The Book of Strange New Things(94)

‘Your mother . . . ’ Peter began, lost for further words.

‘My mother gone,’ said Jesus Lover One. ‘Only her body remain.’

Peter nodded, striving to hide the queasy fascination provoked in him by the insect horde. Lover One’s philosophical attitude to the situation was perfectly sound – it was what Peter himself would have tried to persuade him to feel, had Lover One been terribly distraught. But the fact that Lover One wasn’t terribly distraught, or didn’t appear to be, confused Peter. It was one thing to deliver a funeral address to a bunch of unbelieving USIC workers, urging them to regard the body merely as a vehicle for the immortal soul; it was quite another thing to be standing next to someone who’d taken that principle so deeply to heart that they could watch their own mother’s body being overrun with insects. Peter’s eyes were drawn to one of the woman’s feet: the bugs, in their restless fidgeting, had exposed the toes. There were eight of them, very small and narrow. He’s assumed, because the Oasans were five-fingered, that they’d be five-toed, too. The mistakenness of that assumption made him realise how far he had to go before he truly understood these people.

‘Forgive me for not remembering, Lover One,’ said Peter, ‘but did I ever meet your mother? Before today?’

‘Never,’ Lover One replied. ‘Walk from here ???o our ?ur? . . . ???oo far.’

Peter wondered whether this was an ironic comment, implying that she’d never summoned up sufficient motivation to visit, or whether it literally meant she’d been too weak or ill to walk the distance. Most likely it was literal.

‘My mother begin – only begin – ???o know Je??u??,’ Lover One explained. He made a gesture in the air, gently rotating his hand to indicate slow, stumbling progress. ‘Every day, we carry your word?? away from ?ur? in our hand??, and we bring them ???o her. Every day, word?? go in her like food. Every day, ??he come more near ???o the Lord.’ And he turned his face in the direction of Peter’s church, as if watching his mother walk there after all.

In the days that followed, Peter learned what was really meant by ‘the harvest’. He realised that Jesus Lover One’s reason for fetching him to see the corpse had nothing to do with emotions. It was educative.

The alighting of the bugs on the flesh was just the first step in an industrious husbandry managed by the Oasans in every detail. The body, Peter learned, had been painted with a poison which intoxicated the bugs so that when they’d finished laying eggs, they were semi-conscious, unable to fly. The Oasans then collected them and, with great care, pulled them to bits. The legs and wings, when ground up and dried, made a fearsomely potent seasoning: one pinch could flavour a vat of food. The bodies yielded a rich nectar which was mixed with water and whiteflower to make honey, or processed into a vivid yellow dye. And, while various members of the Oasan community were busy transforming the insects’ remains into useful materials, the insects’ eggs were busy hatching. Peter was fetched at regular intervals to witness how things were getting on.

Like most people he’d ever known, except for one frankly barmy biology teacher at school, Peter was not very keen on maggots. Wise and practical though it might be to accept the naturalness of death and decay, the sight of those opportunistic little larvae always disgusted him. But the maggots on the body of Jesus Lover One’s mother were like nothing he’d ever seen before. They were calm and fat, rice-white, each the size of a large fruit-pip. There were many thousands of them, densely packed and pearlescent, and if you stared at them long enough they didn’t look like maggots at all, but like a cornucopia of albino raspberries.

These, too, the Oasans harvested.

When, at last, the body of Jesus Lover One’s mother had yielded all the bounty it was going to yield, she lay exhausted on the ground, in the shade of a couple of gently swaying garments that hung on the washing line nearby. Since she was the only Oasan Peter had seen completely naked, he had no way of telling how much of the grotesquery he saw before him was due to decay and how much of it was what he would have found under the clothing of any healthy, living Oasan. Her flesh, which smelled fermented but not foul, had turned grey as clay, and was pitted with pocks and cavities. She had no breasts or anything else suggesting human femaleness – or maleness. The paradigm he had in his head, based on photographs of human corpses in famines and concentration camps, was of flesh shrunk down to a thin parchment of skin to hold the bones together. That wasn’t what confronted him here. Lover One’s mother apparently had no ribs, no skeleton, just solid flesh that was liquefying. The holes eaten into her arms and legs exposed a ribbed black substance like liquorice.

Monster, was the word that came to his mind as he suppressed a shudder. But then Creatura: created thing, he reminded himself.

‘Now we pu??? her in the ground,’ said Lover One on the third day. There was no urgency or ceremonial portent in his voice, nor was it clear what he meant by ‘now’. As far as Peter was aware, no grave had been dug and there was no evidence of the community preparing for a solemn ritual.

‘Would you like me to . . . say something?’ suggested Peter. ‘At the funeral?’

‘Funeral?’

‘It’s the custom of our . . . ’ he began. Then, ‘When Christians . . . ’ he began again. Then, ‘Where I come from, when a person dies and is being buried, someone usually makes a speech before the body is put into the ground. They talk about the person who’s died, and they try to remind his friends and family about what made that person special.’