The Book of Strange New Things


25


Some of us have work to do


Outside, the sky turned dark, even though it was day. Ominous cloud-masses had formed, dozens of them, almost perfectly circular, like giant moons of vapour. Peter stared at them through the window of his room. Lover One had once assured him that there were no storms on Oasis. It looked like that was about to change.

The giant globes of moisture, as they advanced, became at once more familiar and more alarming. They were swirls of rain, only rain, no different in their motion from the rain-swirls he’d witnessed many times before. But their relationship with the sky around them was not as subtle and freely shifting as usual; instead, it was as though each vast congregation of water-droplets was restrained by an inner gravitational pull, held together like a planet or some gaseous heavenly body. And the spheres were so dense that they had lost some of their transparency, casting an oppressive pall over what had been a bright morning.

There are rain clouds on the way, he thought of writing to Bea, and was hit with a double distress: the memory of the state Bea was in, and deep shame at how inadequate his letters to her were, how inadequate they’d been from the beginning. If he could have described what he’d experienced better, she might not have felt so separated from him. If only the tongue that God lent him when he was called upon to speak in public to strangers could have come to his aid when writing in private to his wife.

He sat at the Shoot and checked for a message. None.

The truth was as plain as a dull blank screen where words had once glowed: she saw no point in responding to him now. Or she was unable to respond – too busy, or too upset, or in trouble. Maybe he should write again regardless, not wait for an answer, just keep sending messages. The way she had done for him when he’d first got here, message after message which he’d left unanswered. He searched his mind for words that might give her hope, maybe something along the lines of ‘Hope is one of the strongest things in the universe. Empires can fall, civilisations can vanish into dust . . . ’ But no: the rhetoric of a sermon was one thing; his wife’s grim reality was another. Civilisations did not vanish smoothly and easefully; empires did not set like suns: empires collapsed in chaos and violence. Real people got pushed around, beaten up, robbed, made destitute. Real lives went down the toilet. Bea was scared and hurt, and she didn’t need his preaching.

Bea, I love you, he wrote. I;m so worried about you.

Was it right to spend five thousand dollars of USIC’s money to send those nine impotent little words through space? With barely a moment’s hesitation, he pressed the transmission button. The letters trembled on the screen for two, three, then four minutes, making Peter fear that his feelings had been judged, by some jaded shiftworker elsewhere in the building, to have failed a test, to have sinned against the USIC ethos, attempting to undermine the great mission. Staring at the screen, sweat forming on his brow, he belatedly noticed the typo – a semi-colon instead of an apostrophe. He lifted his hand to fix it, but the words evaporated.

APPROVED. TRANSMITTED, the screen said in a wink.

Thank God for that.

Outside the compound, a rumble of thunder.

Peter prayed.

In every Christian’s life there comes a time when he or she needs to know the precise circumstances under which God is willing to heal the sick. Peter had reached that pass now. Until today, he’d muddled through with the same hodgepodge of faith, medicine and common sense that everyone else in his church back in England was likely to rely on: Drive carefully, take the pills as stated on the package, pour cold water on a scald, get the cyst removed by a surgeon, be mindful that a Christian diabetic needs insulin just as much as an atheist diabetic does, regard a heart attack as a warning, remember that all human beings must die, but remember too that God is merciful and may snatch your life back from the jaws of death if . . . if what? If what?

A few hundred metres from here, confined in a metal cot, lay Lover Five, so small and helpless in that big empty space labelled Intensive Care. Nothing that USIC’s doctors had to offer could fix the rot in her flesh. Amputating her hand would be like cutting the rotten part out of an apple; it was just tidying up the fruit as it died.

But God . . . God could . . . God could what? God could cure cancer, that had been proven many times. An inoperable tumour could, through the power of prayer, miraculously shrink. Sentences of death could be commuted for years, and, although Peter disapproved of charlatan faith-healers, he had seen people wake from supposedly fatal comas, had seen hopelessly premature babies survive, had even seen a blind woman regain her sight. But why did God do it for some Christians and not for others? Such a basic question, too simpleminded for theologians to bother discussing at their synods. But what was the answer? To what extent did God feel bound to respect the laws of biology, letting calcifying bones crumble, poisoned livers succumb to cirrhosis, severed arteries gush blood? And if the laws of biology on Oasis were such that the ????? couldn’t heal, that the mechanism for healing didn’t even exist, was there any point in praying to God for help?

Dear God, please don’t let Lover Five die.

It was such an infantile prayer, the sort of prayer a five-year-old might pray.

But maybe those were the best kind.

What with the thunder in the skies outside and the rumble of worry in his own head, it was difficult for him to recognise the knocking at his door for what it was. Eventually he opened up.

‘How are you feeling?’ said Grainger, dressed for going out.

Like hell, he almost said. ‘I’m very upset and worried about my friend.’

‘But physically?’

‘Physically?’

‘Are you up for going out with me?’ Her voice was firm and dignified; she was wholly back to normal now. Her eyes were clear, no longer red-rimmed; she didn’t smell of alcohol. In fact, she was beautiful, more beautiful than he’d given her credit for before. As well as her usual driving shawl, she wore a white tunic top with loose sleeves that barely reached past her elbows, exposing the network of scars on her pale forearms to public view. Take me as I am, was the message.

‘We can’t leave Tartaglione to rot,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to bring him back.’

‘He doesn’t want to come back,’ said Peter. ‘He feels utter contempt for everybody here.’

‘He’s just saying that,’ said Grainger, bristling with impatience. ‘I know him. We used to talk. He’s a real interesting guy, very smart and charming. And sociable. He’ll go insane out there.’

A naked bogey-man from medieval depictions of the damned leapt around in Peter’s memory. ‘He’s insane already.’

Grainger’s eyes narrowed. ‘That’s kinda . . . judgemental, wouldn’t you say?’

Peter looked away, too burdened with care to argue. Clumsily, he pretended to be distracted by the demands of unloading the washing machine.

‘Anyway,’ said Grainger, ‘I’ll talk to him, you don’t have to talk to him. Just get him to come out of hiding. Whatever you did last time, do it again.’

‘Well,’ Peter recalled, ‘I was stumbling around in pitch darkness, delirious, convinced I was dying, loudly reciting a paraphrase of Psalm 23. If that’s what it takes, I’m not sure I could . . . uh . . . replicate the conditions.’

She put her hands on her hips, provocatively. ‘So does that mean you’re not willing to give it a shot?’

And so they set off. Not in the delivery jeep Grainger preferred for her drug and food runs, but in the hearse-like station wagon Peter had commandeered, the one with the bed in the back. Grainger took a while to adjust to driving it, sniffing at its unfamiliar smells, fiddling with its unfamiliar controls, wriggling her buttocks on the unfamiliar shape of its seat. She was a creature of habit. All the USIC staff were creatures of habit, he realised now. There wasn’t a reckless adventurer among them: Ella Reinman’s vetting process made sure of that. Maybe he, Peter, was the closest thing to an adventurer they’d ever allowed to come here. Or maybe Tartaglione was the closest. And that’s why he’d gone insane.

‘I figure he’s more likely to show,’ Grainger explained, ‘if the vehicle’s the same. He probably saw you coming for ages.’

‘It was night.’

‘The vehicle would have lit itself up. He could’ve been watching it from a mile away.’

Peter thought this was unlikely. He was more inclined to believe that Tartaglione had been watching the twinkles in his vat of moonshine, watching musty memories slowly decay inside his own skull.

‘What if we don’t find him?’

‘We’ll find him,’ said Grainger, focusing her eyes on the featureless landscape.

‘But what if we don’t?’

She smiled. ‘You gotta have faith.’ The heavens rumbled.

A few minutes later, Peter said, ‘May I check the Shoot?’

Grainger fumbled on the dashboard, not sure where the Shoot was located in this vehicle. A drawer slid out like a tongue, offering two repulsive objects that looked like large mummified slugs but which, at second glance, were mouldy cigars. Another drawer revealed some sheets of printed paper that had turned rainbow colours and shrivelled to a fragile tissue resembling autumn leaves. Evidently, the USIC personnel had made little or no use of Kurtzberg’s hearse since his disappearance. Maybe they regarded it as cursed with bad luck, or maybe they’d made a conscious decision to leave it just as it was, in case the minister came back one day.

Grainger’s fingers found the Shoot at last, and swivelled it over Peter’s lap. He switched it on: everything looked and behaved as it should. He checked for messages from Bea. Nothing. Maybe this particular machine was not configured like the others. Maybe its promise of connection was an illusion. He checked again, reasoning that if Bea had sent a message, a few extra seconds could make all the difference between its not-yet-having-arrived and its arrival.

Nothing.

The sky continued to darken as they drove further. Not exactly black as sackcloth, but certainly ominous. Thunder boomed again.

‘I’ve never seen it like this,’ he said.

Grainger glanced cursorily out the side window. ‘I have,’ she said. Then, sensing his scepticism, she added: ‘I’ve been here longer than you.’ She shut her eyes and breathed deep. ‘Too long.’

‘What happens?’

‘Happens?’

‘When it goes dark like this?’

She sighed. ‘It rains. It just rains. What do you expect? This place is one big anti-climax.’

He opened his mouth to speak. To defend the awesome beauties of this planet, or else to make some comment about the USIC project, he would never know which, because as he opened his lips, a fork of lightning split the sky, the windows flared with a blinding flash, and the vehicle was struck from above as if by a colossal fist.

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