Michel Faber - The Book of Strange New Things

Peter enjoyed working in the fields. It took him back to his younger days of strawberry-picking for cash-in-hand, except that this was honest toil and he wasn’t doing it because he was on the run from drug buddies he’d robbed. It wasn’t mindless drudgery, either, because you had to evaluate each plant to decide whether to leave it alone, tear bits off it, squeeze it, or pull it out.

The สีฐฉั harvested patiently and with quiet deliberation, more like gardeners than slave-driven serfs. They wore their gloves as usual. Whenever these became too muddy, they would stop for a while to wipe them free of excess dirt or adjust the fit. Sometimes they just sat back and rested for a few minutes. When they’d accumulated a basketful of plants, they would carry it to the edge of the field, where half a dozen nets were spread out. Onto these nets they would distribute the different parts of the plants, each part according to its destiny. It had taken Peter quite a while to get the hang of which bits went on which pile, but he believed he had it sorted now. He was no longer a liability; he was a fellow-worker. And he worked harder and faster than any of them.

After an hour or two, despite the fact that there were probably still lots of moribund plants hiding in amongst the resilient ones, the harvesters — mindful of their limited energy — moved on to the next phase. This was the part Peter liked best, because it really did require vigour and stamina — two qualities the สีฐฉั were not overly endowed with. They were all right at carrying the produce from the fields back into the settlement, for each net could be carried as slowly, and as haltingly, and by as many people, as the weight of its contents demanded. But there was a task which allowed no slack: the making of meat. Beefsteak, lamb, bacon, veal: cunning simulacra of these were favourites among the largely carnivorous USIC personnel, but they weren’t easy to create. They required violent effort — not the killing of an animal, but the relentless pounding of whiteflower plants that were on the brink of death. Only the most swollen, senile specimens were chosen. When the water-gorged flesh was pummelled with a stone, the weakened capillaries of the plant diffused a characteristic flavour through the pulpy mess. With each pound, the mess became more elastic and homogenous, until it could be left to solidify into dense lumps which, when carved and seasoned, looked and tasted uncannily like meat. The สีฐฉั pummelled gingerly, one or two blows at a time. Peter pummelled like a machine.

So absorbed were Peter and the สีฐฉั in their work that they didn’t notice, until it was too late, the arrival of the swarm.

One of the สีฐฉั shouted something Peter half-understood, because it contained the same root word for ‘foreign/alien/unexpected/strange’ that was in ‘The Book of Strange New Things’. Smiling in pleasure at this further proof of his progress in the language, he looked to where the person was pointing. At the perimeter of the plantation, barely discernible as anything more than a low mist of pinky-grey, was the horde of bird-like creatures Peter had seen marching past the USIC base.

His first impulse was to whoop with delight and urge his friends to enjoy the spectacle. But the สีฐฉั were obviously alarmed — and with good reason. The creatures waddled silently into the whiteflower and within seconds a large swathe of the field was obscured by their quivering bodies. Peter ran through the fields to get a closer look, but he knew, he already knew. These animals, these adorable critters, these chicadees, duckaboos, woglets or whatever other cute names they might be given, were rapacious vermin, and they were here to eat the crop.

Mindless as maggots, they hunkered into the juicy whiteflower, making no distinction between old plants and young plants, hard buds and flaccid leaves, flower or stalk. In their downy grey heads, muscles pulsed as they chewed and chomped. Their spherical bodies shivered and swelled and were not satisfied.

Instinctively, he reached down and seized the nearest of them and yanked it free of its feast. At once, his forearm got an electric shock. Or that’s how it felt, as the frantic creature lunged round and clamped its fangs into his flesh. He hurled it away in an arc of his own blood. He tried kicking at the creatures, but he was bare-legged apart from his sandals, and a vicious bite on one of his calves sent him reeling backwards. There were too many of them, anyway. If he’d had a cudgel, or a gun… a machine gun, or a fucking flamethrower! Adrenalin connected him with a younger, angrier Peter, a pre-Christian Peter who was capable of punching a man’s nose until it splintered, capable of smashing the windscreen of a car, capable of sweeping a long row of fragile knick-knacks off a mantelpiece in a convulsive gesture of hatred, except that he was capable of nothing now, and his adrenalin was useless, because all he could do was fall back and watch this horde consume the fruits of his people’s labour.

Those of the สีฐฉั who weren’t Jesus Lovers had better things to do than stand and watch. The fate of their plantation was obvious. They hurried to the piles of harvested whiteflower and shouldered the nets, heaving them off the ground. They knew that the pests would eat systematically from one end of the field to the other, so there was still time to carry away what was already in the bag, so to speak. The Jesus Lovers swayed anxiously back and forth, torn between their need to salvage the crop and their concern for Peter. He approached them, intending to help them carry the load, but they cringed and swayed all the more. A weird, disturbing sound issued from their heads, a sound he hadn’t heard before. Intuition told him it was the sound of lamentation.

His arm, stretched out toward them, dripped blood into the soil. The bite was not just a puncture, but had lifted a flap of skin. His leg, too, was grisly.

‘You will die, you will die!’ moaned Jesus Lover Five.

‘Why? Are those things poisonous?’

‘You will die, you will die!’ ‘You will die, you will die!’ ‘You will die, you will die!’ Several of the Jesus Lovers had joined in the moaning. Their raised voices, jumbled together, so different from their usual gentle utterances never spoken out of turn, unnerved him.

‘Poison?’ he asked loud and clear, pointing at the swarm of vermin. He wished he knew the สีฐฉั word for ‘poison’. ‘Bad medicine?’

But they did not reply. Instead they hurried away. Only Lover Five hesitated. She’d been in a strange state all through the harvest, hardly working, mostly watching, occasionally lending just one hand — her left — to a simple task. Now she came to him, walking as if drunk or in a daze. She laid her hands — one glove grubby, the other clean — on his hips, then pressed her face hard into his lap. There was nothing sexual in her intent; he doubted if she even knew where or what his genitals were. He guessed she was saying goodbye. And then she was hurrying after the others.

Within minutes, he stood alone in the whiteflower fields, his injured arm and leg itching and burning, his ears filled with the hideous noise of hundreds of rodent mouths gnashing on slimy pulp that, only a few minutes before, had been destined for transformation into bread, lamb, beancurd, ravioli, onion, muสีhroom, peanuรี่ buรี่er, chocolaรี่e, สีoup, สีardine, สีinnamon and a host of other things.

When Peter limped back to his church, he found a pickup truck parked outside and a USIC employee called Conway sipping from a $50 bottle of pop. A short, bald man in immaculate lime-green overalls and polished black boots, he cut a remarkable contrast to Peter’s filthy, blood-spattered appearance.