The Book of Strange New Things(134)

‘Forget the Book for a moment . . . ’ Peter had said, but Lover One was so wound up that, for the first time, he interrupted.

‘Never forge??? the Book. Never, never. The Book our rock, our hope, our redeemer.’

The words were Peter’s own, specially selected to be easy for these people to say, but the more often he heard the ????? uttering words like ‘redeemer’, the more he wondered what they really thought they meant.

‘I didn’t mean . . . I wasn’t saying . . . ’ Peter floundered. Then: ‘I just want to know you better.’

‘You know enough,’ Lover One said. ‘We are they who need more knowing, more word of Je??u??. Word of Je??u?? good. Our word no good.’ And no amount of reassurance could convince him otherwise.

So here they were, a congregation within a congregation, engaged in an activity that had a slightly contentious status – which made it feel more important, of course. They sat on a patch of earth which had been shrouded in shade when they first settled in it, but not anymore. How many hours had they been sitting here? He didn’t know. Enough for the sun to move a significant distance across the sky. The sun’s name, he’d learned, was ?. Back at the USIC base, stowed in a drawer in Peter’s quarters, lay a printout prepared for him by some well-meaning boffin, charting the rising and setting of the sun within the 72-hour diurnal cycle. The heavens were reduced to a geometric grid with USIC at its centre; the times of day were represented as incomprehensible multi-digit numbers, and the sun was not dignified with a name. Typical.

Now, under that sun, he sat with his brethren on the mildest, most beautiful day yet. He imagined the scene from above – not very high above, but as if from a beach lifeguard’s observation tower. A tanned, lanky, blond-haired man in white, squatting on brown earth, encircled by small robed figures in all the colours of the rainbow. Everyone leaning slightly forward, attentive, occasionally passing a flask of water from hand to hand. Communion of the simplest kind.

He hadn’t felt like this since he was six and his parents took him to the dunes in Snowdonia. That summer had been the happiest time of his life, as he’d luxuriated not just in the balmy weather but also in his parents’ reconciliation, all coos and hugs and soft words. Even the name ‘Snowdonia’ seemed magical, like an enchanted kingdom rather than a national park in Wales. He’d sat for hour upon hour in the dunes, soaking up the warmth and his parents’ togetherness, listening to their beningnly meaningless chatter and the lapping of the waves, gazing out at the sea from under his oversized straw hat. Unhappiness was a test that you had to pass, and he’d passed it, and everything would be all right from now on. Or so he’d thought, until his parents’ divorce.

The language of the ????? was murder to pronounce but simple to learn. He had a hunch that there were probably only a few thousand words in the vocabulary – certainly far fewer than the quarter million in English. The grammar was logical and transparent. No eccentricities, no traps. There were no cases, no distinctions between singular and plural, no genders, and only three tenses: past, present and future. Even to call them tenses was a stretch: the ????? didn’t think that way. They classified a thing according to whether it was gone, or it was here, or it was expected to come.

‘Why did you leave the original settlement?’ he asked, at one point. ‘The place where you were living when USIC first came. You left it. Did something go wrong between you and USIC?’

‘We are here now,’ they replied. ‘Here good.’

‘But was there a problem?’

‘No problem. We are here now.’

‘It must have been very difficult to build everything again, from nothing.’

‘Building no problem. Every day a ??mall work more. ??mall work upon ??mall work, day upon day, then the work done.’

He tried a different tack. ‘If USIC had never come, would you still be living in the original settlement?’

‘Here good.’

Evasiveness? He wasn’t sure. The ????? language didn’t appear to contain any conditionals. There was no if.

The home of my Father have room upon room upon room, read one of his Bible paraphrases, carefully refashioned to avoid troublesome words like ‘house’ and ‘mansions’. As for John’s next bit, ‘if it were not so, I would have told you’, he’d ditched it and moved straight on to I will prepare a room for you – which in retrospect was a wiser decision than he’d known at the time, because the ????? wouldn’t have understood what John’s ‘if it were not so’ assurance was supposed to mean. One of the most direct, straight-talking asides in the whole Bible was arcane nonsense here.

And yet, however many problems the ????? might have with English, it was agreed that Peter would continue to speak of God and Jesus in his own tongue. His flock would have it no other way. The Book of Strange New Things was not translatable, they knew that. In foreign phrases, exotic power lurked.

But there was more to life than God and Jesus, and Peter wanted to share these people’s mundane reality. Just a few days after he started to learn the language, he overheard two Jesus Lovers talking, and was delighted to pick up, amongst the meaningless sussurus, a reference to a child refusing breakfast, or maybe not refusing, but doing something with or at breakfast that the grown-ups disapproved of. It was a trivial detail, and his understanding of it made no difference to anything, yet it made a huge difference to how he felt. In that modest moment of comprehension, he was a little less an alien.