The Book of Strange New Things. Michel Faber
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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