The Book of Strange New Things (35 page)

In any event, his pulpit did not much resemble the intricately feathered eagle in the photo. Its streamlined surface, inscribed with randomly chosen letters from the alphabet, might just as easily be an aeroplane’s wings.

‘Iสี iรี่ good?’ A soft voice, which he recognised at once. Jesus Lover Five. He’d left the door of the church open and she’d walked in, dressed in her canary-yellow robe as usual.

‘It’s beautiful,’ he said. ‘A lovely welcome.’

‘God bleสี our reunion, Father Peรี่er.’

He looked past her small form, through the doorway behind her. Several dozen Oasans were making their way across the scrubland, but they were far away still; Lover Five had hurried ahead. Hurrying was unusual among her people. She appeared none the worse for it.

‘I’m happy to see you,’ said Peter. ‘As soon as I left, I wanted to come back.’

‘God bleสี our reunion, Father Peรี่er.’ Slung on her shoulder was a net haversack, with a furry, yellow lump stashed in it – the same intense hue as her robe. He thought it might be a shawl, but she pulled it out and held it up for him to examine. It was a pair of boots.

‘For you,’ she said.

Smiling shyly, he plucked them from her gloved hands. Unlike the petite booties he’d been given on his first visit, these looked as though they might actually be his size. He removed his sandals – whose inner soles were misshapen and almost black from constant wear – and slipped the boots onto his feet instead. They fitted perfectly.

He laughed. Bright yellow boots and an Islamic gown that resembled a dress: if he’d had any ambition to be a macho man, this combo would have spelled the end of it. He lifted one foot and then the other, displaying to Lover Five how excellent her handiwork was. Having witnessed the Oasans making clothes on a previous visit, he knew how much labour this project must have cost her – and how much obsessive concentration. Oasans handled sewing-needles with the same care and respect that humans might handle chainsaws or blowtorches. Each stitch was such a ponderous ritual that he couldn’t bear to watch.

‘They’re excellent,’ he said. ‘Thank you very much.’

‘For you,’ she said again.

They stood together by the open door, watching the rest of the Jesus Lovers make progress towards them.

‘How’s your brother, Jesus Lover Five?’ asked Peter.

‘In the ground.’

‘I mean the other one,’ said Peter. ‘The one who’s causing you sorrow because he doesn’t love Jesus.’

‘In the ground,’ she repeated. Then, helpfully, she added: ‘Alสีo.’

‘He died? In the last week?’

‘The laสีรี่ week,’ she said. ‘Yeสี.’

Peter stared into the shadowed cleft of her hooded head, wishing he could guess what emotion lay behind her impeded speech. His experience so far had made him suspect that Oasans’ emotions were expressed in the rustlings and burbles and squimphs they uttered when not straining to imitate an alien language.

‘What did he die of? What happened?’

Lover Five stroked herself perfunctorily over her arms, chest and midriff, to indicate the entire body. ‘Inสีide him, many thingสี gone the wrong way. Clean thingสี became foul. สีรี่rong thingสี became weak. Full thingสี became empรี่y. Cloสีed thingสี became open. Open thingสี became cloสีed. Dry thingสีbecame filled with wa รี่er. Many other thingสี alสีo. I have no wordสี for all the thingสี.’

‘I’m very sorry to hear this.’

She bowed her head, a gesture of shared regret perhaps. ‘For a long รี่ime already, my brother waสี สีick. Life remained in him, but with a plan รี่o leave. I go every day รี่o my brother, and hiสี life สีpoke รี่o me when he fall aสีleep, สีaying, I am here another day, but I will noรี่ remain here another day more, I am noรี่ welcome in thiสี body. While life remained in my brother, grief remained in me. Now he iสี in the ground, my grief iสี in the ground. God bleสี our reunion, Father Peรี่er. รี่oday will be สีunday.’

Peter nodded, although in truth he didn’t know if it was a Sunday. He’d lost track of his accustomed measures of time. But it didn’t matter. He and the Oasans were about to worship. That was no doubt what Lover Five meant by ‘Sunday’. And she was right.

‘I have something for you, too,’ said Peter, striding over to where he’d left his rucksack. Her head moved down and up, following the motion of his hands as he fetched out the booklets he’d prepared.

‘Bibles,’ he said. ‘Or the beginnings of Bibles, anyway. For you to keep.’ He’d managed to produce twenty pages of Scripture rendered in an English that the Oasans could speak with a minimum of trouble, printed in King James-style columns on ten sheets of paper folded double and stapled in the middle. Not the handsomest display of bookbinding since Gutenberg, but the best he could come up with the tools available at the USIC base. On the front cover of each booklet, he’d hand-drawn a cross, and coloured it gold with a highlight marker.

‘The Book of สีรี่range New Thingสี,’ confirmed Jesus Lover Five, as her fellow converts began to file into the church. Treading slowly in their padded boots, they made almost no sound on the soft earth, but Lover Five heard them come in, and turned to greet them. ‘The Book of สีรี่range New Thingสี,’ she repeated, pointing at the booklets that Peter was piling up on his pulpit. ‘For uสี to keep.’

There was a murmuring and sighing among the new arrivals. To his shame, Peter recognised individuals only by the colour of their robes. He hoped their colour-coding hadn’t changed since last week. He’d trained himself to tell the difference between brown, bronze, auburn and copper, crimson, burgundy and coral, at least in his mind. Each shade reconnected him with conversations – however brief and stumbling – he had had with that person.

‘Friends,’ he announced, when everyone was in. ‘I’m very happy to see you. I have brought you these gifts. Small gifts from me, containing much bigger gifts from our Saviour.’

There were, he estimated, about ninety souls gathered within the four walls, a dazzling flock of different hues. As a minister, he was well-practised in casting a quick eye over a congregation to do an approximate head count. If his estimate was correct, it suggested the number of Christians had swollen by ten or twenty during his time away.

‘As I explained to some of you before,’ he said, ‘the Bible that you’ve seen me carry – and Kurtzberg carry – is a very thick book. Too thick for most people to read. But it was never meant to be read all at once. The Bible is a storehouse of messages, which grew for hundreds of years, as our Lord shared more and more of his thoughts and intentions with whoever was ready to listen.’ As he spoke, he handed booklets to Lover Five, and she distributed them to her fellow worshippers. Each recipient took the computer-printed pamphlet into his or her gloved hands as though it were a fragile egg.

‘When Jesus walked the earth,’ Peter continued, ‘people wrote down what He said and did, and after that, they wrote down the things that happened to His followers. But the Bible was begun in the time before Jesus came, the more ancient time when God seemed much further away and more mysterious, and it was harder to know for sure what He wanted. In those days, people told stories about God, and those stories are in the Bible too. Some of these stories require a lot of knowledge of the customs and places that existed before Jesus. Even among my own people, many don’t have that knowledge.’

He noticed, as he spoke, that every tenth person, rather than taking a booklet from Lover Five, elected to share one with his neighbour. Peter had brought eighty booklets, having judged his congregation to be slightly under that number, not expecting it to grow in his absence. Evidently, the Oasans had counted, at a glance, the number of booklets and – without any consultation or awkwardness – adjusted the logistics of distribution to ensure that the last few people in line weren’t left with nothing.

‘You have told me,’ he said, and gestured towards a robe of saffron and a robe of pale lavender, ‘– you, Jesus Lover Twelve and Jesus Lover Eighteen – that Kurtzberg once told you the story of Nebuchadnezzar, and the story of Balaam and the angel, and of the destruction of Jerusalem, and other stories that you struggled hard to understand and could not understand. Please take heart, my friends. There will be time to understand those stories later, when you have grown in Christ. But for now, Nebuchadnezzar can wait. When God decided to become Jesus, He did it because He wanted to spread His word among strangers, among those who’d never heard of Him, among those who didn’t care for religion or understand it. The stories He told were simple. I’ve tried to put some of the best, most useful ones in your Bibles.’ He picked up one of the booklets and opened it. ‘Your books are small and thin, not because I doubt your hunger for Scripture, nor your power to think, but because I’ve tried to use only words that you and I can speak together in this church, and that you can speak amongst yourselves, with ease. I’ve worked as fast as I can, yet, as you can see from the smallness of the books, I’ve been slow. I promise that in future, I’ll be faster. As you grow in Christ, your Bibles will grow. But we must begin somewhere. And on this wonderful Sunday, as I stand here filled with happiness to see you all here with me, we will begin with . . .
this
.’

And, from the first page, he read Psalm 23. ‘The Lord be He who care for me. I will need no more . . . ’ and so on, until he reached ‘I will dwell in the home of the Lord for ever.’

Then he read it again.

And again.

Each time he read it, more of the Oasans read it aloud with him. Were they reading or reciting? It didn’t matter. Their communal voice was swelling, and it sounded melodious and clear, almost entirely free of vocal impairments. ‘He bid me lie in green land down. He lead me by river where no one can drown. He make my สีoul like new again. He lead me in the path of Good. He do all thiสี, for He be God.’

By the fifth repetition, his own voice was lost in the mighty unison.

15

Hero of the moment, king of the day

A wise man once asked Peter: ‘Do you know what you are?’

‘What I am?’

‘Yes.’

It was a question that could mean so many things, depending on who was posing it. It had, for example, been uttered to him on several occasions by angry thugs who’d supplied the answer themselves – ‘A stupid cunt’, or some similar insult – and then beat him up. It had been asked of him by officials and bureaucrats who regarded him, for one reason or other, as a thorn in their side. It had been said affectionately and admiringly too, by people who went on to tell him he was ‘a total sweetie’, ‘a treasure’, or even ‘my rock’. Big things to live up to.

‘I try not to think about myself too much. I hope I’m just a man who loves God.’

‘You’re a
people person
,’ the wise man said, nodding decisively. ‘That will take you a very long way.’ The wise man was the pastor of a church that Peter would soon inherit. He was an elderly soul, and had that special mixture of benign tolerance and stoic disappointment typical of a minister who’d been in the job too long. He was intricately familiar with all the ways his parishioners were resistant to change, all the ways they could be a pain in the arse – though he would never use such language, of course.

‘You like people. That’s actually quite rare,’ the old pastor went on.

‘Isn’t it basic human nature to be sociable?’

‘I’m not talking about that,’ said the old man. ‘I don’t think you’re necessarily that sociable. A bit of a loner, even. What I mean is, you’re not disgusted or irritated by the human animal. You just take them as they come. Some people never get fed up with dogs; they’re dog people. Doesn’t matter what sort of dog it is, big or small, placid or yappy, well-behaved or naughty – they’re all lovable in their own way, because they’re dogs and dogs are
a good thing
. A pastor should feel that way about human beings. But you know what? – not many do. Not many at all. You’ll go far, Peter.’

It had felt odd to be told this, with such certitude, by a sage old-timer who wasn’t easily fooled. Peter’s co-existence with his fellow humans had not always been a happy one, after all. Could someone who’d behaved as badly as he did when he was in his teens and twenties – lying and breaking promises and stealing from any altruistic fool who gave him the benefit of the doubt – truly be said to love people? And yet the old pastor was well aware of his history. There were no secrets between shepherds.

Now, Peter was sitting cross-legged, dazzled by the light, half-delirious. Right in front of him, also cross-legged, sat a small boy – himself when eight or nine years old. He was a Cub Scout. He was proud and happy to be a Cub Scout, possessor of a green shirt and sewn-on badges and arcane knowledge about knots and tent pitching and the proper way to light a fire. He was looking forward to becoming a fully-fledged Scout soon, not just a Cub, so that he could learn archery and go hiking in the mountains and save the lives of strangers who had been buried under avalanches or bitten by snakes. As it turned out, he would never get to be a Scout – his family circumstances would soon become too awkward, and the Cubs membership would be cancelled and his uniform would sit neatly folded in the cupboard until finally the silverfish ruined it – but at eight he didn’t know that yet, and he was sitting cross-legged in his shorts and neckerchief, almost levitating with pleasure to be here amongst his wolf pack.

Sweat trickled from his brow into his eyes. He blinked and the blurry world sharpened into view. The child sitting before him was not himself at the age of eight. It was not even a child. It was Jesus Lover Seventeen, a creature unlike him in almost every imaginable way, except that she, or he, or it could sit cross-legged and clasp hands in prayer. Her robe was spinach-green, and so were her soft boots, albeit speckled with brown dirt. The sun, almost directly overhead, cast a shadow under her hood, swallowing her face in blackness.

‘What are you thinking, Jesus Lover Seventeen?’ he asked.

There was, as always, a pause. The Oasans were unaccustomed to thinking about thinking, or maybe they just found it difficult to translate their thoughts into English.