by John Brunner
‘There is a little smell of death, but it is so faint, it is more likely to issue, I think, from food which has rotted through several summers and been frozen again. Those documents: they say where we have come to. Do they also hint at what became of the people who lived here?’
Forgetful, Hans shook his head. Mustapha was looking at him directly and his eyes were bright in the lamp bèam. It was not they which were at fault, but the nerves serving them. At first Hans had suspected that the poet was lying about being blind; he moved so surely about the room in which they’d met. Seeing eyes, inescapably one assumed that they saw.
Recovering almost at once, he said, ‘No, but we can dismiss fallout, I think. This area must have been well out of range of the big blasts at Kiruna and Trondheim.’
Reflexively he confirmed that statement with a glance at his radiation-counter, even though it had remained silent. At most places he went to in the line of duty as a recuperator it beeped incessantly, and he had to sort through weathered industrial junk hampered as much by its distracting row as by his lead-impregnated suit.
‘One would have expected that, yes,’ Mustapha murmured. ‘Disease, possibly? So many epidemics were imported here by the skelter … There are other rooms. For the sake of your “after” pictures, Hans, you go into them first.’
With an ironical little bow.
Sourly, Hans complied, mentally agreeing with the other’s guesswork. Sickness after killing sickness had exploded like shrapnel from the few surviving reservoirs in less fortunate areas of the world into those whose inhabitants had neglected their immunization shots, as though they were convinced that they bore charmed lives. What, of the many that came this way, had carried off the Erikssons? Could it have been plague, diphtheria, cholera, rabies, smallpox –?
No, none of these. Violence.
In the small room adjacent to the study a child’s skeleton lay in bed. The coverlet had been soaked with blood, urine and excrement, then with the liquid foulness of rotting flesh, and dried into a hard loathsome lump.
‘Ah,’ Mustapha said with the air of a man whose favorite suspicion has been confirmed. ‘I take it we have stumbled on an actual body?’
Hans swallowed against nausea, though it was far from the first time he had chanced across similar horrors, and lowered the camera with which he had been ready to take one of what Mustapha scathingly referred to as his ‘after’ pictures. Customarily what he did at each of these lost homes was, as it were, to reverse the effects of time: record on his arrival the state to which the passage of years had reduced the place, then with much care and labor restore it to something like the way it must have looked when it was in regular occupation. ‘Before and after’, as the old advertisements used to say.
But a scene like this … No, he didn’t want it included in his report.
Then, with that incredible depersonalized interest which at first Hans had privately termed callousness, but now knew was something his vocabulary furnished no name for, Mustapha slipped past, located the bed, ran his hands lightly over the disgusting mass until he located the shape of the skull.
‘A child,’ he said. ‘Boy, girl?’
Hans surveyed the room, torch-beam dancing wildly on the irregular surfaces of a table, a half-open closet, a shelf of toys and books with brightly colored pictures. On a chair-back, casually deposited, two pathetic scraps of cloth, the parts of a bikini.
‘Girl.’
‘And young, by the size. Ten, twelve?’
‘More likely ten. So far as I can guess from the toys and books without disturbing them.’
He thought in passing: funny, one had the impression that Swedes were casual about their bodies, that a child so young would be let run naked … but perhaps like so many other preconceptions it was a trick of perspective. Around the Mediterranean what had been believed about Swedes in the old days, fifty years ago, would logically have been based on the atypical behavior of expatriates.
A hall of distorting mirrors. The whole world had been turned into one – and sometimes the distortions had been mistakenly accepted for reality. It was going to be an infinitely long, infinitely painful task to set the consequences right.
‘Perhaps in the adjacent room, then,’ Mustapha said, ‘we shall find traces of her parents. Lead the way again, if you please.’
There, in the master bedroom, two more skeletons, one sitting up in a twin bed, the other sprawled on the floor nearby, adherent to the ruin of an Icelandic pony rug. Among the shreds of dried ancient meat clinging to the ribs it could be seen that the latter’s breastbone and one shoulderblade had been shattered. Also, on the wall behind, there was a pit such as might be made by a deformed and tumbling bullet.
Taking Hans’s arm in a light grip, not to be tightened – and his fingers were dreadfully strong! – except if his companion tried to shake it off, Mustapha demanded a description in vivid detail before crossing the threshold, and at once began to compile an explanation.
‘Ah, it comes clear. They were too casual with their skelter code, because in those days possession of a skelter was something to boast about. One midnight they were awakened by the arrival signal, and the intruder proved to be a thief – ’
‘Not a thief,’ Hans cut in, dully pleased at being able to make the contradiction. ‘A thief would have ransacked the house for money and valuables, left drawers and closets open everywhere. There’s no more disorder than you’d expect in a lived-in home with a child around.’
‘Someone who didn’t come here to steal, then,’ Mustapha accepted, unperturbed. ‘But who wanted his presence kept secret albeit at the cost of three lives. A spy or saboteur – even a whole gang of saboteurs.’
‘People playing skelter roulette?’ Hans offered, hoping for a second chance to edit his companion’s analysis.
‘No, it’s too recent a phenomenon. By the time that fad caught on they would have scrapped the notepaper with the code on it, perhaps if they were rich enough installed a privateer because it was about then that they started to come on the market. But I gathered that the skelter is an extremely old model?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very well, I believe in my saboteurs. Memory reports some kind of industry at Umeå; it was a city of moderate importance, a convincing target.’
He stood silent for a long moment, inhaling with nostrils flared, and then unexpectedly turned on his heel. Hans said, unconsciously rubbing the spot on his arm where those deceitfully gentle fingers had rested, ‘You’re leaving already?’
‘Yes. Thank you for your assistance. I have what I came for. I wish you success in garnering what you came for too.’
‘When – when shall I see you again?’
‘When I have something else to offer that’s just as good.’ With an enigmatic smile. ‘Which may not be soon, but then this site should occupy you for quite a while, no? So I shan’t hurry. Well, goodbye, and thanks again.’
There was a question Hans always wanted to ask at this moment of separation: whether he was Mustapha’s sole customer for illegal codes. Now, once again, it tremored on his lips … but, once again, it remained unuttered. There was a faint wash of blue light from the skelter. He was alone.
Almost at once other thoughts were chased from Hans’s mind by a surge of relief at being able to get ahead so quickly with his main task. The more he studied the house, the more convinced he became that, once restored to its pristine condition, it was going to be the star of his secret collection of words and pictures which – as Mustapha had reminded him – no one else must learn of until after his death.
Then, they would bless his foresight and dedication to the cause of history. If news of what he was doing leaked out while he was still alive, though, he would undoubtedly be braced, no matter how high-minded his motives. There were few absolutes left on Earth. The right to conceal a private skelter code had to be among them.
Well, now he could stop theorizing about the Erikssons’ fate and get rid of their remains. Not before
time, either. Close on two-thirds of the planet’s population had been killed by violence or disease within twenty years of the marketing of the first skelters; as though it felt chilly in the shadow of that tidal wave of death, men now were paranoid about the presence of corpses, and he was not immune.
Luckily, in the course of his regular work he had gained access to garbage-disposal codes which ensured delivery straight to the hot heart of a furnace. Presumably when the Erikssons were killed such codes had not existed, or the intruder would have bundled up the bodies along with the blood-stained bedding and rugs, made the beds afresh and left the house looking as though the owners had dropped down to the tropics for a few days and might return at any moment. Exactly as he planned to do now.
He felt fortunate that he didn’t have to buy his garbage codes. They came expensive. They had to. They made it so easy to destroy the evidence of crime, especially murder.
He decided to attend to the chore right now instead of delaying it until his next visit. Used as he was to entering long-abandoned premises legitimately in the course of his profession – though never private homes, only factories and warehouses – and finding not two or three bodies but great piles of them, charred a little by pyres which other people had been too weak to keep alight until they themselves died, he found he hated the idea of coming back to this house that once must have been very beautiful and finding corpses in residence. It would make him feel too much like a trespasser.
He didn’t bother to rehearse any prayers as he consigned the bodies to the skelter. In Northern Europe these people would presumably have been either atheist – in which case they wouldn’t have cared – or Christian. As a moderately devout follower of the Way of Life he regarded Christianity with the same revulsion as black magic.
Let their evil Lord claim his own.
When the distasteful task was over he relaxed and spent a long while roaming from room to room in the house, everywhere finding new things to take pictures of, then disturb very delicately for fear time might have made them brittle, then, reassured, pick up and marvel at. To think that this family, probably not exceptionally prosperous, had been able to buy and use, from new, objects that today would fetch a small fortune in the antiques market! He found a camera better and more costly than his own, a range of long-playing records in a well-sealed cabinet with a glass door any of which would attract bids from a hundred eager buyers, clothing of virtually imperishable synthetic fiber from which the dust fell away as he lifted it to reveal the brilliance of unfaded dyes, and more and still more whichever way he turned …
Abruptly he realized that his fingers and toes were growing numb despite his climatized garb, and his throat was stiffening, a sure sign of incipient frost-dehydration. There was, he remembered, a thermometer apparently in working order on the wall of the kitchen; when he consulted it, he discovered with alarm that he had been blithely wandering around at minus twenty Celsius.
Time for home. When he came back he must bring a heater.
INTERFACE C
This I am compelled to utter in another tongue
But it is a truth important enough to be spoken:
Some of those who call a journey-map a ‘route’
Pronounce it ‘root’ and cannot tell the two apart;
Others say ‘rout’ which means ‘to put to flight’
And oddly also ‘to pull up by the roots’ …
It is as though the genius of their language
Gave them warning in advance, which they ignored.
– MUSTAPHA SHARIF
Chapter 3
To possess two private skelters: it was not unheard-of. To own three: that was remarkable, but certain successful persons, mostly working for the planetary authorities, had attained that goal and shuttled back and forth between three homes.
To own three sited all in the same building, even though the building was large and sprawled into many shady colonnades, white-glittering domes, towers of marble and courts where lizards darted at the feet of priceless statues … That was unique. And their unique proprietor was the man who, some declared, was the greatest living poet: Mustapha Sharif.
But if anybody said as much in his hearing, he would wryly observe that there was very little competition nowadays.
Possession of his third skelter, high in a minaret where five times daily an elderly and arthritic muezzin came to call to prayer those of the local people who had not been seduced into following the infidel creed, the Way of Life, was not an achievement he advertised. The world might assume the existence of the first skelter; so famous a man was bound to have one at least. The lucky ones might even, by invitation, pass the privateer which guarded it and lavish on their host praise for the splendor of his home, which he could not see but always modestly said was worth maintaining for the pleasure it gave to others.
Equally, once having arrived whether by skelter or on foot or camel-back, visitors might guess at a second skelter. His estate was on rocky ill-favored ground, long unclaimed, but a skelter could and did bring in sweet water, delicate foods, relics salvaged from elsewhere on the planet.
But the third … Only two, out of all his many servants, were even aware that it was located behind that locked door on the last but one landing of a twisted staircase made of drab, worn tiles.
There was no light in the room, only a current of warm air from a high-set ventilator. He emerged into it, swiftly and deftly exchanged his climatized suit – necessary for the visit to Sweden – for his usual burnous and sandals, and after listening very carefully for the sound of footsteps unlocked the door, stepped out, re-locked it. The heat of Africa brushed him like fine wires, making his chill skin tingle.
On the point of turning downward on the staircase, he checked and changed his mind and instead took the last short flight up to the rooftop. He needed time to digest what he had learned.
There was a stool set out near the parapet. He felt for it, positioned it where he could lean comfortably forward, and faced the direction of ancient Luxor, which – so he had been told – was in line-of-sight from this tower. But he had scarcely begun to learn to think in pictures before he lost his vision. Instead he thought in terms of his other senses: the hot dry air bore him sounds that he readily identified, scents that he knew as intimately as his own hunger or thirst or fatigue. There were dates, camel-dung, humanity, cook-fires, growing crops, spices, wet cloth tentered on poles to bleach, and several other distinguishable aromas in the air today. The odors of life, not of death!
There was going to be another poem. He could feel the shy probing of its first tendrils at the back of his mind, those tender early shoots which eventually would knot and crack flagstones into fragments.
He toyed with a phrase or two. The images were elusive. It was too soon yet. But the time would come.
Content to wait, preferring not to wonder whether eventually someone might read and understand his work rather than simply admire it, and draw a correct conclusion about his inspiration, he turned his mind to another matter: Hans Dykstra.
He had made a mistake in choosing that man to go with him to the nine lost homes. There had better not be a tenth.
In the beginning, it had seemed that Hans would be an ideal companion. There were others who might have been equally eager to buy illegal disused codes, but they were greedy, like his own former partner … whom he had been compelled to lose, regretfully but with small compunction, when he started to pilfer items rare enough to be valuable in such quantities that the authorities grew suspicious and clamped down. He was buried, conferring the life of his body on a field of corn.
To come upon somebody who wanted to leave, as a personal bequest to the whole of mankind, a series of documented samples of the past, one typical family home from each major culture of the pre-skelter period, but was content to store up his reports until he was safely dead – yes, that had seemed like a tremendous stroke of luck.
But Mustapha was wise to the ways in which a man could change. He
knew beyond any possible doubt that the idea of being famous in his life time was eroding Hans’s original determination as surely as a river erodes the lip of a waterfall.
Sooner or later be would make a mistake. Sooner or later he would be tempted beyond endurance; he would carry home with him some precious object – more likely to be a tool, perhaps a camera, than a mere ornament – and it would be recognized by someone aware that Hans Dykstra was not entitled to possess it … There was a great deal left from the heyday of mankind’s inventiveness, but not so much that it was impossible to figure out such things.
And when that moment came, there would be trouble. Dreadful trouble. Therefore the moment had better not arrive at all.
More content after having reached that decision, Mustapha relaxed into pure enjoyment of the sounds and scents that the breeze bore to him. He was glad he had chosen to settle here in Middle Egypt; it was a place of strong vivid stimuli, its wind alive with grit from the deserts to the west, its sunshine harsh and its night air cold, its water flavored with the essence of inner Africa, and many, many of its rocks chased with inscriptions left by long-dead hands.
It was about time he went back to the Luxor ruins and refreshed his fingertip acquaintance with the statues and the stelae.
Establishing himself here had not been easy. There was much history in the area, both ancient and modern, with a great gap in between the two. First, a community had flourished and faded in Pharaonic times. Then, for a long while, nothing much happened; the life of a small village repeated and repeated itself. And then they built the Aswan High Dam – not the first, which did little damage, but the second newer dam – and stole away the annual floods from the peasants lower down and rendered millions of hectares down-river infertile, sterile, useless. Starving, whole villages of people had trudged south seeking new homes, and an exhausted few had given up the journey here where it was possible to raise subsistence crops and pasture a small herd of goats.