The Book of Strange New Things(177)

‘Crack them?’ echoed Tuska.

‘Find out what makes them tick,’ she explained.

‘Yeah?’ said Tuska, clearly not much interested in the prospect.

‘Yes. And then, God willing, we’ll fix them.’

Peter was surprised to hear such words uttered by a USIC employee. But then Flores’s face appeared in the gap between the front seats, like a gargoyle head jutting out from a Gothic wall, seeking out the minister stashed in the back.

‘Just a figure of speech, you understand,’ she said. ‘I really meant, with luck.’ Her face vanished again, but she wasn’t done talking. ‘I guess you don’t believe there’s such a thing as luck, huh?’

Peter turned his face to stare out the window. At the speed Tuska was driving, the dark earth could be mistaken for tarmac, and the occasional outcrop of pale wildflower swept past in a blur like the painted white lines of a motorway. If he imagined hard enough, he might even see M25 road signs estimating the distance to London.

‘I hope there is,’ he answered Flores, a little too late. He was pretty sure the word ‘luck’ appeared nowhere in the Bible, but that didn’t mean there was no such thing. Grainger had called him a lucky guy. And, with Bea at his side, for the best part of his life, he truly had been.

When he got back to his quarters, there was, finally, a message from Bea.

It said,

Peter, I love you. But please, don’t come home. I beg you. Stay where you are.





28


Amen



‘What I like about this place,’ said Moro, making brisk progress on her treadmill, ‘is that every day there’s something a little bit different, but also it’s the same.’

She, BG and Peter were exercising in the gazebo. It was just another day on Oasis, another scheduled break in the task at hand, a few hours of R&R before work resumed on the great project. The canopy was shading them from the sun, but the light was so intense at this stage of the afternoon that it penetrated the canvas, casting a yellow tinge over their flesh.

Moro had worked up a big sweat already; the fabric of her shalwar was sculpted to her thighs as she paced, and her bare midriff glistened. She had announced three hundred steps as her goal and must be about halfway through by now, never letting the rhythm slacken. She swivelled her wrists on the treadmill’s handle-bars, as if revving the throttle grip of a motorcycle.

‘You should try it with just your legs, no holding on,’ advised BG, resting between bouts of press-ups. ‘Better for your quads, your tibs, everything.’

‘I see it as exercise for my hands, too,’ said Moro. ‘People who lose a finger often let the hand get sloppy. I made a decision: not me.’

Peter was lifting a sandbag on a pulley, or trying to. His arms had become quite strong and wiry from working in the whiteflower fields, but the muscles he’d toughened must be a different set from the ones he was straining now.

‘Don’t bust a gut on the lifting,’ advised BG. ‘The lowering’s just as good. Do it slow. Slow as you can.’

‘It’s still too heavy for me, I think,’ said Peter. ‘What’s the bag filled with? Not sand, surely?’ He couldn’t imagine USIC approving the shipment of a sack of sand when, for the same cost-weight ratio, they could transport a sack of sugar or a person.

‘Earth,’ said BG, gesturing at the bare acres around the exercise yard. He removed his singlet and wrung it out in his fists. An arc of puckered scars came to life near his left armpit, marring the smooth swell of his pectoral. He put his singlet back on.

‘I don’t suppose we could let some of the soil out?’ said Peter.

‘I don’t suppose so, bro,’ said BG. His facial expression was unsmilingly serious, but he was amused. Human beings could be read quite easily once you got to know them a bit. It was all in the tone, the cadences, the twinkle in the eyes, so many subtle factors that defied scientific description but which you could, if you wished, build a lifelong friendship on.

Peter tried to lift the sandbag again. This time, he barely raised it above knee-level before his biceps began to hurt.

‘Part of your problem there,’ said BG, coming over, ‘is you need more of a balanced approach.’ He unhooked the sandbag from the pulley, hoisted it without much effort to his chest, then cradled it in one arm. ‘Most important muscle is your brain. You gotta plan what you’re gonna do, warm up to it. Find an exercise that pushes you to the limit but not beyond it. With this sandbag, I suggest a straight carry.’

‘Sorry?’

BG stood close to Peter, transferred the sack from his own arms into Peter’s, carefully as if it was a sleeping baby.

‘Just hug it to your chest,’ he said. ‘Wrap your arms around it and walk. From one end of the gazebo to the other, and again, and again, as many times as you can until you can’t do it no more. Then lower it to the ground nice and easy.’

Peter did as he was told. BG watched. So did Moro, who had finished her three hundred steps and was drinking from a bottle of pale green liquid, possibly rainwater, possibly a small fortune’s-worth of carbonated soft drink from a faraway multinational corporation. Peter hurried past them with the sack in his arms, back and forth, back and forth. He performed reasonably well with the carrying part, but when he reached his limit, the lowering part was clumsy.