Web of Everywhere

by John Brunner

  ‘I say your plan goes like this. You have by chance been brought together with a girl who is lost in the modern world. Aleuker, a busy man, with more friends, more women, more preoccupations than he could cope with, neglected her when he found her childhood conditioning had scarred her mind too deeply for her to be turned into a decent citizen of today’s world.

  ‘But you have the time, and the urge. Hating your wife, possessing her not as a person and a partner but as a trophy, a prize that all too many men these days can never aspire to, you suddenly realize there’s a chance for you to supplant her. What likelier target than a girl who’s lonely and miserable and frightened? In a few months, gratitude; in a year or so, divorce – Dany like any other woman can always find an eager youth wanting to share her bed – and after that marriage, legal binding marriage, with a teenage girl who’s been carefully prevented from involving herself with anybody except Hans Dykstra. It won’t be love, but you never understood what love is. You want to buy this child, as though she were a slave, and bind her to you with intangible chains.’

  The diagnosis was too terribly accurate for Hans to answer at once. He gulped air, swayed, blinked, at last found his voice again.

  ‘You dare to say that to me? You, who’ve done the same and worse to kids from all over the world? Spent your time and money hunting for orphans, boys as well as girls so long as they’re pretty and bright, seduced them into your bed and imprisoned them in your home and taught them just those jobs they can’t make use of anywhere else if they do decide to try and escape from you? What do you pay for the children you enslave?’

  ‘I pay what you can’t because you never had any,’ Mustapha said, and the words quavered unexpectedly. A glint from the fire showed, bewilderingly, that tears had gathered in his sightless eyes, and now of a sudden they spilled over and ran down his face.

  ‘What? What?’

  ‘I pay love.’ The poet gathered himself again, brushed at his itching cheeks. ‘I have never fettered any of my protégés. Of either sex. I have kissed and embraced and comforted those who never before in their lives were touched by another person except to be punched or slapped. I have broken my heart so many times it is held together with rivets like a shattered porcelain bowl, because I have always let go those I loved with the depths of my being when they said it was time for them to become themselves, to be individuals and not to depend on me any more. Compared to what you plan to make of this girl – a bunch of reflexes, a machine whose buttons you can press at will – I am sinless and without reproach.’

  The world turned red around Hans. Without volition he snatched at a poker lying on the side of the hearth, hot but not too hot to grasp, and used it to silence that accusing tongue.

  INTERFACE N

  Proverbially

  ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder’

  – Or so said they who are no longer with us.

  Likewise however

  ‘To be out of sight is to be out of mind’

  – I never knew which proverb to believe.

  You whom I love

  Stepped through the skelter yesterday.

  – Now I have had proof that both are true.

  – MUSTAPHA SHARIF

  Chapter 14

  ‘Who –? Hans! What –? Oh, God …!’

  An incredible confusion of slump, cry, run, exclaim, moan. It all happened in a time when he was out of touch with the universe; it sandwiched together, compressed, declined to be separated again.

  But that was a moment ago. This moment: Anneliese at the door of the room where she had been sleeping, staring at what the wan firelight showed, petrified by horror. Her dress was crumpled, and in a sense so was her face, for she had been lying on a fold in the pillows and a deep dent marked her left cheek like a sort of brand.

  Nobody, no matter how dull-witted, could have failed to add together a scene like this: prone by the hearth, a stranger unconscious, dark blood trickling out of his hair, and Hans still clutching the poker he had struck out with.

  He remained in a daze until she managed to utter the all-important question: ‘Have you – killed him?’

  ‘No, no!’ Hans’s mind seemed to rush back into normal operation; he could think again, discovered a cluster of excuses full-blown and ready for use.

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. But I know what he is.’

  She advanced a pace toward him, hands clenched, jaw-muscles lumping as though to restrain a scream, and waited for him to elaborate.

  Now I’ve got to pile yet another untruth atop the crazy pyramid I’ve already erected. Why? Why? How did I get tangled in this lunatic mess? I lost my temper, that’s all – first with Dany, then with Mustapha, both times with complete justification. And all of a sudden it turns out I’m snarled up as though I’ve been wrapped in barbed wire!

  Was I to know so many people would notice me leaving Aleuker’s that Mustapha would get to hear in a matter of hours?

  Oh, maybe I should have guessed. After all, I bought notoriety, didn’t I? By being the person who won Boris Pech his bet …

  I’m not myself. It’s all happened too fast. I claim to follow the Way of Life and I just used frenzied violence against a fellow human being. That’s not like me. It isn’t – I’m sure it isn’t in my real nature to do that!

  So I’ll be justified if I put the best possible light on things. I’ll atone later. When I’ve straightened matters out. After the inquest on Dany. After finding somewhere to live a long, long way away from Malta. I can just disappear from the awareness of my friends. My colleagues at work must be informed, naturally … but I can lose the people who knew me with Dany, I can start over somehow, I can –

  The rush of thought had to break off. Anneliese was staring at him, still waiting for the reply to her last question.

  He fumbled for the proper words.

  ‘I’m dreadfully sorry about this. But I imagine you’ve been told there are still criminals in our modern world?’

  ‘Y-yes … ’ Her voice was as faint as autumn wind.

  ‘This is one. Of the worst kind. What we call a code-breaker. A person who figures out how to use a private skelter, and sneaks in to rob people’s homes, and if he’s caught to kill the person who catches him.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Do you think I’d use this’ – brandishing the poker – ‘if I weren’t?’

  ‘I thought I heard you talking together,’ she ventured.

  ‘Well – well, of course! I wouldn’t have knocked him down on sight, would I? But when he couldn’t give a satisfactory account of his presence … Well, there was only one sensible course of action.’

  ‘I … ’ She shook her head. ‘I must have misunderstood. I believed that because of something Chaim invented, this didn’t happen anymore. Didn’t he devise what they call a privateer?’

  Hans cursed silently. Ignorant this girl might be; she was in no sense stupid.

  ‘Yes, but I’m talking about the sort of burglar who can get around a privateer. What one man can invent, another can evade. It’s very rare, but it does happen now and then.’

  ‘I–I see.’

  ‘There are always flaws in the best of systems. You get transmission errors, for example, like the one which – ’ He interrupted himself, momentarily experiencing a renewal of his former panic. The less often Anneliese was reminded about the ‘anonymous’ dead woman, the better.

  ‘But I’ve got to get you out of here.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Because where one code-breaker gets in, another may follow. Very often they work in gangs. If this one doesn’t report back in half an hour or so, his confederates may very likely come to see what’s happened … You poor girl! It must be absolutely terrible to have seen so much of what’s bad in today’s world, and so little of what’s good. I do promise you, it is possible to be happy and enjoy yourself and make plans for the future and see them fulfilled. I want to give you that. You deserve it.’<
br />
  In memory, an echo of Mustapha’s accusations … but he stifled it.

  ‘Where will you take me, then?’

  ‘A safe place. Just for long enough to sort this out. I shall have to tell the police, of course, and then I’ll have to have the skelter re-coded. It takes a few hours. I’m so sorry, I really am! Because what I most want to be doing is help you. You – ah – you don’t mind my wanting to help you?’

  All the color drained from her cheeks.

  ‘Hans, where would I be if there wasn’t somebody to help me? I could be dead! Couldn’t I?’

  Marvelous! Oh, marvelous!

  Hans opened his arms just in time as she rushed at him and buried her face in his shoulder and convulsed into sobs.

  There followed an unmeasured period during which she wept and he caressed her back through one thin layer of cloth and dreamed of the time when the cloth would no longer be there. How long would it take to persuade her, by slow degrees, that it was okay for her to strip in his presence?

  Too soon. Too soon! Keep your head, Hans Dykstra, and don’t push your luck.

  Eventually he drew back from her and murmured something about having to hurry. She nodded pliantly.

  ‘Just to be on the safe side,’ he said, ‘I guess I’d better tie this villain up so he can’t get away before the police collect him – ’

  ‘You will not send for them at once? They could be waiting here when his confederates come, couldn’t they?’

  Once more Hans chided himself for underestimating this girl’s native wit. How to get around that little problem –?

  Ah.

  ‘But suppose the police and the other code-breakers arrive together! You could be involved in another gunfight! You just escaped from one at Aleuker’s – surely you don’t want to risk another? Just do as I say, and everything will work out fine!’

  She raised no more objections, and within another five minutes they entered the skelter together and he pressed the code for a Way of Life refuge he had once visited in Bali. Anneliese might be disturbed at finding herself among committed heathens; still, the place had three great advantages. They took in anybody, gave help and never asked too many questions; they were always extremely busy and maintained no records, preferring to get on with their real work and forget about what happened yesterday; and very few people there spoke more than a smattering of English, let alone Flemish or Plattdütsh.

  They were received at the skelter door by a smiling, thirtyish woman garlanded with flowers; flowers were also braided into her black hair. Apart from that, she wore only a sort of kilt secured with a belt of woven leather from which dangled a small pouch. Anneliese’s fingers cramped painfully on Hans’s arm as she realized that by her standards the woman was shamelessly unclad.

  He murmured reassuringly, ‘You probably find this hard to believe … but you’re looking at a nun.’

  She turned wide disbelieving eyes to him. ‘A – a nun?’ she repeated.

  ‘What else do you call someone who has decided to dedicate her existence to helping others because of what she believes?’

  ‘I … ’ Anneliese’s voice failed her. Just as well; it would have complicated matters beyond bearing to try and fill in the details. A somewhat more exact term than ‘nun’ might have been ‘temple prostitute’ – but it would still have been wide of the mark. The concepts of the Way of Life were as subtle as any evolved by previous religions, and required a very open mind.

  By then, however, the woman was making them welcome with smiles, and for each of them a posy of fresh-picked flowers – which went a long way to assuaging Anneliese’s alarm – and inviting them with gestures to leave the small room in which the skelter was located and follow her down a quiet corridor walled with stone and lit at intervals with lamps set behind translucent paintings, all of various living organisms, from naked athletes to lowly bacteria shown magnified thousands of times.

  ‘It is the belief of these people that no harm should ever be done to any evolved creature,’ Hans whispered. ‘With one exception: if a superior creature may be saved from suffering thereby. They are willing to cure diseases even though it means killing germs – you follow me? – provided a human life can be made better because of it. You’ll find them very kind and very generous. This is a refuge which they keep open for anybody who wants to come to it: people for whom life is too much of a problem, who need to rest and relax and think things out, or people who are ill and have no friends or relatives to look after them … You don’t have to believe what they believe. They give what they can and leave it at that.’

  ‘I – I see,’ Anneliese answered. ‘Once I read a book about monks at the Pass of St Bernard in Switzerland, who had to help everybody lost in the snow. Is it like that?’

  ‘Yes, very like. Except you should say: people lost in the world.’

  He was infinitely relieved to find her so open-minded. Doubtless she would also be favorably impressed when she learned that no meat was ever eaten here because no follower of the Way of Life could kill an animal – he himself had never become a convert to total vegetarianism, but he had often had qualms of conscience about it. When it came to some of the rituals glorifying sensuality, on the other hand, Anneliese might well be completely repelled … but with luck she would have to stay here so short a time, she wouldn’t even hear rumors about that side of it.

  To an elderly, likewise nearly naked, woman of perhaps sixty who had retained an astonishingly attractive figure even though her face was wrinkled like an old apple – but wrinkled for the right reason, because she had talked and smiled and laughed a great deal all her life – he explained slowly in English the reason why he had brought Anneliese here. He referred to her parents’ fate, and then to the attack at Aleuker’s, and then to the burglar at his home where he’d taken her for safety, and the elderly woman nod-nodded every time she got the picture through the barrier of a half-comprehended language.

  ‘We shall help and take care,’ she said firmly. ‘Is a badness, so much hate and hurt. Will here be safe!’

  He asked Anneliese, ‘Do you think you can stand it here for a while, as long as it takes me to sort everything out?’

  She bit her lip.

  ‘I think so,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand why these people do what they do, but it must always be good to help people in trouble, I think. I don’t really understand why you’re helping me, either, but I am very grateful to you.’

  That encouraged him to embrace her on parting, and even to plant a chaste kiss on her lips: light, very brotherly, most out of keeping with the practices of the Way of Life … but luckily Anneliese didn’t notice the look of astonished disapproval that crossed the face of the old nun.

  He was humming as he stepped back through the skelter in Sweden, rehearsing the terms of the bargain he was going to strike with Mustapha: leave me alone, and I won’t report you for selling illegal codes. Fair?

  It would have been. Would have had to be.

  But Mustapha had disappeared.

  INTERFACE O

  The great courtesans

  Reported by old scandalmongers

  Notched up their respectable collections

  Of noblemen and servants and friends

  But never managed

  Because they could not manage

  What girls of the most respectable descent

  Take for granted in modern times –

  That they should sleep

  In seven beds on seven continents

  Incontinently in any given week….

  – MUSTAPHA SHARIF

  Chapter 15

  In the other of the two rooms of his home where nobody except his closest and most intimate servants entered – the first being the room with his secret skelter, the second not being his bedroom which had been shared over the years with an amazing range of partners – Mustapha Sharif waved aside with thanks that same boy who had tended Satamori’s wounds and pronounced himself capable of thinking clearly again. />
  Ali and Feisal, his body-servants, and Muley the chief scribe who was the third of his right hands – he had created that conceit for a poem, long ago – stood about him, exuding anxiety so fiercely he did not need eyes to read their expressions.

  ‘It must be done as it was done before,’ Muley said in a sententious voice.

  ‘No.’ Mustapha rubbed his forehead; his head still ached, but a cold compress and a salve and a glass of sweet mint tea with a pain-killing drug dissolved in it had brought his body’s agony under control. He said again, ‘No, not in any detail the way it was done before. Instead of dealing solely with a conscious criminal, we now have to take steps to ensure the safety of an innocent girl, barely more than a child, for whom this – this person has conceived a fate worse than imprisonment. He plans to put shackles on her mind, cripple her in a way which no bodily restraint could match. He is moreover unaware of what evil he is hatching … Muley, I trust you as I trust myself, and sometimes more so. Judge in accordance with what you believe a man who is married, who chose a woman older than himself, not altogether intelligent, confined her to him by legal bonds, made her so miserable that she learned how to hate him and herself too, and on the basis of a spur-of-the-moment encounter, attained by sheer chance, decided he was going to abandon her – knowing, admittedly, that any woman still capable of standing, sitting, lying and spreading her legs is instantly desirable nowadays – but regardless of that reservation is capable of discarding her because he has a chance of deluding an ignorant teenage girl into the misconception that she must depend on him and him alone in order to keep afloat in a world she doesn’t understand … Well?’

  Muley plucked at his large lower lip; he was a portly man, full-jowled, pot-bellied, soft … because when he was a very small boy he had trodden on an inefficient anti-personnel mine, which did not kill him but did reduce him to a condition that in other ages had been more deliberately created. He also limped on his left leg.