All the Lives He Led-A Novel (7 page)
There were a lot of people working at the Jubilee. Eight or nine hundred of us at least, including the ones who would be in public view, like me, plus the ones who worked behind the scenes to keep the whole thing going. (For instance, the guy who had picked us up at the dock, Maury Tesch, had something to do with the city’s water supply system.) The workers came from all over the world. From Munich and Liverpool and Kiev and Buenos Aires, and also from places like Boston and Addis Ababa and Toronto and Cleveland and Tannu Tuva—that’s in Outer Mongolia, if you didn’t know. There was a big difference between the two groups. Indentureds, like myself, were there because there weren’t any jobs back home. We needed the Jubilee’s pay, pitiful as it was. But the other guys—
Ah, the other guys. They were the volunteers. They were college students on vacation, or maybe teenagers from well-to-do families in un-Yellowstoned countries having their first adventure away from home. Rich kids wondering how the other half lived. They didn’t need the Jubilee’s miserly pay. They all took it, though—hey, you never knew when you might want to buy an extra pack of somadone stim-gum. And they certainly didn’t want to be friends with the likes of us Indentureds.
In fact it looked like nobody wanted that. Oh, I got to chat a bit with the man who met us at the dock, Tesch, now and then. He had a good job on the Jubilee waterworks, and, curiously, Tesch wanted to be friends.
All right, maybe I worry too much about being hassled by somebody—some male somebody—who’s really only looking for cheap, quick sex. All I can say about that is that anybody who had been a punk kid working the streets of New York City when I was there would learn to be careful about that. Or maybe he would come to like it. (I didn’t.) So when, once or twice, Maury Tesch invited me to join him for a hit, a puff, or something stronger in his own room I said no. See, the operative word there with Tesch was “guy.” He wasn’t the gender of friends I wanted to find.
That gender of potential friends did exist. I saw quite a few of them every day at quitting time. The employee dressing rooms were unisex, so every day there I got a look at thirty or forty reasonably good-looking women wearing various amounts of clothing, sometimes hardly any at all. None of them seemed to mind being looked at, either. Some even cast interested looks my way as I was unwrapping my diaper and pulling on my flexshorts. But they just looked. When I tried to strike up a conversation they gave me short answers and strolled away.
One of them, formerly from the olive-growing country along the Adriatic, was really nasty about it, too. (That’s when I found out that there were a lot of people in the rest of the world that disliked Americans for not preventing Yellowstone, though that was pretty unfair. Really Yellowstone’s blowup was fairly trivial compared to what it could have been, like plunging the whole world into another Ice Age instead of just causing a few poor harvests.)
I should admit that I wasn’t totally frozen out. A couple of the women did finally let me know that they might be willing to take the electric into Naples with me some night, or check out some of the Italian clubs along the shore.
I didn’t encourage them, though. Not only were those things expensive, but the women offering them weren’t the pretty ones.
And then, wonder of wonders, one was.
I was sitting by myself in the game room playing, I don’t know, Dust Robber or Intersec and Terrorist, when somebody sat down next to me. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Gerda Fleming. You’re Brad Sheridan.”
I switched the game off in the middle of unexpectedly coming across a nuclear weapons cache while I happened to be holding a pulverizer bomb on a five-minute time delay. “Pleased to know you,” I said, and shook her hand.
That seemed to amuse her. She said, “How do you like the bakery?”
That was definitely the most other-sex friendliness I’d been given since I arrived in Italy. I would have liked it even better if it had come from someone a little prettier, but she wasn’t bad. I wouldn’t say she knocked me over with her gorgeousness—hair pulled back in a sort of accidental-looking scrunchy, her really quite adequate figure camouflaged in middle-aged schoolteacher shorts and shirt. I might even have called her mousy, although she did have a sort of thoroughly female look that I appreciated, even if she wasn’t wearing much in the way of makeup. Or much in the way of sex jewelry, either—no nostril studs, for instance, which I interpreted to mean that she wasn’t urgently seeking.
She was nice looking, of course. What young woman who could afford an occasional makeover wasn’t? But I wouldn’t have said she was anything radical. I mean not the kind of woman who could change my life completely. Could even
be
my life. You see how wrong I often am?
Since she had asked, I told her how little I liked it, in detail. That also made her smile and offer me a stick of gum. Anyway, I found out from her what she did for the Jubilee show. Most days this Gerda Fleming person put on a blond wig to play a Pompeiian prostitute, but now and then they let her be a matron showing tourists around her villa and explaining the pornographic murals to them.
When I mentioned that I wouldn’t mind my lousy job quite as much if the people were a little friendlier, she put her hand over mine sympathetically. “It’s not you, Brad. The reason is they’re too scared,” she told me. “Strangers might be terrorists. Then, if the terrorists got busted, the Security goons would go looking for everybody who knew them. Can you blame people for being careful?”
I opened my mouth to say that, yes, I could, but she didn’t let me do it. She squeezed my hand. “Don’t worry, Brad: a. things’ll get better, and b. listen, I think there’s going to be an opening in the tourist
ristorante
, so maybe we can get you off the flour mill.” She lifted her hand to look at her thumb watch, then grimaced. “Shoot. I have to run.”
I stood up, looking her over. She looked pretty good, at that, maybe a little better than I had first thought—reddish hair, very goodish figure—except for being a little taller than I was and a lot more muscular. “One thing,” I said. “How did you know I’m not a terrorist?”
She shook my hand, grinning. “You passed Security, didn’t you? I mean, all but that early bit about swiping the kid’s lunch money, so what’s to worry about? And, hey, who can be responsible for what their uncles might be up to? Anyway, ciao.”
She didn’t say how she knew what happened in my Security interview, especially how she knew about my Uncle Devious. She just went out the door, and I didn’t see her again for three weeks.
I didn’t fail to think about her, though. Partly about the things she knew that she shouldn’t have … but mostly, I have to admit, about the fact that she was redheaded, and tall, and, I ultimately decided, with a really good figure. And friendly. And, oh yes, female.
MY LIFE AS AN ANCIENT POMPEIIAN
I can’t say I got used to the bakery job. Pushing that heavy damned wheel around wasn’t the kind of thing that grows on you. But there were other things going on in my world, and, surprisingly, some of them almost made up for the crappy job and the paucity of friends.
I was, after all, sitting right there in the middle of the world’s number-one tourist attraction. A lot of it didn’t interest me—the “thrill rides” like the chariot races in which you could ride one of the chariots, racing against the other daredevil charioteers who looked at every second as though they were moments away from crashing into and maiming you, but who wouldn’t have done much damage if they had, because they were all virts. Or the giant Ferris wheel that towered over the old city. Or the virt lake with its virt biremes and virt rowers. They all looked like the kind of thing you might want to take a girl on if you had one. But I didn’t.
True, for us employees, it was almost all free. (Not counting, of course, those extra-ticket special attractions like the whorehouses and the fish ponds where “slaves” fed living, screaming other “slaves” to the “slave owners’” favorite mullets. All virts, of course, but as they were being eaten alive by the fish they didn’t sound that way.
One thing I have to say for the Jubilee is that they did have about the best virts I ever saw. I got to talking to one of the virt experts before opening one morning while he was finishing replacing some circuits in the projector of the bakery’s upper floors. He was proud of his work. The basic science behind the things, he told me, had been invented back in the Twentieth Century when a man named Dennis Gabor had developed the hologram. Once that was done it was obvious that scientists could make bunches of photons do just as they were told, which included standing alone and moving. The sound—what they called “Pompei sound,” spelled with one “i”—came later. I had heard of it when I was hitting the books in the library of
La Bella Donna di Palermo
but assumed it was named after the city. Wrong. It was somebody named One-i Pompei who’d invented it, more than a hundred years ago.
Dealing with that sort of system was one of the kinds of things I wished I had learned back in good old—or I should say bad old—NYA&M but I hadn’t. As the technician was packing up his probes and meters I mentioned politely that I sure would appreciate the chance to be somebody’s helper long enough to learn how to do what he did.
That was the end of the casual chat. He gave me a freezing look, said, “Don’t get your hopes up,” and left me standing there.
I got the message. He was willing to chat a bit with his social inferiors. But when one of us talked about rising to his level the politeness disappeared.
What kept me from total despair was that, no matter the bad parts, there was still a lot to do and a lot to see in Pompeii, and quite a lot of it didn’t carry an extra charge. I saw as much of it as I could.
The Welsh Bastard had put me on the morning shift on the bakery treadmill, six in the morning until two in the afternoon and—after a long, hot shower to get the kinks out and a change into my own clothes—I had the rest of the day to explore. I explored. I walked the old streets, being jostled by Scandinavian and African and Japanese tourists, and wishing I was one of them. I splurged for swims in the baths—the one bath, right across the street from the villa with the “Beware of the Dog” mosaic, that was the only fully reconstructed one, that is. The other baths were all virts. You could see a batch of ancient Romans eating, reading, bathing, whatever. But you couldn’t touch them because there was nothing tangible there to touch. I ate peculiar cheese and weird fruits sold by the vendors in their little cubbyholes. (That would have been expensive if we Indentureds had had to pay full price for them all. We didn’t.) I even watched a show in the amphitheater once—the little amphitheater in what they called the Triangular Forum, that is, not the big one at the edge of town that was too ruined and too far from the tourist areas to dress up. Those shows were okay if you liked a lot of blood, even make-believe virt blood, squirting out of the virt gladiators and the equally virt wild animals in the arena. But sitting through a whole show meant an hour or so of resting your bun muscles on those cold, hard stone seats, and that took a lot of the joy out of it. Besides, sitting in one place for very long gave me time to think, and I had more time to think pushing the damn wheel around than I really needed.
What I mostly thought about, of course, was my troubles. Especially my dashed hopes of finding, and collecting from, my rotten old Uncle Devious.
It was funny how those hopes stayed with me. I wasn’t stupid—honest—and I was generally a realist. I don’t suppose I had ever really expected to run into some tourist face, brilliant blue eyes peering out of a ruddy complexion, and immediately recognize my Uncle Devious. I had always known that that wasn’t going to happen, because how would I have recognized him? Until Piranha Woman had showed me her scenes from Uncle Devious’s last days I had had no real idea of what he might have been looking like by then. I’d always known that with all the money he stole he could buy himself any look he chose—like the one he actually did buy, according to Piranha Woman’s photo, or any other slim or stout body, choice of hair and skin color, even gender, if he wanted badly enough to look that different. Whatever you wanted the cosmetic surgeons could supply, given that you had, and were willing to part with, the astronomical amounts of cash required.
So there had been no real chance that I’d have identified Uncle Devious even if I’d stood next to him at a men’s urinal. But that hadn’t stopped me from looking and hoping, and I did truly resent the fact that now even those slim hopes were gone.
Six hours a day of pushing that damn wheel around weren’t all the Giubileo wanted from me. There was also the compulsory, and I do mean compulsory, Security briefings.
They weren’t just the Jubilee’s idea, either. They were Italian law. The Italians had had their share of terrorism, notably the fairly frequent attacks on the pope. Well, those and also the occasional secular kook group that came along, like the ones who called themselves L’Esercito Nuovo del Risorgimento, whatever that meant, and to further their objectives, whatever those might have been, firebombed the Ponte Vecchio in Florence one Saturday morning. That was a shock for the Italians. Even the Nazis hadn’t touched the Ponte Vecchio, back in WWII days when the retreating German army was pulverizing just about everything else it left behind. In Florence they had merely demolished all the buildings for four or five blocks on either side. So it was the law that every Italian resident, citizen or not, had to put in one hour a week on training to resist terrorism.
Of course nobody really could do much that was useful about resisting it. But there were motions to go through, so we went through them.
The sessions weren’t really all that bad. Oh, numbingly dull, sure, but they were something I could be doing with other people. Some of them were almost friendly. Well, noncommittal, anyway. There was Abukar Abdu, from some little town somewhere in Africa. And of course my chess and general conversation pal, Maury Tesch. There was a good-looking, dark-haired woman named Elfreda Something-or-other whom I might have had some faint hopes for if she hadn’t been hanging on the arm of a large, Italian-looking guy I’d never seen before. There was also another Italian, this one named Vespasiano Gatti, who, it turned out, wasn’t friendly at all. In fact he didn’t like me even as much as the average other person.