who this distraught young man might be. It was a cheesy, run-of-the-mill Sci-Fi tale but I read it when I was at an impressionable age and it really got to me. And of course now I’m scared it will come true. BG, Severin and Tuska have all been to Oasis & back several times over the years and I suppose I should take that as proof that you’re not wrinkling up like a prune! (Although I would still love you if you did!)
As you can probably tell from my babbling, I’m still horribly jetlagged. Slept well but nowhere near enough. It’s still dark here, smack dab in the middle of the three-day night. I haven’t been outside yet, but I’ve seen the rain. The rain here is amazing. It sways backwards and forwards, like one of those bead curtains.
There’s a well-appointed bathroom here and I’ve just had a shower. The water is green! Safe to drink, apparently. Wonderful to have a proper wash at last, even though I still smell odd (I’m sure you’d laugh to see me sitting here, sniffing my own armpits with a frown on my face) and my urine is a weird colour.
Well, that’s not the note I wanted to end on, but I can’t think of anything else to say right now. I just need to hear from you. Are you there? Please speak!
Love,
Peter
Having sent this missive, Peter loitered around his quarters, at a loss for what to do next. The USIC representative who’d escorted him off the ship had made all the correct noises about being available for him if he needed anything. But she hadn’t specified how this availability would work. Had she even divulged her name? Peter couldn’t recall. There certainly wasn’t any note left lying on the table, to welcome him, give him a few pointers and tell him how to get in touch. There was a red button on the wall labelled EMERGENCY, but no button labelled BEWILDERMENT. He spent quite a while searching for the key to his quarters, mindful that it might not look like a conventional key but might be a plastic card of the sort issued by hotels. He found nothing that even vaguely resembled a key. Eventually, he opened his door and examined the lock, or rather the place where a lock would be if there’d been one. There was only an old-fashioned swivel handle, as though Peter’s quarters were a bedroom within an unusually large home. In my father’s house are many mansions. USIC evidently wasn’t concerned about security or privacy. OK, maybe its personnel had nothing to steal and nothing to hide, but even so . . . Odd. Peter looked up and down the corridor; it was vacant and his was the only door in view.
Back inside, he opened the fridge, verified that the empty ice cube tray was the only thing in it. An apple wouldn’t have been too much to expect, would it? Or perhaps it would. He kept forgetting how far from home he was.
It was time to go out and face that.
He got dressed in the clothes he’d worn yesterday – underpants, jeans, flannel shirt, denim jacket, socks, lace-up shoes. He combed his hair, had another drink of greenish water. His empty stomach gurgled and grunted, having processed and eliminated the noodles he’d eaten on the ship. He strode to the door; hesitated, sank to his knees, bowed his head in prayer. He had not yet thanked God for delivering him safely to his destination; he thanked Him now. He thanked Him for some other things, too, but then got the distinct feeling that Jesus was standing at his back, prodding him, good-humouredly accusing him of stalling. So he sprang to his feet and left at once.
The USIC mess hall was humming, not with human activity, but with recorded music. It was a large room, one wall of which consisted almost wholly of glass, and the music hung around it like a fog, piped from vents in the ceiling. Apart from a vague impression of watery glitter on the window, the rain outside was felt rather than seen; it added a sense of cosy, muffled enclosure to the hall.
‘I stopped to see a weeping willow
Crying on his pillow
Maybe he’s crying for me . . . ’ sang a ghostly female voice, seemingly channelled through miles of subterranean tunnels to emerge at last from an accidental aperture.
‘And as the skies turn gloomy,
Night blooms whisper to me,
I’m lonesome as I can be . . . ’
There were four USIC employees in the mess hall, all of them young men unknown to Peter. One, an overweight, crewcut Chinese, dozed in an armchair next to a well-stocked magazine rack, his face slumped on a fist. One was working at the coffee bar, his tall spindly body draped in an oversize T-shirt. He was intently fiddling with a touch-sensitive screen balanced on the counter, poking at it with a metal pencil. He chewed at his swollen lips with large white teeth. His hair was heavy with some sort of gelatinous haircare product. He looked Slavic. The other two men were black. They were seated at one of the tables, studying a book together. It was too large and slim to be a Bible; more likely a technical manual. At their elbows were large mugs of coffee and a couple of dessert plates, bare except for crumbs. Peter could smell no food in the room.
‘I go out walking after midnight,
Out in the starlight.
Just hoping you may be . . . ’
The three awake men noted his arrival with a nod of low-key welcome but did not otherwise interrupt what they were doing. The snoozing Asian and the two men with the book were all dressed the same: loose Middle Eastern-style shirt, loose cotton trousers, no socks, and chunky sports shoes. Islamic basketball players.
‘Hi, I’m Peter,’ said Peter, fronting up to the counter. ‘I’m new here. I’d love something to eat, if you’ve got it.’
The Slavic-looking young man shook his prognathous face slowly to and fro.
‘Too late, bro.’
‘Too late?’
‘Twenty-four-hourly stock appraisal, bro. Began an hour ago.’
‘I was told by the USIC people that food is provided whenever we need it.’
‘Correct, bro. You just gotta make sure you don’t need it at the wrong time.’
Peter digested this. The female voice on the PA system had come to the end of her song. A male announcement followed, sonorous and theatrically intimate.
‘You’re listening to Night Blooms, a documentary chronicle of Patsy Cline’s performances of ‘Walkin’ After Midnight’ from 1957 right through to the posthumous duets in 1999. Well, listeners, did you do what I asked? Did you hold in your memory the girlish shyness that radiated from Patsy’s voice in the version she performed for her debut on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts? What a difference eleven months makes! The second version you’ve just heard was recorded on December 14, 1957, for the Grand Ole Opry. By then, she clearly had more of an inkling of the song’s uncanny power. But the aura of wisdom and unbearable sadness that you’ll hear in the next version owes something to personal tragedy, too. On June 14, 1961, Patsy was almost killed in a head-on car collision. Incredibly, only a few days after she left hospital, we find her performing ‘After Midnight’ at the Cimarron Ballroom in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Listen, people, listen closely, and you will hear the pain of that terrible auto accident, the grief she must have felt at the deep scars on her forehead, which never healed . . . ’
The ghostly female voice wafted across the ceiling once more.
‘I go out walking after midnight,
Out in the moonlight just like we used to do.
I’m always walking after midnight,
Searching for you . . . ’
‘When is the next food delivery?’ asked Peter.
‘Food’s already here, bro,’ said the Slavic man, patting the counter. ‘Released for consumption in six hours and . . . twenty-seven minutes.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m new here; I didn’t know about this system. And I really am very hungry. Couldn’t you . . . uh . . . release something early, and just mark it as having been served in six hours from now?’
The Slav narrowed his eyes.
‘That would be . . . committing an untruth, bro.’
Peter smiled and hung his head in defeat. Patsy Cline sang ‘Well, that’s just my way of saying I love you . . . ’ as he walked away from the counter and sat down in one of the armchairs near the magazine rack, directly behind the sleeping man.
As soon as his back sank into the upholstery he felt exhausted and he knew that if he didn’t get up again quite soon he would fall asleep. He leaned towards the magazines, taking a quick mental inventory of the selection. Cosmopolitan, Retro Gamer, Men’s Health, Your Dog, Vogue, Vintage Aircraft, Dirty Sperm Whores, House & Garden, Innate Immunity, Autosport, Science Digest, Super Food Ideas . . . Pretty much the full range. Well-thumbed and only slightly out of date.
‘Hey, preacher!’
He turned in his chair. The two black men sharing the table had shut their book, finished with it for the night. One of them was holding aloft a foil-wrapped object the size of a tennis ball, wiggling it demonstratively. As soon as he had Peter’s attention, he tossed the object across the room. Peter caught it easily, without even a hint of a fumble. He had always been an excellent catcher. The two black men raised a friendly fist each, congratulating him. He unwrapped the foil, found a hunk of blueberry muffin.
‘Thank you!’ His voice sounded strange in the acoustics of the mess hall, competing with the DJ, who had resumed his exegesis of Patsy Cline. By this stage of the narrative, Patsy had perished in a plane crash.
‘ . . . personal belongings left behind after the sale of her home. The tape passed from hand to hand, unrecognised for the treasure it was, before finally ending up stored in the closet of a jeweller for several years. Imagine it, friends! Those divine sounds you just heard, dormant inside an unassuming reel of magnetic tape, locked up in a dark closet, perhaps never to see the light of day. But we can be eternally grateful that the jeweller eventually woke up and negotiated a deal with MCA Records . . . ’
The blueberry muffin was delicious; among the best things Peter had ever tasted. And how sweet it was, too, to know that he was in not altogether hostile territory.
‘Welcome to Heaven, preacher!’ called one his benefactors, and everyone except the sleeping Asian laughed.
Peter turned to face them, beamed them a smile. ‘Well, things are certainly looking up from what they were a few minutes ago.’
‘Onwards and upwards, preach! That’s the USIC motto, more or less.’
‘So,’ said Peter, ‘do you guys like it here?’
The black man who’d thrown the muffin went pensive, considering the question seriously. ‘It’s OK, man. As good as anywhere.’
‘Cool weather,’ his companion chipped in.
‘He means nice warm weather.’
‘Which is cool, man, is what I’m saying.’
‘You know, I haven’t even been outside yet,’ said Peter.
‘Oh, you should go,’ said the first man, as though acknowledging the possibility that Peter might prefer to spend his entire Oasis sojourn inside his quarters. ‘Check it out before the light comes up.’
Peter stood up. ‘I’d like that. Where’s . . . uh . . . the nearest door?’
The coffee bar attendant pointed a long, bony finger past an illuminated plastic sign that said ENJOY! in large letters and, underneath in smaller print, EAT AND DRINK RESPONSIBLY. REMEMBER THAT BOTTLED WATER, CARBONATED SOFT DRINKS, CAKES, CONFECTIONERY AND YELLOW-STICKERED ITEMS ARE NOT INCLUDED IN THE FOOD AND DRINK ALLOWANCE AND WILL BE DEDUCTED FROM YOUR EARNINGS.
‘Thanks for the tip,’ said Peter, as he was leaving. ‘And the food!’
‘Have a good one, bro.’
The last thing he heard was Patsy Cline’s voice, this time in a celebrity duet recorded, through the miracle of modern technology, decades after her death.
Peter stepped through the sliding door into the air of Oasis and, contrary to his apprehensions, he did not instantly die, get sucked into an airless vortex, or shrivel up like a scrap of fat on a griddle. Instead, he was enveloped in a moist, warm breeze, a swirling balm that felt like steam except that it didn’t make his throat catch. He strolled into the dark, his way unlit except by several distant lamps. In the dreary environs of the USIC airport, there was nothing much to see anyway, just acres of wet black bitumen, but he’d wanted to walk outside, and so here he was, walking, outside.
The sky was dark, dark aquamarine. Aquamareeeeeen, as BG might say. There were only a few dozen stars visible, far fewer than he was used to, but each one shone brightly, without any flicker, and with a pale green aura. There was no moon.
The rain had stopped now, but the atmosphere still seemed substantially composed of water. If he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine he’d waded into a warm swimming pool. The air lapped against his cheeks, tickled his ears, flowed over his lips and hands. It penetrated his clothing, breathing into the collar of his shirt and down his backbone, making his shoulderblades and chest dewy, making his shirtcuffs adhere to his wrists. The warmth – it was extreme warmth rather than heat – caused his skin to prickle with sweat, making him intimately aware of his armpit hair, the clefts of his groin, the shape of his toes inside their humid footwear.
He was dressed all wrong. Those USIC guys with their loose Arabic duds had it sussed, didn’t they? He would have to emulate them as soon as possible.
As he walked, he tried to sort out which unusual phenomena were occurring inside of him and which were external realities. His heart was beating a little faster than usual; he put that down to excitement. His gait was a little wonky, as though skewed by alcohol; he wondered if he was merely suffering the after-effects of the Jump, jetlag, and general exhaustion. His feet seemed to bounce slightly with every step, as though the bitumen was rubberised. He knelt and rapped on the ground with his knuckles. It was hard, unyielding. Whatever it was made of – presumably some combination of the local earth and imported chemicals – it had an asphalt-like consistency. He stood up, and the action of standing was perhaps easier than it should be. An ever-so-slight trampoline effect. But this was counterbalanced by the watery density of the air. He lifted his hand, pushed his palm forward into space, testing for resistance. There was none, and yet the air swirled around his wrist and up his forearm, tickling him. He didn’t know whether he liked it, or found it creepy. Atmosphere, in his experience, had always been an absence. The air here was a presence, a presence so palpable that he was tempted to believe he could let himself fall and the air would simply catch him like a pillow. It wouldn’t, of course. But as it nuzzled against his skin, it almost promised that it would.
He took a deep breath, concentrating on the texture of it as it went in. It felt and tasted no different from normal air. He knew from the USIC brochures that the composition was much the same mix of nitrogen and oxygen he’d been breathing all his life, with a bit less carbon dioxide and a bit more ozone and a few trace elements he might not have had before. The brochures hadn’t mentioned the water vapour, although Oasis’s climate had been described as ‘tropical’, so maybe that covered it.
Something tickled his left ear and, as a reflex, he brushed at it. Something squishy, like a wet cornflake or a rotting leaf, passed across his fingers but fell off before he could hold it up to his eyes and examine it. His fingers were streaked with a sticky fluid. Blood? No, not blood. Or if it was, it wasn’t his. It was green as spinach.
He turned around and looked at the building he’d emerged from. It was monumentally ugly, like all architecture not built by religious devotees or mad eccentrics. Its only redeeming feature was the transparency of the mess hall’s window, lit up like a video screen in the dark. Although he’d walked quite a long way, he could still recognise the coffee bar and the magazine rack, and even fancied he could make out the Asian man still slumped on one of the chairs. At this distance, these details looked like a neat assortment of items stored inside a coin-operated dispenser. A luminous little box, surrounded by a great sea of strange air; and above it, a trillion miles of darkness.
He’d experienced moments like this before, on the planet that was supposed to be his home. Sleepless and wandering the streets of shabby British towns at two, three in the morning, he would find himself at a bus shelter in Stockport, a woebegone shopping mall in Reading, or the empty husks of Camden market in the hours before dawn – and it was at those times, in those places, that he was struck by a vision of human insignificance in all its unbearable pathos. People and their dwellings were such a thin dust on the surface of the globe, like invisible specks of bacteria on an orange, and the feeble lights of kebab shops and supermarkets failed utterly to register on the infinities of space above. If it weren’t for God, the almighty vacuum would be too crushing to endure, but once God was with you, it was a different story.
Peter turned again and kept walking. His vague hope was that if he walked far enough, the featureless tarmac of the airport environs would finally come to an end, and he would step over into the landscape of Oasis, the real Oasis.
His denim jacket was growing heavy with moisture and his flannel shirt was swollen with perspiration. His jeans made a comical whooping noise as he walked, rough wet cotton rubbing against itself. The waistband was starting to chafe against his hips; a rivulet of sweat ran into the cleft of his arse. He stopped to hitch up his trousers and to wipe his face. He pressed his fingertips to his ears, to clear them of a sibilant undertone he’d been attributing to his sinuses. But the noise was not from within. The atmosphere was full of rustling. Worldless whispering, the sound of agitated leaves, except that there was no vegetation anywhere to be seen. It was as though the air currents, so similar to water currents, could not move silently, but must churn and hiss like ocean waves.
He was sure he’d adjust, in time. It would be like living near a railway line, or, indeed, near the ocean. After a while you wouldn’t hear it anymore.
He walked further, resisting an impulse to remove his clothes and toss them on the ground for retrieval on his return. The tarmac showed no sign of ending. What could USIC possibly want with all this blank bitumen? Maybe there were plans to extend the accommodation wings, or build squash courts, or a shopping mall. Oasis was tipped, in ‘the very near future’, to become a ‘thriving community’. By which USIC meant a thriving community of foreign settlers, of course. This world’s indigenous inhabitants, thriving or otherwise, were scarcely mentioned in USIC’s literature, except for fastidious assurances that nothing was planned or implemented without their full and informed consent. USIC was ‘in partnership’ with the citizens of Oasis – whoever they might be.
Peter was certainly very much looking forward to meeting them. They were, after all, the whole reason he had come.
From one of his jacket pockets, he extracted a compact camera. He’d been warned by the preparatory literature that it was ‘not practicable’ to use a camera on Oasis, but he’d brought one anyway. ‘Not practicable’ – what did that mean? Was it a veiled threat? Might his camera get impounded by authorities of some sort? Well, he would cross that bridge when he came to it. Right now, he wanted to take some pictures. For Bea. When he returned to her, any photo he’d bothered to snap would be worth a thousand words. He raised the gadget and captured the eerie tarmac, the lonely buildings, the glow of light from the cafeteria. He even tried to capture the aquamarine sky, but a quick inspection of the stored image confirmed it was a rectangle of pure black.
He pocketed the camera and walked on. How long had he been walking? His watch was not the illuminated digital kind; it was an old-fashioned one with hands, a gift from his father. He held it close to his face, trying to angle it so that it caught the light from the nearest lamp. But the nearest lamp was at least a hundred metres away.
Something glittered on his forearm, near the wristwatch band. Something alive. A mosquito? No, it was too big for that. A dragonfly, or some creature resembling a dragonfly. A tiny, trembling matchstick body shrouded in translucent wings. Peter wiggled his wrist, and the creature fell off. Or maybe it jumped, or flew, or got sucked into the swirling atmosphere. Whatever: it was gone.
He suddenly became aware that the whispering of the air was supplemented by a new noise, a mechanical whir, behind him. A vehicle cruised into view. It was steely-grey and bullet-shaped, with large wheels and thick vulcanised tyres designed for rough terrain. The driver was difficult to make out through the tinted windscreen, but was humanoid in shape. The car slowed and came to a halt right next to him, its metal flank only a few inches from where he stood. Its headlights pierced the darkness he’d been heading for, revealing a wire-mesh perimeter fence that he would have reached in another minute or two of walking.
‘Howdy.’
A female voice, with an American accent.
‘Hi,’ he replied.
‘Let me give you a ride back.’
It was the USIC woman who’d met him upon his arrival, the one who’d escorted him to his quarters and told him she was available if he needed anything. She opened the passenger door for him and waited, piano-playing her fingers on the steering wheel.
‘I’d been hoping to walk a little further, actually,’ said Peter. ‘Maybe meet some of the local . . . uh . . . people.’
‘We’ll do that after sunrise,’ the woman said. ‘The settlement is about fifty miles away. You’ll need a vehicle. Do you drive?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Have you discussed requisition of a vehicle?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You don’t think so?’
‘Uh . . . my wife handled most of the practicalities with USIC. I don’t know if they covered that.’
There was a pause, then a good-natured laugh. ‘Please get in, or the air conditioning will get all messed up.’
He swung into the car and closed the door. The air was dry and cool, and immediately made him aware that he was drenched to the skin. His feet, relieved of the weight of his body, made a sucking sound inside his socks.
The woman was dressed in a white smock, thin white cotton slacks and a taupe headscarf that hung loose over her chest. Her face was bare of makeup, and she had a puckered scar on her forehead, just under the hairline. Her hair, a lustreless brown, was very short and she might have passed for a young male soldier were it not for her soft dark eyebrows, tiny ears and pretty mouth.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Peter. ‘I’ve forgotten your name. I was very tired . . . ’
‘Grainger,’ she said.
‘Grainger,’ he said.
‘Christian names aren’t a big thing among USIC employees, in case you haven’t noticed.’
‘I’ve noticed.’
‘It’s a bit like the army. Except we don’t harm people.’
‘I should hope not.’
She revved the engine and steered the car back towards the airport complex. As she drove, she leaned forward, frowning in concentration, and even though the inside of the cabin was poorly lit, he spotted the tell-tale edges of contact lenses on her eyeballs. Beatrice was a contact lens wearer: that’s how he knew.
‘Did you come out specially to fetch me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you watching my every move? Keeping tabs on my every half-muffin?’
The allusion was lost on her. ‘I just dropped by the mess hall, and one of the guys said you’d gone out walking.’
‘Does that worry you?’ He kept his tone light and amiable.
‘You’ve just arrived,’ she said, not taking her eyes off the wind-screen. ‘We wouldn’t want you to come to harm on your first foray out of doors.’
‘What about the disclaimer I signed? The one that emphasises in twelve different ways that USIC accepts no responsibility for anything that might happen to me?’
She seemed nettled by this. ‘That was a legalistic document written by paranoid lawyers who’ve never even been here. I’m a nice person and I’m here and I welcomed you off that ship and I said I would keep an eye out for you. So that’s what I’m doing.’
‘I appreciate that,’ he said.
‘I take an interest in people,’ she said. ‘Gets me in trouble sometimes.’
‘I’ll try not to get you in trouble,’ he said. The eerily lit cafeteria seemed to be moving towards them in the dark, as if it was another vehicle threatening a head-on collision. He wished he hadn’t been fetched back so soon. ‘I hope you understand that I didn’t come here to sit and read magazines in a cafeteria. I want to go and find the people of Oasis, wherever they are. I’ll probably live among them, if they’ll let me. So it may not be feasible for you to . . . uh . . . keep an eye out for me.’
She manoeuvred the vehicle into a garage; they’d arrived.
‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’
‘I’m hoping to cross it pretty soon,’ he said, still maintaining a light tone. ‘As soon as possible. I don’t mean to be pushy, but . . . I’m going to be pushy. When are you available to drive me out of here?’
She switched off the engine, removed her small feet from the pedals. ‘Give me an hour to get things ready.’
‘Things?’
‘Food, mainly. You’ll have noticed that the mess hall isn’t serving right now.’
He nodded, and a ticklish trickle of sweat ran down his face. ‘I can’t really figure out how the day/night routine is supposed to work, if it’s dark for three days straight. I mean, right now, it’s officially night, yes?’
‘Yes, it’s night.’ She rubbed her eyes, but gingerly, so as not to dislodge the lenses.
‘So do you just let the clock decide when the days begin and end?’
‘Sure. It’s not much different than living in the Arctic Circle, I guess. You adjust your sleep pattern so that you’re awake when everybody else is.’
‘What about those guys in the mess hall right now?’
She shrugged. ‘Stanko’s scheduled to be there because he’s on night duty. The other guys . . . well, people get insomnia sometimes. Or they get all slept out.’
‘What about the people of Oasis – the . . . uh . . . natives? Are they asleep right now? I mean, should we wait until the sun comes up?’
She faced him with an unblinking, defensive stare. ‘I have no idea when they sleep. Or even if they sleep. To be straight with you, I know almost nothing about them, even though I probably know more than anyone here. They’re . . . kind of hard to get to know. I’m not sure they want to be known.’
He grinned. ‘Nevertheless . . . I’m here to know them.’
‘OK,’ she sighed. ‘It’s your call. But you look tired. Are you sure you’ve had enough rest?’
‘I’m fine. What about you?’
‘Fine also. Like I said, give me an hour. If, in that time, you change your mind and want to sleep some more, let me know.’
‘How would I do that?’
‘The Shoot. There’s a scroll-down menu behind the USIC icon. I’m on it.’
‘Glad to hear there’s one menu that’s got something on it.’ He meant it as a rueful comment on the mess hall, but as soon as the words left his mouth, he worried she might take them the wrong way.
She opened her door, he did the same on his side, and they stepped out into the moist swirling dark.
‘Any other advice?’ he called over the top of the vehicle.
‘Yes,’ she shot back. ‘Forget the denim jacket.’
The power of suggestion? She’d told him he looked tired and he hadn’t felt tired when she said it, but he felt tired now. Befuddled, too. As though the excessive humidity had seeped into his brain and fogged his thoughts. He hoped Grainger would escort him all the way back to his quarters, but she didn’t. She led him into the building through a different door from the one he’d used as an exit, and, within half a minute, was bidding him au revoir at a T-junction in the corridors.
He walked off in the opposite direction from her, as she clearly expected him to, but he had no clear idea where he was going. The passage was empty and silent and he couldn’t recall having seen it before. The walls were painted a cheerful blue (turned somewhat darker by the subdued lighting) but were otherwise nondescript, with no signs or pointers. Not that there was any reason to expect a sign pointing to his quarters. USIC had made it clear, during one of the interviews, that he would not ‘in any way, shape or form’ be the official pastor of the base and shouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t much call for his services. His true responsibility was to the indigenous inhabitants. Indeed, that was his job description in the contract: Minister (Christian) to Indigenous Population.
‘But you do have a minister for the USIC personnel’s needs, surely?’ he’d asked.
‘Actually, at the moment, no,’ the interviewer had replied.
‘Does that mean the colony is officially atheist?’ Bea had asked.
‘It’s not a colony,’ another of the USIC interviewers said, with an edge to her voice. ‘It’s a community. We do not use the word colony. And we do not promote any faith or lack of faith. We’re looking for the best people, that’s all.’
‘A pastor specifically for the USIC staff is a fine idea, in principle,’ the first interviewer reassured them. ‘Especially if he – or she – had other useful skills. We’ve included such individuals in the team at various times in the past. Right now, it’s not a priority.’
‘But my mission is a priority?’ Peter had said, still scarcely able to believe it.
‘We would classify it “urgent”,’ the interviewer said. ‘So urgent, in fact, that I must ask you . . . ’ He leaned forward, looked straight into Peter’s eyes. ‘How soon can you leave?’
Now there was a light glowing around the next bend in the corridor, and a faint harmonious noise which he identified, after a moment, as piped music. He had walked too far, failed to spot his own room, and ended up back at the mess hall.
When he re-entered, he found that there had been a few changes. The ghostly croon of Patsy Cline had vanished from the airwaves, replaced by cocktail jazz so bland that it barely existed. The two black guys had left. The Chinese guy had woken up and was leafing through a magazine. A petite middle-aged woman, maybe Korean or Vietnamese, with a dyed streak of orange through her black hair, was staring meditatively at a cup in her lap. The Slavic-looking guy behind the counter was still on duty. He appeared not to notice Peter walking in, mesmerised as he was by a game he was playing with two squeezable plastic bottles – ketchup and mustard. He was trying to balance them against each other, tipped at an angle so that only their nozzles touched. His long fingers hovered above the fragile arrangement, ready to enfold the bottles when they fell.
Peter paused in the doorway, suddenly cold in his sweat-soaked denims and bedraggled hair. How ridiculous he must look! For just a few seconds, the sheer alienness of these people, and his irrelevance to them, threatened to flood his spirit with fear, the paralysis of shyness, the terror that a child feels when faced with a new school filled with strangers. But then God calmed him with an infusion of courage and he stepped forward.
‘Hello everybody,’ he said.
