Web of Everywhere Read online

  WEB OF EVERYWHERE

  John Brunner

  www.sf-gateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain's oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language's finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today's leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Website

  Also by John Brunner

  Dedication

  Author Bio

  Copyright

  INTERFACE A

  Theseus

  Blinded by the dark

  Followed Ariadne’s clew of thread

  Ariadne

  Has ceased her spinning

  And all doors lead to the Minotaur

  – MUSTAPHA SHARIF

  Chapter 1

  ‘Look out!’

  Thinking, in that instant of chill due as much to the change from excitement to alarm as to the step they’d taken from sub-tropical to sub-arctic, how absurd it was to blurt those words to a blind man. But Mustapha was accustomed to his lack after – how long? Fifteen years, fifty? It was not something one inquired about.

  He complied, tautening into that strange state of total attention which, Hans Dykstra had sometimes imagined, could truly halt the passage of his personal time, poise him an arm’s length away from the world experienced by ordinary people while he took exhaustive unseeing stock of it.

  That too made Hans shiver, despite his climatized suit.

  And then he realized: of course! Cobwebs!

  He forced himself to take a deep breath, and fear sub-sided as icy air seeped through his mask. There was no light here, except from the powerful hand-torch he had brought, and the very first thing he had seen when he arrived had been gray fluff-thickened strands barring the exit from the skelter.

  Illegal it might be, but one did hear stories now and then about people who couldn’t afford a privateer and rigged man-traps of their own devising….

  ‘I sense no one,’ Mustapha said in a voice which was not quite tinged with complaint. The eagerness which drove him had nothing in common with his companion’s – at least none which the latter could recognize. They were collaborators, but they were not and could not be partners. One might say, ‘The enemy of my enemy … ’ And be able to proceed no further with an explanation.

  Never mind.

  Hans uttered the necessary words, and into the fringe of the lamp beam instantly rose a brown hand child-chubby as Mustapha’s face, groping greedily for the spider’s fragile legacy.

  ‘Wait, wait!’ Hans implored, thrusting away the blue flower, the speedwell, which of course he had held up before him as he entered the skelter. He hastened through his regular protective charms in his mind, meantime using one hand to sweep the visible portion of the house with his lamp and keeping the other alert to punch a getaway code should someone turn out to be already in possession. Such caution was very likely superfluous; an assurance from Mustapha was worth a dozen instrument readings. But since neither the radiation-counter nor the bio-assay unit had beeped, the place was obviously habitable, and it had been long since one stopped to ask polite questions of strangers who showed up unannounced in a domestic skelter.

  ‘Wait why?’ Mustapha demanded querulously. ‘Because you can see a warning sign?’

  With a sigh Hans abandoned his mental formulae before completion. ‘No,’ was his gruff answer. ‘Because when you touch the webs you’ll break them, and I want to get them down on film first.’

  He unslung his camera and flash to record the delicate tracery marred by thickening dust.

  ‘Keep your hand out of shot,’ he added, eye glued to the viewfinder. ‘Want to get yourself braced?’

  ‘They will not find your pictures until they’re meant to, after you’re dead. So at least you originally promised me.’

  ‘I could be dead, but you could still be alive,’ Hans grunted, and wound the film on. ‘Good, two will be enough. Go ahead.’

  Plump fingers, with the slyness of a stalking fox, moved in air and located a web-strand, traced along it musician-precise without breaking it; found another; broke both in a deliberate gesture and savored the sensation of contact. Hans had witnessed him performing similar marvels before, but this was the most amazing. To stroke the full length of that spider-silk and leave it intact until the moment of his decision to snap it: such abilities sometimes made Mustapha seem inhuman. Men rush in where angels …

  But there was no room in his mind right now for reflection, only for reaction. This time, no doubt about it, Mustapha had done him proud. He’d guessed from the form of the code he had bought that it was exceptionally early, and had dared to hope it might lie in the first million. On site, he was immediately ready to believe they’d located one of the first hundred thousand … assuming that this was Scandinavia, and everything pointed to it. The air was certainly cold enough, and facing him across the living-zone were big windows, absolutely black, silent witnesses of a far-northern night.

  ‘Oh, wow,’ he said under his breath. The phrase was archaic, but English was not his mother tongue, and anyhow if someone had invented a better way to express delighted astonishment he hadn’t heard about it. Under the obliterating dust that floor looked like natural wood parquet; draped with cobwebs, that might be an authentic Hille chair; weren’t those shelves System Cado …?

  ‘It pleases you?’ Mustapha murmured, his study of the webs complete. At once he had reverted to his regular manner: cool, detached, as though he were a machine programmed to acquire and analyze with maximum concentration all new data that presented themselves, to idle in face of any precedented situation. This was the ninth time he and Hans had come together to a lost home. How his companion obtained the codes to reach them, Hans had no idea and intended never to
ask, for fear of being told that they were relying on some ancient ‘little black book’, rather than some burgled bank of computer records, or bribery of a technician at the Skelter Authority.

  And the Arab went on, ‘I apologize for being over-ready to touch the webs. But they are so rare now. I had not felt one since boyhood. I had almost forgotten them. Curious! One would have expected spiders to be tough.’

  Yes, perhaps, Hans thought. But infection had come out of Central America – a fungus, or some microscopic parasite – and something kept happening to their eggs…. Well, one would also, at one time, have imagined that humanity was tough.

  Aloud he said, ‘I think this strike is the best yet!’

  Cozy in his suit, he drew down his mask and inhaled the harsh air with paradoxical enjoyment. It was cruel to the throat, but it tasted infinitely cleaner than what he had left minutes ago, tainted with the open-sewer stench of the Mediterranean and the collective halitosis of Valletta. The dust merely added spice to its tang.

  Unencumbered with equipment, Mustapha had walked forward, out of range of the handlamp’s beam, to stand on the level floor and turn, as though on a very slow-revolving potter’s wheel, soaking in the nonvisual information the house could afford him. Once or twice he clapped loudly, cocking his head, mapping walls and doorways and furniture, sniffing the while, memorizing new scents.

  Somewhat more slowly, and somewhat enviously (but to envy a man who had been blinded! Crazy!), Hans also emerged from the skelter, hung about with safety devices, camera, flashbar, bag of spare film, lamp, instruments…. It was all gear legitimately come by, but there was nothing legitimate about the use he was at present putting it to.

  His profession was that of a recuperator, his duty to share out reclaimed resources around the world to those who were in greatest need of them, or who could exploit them for the general good. It wasn’t the lure of strange places which had enticed him to take up his dangerous and unlawful hobby, for he was routinely instructed to go to every continent as and when a reclaimable cache was reported to the Economics Authority.

  No, what fascinated him was the form and pattern of a dead age, in suspended animation now but being gnawed by time so rapidly that unless someone made a record of it less tenuous than memory could provide its relics would have to be reconstructed in ignorance by the archaeologists of the far future.

  If there were any.

  This particular skelter was indeed one of the very earliest, half a century old and amazingly bulky, as big as a car. He understood that in fact some car parts had been adapted for the first skelters, just as Remington included bits from sewing machines in their original typewriters. So old a model might be developing faults. The thing had delivered them here safely, but would it send them away again? Worst of all: would it take Mustapha away – leaving first, as always, with his own incomprehensible curiosity satisfied – and then maroon him, maroon Hans Dykstra?

  For an instant he pictured himself trudging across the snowbound wastes of … What country was this, anyhow? Sweden, Norway, Finland? Most likely Sweden; there was a Volvo plate on the skelter’s crystal-box, rimmed with frost but legible. An almost vacant land, then. The winter population of Sweden was reputed to be down around two or three thousand now, mostly eccentrić recluses, so hunting on foot for help in getting home would be absurd. In the summer, of course, things were different. There might be a million temporary residents by July.

  He contemplated the skelter gloomily. Like most people nowadays – or rather, like most privileged people – he could undertake simple routine maintenance on his own model of skelter, the equivalent of changing a car-tire or a tap-washer, but he’d never seen a design this old before. If he were to start making inquiries about service manuals for obsolete Volvo skelters, though, within the day some bland official would track him down to ask what need he had for such data, and he had absolutely no desire to land a bracelet for code-breaking. No, he’d have to put his faith in the high standard of Swedish craftsmanship, take his chance of being disintegrated on the way to or from home, or of being stuck here until summer gave him the chance to mingle with a mass of visitors at a public skelter outlet.

  It wouldn’t be impossible to survive here for a while. It might even be fun, in a way. Novel, at any rate. He had never experienced such solitude as this lonely northern land promised. He had walked all around the living-zone by now, his heels on the hard parquet affording Mustapha the sonic reflections he needed to build his chiropteran picture of their surroundings, and located the kitchen. Apart from the packs of food in the deep-freeze – which obviously he would not dare touch because they had been thawed and refrozen countless times – there was a huge store of canned goods. And if that wall-gauge were to be relied on, hadn’t just jammed at a false reading, there were almost a thousand liters of oil in the heating tank.

  On the other hand, Dany would report him missing at once, and they would promptly start turning the skelter system inside out in search of a fault which might have destroyed him in transit. There weren’t so many human beings left that you could afford to have them disappear at random; the days when, if they heard about them, most people regarded a million deaths with equanimity, a mere garnish to breakfast, were over. And the last thing he wanted was to attract official notice. He’d just have to pray that the skelter would last out another dozen cycles.

  By way of insurance, he retrieved his speedwell and placed it inconspicuously in a corner of the machine. That was a safe token to leave; its name had made the pretty little blue flower much the commonest of all life-symbols to take with you on a journey.

  Then, pushing such considerations to the back of his mind, he photographed the living-zone, then the kitchen, then the sauna he discovered beyond, shooting to avoid the tread-marks which he and Mustapha had left in the dust as clear as in new snow.

  Next he came to a small study, with an open bureau bearing a Halda typewriter, documents in pigeon-holes, a pile of dusty correspondence papers which he blew at gently until the name and address were legible. From it he learned that the house’s owners had been called Eriksson, that they were indeed in Sweden, near a place called Umeå, which he would have to look up on a map when he got home, and something else which struck him as literally incredible.

  Their skelter code was printed on the letterhead!

  INTERFACE B

  O my beloved I offer you my heart

  To eat as you would bite a pomegranate –

  But beware.

  A human heart holds seeds like a pomegranate

  And some are sweet but more are poisonous –

  We have seen much death, you and I.

  – MUSTAPHA SHARIF

  Chapter 2

  Almost, he snatched up the entire pile, thinking to dump it on the big open hearth in the living-zone and set light to it. He checked his hand an inch from the paper in the same moment that he heard Mustapha’s cool query: ‘Hans, is something wrong?’

  ‘No, nothing,’ he answered with an effort. True enough. He had imagined something was, but that stemmed from pure force of habit. Even if Mustapha was going to charge him twenty thousand for the code which was here repeated scores of times, he didn’t need to fear the loss of his monopoly. Years had gone by without anyone finding the Way – except Mustapha. Most likely as long again would pass before other feet smutched this floor. Those numbers were simply … numbers.

  No, wait. They were something more, after all. A symbol, a key symbol, of that strange far-off world of the recent past which he was struggling to capture and preserve for posterity. A good clear picture of the paper, or better yet an actual sheet of it, would have to be included in his final report.

  ‘You exclaimed,’ Mustapha said obstinately. ‘It must have been for a cause. You have found a clue to the fate of the former occupants?’

  A shadow of ghoulish hunger lay on his words, familiar to Hans from their previous expeditions together. (How had they managed to become open with each other, that
first time? Hans had tried over and over to reconstruct the details in his memory, and been baffled of recall. He was sure of only one fact, that it had been Mustapha who broached the matter. Himself, he would not have dared. Nor, in a sense, had Mustapha ‘dared’. He had determined that such trips could be undertaken in safety. There had been someone before, another man – or possibly a woman – who’d traveled with him to forgotten lonely homes, added those details necessary to comprehension of the whole which a visitor without sight could not provide for himself. But they had never spoken of the fate of Hans’s predecessor.)

  Curtly he explained, his head buzzing with plans for his later visits: the need for cleaning materials, floodlights, reference books about the culture of the country fifty years ago to explain the purpose of the mysterious gadgets such as he knew from experience he was bound to find, dictionaries to help him puzzle out a few of the letters and the shopping-list he had seen scrawled on a memo-board in the kitchen …

  But when he came back he would be alone. For the moment, he owed Mustapha something more than the mere money which would by then have changed hands – in return, of course, for another volume of his poetry, hand-illuminated and magnificently calligraphed but to Hans totally incomprehensible. Regardless of the fact that he understood no Arabic, though, the frequent purchases he made from Mustapha to cover up the transfer of the large sums he shelled out for illegal skelter codes excited no remark. Little new beauty was being brought into the modern world, and what there was, was precious. A score of other people patronized Mustapha even more generously, and without ulterior motive.

  Even Dany, who was resentful of the money her husband chose not to spend on her, had been impressed enough by the delicately illustrated books, lively with red and blue and real gold-leaf, to believe that he was buying them as a safe investment for their old age.

  Mustapha was talking. Hans compelled/composed himself to hear the words.