The Book of Strange New Things (17 page)

Maybe, if we’d bent their arm on that one, we could then have insisted that Joshua came along too. Not sure how he would have fared in the Jump, though. Probably would have been transformed into a furry tea cosy.

Feeble cat jokes. My equivalent of your chocolate rollettes, I suppose.

Darling, I love you. Keep well. Take the wise advice that you’ve given me so often: don’t be hard on yourself, and don’t let the bad blind you to the good. I’ll join you in prayer for the relatives of the dead in the Maldives. Join me in prayer for the people here, who are thrilled at the prospect of a new life in Christ. Oh, and also: there is a girl in Oskaloosa called Coretta whose father has recently died and whose mother has hit the booze. Pray for her too, if you remember.

Love,

Peter

He read the text of his message over, but didn’t tinker with it any further, feeling suddenly faint with hunger and fatigue. He pressed a button. For several minutes, his 793 inadequate words hung there, trembling slightly, as if unsure what to do. That was normal for the Shoot, he’d found. The process kept you in suspense each time, tempting you to fear that it would fail. Then his words vanished and the screen went blank, except for the automated logo that said: APPROVED, TRANSMITTED.

8

Take a deep breath and count to a million

Everything looked different in daylight. The USIC mess hall, which had seemed so lonesome and eerie during the long hours of darkness, was a hive of cheerful activity now. A happy congregation. The glass wall on the eastern side of the building, although tinted, let in so much light and warmth that Peter had to shield his face from it. A glow was cast over the entire room, transforming coffee machines into jewelled sculptures, aluminium chairs into precious metal, magazine racks into ziggurats, bald heads into lamps. Thirty or forty people were gathered together, eating, chatting, fetching refills from the coffee bar, lolling around in the armchairs, gesticulating over the tables, raising their voices to compete with the raised voices of the others. Most were dressed in white, just like Peter, although
sans
the big inky crucifix on the chest. There were quite a few black faces, including BG’s. BG didn’t look up when Peter arrived; he was involved in an animated discussion with a rather butch-looking white woman. There was no sign of Grainger.

Peter stepped into the throng. Piped music was still issuing from the PA system but it was barely audible above the clamour of conversation; Peter couldn’t tell whether it was the same Patsy Cline documentary or an electronic disco song or a piece of classical music. Just another voice in the hubbub.

‘Hey, preacher!’

It was the black man who’d tossed him the blueberry muffin. He was seated at the same table as last night, but with a different pal, a fat white guy. In fact, both of them were fat: exactly the same weight, and with similar features. Coincidences like that served as a reminder that, variations in pigment aside, humans were all part of the same species.

‘Hi there,’ said Peter, pulling up a seat and joining them. They each glanced at his chest to check out the ink-stained design there, but, having satisfied themselves that it was a crucifix rather than something they might wish to comment on, pulled their heads back again.

‘How’s things, man?’ The black guy extended his hand for a handshake. Mathematical formulae were jotted on the sleeve of his shirt, right up to the elbow.

‘Very good,’ said Peter. It had never occurred to him before that dark-skinned people didn’t have the option of jotting numbers on their skin. You learned something new about human diversity every day.

‘You got yourself fed yet?’ The black man had just polished off a plate of something brown and saucy. He nursed a jumbo plastic mug of coffee. His friend nodded a greeting to Peter, and unwrapped a soggy napkin from around a large sandwich.

‘No, I’m still functioning on half a muffin,’ said Peter, blinking dazedly in the light. ‘Actually, that’s not quite true: I’ve had some raisin bread since then.’

‘Lay off that raisin bread, man. It’s NRC.’

‘NRC?’ Peter consulted his mental database of acronyms. ‘Not recommended for children?’

‘Not Real Coke.’

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘It’s our cute way of saying that it was made here, not back home. Probably contains monocycloparaffins or cyclohexyldodecanoic acid or some shit like that.’ The black man was half-smiling, but his eyes were serious. The polysyllabic chemical terms had rolled off his tongue with the ease of obscenities. Again, Peter was reminded that each and every member of this personnel must possess skills that amply justified the cost of his or her passage to Oasis. Every member except him.

The black man took a loud slurp of coffee.

Peter asked: ‘Do you never eat anything that’s been made here?’

‘My body is my temple, preacher, and you gotta keep it holy. The Bible says that.’

‘The Bible says a lot of things, Mooney,’ his pal remarked, and took a big bite out of his sandwich, which dripped grey sauce. Peter glanced across the room at BG. The butch-looking white woman was laughing, almost doubled up. She had one hand on BG’s knee, for balance. The piped music poked through a gap in the noise, revealing the chorus of a Broadway song from the mid-twentieth century, the sort of stuff Peter had always associated with provincial charity shops or the record collections of lonely old men.

‘How’s your sandwich?’ he enquired. ‘Looks pretty good.’

‘Mmf,’ nodded the fat white guy. ‘It
is
good.’

‘What’s in it?’

‘Whiteflower.’

‘Apart from the bread . . . ’

‘Whiteflower, preacher. Not white
flour
.
White
flower. Roast whiteflower.’

Mooney came to the rescue. ‘My friend Roussos is talking about a flower.’ He made an elegant hand-gesture, unfurling his plump fingers in imitation of an opening blossom. ‘A flower that grows here. Just about the
only
thing that grows here . . . ’

‘Tastes like the best pastrami you ever had in your life,’ said Roussos.

‘It’s very adaptable,’ Mooney conceded. ‘Depending on the flavours you put in, it can be made to taste like just about any damn thing. Chicken. Fudge. Beefsteak. Banana. Sweetcorn. Mushroom. Add water and it’s soup. Boil it down and it’s jelly. Grind and bake it and it’s bread. The universal food.’

‘You’re doing a very good job of selling it,’ said Peter, ‘for someone who refuses to eat it.’

‘Sure he eats it,’ said Roussos. ‘He loves the banana fritters!’

‘They’re OK,’ sniffed Mooney. ‘I don’t make a habit of it. Mainly I insist on the real deal.’

‘But isn’t it expensive,’ asked Peter, ‘if you only eat and drink . . . uh . . . imported stuff?’

‘You bet, preacher. At the rate I’m drinking real Coke, I estimate I owe USIC maybe in the region of . . . fifty thousand bucks.’

‘Easy,’ confirmed Roussos. ‘That, and the Twinkies.’

‘Hell yeah! The prices these sharks charge for a Twinkie! Or a Hershey bar. I tell ya, if I wasn’t the easy-going type . . . ’

Mooney slid his empty plate towards Peter.

‘If I hadn’t eaten it all, I could show ya something else,’ he said. ‘Vanilla ice-cream and chocolate sauce. The vanilla essence and the chocolate is imported, the sauce has maybe some whiteflower in it, but the ice cream . . . the ice cream is pure entomophagy, know what I’m saying?’

Peter reflected a moment. ‘No, Mooney, I don’t know what you’re saying.’

‘Bugs, man. Grubs.
You scream, I scream, we all scream for
. . . whipped bugs!’

‘Very funny,’ mumbled Roussos, and continued chewing his mouthful with less enthusiasm than before.

‘And they do a delicious rice dessert that uses – can you
believe
this? – it uses maggots.’

Roussos put down his sandwich. ‘Mooney, you’re my pal, I love you a lot, but . . . ’

‘Not dirty maggots, you understand,’ Mooney explained. ‘Clean, fresh, specially bred ones.’

Roussos had had enough. ‘Mooney, put a goddamn sock in it. There are some things it’s better for a person not to know.’

As if alerted by the sounds of dispute, BG abruptly hove into view.

‘Hey, Peter! How’s tricks, bro?’ The white woman was no longer at his side.

‘Excellent, BG. And you?’

‘On top of it, man, on top of it. We got the solar panels putting out two hundred and fifty per cent of our electric power now. We’re ready to pump the surplus into some seriously smart systems.’ He nodded towards an invisible location somewhere beyond the mess hall, on the opposite side from where Peter had explored. ‘You seen that new building out there?’

‘They all look new to me, BG.’

‘Yeah, well, this one is
real
new.’ BG’s face was serene with pride. ‘You go out there and look at it sometime, when you get the oppor
toon
ity. It’s a beautiful piece of engineering. Our new rain-collecting centrifuge.’

‘Otherwise known as the Big Brassiere,’ interjected Roussos, mopping up the sauce with a fragment of bread-crust.

‘Hey, we ain’t looking to win no architecture prizes,’ grinned BG. ‘Just figuring out how to catch that water.’

‘Actually,’ said Peter, ‘now that you mention it, it’s just occurred to me: Despite all the rain . . . I haven’t seen any rivers or lakes. Not even a pond.’

‘The ground is like a sponge. Anything that goes in, you don’t get back. But most of the rain evaporates in, like, five minutes. You can’t see it happening, it’s constant. Invisible steam. That’s a oxymoron, right?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Peter.

‘Anyway, we got to grab that rain before it disappears. That’s what me and the team been designing. Vacuum nets. Flow concentrators. Big, big toys. And what about you, bro? You got yourself a church yet?’

The question was asked lightly, as if churches were tools or other necessary supplies that could be requisitioned – which, on reflection, they were.

‘Not the physical building, BG,’ said Peter. ‘But that’s never been what a church is about. A church is made of hearts and minds.’

‘Low-budget construction,’ quipped Roussos.

‘Show some respect, asshole,’ said Mooney.

‘Actually, BG,’ said Peter, ‘I’m kind of in a state of shock – or happy astonishment would be a better word. Last night . . . uh . . . this morning . . . earlier today, Grainger took me to the Oasan settlement . . . ’

‘The what, bro?’

‘The Oasan settlement.’

The three men laughed. ‘You mean Freaktown,’ said Roussos.

‘C-2,’ corrected BG, abruptly serious. ‘We call it C-2.’

‘Anyway,’ Peter continued, ‘I got the most
amazing
welcome. These people are desperate to learn about God!’

‘Well, ain’t that a lick on the dick,’ said BG.

‘They already know about the Bible!’

‘This calls for celebration, bro. Lemme buy you a drink.’

‘I don’t drink, BG.’

BG raised one eyebrow. ‘I meant a coffee, bro. If you want alcohol, you’re gonna need to set up your church
real
fast.’

‘Sorry . . . ?’

‘Donations, bro. Lotsa donations. One beer will set you back a loooong way.’

BG lumbered towards the coffee bar. Peter was left alone with the two fat guys, who took synchronised sips from their plastic mugs.

‘It’s extraordinary the way you can be driven through a landscape for hours and yet not notice the most striking thing about it,’ reflected Peter. ‘All that rain, and none of it collected in lakes or reservoirs . . . I wonder how the Oasans cope.’

‘No problem,’ said Roussos. ‘It rains every day. They get what they need when they need it. It’s like, on tap.’ He held up his plastic mug to an imagined sky.

‘In fact,’ added Mooney, ‘it would be a problem if the ground
didn’t
soak it up. Imagine the floods, man.’

‘Oh!’ said Peter, suddenly remembering. ‘Have you heard about the Maldives?’

‘The Maldives?’ Roussos looked wary, as though suspecting that Peter was about to launch into an evangelistic parable.

‘The Maldives. A bunch of islands in the Indian Ocean,’ said Peter. ‘They got wiped out by tidal waves. Almost everyone who lived there is dead.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ said Mooney, impassive, as though Peter had just imparted a fragment of knowledge from a branch of science outside his own.

‘Wiped out?’ said Roussos. ‘That’s bad.’

BG returned to the table with a steaming mug of coffee in each fist.

‘Thanks,’ said Peter, taking hold of his. There was a jokey message printed on it:
YOU DON’T NEED TO BE HUMAN TO WORK HERE, BUT IT HELPS
. BG’s said something different. ‘Hey, I’ve just realised,’ said Peter. ‘These mugs are real plastic. I mean, er . . .
thick
plastic. I mean, not Styrofoam, not disposable . . . ’

‘We got better things to transport halfway across the universe than disposable cups, bro,’ said BG.

‘Yeah, like Hershey bars,’ said Mooney.

‘Like Christian ministers,’ said BG, without a hint of mockery.

My dear Bea, wrote Peter an hour later.

No reply from you yet, and maybe it’s a bit soon for me to be writing you another letter. But I couldn’t wait to tell you – I’ve just had a MOST eye-opening conversation with some of the USIC guys. It turns out I’m not the first Christian missionary that’s been sent here. Before me, there was a man called Marty Kurtzberg. A Baptist apparently, despite the Jewish name. His ministry was welcomed by the natives, but then he disappeared. That was a year ago. No one knows what became of him. Of course the men joke that the Oasans probably ate him, like in those old cartoons of missionaries tied up & getting boiled in a pot by hungry savages. They shouldn’t talk like that, it’s racist, but anyway I know in my heart that these people – the Oasans, that is – aren’t dangerous. Not to me, anyway. Maybe that’s a rash assessment, since I’ve only met one so far. But I’m sure you recall the times when you & I were witnessing for the Lord in some unfamiliar place/context, and we suddenly sensed that we should beat a hasty retreat if we wanted to stay alive! Well, I don’t get that feeling here.