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.
After another few minutes of driving, the shapes on the horizon had firmed up into the unmistakable contours of buildings. Nothing fancy or monumental. Square blocks, like British tower blocks, cheap utilitarian housing. Not exactly the diamantine spires of a fantastical city.
‘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 . . . ’