The Book of Strange New Things(71)

‘OK, I’ll try to be more stereotypical,’ she said lightly. ‘Maybe a coffee will do it.’

She fetched a Thermos up from the floor and balanced it next to her thigh. With her left hand on the steering wheel, she attempted, with her right hand, to unscrew the firmly-sealed cap. Her wrist trembled.

‘Let me do that for you.’

She handed it over. He unscrewed the cup and poured her a coffee. The oily brown liquid was no longer hot enough to give off steam.

‘Here.’

‘Thanks,’ she said, and took a sip. ‘This tastes like shit.’

He laughed. Grainger’s face looked odd to him when he saw it up close. Beautiful yet unreal, like a plastic doll’s head mould. Her lips were too perfect, her skin too pale. But maybe it was the golden sunrise thing all over again: maybe he had already, in the last three hundred and sixty-eight hours, adjusted to the way Oasans looked, and begun to accept their faces as the norm. Grainger didn’t fit.

‘Hey, I just thought of something,’ he said. ‘The drugs you give the Oasans are requisitioned especially for them, right?’

‘Right.’

‘But, from what you were saying back there, when you were talking to Jesus Lover One . . . ’

‘Jesus what?’

‘Jesus Lover One. That’s his name.’

‘The name you’ve given him?’

‘No, the name he’s given himself.’

‘Oh. OK.’

Her face was impassive, with perhaps just the hint of a smirk. He couldn’t tell if she disapproved of him deeply, or thought the whole thing was just ridiculous.

‘Anyway,’ he pressed on, ‘when you were talking about diabetes, I got the impression the Oasans don’t even know what diabetes is. So why offer them insulin?’

Grainger finished her coffee and screwed the cup back onto the thermos. ‘I guess I didn’t want it to go to waste,’ she said. ‘The insulin wasn’t meant for them; it was our own supply. But we don’t need it anymore.’ She paused for a couple of beats. ‘Severin died.’

‘Severin? The guy I travelled with?’

‘Yup.’

‘He’s a diabetic?’

‘Was.’

Peter tried to recall the journey he’d shared with Severin. It felt like something that had happened in another phase of his life, much longer ago than a few weeks.

‘When did he die?’

‘Last night. That phrase doesn’t mean much here, I know. Toward the end of the night.’ She consulted her watch. ‘About eighteen hours ago.’ Another couple of beats’ pause. ‘You’re conducting the funeral service. If you’re willing, that is.’

Again, Peter tried to cast his mind back to the time he’d shared with Severin. He recalled BG asking Severin what religion he was, and Severin replying, I’m nothing, and that’s the way it’s staying.

‘Severin might not have wanted a funeral service. He didn’t have a religion.’

‘A lot of people here don’t have a religion. But the thing is, we cannot throw a dead person into an incinerator without giving him some kind of a send-off.’

Peter pondered this a moment.

‘Can you . . . er . . . give me a rough idea what sort of send-off the majority of the personnel might consider . . . ’

‘Totally up to you. We’ve got some Catholics, we’ve got some Baptists, we’ve got some Buddhists . . . You name it, we’ve got some. I wouldn’t sweat about that. You were chosen because . . . Well, let’s just say that if you were a strict Pentecostal or a strict anything, you wouldn’t be here. Somebody studied your resumé and made a judgement that you can handle it.’

‘Handle funerals?’

‘Handle . . . whatever.’ She clenched her fists on the steering wheel, drew a deep breath. ‘Whatever.’

Peter sat in silence for a while. The landscape continued to flicker by. A rich, fragrant smell of whiteflower in various forms began to suffuse the cabin, seeping in from the back.

Dear Peter, wrote Bea. We are in big trouble.

He was sitting in his quarters, still unwashed, and naked. Goose-pimples prickled on his flesh: big trouble.

His wife’s words had been sent a fortnight ago, or twelve days to be precise. She had kept silent for the first forty-eight hours of his stay among the Oasans, evidently counselling herself that anything she wrote would go unread until his return. But after two days she’d written regardless. And written again the next day, and the next. She’d written eleven more messages, all of them now stored in glowing capsules at the bottom of his screen. Each capsule bore a number: the date of transmission. To his wife, these messages were already History. To him, they were a frozen Present, yet to be experienced. His head buzzed with the urgent need to open them all, to crack open those capsules with eleven rapid-fire jabs of his finger – and buzzed also with the knowledge that he could only take them in one at a time.

He could’ve started reading them an hour earlier, in the vehicle on the way back from the settlement. But Grainger’s odd mood during the drive had discouraged him from asking her to tell him when they were close enough to the USIC base for the Shoot to work. Although he wasn’t usually secretive or prone to embarrassment, he’d felt self-conscious at the prospect of reading his wife’s personal communications right next to Grainger. What if Bea made some unguardedly intimate reference? A gesture of sexual affection? No, it was better to restrain his eagerness and wait until he had privacy.