The Book of Strange New Things

by Michel Faber

  Ignore this self-pitying prattle, I’ll be fine by tomorrow. Let me know how you’re going. I’m so proud of you.

  Kisses, hugs (I wish!)

  Beatrice

  PS: Want a cat?

  My dear Bea, he wrote back.

  I hardly know what to say. How dreadful about the Maldives. The scale of such a tragedy is, as you say, almost impossible to imagine. I’ll pray for them.

  Those sentences, short as they were, took him a long while to write. A full three to five minutes for each. He racked his brains for an additional sentence that would make a dignified transition from the disaster to his own glad tidings. Nothing came.

  I have had my first meeting with an Oasan native, he went on, trusting that Bea would understand. Contrary to my wildest hopes they are hungry for Christ. They know of the Bible. I didn’t have mine with me at the time – that’ll teach me never to go anywhere without it! I don’t know why I left it behind. I suppose I assumed that the first visit would be basically reconnaissance, and that the response would be negative. But as Jesus says in John 4,’ Say not ye, There are yet four months before the harvest; behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes and look upon the fields, for they are ripe already!’

  The settlement is not at all what I expected. There is no evidence of industrialisation, it could be the Middle East in the middle ages (with different architecture, of course). No electricity, apparently! It’s also in the middle of nowhere, a long, long way from the USIC base. I don’t think it will be feasible for me to live here and travel there on a regular basis. I will have to go and live with the Oasans. And as soon as possible. I haven’t discussed any of the practicalities. (Yes, yes, I know . . . I really need you with me. But God is well aware that I’m clueless in that area.) I’ll have to trust that everything will fall into place. There seems plenty of reason to hope that it will!

  The Oasans – assuming the one I met was typical – are average height and look remarkably like us, except for their faces which are a gruesome sort of jumble, impossible to describe really, like foetuses. You don’t know what to look at when you’re talking to them. They speak English with a strong accent. Well, the one I met did. Maybe he’s the only one who speaks any English, and my original assumption – that I would spend several months learning the language before I made any headway – will still be borne out. But I have a feeling that God has been at work here already, more than I dared imagine.

  Anyway, I’m going straight back there as soon as I can. I was going to say ‘tomorrow’, but with the periods of daylight being several ‘days’ long here, the word ‘tomorrow’ is a problem. I must find out what the USIC personnel do to get round that one. I’m sure they have a solution. I’ll ask Grainger during the drive, if I remember. My mind’s a bit over-excited, as you can imagine! I’m just raring to go back to that settlement, take my place amongst these extraordinary people and satisfy their thirst for the Gospel.

  What a privilege to

  He stopped typing, midway through ‘What a privilege to serve the Lord’. He had remembered the Maldives, or, more to the point, he’d become aware that he’d forgotten all about them in his enthusiasm. Bea’s uneasy, almost anxious mood – so unlike her! – was at odds with his exuberance, like a funeral dirge interrupted by the cheery hootings of a passing carnival. Re-reading the opening line of his letter, he could see that his acknowledgement of her distress was pretty cursory. In normal circumstances, he would have embraced her; the pressure of his arms against her back and the nudge of his cheek against her hair would have said it all. But now, the written word was all he had.

  He considered elaborating on how he felt about the Maldives. But he didn’t feel much, at least not about the Maldives themselves. His feelings were largely regret – disappointment, even – that the tragedy had affected Beatrice so badly, just when he wanted her to be happy and all right and getting on with things as usual and receptive to his wonderful news about the Oasans.

  His stomach gurgled loudly. He hadn’t eaten since the drive back from the settlement, when he and Grainger had nibbled at the dried-out remainder of the raisin bread. (‘Five bucks a slice,’ she’d remarked ruefully. He hadn’t asked who was footing the bill.) As if by mutual agreement, they had not discussed the Oasan’s extraordinary response to Peter. Instead, Grainger explained various routine procedures relating to laundry, electric appliances, availability of vehicles, canteen etiquette. She was irritable, insisting that she’d briefed him on these things before, when she first escorted him off the ship. The forgiveness joke didn’t work a third time.

  Peter stood up and walked to the window. The sun – egg-yellow and hazy-edged at this time of day – was clearly visible from his quarters, right in the middle of the sky. It was four or five times bigger than the sun he’d grown up with, and it cast a rim of golden light along the contours of the airport compound’s drab buildings. Puddles of rainwater, left by last night’s deluge, had been evaporating steadily since then. The vapours twirled and danced as they flew off the ground and past the rooftops into oblivion, as if the puddles were blowing sophisticated smoke rings.

  The air conditioning in his room was unnecessarily cool. He found that if he stepped closer to the window, almost pressing his body against it, the warmth from outside radiated through the glass and permeated his clothing. He would have to ask Grainger about adjusting the air-con; it was one of the points they hadn’t covered.

  Back at the message screen, he finished typing serve the Lord and started a fresh paragraph.

  Even in my joy at this wonderful opportunity that God has laid before me, I feel an ache of grief that I can’t hold you and comfort you. I only realised today that this is the first time you & I have been apart for longer than a couple of nights. Couldn’t I have gone on a mini-mission to Manchester or Cardiff first, as a practice exercise, before coming all the way here?

  I think you would find Oasis as beautiful as I do. The sun is huge and yellow. The air swirls around constantly and slips in and out of your clothes. That may sound unpleasant, I know, but you get used to it. The water is green and my urine comes out orange. I’m doing a great job of selling the place to you, aren’t I? I should have taken a course in novel-writing before I volunteered for this. I should have insisted to USIC that we went together or I didn’t go at all.

  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, tran
sforming 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. Whiteflower. 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 opportoonity. 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 Pete
r.

  ‘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.