The Book of Strange New Things (53 page)

III

AS IT IS

21

There is no God, she wrote

‘Sคฉ้นtฉ้ณ,’ he said.

‘สีคฉ้นรี่ฉ้ณ,’ she corrected him.

‘Sคฉ้นtฉ้ณ,’ he tried again.

‘สีคฉ้นรี่ฉ้ณ,’ she corrected him again.

‘สีคฉ้นรี่ฉ้ณ,’ he said.

All round him rose a noise like a flock of birds flapping their wings. It was not birds. It was the sound of applause from dozens of gloved hands. The Oasans – no longer Oasans to him but สีฐฉั – were letting him know he was making excellent progress in their language.

It was a perfect afternoon, just perfect. The air was less clammy than ever before, or perhaps he’d grown accustomed to the humidity at last. His body felt free and unencumbered, almost a part of the atmosphere, with no division between his skin and the surrounding sky. (Funny how he’d always been encouraged to conceive of the sky as something that started at some point far above him, whereas the สีฐฉั word for it – สี – recognised that it extended right down to the ground.)

He and the สีฐฉั were sitting outside the church, as was their custom when they were engaged in matters not strictly related to faith. The church was for singing, for sermons (although Peter didn’t refer to his Bible talks as such) and for contemplating the pictures his friends had dedicated to the glory of God. Outside, they could speak of other things. Outside, they could be his teachers.

Today, they numbered thirty. Not because the Jesus Lovers had dwindled in total, but because only certain members of the congregation felt confident to give their pastor instruction. Some of the people he was fondest of weren’t here, and he was forging a new intimacy with others who’d been a closed book to him before. For example, Jesus Lover Sixty-Three – so shy and awkward in most contexts – displayed a flair for linguistic problem-solving, keeping silent for long periods and then, when everyone was stuck, uttering the word they were searching for. By contrast, Lover One – the original convert to Christ and thus a person of some eminence among the believers – had declined Peter’s invitation to take part in the lessons. Declined? ‘Dismissed’ or ‘rejected’ was closer to the mark; Lover One was opposed to Peter attempting anything that might dilute the strangeness of the Book of Strange New Things.

‘Forget the Book for a moment . . . ’ Peter had said, but Lover One was so wound up that, for the first time, he interrupted.

‘Never forgeรี่ the Book. Never, never. The Book our rock, our hope, our redeemer.’

The words were Peter’s own, specially selected to be easy for these people to say, but the more often he heard the สีฐฉั uttering words like ‘redeemer’, the more he wondered what they really thought they meant.

‘I didn’t mean . . . I wasn’t saying . . . ’ Peter floundered. Then: ‘I just want to know
you
better.’

‘You know enough,’ Lover One said. ‘
We
are they who need more knowing, more word of Jeสีuสี. Word of Jeสีuสี good. Our word no good.’ And no amount of reassurance could convince him otherwise.

So here they were, a congregation within a congregation, engaged in an activity that had a slightly contentious status – which made it feel more important, of course. They sat on a patch of earth which had been shrouded in shade when they first settled in it, but not anymore. How many hours had they been sitting here? He didn’t know. Enough for the sun to move a significant distance across the sky. The sun’s name, he’d learned, was ڇ. Back at the USIC base, stowed in a drawer in Peter’s quarters, lay a printout prepared for him by some well-meaning boffin, charting the rising and setting of the sun within the 72-hour diurnal cycle. The heavens were reduced to a geometric grid with USIC at its centre; the times of day were represented as incomprehensible multi-digit numbers, and the sun was not dignified with a name. Typical.

Now, under that sun, he sat with his brethren on the mildest, most beautiful day yet. He imagined the scene from above – not very high above, but as if from a beach lifeguard’s observation tower. A tanned, lanky, blond-haired man in white, squatting on brown earth, encircled by small robed figures in all the colours of the rainbow. Everyone leaning slightly forward, attentive, occasionally passing a flask of water from hand to hand. Communion of the simplest kind.

He hadn’t felt like this since he was six and his parents took him to the dunes in Snowdonia. That summer had been the happiest time of his life, as he’d luxuriated not just in the balmy weather but also in his parents’ reconciliation, all coos and hugs and soft words. Even the name ‘Snowdonia’ seemed magical, like an enchanted kingdom rather than a national park in Wales. He’d sat for hour upon hour in the dunes, soaking up the warmth and his parents’ togetherness, listening to their beningnly meaningless chatter and the lapping of the waves, gazing out at the sea from under his oversized straw hat. Unhappiness was a test that you had to pass, and he’d passed it, and everything would be all right from now on. Or so he’d thought, until his parents’ divorce.

The language of the สีฐฉั was murder to pronounce but simple to learn. He had a hunch that there were probably only a few thousand words in the vocabulary – certainly far fewer than the quarter million in English. The grammar was logical and transparent. No eccentricities, no traps. There were no cases, no distinctions between singular and plural, no genders, and only three tenses: past, present and future. Even to call them tenses was a stretch: the สีฐฉั didn’t think that way. They classified a thing according to whether it was gone, or it was here, or it was expected to come.

‘Why did you leave the original settlement?’ he asked, at one point. ‘The place where you were living when USIC first came. You left it. Did something go wrong between you and USIC?’

‘We are here now,’ they replied. ‘Here good.’

‘But was there a problem?’

‘No problem. We are here now.’

‘It must have been very difficult to build everything again, from nothing.’

‘Building no problem. Every day a สีmall work more. สีmall work upon สีmall work, day upon day, then the work done.’

He tried a different tack. ‘If USIC had never come, would you still be living in the original settlement?’

‘Here good.’

Evasiveness? He wasn’t sure. The สีฐฉั language didn’t appear to contain any conditionals. There was no if.

The home of my Father have room upon room upon room
, read one of his Bible paraphrases, carefully refashioned to avoid troublesome words like ‘house’ and ‘mansions’. As for John’s next bit, ‘if it were not so, I would have told you’, he’d ditched it and moved straight on to
I will prepare a room for you
– which in retrospect was a wiser decision than he’d known at the time, because the สีฐฉั wouldn’t have understood what John’s ‘if it were not so’ assurance was supposed to mean. One of the most direct, straight-talking asides in the whole Bible was arcane nonsense here.

And yet, however many problems the สีฐฉั might have with English, it was agreed that Peter would continue to speak of God and Jesus in his own tongue. His flock would have it no other way. The Book of Strange New Things was not translatable, they knew that. In foreign phrases, exotic power lurked.

But there was more to life than God and Jesus, and Peter wanted to share these people’s mundane reality. Just a few days after he started to learn the language, he overheard two Jesus Lovers talking, and was delighted to pick up, amongst the meaningless sussurus, a reference to a child refusing breakfast, or maybe not refusing, but doing something with or at breakfast that the grown-ups disapproved of. It was a trivial detail, and his understanding of it made no difference to anything, yet it made a huge difference to how he felt. In that modest moment of comprehension, he was a little less an alien.

‘Breakfast’ was ‘ڇสีน รี่ณ สค’ – literally, ‘first food after sleep’. A great many สีฐฉั words were composites of other words. Or maybe they were phrases, it was hard to tell. The สีฐฉั made no distinction. Did that mean they were vague? Well, yes and no. He got the impression there was a word for every thing – but just one. Poets would have a hard time here. And a single word might refer to an activity, a concept and a location all in one, as in สสีณ, which referred to the whiteflower fields, whiteflower in general, and the farming of the crop. Pronouns didn’t exist; you just repeated the noun. You repeated a lot of things.

‘สครี่ สีฐ?’ he asked Jesus Lover Twenty-Eight one day, proud that he could manage ‘Your child?’ in the สีฐฉั language. A small person, clearly not yet mature, was dawdling near the church, waiting for her to finish her worship and return home.

‘ณ,’ she confirmed.

Observing the child, he felt sad that there were no children in his congregation. The Jesus Lovers were all grown-ups.

‘Why don’t you keep him by your side?’ he asked. ‘He’s welcome to join us.’

Ten, twenty, thirty seconds went by while they stood there, watching the child watch them. A breeze fluttered the boy’s cowl, and he raised his tiny hands to adjust it.

‘He no love Jeสีuสี,’ Jesus Lover Twenty-Eight said.

‘He doesn’t have to,’ said Peter. ‘He could just sit with you, listen to the singing. Or sleep.’

More time passed. The boy stared down at his boots, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

‘He no love Jeสีuสี,’ Jesus Lover Twenty-Eight said.

‘Maybe in the future.’

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘I hope.’ And she walked out of the church into the shimmering heat. Mother and son fell into step without a word. They didn’t hold hands, but then สีฐฉั seldom did.

How much did her child’s lack of Christian fellowship grieve her? How contemptuous or tolerant was this boy of his mother’s faith? Peter couldn’t tell. And asking Lover Twenty-Eight about it probably wouldn’t yield much insight. The lack of self-absorption he’d noted in these people from the outset went deep into the language itself: there were no words for most of the emotions that humans devoted endless energy to describing. The sort of intimate confab that longtime girlfriends indulged in, analysing whether a feeling was True Love or merely lust, affection, infatuation, habit, dysfunction, blah blah blah, was inconceivable here. He couldn’t even be sure if there was a word for anger, or if ‘รี่ฉ้ณ’ merely denoted disappointment, or a neutral recognition that life wasn’t turning out as planned. As for ‘ฉนณ’, the word for faith . . . its meaning was not what you’d call precise. Faith, hope, intention, objective, desire, plan, wish, the future, the road ahead . . . these were all the same thing, apparently.

Learning the language, Peter understood better how his new friends’ souls functioned. They lived almost wholly in the present, focusing on the tasks at hand. There was no word for yesterday except ‘yeสีรี่erday’. This didn’t mean the สีฐฉั had a poor memory; they just lived with memory differently. If someone dropped a dish and broke it, they would remember next day that the dish was broken, but rather than reliving the incident when the dish fell, they would be preoccupied with the need to make a new dish. Locating a past event in measured time was something they could do with great effort, as a special favour, but Peter could tell they didn’t see the point. Why should it matter exactly how many days, weeks, months or years ago a relative had died? A person was either living amongst them or in the ground.

‘Do you miss your brother?’ he asked Jesus Lover Five.

‘Brother here.’

‘I mean the one that died. The one that’s . . . in the ground.’

She remained utterly still. If she’d had eyes he could recognise, he suspected she would be staring at him blankly.

‘Do you feel pain that he is in the ground?’

‘He feel no pain in the ground,’ she said. ‘Before he go in the ground, he feel pain. Big, very big pain.’

‘But you? Do you feel pain? Not in your body, but in your spirit? Thinking of him, being dead?’

She shuddered gently. ‘I feel pain,’ she conceded after half a minute or so. ‘I feel pain.’

It was like a guilty triumph, extracting this confession from her. He knew that the สีฐฉั felt deep emotions, including grief; he sensed it. They weren’t solely practical organisms. They couldn’t be, or they wouldn’t have such an intense need for Christ.

‘Have you ever wished you were dead, Jesus Lover Five?’ He knew her real name now, and could even make a fair stab at pronouncing it, but she’d let him know that she preferred him to call her by her Christian honorific. ‘
I
have,’ he went on, hoping for a breakthrough in rapport. ‘At various bad times in my life. Sometimes the pain is so great, we feel it would be better not to be alive.’

She was silent for a long while. ‘Beรี่er be alive,’ she said at last, staring down at one of her gloved hands as if it contained a profound secret. ‘Dead no good. Alive good.’

Getting to grips with the language brought him no closer to understanding the origins of สีฐฉั civilisation. The สีฐฉั never alluded to what had happened in their collective past and appeared to have no concept of ancient history – their own or anyone else’s. For example, they either didn’t grasp, or considered irrelevant, the fact that Jesus walked the earth several thousand years ago; it might as well have been last week.

In this, they were, of course, excellent Christians.

‘Tell me about Kurtzberg,’ he asked them.

‘Kurรี่สีberg gone.’

‘Some of the workers at USIC say cruel things about that. I think they’re not serious, but I can’t be sure. They say you killed him.’

‘Kill him?’

‘Made him dead. Like the Romans made Jesus dead.’

‘Jeสีuสี no dead. Jeสีuสี alive.’

‘Yes, but he was killed. The Romans beat him and nailed him to the cross and he died.’

‘God iสี miracle. Jeสีuสี no longer dead.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Peter. ‘God is miracle. Jesus no longer dead. But what happened to Kurtzberg? Is he alive too?’

‘Kurรี่สีberg alive.’ A dainty gloved hand gestured at the empty landscape. ‘Walking. Walking, walking, walking.’