Michel Faber - The Book of Strange New Things

And inside that hesitant glow, was that…? Yes, there was something else on the horizon. Raised structures of some sort. Mountains? Boulders? Buildings? A town? A city? Grainger had said that the ‘settlement’ was about fifty miles away. They must have travelled half that distance by now, surely.

‘Do they have genders?’ he said at last.

‘Who?’ she said.

‘The people we’re going to see.’

Grainger looked exasperated. ‘Why don’t you just come straight out and use the word aliens ?’

‘Because we’re the aliens here.’

She laughed out loud. ‘I love it! A politically correct missionary! Forgive me for saying so, but it seems a total contradiction in terms.’

‘I forgive you, Grainger,’ he winked. ‘And my attitudes shouldn’t strike you as a contradiction. God loves every creature equally.’

The smile faded from her face. ‘Not in my experience,’ she said.

Silence descended on the cabin once more. Peter deliberated whether to push; decided not to. Not in that direction, anyway. Not yet.

‘So,’ he rejoined lightly, ‘do they have genders?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Grainger, in a flat, business-like tone. ‘You’ll have to lift up their robes and take a look.’

They drove for ten, fifteen minutes without further conversation. The topmost slice of the raisin bread dried out. The haze of light on the horizon became more distinct. The mysterious structures straight ahead were definitely architecture of some kind, although the sky was still too dark for Peter to make out exact shapes or details.

Eventually, he said, ‘I need to have a pee.’

‘No problem,’ said Grainger, and slowed the car to a halt. On the dashboard, an electronic gauge estimating the fuel consumption per mile flickered through its numbers and settled on an abstract symbol.

Peter opened the door and, as he stood out onto the earth, was enveloped at once by the humid, whispering air. He’d grown unaccustomed to it, having spent so long in the air-conditioned bubble of the vehicle. It was enjoyable, this sudden all-out luxury of atmosphere, but also an assault: the way the air immediately ran up the sleeves of his shirt, licked his eyelids and ears, dampened his chest. He hitched the hem of his dishdasha up to his abdomen and pissed straight onto the ground, since the landscape offered no trees or boulders to hide behind. The earth was already moist and dark brown, so the urine made little difference to its colour or consistency. It sank in without pause.

He heard Grainger opening and shutting the door on her side of the vehicle. To give her some privacy, he stood for a while and appraised the scenery. The plants that he’d taken for mushrooms were flowers, greyish-white flowers with a tinge of mauve, almost luminous in the gloom. They grew in small, neat clumps. There was no distinction between blossom, leaf and stalk: the whole plant was slightly furry, leathery and yet so thin as to be almost transparent, like the ear of a kitten. Evidently no other plants were viable in this part of the world. Or perhaps he’d simply come at the wrong time of year.

Grainger’s door slammed, and he turned to join her. She was crumpling a cardboard box of disposable tissues into the glove compartment as he took his seat.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Last few miles coming up.’

He shut his door and the air conditioning promptly restored the neutral atmosphere of the cabin. Peter settled back in his seat, and shivered as a trapped wisp of balmy Oasan air slipped between his shoulderblades and out of his collar.

‘I must say you built your landing base a respectfully long way out,’ he said. ‘The planners of London’s airports were never so considerate of local residents.’

Grainger unscrewed a water-bottle, drank deep, coughed. A rivulet ran down her chin, and she mopped it up with a handful of her headscarf.

‘Actually… ’ She cleared her throat. ‘Actually, when we first built the base, the… ah… local residents lived just two miles away. They relocated. Took everything with them. I mean everything . A couple of our guys had a look around the old settlement when it was all over. Like, maybe we can learn something from what they left behind. But it was stripped clean. Just the shells of houses. Not even a single mushroom left in the ground.’ She consulted one of the gauges on the dashboard. ‘The fifty miles must have taken them for ever to walk.’

‘It sounds like they really do value their privacy. Unless… ’ He hesitated, trying to think of a diplomatic way of asking whether USIC had done something outrageously offensive. Before he could frame the question, Grainger answered it.

‘It was out of the blue. They just told us they were moving. We asked if we were doing anything wrong. Like, was there some problem we could fix so they’d reconsider? They said no, no problem.’

Grainger revved the engine and they were off again.

‘When you say “we asked”,’ said Peter, ‘do you mean “we” as in…?’

‘I wasn’t personally a party to these negotiations, no.’

‘Do you speak their language?’

‘No.’

‘Not a word?’

‘Not a word.’

‘So… uh… how good is their English? I mean, I tried to find out about this before I came, but I couldn’t get a straight answer.’

‘There isn’t a straight answer. Some of them… maybe most of them, don’t… ’ Her voice trailed off. She chewed her lip. ‘Listen, this is gonna sound bad. It’s not meant to. The thing is, we don’t know how many of them there are. Partly because they keep themselves hidden, and partly because we can’t tell the difference between them… No disrespect, but we just can’t. There’s a few individuals we have dealings with. Maybe a dozen. Or maybe it’s the same five or six guys in different clothes, we just can’t tell. They speak some English. Enough.’

‘Who taught them?’

‘I think they just kind of picked it up, I don’t know.’ She glanced up at the rear-view mirror, as though there might be a traffic snarl he was distracting her from dealing with safely. ‘You’d have to ask Tartaglione. If he was still with us.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Tartaglione was a linguist. He came here to study the language. He was going to compile a dictionary and so forth. But he… ah… disappeared.’

Peter chewed on that for a couple of seconds. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘You do drop lots of little morsels of info, don’t you, if I only wait long enough… ’

She sighed, annoyed again. ‘I already told you most of this stuff when I first met you, escorting you off the ship.’

This was news to him. He strained to recall their walk together, on that first day. The words had evaporated. All he recalled, vaguely, was her presence at his side.

‘Forgive me. I was very tired.’

‘You’re forgiven.’

They travelled on. A few hundred metres ahead and to the side of them, there was another isolated swirl of rain, cartwheeling along the land.

‘Can we drive through that?’ Peter asked.

‘Sure.’

She swerved slightly, and they ploughed through the whirl of brilliant water-drops, which enveloped them momentarily in its fairy-light display.

‘Psychedelic, huh,’ remarked Grainger, deadpan, switching on the windscreen wipers.

‘Beautiful,’ he said.

After another few minutes of driving, the shapes on the horizon had firmed up into the unmistakable contours of buildings. Nothing fancy or monumental. Square blocks, like British tower blocks, cheap utilitarian housing. Not exactly the diamantine spires of a fantastical city.

‘What do they call themselves?’ asked Peter.

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Grainger. ‘Something we couldn’t pronounce, I guess.’