Web of Everywhere

by John Brunner

  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.

  – MUSTAPHA SHARIF

  Chapter 7

  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.

  It was incontestably worth trying, though Aleuker himself had little hope of it paying off.

  ‘Still expecting to win your bet with me, Chaim?’ a voice demanded from his side.

  The speaker was Boris Pech, affable, smart in blue suède, manager of the Advancement Authority which was the most recent of the planetary administrative departments. It had grown from a tiny nucleus within the Economics Authority, charged with devising new means of exploiting what the old world had left lying about in such colossal quantities: spare parts for obsolete machinery, adult toys for which there was no longer any call, gambling machines and the like. Boris Pech had hit on countless brand-new tricks, and elected himself automatically as head of the Advancement Authority when it was created five years ago.

  Its work was little publicized; the climate of opinion was still against innovation. But sooner or later people would find out that it was still possible, in spite of all, to make progress.

  Chaim chuckled. ‘Only twenty minutes are left,’ he said. ‘And the clues we planted are pretty difficult … You were talking to Fred Satamori, weren’t you? He was looking gloomy when he arrived; is something the matter with him?’

  A waiter passed carrying a tray of drinks and canapés. Boris helped himself before replying.

  ‘Not really, but in a way,’ he said eventually.

  ‘I see. You’ve caught the riddle-making habit, and now you’re talking in mysterious gobbledegook.’

  ‘On the contrary. I’m speaking the literal truth. Fred stopped off to see Mustapha Sharif on his way here, assuming he’d be among the guests and thinking they might come along together. You know he’s been collecting Mustapha’s work longer than almost anybody else.’

  ‘Ah.’ Chaim tapped the side of his glass thoughtfully with one of his rings. ‘Was Mustapha angry at not having been invited, is that it?’

  ‘Not at all. Fred said he wouldn’t have come even if he had been invited. He doesn’t approve of our trying to perpetuate the – the managerial system we’ve evolved.’

  ‘He finally came out and said it in so many words? That’s interesting. And a little bit alarming.’

  Boris blinked. ‘I’m not with you!’

  Chaim stretched, half-raising himself from the chaise-longue as though to cure an embryo attack of cramp. He said, ‘Maybe I exaggerate, but I do believe Mustapha is a dangerous man. Has it never struck you that he’s quite literally the only one of – of us, for want of a better term, who has succeeded in integrating himself into a non-skelter community?’

  ‘That makes him dangerous? I’d have said the contrary! It’s high time we – ’

  ‘Naturally, naturally!’ Chaim interrupted. ‘But how has he done it? By ingratiating himself; by what can only be called overt dishonesty. Have you ever attended one of those sessions he holds on the big Moslem feast days, when the imams come and recite the Koran all night long? He’s not a believer. Hell, he edited most of what now passes for the authentic teaching of Prince Knud, and he doesn’t believe in the Way of Life any more than you do! I take it you are still a good dialectical materialist?’

  Boris chuckled. ‘About as much as anybody, these days. I don’t imagine Papa Lenin – let alone Grandpa Marx – would find much to agree with me about if we had a chance to chat together. But it did happen, didn’t it, that the Soviet model came in handy when we had to try and reconstruct the world’s economy?’

  ‘Oh, we’ve stolen from it wholesale, under compulsion. If we hadn’t forcibly redistributed the available resources, far more than two-thirds of mankind would have died; if we hadn’t taken steps to interfere whenever some petty local power group decided to seek vengeance; if we hadn’t made it worth the while of those with the necessary talent to work with us instead of against us, by creating the counterpart of a privileged group of Party members … No, we’d never have made the repairs we have managed, makeshift though they are.’

  ‘Mustapha won’t concede the necessity, will he?’

  ‘Indeed he won’t. And I’ve never been quite sure why. I can’t tell whether it’s because he genuinely hates, on the gut level, everything about the old days and the old ways, or whether it’s that he’s secretly ambitious.’

  Boris’s mouth rounded into an O. He said after a pause, ‘I recall a quotation, I think, though I can’t remember the exact words. An English poet who said that people in his profession – ’

  ‘Ah, yes. “Unacknowledged lawgivers”, isn’t that it?’

  ‘Yes, precisely. Was it Shelley?’

  ‘I forget. But you’re right to mention it in this context. At his home in Luxor, Mustapha behaves like a caliph, doesn’t he? By acting out a role which the local people recognize, being unsophisticated enough to want a distinction between rich and poor, he has ingratiated himself, as I said. It is dishonest.’

  Boris hesitated. He said, ‘Even so, it’s a white lie, surely. Life would be a lot easier for many of us, including yourself, if we did the same. It’s no coincidence that so many of us now live on small islands, where one can get to know the local troublemakers personally and perhaps calm them down.’

  ‘Bribe them to calm down?’

  ‘Occasionally one has to. There’s no alternative. It’s as rigid a predicament as the world was in thirty years ago.’

  ‘No, no and again no,’ Chaim said. ‘One thing we must not do is build the foundations of the future on deception. I know there are people who hate my guts just the other side of those hills.’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘I can practically feel their breath on the nape of my neck sometimes: Maoris who ran for shelter in the cozy dead end of their old traditional ways, white people of British stock who were brought up to believe that their mother country was the greatest on earth and don’t even yet accept that it
doesn’t exist any longer … Nominally I’m a Jew; that gives them enough reason to hate me, even though I bought my land legally, because they’ve always been convinced that any Jew with a fortune came by it dishonestly. But the one thing we dare not be from now on is hypocritical, Boris! We musn’t imitate the lies that brought the old world down, we mustn’t pretend that riches are a burden, we mustn’t deprecate intelligence, we mustn’t preach loving brotherhood with a Bible in one hand and an H-bomb in the other!’

  Boris gave a sober nod. ‘We’ve taken steps in that direction. Making the skelter system free and open – ’

  ‘Hah!’ Chaim gulped his drink. ‘What does the village kid with ambitions see when he goes to a skelter outlet for the first time? Stucks, hundreds of them, and bracees, blocking his way! You know sometimes they attack people trying to get into a transit booth?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard about that. We shall simply have to put guards on – ’

  ‘That’s exactly what we must not do!’ Chaim flared. ‘Armed patrols at skelter terminals? I can’t think of a worse way of importing the foulness of the past into what we hope and pray will be a brighter future! As a matter of fact, that was the chief reason why I agreed to organize this party. I’m desperately hoping that somebody may turn up who thinks in terms of no-guards, no-guns, no-locks. Come to that, no privateers. If we could only find a few people, just a handful, who’ve lived all their lives with the skelter as a fact, who’ve adjusted to it instead of regarding it as a fearful mechanical monster … ’ Looking lugubrious, he shook his head.

  ‘What you just said reminded me,’ Boris murmured. ‘How is your private venture in rehabilitation coming along?’