Web of Everywhere Page 3

  Later, when Cairo and Alexandria were bombed, the Aswan High Dam was destroyed too. Another horde of refugees, this time much larger, straggled along the banks of Father Nile, and found that this was as far as they need travel in search of regular floods and revitalizing deposits of silt. In a year there was a huge new town: too big for a village, built of too many shabby hovels to be called a city.

  At first they were jealous of their well-watered land, and declined to offer strangers any welcome. But they were growing slowly more tolerant. Indeed, they were becoming proud that their neighbor in the handsome mansion, though not Egyptian by birth, was admired the world around, and was generous to the poor, and gave work to the deserving, and altogether behaved in a manner befitting those enjoying Allah’s favor … bar one thing. He had truck with that instrument of shaitan, the skelter. Even the most ignorant mud-grubbing fellahin were aware that the impiety of this invention had caused divine wrath to descend upon the world.

  Their reservations, however, were being tempered by time. And by the judicious donation of good seed, new strong baby camels and donkeys, useful tools … Those could be cleansed of the smirch the skelter had left on them and put to honest use. Slowly he was winning the people over. Now, when he held open house on a feast-day and invited the local imams to preside at a night-long recitation of the Blessed Koran, many hundreds of the younger people came and sat in his courts.

  A footstep on the stairs. Thinking he had mused so long, it was time for the muezzin to utter a prayer-call, he roused and turned.

  But those soft slippers did not belong to the muezzin; here came Ali, his most trusted body-servant.

  ‘What is it?’ he demanded.

  There were shushing sounds: the man was bowing.

  ‘It is to be hoped that the work will not suffer,’ he said in a tone of obsequious regret. ‘One attends below, however, who wishes urgently to speak with you. His name is Dr Frederick Satamori.’

  Mustapha’s heart lurched halfway to his soles. The Deputy Director of the Skelter Authority! What could have brought him here, instead of putting in a phone call?

  A myriad fearful images chased one another across his mind: memories of all the houses he had visited illegally, all the codes he had sold first to his former partner, then to Hans Dykstra who was so unconvincing in his rôle as a collector of finely-calligraphed books of Arabic poetry …

  He gathered himself with an effort. ‘Request Dr Satamori to make himself comfortable in the Room of the Leopards,’ he directed. ‘Bring him refreshments. Inform him that I shall join him in a few minutes.’

  ‘The effendi’s will is done,’ Ali said, backing away with his sandals scraping the sand-dusted floor.

  But it was more than a few minutes before Mustapha regained his normal composure and was able to find his way down the twisted staircase.

  INTERFACE D

  Time was when any lover, seeing his mistress

  Was gone from the room, might call for her

  And be assured that she would hear his cry.

  O my beloved I do not treat you coldly.

  Rather am I haunted by the knowledge

  That one step may have put the world between us.

  – MUSTAPHA SHARIF

  Chapter 4

  Hans wondered absently: what had the woman of that house been like? Tall, from her skeleton propped up in bed (devoid of a visible wound like her husband’s but maybe she was stabbed in the throat or belly instead of shot) – but beautiful? Blonde? Blue-eyed?

  Well, no doubt there would be pictures of her in an album or a drawer, and of her husband and child, even though none had been on display.

  She must at all events have been better than that lazy greedy incompetent smug ungrateful …

  Resentful thoughts in his resentful brain, he stepped out of the skelter into his own hallway – and Dany was rising from a chair to confront him.

  He stopped, petrified. She had no business to be at home! She had told him she was off to a treasure-hunt party, a common and indeed a favorite gimmick in the circles she frequented, and he had relied on her solving the imbecilic clues, finding her way to the right place, staying at least several hours in the company of her friends.

  Hers. Not his.

  But here she was – and here he was, with the mask he’d put on after her departure still around his neck, frost on the outlet vent of his suit, a score of fatal clues in plain sight for anyone to strand a noose for him!

  Or worse: a bracelet, symbol of living death.

  ‘Hans, where the hell have you been? I want your help!’

  Words flared instantly into his consciousness: ‘Liar! When you accept help the millennium will have arrived! I’ve told you over and over that you need it, and Karl Bonetti would supply it, and – the hell with you. May your next bug be fatal.’

  But he couldn’t say that because he was ashamed of even half-meaning it; he was hung up on a problem called ‘conscience’, very contra-survival for the individual inasmuch as it made him vulnerable, but enjoined on him by the faith he had adopted, the Way of Life. Besides, to have an actual wife, legally bound – no matter that she was aging, fat, plain, querulous and selfish – was a great status symbol, bringing young subordinates to him during brief breaks from the job in Caracas or Calcutta or Cardiff to pose problems to him about their love-lives and ask his experienced opinion. Thanks to contagious puerperal fever, CPF, men outnumbered women five to three, and the disease was still rife even in those underprivileged communities where desperation had turned the ancient preference for sons topsy-turvy and they were actually trying to breed for girls, which meant there was no surplus to be disposed of into the ranks of the skelter-traveling elite, and until sufficient vaccine to treat half a billion people all at one go could be deployed the pattern would remain constant: any female who was even passably attractive could and generally would ignore marriage, trading in one man for another because he was younger or had better prospects or simply because there had been a row the night before.

  In any case, Dany was stupid, and would never put two and two together from his outfit, because she had so often seen him come home similarly clad from a day’s work.

  Nothing to be afraid of!

  So get her out as fast as possible, which meant going to any lengths to avoid a quarrel. He said peaceably, invoking the authorized hobby which he had adopted as a cover for his real pastime, ‘I’ve been out shooting photographs as usual. What’s the trouble, and what can I do?’

  And looked at her for once, instead of merely registering her presence.

  The sight was remarkable. She had on a pathetically glamorous new outfit, obviously expensive, hand-embroidered with huge flowers: Shapex leotards, Shapex bolero, wrinkled skin between, a tropical or sub-tropical style more extreme than was common around the Med in winter, tipped with hood, boots, and gauntlets lined with fur (genuine, as he well knew because his team had found skins during a survey they had lately mounted in Saskatchewan), and framed with an all-zones climatized coat currently wide open as though she were too desperate for time to take it off even in the temperate air of Malta. Not only her face, but her legs, bare midriff and presumably arms had been plastered with inexpert makeup; she jangled with jewelry and stank of far too much perfume. But so long as she was content with her appearance …

  ‘I’ve been invited to a party at Chaim Aleuker’s!’ she half-screamed, holding up a slip of card. ‘But I can’t figure out the clue in the invitation!’

  Hans started in disbelief. Invited to a party by Chaim Aleuker? This – this wreck? Oh, it must be a hoax! Everybody knew that Aleuker was probably the richest man alive, thanks to having invented the privateer, the code-shifting device which changed the skelter from a wild beast to a domesticated draft-animal … as it were. Millions of people who had never met him reacted to his name as to an electric shock, and Hans did so now.

  For an instant he wondered whether he could be the one in the wrong, making ill-founded judgments.
After six years of marriage, he was sharing little of his daily life with Dany. Perhaps she did possess some outstanding quality; perhaps the fact that she had stayed married to him had singled her out, or some other aspect of her personality had –

  But she was disillusioning him already.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that!’ she snapped. ‘It’s perfectly true. Apparently Aleuker is bored with the people he knows and wants to meet some new ones, so he’s sent out cards like this all over the world. Molly Chu got one as well, but the bitch won’t join forces to work out what it means!’

  ‘You should consult the library computer,’ Hans suggested, his tone still level and polite.

  ‘Think I’m an idiot?’ Dany blasted. ‘Think I’d have asked you if the computer had been any help, you – you pompous sod?’

  Alarm signal. Next she would be raking up his past, about which he was five years too old not to feel embarrassed even if living with Giuseppe and Hakim had been faute de mieux. Their quarrels always followed an identical pattern because they had not grown up in the atmosphere of tolerance displayed by the post-Blowup generation.

  It must be great to have come to terms with reality instead of laboring under the delusive burden of a vanished world, leaden with prejudices and preconceptions. He did do his best, struggled to accept the doctrines of the Way of Life and act on them. Perhaps if he had managed to find a younger wife – No, that was out of the question. Perhaps he ought to have resigned himself to never marrying, especially since the marriage was compulsorily childless …?

  Younger people had no memory of ancient evils like churches and nation-states. But they were all too keenly aware of their legacy.

  Their frontiers nullified by the skelter, under constant attack by saboteurs and partisans who could be half a world away before their time-bombs exploded, five of the Great Powers had gone into insensate nuclear spasm as though they had taken strychnine. The survivors, or at least some of them, believed their governments had also been responsible for the subsequent epidemics. Given that foundation to build on, they had abandoned at last everything their ancestors took pride in: patriotism, religion, conformist morality, group solidarity … Oh, not completely, not all at once. But for the third and final time the wisdom chain had been shattered; so ran the teachings of the Way of Life.

  In the beginning, the argument declared, to be older meant to be wiser – to have had more experience of how things are, to be more in touch with the reality of human existence.

  Then came a war that murdered a whole generation of fine young men in mud and blood, and murmurings of dissent accompanied them to their unmarked graves.

  It was said, ‘We have fought the War to End War.’ Many believed, and were comforted.

  In one more generation there was another war, that killed not only young men but old people and little children in their beds, that loosed the firepower of the universe on the fragile flesh of man.

  By that time there were young people saying in tones of extreme puzzlement, ‘Grandfather promised peace to father and father swore he would preserve it and father is dead in an ugly, cruel manner. Can we trust nobody at all?’

  And there came the third war, the Blowup, and the wisdom-chain – already filed twice at its crucial link – snapped.

  It was a new world. But a new world that must understand the old in order to surpass it. Hans Dykstra was convinced of that.

  Right now there was no time for reflection, though. He needed some means to placate his wife. Being too slow, he failed. That was unusual. Ordinarily he was quick to react and forestall her; he had to be, because the risk of her leaving him was so high. No matter that she was close on fifty; no matter that under her thick face-powder dark bags marred her eyes and her cheeks were crested with blue-red broken veins; no matter that her bust, her belly and her bottom sagged – she was a wife, and for a young man nowadays no achievement surpassed stealing away a wife … unless it were abandoning her in her turn, a just act of punishment, as though CPF which had shrunk the proportion of females so low that many men had to resign themselves to never having a woman were in some way the fault of all women.

  But this time Hans was laggard. She made it as far as sobs and wails.

  She was eighteen years older than him. Like many of her generation, of both sexes, she was subject to crying fits born of sheer despair at the disappearance of the world she had been taught to believe in as a child. Perhaps earlier than the average she had learned to exploit tears as a weapon against anybody who worried about her, who cared whether or not she killed herself in accordance with her frequent threats. It was there, Hans suspected, that one should seek the reason for her not accepting the invitation she had been granted by Karl Bonetti.

  Karl was a psychiatrist who practiced on the neighboring island of Gozo. Islands were popular among those who were lucky enough to enjoy access to the skelter system; they were instant geographical symbols of freedom from the limits of separative space. This condition of depressive nostalgia being so common, he had literally hundreds of patients on supportive therapy because he couldn’t cope individually with them. But Hans had located a drug Karl desperately needed dug out of the scrap-pile of Europe, and from gratitude he had offered to add Dany to his list.

  One of these days Hans was going to insist. But not today. Right now he wanted her safely out of the way so that he could adjourn to his darkroom and see how the pictures of the Swedish house had come out.

  ‘Let me look,’ he cajoled, and the sobs switched off like a light and she gave him the card with the hopeful expression of a slum child promised a trip to the wonderland of the country. He selected the image with conscious pride from the stock of data about the near past which he carried in his head. In the old days it had been said that the period of history about which people knew least was the one directly before they were born: too recent to be taught from a book, too vivid still for their elders to offer an objective appraisal. He had resolved not to let that be true in his own case.

  The card bore a short enigmatic verse, akin to a crossword-puzzle clue. That much he had expected. He had not foreseen that – if this did indeed emanate from Chaim Aleuker – it would be so childishly simple.

  He read aloud, without stressing the rhythm, ‘I’ll give to you some exercise and syllogisms from the wise. Madam will you walk, madam will you talk, madam will you walk and talk with me?’

  ‘It’s – it’s sort of like poetry, I think,’ Dany ventured. ‘The library computer says it goes to an old English tune called The Keys of Canterbury.’

  ‘So I suppose Canterbury was the first place you made for?’ he countered – more scathingly than he had intended. The last thing he wanted was for her to lose her temper so completely she would abandon all hope of finding her way to the party and stay home for the pleasure of spoiling his own leisure-time.

  She colored, although one would have imagined her too old to blush, and miraculously replied in a mutter instead of a scream.

  ‘You can’t. Not the original one, anyway. They dropped so many bombs on Eastern England. But there’s another Canterbury in New Zealand, so I went there, but there wasn’t anyone to give me the second card, and – ’

  ‘Oh, honestly!’ He handed back the card. ‘Athens! The Lyceum! Aristotle founded a school of philosophy there, and they called it the Peripatetic School – the walking-around school – because of his habit of strolling along while he was lecturing.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ she asked doubtfully.

  ‘Ah … No! I’m not even sure the Lyceum still exists, even as a ruin. But I think it may; Athens was among the few capital cities that didn’t get blasted, wasn’t it? Look, you check out the idea, and if it doesn’t fit come back and see if I’ve thought of an alternative.’

  He had been ready to cap his contribution to her day’s amusement with a kiss, but his embryo gesture went to waste. She snatched the card back and headed for the skelter at a near-run, tossing over her shoulder a word of thanks tha
t was literally cut in half as the transmission effect displaced her.

  Typical!

  But at least she had left him in peace. For that small mercy he made perfunctory obeisance to the nearest life-symbol – here in the hallway they kept a tortoise, because Dany refused to be content with a mere plant in sight of the spot where invited guests gained their first impression of the ‘Dykstra Residence’ – before shutting his light-tight darkroom door.

  INTERFACE E

  Father!

  You desired me to do you honor

  As a dutiful and loving son.

  Father!

  I am indeed obliged to you because

  It was you who facilitated my existence.

  Father!

  You must not imagine that I’m disrespectful

  But the best way I can conceive to honor you,

  Father,

  Is to think otherwise and make different mistakes.

  – MUSTAPHA SHARIF

  Chapter 5

  Dr Frederick Satamori hailed, of course, not from mainland Japan but from Okinawa (again, the association to the concept ‘island’!); there were excellent reasons for that.

  And their meeting was in the Room of the Leopards – leopards their owner had never seen, could scarcely imagine, for they existed in paint on the walls and had been varnished over so that not even the minuscule discontinuity between one color and another revealed the fine detail of the design to Mustapha’s probing fingers.

  Yet imagination populated the room with watchful threat: the alert tension belonging to beasts which must scent, spot, run down and overcome their prey. Sighted or blind, Mustapha who had early grown acquainted with the reality of such abstracts as ‘hunger’, well understood the concepts ‘quest’ and ‘quarry’. To come in here was to taste blood in anticipation.

  Yet he had no known grudge against Satamori. He might have picked the Room of Elephants, or of Fishes, or of Flowers …