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.”
“What was left of it,” the woman said.
“We did find the surgeon who rebuilt Maddingsley into that rather good-looking Negro,” Swinn said. “All the surgeon got for it, though, was a year in prison. Should’ve thrown the key away. There were some money judgments, too—he had to repay what Maddingsley had paid him, and of course we sold Maddingsley’s estate and all his stuff. We think Maddingsley had a lot more squirreled away, though. We’re still looking for it.”
“And we’re not the only ones,” the woman said. “Some appear to believe that the funds were banked with the Stans.”
“Which is of interest to us,” Swinn added, “because of Mrs. Maddingsley’s use of somadone, which comes from the Stans, and we wonder whether your uncle made trips there to secure it for her.”
I thought they were beginning to get silly, but I just shook my head. “I don’t know.”
Swinn sighed. The woman gave him another reprimanding look, but after a moment she sighed, too. “Very well,” she said, “you can now go.”
That was it. They pointed to the door. As I opened it, the woman said, “You have displayed a very sloppy attitude toward providing the Security force with essential information, Sheridan. Do not do this again. Be sure you attend your antiterrorist orientation sessions. Do not miss any of them.”
And the man said, “You’re very lucky in the employment you have been offered here, Sheridan. You don’t want to lose it. The soft-coal distillation mines at Krakow are always looking for new Indentured workers.”
And the woman said, “You’ve made a bad start, Sheridan. You can repair it. If you observe anything suspicious among the people you will be working with report to me at once. My name is Major Yvonne Feliciano. To reach me use any communications facility in Pompeii and ask for my code name, which is Piranha Woman. Do it.”
That was the end of the interrogation.
On my way out I saw my former fellow passengers sprawled out in the waiting room and eyeing me with malice as I passed through. Obviously they had been made to wait while I went through my own inquisition. I was a little sorry for them. Maybe a little sorrier for myself, with the news about Uncle Devious. I hadn’t expected that information to come out of this particular interview. But there it was.
I tried to put it all out of my mind. For a while I succeeded.
5
THE CITY THAT CAME BACK TO LIFE
When you talk about Pompeii you have to remember that two thousand years is a long time. All those years had made significant changes in the way the city of Pompeii looked.
What had happened to that old AD 79 Pompeii was pretty obvious. You could see the cause of it, sitting right down the road from the city itself, and what it was was that humongous neighbor mountain named Vesuvius. And AD 79 was the year when Vesuvius blew itself up and cooked Pompeii in the process.
That was the bad part of that ancient event. Looked at from an AD 2079 viewpoint, it had a lot of good about it. All that rock and ash the volcano dumped on the city had the unexpected and fortunate effect of preserving its bare bones for us two-thousand-years-later people to see.
(When I say “fortunate” I don’t mean that it was good luck for the actual Pompeiians who lived there at that time, of course. They didn’t get any pleasure at all out of being preserved.)
So then, two thousand years later or so, the world is getting close to AD 2079 and suddenly somebody comes up with a great idea. They realized that they could make a pot of money out of having a two-thousand-year birthday party for the ancient city. So they did. They turned it into a kind of a theme park and they called it Pompeii’s Jubilee Year, or L’Anno Giubileo della Citta di Pompeii.
Well, I said that already, didn’t I?
When the mountain did blow its top, back all those twenty long centuries ago, it took everybody by surprise. It hadn’t done anything of that sort in quite a while—in enough of a while, that is, that those old Romans figured it wasn’t ever going to do it again. So they started building summer homes in and around Pompeii. It was very desirable real estate, especially if what you had been used to was Rome’s cold, wet winters.
The situation wasn’t all gravy for the Pompeiians, though.
The city did have a now-and-then history of pretty bad earthquakes. As a matter of fact, the city had still been rebuilding from one of the worst of them, a big one that had knocked down several temples and public buildings, when the big blast from the volcano put a permanent stop to the repair program. That was the end of that chapter in the history of Pompeii.
Nobody saw the city again for a long time. Not until some workmen, with their minds undoubtedly on other matters entirely, accidentally dug up a piece of it almost two thousand years later.
People are stupid, you know that? For instance, you’d think the old Pompeiians would have figured out that this was not a really safe place to settle down in.
They didn’t. Still, hey, I’m not in a position t
o criticize them. We Americans weren’t all that much smarter. It wouldn’t have taken a genius in, say, 2000 to figure out that all those geysers and hot springs in old Yellowstone Park might just mean that something on a large bad scale could be getting ready to happen there.
Nobody did figure it out, though.
I knew how those old Pompeiians felt. I had felt the same way, back when I was a kid and Yellowstone happened. The big difference between us was that Yellowstone was a couple thousand kilometers away from our house in Kansas City, while for the Pompeiians Vesuvius was right next door.
So when Yellowstone began to do its serious premonitory shaking and rumbling, around 2055, the Americans had the sort of warning that you really shouldn’t ignore. That didn’t stop them. They ignored it anyway. According to the seismologists, Yellowstone only did one of those really big eruptions about every 600,000 years or so, so why worry? They didn’t worry. Not even when other scientists pointed out that the last eruption had been about 640,000 years ago, so a better way to think about it was that it was kind of overdue.
Anyway, in America the people in charge of such matters didn’t choose to do any worrying until it was quite a lot too late. By then the dust from that giant-sized eruption of what they began calling the Yellowstone super-volcano was already two meters deep in Chicago and St. Louis and Milwaukee—and right on top of my family’s house on the old Missouri River as well.
I wondered if, a few thousand years from now, people would reconstruct Kansas City the way the Italians had Pompeii.
Probably not, I decided. Pompeii was pretty much one of a kind, while those thousands-of-years-from-now archeologists would have a large selection of ash-buried cities to choose from, since Yellowstone didn’t stop with Kansas City. Actually it had buried nearly half of the land mass of the old USA’s lower forty-eight before it was over.
All the Lives He Led Page 4