by John Brunner
‘You’re not denying you sent your chief scribe Muley in search of me?’
‘Indeed not, and in fact he’s on his way to join us. I just heard the scuffle of his shoes at the end of the corridor. He almost caught up with you, twice I believe, and I’m very puzzled, not to say offended, at the fact that you decided to avoid him. You made things even worse, I gather, by lying in order to persuade the monks and nuns at the Balinese Way of Life refuge to lie too. Ever since our first meeting you’ve claimed to follow that Way. It is sad to realize that a friend of long standing has been telling you untruths, isn’t it?’
Giddy, Hans had to sit down; the alert Ali made sure that a stool was ready behind his legs.
‘But if Anneliese didn’t go off with someone you sent after us … ’
Muley entered silently; Mustapha acknowledged his bow with a brief nod.
‘Explain the circumstances,’ he invited Hans. And, having heard Hans’s broken summary, had to chuckle.
‘Oh, Hans, Hans, I suppose I should feel flattered because you thought all that was my doing!’
‘Whose, then?’ Hans demanded furiously.
‘Who but a senior official of the Skelter Authority could ensure that watch was being kept, world-wide, for a single man? Frederick Satamori was here, recovering from the injuries he suffered at Chaim Aleuker’s, during the very time when you and I were talking at the house in Sweden: that conversation which you ended in such an unceremonious fashion.’ Mustapha had discarded his bandage, but now he raised one hand to part his hair and display a piece of bright pink sticking-plaster covering his scalp-wound from the poker.
‘But … but Anneliese wouldn’t have gone off with a total stranger, even if he is an employee of the Skelter Authority!’
‘What grounds do you have to say that she would not?’ Mustapha retorted. ‘During the few brief hours of your acquaintance at Aleuker’s party, had you become such old intimate friends …? No, on the contrary: I say you have one hundred per cent evidence that that’s exactly what she would do. Have you not realized, even now, that she is deranged?’
‘I – ’ Hans’s jaw dropped.
‘I discern that you had begun to suspect, and were denying the truth to yourself.’
With renewed fury: ‘So you told Satamori to find me and Anneliese! Is he pimping for you now? You want her for yourself, is that it? Well, I can tell you – ’
‘Never in my entire life, and I’m no longer a young man,’ Mustapha said thinly, ‘have I been so mortally insulted. And I am not the only one to take offense. Look at my servants. Can you not read in their faces that they would cheerfully seize you and drag you screaming up my tallest minaret and pitch you to your death on the flagstones below? It is as gentle a fate as you deserve. But you are yourself insane now. Possibly you always have been. In that case I am myself to blame for having befriended you. So I will answer with fair words. No, I did not set Satamori on your trail. Owing to the loss of Chaim and other crucial people, he was eager to track down those who had solved the treasure-hunt clues and you were the first person to do so and he wanted to get in touch with you and offer you a better job, more responsible, better paid. Instead, you let yourself become obsessed with a mentally-disturbed girl, barely more than a child; you let your wife sacrifice herself and gave perjured evidence about her death; you – ’
‘Lies, lies!’ Hans shrieked.
‘Ali, serve our visitor a tranquilizing draught. It will soften his panic and enable him to think and talk more like his normal self.’
Prompt, Ali proffered an engraved brass cup. Hans swept it aside, crying, ‘Out to poison me now, are you?’
‘Ali, fill two cups; the strain is telling on me and I too would welcome some of that drink. If you choose which cup I should take, will that content you?’ Mustapha added to Hans.
Hans licked lips gone suddenly dry. Eventually he nodded.
‘Good. I might say: just as well. Because if I had to kill you, I would. I had your predecessor killed when he started pilfering things from the houses we visited together. I do not wish to wear a bracelet …
‘But I do wish to make several things clear to you, and when your mind is settled enough to take them in, I shall continue with my explanations. I would rather convince you than have your death on my conscience.’
INTERFACE T
I have noticed
how deep in litter is the world.
It is because
nobody cares about anywhere now.
I don’t live here!
– they say, and take the skelter.
But they do.
They do live here. This is Earth.
– MUSTAPHA SHARIF
Chapter 20
Perhaps Mustapha was more accustomed to whatever was in the tranquilizing draught; at any rate, he seemed unaffected by it when he had drained his cupful. By contrast Hans was pervaded by sudden alarming detachment, as though his ego had separated from his body and now floated above his head, observing himself, controlling his movement and speech but from a distance, puppet-fashion.
He said, enunciating carefully, ‘Well – explanations! And I warn you: make them good ones … ’ A yawn unexpectedly stretched that last word, and he converted it into a gasp.
Mustapha, apparently not having noticed, said, ‘You must have wondered what it is I obtain from visiting abandoned homes with you.’
‘Yes, often.’
‘I obtain insight into the process that led to my being blinded.’
‘How – how …? No, I shouldn’t ask. It’s too personal.’
‘On the contrary; you should have asked long ago, and you would have made more sense of your life. I was blinded because I was looking directly toward a nuclear fireball. It was the bomb that destroyed the Suez Canal. It doesn’t matter by whom it was fired. But its glare was focused straight through my corneas, which are as you have seen unmarred, and on each of my retinas the point at which the optic nerve sets in was cicatrized, converted in a fraction of a second to useless scar-tissue. It is because of that experience that when I go to an abandoned home belonging to people who lived by the old standards, I find something different there from what you find. I find a distillation of what they used to disguise the cruelty and brutality they were capable of. You go to such places in a spirit of envy and resentment. You wish you could have lived as they did, not realizing that it would mean paying the spiritual price they paid. At heart you belong to that old cruel world.’
‘No, no!’
‘Do you not? Do you really not? Because I do!’
Confused, Hans shook his head; the sensation was like twitching marionette-strings.
‘I belong so completely to that old world, despite all my efforts to identify the foul poisons it has left in the collective psyche of mankind, that when I heard Satamori was going to search for you I gave way to panic. I could foresee you betraying me. It was not until I sent for and re-heard a tape I once compiled about you, the one which documented your past history and impelled me to decide that you and I would become partners in crime, that I realized how stupid I was being. At first I was thinking of catching you and tying you up, as you did me only better – you made a terribly clumsy job of those bonds, you know! Then later I realized that was betraying my own vision of man’s ultimate nature … and in the upshot, I’m delighted to say, my better judgment has been proven right. You did come here of your own free will; you have become separated from Anneliese to whom as I told you only harm could come from your relationship – ’
‘Stop, stop! That isn’t true!’
‘Ah, but it is. Think hard, Hans.’ Mustapha leaned forward, his sightless gaze seeming to bore through into Hans’s very brain. ‘Think first about your own situation. Do you feel the world has treated you unjustly?’
‘Yes, damn it, yes!’ Hans felt tears start to his eyes. ‘I haven’t done any real harm to anybody, I just got taken aback and miscalculated about a couple of things. It isn’t fair that I should have
been punished for – ’
‘Who punished you?’ Mustapha slipped in the question with the neatness of a hypodermic needle. ‘You are guilty of a major crime, as the standards of today measure crime. You’re a code-breaker. So am I.’
‘But I only did that because I wanted to get to grips with the past, document it, leave my reports for the archeologists of the future – ’
‘Not true. If that had been the truth, could you not have gone to your superiors and said that in addition to working as a recuperator, a legal scavenger, you wanted – in your own time – to garner information too? They would never have accorded me that privilege. But to you, a trustworthy and indeed a respected colleague, they would have said yes. You could have had discontinued codes with full legal authority. But you didn’t want that. You wanted to be regarded, albeit after your death, as a man who dared to defy society’s rules!’
‘No, that’s not so! They would never have let me – ’
‘Damnation, man! You met the people, or some of them, who are running Earth these days. You met Satamori and Aleuker and Pech and the others at that ridiculous party! For all I maintain that they’re going about saving mankind the wrong way, inventing new rules and regulations when what we most desperately need is to apply common sense instead of inflexible principles that become out of date in a year or two – for all the disagreements I’ve had with them, I have to concede them this much: they’re the most open-minded people ever to achieve such power in the whole of human history. You don’t know what Satamori said when he mentioned that he was going to track you down, so I’ll tell you. He said, approximately, that it wouldn’t matter if you proved to be a coward, as was suggested by the speed of your flight from Chaim’s home. What counted was that you were plainly a quick thinker.’
A faint moan escaped from Hans’s lips. He tried to stop it, and could not.
His voice colored by pity, Mustapha went on more softly, ‘There’s one thing you still have to accept, my friend. You are acting as though you became the – the proprietor of this girl Anneliese. You could never have done so. You could at best have been her … keeper.’
‘But she didn’t seem to be mentally disturbed!’
‘No more do you, from most people’s standpoint. Less than – ’ Sensing that Hans was drawing breath to interrupt, Mustapha raised one hand to forestall him. ‘Less than I do, was what I was about to say. I know for a fact that Chaim Aleuker believed me to be a terribly dangerous man. He suspected me of vaulting ambition, of a lust for power, of degrees of hypocrisy unparalleled in the worst of the olden days … and with respect to his memory, I must argue that he was wrong.
‘Honestly, my friend, how could you imagine that someone in Anneliese’s plight could be less than seriously deranged? Your wife Dany, unlikable perhaps, but capable of functioning as a person, more or less, capable of making her own friends and even of being singled out as a recipient of one of those silly treasure-hunt invitations – surely with her before you as an example of how deeply deformed a personality can become thanks to the trauma mankind has undergone, you ought to have seen how much more seriously Anneliese must have been affected? A priori! And in addition … ’ Mustapha’s voice dropped. ‘In addition you ought to have applied the same lesson to yourself.’
Hans gulped air, but could not answer.
‘So far as I’m concerned,’ Mustapha went on, ‘I am ashamed of what the old world did to me, and I want the world to know that I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed that there was so much greed and envy, and that greed and envy are in my nature too. I’m ashamed that people had power without responsibility, and since I have power I strive to act in a responsible manner, not by accepting government posts but by listening when those in need come to me, by helping those who cannot help themselves, by admiring the petty achievements of those who have no better and yet do not deserve to have nothing at all … Possibly I am respected; I believe I am. But that is by strangers, people far away whose only contact with me is through what I have written. What counts above all for me is that I know I am liked by the people who live in the town just beyond the far wall of my home!’ He thrust out one chubby arm and slapped what happened to be the head of one of the painted leopards, bowed to the gutting of a deer.
‘It is because those who had far more than I dare ever dream of having,’ he concluded, ‘chose to use their wealth in such abominable ways, that I would rather be regarded as eccentric than join the ruling élite. But that is my personal opinion. I have no right to instruct you to follow my example. What I, or any other man, may justly do is say this to you: you have misjudged yourself, taken the wrong measure of yourself. As a result you have a death on your conscience, and your wife’s at that. You have a talent, and from that flows your chance to atone. You dreamed of making the girl Anneliese subservient to you by trapping her in a web of cajolement – but I went over that, and you answered me with a blow on the head. Instead, go to Satamori, accept whatever post he feels you are capable of taking on, dedicate yourself to it. Convert, transform, sublimate your desire for power into liking for work well done. It is possible. I think that what persuaded me to select you as – I use the phrase again – my partner in crime must have been that I sensed your ability to achieve that kind of sublimation. Now prove me right.’
Out of all that long discourse, Hans clutched at and retained one key suggestion. Rising, his mind foggy, he said, ‘You want me to go straight to Satamori.’
‘I think it is a wise course of action.’
‘Very well. Ali, lead me to the nearest skelter and find the code for the headquarters of the Skelter Authority.’
Less than five minutes later he was there. And a young man appeared to him from another skelter after a safe interval, and faced him through armour-glass from behind a reception desk which – Hans didn’t have to be told – concealed guns. The pattern was the same at that point in Recuperation HQ which had to be open to the public. When the arrival signal sounded, what had entered the room might not be a person, but a saboteur’s bomb.
He identified himself, and added, ‘I gather Dr Satamori has been looking for me.’
The young man’s face brightened.
‘I’ll say he has! I never before had to issue so many copies of a single person’s picture. We’ve been standing by at every public skelter outlet to try and locate you, but I guess you haven’t felt much inclined to travel, hm? I heard the sad news about your wife – if you don’t mind my mentioning that? Some people do mind, some don’t. Seems to be culturally dependent … Well, what can we do for you?’
‘Show me to Dr Satamori, I guess,’ Hans muttered.
‘Well, right this minute he’s not here,’ the young man said. ‘You maybe heard Dr Pech of the Advancement Authority is still hospitalized as a result of what happened at Chaim Aleuker’s?’
‘I was there!’
‘Never! So that’s how you met the chief! Well, well! Ah – as I was saying, Dr Satamori has gone to call on Dr Pech in the hospital, but if you’d care to wait he said he wouldn’t be long, maybe another twenty minutes at most, or if you’d prefer to come back, or have him call you …?’
A vast weariness was pervading Hans’s mind now. The echo of the advice he had been given by Mustapha was fading away, as though the effect of the tranquilizing drink had muted the impact of the words. Overlaying it now were deep, deep emotions: disappointment, frustration, horror … He said gruffly, ‘No, I guess I’d rather not wait. But if you can give me a piece of paper and an envelope, I’d like to leave a note.’
‘Surely! Here you are!’
He sat down, wrote the note – no more than ten lines – and re-read it, and sealed the envelope and handed it over. Then he headed for the skelter without another word.
‘Hey!’ the young man said, and then much louder and far more urgently, ‘Hey! That’s not –!’
He had a clear sight of the nine-digit code Hans was punching. And it was not one which you’d expect a traveler to select.
‘I tried to stop him – shouted out, even before he finished composing all nine digits!’ the young man mourned. ‘One gets into the habit of automatically glancing at what people are punching, just in case – ’
‘Stop blaming yourself,’ Satamori said glacially, seated at his desk and reading for the third or fourth time the note which Hans had left. ‘You weren’t to know in advance he was punching the code for an incinerator.’
He glanced at the skelter in the corner of his own office, and could not repress a shudder.
‘That will be all,’ he added, and the young man went out, shaking his head as automatically as a porcelain mandarin.
Alone, Satamori stared at the note and tried to consult in his mind with Chaim Aleuker, with Boris Pech, with the miserable girl whom his agents had luckily caught up with in – of all places – the Seychelles, and who would probably be fit to take her place in society in a few years’ time, after treatment by Karl Bonetti. He fancied he could hear all their voices, blended into a single voice, inside his head. They agreed, they concurred, they were unanimous.
The note said that Mustapha Sharif had for years been guilty of selling illegal codes to abandoned houses. There were several of the actual codes listed.
‘But I know him,’ Satamori said under his breath. ‘I respect him. More importantly, I like him, even though we’re forever arguing. To see him braced … No, it would be – unworthy. Whatever his reasons, I’m sure they were justified. And he’s always said, rightly, that we must never put an absolute straitjacket of rules and regulations around the world again. Maybe what brought us to the Blowup was the simple operation of an inflexible natural law. Equally, it might have been the excessive constriction of inflexible man-made laws. Man likes to be free. When he’s fettered he gets angry and lashes out.’
He reached his decision. Rising, he walked to his private skelter and tossed the note on to its floor. Then, at the full stretch of his arm, he composed the same nine-digit code which had taken Hans Dykstra on the longest of all journeys so far made possible by the skelter – the longest that ever would be possible, indeed – and the note followed him into eternity.