Suddenly, the magnitude of the challenge hit home. Until now, it had been all about him and his ability to keep himself in one piece: to survive the journey, to recover from the Jump, to adjust to the strange new air and the shock of separation. But there was so much more to it than that. The scale of the unknown remained just as immense whether he was feeling well or unwell; he was approaching monolithic barriers of foreignness which existed oblivious to him, indifferent to how rested or unrested he was, how bleary-eyed or attentive, how keen or dull.
Psalm 139 came to his mind, as it so often did when he needed reassurance. But today, the reminder of God’s omniscience was no comfort; instead, it heightened his own sense of unease. How precious are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand. Each and every mote of dirt flung up by the vehicle’s wheels was like a truth that he needed to learn, a ridiculously large number of truths which he had neither the time nor the wisdom to grasp. He was not God, and maybe only God could do what needed to be done here.
Grainger switched on the windscreen wipers once more. The view went smeary for a while, then the glass cleared and the native settlement was revealed afresh, lit up now by the rising sun. The sun made all the difference.
Yes, the mission was daunting and, yes, he wasn’t in the best shape. But here he was, on the threshold of meeting an entirely new kind of people, an encounter chosen for him by God. Whatever was fated to happen, it would surely be precious and amazing. His whole life — he understood that now, as the façades of the unknown city loomed up before him, harbouring unimaginable wonders — his whole life had been leading up to this.
7. Approved, transmitted
‘Well,’ said Grainger, ‘here we are.’ Sometimes a statement of the bloody obvious was the only appropriate way forward. As if to give life ceremonious permission to proceed.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked.
‘Uh… yes,’ he said, swaying in his seat. The dizziness he’d felt back at the base had come over him again. ‘I’m probably over-excited. It’s my first time, after all.’
She gave him a look he recognised very well, a look he’d seen on thousands of faces during his years as a pastor, a look that said: Nothing is worth getting excited about; everything is a disappointment. He would have to try to do something about that look, if he could, later.
In the meantime, he had to admit that their surroundings were not exactly awesomely impressive. The Oasan settlement wasn’t what you’d call a city. More like a suburb, erected in the middle of a wasteland. There were no streets in the formal sense, no pavements, no signs, no vehicles, and — despite the dim light and broad shadows of early dawn — no lamps, or any evidence of electricity or fire. Just a community of buildings resting on bare ground. How many dwellings altogether? Peter couldn’t guess. Maybe five hundred. Maybe more. They were spread out in unruly clusters, ranging in scale from single-storey to three-floor blocks, all flat-roofed. The buildings were brick, obviously made of the same clay as the earth, but baked marble-smooth and caramel-coloured. There was not a soul to be seen. All the doors and windows were shut. Well, that wasn’t quite true: the doors weren’t made of wood nor the windows of glass; they were merely holes in the buildings, shrouded with bead curtains. The beads were crystalline, like extravagant strings of jewellery. They swayed gently in the breeze. But there was nobody parting those curtains to peek out, nobody walking through the doorways.
Grainger parked the vehicle right in front of a building which looked like all the others except that it was marked by a painted white star, the bottom point of which had trickled slightly and dried that way. Peter and Grainger stepped out and submitted to the atmosphere’s embrace. Grainger wrapped her scarf around her face, covering her mouth and nose, as though she considered the air impure. From a pocket of her slacks she removed a metal gadget which Peter assumed was a weapon. She pointed it at the vehicle and pressed the trigger twice. The engine switched off and a hatch in the back flipped open.
In the absence of motor noise, the sounds of the Oasan settlement ventured onto the airwaves like opportunistic wildlife. The burble of running water, from an invisible source. The occasional muffled clank or clunk, suggesting routine struggles with domestic objects. Distant squeaks and chortles that might be birds or children or machinery. And, closer by, the unintelligible murmur of voices, subtle and diffuse, emanating from the buildings like a hum. This place, despite outward appearances, was no ghost town.
‘So, do we just yell hello?’ said Peter.
‘They know we’re here,’ said Grainger. ‘That’s why they’re hiding.’ Her voice, muffled slightly by the scarf, sounded tense. She had her arms folded, and he could see a tongue of dark sweat in the armpit of her smock.
‘How many times have you been here?’ he asked.
‘Dozens. I bring them their drug supply.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘I’m a pharmacist.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
She sighed. ‘Looks like I totally wasted my breath when we first met. You didn’t absorb a word I said, did you? My big speech of welcome, my detailed explanation of the procedure for getting stuff from the pharmacy if you need it.’
‘Sorry, my brains must have been scrambled.’
‘The Jump does that to some people.’
‘The wimpy ones, huh?’
‘I didn’t say that.’ Grainger hugged herself tightly, squeezing her upper arms in stress. ‘Come on, let’s get this over with.’ This last was not addressed to him; she was staring at the building with the star painted on it.
‘Are we in any danger?’
‘None that I know of.’
Peter leaned against the crash-bar of the vehicle and made a more careful study of what he could see of the settlement. The buildings, although rectangular, had no hard edges: each brick was a well-buffed lozenge, a glassy loaf of amber. The mortar had no grit to it; it was like plastic sealant. There wasn’t a hard angle anywhere, nothing sharp or corrugated. It was as though the architect’s aesthetics had been formed in homage to children’s play centres. Not that these buildings were in any way infantile or crass: they had their own uniform dignity, and they were obviously rock-solid, and the warm colours were… well… warm. But Peter couldn’t say he found the overall effect attractive. If God blessed him with the opportunity to build a church here, it would have to strike a different note, stand out against the squatness all around. At the very least it would need to have… Yes, that’s it: he’d worked out what was so dispiriting about this place. There was no attempt to reach up into the heavens. No tower, no turret, no flagpole, not even a modest triangular roof. Oh, for a spire!
Peter’s vision of a church steeple shone in his mind just long enough for him to be oblivious to a movement in the bead curtain of the nearest doorway. By the time he blinked and focused, the figure had already stepped out and was confronting Grainger. The event had occurred too suddenly, he felt; it lacked the drama appropriate to his first sighting of an Oasan native. It ought to have happened with ceremonial slowness, in an amphitheatre, or at the summit of a long staircase. Instead, the encounter was already under way, and Peter had missed its beginning.