‘It’s the Légion Étrangère is what it is.’
‘Sorry?’
Tuska leaned forward, in storyteller mode now. ‘The French Foreign Legion,’ he said. ‘An elite army corps. They fought in lots of wars back in the day. A great team. You didn’t have to be French to join. You could come from anywhere. You didn’t have to tell them your real name, your past, your criminal record, nothing. So, as you can imagine, a lot of those guys were trouble with a capital T. They didn’t fit in anywhere. Not even in the regular army. It didn’t matter. They were Legionnaires.’
Peter considered this for a few seconds. ‘Are you saying everybody here is trouble with a capital T?’
Tuska laughed. ‘Ah, we’re pussycats,’ he schmoozed. ‘Fine and upstanding citizens one and all.’
‘In my interviews with USIC,’ reflected Peter, ‘I didn’t get the impression I could’ve lied about anything. They’d done their research. I had to get medical checks, certificates, testimonials…’
‘Sure, sure,’ said Tuska. ‘We’re all hand-picked here. My analogy with the Legion is not that there’s no questions asked. Far from it. My analogy is that we can deal with being here, period. Legio Patria Nostra, that was the motto of the Legionnaires. The Legion Is Our Homeland.’
‘Yet you’ve been back,’ observed Peter.
‘Well, I’m the pilot.’
‘And BG and Severin; they went back a couple of times too.’
‘Yeah, but they spent years here in between trips. Years. You’ve seen Severin’s files. You know how much time he spent in this place, doing his job every day, drinking green water, pissing orange piss, moseying on down to the mess hall every evening and eating adapted fungus or whatever the hell it is, maybe leafing through some year-old magazines like you’d find in a dentist’s waiting room, going to bed at night and staring at the ceiling. That’s what we do here. And we deal with it. You know how long the first USIC workers here lasted? The first couple batches of personnel, in the very early days? Three weeks, on average. We’re talking about ultra-fit, highly trained, well-adjusted people from loving families blah blah blah. Six weeks, max. Sometimes six days. Then they would go out of their skulls, weeping, begging, crawling up the walls, and USIC would have to send them back. Back ho-ome.’ While uttering this last word, he made a grandiloquent sweep of his arms, to add a sarcastic halo of importance to the concept. ‘OK, I know USIC has a lot of money. But not that much money.’
‘What about Kurtzberg?’ said Peter quietly. ‘And Tartaglione? They didn’t go home, did they?’
‘No,’ conceded Tuska. ‘They went native.’
‘Isn’t that just a different way of adapting?’
‘You tell me,’ said Tuska with a hint of mischief. ‘You just came back from Freaktown and now you’re going again. What’s your hurry? Don’t you love us anymore?’
‘Yes, I love you,’ said Peter, aiming for a light, good-humoured tone that might simultaneously convey that he really did love everyone here. ‘But I wasn’t brought here… uh… USIC made it clear I shouldn’t expect… ’ He faltered, dismayed. His tone was neither bantering nor sincere; it was defensive.
‘We’re not your job,’ summarised Tuska. ‘I know that.’
Out of the corner of his eye, Peter noticed that Grainger had entered the mess hall, ready to drive him to the settlement. ‘I do care,’ he said, suppressing the urge to bring up Severin’s funeral, to remind Tuska how hard he’d tried to come up with something decent at short notice. ‘If you… if anyone actually… reached out to me, I’d be there for them.’
‘Sure you would,’ the pilot shrugged. Leaning back in his seat again, he noticed Grainger edging nearer, and gave her a casual salute.
‘Your chariot awaits,’ announced Grainger.
Rather than taking the cafeteria exit and walking round the building to where the vehicle was parked, Grainger escorted Peter through a maze of internal corridors, postponing when they’d have to wade into the muggy air. This route through the base took them past the USIC pharmacy, Grainger’s domain. It was shut and Peter would have walked right by without noticing it, if not for the bright green plastic cross mounted on its otherwise nondescript door. He paused for a proper look, and Grainger paused with him.
‘The serpent of Epidaurus,’ he murmured, surprised that whoever had made this cross had bothered to embellish it, in silver metallic inlay, with the ancient symbol of the snake encircling the staff.
‘Yeah?’ she said.
‘It symbolises wisdom. Immortality. Healing.’
‘And “Pharmacy”,’ she added.
He wondered if the door was unlocked. ‘What if someone shows up while we’re gone, wanting you?’
‘Unlikely,’ she said.
‘USIC doesn’t keep you that busy?’
‘I do lots of other things besides the drugs. I analyse all the food, to check we’re not poisoning ourselves. I do research. I pitch in.’
He hadn’t meant to make her justify her wage; he was only curious about that door. Having burgled quite a few pharmacies in his time, he struggled to believe that a storehouse of pharmaceutical goodies wouldn’t be a temptation for even one of the people here. ‘Is it locked?’
‘Of course it’s locked.’
‘The only door in the whole place that’s locked?’
She shot him a suspicious glance. He felt she’d peered straight into his conscience, eavesdropping on his guilty memory of trespassing in Kurtzberg’s quarters. What had possessed him to do that?
‘It’s not that I think anybody would steal anything,’ she said. ‘It’s just… procedure. Can we go now?’
They walked to the corridor’s end, where Grainger took a deep breath and opened the door to the outside. The cool, neutral air of the interior was sucked from behind them into the atmosphere beyond, exerting a tug on their bodies as they stepped out of the building. Then the flood of gaseous moisture enveloped them, a shock as always, until you got used to it.
‘I overheard you tell Tuska you love him,’ said Grainger as they approached the vehicle.
‘He was bantering,’ said Peter, ‘and I was… uh… bantering back.’ The air currents ruffled his hair, ran under his clothing, blurred his vision. Distracted, he almost blundered against Grainger, having followed her to the driver’s side before he remembered that he should be heading for the passenger’s side. ‘But on a deeper level,’ he said, as he backtracked, ‘yes, it’s true. I’m a Christian. I try to love everybody.’
They took their seats in the front of the van and slammed the doors shut, sealing themselves into the air-conditioned cabin. The short time they’d spent in the open air had been enough to dampen their skin all over, so that they both shivered at the same instant, a coincidence which made them smile.
‘Tuska isn’t very lovable,’ Grainger remarked.
‘He means well,’ said Peter.
‘Yeah?’ she said tartly. ‘I guess he’s more fun if you’re a guy.’ She dabbed her face dry with a hunk of her shawl and, peering up into a mirror, brushed her hair. ‘All that sex talk. You should hear him sometimes. Real locker room stuff. So much hot air.’
‘You wouldn’t want it to be more than hot air, would you?’
‘God forbid,’ she scoffed. ‘I can imagine why his wife left him.’
‘Maybe he left her,’ said Peter, wondering why she was drawing him into this peculiar conversation, and why they weren’t moving yet. ‘Or maybe it was a mutual decision.’
‘The end of a marriage is never a mutual decision,’ she said.
He nodded, as if deferring to her greater wisdom on this point. Still she made no move to start the vehicle. ‘Are there any married couples here?’ he asked.