The Book of Strange New Things(57)

Lover One’s voice, when it came, was hushed so as not to wake the others. A soft, suppressed sound, eerie as the creak of a door in a distant building.

‘You are praying,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ whispered Peter.

‘I al??o am praying,’ said Lover One. ‘Praying in hope for the hearing of God.’

The two of them were silent for a while. In the adjacent room, the other Oasans snortled on. Eventually, Lover One added:

‘I fear all my praying go a?????ray.’

Peter replayed the half-dissolved word in his mind several times. ‘Astray?’ he echoed.

‘A?????ray,’ confirmed Lover One, unclasping his hands. With one he pointed upwards. ‘God abide there.’ With the other he pointed downwards. ‘Prayer go here.’

‘Prayers don’t travel in space, Lover One,’ said Peter. ‘Prayers don’t go anywhere; they just are. God is here with us.’

‘You hear God? Now?’ The Oasan raised his head in rapt attention; the cleft in his face quivered.

Peter stretched his cramped limbs, aware suddenly of a full bladder.

‘Right now, I only hear my body telling me I need to pass water.’

The Oasan nodded, and motioned for them to go. Peter clambered out of the cot and found his sandals. There were no toilets in Oasan dwellings, as far as he’d been able to tell during the first twenty-odd hours of his visit. Wastes were disposed of out-of-doors.

Together, Peter and Jesus Lover One left the bedchamber. In the adjacent room, they passed the other sleepers, who lay swaddled in their cocoons, immobile as corpses apart from their raucous respirations. Peter tip-toed; Lover One walked normally, the velvety skin of his boots making no noise on the floor. Side by side they passed through a vaulted corridor, and emerged through a curtain of beads into the open air (if the air on Oasis could ever truly be called open). The sun shone into Peter’s swollen eyes, and he was even more aware of how sweaty and itchy the bedding had made him.

Glancing back at the building he’d emerged from, he noticed that, in the hours since his arrival, the Oasan atmosphere had been applying its energies to the WEL COME on the outer wall, loosening the paint’s purchase, transforming it into a perspirous froth that now trickled towards the ground, the letters blurred into Cyrillic patterns.

Jesus Lover One saw him looking at the remains of the message. ‘Word on wall ??oon gone,’ he said. ‘Word, in memory, abide.’ And he touched his chest, as if to indicate where memory abided for his kind, or maybe he was signalling heartfelt emotion. Peter nodded.

Then Jesus Lover One led him through the streets (could unpaved paths be called streets, if they were wide enough?), further into the settlement. There was no one else about, no sign of life, although Peter knew that the throng of people he’d met earlier in the day must be in there somewhere. The buildings all looked the same. Oblong, oblong, oblong; amber, amber, amber. If this settlement and the USIC base constituted the only architecture on Oasis, then this was a world where aesthetic niceties weren’t wanted and utilitarianism ruled. It shouldn’t bother him, but it did. All along, he’d assumed that the church he would build here should be simple and unpretentious, to give the message that its outward form didn’t matter, only the souls inside; but now he was inclined to make it a thing of beauty.

With every step, he grew more desperate to piss, and wondered if Lover One was going to unnecessary lengths to find him a private place to do it. Oasans themselves had no such concern for privacy, at least not when it came to toilet matters. Peter had seen them expelling their wastes freely in the streets, unheedful of the loss. They’d be walking along, solemnly focused on where they were going, and then, out of the bottom of their robes, a trail of turdlets would patter onto the earth: grey-green pellets that didn’t smell and, if accidentally stepped on by other people, disintegrated into a powdery pulp, like meringue. Nor did the faeces linger long on the ground. Either the wind blew it away, or it got swallowed up by the earth. Peter had not seen any Oasan expelling liquid waste. Perhaps they didn’t need to.

Peter most certainly needed to. He was just about to tell Lover One that they must stop right now, anywhere, when the Oasan came to a halt in front of a circular structure, the architectural equivalent of a biscuit tin, but the size of a warehouse. Its low roof was festooned with chimneys . . . no, funnels – large, ceramic-looking funnels, like kiln-fired vases – all pointing up at the sky. Lover One motioned Peter to enter through the beaded doorway. Peter obeyed. Inside, he was faced with a jumbled array of vats and canisters and kegs, each different and hand-made, each fed from tubes that snaked up to the ceiling. The containers were arranged around the sides of the room, leaving the centre free. An artificial pond, the size of a backyard swimming pool in the wealthier parts of Los Angeles, glimmered with pale emerald water.

‘Wa???er,’ said Lover One.

‘Very . . . clever,’ Peter complimented him, having rejected the word ‘resourceful’ as too difficult. The sight of the full pond and the dozens of tubes fogged with moisture made him only more convinced that he was about to wet himself.

‘Enough?’ enquired Lover One, as they turned to leave.

‘Uh . . . ’ hesitated Peter, nonplussed.

‘Enough wa???er? We pa?? now?’

At last, Peter understood the misunderstanding. ‘Pass water’ – of course! Such collisions between the literal and the colloquial – he’d read about them so often in accounts of other missionary expeditions, and had promised himself he would avoid ambiguity at all times. But Lover One’s acquiescence to his request had been so low-key, so smooth, that there was no hint of a communication glitch.