The soup was tasty, despite containing neither cream nor pieces of chicken. It had a rich chicken stock flavour, no doubt transported here in powder form. The whiteflower roll was crisp on the outside and spongy on the inside, still slightly warm – exactly as a bread roll should be. He ate and gave thanks to God for every mouthful.
The sound filtering through the PA was some sort of Dixieland jazz he couldn’t identify. Ancient music wasn’t his specialty. Every few minutes, a recorded announcement recited a list of trombonists and trumpeters and pianists and so on.
He finished his meal and returned the bowl to the counter.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘You’re welcome,’ the woman said. Her wrist, as she picked up the bowl, was knobbly yet delicate, like Bea’s. He wished he could link fingers with Bea just for three seconds and feel the bone of her wrist against his own flesh. The need of it struck him as he stood there, his eyes misted over; then he pulled himself together.
He returned to his seat, to allow the food to settle in his stomach. Stroking his palm down the front of his tunic, he was stung by a spark of static electricity, a phenomenon he’d noticed often before when he was too full of anticipation. He closed his eyes and sent a prayer to God for calm. A measure of calm was granted.
On the public address system, the Dixieland jazz had given way to something less hectic. He started to leaf through magazines from the racks near his armchair, spending a couple of minutes on each one before neatly replacing it.
His initial impression had been that USIC offered a comprehensive selection of what might be on sale in a newsagent’s back home. Now that he examined the magazines more carefully, he wasn’t so sure. House & Garden, Hot Goss, Aquarium Fish, Men’s Health, Lesbian Action, The Chemical Engineer, Classic Jazz, Vogue . . . Yes, they were fairly recent, having arrived on the same ship that brought him to Oasis. And yes, they covered a broad range of interests, but . . . there was no hard news in any of them. He scanned the buzzwords and the teasers emblazoned on the covers. They were the same buzzwords and teasers that had appeared on these sorts of publications for decades. Absent from the racks was any magazine that reported on what was happening on the front lines, so to speak. You could read about jazz or how to harden your abdominal muscles or what to feed your fish, but where were the political crises, the earthquakes, the wars, the demises of major corporations? He picked up Hot Goss, a showbiz tattle mag, and flipped through it. Article after article was about celebrities he’d never heard of. Two pages came loose in his hand, alerting him to the fact that another two pages further on had been torn out. He found the relevant place. Sure enough, the numbering jumped from 32 to 37. He flipped back to the contents page and consulted the blurbs for a clue to the missing material. ‘Umber Rosaria Goes To Africa! Our fave party girl swaps rehab for refugee camps’.
‘Hey, preacher!’
He looked up. A sardonic-looking man with several days’ growth of stubble was standing over him.
‘Hi, Tuska,’ said Peter. ‘Good to see you. Growing the beard back?’
Tuska shrugged. ‘No big deal. Different display panel, same machine.’ He sat down in the nearest armchair and nodded towards the Hot Goss in Peter’s hands. ‘That crap will turn your brain to jelly.’
‘I’m just checking out what’s available here,’ said Peter. ‘And I noticed a couple of pages have been torn out.’
Tuska leaned back, crossed one leg over the other. ‘Only a couple? Jeez, you should check out Lesbian Action. A third of it is gone, easy.’ He winked. ‘We’d probably need to break into Hayes’s quarters to get it back.’
Peter maintained eye contact with Tuska but did not allow his face to express approval or disapproval. This often acted as a moral mirror, he’d found, reflecting back at a person what they’d just said.
‘No disrespect meant, you understand,’ added Tuska. ‘She’s a damn good engineer. Keeps herself to herself. Like all of us here, I guess.’
Peter replaced Hot Goss on the racks. ‘Are you married, Tuska?’
Tuska raised one bushy brow. ‘A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,’ he intoned theatrically, wiggling his fingers in the air to emphasise the antiquated pop-culture reference. Then, in his normal voice. ‘Haven’t heard from her in twenty years. More.’
‘Is there a special person in your life right now?’
Tuska narrowed his eyes pensively, play-acted a thorough scrutiny of the available data. ‘Nope,’ he said after four or five seconds. ‘Can’t say that there is.’
Peter smiled to signal that he understood the joke, but somewhere in his eyes there must have been a stray glint of pity, because Tuska felt provoked to explain further.
‘You know, Peter, I’m surprised you got through the USIC screening process. Real surprised, as a matter of fact.’ For several beats, he kept Peter waiting for elaboration. ‘If you look at the guys and gals working here, you’ll find that pretty much all of us are . . . ah . . . free agents. No wives or husbands back home. No steady girlfriends, no dependent children, no moms checking the mailbox. No strings.’
‘Because of the high risk of us dying on the way here?’
‘Dying? Who’s dying? We’ve had one accident in all these years and it had nothing to do with the Jump, it was a freak thing that could’ve happened to a commercial jet plane on its way to LA. The kinda thing insurance companies call an Act of God.’ He winked, then got back to the point. ‘Nah, the screening process . . . it’s about conditions here. Life here. What can I say? “Isolated” would be a fair word for it. The big risk, for anybody, is going crazy. Not psycho-killer, axe-murderer crazy, just . . . crazy. So-o-o . . . ’ He drew a deep, indulgent breath. ‘So it’s best if you’ve got a team of individuals that understand what it’s like to be in permanent . . . limbo. To have no other plans . . . nowhere else to go . . . nobody in the picture who particularly gives a damn. Know what I’m saying? People who can deal with that.’
‘A team of loners? Sounds like a contradiction in terms.’
‘It’s the Légion étrangère is what it is.’
‘Sorry?’
Tuska leaned forward, in storyteller mode now. ‘The French Foreign Legion,’ he said. ‘An elite army corps. They fought in lots of wars back in the day. A great team. You didn’t have to be French to join. You could come from anywhere. You didn’t have to tell them your real name, your past, your criminal record, nothing. So, as you can imagine, a lot of those guys were trouble with a capital T. They didn’t fit in anywhere. Not even in the regular army. It didn’t matter. They were Legionnaires.’
Peter considered this for a few seconds. ‘Are you saying everybody here is trouble with a capital T?’
Tuska laughed. ‘Ah, we’re *cats,’ he schmoozed. ‘Fine and upstanding citizens one and all.’
‘In my interviews with USIC,’ reflected Peter, ‘I didn’t get the impression I could’ve lied about anything. They’d done their research. I had to get medical checks, certificates, testimonials . . .’
‘Sure, sure,’ said Tuska. ‘We’re all hand-picked here. My analogy with the Legion is not that there’s no questions asked. Far from it. My analogy is that we can deal with being here, period. Legio Patria Nostra, that was the motto of the Legionnaires. The Legion Is Our Homeland.’
‘Yet you’ve been back,’ observed Peter.
‘Well, I’m the pilot.’
‘And BG and Severin; they went back a couple of times too.’
‘Yeah, but they spent years here in between trips. Years. You’ve seen Severin’s files. You know how much time he spent in this place, doing his job every day, drinking green water, pissing orange piss, moseying on down to the mess hall every evening and eating adapted fungus or whatever the hell it is, maybe leafing through some year-old magazines like you’d find in a dentist’s waiting room, going to bed at night and staring at the ceiling. That’s what we do here. And we deal with it. You know how long the first USIC workers here lasted? The first couple batches of personnel, in the very early days? Three weeks, on average. We’re talking about ultra-fit, highly trained, well-adjusted people from loving families blah blah blah. Six weeks, max. Sometimes six days. Then they would go out of their skulls, weeping, begging, crawling up the walls, and USIC would have to send them back. Back ho-ome.’ While uttering this last word, he made a grandiloquent sweep of his arms, to add a sarcastic halo of importance to the concept. ‘OK, I know USIC has a lot of money. But not that much money.’
‘What about Kurtzberg?’ said Peter quietly. ‘And Tartaglione? They didn’t go home, did they?’
‘No,’ conceded Tuska. ‘They went native.’
‘Isn’t that just a different way of adapting?’
‘You tell me,’ said Tuska with a hint of mischief. ‘You just came back from Freaktown and now you’re going again. What’s your hurry? Don’t you love us anymore?’
‘Yes, I love you,’ said Peter, aiming for a light, good-humoured tone that might simultaneously convey that he really did love everyone here. ‘But I wasn’t brought here . . . uh . . . USIC made it clear I shouldn’t expect . . . ’ He faltered, dismayed. His tone was neither bantering nor sincere; it was defensive.
‘We’re not your job,’ summarised Tuska. ‘I know that.’
Out of the corner of his eye, Peter noticed that Grainger had entered the mess hall, ready to drive him to the settlement. ‘I do care,’ he said, suppressing the urge to bring up Severin’s funeral, to remind Tuska how hard he’d tried to come up with something decent at short notice. ‘If you . . . if anyone actually . . . reached out to me, I’d be there for them.’
‘Sure you would,’ the pilot shrugged. Leaning back in his seat again, he noticed Grainger edging nearer, and gave her a casual salute.
‘Your chariot awaits,’ announced Grainger.
Rather than taking the cafeteria exit and walking round the building to where the vehicle was parked, Grainger escorted Peter through a maze of internal corridors, postponing when they’d have to wade into the muggy air. This route through the base took them past the USIC pharmacy, Grainger’s domain. It was shut and Peter would have walked right by without noticing it, if not for the bright green plastic cross mounted on its otherwise nondescript door. He paused for a proper look, and Grainger paused with him.
‘The serpent of Epidaurus,’ he murmured, surprised that whoever had made this cross had bothered to embellish it, in silver metallic inlay, with the ancient symbol of the snake encircling the staff.
‘Yeah?’ she said.
‘It symbolises wisdom. Immortality. Healing.’
‘And “Pharmacy”,’ she added.
He wondered if the door was unlocked. ‘What if someone shows up while we’re gone, wanting you?’
‘Unlikely,’ she said.