Peter stared into the shadowed cleft of her hooded head, wishing he could guess what emotion lay behind her impeded speech. His experience so far had made him suspect that Oasans’ emotions were expressed in the rustlings and burbles and squimphs they uttered when not straining to imitate an alien language.
‘What did he die of? What happened?’
Lover Five stroked herself perfunctorily over her arms, chest and midriff, to indicate the entire body. ‘In??ide him, many thing?? gone the wrong way. Clean thing?? became foul. ?????rong thing?? became weak. Full thing?? became emp???y. Clo??ed thing?? became open. Open thing?? became clo??ed. Dry thing??became filled with wa ???er. Many other thing?? al??o. I have no word?? for all the thing??.’
‘I’m very sorry to hear this.’
She bowed her head, a gesture of shared regret perhaps. ‘For a long ???ime already, my brother wa?? ??ick. Life remained in him, but with a plan ???o leave. I go every day ???o my brother, and hi?? life ??poke ???o me when he fall a??leep, ??aying, I am here another day, but I will no??? remain here another day more, I am no??? welcome in thi?? body. While life remained in my brother, grief remained in me. Now he i?? in the ground, my grief i?? in the ground. God ble?? our reunion, Father Pe???er. ???oday will be ??unday.’
Peter nodded, although in truth he didn’t know if it was a Sunday. He’d lost track of his accustomed measures of time. But it didn’t matter. He and the Oasans were about to worship. That was no doubt what Lover Five meant by ‘Sunday’. And she was right.
‘I have something for you, too,’ said Peter, striding over to where he’d left his rucksack. Her head moved down and up, following the motion of his hands as he fetched out the booklets he’d prepared.
‘Bibles,’ he said. ‘Or the beginnings of Bibles, anyway. For you to keep.’ He’d managed to produce twenty pages of Scripture rendered in an English that the Oasans could speak with a minimum of trouble, printed in King James-style columns on ten sheets of paper folded double and stapled in the middle. Not the handsomest display of bookbinding since Gutenberg, but the best he could come up with the tools available at the USIC base. On the front cover of each booklet, he’d hand-drawn a cross, and coloured it gold with a highlight marker.
‘The Book of ?????range New Thing??,’ confirmed Jesus Lover Five, as her fellow converts began to file into the church. Treading slowly in their padded boots, they made almost no sound on the soft earth, but Lover Five heard them come in, and turned to greet them. ‘The Book of ?????range New Thing??,’ she repeated, pointing at the booklets that Peter was piling up on his pulpit. ‘For u?? to keep.’
There was a murmuring and sighing among the new arrivals. To his shame, Peter recognised individuals only by the colour of their robes. He hoped their colour-coding hadn’t changed since last week. He’d trained himself to tell the difference between brown, bronze, auburn and copper, crimson, burgundy and coral, at least in his mind. Each shade reconnected him with conversations – however brief and stumbling – he had had with that person.
‘Friends,’ he announced, when everyone was in. ‘I’m very happy to see you. I have brought you these gifts. Small gifts from me, containing much bigger gifts from our Saviour.’
There were, he estimated, about ninety souls gathered within the four walls, a dazzling flock of different hues. As a minister, he was well-practised in casting a quick eye over a congregation to do an approximate head count. If his estimate was correct, it suggested the number of Christians had swollen by ten or twenty during his time away.
‘As I explained to some of you before,’ he said, ‘the Bible that you’ve seen me carry – and Kurtzberg carry – is a very thick book. Too thick for most people to read. But it was never meant to be read all at once. The Bible is a storehouse of messages, which grew for hundreds of years, as our Lord shared more and more of his thoughts and intentions with whoever was ready to listen.’ As he spoke, he handed booklets to Lover Five, and she distributed them to her fellow worshippers. Each recipient took the computer-printed pamphlet into his or her gloved hands as though it were a fragile egg.
‘When Jesus walked the earth,’ Peter continued, ‘people wrote down what He said and did, and after that, they wrote down the things that happened to His followers. But the Bible was begun in the time before Jesus came, the more ancient time when God seemed much further away and more mysterious, and it was harder to know for sure what He wanted. In those days, people told stories about God, and those stories are in the Bible too. Some of these stories require a lot of knowledge of the customs and places that existed before Jesus. Even among my own people, many don’t have that knowledge.’
He noticed, as he spoke, that every tenth person, rather than taking a booklet from Lover Five, elected to share one with his neighbour. Peter had brought eighty booklets, having judged his congregation to be slightly under that number, not expecting it to grow in his absence. Evidently, the Oasans had counted, at a glance, the number of booklets and – without any consultation or awkwardness – adjusted the logistics of distribution to ensure that the last few people in line weren’t left with nothing.
‘You have told me,’ he said, and gestured towards a robe of saffron and a robe of pale lavender, ‘– you, Jesus Lover Twelve and Jesus Lover Eighteen – that Kurtzberg once told you the story of Nebuchadnezzar, and the story of Balaam and the angel, and of the destruction of Jerusalem, and other stories that you struggled hard to understand and could not understand. Please take heart, my friends. There will be time to understand those stories later, when you have grown in Christ. But for now, Nebuchadnezzar can wait. When God decided to become Jesus, He did it because He wanted to spread His word among strangers, among those who’d never heard of Him, among those who didn’t care for religion or understand it. The stories He told were simple. I’ve tried to put some of the best, most useful ones in your Bibles.’ He picked up one of the booklets and opened it. ‘Your books are small and thin, not because I doubt your hunger for Scripture, nor your power to think, but because I’ve tried to use only words that you and I can speak together in this church, and that you can speak amongst yourselves, with ease. I’ve worked as fast as I can, yet, as you can see from the smallness of the books, I’ve been slow. I promise that in future, I’ll be faster. As you grow in Christ, your Bibles will grow. But we must begin somewhere. And on this wonderful Sunday, as I stand here filled with happiness to see you all here with me, we will begin with . . . this.’
And, from the first page, he read Psalm 23. ‘The Lord be He who care for me. I will need no more . . . ’ and so on, until he reached ‘I will dwell in the home of the Lord for ever.’
Then he read it again.
And again.
Each time he read it, more of the Oasans read it aloud with him. Were they reading or reciting? It didn’t matter. Their communal voice was swelling, and it sounded melodious and clear, almost entirely free of vocal impairments. ‘He bid me lie in green land down. He lead me by river where no one can drown. He make my ??oul like new again. He lead me in the path of Good. He do all thi??, for He be God.’
By the fifth repetition, his own voice was lost in the mighty unison.