The Book of Strange New Things

1. Forty minutes later he was up in the sky

‘I was going to say something,’ he said.

‘So say it,’ she said.

He was quiet, keeping his eyes on the road. In the darkness of the city’s outskirts, there was nothing to see except the tail-lights of other cars in the distance, the endless unfurling roll of tarmac, the giant utilitarian fixtures of the motorway.

‘God may be disappointed in me for even thinking it,’ he said.

‘Well,’ she sighed, ‘He knows already, so you may as well tell me.’

He glanced at her face, to judge what mood she was in as she said this, but the top half of her head, including her eyes, was veiled in a shadow cast by the edge of the windscreen. The bottom half of her face was lunar bright. The sight of her cheek, lips and chin — so intimately familiar to him, so much a part of life as he had known it — made him feel a sharp grief at the thought of losing her.

‘The world looks nicer with man-made lights,’ he said.

They drove on in silence. Neither of them could abide the chatter of radio or the intrusion of pre-recorded music. It was one of the many ways they were compatible.

‘Is that it?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘What I mean is… Unspoiled nature is supposed to be the ultimate in perfection, isn’t it, and all the man-made stuff is supposed to be a shame, just cluttering it up. But we wouldn’t enjoy the world half as much if we — man… that is, human beings… ’

(She gave him one of her get-on-with-it grunts.)

‘… if we hadn’t put electric lights all over it. Electric lights are actually attractive. They make a night drive like this bearable. Beautiful, even. I mean, just imagine if we had to do this drive in total darkness. Because that’s what the natural state of the world is, at night, isn’t it? Total darkness. Just imagine. You’d have the stress of not having a clue where you were going, not being able to see more than a few metres in front of you. And if you were heading for a city — well, in a non-technological world there wouldn’t be cities, I suppose — but if you were heading for a place where other people lived, living there naturally, maybe with a few campfires… You wouldn’t see them until you actually arrived. There wouldn’t be that magical vista when you’re a few miles away from a city, and all the lights are twinkling, like stars on the hillside.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘And even inside this car, assuming you could have a car, or some sort of vehicle, in this natural world, pulled by horses I suppose… It would be pitch black. And very cold, too, on a winter’s night. But instead, look what we’ve got here.’ He took one hand off the steering wheel (he always drove with both hands laid symmetrically on the wheel) and indicated the dashboard. The usual little lights glowed back at them. Temperature. Time. Water level. Oil. Speed. Fuel consumption.

‘Peter… ’

‘Oh, look!’ Several hundred metres up ahead, a tiny over-burdened figure, standing in a puddle of lamplight. ‘A hitchhiker. I’ll stop, shall I?’

‘No, don’t.’

The tone of her voice made him think better of challenging her, even though they seldom missed an opportunity to show kindness to strangers.

The hitchhiker raised his head in hope. As the headlights enveloped him, his body was — just for an instant — transformed from a vaguely humanoid shape into a recognisably individual person. He was holding a sign that said HETHROW.

‘How strange,’ said Peter, as they zoomed past. ‘You’d think he’d just take the Tube.’

‘Last day in the UK,’ said Beatrice. ‘Last chance to have a good time. He probably used up his British money in a pub, thinking he’d keep just enough for the train. Six drinks later he’s out in the fresh air, sobering up, and all he’s got left is his plane ticket and £1.70.’

It sounded plausible. But if it was true, then why leave this lost sheep in the lurch? It wasn’t like Bea to leave anybody stranded.

He turned towards her darkened face again, and was alarmed to see teardrops twinkling on her jaw and in the corners of her mouth.

‘Peter… ’ she said.

He took one hand off the steering wheel again, this time to squeeze her shoulder. Suspended over the highway up ahead was a sign with a symbol of an aeroplane on it.

‘Peter, this is our last chance.’

‘Last chance?’

‘To make love.’

The indicator lights flashed gently and went tick, tick, tick, as he eased the car into the airport lane. The words ‘make love’ bumbled against his brain, trying to get in, even though there was no room in there. He almost said, ‘You’re joking.’ But, even though she had a fine sense of humour and loved to laugh, she never joked about things that mattered.

As he drove on, the sense that they were not on the same page — that they needed different things at this crucial time — entered the car like a discomfiting presence. He’d thought — he’d felt — that yesterday morning had been their proper leavetaking, and that this trip to the airport was just… a postscript, almost. Yesterday morning had been so right. They’d finally worked their way to the bottom of their ‘To Do’ list. His bag was already packed. Bea had the day off work, they’d slept like logs, they’d woken up to brilliant sunshine warming the yellow duvet of their bed. Joshua the cat had been lying in a comical pose at their feet; they’d nudged him off and made love, without speaking, slowly and with great tenderness. Afterwards, Joshua had jumped back on the bed and tentatively laid one forepaw on Peter’s naked shin, as if to say, Don’t go; I will hold you here. It was a poignant moment, expressing the situation better than language could have, or perhaps it was just that the exotic cuteness of the cat put a protective furry layer over the raw human pain, making it endurable. Whatever. It was perfection. They’d lain there listening to Joshua’s throaty purr, enfolded in each other’s arms, their sweat evaporating in the sun, their heart-rates gradually reverting to normal.

‘One more time,’ she said to him now, above the engine noise on a dark motorway on the way to the plane that would take him to America and beyond.

He consulted the digital clock on the dashboard. He was supposed to be at the check-in counter in two hours; they were about fifteen minutes from the airport.

‘You’re wonderful,’ he said. Perhaps if he pronounced the words in exactly the right way, she might get the message that they shouldn’t try to improve on yesterday, that they should just leave it at that.

‘I don’t want to be wonderful,’ she said. ‘I want you inside me.’

He drove for a few seconds in silence, adjusting quickly to the circumstances. Prompt adjustment to changed circumstances was another thing they had in common.

‘There are lots of those horrible corporate hotels right near the airport,’ he said. ‘We could rent a room just for an hour.’ He regretted the ‘horrible’ bit; it sounded as though he was trying to dissuade her while pretending not to. He only meant that the hotels were the sort they both avoided if they possibly could.

‘Just find a quiet lay-by,’ she said. ‘We can do it in the car.’

‘Crisis!’ he said, and they both laughed. ‘Crisis’ was the word he’d trained himself to say instead of ‘Christ’, when he’d first become a Christian. The two words were close enough in sound for him to able to defuse a blasphemy when it was already half out of his mouth.

‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘Anywhere will do. Just don’t park in a place where another car’s likely to run into the back of us.’

The highway looked different to him now, as they drove on. In theory it was the same stretch of tarmac, bounded by the same traffic paraphernalia and flimsy metal fences, but it had been transformed by their own intent. It was no longer a straight line to an airport, it was a mysterious hinterland of shadowy detours and hidey-holes. Proof, once again, that reality was not objective, but always waiting to be reshaped and redefined by one’s attitude.

Of course, everybody on earth had the power to reshape reality. It was one of the things Peter and Beatrice talked about a lot. The challenge of getting people to grasp that life was only as grim and confining as you perceived it to be. The challenge of getting people to see that the immutable facts of existence were not so immutable after all. The challenge of finding a simpler word for ‘immutable’ than ‘immutable’.

‘How about here?’

Beatrice didn’t answer, only put her hand on his thigh. He steered the car smoothly into a truckstop. They would have to trust that getting squashed flat by a 44-ton lorry was not in God’s plan.

‘I’ve never done this before,’ he said, when he’d switched the ignition off.

‘You think I have?’ she said. ‘We’ll manage. Let’s get in the back.’

They swung out of their respective doors and were reunited several seconds later on the back seat. They sat like passengers, shoulder to shoulder. The upholstery smelled of other people — friends, neighbours, members of their church, hitchhikers. It made Peter doubt all the more whether he could or should make love here, now. Although… there was something exciting about it, too. They reached for each other, aiming for a smooth embrace, but their hands were clumsy in the dark.

‘How fast would the cabin light drain the car’s battery?’ she said.

‘I’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘Best not to risk it. Besides, it would make us a sideshow for all the passing traffic.’

‘I doubt it,’ she said, turning her face towards the headlights whizzing by. ‘I read an article once about a little girl who was being abducted. She managed to jump out of the car when it slowed down on the motorway. The kidnapper grabbed her, she put up a good fight, she was screaming for help. A stream of cars went past. Nobody stopped. They interviewed one of those drivers later. He said, “I was travelling so fast, I didn’t believe what I was seeing.”’

He shifted uncomfortably. ‘What an awful story. And maybe not the best of times to tell it.’

‘I know, I know, I’m sorry. I’m a bit… out of my mind just now.’ She laughed nervously. ‘It’s just so hard… losing you.’

‘You’re not losing me. I’m just going away for a while. I’ll be… ’

‘Peter, please. Not now. We’ve done that part. We’ve done what we can with that part.’

She leaned forward, and he thought she was going to start sobbing. But she was fishing something out from the gap between the two front seats. A small battery-operated torch. She switched it on and balanced it on the headrest of the front passenger seat; it fell off. Then she wedged it in the narrow space between the seat and the door, angled it so that its beam shone on the floor.

‘Nice and subdued,’ she said, her voice steady again. ‘Just enough light so we can make each other out.’

‘I’m not sure I can do this,’ he said.

‘Let’s just see what happens,’ she said, and began to unbutton her shirt, exposing her white bra and the swell of her bosom. She allowed the shirt to fall down her arms, wiggled her shoulders and elbows to shake the silky material off her wrists. She removed her skirt, panties and pantyhose all together, hooked in her strong thumbs, and made the motion look graceful and easy.

‘Now you.’

He unclasped his trousers and she helped him remove them. Then she slid onto her back, contorting her arms to remove her bra, and he tried to reposition himself without squashing her with his knees. His head bumped against the ceiling.

‘We’re like a couple of clueless teenagers here,’ he complained. ‘This is… ’

She laid her hand on his face, covering his mouth.

‘We’re you and me,’ she said. ‘You and me. Man and wife. Everything’s fine.’

She was naked now except for the wristwatch on her thin wrist and the pearl necklace around her throat. In the torchlight, the necklace was no longer an elegant wedding anniversary gift but became a primitive erotic adornment. Her breasts shook with the force of her heartbeat.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Do it.’

And so they began. Pressed close together, they could no longer see each other; the torchlight’s purpose was over. Their mouths were joined, their eyes clasped shut, their bodies could have been anyone’s bodies since the world was created.

‘Harder,’ Beatrice gasped after a while. Her voice had a harsh edge to it, a brute tenacity he’d never heard in her before. Their lovemaking had always been decorous, friendly, impeccably considerate. Sometimes serene, sometimes energetic, sometimes athletic, even — but never desperate. ‘Harder!’

Confined and uncomfortable, with his toes knocking against the window and his knees chafing on the furry viscose of the car seat, he did his best, but the rhythm and angle weren’t right and he misjudged how much longer she needed and how long he could last.

‘Don’t stop! Go on! Go on!’

But it was over.

‘It’s OK,’ she finally said, and wriggled from under him, clammy with sweat. ‘It’s OK’.

They were at Heathrow in plenty of time. The check-in lady gave Peter’s passport the once-over. ‘Travelling one-way to Orlando, Florida, yes?’ she said. ‘Yes,’ he said. She asked him if he had any suitcases to check in. He swung a sports bag and a rucksack onto the belt. It came across as dodgy somehow. But the logistics of his journey were too complicated and uncertain for a return booking. He wished Beatrice weren’t standing next to him, listening to these confirmations of his imminent departure into thin air; wished she’d been spared hearing the word ‘one-way’.

And then, of course, once he was handed his boarding pass, there was more time to fill before he would actually be allowed on the plane. Side by side, he and Beatrice meandered away from the check-in desks, a little dazzled by the excessive light and monstrous scale of the terminal. Was it the fluorescent glare that made Beatrice’s face look drawn and anxious? Peter put his arm around the small of her back. She smiled up at him reassuringly, but he was not reassured. WHY NOT START YOUR HOLIDAY UPSTAIRS? the billboards leered. WITH OUR EVER-EXPANDING SHOPPING OPPORTUNITIES, YOU MAY NOT WANT TO LEAVE!

At this hour of evening, the airport was not too crowded, but there were still plenty of people trundling luggage and browsing in the shops. Peter and Beatrice took their seats near an information screen, to await the number of his departure gate. They joined hands, not looking at each other, looking instead at the dozens of would-be passengers filing past. A gaggle of pretty young girls, dressed like pole dancers at the start of a shift, emerged from a duty-free store burdened with shopping bags. They tottered along in high heels, scarcely able to carry their multiple prizes. Peter leaned towards Beatrice’s face and murmured:

‘Why would anybody want to go on a flight so heavily laden? And then when they get to wherever they’re going, they’ll buy even more stuff. And look: they can barely walk.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘But maybe that’s the whole point. Maybe this is a display put on specially for us. The sheer impracticality of it all — right down to the ridiculous shoes. It lets everyone know these girls are so rich they don’t have to worry about the real world. Their wealth makes them like a different creature, an exotic thing that doesn’t have to function like a human.’

Bea shook her head. ‘These girls aren’t rich,’ she said. ‘Rich people don’t travel in packs. And rich females don’t walk as if they’re not used to high heels. These girls are just young and they enjoy shopping. They’re having an adventure. They’re showing off to each other, not to us. We’re invisible to them.’

Peter watched the girls stagger towards Starbucks. Their buttocks quivered inside their wrinkled skirts and their voices became raucous, betraying regional accents. Bea was right.

He sighed, squeezed her hand. What was he going to do without her, out in the field? How would he cope, not being able to discuss his perceptions? She was the one who stopped him coming out with claptrap, curbed his tendency to construct grand theories that encompassed everything. She brought him down to earth. Having her by his side on this mission would have been worth a million dollars.

But it was costing a great deal more than a million dollars to send him alone, and USIC was footing the bill.

‘Are you hungry? Can I get you anything?’

‘We ate at home.’

‘A chocolate bar or something?’

She smiled but looked tired. ‘I’m fine. Honestly.’

‘I feel so bad about letting you down.’

‘Letting me down?’

‘You know… In the car. It feels unfair, unfinished, and today of all days… I hate to leave you like this.’

‘It’ll be awful,’ she said. ‘But not because of that.’

‘The angle, the unfamiliar angle made me… ’

‘Please, Peter, there’s no need for this. I’m not keeping a score-card or a balance sheet. We made love. That’s enough for me.’

‘I feel I’ve… ’

She stopped his mouth with her finger, then kissed him. ‘You’re the best man in the world.’ She kissed him again, on the forehead. ‘If you’re going to do post-mortems, I’m sure there’ll be much better reasons on this mission.’

His brow furrowed against her lips. What did she mean by ‘postmortems’? Was she just referring to the inevitability of encountering obstacles and setbacks? Or was she convinced that the mission as a whole would end in failure? In death?

He stood up; she stood up with him. They held each other tight. A large party of tourists poured into the hall, fresh from a coach and keen to travel to the sun. Surging towards their appointed gate, the babbling revellers split into two streams, flowing around Peter and Bea. When they’d all gone and the hall was relatively quiet again, a voice through the PA said: ‘Please keep your belongings with you at all times. Unattended items will be removed and may be destroyed.’

‘Do you have some sort of… instinct my mission will fail?’ he asked her.

She shook her head, bumping his jaw with her skull.

‘You don’t feel God’s hand in this?’ he persisted.

She nodded.

‘Do you think He would send me all the way to — ’

‘Please, Peter. Don’t talk.’ Her voice was husky. ‘We’ve covered all this ground so many times. It’s pointless now. We’ve just got to have faith.’

They sat back down, tried to make themselves comfortable in the chairs. She laid her head on his shoulder. He thought about history, the hidden human anxieties behind momentous events. The tiny trivial things that were probably bothering Einstein or Darwin or Newton as they formulated their theories: arguments with the landlady, maybe, or concern over a blocked fireplace. The pilots who bombed Dresden, fretting over a phrase in a letter from back home: What did she mean by that? Or what about Columbus, when he was sailing towards the New Land… who knows what was on his mind? The last words spoken to him by an old friend, perhaps, a person not even remembered in history books…

‘Have you decided,’ said Bea, ‘what your first words will be?’

‘First words?’

‘To them. When you meet them.’

He tried to think. ‘It’ll depend… ’ he said uneasily. ‘I have no idea what I’m going to find. God will guide me. He’ll give me the words I need.’

‘But when you imagine it… the meeting… what picture comes to your mind?’

He stared straight ahead. An airport employee dressed in overalls with bright yellow reflective sashes was unlocking a door labelled KEEP LOCKED AT ALL TIMES. ‘I don’t picture it in advance,’ he said. ‘You know what I’m like. I can’t live through stuff until it happens. And anyway, the way things really turn out is always different from what we might imagine.’

She sighed. ‘I have a picture. A mental picture.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Promise you won’t make fun of me.’

‘I promise.’

She spoke into his chest. ‘I see you standing on the shore of a huge lake. It’s night and the sky is full of stars. On the water, there’s hundreds of small fishing boats, bobbing up and down. Each boat has at least one person in it, some have three or four, but I can’t see any of them properly, it’s too dark. None of the boats are going anywhere, they’ve all dropped anchor, because everyone is listening. The air is so calm you don’t even have to shout. Your voice just carries over the water.’

He stroked her shoulder. ‘A nice… ’ He was about to say ‘dream’, but it would have sounded dismissive. ‘Vision.’

She made a sound that could have been a croon of assent, or a subdued cry of pain. Her body was heavy against him, but he let her settle and tried not to fidget.

Diagonally opposite Peter and Beatrice’s seats was a chocolate and biscuit shop. It was still doing a brisk trade despite the lateness of the hour; five customers stood queued at the checkout, and several others were browsing. Peter watched as a young, well-dressed woman selected an armful of purchases from the display racks. Jumbo-sized boxes of pralines, long slim cartons of shortbreads, a Toblerone the size of a truncheon. Hugging them all to her breast, she ambled beyond the pylon supporting the shop’s ceiling, as if to check out whether there were more goodies displayed outside. Then she simply walked away, into the swirl of passers-by, towards the ladies’ toilets.

‘I’ve just witnessed a crime,’ Peter murmured into Beatrice’s hair. ‘Have you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought you might be dozing off.’

‘No, I saw her too.’

‘Should we have nabbed her?’

‘Nabbed her? You mean, like, a citizen’s arrest?’

‘Or at least reported her to the shop staff.’

Beatrice pressed her head harder against his shoulder as they watched the woman disappear into the loo. ‘Would that help anyone?’

‘It might remind her that stealing is wrong.’

‘I doubt it. Getting caught would just make her hate the people catching her.’

‘So, as Christians, we should just let her get on with stealing?’

‘As Christians, we should spread the love of Christ. If we do our job right, we’ll create people who don’t want to do wrong.’

‘“Create”?’

‘You know what I mean. Inspire. Educate. Show the way.’ She lifted her head, kissed his brow. ‘Exactly what you’re about to do. On this mission. My brave man.’

He blushed, gratefully swallowing the compliment like a thirsty child. He hadn’t realised how much he needed it just now. It was so huge inside him he thought his chest would burst.

‘I’m going to the prayer room,’ he said. ‘Want to come?’

‘In a little while. You go ahead.’

He stood up and walked without hesitation towards Heathrow’s chapel. It was the one place in Heathrow, Gatwick, Edinburgh, Dublin and Manchester airports that he knew how to find without any bother. It was always the ugliest, dowdiest room in the entire complex, a far cry from the glittery hives of commerce. But there was soul in it.

Having found it again, he perused the timetable posted on the door in case he’d arrived just in time for a rare Communion. But the next one wasn’t scheduled till Thursday afternoon at three, by which time he would be an unimaginable distance away from here, and Beatrice would have started her long months of sleeping alone with Joshua.

He pushed the door open gently. The three Muslims kneeling inside didn’t acknowledge him as he walked in. They were facing a piece of paper attached to the wall, a computer-printed pictogram of a large arrow, like a traffic sign. It pointed to Mecca. The Muslims bowed, thrusting their rumps in the air, and kissed the fabric of the brightly coloured mats provided. They were immaculately dressed men, with expensive watches and bespoke suits. Their polished patent-leather shoes had been tossed aside. The balls of their stockinged feet squirmed with the enthusiasm of their obeisance.

Peter cast a quick glance behind the curtain that divided the room down the middle. As he’d suspected, there was a woman there, another Muslim, shrouded in grey, performing the same mute ritual. She had a child with her, a miraculously well-behaved little boy dressed like Little Lord Fauntleroy. He was sitting near his mother’s feet, ignoring her prostrations, reading a comic. Spider-Man.

Peter walked over to the cabinet where the Holy Books and pamphlets were kept. The Bible (a Gideon edition), a separate New Testament and Psalms, a Qur’an, a tatty book in Indonesian that was probably another New Testament. Stacked on a lower shelf, next to the Watchtower and the Salvation Army newspapers, was an optimistically large pile of leaflets. The logos looked familiar, so he bent down to identify them. They were from a very large American evangelical sect whose London pastor had been interviewed for this same mission. Peter actually met him in the USIC foyer, leaving in a huff. ‘Bunch of time-wasters,’ the guy hissed as he headed for the exit. Peter had expected to be unsuccessful too, but instead… he had been chosen. Why him and not someone from a church with loads of money and political clout? He still wasn’t sure. He opened one of the leaflets, immediately saw the usual stuff about the numerological significance of 666, barcodes and the Whore of Babylon. Maybe that was the problem right there: fanaticism wasn’t what USIC was looking for.

The quiet of the room was interrupted by an intercom message, piped through a small speaker attached, limpet-like, to the ceiling.

‘Allied Airlines regrets to announce that there has been a further delay to Flight AB31 to Alicante. This is due to technical problems with the aircraft. The next announcement will be made at 2230. Any remaining passengers who have not yet picked up their meal vouchers are requested to do so. Allied Airlines would like to apologise once again for any inconvenience.’

Peter fancied he could hear a collective moan of lamentation start up outside, but it was probably his imagination.

He opened the Visitors Book and leafed through its ledger-sized pages, reading the comments scribbled one beneath the other by travellers from all over the world. They didn’t disappoint him; they never did. Today’s entries alone filled three pages. Some were in Chinese characters, or Arabic script, but most were in English, halting or otherwise. The Lord was here, poured forth in this welter of biro ink and felt-tip pen.

It always struck him, whenever he was in an airport, that the entire, vast, multi-storied complex pretended to be a playground of secular delights, a galaxy of consumerism in which religious faith simply did not exist. Every shop, every billboard, every inch of the building right down to the rivets and the toilet plugholes, radiated the presumption that no one had any need for God here. The crowds that queued for snacks and knick-knacks, the constant stream of passengers recorded by the closed-circuit TVs, were wondrous proof of the sheer variety of human specimens, except that they were presumed to be identically faithless inside, duty-free in every sense of that word. And yet these hordes of bargain-hunters, honeymooners, sunbathers, business executives preoccupied with their deals, fashionistas haggling for their upgrades… no one would guess how many of them ducked into this little room and wrote heartfelt messages to the Almighty and to their fellow believers.

Dear God, please take all the bad parts out of the world — Johnathan.

A child, he guessed.

Yuko Oyama, Hyoyo, Japan. I pray for the children of illness and peace of planet. And I pray for finding a good partner.

Where is the CROSS of CHRIST our RISEN LORD? Wake UP!

Charlotte Hogg, Birmingham. Please pray that my beloved daughter and grandson will be able to accept my illness. And pray for everyone in distress.

Marijn Tegelaars, London/Belgium. My dearest friend G, that she may find the courage to be who she is.

Jill, England. Please pray for my late mother’s soul to rest peacefully and pray for my family who are not united and hate each other.

Allah is the best! God rules!

The next entry was indecipherably crossed out. A nasty, intolerant rebuttal of the Muslim message above, most likely, deleted by another Muslim or by the caretaker of the Prayer Room.

Coralie Sidebottom, Slough, Berks. Thanks for God’s wonderful creation.

Pat & Ray Murchiston, Langton, Kent. For our dear son, Dave, killed in a car crash yesterday. Forever in our hearts.

Thorne, Frederick, Co. Armagh, Ireland. I pray for the healing of the planet and the awakening of ALL peoples on it.

A mother. My heart is broken as my son has not spoken to me since my remarriage 7 years ago. Please pray for reconciliation.

Awful smell of cheap air freshener you can do better than this.

Moira Venger, South Africa. God is in control.

Michael Lupin, Hummock Cottages, Chiswick. Some other smell than antiseptic.

Jamie Shapcott, 27 Pinley Grove, Yeovil, Somerset. Please can my BA plane to Newcastle not crash. Thank you.

Victoria Sams, Tamworth, Staffs. Nice décor but the lights keep going on and off.

Lucy, Lossiemouth. Bring my man back safely.

He closed the book. His hands were trembling. He knew that there was quite a decent chance that he would die in the next thirty days, or that, even if he survived the journey, he would never return. This was his Gethsemane moment. He clenched his eyes shut and prayed to God to tell him what He wanted him to do; whether it would serve His purpose better if he grabbed Beatrice by the hand and ran with her to the exit and out to the car park, and drove straight back home before Joshua had even registered that he was gone.

By way of answer, God let him listen to the hysterical babble of his own inner voice, let it echo in the vault of his skull. Then, behind him, he heard a jingle of loose change as one of the Muslims jumped up to retrieve his shoes. Peter turned around. The Muslim man nodded courteously at him on his way out. The woman behind the curtain was touching up her lipstick, primping her eyelashes with her little finger, tucking stray hairs inside the edges of her hijab. The arrow on the wall fluttered slightly as the man swung open the door.

Peter’s hands had ceased trembling. He had been granted perspective. This was not Gethsemane: he wasn’t headed for Golgotha, he was embarking on a great adventure. He’d been chosen out of thousands, to pursue the most important missionary calling since the Apostles had ventured forth to conquer Rome with the power of love, and he was going to do his best.

Beatrice wasn’t in the seat where he’d left her. For a few seconds he thought she’d lost her nerve and fled the terminal rather than say her last goodbye. He felt a pang of grief. But then he spotted her a few rows further towards the coffee and muffin kiosk. She was on the floor on her hands and knees, her face obscured by loose hair. Hunkered down in front of her, also on its hands and knees, was a child — a fat toddler, whose elasticated trousers bulged with an ill-concealed nappy.

‘Look! I’ve got… ten fingers!’ she was telling the child. ‘Have you got ten fingers?’

The fat toddler slid his hands forward, almost touching Bea’s. She made a show of counting the digits, then said ‘A hundred! No, ten!’ The boy laughed. An older child, a girl, stood shyly back, sucking on her knuckles. She kept looking back at her mother, but the mother was looking neither at her children nor at Beatrice; instead, she was focused on a hand-held gadget.

‘Oh, hi,’ said Beatrice when she saw Peter coming. She brushed her hair off her face, tucked it behind her ears. ‘This is Jason and Gemma. They’re going to Alicante.’

‘We hope,’ said the mother wearily. The gadget made a small beeping noise, having analysed the glucose levels of the woman’s blood.

‘These people have been here since two p.m.,’ explained Beatrice. ‘They’re stressed out.’

‘Never again,’ muttered the woman as she rummaged in a travel pouch for her insulin injections. ‘I swear. They take your money and they don’t give a shit.’

‘Joanne, this is my husband Peter. Peter, this is Joanne.’

Joanne nodded in greeting but was too bound up in her misfortune to make small talk. ‘It all looks dead cheap on the brochure,’ she remarked bitterly, ‘but you pay for it in grief.’

‘Oh, don’t be like that, Joanne,’ counselled Beatrice. ‘You’ll have a lovely time. Nothing bad has actually happened. Just think: if the plane had been scheduled to leave eight hours later, you would’ve been doing the same thing as you’re doing now — waiting, except at home.’

‘These two should be in bed,’ grumbled the woman, baring a roll of abdominal flesh and sticking the needle in.

Jason and Gemma, righteously offended by the allegation that they were sleepy rather than maltreated, looked poised for a fresh set of tantrums. Beatrice got on her hands and knees again. ‘I think I’ve lost my feet,’ she said, peering nearsightedly around the floor. ‘Where have they gone?’

‘They’re here!’ cried little Jason, as she turned away from him. ‘Where?’ she said, spinning back.

‘Thank God,’ said Joanne. ‘Here comes Freddie with the food.’

A hassled-looking fellow with no chin and a porridge-coloured windcheater lumbered into view, several paper bags clutched in each hand.

‘World’s biggest rip-off,’ he announced. ‘They keep you standing there with your little voucher for two quid or whatever. It’s like the dole office. I tell you, in another half an hour, if this lot don’t bloody well — ’

‘Freddie,’ said Beatrice brightly, ‘this is my husband, Peter.’

The man put down his packages and shook Peter’s hand.

‘Your wife’s a bit of an angel, Pete. Is she always taking pity on waifs and strays?’

‘We… we both believe in being friendly,’ said Peter. ‘It costs nothing and it makes life more interesting.’

‘When are we gonna see the sea?’ said Gemma, and yawned.

‘Tomorrow, when you wake up,’ said the mother.

‘Will the nice lady be there?’

‘No, she’s going to America.’

Beatrice motioned the little girl to come and sit against her hip. The toddler had already dropped off to sleep, sprawled against a canvas backpack filled to bursting point. ‘Wires slightly crossed,’ said Beatrice. ‘It’s my husband who’s going, not me.’

‘You stay home with the kids, huh?’

‘We don’t have any,’ said Beatrice. ‘Yet.’

‘Do yourselves a favour,’ sighed the man. ‘Don’t. Just skip it.’

‘Oh, you don’t mean that,’ said Beatrice. And Peter, seeing that the man was about to make an off-hand retort, added: ‘Not really.’

And so the conversation went on. Beatrice and Peter got into rhythm, perfectly united in purpose. They’d done this hundreds of times before. Conversation, genuine unforced conversation, but with the potential to become something much more significant if the moment arose when it was right to mention Jesus. Maybe that moment would come; maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe they would just say ‘God bless you’ in parting and that would be it. Not every encounter could be transformative. Some conversations were just amiable exchanges of breath.

Coaxed into this exchange, the two strangers relaxed despite themselves. Within minutes they were even laughing. They were from Merton, they had diabetes and depression respectively, they both worked in a hardware superstore, they’d saved up for this holiday for a year. They were none too bright and not very fascinating. The woman had an unattractive snort and the man stank terribly of musk aftershave. They were human beings, and precious in the eyes of God.

‘My plane is about to board,’ said Peter at last.

Beatrice was still on the floor, the head of a stranger’s child lolling on her thigh. Her eyes were glassy with tears.

‘If I come with you to Security,’ she said, ‘and hold you when you’re about to go through, I won’t be able to cope, I swear. I’ll lose it, I’ll cause a scene. So kiss me goodbye here.’

Peter felt as if his heart was being cleaved in half. What had seemed like a grand adventure in the prayer room now bereaved him like a sacrifice. He clung to the words of the Apostle: Do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry. For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand.

He bent down and Beatrice gave him a quick, rough kiss on the lips, clasping the back of his head with one hand as she did so. He straightened up, dazed. This whole scenario with the strangers — she’d engineered it to happen, he could see that now.

‘I’ll write,’ he promised.

She nodded, and the motion shook the tears out onto her cheeks.

He walked briskly to Departures. Forty minutes later he was up in the sky.

2. He would never see other humans the same way again

The USIC chauffeur emerged from the gas station with a bottle of Tang and a spotless, supernaturally yellow banana. Dazzled by the sun, he scanned the forecourt for his tanked-up limousine and its precious foreign cargo. That cargo was Peter, who was using this fuel stop to stretch his legs and attempt one last call.

‘Excuse me,’ said Peter. ‘Can you help me with this phone?’

The man seemed flummoxed by this request, jerking his hands around to indicate that they were both full. In his dark blue suit, complete with tie, he was overdressed for the Florida heat, and was still suffering some residual stress from the plane’s delayed arrival. It was almost as if he held Peter personally responsible for the turbulent atmospheric conditions over the North Atlantic ocean.

‘What’s the problem with it?’ he said, as he balanced the drink and the banana on the sun-blazed surface of the limousine’s roof.

‘Probably nothing,’ said Peter, squinting down at the gadget in his palm. ‘I probably don’t know how to use it properly.’

That was true. He wasn’t good with gadgets, and used a phone only when circumstances forced him to; the rest of the time it would hibernate in his clothing, eventually becoming obsolete. Every year or so, Beatrice would tell him what his new number was, or what her new number was, because yet another service provider had become too frustrating to deal with or had gone bust. Businesses were going bust with alarming frequency these days; Bea kept up with stuff like that, Peter didn’t. All he knew was that memorising two new telephone numbers every year was not easy for him, despite his ability to memorise long passages of Scripture. And his unease with technology was such that if he pressed the gadget’s call symbol and nothing happened — as he’d just done, here in the blinding limbo of Florida — he couldn’t imagine what to do next.

The chauffeur was keen to resume the drive: there was still a long way to go. Biting off a mouthful of banana, he took hold of Peter’s phone and examined it mistrustfully.

‘Has this got the right kinda card in it?’ he mumbled as he chewed. ‘For calling… ah… England?’

‘I think so,’ said Peter. ‘I believe so.’

The chauffeur handed it back, non-committal. ‘Looks like a healthy cellphone to me.’

Peter stepped under the shade of a metal canopy that overhung the fuel pumps. He tried once more to tap the correct sequence of symbols. This time, he was rewarded with a staccato melody: the international code followed by Bea’s number. He held the metal lozenge to his ear and stared out at the unfamiliarly blue sky and the sculpted trees surrounding the truckstop.

‘Hello?’

‘It’s me,’ he said.

‘… ello?’

‘Can you hear me?’ he said.

‘… hear you… ’ said Bea. Her voice was enveloped in a blizzard of static. Random words jumped out of the phone’s tiny amplifier like stray sparks.

‘I’m in Florida,’ he said.

‘… middle… night,’ she answered.

‘I’m sorry. Did I wake you?’

‘… love you… how are… know what…?’

‘I’m safe and sound,’ he said. Sweat was making the phone slippery in his fingers. ‘Sorry to be calling you now but I may not get another chance later. The plane was delayed and we’re in a big hurry.’

‘… e… o… in the… me… guy know anything about…?’

He walked further away from the vehicle, leaving the shade of the metal canopy. ‘This guy knows nothing about anything,’ he murmured, trusting that his words were being transmitted more clearly to her than hers were to him. ‘I’m not even sure if he works for USIC.’

‘… haven’t ask…?’

‘No, I haven’t asked yet. I will.’ He felt a bit sheepish. He’d spent twenty, thirty minutes in the car with this chauffeur already and hadn’t even established if he was an actual USIC employee or just a driver for hire. All he’d learned so far was that the photo of the little girl on the dashboard was the driver’s daughter, that the driver was newly divorced from the little girl’s mother, and that the mother’s mom was an attorney who was working hard to make the driver regret the day he was born. ‘It’s all very… hectic at the moment. And I didn’t sleep on the flight. I’ll write to you when I’m… you know, when I get to the other end. Then I’ll have plenty of time and I’ll put you in the picture. It’ll be just like we’re travelling together.’

There was a rush of static and he wasn’t sure if she had fallen silent or if her words were being swallowed up. He raised his voice: ‘How’s Joshua?’

‘… first few… he just… o… ink… side… ’

‘I’m sorry, you’re breaking up. And this guy wants me to stop talking. I have to go. I love you. I wish… I love you.’

‘… you too… ’

And she was gone.

‘That your wife?’ said the driver when Peter had settled back into the vehicle and they were pulling out of the truckstop.

Actually, no, Peter felt like saying, that was not my wife, that was a bunch of disassembled electronic noises coming out of a small metal device. ‘Yes,’ he said. His almost obsessional preference for face-to-face communication was too difficult to explain to a stranger. Even Beatrice had trouble understanding it sometimes.

‘And your kid’s called Joshua?’ The driver seemed unconcerned by any social taboo against eavesdropping.

‘Joshua’s our cat,’ said Peter. ‘We don’t have children.’

‘Saves a lot of drama,’ said the driver.

‘You’re the second person in two days who’s told me that. But I’m sure you love your daughter.’

‘No choice!’ The driver waved one hand towards the windscreen, to indicate the whole world of experience, destiny, whatever. ‘What does your wife do?’

‘She’s a nurse.’

‘That’s a good job. Better than an attorney anyways. Making people’s lives better instead of making them worse.’

‘Well, I hope being a minister achieves the same thing.’

‘Sure,’ said the driver breezily. He didn’t sound sure at all.

‘And what about you?’ said Peter. ‘Are you a USIC… uh… staff member, or do they just hire you for taxi jobs?’

‘Been a driver for USIC for nine, ten years,’ said the chauffeur. ‘Goods, mainly. Academics sometimes. USIC holds a lot of conferences. And then every now and then, there’s an astronaut.’

Peter nodded. For a second he imagined the driver picking up an astronaut from Orlando Airport, pictured a square-jawed hulk in a bulbous space suit lumbering through the arrivals hall towards the placard-wielding chauffeur. Then he twigged.

‘I’ve never thought of myself as an astronaut,’ he said.

‘It’s an old-fashioned word,’ conceded the chauffeur. ‘I use it out of respect for tradition, I guess. The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that’s always been there, and the next minute it’s just a memory.’

Peter looked out the window. The motorway looked much the same as a motorway in the UK, but there were giant metal signs informing him that splendid attractions like the Econlockhatchee River and the Hal Scott Regional Nature Preserve were somewhere nearby, hidden beyond the windbreaks. Stylised illustrations on billboards evoked the joys of camping and horseback riding.

‘One of the good things about USIC,’ said the driver, ‘is that they have some respect for tradition. Or maybe they just recognise the value of a brand. They bought Cape Canaveral, you know that? They own the whole place. Must have cost them a fortune, and they could’ve built their launch site somewhere else, there’s so much real estate up for grabs these days. But they wanted Cape Canaveral. I call that class.’

Peter made a vague noise of agreement. The classiness — or otherwise — of multinational corporations was not a subject on which he had strong opinions. One of the few things he knew about USIC was that it owned lots of formerly defunct factories in formerly destitute towns in sloughed-off parts of the former Soviet Union. He somehow doubted that ‘classy’ was the right word for what went on there. As for Cape Canaveral, the history of space travel had never been of the slightest interest to him, even as a kid. He’d not even noticed that NASA had ceased to exist. It was the sort of nugget of useless information that Beatrice was liable to unearth while reading the newspapers that would later be put underneath Joshua’s food bowls.

He missed Joshua already. Beatrice often left for work at dawn, when Joshua was still fast asleep on the bed. Even if he stirred and miaowed, she would hurry off and say, ‘Daddy will feed you.’ And sure enough, an hour or two later, Peter would be sitting in the kitchen, munching sweet cereal, while Joshua munched savoury cereal on the floor nearby. Then Joshua would jump on the kitchen table and lick the milk dregs from Peter’s bowl. Not something he was allowed to do when Mummy was around.

‘The training is tough, am I right?’ said the chauffeur.

Peter sensed he was expected to tell stories of military-style exercise regimens, Olympic tests of endurance. He had no such tales to tell. ‘There’s a physical,’ he conceded. ‘But most of the screening is… questions.’

‘Yeah?’ said the driver. A few moments later, he switched on the car radio. ‘… continues in Pakistan,’ an earnest voice began, ‘as anti-government forces… ’ The chauffeur switched to a music station, and the vintage sounds of A Flock of Seagulls warbled out.

Peter leaned back and recalled some of the questions in his screening interviews. These sessions, held in a boardroom on the tenth floor of a swanky London hotel, had gone on for hours at a time. One American woman was a constant presence: an elegant, tiny anorexic, who carried herself like a famous choreographer or retired ballet dancer. Bright-eyed and nasal-voiced, she nursed glass mugs of decaffeinated coffee as she worked, aided by a changeable team of other interrogators. Interrogators was the wrong word, perhaps, since everyone was friendly and there was an odd sense that they were rooting for him to succeed.

‘How long can you go without your favourite ice-cream?’

‘I don’t have a favourite ice-cream.’

‘What smell reminds you most of your childhood?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe custard.’

‘Do you like custard?’

‘It’s OK. These days I mainly have it on Christmas pudding.’

‘What do you think of when you think of Christmas?’

‘Christ’s Mass, a celebration of Jesus’s birth, held at the time of the Roman winter solstice. John Chrysostom. Syncretism. Santa Claus. Snow.’

‘Do you celebrate it yourself?’

‘We make a big deal of it in our church. We organise presents for disadvantaged children, put on Christmas dinner at our drop-in centre… A lot of people feel horribly lost and depressed at that time of year. You have to try to get them though it.’

‘How well do you sleep in beds that aren’t your own?’

He’d had to think about that one. Cast his mind back to the cheap hotels he and Bea had stayed in when they’d participated in evangelist rallies in other cities. The friends’ sofas that converted into mattresses of a kind. Or, further back still in his life, the tough choice between keeping your coat on so you’d shiver less, or using it as a pillow to soften the concrete against your skull. ‘I’m probably… average,’ he said. ‘As long as it’s a bed and I’m horizontal, I think I’m fine.’

‘Are you irritable before your first coffee of the day?’

‘I don’t drink coffee.’

‘Tea?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Sometimes you’re irritable?’

‘I don’t get annoyed easily.’ This was true, and these interrogations provided additional proof. He enjoyed the sparring, felt he was being tested rather than judged. The rapid-fire questions were an invigorating change from church services where he was expected to orate for an hour while others sat silent. He wanted the job, wanted it badly, but the outcome was in God’s hands, and there was nothing to be gained by getting anxious, giving dishonest answers or straining to please. He would be himself, and hope that that was enough.

‘How would you feel about wearing sandals?’

‘Why, will I have to?’

‘You might.’ This from a man whose feet were sheathed in expensive black leather shoes so shiny that Peter’s face was reflected in them.

‘How do you feel if you haven’t accessed social media for a day?’

‘I don’t access social media. At least I don’t think so. What do you mean exactly by “social media”?’

‘It’s OK.’ Whenever a question got tangled, they tended to change tack. ‘Which politician do you hate most?’

‘I don’t hate anyone. And I don’t really follow politics.’

‘It’s nine o’clock at night and the power fails. What do you do?’

‘Fix it, if I can.’

‘But how would you spend the time if you couldn’t?’

‘Talk to my wife, if she was at home at the time.’

‘How do you think she’ll cope if you’re away from home for a while?’

‘She’s a very independent and capable woman.’

‘Would you say you’re an independent and capable man?’

‘I hope so.’

‘When did you last get drunk?’

‘About seven, eight years ago.’

‘Do you feel like a drink now?’

‘I wouldn’t mind some more of this peach juice.’

‘With ice?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘Imagine this,’ the woman said. ‘You visit a foreign city and your hosts invite you out for dinner. The restaurant they take you to is pleasant and lively. There’s a large transparent enclosure of cute white ducklings running around behind their mother. Every few minutes, a chef grabs one of the ducklings and tosses it into a vat of boiling oil. When it’s fried, it gets served up to the diners and everyone is happy and relaxed. Your hosts order duckling and say you should try it, it’s fantastic. What do you do?’

‘Is there anything else on the menu?’

‘Sure, lots of things.’

‘Then I’d order something else.’

‘You could still sit there and eat?’

‘It would depend on what I was doing in these people’s company in the first place.’

‘What if you disapproved of them?’

‘I’d try to steer the conversation towards the things I disapproved of, and then I’d be honest about what I thought was wrong.’

‘You don’t have a problem specifically with the duckling thing?’

‘Humans eat all sorts of animals. They slaughter pigs, who are much more intelligent than birds.’

‘So if an animal is dumb it’s OK to kill it?’

‘I’m not a butcher. Or a chef. I’ve chosen to do something else with my life. That’s a choice against killing, if you like.’

‘But what about the ducklings?’

‘What about the ducklings?’

‘You wouldn’t feel compelled to save them? For example, would you consider smashing the glass enclosure, so they could escape?’

‘Instinctively, I might. But it probably wouldn’t do those ducklings any good. If I was really haunted by what I saw in that restaurant, I suppose I could devote my whole life to re-educating the people in that society so they would kill the ducks more humanely. But I would rather devote my life to something that might persuade human beings to treat each other more humanely. Because human beings suffer so much more than ducks.’

‘You might not think so if you were a duck.’

‘I don’t think I would think much about anything if I were a duck. It’s higher consciousness that causes all our griefs and tortures, don’t you think?’

‘Would you step on a cricket?’ interjected one of the other questioners.

‘No.’

‘A cockroach?’

‘Maybe.’

‘You’re not a Buddhist, then.’

‘I never claimed to be a Buddhist.’

‘You wouldn’t say that all life is sacred?’

‘It’s a beautiful concept, but every time I wash, I kill microscopic creatures that were hoping to live on me.’

‘So where’s the dividing line for you?’ the woman rejoined. ‘Dogs? Horses? What if the restaurant was frying live kittens?’

‘Let me ask you a question,’ he said. ‘Are you sending me to a place where people are doing terrible, cruel things to other creatures?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Then why ask me these sorts of questions?’

‘OK, how about this one: Your cruise ship has sunk, and now you’re stuck in a life raft with an extremely irritating man who also happens to be homosexual… ’

And so it went on. For days and days. So long, in fact, that Bea lost patience and began to wonder if he should tell USIC that his time was too precious to waste on any more of these charades.

‘No, they want me,’ he’d reassured her. ‘I can tell.’

Now, on a balmy morning in Florida, having earned the corporation’s stamp of approval, Peter turned to face the driver and posed the question to which, in all these months, he hadn’t been given a straight answer.

‘What is USIC, exactly?’

The driver shrugged. ‘These days, the bigger the company, the less you can figure out what it does. Time was when a car company made cars, a mining company dug mines. It’s not like that anymore. You ask USIC what they specialise in and they tell you things like… Logistics. Human resources. Large-scale project development.’ The driver sucked the last of the Tang through a straw, making an ugly gurgling sound.

‘But where does all the money come from?’ said Peter. ‘They’re not funded by the government.’

The driver frowned, distracted. He needed to make sure his vehicle was in the correct lane. ‘Investments.’

‘Investments in what?’

‘Lots of things.’

Peter shielded his eyes with one hand; the glare was giving him a headache. He recalled that he’d asked the same question of his USIC interrogators, at one of the early interviews when Beatrice was still sitting in.

‘We invest in people,’ the elegant female had replied, shaking her artfully clipped grey mane, laying her scrawny, delicate hands on the table.

‘All corporations say that,’ Beatrice remarked, a bit rudely he thought.

‘Well, we really mean it,’ said the older woman. Her grey eyes were sincere and animated by intelligence. ‘Nothing can be achieved without people. Individuals, unique individuals with very special skills.’ She turned to Peter. ‘That’s why we’re talking to you.’

He’d smiled at the cleverness of this phrasing: it could function as flattery — they were talking to him because it was obvious he was one of these special people — or it could be a preamble to rejection — they were talking to him to maintain the high standards that would, in the end, disqualify him. One thing was for sure: the hints that he and Bea dropped about what a fine team they’d make if they could go on this mission together fell like cookie crumbs and disappeared into the carpet.

‘One of us needs to stay and look after Joshua, anyway,’ said Bea when they discussed it afterwards. ‘It would be cruel to leave him for so long. And there’s the church. And the house, the expenses; I need to keep working.’ All valid concerns — although an advance payment from USIC, even a small fraction of the full sum, would have covered an awful lot of cat food, neighbourly visits and heating bills. ‘It just would have been nice to be invited, that’s all.’

Yes, it would have been nice. But they were not blind to good fortune when it was offered. Peter had been chosen, from among many others who were not.

‘So,’ he said to the driver, ‘how did you first get involved with USIC?’

‘Bank foreclosed on our house.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘Bank foreclosed on just about every damn house in Gary. Repossessed them, couldn’t sell them, let them fall apart and rot. But USIC made us a deal. They took on the debt, we got to keep the house, and in exchange we worked for them, for like, grocery money. Some of my old pals called it slavery. I call it… humanitarian. And those old pals of mine, they’re in trailer parks now. And here’s me, driving a limousine.’

Peter nodded. He’d already forgotten the name of the place where this guy was from, and he had only the vaguest grasp on the current health of the American economy, but he understood very well what it meant to be thrown a lifeline.

The limousine cruised gently to the right and was cloaked in cooling shade from the pine trees on the verge. A wooden road sign — the sort that normally advertised campsites, roadside grills or log-house holidays — announced an imminent turn-off for USIC.

‘You go to any sinking city in the country,’ continued the driver, ‘and you’ll find lots of people in the same boat. They may tell you they’re working for this or that company, but scratch underneath, and they’re working for USIC.’

‘I don’t even know what the letters in “USIC” stand for,’ said Peter.

‘Search me,’ said the driver. ‘A lot of companies these days got meaningless names. All the meaningful names have been taken. It’s a trademark thing.’

‘I assume the US part means United States.’

‘I guess. They’re multinational, though. Somebody even told me they started up in Africa. All I know is, they’re good to work for. Never screwed me around. You’ll be in good hands.’

Into thy hands I commend my spirit, Peter naturally thought. Luke 23:46, fulfilling the prophesy of Psalms 31:5. Except that it wasn’t clear into whose hands he was about to be delivered.

‘This will sting some,’ said the black woman in the white lab coat. ‘In fact, it will be real unpleasant. You’ll feel like a pint of cold yoghurt is travelling up your veins.’

‘Gee, thanks. I can hardly wait.’ He settled his head uneasily in the padded polystyrene hollow of his coffin-like crib and tried not to look at the spike that was approaching his tourniquetted arm.

‘We wouldn’t want you to think there was anything wrong, that’s all.’

‘If I die, please tell my — ’

‘You won’t die. Not with this stuff inside you. Just relax and think nice thoughts.’

The cannula was in his vein; the IV drip was activated; the translucent substance moved into him. He thought he might vomit from the sheer ghastliness of it. They ought to have given him a sedative or something. He wondered if his three fellow travellers were braver than him. They were nestled in identical cribs, elsewhere in the building, but he couldn’t see them. He would meet them in a month from now, when he woke up.

The woman who had administered the infusion stood calmly watching over him. Without warning — but how could there be any warning? — her lipsticked mouth started to drift to the left of her face, the lips travelling across the flesh of her cheek like a tiny red canoe. The mouth did not stop until it reached her forehead, where it came to rest above her eyebrows. Then her eyes, complete with eyelids and lashes, moved down towards her jawline, blinking normally as they relocated.

‘Don’t fight it, just go with it,’ the mouth on the forehead advised. ‘It’s temporary.’

He was too frightened to speak. This was no hallucination. This was what happened to the universe when you were no longer able to hold it together. Atoms in clusters, rays of light, forming ephemeral shapes before moving on. His greatest fear, as he dissolved into the dark, was that he would never see other humans the same way again.

3. The grand adventure could surely wait

‘Man, man, man.’ A deep, rueful voice from the formless void. ‘That shit is one bad, bad motherfucker.’

‘Mind your language, BG. We got a religious person here with us.’

‘Well, ain’t that a lick on the dick. Gimme a hand outta this coffin, man.’

A third voice: ‘Me too. Me first.’

‘You’ll regret it, children.’ (This said with sing-song condescension.) ‘But OK.’ And there was a rustling and a grunting and a gasping and a muttering of hard labour.

Peter opened his eyes, but was too nauseous to turn his head towards the voices. The ceilings and walls seemed to be convulsing; the lights yo-yo’d. It was as though the solid framework of the room had turned elastic, walls billowing, ceiling flailing around. He shut his eyes against the delirium, but that was worse: the convulsions continued inside his skull, as though his eyeballs were inflating like balloons, as though the pulpy insides of his face might, any moment, squirt out through his nostrils. He imagined he could feel his brain filling up with — or being drained of — some vile, caustic liquor.

From elsewhere in the cabin, the grunting and scuffling went on, accompanied by deranged laughter.

‘You know, it’s pretty entertaining,’ remarked the mocking, sober voice, removed from the other two, ‘watching you guys flopping around on the floor like a couple of sprayed bugs.’

‘Hey, no fair! Damn system should wake us all up at the same time. Then we’d see who’s most fit.’

‘Well… ’ (The superior voice again.) ‘Somebody has to be first, I guess. To make the coffee and check that everything’s working.’

‘So go check, Tuska, and leave me and BG to slug it out for second place.’

‘Suit yourselves.’ Footsteps. A door opening. ‘You think you’ll have privacy? Dream on, people. I can watch you squirming around on the surveillance cameras. Smile!’

The door clicked shut.

‘Thinks the sun shines out of his ass,’ muttered a voice from the floor.

‘That’s ’cause you’re always kissin’ it, man.’

Peter lay still, gathering his strength. Intuitively he understood that his body would settle back to normal in its own good time, and that there was nothing gained in trying to function too soon, unless you were the competitive type. The two men on the floor continued to grunt and giggle and heave themselves about, in defiance of the chemicals that had allowed them to survive the Jump.

‘You gonna be the first one standing or am I?’

‘I’m up already, bro… see?’

‘You’re so full of shit, man. That ain’t standing, that’s leaning. Let go the bench.’

Sound of a body falling to the floor; more laughter.

‘See you do better, bro… ’

‘Easy.’

Sound of another body falling to the floor; dopey hysterics.

‘Forgot how bad it was, man.’

‘Nothing a half dozen cans of Coke won’t fix.’

‘Fuck that, man. A line of coke and you’re talkin’.’

‘If you want more drugs after this, you must be dumber than I thought.’

‘Just stronger, bro, just stronger.’

And so it went on. The two men sparred with each other, expelling bravado into the atmosphere, biding for time, until they were both on their feet. They grunted and panted as they rummaged in plastic bags, mocked each other’s taste in clothing, put on shoes, tested their bipedalism by walking around. Peter lay in his crib, breathing shallowly, waiting for the room to stop moving. The ceiling had calmed down, at least.

‘Yo, bro.’

A large face loomed into his range of view. For a second, Peter couldn’t recognise it as human: it seemed to be attached to the neck upside-down, with eyebrows on the chin and a beard at the top. But no: it was human, of course it was human, just very different from his own. Dark brown skin, a shapeless nose, small ears, beautiful brown eyes tinged with red. Neck muscles that could raise and lower an elevator in a twenty-storey shaft. And those eyebrow-like things on the chin? A beard. Not a full, furry beard, but one of those finely-sculpted fashion statements you could buy from a fancy barber. Years ago, it must have looked like a neat line drawn with a black felt-tip marker, but the man was middle-aged now, and the beard was patchy and speckled with grey. Advancing baldness had left him with just a few knobs of frizz on his head.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ croaked Peter. ‘I’m Peter.’

‘BG, bro,’ said the black man, extending a hand. ‘You want I pull you outta there?’

‘I… I might prefer to lie here a bit longer.’

‘Don’t wait too long, bro,’ said BG, with a radiant white grin. ‘You shit your pants, and it’s a small ship.’

Peter smiled, unsure of whether BG meant this as a warning of what might happen or as an observation of what had already happened. The viscose swaddling of the crib felt damp and heavy, but it had felt that way even when the woman in the lab coat first wrapped him in it.

Another face swung into view. Sunburnt white, fiftyish, with thinning grey hair cut to a military bristle. Eyes as bloodshot as BG’s, but blue and full of painful childhood and messy divorce and violent upheavals in employment.

‘Severin,’ he said.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Artie Severin. We gotta get you out of there, pal. Sooner you start drinking, sooner you’ll feel like a human being.’

BG and Severin lifted him out of the crib as though they were extracting a newly purchased piece of equipment from its box: not exactly gently, but with sufficient care not to tear or break anything. His feet barely touched the floor as they carried him out of the room, down a short corridor and into a bathroom. There they stripped him of the gauzy loincloth he’d worn for the last month, sprayed him with blue foam from neck to ankles, and wiped him down with paper towels. A large transparent plastic waste bag got filled halfway to the top with blue and brown muck before they were finished.

‘Is there a shower?’ he asked, when it was over and he still felt sticky. ‘I mean, with water?’

‘Water is gold, bro,’ said BG. ‘Every drop we got, goes into here.’ He tapped his throat. ‘It don’t do nobody no good out there.’ And he nodded towards the wall, the outer shell of the ship, the barrier between them and the vast airless emptiness in which they were suspended.

‘Sorry,’ said Peter. ‘That was naïve of me.’

‘Naïve’s not a problem,’ said BG. ‘We all gotta ride the learning curve. I done this trip once before. First time I didn’t know shit.’

‘You’ll have all the water you want when we get to Oasis,’ said Severin. ‘Right now, you’d better drink some.’

Peter was handed a plastic bottle with a resealable nipple. He took a big swig and, ten seconds later, fainted.

His recovery from the Jump took him longer than he would have liked. He would have liked to spring up like a momentarily winded boxer, and impress the other men. But the other men shook off the effects of the Jump rapidly and got busy doing whatever it was that they were doing, while he lolled helpless in a bunk, occasionally managing a sip of water. Before take-off he’d been warned that he would feel as though he’d been disassembled and put back together again, which was not exactly how the Jump worked, scientifically speaking, but was indeed the way it felt.

He spent the afternoon… well, no, those words made no sense, did they? There was no such thing as afternoon, morning or night here. In the darkened room where BG and Severin had stowed him after cleaning him up, he woke occasionally from his woozy slumber and looked at his watch. The numbers were only symbols. Real time would not resume until he had ground underfoot, and there was a sun rising and setting.

Once he got to Oasis, there would be facilities for sending a message to Beatrice. ‘I’ll write to you every day,’ he’d promised. ‘Every single day, if God allows me.’ He tried to imagine what she might be doing at this moment, how she might be dressed, whether she would have her hair pinned up or hanging loose over her shoulders. That was what his watch was for, he realised: not to tell him anything useful about his own situation, but to allow him to imagine Beatrice existing in the same reality as himself.

He looked at his watch again. In England, it was 2.43 in the morning. Beatrice would be asleep, with Joshua stretched opportunistically on his side of the bed, legs spread. Joshua, that is, not Beatrice. She would be on her left side, one arm dangling over the edge, the other thrown up, elbow covering her ear, fingers so close to his pillow that he could kiss them from where he lay. Not now, of course.

Maybe Beatrice was awake. Maybe she was worrying about him. A month had passed without contact between them, and they were used to communicating every day.

‘What if my husband dies en route?’ she’d asked the USIC people.

‘He will not die en route,’ was the reply.

‘But what if he does?’

‘We would let you know immediately. In other words, no news is good news.’

Good news it was, then. But still… Bea had spent these last thirty days conscious of his absence, while he’d been oblivious to hers.

He pictured their bedroom, lit in subdued tones by the bedside lamp; he pictured Bea’s pale blue uniform slung over the chair, the jumble of shoes on the floor, the yellow duvet with Joshua’s fur all over it. Beatrice sitting up against the headboard, bare-legged but with a sweater on, reading and re-reading the uninformative info pack sent by USIC.

‘USIC cannot and does not guarantee the safety of any travellers on its craft or domiciled in its facilities or in the pursuit of any activities related to, or not related to, USIC activities. “Safety” is defined as health both physical and mental and includes, but is not restricted to, survival and/or return from Oasis, either within the time period specified by this agreement or beyond that period. USIC undertakes to minimise risk to any persons participating in its projects but signature of this document is deemed to constitute acknowledgement of understanding that USIC’s efforts in this regard (i.e., minimising risk) are subject to circumstances beyond USIC’s control. These circumstances, because unforeseen and unprecedented, cannot be detailed in advance of occurrence. They may include, but are not restricted to, disease, accident, mechanical failure, adverse weather, and any other events commonly categorised as Acts of God.’

The door of the dormitory cell swung open, silhouetting the massive body of BG.

‘Yo, bro.’

‘Hi.’ In Peter’s experience, it was better to speak in one’s own idiom than echo the idioms and accents of others. Rastafarians and cockney Pakistanis did not come to Christ through being patronised by evangelists making clownish attempts to talk like them, so there was no reason to suppose that black Americans might.

‘You wanna eat with us, you better get yourself out of bed, bro.’

‘Sounds fine to me,’ said Peter, swinging his legs out of the bunk. ‘I think I’m up for it.’

BG’s massive arms were poised to lend assistance. ‘Noodles,’ he said. ‘Beef noodles.’

‘Sounds just fine.’ Still barefoot, dressed only in underpants and an unbuttoned shirt, Peter waddled out of the room. It was like being six again, when he was spaced out on liquid paracetamol and his mother fetched him out of bed to celebrate his birthday. The prospect of opening presents was not sufficiently adrenalising to dispel the effects of chickenpox.

BG led him into a corridor whose walls were papered with floor-to-ceiling colour photographs of green meadows, the kind of adhesive enlargements he was more accustomed to seeing on the sides of buses. Some thoughtful designer must have decided that a vista of grass, spring flowers and an azure sky was just the thing to combat the claustrophobia of airless space.

‘You ain’t a vegetarian, are you, bro?’

‘Uh… no,’ said Peter.

‘Well, I am,’ declared BG, steering him round a corner, where the verdant if slightly blurry scenery was repeated. ‘But one thing you learn when you go on a trip like this, man, is you gotta relax your principles sometimes.’

Dinner was served in the control room; that is, the room that contained the piloting and navigation hardware. Contrary to Peter’s expectations, he was not met with a breathtaking sight when he stepped inside. There was no giant window facing out onto a vast expanse of space, stars and nebulae. There was no window at all; no central focus of attention, just reinforced plastic walls punctuated by air conditioning vents, light switches, humidity adjustors, and a couple of laminated posters. Peter had seen the imagery before, on the USIC pamphlets when he’d first applied for this vacancy. The posters were glossy corporate productions, depicting a stylised ship, a stylised bird with a stylised twig in its beak, and a small amount of text extolling USIC’s high standards of business practice and unlimited potentials to benefit mankind.

The ship’s controls were also less impressive than Peter had imagined: no giant rig of knobs and dials and meters and flashing lights, just a few compact keyboards, slimline monitors and one freestanding computer cabinet that resembled a snack dispenser or automatic bankteller machine. In all honesty, the control room was less a ship’s bridge than an office — a somewhat pokey office, at that. There was nothing here to do justice to the fact that they were floating in a foreign solar system, trillions of miles from home.

Tuska the pilot had swivelled his chair away from the monitors and was staring into a small plastic tub held up near his face. Steam obscured his features. His legs, crossed casually over one another, were bare and hairy, clad only in oversize shorts and tennis shoes without socks.

‘Welcome back to the land of the living,’ he said, lowering the tub to rest against his rotund belly. ‘Sleep well?’

‘I don’t know if I was sleeping, really,’ said Peter. ‘More just waiting to feel human again.’

‘Takes a while,’ conceded Tuska, and raised the noodle tub to his face again. He had a mouse-coloured beard, and was obviously well-practised in the logistics of conveying sloppy food past the hazards of facial hair. He twirled some noodles round his fork and closed his neat red lips over them.

‘Here’s yours, Pete,’ said Severin. ‘I’ve torn the foil off for you.’

‘That’s very kind,’ said Peter, taking his seat at a black plastic table, where BG and Severin were tucking into their own noodle tubs with their own plastic forks. Three unopened cans of Coke stood ready. Peter shut his eyes, recited a silent prayer of thanks for what he was about to receive.

‘You’re a Christian, right?’ said BG.

‘Right,’ said Peter. The beef noodle stew had been cooked unevenly in the microwave: some parts were bubbling hot, other parts were still ever-so-slightly crunchy with ice. He stirred them into a warm compromise.

‘I used to be Nation of Islam, long time ago,’ said BG. ‘Got me through some tough times. But it’s high maintenance, man. Can’t do this, can’t do that.’ BG opened his considerable mouth and forked a quivering freight of noodles in, chewed three times, swallowed. ‘Ya gotta hate Jews and white people, too. They say it’s not mandatory and all that shit. But you get the message, man. Loud and clear.’ Another mouthful of noodles. ‘I make my own decisions who I’m gonna hate, know what I’m saying? Somebody fucks with me, I hate ’em — they can be white, black, aquamareeeen, man; don’t make no difference to me.’

‘I suppose what you’re saying, also,’ said Peter, ‘is that you make your own decisions about who you’ll love.’

‘Damn right. White pussy, black pussy, it’s all good.’

Tuska snorted. ‘You’re making a fine impression on our minister, I’m sure.’ He’d finished his meal and was wiping his face and beard with a towelette.

‘I’m not that easy to scandalise,’ said Peter. ‘Not with words, anyway. The world has room for lots of different ways of talking.’

‘We’re not in the world now,’ said Severin with a lugubrious grin. He cracked open a can of Coke and a frothing jet of brown liquid sprayed up towards the ceiling.

‘Jee-sus,’ exclaimed Tuska, falling half off his chair. BG just chuckled.

‘I’ll take care of it, I’ll take care of it,’ said Severin, snatching a handful of paper towels from a dispenser. Peter helped him mop the sticky liquid from the tabletop.

‘I do that every goddamn time,’ muttered Severin, dabbing at his chest, his forearm, the chairs, the coolbox from which the Cokes had come. He bent down to dab at the floor, whose carpet was fortuitously already brown.

‘How many times have you made this trip?’ asked Peter.

‘Three. Swore I wouldn’t go back each time.’

‘Why?’

‘Oasis drives people crazy.’

BG grunted. ‘You’re crazy already, bro.’

‘Mr Severin and Mr Graham are both seriously unbalanced individuals, Pete,’ said Tuska, magistrate-solemn. ‘I’ve known ’em for years. Oasis is the most suitable place for guys like them. Keeps ’em off the streets.’ He tossed his empty noodle tub into a garbage bin. ‘Also, they’re extremely good at what they do. The best. That’s why USIC keeps spending the money on ’em.’

‘What about you, bro?’ BG asked Peter. ‘Are you the best?’

‘The best what?’

‘The best preacher.’

‘I don’t really think of myself as a preacher.’

‘What do you think of yourself as, bro?’

Peter swallowed hard, stumped. His brain was still residually affected by the same violent forces that had shaken up the cans of Coke. He wished Beatrice was here with him, to parry the questions, change the nature of this all-male atmosphere, deflect the conversation onto more fruitful paths.

‘I’m just someone who loves people and wants to help them, whatever shape they’re in.’

Another big grin spread across BG’s massive face, as though he was about to unleash another wisecrack. Then he abruptly turned serious. ‘You really mean that? No shit?’

Peter stared him straight in the eyes. ‘No shit.’

BG nodded. Peter sensed that in the big man’s consideration, he had passed some sort of test. Reclassified. Not exactly ‘one of the boys’, but no longer an exotic animal that might be a major annoyance.

‘Hey, Severin!’ BG called. ‘I never asked you: what religion are you, man?’

‘Me? I’m nothing,’ said Severin. ‘And that’s the way it’s staying.’

Severin had finished the Coca-Cola clean-up and was wiping blue detergent gel off his fingers with paper towels.

‘Fingers are still sticky,’ he complained. ‘I’m gonna be driven crazy until I get soap and water.’

The computer cabinet started beeping gently.

‘Looks like your prayer has been answered, Severin,’ remarked Tuska, turning his attention to one of the monitors. ‘The system has just figured out where we are.’

All four men were silent as Tuska scrolled through the details. It was as though they were giving him the opportunity to check for emails or bid in an internet auction. He was, in fact, ascertaining whether they would live or die. The ship had not yet begun the piloted phase of its journey; it had merely been catapulted through time and space by the physics-defying technology of the Jump. Now they were spinning aimlessly, somewhere in the general vicinity of where they needed to be, a ship in the shape of a swollen tick: big belly of fuel, tiny head. And inside that head, four men were breathing from a limited supply of nitrogen, oxygen and argon. They were breathing faster than necessary. Unspoken, but hanging in the filtered air, was the fear that the Jump might have slung them too far wide of the mark, and that there might be insufficient fuel for the final part of the journey. A margin for error that was almost unmeasurably small at the beginning of the Jump could have grown into a fatal enormity at the other end.

Tuska studied the numbers, tickled the keyboard with nimble stubby fingers, scrolled through geometrical designs that were, in fact, maps of the unmappable.

‘Good news, people,’ he said at last. ‘Looks like practice makes perfect.’

‘Meaning?’ said Severin.

‘Meaning we should send a prayer of thanks to the tech-heads in Florida.’

‘Meaning what, exactly, for us, here?’

‘Meaning that when we divide the fuel over the distance we’ve got to travel, we’ve got lots of juice. We can use it up like it’s beer at a frat party.’

‘Meaning how many days, Tuska?’

‘Days?’ Tuska paused for effect. ‘Twenty-eight hours, tops.’

BG leapt to his feet and punched the air. ‘Whooo-hoo!’

From this moment onwards, the atmosphere in the control room was triumphal, slightly hysterical. BG paced around restlessly, pumping his arms, doing the locomotion. Severin grinned, revealing teeth discoloured by nicotine, and drummed on his knees to a tune only he could hear. To simulate the cymbal-clashes, he flicked his fist periodically into empty air and winced as though buffeted by joyful noise. Tuska went off to change his clothes — maybe because he’d got a noodle stain on his sweater, or maybe because he felt his imminent piloting duties warranted a ceremonial gesture. Freshly decked out in a crisp white shirt and grey trousers, he took his seat at the keyboard on which their trajectory to Oasis would be typed.

‘Just do it, Tuska,’ said Severin. ‘What do you want, a brass band? Cheerleaders?’

Tuska blew a kiss, then made a decisive keystroke. ‘Gentlemen and crew sluts,’ he declared, in a mockingly oratorical tone. ‘Welcome onboard the USIC shuttle service to Oasis. Please give your full attention to the safety demonstration even if you are a frequent flyer. The seatbelt is fastened and unfastened as shown. No seatbelt on your seat? Hey, live with it.’

He jabbed another key. The floor began to vibrate.

‘In the event of a loss of cabin pressure, oxygen will be provided. It will be pumped straight into the mouth of the pilot. The rest of you just hold your breath and sit tight.’ (Laughter from BG and Severin.) ‘In the event of a collision, low-level lighting will guide you to an exit, where you will be sucked instantly to your death. Please remember that the nearest usable planet may be three billion miles behind you.’

He jabbed another key. A graph on the computer screen began to rise and fall like waves. ‘This craft is equipped with one emergency escape pod: one at the front, none in the middle and none at the rear. There’s room for the pilot and five really hot chicks.’ (Guffaws from BG; snickering from Severin.) ‘Take your high heels off, girls, before using the escape pod. Hell, take it all off. Blow on my tube if it fails to inflate. There is a light and a whistle for attracting attention, but don’t worry, I’ll get around to all of you in turn. Please consult the instruction card which shows you the position you must adopt if you hear the command “Suck, suck”. We recommend you keep your head down at all times.’

He made one more keystroke, then held a fist up in the air. ‘We appreciate that you had no choice of airlines today, and so we would like to thank you for choosing USIC.’

Severin and BG applauded and whooped. Peter put his hands together shyly, but made no noise with them. He hoped he could stand by unobtrusively, part of the gathering but not subject to scrutiny. It was, he knew, not a very impressive start to his mission to win the hearts and souls of an entire population. But he hoped he could be forgiven. He was far from home, his head ached and buzzed, the beef noodles sat in his stomach like a stone, he kept hallucinating that his body parts had been disassembled and put back together slightly wrong, and all he wanted to do was crawl into bed with Beatrice and Joshua and go to sleep. The grand adventure could surely wait.

4. ‘Hello everybody,’ he said

Dear Bea,

Finally, a chance to communicate with you properly! Shall we call this my First Epistle to the Joshuans? Oh, I know we both have our misgivings about St Paul and his slant on things, but the guy sure knew how to write a good letter and I’m going to need all the inspiration I can get, especially in my current state. (Half-delirious with exhaustion.) So, until I can come up with something wonderfully original: ‘Grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ.’ I doubt whether Paul had any women in mind when he wrote that greeting, given his problems with females, but maybe if he’d known YOU, he would have!

I would love to put you in the picture, but there’s not much to describe yet. No windows in this ship. There are millions of stars out there and possibly other amazing sights, but all I can see is the walls, the ceiling and the floor. It’s a good thing I’m not claustrophobic.

I’m writing this with pencil and paper. (I had a bunch of pens but they must have exploded during the Jump — there’s ink all over the insides of my bag. No surprise they didn’t survive the trip, given how my own head felt…!) Anyway, when sophisticated technology fails, primitive technology steps in to do the job. Back to the sharpened stick with the sliver of graphite inside, and the sheets of pressed wood-pulp…

Have I gone insane, you’re wondering? No, don’t worry (yet). I’m not under the delusion I can put this letter in an envelope and stick a stamp on it. I’m still in transit — we’ve got about 25 hours’ journey left to go. As soon as I’m on Oasis and settled in, I’ll transcribe these jottings. Someone will plug me into the network and I’ll be able to send a message to the thing that USIC installed in our house. And you can forget about calling it a ‘Zhou-23 Messenger Mainframe’ like we were told to. I mentioned that term to the guys here and they just laughed. They refer to it as a Shoot. Typical of Americans to shorten everything to a monosyllable. (It’s catchy, though.)

I suppose, instead of waiting a whole day, I could use the Shoot that’s here on board, especially since I’m too wound up to sleep and it would be a good way of filling the time until we land. But it wouldn’t be private, and I need privacy for what I’m going to say next. The other men on this ship are — how can I put this? — not exactly models of discretion and sensitivity. If I wrote this on their machine, I can just imagine one of them retrieving my message and reading it out loud, to general hilarity.

Bea, forgive me for not being able to let this go, but I’m still upset about what happened in the car. I feel I let you down. I wish I could take you in my arms and make it right. It’s a silly thing to obsess about, I know. I suppose it just makes me confront how far away we are from each other now. Have any husband and wife ever been separated by so vast a distance? It seems like only yesterday I could reach out my arm and you’d be right there. On our last morning in bed together, you looked so satisfied and serene. But in the car you looked distraught.

As well as being shaken about that, I can’t say I’m feeling confident about my mission. It’s probably just physical and temporary, but I wonder if I’m up to it. The other men on the ship, raucous though they are, have been very nice to me, in a condescending sort of way. But I’m sure they’re wondering why USIC would pay a fortune to transport me to Oasis, and I must admit I’m confused myself. Each member of the team has a clearly defined role. Tuska (not sure of his Christian name) is the pilot, and on Oasis he works with computers. Billy Graham, nicknamed BG, is an engineer with huge experience in the oilmining industry. Arthur Severin is another sort of engineer, something to do with hydro-metallurgical processes; it’s way above my head. In conversation, these guys come across like construction workers (and I suppose they are!) but they’re a lot cleverer than they appear and, unlike me, they are supremely qualified for their assignments.

Well, I think that’s enough self-doubt for one day!

The part of this letter that I scribbled on the ship has now come to an end — I didn’t manage to achieve much with my pencil and paper, did I? Everything from here on is written (well, typed) on Oasis. Yes, I’ve arrived, I’m here! And the first thing I’m doing is writing to you.

It was a safe landing — weirdly smooth in fact, not even the shuddery bump you get when an aeroplane’s wheels hit the ground. More like a lift arriving at the correct floor. I would have preferred something more dramatic, or even frightening, to dispel the sense of unreality. Instead, you’re told that you’ve landed, the doors open, and you walk out into one of those tube-tunnel things just like at an airport, and then you’re in a big ugly building that looks like any other big ugly building you’ve ever been in. I expected something more exotic, something architecturally outlandish. But maybe the same people designed this place as designed USIC’s facilities in Florida.

Anyway, I’m in my quarters now. I’d assumed that upon arrival I would immediately have to be ferried somewhere else, a journey across some amazing terrain. But the airport — if you can call it that, it’s more like a huge car park — has several wings of accommodation facilities attached to it. I’ve been shunted from one box to another.

Not that my quarters are small. In fact the bedroom is bigger than our bedroom, there’s a proper bathroom/shower (which I’m too tired to use yet), a fridge (completely empty except for a plastic ice-cube tray, also empty), a table, two chairs and, of course, the Shoot that I’m typing this on. The ambience is very ‘hotel chain’; I could be in a conference centre in Watford. But I expect I’ll be asleep very soon. Severin told me that it’s quite common for people to experience insomnia for a couple of days after the Jump, and then to sleep for 24 hours straight. I’m sure he knows what he’s talking about.

We parted on slightly awkward terms, Severin and I. The fact that the Jump’s aim was more accurate than expected meant that, even with unrestricted use of fuel to get us to Oasis in the fastest possible time, we still had a huge amount left over. So we just jettisoned it all before arrival. Can you imagine? Thousands of litres of fuel squirted out into space, along with our body wastes, dirty tissues, empty noodle containers. I couldn’t help saying, Surely there must be a better way. Severin took offence (I think he was sticking up for Tuska, who was technically responsible for the decision — those two have a love/hate thing going). Anyway, Severin asked me if I thought I could land a ship with that much fuel ‘hanging off its ass’. He said it was like tossing a bottle of milk off a skyscraper and hoping it wouldn’t come to any harm when it reached the ground. I said that if science could come up with something like the Jump it could surely solve a problem like that. Severin seized hold of that word, ‘science’. Science, he said, is not some mysterious larger-than-life force, it’s just the name we give to the bright ideas that individual guys have when they’re lying in bed at night, and that if the fuel thing bothered me so much, there was nothing stopping me from having a bright idea to solve it and submitting it to USIC. He said it in an off-hand sort of tone but there was aggression behind it. You know how men can be.

I can’t believe I’m talking about a spat I had with an engineer! By the grace of God I’ve been sent to another world, the first Christian missionary ever to do so, and here I am gossiping about my fellow travellers!

My dear Beatrice, please regard this First Epistle as a prelude, a trial run, a rough turning over of the soil before I plant something beautiful in it. That’s partly why I decided to transcribe the pencilled scribblings I wrote on the ship, and type them unchanged and unedited into this Shoot message to you. If I changed one sentence I would be tempted to change them all; if I gave myself permission to omit one dull detail I’d probably end up discarding the whole thing. Better that you get these jetlagged, barely coherent ramblings than nothing.

I’m going to go to bed now. It’s night. It will be night for the next three days, if you know what I mean. I haven’t seen the sky yet, not properly, just a glimpse through the transparent ceiling of the arrivals hall as I was being escorted to my quarters. A very solicitous USIC liaison officer whose name I’ve forgotten was chattering at me and trying to carry my bag and I just sort of got swept along. My quarters have big windows but they’re shuttered with a Venetian blind that’s presumably electronic and I’m too tired & disoriented to figure out how it works. I should get some sleep before I start pressing buttons. Except, of course, for the button I will now press to send this message to you.

Shoot through space, little light beams, and bounce off all the right satellites to reach the woman I love! But how can these words, translated into blinks of binary code, travel so impossibly far? I won’t quite believe it until I get a reply from you. If I can be granted that one small miracle, all the others will follow, I’m sure.

Love,

Peter

He slept, and awoke to the sound of rain.

For a long time he lay in the dark, too weary to stir, listening. The rain sounded different from rain back home. Its intensity waxed and waned in a rapid cyclical rhythm, three seconds at most between surges. He synchronised the fluctuations with his own breathing, inhaling when the rain fell softer, exhaling when it fell hard. What made the rain do that? Was it natural, or was it caused by the design of the building: a wind-trap, an exhaust fan, a faulty portal opening and closing? Could it be something as mundane as his own window flapping in the breeze? He could see no further than the slats of the Venetian blind.

Eventually his curiosity got the better of his fatigue. He staggered out of bed, fumbled for the bathroom light, was momentarily blinded by halogen overkill. He squinted at his watch, the only item of apparel he’d kept on when he’d gone to bed. He’d slept… how long?… only seven hours… unless he’d slept thirty-one. He checked the date. No, only seven. What had woken him? His erection, perhaps.

The bathroom was in all respects identical to a bathroom one might expect to find in a hotel, except that the toilet, instead of employing a flush mechanism, was the kind that sucked out its contents in a whoosh of compressed air. Peter pissed slowly and with some discomfort, waiting for his penis to unstiffen. His urine was dark orange. Alarmed, he filled a glass with water from the tap. The liquid was pale green. Clean and transparent, but pale green. Stuck to the wall above the sink was a printed notice: COLOR OF WATER IS GREEN. THIS IS NORMAL AND CERTIFIED SAFE. IF IN DOUBT, BOTTLED WATER & SOFT DRINKS ARE AVAILABLE, SUBJECT TO AVAILABILITY, FROM USIC STORE, $50 PER 300ml.

Peter stared at the glass of green liquid, parched but wary. All those stories of British tourists drinking foreign water while on holiday and getting poisoned. Delhi belly and all that. Two reassuring Scripture quotations came to his mind, ‘Take no thought for what ye shall drink’ from Matthew 6:25 and ‘To the pure, all things are pure’ from Titus 1:15, but those were clearly meant for other contexts. He looked again at the placard for the bottled alternative: $50 PER 300ml. Out of the question. He and Bea had already discussed what they would do with the money he earned on this mission. Pay off their mortgage. Rebuild the nursery room of their church so the children had more light and sunshine. Buy a van adapted for wheel-chairs. The list went on and on. Every dollar he spent here would cross something worthwhile off it. He lifted the glass and drank.

It tasted good. Divine, in fact. Was that a blasphemous thought? ‘Oh, give it a rest,’ Beatrice would no doubt advise him. ‘There are more important things in the world to fret about.’ What things might there be to fret about in this world? He would find out soon enough. He stood up, flushed the toilet, drank more of the green water. It tasted ever-so-slightly of honeydew melon, or maybe he was imagining that.

Still naked, he walked to the bedroom window. There must be a way of raising the blind, even though there were no switches or buttons in sight. He felt around the edges of the slats, and his fingers snagged in a cord. He tugged on it and the blind lifted. It occurred to him as he continued pulling on the cord that he might be exposing his nakedness to anyone who happened to be passing by, but it was too late to worry about that now. The window — one large pane of Plexiglass — was wholly revealed.

Outside, darkness still ruled. The area surrounding the USIC airport complex was a wasteland, a dead zone of featureless bitumen, dismal shed-like buildings, and spindly steel lamps. It was like a supermarket car park that went on for ever. And yet Peter’s heart pumped hard, and he breathed shallowly in his excitement. The rain! The rain wasn’t falling in straight lines, it was… dancing! Could one say that about rainfall? Water had no intelligence. And yet, this rainfall swept from side to side, hundreds of thousands of silvery lines all describing the same elegant arcs. It was nothing like when rain back home was flung around erratically by gusts of wind. No, the air here seemed calm, and the rain’s motion was graceful, a leisurely sweeping from one side of the sky to the other — hence the rhythmic spattering against his window.

He pressed his forehead to the glass. It was blessedly cool. He realised he was running a slight fever, wondered if he was hallucinating the curvature of the rainfall. Peering out into the dark, he made an effort to focus on the hazes of light around the lamp-posts. Inside these halo-like spheres of illumination, the raindrops were picked out bright as tinfoil confetti. Their sensuous, undulating pattern could not be clearer.

Peter stepped back from the window. His reflection was ghostly, criss-crossed by the unearthly rain. His normally rosy-cheeked, cheerful face had a haunted look, and the tungsten glow of a distant lamppost blazed inside his abdomen. His genitals had the sculptured, alabaster appearance of Greek statuary. He raised his hand, to break the spell, to reorient himself to his own familiar humanity. But it might as well have been a stranger waving back.

My dear Beatrice,

No word from you. I feel as though I’m literally suspended — as though I can’t let out my breath until I have proof that we can communicate with each other. I once read a Science Fiction story in which a young man travelled to an alien planet, leaving his wife behind. He was only away for a few weeks and then he returned to Earth. But the punchline of the story was that Time passed at a different rate for her than it did for him. So when he got back home, he discovered that 75 earth years had sped by, and his wife had died the week before. He arrived just in time to attend the funeral, and all the old folks were wondering who this distraught young man might be. It was a cheesy, run-of-the-mill Sci-Fi tale but I read it when I was at an impressionable age and it really got to me. And of course now I’m scared it will come true. BG, Severin and Tuska have all been to Oasis & back several times over the years and I suppose I should take that as proof that you’re not wrinkling up like a prune! (Although I would still love you if you did!)

As you can probably tell from my babbling, I’m still horribly jetlagged. Slept well but nowhere near enough. It’s still dark here, smack dab in the middle of the three-day night. I haven’t been outside yet, but I’ve seen the rain. The rain here is amazing. It sways backwards and forwards, like one of those bead curtains.

There’s a well-appointed bathroom here and I’ve just had a shower. The water is green! Safe to drink, apparently. Wonderful to have a proper wash at last, even though I still smell odd (I’m sure you’d laugh to see me sitting here, sniffing my own armpits with a frown on my face) and my urine is a weird colour.

Well, that’s not the note I wanted to end on, but I can’t think of anything else to say right now. I just need to hear from you. Are you there? Please speak!

Love,

Peter

Having sent this missive, Peter loitered around his quarters, at a loss for what to do next. The USIC representative who’d escorted him off the ship had made all the correct noises about being available for him if he needed anything. But she hadn’t specified how this availability would work. Had she even divulged her name? Peter couldn’t recall. There certainly wasn’t any note left lying on the table, to welcome him, give him a few pointers and tell him how to get in touch. There was a red button on the wall labelled EMERGENCY, but no button labelled BEWILDERMENT. He spent quite a while searching for the key to his quarters, mindful that it might not look like a conventional key but might be a plastic card of the sort issued by hotels. He found nothing that even vaguely resembled a key. Eventually, he opened his door and examined the lock, or rather the place where a lock would be if there’d been one. There was only an old-fashioned swivel handle, as though Peter’s quarters were a bedroom within an unusually large home. In my father’s house are many mansions. USIC evidently wasn’t concerned about security or privacy. OK, maybe its personnel had nothing to steal and nothing to hide, but even so… Odd. Peter looked up and down the corridor; it was vacant and his was the only door in view.

Back inside, he opened the fridge, verified that the empty ice cube tray was the only thing in it. An apple wouldn’t have been too much to expect, would it? Or perhaps it would. He kept forgetting how far from home he was.

It was time to go out and face that.

He got dressed in the clothes he’d worn yesterday — underpants, jeans, flannel shirt, denim jacket, socks, lace-up shoes. He combed his hair, had another drink of greenish water. His empty stomach gurgled and grunted, having processed and eliminated the noodles he’d eaten on the ship. He strode to the door; hesitated, sank to his knees, bowed his head in prayer. He had not yet thanked God for delivering him safely to his destination; he thanked Him now. He thanked Him for some other things, too, but then got the distinct feeling that Jesus was standing at his back, prodding him, good-humouredly accusing him of stalling. So he sprang to his feet and left at once.

The USIC mess hall was humming, not with human activity, but with recorded music. It was a large room, one wall of which consisted almost wholly of glass, and the music hung around it like a fog, piped from vents in the ceiling. Apart from a vague impression of watery glitter on the window, the rain outside was felt rather than seen; it added a sense of cosy, muffled enclosure to the hall.

‘I stopped to see a weeping willow

Crying on his pillow

Maybe he’s crying for me… ’ sang a ghostly female voice, seemingly channelled through miles of subterranean tunnels to emerge at last from an accidental aperture.

‘And as the skies turn gloomy,

Night blooms whisper to me,

I’m lonesome as I can be… ’

There were four USIC employees in the mess hall, all of them young men unknown to Peter. One, an overweight, crewcut Chinese, dozed in an armchair next to a well-stocked magazine rack, his face slumped on a fist. One was working at the coffee bar, his tall spindly body draped in an oversize T-shirt. He was intently fiddling with a touch-sensitive screen balanced on the counter, poking at it with a metal pencil. He chewed at his swollen lips with large white teeth. His hair was heavy with some sort of gelatinous haircare product. He looked Slavic. The other two men were black. They were seated at one of the tables, studying a book together. It was too large and slim to be a Bible; more likely a technical manual. At their elbows were large mugs of coffee and a couple of dessert plates, bare except for crumbs. Peter could smell no food in the room.

‘I go out walking after midnight,

Out in the starlight.

Just hoping you may be… ’

The three awake men noted his arrival with a nod of low-key welcome but did not otherwise interrupt what they were doing. The snoozing Asian and the two men with the book were all dressed the same: loose Middle Eastern-style shirt, loose cotton trousers, no socks, and chunky sports shoes. Islamic basketball players.

‘Hi, I’m Peter,’ said Peter, fronting up to the counter. ‘I’m new here. I’d love something to eat, if you’ve got it.’

The Slavic-looking young man shook his prognathous face slowly to and fro.

‘Too late, bro.’

‘Too late?’

‘Twenty-four-hourly stock appraisal, bro. Began an hour ago.’

‘I was told by the USIC people that food is provided whenever we need it.’

‘Correct, bro. You just gotta make sure you don’t need it at the wrong time.’

Peter digested this. The female voice on the PA system had come to the end of her song. A male announcement followed, sonorous and theatrically intimate.

‘You’re listening to Night Blooms, a documentary chronicle of Patsy Cline’s performances of ‘Walkin’ After Midnight’ from 1957 right through to the posthumous duets in 1999. Well, listeners, did you do what I asked? Did you hold in your memory the girlish shyness that radiated from Patsy’s voice in the version she performed for her debut on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts? What a difference eleven months makes! The second version you’ve just heard was recorded on December 14, 1957, for the Grand Ole Opry. By then, she clearly had more of an inkling of the song’s uncanny power. But the aura of wisdom and unbearable sadness that you’ll hear in the next version owes something to personal tragedy, too. On June 14, 1961, Patsy was almost killed in a head-on car collision. Incredibly, only a few days after she left hospital, we find her performing ‘After Midnight’ at the Cimarron Ballroom in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Listen, people, listen closely, and you will hear the pain of that terrible auto accident, the grief she must have felt at the deep scars on her forehead, which never healed… ’

The ghostly female voice wafted across the ceiling once more.

‘I go out walking after midnight,

Out in the moonlight just like we used to do.

I’m always walking after midnight,

Searching for you… ’

‘When is the next food delivery?’ asked Peter.

‘Food’s already here, bro,’ said the Slavic man, patting the counter. ‘Released for consumption in six hours and… twenty-seven minutes.’

‘I’m sorry, I’m new here; I didn’t know about this system. And I really am very hungry. Couldn’t you… uh… release something early, and just mark it as having been served in six hours from now?’

The Slav narrowed his eyes.

‘That would be… committing an untruth, bro.’

Peter smiled and hung his head in defeat. Patsy Cline sang ‘Well, that’s just my way of saying I love you… ’ as he walked away from the counter and sat down in one of the armchairs near the magazine rack, directly behind the sleeping man.

As soon as his back sank into the upholstery he felt exhausted and he knew that if he didn’t get up again quite soon he would fall asleep. He leaned towards the magazines, taking a quick mental inventory of the selection. Cosmopolitan, Retro Gamer, Men’s Health, Your Dog, Vogue, Vintage Aircraft, Dirty Sperm Whores, House & Garden, Innate Immunity, Autosport, Science Digest, Super Food Ideas… Pretty much the full range. Well-thumbed and only slightly out of date.

‘Hey, preacher!’

He turned in his chair. The two black men sharing the table had shut their book, finished with it for the night. One of them was holding aloft a foil-wrapped object the size of a tennis ball, wiggling it demonstratively. As soon as he had Peter’s attention, he tossed the object across the room. Peter caught it easily, without even a hint of a fumble. He had always been an excellent catcher. The two black men raised a friendly fist each, congratulating him. He unwrapped the foil, found a hunk of blueberry muffin.

‘Thank you!’ His voice sounded strange in the acoustics of the mess hall, competing with the DJ, who had resumed his exegesis of Patsy Cline. By this stage of the narrative, Patsy had perished in a plane crash.

‘… personal belongings left behind after the sale of her home. The tape passed from hand to hand, unrecognised for the treasure it was, before finally ending up stored in the closet of a jeweller for several years. Imagine it, friends! Those divine sounds you just heard, dormant inside an unassuming reel of magnetic tape, locked up in a dark closet, perhaps never to see the light of day. But we can be eternally grateful that the jeweller eventually woke up and negotiated a deal with MCA Records… ’

The blueberry muffin was delicious; among the best things Peter had ever tasted. And how sweet it was, too, to know that he was in not altogether hostile territory.

‘Welcome to Heaven, preacher!’ called one his benefactors, and everyone except the sleeping Asian laughed.

Peter turned to face them, beamed them a smile. ‘Well, things are certainly looking up from what they were a few minutes ago.’

‘Onwards and upwards, preach! That’s the USIC motto, more or less.’

‘So,’ said Peter, ‘do you guys like it here?’

The black man who’d thrown the muffin went pensive, considering the question seriously. ‘It’s OK, man. As good as anywhere.’

‘Cool weather,’ his companion chipped in.

‘He means nice warm weather.’

‘Which is cool, man, is what I’m saying.’

‘You know, I haven’t even been outside yet,’ said Peter.

‘Oh, you should go,’ said the first man, as though acknowledging the possibility that Peter might prefer to spend his entire Oasis sojourn inside his quarters. ‘Check it out before the light comes up.’

Peter stood up. ‘I’d like that. Where’s… uh… the nearest door?’

The coffee bar attendant pointed a long, bony finger past an illuminated plastic sign that said ENJOY! in large letters and, underneath in smaller print, EAT AND DRINK RESPONSIBLY. REMEMBER THAT BOTTLED WATER, CARBONATED SOFT DRINKS, CAKES, CONFECTIONERY AND YELLOW-STICKERED ITEMS ARE NOT INCLUDED IN THE FOOD AND DRINK ALLOWANCE AND WILL BE DEDUCTED FROM YOUR EARNINGS.

‘Thanks for the tip,’ said Peter, as he was leaving. ‘And the food!’

‘Have a good one, bro.’

The last thing he heard was Patsy Cline’s voice, this time in a celebrity duet recorded, through the miracle of modern technology, decades after her death.

Peter stepped through the sliding door into the air of Oasis and, contrary to his apprehensions, he did not instantly die, get sucked into an airless vortex, or shrivel up like a scrap of fat on a griddle. Instead, he was enveloped in a moist, warm breeze, a swirling balm that felt like steam except that it didn’t make his throat catch. He strolled into the dark, his way unlit except by several distant lamps. In the dreary environs of the USIC airport, there was nothing much to see anyway, just acres of wet black bitumen, but he’d wanted to walk outside, and so here he was, walking, outside.

The sky was dark, dark aquamarine. Aquamareeeeeen, as BG might say. There were only a few dozen stars visible, far fewer than he was used to, but each one shone brightly, without any flicker, and with a pale green aura. There was no moon.

The rain had stopped now, but the atmosphere still seemed substantially composed of water. If he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine he’d waded into a warm swimming pool. The air lapped against his cheeks, tickled his ears, flowed over his lips and hands. It penetrated his clothing, breathing into the collar of his shirt and down his backbone, making his shoulderblades and chest dewy, making his shirtcuffs adhere to his wrists. The warmth — it was extreme warmth rather than heat — caused his skin to prickle with sweat, making him intimately aware of his armpit hair, the clefts of his groin, the shape of his toes inside their humid footwear.

He was dressed all wrong. Those USIC guys with their loose Arabic duds had it sussed, didn’t they? He would have to emulate them as soon as possible.

As he walked, he tried to sort out which unusual phenomena were occurring inside of him and which were external realities. His heart was beating a little faster than usual; he put that down to excitement. His gait was a little wonky, as though skewed by alcohol; he wondered if he was merely suffering the after-effects of the Jump, jetlag, and general exhaustion. His feet seemed to bounce slightly with every step, as though the bitumen was rubberised. He knelt and rapped on the ground with his knuckles. It was hard, unyielding. Whatever it was made of — presumably some combination of the local earth and imported chemicals — it had an asphalt-like consistency. He stood up, and the action of standing was perhaps easier than it should be. An ever-so-slight trampoline effect. But this was counterbalanced by the watery density of the air. He lifted his hand, pushed his palm forward into space, testing for resistance. There was none, and yet the air swirled around his wrist and up his forearm, tickling him. He didn’t know whether he liked it, or found it creepy. Atmosphere, in his experience, had always been an absence. The air here was a presence, a presence so palpable that he was tempted to believe he could let himself fall and the air would simply catch him like a pillow. It wouldn’t, of course. But as it nuzzled against his skin, it almost promised that it would.

He took a deep breath, concentrating on the texture of it as it went in. It felt and tasted no different from normal air. He knew from the USIC brochures that the composition was much the same mix of nitrogen and oxygen he’d been breathing all his life, with a bit less carbon dioxide and a bit more ozone and a few trace elements he might not have had before. The brochures hadn’t mentioned the water vapour, although Oasis’s climate had been described as ‘tropical’, so maybe that covered it.

Something tickled his left ear and, as a reflex, he brushed at it. Something squishy, like a wet cornflake or a rotting leaf, passed across his fingers but fell off before he could hold it up to his eyes and examine it. His fingers were streaked with a sticky fluid. Blood? No, not blood. Or if it was, it wasn’t his. It was green as spinach.

He turned around and looked at the building he’d emerged from. It was monumentally ugly, like all architecture not built by religious devotees or mad eccentrics. Its only redeeming feature was the transparency of the mess hall’s window, lit up like a video screen in the dark. Although he’d walked quite a long way, he could still recognise the coffee bar and the magazine rack, and even fancied he could make out the Asian man still slumped on one of the chairs. At this distance, these details looked like a neat assortment of items stored inside a coin-operated dispenser. A luminous little box, surrounded by a great sea of strange air; and above it, a trillion miles of darkness.

He’d experienced moments like this before, on the planet that was supposed to be his home. Sleepless and wandering the streets of shabby British towns at two, three in the morning, he would find himself at a bus shelter in Stockport, a woebegone shopping mall in Reading, or the empty husks of Camden market in the hours before dawn — and it was at those times, in those places, that he was struck by a vision of human insignificance in all its unbearable pathos. People and their dwellings were such a thin dust on the surface of the globe, like invisible specks of bacteria on an orange, and the feeble lights of kebab shops and supermarkets failed utterly to register on the infinities of space above. If it weren’t for God, the almighty vacuum would be too crushing to endure, but once God was with you, it was a different story.

Peter turned again and kept walking. His vague hope was that if he walked far enough, the featureless tarmac of the airport environs would finally come to an end, and he would step over into the landscape of Oasis, the real Oasis.

His denim jacket was growing heavy with moisture and his flannel shirt was swollen with perspiration. His jeans made a comical whooping noise as he walked, rough wet cotton rubbing against itself. The waistband was starting to chafe against his hips; a rivulet of sweat ran into the cleft of his arse. He stopped to hitch up his trousers and to wipe his face. He pressed his fingertips to his ears, to clear them of a sibilant undertone he’d been attributing to his sinuses. But the noise was not from within. The atmosphere was full of rustling. Worldless whispering, the sound of agitated leaves, except that there was no vegetation anywhere to be seen. It was as though the air currents, so similar to water currents, could not move silently, but must churn and hiss like ocean waves.

He was sure he’d adjust, in time. It would be like living near a railway line, or, indeed, near the ocean. After a while you wouldn’t hear it anymore.

He walked further, resisting an impulse to remove his clothes and toss them on the ground for retrieval on his return. The tarmac showed no sign of ending. What could USIC possibly want with all this blank bitumen? Maybe there were plans to extend the accommodation wings, or build squash courts, or a shopping mall. Oasis was tipped, in ‘the very near future’, to become a ‘thriving community’. By which USIC meant a thriving community of foreign settlers, of course. This world’s indigenous inhabitants, thriving or otherwise, were scarcely mentioned in USIC’s literature, except for fastidious assurances that nothing was planned or implemented without their full and informed consent. USIC was ‘in partnership’ with the citizens of Oasis — whoever they might be.

Peter was certainly very much looking forward to meeting them. They were, after all, the whole reason he had come.

From one of his jacket pockets, he extracted a compact camera. He’d been warned by the preparatory literature that it was ‘not practicable’ to use a camera on Oasis, but he’d brought one anyway. ‘Not practicable’ — what did that mean? Was it a veiled threat? Might his camera get impounded by authorities of some sort? Well, he would cross that bridge when he came to it. Right now, he wanted to take some pictures. For Bea. When he returned to her, any photo he’d bothered to snap would be worth a thousand words. He raised the gadget and captured the eerie tarmac, the lonely buildings, the glow of light from the cafeteria. He even tried to capture the aquamarine sky, but a quick inspection of the stored image confirmed it was a rectangle of pure black.

He pocketed the camera and walked on. How long had he been walking? His watch was not the illuminated digital kind; it was an old-fashioned one with hands, a gift from his father. He held it close to his face, trying to angle it so that it caught the light from the nearest lamp. But the nearest lamp was at least a hundred metres away.

Something glittered on his forearm, near the wristwatch band. Something alive. A mosquito? No, it was too big for that. A dragonfly, or some creature resembling a dragonfly. A tiny, trembling matchstick body shrouded in translucent wings. Peter wiggled his wrist, and the creature fell off. Or maybe it jumped, or flew, or got sucked into the swirling atmosphere. Whatever: it was gone.

He suddenly became aware that the whispering of the air was supplemented by a new noise, a mechanical whir, behind him. A vehicle cruised into view. It was steely-grey and bullet-shaped, with large wheels and thick vulcanised tyres designed for rough terrain. The driver was difficult to make out through the tinted windscreen, but was humanoid in shape. The car slowed and came to a halt right next to him, its metal flank only a few inches from where he stood. Its headlights pierced the darkness he’d been heading for, revealing a wire-mesh perimeter fence that he would have reached in another minute or two of walking.

‘Howdy.’

A female voice, with an American accent.

‘Hi,’ he replied.

‘Let me give you a ride back.’

It was the USIC woman who’d met him upon his arrival, the one who’d escorted him to his quarters and told him she was available if he needed anything. She opened the passenger door for him and waited, piano-playing her fingers on the steering wheel.

‘I’d been hoping to walk a little further, actually,’ said Peter. ‘Maybe meet some of the local… uh… people.’

‘We’ll do that after sunrise,’ the woman said. ‘The settlement is about fifty miles away. You’ll need a vehicle. Do you drive?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Have you discussed requisition of a vehicle?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You don’t think so?’

‘Uh… my wife handled most of the practicalities with USIC. I don’t know if they covered that.’

There was a pause, then a good-natured laugh. ‘Please get in, or the air conditioning will get all messed up.’

He swung into the car and closed the door. The air was dry and cool, and immediately made him aware that he was drenched to the skin. His feet, relieved of the weight of his body, made a sucking sound inside his socks.

The woman was dressed in a white smock, thin white cotton slacks and a taupe headscarf that hung loose over her chest. Her face was bare of makeup, and she had a puckered scar on her forehead, just under the hairline. Her hair, a lustreless brown, was very short and she might have passed for a young male soldier were it not for her soft dark eyebrows, tiny ears and pretty mouth.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Peter. ‘I’ve forgotten your name. I was very tired… ’

‘Grainger,’ she said.

‘Grainger,’ he said.

‘Christian names aren’t a big thing among USIC employees, in case you haven’t noticed.’

‘I’ve noticed.’

‘It’s a bit like the army. Except we don’t harm people.’

‘I should hope not.’

She revved the engine and steered the car back towards the airport complex. As she drove, she leaned forward, frowning in concentration, and even though the inside of the cabin was poorly lit, he spotted the tell-tale edges of contact lenses on her eyeballs. Beatrice was a contact lens wearer: that’s how he knew.

‘Did you come out specially to fetch me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you watching my every move? Keeping tabs on my every half-muffin?’

The allusion was lost on her. ‘I just dropped by the mess hall, and one of the guys said you’d gone out walking.’

‘Does that worry you?’ He kept his tone light and amiable.

‘You’ve just arrived,’ she said, not taking her eyes off the wind-screen. ‘We wouldn’t want you to come to harm on your first foray out of doors.’

‘What about the disclaimer I signed? The one that emphasises in twelve different ways that USIC accepts no responsibility for anything that might happen to me?’

She seemed nettled by this. ‘That was a legalistic document written by paranoid lawyers who’ve never even been here. I’m a nice person and I’m here and I welcomed you off that ship and I said I would keep an eye out for you. So that’s what I’m doing.’

‘I appreciate that,’ he said.

‘I take an interest in people,’ she said. ‘Gets me in trouble sometimes.’

‘I’ll try not to get you in trouble,’ he said. The eerily lit cafeteria seemed to be moving towards them in the dark, as if it was another vehicle threatening a head-on collision. He wished he hadn’t been fetched back so soon. ‘I hope you understand that I didn’t come here to sit and read magazines in a cafeteria. I want to go and find the people of Oasis, wherever they are. I’ll probably live among them, if they’ll let me. So it may not be feasible for you to… uh… keep an eye out for me.’

She manoeuvred the vehicle into a garage; they’d arrived.

‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’

‘I’m hoping to cross it pretty soon,’ he said, still maintaining a light tone. ‘As soon as possible. I don’t mean to be pushy, but… I’m going to be pushy. When are you available to drive me out of here?’

She switched off the engine, removed her small feet from the pedals. ‘Give me an hour to get things ready.’

‘Things?’

‘Food, mainly. You’ll have noticed that the mess hall isn’t serving right now.’

He nodded, and a ticklish trickle of sweat ran down his face. ‘I can’t really figure out how the day/night routine is supposed to work, if it’s dark for three days straight. I mean, right now, it’s officially night, yes?’

‘Yes, it’s night.’ She rubbed her eyes, but gingerly, so as not to dislodge the lenses.

‘So do you just let the clock decide when the days begin and end?’

‘Sure. It’s not much different than living in the Arctic Circle, I guess. You adjust your sleep pattern so that you’re awake when everybody else is.’

‘What about those guys in the mess hall right now?’

She shrugged. ‘Stanko’s scheduled to be there because he’s on night duty. The other guys… well, people get insomnia sometimes. Or they get all slept out.’

‘What about the people of Oasis — the… uh… natives? Are they asleep right now? I mean, should we wait until the sun comes up?’

She faced him with an unblinking, defensive stare. ‘I have no idea when they sleep. Or even if they sleep. To be straight with you, I know almost nothing about them, even though I probably know more than anyone here. They’re… kind of hard to get to know. I’m not sure they want to be known.’

He grinned. ‘Nevertheless… I’m here to know them.’

‘OK,’ she sighed. ‘It’s your call. But you look tired. Are you sure you’ve had enough rest?’

‘I’m fine. What about you?’

‘Fine also. Like I said, give me an hour. If, in that time, you change your mind and want to sleep some more, let me know.’

‘How would I do that?’

‘The Shoot. There’s a scroll-down menu behind the USIC icon. I’m on it.’

‘Glad to hear there’s one menu that’s got something on it.’ He meant it as a rueful comment on the mess hall, but as soon as the words left his mouth, he worried she might take them the wrong way.

She opened her door, he did the same on his side, and they stepped out into the moist swirling dark.

‘Any other advice?’ he called over the top of the vehicle.

‘Yes,’ she shot back. ‘Forget the denim jacket.’

The power of suggestion? She’d told him he looked tired and he hadn’t felt tired when she said it, but he felt tired now. Befuddled, too. As though the excessive humidity had seeped into his brain and fogged his thoughts. He hoped Grainger would escort him all the way back to his quarters, but she didn’t. She led him into the building through a different door from the one he’d used as an exit, and, within half a minute, was bidding him au revoir at a T-junction in the corridors.

He walked off in the opposite direction from her, as she clearly expected him to, but he had no clear idea where he was going. The passage was empty and silent and he couldn’t recall having seen it before. The walls were painted a cheerful blue (turned somewhat darker by the subdued lighting) but were otherwise nondescript, with no signs or pointers. Not that there was any reason to expect a sign pointing to his quarters. USIC had made it clear, during one of the interviews, that he would not ‘in any way, shape or form’ be the official pastor of the base and shouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t much call for his services. His true responsibility was to the indigenous inhabitants. Indeed, that was his job description in the contract: Minister (Christian) to Indigenous Population.

‘But you do have a minister for the USIC personnel’s needs, surely?’ he’d asked.

‘Actually, at the moment, no,’ the interviewer had replied.

‘Does that mean the colony is officially atheist?’ Bea had asked.

‘It’s not a colony,’ another of the USIC interviewers said, with an edge to her voice. ‘It’s a community. We do not use the word colony. And we do not promote any faith or lack of faith. We’re looking for the best people, that’s all.’

‘A pastor specifically for the USIC staff is a fine idea, in principle,’ the first interviewer reassured them. ‘Especially if he — or she — had other useful skills. We’ve included such individuals in the team at various times in the past. Right now, it’s not a priority.’

‘But my mission is a priority?’ Peter had said, still scarcely able to believe it.

‘We would classify it “urgent”,’ the interviewer said. ‘So urgent, in fact, that I must ask you… ’ He leaned forward, looked straight into Peter’s eyes. ‘How soon can you leave?’

Now there was a light glowing around the next bend in the corridor, and a faint harmonious noise which he identified, after a moment, as piped music. He had walked too far, failed to spot his own room, and ended up back at the mess hall.

When he re-entered, he found that there had been a few changes. The ghostly croon of Patsy Cline had vanished from the airwaves, replaced by cocktail jazz so bland that it barely existed. The two black guys had left. The Chinese guy had woken up and was leafing through a magazine. A petite middle-aged woman, maybe Korean or Vietnamese, with a dyed streak of orange through her black hair, was staring meditatively at a cup in her lap. The Slavic-looking guy behind the counter was still on duty. He appeared not to notice Peter walking in, mesmerised as he was by a game he was playing with two squeezable plastic bottles — ketchup and mustard. He was trying to balance them against each other, tipped at an angle so that only their nozzles touched. His long fingers hovered above the fragile arrangement, ready to enfold the bottles when they fell.

Peter paused in the doorway, suddenly cold in his sweat-soaked denims and bedraggled hair. How ridiculous he must look! For just a few seconds, the sheer alienness of these people, and his irrelevance to them, threatened to flood his spirit with fear, the paralysis of shyness, the terror that a child feels when faced with a new school filled with strangers. But then God calmed him with an infusion of courage and he stepped forward.

‘Hello everybody,’ he said.

5. Just as he recognised them for what they were

In the eyes of God, all men and women are naked. Clothes are nothing more than a fig leaf. And the bodies beneath are just another layer of clothing, an outfit of flesh with an impractically thin leather exterior, in various shades of pink, yellow and brown. The souls alone are real. Seen in this way, there can never be any such thing as social unease or shyness or embarrassment. All you need do is greet your fellow soul.

At Peter’s greeting, Stanko set the bottles to rights, looked up and grinned. The Chinese guy gave a thumbs-up salute. And the woman, who’d been dozing with her eyes open, unfortunately got a fright and jerked her legs, spilling coffee into her lap.

‘Oh my…!’ cried Peter, and rushed over to her. ‘I’m so sorry!’

She was wide awake now. She had on a loose smock and pants, much like Grainger’s but beige. The spilled liquid added a large brown blotch.

‘It’s OK, it’s OK,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t that hot.’

An object flew past Peter’s face, landing on the woman’s knee. It was a tea towel, tossed by Stanko. Calmly she began to swab and dab. She lifted the hem of her dress, revealing two damp patches on her gauzy cotton slacks.

‘Can I help?’ said Peter.

She laughed. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘My wife uses vinegar on coffee stains,’ he said, keeping his eyes on her face so that she wouldn’t think he was ogling her thighs.

‘This isn’t real coffee,’ the woman said. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ She balled up the tea towel and placed it on the table, in an unhurried, methodical motion. Then she settled back into her chair, apparently in no rush to change. The jazz muzak lapsed into silence for a moment, then the cymbals and snare drum were tickled by a pair of brushes, the saxophone exhaled, and the noodling began once more. Stanko busied himself with something tactfully noisy, and the Chinese guy studied his magazine. Bless them, they were trying to give him space.

‘Have I blown my chance to introduce myself?’ he said. ‘I’m Peter.’

‘Moro. Pleased to meet you.’ The woman extended her right hand. He hesitated before shaking it, having noticed that one of her fingers ended at a knuckle stub and her pinky was missing altogether. He took hold and she squeezed, confidently.

‘You know, that’s very unusual,’ he said, sitting down next to her.

‘Factory accident,’ she said. ‘Happens every day.’

‘No, I meant the way you offered me that hand. I’ve met lots of people with fingers missing from their right hand. They always offer the left one for a handshake. Because they don’t want to make the other person feel uncomfortable.’

She seemed mildly surprised. ‘Is that a fact?’ Then she smiled and shook her head, as if to say, Some people sure are weird. Her gaze was direct and yet guarded, examining him for identifiers that could be logged in the as-yet empty file labelled Missionary From England.

‘I just went out for a walk,’ he said, gesturing at the darkness outside. ‘My first time.’

‘Not much to see,’ she said.

‘Well, it is night,’ he said.

‘Even in daylight, there’s not much to see. But we’re working on that.’ She didn’t sound proud or off-hand, just descriptive.

‘What’s your job here?’

‘Engineering technologist.’

He allowed himself to look bemused, signalling: Please explain. She parried with a look that signalled: It’s late and I’m tired.

‘Also,’ she said, ‘I do some work in the kitchens, cooking and baking, every ninety-six hours.’ She raked her fingers through her hair. There were grey roots under the glossy black and orange. ‘That’s kinda fun, I look forward to that.’

‘Volunteer work?’

‘No, it’s all part of my schedule. You’ll find a lot of us have more than one function here.’ She stood up. It wasn’t until she extended her hand again that Peter realised their encounter was over.

‘I’d better get cleaned up,’ she explained.

‘Nice to have met you, Moro,’ he said.

‘Likewise,’ she said, and walked out.

‘Makes good dim sum parcels,’ said the Chinese man when she’d gone.

‘Excuse me?’ said Peter.

‘Dim sum pastry is a difficult thing,’ said the Chinese man. ‘It’s fragile. The dough. But it’s gotta be thin or it’s not dim sum. Tricky. But she’s good at it. We can always tell when she’s been on kitchen duty.’

Peter moved to a vacant chair next to the Chinese man.

‘I’m Peter,’ he said.

‘Werner,’ said the Chinese man. His hand was five-fingered and pudgy, and exerted a carefully measured firmness in the handshake. ‘So, you’ve been exploring.’

‘Not much yet. I’m still very tired. Just got here.’

‘Takes a while to adjust. Those molecules in you gotta calm down. When’s your first shift?’

‘Uh… I don’t really… I’m here as a pastor. I suppose I expect to be on duty all the time.’

Werner nodded, but there was a hint of bemusement on his face, as though Peter had just confessed to signing a shonky contract without proper legal advice.

‘Doing God’s work is a privilege and a joy,’ said Peter. ‘I don’t need any breaks from it.’

Werner nodded again. Peter noted at a glance that the magazine he’d been reading was Pneumatics & Hydraulics Informatics, with a full-colour cover photo of machine innards and the snappy headline MAKING GEAR PUMPS MORE VERSATILE.

‘This pastor thing… ’ said Werner. ‘What are you gonna be doing, exactly? On a day-to-day basis?’

Peter smiled. ‘I’ll have to wait and see.’

‘See how the land lays,’ suggested Werner.

‘Exactly,’ said Peter. Tiredness was swamping him again. He felt as if he might pass out right there in his chair, slide onto the floor for Stanko to mop up.

‘I gotta admit,’ said Werner, ‘I don’t know much about religion.’

‘And I don’t know much about pneumatics and hydraulics,’ said Peter.

‘Not my line, either,’ said Werner, reaching over with some effort to replace the magazine in the racks. ‘I just picked it up out of curiosity.’ He faced Peter again. There was something he wanted to clarify. ‘China didn’t even have religion for a long time, under, like, one of the dynasties.’

‘What dynasty was that?’ For some reason, the word ‘Tokugawa’ popped into Peter’s mind, but then he realised he was confusing Japanese and Chinese history.

‘The Mao dynasty,’ said Werner. ‘It was bad, man. People getting killed left, right and centre. Then things loosened up. People could do what they liked. If you wanted to believe in God, fine. Buddha, too. Shinto. Whatever.’

‘What about you? Were you ever interested in any faith?’

Werner peered up at the ceiling. ‘I read this huge book once. Must’ve been four hundred pages. Scientology. Interesting. Food for thought.’

Oh, Bea, thought Peter, I need you here by my side.

‘You gotta understand,’ Werner went on, ‘I’ve read a lot of books. I learn words from them. Vocabulary building. So if I ever come across a weird word one day, in a situation where it matters, I’m, like, ready for it.’

The saxophone hazarded a squawk that might almost have been considered raucous, but immediately resolved itself into sweet melody.

‘There are lots of Christians in China nowadays,’ Peter observed. ‘Millions.’

‘Yeah, but out of the total population it’s, like, one per cent, half of one per cent, whatever. Growing up, I hardly ever met one. Exotic.’

Peter drew a deep breath, fighting nausea. He hoped he was only imagining the sensation in his head, of his brain shifting position, adjusting its fit against the lubricated shell of his skull. ‘The Chinese… the Chinese are very focused on family, yes?’

Werner looked pensive. ‘So they say.’

‘Not you?’

‘I was fostered. To a German military couple based in Chengdu. Then when I was fourteen they moved to Singapore.’ He paused; then, in case there might be doubt, he added: ‘With me.’

‘That must be a very unusual story for China.’

‘I couldn’t give you stats. But, yeah. Very unusual, I’m sure. Nice folks, too.’

‘How do they feel about you being here?’

‘They died,’ said Werner, with no change of expression. ‘Not long before I was selected.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

Werner nodded, to confirm agreement that his step-parents’ demise was, in the final analysis, a regrettable event. ‘They were good folks. Supportive. A lot of the guys here didn’t have that. I had that. Lucky.’

‘Are you in touch with anyone else back home?’

‘There’s a lot of folks I’d like to touch base with. Fine people.’

‘Any one special person?’

Werner shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t rate them one over the other. All unique, you know. Talented. Some of them, I really owe. Like, they helped me. Gave me pointers, introduced me to… opportunities.’ His eyes went glassy as he reconnected, momentarily, with a distant past.

‘When do you go back?’ said Peter.

‘Go back?’ Werner took a second or two to decode the question, as though Peter had voiced it in an impenetrably thick accent. ‘Nothing scheduled for the foreseeable. Some guys, like Severin for instance, have been back and forth, back and forth, every few years. I’m like, why? It takes you three, four years to hit your stride. Acclimatisation-wise, expertise-wise, focus-wise. It’s a big project. After a while you get to the point where you can see how everything joins up with everything else. How the work of an engineer ties in with the work of a plumber and an electrician and a cook and a… a horticulturalist.’ His pudgy hands cupped an invisible sphere, to indicate some sort of holistic concept.

Suddenly, Werner’s hands appeared to swell in size, each finger ballooning to the thickness of a baby’s arm. His face changed shape, too, sprouting multiple eyes and mouths that swarmed loose from the flesh and swirled around the room. Then something hit Peter smack on the forehead. It was the floor.

A few seconds or minutes later, strong hands hooked under his shoulders and heaved him onto his back.

‘Are you OK?’ said Stanko, strangely unfazed by the delirious see-sawing of the walls and ceiling all around him. Werner, whose face and hands were back to normal, was likewise unaware of any problem — except the problem of a sweat-soaked, foolishly overdressed missionary sprawled insensible on the floor. ‘Are you with us, bro?’

Peter blinked hard. The room turned slower. ‘I’m with you.’

‘You need to be in bed,’ said Stanko.

‘I think you’re right,’ said Peter. ‘But I… I don’t know where… ’

‘It’ll be in the directory,’ said Stanko, and went off to check.

Within sixty seconds, Peter was being carried out of the mess hall and into the dim blue corridor by Stanko and Werner. Neither man was as strong as BG so they made slow and lurching progress, pausing every few metres to adjust their grip. Stanko’s bony fingers dug into Peter’s armpits and shoulders, sure to leave bruises, while Werner had the easy job, the ankles.

‘I can walk, I can walk,’ said Peter, but he wasn’t sure if that was true and his two Samaritans ignored him anyway. In any case, his quarters weren’t far from the mess hall. Before he knew it, he was being laid down — or rather, dumped — on his bed.

‘Nice talking with you,’ said Werner, panting slightly. ‘Good luck with… whatever.’

‘Just close your eyes and relax, bro,’ advised Stanko, already halfway to the door. ‘Sleep it off.’

Sleep it off. These were words he’d heard many times before in his life. He had even heard them spoken by men who’d scooped him off a floor and carried him away — although usually to a dumping-place much less pleasant than a bed. On occasion, the guys who’d lugged him out of the nightclubs and other drinking-holes where he’d disgraced himself had given him a few kicks in the ribs before hoisting him up. Once, they’d tossed him into a back street and a delivery van had passed right over him, its tyres miraculously missing his head and limbs, just tearing off a hunk of his hair. That was in the days before he was ready to admit there was a higher power keeping him alive.

Uncanny how similar the after-effects of the Jump were to extremes of alcohol abuse. But worse. Like the mother of all hangovers combined with a dose of magic mushrooms. Neither BG nor Severin had mentioned hallucinations, but maybe these guys were simply more robust than him. Or maybe they were both fast asleep right now, quietly recuperating instead of making fools of themselves.

He waited for the room to become a geometric space of fixed angles anchored in gravity, and then he got up. He checked the Shoot for messages. Still no word from Bea. Perhaps he should have asked Grainger to come to his room to check his machine, make sure he was using it correctly. But it was night and she was a woman and he barely knew her. Nor would their relationship have got off to an auspicious start if he’d hallucinated that she was sprouting multiple eyes and mouths and then collapsed at her feet.

Besides, the Shoot was so simple to operate that he couldn’t imagine how anyone — even a technophobe like himself — might misunderstand it. The thing sent and received messages: that was all. It didn’t play movies, make noises, offer to sell him products, inform him about the plight of mistreated donkeys or the Brazilian rainforest. It didn’t offer him the opportunity to check the weather in southern England or the current number of Christians in China or the names and dates of dynasties. It just confirmed that his messages had been sent, and that there was no reply.

Abruptly he glimpsed — not on the matt grey screen of the Shoot, but in his own mind — a picture of tangled wreckage on an English motorway, at night, garishly lit by the headlights of emergency vehicles. Bea, dead, somewhere on the road between Heathrow and home. Loose pearls scattered across the asphalt, black slicks of blood. A month ago already. History. Such things could happen. One person embarks on an outrageously hazardous journey and arrives unscathed; another goes for a short, routine drive and gets killed. ‘God’s sick sense of humour,’ as one grieving parent (soon to leave the church) had once put it. For a few seconds, the nightmarish vision of Beatrice lying dead on the road was real to Peter, and a nauseous thrill of terror passed through his guts.

But no. He mustn’t let himself be deluded by imaginary horrors. God was never cruel. Life could be cruel, but not God. In a universe made dangerous by the gift of free will, God could be relied upon for support no matter what happened, and He appreciated the potentials and limitations of each of His children. Peter knew that if anything awful happened to Bea, there was no way he’d be able to function here. The mission would be over before it began. And if there was one thing that had become clear in all the months of thought and prayer leading up to his journey to Oasis, it was that God really wanted him here. He was safe in God’s hands, and so was Bea. She must be.

As for the Shoot, there was one easy way of checking whether he was using it correctly. He located the USIC icon — a stylised green scarab — on the screen, and clicked open the menu behind it. It wasn’t much of a menu, just three items: Maintenance (repairs), Admin and Graigner, obviously set up in haste by Grainger herself. If he wanted a more substantial list of correspondents, it was up to him to organise it.

He opened a fresh message page, and wrote:

Dear Grainger. Then deleted ‘Dear’ and substituted ‘Hi’, then deleted that and just had ‘Grainger’, then reinstated ‘Dear’, then deleted it again. Unwarranted intimacy versus unfriendly brusqueness… a flurry of confused gestures before communication could begin. Letter-writing must have been so much easier in the olden days when everyone, even the bank manager or the tax department, was Dear.

Hi Grainger.

You were right. I am tired. I should sleep some more. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Best wishes,

Peter

Laboriously, he undressed. Every item of his clothing was swollen with damp, like he’d been caught in a downpour. His socks peeled away from his wrinkled feet like muddy clumps of foliage. His trousers and jacket clung obstinately to him, resisting his attempts to tug free. Everything he removed weighed heavy and fell to the floor with a dull whump. At first, he thought that fragments of his clothing had actually crumbled off and rolled across the floor, but on closer inspection, the loose bits were dead insects. He picked up one of the bodies and held it between his fingers. The wings had lost their silvery translucence, and were stained red with dye. Legs had been lost. It was an effort, actually, to perceive this mangled husk as an insect at all: it looked and felt like the pulverised remains of a hand-rolled cigarette. Why had these creatures hitched a ride in his clothes? He’d probably killed them just by the friction of walking.

Remembering the camera, he fished it out of his jacket pocket. It was slippery with moisture. He switched it on, intending to review the pictures he’d taken of the USIC perimeter and to snap a few more here, to show Bea his quarters, his sodden clothes, maybe one of the insects. A spark leapt from the mechanism, stinging him, and the light died. He held the camera in his hand, staring down at it as though it were a bird whose tiny heart had burst from fright. He knew the thing was unfixable and yet he half-hoped that if he waited a while, it would hiccup back into life. Just a moment ago, it had been a clever little storehouse of memories for Bea, a trove of images which would come to his aid in a near future he’d already inhabited in his imagination. Him and Bea on the bed, the gadget glowing between them, her pointing, him following the line of her finger, him saying ‘That? Oh, that was… ’ ‘And that was… ’ ‘And that was… ’ Now suddenly none of it was. In his palm lay a small metal shape with no purpose.

As the minutes passed, he became aware that his naked flesh smelled strange. It was that same faint honeydew melon scent he detected in the drinking water. The atmosphere swirling around out there had not been content merely to lick and stroke his skin, it had made him fragrant, as well as provoking copious sweat.

He was too tired to wash, and a slight quaver in the straight line of the skirting board warned him that the whole room might soon start moving again if he didn’t shut his eyes and rest. He collapsed on the bed and slept for an eternity which, when he awoke, turned out to have been forty-odd minutes.

He checked the Shoot for messages. Nothing. Not even from Grainger. Maybe he didn’t know how to use this machine after all. The message he’d sent Grainger was not a foolproof test, because he’d worded it in such a way that it hadn’t strictly required a response. He thought for a minute, then wrote:

Hello again Grainger,

Sorry to bother you, but I haven’t noticed any phones or any other method of getting hold of somebody directly. Are there none?

Best wishes,

Peter

He showered, towelled himself half-dry and lay on the bed again, still naked. If his messages to Grainger had failed to get through and she turned up a few minutes from now, he would wrap himself in a sheet and talk to her through the door. Unless she walked right in without knocking. She wouldn’t do that, would she? Surely the social conventions of the USIC base weren’t that different from the norm? He looked around the room for a suitable object to wedge against the door, but there was nothing.

Once, years ago, while going through the complicated procedure of locking up the church (deadbolts, padlocks, mortice locks, even a chain), he’d suggested to Beatrice that they should have an open-door policy.

‘But we do,’ she’d said, puzzled.

‘No, I mean no locks at all. The doors open to anyone, any time. “Entertaining angels unawares”, as the Scripture puts it.’

She’d stroked his head as if he were a child. ‘You’re sweet.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘So are the drug addicts.’

‘We don’t have any drugs here. And nothing that could be sold for drugs.’ He gestured at the walls decorated with children’s drawings, the pews with their comfy old cushions, the wobbly lectern, the stacks of well-worn Bibles, the general absence of silver candelabras, antique sculptures and precious ornaments.

Bea sighed. ‘Anything can be sold for drugs. Or at least the person can try. If he’s desperate enough.’ And she gave him a You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you? look.

Indeed, he knew all about that. He just had a tendency to forget.

Despite his resolution to stay awake until the time Grainger might show up if she hadn’t received his message, Peter fell asleep. Two hours passed and, when he woke, the room was stable and the view through the window was unchanged: lonesome expanses of darkness, speckled with eerie lamplight. He shambled out of bed and his foot kicked something flimsy across the floor: one of his socks, dried out and stiff, transformed from cotton into cardboard. He sat at the Shoot and read a fresh response from Grainger that had his own ‘sorry to bother you’ lure hanging off it.

A telephone call would have bothered me a lot more, she wrote, especialy if Id been asleep. No, there are no phones. USIC tried setting them up in the early days but reception ranged from lousy to nonexistant. The atmosphere is wrong, too thick or something. So weve done without. And its been OK. Lets face it, most of what phones get used for is a total waste of time anyway. Weve got red buttons all over the place for emergencies (and never need them!). Our work schedules are on printed rosters so we know where to turn up and what to do. As far as chat goes we talk face to face if were not too busy — and if were too busy we shouldnt be trying to chat. When special announcements need to be made, we pipe them over the PA. We can use the Shoot also but most people wait until they can discuss things face to face. Everybodys an expert here and discussions can get quite technical and then theres the give+take of problem solving in situ. Writing stuff down so as the other person can understand it and then waiting for an answer is a nightmare. Hope this helps, Grainger.

He smiled. In one sentence, she’d flushed thousands of years of written communication briskly down the toilet, having already discarded a century and a half of telephone use in the previous dump. The ‘hope this helps’ chaser was a cute touch, too. Chutzpah of a kind.

Still smiling, and picturing the boyish face of Grainger in his head, he checked for messages from Beatrice, not really expecting any. A long scroll of text manifested on the screen and, because it appeared instantaneously, without fuss or fanfare, he was slow to recognise it for what it was. The screen was full to overflowing. He looked into the nest of words, and spotted the name Joshua. A cluster of six letters, meaningless to most other people, but it sprang into his soul and made it come alive with vivid images: Joshua’s paws, with their comical white tufts between the pink pads; Joshua covered in plaster dust from next door’s renovations; Joshua performing his death-defying circus leap from the top of the fridge to the ironing board; Joshua scratching at the kitchen window, his soft cry inaudible over the peak-hour traffic; Joshua asleep in the basket of dried washing; Joshua on the kitchen table, stroking his furry jaw against the earthenware teapot that never got used for any other purpose than this; Joshua in bed with him and Bea. And then he saw Bea: Bea only half-covered by the yellow duvet, reluctant to move because the cat was asleep against her thigh. Bea’s ribcage and bosom, poking through the threadbare cotton of her favourite T-shirt which was too old to be worn in public anymore but which was just right for bed. Bea’s neck, long and smooth except for two pale creases like seams. Bea’s mouth, her lips.

Dear Peter, her letter began.

Oh, the preciousness to him of those words! If there’d been no more to her message than this, he would have been satisfied. He would have read Dear Peter, Dear Peter, Dear Peter over and over, not out of vanity, but because these were words from her to him.

Dear Peter,

I’m crying with relief as I write this. Knowing that you’re alive has made me all shaky and woozy, as if I’ve been holding my breath for a month and I’ve finally let it out. Praise the Lord that He kept you safe.

What’s it like where you are? I don’t mean the room, I mean outside, the whole place in general. Please tell me, I’m desperate to know. Have you taken any pictures?

As for me, relax, I haven’t aged fifty years or even developed any wrinkles since you last saw me. Just some bags under my eyes from lack of sleep (more about that later).

Seriously, the last four weeks have been hard, not knowing if you would get there in one piece or if you were already dead and nobody told me. I kept loitering around this machine even though I knew that nothing would come through for ages yet.

Then when your message finally did come I wasn’t here to receive it. I was trapped at work. I did a morning shift which went OK and I was about to go home but by 2.45 it was clear we would be 3 staff members down — Leah and Owen phoned in sick and Susannah just didn’t turn up. No joy from the nursing agency so I was asked to stay on and do a double, which I did. Then at 11 PM, guess what? — half the night staff didn’t show up either. So I was pressured to do a triple shift! Highly illegal, but do they care?

Tony from next door popped round to feed Joshua but didn’t sound too happy when I phoned him. ‘We’ve all got problems,’ he said. All the more reason to help each other, I almost said. But he sounded stressed out. If this happens again, I may have to ask the students on the other side. I’d probably have to teach them how to use a tin opener.

Speaking of Joshua, he isn’t coping well with your absence. He wakes me up at 4 AM, miaowing in my ear and then flopping down demonstratively on your side of the bed. Then I lie awake until I have to get ready for work. Oh, the joys of being an abandoned mother.

I’ve been checking the news on my phone obsessively, in case there was a news report about you. I know that’s daft. USIC is not exactly the world’s most high-profile organisation, is it? We’d never even heard of them before they approached you. But still…

Anyway, you’re safe now — I’m so indescribably relieved. I’ve finally stopped trembling and I feel less woozy. I’ve read and re-read your two messages over and over! And yes, you’re right to assume that it’s better to write to me when your brain is scrambled than not to write at all. Perfection is not ours to achieve.

Which reminds me: please stop worrying about the last time we made love. I told you it was all right and it was (and is). The orgasm wasn’t primarily what I wanted from the experience, trust me.

Also, stop worrying about what these guys (Severin etc) think of you. It’s irrelevant. You didn’t go to Oasis to impress them. You went to Oasis to witness to souls who have never heard of Jesus. In any case these USIC guys have jobs to do and you’ll probably not see much of them.

I can’t really picture the Oasis rain from your description but green water sounds a bit alarming. The weather here has been terrible since you left. Heavy downpours every day. I wouldn’t say it’s like bead curtains, more like getting a bucket of water emptied over your head. There’s been flooding in some towns in the Midlands, cars floating down the street, etc. We’re OK except that the toilet bowl is slow to drain after a flush, ditto the plughole in the shower cubicle. Not sure what’s going on there. Too busy to get it seen to.

Life in our parish continues hectic. The situation with Mirah (?Meerah) and her husband has reached crisis point. She finally told him she’s been attending our church and he hit the roof. Or to be more precise, he hit Mirah. Many times. Her face is a swollen mess, she can barely see. She says she wants to leave him and she needs our (my) help with the legalities — housing, employment, benefits, etc. I’ve been making some preliminary phone calls (ie, a few hours so far) but mainly just providing TLC. Her prospects for independence are not good. She can barely speak English, she’s totally unskilled and to be honest I think she’s of below average intelligence. I see my role as being there for her emotionally until her face heals a bit and she goes back to her husband. In the meantime I hope our house doesn’t become the scene of an Arabic honour killing. I’m sure that would traumatise Joshua no end.

I know I sound flippant, but the bottom line is that I don’t think Meerah (?Mirah — I’ll have to get the spelling straight if I’m to be filling in application forms for Crisis Loans, etc) is ready to receive the support & strength she would get if she gave her heart to Christ. I think she’s attracted to the friendly, tolerant atmosphere of our church and the tantalising notion of being a free woman. She talks about being a Christian as if it’s a gym club membership you can sign up for.

Well, I see that it’s about 1.30 AM which is bad news for me because Joshua will no doubt wake me two and a half hours from now, and I’m not even in bed yet. I hear rain again. I love you and miss you. Don’t worry about anything. Trust in Jesus. He has made the journey with you. (I only wish I had.) Remember that Jesus is working through you even at those times when you feel you’re out of your depth.

As for our old friend Saint Paul, he might not approve of how much I wish I could curl up in bed next to you right now. But yes, let’s quote his wise advice on other matters. My darling, we both know that the effects of your travels will eventually pass and you’ll be rested and then you’ll no longer be able to sit in your cosy quarters writing epistles to me and looking out at the rain. You’ll have to open the door and start work. As Paul says, ‘Walk in wisdom toward them that are without, redeeming the time.’ And remember I’m thinking of you!

Kisses, hugs, and a headbutt from Joshua,

Beatrice

Peter read this letter eight or nine times at least before he could bear to part with it. Then he fetched his bag, the one that the Virgin check-in girl had doubted was enough for a one-way transatlantic flight, dumped it on the bed and zipped it open. It was time to get dressed for work.

Apart from his Bible, notepads, a second pair of jeans, polished black shoes, trainers, sandals, three T-shirts and three pairs of socks and underpants, the bag contained one item of apparel that had seemed uselessly exotic when he’d packed it, an item he’d figured he was about as likely to wear as a tutu or a tuxedo. The USIC interviewers had advised him that there was no particular dress code on Oasis but that if he intended to spend a significant amount of time outdoors, he might wish to invest in some Arabic-style garments. Indeed, they’d dropped strong hints that he might regret it if he didn’t. So, Beatrice had bought him a dishdasha from the local cut-price Muslim outfitters.

‘It was the plainest one I could find,’ she said, showing it to him a couple of nights before his departure. ‘They had ones with gold brocade, spangles, embroidery… ’

He’d held it against his body. ‘It’s very long,’ he said.

‘It means you won’t need trousers,’ she said, half-smiling. ‘You can be naked underneath. If you want.’

He thanked her but didn’t try it on.

‘You don’t think it’s too girly, do you?’ she said. ‘I think it’s very masculine.’

‘It’s fine,’ he said, packing it away. It wasn’t effeminacy that worried him; it was that he couldn’t imagine himself swanning about like an actor in an old Bible movie. It seemed vainglorious, and not at all what modern Christianity was about.

One walk in the Oasan atmosphere had changed all that. His denim jacket, still in a crumpled heap on the floor, had dried stiff as tarpaulin. An Arabic smock and pyjama-style pants, such as he’d seen several of the USIC staff wearing, was probably the ideal alternative, but his ankle-length dishdasha would do nicely too. He could wear it with sandals. So what if he looked like a fancy-dress party sheikh? This was about practicality. He pulled the dishdasha out of the bag, let it unfurl.

To his dismay, it was spattered and stained with black ink. The ballpoint pens that had exploded during the flight had splurted their contents directly onto the white fabric. To make matters worse, he’d evidently scrunched the garment further down in the bag when he was preparing to leave the ship, causing the ink stains to reproduce themselves in Rorschach fashion.

And yet… and yet… He shook the garment straight, held it at arm’s length. Something astonishing had happened. The ink pattern, created randomly, had turned into a cross, a Christian cross, right in the middle of the chest. If it had been red instead of black, it would almost be the insignia on the tunic of a medieval crusader. Almost. The ink stains were untidy, with globs and stray extra lines marring the perfection of the design. Although… although… those faint lines ghosting under the crossbar could be interpreted as the skeletally thin arms of the crucified Christ… and those spiky smudges higher up could be seen as thorns from Jesus’s crown. He shook his head: reading too much into things was a weakness of his. And yet here it was, the cross on his garment where no cross was before. He prodded the ink, to check if it stained his fingers. Apart from a slightly tacky patch in the very centre, it was dry. Ready to wear.

He threw the dishdasha over his head and allowed the cool fabric to slide across his skin, sheathing his nakedness. Turning to appraise his reflection in the window, he confirmed that Bea had chosen well. The thing fitted him, as though a tailor in the Middle East had measured his shoulders, cut the cloth and sewn it for him specially.

The window he’d been using as a mirror became a window again, as lights flared up outside. Two glowing points, like the eyes of some monstrous organism approaching. He stepped closer to the glass and peered through, but the vehicle’s headlights disappeared just as he recognised them for what they were.

6. His whole life had been leading up to this

A rendezvous between a married man and a female stranger, each of them far from home, in the obscure hours before dawn. If there was anything improper or potentially complicated about that, Peter didn’t waste energy worrying over it. He and Grainger both had jobs to do, and God was watching.

Besides, Grainger’s reaction to him, when he opened the door to her knock, was hardly encouraging. She did a double-take: a classic cartoon-style double-take. Her head jerked so hard he thought she might teeter backwards into the corridor, but she just swayed on her feet and stared. The provocation, of course, was the big inky cross on his chest. Seeing it through her eyes, he was suddenly embarrassed.

‘I took your advice,’ he tried to joke, plucking at the sleeves of the dishdasha. ‘About the denim jacket.’

She didn’t smile, just stared some more.

‘You could’ve gone to, like, a T-shirt place,’ she said at last, ‘and got that done… uh… professionally.’ Her own attire was unchanged since their first meeting: still the white smock, cotton slacks, and headscarf. Not conventional Western dress, by any means, yet somehow, on her, it looked more natural, less affected, than his own get-up.

‘The cross was… an accident,’ he explained. ‘A bunch of ink pens exploded.’

‘Uh… OK,’ she said. ‘Well, I guess it gives… kind of a homespun impression. Amateur — in a good way.’

This condescending gesture of diplomacy made him smile. ‘You think I look like a ponce.’

‘A what?’

‘A poseur.’

She glanced down the corridor, towards the exit. ‘Not for me to say. You ready?’

Side by side they walked out of the building, into the darkness. The warm air embraced them with balmy enthusiasm and Peter instantly felt less self-conscious about his outfit, as it was perfect for the climate. Transporting his old clothes all the way to Oasis had been pointless, he appreciated that now. He must reinvent himself, and this morning was a good time to begin.

Grainger’s vehicle was parked right next to the compound, illuminated by a lamp jutting from the concrete façade. It was a big, military-looking thing, clearly much more powerful than the frugal little runabout Peter and Bea owned.

‘I really appreciate you making a car available for me,’ said Peter. ‘I imagine you have to ration them. The fuel and so on.’

‘Best to keep ’em in use,’ said Grainger. ‘They go to hell otherwise. Technically speaking. The moisture’s a killer. Let me show you something.’

She stepped up to the vehicle and flipped open the hatch to show him the engine. Peter dutifully leaned over and looked, although he knew nothing about the inner workings of cars, hadn’t even mastered such basics as Bea could manage, like topping up oil, applying anti-freeze or attaching jump leads. Even so, he could tell that there was something unusual here.

‘It’s… disgusting,’ he said, and laughed at his own tactlessness. But it was true: the whole engine was caked in a greasy gunk that stank like old cat food.

‘Sure,’ said Grainger, ‘but I hope you understand this isn’t damage, this is the cure. The prevention.’

‘Oh.’

She pushed the hatch down with just the right amount of force to make it snap shut. ‘Takes a full hour to grease up a vehicle like this. Do a few of ’em and you stink for the whole day.’

Instinctively, he tried to smell her, or at least retrieve a memory of how she’d smelled before they stepped out into the muggy air. She smelled neutral. Nice, even.

‘Is that one of your jobs? Greasing up the cars?’

She motioned him to get in. ‘We all get grease duty sometimes.’

‘Very democratic. Nobody complains?’

‘This is not the place for complainers,’ she said, swinging into the driver’s seat.

He opened the passenger door and joined her inside. No sooner had his body settled into position than she switched on the ignition and got the motor revving.

‘What about the people at the top?’ he asked. ‘Do they get grease duty too?’

‘People at the top?’

‘The… administration. Managers. Whatever you call them here.’

Grainger blinked, as though she’d been asked a question about lion tamers or circus clowns. ‘We don’t really have managers,’ she said, as she steered the vehicle and got into gear. ‘We all pitch in, take turns. It’s pretty obvious what needs to be done. If there’s any disagreement, we vote. Mostly we just follow the USIC guidelines.’

‘Sounds too good to be true.’

‘Too good to be true?’ Grainger shook her head. ‘No offence, but that’s what some people might say about religion. Not about a simple duty roster for keeping your vehicles’ engines from corroding.’

The rhetoric was neat, but something in Grainger’s tone of voice made Peter suspect that she didn’t quite believe it. He had a pretty good radar for the doubts that people hid beneath bravado.

‘But there must be someone,’ he insisted, ‘who takes responsibility for the project as a whole?’

‘Sure,’ she said. The car was picking up speed now and the lights of the compound rapidly receded into the gloom. ‘But they’re a long way away. Can’t expect them to hold our hands, can we?’

As they drove through the dark towards the invisible horizon, they munched on raisin bread. Grainger had positioned a big fresh loaf of it in the gap between the front seats, propped up against the gearstick, and they each helped themselves to slice after slice.

‘This is good,’ he said.

‘It’s made here,’ she said, with a hint of pride.

‘Including the raisins?’

‘No, not the raisins. Or the egg. But the flour and the shortening and the sweetener and the sodium bicarbonate are. And the loaves are baked here. We have a bakery.’

‘Very nice.’ He munched some more, swallowed. They’d left the base perimeter fifteen minutes ago. Nothing remarkable had happened yet. There was little to be seen in the vehicle’s headlight beam, which was the only light for miles around. Not for the first time, Peter thought about how much of our lives we spend sequestered inside small patches of electric brightness, blind to everything beyond the reach of those fragile bulbs.

‘When is sunrise?’ he asked.

‘In about three, four hours,’ she said. ‘Or maybe two, I’m not sure, don’t quote me. It’s a gradual process. Not so dramatic.’

They were driving straight over raw, uncultivated ground. There was no road or track or any evidence that anyone had ever driven or walked here before, although Grainger assured him that she made this trip regularly. In the absence of tracks or lights, it was sometimes difficult to believe they were moving, despite the gentle vibration of the vehicle’s chassis. The view in every direction was the same. Grainger would occasionally glance at the dashboard’s computerised navigation system, which kept her informed when they were about to stray from the correct course.

The landscape — what little Peter could see of it in the dark — was surprisingly bare given the climate. The earth was chocolate-brown, and so densely compacted that the tyres travelled smoothly across it with no jolts to the suspension. Here and there, the terrain was spotted with patches of white mushroom, or speckled with a haze of greenish stuff that might be moss. No trees, no bushes, not even any grass. A dark, moist tundra.

He took another slice of raisin bread. It was losing its appeal, but he was hungry.

‘I wouldn’t have thought,’ he remarked, ‘that eggs could survive the Jump intact. I certainly felt a bit scrambled myself, when I went through it.’

‘Egg powder,’ said Grainger. ‘We use egg powder.’

‘Of course.’

Through the side window, he spotted a single swirl of rain in an otherwise vacant sky: a curved glitter of water-drops about the size of a Ferris wheel, making its way across the land. It was travelling at a different tangent from their own, so Grainger would have to detour in order to drive through it. He considered asking her if they could do so, for the fun of it, like children chasing a rotating garden sprinkler. But she was intent on her navigation, staring out at the non-road ahead, both hands clamped on the steering wheel. The shimmering rain-swirl dimmed as the headlight beams passed it by, and then was swept into the darkness of their wake.

‘So,’ said Peter. ‘Tell me what you know.’

‘About what?’ Her relaxed demeanour was gone in a flash.

‘About the people we’re going to see.’

‘They’re not people.’

‘Well… ’ He drew a deep breath. ‘Here’s an idea, Grainger. How about we agree to use the term “people” in its extended sense of “inhabitants”? The original Roman etymology isn’t clear, so who knows? — maybe it meant “inhabitants” anyway. Of course, we could use “creature” instead, but there are problems with that, don’t you think? I mean, personally, I’d love to use “creature”, if we could just take it back to its Latin origins: creatura: “created thing”. Because we’re all created things, aren’t we? But it’s suffered a bit of a decline, that word, through the centuries. To the point where “creature”, to most people, means “monster”, or at least “animal”. Which reminds me: wouldn’t it be nice to use “animal” for all beings that breathe? After all, the Greek word anima means “breath” or “soul”, which pretty much covers everything we’re looking for, doesn’t it?’

Silence settled in the cabin. Grainger drove, keeping her eyes straight on the headlight beam just as before. After thirty seconds or so, which seemed quite a long time in the circumstances, she said:

‘Well, it’s plain to see you’re not an uneducated holy roller from Hicksville.’

‘I never said I was.’

She glanced aside at him, caught him smiling, smiled back. ‘Tell me, Peter. What made you decide to come here, and do this?’

‘I didn’t decide,’ he said. ‘God did.’

‘He sent you an email?’

‘Sure.’ He grinned wider. ‘You wake up in the morning, go to the inbox of your heart, check what’s loaded in. Sometimes there’s a message.’

‘That’s kind of a corny way of putting it.’

He stopped smiling, not because he was offended, but because the discussion was turning serious. ‘Most true things are kind of corny, don’t you think? But we make them more sophisticated out of sheer embarrassment. Simple truths with complicated clothes on. The only purpose of the linguistic dressing-up is so people won’t look at the contents of our naked hearts and minds and say “How naff”.’

She frowned. ‘“Naff”?’

‘It’s a British slang term, meaning trite or banal, but with an extra overtone of… uh… nerdishness. Uncoolness. Dorkishness.’

‘Wow. Did they teach American slang in your Bible School too?’

Peter took a few swigs from a water-bottle. ‘I never went to Bible School. I went to the University of Hard Drinking and Drug Abuse. Got my degree in Toilet Bowl Interior Decoration and… uh… Hospital Casualty Ward Occupancy.’

‘And then you found God?’

‘Then I found a woman called Beatrice. We fell in love.’

‘Guys don’t often put it that way.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Guys say “we got together” or “you can guess the rest” or something like that. Something that doesn’t sound quite so… ’

‘Naff?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Well, we fell in love,’ said Peter. ‘I quit the booze and drugs to impress her.’

‘I hope she was impressed.’

‘Yes.’ He took a last swig, screwed the top back on the bottle and slid it onto the floor between his feet. ‘Although she didn’t tell me so until years later. Addicts don’t handle praise well. The pressure of living up to it drives them back to drink and drugs.’

‘Yup.’

‘Have you had some experience of these things in your life?’

‘Yup.’

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

‘Not right now.’ She readjusted her posture in the seat, revved the engine, drove a little faster. The blush on her face made her look more feminine, although it accentuated the white scar under her hairline. She had pulled off her headscarf so that it hung loosely around her neck; her short crop of soft mousy hair fluttered in the air conditioning. ‘Your girlfriend sounds like a smart cookie.’

‘She’s my wife. And yes, she’s smart. Smarter — or at least wiser — than I am, that’s for sure.’

‘Then why was it you that got chosen for this mission?’

Peter rested his head against the seat. ‘I’ve wondered about that myself. I suppose God must have other plans for Beatrice at home.’

Grainger didn’t comment. Peter looked out the side window. The sky was a little lighter. Perhaps he was only imagining it. A particularly large clump of mushrooms trembled as they swept by.

‘You didn’t answer my question,’ he said.

‘I told you I didn’t want to talk about it,’ she said.

‘No, I meant my question about the people we’re going to see. What do you know about them?’

‘They’re… ah… ’ She struggled for several seconds to find the right words. ‘They like their privacy.’

‘I could’ve guessed that. Not a single photo in any of the brochures and reports USIC gave me. I was expecting at least one smiley picture of your top brass shaking hands with the locals.’

She chuckled. ‘That would be difficult to arrange.’

‘No hands?’

‘Sure they have hands. They just don’t like to be touched.’

‘So: describe them.’

‘It’s difficult,’ she sighed. ‘I’m not good at descriptions. We’ll see them soon enough.’

‘Do try.’ He batted his eyelashes. ‘I’d appreciate it.’

‘Well… they wear long robes and hoods. Like monks, I guess.’

‘So they’re human in shape?’

‘I guess. It’s kind of hard to tell.’

‘But they have two arms, two legs, a torso… ’

‘Sure.’

He shook his head. ‘That surprises me. All along, I’ve been telling myself I mustn’t assume the human design is some sort of universal standard. So I was trying to imagine… uh… big spider-like things, or eyes on stalks, or giant hairless possums… ’

‘Giant hairless possums?’ She beamed. ‘I love it. Very sci-fi.’

‘But why should they have human form, Grainger, of all the forms they might conceivably have? Isn’t that exactly what you’d expect from sci-fi?’

‘Yeah, I guess… Or religion, maybe. Didn’t God create man in his own image?’

‘I wouldn’t use the word “man”. The Hebrew is ha-adam, which I would argue encompasses both sexes.’

‘Pleased to hear it,’ she said, deadpan.

Again, they drove on for a couple of minutes in silence. On the horizon, Peter was certain he could see the beginnings of a glow. A subtle haze of illumination, turning the junction of sky and earth from dark aquamarine-against-black to green-against-brown. If you stared at it too long, you began to wonder whether it was just an optical illusion, a hallucination, a frustrated yearning for the end of night.

And inside that hesitant glow, was that…? Yes, there was something else on the horizon. Raised structures of some sort. Mountains? Boulders? Buildings? A town? A city? Grainger had said that the ‘settlement’ was about fifty miles away. They must have travelled half that distance by now, surely.

‘Do they have genders?’ he said at last.

‘Who?’ she said.

‘The people we’re going to see.’

Grainger looked exasperated. ‘Why don’t you just come straight out and use the word aliens?’

‘Because we’re the aliens here.’

She laughed out loud. ‘I love it! A politically correct missionary! Forgive me for saying so, but it seems a total contradiction in terms.’

‘I forgive you, Grainger,’ he winked. ‘And my attitudes shouldn’t strike you as a contradiction. God loves every creature equally.’

The smile faded from her face. ‘Not in my experience,’ she said.

Silence descended on the cabin once more. Peter deliberated whether to push; decided not to. Not in that direction, anyway. Not yet.

‘So,’ he rejoined lightly, ‘do they have genders?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Grainger, in a flat, business-like tone. ‘You’ll have to lift up their robes and take a look.’

They drove for ten, fifteen minutes without further conversation. The topmost slice of the raisin bread dried out. The haze of light on the horizon became more distinct. The mysterious structures straight ahead were definitely architecture of some kind, although the sky was still too dark for Peter to make out exact shapes or details.

Eventually, he said, ‘I need to have a pee.’

‘No problem,’ said Grainger, and slowed the car to a halt. On the dashboard, an electronic gauge estimating the fuel consumption per mile flickered through its numbers and settled on an abstract symbol.

Peter opened the door and, as he stood out onto the earth, was enveloped at once by the humid, whispering air. He’d grown unaccustomed to it, having spent so long in the air-conditioned bubble of the vehicle. It was enjoyable, this sudden all-out luxury of atmosphere, but also an assault: the way the air immediately ran up the sleeves of his shirt, licked his eyelids and ears, dampened his chest. He hitched the hem of his dishdasha up to his abdomen and pissed straight onto the ground, since the landscape offered no trees or boulders to hide behind. The earth was already moist and dark brown, so the urine made little difference to its colour or consistency. It sank in without pause.

He heard Grainger opening and shutting the door on her side of the vehicle. To give her some privacy, he stood for a while and appraised the scenery. The plants that he’d taken for mushrooms were flowers, greyish-white flowers with a tinge of mauve, almost luminous in the gloom. They grew in small, neat clumps. There was no distinction between blossom, leaf and stalk: the whole plant was slightly furry, leathery and yet so thin as to be almost transparent, like the ear of a kitten. Evidently no other plants were viable in this part of the world. Or perhaps he’d simply come at the wrong time of year.

Grainger’s door slammed, and he turned to join her. She was crumpling a cardboard box of disposable tissues into the glove compartment as he took his seat.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Last few miles coming up.’

He shut his door and the air conditioning promptly restored the neutral atmosphere of the cabin. Peter settled back in his seat, and shivered as a trapped wisp of balmy Oasan air slipped between his shoulderblades and out of his collar.

‘I must say you built your landing base a respectfully long way out,’ he said. ‘The planners of London’s airports were never so considerate of local residents.’

Grainger unscrewed a water-bottle, drank deep, coughed. A rivulet ran down her chin, and she mopped it up with a handful of her headscarf.

‘Actually… ’ She cleared her throat. ‘Actually, when we first built the base, the… ah… local residents lived just two miles away. They relocated. Took everything with them. I mean everything. A couple of our guys had a look around the old settlement when it was all over. Like, maybe we can learn something from what they left behind. But it was stripped clean. Just the shells of houses. Not even a single mushroom left in the ground.’ She consulted one of the gauges on the dashboard. ‘The fifty miles must have taken them for ever to walk.’

‘It sounds like they really do value their privacy. Unless… ’ He hesitated, trying to think of a diplomatic way of asking whether USIC had done something outrageously offensive. Before he could frame the question, Grainger answered it.

‘It was out of the blue. They just told us they were moving. We asked if we were doing anything wrong. Like, was there some problem we could fix so they’d reconsider? They said no, no problem.’

Grainger revved the engine and they were off again.

‘When you say “we asked”,’ said Peter, ‘do you mean “we” as in…?’

‘I wasn’t personally a party to these negotiations, no.’

‘Do you speak their language?’

‘No.’

‘Not a word?’

‘Not a word.’

‘So… uh… how good is their English? I mean, I tried to find out about this before I came, but I couldn’t get a straight answer.’

‘There isn’t a straight answer. Some of them… maybe most of them, don’t… ’ Her voice trailed off. She chewed her lip. ‘Listen, this is gonna sound bad. It’s not meant to. The thing is, we don’t know how many of them there are. Partly because they keep themselves hidden, and partly because we can’t tell the difference between them… No disrespect, but we just can’t. There’s a few individuals we have dealings with. Maybe a dozen. Or maybe it’s the same five or six guys in different clothes, we just can’t tell. They speak some English. Enough.’

‘Who taught them?’

‘I think they just kind of picked it up, I don’t know.’ She glanced up at the rear-view mirror, as though there might be a traffic snarl he was distracting her from dealing with safely. ‘You’d have to ask Tartaglione. If he was still with us.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Tartaglione was a linguist. He came here to study the language. He was going to compile a dictionary and so forth. But he… ah… disappeared.’

Peter chewed on that for a couple of seconds. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘You do drop lots of little morsels of info, don’t you, if I only wait long enough… ’

She sighed, annoyed again. ‘I already told you most of this stuff when I first met you, escorting you off the ship.’

This was news to him. He strained to recall their walk together, on that first day. The words had evaporated. All he recalled, vaguely, was her presence at his side.

‘Forgive me. I was very tired.’

‘You’re forgiven.’

They travelled on. A few hundred metres ahead and to the side of them, there was another isolated swirl of rain, cartwheeling along the land.

‘Can we drive through that?’ Peter asked.

‘Sure.’

She swerved slightly, and they ploughed through the whirl of brilliant water-drops, which enveloped them momentarily in its fairy-light display.

‘Psychedelic, huh,’ remarked Grainger, deadpan, switching on the windscreen wipers.

‘Beautiful,’ he said.

After another few minutes of driving, the shapes on the horizon had firmed up into the unmistakable contours of buildings. Nothing fancy or monumental. Square blocks, like British tower blocks, cheap utilitarian housing. Not exactly the diamantine spires of a fantastical city.

‘What do they call themselves?’ asked Peter.

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Grainger. ‘Something we couldn’t pronounce, I guess.’

‘So who named this place Oasis?’

‘A little girl from Oskaloosa, Iowa.’

‘You’re kidding.’

She cast him a bemused glance. ‘You didn’t read about it? It’s gotta be the only thing the average person knows about this place. There were articles about this little girl in magazines, she was on TV… ’

‘I don’t read magazines, and I don’t have a TV.’

Now it was her turn to say, ‘You’re kidding.’

He smiled. ‘I’m not kidding. One day I got a message from the Lord saying, “Get rid of the TV, Peter, it’s a huge waste of time.” So I did.’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know how to take you.’

‘Straight,’ he said. ‘Always straight. Anyway: this little girl from… uh… ’

‘Oskaloosa. She won a competition. “Name A New World”. I’m so amazed you didn’t hear about it. There were hundreds of thousands of entries, most of them unbelievably wrong. It was like a nerd jamboree. The USIC staff in the building where I worked kept an internal dossier of the worst names. Every week we’d have new favourites. We ended up using them for a competition we ran ourselves, to name the janitor’s supply room. “Nuvo Opportunus”, that was a great one. “Zion II”. “Atlanto”. “Arnold” — that had real pizzazz, I thought. “Splendoramus”. Uh… “Einsteinia”. I forget the rest. Oh, yeah: “Traveller’s Rest”, that was another one. “Newfoundplanet”. “Cervix”. “Hendrix”. “Elvis”. They just kept on coming.’

‘And the little girl?’

‘She got lucky, I guess. There must’ve been hundreds of other people who came up with “Oasis”. She won $50,000. The family needed it, too, because the mother had just lost her job, and the father had been diagnosed with some kind of rare disease.’

‘So how did the story end?’

‘Just like you’d expect. The dad died. The mom talked about it on TV and became an alcoholic. Then the media moved on and you never got to know what happened next.’

‘Can you remember the girl’s name? I’d like to pray for her.’

Grainger butted her palms against the steering wheel irritably, and rolled her eyes upwards. ‘Puh-lease. There were a million Americans praying for her, and it didn’t stop her life going down the toilet.’

He shut up, faced front. They drove in silence for forty seconds or so.

‘Coretta,’ she said at last.

‘Thank you,’ said Peter. He tried to picture Coretta, so that she wouldn’t be just a name to him when he prayed. Any sort of face was better than none at all. He thought of the children he knew, the kids in his congregation back home, but the ones that sprang to mind were too old or too young or the wrong sex. In any case, as a minister, in his own church, he wasn’t so involved with the little ones; Bea took them into another room for play activities during his sermons. Not that he was unaware of them while he preached: the walls were so thin that if he paused for effect between sentences, the silence was often filled by laughter or snatches of song or even the galumphing of small feet. But he didn’t know any of the kids particularly well.

‘This Coretta,’ he said, pushing his luck with Grainger. ‘Is she black or white?’ One child had popped into his memory: the daughter of that new Somali couple, the cheeky girl who was always dressed like a miniature nineteenth-century Southern belle… what was her name? — Lulu. Adorable kid.

‘White,’ said Grainger. ‘Blonde hair. Or maybe a redhead, I forget. It was a long time ago, and there’s no way of checking.’

‘Can’t look her up?’

She blinked. ‘Look her up?’

‘On a computer or something?’ Even as he said it, he realised it was a stupid suggestion. Oasis was far beyond the reach of any information superhighways; there were no world-wide webs laden with morsels of trivia, no industrious search engines offering up millions of Oskaloosas and Corettas. If what you wanted to know was not to be found in the stuff you’d brought along with you — the books, the magic discs, the memory sticks, the old copies of Hydraulics magazine — you could forget it. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Not thinking clearly.’

‘This atmosphere will do that to you,’ she said. ‘I hate the way it pushes. Right inside your ears, even. Never lets up. Sometimes you just wanna… ’ She didn’t pursue the thought, just puffed a mouthful of breath upwards, dislodging a damp lock of hair from her forehead. ‘There’s no point talking about it with the guys here. They’re used to it, they don’t have a problem with it, they don’t notice it anymore. Maybe they even enjoy it.’

‘Maybe they hate it but don’t complain.’

Her face went stiff. ‘OK, message received,’ she said.

Peter groaned inwardly. He should have thought the implications through before opening his mouth. What was wrong with him today? He was usually so tactful. Could it be the atmosphere, as Grainger said? He’d always imagined his brain as a wholly enclosed thing, safe inside a shell of bone, but maybe, in this strange new environment, the seal was more permeable and his brain was being infiltrated by insidious vapours. He wiped sweat off his eyelids and made an effort to be a hundred per cent alert, facing front and peering through the dirt-hazed windscreen. The terrain was looser, less stable, the closer they came to their destination. Particles of clammy soil were being thrown up by the tyres and enveloping the vehicle in a kind of halo of filth. The outline of the native settlement seemed grim and unwelcoming somehow.

Suddenly, the magnitude of the challenge hit home. Until now, it had been all about him and his ability to keep himself in one piece: to survive the journey, to recover from the Jump, to adjust to the strange new air and the shock of separation. But there was so much more to it than that. The scale of the unknown remained just as immense whether he was feeling well or unwell; he was approaching monolithic barriers of foreignness which existed oblivious to him, indifferent to how rested or unrested he was, how bleary-eyed or attentive, how keen or dull.

Psalm 139 came to his mind, as it so often did when he needed reassurance. But today, the reminder of God’s omniscience was no comfort; instead, it heightened his own sense of unease. How precious are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand. Each and every mote of dirt flung up by the vehicle’s wheels was like a truth that he needed to learn, a ridiculously large number of truths which he had neither the time nor the wisdom to grasp. He was not God, and maybe only God could do what needed to be done here.

Grainger switched on the windscreen wipers once more. The view went smeary for a while, then the glass cleared and the native settlement was revealed afresh, lit up now by the rising sun. The sun made all the difference.

Yes, the mission was daunting and, yes, he wasn’t in the best shape. But here he was, on the threshold of meeting an entirely new kind of people, an encounter chosen for him by God. Whatever was fated to happen, it would surely be precious and amazing. His whole life — he understood that now, as the façades of the unknown city loomed up before him, harbouring unimaginable wonders — his whole life had been leading up to this.

7. Approved, transmitted

‘Well,’ said Grainger, ‘here we are.’ Sometimes a statement of the bloody obvious was the only appropriate way forward. As if to give life ceremonious permission to proceed.

‘Are you OK?’ she asked.

‘Uh… yes,’ he said, swaying in his seat. The dizziness he’d felt back at the base had come over him again. ‘I’m probably over-excited. It’s my first time, after all.’

She gave him a look he recognised very well, a look he’d seen on thousands of faces during his years as a pastor, a look that said: Nothing is worth getting excited about; everything is a disappointment. He would have to try to do something about that look, if he could, later.

In the meantime, he had to admit that their surroundings were not exactly awesomely impressive. The Oasan settlement wasn’t what you’d call a city. More like a suburb, erected in the middle of a wasteland. There were no streets in the formal sense, no pavements, no signs, no vehicles, and — despite the dim light and broad shadows of early dawn — no lamps, or any evidence of electricity or fire. Just a community of buildings resting on bare ground. How many dwellings altogether? Peter couldn’t guess. Maybe five hundred. Maybe more. They were spread out in unruly clusters, ranging in scale from single-storey to three-floor blocks, all flat-roofed. The buildings were brick, obviously made of the same clay as the earth, but baked marble-smooth and caramel-coloured. There was not a soul to be seen. All the doors and windows were shut. Well, that wasn’t quite true: the doors weren’t made of wood nor the windows of glass; they were merely holes in the buildings, shrouded with bead curtains. The beads were crystalline, like extravagant strings of jewellery. They swayed gently in the breeze. But there was nobody parting those curtains to peek out, nobody walking through the doorways.

Grainger parked the vehicle right in front of a building which looked like all the others except that it was marked by a painted white star, the bottom point of which had trickled slightly and dried that way. Peter and Grainger stepped out and submitted to the atmosphere’s embrace. Grainger wrapped her scarf around her face, covering her mouth and nose, as though she considered the air impure. From a pocket of her slacks she removed a metal gadget which Peter assumed was a weapon. She pointed it at the vehicle and pressed the trigger twice. The engine switched off and a hatch in the back flipped open.

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 สีurpriสีe.’ 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 รี่ogether 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.

‘You and I,’ said the Oasan. ‘Never before now.’ The vertical cleft in the middle of his face squirmed slightly as he formed the words. The foetuses rubbed knees, so to speak. Peter smiled but could not summon a response.

‘He means he hasn’t met you before,’ said Grainger. ‘In other words, he’s saying hello.’

‘Hello,’ said Peter. ‘I’m Peter.’

The Oasan nodded. ‘You are Peรี่er. I will remember.’ He turned back to Grainger. ‘You bring mediสีine?’

‘A little.’

‘How liรี่le?’

‘I’ll show you,’ said Grainger, walking around to the back of the vehicle and lifting the hatch. She rummaged in the jumbled contents — bottles of water, toilet paper, canvas bags, tools, tarps — and extracted a plastic tub no bigger than a schoolchild’s lunch-box. The Oasan followed every movement, although Peter was still unable to work out which parts of the face were its eyes. His eyes, sorry.

‘This is all I could get from our pharmacy,’ said Grainger. ‘Today is not one of the official supply days, you understand? We’re here for a different reason. But I didn’t want to come with nothing. So this’ — she handed him the tub — ‘is extra. A gift.’

‘We are diสีappoinรี่ful,’ said the Oasan. ‘And in the สีame breath we are graรี่eful.’

There was a pause. The Oasan stood holding his plastic tub; Grainger and Peter stood watching him hold it. A ray of sunlight found its way to the roof of the vehicle, making it glow.

‘So… uh… How are you?’ said Grainger. Sweat twinkled in her eyebrows and on her cheeks.

‘I alone?’ enquired the Oasan. ‘Or I and we รี่ogether?’ He gestured vaguely at the settlement behind him.

‘All of you.’

The Oasan appeared to give this a great deal of thought. At last he said: ‘Good.’

There was another pause.

‘Is anyone else coming out today?’ asked Grainger. ‘To see us, I mean?’

Again, the Oasan mulled over the question as though it were immensely complex.

‘No,’ he concluded. ‘I รี่oday am only one.’ He gestured solemnly at both Grainger and Peter, in acknowledgement, perhaps, of his regret for the 2:1 imbalance between number of visitors and welcoming party.

‘Peter here is a special guest of USIC,’ said Grainger. ‘He’s a… he’s a Christian missionary. He wants to… uh… live with you.’ She glanced at Peter for uneasy confirmation. ‘If I’ve got that right.’

‘Yes,’ said Peter, brightly. There was a glistening, champignon-like thing roughly halfway down the central cleft of the Oasan’s face that he’d decided was the Oasan’s eye, and he looked straight at that, doing his best to radiate friendliness. ‘I have good news to tell you. The best news you’ve ever heard.’

The Oasan cocked his head to one side. The two foetuses — no, not foetuses, his brow and cheeks, please! — blushed, revealing a spidery network of capillaries just beneath the skin. His voice, when it came, was even more asthmatic-sounding than before. ‘The Goสีpel?’

The words hung in the whispering air for a second before Peter was able to take them in. He couldn’t believe he’d heard correctly. Then he noticed that the Oasan’s gloved hands had been pressed together in a steeple shape.

‘Yes!’ Peter cried, dizzy with elation. ‘Praise Jesus!’

The Oasan turned to Grainger again. His gloved hands were trembling against the tub he held. ‘We have waiรี่ed long for the man Peรี่er,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Grainger.’ And without further explanation he hurried through the doorway, leaving the crystalline beads swinging in his wake.

‘Well I’ll be damned,’ said Grainger, yanking her scarf loose and wiping her face with it. ‘He never called me by name before.’

They stood waiting for twenty minutes or so. The sun continued to rise, a sliver of brilliant burning orange, like a great bubble of lava on the horizon. The walls of the buildings glowed as if each brick had a light inside.

At last, the Oasan returned, still clutching the plastic tub, which was now empty. He handed it back to Grainger, very slowly and carefully, only letting it go when her grip on it was secure.

‘Mediสีine have all gone,’ he said. ‘Gone inสีide the graรี่eful.’

‘I’m sorry there wasn’t more,’ said Grainger. ‘There’ll be more next time.’

The Oasan nodded. ‘We abide.’

Grainger, stiff with unease, walked to the rear of the vehicle to stow the tub back in the trunk. As soon as her back was turned, the Oasan sidled up to Peter, bringing them face to face.

‘Have you the book?’

‘The book?’

‘The Book of สีรี่range New Thingสี.’

Peter blinked and tried to breathe normally. Up close, the Oasan’s flesh smelled sweet: not the sweet of rot, but sweet like fresh fruit.

‘You mean the Bible,’ he said.

‘We สีpeak never the name. Power of the book forbid. Flame give warmth… ’ With outstretched hands, he mimed the action of warming oneself on a fire, getting too close, and being burned.

‘But you mean the Word of God,’ said Peter. ‘The Gospel.’

‘The Goสีpel. The รี่echnique of Jeสีuสี.’

Peter nodded, but it took him a few seconds to decode the last word from its impeded passage through the Oasan’s head cleft.

‘Jesus,’ he echoed in wonder.

The Oasan reached out one hand, and, with an unmistakably tender motion, stroked Peter’s cheek with the tip of a glove. ‘We pray Jeสีuสี for your coming,’ he said.

Grainger’s failure to rejoin them was, by now, obvious. Peter glanced round and saw her leaning on the back of the vehicle, pretending to study the gadget with which she’d unlocked the trunk. In that fraction of a second before he turned back to the Oasan, he felt the full intensity of her embarrassment.

‘The book? You have the book?’ the Oasan repeated.

‘Uh… not on me right now,’ said Peter, chastising himself for leaving his Bible back at the base. ‘But yes, of course. Of course!’

The Oasan clapped his hands in a gesture of delight, or prayer, or both. ‘Comforรี่ and joy. Glad day. Come back สีoon, Peรี่er, oh very สีoon, สีooner than you can. Read for uสี the Book of สีรี่range New Thingสี, read and read and read unรี่il we underสีรี่and. In reward we give you… give you… ’ The Oasan trembled with the effort of finding adequate words, then threw his hands wide, as if to indicate everything under the sun.

‘Yes,’ said Peter, laying a reassuring hand on the Oasan’s shoulder. ‘Soon.’

The Oasan’s brow — the heads of the foetuses, so to speak — swelled slightly. Peter decided that this, in these miraculous new people, was a smile.

Dear Peter, wrote Beatrice.

I love you and hope you are well but I must start this letter with some very bad news.

It was like running towards an open doorway in a state of high enthusiasm and colliding with a pane of glass. He had spent the entire journey back to the base almost levitating with excitement; it was a wonder he hadn’t floated straight through the roof of Grainger’s vehicle. Dear Bea… God be praised… We ask for a small break and God gives us a miracle… these were some of the ways he’d thought of beginning his message to Beatrice upon returning to his room. His fingers were poised to type at delirious speed, to shoot his delight through space, mistakes and all.

There has been a terrible tragedy in the Maldives. A tidal wave. It was the height of the tourist season. The place was teeming with visitors and it’s got a population of about a third of a million. Had. You know how when disasters happen, usually the media talks about how many people are estimated to have died? In this one, they’re talking about how many people may be LEFT ALIVE. It’s one vast swamp of bodies. You see it on the news footage but you can’t take it in. All those people with individual quirks and family secrets and special ways of wearing their hair, etc, reduced to what looks like a huge bog of meat that goes on for miles.

The Maldives has (HAD…) lots of islands, most of them at risk of flooding, so the government had been pushing for years to get the population to relocate to the biggest, best-fortified atoll. By coincidence, there was a TV documentary crew making a film about a few islanders on one of the smaller atolls who were protesting at being rehoused. The cameras were rolling when the tsunami hit. I’ve seen clips on my phone. You cannot believe what you are seeing. One second, an American anchorperson voice is saying something about papaya groves, and the next second, a zillion tons of seawater smashes across the screen. Rescue crews saved some of the Americans, a few tourists, a few of the locals. And the cameras, of course. That sounds cynical. I think they did what they could.

Our church is considering what we can do to help. Sending people over there isn’t an option. There’s nothing we can achieve. Most of the islands are wiped off, there is nothing left except humps in the ocean. Even the biggest islands are probably never going to recover. All the fresh water has been fouled. There is not one fully intact, usable building. There is nowhere safe to land, nowhere to set up a hospital, no way of burying the dead. Helicopters are buzzing around like seagulls over an oilspill full of dead fish. At this stage, all we can do is pray for the relatives of Maldivans everywhere. And maybe, in time, there’ll be refugees.

I’m sorry to start this way. You can imagine my head and heart are full of it. It doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking of you.

Peter leaned back in his chair, lifted his face to the ceiling. The electric light was still on, superfluous now that the sunshine was beaming in, almost too bright to bear. He shivered, feeling the dampness in his clothes turning chilly in the air conditioning. He felt grief for the people of the Maldives, but, to his shame, the grief was mingled with a purely selfish pang: the sense that he and Beatrice, for the first time since the beginning of their relationship, were not going through the same things together. In the past, whatever happened would happen to them both, like a power blackout or a late-night visit from a distressed friend or a rattling window-frame while they were trying to sleep. Or like sex.

I miss you, wrote Beatrice. This Maldives thing wouldn’t have upset me so much if you’d been here. Tell me more about your mission. Is it horrendously difficult? Remember that unexpected breakthroughs often come directly after everything has seemed impossible. The ones who insist they don’t want or need God are the ones who want and need Him most.

Joshua is still playing his tricks. I’m seriously considering slipping him a Mickey Finn in his evening milk. Or hitting him on the head with a mallet when he wakes me up yet again at 4 AM. Alternatively, maybe I should make a life-size dummy of you to lie next to me in the bed. That might fool him. Sadly, it wouldn’t fool me.

The Mirah situation is under control now. I got together with a Muslim social worker, Khadija, who liaises with the imam at Mirah’s local mosque. Basically we’re trying to sell it to the imam as a human decency issue (the husband’s violence/lack of respect) rather than a religion vs religion issue. It’s hardcore diplomacy, as you can imagine, like brokering a peace deal between Syria and the USA. But Khadija is brilliant.

I got a message from USIC saying you’re fine. How would they know? I suppose they mean they can verify you didn’t get vaporised. The message was sent by Alex Grainger. Have you met him? Tell him he can’t spell ‘liaise’. Or maybe there’s a simplified American way of spelling it now? Bitch, bitch, bitch. But I’ve been tolerant all day, honest! (Very difficult new patient on the ward. Supposedly transferred down from Psych for medical reasons but I think they were just desperate to get rid of her.) Anyway, I feel like being outrageously unfair to someone for just three minutes, to let it rip. I won’t, of course. I’ll be very nice, even to Joshua when he wakes me up AGAIN in the small hours.

Seriously, I’m missing you terribly. Wish I could spend just a few minutes in your arms. (OK, maybe an hour.) Weather is better, lovely sunshine today, but it’s not cheering me up. Went to the supermarket for some comfort food (chocolate mousse, tiramisu, you know the sort of thing). Turns out lots of other people had the same idea. Everything I wanted was out of stock, a blank space on the shelf. Settled for one of those rollette things with the fake cream inside.

Head full of Maldives tragedy, stomach full of dessert. What fortunate people we are in our Western playground… We watch the footage of foreign dead on video clips and then mosey out to the supermarket in search of our favourite treats. Of course when I say ‘we’, I can’t speak for you right now. You are far from all of this. Far from me.

Ignore this self-pitying prattle, I’ll be fine by tomorrow. Let me know how you’re going. I’m so proud of you.

Kisses, hugs (I wish!)

Beatrice

PS: Want a cat?

My dear Bea, he wrote back.

I hardly know what to say. How dreadful about the Maldives. The scale of such a tragedy is, as you say, almost impossible to imagine. I’ll pray for them.

Those sentences, short as they were, took him a long while to write. A full three to five minutes for each. He racked his brains for an additional sentence that would make a dignified transition from the disaster to his own glad tidings. Nothing came.

I have had my first meeting with an Oasan native, he went on, trusting that Bea would understand. Contrary to my wildest hopes they are hungry for Christ. They know of the Bible. I didn’t have mine with me at the time — that’ll teach me never to go anywhere without it! I don’t know why I left it behind. I suppose I assumed that the first visit would be basically reconnaissance, and that the response would be negative. But as Jesus says in John 4,’ Say not ye, There are yet four months before the harvest; behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes and look upon the fields, for they are ripe already!’

The settlement is not at all what I expected. There is no evidence of industrialisation, it could be the Middle East in the middle ages (with different architecture, of course). No electricity, apparently! It’s also in the middle of nowhere, a long, long way from the USIC base. I don’t think it will be feasible for me to live here and travel there on a regular basis. I will have to go and live with the Oasans. And as soon as possible. I haven’t discussed any of the practicalities. (Yes, yes, I know… I really need you with me. But God is well aware that I’m clueless in that area.) I’ll have to trust that everything will fall into place. There seems plenty of reason to hope that it will!

The Oasans — assuming the one I met was typical — are average height and look remarkably like us, except for their faces which are a gruesome sort of jumble, impossible to describe really, like foetuses. You don’t know what to look at when you’re talking to them. They speak English with a strong accent. Well, the one I met did. Maybe he’s the only one who speaks any English, and my original assumption — that I would spend several months learning the language before I made any headway — will still be borne out. But I have a feeling that God has been at work here already, more than I dared imagine.

Anyway, I’m going straight back there as soon as I can. I was going to say ‘tomorrow’, but with the periods of daylight being several ‘days’ long here, the word ‘tomorrow’ is a problem. I must find out what the USIC personnel do to get round that one. I’m sure they have a solution. I’ll ask Grainger during the drive, if I remember. My mind’s a bit over-excited, as you can imagine! I’m just raring to go back to that settlement, take my place amongst these extraordinary people and satisfy their thirst for the Gospel.

What a privilege to

He stopped typing, midway through ‘What a privilege to serve the Lord’. He had remembered the Maldives, or, more to the point, he’d become aware that he’d forgotten all about them in his enthusiasm. Bea’s uneasy, almost anxious mood — so unlike her! — was at odds with his exuberance, like a funeral dirge interrupted by the cheery hootings of a passing carnival. Re-reading the opening line of his letter, he could see that his acknowledgement of her distress was pretty cursory. In normal circumstances, he would have embraced her; the pressure of his arms against her back and the nudge of his cheek against her hair would have said it all. But now, the written word was all he had.

He considered elaborating on how he felt about the Maldives. But he didn’t feel much, at least not about the Maldives themselves. His feelings were largely regret — disappointment, even — that the tragedy had affected Beatrice so badly, just when he wanted her to be happy and all right and getting on with things as usual and receptive to his wonderful news about the Oasans.

His stomach gurgled loudly. He hadn’t eaten since the drive back from the settlement, when he and Grainger had nibbled at the dried-out remainder of the raisin bread. (‘Five bucks a slice,’ she’d remarked ruefully. He hadn’t asked who was footing the bill.) As if by mutual agreement, they had not discussed the Oasan’s extraordinary response to Peter. Instead, Grainger explained various routine procedures relating to laundry, electric appliances, availability of vehicles, canteen etiquette. She was irritable, insisting that she’d briefed him on these things before, when she first escorted him off the ship. The forgiveness joke didn’t work a third time.

Peter stood up and walked to the window. The sun — egg-yellow and hazy-edged at this time of day — was clearly visible from his quarters, right in the middle of the sky. It was four or five times bigger than the sun he’d grown up with, and it cast a rim of golden light along the contours of the airport compound’s drab buildings. Puddles of rainwater, left by last night’s deluge, had been evaporating steadily since then. The vapours twirled and danced as they flew off the ground and past the rooftops into oblivion, as if the puddles were blowing sophisticated smoke rings.

The air conditioning in his room was unnecessarily cool. He found that if he stepped closer to the window, almost pressing his body against it, the warmth from outside radiated through the glass and permeated his clothing. He would have to ask Grainger about adjusting the air-con; it was one of the points they hadn’t covered.

Back at the message screen, he finished typing serve the Lord and started a fresh paragraph.

Even in my joy at this wonderful opportunity that God has laid before me, I feel an ache of grief that I can’t hold you and comfort you. I only realised today that this is the first time you & I have been apart for longer than a couple of nights. Couldn’t I have gone on a mini-mission to Manchester or Cardiff first, as a practice exercise, before coming all the way here?

I think you would find Oasis as beautiful as I do. The sun is huge and yellow. The air swirls around constantly and slips in and out of your clothes. That may sound unpleasant, I know, but you get used to it. The water is green and my urine comes out orange. I’m doing a great job of selling the place to you, aren’t I? I should have taken a course in novel-writing before I volunteered for this. I should have insisted to USIC that we went together or I didn’t go at all.

Maybe, if we’d bent their arm on that one, we could then have insisted that Joshua came along too. Not sure how he would have fared in the Jump, though. Probably would have been transformed into a furry tea cosy.

Feeble cat jokes. My equivalent of your chocolate rollettes, I suppose.

Darling, I love you. Keep well. Take the wise advice that you’ve given me so often: don’t be hard on yourself, and don’t let the bad blind you to the good. I’ll join you in prayer for the relatives of the dead in the Maldives. Join me in prayer for the people here, who are thrilled at the prospect of a new life in Christ. Oh, and also: there is a girl in Oskaloosa called Coretta whose father has recently died and whose mother has hit the booze. Pray for her too, if you remember.

Love,

Peter

He read the text of his message over, but didn’t tinker with it any further, feeling suddenly faint with hunger and fatigue. He pressed a button. For several minutes, his 793 inadequate words hung there, trembling slightly, as if unsure what to do. That was normal for the Shoot, he’d found. The process kept you in suspense each time, tempting you to fear that it would fail. Then his words vanished and the screen went blank, except for the automated logo that said: APPROVED, TRANSMITTED.

8. Take a deep breath and count to a million

Everything looked different in daylight. The USIC mess hall, which had seemed so lonesome and eerie during the long hours of darkness, was a hive of cheerful activity now. A happy congregation. The glass wall on the eastern side of the building, although tinted, let in so much light and warmth that Peter had to shield his face from it. A glow was cast over the entire room, transforming coffee machines into jewelled sculptures, aluminium chairs into precious metal, magazine racks into ziggurats, bald heads into lamps. Thirty or forty people were gathered together, eating, chatting, fetching refills from the coffee bar, lolling around in the armchairs, gesticulating over the tables, raising their voices to compete with the raised voices of the others. Most were dressed in white, just like Peter, although sans the big inky crucifix on the chest. There were quite a few black faces, including BG’s. BG didn’t look up when Peter arrived; he was involved in an animated discussion with a rather butch-looking white woman. There was no sign of Grainger.

Peter stepped into the throng. Piped music was still issuing from the PA system but it was barely audible above the clamour of conversation; Peter couldn’t tell whether it was the same Patsy Cline documentary or an electronic disco song or a piece of classical music. Just another voice in the hubbub.

‘Hey, preacher!’

It was the black man who’d tossed him the blueberry muffin. He was seated at the same table as last night, but with a different pal, a fat white guy. In fact, both of them were fat: exactly the same weight, and with similar features. Coincidences like that served as a reminder that, variations in pigment aside, humans were all part of the same species.

‘Hi there,’ said Peter, pulling up a seat and joining them. They each glanced at his chest to check out the ink-stained design there, but, having satisfied themselves that it was a crucifix rather than something they might wish to comment on, pulled their heads back again.

‘How’s things, man?’ The black guy extended his hand for a handshake. Mathematical formulae were jotted on the sleeve of his shirt, right up to the elbow.

‘Very good,’ said Peter. It had never occurred to him before that dark-skinned people didn’t have the option of jotting numbers on their skin. You learned something new about human diversity every day.

‘You got yourself fed yet?’ The black man had just polished off a plate of something brown and saucy. He nursed a jumbo plastic mug of coffee. His friend nodded a greeting to Peter, and unwrapped a soggy napkin from around a large sandwich.

‘No, I’m still functioning on half a muffin,’ said Peter, blinking dazedly in the light. ‘Actually, that’s not quite true: I’ve had some raisin bread since then.’

‘Lay off that raisin bread, man. It’s NRC.’

‘NRC?’ Peter consulted his mental database of acronyms. ‘Not recommended for children?’

‘Not Real Coke.’

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘It’s our cute way of saying that it was made here, not back home. Probably contains monocycloparaffins or cyclohexyldodecanoic acid or some shit like that.’ The black man was half-smiling, but his eyes were serious. The polysyllabic chemical terms had rolled off his tongue with the ease of obscenities. Again, Peter was reminded that each and every member of this personnel must possess skills that amply justified the cost of his or her passage to Oasis. Every member except him.

The black man took a loud slurp of coffee.

Peter asked: ‘Do you never eat anything that’s been made here?’

‘My body is my temple, preacher, and you gotta keep it holy. The Bible says that.’

‘The Bible says a lot of things, Mooney,’ his pal remarked, and took a big bite out of his sandwich, which dripped grey sauce. Peter glanced across the room at BG. The butch-looking white woman was laughing, almost doubled up. She had one hand on BG’s knee, for balance. The piped music poked through a gap in the noise, revealing the chorus of a Broadway song from the mid-twentieth century, the sort of stuff Peter had always associated with provincial charity shops or the record collections of lonely old men.

‘How’s your sandwich?’ he enquired. ‘Looks pretty good.’

‘Mmf,’ nodded the fat white guy. ‘It is good.’

‘What’s in it?’

‘Whiteflower.’

‘Apart from the bread… ’

‘Whiteflower, preacher. Not white flour. Whiteflower. Roast whiteflower.’

Mooney came to the rescue. ‘My friend Roussos is talking about a flower.’ He made an elegant hand-gesture, unfurling his plump fingers in imitation of an opening blossom. ‘A flower that grows here. Just about the only thing that grows here… ’

‘Tastes like the best pastrami you ever had in your life,’ said Roussos.

‘It’s very adaptable,’ Mooney conceded. ‘Depending on the flavours you put in, it can be made to taste like just about any damn thing. Chicken. Fudge. Beefsteak. Banana. Sweetcorn. Mushroom. Add water and it’s soup. Boil it down and it’s jelly. Grind and bake it and it’s bread. The universal food.’

‘You’re doing a very good job of selling it,’ said Peter, ‘for someone who refuses to eat it.’

‘Sure he eats it,’ said Roussos. ‘He loves the banana fritters!’

‘They’re OK,’ sniffed Mooney. ‘I don’t make a habit of it. Mainly I insist on the real deal.’

‘But isn’t it expensive,’ asked Peter, ‘if you only eat and drink… uh… imported stuff?’

‘You bet, preacher. At the rate I’m drinking real Coke, I estimate I owe USIC maybe in the region of… fifty thousand bucks.’

‘Easy,’ confirmed Roussos. ‘That, and the Twinkies.’

‘Hell yeah! The prices these sharks charge for a Twinkie! Or a Hershey bar. I tell ya, if I wasn’t the easy-going type… ’

Mooney slid his empty plate towards Peter.

‘If I hadn’t eaten it all, I could show ya something else,’ he said. ‘Vanilla ice-cream and chocolate sauce. The vanilla essence and the chocolate is imported, the sauce has maybe some whiteflower in it, but the ice cream… the ice cream is pure entomophagy, know what I’m saying?’

Peter reflected a moment. ‘No, Mooney, I don’t know what you’re saying.’

‘Bugs, man. Grubs. You scream, I scream, we all scream for… whipped bugs!’

‘Very funny,’ mumbled Roussos, and continued chewing his mouthful with less enthusiasm than before.

‘And they do a delicious rice dessert that uses — can you believe this? — it uses maggots.’

Roussos put down his sandwich. ‘Mooney, you’re my pal, I love you a lot, but… ’

‘Not dirty maggots, you understand,’ Mooney explained. ‘Clean, fresh, specially bred ones.’

Roussos had had enough. ‘Mooney, put a goddamn sock in it. There are some things it’s better for a person not to know.’

As if alerted by the sounds of dispute, BG abruptly hove into view.

‘Hey, Peter! How’s tricks, bro?’ The white woman was no longer at his side.

‘Excellent, BG. And you?’

‘On top of it, man, on top of it. We got the solar panels putting out two hundred and fifty per cent of our electric power now. We’re ready to pump the surplus into some seriously smart systems.’ He nodded towards an invisible location somewhere beyond the mess hall, on the opposite side from where Peter had explored. ‘You seen that new building out there?’

‘They all look new to me, BG.’

‘Yeah, well, this one is real new.’ BG’s face was serene with pride. ‘You go out there and look at it sometime, when you get the opportoonity. It’s a beautiful piece of engineering. Our new rain-collecting centrifuge.’

‘Otherwise known as the Big Brassiere,’ interjected Roussos, mopping up the sauce with a fragment of bread-crust.

‘Hey, we ain’t looking to win no architecture prizes,’ grinned BG. ‘Just figuring out how to catch that water.’

‘Actually,’ said Peter, ‘now that you mention it, it’s just occurred to me: Despite all the rain… I haven’t seen any rivers or lakes. Not even a pond.’

‘The ground is like a sponge. Anything that goes in, you don’t get back. But most of the rain evaporates in, like, five minutes. You can’t see it happening, it’s constant. Invisible steam. That’s a oxymoron, right?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Peter.

‘Anyway, we got to grab that rain before it disappears. That’s what me and the team been designing. Vacuum nets. Flow concentrators. Big, big toys. And what about you, bro? You got yourself a church yet?’

The question was asked lightly, as if churches were tools or other necessary supplies that could be requisitioned — which, on reflection, they were.

‘Not the physical building, BG,’ said Peter. ‘But that’s never been what a church is about. A church is made of hearts and minds.’

‘Low-budget construction,’ quipped Roussos.

‘Show some respect, asshole,’ said Mooney.

‘Actually, BG,’ said Peter, ‘I’m kind of in a state of shock — or happy astonishment would be a better word. Last night… uh… this morning… earlier today, Grainger took me to the Oasan settlement… ’

‘The what, bro?’

‘The Oasan settlement.’

The three men laughed. ‘You mean Freaktown,’ said Roussos.

‘C-2,’ corrected BG, abruptly serious. ‘We call it C-2.’

‘Anyway,’ Peter continued, ‘I got the most amazing welcome. These people are desperate to learn about God!’

‘Well, ain’t that a lick on the dick,’ said BG.

‘They already know about the Bible!’

‘This calls for celebration, bro. Lemme buy you a drink.’

‘I don’t drink, BG.’

BG raised one eyebrow. ‘I meant a coffee, bro. If you want alcohol, you’re gonna need to set up your church real fast.’

‘Sorry…?’

‘Donations, bro. Lotsa donations. One beer will set you back a loooong way.’

BG lumbered towards the coffee bar. Peter was left alone with the two fat guys, who took synchronised sips from their plastic mugs.

‘It’s extraordinary the way you can be driven through a landscape for hours and yet not notice the most striking thing about it,’ reflected Peter. ‘All that rain, and none of it collected in lakes or reservoirs… I wonder how the Oasans cope.’

‘No problem,’ said Roussos. ‘It rains every day. They get what they need when they need it. It’s like, on tap.’ He held up his plastic mug to an imagined sky.

‘In fact,’ added Mooney, ‘it would be a problem if the ground didn’t soak it up. Imagine the floods, man.’

‘Oh!’ said Peter, suddenly remembering. ‘Have you heard about the Maldives?’

‘The Maldives?’ Roussos looked wary, as though suspecting that Peter was about to launch into an evangelistic parable.

‘The Maldives. A bunch of islands in the Indian Ocean,’ said Peter. ‘They got wiped out by tidal waves. Almost everyone who lived there is dead.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ said Mooney, impassive, as though Peter had just imparted a fragment of knowledge from a branch of science outside his own.

‘Wiped out?’ said Roussos. ‘That’s bad.’

BG returned to the table with a steaming mug of coffee in each fist.

‘Thanks,’ said Peter, taking hold of his. There was a jokey message printed on it: YOU DON’T NEED TO BE HUMAN TO WORK HERE, BUT IT HELPS. BG’s said something different. ‘Hey, I’ve just realised,’ said Peter. ‘These mugs are real plastic. I mean, er… thick plastic. I mean, not Styrofoam, not disposable… ’

‘We got better things to transport halfway across the universe than disposable cups, bro,’ said BG.

‘Yeah, like Hershey bars,’ said Mooney.

‘Like Christian ministers,’ said BG, without a hint of mockery.

My dear Bea, wrote Peter an hour later.

No reply from you yet, and maybe it’s a bit soon for me to be writing you another letter. But I couldn’t wait to tell you — I’ve just had a MOST eye-opening conversation with some of the USIC guys. It turns out I’m not the first Christian missionary that’s been sent here. Before me, there was a man called Marty Kurtzberg. A Baptist apparently, despite the Jewish name. His ministry was welcomed by the natives, but then he disappeared. That was a year ago. No one knows what became of him. Of course the men joke that the Oasans probably ate him, like in those old cartoons of missionaries tied up & getting boiled in a pot by hungry savages. They shouldn’t talk like that, it’s racist, but anyway I know in my heart that these people — the Oasans, that is — aren’t dangerous. Not to me, anyway. Maybe that’s a rash assessment, since I’ve only met one so far. But I’m sure you recall the times when you & I were witnessing for the Lord in some unfamiliar place/context, and we suddenly sensed that we should beat a hasty retreat if we wanted to stay alive! Well, I don’t get that feeling here.

Despite the cannibalism jokes, USIC and the Oasans have what appears to be quite a decent trading relationship. It’s not the colonial model of exploitation that you’d expect. There’s a regular exchange of goods, formal and low-key. The Oasans provide us with basic foodstuffs. As I understand it, the main thing we’ve been giving the Oasans is medicines. There’s not a great variety of plants growing here, which is surprising given the amount of rain. But since most medicines are made from plants I suspect that the scope for discovering/making analgesics, antibiotics, etc, here has been limited. Or maybe this is USIC’s evil plan to get the locals hooked on drugs? I won’t be able to make authoritative statements about that until I know these people better.

Anyway, are you sitting down? — because I have some amazing news that may knock you flat. The Oasans want only one thing (besides medicines) — the word of God. They’ve been asking USIC to supply them with another pastor. Asking? — Demanding! According to the men I just spoke to, they (Oasans) have let it be known, politely, that their continued co-operation with USIC’s activities depends on it! And here’s you and me thinking that USIC was being fantastically generous in offering me this opportunity to come here… Well, far from me being here under sufferance, it turns out the whole project may depend on me! If I’d known this before, I would have INSISTED that you came too. But then maybe USIC would have passed me over in favour of someone else, someone less troublesome. There must have been hundreds of applicants. (I still don’t understand Why Me. But perhaps the right question is Why Not?)

Anyway, it’s clear that I’ll be given whatever assistance I require in the setting up of my church. A vehicle, building materials, even labourers. The way things are shaping up, it looks like my yoke is going to be easier than that of just about any missionary since the beginning of Christian evangelism. When you think of Saint Paul, getting beaten up, stoned, shipwrecked, starved, imprisoned… I’m almost looking forward to my first setback! (ALMOST)

He paused. That was all he wanted to say but he felt he should make some reference to the Maldives. And then felt guilty for feeling he should, rather than wanting to.

Love,

Peter

After he vomited up the coffee, he felt better. He wasn’t much of a coffee drinker at the best of times — it was a stimulant, after all, and he’d weaned himself off artificial stimulants years ago — but the stuff BG had presented him with tasted foul. Maybe it was made of Oasan flowers, or maybe the combination of imported coffee and Oasan water was bad news. Either way, he felt better rid of it. In fact, he felt almost normal. The effects of the Jump were leaving his system at last. He took a long swig of water straight from the tap. Delicious. He would drink only water from now on.

Energy returned to his body, as though each cell was a microscopic sponge that swelled in gratitude for being fed. Maybe it was. He strapped on his sandals and left his quarters, ostensibly to get the hang of his surroundings but also to celebrate feeling vigorous again. He’d been cooped up too long. Free at last!

Well, free to walk the labyrinth of the USIC base. A welcome change from his room, but not exactly the wide open prairie. Just empty corridors, brightly lit tunnels of wall, ceiling and floor. And every few metres, a door.

Each door had a name tag on it — surname and initial only — with the person’s job description in larger letters. Thus, W. HEK, CHEF, S. MORTELLARO, DENTAL SURGEON, D. ROSEN, SURVEYOR, L. MORO, ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGIST, B. GRAHAM, CENTRIFUGE ENGINEER, J. MOONEY, ELECTRICAL ENGINEER, and so on. The word ‘engineer’ came up often, as did professions ending in ‘-ist’.

No sound came through those doors, and the corridors were likewise silent. Evidently, the USIC staff were either at work or hanging out in the cafeteria. There was nothing sinister in their absence, no reason to feel spooked, yet Peter felt spooked. His initial relief at being able to reconnoitre alone, unwatched, gave way to a hankering for signs of life. He walked with increasing pace, turned corners with increasing resolution, and was met each time with the same rectangular passageways and rows of identical doors. In a place like this, you couldn’t even be sure if you were lost.

Just as he was starting to sweat, needled with memories of being trapped in juvenile corrective institutions, the spell was broken — turning another corner, he almost collided, chest-to-chest, with Werner.

‘Whoa! Where’s the fire?’ Werner said, patting his fat torso as if checking that the surprise hadn’t done him any harm.

‘Sorry,’ said Peter.

‘You OK?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘That’s good,’ nodded Werner, cordial but in no mood to chat. ‘Stay with it, man.’ A catchphrase or a caution? Hard to tell.

Within seconds, Peter was alone once more. His moment of panic had passed. He could see now that there was a difference between wandering around in an unfamiliar building and being trapped in a prison. Werner was right: he needed to get a grip.

Back in his own quarters, Peter prayed. Prayed for guidance. No answer came to him, at least not immediately.

The alien — the Oasan — had begged him to return to the settlement as soon as he could. So… should he go right away? The claustrophobia that had threatened him in the corridors suggested that he still wasn’t fully back to normal — he wasn’t a panicker, usually. And it wasn’t long since he’d been fainting, vomiting and hallucinating. Perhaps he should continue resting up until he was a hundred per cent sure he was himself again. But the Oasan had begged him to return, and USIC hadn’t brought him all this way for him to lie in bed staring at his toes. He should go. He should go.

The thing was, it would mean being out of contact with Bea for a number of days. That would be hard on both of them. Yet, in the circumstances, there was no avoiding it; the best he could do was delay his departure just a little while longer, so that they had more time to write to each other first.

He checked the Shoot. Nothing.

Come back สีoon, Peรี่er, oh very สีoon, สีooner than you can. Read for uสี the Book of สีรี่range New Thingสี. He could still hear the Oasan’s voice, wheezy and strained as though each word was well-nigh impossible to produce, a bleat from a musical instrument made of preposterously ill-suited materials. A trombone carved out of a watermelon, held together with rubber bands.

But never mind the physicalities: here were souls hungry for Christ, waiting for him to return as he had promised.

But had he promised, in so many words? He couldn’t recall.

God’s answer resounded in his head. Don’t make everything so complicated. Do what you came here for.

Yes, Lord, he responded in turn, but is it OK if I wait for just one more letter from Bea?

Frazzled from waiting, he went out into the corridors again. They were silent as before, still empty, and smelled of nothing, not even floor cleaner, although they were very clean. Not showroom-pristine or shiny, but free of noticeable dirt or dust. Sensibly clean.

He’d been wrong to feel claustrophobic. Only a few of the passageways were enclosed; others had windows, big ones with sunshine beaming in. How could he have missed this before? How had he managed to choose only the windowless passageways? That was the sort of thing crazy people did — instinctively choosing the experiences that confirmed their own negative attitudes. He was a past master of stuff like that; God had shown him a better way. God and Bea.

He walked along, re-reading the names on the doors, trying to commit them to memory in case he ever needed to know where to find someone. He was struck anew by how odd it was that none of the doors was fitted with a lock, just a simple handle which any stranger could open.

‘You planning to steal my toothpaste?’ Roussos had teased when Peter remarked on this earlier on.

‘No, but you might have possessions that are very individual to you.’

‘You planning to steal my shoes?’

Peter had stolen someone’s shoes once, and considered mentioning it, but Mooney interrupted:

‘He wants your muffins, man! Watch your muffins!’

By coincidence, Peter noted the nameplate of F. ROUSSOS, OPERATING ENGINEER on one of the doors, and walked on. Seconds later, he noted another name in passing and then almost lost his balance when it registered on his consciousness: M. KURTZBERG, PASTOR.

Why was he so surprised? Kurtzberg was missing in action, but no one had said he was dead. Until his fate was established, there was no reason to reallocate his quarters or remove his name. He might return anytime.

On impulse, Peter knocked at the door. There was no answer. He knocked again, louder. Again, no answer. He should, of course, move on. But he did not. Within moments, he was standing inside the room. It was a room identical to his own, in design and décor at least. The window blind was shut.

‘Hello?’ he called quietly, to verify that he was alone. He tried to convince himself that Kurtzberg, if he had been here, would have urged him to come in, and although this was probably true, it didn’t alter the fact that it was wrong to enter a stranger’s home uninvited.

But this isn’t a home, is it? he thought to himself. The USIC base isn’t a home for anybody. It’s just one big workplace. Self-justifying sophistry? Perhaps. But no, it was an instinct that went deeper than that. Bea would have sensed it too. There was something weird about the USIC personnel, something Bea could have helped him articulate. These people had been living here for years; they obviously enjoyed a degree of camaraderie; and yet… and yet.

He stepped deeper into Kurtzberg’s apartment. There was no evidence of any other illicit visits before this one. The atmosphere was stale, and a film of dust covered the flat surfaces. There was no Shoot on the table, just a bottle of filtered water (half-empty and pure-looking) and a plastic mug. The bed was unmade, with one pillow hanging off the edge, poised to fall, placidly established in that poise, set to hang there for ever. Spread out on the bed was one of Kurtzberg’s shirts, its sleeves upflung as if in surrender. The armpits were discoloured with mildew.

Disappointingly, there were no documents anywhere to be seen: no diaries or notebooks. There was a Bible — a neat paperback Revised Standard Version — lying on a chair. Peter opened it, riffled through the pages. Kurtzberg, he soon realised, was not the sort of person who underlined verses that struck him as particularly significant or who scribbled annotations in the margins. There was nothing here but pristine Scripture. Peter, in his own sermons, would occasionally tell a joke or an aphorism to drive home a point, and one of the dictums he enjoyed quoting, whenever he sensed that people in the congregation were staring at his grubby, decrepit, dog-eared New Testament, was ‘Clean Bible — dirty Christian. Dirty Bible — clean Christian.’ Marty Kurtzberg obviously did not subscribe to this view.

Peter opened the wardrobe. A formal suit jacket, in powder-blue linen, hung there, next to a pair of white slacks with faint grey stains on the knees. Kurtzberg was a compact man, no taller than five foot six, and his shoulders were narrow. Two more coat-hangers were cloaked in shirts of the same kind as the one on the bed, replete with classy silk ties slung loosely around the collars. On the bottom of the wardrobe lay a pair of leather shoes, polished to a gleam, and a wadded-up pair of cream socks that were furry with mould.

I’m not going to learn anything here, thought Peter, and turned to leave. As he turned, though, he noticed something lying under the window, a litter of what looked like flower petals. On closer inspection, it proved to be torn fragments of adhesive bandage. Dozens of them. As if Kurtzberg had stood at the window, staring out at goodness knows what, and ripped up an entire packet of Band-Aids one by one, into shreds as small as possible, letting them fall at his feet.

After his visit to Kurtzberg’s quarters, Peter lost all motivation to explore the USIC compound any further. A pity, because this was his chance to make up for forgetting all the orienteering info Grainger had told him on arrival. Walking around was good exercise, too; no doubt his muscles needed it, but… well, to be truthful, this place made him depressed.

He wasn’t sure why. The compound was spacious, clean, cheerfully painted, and there were plenty of windows. OK, a few of the corridors were a bit tunnel-like, but they couldn’t all face onto the sky, could they? And OK, a few pot plants here and there might have been nice, but USIC could hardly be blamed if the soil of Oasis didn’t support ferns and rhododendrons. And it wasn’t as if no attempt had been made to finesse the décor. At regular intervals in the corridors hung nicely framed posters that were intended, presumably, to raise a smile. Peter noted perennial favourites like the photo of the worried-looking kitten hanging upside-down from a twig, captioned OH, SHIT…, the dog sharing his basket with two ducks, Laurel and Hardy cluelessly attempting to build a house, the elephant balancing on a ball, the convoy of forward-striding cartoon men in Robert Crumb’s ‘Keep On Truckin’, and — at impressive size, from chest-height to just under the ceiling — Charles Ebbets’ famous monochrome of construction workers eating lunch on an iron girder suspended vertiginously above the streets of Manhattan. A little further on, Peter wondered whether the 1940s propaganda painting titled We Can Do It!, showing ‘Rosie the Riveter’ flexing her well-muscled forearm, was intended sincerely to inspire the personnel, or if it had been fixed there with a wink of irony. In any case, some sly graffitist had added, in felt-tip, NO THANKS ROSIE.

Not all the pictures alluded to construction projects and tough challenges; there was a quotient of art-for-art’s-sake as well. Peter noted several classic screenprints by Mucha and Toulouse-Lautrec, a collage by Braque or someone of that ilk, and a giant photograph labelled ‘Andreas Gursky: Rhine II’ that was almost abstract in its simple stripes of green field and blue river. There were also facsimiles of old movie posters featuring matinee idols from the far distant past: Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Marlene Dietrich, even Rudolph Valentino. Something for everybody. The range couldn’t be faulted, really, although there was a curious absence of any image that evoked a specific, currently existing spot on Earth, or a passionate emotion.

Craving fresh air, Peter headed for the nearest door that led outside.

Whether the ocean of humid air that rushed to greet him when he emerged into the sunshine could be called ‘fresh’ was, of course, debatable. It certainly wasn’t stagnant. Wisps of it lifted locks of his hair to caress his scalp, while other currents slipped into his clothing and sought out the flesh he’d tried to keep covered. But it was better this time. His dishdasha was a single layer between him and the atmosphere, and once it became damp — which happened within seconds — it hung off him loosely, a bit heavy on the shoulders but comfortable everywhere else. The fabric, though thin enough not to be stifling, was tightly woven enough to conceal the fact that he wore nothing else underneath, and stiff enough not to cling. The atmosphere got on well with it.

He walked briskly along the tarmac, along the outer wall of the USIC building, taking advantage of the shade cast by the concrete monstrosity. The sandals allowed his feet to breathe; the sweat between his toes evaporated as soon as it formed. The air tickled his shins and ankles, which ought to have been unpleasant but was really quite delightful. His mood was much improved, the unease he’d felt indoors already forgotten.

Turning a corner, he found himself passing alongside the windowed exterior of the mess hall. The sun blazed on the glass, making it difficult for him to see through, but he got a vague impression of the tables and chairs and the people gathered in there. He waved blindly into the haze, in case anyone had spotted him and might be waving to him. He wouldn’t want them to think he was snubbing them.

Averting his eyes from the glare, he caught sight of something unexpected: a large gazebo, situated a couple of hundred metres from the main building. Its canopy was bright yellow, made of canvas or sailcloth, slackly stretched over the support struts. Peter had once conducted a wedding under such a structure; he’d also seen them at the seaside and in public gardens. They provided shelter from sun and rain and could be easily dismantled, although this one looked more permanent. There was movement inside its shade, so he ambled over to investigate.

Four — no, five — people were under the gazebo, dancing. Not in pairs but alone. Actually, no, maybe they weren’t dancing: maybe it was a Tai Chi session.

Approaching nearer still, Peter saw that they were in fact exercising. This place was a sort of outdoor gym, furnished not with high-tech electric treadmills and ergometers but with simple wooden and metal structures that resembled children’s playground equipment. Moro was there, pumping her legs on the padded sidebars of a weighted wheel. BG was there, lifting sandbags on a pulley. The other three were unknown to Peter. Wet with sweat, all five applied themselves to their brightly painted mechanisms, stretching, pacing, twisting, bowing.

‘Yay, Peter!’ called BG, without interrupting the rhythm of his workout. His arms, as he flexed them to raise and lower the bags, were as thick as Peter’s legs, and the knots of muscle bulged as though inflated by a puffer. He wore baggy shorts that reached down to his calves and a skimpy cotton singlet through which his nipples poked like rivets.

‘That looks like hard work, BG,’ said Peter.

‘Work, play, it’s all the same to me,’ BG replied.

Moro didn’t acknowledge Peter’s arrival, but then the position she was in — flat on her back with her legs in the air, pedalling — might have made that problematic. She wore a white shalwar whose waistband had slipped under her hip-bones, and a sleeveless T-shirt that left her midriff bare. Sweat had saturated the fabric, rendering it semi-transparent; she breathed loudly and rhythmically. BG had an unimpeded view.

‘On top of it, man, on top of it,’ he exclaimed.

At first, Peter took this to be a bawdy pun. It would fit in with the sexualised banter on the ship and BG’s generally bullish air. But as he looked into BG’s face, he realised that the man was abstracted, gazing at no particular object, focused on his own exercise. Moro might or might not be registering on his consciousness as a blur of movement, but as a woman she was invisible to him.

There was another female here, too, a tall, sinewy Caucasian with sparse red hair pulled into a ponytail. Her legs dangled inches off the ground as she supported herself between two parallel bars. She smiled at Peter but it was a smile that said ‘Let’s be properly introduced someday when I’m not so busy.’ The two unknown men were similarly preoccupied. One stood on a low pedestal with a swivel base, his eyes fixed on his own feet as he gyrated his hips. The other sat on a spider-like structure with many rungs, and was touching his cheeks to his knees. His hands were interlocked behind his head, as tightly as the metal rungs in which he’d hooked his feet. He was a closed circuit of exertion. He heaved himself forward, and one of his knotty vertebrae seemed to pop out of his skin and fly into the air. Actually, it was an insect. The gazebo was a harbour for grasshopper-like bugs which settled calmly on the humans here and there, but mostly just crawled on the canvas, green against the yellow.

The gazebo area contained enough equipment for a dozen people. Peter wondered if it was bad form not to join in. Maybe he should pick a gadget and do a small workout, just a few minutes — enough to be able to walk away without seeming to have come here solely to spectate. But he’d never been a formal-exercise kind of guy and he would feel foolish pretending. Anyway, he was a newbie and surely people could understand that he needed to check the place out.

‘Nice day,’ remarked Moro. She’d stopped pedalling and was taking a breather.

‘More than nice. Beautiful,’ said Peter.

‘Sure is,’ said Moro, and swigged some water from a bottle. One of the green insects had attached itself to her top, between the breasts, like a brooch. She paid it no mind.

‘Did the coffee come out?’ said Peter.

She looked at him uncomprehendingly. ‘Coffee?’

‘The coffee I made you spill.’

‘Oh, that.’ Her expression implied she’d engaged with a dozen challenges and activities since then, and could hardly be expected to remember an event so trivial. ‘It wasn’t coffee.’

‘Whiteflower?’

‘Chicory and rye extract. And yeah, just a bit of whiteflower. To give it body.’

‘I must try it sometime.’

‘It’s worth trying. Don’t expect the most wonderful thing on earth and you won’t be disappointed.’

‘A sound philosophy as a general rule,’ he said.

Again she looked at him as if he was talking gibberish. He smiled, waved and walked away. There were some people you would never click with, no matter how many times you tried, no matter how many shared experiences came your way, and maybe Moro was one of those. But it didn’t matter. As the USIC interviewers had reminded him at every opportunity, he wasn’t here for her.

Reluctant to go back inside just yet, Peter strayed further and further from the USIC base. He would be in trouble, he supposed, if he got suddenly tired or unwell, but it was a risk he was willing to take. His health and endurance would be tested to the limit soon enough anyway, when he delivered himself to the Oasan settlement with no supplies apart from a Bible and the clothes he stood up in.

Stark against the horizon towered two silos or chimneys, he wasn’t sure which. Obviously not the Big Brassiere, judging from the shape, but what it was he couldn’t guess. No smoke coming out, so maybe they were silos after all. Might this be one of the many things that Grainger had explained to him, as she escorted him off the ship? The conversation they were supposed to have had, which he had so embarrassingly forgotten, threatened to grow to mythical proportions: a grand tour of everything, with scripted commentary answering all conceivable questions. He should bear in mind that there was a limit to how much she could have passed on to him at first sight.

He walked towards the silos for ten, twenty minutes, but they didn’t get any closer. A trick of perspective. In cities, the buildings and streets gave you a more accurate sense of how far or near the horizon was. In natural, unspoiled landscapes, you didn’t have a clue. What looked like a mile or two might be several days’ journey.

He should conserve his energy. He should turn around and make his way back to the base. Just as he’d made this decision, however, a vehicle drove into view, coming from the direction of the silos. It was a jeep identical to Grainger’s, but as it came closer he could see it wasn’t Grainger at the wheel. It was the big, butch-looking woman who’d been talking to BG in the mess hall earlier on. She smoothed the car to a standstill right nearby and wound down the window.

‘Running away from home?’

He smiled. ‘Just exploring.’

She gave him the once-over.

‘You done?’

He laughed. ‘Yes.’

She tipped her head in a get-in gesture and he complied. The interior of the vehicle was messy — there wouldn’t have been room for him in the back — and humid, without air conditioning. Unlike Grainger, this woman evidently didn’t feel the need to exclude the Oasan atmosphere. Her skin was shiny with sweat and the spiky tips of her bleached hair drooped with moisture.

‘Time for lunch,’ she said.

‘Seems we just had lunch,’ he said. ‘Or was that breakfast?’

‘I’m a growing girl,’ she said. Her tone tipped him off that she was aware she was hefty but couldn’t care less. Her arms were well-muscled and her bosom, encased in a bra whose underwiring pushed against the fabric of her white T-shirt, was matronly.

‘I was wondering what those are,’ said Peter, indicating the silos.

She glanced up at the rear-view mirror as they got under way. ‘Them? They’re oil.’

‘Petroleum?’

‘Not exactly. Something like it.’

‘But you can convert it into fuel?’

She sighed ruefully. ‘Well now, that’s a question that’s got other questions hanging off of it. I mean, which way do you go? Design new engines to work with the new fuel or monkey around with the fuel so it works with the old engines? We’ve had some… discussions about that, over the years.’ The way she pronounced the word ‘discussions’ suggested a personal stake in the matter, and a degree of exasperation.

‘And who won?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘The chemistry guys. They figured out how to adapt the fuel. It’s like… changing the design of the butt so the butt fits the chair. But hey, who am I to argue.’

They drove past the yellow gazebo. Moro had left, but the other four were still hard at it.

‘Do you ever exercise there?’ Peter asked. The woman still hadn’t volunteered her name and it felt awkward to ask it now.

‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘But my job is more physical than some other people’s, so… ’

‘You’re a friend of BG’s?’ said Peter. They would be back at the base within seconds and that would be it, conversation over.

‘He’s a fun guy,’ the woman said. ‘They should have called him BS. You never know what will come out of his mouth. Keeps things interesting.’

‘Where did he stand on the fuel question?’

She snorted. ‘No opinion. That’s BG! It takes a lot of muscle to be that weak.’ She slowed the vehicle down and parked it neatly in the shade of the main building. ‘But he’s a great guy,’ she added. ‘We get along great. Everybody gets along great. It’s a great team.’

‘Except when you disagree.’

She reached forward to pull the key from the ignition. Her upper arm, just below the shoulder, sported a tattoo. ‘Sported’ was probably the wrong word, since the tattoo involved the vestiges of a name, rendered illegible under a later design of a snake crushing a rodent.

‘Best not to think about winning and losing here, Mr Preacher Man,’ she said, swinging the door open and heaving her body out. ‘Take a deep breath and count to a million.’

9. The choir resumed

Peter did not wish to count to a million. He was ready now. Pacing his quarters, itching for his rendezvous. His rucksack was packed and he’d already tested its weight on his shoulders. As soon as Grainger was ready to take him, he would go.

His Bible, much annotated, dog-eared and interleaved with paper place-markers, was stashed in the rucksack along with his socks, notebooks and so on. He didn’t need to consult it just now: the relevant verses were deeply engraved in his memory. Psalms was the obvious resource, the first port of call if you needed courage in the face of a huge, possibly dangerous challenge. The valley of the shadow of death. Somehow, he doubted that he was about to be taken there.

But then, he had a very poor instinct for danger. That time in Tottenham when he almost got knifed — he would have just kept talking to that street gang as they grew in number and pressed more closely and aggressively around him, if it hadn’t been for Beatrice whisking him into a minicab.

‘You are completely insane,’ she’d said to him as the doors slammed shut and obscenities ricocheted off the car’s surface.

‘But look, some of them are waving to us,’ he’d protested, as they accelerated away from the mob. She looked, and it was true.

Dear Peter, she wrote.

What thrilling news, that the Oasans have already heard of Jesus. It doesn’t surprise me, though. Remember when I asked USIC what contact there’d been with Christians so far? They were cagey, keen to maintain their ‘USIC is non-religious’ stance. But there must have been quite a few Christians among the personnel over the years and we both know that if you put a real Christian anywhere, things happen! Even the smallest seed can grow.

And now you’re there, my darling, and you can plant more. Many more!

Peter noted that she wasn’t mentioning Kurtzberg. Evidently, when she wrote this, she hadn’t yet received his most recent message. Maybe she was reading it right now, at exactly the same moment as he was reading hers. Unlikely, but the thought of such synchronous intimacy was too seductive to resist.

Don’t agonise about the fact that I’m not there with you. If God had meant us to go on this mission together, He would have fixed it so we did. I have my own little ‘missions’ here, not as ground-breaking or exotic as yours, but worthwhile all the same. Wherever we are, life throws lost souls into our path. Angry, frightened souls who ignore the light of Christ while cursing the darkness.

Mind you, Christians are capable of ignoring the light of Christ, too. There’s been a ridiculous fuss in our church since you went away — a storm in a teacup but it has caused me some grief. A few of our congregation — the older members, mostly — have been grumbling that we’ve got ‘no business’ preaching the word of God to ‘aliens’. The argument goes that Jesus died for humans only. In fact if you pressed Mrs Shankland on the issue, she’d probably tell you that Jesus died for white middle-class English people from the Home Counties! Geoff has been doing a reasonable job as pastor overall but he’s acutely conscious of being a ‘stand-in’ and he wants to be popular. His sermons are sincere but safe, he never lays anything on the line like you do. So… the grumblings go on. ‘Why not China? There’s millions needing it there, dear.’ Thanks, Mrs Shanks, for those words of wisdom.

Well, my darling, I really must go now and have a shower (assuming the plumbing hasn’t gone bung again) and rustle up something to eat. Supplies of my favourite comfort foods continue to be conspicuously absent from the supermarket shelves (even the horrid but serviceable ‘lo-fat’ rollettes have been out of stock for days!) so I’ve been forced into the arms of another dessert, a sort of chocolate and raisin éclair made by the local baker. Probably just as well: I should be supporting local businesses anyway.

On which edifying note, much love from your excited and admiring wife!

Bea

Peter tried to picture Mrs Shankland. He had obviously met and talked to her; he’d met and talked to everyone in the congregation. His mind was a blank, though. Maybe he knew her as something other than Mrs Shankland. Edith, Millicent, Doris. She sounded like a Doris.

Dear Bea, he wrote,

Let’s groom Mrs Shankland for a mission to China. She could convert a thousand people per hour with a few well-aimed words.

Seriously, things have begun moving quickly now, and I may not have another opportunity to write to you for some time. A couple of weeks, even. (A couple of weeks for you — a few days for me, if you know what I mean.) It’s a scary prospect but I feel I’m in the Lord’s hands — ironically at the same time as I’ve got the feeling that I’m being used by USIC for some purpose that has yet to be revealed.

Sorry to sound so mysterious. It’s USIC’s secrecy about Kurtzberg and their caginess about the indigenous people in general that’s made me feel this way.

To my great relief, I’m finally over my jetlag or whatever it should be called in the circumstances. I’m sure I would benefit from some more sleep and I’m not sure how I’m going to manage that with 72 hours of sunshine coming up, but at least the sense of disorientation is gone. My urine is still bright orange but I don’t think it’s dehydration, I think it’s something to do with the water. I feel quite well. Rested, if a bit restless. Actually, I’m buzzing with energy. The first thing I’m going to do (once I finish this letter to you) is pack a bag and get myself driven back to the settlement (officially called C-2, although some of the men call it ‘Freaktown’ — charming, eh?) and just be left there. Dumped, if you like. It’s no good being ferried about in some sort of protective bubble, venturing out for a quick meet & greet while a USIC chauffeur is parked nearby with the motor running. And if I have my own vehicle, that still seems to say, I’m paying a visit, and I’ll leave when I’ve had enough. Bad message! If God has a plan for me here, among these people, then I must deliver myself into their hands.

OK, that might not have been the wisest course of action for Paul among the Corinthians and Ephesians, but I can hardly claim to be in hostile territory, can I? The most hostility I’ve had to endure so far is Severin being in a bit of a snit with me on the way over. (Haven’t seen him since, by the way.)

In my excitement about what’s to come, I must try to remember what I have & haven’t described to you so far. How I wish you were here with me, seeing it with your own eyes. Not because it would save me the trouble of trying to describe it (although I must admit my lack of skill in that department is becoming ever more obvious!) but because I miss you. I miss living through the visible moments of life with you. Without you at my side, I feel as though my eyes are just a camera, like a closed-circuit camera without film in it, registering what’s out there, second by second, letting it all vanish instantly to be replaced by more images, none of them properly appreciated.

If only I could send you a photo or a movie! How quickly we adjust to what’s provided for us and want MORE… The technology that allows me to send these words to you, across unimaginable distances, is truly miraculous (— a blasphemous assertion??) yet as soon as I’ve used it a few times, I think: Why can’t I send pictures as well?

Peter stared at the screen. It was pearlescent grey, and his text hung suspended in the plasma, but if he adjusted his focus he could see his ghostly visage: his unruly blond hair, his big bright eyes, his strong cheekbones. His face, strange and familiar.

He seldom looked in mirrors. In his daily routine at home, he acted on the assumption that after he’d showered, shaved and pulled a comb through his hair (straight back across the scalp, no styling), there was no way a mirror could help improve his appearance further. During the years when he was permanently wasted on booze and drugs, he’d begun many mornings examining his reflection, assessing the damage from the night before: cuts, bruises, bloodshot eyeballs, jaundice, purple lips. Since he’d straightened out, there was no need; he could trust that nothing drastic had happened to him since he’d last checked. He would notice the length of his hair only when it started to fall in his eyes, whereupon he would ask Bea to cut it for him; he was only reminded of the deep scar between his eyebrows when she’d stroke it tenderly with her fingers after lovemaking, frowning in concern as though she’d noticed for the first time that he was injured. The shape of his chin only became real to him when he was nestling it in the soft hollow of her shoulder. His neck materialised inside her palm.

He missed her. God, how he missed her.

The weather is dry just now, he typed. I’m told it will be dry for the next ten hours, then it will rain for several hours, then be dry again for ten hours, then rain, etc. All very reliable. The sun is very warm, but not scorching. There are some insects but they don’t bite. I’ve just had a proper meal. Lentil stew and pitta bread. Very filling, if a bit on the stodgy side. The pitta bread was made from local flowers. The lentils were imported, I think. Then I had a chocolate pudding that wasn’t really chocolate. I wonder if it would have passed muster with you, given your highly developed tastes in that area! It tasted fine to me. Maybe the chocolate was real but the pudding was made of something else — yes, that’s it.

He stood up from the table and walked over to the window, allowing the warm light to blaze on his skin. He was aware that the tinted-glass rectangle, big as it was, showed only a tiny fraction of the sky out there, yet even this circumscribed portion was too big to take in at once and suffused with an indescribable variety of subtle colours. Bea, receiving his missives, would be gazing at a glassy rectangle too. She would see nothing of what he saw, not even his ghostly reflection. Only his words. With each inadequate message, her view of him got fainter and foggier. She had no choice but to imagine him in a void, with odd details floating around him like space debris: a plastic ice-cube tray, a glass of green water, a bowl of lentil stew.

My dear Bea, I want you. I wish you were standing here with me, with the light and warmth of the sun on your naked skin, and my arm around your waist, my fingers cradling your ribcage. I’m ready for you. I wish you could verify how ready! If I close my eyes, I can almost feel my chest settling against your breastbone, your legs wrapping themselves around me, welcoming me home.

There is so little said in the New Testament about sexual love, and most of it consists of Paul heaving a deep sigh and tolerating it like a weakness. But I feel certain Jesus didn’t see it that way. It was He who talked of two lovers becoming one flesh. It was He who showed compassion to prostitutes and adulterers. If He could feel that way towards people who misused sexual desire, why would He be disappointed if they were happily married instead? It’s significant that the only miracle He ever performed for ‘non-emergency’ reasons, but just because He wanted to cheer people up, was at a wedding. We even know He had no problem with being caressed by a female, or He wouldn’t have allowed the woman in Luke 7 to kiss His feet and wipe them with her hair. (That’s as sexy as anything in Song of Solomon!) How did His face look, I wonder, while she was doing it? An old-fashioned religious painting would no doubt depict Him staring stonily ahead, ignoring her as if nothing was going on. But Jesus didn’t ignore people. He was tender and solicitous towards them. He wouldn’t have made her feel like a fool.

I know John says, ‘Love not the world, nor the things of the world. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.’ But that’s a different point, a point about ALL the mundane stuff we concern ourselves with, all the baggage of being physical beings. And I think John is being too harsh on people. He assumed the Second Coming would happen in his own lifetime — it might come any day, maybe tomorrow afternoon, certainly not centuries in the future. All the early Christians thought that, and it made them intolerant of any activity that wasn’t urgently focused on Heaven. But Jesus understood — God understands — that people have a whole life to live before they die. They have friends and family and jobs, and children to give birth to and raise, and lovers to cherish.

My dear, sexy, wonderful wife, I know you are with me in spirit, but I’m feeling sad that your body is so far away. I hope that when you read this, it will be after a long, refreshing night’s sleep full of good dreams (and undisturbed by Joshua!). In a few hours or days from now, my desire to hold you will still be unfulfilled, but I hope to be the bearer of some glad tidings on another front.

Love,

Peter

Grainger emerged from her vehicle blinking, ready for their rendezvous. She hadn’t changed her clothes — still the same cotton top and slacks, a bit crumpled by now. Her headscarf was inelegantly slung around her neck, speckled with water-drops from her hair, which stuck up from her scalp like the fur of a rain-drenched cat. He wondered if an alarm clock had jolted her from a deep sleep and she’d only had time to splash a few handfuls of water on her face. Maybe it was insensitive to oblige her to drive him again so soon. But when they’d parted, she’d emphasised that she was at his disposal.

‘I’m sorry if this is inconvenient,’ he said. He was standing in the shade of USIC’s accommodation wing, just outside the exit door nearest his own quarters. His rucksack hung on his back, already slippery with sweat.

‘It’s not inconvenient,’ she said. Her damp hair, exposed to the attentive air, began to emit faint, spidery plumes of steam. ‘And I’m sorry I was grouchy on the way back this morning. The sight of religious passion always freaks me out.’

‘I’ll try not to be too passionate this time.’

‘I meant the alien,’ she said, pronouncing the word without any sign of having taken Peter’s little lecture to heart.

‘He didn’t mean to unnerve you, obviously.’

She shrugged. ‘They give me the creeps. Always. Even when they keep real quiet and don’t get too close.’

He ventured out of the shade and she stepped aside, away from the vehicle, allowing him access to the trunk, which she’d swung open for him. The engine was purring in readiness.

‘You think they mean you harm?’ he said.

‘No, it’s just the sight of them,’ she said, turning her head towards the horizon. ‘You try and look at their face and it’s like staring into a pile of entrails.’

‘I thought of foetuses myself.’

She shuddered. ‘Puh-lease.’

‘Well,’ he said cheerily, stepping up to the vehicle, ‘that’s us off on the wrong foot again.’

Out of the corner of his eye, he observed Grainger sizing up his rucksack as he unhitched it from his shoulders. She did a slight double-take as she registered that it was his only luggage.

‘You look as if you’re going hill-walking. Your little knapsack on your back.’

He grinned as he tossed the bag into the trunk.

‘Val-de-reee!’ he sang in a mock-operatic baritone. ‘Val-de-raa! Val-de-reee! Val-de-ra-ha-ha-ha-ha… ’

‘Now you’re making fun of one of my idols,’ she said, placing her fists on her hips.

‘Sorry?’

‘Bing Crosby.’

Peter looked at her in bemusement. The sun was still quite near the horizon, and Grainger was silhouetted in front of it, the crooks of her arms framing triangles of rosy light. ‘Uh… ’ he said. ‘Did Bing Crosby sing “The Happy Wanderer” too?’

‘I thought it was his song,’ she said.

‘It’s an ancient German folk tune,’ he said.

‘I didn’t know that,’ she said. ‘I thought it was a Bing number. It was all over the airwaves last year.’

He scratched the back of his head, taking pleasure in the bizarreness of everything today: the endless sky with its outsize sun, the playground under the gazebo, his strange new parishioners waiting for another taste of the Gospel, and this dispute over the authorship of ‘The Happy Wanderer’. The air took advantage of his raised arm to find different entry points into his clothing. Tendrils of atmosphere licked him between his sweaty shoulderblades, twirled around his nipples, counted his ribs.

‘I didn’t know Bing Crosby was back in fashion,’ he said.

‘Those artists are beyond fashion,’ declared Grainger, with undisguised fervour. ‘Nobody wants mindless dance music anymore, or cheap, sleazy rock.’ She imitated an arrogant rock star striking a chord on his phallic guitar. Disdainful though the gesture was, Peter found it attractive: her thin arm, slamming against the invisible guitar strings, pushed her bosom out, reminding him how soft and malleable the flesh of a woman’s breast was. ‘People have had enough of all that,’ she said. ‘They want something with class, something that’s stood the test of time.’

‘I’m all for that,’ he said.

Once they were safely sealed inside the vehicle and driving into the wilderness, Peter raised the issue of communication again.

‘You wrote to my wife,’ he said.

‘Yes, I sent her a courtesy message. To let her know you’d arrived safely.’

‘Thank you. I’ve been writing to her myself, whenever I can.’

‘That’s sweet,’ she said. Her eyes were on the featureless brown horizon.

‘You’re sure there’s no possibility of organising a Shoot for me in the Oasan settlement?’

‘I told you, they don’t have electricity.’

‘Couldn’t a Shoot run on batteries?’

‘Sure it could. You can write on it anywhere. You can write a whole book if you want. But to actually send a message, you need more than a machine that lights up when you switch it on. You need a connection to the USIC system.’

‘Isn’t there a… I’m not sure what to call it… a relay? A signal tower?’ Even as he uttered the words they sounded foolish. The territory stretching into the distance ahead was stark and empty.

‘Nope,’ she replied. ‘We never needed anything like that. You’ve got to remember that the original settlement was right near the base.’

Peter sighed, leaned his head hard back against the seat. ‘I’m going to miss communicating with Bea,’ he said, half to himself.

‘Nobody’s insisting you go and live with these… people,’ Grainger reminded him. ‘That’s your choice.’

He kept silent, but his unspoken objection might as well have written itself on the windscreen in front of them in big red letters: GOD DECIDES THESE THINGS.

‘I enjoy driving,’ added Grainger after a minute or two. ‘It relaxes me. I could’ve driven you there and back every twelve hours, easy.’

He nodded.

‘You could’ve had daily contact with your wife,’ she carried on. ‘You could’ve had a shower, a meal… ’

‘I’m sure these people won’t let me starve or get filthy,’ he said. ‘The one who came out to meet us looked clean enough to me.’

‘Suit yourself,’ she said, and revved the accelerator. They jumped forwards with a gentle whiplash effect, and a quantity of damp earth was thrown up behind them.

‘I’m not suiting myself,’ he said. ‘Suiting myself would mean taking you up on your generous offer. I have to consider what’s best for these people.’

‘God knows,’ she muttered, then, realising what she’d just said, graced him with a big self-conscious smile.

The landscape was no more colourful or varied now that the sun had fully risen, but it had its own sober beauty, in common with all endless vistas of the same substance, whether it be sea, sky or desert. There were no mountains or hills, but the topography had gentle gradients, patterned with ripples similar to those in wind-swept deserts. The mushroom-like blossoms — whiteflower, he supposed — glowed brilliant.

‘It’s a lovely day,’ he said.

‘Uh-huh,’ said Grainger, matter-of-fact.

The sky’s colour was elusive; the gradations were too subtle for the eye to discern. There were no clouds, although occasionally a patch of air would shimmer and become slightly blurry for a few seconds, before shivering back into transparency. The first few times Peter observed this phenomenon, he stared intently, straining to understand it, or perhaps appreciate it. But it just made him feel as though his eyes were defective, and he quickly learned to shift his gaze elsewhere whenever the blurring began to occur. The roadless earth, dark and moist and sprinkled with pale blooms, was the most restful sight. Your eyes could just relax on it.

Overall, though, he had to admit that the scenery here was less beautiful than he’d seen in, well, quite a few other places. He had expected mind-boggling landscapes, canyons shrouded in swirling mists, tropical swamps teeming with exotic new wildlife. It suddenly occurred to him that this world might be quite a dowdy one compared to his own. And the poignancy of that thought made him feel a rush of love for the people who lived here and knew no better.

‘Hey, I’ve just realised!’ he said to Grainger. ‘I haven’t seen any animals. Just a few bugs.’

‘Yeah, it’s kind of… low diversity here,’ she said. ‘Not much scope for a zoo.’

‘It’s a big world. Maybe we’re just on a sparse little bit of it.’

She nodded. ‘Whenever I go to C-2, I could swear there’s more bugs there than at the base. Also, there’s supposed to be some birds. I’ve never seen them myself. But Tartaglione used to hang around C-2 all the time, and he told me he saw birds once. Maybe it was a hallucination. Living in the wilderness can do scary things to the brain.’

‘I’ll try to keep my brain in reasonable condition,’ he promised. ‘But seriously, what do you think really happened to him? And to Kurtzberg?’

‘No idea,’ she said. ‘Both of them just went AWOL.’

‘How do you know they’re not dead?’

She shrugged. ‘They didn’t vanish overnight. It was kinda gradual. They would come back to the base less and less often. They became… distant. Didn’t want to stick around. Tartaglione used to be a real gregarious guy. Blabbermouth maybe, but I liked him. Kurtzberg was friendly too. An army chaplain. He used to reminisce to me about his wife; he was one of those sentimental old widowers who never remarry. Forty years ago was only yesterday for him, it was like she’d never died. Like she was just slow getting dressed, she’d be along any minute. Kind of sad, but so romantic.’

Observing a wistful glow transfiguring her face, Peter felt a pang of jealousy. Childish as it might be, he wanted Grainger to admire him as much as she’d admired Kurtzberg. Or more.

‘How did you find him as a pastor?’ he asked.

‘Find him?’

‘What was he like? As a minister?’

‘I wouldn’t know. He was here from the beginning, before my time. He… counselled the personnel who were having problems adjusting. In the early days, there were people who didn’t really belong here. I guess Kurtzberg tried to talk them through it. But it was no use, they bailed out anyway. So USIC tightened up the screening process. Cut the wastage.’ The wistful glow was gone; her face was neutral again.

‘He must have felt like a failure,’ suggested Peter.

‘He didn’t come across that way. He was the chirpy type. And he got a boost when Tartaglione came. The two of them really got along, they were a team. They were a hit with the aliens, the natives, whatever you want to call them. Making big progress. The natives were learning English, Tartaglione was learning… whatever.’ A couple of insects flew against the windscreen, their bodies disintegrating on impact. Brown juice scrawled across the glass. ‘And then something came over them.’

‘Maybe they caught some sort of disease?’

‘I don’t know. I’m a pharmacist, not a doctor.’

‘Speaking of which… ’ said Peter. ‘Have you got some more drugs to give the Oasans?’

She frowned. ‘No, I didn’t have time to raid the pharmacy. You need clearance for stuff like that.’

‘Stuff like morphine?’

She drew a deep breath. ‘It’s not what you think.’

‘I haven’t told you what I think.’

‘You think we’re handing out narcotics here. It’s not like that. The drugs we give them are medicines. Antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, simple analgesics. I’m confident they’re being used for the correct purpose.’

‘I wasn’t accusing you of anything,’ he said. ‘I’m just trying to get a handle on what these people have and don’t have. They don’t have hospitals, then?’

‘I guess not. Technology isn’t their forte.’ She pronounced it ‘for-tay’, with almost mocking exaggeration, the way Americans tended to when quoting French.

‘So they’re primitives, would you say?’

She shrugged. ‘I guess.’

He leaned his head back again and reviewed what he knew about his flock so far. He had only met one of them, which was a small sample by any standards. That person had worn a robe and cowl which looked as though it was probably hand-made. His gloves and boots…? Again, probably hand-made, albeit to a sophisticated standard. You’d need a machine to sew leather so neatly, surely? Or perhaps just very strong fingers.

He recalled the architecture of the settlement. Complexity-wise, it was in a class above mud huts or dolmens, but it was hardly high-tech manufacture. He could imagine each stone being fashioned by hand, baked in rudimentary ovens, hauled into place by sheer human — or inhuman — effort. Maybe, inside the buildings, undiscovered by the likes of Grainger, there were all sorts of mechanical marvels. Or maybe not. But one thing was certain: there was no electricity, and there would be nowhere to plug in a Shoot.

He wondered how God would feel about him announcing, right here in the car, that he really, desperately needed to know whether Bea had written to him, and that Grainger must therefore turn the vehicle around and drive all the way back to the base. To Grainger, it would look like a failure of nerve. Or maybe she’d be touched by the ardency of his love. And then again, maybe what seemed like a backwards step would in fact be God pushing him forward, God using the delay to put him in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Or was he just straining to find a theological justification for his own lack of courage? He was being tested, that much was obvious, but what was the nature of the test? Whether he had the humility to appear weak in the eyes of Grainger, or whether he had the strength to push on?

Oh Lord, he prayed. I know it’s impossible, but I wish I could know whether Bea has written back to me yet. I wish I could just close my eyes and see her words before me, right here in the car.

‘OK, Peter, this is your last chance,’ said Grainger.

‘Last chance?’

‘To check for a message from your wife.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘There’s a Shoot in this vehicle. We’re still in range of USIC reception. Another five, ten minutes of driving, and we’ll lose it.’

He could feel himself blushing, with a big daft smile so broad it made his cheeks ache. He felt like hugging her.

‘Yes, please!’

Grainger stopped the vehicle but did not switch off the motor. She flipped open a hatch in the dashboard and pulled out a slim contraption of plastic and steel, which unfolded to reveal a monitor and miniature keyboard. He made the inarticulate noise of surprise and admiration that was called for in the circumstances. There was momentary confusion as to which of them would take responsibility for switching the thing on, and their fingers met on the back of the console.

‘Take your time,’ said Grainger, settling back in her seat and turning her face towards the window, in a display of respect for his privacy.

For nearly a minute — sixty agonising seconds — nothing manifested on the Shoot except a computerised promise that a search was under way. Then the screen filled up from top to bottom with unfamiliar words: Bea’s words. God bless her, she’d responded.

Dear Peter, she wrote.

I’m upstairs in our study. It’s six o’clock in the evening, still full daylight, indeed nicer than it’s been all day. The sun is at a low angle now, mild and buttery yellow, streaming through the window straight onto the wall-hanging/collage that Rachel & Billy & Keiko made for me. Those kids must be teenagers by now, but their wonderful depiction of the ark and its animals is still as cute and eccentric as when it was first done. The way Rachel used bits of orange wool for the lion’s mane never ceases to charm me, especially when it’s lit up by the evening sun as it is now. One of the giraffes’ necks is dangling down, though; I’ll have to stick it back into place.

I only just arrived home from work — bliss to be sitting down at last. Too tired to have a shower yet. Your message was waiting for me when I rushed upstairs to check.

I can understand that you would be eager to go and live with the Oasans ASAP. Of course God is with you and you shouldn’t delay unnecessarily. Try not to sacrifice common sense, though! Remember when that crazy Swedish guy at our Bible study dedicated himself to Jesus? He said his faith in the Lord was so strong that he could just ignore the council’s eviction notice, and God would organise a miraculous last-minute reprieve! Two days later he’s on our doorstep with his bin-bag of possessions… I’m not implying you’re a nutcase like him, just reminding you that practicalities are not your strong suit and that bad things can happen to ill-prepared Christians just as they can happen to anyone else. We need to strike a balance between trusting in our Lord to provide, and showing due respect for the gift of life and this body we’ve been lent.

Which means: when you do go to live with your new flock, please make sure you’ve got (1) some way of calling for help if you’re in trouble, (2) an emergency supply of food and water, (3) DIARRHOEA MEDICATION, (4) the compass co-ordinates of the USIC base and the Oasan settlement, (5) a compass, obviously.

Peter glanced up at Grainger, just in case she was reading over his shoulder. But she was still gazing out the window, feigning deep interest in the landscape. Her hands were loosely clasped in the lap of her gown. Small hands, well formed, with pale, stubby-nailed fingers.

He was embarrassed that, apart from a bottle of green water filled from the tap, he’d taken none of the precautions Bea was urging him to. Not even the diarrhoea pills she’d bought for him specially. They would hardly have weighed down his rucksack, those pills, and yet he’d removed them. Why had he removed them? Was he being as foolish as the crazy Swede? Maybe he was indulging a stubborn pride in his minimal baggage, his statement of single-minded intent: two Bibles (King James and New Living Translation, 4th edition), half a dozen indelible marker pens, notebook, towel, scissors, roll of adhesive tape, comb, flashlight, plastic wallet of photographs, T-shirt, underpants. He closed his eyes and prayed: Am I drunk on my own mission?

The answer came, as it so often did, in the form of a sensation of well-being, as if a benign substance in his bloodstream was suddenly taking effect.

‘Have you fallen asleep?’ asked Grainger.

‘No, no, I was just… thinking,’ he said.

‘Uh-huh,’ she said.

He returned to Bea’s message, and Grainger returned to her study of the empty scrubland.

Joshua is helping me type, as usual: lying between the keyboard and the monitor, his back legs and tail obscuring the top row of keys. People think I’m being pedantic when I write numbers out as words, or type ‘pounds’ instead of ‘£’, but the fact is that I have to lift up a comatose cat every time I want to use those symbol keys. I did it just now and Joshua made that ‘njurp’ sound that he makes. Last night, he slept right through, didn’t utter a peep (purred a bit). Maybe he’s adjusting to your absence at last. I wish I could! But don’t worry, I’m getting on with things.

The Maldives tragedy has dropped out of the media. There are still small articles on the inner pages of some newspapers, and a few ads placed by charities for donations, but the front pages and the prime-time coverage (as far as I can tell from the clips on my phone) have moved on to other things. An American congressman has just been arrested for shooting his wife. Point-blank range, with a shotgun, in the head, while she was swimming in their private pool with her lover. The newspaper journalists must be so relieved — with the Maldives thing they had to evoke gruesomeness without appearing prurient, whereas with this they can be as gross as they like. The woman’s head was blown off from the jaw up, and her brains (juicy detail!) were floating around in the water. The lover was shot too, in the abdomen (‘possibly aiming for the groin’). Lots of supplementary articles about the congressman, his life history, achievements, college graduation photo, etc. The wife looked (when she still had a head) exactly as you’d expect: glamorous, not quite real.

Mirah and her husband are getting along much better. I met her at the bus stop and she was giggly, almost flirtatious. She didn’t raise the issue of converting to Christianity again, just talked about the weather (it’s been bucketing down again). She only got serious when she talked about the Maldives. Most of the islanders were Sunni Muslims; Mirah’s theory is that they must have displeased Allah by ‘doing bad things with tourists’. A very confused young lady, but I’m glad she’s no longer in crisis and I’ll continue to pray for her. (I’ll pray for your Coretta too.)

Speaking of Muslims, I know they consider it a terrible sin to throw away old or damaged copies of the Qur’an. Well, I’m about to commit a similar sin. You know the big cardboard box of New Testaments we had sitting in the front room? It looks like they’ll have to be dumped. I can imagine this might upset you to hear, given your news about the Oasans being so hungry for the Gospel. But we’ve had some flooding. The rain was ridiculous, it didn’t let up for five hours, full pelt. There were torrents flowing along the footpaths; the drains just aren’t designed to take that kind of volume. It’s all right now, in fact the weather is lovely, but half the houses in our street have suffered damage. In our case, it’s just some patches of sopping-wet carpet, but unfortunately the books were right on one of those patches and it was a while before I realised they’d been soaking up the water. I tried drying them out in front of the heater. Big mistake! Yesterday they were New Testaments, today they’re blocks of wood pulp.

Anyway, not your problem. Hope this reaches you before you set off!

Bea

Peter drew a deep breath, past the lump in his throat. ‘Do I have time to write her a reply?’ he asked.

Grainger smiled. ‘Maybe I should’ve brought a book.’

‘I’ll be quick,’ he promised.

Dear Bea, he wrote, then got stuck. His heart was beating hard, Grainger was waiting, the engine was running. It was impossible.

No time for a proper ‘epistle’ — think of this as a postcard. I’m on my way!

Love,

Peter

‘OK, that’s it,’ he said, after he pressed the button. His words hung on the screen more briefly than usual; the transmission was almost instant. Maybe the open air was conducive to the Shoot’s function, or maybe it had something to do with the small amount of text.

‘Really?’ said Grainger. ‘You’re done?’

‘Yes, I’m done.’

She leaned across him and replaced the Shoot in its slot. He could smell the fresh sweat inside her clothing.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Let’s hit the road.’

They spoke little on the remainder of the drive. They’d discussed the essentials — or agreed not to discuss them further — and neither of them wanted to part on bad terms.

The Oasan settlement was visible a long time before they reached it. In full daylight, it glowed amber in the light of the sun. Not exactly magnificent, but not without beauty either. A church spire would make all the difference.

‘Are you sure you’ll be OK?’ said Grainger, when they had a mile or so to go.

‘Yes, I’m sure.’

‘You might get sick.’

‘Yes, I might. But I’d be surprised if I died.’

‘What if you really need to come back?’

‘Then the Lord will make it possible for me to come back somehow.’

She chewed on that for a few seconds, as if it were a dry mouthful of bread.

‘The next official USIC visit — our regular trading exchange — is in five days,’ she said, in an efficient, professionally neutral voice. ‘That’s five real days, not days according to your watch. Five cycles of sunrise and sunset. Three hundred… ’ (she consulted the clock on the dashboard) ‘… three hundred and sixty-odd hours from now.’

‘Thanks,’ he said. It seemed impolite not to make a note of it, if only on his palm, but he knew perfectly well that he was unable to calculate three hundred and sixty hours into the future, when he’d be sleeping and waking up at various points along the way. He would have to take everything as it came.

At the final approach, C-2 appeared deserted. Their vehicle pulled up at the outermost of the settlement’s buildings, the same place as before, marked with the white star. Except that the building was now marked with something else as well: a large message, freshly painted in white letters three feet tall.

WEL COME

‘Wow,’ said Grainger. ‘Didn’t know they had it in them.’

She stopped the car and flipped open the hatch. Peter got out and fetched his rucksack from the boot, strapping it onto his shoulders so that his arms were free. He wondered what the correct way of taking his leave of Grainger might be: a handshake, a courteous nod, a casual wave, or what.

The crystalline curtain that veiled the nearest doorway sparkled as its trails of beads were brushed aside to allow someone through — a hooded figure, small and solemn. Peter couldn’t tell if it was the same person he’d met before. He remembered the Oasan’s robe as being blue, whereas this one’s was pastel yellow. No sooner had the person stepped out into the light than another person followed him, parting the beads with his delicate gloves. This one’s robe was pale green.

One by one, the Oasans emerged from the building. They were all hooded and gloved, all daintily built, all wearing the same soft leather boots. Their robes were all the same design, but there was scarcely a colour repeated. Pink, mauve, orange, yellow, chestnut, faun, lilac, terracotta, salmon, watermelon, olive, copper, moss, lavender, peach, powder blue…

On and on they came, making room for each new arrival, but standing as close together as a family. Within a few minutes, a crowd of seventy or eighty souls had gathered, including smaller creatures who were evidently children. Their faces were mostly obscured, but here and there a whitish-pink swell of flesh peeped out.

Peter gaped back at them, light-headed with exhilaration.

The frontmost of the Oasans turned to face his people, raised his arms high and gave a signal.

‘Amaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa… ’ they sang, sweet and high and pure. The vowel floated for five, ten seconds without pause, a grand communal exhalation, sustained so long that Peter interpreted it as an abstract sound, unrelated to language or melody. But then it incorporated a consonant — albeit an unidentifiable one — and shifted in pitch: ‘…สีiiiiiiing graaaaaaaaสีe! Howสีweeeeeeeรี่ a สีouuuuuund thaรี่ สีaaaaaaaaaaaaved a wreeeeฐ liiiiike meeeeeeeeeee!’

In synchronised obedience to an energetic hand-gesture from the frontmost Oasan, they all stopped at once. There was a huge intake of breath, a seventy-strong sigh. Peter fell to his knees, having only just recognised the hymn: the anthem of fuddy-duddy evangelism, the archetype of Salvation Army naffness, the epitome of everything he had despised when he’d been a young punk snorting lines of speed off piss-stained toilet lids, of everything he dismissed as stupid when he was liable to wake in a pool of congealed vomit, of everything he considered contemptible when he was stealing money from prostitutes’ handbags, of everything he laughed off as worthless when he himself was a toxic waste of space. I once was lost, and now I’m found.

The conductor gestured again. The choir resumed.