The Book of Strange New Things(125)

Peter drew abreast with the nearest person he knew by name, which happened to be Hayes, the literal-minded engineer who’d delivered the speech at the official opening of the Centrifuge & Power Facility. He’d made conversation with her several times since then, and had grown to enjoy how boring she was. Her boringness was so perfect that it had transcended itself to become a kind of eccentricity, and her own unawareness of it was funny and sort of touching. Other USIC personnel felt the same way about her, he’d noticed. There was a twinkle in their eye when she droned on.

‘What have we come out here for?’ he asked her.

‘I don’t know why you’ve come,’ she replied. ‘I can only speak for why we’ve come.’ In anyone else, this would be testiness or sarcasm. In her, it was earnest determination to stay within the limits of the subject matter on which she could speak with authority.

‘OK,’ he said, falling into step beside her. ‘Why have you come out here?’

‘We got a call from the team at the Mother,’ she said.

‘Oh yes?’ It took him a couple of seconds to figure out she meant the Big Brassiere. Nobody but her called it the Mother, but still she would repeat the term at every opportunity, hoping it would catch on.

‘They told us there were animals headed this way. A horde. Or maybe they said a herd.’ Her brow wrinkled at the ambiguity. ‘A large number, anyway.’

‘Animals? What sort of animals?’

She took further cognisance of the parameters of her knowledge. ‘Native animals,’ she said.

‘I thought there weren’t any!’

Hayes mistook his excitement for scepticism. ‘I’m sure our colleagues at the Mother are reliable eyewitnesses,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe they would play a practical joke on us. We’ve discussed practical jokes in USIC briefings, and agreed that they’re counterproductive and potentially hazardous.’

Peter nodded, his attention wandering to the terrain ahead. Visibility was poor, not only because of the intense glare but because copious amounts of mist were swirling along the ground, spread wide over hundreds of metres like a swarm of spectral tumbleweeds. The eye played tricks: some obscure thing would appear to be moving forwards, emerging from the fog, only to be revealed a moment later as a clump of vegetation, demurely rooted in the soil.

The troop of humans reached the end of the tarmac, and the ground underfoot was soft. Peter surveyed the front ranks of the USIC personnel and noted who was walking foremost. It was Stanko, the guy from the mess hall. His gangly frame was graceful in motion; his long arms swung loosely and casually. It suddenly occurred to Peter how odd it was, in the circumstances, that Stanko wasn’t carrying a weapon. In fact . . . No one was. In fact . . . in fact, had he seen a gun at all since coming to Oasis? Could this really be a community without weapons? Could there be such a thing? How astonishing, if it were so . . . But on the other hand, wasn’t it foolhardy to be so indifferent to danger? Weren’t there times when it was crazy to set out without a rifle in hand? Who had authorised this communal foray, armed with nothing but curiosity? Were they all walking to their deaths, doomed to be crushed or torn to pieces by savage animals?

The answer wasn’t long in coming. A breeze pushed the mist backward and a large swathe of scrubland was swept clear, abruptly revealing the herd, or horde, of advancing creatures – perhaps eighty or a hundred of them. The USIC personnel gasped, whooped and muttered, each according to their nature. Then, inevitably, there was laughter. The animals were the size of chickens. Small chickens.

‘Well, will ya look at that,’ drawled Stanko, beaming.

The creatures seemed to be half-bird, half-mammal. Featherless, their hide was pink and leathery, mottled with grey. Duck-like heads bobbed with the rhythm of their waddling walk. Puny, vestigial wings hung against their flanks, gently jogged by the motion of the march but otherwise flaccid, like the rumpled lining of pulled-out trouser pockets. Their torsos were remarkably fat – rotund as teapots. Their gait was solemn and hilarious.

‘I cannot be-leeeeve this!’ BG’s voice. Peter looked for him in the crowd but there were a dozen people in the way and it would be impolite to cut across them.

By unspoken mutual assent, they stopped moving forward, so as not to spook the animals. The horde was waddling ever closer, apparently unperturbed by the alien onlookers. Their fat bodies kept up the pace, making slow but inexorable progress. At a distance, it had been unclear how many limbs each creature had under its belly, two or four. Closer up, it turned out to be four: squat little legs, unbirdlike in their muscular stockiness. Downy, paddle-like paws of a much darker grey than the rest of the body gave them the appearance of wearing shoes.

‘Cute to the power of ten,’ somebody said.

‘Cute to the power of a hundred,’ somebody else said.

Seen at close range, the animals’ heads were not quite so duck-like. Their bills were fleshier, drooping slightly like dog snouts. Their minuscule, expressionless eyes were very close together, conveying an impression of utter stupidity. They didn’t look up, around or at each other, only straight ahead. They were on course to pass right by the USIC base, on their way elsewhere. They made no sound apart from the faint, rhythmic thwuh-thwuh-thwuh-thwuh of their feet on the soil.

‘What are we gonna call these critters?’ somebody asked.