The Book of Strange New Things

  ‘It was the plainest one I could find,’ she said, showing it to him a couple of nights before his departure. ‘They had ones with gold brocade, spangles, embroidery . . . ’

  He’d held it against his body. ‘It’s very long,’ he said.

  ‘It means you won’t need trousers,’ she said, half-smiling. ‘You can be naked underneath. If you want.’

  He thanked her but didn’t try it on.

  ‘You don’t think it’s too girly, do you?’ she said. ‘I think it’s very masculine.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ he said, packing it away. It wasn’t effeminacy that worried him; it was that he couldn’t imagine himself swanning about like an actor in an old Bible movie. It seemed vainglorious, and not at all what modern Christianity was about.

  One walk in the Oasan atmosphere had changed all that. His denim jacket, still in a crumpled heap on the floor, had dried stiff as tarpaulin. An Arabic smock and pyjama-style pants, such as he’d seen several of the USIC staff wearing, was probably the ideal alternative, but his ankle-length dishdasha would do nicely too. He could wear it with sandals. So what if he looked like a fancy-dress party sheikh? This was about practicality. He pulled the dishdasha out of the bag, let it unfurl.

  To his dismay, it was spattered and stained with black ink. The ballpoint pens that had exploded during the flight had splurted their contents directly onto the white fabric. To make matters worse, he’d evidently scrunched the garment further down in the bag when he was preparing to leave the ship, causing the ink stains to reproduce themselves in Rorschach fashion.

  And yet . . . and yet . . . He shook the garment straight, held it at arm’s length. Something astonishing had happened. The ink pattern, created randomly, had turned into a cross, a Christian cross, right in the middle of the chest. If it had been red instead of black, it would almost be the insignia on the tunic of a medieval crusader. Almost. The ink stains were untidy, with globs and stray extra lines marring the perfection of the design. Although . . . although . . . those faint lines ghosting under the crossbar could be interpreted as the skeletally thin arms of the crucified Christ . . . and those spiky smudges higher up could be seen as thorns from Jesus’s crown. He shook his head: reading too much into things was a weakness of his. And yet here it was, the cross on his garment where no cross was before. He prodded the ink, to check if it stained his fingers. Apart from a slightly tacky patch in the very centre, it was dry. Ready to wear.

  He threw the dishdasha over his head and allowed the cool fabric to slide across his skin, sheathing his nakedness. Turning to appraise his reflection in the window, he confirmed that Bea had chosen well. The thing fitted him, as though a tailor in the Middle East had measured his shoulders, cut the cloth and sewn it for him specially.

  The window he’d been using as a mirror became a window again, as lights flared up outside. Two glowing points, like the eyes of some monstrous organism approaching. He stepped closer to the glass and peered through, but the vehicle’s headlights disappeared just as he recognised them for what they were.

  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?’