Читать книгу The Book of Strange New Things - Michel Faber - Страница 14

6

His whole life had been leading up to this

A rendezvous between a married man and a female stranger, each of them far from home, in the obscure hours before dawn. If there was anything improper or potentially complicated about that, Peter didn’t waste energy worrying over it. He and Grainger both had jobs to do, and God was watching.

Besides, Grainger’s reaction to him, when he opened the door to her knock, was hardly encouraging. She did a double-take: a classic cartoon-style double-take. Her head jerked so hard he thought she might teeter backwards into the corridor, but she just swayed on her feet and stared. The provocation, of course, was the big inky cross on his chest. Seeing it through her eyes, he was suddenly embarrassed.

‘I took your advice,’ he tried to joke, plucking at the sleeves of the dishdasha. ‘About the denim jacket.’

She didn’t smile, just stared some more.

‘You could’ve gone to, like, a T-shirt place,’ she said at last, ‘and got that done . . . uh . . . professionally.’ Her own attire was unchanged since their first meeting: still the white smock, cotton slacks, and headscarf. Not conventional Western dress, by any means, yet somehow, on her, it looked more natural, less affected, than his own get-up.

‘The cross was . . . an accident,’ he explained. ‘A bunch of ink pens exploded.’

‘Uh . . . OK,’ she said. ‘Well, I guess it gives . . . kind of a homespun impression. Amateur – in a good way.’

This condescending gesture of diplomacy made him smile. ‘You think I look like a ponce.’

‘A what?’

‘A poseur.’

She glanced down the corridor, towards the exit. ‘Not for me to say. You ready?’

Side by side they walked out of the building, into the darkness. The warm air embraced them with balmy enthusiasm and Peter instantly felt less self-conscious about his outfit, as it was perfect for the climate. Transporting his old clothes all the way to Oasis had been pointless, he appreciated that now. He must reinvent himself, and this morning was a good time to begin.

Grainger’s vehicle was parked right next to the compound, illuminated by a lamp jutting from the concrete façade. It was a big, military-looking thing, clearly much more powerful than the frugal little runabout Peter and Bea owned.

‘I really appreciate you making a car available for me,’ said Peter. ‘I imagine you have to ration them. The fuel and so on.’

‘Best to keep ’em in use,’ said Grainger. ‘They go to hell otherwise. Technically speaking. The moisture’s a killer. Let me show you something.’

She stepped up to the vehicle and flipped open the hatch to show him the engine. Peter dutifully leaned over and looked, although he knew nothing about the inner workings of cars, hadn’t even mastered such basics as Bea could manage, like topping up oil, applying anti-freeze or attaching jump leads. Even so, he could tell that there was something unusual here.

‘It’s . . . disgusting,’ he said, and laughed at his own tactlessness. But it was true: the whole engine was caked in a greasy gunk that stank like old cat food.

‘Sure,’ said Grainger, ‘but I hope you understand this isn’t damage, this is the cure. The prevention.’

‘Oh.’

She pushed the hatch down with just the right amount of force to make it snap shut. ‘Takes a full hour to grease up a vehicle like this. Do a few of ’em and you stink for the whole day.’

Instinctively, he tried to smell her, or at least retrieve a memory of how she’d smelled before they stepped out into the muggy air. She smelled neutral. Nice, even.

‘Is that one of your jobs? Greasing up the cars?’

She motioned him to get in. ‘We all get grease duty sometimes.’

‘Very democratic. Nobody complains?’

‘This is not the place for complainers,’ she said, swinging into the driver’s seat.

He opened the passenger door and joined her inside. No sooner had his body settled into position than she switched on the ignition and got the motor revving.

‘What about the people at the top?’ he asked. ‘Do they get grease duty too?’

‘People at the top?’

‘The . . . administration. Managers. Whatever you call them here.’

Grainger blinked, as though she’d been asked a question about lion tamers or circus clowns. ‘We don’t really have managers,’ she said, as she steered the vehicle and got into gear. ‘We all pitch in, take turns. It’s pretty obvious what needs to be done. If there’s any disagreement, we vote. Mostly we just follow the USIC guidelines.’

‘Sounds too good to be true.’

‘Too good to be true?’ Grainger shook her head. ‘No offence, but that’s what some people might say about religion. Not about a simple duty roster for keeping your vehicles’ engines from corroding.’

The rhetoric was neat, but something in Grainger’s tone of voice made Peter suspect that she didn’t quite believe it. He had a pretty good radar for the doubts that people hid beneath bravado.

‘But there must be someone,’ he insisted, ‘who takes responsibility for the project as a whole?’

‘Sure,’ she said. The car was picking up speed now and the lights of the compound rapidly receded into the gloom. ‘But they’re a long way away. Can’t expect them to hold our hands, can we?’

As they drove through the dark towards the invisible horizon, they munched on raisin bread. Grainger had positioned a big fresh loaf of it in the gap between the front seats, propped up against the gearstick, and they each helped themselves to slice after slice.

‘This is good,’ he said.

‘It’s made here,’ she said, with a hint of pride.

‘Including the raisins?’

‘No, not the raisins. Or the egg. But the flour and the shortening and the sweetener and the sodium bicarbonate are. And the loaves are baked here. We have a bakery.’

‘Very nice.’ He munched some more, swallowed. They’d left the base perimeter fifteen minutes ago. Nothing remarkable had happened yet. There was little to be seen in the vehicle’s headlight beam, which was the only light for miles around. Not for the first time, Peter thought about how much of our lives we spend sequestered inside small patches of electric brightness, blind to everything beyond the reach of those fragile bulbs.

‘When is sunrise?’ he asked.

‘In about three, four hours,’ she said. ‘Or maybe two, I’m not sure, don’t quote me. It’s a gradual process. Not so dramatic.’

They were driving straight over raw, uncultivated ground. There was no road or track or any evidence that anyone had ever driven or walked here before, although Grainger assured him that she made this trip regularly. In the absence of tracks or lights, it was sometimes difficult to believe they were moving, despite the gentle vibration of the vehicle’s chassis. The view in every direction was the same. Grainger would occasionally glance at the dashboard’s computerised navigation system, which kept her informed when they were about to stray from the correct course.

The landscape – what little Peter could see of it in the dark – was surprisingly bare given the climate. The earth was chocolate-brown, and so densely compacted that the tyres travelled smoothly across it with no jolts to the suspension. Here and there, the terrain was spotted with patches of white mushroom, or speckled with a haze of greenish stuff that might be moss. No trees, no bushes, not even any grass. A dark, moist tundra.

He took another slice of raisin bread. It was losing its appeal, but he was hungry.

‘I wouldn’t have thought,’ he remarked, ‘that eggs could survive the Jump intact. I certainly felt a bit scrambled myself, when I went through it.’

‘Egg powder,’ said Grainger. ‘We use egg powder.’

‘Of course.’

Through the side window, he spotted a single swirl of rain in an otherwise vacant sky: a curved glitter of water-drops about the size of a Ferris wheel, making its way across the land. It was travelling at a different tangent from their own, so Grainger would have to detour in order to drive through it. He considered asking her if they could do so, for the fun of it, like children chasing a rotating garden sprinkler. But she was intent on her navigation, staring out at the non-road ahead, both hands clamped on the steering wheel. The shimmering rain-swirl dimmed as the headlight beams passed it by, and then was swept into the darkness of their wake.

‘So,’ said Peter. ‘Tell me what you know.’

‘About what?’ Her relaxed demeanour was gone in a flash.

‘About the people we’re going to see.’

‘They’re not people.’

‘Well . . . ’ He drew a deep breath. ‘Here’s an idea, Grainger. How about we agree to use the term “people” in its extended sense of “inhabitants”? The original Roman etymology isn’t clear, so who knows? – maybe it meant “inhabitants” anyway. Of course, we could use “creature” instead, but there are problems with that, don’t you think? I mean, personally, I’d love to use “creature”, if we could just take it back to its Latin origins: creatura: “created thing”. Because we’re all created things, aren’t we? But it’s suffered a bit of a decline, that word, through the centuries. To the point where “creature”, to most people, means “monster”, or at least “animal”. Which reminds me: wouldn’t it be nice to use “animal” for all beings that breathe? After all, the Greek word anima means “breath” or “soul”, which pretty much covers everything we’re looking for, doesn’t it?’

Silence settled in the cabin. Grainger drove, keeping her eyes straight on the headlight beam just as before. After thirty seconds or so, which seemed quite a long time in the circumstances, she said:

‘Well, it’s plain to see you’re not an uneducated holy roller from Hicksville.’

‘I never said I was.’

She glanced aside at him, caught him smiling, smiled back. ‘Tell me, Peter. What made you decide to come here, and do this?’

‘I didn’t decide,’ he said. ‘God did.’

‘He sent you an email?’

‘Sure.’ He grinned wider. ‘You wake up in the morning, go to the inbox of your heart, check what’s loaded in. Sometimes there’s a message.’

‘That’s kind of a corny way of putting it.’

He stopped smiling, not because he was offended, but because the discussion was turning serious. ‘Most true things are kind of corny, don’t you think? But we make them more sophisticated out of sheer embarrassment. Simple truths with complicated clothes on. The only purpose of the linguistic dressing-up is so people won’t look at the contents of our naked hearts and minds and say “How naff”.’

She frowned. ‘“Naff”?’

‘It’s a British slang term, meaning trite or banal, but with an extra overtone of . . . uh . . . nerdishness. Uncoolness. Dorkishness.’

‘Wow. Did they teach American slang in your Bible School too?’

Peter took a few swigs from a water-bottle. ‘I never went to Bible School. I went to the University of Hard Drinking and Drug Abuse. Got my degree in Toilet Bowl Interior Decoration and . . . uh . . . Hospital Casualty Ward Occupancy.’

‘And then you found God?’

‘Then I found a woman called Beatrice. We fell in love.’

‘Guys don’t often put it that way.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Guys say “we got together” or “you can guess the rest” or something like that. Something that doesn’t sound quite so . . . ’

‘Naff?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Well, we fell in love,’ said Peter. ‘I quit the booze and drugs to impress her.’

‘I hope she was impressed.’

‘Yes.’ He took a last swig, screwed the top back on the bottle and slid it onto the floor between his feet. ‘Although she didn’t tell me so until years later. Addicts don’t handle praise well. The pressure of living up to it drives them back to drink and drugs.’

‘Yup.’

‘Have you had some experience of these things in your life?’

‘Yup.’

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

‘Not right now.’ She readjusted her posture in the seat, revved the engine, drove a little faster. The blush on her face made her look more feminine, although it accentuated the white scar under her hairline. She had pulled off her headscarf so that it hung loosely around her neck; her short crop of soft mousy hair fluttered in the air conditioning. ‘Your girlfriend sounds like a smart cookie.’

‘She’s my wife. And yes, she’s smart. Smarter – or at least wiser – than I am, that’s for sure.’

‘Then why was it you that got chosen for this mission?’

Peter rested his head against the seat. ‘I’ve wondered about that myself. I suppose God must have other plans for Beatrice at home.’

Grainger didn’t comment. Peter looked out the side window. The sky was a little lighter. Perhaps he was only imagining it. A particularly large clump of mushrooms trembled as they swept by.

‘You didn’t answer my question,’ he said.

‘I told you I didn’t want to talk about it,’ she said.

‘No, I meant my question about the people we’re going to see. What do you know about them?’

‘They’re . . . ah . . . ’ She struggled for several seconds to find the right words. ‘They like their privacy.’

‘I could’ve guessed that. Not a single photo in any of the brochures and reports USIC gave me. I was expecting at least one smiley picture of your top brass shaking hands with the locals.’

She chuckled. ‘That would be difficult to arrange.’

‘No hands?’

‘Sure they have hands. They just don’t like to be touched.’

‘So: describe them.’

‘It’s difficult,’ she sighed. ‘I’m not good at descriptions. We’ll see them soon enough.’

‘Do try.’ He batted his eyelashes. ‘I’d appreciate it.’

‘Well . . . they wear long robes and hoods. Like monks, I guess.’

‘So they’re human in shape?’

‘I guess. It’s kind of hard to tell.’

‘But they have two arms, two legs, a torso . . . ’

‘Sure.’

He shook his head. ‘That surprises me. All along, I’ve been telling myself I mustn’t assume the human design is some sort of universal standard. So I was trying to imagine . . . uh . . . big spider-like things, or eyes on stalks, or giant hairless possums . . . ’

‘Giant hairless possums?’ She beamed. ‘I love it. Very sci-fi.’

‘But why should they have human form, Grainger, of all the forms they might conceivably have? Isn’t that exactly what you’d expect from sci-fi?’

‘Yeah, I guess . . . Or religion, maybe. Didn’t God create man in his own image?’

‘I wouldn’t use the word “man”. The Hebrew is ha-adam, which I would argue encompasses both sexes.’

‘Pleased to hear it,’ she said, deadpan.

Again, they drove on for a couple of minutes in silence. On the horizon, Peter was certain he could see the beginnings of a glow. A subtle haze of illumination, turning the junction of sky and earth from dark aquamarine-against-black to green-against-brown. If you stared at it too long, you began to wonder whether it was just an optical illusion, a hallucination, a frustrated yearning for the end of night.

And inside that hesitant glow, was that . . . ? Yes, there was something else on the horizon. Raised structures of some sort. Mountains? Boulders? Buildings? A town? A city? Grainger had said that the ‘settlement’ was about fifty miles away. They must have travelled half that distance by now, surely.

‘Do they have genders?’ he said at last.

‘Who?’ she said.

‘The people we’re going to see.’

Grainger looked exasperated. ‘Why don’t you just come straight out and use the word aliens?’

‘Because we’re the aliens here.’

She laughed out loud. ‘I love it! A politically correct missionary! Forgive me for saying so, but it seems a total contradiction in terms.’

‘I forgive you, Grainger,’ he winked. ‘And my attitudes shouldn’t strike you as a contradiction. God loves every creature equally.’

The smile faded from her face. ‘Not in my experience,’ she said.

Silence descended on the cabin once more. Peter deliberated whether to push; decided not to. Not in that direction, anyway. Not yet.

‘So,’ he rejoined lightly, ‘do they have genders?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Grainger, in a flat, business-like tone. ‘You’ll have to lift up their robes and take a look.’

They drove for ten, fifteen minutes without further conversation. The topmost slice of the raisin bread dried out. The haze of light on the horizon became more distinct. The mysterious structures straight ahead were definitely architecture of some kind, although the sky was still too dark for Peter to make out exact shapes or details.

Eventually, he said, ‘I need to have a pee.’

‘No problem,’ said Grainger, and slowed the car to a halt. On the dashboard, an electronic gauge estimating the fuel consumption per mile flickered through its numbers and settled on an abstract symbol.

Peter opened the door and, as he stood out onto the earth, was enveloped at once by the humid, whispering air. He’d grown unaccustomed to it, having spent so long in the air-conditioned bubble of the vehicle. It was enjoyable, this sudden all-out luxury of atmosphere, but also an assault: the way the air immediately ran up the sleeves of his shirt, licked his eyelids and ears, dampened his chest. He hitched the hem of his dishdasha up to his abdomen and pissed straight onto the ground, since the landscape offered no trees or boulders to hide behind. The earth was already moist and dark brown, so the urine made little difference to its colour or consistency. It sank in without pause.

He heard Grainger opening and shutting the door on her side of the vehicle. To give her some privacy, he stood for a while and appraised the scenery. The plants that he’d taken for mushrooms were flowers, greyish-white flowers with a tinge of mauve, almost luminous in the gloom. They grew in small, neat clumps. There was no distinction between blossom, leaf and stalk: the whole plant was slightly furry, leathery and yet so thin as to be almost transparent, like the ear of a kitten. Evidently no other plants were viable in this part of the world. Or perhaps he’d simply come at the wrong time of year.

Grainger’s door slammed, and he turned to join her. She was crumpling a cardboard box of disposable tissues into the glove compartment as he took his seat.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Last few miles coming up.’

He shut his door and the air conditioning promptly restored the neutral atmosphere of the cabin. Peter settled back in his seat, and shivered as a trapped wisp of balmy Oasan air slipped between his shoulderblades and out of his collar.

‘I must say you built your landing base a respectfully long way out,’ he said. ‘The planners of London’s airports were never so considerate of local residents.’

Grainger unscrewed a water-bottle, drank deep, coughed. A rivulet ran down her chin, and she mopped it up with a handful of her headscarf.

‘Actually . . . ’ She cleared her throat. ‘Actually, when we first built the base, the . . . ah . . . local residents lived just two miles away. They relocated. Took everything with them. I mean everything. A couple of our guys had a look around the old settlement when it was all over. Like, maybe we can learn something from what they left behind. But it was stripped clean. Just the shells of houses. Not even a single mushroom left in the ground.’ She consulted one of the gauges on the dashboard. ‘The fifty miles must have taken them for ever to walk.’

‘It sounds like they really do value their privacy. Unless . . . ’ He hesitated, trying to think of a diplomatic way of asking whether USIC had done something outrageously offensive. Before he could frame the question, Grainger answered it.

‘It was out of the blue. They just told us they were moving. We asked if we were doing anything wrong. Like, was there some problem we could fix so they’d reconsider? They said no, no problem.’

Grainger revved the engine and they were off again.

‘When you say “we asked”,’ said Peter, ‘do you mean “we” as in . . . ?’

‘I wasn’t personally a party to these negotiations, no.’

‘Do you speak their language?’

‘No.’

‘Not a word?’

‘Not a word.’

‘So . . . uh . . . how good is their English? I mean, I tried to find out about this before I came, but I couldn’t get a straight answer.’

‘There isn’t a straight answer. Some of them . . . maybe most of them, don’t . . . ’ Her voice trailed off. She chewed her lip. ‘Listen, this is gonna sound bad. It’s not meant to. The thing is, we don’t know how many of them there are. Partly because they keep themselves hidden, and partly because we can’t tell the difference between them . . . No disrespect, but we just can’t. There’s a few individuals we have dealings with. Maybe a dozen. Or maybe it’s the same five or six guys in different clothes, we just can’t tell. They speak some English. Enough.’

‘Who taught them?’

‘I think they just kind of picked it up, I don’t know.’ She glanced up at the rear-view mirror, as though there might be a traffic snarl he was distracting her from dealing with safely. ‘You’d have to ask Tartaglione. If he was still with us.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Tartaglione was a linguist. He came here to study the language. He was going to compile a dictionary and so forth. But he . . . ah . . . disappeared.’

Peter chewed on that for a couple of seconds. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘You do drop lots of little morsels of info, don’t you, if I only wait long enough . . . ’

She sighed, annoyed again. ‘I already told you most of this stuff when I first met you, escorting you off the ship.’

This was news to him. He strained to recall their walk together, on that first day. The words had evaporated. All he recalled, vaguely, was her presence at his side.

‘Forgive me. I was very tired.’

‘You’re forgiven.’

They travelled on. A few hundred metres ahead and to the side of them, there was another isolated swirl of rain, cartwheeling along the land.

‘Can we drive through that?’ Peter asked.

‘Sure.’

She swerved slightly, and they ploughed through the whirl of brilliant water-drops, which enveloped them momentarily in its fairy-light display.

‘Psychedelic, huh,’ remarked Grainger, deadpan, switching on the windscreen wipers.

‘Beautiful,’ he said.

After another few minutes of driving, the shapes on the horizon had firmed up into the unmistakable contours of buildings. Nothing fancy or monumental. Square blocks, like British tower blocks, cheap utilitarian housing. Not exactly the diamantine spires of a fantastical city.

‘What do they call themselves?’ asked Peter.

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Grainger. ‘Something we couldn’t pronounce, I guess.’

‘So who named this place Oasis?’

‘A little girl from Oskaloosa, Iowa.’

‘You’re kidding.’

She cast him a bemused glance. ‘You didn’t read about it? It’s gotta be the only thing the average person knows about this place. There were articles about this little girl in magazines, she was on TV . . . ’

‘I don’t read magazines, and I don’t have a TV.’

Now it was her turn to say, ‘You’re kidding.’

He smiled. ‘I’m not kidding. One day I got a message from the Lord saying, “Get rid of the TV, Peter, it’s a huge waste of time.” So I did.’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know how to take you.’

‘Straight,’ he said. ‘Always straight. Anyway: this little girl from . . . uh . . . ’

‘Oskaloosa. She won a competition. “Name A New World”. I’m so amazed you didn’t hear about it. There were hundreds of thousands of entries, most of them unbelievably wrong. It was like a nerd jamboree. The USIC staff in the building where I worked kept an internal dossier of the worst names. Every week we’d have new favourites. We ended up using them for a competition we ran ourselves, to name the janitor’s supply room. “Nuvo Opportunus”, that was a great one. “Zion II”. “Atlanto”. “Arnold” – that had real pizzazz, I thought. “Splendoramus”. Uh . . . “Einsteinia”. I forget the rest. Oh, yeah: “Traveller’s Rest”, that was another one. “Newfoundplanet”. “Cervix”. “Hendrix”. “Elvis”. They just kept on coming.’

‘And the little girl?’

‘She got lucky, I guess. There must’ve been hundreds of other people who came up with “Oasis”. She won $50,000. The family needed it, too, because the mother had just lost her job, and the father had been diagnosed with some kind of rare disease.’

‘So how did the story end?’

‘Just like you’d expect. The dad died. The mom talked about it on TV and became an alcoholic. Then the media moved on and you never got to know what happened next.’

‘Can you remember the girl’s name? I’d like to pray for her.’

Grainger butted her palms against the steering wheel irritably, and rolled her eyes upwards. ‘Puh-lease. There were a million Americans praying for her, and it didn’t stop her life going down the toilet.’

He shut up, faced front. They drove in silence for forty seconds or so.

‘Coretta,’ she said at last.

‘Thank you,’ said Peter. He tried to picture Coretta, so that she wouldn’t be just a name to him when he prayed. Any sort of face was better than none at all. He thought of the children he knew, the kids in his congregation back home, but the ones that sprang to mind were too old or too young or the wrong sex. In any case, as a minister, in his own church, he wasn’t so involved with the little ones; Bea took them into another room for play activities during his sermons. Not that he was unaware of them while he preached: the walls were so thin that if he paused for effect between sentences, the silence was often filled by laughter or snatches of song or even the galumphing of small feet. But he didn’t know any of the kids particularly well.

‘This Coretta,’ he said, pushing his luck with Grainger. ‘Is she black or white?’ One child had popped into his memory: the daughter of that new Somali couple, the cheeky girl who was always dressed like a miniature nineteenth-century Southern belle . . . what was her name? – Lulu. Adorable kid.

‘White,’ said Grainger. ‘Blonde hair. Or maybe a redhead, I forget. It was a long time ago, and there’s no way of checking.’

‘Can’t look her up?’

She blinked. ‘Look her up?’

‘On a computer or something?’ Even as he said it, he realised it was a stupid suggestion. Oasis was far beyond the reach of any information superhighways; there were no world-wide webs laden with morsels of trivia, no industrious search engines offering up millions of Oskaloosas and Corettas. If what you wanted to know was not to be found in the stuff you’d brought along with you – the books, the magic discs, the memory sticks, the old copies of Hydraulics magazine – you could forget it. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Not thinking clearly.’

‘This atmosphere will do that to you,’ she said. ‘I hate the way it pushes. Right inside your ears, even. Never lets up. Sometimes you just wanna . . . ’ She didn’t pursue the thought, just puffed a mouthful of breath upwards, dislodging a damp lock of hair from her forehead. ‘There’s no point talking about it with the guys here. They’re used to it, they don’t have a problem with it, they don’t notice it anymore. Maybe they even enjoy it.’

‘Maybe they hate it but don’t complain.’

Her face went stiff. ‘OK, message received,’ she said.

Peter groaned inwardly. He should have thought the implications through before opening his mouth. What was wrong with him today? He was usually so tactful. Could it be the atmosphere, as Grainger said? He’d always imagined his brain as a wholly enclosed thing, safe inside a shell of bone, but maybe, in this strange new environment, the seal was more permeable and his brain was being infiltrated by insidious vapours. He wiped sweat off his eyelids and made an effort to be a hundred per cent alert, facing front and peering through the dirt-hazed windscreen. The terrain was looser, less stable, the closer they came to their destination. Particles of clammy soil were being thrown up by the tyres and enveloping the vehicle in a kind of halo of filth. The outline of the native settlement seemed grim and unwelcoming somehow.

Suddenly, the magnitude of the challenge hit home. Until now, it had been all about him and his ability to keep himself in one piece: to survive the journey, to recover from the Jump, to adjust to the strange new air and the shock of separation. But there was so much more to it than that. The scale of the unknown remained just as immense whether he was feeling well or unwell; he was approaching monolithic barriers of foreignness which existed oblivious to him, indifferent to how rested or unrested he was, how bleary-eyed or attentive, how keen or dull.

Psalm 139 came to his mind, as it so often did when he needed reassurance. But today, the reminder of God’s omniscience was no comfort; instead, it heightened his own sense of unease. How precious are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand. Each and every mote of dirt flung up by the vehicle’s wheels was like a truth that he needed to learn, a ridiculously large number of truths which he had neither the time nor the wisdom to grasp. He was not God, and maybe only God could do what needed to be done here.

Grainger switched on the windscreen wipers once more. The view went smeary for a while, then the glass cleared and the native settlement was revealed afresh, lit up now by the rising sun. The sun made all the difference.

Yes, the mission was daunting and, yes, he wasn’t in the best shape. But here he was, on the threshold of meeting an entirely new kind of people, an encounter chosen for him by God. Whatever was fated to happen, it would surely be precious and amazing. His whole life – he understood that now, as the façades of the unknown city loomed up before him, harbouring unimaginable wonders – his whole life had been leading up to this.