The Book of Strange New Things. Michel Faber
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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