The Book of Strange New Things(78)
Love,
Peter
He stared at the words on the screen, aware that they needed expansion. Details, details. A woman called Maneely had confessed to him that she hadn’t given a thought to Christianity since she was a small child, but that she’d felt the presence of God today. He considered telling Bea that. His heart was thumping strangely. He left his message in draft form, unsent, and opened another capsule.
Dear Peter,
Are you sitting down? I hope so.
Darling, I’m pregnant. I know you’ll think that’s not possible. But I stopped taking the Pill a month before you left.
Please don’t be angry with me. I know we agreed to wait another couple of years. But please understand that I was scared you’d never come back. I was scared there’d be an explosion at the launch and your mission would be over before it began. Or that you’d disappear somewhere along the way, just disappear into space, and I would never even know what became of you. So, as the departure date got closer and closer, I got more and more desperate for some part of you to be here with me, no matter what.
I prayed and prayed about it but just didn’t feel I’d got an answer. In the end I left it in God’s hands whether I would be fertile so soon after coming off the Pill. Of course it was still my decision, I’m not denying that. I wish the decision had been ours together. Maybe it was – or could have been. Maybe if we’d discussed it, you would have said it was exactly what you’d been wanting to suggest yourself. But I was terrified you’d say no. Would you have? Just tell me straight, don’t spare me.
Whatever you feel, I hope it makes some difference to you that I’m proud and thrilled to be carrying your baby. Our baby. By the time you come back, I’ll be 26 weeks along the way and getting pretty enormous. That’s assuming I don’t have a miscarriage. I hope I don’t. It wouldn’t be the end of the world, and we could try again, but it would be a different child. This one I’m carrying feels so precious – already! You know what I was thinking when you made love to me on the way to the airport? I was thinking, I’m ready, this is the moment, this is exactly the right moment, all it needs now is one tiny seed. And I bet that was when it happened. Looking back, almost certainly, that was when it happened.
13
The engine kindled into life
‘And this is where it all started,’ said the woman solemnly. ‘This is what it looked like in the beginning.’
Peter nodded. He kept his jaw rigid and didn’t dare try to make the appropriate interested noises, for fear of breaking into a grin or even laughing out loud. The official opening of this facility was a momentous occasion for everyone gathered here today.
‘We put an extra-thick layer of epoxy on the top of the downstream surface,’ the woman continued, pointing to the relevant parts of the scale model, ‘to control the migration of water through the foundation. These tubes on the downstream side were connected to pressure transducers.’
If she’d been breezy or casual, it wouldn’t be so bad, but she was deadly earnest and that made it funnier, and everybody but him seemed to understand what she was talking about, which made it funnier still. Then there was the inherent comicality of an architectural scale model (so dignified, so full of symbolic importance, and yet so . . . dinky, like something from a children’s playground). And, added to that, the shape of the model itself: two inverted cups joined together, fully justifying the ‘Big Brassiere’ nickname.
The real buildings, from a distance, hadn’t struck him as particularly comical. He’d seen them, along with everyone else, looming on the horizon earlier in the afternoon as USIC’s convoy of vehicles drove across the scrubland, each vehicle ferrying half a dozen employees. The sheer size of the structures, and the fact that one partially obscured the other on approach, made them appear like nothing less than what they were: mighty works of architecture. When the convoy finally cruised to a standstill in front of the foremost structure, the vehicles parked in an area of shade so large that its contours were difficult to tell. Only once Peter and the other USIC personnel were gathered together in the entrance hall, contemplating a replica barely a metre high, was the design of this place revealed in all its bulbous symmetry. The officiating woman, Hayes, an engineer who’d worked closely with Severin, waved her hand in the air over the twin structures, oblivious to the fact that she appeared to be miming a caress of a sofa-sized bosom.
‘ . . . the desired g-level . . . self-weight displacements . . . overtopping simulation . . . ’ Hayes droned on. ‘ . . . uplift pressures with five transducers . . . proximity probe . . . ’
Peter’s urge to laugh had passed. Now, he could scarcely keep awake. The entrance hall was stiflingly warm and poorly ventilated; it felt rather like being enclosed inside an engine – which was basically what it was, of course. He swayed slightly on his feet, took a deep breath, and made an effort to stand straighter. Bubbles of trapped sweat squelched in his sandals; his eyes stung and Hayes became blurry.
‘ . . . recorded in real time . . . ’
He blinked. Hayes muddled back into focus. She was a tiny woman with a military-style masculine haircut and the sort of dress sense that made anything she wore look like a uniform even when it wasn’t. He’d made her acquaintance several days ago in the mess hall when she was shovelling her way through a plate of whiteflour mash and gravy. They’d conversed for ten, fifteen minutes and she’d been perfectly pleasant in a dull sort of way. She was from Alaska, used to like dogs and sledding but was content nowadays to read about them in magazines, and didn’t believe in any religion, although she kept ‘kind of an open mind about poltergeists’, having had a weird experience in an uncle’s house when she was twelve. Her low-pitched monotone was, he’d thought, mildly attractive, reminding him slightly of Bea’s melodious croon. But when delivering a lecture on thermodynamics and dam design, it wasn’t so scintillating.