Web of Everywhere (6 page)

Dany, of course, was not party to his secret. She would have betrayed him in a fit of depression, without a doubt.

Humming, in total darkness but moving with the ease of long practice (and thinking about blindness while he worked, as he frequently did), he decided that for once he would process his important film first, not the decoy he had shot on his way to rendezvous with Mustapha. That could serve again. In any case he was suspicious of its quality. He prepared his developing bath, opened the cassette with a tingle of excitement –

And was suddenly dazzled by brilliant light as the door was flung wide.

He stood rigid as a rock, looking at the ruined film in his hand.

A shrill voice gnawed at his mind like a worm attacking the core of an apple.

‘Hans, you were right about Athens! There’s a public skelter terminal called Lyceum only they spell it a funny way. So I went there, but then somebody changed my card for another one and I can’t figure this out either … Oh. Is something wrong?’

Gone: cobwebs. Gone: dust like snow unmarred by footprints. Gone: the irrecoverable ‘after’ to pair with the reconstructed ‘before’ …

In the next five seconds he came close to murdering his wife. But he changed his mind. He thought of something sweeter and more fitting. He tossed aside the film and turned, cordial of expression and tone.

‘Well, what does the second card say?’

She proffered it uncertainly. Like the first, it bore a clue in rhyme. The answer, unless he was overlooking something ridiculously subtle, must be Oaxaca.

‘Can you work it out?’ Dany pressed. ‘I do
so
much want to get to Aleuker’s party!’

‘Yes, I’m sure you do,’ he agreed, moving forward as though to obtain a better light on the card. And continued, having drawn a deep breath: ‘Only – what makes you think Aleuker will want you as a guest? He’s inviting people intelligent enough to solve these puzzles for themselves: knowledgeable
people, well-informed, interesting to be acquainted with. You, on the other hand, are stupid, silly, greedy, selfish, boring, and totally inconsiderate of other people. When you burst in on me just now, you wrecked something I set a lot of store by. It’s gone past recall because you were too impatient to knock!’

‘But I asked if anything was wrong!’ In a wail. He ignored the interruption.

‘So I think it would be a good idea if I kept out of your way for a while, because if I see you again today I shall certainly beat you to a whimpering pulp. I’ll go to Aleuker’s party. When I get back I may have sweated out my anger.’

‘No! No, you wouldn’t steal my chance!’ Clawing at him with slow pudgy hands. He slapped her accurately on the left cheek, and as she shrank back, convinced by pain that he meant what he said, made for the skelter.

An echo of her curses seemed to follow him, though he knew that was impossible.

It was not a short trip, nor a quick one, but he relished the going.

At Oaxaca Concourse, overlooking the abandoned airport, it was raining, and there were cracks in the concrete roof of the skelter hall which allowed warm dirty water to drip down into many handle-less plastic buckets.

There a shabby young man exchanged the card Hans was carrying for still another, under the watchful eyes of the travel-hungry who pretended not to be: a vast group, hundreds strong, of so-called stucks, so terrified of skelter travel that they could not summon up the courage to pass the non-existent barrier dividing them from the clustered transit booths. It wasn’t inability to pay that held them back; skelter travel cost nothing. Had to. There was no way of pricing infinite speed over nil net expenditure of power. And besides, mankind’s resources of imagination and ingenuity had been slashed by far more than two-thirds when the population crash occurred, so it was imperative always to be able to bring the available talent to bear where it was needed.

The shabby man was contemptuous of the stucks, and let it show although he himself could no more use the
skelters than could they. At least, however, his reason was tangible. He was a bracee, and the tell-tale glint of bright metal shone under the cuff of one loose sleeve. He was far from home, moreover; he had the flat face of a North Chinese, and when addressed returned a parroted phrase, recording-stiff: ‘
No hablo español!
’

He did not even know Hans had addressed him in English.

Wondering why he had been braced, guessing that it might have been for playing skelter roulette – he was the right age, had the right air of defiance, and, if he belonged to the culture one presumed had the right heritage of fatalism – Hans was reminded of Mustapha’s protégés at Luxor.

For obvious reasons he seldom visited his co-conspirator’s home, but he vividly recalled that first trip he had made in order to establish his credentials as a collector of books likely to increase in value. The excuse was colorable; he had had a part-share in an exceptionally good strike of technical equipment, mostly optical goods, in Southern Austria, and wanted a means of investing his windfall.

Granted that the children Mustapha took in and taught might otherwise have died in the gutter, granted that it must cost a vast amount every year to support them and purchase necessary supplies for the scriptorium and the bindery and the rest of the operation … Hans nonetheless had his own opinions about a setup which furnished so many nubile bed-companions. He was aware that Mustapha displayed the traditional Arabic indifference to their sex.

Still, he owed Mustapha the accomplishment of a burning ambition. No fee for that could be termed too high, regardless of what use the money was put to. And the link between those youngsters at Luxor and this barely-more-than-youth at Oaxaca was trivial: it summed to the suspicion that the person handing out Aleuker’s cards might well be Mustapha’s type.

Why had the notion occurred to him at all?

The reason was instantly obvious. He was wondering, half-unconsciously, what he would do if being deprived of her chance to attend Aleuker’s party drove Dany to the pitch of leaving him.

Almost, he changed his mind and went home immediately. He was certain he would never again find himself a wife; there was far too much competition. (Curious, that an imbalance of five-to-three could create such liberty of choice for the minority!) But he steeled his resolution. It wasn’t worth being married if he had to put up with the sort of thing Dany had just done to him. Better to live alone, rent a woman when he wanted to, maybe find a tolerable male companion to keep house – there was no shame attached to that, not nowadays…

In any case, he was being interrupted.

Some of the eyes which had fixed on him as he studied his new card did not belong to stucks. A loose group of about a dozen travelers, mostly youthful, had spotted him as he addressed the shabby man. No doubt they too were following Aleuker’s trail. How many invitations could the man have issued? If the net had been cast wide enough to entangle Dany, logically thousands.

Therefore, too, there must be many eager-beavers who were pursuing imagined short-cuts, punching LNA codes into sub-legal computers for Aleuker’s last notified address, or risking a bracelet by offering bribes to skelter-system officials who might have heard a rumor about the actual location of the party.

Among the group present was an attractive girl in her early twenties, a product of the fantastical mixing of the gene-pool the skelter had brought about. Her face alone hinted at ancestors from at least three continents. She whispered something to a male companion of her own age and advanced boldly toward Hans, swinging her hips against her long opaque dress and donning a flashing smile.

Ordinarily, like any other man of his generation, Hans would have preened a little and relished the chance to exchange a mere dozen words with her. Right now he was immune from feminine wiles. He strode directly back to the nearest vacant transit booth and punched a code as though he had solved the riddle at a glance.

In fact he had not; he had simply made for the Gozo public outlet, the code for which he had long ago memorized because Karl Bonetti received his patients in a former hotel
nearby, now rented out as offices. The skelter, inevitably, had killed the hotel business stone-dead. There was no need for anybody to rent a room overnight any more, no matter how far he might be from home. He could sleep in his own bed and work half a world away. Karl did precisely that. Hans had a vague idea that the psychiatrist actually lived somewhere in Greenland, but for good and sufficient reasons his home code was never divulged.

At the Gozo terminal Hans sat down on a stone bench and – with some enjoyment, which surprised him, because he had never before considered going to a treasure-hunt party – unraveled the complex double meanings of a mock haiku which led him to Pitcairn Island and another young man with more cards, even worse off than the one at Oaxaca. He was braced for the second time, and lacked his right hand as witness of the efficiency of the anti-tamper circuit in his first bracelet. Braced, one could enter a skelter … but that, or the attempt this young man presumably must have made to remove the metal ring, fired a shaped charge focused inwards.

Very messy.

At Pitcairn there were three recipients of cards hanging about, all too shy to approach Hans: one woman of early middle age, two men verging on the elderly, with that dusty air scholars seem to acquire regardless of their cultural background through spending too much time in underpatronized libraries.

In any case, he would not have needed to re-use his dodge because he solved the new clue instantly: Bucarest. There was an excruciating pun on ‘lei’, obviously designed to misdirect the less perceptive into making for Honolulu. And from Bucarest he stepped into a private skelter in New Zealand, thinking that if Dany knew how close she’d been to her goal when she hit on Canterbury she would die of mortification. It would be great to tell her when he returned home, and watch her squirm –

He checked suddenly. He knew he had been given, now, a code for a private home, and it was in the right part of the world. He was walking on carpet in a spacious reception-hall nearly thirty meters long. Curtains were drawn across its windows even though hereabout there must still be a lot
of daylight left; still, one knew that the planet’s wealthy families no longer cared to be bothered by night and day.

But he was completely alone, and there was absolute dead silence, no matter how hard he strained his ears.

INTERFACE G

There were giants in the earth in those days.

The fact is attested by scriptural authority.

Today you or I can walk around the globe in three strides.

It does not follow that you and I have become giants.

– M
USTAPHA
S
HARIF

The declining sun dappled the sea with highlights as artificial-looking as a Van Gogh painting. Reclining on a chaise-longue, Chaim Aleuker admired it in between taking sips of his planter’s punch. He was the very model of elegant success: lean, but nonetheless having contrived to develop a paunch; extremely well dressed in a loose, casual shirt and breeches of real silk, his hair immaculately coiffed, his fingers bright with valuable antique rings.

His house – the largest of his three homes – overlooked a small bay, or rather a cove, with a northwestern aspect. On either side green-fledged hills ran down to stark gray rocks, but there was a smooth sandy beach between. A sailboat and a power-launch bobbed at a tiny jetty. The scene could have belonged to last century. There were few such sights to be found now anywhere on Earth.

Around him, sitting or strolling or standing in knots of two or three and chatting quietly, were the guests he had invited to form a nucleus for his treasure-hunt party. It was unlikely in the extreme that anybody new would arrive before eight p.m. local – indeed, he had a bet with Boris Pech of the Advancement Authority to that effect – and it was not yet seven-thirty.

So, to keep him company, and also to assess the quality of any of the strangers who found their way through his careful maze of clues, he had notified some fifteen of his compeers to come direct. For a full generation after the Blowup personal power, influence and initiative had meant little; humanity existed in a totally-constrained situation where it was a real achievement to keep body and soul together … not that that phrase was current any longer. But now things were back on a more or less even keel. A new balance had been struck, new class-lines had been drawn, new meanings had been found for
rich
and
poor
.

In a very real sense, this handful of people, ten men and five women, could be said to be in charge of Earth. They had rescued most from the wreckage; they had laid down tracks on to which, with immense effort, society had been hoisted like a derailed locomotive. It was grunting forward again now, very cautiously in case there should prove to be other faults on the line … but making progress, after a fashion.

It was not a solution to everybody’s taste, granted. The – the élite (much as Aleuker hated the word) numbered, about one per cent of the surviving population. It was a simple fact, and stemmed from the terrible traumatic effect of the Blowup. Regardless of what reasons were offered by people to explain why they would have nothing to do with skelters, whether they invoked religious principles or a search for new roots or whatever else, the truth was definable in one word: fear.

Because they were afraid to share what actually was available to all, except those who had been given a bracelet for code-breaking, or using the system for theft or to cover up a murder, they sometimes became jealous and tried to sabotage the work of the new managers. Now and then a mob would attack a skelter outlet; now and then they would strike at rich individuals, preferring to level everybody down to their own mud-wallowing status rather than come up the free and open path to real achievement.

The élite was far too small. Its human resources were being stretched so hard one could hear them twang. Something had to be done to enlarge it. A casually amusing idea had cropped up recently in conversation: hold a treasure-hunt
party, of the kind so much enjoyed by small-minded folk on the lowest rung of the skelter-using ladder, but instead of merely employing it as a trivial diversion, turn it into a genuine test for those with sharp minds and the desire to better themselves.