The Book of Strange New Things (11 page)

Werner nodded again. Peter noted at a glance that the magazine he’d been reading was
Pneumatics & Hydraulics Informatics
, with a full-colour cover photo of machine innards and the snappy headline
MAKING GEAR PUMPS MORE VERSATILE
.

‘This pastor thing . . . ’ said Werner. ‘What are you gonna be doing, exactly? On a day-to-day basis?’

Peter smiled. ‘I’ll have to wait and see.’

‘See how the land lays,’ suggested Werner.

‘Exactly,’ said Peter. Tiredness was swamping him again. He felt as if he might pass out right there in his chair, slide onto the floor for Stanko to mop up.

‘I gotta admit,’ said Werner, ‘I don’t know much about religion.’

‘And I don’t know much about pneumatics and hydraulics,’ said Peter.

‘Not my line, either,’ said Werner, reaching over with some effort to replace the magazine in the racks. ‘I just picked it up out of curiosity.’ He faced Peter again. There was something he wanted to clarify. ‘China didn’t even
have
religion for a long time, under, like, one of the dynasties.’

‘What dynasty was that?’ For some reason, the word ‘Tokugawa’ popped into Peter’s mind, but then he realised he was confusing Japanese and Chinese history.

‘The Mao dynasty,’ said Werner. ‘It was bad, man. People getting killed left, right and centre. Then things loosened up. People could do what they liked. If you wanted to believe in God, fine. Buddha, too. Shinto. Whatever.’

‘What about you? Were you ever interested in any faith?’

Werner peered up at the ceiling. ‘I read this huge book once. Must’ve been four hundred pages. Scientology. Interesting. Food for thought.’

Oh, Bea
, thought Peter,
I need you here by my side
.

‘You gotta understand,’ Werner went on, ‘I’ve read a lot of books. I learn words from them. Vocabulary building. So if I ever come across a weird word one day, in a situation where it matters, I’m, like, ready for it.’

The saxophone hazarded a squawk that might almost have been considered raucous, but immediately resolved itself into sweet melody.

‘There are lots of Christians in China nowadays,’ Peter observed. ‘Millions.’

‘Yeah, but out of the total population it’s, like, one per cent, half of one per cent, whatever. Growing up, I hardly ever met one. Exotic.’

Peter drew a deep breath, fighting nausea. He hoped he was only imagining the sensation in his head, of his brain shifting position, adjusting its fit against the lubricated shell of his skull. ‘The Chinese . . . the Chinese are very focused on family, yes?’

Werner looked pensive. ‘So they say.’

‘Not you?’

‘I was fostered. To a German military couple based in Chengdu. Then when I was fourteen they moved to Singapore.’ He paused; then, in case there might be doubt, he added: ‘With me.’

‘That must be a very unusual story for China.’

‘I couldn’t give you stats. But, yeah. Very unusual, I’m sure. Nice folks, too.’

‘How do they feel about you being here?’

‘They died,’ said Werner, with no change of expression. ‘Not long before I was selected.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

Werner nodded, to confirm agreement that his step-parents’ demise was, in the final analysis, a regrettable event. ‘They were good folks. Supportive. A lot of the guys here didn’t have that. I had that. Lucky.’

‘Are you in touch with anyone else back home?’

‘There’s a lot of folks I’d like to touch base with. Fine people.’

‘Any one special person?’

Werner shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t rate them one over the other. All unique, you know. Talented. Some of them, I really owe. Like, they helped me. Gave me pointers, introduced me to . . . opportunities.’ His eyes went glassy as he reconnected, momentarily, with a distant past.

‘When do you go back?’ said Peter.

‘Go back?’ Werner took a second or two to decode the question, as though Peter had voiced it in an impenetrably thick accent. ‘Nothing scheduled for the foreseeable. Some guys, like Severin for instance, have been back and forth, back and forth, every few years. I’m like, why? It takes you three, four years to hit your stride. Acclimatisation-wise, expertise-wise, focus-wise. It’s a big project. After a while you get to the point where you can see how everything joins up with everything else. How the work of an engineer ties in with the work of a plumber and an electrician and a cook and a . . . a horticulturalist.’ His pudgy hands cupped an invisible sphere, to indicate some sort of holistic concept.

Suddenly, Werner’s hands appeared to swell in size, each finger ballooning to the thickness of a baby’s arm. His face changed shape, too, sprouting multiple eyes and mouths that swarmed loose from the flesh and swirled around the room. Then something hit Peter smack on the forehead. It was the floor.

A few seconds or minutes later, strong hands hooked under his shoulders and heaved him onto his back.

‘Are you OK?’ said Stanko, strangely unfazed by the delirious see-sawing of the walls and ceiling all around him. Werner, whose face and hands were back to normal, was likewise unaware of any problem – except the problem of a sweat-soaked, foolishly overdressed missionary sprawled insensible on the floor. ‘Are you with us, bro?’

Peter blinked hard. The room turned slower. ‘I’m with you.’

‘You need to be in bed,’ said Stanko.

‘I think you’re right,’ said Peter. ‘But I . . . I don’t know where . . . ’

‘It’ll be in the directory,’ said Stanko, and went off to check.

Within sixty seconds, Peter was being carried out of the mess hall and into the dim blue corridor by Stanko and Werner. Neither man was as strong as BG so they made slow and lurching progress, pausing every few metres to adjust their grip. Stanko’s bony fingers dug into Peter’s armpits and shoulders, sure to leave bruises, while Werner had the easy job, the ankles.

‘I can walk, I can walk,’ said Peter, but he wasn’t sure if that was true and his two Samaritans ignored him anyway. In any case, his quarters weren’t far from the mess hall. Before he knew it, he was being laid down – or rather, dumped – on his bed.

‘Nice talking with you,’ said Werner, panting slightly. ‘Good luck with . . . whatever.’

‘Just close your eyes and relax, bro,’ advised Stanko, already halfway to the door. ‘Sleep it off.’

Sleep it off
. These were words he’d heard many times before in his life. He had even heard them spoken by men who’d scooped him off a floor and carried him away – although usually to a dumping-place much less pleasant than a bed. On occasion, the guys who’d lugged him out of the nightclubs and other drinking-holes where he’d disgraced himself had given him a few kicks in the ribs before hoisting him up. Once, they’d tossed him into a back street and a delivery van had passed right over him, its tyres miraculously missing his head and limbs, just tearing off a hunk of his hair. That was in the days before he was ready to admit there was a higher power keeping him alive.

Uncanny how similar the after-effects of the Jump were to extremes of alcohol abuse. But worse. Like the mother of all hangovers combined with a dose of magic mushrooms. Neither BG nor Severin had mentioned hallucinations, but maybe these guys were simply more robust than him. Or maybe they were both fast asleep right now, quietly recuperating instead of making fools of themselves.

He waited for the room to become a geometric space of fixed angles anchored in gravity, and then he got up. He checked the Shoot for messages. Still no word from Bea. Perhaps he should have asked Grainger to come to his room to check his machine, make sure he was using it correctly. But it was night and she was a woman and he barely knew her. Nor would their relationship have got off to an auspicious start if he’d hallucinated that she was sprouting multiple eyes and mouths and then collapsed at her feet.

Besides, the Shoot was so simple to operate that he couldn’t imagine how anyone – even a technophobe like himself – might misunderstand it. The thing sent and received messages: that was all. It didn’t play movies, make noises, offer to sell him products, inform him about the plight of mistreated donkeys or the Brazilian rainforest. It didn’t offer him the opportunity to check the weather in southern England or the current number of Christians in China or the names and dates of dynasties. It just confirmed that his messages had been sent, and that there was no reply.

Abruptly he glimpsed – not on the matt grey screen of the Shoot, but in his own mind – a picture of tangled wreckage on an English motorway, at night, garishly lit by the headlights of emergency vehicles. Bea, dead, somewhere on the road between Heathrow and home. Loose pearls scattered across the asphalt, black slicks of blood. A month ago already. History. Such things could happen. One person embarks on an outrageously hazardous journey and arrives unscathed; another goes for a short, routine drive and gets killed. ‘God’s sick sense of humour,’ as one grieving parent (soon to leave the church) had once put it. For a few seconds, the nightmarish vision of Beatrice lying dead on the road was real to Peter, and a nauseous thrill of terror passed through his guts.

But no. He mustn’t let himself be deluded by imaginary horrors. God was never cruel. Life could be cruel, but not God. In a universe made dangerous by the gift of free will, God could be relied upon for support no matter what happened, and He appreciated the potentials and limitations of each of His children. Peter knew that if anything awful happened to Bea, there was no way he’d be able to function here. The mission would be over before it began. And if there was one thing that had become clear in all the months of thought and prayer leading up to his journey to Oasis, it was that God really wanted him here. He was safe in God’s hands, and so was Bea. She must be.

As for the Shoot, there was one easy way of checking whether he was using it correctly. He located the USIC icon – a stylised green scarab – on the screen, and clicked open the menu behind it. It wasn’t much of a menu, just three items:
Maintenance (repairs)
,
Admin
and
Graigner
, obviously set up in haste by Grainger herself. If he wanted a more substantial list of correspondents, it was up to him to organise it.

He opened a fresh message page, and wrote:

Dear Grainger. Then deleted ‘Dear’ and substituted ‘Hi’, then deleted that and just had ‘Grainger’, then reinstated ‘Dear’, then deleted it again. Unwarranted intimacy versus unfriendly brusqueness . . . a flurry of confused gestures before communication could begin. Letter-writing must have been so much easier in the olden days when everyone, even the bank manager or the tax department, was
Dear
.

Hi Grainger.

You were right. I am tired. I should sleep some more. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Best wishes,

Peter

Laboriously, he undressed. Every item of his clothing was swollen with damp, like he’d been caught in a downpour. His socks peeled away from his wrinkled feet like muddy clumps of foliage. His trousers and jacket clung obstinately to him, resisting his attempts to tug free. Everything he removed weighed heavy and fell to the floor with a dull whump. At first, he thought that fragments of his clothing had actually crumbled off and rolled across the floor, but on closer inspection, the loose bits were dead insects. He picked up one of the bodies and held it between his fingers. The wings had lost their silvery translucence, and were stained red with dye. Legs had been lost. It was an effort, actually, to perceive this mangled husk as an insect at all: it looked and felt like the pulverised remains of a hand-rolled cigarette. Why had these creatures hitched a ride in his clothes? He’d probably killed them just by the friction of walking.

Remembering the camera, he fished it out of his jacket pocket. It was slippery with moisture. He switched it on, intending to review the pictures he’d taken of the USIC perimeter and to snap a few more here, to show Bea his quarters, his sodden clothes, maybe one of the insects. A spark leapt from the mechanism, stinging him, and the light died. He held the camera in his hand, staring down at it as though it were a bird whose tiny heart had burst from fright. He knew the thing was unfixable and yet he half-hoped that if he waited a while, it would hiccup back into life. Just a moment ago, it had been a clever little storehouse of memories for Bea, a trove of images which would come to his aid in a near future he’d already inhabited in his imagination. Him and Bea on the bed, the gadget glowing between them, her pointing, him following the line of her finger, him saying ‘That? Oh, that was . . . ’ ‘And that was . . . ’ ‘And that was . . . ’ Now suddenly none of it was. In his palm lay a small metal shape with no purpose.

As the minutes passed, he became aware that his naked flesh smelled strange. It was that same faint honeydew melon scent he detected in the drinking water. The atmosphere swirling around out there had not been content merely to lick and stroke his skin, it had made him fragrant, as well as provoking copious sweat.

He was too tired to wash, and a slight quaver in the straight line of the skirting board warned him that the whole room might soon start moving again if he didn’t shut his eyes and rest. He collapsed on the bed and slept for an eternity which, when he awoke, turned out to have been forty-odd minutes.

He checked the Shoot for messages. Nothing. Not even from Grainger. Maybe he didn’t know how to use this machine after all. The message he’d sent Grainger was not a foolproof test, because he’d worded it in such a way that it hadn’t strictly required a response. He thought for a minute, then wrote:

Hello again Grainger,

Sorry to bother you, but I haven’t noticed any phones or any other method of getting hold of somebody directly. Are there none?

Best wishes,

Peter

He showered, towelled himself half-dry and lay on the bed again, still naked. If his messages to Grainger had failed to get through and she turned up a few minutes from now, he would wrap himself in a sheet and talk to her through the door. Unless she walked right in without knocking. She wouldn’t do that, would she? Surely the social conventions of the USIC base weren’t
that
different from the norm? He looked around the room for a suitable object to wedge against the door, but there was nothing.