The Book of Strange New Things



11


He realised for the first time that she was beautiful, too


‘God ble?? our reunion, Father Pe???er,’ a voice called to him.

Dazzled by the light, he turned clumsily, almost falling out of the hammock. The approaching Oasan was a silhouette against the rising sun. All Peter knew was that the voice was not Jesus Lover Fifty-Four’s, the only voice he could put a name to without additional clues.

‘Good morning,’ he responded. The ‘God bless our reunion’ had meant no more than that. Oasans invoked the blessing of God for everything, which either meant they understood the notion of blessedness better than most Christians, or not at all.

‘I come ???o build our ?ur? again.’

Two weeks in these people’s midst had sharpened Peter’s ear; he immediately understood that ‘?ur?’ was ‘church’. He mulled over the voice, matched it with the canary-yellow robe.

‘Jesus Lover Five?’

‘Ye??.’

‘Thank you for coming.’

‘For God I will do wha???ever he wi??he??, any thing, any ???ime.’

Even as he was listening to Lover Five speak, Peter wondered what it was that made this voice different from, say, Lover Fifty-Four’s. Not the sound of it, that was for sure. The marvellous variety of voices he was accustomed to back home – or even at the USIC base – was non-existent among the Oasans. There were no sonorous baritones here, no squeaky sopranos, husky altos, nervous tenors. No shades of brightness or dullness, shyness or aggression, sang-froid or seductiveness, arrogance or humility, breeziness or sorrow. Maybe, in his clueless foreignness, he was missing the nuances, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t. It was like expecting one seagull or blackbird or pigeon to squawk differently from the others of its kind. They just weren’t designed to.

What the Oasans could do was deploy language in distinctive ways. Jesus Lover Fifty-Four, for example, was ingenious in avoiding words he couldn’t pronounce, always managing to come up with a sibilant-free alternative. These evasions (‘lay-a-bed’ for ‘sleep’, ‘give knowledge’ for ‘teach’, and so forth) made his speech eccentric but fluent, promoting the illusion that he was at ease with the alien tongue. By contrast, Jesus Lover Five didn’t bother with avoidance; she just tried to speak conventional English and if there were lots of ‘t’s and ‘s’s in the words she needed, well, too bad. Then again, she made less effort to speak clearly than some of the other Oasans – her shoulders didn’t contort as much when she was coughing up a consonant – and this made her more difficult to understand, sometimes.

Her, her, her. Why did he think of her as female? Was it just the canary-yellow robe? Or did he actually sense something, on a level too instinctive to analyse?

‘There’s not much we can do until the others arrive,’ he said, lowering himself out of the hammock. ‘You could have slept longer.’

‘I wake in fear. Fear you will be gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘U??IC will come ???oday,’ she reminded him. ‘???ake you home.’

‘The USIC base is not my home,’ he said, fastening his sandals. Squatting to do so, he was almost head-to-head with Jesus Lover Five. She was small for an adult. If she was an adult. Maybe she was a child – no, she couldn’t be. Maybe she was incredibly old. He just didn’t know. He knew that she was forthright, even by the standards of Oasans; that she could only work for twenty or thirty minutes at a time before wandering off; and that she was related to someone who was not a Jesus Lover, which caused her sadness, or something he interpreted as sadness. Actually, he couldn’t even swear that this non-believer was a blood relative of hers; maybe it was a friend. And the sadness thing was kind of a hunch on his part; Oasans didn’t weep or sigh or cover their faces with their hands, so she must have said something to make him come to that conclusion.

He tried to recall other things about Jesus Lover Five, but couldn’t. The human brain was like that, unfortunately: it sifted intimacies and perceptions, allowed them to trickle through the sieve of memory, until only a token few remained, perhaps not even the most significant ones.

He really must write more things down, next time.

‘U??IC will ???ake you,’ Jesus Lover Five repeated. ‘I fear you will no??? re???urn.’

He walked to a gap in the wall that would eventually be a door, passed through it, and stood in the shade of his church, to relieve himself on the ground. His pee was a darker orange than before, making him wonder if he was drinking too little. The Oasans drank sparingly and he’d learned to do the same. One long swig of his plastic bottle first thing upon waking, a few swigs at measured intervals throughout the working day, and that was it. The Oasans refilled his bottle without fuss whenever it ran low, walking all the way back to the settlement with it and back again, but he didn’t want to cause them undue bother.

They’d taken superb care of him, really. An intensely private people, who spent the bulk of their time quietly conversing with close friends and family inside their homes, they had nevertheless welcomed him with open arms. Metaphorically speaking. They were not what you’d call touchy-feely. But their goodwill towards him was unmistakable. At intervals throughout each day, as he worked on the church site, he would glimpse someone walking across the scrubland, bearing a gift. A plate of fried globs resembling samosas, a tumbler of lukewarm savoury gloop, a hunk of something crumbly and sweet. His fellow workers seldom ate on site, preferring to take formal meals at home; occasionally someone might pick a few blossoms of whiteflower straight off the ground, if they were newly sprouted and juicy. But the cooked treats, the little offerings, were for him alone. He accepted them with unfeigned gratitude, because he was hungry all the time.

Less so now. Loath to earn a reputation as a glutton, he’d grown accustomed, over the last three hundred and sixty-odd hours, to a sharply reduced calorie intake, and re-learned something that he’d known well during his wasted years: that a man could survive, and even keep active, on very little fuel. If he was forced to. Or too drunk to care. Or – as was currently the case – happily preoccupied.

When he rejoined Jesus Lover Five, she was seated on the floor, her back propped against a wall. Her posture rucked up her robe so that her thin thighs and the space between them were carelessly exposed. Glimpsing Lover Five’s nakedness, Peter thought he could detect an anus, but nothing that resembled genitals.

‘???ell me more from the Book of ?????range New Thing??,’ she said.

Male and female created he them, was the phrase that came to his mind.

‘Do you know the story of Adam and Eve?’ he asked.

‘God ble?? all ?????ories from the Book. They are all of them good.’

‘Yes, but do you know it? Have you heard it before?’

‘Long before,’ she conceded. ‘Now again.’

‘Did you hear it from Kurtzberg?’

‘Ye??.’

‘Why isn’t Kurtzberg here to tell you the story again himself?’ Peter had posed this same question in half a dozen different ways since arriving at the settlement. He hadn’t got a satisfactory answer yet.

‘Father Kur?????berg go away. Leave u?? in lack of him. Like you will leave.’ Her clefted face, usually a healthy pink, was whitish pale in its complicated contours.

‘I’m only going for a little while. I’ll be back soon.’

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