The Book of Strange New Things

by Michel Faber

  ‘ . . . 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.’

  ‘Because it’s one big motherfucker!’ someone called out.

  ‘Because necessity is the mother of invention,’ Hayes explained patiently.

  With that, the opening ceremony speech more or less came to an end. The remainder of the visit was, or pretended to be, a guided tour of the facility, to demonstrate how the principles established by the scale model were put into full-sized practice. However, so many of the facility’s important features and mechanisms were encased in concrete or submerged in water or accessible only by vertiginous steel ladders that there was nothing much to see.

  Only when they were driving away, back to the USIC base, in their little convoy, did Peter finally feel the surge of inspiration he hadn’t been able to muster during Hayes’s speech. Squashed between two strangers on the back seat of a steamy vehicle, he sensed the world darkening a little. He craned round and wiped the condensation off the rear window with his sleeve. The great power utility was already receding in the distance, shimmering slightly in the haze of spent fuel coming out of the jeep’s exhaust. But what could be seen more clearly now was the multitude of solar panels – heliostats – that were arranged in a far-flung semi-circle on the landscape all around the Mother. Each of them was meant to catch the sunlight and redirect it straight to the power station. But by coincidence the sun was partially obscured by passing clouds. The heliostats swivelled on their podiums, adjusting the angle of their mirrored surfaces, adjusting, adjusting, adjusting again. They were only rectangular slabs of steel and glass, not in the least human-looking, but still Peter was moved by their insensate confusion. Like all creatures in the universe, they were only waiting for the elusive light that would grant them purpose.

  Back in his quarters, Peter checked for messages on the Shoot. He felt guilty checking for fresh communications from Bea when he’d let so much time lapse since writing one himself. In his last letter, he’d reassured her that he was delighted to hear she was pregnant and that, no, of course he wasn’t angry with her. The rest of the letter was padded out with mission-related stuff he couldn’t recall. The entire letter had been maybe fifteen lines long, twenty at most, and had taken him several hours of sweat to produce.

  It was true he felt no anger, but he felt disturbingly little of anything else either, aside from stress at his inability to respond. It was difficult, in his current circumstances, to grab hold of feelings and brand them with a name. If he tried his hardest, he could just about make sense of what was happening on Oasis, but that was because he and the events he was grappling with were in the same space. His mind and heart were trapped in his body, and his body was here.

  The news of Bea’s pregnancy was like news of some momentous event in Britain’s current affairs: he knew it was important but he had no idea what he could or should do about it. He assumed that any other man would be imagining the intimate realities of being a father: the baby in his arms, the corporeal son or daughter bouncing on his knee, the kid’s high school graduation or whatever. He could imagine such scenes only in the most contrived and generic way, as if they were two-dimensional panels in a comic book written and drawn by shameless hacks. Trying to visualise Bea with a baby inside her was impossible: there was no baby, yet, and if he tried to conjure up a vision of her belly, his mind’s eye played him old footage of her slim abdomen inside the T-shirt she wore to bed. Or, if he tried harder, an x-ray of a pelvis that could have been anyone’s, speckled with cryptic lucencies that could be a grub-like embryo, could be gas, could be cancer.

  You must be extra careful now to take care of yourself, he’d written. His use of ‘care’ twice in one short sentence was not ideal, but it had taken him long enough to come up with the words and he meant them so he’d sent them. Sincere as the sentiment was, though, he had to admit it was the sort of thing an auntie or a brother might say.

  And since then, he’d not yet managed to write her another letter, despite receiving several from her. More than once, he’d forced himself to sit down and begin, but had got stuck after Dear Bea and taken it no further. Today, he tried to convince himself to type a few words about his visit to the Big Brassiere, but he doubted that his wife was hanging out for information on this topic.

  There was nothing new from her today, which was unusual. He hoped nothing bad had happened. To Beatrice, that is. Bad things were happening to the world in general all the time, it seemed.

  Of course, the world had always been crowded with mishaps and disasters, just as it had also been graced with fine achievements and beautiful endeavours which the media tended to ignore – if only because honour and contentment were hard to capture on film. But, even allowing for all that, Peter felt that the dispatches he was getting from Beatrice were alarmingly crammed with bad news. More bad news than he knew what to do with. There was only so much calamitous change you could hear about, events that re-wrote what you thought was general knowledge, before your brain stopped digesting and you clung on to older realities. He accepted that Mirah had gone back to her husband and that an American politicia
n’s wife had been shot dead in her swimming pool. He remembered that there was a little girl in Oskaloosa called Coretta who’d lost her father. He accepted, with some difficulty, that the Maldives had been wiped out by a tidal wave. But when he thought of North Korea, he pictured a calm cityscape of totalitarian architecture, with legions of bicycle-riding citizens going about their normal business. There was no room in the picture for a catastrophic cyclone.

  No fresh disasters today, though. No news is good news, as some people might say. Uncomforted, he retrieved one of Bea’s older letters and re-read it.

  Dear Peter,

  I got your message last night. I’m so relieved you’re not angry with me, unless the shortness of what you wrote indicates that you ARE angry but just keeping it under control. But I don’t think so. You must be unbelievably preoccupied with your mission, learning the language and tackling all sorts of challenges that no one has ever faced before.(Please tell me a little more about those, when you have a minute.)

  From what you HAVE said, it sounds like you’re adjusting to the weather, at least. That’s not really possible here, because it’s gone haywire again. More torrential rainfall, with the occasional gale force wind as a bonus. The house smells of damp. Mildew on the furniture and walls. Opening the windows lets in fresh air but also rain, it’s hard to know what to do. I know it’s very wet where you are too, but from the little you’ve told me about how the Oasans live, the place seems ‘designed’ for it. Here in England, everything is set up on the basis that the weather will stay mostly dry and moderate. We’re just not very good at planning for emergencies. Denial, I suppose.

  Heard from Sheila again. Billy is clinically depressed, she says. Not good in a 14-year-old boy. I arranged to take him out somewhere on the day that the family is scheduled to move house. (Did I mention that Sheila and Mark split up? Neither one of them could meet the mortgage repayments alone so they’ve decided to sell up and move into flats. Actually, Mark is going to Romania.) I’m not convinced it’s wise to move house without letting your kids be part of the process, but Sheila says Billy genuinely doesn’t want to know and it’s better if he just gets delivered to the flat when it’s a fait accompli. She’s given me money to take him to a movie but I’m actually going to take him to a Cat Show which happens to be on at the Sports & Leisure Centre on that day. It’s risky because (A) he may be the sort of kid who gets freaked out at animals being kept in small cages and (B) it will remind him of the snow leopard, but I hope that seeing all those different cats gathered together in one place will reassure him somehow.

  Whew! If you could have heard the crash that just reverberated through the house! It almost gave me a heart attack. The window of the bathroom is shattered, hundreds of glass shards in the bathtub and on the floor. I thought it was vandalism at first, but it was the wind. A big gust ripped an apple off the tree in the backyard and flung it against our window. But fear not! Someone from the church is coming to fix it ASAP, within two hours, he said. Graeme Stone. Remember him? His wife died of cirrhosis.

  I went to the supermarket yesterday, it was closed. No explanation, just a sellotaped piece of paper saying it wouldn’t open until further notice. Quite a lot of people outside, would-be customers peering through the glass. Inside, the lights were on, everything looked as normal, the shelves stocked up. A couple of security guys stationed near the doors. A few staff(?) walking around the aisles talking calmly, as though nobody could see them, as though they were in their own living room instead of on public display in the high street. Weird. I stood there for about five minutes, I don’t know why. Eventually a cheeky young West Indian man called through the glass to one of the security guys, saying ‘Can I have a packet of 20 Benson & Hedges, mate?’ No response, so he adds, ‘It’s for me mum, mate!’ A ripple of laughter went through the crowd. It was one of those communal things, when something small and funny happens that everyone ‘gets’, and for just an instant everyone’s united. I love those moments. Anyway it was obviously downhill from there so I walked to the 24-hour convenience store and tried to score some milk there but no joy.

  What are you eating, my darling? Anything I would fancy a bite of?

  The USIC mess hall was bathed in orange light. It was afternoon. It would be afternoon for ages yet.

  He ordered cream of chicken soup and a bread roll from the food counter. A woman was working there today, a Greek-looking beauty he hadn’t yet got to know. He’d made conversation with most of the USIC personnel, to gauge whether he could be of use to anyone on a spiritual level, and had found them to be an uncommonly phlegmatic, self-contained bunch. This Greek woman was a new one on him, though, and there was a look in her eyes that offered hope that there might be a God-shaped hole in her life. He wondered if he should pursue the opportunity. But he was hungry and besides his mind was full of the Oasans. His next departure was less than an hour away.

  The soup was tasty, despite containing neither cream nor pieces of chicken. It had a rich chicken stock flavour, no doubt transported here in powder form. The whiteflower roll was crisp on the outside and spongy on the inside, still slightly warm – exactly as a bread roll should be. He ate and gave thanks to God for every mouthful.

  The sound filtering through the PA was some sort of Dixieland jazz he couldn’t identify. Ancient music wasn’t his specialty. Every few minutes, a recorded announcement recited a list of trombonists and trumpeters and pianists and so on.

  He finished his meal and returned the bowl to the counter.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ the woman said. Her wrist, as she picked up the bowl, was knobbly yet delicate, like Bea’s. He wished he could link fingers with Bea just for three seconds and feel the bone of her wrist against his own flesh. The need of it struck him as he stood there, his eyes misted over; then he pulled himself together.

  He returned to his seat, to allow the food to settle in his stomach. Stroking his palm down the front of his tunic, he was stung by a spark of static electricity, a phenomenon he’d noticed often before when he was too full of anticipation. He closed his eyes and sent a prayer to God for calm. A measure of calm was granted.

  On the public address system, the Dixieland jazz had given way to something less hectic. He started to leaf through magazines from the racks near his armchair, spending a couple of minutes on each one before neatly replacing it.

  His initial impression had been that USIC offered a comprehensive selection of what might be on sale in a newsagent’s back home. Now that he examined the magazines more carefully, he wasn’t so sure. House & Garden, Hot Goss, Aquarium Fish, Men’s Health, Lesbian Action, The Chemical Engineer, Classic Jazz, Vogue . . . Yes, they were fairly recent, having arrived on the same ship that brought him to Oasis. And yes, they covered a broad range of interests, but . . . there was no hard news in any of them. He scanned the buzzwords and the teasers emblazoned on the covers. They were the same buzzwords and teasers that had appeared on these sorts of publications for decades. Absent from the racks was any magazine that reported on what was happening on the front lines, so to speak. You could read about jazz or how to harden your abdominal muscles or what to feed your fish, but where were the political crises, the earthquakes, the wars, the demises of major corporations? He picked up Hot Goss, a showbiz tattle mag, and flipped through it. Article after article was about celebrities he’d never heard of. Two pages came loose in his hand, alerting him to the fact that another two pages further on had been torn out. He found the relevant place. Sure enough, the numbering jumped from 32 to 37. He flipped back to the contents page and consulted the blurbs for a clue to the missing material. ‘Umber Rosaria Goes To Africa! Our fave party girl swaps rehab for refugee camps’.

  ‘Hey, preacher!’

  He looked up. A sardonic-looking man with several days’ growth of stubble was standing over him.

  ‘Hi, Tuska,’ said Peter. ‘Good to see you. Growing the beard back?’

  Tuska shrugged. ‘No b
ig deal. Different display panel, same machine.’ He sat down in the nearest armchair and nodded towards the Hot Goss in Peter’s hands. ‘That crap will turn your brain to jelly.’

  ‘I’m just checking out what’s available here,’ said Peter. ‘And I noticed a couple of pages have been torn out.’

  Tuska leaned back, crossed one leg over the other. ‘Only a couple? Jeez, you should check out Lesbian Action. A third of it is gone, easy.’ He winked. ‘We’d probably need to break into Hayes’s quarters to get it back.’

  Peter maintained eye contact with Tuska but did not allow his face to express approval or disapproval. This often acted as a moral mirror, he’d found, reflecting back at a person what they’d just said.

  ‘No disrespect meant, you understand,’ added Tuska. ‘She’s a damn good engineer. Keeps herself to herself. Like all of us here, I guess.’

  Peter replaced Hot Goss on the racks. ‘Are you married, Tuska?’

  Tuska raised one bushy brow. ‘A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,’ he intoned theatrically, wiggling his fingers in the air to emphasise the antiquated pop-culture reference. Then, in his normal voice. ‘Haven’t heard from her in twenty years. More.’

  ‘Is there a special person in your life right now?’

  Tuska narrowed his eyes pensively, play-acted a thorough scrutiny of the available data. ‘Nope,’ he said after four or five seconds. ‘Can’t say that there is.’

  Peter smiled to signal that he understood the joke, but somewhere in his eyes there must have been a stray glint of pity, because Tuska felt provoked to explain further.