by John Brunner
At the top of his Voice Aleuker shouted, ‘Keep calm! I have machinegun posts – ’
And the words were cut short by the sewing-machine vibration of those machineguns, stitching lines of death across the ranks of the attacking force.
Nonetheless, they had already achieved part of their goal. Three of the guests were coughing away their life-blood on Aleuker’s beautiful patio; others were sobbing and moaning from minor injuries; and now the torches – soaked in oil, no doubt – were being put to their proper purpose: they arced through the air and came landing on the roof of the house, thud-thud-thud.
‘Sir, please, what is happening?’ Anneliese whimpered, clutching at Hans.
He recovered his presence of mind with an effort, glanced down at her, and in the same moment saw that the skelter was a mere five steps away. It wouldn’t be more than a few seconds before someone else thought of making a run for it.
‘Come on!’ he blasted, dragging the girl to her feet, and pushed her furiously toward their way of escape.
‘But I don’t want to –’
‘Stay and you’ll get killed!’ Hans retorted, and forced her into the booth, his fingers automatically seeking the code for his home at Valletta. No time to think of what Dany would say; all that mattered was to flee.
Howls, shots, the crackle of flames taking hold, all vanished instantly –
And Anneliese screamed.
Hans wanted to, as well.
They were in his hallway. Facing the skelter, in the same chair where she had awaited his return from Sweden, as though she had arranged herself with care so this must be absolutely the first thing his eyes lit on: Dany.
Or rather, Dany’s body.
She had cut her wrists and was saturated waist to feet with drying blood.
INTERFACE K
Incomprehensibly
Our ancestors preferred
Putrefaction over evolution.
They were embalmed
Wrapped in sheets of lead
Or stored in coffins in a vault.
When my time comes
I want to grow into a stalk,
A leaf, a flower and an ear of corn.
– MUSTAPHA SHARIF
Chapter 11
His reaction was pure reflex, without calculation. His left hand flew up to cover Anneliese’s eyes while his right stabbed another code into the skelter, and between one breath and the next they were bitterly cold.
‘Error! Transmission error! Sometimes happens – nothing is perfect, I think I must have drunk too much, terribly sorry, what a horrible sight to have run across by accident!’ Gabbling. He heard her moan a little, but she was too overcome to form words.
At least, though, here in Sweden it was briefly light, low sun glinting on the snow-ridges beyond the windows. And the Erikssons’ corpses had safely gone to be incinerated. He could take her by the hand and lead her passive into the living-zone, inventing frantic reasons for the state of the house.
Her teeth chattered although the weak sunlight had raised the temperature above the freezing point. He continued with his meant-to-be-soothing flow of talk.
‘Get fire going in a second, don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything … ’
On the stone hearth, logs half-charred, ancient ash. He thought of the correspondence paper in the study, ran for it leaving her to stare wide-eyed and amazed at the dust, collected the entire stack and came back carrying a sort of torch already lighted at the end with the betraying truth about the ownership of the house. Damp, it burned poorly. But it did burn. (Goodbye the sheet to be featured in my secret files … ) In a box beside the fireplace, kindling which had rotted but not crumbled.
His hands trembled. He hadn’t built a fire in twenty years.
‘I’ll turn on the main heating in a moment,’ he promised. ‘I don’t come here often, you see. People don’t stay in one spot these days – I imagine Aleuker told you – we like to follow the warmer weather because it’s so easy and quick to travel, so in winter of course you leave places like this empty until the spring, head for a warmer climate … ’
She was shaking, shaking. Near the fireplace there was a low stool; she groped her way to it and sat down. The kindling caught and flames leapt high and yellow. (In imagination he could hear screams. Had the Maori extremists trapped many of his fellow guests in the pyre of Aleuker’s home? He shut off that line of thought.)
There were other questions bombarding him, such as how to conceal the lack of electricity. With relief he realized: she isn’t used to power, but I ought not to have mentioned the main heating for fear the oil is circulated by an electric pump!
‘Are there still policemen in your world?’ she said suddenly.
What? Hunkered down, tending the fire, he swiveled to face her.
‘You should tell the police about that dead woman,’ she went on.
‘How can I?’ The lie was instantly tailored. ‘I told you, we were taken there by a transmission error. Probably my fault as I said for having drunk too much, but even so … No, I might try a million skelter codes and never find my way back to the same place. I don’t even know what country we were in.’
Numbed by the cold, his fingers ached. He spread them at the fireside to rescue sensation. The chill referred to ghastly experiences in his childhood. Was it really so short a time ago, could the world really have improved so much since he was a ragged and half-starved waif?
‘You don’t even know what country?’ she repeated dully after a pause.
‘No, of course not. The skelter can take you anywhere in next to no time.’
She pondered that for a while, eventually gave a nod and went on staring at the flames.
‘Sorry about the mess everywhere,’ he ventured. ‘Like I said, I don’t come here very often.’
‘Then why did you bring us here now?’
‘Uh … ’ Yes, why? Quickly, quickly, a convincing reason despite the fog of alcohol. ‘Well, obviously we had to get away from Aleuker’s place, didn’t we? And what’s more’ – gravely, with an air of considerateness, fine! – ‘you haven’t had much chance to adapt to our modern world, according to what you told me. You’ve been overwhelmed by new ideas and new habits ever since Aleuker took you to New Zealand – ’
‘New Zealand?’ A cry. She jolted around on her stool.
‘Why … yes! Did you not even know where you were?’
Dumbly she shook her head. And forced out at length, ‘I thought maybe … the United States?’
The horizons of another world, Hans thought. With the concept came a sense of fresh confidence. The image of Dany’s corpse, so brilliantly red in his imagination, was a warning that the universe was poised to come crashing on his head. There was no real sense of loss involved; he had never actually loved his wife, just wanted to have a wife in an age when so many men were resigned to never achieving that goal.
But if no one apart from this ignorant girl so far knew that he had seen Dany dead, it shouldn’t be too hard to wriggle out from under the consequences.
The first step must be to mislead her away from understanding what she had seen. He drew a deep breath and rose to his feet.
Excusing himself, he went to inspect the heating system.
By a minor miracle, it was self-feeding, with a compressed air tank to start the process that required only a dozen firm strokes of a plunger, like an overgrown camping stove. A yellowish smoky flame answered the application of his lighter, turning blue as the burner scorched itself free of dust, and when he returned to the living-zone the registers were already uttering the first warm air.
Pausing in the doorway, he looked around with a grimace.
‘I should apologize! I’d no idea the place would get so filthy in such a short time … It must be very different here, by the way, than where you hail from.’
‘Where is here?’ she asked tremulously.
A brief hesitation. Safe? Well, worth risking, to gain her confidence.
‘We
’ve come to Sweden.’
Her response was a distracted nod. The gamble had paid off. For her, no doubt, it was a name on an old map, corners ragged from the attentions of termites, lacking referents.
She said, ‘No, not very different. Also at Festeburg nothing could be left for more than a day or two without becoming very dirty … Is that snow?’
She was gazing at the windows.
‘Snow? Yes, of course it is!’
‘I heard about it. But I never saw any before.’
Hans relaxed so violently he almost gasped. It was going to be easier than he’d dared to dream, convincing this youngster he was telling the truth about Dany. His mind fermented with ideas: leave her here, afraid to use the skelter without a companion, trapped for as long as proved necessary to sort things out … There was no evidence of his illegal trips, even in his dark-room, for the police to find; he could ask Karl Bonetti to confirm that Dany had made scores of suicide threats without putting any of them into practice; he could arrange to have his hallway redecorated so Anneliese wouldn’t recognize anything, or better yet he could move to another country, another continent …
It could all be done in forty-eight hours.
Too bad that he would have to sacrifice the would-have-been star entry in his secret files – but at the very edge of his mind hovered the idea that from now on he might not be paying so much attention to his hobby.
This girl Anneliese: given the way she’d been brought up, she might well be susceptible to the ancient notion that marriage was a woman’s only security. What would she desire more than security in this weird, unfamiliar world?
To have a young bride … Ho, ho! It must be a decade or more since a man in his thirties married a girl of seventeen!
He took a frenzied grip on himself, aware that he was still a little drunk despite the sobering shock of seeing Aleuker’s home attacked, and then finding Dany. It was too soon to let his dreams run away with him.
He said, ‘Anneliese – dear – I think you look tired. Should I prepare a bed for you? There’s a room you can sleep in, over there.’
He pointed toward the child’s room, forgetting that he’d left its door ajar and the weak sunlight would reveal the toys, books and scattered clothes. She smiled and turned her head, and instantly was bewildered.
‘You – you are married? You have children?’
Invention, quickly! Something that can’t be used against me!
His tone was so smooth it astonished him as he replied.
‘Ah, this is my old family home. You heard that there was – well, what we call the Blowup? And after that, plagues and epidemics?’
A nod. ‘I don’t understand much about it, but they did tell me. It must have been very terrible.’
‘Yes, it was…. Well, I had a sister. She died. And my parents are dead as well. I – ah – I never felt inclined to change things here, if you see what I mean.’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘But it was a long time ago. It’s foolish to live with the dead past. Now you are here, I have an excuse to clear away what I kept as mementos – no, sit down! Stay by the fire!’ Pushing her gently, one hand on her soft warm shoulder. Somehow his fingers remained in contact with her and they were looking at each other, eyes direct into eyes.
There was a stillness.
‘Poor little girl,’ Hans said at last. ‘To be cast adrift in this strange world … it must be awful. Trust me, though, and I’ll see you come to no harm.’
Unexpectedly from her bright dark eyes a pair of tears spilled over.
‘Thank you, sir,’ she muttered almost inaudibly.
‘Not sir! Call me Hans!’
‘Yes please. If you don’t mind …? Yes, it is a fearful new world for me, and I know so little about it. I can’t even find my way around, let alone make a living for myself. It is very kind of you to show such charity. You will be blessed.’
Upon which, with a sudden withdrawal into herself, she freed her arm from his touch and returned to her stool, gazing once more into the fire.
So many things that might contradict his lies! Letters with Eriksson’s name and address on – the rotting food from the deep-freeze, clearly stamped for consumption at the latest by forty years ago – irreplaceable newspapers which must go because though ignorant of Swedish Annieliese might read the dates on them, too …
It hurt him, it agonized him, to see these precious relics destroyed. But he drove himself to the task, mindful of Dany’s corpse waiting for him at home.
And other things had to go as well, for fear she might think to ask him later why, if he had been born in Belgium, his ‘family home’ should be in Sweden. The little girl’s books, punctiliously signed – her name had been Greta – though not her clothes, or not all of them, for she had been tall and well-built for her age while Anneliese was slight for hers, so some of them might come in useful. Doubtless at Festeburg with its limited resources, long before the same thing happened in the larger world, one had had to be content with other people’s cast-offs …
He breathed a vast sigh of relief on discovering that the girl had abandoned her stool for a long sofa, and lying on it had dozed off. That made his job far easier.
The deceased master of the house had owned a large wardrobe. He had been taller than Hans and rather fatter, but providentially took the same size in shoes. Warm in musty thick winter garments, Hans was able to trudge outside with those few articles he did not want to leave lying around for Anneliese to inquire about, yet dared not send to the incinerators for fear they would survive the flames and be recognized as antique. Most of these were luxury items, chiefly molded cosmetic jars and perfume bottles. He could have smashed them, but the noise might have awakened Anneliese.
The ground was frozen far too hard for him to dig a hole; for the time being he’d have to be content with hiding them in the snow.
Returning, bitterly cold, he found bedding and made up the child’s bed for her; she was short enough to find it tolerable, he judged. Then he carried her from the living-zone and tucked her in, removing only her shoes. She barely stirred, being deeply asleep by now.
His mind was full to the brim with two competing emotions: a sort of frustrated tenderness, as though this were his own child he was putting to bed, and a cold and calculating plan for the future, a tangled skein of deceit climaxing in arson to explain why eventually they would be unable to come back here …
At the edge of hearing: trickle, splash … What in the world? Oh, of course. A pipe frost-fractured in the main bathroom. The toilet pan, he found, had been frozen, predictably enough; now a wedge of ice bobbed in it as water dribbled down from the flushing valve behind.
But the Erikssons had been careful people. It took only minutes to locate a tool-kit in a kitchen drawer, which included a roll of siliconized tape. After making the repair, crudely but effectively, he inspected all the other piping he could find and concluded that there was no risk of further leaks.
Now, before leaving: what else? Obviously, light for Anneliese if she woke while he was gone and the short sub-arctic day was over. Festeburg had never accepted electricity, so she would be used to candles, and here were several, wicks damp and fizzing, all colors of the rainbow, meant for tête-à-tête dinner parties, not real illumination – but never mind. He set one by the bed, and matches which (he tried one) still struck well after all these years.
That, and a quick note telling her not to worry, he’d be back soon, would have to be that. He dared not delay too long before reporting Dany’s death, even though the Maori attack on Aleuker’s home would make it extremely improbable that anybody had noted the exact time of his departure from New Zealand. He had a good cover story, too; he would say that even if he fled he realized he didn’t want to confront Dany after their disagreement, so he made for the Gozo outlet instead and spent a while debating with himself as to whether he should ask Karl Bonetti to examine her and pronounce on her sanity. Then decided against the idea, and
finally made for home, to discover …
Yes, the claim would carry conviction, but only if he hurried now.
He propped up his note beside the candle, and on impulse kissed Anneliese’s forehead. She half-smiled in her sleep. As he turned away his heart ached with yearning and delight.
INTERFACE L
It Was laid down
That making the hajj to Mecca
Earned much merit for a man
Someone I know
Now makes the hajj twice a day
It takes about one minute thirty seconds
– MUSTAPHA SHARIF
Chapter 12
He walked straight past the disgusting ruin of Dany, heading for the phone. He dialed the police emergency code, and waited. Sometimes the phones in Valletta worked, and sometimes they didn’t.
This time they worked. A voice said grumpily, ‘Yes, police.’
‘Please send somebody here right away,’ Hans said, his voice shaking just a little. ‘It’s my wife. She’s dead.’
‘What?’
‘She must have killed herself while I was out. Here, make a note of my skelter code. I’ll disconnect the privateer.’
Less than two minutes later a uniformed sergeant appeared in the skelter, holding up a portable recorder. He said, ‘Repeat after me, please: I Hans Dykstra – do of my own free will – consent to the use of my skelter code – by law-enforcement officers – and understand – that on completion of these inquiries – I may require another code – confidential from the authorities … Thank you.’
He stepped into the hallway, his eyes fixed in dismay on Dany. A moment later another policeman appeared, and then after a slightly longer delay a harassed-looking man carrying a medical kit, immediately followed by a photographer.