The Book of Strange New Things(16)
‘Just do it, Tuska,’ said Severin. ‘What do you want, a brass band? Cheerleaders?’
Tuska blew a kiss, then made a decisive keystroke. ‘Gentlemen and crew sluts,’ he declared, in a mockingly oratorical tone. ‘Welcome onboard the USIC shuttle service to Oasis. Please give your full attention to the safety demonstration even if you are a frequent flyer. The seatbelt is fastened and unfastened as shown. No seatbelt on your seat? Hey, live with it.’
He jabbed another key. The floor began to vibrate.
‘In the event of a loss of cabin pressure, oxygen will be provided. It will be pumped straight into the mouth of the pilot. The rest of you just hold your breath and sit tight.’ (Laughter from BG and Severin.) ‘In the event of a collision, low-level lighting will guide you to an exit, where you will be sucked instantly to your death. Please remember that the nearest usable planet may be three billion miles behind you.’
He jabbed another key. A graph on the computer screen began to rise and fall like waves. ‘This craft is equipped with one emergency escape pod: one at the front, none in the middle and none at the rear. There’s room for the pilot and five really hot chicks.’ (Guffaws from BG; snickering from Severin.) ‘Take your high heels off, girls, before using the escape pod. Hell, take it all off. Blow on my tube if it fails to inflate. There is a light and a whistle for attracting attention, but don’t worry, I’ll get around to all of you in turn. Please consult the instruction card which shows you the position you must adopt if you hear the command “Suck, suck”. We recommend you keep your head down at all times.’
He made one more keystroke, then held a fist up in the air. ‘We appreciate that you had no choice of airlines today, and so we would like to thank you for choosing USIC.’
Severin and BG applauded and whooped. Peter put his hands together shyly, but made no noise with them. He hoped he could stand by unobtrusively, part of the gathering but not subject to scrutiny. It was, he knew, not a very impressive start to his mission to win the hearts and souls of an entire population. But he hoped he could be forgiven. He was far from home, his head ached and buzzed, the beef noodles sat in his stomach like a stone, he kept hallucinating that his body parts had been disassembled and put back together slightly wrong, and all he wanted to do was crawl into bed with Beatrice and Joshua and go to sleep. The grand adventure could surely wait.
4
‘Hello everybody,’ he said
Dear Bea,
Finally, a chance to communicate with you properly! Shall we call this my First Epistle to the Joshuans? Oh, I know we both have our misgivings about St Paul and his slant on things, but the guy sure knew how to write a good letter and I’m going to need all the inspiration I can get, especially in my current state. (Half-delirious with exhaustion.) So, until I can come up with something wonderfully original: ‘Grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ.’ I doubt whether Paul had any women in mind when he wrote that greeting, given his problems with females, but maybe if he’d known YOU, he would have!
I would love to put you in the picture, but there’s not much to describe yet. No windows in this ship. There are millions of stars out there and possibly other amazing sights, but all I can see is the walls, the ceiling and the floor. It’s a good thing I’m not claustrophobic.
I’m writing this with pencil and paper. (I had a bunch of pens but they must have exploded during the Jump – there’s ink all over the insides of my bag. No surprise they didn’t survive the trip, given how my own head felt . . . !) Anyway, when sophisticated technology fails, primitive technology steps in to do the job. Back to the sharpened stick with the sliver of graphite inside, and the sheets of pressed wood-pulp . . .
Have I gone insane, you’re wondering? No, don’t worry (yet). I’m not under the delusion I can put this letter in an envelope and stick a stamp on it. I’m still in transit – we’ve got about 25 hours’ journey left to go. As soon as I’m on Oasis and settled in, I’ll transcribe these jottings. Someone will plug me into the network and I’ll be able to send a message to the thing that USIC installed in our house. And you can forget about calling it a ‘Zhou-23 Messenger Mainframe’ like we were told to. I mentioned that term to the guys here and they just laughed. They refer to it as a Shoot. Typical of Americans to shorten everything to a monosyllable. (It’s catchy, though.)
I suppose, instead of waiting a whole day, I could use the Shoot that’s here on board, especially since I’m too wound up to sleep and it would be a good way of filling the time until we land. But it wouldn’t be private, and I need privacy for what I’m going to say next. The other men on this ship are – how can I put this? – not exactly models of discretion and sensitivity. If I wrote this on their machine, I can just imagine one of them retrieving my message and reading it out loud, to general hilarity.
Bea, forgive me for not being able to let this go, but I’m still upset about what happened in the car. I feel I let you down. I wish I could take you in my arms and make it right. It’s a silly thing to obsess about, I know. I suppose it just makes me confront how far away we are from each other now. Have any husband and wife ever been separated by so vast a distance? It seems like only yesterday I could reach out my arm and you’d be right there. On our last morning in bed together, you looked so satisfied and serene. But in the car you looked distraught.