Web of Everywhere (9 page)

He wandered indoors, possessed himself of a plate and allowed a servant to load it with smoked reindeer venison, fresh-cooked fish dressed with mayonnaise, and a crisp oriental salad, a typical contemporary combination. Hunger had smashed most of the barriers of prejudice that used to keep national cuisines apart. He ate with relish, wishing that at home he could afford to combine foodstuffs from three different parts of the world at every meal.

Having finished, and taken yet another glass of wine from a circulating tray, he leaned back in his chair. It looked as though it was about time for him to quit at long last. He was midway along the reception hall, between the skelter and the windows that stood ajar to the patio. For perhaps half an hour past no new arrivals had caused the soft bell to chime, and the privateer had been re-activated. It would make good sense not to stretch his luck.

Then, suddenly, all his resolutions dissolved in the blink of an eye.

He happened to be looking toward a door set in the wall opposite, when it opened a few centimeters and light fell on the face of a girl: large-eyed, shy as a fawn. She peered in, caught sight of him, and at once began to shut the door again.

Without conscious volition he found he had closed the
gap between them and was smiling at her from less than arm’s length.

He heard his voice say, ‘Hello!’

She answered in a language he hadn’t heard for years – or rather, a dialect so close to it he understood perfectly. She muttered an excuse and tried to shut the door a second time.

He checked her by thrusting out his arm, and demanded fiercely, ‘Are you Dutch? Or Flemish?’

Astonished, she let go the edge of the door and jerked her head back a trifle, those wide dark eyes fixed on his face.

‘No – no, I’m from Brazil, but … ’

Brazil?

It was too much for him to figure out. All he could concentrate on was her simple presence. She was short, slim, but well-shaped insofar as one could tell through the drab long dress she was wearing, a tremendous contrast to the gaudy finery of the other guests. Her face was oval, her mouth generous, her hair sleek and black, her hands delicate – in sum, she was beautiful. And young with it. She could have been any age from fourteen to twenty.

‘Why are you hiding?’ he rapped in his mother tongue. He reached for her hand, amazed at his own boldness. ‘A girl as pretty as you should be the star of the party – come on!’

For a second she seemed inclined to resist. Then she yielded, and came out into the hall with the air of a wild animal, casting timid glances to every side. Hans was aware that he was the focus of attention: how did that man in the shabby work-clothes manage to conjure up
her?
He relished the sensation.

‘You must have something to eat, and perhaps a glass of wine, and … ’ Words he hadn’t spoken for years came promptly to consciousness, and he was rewarded to hear her answer yes, yes please!

But it wasn’t Dutch. It was the first cousin of Dutch,
Plattdütsh.
How in the world did she come to speak a dialect like that in Brazil?

From behind him, suddenly, Chaim Aleuker’s voice: ‘Hah! Hans, I see you found Barbara! Good luck to you, see if you can make her bloom a bit!’

Hans started so violently he nearly spilled the plate of
food he was loading for the girl, and swung around. But already Aleuker was past and vanishing in the direction of the patio.

‘So you’re called Barbara!’ he exclaimed, having recovered his poise.

The girl shook her head vigorously. ‘No, my name is Anneliese Schenker.’

‘But I’m sure Chaim called you – ’

‘It is a joke for him. He says that “Barbara” means “a wild girl” – and he thinks I’m a savage!’

There was a red ring of anger in her voice; she set her shoulders back and folded her fists and glared after Aleuker.

Hans hesitated only a moment. Then he said, ‘I suspect you may want to tell somebody about yourself. And it cannot be easy to find people who speak your language. I do, more or less. Shall we go and sit over there out of the way? I promise I will listen to whatever you say.’

He handed her the plate of food. She took it, her eyes on his face, and after a miniature eternity said, ‘Yes, please, sir. I would be so glad if I could talk to somebody properly instead of struggling with English that I only half understand.’

Incredible, incredible! I’m holding a
tête-à-tête
conversation with this girl every susceptible male in the place is eyeing … How did it happen? Never mind! Enjoy, enjoy!

He concentrated on the tale she was unfolding.

She did indeed come from Brazil. The reason she spoke a language so close to his was that she was descended from a colony of German protestant fundamentalists who after World War I had decided they must cut themselves off from the fleshpots of wicked Europe and live a holy life in a new land.

Hans’s mind boggled at the realization that he was talking to a Christian. This was like being transported back in time!

Refusing to accept cars, radios, telephones – let alone the skelter – with hand-axes and horse-ploughs they had built a flourishing little town a hundred miles from anywhere, and called it Festeburg: after a religious song, she explained.

They traded produce locally, and once or twice a year
they loaded a boat with vegetables, cloth and handicrafts, and rowed it down-river to a market-town where they bartered for tools, nails, wire and other goods, mostly metal, which they could not manufacture themselves. Aside from that they had no contact with the larger world.

She had been told by her grandfather how news of the 1939 war reached the colony, by word of mouth and the accident of a newspaper wrapped around a packet of seeds, and how the
Predikant
called everyone together for a day and a night and a day of non-stop prayer to avert God’s wrath from his most faithful worshippers.

The trick must have worked; at any rate the second world war passed and nothing changed in Festeburg.

Prayer was less successful in the case of an epidemic which struck the community and killed Anneliese’s mother when she was still a child. From her halting descriptions Hans deduced that the disease might have been influenza-M, third of the four deadly new strains hatched in the uplands of New Guinea which spread like wildfire after the introduction of the skelter, or just possibly a late outbreak of Alaskan croup. He didn’t inquire over-closely, though. He was too busy marveling at the chance which had brought him an emissary from the past he had imagined vanished forever. Until only a couple of months ago this girl had lived in the pre-skelter age! In cultural terms she had been further removed from the modern world than the Erikssons, whose bodies he had disposed of earlier today. (Yesterday? What the hell?)

‘What happened to bring you here?’ he urged.

Bit by reluctant bit, she explained. Somewhere in the
sertão
a minor warlord had begun to carve out an empire in the all-too-typical manner. Among the places he coveted was the site of Festeburg.

There had been a siege. Her father had been killed. Her elder brother, then head of the family, ordered her to take a canoe and paddle down-river in search of help. With unbelievable courage, considering she had never been further from home than she could walk in half a day, she obeyed.

The first people she had come on were friends of Chaim Aleuker’s cocking a snook at the dangers of modern South America by taking a camping vacation … but with the aid
of a portable skelter. (Hans pursed his lips at that. A traveling skelter had to incorporate its own range-finding gear, and cost a million if you could find a technician able to build one for you.)

They hauled her out of the river when her canoe sprang a leak after hitting a submerged snag, but they couldn’t talk to her until Aleuker turned up. She said she thought it was a miracle when he stepped from the coffin-sized box in the middle of the camp-site. She had literally never dreamed of a skelter before.

But she thought it was even more miraculous when it turned out Aleuker spoke Yiddish and was able to communicate with her in a rudimentary fashion. She had been aware that other languages existed apart from the German dialect spoken at Festeburg, for the traders they dealt with spoke corrupt Portuguese, but girls were forbidden to talk to strangers.

Having puzzled out her story, Chaim persuaded his companions to collect their guns and set off for Festeburg. When they arrived there, however, they found it burning, its inhabitants exterminated.

Well … too bad! Everyone in the group had business to attend to, and their vacation was too near its close for them to bother about the departed warlord and his troops. So in sheer despair, shaking with terror, she had let Chaim lead her into the skelter and bring her here.

In other words: to a place which, according to everything she had been brought up to believe, was a fair facsimile of hell.

INTERFACE J

I am ashamed that I want to believe in judgment.

Punishment turns my guts sour and I will not condemn.

If I did I would be among the guiltiest of all.

I am not however ashamed that those I would like to punish

Are those whose crime is despoiling their fellow men

And particularly little children of the rightful joy

They should have from the existence of their bodies.

– M
USTAPHA
S
HARIF

Perhaps it was unfair to Aleuker – perhaps Hans was adding unjustified glosses to what the girl told him, and in fact she was seeing rapists around every corner, as a result of her appalling heritage … but the impression was quite clear that when Aleuker discovered that Anneliese wasn’t minded to pile straight into bed and make wild jungle love he lost interest.

One would assume that Aleuker had a normal healthy appetite for women; indeed, one had heard that because of his fame he’d enjoyed far more of them than his proper share, which statistically must be three-fifths of one, sixty per cent, or thirty per cent of each of two, or fifteen per cent of each of four … The deadpan calculation made Hans want to giggle.

Serious for a moment, he wondered what it would be like to be in Aleuker’s shoes, welcomed as a father for the babies of women around the world. Those lucky potential mothers who had proved to be naturally immune to CPF – which Dany was not, and in consequence had been compulsorily sterilized – picked and chose their mates regardless of marriage,
regardless of stern official warnings about letting so much of the gene-pool go to waste.

Once, three years ago, without informing Dany, he had advertised himself in one of the crudely-printed contact journals that circulated from continent to continent, serving another and more valid purpose beside the ostensible one of linking people with unusual sexual tastes. With so few people left it seemed a shame that he, Hans Dykstra, should leave behind no child at all, whether or not he could bring it up personally.

But the only girl who had answered had failed to show at the rendezvous he’d proposed in Canberra, and he’d felt so silly he’d never repeated the experiment.

Plainly it would be just as stupid to mention that to Anneliese as it would have been to tell Dany. He composed himself to go on listening.

She had clung to Aleuker purely because she didn’t know where else to go. Like most Christians she had been taught to believe that even followers of heretic branches of her own faith were children of the Evil One and eternally damned, so finding herself in a world full of what she termed heathens, who drank liquor, and smoked, and fornicated, and bowed down to false gods, specifically to trees and animals, had come close to driving her out of her mind.

Only the fact that she hadn’t spoken to anybody for weeks – bar a few sour exchanges with Aleuker and his servants – had impelled her to join the party, as she’d been told to. All the time she was talking her eyes kept darting from the sight of one abomination to another, and her cheeks remained as pale as paper.

When he had the chance, Hans demanded how old she was. She muttered, ‘Seventeen. Eighteen soon.’

At that age, to have seen her father killed, her home burned, all her friends slaughtered …! That echoed an ancient nightmare of Hans’s. He himself had been orphaned in the last epidemic of CPF, and watched his mother die screaming. Though he had found kindly foster-parents instead of being dumped in one of the children’s camps that were the breeding grounds for 21st century crime, his loss
retained the power to wake him weeping in the night now he he was well past thirty.

Dany had never sympathized with him, only complained at having her own sleep disturbed.

But he suspected that this girl might understand instead of mocking a grown man for shedding tears …

Suddenly, with no warning, there was a bang. The conversation flowing merrily in and outside the hall snapped off short like a dry stick trodden on by a heavy foot.

Somebody said into the near-silence which followed, ‘Hell, that was a gun!’

There was a concerted rush toward the sliding windows giving access to the patio – and instantly a mêlée, as those wanting to go out met those wanting desperately to come in.

There was a confused sound of shouting; the guests pushed and milled, and Anneliese laid her hand on Hans’s, whispering, ‘Is something wrong?’

He relished the touch of her fingers: so light, so warm, so delicate. It was as though he could literally feel the fragrance of her fresh youthful body. The impact on him was like a drug.

Rising, daring to lay his own hand on her soft hair in a gesture midway between a pat of reassurance and an overt caress, he said, ‘I’ll ask somebody. Don’t worry – ’

But too late. Another bang cleft the air, and a whole more-than-man-high pane of the sliding windows shattered. Hans had an instantaneous vision of half a hundred mouths standing ajar in astonishment –

And then everybody between him and the outside dived flat to the floor, affording a clear sight of what lay beyond.

At the mouth of the little cove overlooked by Aleuker’s house, a pair of small headlands bent to the sea, dark on dark but highlighted by the beams of a newly risen moon.