The Book of Strange New Things(37)

In the absence of motor noise, the sounds of the Oasan settlement ventured onto the airwaves like opportunistic wildlife. The burble of running water, from an invisible source. The occasional muffled clank or clunk, suggesting routine struggles with domestic objects. Distant squeaks and chortles that might be birds or children or machinery. And, closer by, the unintelligible murmur of voices, subtle and diffuse, emanating from the buildings like a hum. This place, despite outward appearances, was no ghost town.

‘So, do we just yell hello?’ said Peter.

‘They know we’re here,’ said Grainger. ‘That’s why they’re hiding.’ Her voice, muffled slightly by the scarf, sounded tense. She had her arms folded, and he could see a tongue of dark sweat in the armpit of her smock.

‘How many times have you been here?’ he asked.

‘Dozens. I bring them their drug supply.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘I’m a pharmacist.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

She sighed. ‘Looks like I totally wasted my breath when we first met. You didn’t absorb a word I said, did you? My big speech of welcome, my detailed explanation of the procedure for getting stuff from the pharmacy if you need it.’

‘Sorry, my brains must have been scrambled.’

‘The Jump does that to some people.’

‘The wimpy ones, huh?’

‘I didn’t say that.’ Grainger hugged herself tightly, squeezing her upper arms in stress. ‘Come on, let’s get this over with.’ This last was not addressed to him; she was staring at the building with the star painted on it.

‘Are we in any danger?’

‘None that I know of.’

Peter leaned against the crash-bar of the vehicle and made a more careful study of what he could see of the settlement. The buildings, although rectangular, had no hard edges: each brick was a well-buffed lozenge, a glassy loaf of amber. The mortar had no grit to it; it was like plastic sealant. There wasn’t a hard angle anywhere, nothing sharp or corrugated. It was as though the architect’s aesthetics had been formed in homage to children’s play centres. Not that these buildings were in any way infantile or crass: they had their own uniform dignity, and they were obviously rock-solid, and the warm colours were . . . well . . . warm. But Peter couldn’t say he found the overall effect attractive. If God blessed him with the opportunity to build a church here, it would have to strike a different note, stand out against the squatness all around. At the very least it would need to have . . . Yes, that’s it: he’d worked out what was so dispiriting about this place. There was no attempt to reach up into the heavens. No tower, no turret, no flagpole, not even a modest triangular roof. Oh, for a spire!

Peter’s vision of a church steeple shone in his mind just long enough for him to be oblivious to a movement in the bead curtain of the nearest doorway. By the time he blinked and focused, the figure had already stepped out and was confronting Grainger. The event had occurred too suddenly, he felt; it lacked the drama appropriate to his first sighting of an Oasan native. It ought to have happened with ceremonial slowness, in an amphitheatre, or at the summit of a long staircase. Instead, the encounter was already under way, and Peter had missed its beginning.

The creature – the person – stood upright, but not tall. Five foot three, maybe five foot four. (Funny how those imperial measurements – inches, miles – stubbornly refused to be left behind.) Anyway, he, or she, was delicate. Small-boned, narrow-shouldered, an unassuming presence – not at all the fearsome figure Peter had prepared himself to confront. As foretold, a hood and monkish robes – made of a pastel-blue fabric disconcertingly like bathtowel – covered almost all of the body, its hems brushing the toes of soft leather boots. There was no swell of bosom, so Peter – aware that this was flimsy evidence on which to base a judgement, but unwilling to clutter his brain with unwieldy repetitions of ‘he or she’ – decided to think of the creature as male.

‘Hi,’ said Grainger, extending her hand.

The Oasan extended his hand in return, but did not grasp Grainger’s; rather he touched her gently on the wrist with his fingertips. He was gloved. The gloves had five digits.

‘You, here, now . . . ’ he said. ‘A ??urpri??e.’ His voice was soft, reedy, asthmatic-sounding. Where the ‘s’s should have been, there was a noise like a ripe fruit being thumbed into two halves.

‘Not a bad surprise, I hope,’ said Grainger.

‘I hope ???ogether with you.’

The Oasan turned to look at Peter, tilted his head slightly so that the shadows from the hood slid back. Peter, having been lulled by the Oasan’s familiar shape and five-fingered hands into expecting a more-or-less human face, flinched.

Here was a face that was nothing like a face. Instead, it was a massive whitish-pink walnut kernel. Or no: even more, it resembled a placenta with two foetuses – maybe three-month-old twins, hairless and blind – nestled head to head, knee to knee. Their swollen heads constituted the Oasan’s clefted forehead, so to speak; their puny ribbed backs formed his cheeks, their spindly arms and webbed feet merged in a tangle of translucent flesh that might contain – in some form unrecognisable to him – a mouth, nose, eyes.

Of course, there were no foetuses there, not really: the face was what it was, the face of an Oasan, nothing else. But try as he might, Peter couldn’t decode it on its own terms; he could only compare it to something he knew. He had to see it as a grotesque pair of foetuses perched on someone’s shoulders, half-shrouded in a cowl. Because if he didn’t allow it to resemble that, he would probably always have to stare at it dumbfounded, reliving the initial shock, dizzy with the vertigo of unsupported falling, in that gut-wrenching instant before a solid comparison is found to clasp onto.