The Book of Strange New Things (18 page)

Despite the cannibalism jokes, USIC and the Oasans have what appears to be quite a decent trading relationship. It’s not the colonial model of exploitation that you’d expect. There’s a regular exchange of goods, formal and low-key. The Oasans provide us with basic foodstuffs. As I understand it, the main thing we’ve been giving the Oasans is medicines. There’s not a great variety of plants growing here, which is surprising given the amount of rain. But since most medicines are made from plants I suspect that the scope for discovering/making analgesics, antibiotics, etc, here has been limited. Or maybe this is USIC’s evil plan to get the locals hooked on drugs? I won’t be able to make authoritative statements about that until I know these people better.

Anyway, are you sitting down? – because I have some amazing news that may knock you flat. The Oasans want only one thing (besides medicines) – the word of God. They’ve been asking USIC to supply them with another pastor. Asking?– Demanding! According to the men I just spoke to, they (Oasans) have let it be known, politely, that their continued co-operation with USIC’s activities depends on it! And here’s you and me thinking that USIC was being fantastically generous in offering me this opportunity to come here . . . Well, far from me being here under sufferance, it turns out the whole project may depend on me! If I’d known this before, I would have INSISTED that you came too. But then maybe USIC would have passed me over in favour of someone else, someone less troublesome. There must have been hundreds of applicants. (I still don’t understand Why Me. But perhaps the right question is Why Not?)

Anyway, it’s clear that I’ll be given whatever assistance I require in the setting up of my church. A vehicle, building materials, even labourers. The way things are shaping up, it looks like my yoke is going to be easier than that of just about any missionary since the beginning of Christian evangelism. When you think of Saint Paul, getting beaten up, stoned, shipwrecked, starved, imprisoned . . . I’m almost looking forward to my first setback! (ALMOST)

He paused. That was all he wanted to say but he felt he should make some reference to the Maldives. And then felt guilty for feeling he should, rather than wanting to.

Love,

Peter

After he vomited up the coffee, he felt better. He wasn’t much of a coffee drinker at the best of times – it was a stimulant, after all, and he’d weaned himself off artificial stimulants years ago – but the stuff BG had presented him with tasted foul. Maybe it was made of Oasan flowers, or maybe the combination of imported coffee and Oasan water was bad news. Either way, he felt better rid of it. In fact, he felt almost normal. The effects of the Jump were leaving his system at last. He took a long swig of water straight from the tap. Delicious. He would drink only water from now on.

Energy returned to his body, as though each cell was a microscopic sponge that swelled in gratitude for being fed. Maybe it was. He strapped on his sandals and left his quarters, ostensibly to get the hang of his surroundings but also to celebrate feeling vigorous again. He’d been cooped up too long. Free at last!

Well, free to walk the labyrinth of the USIC base. A welcome change from his room, but not exactly the wide open prairie. Just empty corridors, brightly lit tunnels of wall, ceiling and floor. And every few metres, a door.

Each door had a name tag on it – surname and initial only – with the person’s job description in larger letters. Thus,
W. HEK,
CHEF,
S. MORTELLARO
, DENTAL SURGEON,
D. ROSEN
, SURVEYOR,
L. MORO
, ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGIST,
B. GRAHAM
, CENTRIFUGE ENGINEER,
J. MOONEY
, ELECTRICAL ENGINEER, and so on. The word ‘engineer’ came up often, as did professions ending in ‘-ist’.

No sound came through those doors, and the corridors were likewise silent. Evidently, the USIC staff were either at work or hanging out in the cafeteria. There was nothing sinister in their absence, no reason to feel spooked, yet Peter felt spooked. His initial relief at being able to reconnoitre alone, unwatched, gave way to a hankering for signs of life. He walked with increasing pace, turned corners with increasing resolution, and was met each time with the same rectangular passageways and rows of identical doors. In a place like this, you couldn’t even be sure if you were lost.

Just as he was starting to sweat, needled with memories of being trapped in juvenile corrective institutions, the spell was broken – turning another corner, he almost collided, chest-to-chest, with Werner.

‘Whoa! Where’s the fire?’ Werner said, patting his fat torso as if checking that the surprise hadn’t done him any harm.

‘Sorry,’ said Peter.

‘You OK?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘That’s good,’ nodded Werner, cordial but in no mood to chat. ‘Stay with it, man.’ A catchphrase or a caution? Hard to tell.

Within seconds, Peter was alone once more. His moment of panic had passed. He could see now that there was a difference between wandering around in an unfamiliar building and being trapped in a prison. Werner was right: he needed to get a grip.

Back in his own quarters, Peter prayed. Prayed for guidance. No answer came to him, at least not immediately.

The alien – the Oasan – had begged him to return to the settlement as soon as he could. So . . . should he go right away? The claustrophobia that had threatened him in the corridors suggested that he still wasn’t fully back to normal – he wasn’t a panicker, usually. And it wasn’t long since he’d been fainting, vomiting and hallucinating. Perhaps he should continue resting up until he was a hundred per cent sure he was himself again. But the Oasan had begged him to return, and USIC hadn’t brought him all this way for him to lie in bed staring at his toes. He should go. He should go.

The thing was, it would mean being out of contact with Bea for a number of days. That would be hard on both of them. Yet, in the circumstances, there was no avoiding it; the best he could do was delay his departure just a little while longer, so that they had more time to write to each other first.

He checked the Shoot. Nothing.

Come back
สี
oon, Pe
รี่
er, oh very
สี
oon
, สี
ooner than you can. Read for u
สี
the Book of
สีรี่
range New Thing
สี. He could still hear the Oasan’s voice, wheezy and strained as though each word was well-nigh impossible to produce, a bleat from a musical instrument made of preposterously ill-suited materials. A trombone carved out of a watermelon, held together with rubber bands.

But never mind the physicalities: here were souls hungry for Christ, waiting for him to return as he had promised.

But had he promised, in so many words? He couldn’t recall.

God’s answer resounded in his head.
Don’t make everything so complicated. Do what you came here for
.

Yes, Lord
, he responded in turn,
but is it OK if I wait for just one more letter from Bea?

Frazzled from waiting, he went out into the corridors again. They were silent as before, still empty, and smelled of nothing, not even floor cleaner, although they were very clean. Not showroom-pristine or shiny, but free of noticeable dirt or dust. Sensibly clean.

He’d been wrong to feel claustrophobic. Only a few of the passageways were enclosed; others had windows, big ones with sunshine beaming in. How could he have missed this before? How had he managed to choose only the windowless passageways? That was the sort of thing crazy people did – instinctively choosing the experiences that confirmed their own negative attitudes. He was a past master of stuff like that; God had shown him a better way. God and Bea.

He walked along, re-reading the names on the doors, trying to commit them to memory in case he ever needed to know where to find someone. He was struck anew by how odd it was that none of the doors was fitted with a lock, just a simple handle which any stranger could open.

‘You planning to steal my toothpaste?’ Roussos had teased when Peter remarked on this earlier on.

‘No, but you might have possessions that are very individual to you.’

‘You planning to steal my shoes?’

Peter
had
stolen someone’s shoes once, and considered mentioning it, but Mooney interrupted:

‘He wants your muffins, man! Watch your muffins!’

By coincidence, Peter noted the nameplate of
F. ROUSSOS
, OPERATING ENGINEER on one of the doors, and walked on. Seconds later, he noted another name in passing and then almost lost his balance when it registered on his consciousness:
M. KURTZBERG
, PASTOR.

Why was he so surprised? Kurtzberg was missing in action, but no one had said he was dead. Until his fate was established, there was no reason to reallocate his quarters or remove his name. He might return anytime.

On impulse, Peter knocked at the door. There was no answer. He knocked again, louder. Again, no answer. He should, of course, move on. But he did not. Within moments, he was standing inside the room. It was a room identical to his own, in design and décor at least. The window blind was shut.

‘Hello?’ he called quietly, to verify that he was alone. He tried to convince himself that Kurtzberg, if he
had
been here, would have urged him to come in, and although this was probably true, it didn’t alter the fact that it was wrong to enter a stranger’s home uninvited.

But this isn’t a home, is it
? he thought to himself.
The USIC base isn’t a home for anybody
.
It’s just one big workplace
. Self-justifying sophistry? Perhaps. But no, it was an instinct that went deeper than that. Bea would have sensed it too. There was something weird about the USIC personnel, something Bea could have helped him articulate. These people had been living here for years; they obviously enjoyed a degree of camaraderie; and yet . . . and yet.

He stepped deeper into Kurtzberg’s apartment. There was no evidence of any other illicit visits before this one. The atmosphere was stale, and a film of dust covered the flat surfaces. There was no Shoot on the table, just a bottle of filtered water (half-empty and pure-looking) and a plastic mug. The bed was unmade, with one pillow hanging off the edge, poised to fall, placidly established in that poise, set to hang there for ever. Spread out on the bed was one of Kurtzberg’s shirts, its sleeves upflung as if in surrender. The armpits were discoloured with mildew.

Disappointingly, there were no documents anywhere to be seen: no diaries or notebooks. There was a Bible – a neat paperback Revised Standard Version – lying on a chair. Peter opened it, riffled through the pages. Kurtzberg, he soon realised, was not the sort of person who underlined verses that struck him as particularly significant or who scribbled annotations in the margins. There was nothing here but pristine Scripture. Peter, in his own sermons, would occasionally tell a joke or an aphorism to drive home a point, and one of the dictums he enjoyed quoting, whenever he sensed that people in the congregation were staring at his grubby, decrepit, dog-eared New Testament, was ‘Clean Bible – dirty Christian. Dirty Bible – clean Christian.’ Marty Kurtzberg obviously did not subscribe to this view.

Peter opened the wardrobe. A formal suit jacket, in powder-blue linen, hung there, next to a pair of white slacks with faint grey stains on the knees. Kurtzberg was a compact man, no taller than five foot six, and his shoulders were narrow. Two more coat-hangers were cloaked in shirts of the same kind as the one on the bed, replete with classy silk ties slung loosely around the collars. On the bottom of the wardrobe lay a pair of leather shoes, polished to a gleam, and a wadded-up pair of cream socks that were furry with mould.

I’m not going to learn anything here
, thought Peter, and turned to leave. As he turned, though, he noticed something lying under the window, a litter of what looked like flower petals. On closer inspection, it proved to be torn fragments of adhesive bandage. Dozens of them. As if Kurtzberg had stood at the window, staring out at goodness knows what, and ripped up an entire packet of Band-Aids one by one, into shreds as small as possible, letting them fall at his feet.

After his visit to Kurtzberg’s quarters, Peter lost all motivation to explore the USIC compound any further. A pity, because this was his chance to make up for forgetting all the orienteering info Grainger had told him on arrival. Walking around was good exercise, too; no doubt his muscles needed it, but . . . well, to be truthful, this place made him depressed.

He wasn’t sure why. The compound was spacious, clean, cheerfully painted, and there were plenty of windows. OK, a few of the corridors were a bit tunnel-like, but they couldn’t
all
face onto the sky, could they? And OK, a few pot plants here and there might have been nice, but USIC could hardly be blamed if the soil of Oasis didn’t support ferns and rhododendrons. And it wasn’t as if no attempt had been made to finesse the décor. At regular intervals in the corridors hung nicely framed posters that were intended, presumably, to raise a smile. Peter noted perennial favourites like the photo of the worried-looking kitten hanging upside-down from a twig, captioned
OH, SHIT
…, the dog sharing his basket with two ducks, Laurel and Hardy cluelessly attempting to build a house, the elephant balancing on a ball, the convoy of forward-striding cartoon men in Robert Crumb’s ‘Keep On Truckin’, and – at impressive size, from chest-height to just under the ceiling – Charles Ebbets’ famous monochrome of construction workers eating lunch on an iron girder suspended vertiginously above the streets of Manhattan. A little further on, Peter wondered whether the 1940s propaganda painting titled
We Can Do It!
, showing ‘Rosie the Riveter’ flexing her well-muscled forearm, was intended sincerely to inspire the personnel, or if it had been fixed there with a wink of irony. In any case, some sly graffitist had added, in felt-tip,
NO THANKS ROSIE
.