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.
– M
USTAPHA
S
HARIF
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.
‘There is a little smell of death, but it is so faint, it is more likely to issue, I think, from food which has rotted through several summers and been frozen again. Those documents: they say where we have come to. Do they also hint at what became of the people who lived here?’
Forgetful, Hans shook his head. Mustapha was looking at him directly and his eyes were bright in the lamp bèam. It was not they which were at fault, but the nerves serving them. At first Hans had suspected that the poet was lying about being blind; he moved so surely about the room in which they’d met. Seeing eyes, inescapably one assumed that they saw.
Recovering almost at once, he said, ‘No, but we can dismiss fallout, I think. This area must have been well out of range of the big blasts at Kiruna and Trondheim.’
Reflexively he confirmed that statement with a glance at his radiation-counter, even though it had remained silent. At most places he went to in the line of duty as a recuperator it beeped incessantly, and he had to sort through weathered industrial junk hampered as much by its distracting row as by his lead-impregnated suit.
‘One would have expected that, yes,’ Mustapha murmured. ‘Disease, possibly? So many epidemics were imported here by the skelter … There are other rooms. For the sake of your “after” pictures, Hans, you go into them first.’
With an ironical little bow.
Sourly, Hans complied, mentally agreeing with the other’s guesswork. Sickness after killing sickness had exploded like shrapnel from the few surviving reservoirs in less fortunate areas of the world into those whose inhabitants had neglected their immunization shots, as though they were convinced that they bore charmed lives. What, of the many that came this way, had carried off the Erikssons? Could it have been plague, diphtheria, cholera, rabies, smallpox –?
No, none of these. Violence.
In the small room adjacent to the study a child’s skeleton
lay in bed. The coverlet had been soaked with blood, urine and excrement, then with the liquid foulness of rotting flesh, and dried into a hard loathsome lump.
‘Ah,’ Mustapha said with the air of a man whose favorite suspicion has been confirmed. ‘I take it we have stumbled on an actual body?’
Hans swallowed against nausea, though it was far from the first time he had chanced across similar horrors, and lowered the camera with which he had been ready to take one of what Mustapha scathingly referred to as his ‘after’ pictures. Customarily what he did at each of these lost homes was, as it were, to reverse the effects of time: record on his arrival the state to which the passage of years had reduced the place, then with much care and labor restore it to something like the way it must have looked when it was in regular occupation. ‘Before and after’, as the old advertisements used to say.
But a scene like this … No, he didn’t want it included in his report.
Then, with that incredible depersonalized interest which at first Hans had privately termed callousness, but now knew was something his vocabulary furnished no name for, Mustapha slipped past, located the bed, ran his hands lightly over the disgusting mass until he located the shape of the skull.
‘A child,’ he said. ‘Boy, girl?’
Hans surveyed the room, torch-beam dancing wildly on the irregular surfaces of a table, a half-open closet, a shelf of toys and books with brightly colored pictures. On a chair-back, casually deposited, two pathetic scraps of cloth, the parts of a bikini.
‘Girl.’
‘And young, by the size. Ten, twelve?’
‘More likely ten. So far as I can guess from the toys and books without disturbing them.’
He thought in passing: funny, one had the impression that Swedes were casual about their bodies, that a child so young would be let run naked … but perhaps like so many other preconceptions it was a trick of perspective. Around the Mediterranean what had been believed about Swedes in the old days, fifty years ago, would logically have been based on
the atypical behavior of expatriates.
A hall of distorting mirrors. The whole world had been turned into one – and sometimes the distortions had been mistakenly accepted for reality. It was going to be an infinitely long, infinitely painful task to set the consequences right.
‘Perhaps in the adjacent room, then,’ Mustapha said, ‘we shall find traces of her parents. Lead the way again, if you please.’
There, in the master bedroom, two more skeletons, one sitting up in a twin bed, the other sprawled on the floor nearby, adherent to the ruin of an Icelandic pony rug. Among the shreds of dried ancient meat clinging to the ribs it could be seen that the latter’s breastbone and one shoulderblade had been shattered. Also, on the wall behind, there was a pit such as might be made by a deformed and tumbling bullet.
Taking Hans’s arm in a light grip, not to be tightened – and his fingers were dreadfully strong! – except if his companion tried to shake it off, Mustapha demanded a description in vivid detail before crossing the threshold, and at once began to compile an explanation.
‘Ah, it comes clear. They were too casual with their skelter code, because in those days possession of a skelter was something to boast about. One midnight they were awakened by the arrival signal, and the intruder proved to be a thief – ’
‘Not a thief,’ Hans cut in, dully pleased at being able to make the contradiction. ‘A thief would have ransacked the house for money and valuables, left drawers and closets open everywhere. There’s no more disorder than you’d expect in a lived-in home with a child around.’
‘Someone who didn’t come here to steal, then,’ Mustapha accepted, unperturbed. ‘But who wanted his presence kept secret albeit at the cost of three lives. A spy or saboteur – even a whole gang of saboteurs.’
‘People playing skelter roulette?’ Hans offered, hoping for a second chance to edit his companion’s analysis.
‘No, it’s too recent a phenomenon. By the time that fad caught on they would have scrapped the notepaper with the code on it, perhaps if they were rich enough installed
a privateer because it was about then that they started to come on the market. But I gathered that the skelter is an extremely old model?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very well, I believe in my saboteurs. Memory reports some kind of industry at Umeå; it was a city of moderate importance, a convincing target.’
He stood silent for a long moment, inhaling with nostrils flared, and then unexpectedly turned on his heel. Hans said, unconsciously rubbing the spot on his arm where those deceitfully gentle fingers had rested, ‘You’re leaving already?’
‘Yes. Thank you for your assistance. I have what I came for. I wish you success in garnering what you came for too.’
‘When – when shall I see you again?’
‘When I have something else to offer that’s just as good.’ With an enigmatic smile. ‘Which may not be soon, but then this site should occupy you for quite a while, no? So I shan’t hurry. Well, goodbye, and thanks again.’
There was a question Hans always wanted to ask at this moment of separation: whether he was Mustapha’s sole customer for illegal codes. Now, once again, it tremored on his lips … but, once again, it remained unuttered. There was a faint wash of blue light from the skelter. He was alone.
Almost at once other thoughts were chased from Hans’s mind by a surge of relief at being able to get ahead so quickly with his main task. The more he studied the house, the more convinced he became that, once restored to its pristine condition, it was going to be the star of his secret collection of words and pictures which – as Mustapha had reminded him – no one else must learn of until after his death.
Then, they would bless his foresight and dedication to the cause of history. If news of what he was doing leaked out while he was still alive, though, he would undoubtedly be braced, no matter how high-minded his motives. There were few absolutes left on Earth. The right to conceal a private skelter code had to be among them.
Well, now he could stop theorizing about the Erikssons’ fate and get rid of their remains. Not before time, either.
Close on two-thirds of the planet’s population had been killed by violence or disease within twenty years of the marketing of the first skelters; as though it felt chilly in the shadow of that tidal wave of death, men now were paranoid about the presence of corpses, and he was not immune.