Web of Everywhere

by John Brunner

  ‘What? Oh, the wild girl? Badly, damn it! In fact I’m minded to quit trying. I never realized before, not all the way down, how horrible the prejudices of the past must have been. Nor how crippling they could be to an innately intelligent child. I mean, she is effectively still a child. I’ve tried everything I can think of: persuasion, pleading, force of example, formal instruction, bribery … Doesn’t work. They used to talk about people being afraid of their own shadow. What was done to her made her afraid of her own substance!’

  ‘But she’ll be around this evening?’

  ‘I guess maybe. I told her to join us. Don’t waste time on her, though. It won’t be worth it.’

  All of a sudden a melodious chime rang out from a bell mounted on the wall of the house, and everybody on the patio glanced reflexively in that direction. Instantly regaining his usual cordiality, Chaim jumped up, glancing at his watch.

  ‘I just lost my bet! It isn’t nearly eight o’clock yet, and somebody has found the way here! I wonder who it can be.’

  INTERFACE H

  Doubtless you know better O my beloved

  Than to try and make me jealous of a rival.

  The world holds so few intelligent lovely girls

  I’d feel it selfish to keep one all to myself.

  Do though choose for lovers men I can respect.

  Otherwise I shall lose all respect for you.

  – MUSTAPHA SHARIF

  Chapter 8

  At first puzzled, then becoming annoyed, Hans advanced along the high-ceilinged room into which the skelter allegedly belonging to Chaim Aleuker had delivered him. Its privateer was off, which fitted with the notion of a party open to all comers. The room, however, didn’t. At the far end there were long tables over which were draped lumpy white cloths, concealing perhaps plates of food and glasses and bottles of liquor; on the walls were fine pictures, of the sort one might imagine Aleuker buying; but there was no sound, not even music, nothing otherwise to suggest a festive celebration.

  Was it just that by some miracle he had arrived ahead of everybody else? Or was the whole affair a cruel hoax after all? One had heard that in the rarefied atmosphere of vast wealth and privilege people developed a distorted sense of humor …

  Then a door opened suddenly and a pair of servants emerged: a footman and a maid in identical uniforms of green trimmed with white braid. Both of them were braced, of course; no one with free access to the skelter system had reason to accept menial employment. The girl had a very ugly face, and a scar ran down from her left temple to vanish under the high collar of her jacket. Nonetheless her figure was excellent: full-bosomed, small-waisted, broad-hipped. Hans wondered briefly why she had been so stupid as to get braced when she could have had her pick of a thousand eager men.

  They wished him a good evening – yes, of course, here it must indeed be early evening – and the footman requested a sight of the card which had brought him here. Having studied it, he asked Hans’s name, repeated it under his breath, then beckoned the newcomer toward the windows that had been curtained until a second ago when the maid drew the drapes aside.

  Revealed was a magnificent patio framed by greenery, with the sea beyond, where men and women in incredibly elegant clothing were gazing toward him with an air of expectancy.

  Hans’s mouth grew instantly dry. He had left home in such haste, he had not bothered to change out of his regular clothes: a short-sleeved shirt and crumpled pants of cotton drill, light enough to be tucked inside a climatized suit, the pockets of both bulging with uncounted oddments. Moreover he was unshaven and his hair was in a bird’s-nest tangle.

  ‘This way, sir,’ the footman urged. ‘My employer is eager to make your acquaintance.’

  It was too late to back down. Besides, he had already recognized the famous Aleuker, and he was indeed beaming with what seemed to be unfeigned pleasure. The maid slid aside a section of the floor-to-ceiling window, and in the footman’s wake Hans passed through to confront his host.

  Neither of them made any move to shake hands. The habit had been mislaid; there had been too many fatal contagious diseases. On the other hand, close friends kissed in public far more often than had been customary in the old Western culture: a gesture that converted mere liking into willingness to share risks. Very strange. Hans cursed his head for being crowded with irrelevant data. All these faces, some white, some brown, some yellow …

  ‘A great pleasure!’ Aleuker was saying warmly. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t quite catch your name when my man repeated it…?’

  ‘Hans Dykstra,’ he heard himself mutter. ‘I’m a recuperator, from – uh … ’

  He hesitated. Mentioning his profession was all right; it was respectable and respected, provided the practitioner was good at it. What he didn’t know was whether it was correct form to refer to one’s place of residence in a circle as exclusive as this one. Respect for privacy these days notoriously escalated in proportion to the square of one’s wealth.

  But Aleuker was looking expectant, so he completed the statement. ‘From Malta. Valletta, to be exact.’

  ‘Ah-hah? Haven’t been there for ages,’ Aleuker said, while Hans belatedly considered a corollary to his last assumption: suppose that obsession with the maintenance of privacy diminished as the means available to protect it increased? ‘Used to have a boy-friend there. Maybe you know Christos Micallef?’

  Hans shook his head.

  ‘Lucky you. She’s a thorough-going bitch.’

  ?

  But before he could speak again a bell chimed, and Aleuker was suddenly looking past him, into the house, instead of at him.

  ‘Hmm! Looks as though the rush is starting. I hope we didn’t underestimate the numbers – we had the whole project computed, but … Well, that’s my headache, not yours. Have a drink, make yourself at home, excuse me while I go welcome the number two.’

  Small wonder, Hans realized as he turned and recognized the second arrival. It was the girl he had nearly met at Oaxaca. Aleuker was grinning from ear to ear. His jubilation faded a little, though, when her boy-friend followed her.

  That should have been amusing. Hans, however, was in no mood to find anything funny. Frankly, he was scared at his own temerity. He was as out of place here as a diehard Christian at a Way of Life ritual. Maybe he ought to leave again at once?

  No, the hell with that idea. He’d brazen it out for an hour at least, make himself scarce when his absence had lasted long enough for Dany to be contrite. His main purpose had been achieved: he was here, he’d spoken to Aleuker personally, even though he fully expected he’d be forgotten again in five minutes, and it wouldn’t worry anybody if he hung around in some quiet corner for a while.

  He advanced on a passing waiter and helped himself to a glass of wine, and, turning away, found himself being smiled at by a genial man in blue suède.

  ‘Thanks for winning me my bet with Chaim!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s not every day of the year one can take money off that fellow. He insisted, you see, that according to his computers – mine really, but what the hell? – nobody would figure out those silly clues of his and arrive here before eight p.m. local. And then up you turn and blow his deadline to smithereens!’

  ‘Uh – did I?’ Hans muttered, restraining himself from consulting his watch because it would show some utterly irrelevant hour.

  ‘Why, yes. You clocked in well under the wire,’ the man in blue declared. ‘By the way, I’m Boris Pech. Did I hear you say you’re a recuperator?’

  ‘Not the Boris Pech?’ Hans blurted.

  ‘What?’ The older man blinked. ‘Oh – oh, I guess you might say so. Advancement Authority, if that’s what you mean. But I was about to ask you: do you ever work Europe, by any chance?’

  ‘Uh … Yes, now and then. When we get clearance to dig over a zone that’s been pronounced free of plague and radiation.’

  ‘Ah. Then I wonder if you’ve come across anything that might help us out of a tight corner. We’ve combed North America
, Russia, what little of Japan we can get at, without joy, and Europe’s our last hope really, though I guess there may be something in Brazil … But of course Brazil is about the most unhealthy spot on the planet nowadays.’

  ‘So I’m told,’ Hans muttered. There was even less news from the interior of South America currently than from Central Africa or China. It was no simple case, like the latter two, of people having decided that skelters were evil and therefore being apt to slaughter skelter-travelers on sight; there were bloody wars in progress as a score of petty local lordlings tried to carve themselves new empires, massacring those who tried to resist.

  ‘Well, the problem’s this,’ Pech went on. ‘A bunch of us landed a skelter on the moon last year, as you know, and doubtless you’ve been wondering why so far we haven’t made any use of the damn’ thing!’

  Hans nodded. He’d heard about that venture, announced as the first earnest of man’s ability to surpass the scientific achievements of the pre-skelter period, which so many people still looked back to as a kind of Golden Age. But he had never expected to find himself chatting casually with one of the experts responsible.

  Far off in his memory resonated something Dany had flung at him in a moment of inspiration during one of their frequent quarrels, and luckily never had the wit to re-use. It had wounded him. She’d charged that he was forever groveling at the feet of the past, scared of doing anything that might shape the future, even his personal future.

  It was true he got little encouragement to act otherwise. His contact with people who had new ideas and the leverage to put them into effect was limited to reporting on the caches of industrial goods he unearthed. His task was to describe and identify them, not dictate what use they should be put to.

  His one genuinely personal project would not be known until after his death … but that was merely sound sense, that decision.

  Aloud he said, ‘Yes, the point had been puzzling me. Why is it?’

  ‘Because our best measurements haven’t given us the transmission-span to closer than two centimeters plus or minus. Of course over such a long distance that’s too slack by an order of magnitude. Earthside the problem doesn’t exist; to be out by a couple of millimeters doesn’t signify and one can compensate automatically for crustal tides and other minor nuisances. So what we’ve all been dreaming of is a batch of those ultra-high-precision lasers that Zeiss of Jena were alleged to be working on when … ’

  Hans let him rattle on. He had not had the vaguest notion that the moon’s distance had been measured to within two centimeters, but he wasn’t about to admit it. Nor, come to that, was he going to do a lot of talking during the party. He was going to compel himself to listen.

  It was clear from the way Pech spoke that English was no more his mother tongue than it was Hans’s. Both he and Dany had been born to French and Flemish, he in Antwerp and she in a village near Liège.

  But Pech used this language with a fluency and vocabulary which made Hans sound like a backward schoolboy, even though he had decreed to Dany when they first got married that they should use English in private as well as in public. She had agreed that the proposal was sensible. English was the first or second language of more people who had survived the Blowup than anything else bar Chinese and Swahili, neither of which had been scattered paint-spray-fashion around the globe. But it sat uncomfortably on his mind, and he remained terribly aware of how small an area of its immense richness he had learned to exploit. And if Pech was typical of Aleuker’s friends …

  He was. So Hans stuck by his resolution, and almost at once found it was both an advantage – for a patient listener was automatically defined as ‘charming’ – and a shame. He seldom got on easily with strangers, and he had fully expected Aleuker’s friends to regard the treasure-hunt party as a joke. But they weren’t in the least patronizing. They clearly assumed that anybody who solved the cryptic clues deserved to be treated as equally well-informed, equally intelligent.

  That gave Hans a warm glow inside, marred only by the fact that he was obliged to stick to the ‘good listener’ rôle instead of – dare he? No! No! He must not mention what one day would add his own name to the roster of the famous, his secret project … (What the hell kind of wine was this, anyhow? Must be strong for him even to consider admitting the illegal things he was getting up to!)

  Never mind. To be treated by the members of this in-group as an equal, however temporarily, was an accolade. News had begun to be acceptable again during the past decade or so, as the race’s psychological sores began to heal, and with the dissolution of nations individuals made the headlines nowadays. Such individuals, in fact, as these: ‘Fred, have you met Hans who was the first to find the party?’ – and it was the Okinawan scientist Frederick Satamori, Deputy Director of the Skelter Authority (what would he think if he knew he was face to face with a criminal?); ‘Ingrid dear, I hear you lost your cats! Does that mean there are none left now?’ – and there he was commiserating with Dr Ingrid Castelnuovo the biologist who had just failed to rescue the domestic cat from extinction (and who was so much further along the Way of Life he was half-ashamed to admit his own adherence to the faith) …

  He had imagined these persons to be unreal, because unapproachable, heard of but never in contact with anyone he himself might have met. Yet that notion had to have been false. This dozen-odd of Aleuker’s closest friends, the winnowings of a vast acquaintanceship, these people with talents that would have been remarkable in any age, were mingling contentedly with the strangers who kept on pouring out of the unprivateered skelter – shy, plainly retiring men of advanced years who must have been through agonies of indecision before concluding that a chance to meet Chaim Aleuker made it worth taking advantage of the clues their scholarship enabled them to decipher; arrogant young student types clearly determined to prove they were a match for their elders; pretty un-bright girls, and a great many more pretty un-bright boys, who had ridden here on the shirt-tails of lovers with a higher IQ …

  Fantastic. And a lot of fun. Hans’s self-allotted hour was nearly up. He revised his deadline and decided to stay at least as long again.

  INTERFACE I

  Who is my neighbor?

  The unknown inquired.

  The teacher replied with a parable

  Concerning one who was going a journey.

  Who is my neighbor?

  I am asking it again.

  Pharisees and Levites by the million

  Pass by the other side of my skelter door.

  – MUSTAPHA SHARIF

  Chapter 9

  Cheerfully adrift on stimulating conversation, first-class liquor and delicious food – down here in the far south the sea still bred safe fish and much of the ground could be farmed in the old-fashioned manner provided it was protected from rain – Hans gloated privately over his vision of the morrow.

  He was going to make Dany weep, actually weep, with his vivid description of the unique occasion she had cheated herself out of by ruining his precious film … not, of course, that she would have figured out the clues that led here. He would imply, in terms broad enough for her not to misconstrue, that he’d have been happy to escort her to the party, deftly link her into discussions beyond her range, help her to leave behind an impression that while that guy Dykstra’s wife might not be too much to look at she must be pretty bright behind that quiet façade … He’d had to undertake similar chores for her throughout their married life, and since he was finding these élite strangers so pleasant he was confident he could have worked the trick in unprecedentedly distinguished company. For his benefit, if not hers.

  He caught sight again of Frederick Satamori, on the far side of the patio as he orbited from one primary of conversation to the next, always welcome, and thought of the enormity of the offenses he was committing by the scientist’s standards.

  This event would certainly have to be recorded in his secret files. One day somebody would read his account of this party and laugh aloud.

&nbs
p; He had hoped for another chance to speak to Aleuker; he had an opening gambit ready, for the presence of many plants in tubs and pots on the broad patio hinted that the owner might follow the Way of Life. But the opportunity eluded him. Basking in adulation, the inventor seemed to be holding forth to a large group of admirers every time he passed within earshot of Hans: always a different group, but always the same subject – the privateer.

  ‘When I think of what would have happened to the world without it …!’ someone said loudly, and Hans cynically glossed: ‘What about what happened to the world in spite of it?’

  Not that he actually spoke the words. In fact he was overcome by a silent shudder of agreement. Stripped of virtually every other means of long-distance transport, because the industry did not exist to replace the aircraft and ocean-liners wiped out in the Blowup, let alone the tankers and freighters and cargo-planes, and there was not enough oil to run the remaining trucks and cars, and the railroads had been allowed to decay in most advanced countries, mankind had had no viable alternative to the skelter. It was cheap, not very difficult to build, and extremely reliable.

  Yet it was itself the cause of the Blowup. Within a decade of being introduced it had turned sour. It had threatened to infect the human race with world-wide ochlophobia.

  Early models had to be open to anybody who punched the proper code, whether friend or enemy, because it cost tens of thousands to activate the power-crystals. They were not designed to be switched on and off, only to resonate in a permanent state of excitement. If they were turned off, they had to be sent back to the factory to be energized again, and that would set you back three-quarters of your initial outlay.

  In the terrible years following the Blowup it was touch and go whether any transportation system would survive, or whether every skelter on Earth would be smashed by crazy mobs sick of having bandits, criminals, JD’s and even foreign soldiers pouring into their towns. It had been the West that hit on the idea of shipping saboteurs through the skelter into ‘enemy’ territory, but when the East retaliated the privileged few who owned domestic skelters at that time lived – if they did live – to regret their investment. Skelters in the Combloc were all public, and could be guarded.