The Book of Strange New Things (9 page)

As soon as his back sank into the upholstery he felt exhausted and he knew that if he didn’t get up again quite soon he would fall asleep. He leaned towards the magazines, taking a quick mental inventory of the selection.
Cosmopolitan
,
Retro Gamer
,
Men’s Health
,
Your Dog
,
Vogue
,
Vintage Aircraft
,
Dirty Sperm Whores
,
House & Garden
,
Innate Immunity
,
Autosport
,
Science Digest
,
Super Food Ideas
. . . Pretty much the full range. Well-thumbed and only slightly out of date.

‘Hey, preacher!’

He turned in his chair. The two black men sharing the table had shut their book, finished with it for the night. One of them was holding aloft a foil-wrapped object the size of a tennis ball, wiggling it demonstratively. As soon as he had Peter’s attention, he tossed the object across the room. Peter caught it easily, without even a hint of a fumble. He had always been an excellent catcher. The two black men raised a friendly fist each, congratulating him. He unwrapped the foil, found a hunk of blueberry muffin.

‘Thank you!’ His voice sounded strange in the acoustics of the mess hall, competing with the DJ, who had resumed his exegesis of Patsy Cline. By this stage of the narrative, Patsy had perished in a plane crash.

‘ . . . personal belongings left behind after the sale of her home. The tape passed from hand to hand, unrecognised for the treasure it was, before finally ending up stored in the closet of a jeweller for several years. Imagine it, friends! Those divine sounds you just heard, dormant inside an unassuming reel of magnetic tape, locked up in a dark closet, perhaps never to see the light of day. But we can be eternally grateful that the jeweller eventually woke up and negotiated a deal with MCA Records . . . ’

The blueberry muffin was delicious; among the best things Peter had ever tasted. And how sweet it was, too, to know that he was in not altogether hostile territory.

‘Welcome to Heaven, preacher!’ called one his benefactors, and everyone except the sleeping Asian laughed.

Peter turned to face them, beamed them a smile. ‘Well, things are certainly looking up from what they were a few minutes ago.’

‘Onwards and upwards, preach! That’s the USIC motto, more or less.’

‘So,’ said Peter, ‘do you guys like it here?’

The black man who’d thrown the muffin went pensive, considering the question seriously. ‘It’s OK, man. As good as anywhere.’

‘Cool weather,’ his companion chipped in.

‘He means nice
warm
weather.’

‘Which is
cool
, man, is what I’m saying.’

‘You know, I haven’t even been outside yet,’ said Peter.

‘Oh, you should go,’ said the first man, as though acknowledging the possibility that Peter might prefer to spend his entire Oasis sojourn inside his quarters. ‘Check it out before the light comes up.’

Peter stood up. ‘I’d like that. Where’s . . . uh . . . the nearest door?’

The coffee bar attendant pointed a long, bony finger past an illuminated plastic sign that said ENJOY! in large letters and, underneath in smaller print,
EAT AND DRINK RESPONSIBLY. REMEMBER THAT BOTTLED WATER, CARBONATED SOFT DRINKS, CAKES, CONFECTIONERY AND YELLOW-STICKERED ITEMS ARE NOT INCLUDED IN THE FOOD AND DRINK ALLOWANCE AND WILL BE DEDUCTED FROM YOUR EARNINGS
.

‘Thanks for the tip,’ said Peter, as he was leaving. ‘And the food!’

‘Have a good one, bro.’

The last thing he heard was Patsy Cline’s voice, this time in a celebrity duet recorded, through the miracle of modern technology, decades after her death.

Peter stepped through the sliding door into the air of Oasis and, contrary to his apprehensions, he did not instantly die, get sucked into an airless vortex, or shrivel up like a scrap of fat on a griddle. Instead, he was enveloped in a moist, warm breeze, a swirling balm that felt like steam except that it didn’t make his throat catch. He strolled into the dark, his way unlit except by several distant lamps. In the dreary environs of the USIC airport, there was nothing much to see anyway, just acres of wet black bitumen, but he’d wanted to walk outside, and so here he was, walking, outside.

The sky was dark, dark aquamarine. Aquamar
eeeeeen
, as BG might say. There were only a few dozen stars visible, far fewer than he was used to, but each one shone brightly, without any flicker, and with a pale green aura. There was no moon.

The rain had stopped now, but the atmosphere still seemed substantially composed of water. If he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine he’d waded into a warm swimming pool. The air lapped against his cheeks, tickled his ears, flowed over his lips and hands. It penetrated his clothing, breathing into the collar of his shirt and down his backbone, making his shoulderblades and chest dewy, making his shirtcuffs adhere to his wrists. The warmth – it was extreme warmth rather than heat – caused his skin to prickle with sweat, making him intimately aware of his armpit hair, the clefts of his groin, the shape of his toes inside their humid footwear.

He was dressed all wrong. Those USIC guys with their loose Arabic duds had it sussed, didn’t they? He would have to emulate them as soon as possible.

As he walked, he tried to sort out which unusual phenomena were occurring inside of him and which were external realities. His heart was beating a little faster than usual; he put that down to excitement. His gait was a little wonky, as though skewed by alcohol; he wondered if he was merely suffering the after-effects of the Jump, jetlag, and general exhaustion. His feet seemed to bounce slightly with every step, as though the bitumen was rubberised. He knelt and rapped on the ground with his knuckles. It was hard, unyielding. Whatever it was made of – presumably some combination of the local earth and imported chemicals – it had an asphalt-like consistency. He stood up, and the action of standing was perhaps easier than it should be. An ever-so-slight trampoline effect. But this was counterbalanced by the watery density of the air. He lifted his hand, pushed his palm forward into space, testing for resistance. There was none, and yet the air swirled around his wrist and up his forearm, tickling him. He didn’t know whether he liked it, or found it creepy. Atmosphere, in his experience, had always been an absence. The air here was a presence, a presence so palpable that he was tempted to believe he could let himself fall and the air would simply catch him like a pillow. It wouldn’t, of course. But as it nuzzled against his skin, it almost promised that it would.

He took a deep breath, concentrating on the texture of it as it went in. It felt and tasted no different from normal air. He knew from the USIC brochures that the composition was much the same mix of nitrogen and oxygen he’d been breathing all his life, with a bit less carbon dioxide and a bit more ozone and a few trace elements he might not have had before. The brochures hadn’t mentioned the water vapour, although Oasis’s climate had been described as ‘tropical’, so maybe that covered it.

Something tickled his left ear and, as a reflex, he brushed at it. Something squishy, like a wet cornflake or a rotting leaf, passed across his fingers but fell off before he could hold it up to his eyes and examine it. His fingers were streaked with a sticky fluid. Blood? No, not blood. Or if it was, it wasn’t his. It was green as spinach.

He turned around and looked at the building he’d emerged from. It was monumentally ugly, like all architecture not built by religious devotees or mad eccentrics. Its only redeeming feature was the transparency of the mess hall’s window, lit up like a video screen in the dark. Although he’d walked quite a long way, he could still recognise the coffee bar and the magazine rack, and even fancied he could make out the Asian man still slumped on one of the chairs. At this distance, these details looked like a neat assortment of items stored inside a coin-operated dispenser. A luminous little box, surrounded by a great sea of strange air; and above it, a trillion miles of darkness.

He’d experienced moments like this before, on the planet that was supposed to be his home. Sleepless and wandering the streets of shabby British towns at two, three in the morning, he would find himself at a bus shelter in Stockport, a woebegone shopping mall in Reading, or the empty husks of Camden market in the hours before dawn – and it was at those times, in those places, that he was struck by a vision of human insignificance in all its unbearable pathos. People and their dwellings were such a thin dust on the surface of the globe, like invisible specks of bacteria on an orange, and the feeble lights of kebab shops and supermarkets failed utterly to register on the infinities of space above. If it weren’t for God, the almighty vacuum would be too crushing to endure, but once God was with you, it was a different story.

Peter turned again and kept walking. His vague hope was that if he walked far enough, the featureless tarmac of the airport environs would finally come to an end, and he would step over into the landscape of Oasis, the real Oasis.

His denim jacket was growing heavy with moisture and his flannel shirt was swollen with perspiration. His jeans made a comical whooping noise as he walked, rough wet cotton rubbing against itself. The waistband was starting to chafe against his hips; a rivulet of sweat ran into the cleft of his arse. He stopped to hitch up his trousers and to wipe his face. He pressed his fingertips to his ears, to clear them of a sibilant undertone he’d been attributing to his sinuses. But the noise was not from within. The atmosphere was full of rustling. Worldless whispering, the sound of agitated leaves, except that there was no vegetation anywhere to be seen. It was as though the air currents, so similar to water currents, could not move silently, but must churn and hiss like ocean waves.

He was sure he’d adjust, in time. It would be like living near a railway line, or, indeed, near the ocean. After a while you wouldn’t hear it anymore.

He walked further, resisting an impulse to remove his clothes and toss them on the ground for retrieval on his return. The tarmac showed no sign of ending. What could USIC possibly want with all this blank bitumen? Maybe there were plans to extend the accommodation wings, or build squash courts, or a shopping mall. Oasis was tipped, in ‘the very near future’, to become a ‘thriving community’. By which USIC meant a thriving community of foreign settlers, of course. This world’s indigenous inhabitants, thriving or otherwise, were scarcely mentioned in USIC’s literature, except for fastidious assurances that nothing was planned or implemented without their full and informed consent. USIC was ‘in partnership’ with the citizens of Oasis – whoever they might be.

Peter was certainly very much looking forward to meeting them. They were, after all, the whole reason he had come.

From one of his jacket pockets, he extracted a compact camera. He’d been warned by the preparatory literature that it was ‘not practicable’ to use a camera on Oasis, but he’d brought one anyway. ‘Not practicable’ – what did that mean? Was it a veiled threat? Might his camera get impounded by authorities of some sort? Well, he would cross that bridge when he came to it. Right now, he wanted to take some pictures. For Bea. When he returned to her, any photo he’d bothered to snap would be worth a thousand words. He raised the gadget and captured the eerie tarmac, the lonely buildings, the glow of light from the cafeteria. He even tried to capture the aquamarine sky, but a quick inspection of the stored image confirmed it was a rectangle of pure black.

He pocketed the camera and walked on. How long had he been walking? His watch was not the illuminated digital kind; it was an old-fashioned one with hands, a gift from his father. He held it close to his face, trying to angle it so that it caught the light from the nearest lamp. But the nearest lamp was at least a hundred metres away.

Something glittered on his forearm, near the wristwatch band. Something alive. A mosquito? No, it was too big for that. A dragonfly, or some creature resembling a dragonfly. A tiny, trembling matchstick body shrouded in translucent wings. Peter wiggled his wrist, and the creature fell off. Or maybe it jumped, or flew, or got sucked into the swirling atmosphere. Whatever: it was gone.

He suddenly became aware that the whispering of the air was supplemented by a new noise, a mechanical whir, behind him. A vehicle cruised into view. It was steely-grey and bullet-shaped, with large wheels and thick vulcanised tyres designed for rough terrain. The driver was difficult to make out through the tinted windscreen, but was humanoid in shape. The car slowed and came to a halt right next to him, its metal flank only a few inches from where he stood. Its headlights pierced the darkness he’d been heading for, revealing a wire-mesh perimeter fence that he would have reached in another minute or two of walking.

‘Howdy.’

A female voice, with an American accent.

‘Hi,’ he replied.

‘Let me give you a ride back.’

It was the USIC woman who’d met him upon his arrival, the one who’d escorted him to his quarters and told him she was available if he needed anything. She opened the passenger door for him and waited, piano-playing her fingers on the steering wheel.

‘I’d been hoping to walk a little further, actually,’ said Peter. ‘Maybe meet some of the local . . . uh . . . people.’

‘We’ll do that after sunrise,’ the woman said. ‘The settlement is about fifty miles away. You’ll need a vehicle. Do you drive?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Have you discussed requisition of a vehicle?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You don’t think so?’

‘Uh . . . my wife handled most of the practicalities with USIC. I don’t know if they covered that.’

There was a pause, then a good-natured laugh. ‘Please get in, or the air conditioning will get all messed up.’

He swung into the car and closed the door. The air was dry and cool, and immediately made him aware that he was drenched to the skin. His feet, relieved of the weight of his body, made a sucking sound inside his socks.