All the Lives He Led-A Novel (10 page)

That was about all there was to my place of business. There was an upstairs, too, probably meant for the real First Century barkeep to sleep in, but that part was all virt.

To the tourists I was just furniture. They would point at me and take pictures of me, but as long as they didn’t actually talk to me I didn’t have to pay much attention to them. Which meant I could go through the motions of wiping off the counter, while what I really was doing was listening to the Italian-language lessons on my earplugs, or to the English-language channel for news and gossip. Or to the historical stuff. Or, when I got really bored, to whatever the Naples soundradio stations were broadcasting, which was mostly last year’s Latin American poprock or those Neapolitan songs they call canzone. And, when I had the opportunity, I made change for the customers who hadn’t converted their euros into the fake Roman stuff, and screw what the Welsh Bastard had ordered.

What with one thing and another, I had pretty nearly forgotten that anybody named Gerda Fleming existed.

That’s what I used to tell myself, anyway. Except when I was feeling particularly lonesome. Or trying to get to sleep on that sack of pebbles they called a mattress. I remembered then, all right. Because have I mentioned that not only had this Gerda woman tipped me to the
ristorante
job but my estimate of her physical attractions, on second thought, had gone up a few stages. Actually (I was beginning to think) she wasn’t bad looking at all.

If I didn’t have a Gerda, there were at least a few sparse and tiny compensations. Little by little, some of the other Indentureds were beginning to thaw toward me. Cedric Mimsley, for instance, nodded to me across the Via dell’Abbondanza the third or fourth morning I saw him there.

The via wasn’t a very wide street. You could spit across it if you were any kind of a spitter at all, but still, he didn’t come across it to visit with me, perhaps because he felt that a person in his position couldn’t afford to be seen with some lower caste person like me. Cedric’s position, actually, was ticket taker for a virt whorehouse. That annoyed me for a while. Then I found out a little more about Cedric and I switched from annoyed-at to sorry-for. None of us Indentureds had any money to speak of, but Cedric had to be the poorest of the lot. He was a double-dip. Well, so was I, because of those extra euros I’d taken onto my debt to get out of Egypt. What Cedric had borrowed his way out of, however, wasn’t anything that was merely hopeless, as Egypt was for me. His last job had been way lower on the totem pole than that. He’d been a decontamination worker at the old Soviet nuclear submarine base at Murmansk, and what kind of Indenture he’d had to sign to get out of that I shudder to think of.

And sometimes a few of my colleagues didn’t get up and leave when I sat beside them in the mess. They didn’t talk much, either, except to each other, but they didn’t make me stop listening.

So gradually I was making a kind of a not unbearable life. And I hadn’t forgotten that I was part of a family.

I wasn’t all selfish, you know. Honest. I gave quite a lot of thought to old Dan and Marilyn Sheridan, sitting around with nothing much to do back in 16-A Liberty Crescent, Floor 15 of the Molly Pitcher Redeployment Village on Staten Island.

At least now and then I did.

I guess I bring that up to show that, never mind my fiddles and my history of occasional minor felonies, I still had enough common decency to have feelings for my parents’ problems and needs. It wasn’t their fault that Yellowstone had blown its top. Or that Uncle Devious was never going to give back Mom’s mad money. Or that the US government was so drowned in emergency expenses that the treasury didn’t have enough left over to give the refugees a decent standard of living.

I was doing my usual how-much-can-I-spare-for-Staten-Island arithmetic when more customers showed up and I had to hide my cell in my diaper. (The Welsh Bastard didn’t want us to be seen with anything that was less than two thousand years old. Especially not with anything high-tech. Would spoil the illusion, he said.) But I needn’t have bothered. These particular customers didn’t seem to know I was there, maybe just another virt, but one with skills enough to take their asses and pour their drinks. These were cheap bastards, too. They kept on telling each other, in English and loud enough that I couldn’t miss a word, how outstandingly lousy the wine was … while they were drinking it down, every damn drop. They sounded American, but were not my kind of American, anyway. Maybe Australian? Or Canadian maybe from the Maritime Provinces and thus still rich?

I don’t know how long they would have gone on dissing my wine, and me, but they caught sight of somebody approaching along the via, a dark-skinned youth in a gray slave tunic like my own. “Real or fake?” one of them said to the other. “Beats the hell out of me,” the other said. “Let’s go stick a finger in his eye and find out.”

I watched them go (their cups left totally empty on the counter), sort of hoping they would try it. The guy they were looking at was named Jamie Hardesty. He came from Springfield, Illinois, and he was as flesh and blood as I was, about twenty kilos more so, actually, and every gram of it pure, hard muscle. The ceramic pots that hung from the yoke across his shoulders would be holding food. Mine, among others.

The maybe Canadians must have got a better look at him because they veered off and wandered away, just glancing back at him now and then over their shoulders. Jamie set his pots down, rubbing the base of his neck where the yoke had bitten in. While I was filling the eating bowl I kept under the counter he said, “Oh, by the way, Brad. Gerda’s back.”

Now, that was the kind of news that rolled the clouds away. I guess my subconscious had been processing more, and hornier, thoughts about Gerda Fleming than my conscious was aware of. What I wished I could do was call her up on my pocket screen, right then, but there were too many tourists hanging around.

I don’t mean I was consciously looking for a special boy-girl relationship with her. I hadn’t been dreaming about the woman—not so that I remembered it when I woke up, anyway. I hadn’t even tried to find out where she’d gone. I just remembered that she was the one I owed the
ristorante
job to, even if the job hadn’t exactly panned out, and I thought I’d like to say thanks. I couldn’t do it just then, though. First Century slaves didn’t have Twenty-first Century phones.

So I had put Gerda out of my mind for the moment and I did the job I was being paid to do, gobbling down my food between serving cups of wine. That seemed to entertain the tourists, because, of course, I was eating the “lunch” with my fingers, as any Roman slave would naturally do, and they probably could tell from the look on my face what I thought of it. That day my lunch was a salty, fishy-smelling porridge. That’s to say, it was just another bastardly little surprise from the Welsh Bastard who was my boss, with the fish in the stew right on the margin between kind of all right and really, truly, inedibly spoiled.

By then there were maybe twenty tourists clustered around my shop, treating themselves to a cup of wine or just enjoying the spectacle of a slave gobbling down his pitiful excuse for a meal. I was glad enough when I’d finished the last foul-tasting fingerful and some of the tourists began to drift away.

The only ones still dawdling at my bar were a pair of middle-aged men who were having a ferocious low-toned argument in what I supposed was Spanish. They showed no signs of leaving.

Then the two men exchanged a particularly nasty-sounding couple of sentences and did finally leave, in opposite directions. Now pretty much alone, I was reaching for my phone when something attracted my attention.

Down the via a quartet of slaves were carrying a litter in my direction. A flash of red hair from the occupant made me think for a moment that it was Gerda inside.

It wasn’t, though. I caught a glimpse of the face and realized it was some other staffer in the blond wig of a Roman prostitute. Or, I realized on second look, it wasn’t a staffer at all. It wasn’t anyone alive. Palanquin, passengers, and bearer were all simulations.

I couldn’t always tell the difference, unless maybe it was raining and I noticed the figures of the virts weren’t getting wet. This time there wasn’t any doubt. The side of the litter changed color to a sort of ripple of green and violet. Then it bulged out, and the figures of a young Asian couple jogged right through the palanquin.

Tourists were always doing that kind of thing, just to show off. Virts were as tenuous as air, and they didn’t care what the customers did to them. What I myself minded, though, was that this couple, once they had crashed their way through the phantom palanquin, hurried right over to my wine bar, where they stopped, giggling to each other, and stood without speaking.

I remembered I was supposed to be unloading wine on them. “Wine?” I asked. “
Vino? Vin? Wein?
” That was about as far as I could go with European languages, and didn’t know any of the Asiatic ones that might have been more useful. It didn’t matter. The youngsters did not seem interested in wine in any language. What they seemed to be interested in was a man slowly approaching down the street.

He was kind of interesting, at that. He was middle-aged and wore a data opticle in his right eye. He was less stylishly dressed than the young people, but the wristscreen on his right arm was set with diamonds and he wore big, jeweled rings on all the fingers of his left hand. He wasn’t alone, either. Eight or ten others of scattered ages followed him. “Good afternoon, sir,” the man said to me, holding his unadorned right hand out for shaking. “I am Dr. Basil Chi-Leong, hello, and you are?”

“Brad Sheridan,” I said, shaking his hand because I couldn’t see any way out of it. Then I was surprised when this Dr. Basil Chi-Leong didn’t let go of me at once. “Now that we are friends,” the old man said sunnily, “I may ask a favor, I think? To be photographed by my family members with you? If I may? All right? Then thank you,” he said, and threw one skinny arm around my shoulders before I could get out of the way.

At that point he changed his tone, and his language, and began issuing orders to his family.

Each one of the adults immediately began snapping pictures of me with one variety or another of camera, still, motion, stereoscopic, and who knew what other kind, as they took a picture with one instrument and then let that one hang from its neck strap as they reached for another. They only stopped when Dr. Chi-Leong raised his hand commandingly. He dropped half a dozen random coins in my meal bowl, still sticky with the remains of my revolting lunch, and said, “That was most enjoyable, Mr. Bradley Sheridan. Allow me to introduce my mother, Madam Katey Chi-Leong, who speaks no English, but is an avid taker of pictures. These others are my three sons and the wives thereof, with grandsons and granddaughters. We are from the Republic of Singapore, perhaps you have visited it? No? That is too bad. But you will not mind if Madam Katey Chi-Leong, my mother, takes some additional pictures of you? And we will each have a cup of your best wine, if you please.”

They did, too, every damn one of them. Even the children. I thought for a moment of refusing to sell wine to the littlest ones, no more than three or four years old; but the pleasure of selling fifteen asses’ worth of wine in five minutes decided me against asking for IDs.

Actually, none of the children drank any of the stuff anyway. They carefully held their cups at arm’s length, to avoid spilling them, or perhaps to avoid the smell of their contents, then set them down untouched on the countertop. Even their parents drank very little of the wine. A sip or two was plenty, and then they each made the same face and drank no more.

I didn’t mind that a bit; there would be more to put back in the vat when they left. What I did mind was that, to get out of the hot sun, all dozen-plus of them had crowded into my tiny shop. It did not have room for such a mob. Three of the little ones had hopped over the counter to share my less congested side, and all three of Dr. Chi-Leong’s sons were sitting on the counter itself.

The old woman, who had been more or less continuously photographing me, said something peremptory to Dr. Chi-Leong. He nodded deferentially and addressed me again. “You are American, is that not true? And of course, if I may say so without giving offense, Indentured? If that is the case please answer me this question, so that my mother’s interest may be satisfied: Is your income from the Giubileo sufficient for your needs?”

No tourist had ever asked me that before, and I was caught without a good answer. “Yes” for the sake of my pride? “No” in the hope of a larger tip? “Mind your own business” as the most appropriate?

I was saved the trouble. An immense black shadow was passing over the Via dell’Abbondanza.

The youngest daughter-in-law, the one who hadn’t been given room in the wineshop and so had been partly out in the sunshine, glanced up, shading her eyes. Then she cried something in that singsong language that I had no hope of understanding. In a moment the shop emptied out of Singaporeans, because they were all photographing the sky.

Dr. Chi-Leong glanced back at me, pointing upward. “That airship is named the
Chang Jang
,” he said proudly. “It is given that name after a major river system in the country of our ancestors, which is the country of China. It is this ship which has brought us here from Berlin and Moscow and other tourist places of that sort.”

By leaning over the counter and craning my neck, I could see what they were looking at. The
Chang Jang
was one of those giant lighter-than-air cruise zeppelins that turned up in the air of every interesting cruise destination, Pompeii definitely included. The colors this one flew from its tail said that it was a ship of the Cathay Pacifica line. It surely was a monster. I’m not talking here about something like the little air-yachts that rich people sometimes flew, or the blimps that do inter-city transportation. I’m talking large. Zeps in general were usually two kilometers long or so. This one, hanging less than a kilometer above the city wall, was even bigger. It filled the sky from horizon to horizon.