So now let’s get back to present time. We’re up to the summer of AD 2079 now and the dead city has come back to life.
I don’t know if some ancient Roman, just waking up from a two-thousand-year nap, would have thought the Giubileo’s restoration of Pompeii was authentic. I guarantee, though, that he would have thought it was gorgeous. And I know there’s one thing about it that would have surprised him a lot. Unlike the AD 79 version, our AD 2079 Pompeii didn’t stink.
Well, didn’t stink much, anyway. Especially if you stayed away from the public latrines, or the barrels of urine outside the laundry—see, the way the Pompeiians cleaned woolen tunics was first to soak them in human pee. For that reason every passerby was invited to relieve himself in one of those barrels so the laundry could have the raw materials it needed to get on with its work.
That was the kind of tourist guide fact I had been trying to fill my head with on the ship from Alexandria. I thought I’d made quite a lot of progress. That seemed to me as though it might justify giving me some preferential treatment, so I asked the Welsh Bastard to let me take one of the tourist groups out as a guide.
He laughed at me. “Asshole. You got to know something before you can tell the customers anything, don’t you? Half of these tourists’ve read the same book you did. Why should they pay to hear it from you?”
However, he promised, they had a job for me that I could handle just the way I was. I could work in the bakery.
That didn’t sound bad, right? Working with that great fresh-bread smell all around me? Chatting with the tourists as they bought their little souvenir loaves to take home? And making sure not to tell them (another fact I’d picked up) that because of the way the flour was ground, between huge millstones, there were tiny crumbs of rock in the ground-up wheat. I even thought that maybe everybody had been wrong about the Welshman’s bastardness, because it certainly looked as though he was being fair with me.
Then I started work, and learned better.
Those sweet baking-bread smells? I never got to smell any. They were probably somewhere around in the air, but where I was they were drowned out by considerably worse ones. The bakery ground its own flour. After you’ve grated the flour out of the original wheat berries what you’re left with is bran. That isn’t a plus. Bran’s worthless. That is, the only thing it’s worth is that you can feed pigs with it if you want.
The Pompeiian bakers wanted. At my bakery their practice was to throw the bran out into the street so their herd of pigs could grow fat on it. Interesting fact: Did you know that bran is a laxative? Not that the pigs really needed one, but it certainly did enhance their natural capacities, and the resultant smell.
That was an example of the Bastard being bastardly, all right. It didn’t stop there, either. The opening he had for me at the bakery wasn’t in the sales department. It was nastier than that.
One of the ways our AD 2079 present-day Pompeii was different from the original was that in the Twenty-first Century we had plenty of electrical power to make the city run, a lot of it geothermal energy from shafts dug into the slopes of Vesuvius itself. Ancient Pompeii hadn’t known how to do that. To run its industries it hadn’t had steam engines or water power or windmills, either. For the energy they needed to make things move what they had was organic beings with organic muscles. So in order to grind that grain into flour the bakery had installed a big turntable that was pushed around and around by played-out horses or mules. Or by slaves.
Slaves were cheaper.
Of course, I wasn’t exactly a slave. There wasn’t much difference, though. I owed the Jubilee the balance of that Indenture money, and until it got paid off I was theirs to command.
I hated the bakery job from the first minute, but not nearly as much as I came to hate it after a day or two. I even hated what I had to wear. They wouldn’t let me keep my own clothes on. They gave me a kind of scratchy woolen smock (which I didn’t really want to put on, because remember what I said about those barrels of urine they cleaned wool with) that came down to about my knees. They wouldn’t even let me wear my own underwear.
I had been kind of expecting being required to wear some kind of native costume. After all, even the Egyptians had sometimes put me in long cotton gowns and sandals while I was guiding there. But the Egyptians hadn’t cared what I wore underneath the gown. The Welsh Bastard did. “What if you bend over?” he asked, grinning. “You got to wear something there, don’t you? And it’s got to be right.” And the undergarment they gave me to wear in case of bending too far over looked pretty much like a grown-up-sized diaper.
There was plenty of other unpleasantness to hate, too. I hated the day-long choking smoke from the ovens. I hated the fact that my stupid dream of ever finding Uncle Devious had blown up in my face. Especially, I hated Pompeii and everything around it, but that was before I met Gerda Fleming.
Actually, I must admit, working at the Giubileo wasn’t all awful. They had given me a reasonably clean room to live in. That was in the Indentureds’ tower flat, though that particular place was a good long trudge up the hill from the bakery. It wasn’t all mine, either. I shared it with somebody—Scandinavian? Dutch? I never did find out—named Jiri Kopthellen. Still, the place had its own little bathroom, which was a step above most of what I’d had in Egypt. Or what I’d had on Staten Island, either. It also not only had a bed—all right, a cot—for each of us and a multichannel wall screen to share, but even a little fridge that Jiri kept filled with Italian beer. And, maybe best of all, I lucked out in having that same Jiri Kopthellen for a roommate. Or, more accurately, in that I usually didn’t have Jiri there at all. He had a wife with an apartment of their own a couple of stops down the electric toward the city of Naples, and he much preferred to spend his off-duty time there.
In my own off-duty time I was kept pretty busy learning how to be a First Century Roman slave. Mostly that meant learning the “Roman” currency that was the only kind of money you could legally spend inside the walls of the Jubilee: The silver denarius was worth sixteen asses or four sestertii; the sestertius, which was made of oricalchum (a kind of silver-copper mixture) was worth four asses; and one copper as, at the Jubilee’s extortionate money-changing rate, equaled one euro.
That part I was interested in, because I was confident that there would be some good fiddles possible with befuddled tourists trying to make change. And apart from that all I really had to learn was to get out of the way of any free Roman, especially if he wore the toga that meant he was of senatorial rank. And also meant that he was invariably a virt, since there weren’t any live Roman senators still around. And, of course, to consider the tourists as honorary senators, since it was their money that paid our bills.
The job itself, of course, continued to be lousy.
I suppose I would have liked it better if I’d managed to make a few friends. I hadn’t. There didn’t seem to be a lot of friendship on offer at Pompeii that year. And twice, in the first few times I tried striking up a conversation with a stranger, I discovered that some of the rest of the world really disliked Americans. They blamed us for letting Yellowstone happen.
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.
6
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 kin
ds 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.
All the Lives He Led Page 5