All the Lives He Led Page 6

  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.

  Gatti made that clear one night when I spotted an empty seat next to him and sat down in it. He gave me one look—a really nasty look—and then he got up and crossed to the other side of the room. Why that was I had no idea. Gatti was middle-aged, or maybe a little more than that, and at first I thought he was too rich to be an Indentured because he carried a silver-handled cane and wore an old-fashioned three-piece suit made out of expensive cream-colored flannel. But then I got a better look. His cuffs were frayed and the ferrule of his silver-handled cane had been broken off and lost. He was at most a formerly rich man. Not unlike my dad.

  A nice touch with the antiterrorism classes was that our teacher passed out little cups of espresso and those rock-hard things they call biscotti that I didn’t care much for but appreciated the thought of. The person who provided the biscotti was our instructor, an old fart named Professor, or sometimes Colonel-Professor, Bartolomeo Mazzini. When I say “old” what I mean is really old. That is, about as old as an old man can get, with a bumpy old skull as bare as a baby’s bottom. Mazzini hadn’t even bothered to get his hair reseeded or to remove the wrinkles in his face or in fact to do any of the things that everybody else in the world did to keep on looking respectably young. When I came in early one evening he was sound asleep at his desk, and when the rest of the class got there and woke him up he stared around at us as though he wondered who we were and what we were doing there.

  He didn’t seem like a totally bad guy, though. Once all the coffee cups and cookies got handed out he would turn on the wall screens and show us everything that was going on, terrorist-wise. Like firebombing department stores and butcher shops in Argentina, which, he told us, was probably a push of native Indians trying to get the European Argentinians to go back home. But, he said cheerfully, we probably didn’t have to worry about it spreading to Pompeii, or actually anywhere off the Argentine pampas, because already a couple of thousand Argentine and UN troops were systematically deploying rockets and artillery to pulverize a little town across the river in Uruguay because that was where the ringleaders of the terrorists had unwisely assembled.

  Old Bart filled us in on stuff like that for ten or fifteen minutes in that first session I went to. Then he showed us pictures of a bunch of individuals—a Pole, an Ecuadorian, a couple of Filipina women—who were known terrorists and might just possibly be somewhere around our area (but, he admitted, probably weren’t). Then he snapped off the screens, took a hit of his cooling espresso and beamed at us. “Any questions?” he asked.

  So the actual Security briefing had amounted to, what?, maybe fifteen minutes or so? That was a pleasant surprise. We couldn’t leave that early, though, so we looked around at each other to see if anybody had a question. Finally one of the Ghanians who had arrived with me raised his hand. When the professor pointed to him he had trouble getting his English going, so he leaned over and whispered to the man next to him. Who said, “Hamel says these class ordered by Italian government, okay? But you not Italian government. You Intersec Security person, Hamel say.”

  At the word “Security” the temperature in the room dropped a couple of degrees. It didn’t change the amiable old-fart expression on the professor’s face, though. “Hamel is very observant,” he said, sounding more like an admirer than a threat. “Yes, Intersec is a global agency, but its personnel are often recruited from the country where they will serve and as it happens I am indeed Italian by birth. Are there any other questions?”

  Most of the class had the look of not wanting to get into any conversation that included the word “Security,” but finally a woman in the first row put her hand up. It was the good-looking one named Elfreda. She asked politely, “Is it true we will all have to work overtime for this Vespasian thing?”

  I was sort of curious about the answer to that, too, since my readings on the ship hadn’t given me any idea of what a “Vespasian” thing was, outside of being the name of Pompeii’s current (as of AD 79) emperor. The professor included us all in his friendly look. “Afraid so, Elfreda,” he admitted. “We’re expecting big crowds on the anniversary, and we’ll have to accommodate them.” I guess I must have let some of my ignorance leak onto the expression on my face, because he was looking right at me when he said, “Maybe some of our newer people don’t know what the anniversary is all about. Anyone care to tell us?”

  Three or four suck-ups tried to answer at once, but it was a thick-necked American whose name I didn’t know who got the nod. “It’s about the Emperor Vespasian, the guy who was the twelfth Caesar, and—what?”

  The professor was waggling a finger at him. “Not the twelfth. Anybody?”

  He was looking right at the Italian with the frayed suit, but he didn’t get a response until he said, “Come on, Mr. Gatti. You’re named after him, aren’t you?”

  Gatti said briefly, “Vespasian was the tenth of the Caesars. If one looks at the virts in the refectory hall one will see this for himself,” and that was
all he did say. He went back to resting his chin on the silver handle of his cane.

  The professor sighed. The same bunch of would-be teacher’s pets began calling out supplementary information, but the professor stopped them. “Counting from Julius Caesar, Vespasian was the tenth, and what’s special about him is that he was the Roman emperor who built the Colosseum in Rome. He died just before the time when Pompeii got snuffed. Specifically, June 2079 is the two thousandth anniversary of the date in 79 when Emperor Vespasian died and was succeeded by his son, Titus. That made a big holiday in First Century Rome, and so the Giubileo’s going to mark the date with a celebration of our own. All clear? Any other questions?” None appeared immediately and he turned to me, beaming again. “What about you, Mr. Sheridan? You just got here. Isn’t there anything that you’d like explained?”

  Well, sure there was. In fact, there were a lot of things, and so over the rest of the hour some of the holes of ignorance in my head got filled. Not just by the professor, either. Most of my classmates got involved, and by the time the professor let us leave I had actually learned quite a lot of useful stuff. Like the fact that almost everything in the Giubileo gift shops was free for us employees. (“Because we’d steal it anyhow,” somebody said from the back of the room. The professor just smiled.) And if there was anything I didn’t like about my job or my accommodations I had the right to report it to my union, the Confederazione Sindacale Lavoratori del Giubileo. Which I hadn’t even known existed but would have found out, it was explained to me, when I got my first pay and saw the deductions for union dues.

  When the class was over and I was bending over the drinking fountain in the hall I heard Maury Tesch’s voice from behind me. “You don’t want to drink that stuff, Brad,” he said amiably. “Don’t you know fish fuck in it?”

  Actually I’d seen the sign on the fountain that said “Aqua Potabile” and figured out in general what it meant. “It says it’s all right, doesn’t it? Are you telling me it would make me sick?” I asked.

  “Maybe, if you drank enough of it, but you wouldn’t do that. Tastes terrible. All the fountains recirculate, and by the twentieth or thirtieth time around it ain’t fresh anymore. How about a beer?”

  I considered that, wiping my lips as I straightened up. I wasn’t much interested in making him a bosom pal, as he seemed to want, but there was always the chance that he might be able to introduce me to somebody more interesting. Like, say, a woman. But it was getting late, and I had that early-morning session on the wheel to think about. “Maybe another time,” I said. “Something I was wondering about, though. What’s this union we’re all supposed to be members of?”

  Tesch took a quick look around, then grinned. “What?” he said. “You never heard of the Confederazione Sindacale Lavoratori, otherwise known as the Mafia? Tell him about it, why don’t you, Vespasiano, since one of your jobs is working there?”

  Old Gatti was just passing us in the hall. He looked us both over, but he didn’t exactly respond. “I do not want to talk to you,” he said, and this time he was definitely looking me in the eye. He pushed past, leaving Maury staring after him.

  “He’s really mad, isn’t he?” he said. “I was only joking.”

  “Maybe Italians don’t like Mafia jokes,” I offered, but I had something else on my mind. “Tesch? What was it you called him, Vespasian? Does that mean he’s like royal blood or something?”

  Tesch gave me a grin. “Him? Not likely. It’s a common name, like all the ones that once belonged to one of the emperors, but actually I have heard that his family did have money at one time. They don’t anymore.”

  I let it go at that; I only sympathized with families that had lost their money when they were my own. When Maury repeated his offer of a beer I told him I was too tired. “But listen,” I said. “I’ve been wanting to ask somebody why they call my boss ‘Bastard.’ Do you know?”

  He gave me a probing look. “Can’t say,” he said at last. “I think I heard once that he didn’t hire any pretty girls unless they’d go to bed with him. But I don’t know for sure.”

  And he walked off, leaving me pretty well convinced that he did know, but just didn’t want to say.

  Then, all alone in my lonesome little cot I lay awake for a while thinking about why Maury didn’t want to spread some gossip my way. And thinking, too, about old Vespasiano Gatti. It wasn’t the Mafia joke he had been mad about. It was Tesch who had made the joke, but the one Gatti had looked right in the eye of and said he didn’t like was definitely me.

  By the next morning I had pretty nearly forgotten about old Gatti. I woke up feeling almost cheerful. There definitely were good parts to working for the Giubileo, and one of the best was just looking out of my window when I got up in the early morning and was getting ready to go to my goddamn wheel. I could look down on that ruined old wreck of a city the way it really was when the virts weren’t beautifying it, jaggedly broken buildings that sulked in the moonlight, more shadow than substance. But then, before my jaded eyes, skeptical, cynical, exhausted from the long hours and the bullying Welsh Bastard, old Pompeii would be born again.

  To get ready for the day’s customers, every morning, they turned the city on.

  When they did that everything of the old city that age and disaster had destroyed was suddenly made whole. Buildings that had been no more than stumps for two thousand years suddenly got back their upper stories. Walls flashed into being where there had been nothing but rubble. From my window I could squint into some of the residential areas of the late Pompeiian well-to-do. I could see lush flower beds exploding into light-generated existence, reflecting pools that magically filled with sparkling clean water and captive birds beginning to sing. They even generated the people. There was this villa that said it was the home of a bigwig named Paoulous Proculus, and when that magicked itself into virt shape it was a big hit with the tourists. They couldn’t get into the atrium, because that was roped off, but the virts of P. Proculus and wife could be watched through a doorway as they endlessly nibbled on apples and peaches brought by relays of virt slaves.

  It was all holos, virts, and simulations. But it was splendidly done, right down to the bright curtains that flapped in some of the unglazed windows and the unreal, but convincing, pair of drayhorses that pawed the ground before my very bakery.

  From a distance it was absolutely convincing. Was from pretty close up, as well, unless you tried to touch it. Of course, there was nothing there, just some cleverly deployed photons.

  It was damn well spectacular, though. It almost made working there a pleasure, as long as you didn’t count in the smells, the lousy pay, the suffocating summer heat and, of course, the Welsh Bastard.

  I did like just to wander around on those streets that ancient Roman people had walked on two thousand years before. (All right, they weren’t exactly the same streets. In AD 79 they would have been ankle deep in all kinds of crap the old Romans and their animals regularly dropped into the street. The Giubileo couldn’t quite duplicate that feature of old Pompeiian life in 2079. The Board of Health didn’t allow it.) But so much of what was there looked really real, especially in that great open space they called the Forum. I mean the real one, the one with the Temple of Jupiter at one end, still under repair from what had happened to it in the AD 62 earthquake, and the sort of town hall place that they called the basilica at the other. Plus all those old statues and all the people. The tourists liked the Forum, too, so it was always crowded with people strolling around and chatting and pausing to buy some nice ripe figs or simulated ancient Roman jewelry from one of the Indentured peddlers who had staked out claims on the flagstones.

  You understand that when I say “people” I don’t mean only the flesh-and-blood ones. There were plenty of that kind of people—tourists and employees of the Giubileo, working at their assignments as fruit sellers and souvenir vendors and whatever else might make a euro’s profit for the Giubileo. But there were also the virts. There were always a dozen or m
ore virtual Roman citizens—copies that the Giubileo swore to its customers were of actual, specific First Century Pompeiian notables. The one who was always carried in an open litter was named Umbricius Scaurus, and his claim to fame was that he was the guy who owned the factory where slaves manufactured that horrible stinky fish sauce they called garum. Sometimes sharing the litter with him—and thus no doubt making life a real living hell for the Nubians who had to carry them, or would have if they hadn’t all been virts anyway—was a man named Modestus, whose claim to fame was that he was the baker I toiled for around that wheel. Then there was Marcus Vesonius Primus—he was a fuller of cloth; evidently in ancient Pompeii tradesmen were treated like gents, at least they were if they were rich enough. And there was Caius Munatius Faustus and, oh, yes, Lucius Veranius Hypsaesus and, well, there were a lot of them. They did look quite real as they strolled and chatted with each other in what the Giubileo’s staff linguists claimed was authentic First Century Latin.

  The whole scene was pretty, with all those rows of columns and monumental Roman structures—and all of them brightly painted in red and yellow. Why all those colors? Because the experts had decreed that the place should look just the way it had looked two thousand years ago, and those were the colors the real First Century Romans had enjoyed. Those paint jobs were a surprise to most of the visitors, but not so much to me. The way the restored Sphinx looked in Egypt had been just as unexpected, for the same coat-of-paint reasons. I can’t say I liked the idea of smearing paint over the marble, but then I wasn’t a First Century Roman. Or an ancient Egyptian, either.