The creature — the person — stood upright, but not tall. Five foot three, maybe five foot four. (Funny how those imperial measurements — inches, miles — stubbornly refused to be left behind.) Anyway, he, or she, was delicate. Small-boned, narrow-shouldered, an unassuming presence — not at all the fearsome figure Peter had prepared himself to confront. As foretold, a hood and monkish robes — made of a pastel-blue fabric disconcertingly like bathtowel — covered almost all of the body, its hems brushing the toes of soft leather boots. There was no swell of bosom, so Peter — aware that this was flimsy evidence on which to base a judgement, but unwilling to clutter his brain with unwieldy repetitions of ‘he or she’ — decided to think of the creature as male.
‘Hi,’ said Grainger, extending her hand.
The Oasan extended his hand in return, but did not grasp Grainger’s; rather he touched her gently on the wrist with his fingertips. He was gloved. The gloves had five digits.
‘You, here, now… ’ he said. ‘A สีurpriสีe.’ His voice was soft, reedy, asthmatic-sounding. Where the ‘s’s should have been, there was a noise like a ripe fruit being thumbed into two halves.
‘Not a bad surprise, I hope,’ said Grainger.
‘I hope รี่ogether with you.’
The Oasan turned to look at Peter, tilted his head slightly so that the shadows from the hood slid back. Peter, having been lulled by the Oasan’s familiar shape and five-fingered hands into expecting a more-or-less human face, flinched.
Here was a face that was nothing like a face. Instead, it was a massive whitish-pink walnut kernel. Or no: even more, it resembled a placenta with two foetuses — maybe three-month-old twins, hairless and blind — nestled head to head, knee to knee. Their swollen heads constituted the Oasan’s clefted forehead, so to speak; their puny ribbed backs formed his cheeks, their spindly arms and webbed feet merged in a tangle of translucent flesh that might contain — in some form unrecognisable to him — a mouth, nose, eyes.
Of course, there were no foetuses there, not really: the face was what it was, the face of an Oasan, nothing else. But try as he might, Peter couldn’t decode it on its own terms; he could only compare it to something he knew. He had to see it as a grotesque pair of foetuses perched on someone’s shoulders, half-shrouded in a cowl. Because if he didn’t allow it to resemble that, he would probably always have to stare at it dumbfounded, reliving the initial shock, dizzy with the vertigo of unsupported falling, in that gut-wrenching instant before a solid comparison is found to clasp onto.
‘You and I,’ said the Oasan. ‘Never before now.’ The vertical cleft in the middle of his face squirmed slightly as he formed the words. The foetuses rubbed knees, so to speak. Peter smiled but could not summon a response.
‘He means he hasn’t met you before,’ said Grainger. ‘In other words, he’s saying hello.’
‘Hello,’ said Peter. ‘I’m Peter.’
The Oasan nodded. ‘You are Peรี่er. I will remember.’ He turned back to Grainger. ‘You bring mediสีine?’
‘A little.’
‘How liรี่le?’
‘I’ll show you,’ said Grainger, walking around to the back of the vehicle and lifting the hatch. She rummaged in the jumbled contents — bottles of water, toilet paper, canvas bags, tools, tarps — and extracted a plastic tub no bigger than a schoolchild’s lunch-box. The Oasan followed every movement, although Peter was still unable to work out which parts of the face were its eyes. His eyes, sorry.
‘This is all I could get from our pharmacy,’ said Grainger. ‘Today is not one of the official supply days, you understand? We’re here for a different reason. But I didn’t want to come with nothing. So this’ — she handed him the tub — ‘is extra. A gift.’
‘We are diสีappoinรี่ful,’ said the Oasan. ‘And in the สีame breath we are graรี่eful.’
There was a pause. The Oasan stood holding his plastic tub; Grainger and Peter stood watching him hold it. A ray of sunlight found its way to the roof of the vehicle, making it glow.
‘So… uh… How are you?’ said Grainger. Sweat twinkled in her eyebrows and on her cheeks.
‘I alone?’ enquired the Oasan. ‘Or I and we รี่ogether?’ He gestured vaguely at the settlement behind him.
‘All of you.’
The Oasan appeared to give this a great deal of thought. At last he said: ‘Good.’
There was another pause.
‘Is anyone else coming out today?’ asked Grainger. ‘To see us, I mean?’
Again, the Oasan mulled over the question as though it were immensely complex.
‘No,’ he concluded. ‘I รี่oday am only one.’ He gestured solemnly at both Grainger and Peter, in acknowledgement, perhaps, of his regret for the 2:1 imbalance between number of visitors and welcoming party.
‘Peter here is a special guest of USIC,’ said Grainger. ‘He’s a… he’s a Christian missionary. He wants to… uh… live with you.’ She glanced at Peter for uneasy confirmation. ‘If I’ve got that right.’
‘Yes,’ said Peter, brightly. There was a glistening, champignon-like thing roughly halfway down the central cleft of the Oasan’s face that he’d decided was the Oasan’s eye, and he looked straight at that, doing his best to radiate friendliness. ‘I have good news to tell you. The best news you’ve ever heard.’
The Oasan cocked his head to one side. The two foetuses — no, not foetuses, his brow and cheeks, please! — blushed, revealing a spidery network of capillaries just beneath the skin. His voice, when it came, was even more asthmatic-sounding than before. ‘The Goสีpel?’
The words hung in the whispering air for a second before Peter was able to take them in. He couldn’t believe he’d heard correctly. Then he noticed that the Oasan’s gloved hands had been pressed together in a steeple shape.
‘Yes!’ Peter cried, dizzy with elation. ‘Praise Jesus!’
The Oasan turned to Grainger again. His gloved hands were trembling against the tub he held. ‘We have waiรี่ed long for the man Peรี่er,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Grainger.’ And without further explanation he hurried through the doorway, leaving the crystalline beads swinging in his wake.
‘Well I’ll be damned,’ said Grainger, yanking her scarf loose and wiping her face with it. ‘He never called me by name before.’
They stood waiting for twenty minutes or so. The sun continued to rise, a sliver of brilliant burning orange, like a great bubble of lava on the horizon. The walls of the buildings glowed as if each brick had a light inside.
At last, the Oasan returned, still clutching the plastic tub, which was now empty. He handed it back to Grainger, very slowly and carefully, only letting it go when her grip on it was secure.
‘Mediสีine have all gone,’ he said. ‘Gone inสีide the graรี่eful.’
‘I’m sorry there wasn’t more,’ said Grainger. ‘There’ll be more next time.’
The Oasan nodded. ‘We abide.’
Grainger, stiff with unease, walked to the rear of the vehicle to stow the tub back in the trunk. As soon as her back was turned, the Oasan sidled up to Peter, bringing them face to face.
‘Have you the book?’