12
Looking back, almost certainly, that was when it happened
The engine purred as it bore him back towards what Grainger called civilisation. Inside the cabin, the atmosphere was cool and filtered. Outside, the landscape had been abruptly transformed. For hundreds of hours, it had been the ground beneath his feet, a changeless environment for his daily routine, rock-solid under slowly evolving skies, familiar in every detail. Now it was insubstantial: a display of images flickering past tinted glass. The sun had slipped out of sight, hidden by the roof. Peter leaned his face near to the window and tried to look back, to catch a glimpse of the settlement. It was already gone.
Grainger drove with her usual careless competence, but seemed preoccupied, irritable. As well as keeping the steering wheel steady, she tapped keys on the dashboard and made numbers and symbols dance on an emerald-green screen. She rubbed at her eyes, blinked hard and, evidently deciding that there was too much air blowing onto her contact lenses, adjusted the air-con settings.
How strange it was to be inside a machine again! All his life he’d been inside machines, whether he realised it or not. Modern houses were machines. Shopping centres were machines. Schools. Cars. Trains. Cities. They were all sophisticated technological constructs, wired up with lights and motors. You switched them on, and didn’t spare them a thought while they pampered you with unnatural services.
‘Looks like you’re the King of Freaktown,’ Grainger remarked breezily. Then, before he could take her to task for boorish disrespect: ‘ . . . as some of my USIC colleagues would no doubt put it.’
‘We’re working together,’ said Peter. ‘The Oasans and I.’
‘Sounds cosy. But they’re doing exactly what you want, right?’
He looked across at her. She had her eyes fixed on the terrain ahead. He half-expected her to be chewing gum. It would have matched her tone.
‘They want to learn more about God,’ he said. ‘So we’re building a church. Of course it’s not essential to have a physical place; you can worship God anywhere. But a church provides a focus.’
‘A signal that you mean business, huh?’
Again he looked across at her, this time staring hard until she acknowledged him with a sideways glance.
‘Grainger,’ he said, ‘why do I get the feeling our roles are reversed here? In this conversation, I mean? You’re the employee of a giant corporation, establishing a colony here. I’m the leftie pastor, the one who’s supposed to be concerned about whether the little guys are being exploited.’
‘OK, I’ll try to be more stereotypical,’ she said lightly. ‘Maybe a coffee will do it.’
She fetched a Thermos up from the floor and balanced it next to her thigh. With her left hand on the steering wheel, she attempted, with her right hand, to unscrew the firmly-sealed cap. Her wrist trembled.
‘Let me do that for you.’
She handed it over. He unscrewed the cup and poured her a coffee. The oily brown liquid was no longer hot enough to give off steam.
‘Here.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, and took a sip. ‘This tastes like shit.’
He laughed. Grainger’s face looked odd to him when he saw it up close. Beautiful yet unreal, like a plastic doll’s head mould. Her lips were too perfect, her skin too pale. But maybe it was the golden sunrise thing all over again: maybe he had already, in the last three hundred and sixty-eight hours, adjusted to the way Oasans looked, and begun to accept their faces as the norm. Grainger didn’t fit.
‘Hey, I just thought of something,’ he said. ‘The drugs you give the Oasans are requisitioned especially for them, right?’
‘Right.’
‘But, from what you were saying back there, when you were talking to Jesus Lover One . . . ’
‘Jesus what?’
‘Jesus Lover One. That’s his name.’
‘The name you’ve given him?’
‘No, the name he’s given himself.’
‘Oh. OK.’
Her face was impassive, with perhaps just the hint of a smirk. He couldn’t tell if she disapproved of him deeply, or thought the whole thing was just ridiculous.
‘Anyway,’ he pressed on, ‘when you were talking about diabetes, I got the impression the Oasans don’t even know what diabetes is. So why offer them insulin?’
Grainger finished her coffee and screwed the cup back onto the thermos. ‘I guess I didn’t want it to go to waste,’ she said. ‘The insulin wasn’t meant for them; it was our own supply. But we don’t need it anymore.’ She paused for a couple of beats. ‘Severin died.’
‘Severin? The guy I travelled with?’
‘Yup.’
‘He’s a diabetic?’
‘Was.’