The Book of Strange New Things (31 page)

‘Art Severin,’ proclaimed Peter – and, despite the muffled acoustics of the room, there seemed somehow to be a churchy reverb after all – ‘we are here today to dispose of your old cage of bone, your parcel of flesh. You don’t need that stuff anymore. It’s crap tools. But if it’s all right with you, please let us keep a few little souvenirs: our memories. We want to keep you with us, even as we let you go. We want you to live on in our minds, even though you’re living somewhere bigger and better than that. One day, we too will go where souls go, where you have travelled before us. Until then: Goodbye, Arthur Laurence Severin. Goodbye.’

Back in his own quarters, after he’d spent some time with a few of the mourners who hadn’t wanted to leave even after the coffin had been consumed, Peter seated himself once more in front of the Shoot. His clothing was sodden with sweat. He wondered how long the interval was between full water supplies to the shower. His head buzzed with the intimacies and confidences that USIC employees had just shared with him, facts about their lives that he must store in his memory, names he must make sure not to forget. His wife’s unopened capsules hung suspended on the screen. Nine more messages he hadn’t had time to read until now.

Dear Peter,

Excuse what will probably be a short, garbled message. I’m tired out. Sheila Frame and the two kids – Rachel and Billy – were here all afternoon and most of the evening. For them it was the weekend, but I’d worked an early shift, after a late shift the day before. Rachel is a handful. Still kind of sweet but full of borderline obsessive-compulsive habits, quite exhausting to watch. Hormones, I suppose. You wouldn’t recognise her, physically. Looks like a porn starlet/pop star/heiress party girl – the usual mix for pubescent females these days. Billy is painfully polite and shy. Small for his age, and a bit chubby with it. Barely spoke the whole time he was here, and obviously undergoing agonies of embarrassment the more chatty/nervy his mother became. Sheila smelled a little boozy, or maybe it was just very strong cologne, I don’t know. She’s buzzing with stress, the whole house is still full of it even though they left an hour ago. How I wished that you and I could have tackled them together – one of us calming Sheila down, the other relating to the kids, maybe taking it in turns. I don’t know why they stayed so long; I can’t imagine I was much use to them. Billy’s one and only moment of candour was when I parked him in front of my computer to play a game. He took one look at the Noah’s Ark display and his whole face flinched like someone had hit him. He told me that the snow leopard is extinct. The last surviving specimen died in a zoo a few weeks back. ‘The snow leopard was my favourite,’ he said. Then he sat down at the computer and within about 30 seconds he was lost in a realistic prison interior, shooting the guards’ heads off, blowing doors open, getting killed.

Must go to bed immediately. Up at 5.30 tomorrow morning. I drank some of the wine that Sheila brought, so she wouldn’t be self-conscious about drinking alone. I will regret it when that alarm clock goes off!

Please tell me a little more about how your mission is going. I want to talk specifics with you. It feels so strange not to. Peter, it HURTS not to. I feel like I’m your sister or something, sending you a long screed of complaint, chattering about things that you can’t possibly care about. I’m still the same person you’ve known, the one you can always rely on to give you perspective and confirmation. I just need to have a clearer sense of what you’re seeing and doing and experiencing, my darling. Give me some names, some particulars. I know you can’t right now, because you’re at the settlement and there’s no way to read this message. But when you get back. Please. Take some time out to reflect. Let me be there for you.

MUST go to bed now.

Love,

Bea.

Peter rocked on the chair, overloaded with adrenalin, but also tired. He wasn’t sure if he should, or even could, read Beatrice’s other eight messages without answering this one. It felt cruel, perverse, not to respond. As though Bea were calling out to him, over and over, and he was ignoring her cries.

Dear Bea, he wrote on a fresh page.

Today I conducted a funeral. Art Severin. I didn’t know he was a diabetic; he died suddenly while I was away at the settlement. I was given a comprehensive file on his life and about three hours to prepare something. I did my best. Everyone seemed to appreciate it.

Love,

Peter

He stared at the words on the screen, aware that they needed expansion. Details, details. A woman called Maneely had confessed to him that she hadn’t given a thought to Christianity since she was a small child, but that she’d felt the presence of God today. He considered telling Bea that. His heart was thumping strangely. He left his message in draft form, unsent, and opened another capsule.

Dear Peter,

Are you sitting down? I hope so.

Darling, I’m pregnant. I know you’ll think that’s not possible. But I stopped taking the Pill a month before you left.

Please don’t be angry with me. I know we agreed to wait another couple of years. But please understand that I was scared you’d never come back. I was scared there’d be an explosion at the launch and your mission would be over before it began. Or that you’d disappear somewhere along the way, just disappear into space, and I would never even know what became of you. So, as the departure date got closer and closer, I got more and more desperate for some part of you to be here with me, no matter what.

I prayed and prayed about it but just didn’t feel I’d got an answer. In the end I left it in God’s hands whether I would be fertile so soon after coming off the Pill. Of course it was still my decision, I’m not denying that. I wish the decision had been ours together. Maybe it was – or could have been. Maybe if we’d discussed it, you would have said it was exactly what you’d been wanting to suggest yourself. But I was terrified you’d say no. Would you have? Just tell me straight, don’t spare me.

Whatever you feel, I hope it makes some difference to you that I’m proud and thrilled to be carrying your baby. Our baby. By the time you come back, I’ll be 26 weeks along the way and getting pretty enormous. That’s assuming I don’t have a miscarriage. I hope I don’t. It wouldn’t be the end of the world, and we could try again, but it would be a different child. This one I’m carrying feels so precious – already! You know what I was thinking when you made love to me on the way to the airport? I was thinking, I’m ready, this is the moment, this is exactly the right moment, all it needs now is one tiny seed. And I bet that was when it happened. Looking back, almost certainly, that was when it happened.

13

The engine kindled into life

‘And this is where it all started,’ said the woman solemnly. ‘This is what it looked like in the beginning.’

Peter nodded. He kept his jaw rigid and didn’t dare try to make the appropriate interested noises, for fear of breaking into a grin or even laughing out loud. The official opening of this facility was a momentous occasion for everyone gathered here today.

‘We put an extra-thick layer of epoxy on the top of the downstream surface,’ the woman continued, pointing to the relevant parts of the scale model, ‘to control the migration of water through the foundation. These tubes on the downstream side were connected to pressure transducers.’

If she’d been breezy or casual, it wouldn’t be so bad, but she was deadly earnest and that made it funnier, and everybody but him seemed to understand what she was talking about, which made it funnier still. Then there was the inherent comicality of an architectural scale model (so dignified, so full of symbolic importance, and yet so . . .
dinky
, like something from a children’s playground). And, added to
that
, the shape of the model itself: two inverted cups joined together, fully justifying the ‘Big Brassiere’ nickname.

The real buildings, from a distance, hadn’t struck him as particularly comical. He’d seen them, along with everyone else, looming on the horizon earlier in the afternoon as USIC’s convoy of vehicles drove across the scrubland, each vehicle ferrying half a dozen employees. The sheer size of the structures, and the fact that one partially obscured the other on approach, made them appear like nothing less than what they were: mighty works of architecture. When the convoy finally cruised to a standstill in front of the foremost structure, the vehicles parked in an area of shade so large that its contours were difficult to tell. Only once Peter and the other USIC personnel were gathered together in the entrance hall, contemplating a replica barely a metre high, was the design of this place revealed in all its bulbous symmetry. The officiating woman, Hayes, an engineer who’d worked closely with Severin, waved her hand in the air over the twin structures, oblivious to the fact that she appeared to be miming a caress of a sofa-sized bosom.

‘ . . . the desired g-level . . . self-weight displacements . . . overtopping simulation . . . ’ Hayes droned on. ‘ . . . uplift pressures with five transducers . . . proximity probe . . . ’

Peter’s urge to laugh had passed. Now, he could scarcely keep awake. The entrance hall was stiflingly warm and poorly ventilated; it felt rather like being enclosed inside an engine – which was basically what it was, of course. He swayed slightly on his feet, took a deep breath, and made an effort to stand straighter. Bubbles of trapped sweat squelched in his sandals; his eyes stung and Hayes became blurry.

‘ . . . recorded in real time . . . ’

He blinked. Hayes muddled back into focus. She was a tiny woman with a military-style masculine haircut and the sort of dress sense that made anything she wore look like a uniform even when it wasn’t. He’d made her acquaintance several days ago in the mess hall when she was shovelling her way through a plate of whiteflour mash and gravy. They’d conversed for ten, fifteen minutes and she’d been perfectly pleasant in a dull sort of way. She was from Alaska, used to like dogs and sledding but was content nowadays to read about them in magazines, and didn’t believe in any religion, although she kept ‘kind of an open mind about poltergeists’, having had a weird experience in an uncle’s house when she was twelve. Her low-pitched monotone was, he’d thought, mildly attractive, reminding him slightly of Bea’s melodious croon. But when delivering a lecture on thermodynamics and dam design, it wasn’t so scintillating.

Even so, the fact that he was having trouble staying awake annoyed him. Boring experiences didn’t normally affect him like this. Usually, he had exceptional tolerance for tedium; homelessness had taught him that. But living in the USIC base was worse than homelessness somehow. He’d been back a week, and his sunburned face had peeled and healed, but his brain wasn’t recovering so well. He was wired and wakeful when he should be sleeping, and dopey when he should be alert. And here he was, nodding off, when he should be admiring the engineering genius of USIC’s brand new Centrifuge & Power Facility.

‘ . . . mutually exclusive functions . . . couldn’t be done . . . Severin . . . vacuum net . . . the vision to let go of photo-voltaics . . . ’

It
was
impressive what had been wrought here: a feat of engineering that stretched the limits of what was thought possible. Under normal conditions – that is to say, the conditions everyone was used to back home – rain fell over a large area and accumulated in great pools, or flowed into rivers which moved across the landscape gathering speed. Either way, a substance which, to a person standing under a rainshower, was perceived as individual droplets falling through the air, was transformed by time and volume and momentum into a vast force that could power a hundred thousand engines. These principles did not apply on Oasis. The raindrops manifested, dropped onto the sponge-like terrain, and were gone. If you happened to be outdoors while it was raining and held out a cup, it would be filled, or you could quench your thirst more simply than that, by leaning back with your mouth wide open. But when it was over, it was over, until the next rainfall.

The Big Brassiere’s grand bipartite structure defied these limitations. One part of it was designed to suck the rain from the sky, gather the diffuse droplets into a cyclonic whirl, tug the condensed water into a gigantic centrifuge. But that was only half of the project’s audacious ingenuity. The amount of electricity required to power this centrifuge was, of course, colossal – far beyond the yield of USIC’s existing solar panels. So, the harvested water was not merely flung into a reservoir; it was first put to work in a giant boiler, where fearsome volumes of trapped steam set turbines spinning.

Each of the two buildings fed into each other, providing the energy to catch the water, providing the water to generate the energy. It wasn’t exactly a perpetual motion machine – two hundred solar panels stationed in the scrubland all around the facility kept the sun’s rays beaming in – but it was mind-bogglingly efficient. Oh, if only a few of these Big Brassieres could be installed in famine-ravaged countries like Angola and Sudan! What a difference they would make! Surely USIC, having just achieved this technological marvel and proved what could be done, must be negotiating such projects? He would have to ask someone about that.

But now was not the time.

‘And in conclusion . . . ’ Hayes was saying. ‘One last practicality. We’re cognisant of the fact that there’s been some reluctance to use the official title of this facility, the Centrifuge & Power Facility. We’re further cognisant of the fact that there’s a nickname currently being usaged that is not what we want to hear. Some people may think it’s funny but it’s not exactly dignified and I think we owe it to Severin, who worked so hard on this project along with the rest of us, to give it a name that we can all live with. So, in recognition of the fact that a lot of people prefer names that are short and snappy, here’s the deal. Officially, we are here today to celebrate the opening of the USIC Centrifuge & Power Facility. Unofficially, we suggest you call it . . . the Mother.’