Web of Everywhere

by John Brunner

  Hence the existence of Way of Life refuges like this one all over Asia and Africa and the Pacific … and their absence in Europe and North America, places where not only was there no need to explain the causes of the Blowup, but so much damage had been done to the minds of the survivors that the notion of having strangers wander at will among them was untenable.

  Praise be for the childlike naïveté of that attitude. Without it …

  ‘Do as I say!’ Hans roared at Anneliese, and she flinched.

  ‘I am to get dressed with so many people staring?’

  No, no, it simply couldn’t be possible. It couldn’t be that he, Hans Dykstra, was condemned because a stupid girl was ashamed to show her nipples and her crotch … But he gathered his wits and without a word rushed the others from the room, catching them by the hands. Over his shoulder he cried, ‘Hurry! Hurry!’

  And she didn’t. Time leaked away while he and the monk and the nun stood irresolute in the corridor, and then another monk came into sight and called something in which Hans was able to detect the name of Muley Hassan, and his patience would endure no longer. He again flung wide the door of Anneliese’s room and found her red-faced and struggling to fasten her long drab dress.

  ‘What are you playing at?’ he demanded.

  She exclaimed in horror at having him intrude when she was incompletely covered. Over her bosom, the front-closing zipper was jammed at a height which most girls would regard as excessively modest, but she by contrast covered with both hands.

  ‘It’s shrunk and I can’t do it up!’

  The world turned red, like the fire he had set at the Eriksson house and never seen but could imagine. He seized her by the arm and literally dragged her from the room in disregard of her shrieks of protest. The nun and the two monks tried to interfere, and he brushed them aside and physically carried Anneliese the last few meters to the skelter – and shoved her into it – and punched the first remote code that came to his mind, in Panama.

  To the girl, very close to her ear, he said between his teeth, ‘You would rather be beaten up, maybe killed, maybe raped, than let me see a patch of your chest? Are you insane?’

  She fought him for another few seconds, and then wilted against his shoulder, weeping as he pushed her out of the skelter. Here, as almost everywhere, the concourse around the skelter outlets was full of stucks and bracees, making shift to earn their living as touts and shills and guides.

  ‘I don’t understand your world!’ Anneliese was moaning. ‘I hate it – and it makes me terrified!’

  Alertly dozens of the watchers reacted, and closed in.

  ‘Ah, sir!’ the first said, choosing English – he was a boy of no more than fifteen, but muscular and agile as an eel so that he slipped through the throng. ‘You want private place finish raping virgin girl, yes? I got good place cheap, I – ’

  Hans cuffed him aside with the flat of his hand and looked desperately for a way past the others, but failed to find one. The universe seemed to be full of greedy outstretched hands, shouting mouths, the glint of light on those bracelets which forbade entrance to the skelter system …

  ‘Hey, you!’

  A booming voice that overrode the clamor from the touts and shills, and a ring of authority that caused them to fall back and give passage to the speaker: a heavy-set man in his early forties, well-dressed, clean-shaven, cast from a different mold. He carried in his left hand a white card that might have been a photograph because he glanced at it before continuing to Hans.

  ‘Aren’t you Hans Dykstra? I have a message for you from – ’

  But already Hans’s fevered mind had completed the sentence, by way of an instantaneous detour that posed the question: how did Mustapha manage to ensure that one of his agents was here, in Panama the place I chose at random?

  ‘Quick!’ he forced out, and taking Anneliese by the arm again dragged her back into the skelter and punched for …

  Spitzbergen. (How many more codes can I think of before I have to consult a directory? Before I start accidentally using ones which belong to friends, colleagues at work? Oh, if there were a God I’d pray, I’d pray but there’s only the impersonal force that evolved us from the slime …!)

  ‘Hans, Hans, let me go!’ Anneliese was shrieking, trying to pummel him with her free hand.

  The cry attracted attention. Here, in an Arctic winter, the concourse was nearly deserted; those whom chance had stranded this far north spent the time of sunlessness, or so he had been told, adapting the ancient Eskimo practice of wife-swapping to the tenets of the Way of Life. But a fat ugly woman wearing some sort of police-like uniform jumped up from a bench and came toward them, grinning from ear to ear.

  ‘Hey, you’re Dykstra, aren’t you? I never expected you to – ’

  And back into the skelter, straight away. Code: Victoria, Vancouver Island, on that western fringe of Canada which had escaped the worst of the fallout from the Blowup.

  It was as though Mustapha had multiplied himself, become a sort of all-knowing deity, able to see the entire planet at a single glance.

  And again at Victoria …! How – how – could that devil Mustapha have planted his agents at every public skelter outlet? There were thousands, and even if he were to send every last member of his retinue to keep watch surely there couldn’t be enough to cover every one!

  But yet once more a stranger rose and approached with a smile and uttered his name and he fled as before. Where to this time? Somewhere isolated in the middle of an ocean: Tahiti, the Seychelles …

  He settled for the latter and they emerged at another Victoria, on the island of Mahé, and here nobody was waiting for them. Almost unable to believe it was true, Hans emerged cautiously on to a near-deserted concourse, seeing broken windows around him, much litter blowing in a breeze, a dark man asleep beside a refreshment stand. Nobody else.

  He heaved a vast sigh, and let go Anneliese’s arm.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m most terribly sorry, I really am. But you saw what happened everywhere else we’ve been until now, didn’t you?’

  Rubbing the spot where his fingers had clamped, vise-tight, she said, ‘All I saw was that a lot of people recognized you and said they wanted to give you a message. I don’t know why you have to run away from them. I wish I’d never said I’d come with you. You seem to be treating me more like – like baggage than a person!’

  ‘But the only people I can think of who might want to hound me are criminals, like the one who burgled my home and then burnt it down!’ Hans felt perspiration spring from every inch of his skin.

  ‘You have criminal gangs who can be ready and waiting any place you go, ambushing innocent people even though they can go right round the world in next to no time? Then modern life is even more abominable than I already thought it was!’

  She gave him a defiant glare, her chin jutted at a sullen angle. His heart sank. Searching for some fragment of consolation, he could find nothing better than the fact that for the moment at least she had forgotten about her stuck zipper.

  He soothed her by degrees, until she relaxed enough to agree to accompany him from the concourse and find a place to lodge, The sound of their altercation had awakened the man at the refreshment stand, and he stood up, rubbing sleep from his eyes, and offered his wares: stale-looking pasties and flyblown fruit, old bottles refilled with sickly-looking soft drinks colored repulsively bright red, green and purple.

  Hans refused, but asked if there were a hotel to be found … without much hope.

  The man shook his head. ‘No, sir. Is not hotels here any more. But is a lodging-house I know, good cheap clean. Is my sister-in-law who runs it. I write address and give directions too.’

  He seized a stub of pencil and tore the corner off a yellow sheet of newspaper, and in slow awkward capitals wrote two hard-to-decipher lines. After going through the data with him, Hans thanked him and was about to take Anneliese’s arm again when he realized that the man was holding out his palm with a look of annoya
nce.

  Oh. Of course, a tip. He felt in his pocket and produced a couple of coins, suddenly remembering with a wrenching sensation that he had almost no money on him. He had forgotten to pick up his spare cash when he last called by at home.

  So he’d have to go back yet one more time, and if there was one place where Mustapha would beyond doubt have planted his agents, it would be at Valletta. It wouldn’t be possible for him to get past the privateer and Hans’s own skelter, but of course the house still had ordinary doors and windows … No, wait a second; hadn’t Vanzetti promised that the police would keep a watch on his home? So it would probably be safe to go there after all. And if it proved to be otherwise, then there were alternatives: he could for example go to Recuperation Service headquarters and draw some money there, payment in advance for the compassionate leave he’d applied for. He breathed a little more easily as he led Anneliese out of the concourse building, along a littered street past shabby houses, to another even shabbier one which was obviously the ‘good cheap clean’ lodging house.

  The woman who came to answer Hans’s knock at the rickety front door smiled and bobbed and escorted them indoors, explaining that yes, very luckily there was room for someone else because one of the long-term lodgers had just died and nobody had yet rented the room again. She showed them into an ill-furnished cramped room with a double bed, a wash-stand so ancient that had he come on it in the course of his work Hans would have thought it worth recuperating and selling as an antique, and a big wardrobe standing lopsided against the wall because one of its legs was missing.

  Anneliese stared about her in dismay. Thinking that it was because of the state of the room, Hans began apologetically to explain about the collapse of the hotel business the world over, so that in most places one could find nothing better than this sort of squalid accommodation, used by stucks and bracees and other poverty-stricken social débris … but that wasn’t what was on her mind.

  ‘There must be two rooms!’ she ordered. ‘Find a place where there are two rooms! I will not accept this – we are not married!’

  And before he could conjure up an answer she was storming at him, a flood of unleashed words that battered his ears until his skull seemed to be ringing like a bell.

  ‘Every man I have met since I came from Brazil is the same, and you too when I thought you were more honest, more moral! I was a fool to believe your lies, and I should have known better! All you can think of is your filthy sinful lust, and any way you can cheat a girl, deceive her, force her into a corner she can’t escape from, that’s what you do! I said I’d come with you because you promised to show me the beautiful side of the modern world, places where people are happy and kind and life is sweet, and what have I seen? What have you brought me to? A horrible shabby filthy stinking townful of slums, that’s what! Get me away from here this minute, and this time show me what you promised!’

  INTERFACE S

  Many people sit at home

  gnawing their nails,

  unable to decide where to go.

  An ass – claimed Buridan –

  starved to death

  equidistant between bales of hay.

  Buridan however was human.

  Other creatures

  aren’t really as stupid as mankind.

  – MUSTAPHA SHARIF

  Chapter 19

  All his castles in the air were collapsing around Hans now. He could barely believe that so short a time had transformed Anneliese from the shy, seemingly affectionate child who had been so delighted to find someone at Aleuker’s whom she could talk to – albeit slowly and with many verbal footnotes – in her own language. Now she seemed to have turned into a thoroughgoing virago, tongue-lashing him with more imagination and more sheer anger than Dany had ever achieved.

  Could this be the fruit of the ideals to which she had been raised? It seemed incredible. How could people get on with one another if they thought this attitude the right and proper one?

  And then he remembered sickly: they hadn’t got on with one another. They had been so crazy, they had invented weapons capable of wiping out whole cities-full of people at a blow, and they had used the skelter first of all to commit theft, murder and sabotage.

  Dazed, there was nothing he could do except comply with Anneliese’s demands. Walking back to the skelter concourse, to the accompaniment of her sniffs and snorts of contempt at the state of this run-down dirty little town which were impervious to all his attempts to interrupt, he searched his mind for somewhere else he might risk taking her.

  Tahiti had crossed his mind a little while ago, he recalled. Would that be tolerable by her standards …? Very likely not, because it was a clean smart place patronized by skelter-tourists, people taking long vacations with plenty of money in their pockets. If Anneliese had been horrified to see people going about at the Balinese refuge clad only in kilts and baldrics, even though the costume was practical and they were carrying out their daily tasks, how much more offended would she be at the sight of women and gay men sprawling naked on the beach out of narcissism and the hope that they would attract partners for the night?

  He didn’t know. He literally had no idea. He couldn’t get hold of these lunatic standards which she lived by.

  Was there any skelter-using community, anywhere on the planet, conservative enough to satisfy her? Well, if there were it would have to be in Australia. It wasn’t that no one at all nowadays adhered to the same sort of principles; it was that those communities where they were in force were disdainful of the skelter, or terrified of it, and he’d never been to any of them apart from making a brief tour of the town near Mustapha’s home … during which so many people had made signs at him to ward off the Evil Eye, or spat at the prints he left in the dust, that he’d lost count in a few minutes.

  Did he know the code for any place in Australia? The answer was no. He’d have to consult a directory, and pick somewhere at random.

  There were a few more people in the concourse now, half a dozen altogether including a couple of curious children buying soft drinks at the refreshment stand. He waited until they had been served, then asked about a directory. Recognizing him, the salesman’s face fell.

  ‘You did not like the home of my sister-in-law?’

  ‘She – she had only one room, and we wanted two!’

  A pause, during which the salesman looked him over with mingled amazement and contempt: if a man can persuade a girl so pretty to travel with him, how can he not share her bed? A good question … But he moved at last, pointing toward a booth which Hans had not noticed on the far side of the concourse, and said there was a directory there.

  He expected Anneliese to come with him; she declined, and sat down firmly on a vacant bench.

  ‘You make me walk too much! My feet hurt! And this is the world where they told me you never need to walk because you have the skelter!’

  So Hans went to the directory booth alone, and leafed through a tattered out-of-date volume with many pages missing. The purpose they had been put to was plain from the stench that arose from a corner of the booth; the floor had subsided, there was a hole in it, and people had used it as an impromptu latrine.

  Half-deafened by the buzz of flies that circled that spot, Hans eventually located and memorized the code for the public skelter outlet in Alice Springs, Australia, which – so he seemed to remember – was currently flourishing and certainly must be as conservative as most of the subcontinent. He headed, sighing, back toward the bench where he had left Anneliese … and realized with a shock of horror that she wasn’t there.

  Staring frantically around, he spotted her approaching the skelters, talking animatedly to a man in neatly tailored clothes who certainly had not been on the concourse a few minutes ago.

  He shouted at her. Glancing fearfully at him, she clutched her new companion’s arm and whispered something that impelled him to hurry her into the nearest booth. Before Hans could catch up, a wash of bright blue light signaled their departure.<
br />
  To anywhere.

  For a long while Hans simply stood there cursing, his hands clenched so tight he fancied blood would run from the tips of his nails. The children regarded him in amazement, sucking their soft drinks noisely through straws; also the other people present gazed at him.

  At long last he managed to gather his wits, and said to the air, ‘He’s not going to get away with it! I’ll see him in hell first!’

  He strode to the same skelter by which Anneliese and the unknown man had traveled, and punched a code he had only used once before but remembered almost better than his own.

  It belonged to Mustapha Sharif.

  ‘He has come, effendi,’ said Ali, and stood aside from the doorway of the Room of Leopards so that Hans could pass him, shouting wildly.

  ‘What have you done with her, damn you?’

  Mustapha, seated cross-legged on a pile of soft cushions, raised the brow over one sightless eye: what do you mean?

  ‘Hans, good day to you,’ he murmured. ‘I have been half-expecting you … Be seated, and let Ali serve you some refreshment.’

  ‘I want to know what you’ve done with Anneliese!’ Hans bellowed.

  ‘You have become separated from her?’ Mustapha countered.

  ‘Lost her, as you damned well know!’

  ‘To be strictly accurate, I didn’t know. But I’m glad. That is as it ought to be.’

  ‘You … ’ Hans’s voice failed him; he recovered it with a tremendous effort. ‘You have the gall to sit there and say she didn’t go off with one of your agents?’

  ‘My dear fellow, am I a miracle-worker?’

  Bewildered, Hans wondered if he were losing his sanity. Had he not himself found it hard to believe that Mustapha could have his servants ready and waiting at every public skelter on earth? And yet –