All the Lives He Led-A Novel (5 page)
Then it actually did touch him—
Then it kept right on going. It looked like the whole shebang went right through the Bastard, or the Bastard went through it. Anyway mule, driver, wagon and all kept right on going as though he weren’t there at all. The Bastard got sort of fuzzily hard to see for a moment, and then reappeared behind the wagon as it rattled on away.
He laughed out loud at the expressions on our faces. “Simulations,” he explained. “We’ve got the best virts in the business here; you won’t see any better than these anywhere in the world. You’re going to see a lot of these, you know, simulated guys marching around all over the city. Just pay them no attention. They aren’t there. They’re just images, really, except they also got sound, right?” He looked at the timekeeper on his opticle. “Wait a minute,” he said.
It wasn’t just a minute, it was like a long five or ten minutes, and then I nearly jumped out of my skin. From somewhere not too far from where we were standing came one of the most horrible shrieks I have ever heard. The woman from Myanmar whispered a little prayer, I think, it wasn’t in English. I said, “What the hell is that?”
He was grinning. “It’s the elephant.”
“Elephant? What elephant?”
“What you’re hearing is the last show in the arena. That’s the one where large animals are getting killed and Christians are getting crucified and so on. Oh,” he said, looking at the expression on my face, “they’re all virts. You think the Jubilee is going to pay to kill a whole real elephant three times a day? That’d be stupid. Now let me show you the refectory where you’ll mostly eat.”
Once I got over that elephant’s scream I began to cheer up. In fact, I have to say that at that moment I was feeling pretty pleased with myself for having the intelligence to come here. Pompeii made those old Egyptian rock piles look sick. Taken all in all, I thought that it was going to be a good place to build up my stash, or anyway I thought that until I met with the folks from Security.
BAD NEWS FROM THE COPS
I think I already mentioned that in Egypt if you stayed out of the cities you didn’t have much of a problem with terrorists. Even better, you didn’t have a problem with the kind of heavy-duty police presence that came when the authorities were worried about terrorists—and, given a choice between a lot of bomb throwers and a lot of cops, I might have preferred the bomb throwers. At least they wouldn’t have thought their best target was me.
It’s true that even in the Valley of the Kings every now and then some splinter group might try a drive-through tourist shoot, spraying fletches and bullets at the crowds in the Valley, just to show that they were still pissed off about Basque rights or the subjection of the Turkic Uighurs to the Han Chinese or the secession of French-speaking Canada. Or whatever. There wouldn’t be any big, scary stuff, though. The powerful and well-financed terror groups didn’t bother with Egypt.
The Italians, however, weren’t taking any chances. That very first night, just as I was getting ready to think that sleeping would be a good idea, even in the tiny bunk beds that were in the dorm the Bastard showed us to, a plainclothes woman (whose name, she said, was Brigitta) showed up. Us newcomers weren’t ready to go to sleep yet, she informed us. Instead she was taking the four of us to a Security office.
It wasn’t the office the Bastard had pointed out to us. This one wasn’t even located where the other administration offices were. It was all by itself, a low, unmarked building at the far end of a gated cul-de-sac, with nothing else nearby. (So no outsiders would hear the screaming, somebody joked. I was pretty sure it was a joke.) There wasn’t any sign on the door and Brigitta wasn’t any help; as soon as we arrived at the building she turned around and pointed at me and at a door. I got the message. I took one last look at my colleagues, huddled together and looking both scared and kind of happy that at least they weren’t the first to go in, and turned to the door.
I didn’t get a chance to knock on it. It opened as soon as I got there, and inside was a bare hall. Nobody was visible, but from somewhere a voice track said, “Wipe your feet and go to the room at the end of the hall.”
When I did, two people were waiting for me there.
My interviewers were a man and a woman, neither of them particularly good-looking or, actually, distinguished in any way at all. Neither of them was American, either, I was pretty sure, but I couldn’t tell from their names—Yvonne Feliciano and Johann Swinn, their badges said. Maybe Eastern Europe? Maybe not. The one who took me on first was the man, and what he did was ask me a long list of pretty personal questions. Had I ever owned a weapon? Did I ever take part in any demonstrations? How did I feel about the way the United States was treated since the Yellowstone accident? Had I ever known anybody who advocated force and violence as a solution to social evils? Did I have a police record anywhere?
That was where I got into trouble. I said, “No.”
That made the two of them look at each other, then go off in a corner and jabber, their voices too low pitched for me to hear. Then they came back and bracketed me on either side, both of them looking as though I had betrayed their trust. “Why do you lie to us?” the woman demanded, and the man asked, “Are you not Bradley Wilson Sheridan, formerly of 16-A Liberty Crescent, Floor 15, Molly Pitcher Redeployment Village, Staten Island, New York, arrested by the New York metropolitan police, Fifty-fifth Precinct, on May 26, 2065, for stealing with threat of violence certain cash and vouchers from one Terence Vincent Youngblood, a minor aged seven, of 16-B Liberty Crescent of the same redeployment village?”
That was a nasty moment. Nobody had mentioned to me the name of that little snot, Terry Youngblood, in years. I hadn’t expected that anybody ever would. Anyway, when I caught my breath I pointed out to the two of them that I had been only eleven years old at the time myself, and the value of the stuff I stole from Terry’s locker—the threat-of-violence business came later, after he said he was going to report me and I said I would pound him seriously if he did—was less than $10,000 American. So the whole business wasn’t even a crime, just a misdemeanor. Besides, the charges had been dropped and the arrest expunged from my record—it was what they did for kids who didn’t ever get caught doing anything more serious.
“Facts are never expunged from the record if one knows how to look for them,” the woman informed me, “and a crime is a crime regardless of its magnitude. Continue standing here. Do not sit down.”
The two of them went back to their corner for more inaudible jabbering. Then, without comment, they came back and instructed me to take off my clothes. All of them.
I’m not easily embarrassed. I’d been undressed in mixed company often enough before then—you can’t get a passport in the US of A without a strip search, or a work permit in Egypt. Some of the officials at those little events, too, had been female. So it wasn’t gender shyness. It was the way this Feliciano woman looked, more than anything else—not at all pretty, but not worrisomely ugly, either. Mostly she looked sort of like the product of a mating between a human dad and a mom who was some kind of a venomous snake. But they weren’t going to let me off because I didn’t like their looks, so I did what I was told.
Then the man attached sticky things all over my scalp, the back of my neck, my spinal cord, the soles of my feet, and several parts of my torso. Then he paused to look at what he had done. He was wearing a faint scowl. “What?” the woman asked.
“It is not important,” he said. “I simply wonder if it mightn’t be better to open him all the way up.”
She gave him an unfriendly smile. “If employment of the amphiprobe should prove to be indicated,” she informed him, “I will make that decision myself and will then request the colonel’s permission to go as deep as necessary. Now you, Sheridan”—she was turning to me—“let us cover this matter again, this time without omitting important facts.”
Then the woman asked me the same questions all over again. This time I acknowledged my juvie crime spree. Then the two of them went to the corner and talked for some time, again too softly for me to hear.
Then the woman came close to me, looked me straight in the eye—her eyes weren’t hard little reptilian dots, just normal brown eyes, but I still had the feeling that she was just waiting for the right moment to stab her poison fangs into me—and said, “You are Bradley Wilson Sheridan—let me see—175 centimeters, 93 kilos, eyes blue, complexion pale. Born 2054, so now you would be twenty-five.” I couldn’t deny any of that, so I just nodded. She didn’t seem to care whether I agreed or not, but went on without a pause. “In spite of my instruction you failed to disclose essential information about yourself, Sheridan. Why did you not tell us of your mother’s sister, the one who for a time before her marriage actually lived in your parents’ home, Mrs. Carolyn Sheridan DeVries Maddingsley?”
“Whose husband was known as the Reverend Delmore DeVries Maddingsley,” her partner added. “The one who raised money to fund terrorists.”
Right then I figured I was out of luck for good, and the best thing that might happen to me was that they’d put me on the next ship back to Egypt and its tax authorities and religion police and sand. Even that might be better than staying here. At least the Egyptians had been forgiving enough, or incompetent enough, to never mention Uncle Devious.
I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Of course I did know. I knew all about my Uncle Devious’s secret criminal side, because of all the things that my father and mother had said to each other when they didn’t know I could hear. It was pretty clear that I didn’t know as much as the Security people did, though. After I told them, over and over, that I had truthfully answered every question on the Giubileo employment application, they reluctantly admitted that, no, there hadn’t been any question that asked if I had an uncle by marriage who was accused of funding terrorists. Then they just began asking, fairly civilly, or almost, for me to tell them everything I remembered about my Uncle Devious.
Which was easy enough. I’d done it often enough for one American law enforcement body or another. So I told them yes, my uncle was Delmore DeVries Maddingsley. Yes, he was married to my mother’s older somadone-head sister—swept the poor woman off her feet and married her, against my mother’s advice and pretty nearly over the dead body of my father, but Aunt Carrie wasn’t listening to her family. She was listening to her glands. Uncle Devious was a studly-looking man with a document from a Tennessee Baptist college that said he was a full-fledged minister, though at present without a congregation, whose current good-doing ran to raising money for poor Tibetan children. While Carrie was, and knew she was, a sickly somadone-hooked old maid. Sure, he had turned out to be a criminal, but we hadn’t known that at the time. How could we? He had all those diplomas and certificates of awards for being such a wonderful guy. Plus all those before-and-after virt pictures of raggedy and starving Tibetan kids who became well-scrubbed honor students with the help of his charities.
So I told them everything I remembered, until they began looking bored. I won’t say that satisfied them. It did send them back to the corner to mutter at each other again, though. Leaving me standing there to wonder, a. how much deep shit I was in, and, b. what this meant to my never quite abandoned hope of finding Uncle Devious myself and squeezing my mother’s money out of him.
When they came back they answered one part of that. “Let me show you something,” the man said. He touched parts of the keypad on his tunic. Across the room a screen lit up. What it was displaying was the face of a handsome man with a pencil mustache and just a few glints of gray in his neatly brushed hair. “Holy shit,” I said, “that’s Uncle Devious. DeVries, I mean.”
The woman said, “Yes, this is how this Reverend Mr. Maddingsley looked when he went underground with his stolen funds.”
“What he swindled out of my mother plus my aunt’s three-million-buck trust fund,” I agreed. And that $3 million was in real 2062 dollars, before the post-Yellowstone inflation.
“Oh, more than that,” the woman said seriously.
“Very much more than a minor embezzlement from members of his family,” Swinn agreed. “We don’t really know how much. But, yes, quite a lot. At any rate, that is how he looked when the search began”—more
pat-a-pat
on his blouse keypad—“and this is how he looked on April 25, 2059, when this other picture was taken. He had just recovered from his plastic surgery.”
The new picture on the screen didn’t look anything like Uncle Devious anymore. For one thing, the smiling man it displayed was black, or coffee-cream color, anyway. He was also nearly bald. He wore neatly trimmed sideburns with a tiny sprout of white beardlet coming out of the dimple in his chin, which was nowhere near as manly as Uncle Devious’s.
“That was taken at his estate near Ocho Rios in Jamaica,” the woman was going on. “Three days later the local police found him, but someone else had found him first. Then he looked like this.”
I’ve seen plenty of sickening sights in my life but never one more sickening than that. The man was now naked and on a morgue pallet. He didn’t have any genitals. They had been hacked off. He didn’t have any eyes, either—gouged out, nothing left but bloody pits over where his nose, too, had been cut away. There’s no point saying how many other places on his body had been cut, stabbed, or gouged. I didn’t count. I didn’t vomit, either, but it was a close call.
“It was definitely Delmore DeVries Maddingsley,” Swinn told me. “DNA match. Such matches are commonly made in America, where police have more freedom than we have with the do-gooders in Euro-center in Brussels—”
The woman turned to look at him. She didn’t speak, but the male swallowed hard and abandoned the subject of do-gooders in Brussels. He said, “We think we know who did it to him—Brian Bossert, the guy who did the Boston Tunnel and San Francisco BART blowups. He’s dead, too. He got it in the Lake Ontario oil attack later that year. But we never found the money.”