The Book of Strange New Things(27)

He waited for the room to become a geometric space of fixed angles anchored in gravity, and then he got up. He checked the Shoot for messages. Still no word from Bea. Perhaps he should have asked Grainger to come to his room to check his machine, make sure he was using it correctly. But it was night and she was a woman and he barely knew her. Nor would their relationship have got off to an auspicious start if he’d hallucinated that she was sprouting multiple eyes and mouths and then collapsed at her feet.

Besides, the Shoot was so simple to operate that he couldn’t imagine how anyone – even a technophobe like himself – might misunderstand it. The thing sent and received messages: that was all. It didn’t play movies, make noises, offer to sell him products, inform him about the plight of mistreated donkeys or the Brazilian rainforest. It didn’t offer him the opportunity to check the weather in southern England or the current number of Christians in China or the names and dates of dynasties. It just confirmed that his messages had been sent, and that there was no reply.

Abruptly he glimpsed – not on the matt grey screen of the Shoot, but in his own mind – a picture of tangled wreckage on an English motorway, at night, garishly lit by the headlights of emergency vehicles. Bea, dead, somewhere on the road between Heathrow and home. Loose pearls scattered across the asphalt, black slicks of blood. A month ago already. History. Such things could happen. One person embarks on an outrageously hazardous journey and arrives unscathed; another goes for a short, routine drive and gets killed. ‘God’s sick sense of humour,’ as one grieving parent (soon to leave the church) had once put it. For a few seconds, the nightmarish vision of Beatrice lying dead on the road was real to Peter, and a nauseous thrill of terror passed through his guts.

But no. He mustn’t let himself be deluded by imaginary horrors. God was never cruel. Life could be cruel, but not God. In a universe made dangerous by the gift of free will, God could be relied upon for support no matter what happened, and He appreciated the potentials and limitations of each of His children. Peter knew that if anything awful happened to Bea, there was no way he’d be able to function here. The mission would be over before it began. And if there was one thing that had become clear in all the months of thought and prayer leading up to his journey to Oasis, it was that God really wanted him here. He was safe in God’s hands, and so was Bea. She must be.

As for the Shoot, there was one easy way of checking whether he was using it correctly. He located the USIC icon – a stylised green scarab – on the screen, and clicked open the menu behind it. It wasn’t much of a menu, just three items: Maintenance (repairs), Admin and Graigner, obviously set up in haste by Grainger herself. If he wanted a more substantial list of correspondents, it was up to him to organise it.

He opened a fresh message page, and wrote:

Dear Grainger. Then deleted ‘Dear’ and substituted ‘Hi’, then deleted that and just had ‘Grainger’, then reinstated ‘Dear’, then deleted it again. Unwarranted intimacy versus unfriendly brusqueness . . . a flurry of confused gestures before communication could begin. Letter-writing must have been so much easier in the olden days when everyone, even the bank manager or the tax department, was Dear.

Hi Grainger.

You were right. I am tired. I should sleep some more. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Best wishes,

Peter

Laboriously, he undressed. Every item of his clothing was swollen with damp, like he’d been caught in a downpour. His socks peeled away from his wrinkled feet like muddy clumps of foliage. His trousers and jacket clung obstinately to him, resisting his attempts to tug free. Everything he removed weighed heavy and fell to the floor with a dull whump. At first, he thought that fragments of his clothing had actually crumbled off and rolled across the floor, but on closer inspection, the loose bits were dead insects. He picked up one of the bodies and held it between his fingers. The wings had lost their silvery translucence, and were stained red with dye. Legs had been lost. It was an effort, actually, to perceive this mangled husk as an insect at all: it looked and felt like the pulverised remains of a hand-rolled cigarette. Why had these creatures hitched a ride in his clothes? He’d probably killed them just by the friction of walking.

Remembering the camera, he fished it out of his jacket pocket. It was slippery with moisture. He switched it on, intending to review the pictures he’d taken of the USIC perimeter and to snap a few more here, to show Bea his quarters, his sodden clothes, maybe one of the insects. A spark leapt from the mechanism, stinging him, and the light died. He held the camera in his hand, staring down at it as though it were a bird whose tiny heart had burst from fright. He knew the thing was unfixable and yet he half-hoped that if he waited a while, it would hiccup back into life. Just a moment ago, it had been a clever little storehouse of memories for Bea, a trove of images which would come to his aid in a near future he’d already inhabited in his imagination. Him and Bea on the bed, the gadget glowing between them, her pointing, him following the line of her finger, him saying ‘That? Oh, that was . . . ’ ‘And that was . . . ’ ‘And that was . . . ’ Now suddenly none of it was. In his palm lay a small metal shape with no purpose.

As the minutes passed, he became aware that his naked flesh smelled strange. It was that same faint honeydew melon scent he detected in the drinking water. The atmosphere swirling around out there had not been content merely to lick and stroke his skin, it had made him fragrant, as well as provoking copious sweat.