The Book of Strange New Things(148)

The woman frowned. ‘Can I help you?’

‘I would like to . . . uh . . . requisition a vehicle.’ Inside his head, banked up on his tongue, he had a barrage of speech ready to push her objections aside, to steamroller her reluctance. Do what I want. Do what I want. You were told from the beginning I would require a vehicle; now it’s happening just as you were warned it would, so don’t be difficult, don’t resist me, just say yes. ‘Just for an hour or two,’ he added, as the sweat prickled his eyebrows. ‘Please.’

‘Sure.’ She gestured towards a black station wagon that reminded Peter of a hearse. ‘How about this one? Kurtzberg used it all the time.’

He swayed on his feet. The victory was too easy; there must be a catch. ‘Fine with me.’

She opened the door and let him slide in. The key was already in the ignition. He’d expected to have to sign papers, produce a driving licence, or at least exert some serious psychological pressure. Maybe God was cutting through the obstacles for him. Or maybe this was just the way things worked here.

‘If you’re underslept,’ said Craig, ‘maybe you shouldn’t drive.’

Peter glanced over his shoulder. Kurtzberg’s bed – actually a small mattress with a floral coverlet and matching pillow – was right there in the back.

‘I’ll get all the sleep I want, soon,’ he assured her.

He drove into the wilderness, towards . . . Freaktown. Its official name escaped him for the moment. Peterville. New Zion. Oskaloosa. Please rescue Coretta from trouble, Lord. May your presence be felt in the Maldives.

His brain felt swollen, bulging out against his eyeballs. He shut his eyelids tight, to keep his eyeballs in. It was OK to do that while driving. There was nothing to collide with, no road to veer off or stay on. Only the general direction was important. And, he wasn’t actually sure if he was going the right way. This vehicle had the same navigation system as Grainger’s, but he had no idea how to use it, no idea what buttons to push. Bea would be able to figure it out, if she were given a –

He pressed his foot on the accelerator. Let’s see how fast this thing could go. There was a time for taking things easy and a time for really moving.

Was he really moving? It was hard to tell in the dark. The headlights illuminated only an abstract swathe of the terrain and there were no landmarks. He might be travelling at dangerous speed or he might be marooned in the soil, tyres churning endlessly, getting nowhere. But no: he could see clumps of whiteflower whizzing past like reflective strips on a highway. He was making progress. Progress away from the USIC base, at least – he couldn’t be sure he was getting any closer to the ????? settlement.

If only this vehicle were a living creature, like a horse or a dog, it would sniff its way unerringly back to the place Kurtzberg had visited so many times before. Just like Joshua when he –

An ugly sound startled him. It was a human cry, right here in the vehicle with him. It was his own voice. It was his own cry. He bashed the steering wheel with his fists, butted the back of his head repeatedly against the seat. A brick wall would have been better.

He wiped his eyes and peered through the front window. In the distance, dimly, he could see something looming up from the tundra. Architecture of some sort. He’d been travelling a few minutes only, so it couldn’t be the settlement yet. Unless, in his delirium, time had telescoped, so that he’d driven for hours in what seemed like seconds, or unless he’d fallen asleep at the wheel. But no. The looming thing was two huge spherical structures: the Big Brassiere. He was heading in the wrong direction.

‘Christ!’ It was his voice again. He’d slipped and forgotten to say ‘Crisis’. He must calm down. God was in control.

He pressed a button on the navigation screen. It glowed brighter, as if delighted to be touched. The words CENTR POWER FAC manifested near the top, with an arrow that symbolised his vehicle pulsing underneath. He pushed some more buttons. No other destinations came up; instead, he was quoted various data about temperature, water level, oil, speed, fuel consumption. With a grunt of frustration, he wrenched the steering wheel ninety degrees, sending a flurry of damp soil flying. The Big Brassiere, the Centrifuge, the Mother, whatever the damn thing was called, receded into the darkness as he sped into unknown territory.

Within another few minutes, he saw the shapes and colours of the Oasan settlement. It wasn’t possible, it just wasn’t possible, it should be an hour yet before he got here, and yet . . . the blockish, uniform architecture, the flat roofs, the lack of pinnacles or poles of any sort, the amber glow . . . As he drove closer and closer, his vehicle’s headlights illuminated lozenge-shaped bricks. Unmistakable. The poison must have deranged his sense of time.

He was approaching from an unfamiliar angle and couldn’t get his bearings. Grainger’s usual arrival point was the building with the white star and the illegible residue of WEL WEL COME clinging to its outer wall like bird cack. But he was not with Grainger now. Never mind: his church was the true landmark. Set apart from the town, it would stand out in the bare prairie, hologrammed into life by the headlights.

He drove around the perimeter, looking for his church. He drove and drove. His high beam picked out nothing more substantial than pallid clumps of whiteflower. Eventually, he saw tyre-tracks in the soil: his own vehicle’s. He’d come full circle and there was no church. It was gone; it had been destroyed and every trace of it removed as if it had never existed. These people had rejected him, cast him off in one of those unfathomable flashes of antipathy that missionary history was so full of – cruel severances that came out of nowhere, revealing that all the intimacy you thought you’d forged was just an illusion, a church built on quicksand, a seed planted in windblown topsoil.