by Michel Faber
‘Yeah, I guess . . . Or religion, maybe. Didn’t God create man in his own image?’
‘I wouldn’t use the word “man”. The Hebrew is ha-adam, which I would argue encompasses both sexes.’
‘Pleased to hear it,’ she said, deadpan.
Again, they drove on for a couple of minutes in silence. On the horizon, Peter was certain he could see the beginnings of a glow. A subtle haze of illumination, turning the junction of sky and earth from dark aquamarine-against-black to green-against-brown. If you stared at it too long, you began to wonder whether it was just an optical illusion, a hallucination, a frustrated yearning for the end of night.
And inside that hesitant glow, was that . . . ? Yes, there was something else on the horizon. Raised structures of some sort. Mountains? Boulders? Buildings? A town? A city? Grainger had said that the ‘settlement’ was about fifty miles away. They must have travelled half that distance by now, surely.
‘Do they have genders?’ he said at last.
‘Who?’ she said.
‘The people we’re going to see.’
Grainger looked exasperated. ‘Why don’t you just come straight out and use the word aliens?’
‘Because we’re the aliens here.’
She laughed out loud. ‘I love it! A politically correct missionary! Forgive me for saying so, but it seems a total contradiction in terms.’
‘I forgive you, Grainger,’ he winked. ‘And my attitudes shouldn’t strike you as a contradiction. God loves every creature equally.’
The smile faded from her face. ‘Not in my experience,’ she said.
Silence descended on the cabin once more. Peter deliberated whether to push; decided not to. Not in that direction, anyway. Not yet.
‘So,’ he rejoined lightly, ‘do they have genders?’
‘I have no idea,’ said Grainger, in a flat, business-like tone. ‘You’ll have to lift up their robes and take a look.’
They drove for ten, fifteen minutes without further conversation. The topmost slice of the raisin bread dried out. The haze of light on the horizon became more distinct. The mysterious structures straight ahead were definitely architecture of some kind, although the sky was still too dark for Peter to make out exact shapes or details.
Eventually, he said, ‘I need to have a pee.’
‘No problem,’ said Grainger, and slowed the car to a halt. On the dashboard, an electronic gauge estimating the fuel consumption per mile flickered through its numbers and settled on an abstract symbol.
Peter opened the door and, as he stood out onto the earth, was enveloped at once by the humid, whispering air. He’d grown unaccustomed to it, having spent so long in the air-conditioned bubble of the vehicle. It was enjoyable, this sudden all-out luxury of atmosphere, but also an assault: the way the air immediately ran up the sleeves of his shirt, licked his eyelids and ears, dampened his chest. He hitched the hem of his dishdasha up to his abdomen and pissed straight onto the ground, since the landscape offered no trees or boulders to hide behind. The earth was already moist and dark brown, so the urine made little difference to its colour or consistency. It sank in without pause.
He heard Grainger opening and shutting the door on her side of the vehicle. To give her some privacy, he stood for a while and appraised the scenery. The plants that he’d taken for mushrooms were flowers, greyish-white flowers with a tinge of mauve, almost luminous in the gloom. They grew in small, neat clumps. There was no distinction between blossom, leaf and stalk: the whole plant was slightly furry, leathery and yet so thin as to be almost transparent, like the ear of a kitten. Evidently no other plants were viable in this part of the world. Or perhaps he’d simply come at the wrong time of year.
Grainger’s door slammed, and he turned to join her. She was crumpling a cardboard box of disposable tissues into the glove compartment as he took his seat.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Last few miles coming up.’
He shut his door and the air conditioning promptly restored the neutral atmosphere of the cabin. Peter settled back in his seat, and shivered as a trapped wisp of balmy Oasan air slipped between his shoulderblades and out of his collar.
‘I must say you built your landing base a respectfully long way out,’ he said. ‘The planners of London’s airports were never so considerate of local residents.’
Grainger unscrewed a water-bottle, drank deep, coughed. A rivulet ran down her chin, and she mopped it up with a handful of her headscarf.
‘Actually . . . ’ She cleared her throat. ‘Actually, when we first built the base, the . . . ah . . . local residents lived just two miles away. They relocated. Took everything with them. I mean everything. A couple of our guys had a look around the old settlement when it was all over. Like, maybe we can learn something from what they left behind. But it was stripped clean. Just the shells of houses. Not even a single mushroom left in the ground.’ She consulted one of the gauges on the dashboard. ‘The fifty miles must have taken them for ever to walk.’
‘It sounds like they really do value their privacy. Unless . . . ’ He hesitated, trying to think of a diplomatic way of asking whether USIC had done something outrageously offensive. Before he could frame the question, Grainger answered it.
‘It was out of the blue. They just told us they were moving. We asked if we were doing anything wrong. Like, was there some problem we could fix so they’d reconsider? They said no, no problem.’
Grainger revved the engine and they were off again.
‘When you say “we asked”,’ said Peter, ‘do you mean “we” as in . . . ?’
‘I wasn’t personally a party to these negotiations, no.’
‘Do you speak their language?’
‘No.’
‘Not a word?’
‘Not a word.’
‘So . . . uh . . . how good is their English? I mean, I tried to find out about this before I came, but I couldn’t get a straight answer.’
‘There isn’t a straight answer. Some of them . . . maybe most of them, don’t . . . ’ Her voice trailed off. She chewed her lip. ‘Listen, this is gonna sound bad. It’s not meant to. The thing is, we don’t know how many of them there are. Partly because they keep themselves hidden, and partly because we can’t tell the difference between them . . . No disrespect, but we just can’t. There’s a few individuals we have dealings with. Maybe a dozen. Or maybe it’s the same five or six guys in different clothes, we just can’t tell. They speak some English. Enough.’
‘Who taught them?’
‘I think they just kind of picked it up, I don’t know.’ She glanced up at the rear-view mirror, as though there might be a traffic snarl he was distracting her from dealing with safely. ‘You’d have to ask Tartaglione. If he was still with us.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Tartaglione was a linguist. He came here to study the language. He was going to compile a dictionary and so forth. But he . . . ah . . . disappeared.’
Peter chewed on that for a couple of seconds. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘You do drop lots of little morsels of info, don’t you, if I only wait long enough . . . ’
She sighed, annoyed again. ‘I already told you most of this stuff when I first met you, escorting you off the ship.’
This was news to him. He strained to recall their walk together, on that first day. The words had evaporated. All he recalled, vaguely, was her presence at his side.
‘Forgive me. I was very tired.’
‘You’re forgiven.’
They travelled on. A few hundred metres ahead and to the side of them, there was another isolated swirl of rain, cartwheeling along the land.
‘Can we drive through that?’ Peter asked.
‘Sure.’
She swerved slightly, and they ploughed through the whirl of brilliant water-drops, which enveloped them momentarily in its fairy-light display.
‘Psychedelic, huh,’ remarked Grainger, deadpan, switching on the windscreen wipers.
‘Beautiful,’ he said.
‘What do they call themselves?’ asked Peter.
‘I’ve no idea,’ said Grainger. ‘Something we couldn’t pronounce, I guess.’
‘So who named this place Oasis?’
‘A little girl from Oskaloosa, Iowa.’
‘You’re kidding.’
She cast him a bemused glance. ‘You didn’t read about it? It’s gotta be the only thing the average person knows about this place. There were articles about this little girl in magazines, she was on TV . . . ’
‘I don’t read magazines, and I don’t have a TV.’
Now it was her turn to say, ‘You’re kidding.’
He smiled. ‘I’m not kidding. One day I got a message from the Lord saying, “Get rid of the TV, Peter, it’s a huge waste of time.” So I did.’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know how to take you.’
‘Straight,’ he said. ‘Always straight. Anyway: this little girl from . . . uh . . . ’
‘Oskaloosa. She won a competition. “Name A New World”. I’m so amazed you didn’t hear about it. There were hundreds of thousands of entries, most of them unbelievably wrong. It was like a nerd jamboree. The USIC staff in the building where I worked kept an internal dossier of the worst names. Every week we’d have new favourites. We ended up using them for a competition we ran ourselves, to name the janitor’s supply room. “Nuvo Opportunus”, that was a great one. “Zion II”. “Atlanto”. “Arnold” – that had real pizzazz, I thought. “Splendoramus”. Uh . . . “Einsteinia”. I forget the rest. Oh, yeah: “Traveller’s Rest”, that was another one. “Newfoundplanet”. “Cervix”. “Hendrix”. “Elvis”. They just kept on coming.’
‘And the little girl?’
‘She got lucky, I guess. There must’ve been hundreds of other people who came up with “Oasis”. She won $50,000. The family needed it, too, because the mother had just lost her job, and the father had been diagnosed with some kind of rare disease.’
‘So how did the story end?’
‘Just like you’d expect. The dad died. The mom talked about it on TV and became an alcoholic. Then the media moved on and you never got to know what happened next.’
‘Can you remember the girl’s name? I’d like to pray for her.’
Grainger butted her palms against the steering wheel irritably, and rolled her eyes upwards. ‘Puh-lease. There were a million Americans praying for her, and it didn’t stop her life going down the toilet.’
He shut up, faced front. They drove in silence for forty seconds or so.
‘Coretta,’ she said at last.
‘Thank you,’ said Peter. He tried to picture Coretta, so that she wouldn’t be just a name to him when he prayed. Any sort of face was better than none at all. He thought of the children he knew, the kids in his congregation back home, but the ones that sprang to mind were too old or too young or the wrong sex. In any case, as a minister, in his own church, he wasn’t so involved with the little ones; Bea took them into another room for play activities during his sermons. Not that he was unaware of them while he preached: the walls were so thin that if he paused for effect between sentences, the silence was often filled by laughter or snatches of song or even the galumphing of small feet. But he didn’t know any of the kids particularly well.
‘This Coretta,’ he said, pushing his luck with Grainger. ‘Is she black or white?’ One child had popped into his memory: the daughter of that new Somali couple, the cheeky girl who was always dressed like a miniature nineteenth-century Southern belle . . . what was her name? – Lulu. Adorable kid.
‘White,’ said Grainger. ‘Blonde hair. Or maybe a redhead, I forget. It was a long time ago, and there’s no way of checking.’
‘Can’t look her up?’
She blinked. ‘Look her up?’
‘On a computer or something?’ Even as he said it, he realised it was a stupid suggestion. Oasis was far beyond the reach of any information superhighways; there were no world-wide webs laden with morsels of trivia, no industrious search engines offering up millions of Oskaloosas and Corettas. If what you wanted to know was not to be found in the stuff you’d brought along with you – the books, the magic discs, the memory sticks, the old copies of Hydraulics magazine – you could forget it. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Not thinking clearly.’
‘This atmosphere will do that to you,’ she said. ‘I hate the way it pushes. Right inside your ears, even. Never lets up. Sometimes you just wanna . . . ’ She didn’t pursue the thought, just puffed a mouthful of breath upwards, dislodging a damp lock of hair from her forehead. ‘There’s no point talking about it with the guys here. They’re used to it, they don’t have a problem with it, they don’t notice it anymore. Maybe they even enjoy it.’
‘Maybe they hate it but don’t complain.’
Her face went stiff. ‘OK, message received,’ she said.
Peter groaned inwardly. He should have thought the implications through before opening his mouth. What was wrong with him today? He was usually so tactful. Could it be the atmosphere, as Grainger said? He’d always imagined his brain as a wholly enclosed thing, safe inside a shell of bone, but maybe, in this strange new environment, the seal was more permeable and his brain was being infiltrated by insidious vapours. He wiped sweat off his eyelids and made an effort to be a hundred per cent alert, facing front and peering through the dirt-hazed windscreen. The terrain was looser, less stable, the closer they came to their destination. Particles of clammy soil were being thrown up by the tyres and enveloping the vehicle in a kind of halo of filth. The outline of the native settlement seemed grim and unwelcoming somehow.
Suddenly, the magnitude of the challenge hit home. Until now, it had been all about him and his ability to keep himself in one piece: to survive the journey, to recover from the Jump, to adjust to the strange new air and the shock of separation. But there was so much more to it than that. The scale of the unknown remained just as immense whether he was feeling well or unwell; he was approaching monolithic barriers of foreignness which existed oblivious to him, indifferent to how rested or unrested he was, how bleary-eyed or attentive, how keen or dull.
Psalm 139 came to his mind, as it so often did when he needed reassurance. But today, the reminder of God’s omniscience was no comfort; instead, it heightened his own sense of unease. How precious are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand. Each and every mote of dirt flung up by the vehicle’s wheels was like a truth that he needed to learn, a ridiculously large number of truths which he had neither the time nor the wisdom to grasp. He was not God, and maybe only God could do what needed to be done here.
Grainger switched on the windscreen wipers once more. The view went smeary for a while, then the glass cleared and the native settlement was revealed afresh, lit up now by the rising sun. The sun made all the difference.
Yes, the mission was daunting and, yes, he wasn’t in the best shape. But here he was, on the threshold of meeting an entirely new kind of people, an encounter chosen for him by God. Whatever was fated to happen, it would surely be precious and amazing. His whole life – he understood that now, as the façades of the unknown city loomed up before him, harbouring unimaginable wonders – his whole life had been leading up to this.
7
Approved, transmitted
‘Well,’ said Grainger, ‘here we are.’ Sometimes a statement of the bloody obvious was the only appropriate way forward. As if to give life ceremonious permission to proceed.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked.
‘Uh . . . yes,’ he said, swaying in his seat. The dizziness he’d felt back at the base had come over him again. ‘I’m probably over-excited. It’s my first time, after a
ll.’
She gave him a look he recognised very well, a look he’d seen on thousands of faces during his years as a pastor, a look that said: Nothing is worth getting excited about; everything is a disappointment. He would have to try to do something about that look, if he could, later.
In the meantime, he had to admit that their surroundings were not exactly awesomely impressive. The Oasan settlement wasn’t what you’d call a city. More like a suburb, erected in the middle of a wasteland. There were no streets in the formal sense, no pavements, no signs, no vehicles, and – despite the dim light and broad shadows of early dawn – no lamps, or any evidence of electricity or fire. Just a community of buildings resting on bare ground. How many dwellings altogether? Peter couldn’t guess. Maybe five hundred. Maybe more. They were spread out in unruly clusters, ranging in scale from single-storey to three-floor blocks, all flat-roofed. The buildings were brick, obviously made of the same clay as the earth, but baked marble-smooth and caramel-coloured. There was not a soul to be seen. All the doors and windows were shut. Well, that wasn’t quite true: the doors weren’t made of wood nor the windows of glass; they were merely holes in the buildings, shrouded with bead curtains. The beads were crystalline, like extravagant strings of jewellery. They swayed gently in the breeze. But there was nobody parting those curtains to peek out, nobody walking through the doorways.
Grainger parked the vehicle right in front of a building which looked like all the others except that it was marked by a painted white star, the bottom point of which had trickled slightly and dried that way. Peter and Grainger stepped out and submitted to the atmosphere’s embrace. Grainger wrapped her scarf around her face, covering her mouth and nose, as though she considered the air impure. From a pocket of her slacks she removed a metal gadget which Peter assumed was a weapon. She pointed it at the vehicle and pressed the trigger twice. The engine switched off and a hatch in the back flipped open.
In the absence of motor noise, the sounds of the Oasan settlement ventured onto the airwaves like opportunistic wildlife. The burble of running water, from an invisible source. The occasional muffled clank or clunk, suggesting routine struggles with domestic objects. Distant squeaks and chortles that might be birds or children or machinery. And, closer by, the unintelligible murmur of voices, subtle and diffuse, emanating from the buildings like a hum. This place, despite outward appearances, was no ghost town.