The Book of Strange New Things (55 page)

So absorbed were Peter and the สีฐฉั in their work that they didn’t notice, until it was too late, the arrival of the swarm.

One of the สีฐฉั shouted something Peter half-understood, because it contained the same root word for ‘foreign/alien/unexpected/strange’ that was in ‘The Book of Strange New Things’. Smiling in pleasure at this further proof of his progress in the language, he looked to where the person was pointing. At the perimeter of the plantation, barely discernible as anything more than a low mist of pinky-grey, was the horde of bird-like creatures Peter had seen marching past the USIC base.

His first impulse was to whoop with delight and urge his friends to enjoy the spectacle. But the สีฐฉั were obviously alarmed – and with good reason. The creatures waddled silently into the whiteflower and within seconds a large swathe of the field was obscured by their quivering bodies. Peter ran through the fields to get a closer look, but he knew, he already knew. These animals, these adorable critters, these chicadees, duckaboos, woglets or whatever other cute names they might be given, were rapacious vermin, and they were here to eat the crop.

Mindless as maggots, they hunkered into the juicy whiteflower, making no distinction between old plants and young plants, hard buds and flaccid leaves, flower or stalk. In their downy grey heads, muscles pulsed as they chewed and chomped. Their spherical bodies shivered and swelled and were not satisfied.

Instinctively, he reached down and seized the nearest of them and yanked it free of its feast. At once, his forearm got an electric shock. Or that’s how it felt, as the frantic creature lunged round and clamped its fangs into his flesh. He hurled it away in an arc of his own blood. He tried kicking at the creatures, but he was bare-legged apart from his sandals, and a vicious bite on one of his calves sent him reeling backwards. There were too many of them, anyway. If he’d had a cudgel, or a gun . . . a machine gun, or a fucking flamethrower! Adrenalin connected him with a younger, angrier Peter, a pre-Christian Peter who was capable of punching a man’s nose until it splintered, capable of smashing the windscreen of a car, capable of sweeping a long row of fragile knick-knacks off a mantelpiece in a convulsive gesture of hatred, except that he was capable of nothing now, and his adrenalin was useless, because all he could do was fall back and watch this horde consume the fruits of his people’s labour.

Those of the สีฐฉั who weren’t Jesus Lovers had better things to do than stand and watch. The fate of their plantation was obvious. They hurried to the piles of harvested whiteflower and shouldered the nets, heaving them off the ground. They knew that the pests would eat systematically from one end of the field to the other, so there was still time to carry away what was already in the bag, so to speak. The Jesus Lovers swayed anxiously back and forth, torn between their need to salvage the crop and their concern for Peter. He approached them, intending to help them carry the load, but they cringed and swayed all the more. A weird, disturbing sound issued from their heads, a sound he hadn’t heard before. Intuition told him it was the sound of lamentation.

His arm, stretched out toward them, dripped blood into the soil. The bite was not just a puncture, but had lifted a flap of skin. His leg, too, was grisly.

‘You will die, you will die!’ moaned Jesus Lover Five.

‘Why? Are those things poisonous?’

‘You will die, you will die!’ ‘You will die, you will die!’ ‘You will die, you will die!’ Several of the Jesus Lovers had joined in the moaning. Their raised voices, jumbled together, so different from their usual gentle utterances never spoken out of turn, unnerved him.

‘Poison?’ he asked loud and clear, pointing at the swarm of vermin. He wished he knew the สีฐฉั word for ‘poison’. ‘Bad medicine?’

But they did not reply. Instead they hurried away. Only Lover Five hesitated. She’d been in a strange state all through the harvest, hardly working, mostly watching, occasionally lending just one hand
–
her left
–
to a simple task. Now she came to him, walking as if drunk or in a daze. She laid her hands – one glove grubby, the other clean – on his hips, then pressed her face hard into his lap. There was nothing sexual in her intent; he doubted if she even knew where or what his genitals were. He guessed she was saying goodbye. And then she was hurrying after the others.

Within minutes, he stood alone in the whiteflower fields, his injured arm and leg itching and burning, his ears filled with the hideous noise of hundreds of rodent mouths gnashing on slimy pulp that, only a few minutes before, had been destined for transformation into bread, lamb, beancurd, ravioli, onion, muสีhroom, peanuรี่ buรี่er, chocolaรี่e, สีoup, สีardine, สีinnamon and a host of other things.

When Peter limped back to his church, he found a pickup truck parked outside and a USIC employee called Conway sipping from a $50 bottle of pop. A short, bald man in immaculate lime-green overalls and polished black boots, he cut a remarkable contrast to Peter’s filthy, blood-spattered appearance.

‘Are you OK?’ said Conway, then laughed at the absurdity of the question.

‘I got bitten,’ said Peter.

‘By what?’

‘Uh . . . I don’t know what word you guys finally decided on. Flabbits? Chicadees? Whatever.’

Conway raked a hand through his non-existent hair. He was an electrical engineer, not a medic. He pointed behind the church, at a brand-new structure that resembled a washing machine with a miniature Eiffel Tower stuck on top. ‘Your Shoot relay,’ he explained. In normal circumstances, copious expressions of thanks and admiration would have been in order, and Peter could see that Conway was having trouble letting go of his moment of well-deserved praise.

‘I think I’d better get some treatment for this,’ said Peter, holding up his gory forearm.

‘I think maybe you better,’ agreed Conway.

By the time they reached the USIC base hours later, the bleeding had stopped but the flesh around his wounds was turning dark blue. Necrosis? Probably just bruising. The vermin’s jaws had punched him with the force of a power tool. During the drive, he’d had ample opportunity to examine his arm and he couldn’t see any bone peeping out, so he supposed the injury could be classified as superficial. He’d tucked the loose flap of skin back into place but he guessed it would need stitches to stay there.

‘We got us a new doctor,’ said Conway. ‘Just arrived.’

‘Oh yes?’ said Peter. He was losing sensation in his mangled leg.

‘Nice guy. And good at his job, too.’ It seemed a fatuous remark to make: everyone chosen by USIC was nice and good at their job.

‘Glad to hear it.’

‘So,’ pursued Conway, ‘let’s go see him. Now.’

But Peter refused to go straight to the infirmary, insisting that he must first stop off in his quarters. Conway wasn’t keen.

‘It won’t make any difference to the doctor how you’re dressed,’ he pointed out. ‘And they’ll clean you up with disinfectant and stuff.’

‘I know,’ said Peter. ‘I want to check for messages from my wife.’

Conway blinked in bemusement. ‘Can’t it wait?’ he said.

‘No, it can’t wait,’ said Peter.

‘OK,’ said Conway, and nudged the steering wheel. Unlike Peter, who couldn’t distinguish one concrete façade from another, he knew exactly where to go.

As soon as Peter walked into the USIC building, he was overcome with a fit of shivering. His teeth chattered as Conway led him to his quarters.

‘You’re not gonna keel over, are you?’

‘I’m fine.’ The atmosphere inside the complex was glacial, a vacuum laced with chilled, sterile oxygen lacking any of the other natural ingredients that would have made it air. Each breath hurt his lungs. The light seemed bunker-dim, ghastly. But didn’t he always feel this way, whenever he’d been in the field for a while? He always needed to acclimatise.

By the time they got to his room, Conway was very agitated indeed. ‘I’ll be right outside,’ he said. ‘Try to make it quick. I don’t want a dead preacher on my hands.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ said Peter, and shut him away from view. Fever, or some other disorder, was swelling the vessels in his head, and his teeth were still chattering so hard that his cheeks and jaw ached. Dizziness and lethargy came in waves, trying to knock him off his feet.

As he switched on the Shoot, he wondered if he was wasting precious seconds in which his life could be saved. But he doubted it. If the bite had poisoned him, USIC’s medical clinic was unlikely to have an antidote. The poison would do whatever the poison was going to do, and it would either happen with a bunch of concerned faces hanging over him or it would happen in the privacy of his own space. Maybe he had only hours to live. Maybe he would be the new pathologist’s first challenge, a corpse full of alien venom.

If so, he wanted, before he lost consciousness, to read just once more that Bea loved him and that she was OK. The Shoot glowed to life and a small green light near the bottom of the screen winked on and off, indicating that an invisible net was sweeping through the universe to find any words that might be from his wife.

Her message, when it came, was brief.

There is no God, she wrote.

22

Alone with you by my side

‘Carpenter,’ said a voice floating above him.

‘Mm?’ he responded.

‘When I was a kid, people assumed I’d be a carpenter. I had a talent for it. But then . . . this is all a con, you know.’

‘A con?’

‘This air of sophistication medicine gets wrapped in. The doctor magician, the great master surgeon. Baloney. Fixing the human body doesn’t require that much finesse. The skills you need . . . I tell ya, it’s just carpentry, plumbing, sewing.’

Dr Adkins was proving his point by pushing a sewing-needle through Peter’s flesh to add another loop of fine black thread to the row. He was almost done. The stitches formed an elegant design, like a tattoo of a swallow in flight. Peter felt nothing. He was generously dosed with analgesics on top of having been injected with two whacks of local anaesthetic, and this, combined with his exhaustion, put him beyond the reach of pain.

‘Do you think I’ve been poisoned?’ he asked. The operating theatre seemed to be expanding and contracting slightly, in rhythm with his pulse.

‘Nothing in your blood to suggest you have,’ said Adkins, tying the final knot.

‘And what about . . . uh . . . I forgot his name. The doctor you came here to . . . uh . . . the one who died . . . ’

‘Everett.’

‘Everett. Have you established what killed him?’

‘Yup.’ Adkins tossed the needle onto the suture tray, which was immediately removed by Nurse Flores. ‘Death.’

Peter laid his embroidered arm across the white linen napkin covering his chest. He wanted to sleep now.

‘But the cause?’

Dr Adkins pursed his lips. ‘A cardio-vascular accident – with the emphasis on “accident”. His grandfather died the same way, apparently. These things happen. You can eat healthy foods, keep fit, take vitamins . . . But sometimes, you just die. It’s your time.’ He raised one eyebrow. ‘I guess
you
’d call it an appointment with God.’

Peter flexed his fingers, appraised his tattoo of stitches again.

‘I thought it was
my
time for a while there.’

Adkins chuckled. ‘You’ll live to preach another day. And when you go back, just in case you cross paths with those nasties again, here’s my advice.’ He clamped his hands together, mimed a violent swing. ‘Take a golf club.’

Peter was too drugged to walk, so someone trundled him out of the surgery in a wheelchair. Two pale hands appeared from behind him and spread a cotton blanket over his knees, tucked it around his hips, deposited a transparent plastic bag containing his sandals in his lap.

‘Thank you, whoever you are,’ he said.

‘You’re welcome, I’m sure,’ said Grainger.

‘Oh, gosh, I’m sorry,’ said Peter. ‘I didn’t see you in the surgery.’

She wheeled him, straight and steady, along the sunlit corridor towards the big double doors. ‘I was in the waiting room. I don’t like the gory stuff.’

Peter lifted his arm, displayed the pure white bandage. ‘All fixed up,’ he said.

Even before she replied, he could sense she was not impressed. Her wrists, gripping the handles of the wheelchair, were tense – tenser than they needed to be.

‘You don’t take care of yourself when you’re out there,’ she said. ‘For Christ’s sake, you’re skin and bone. And yeah, I know I’m blaspheming. But look at you.’

He stared down at his wrists, which had always been bony, he thought. Well, maybe not
that
bony. The thick bandage made his arm look more emaciated somehow. How angry was Grainger? Just a bit exasperated? Furious? The distance between the medical centre and his quarters would take several minutes to cover, which was a long time when you were in the hands of someone who was upset with you. Weakened by the analgesics and the shock of Bea’s message – which returned to his mind over and over like a wave of nausea – he was suddenly overcome by a belief that other men had often described to him when he’d given them pastoral counselling – a deep, despondent conviction that no matter what they did, no matter how good their intentions, they were doomed to bitterly disappoint women.

‘Hey, I made an effort not to let my ears get so burnt this time,’ he said. ‘Give me some points for trying.’

‘Don’t patronise me.’

Grainger pushed him through the double doors, veered him sharply to the right.

‘Kurtzberg was the same,’ she remarked. ‘And Tartaglione. They looked like skeletons in the end.’

He sighed. ‘We all look like skeletons in the end.’

Grainger grunted irritably. She wasn’t finished chastising him yet. ‘What goes wrong out there in Freaktown? Is it you or them? They don’t feed you, is that it? Or they just don’t eat, period?’

‘They’re very generous,’ Peter protested. ‘They’ve never . . . I’ve never felt that I’m being starved. It’s just that they don’t eat a lot themselves. I think most of what they grow and . . . uh . . . process . . . gets put aside to feed the USIC personnel.’