Behind the columns the buildings were all two stories high, with togaed Roman men and gowned Roman women gazing benevolently down on the crowd below. Mostly they, too, were virts, of course, though not all of them. The ones that were visibly Asian or African or blond weren’t going to be virts. They were organic real people like me, although they were the particular kind of organically real people that got all the best and easiest jobs, which is to say the volunteers.
It was the hucksters that put ideas in my head. Those were mostly Indentureds, just like me. They set up their wares here and there around the Forum, selling food and wine and trinkets and fortunes told while you wait. Some of the trinkets were sort of authentic, being at least modern copies of real Roman cups and vases. Some definitely were not, like the souvenir maps of the Giubileo’s Pompeii. They charged for all this. Wouldn’t take genuine euros, though.
I took an interest in the money changing. That had been one of my best sidelines in Egypt, and even if I couldn’t wind up any better than, say, a fig merchant in the Forum I could see possibilities. Like if some person paid me with a silver denarius, say—and if nobody who looked to be any kind of law enforcement was near—I could “accidentally” give him change of a sestertius—and apologize like crazy for my mistake if he caught me at it. Or I could change euros into asses myself instead of bothering the official money changers. But when I asked the Welsh Bastard if I could get one of those jobs he laughed in my face. “What do you think, you’re an Australian?” he asked, sneering. “You stick to the job you’re assigned.”
But in the long run I didn’t have to.
Surprisingly, the next day the Welsh Bastard called me in to his dispatch room, and what he had to tell me was that that ristorante job that Gerda had talked about had actually come along.
I kind of had hopes for that one—well, at least partly because I liked the idea of a reasonably good-looking woman doing things to help me. Besides, the ristorante looked like a good prospect for getting cash tips from the customers. On the negative side, it’s true that the smells bothered me, because some of the dishes were authentic Pompeiian, which generally meant that they were smothered in more of that horrible rotten fish sauce. Not to mention the six or seven kinds of cheeses, all smelly—cow’s milk or sheep’s milk or goat’s, sometimes smoked or aged, but always highly odorous. We Indentureds didn’t get that kind of luxury food in the employees’ mess. Or, to put it differently, even we Indentureds weren’t forced to swallow that crap.
For a little while I was actually feeling optimistic. The decorations in the ristorante were pretty neat—virt-animated murals of all kinds of famous Romans and their famous (or a lot of the time you’d have to say their pretty infamous) wives and daughters. I thought that was a plus because working there meant getting a history lesson every time I walked through the room.
The work, though, was harder than I expected. When you’re carrying breakfast for a table of six the dishes get heavy, and I had to take orders from six or eight different cuisines—standard international (steaks, orange juice, scrambled eggs, and the like), Chinese (what they called the dim sum menu), Middle Eastern (couscous), Scandinavian (a hundred kinds of pickled herring), Slavic (borscht and a lot of sour cream), and, of course, the alleged First Century Roman that everybody wanted to try once but hardly ever twice. I figured it would take me a month just to learn the menus.
I didn’t have a month. It turned out that I didn’t really have waiterly skills. What convinced the manager was when I spilled some of that Roman fish soup on a tourist from the Argentine Republic.
I should point out that it wasn’t my fault. Argentinians aren’t that crazy about fish to begin with. She shoved it away when she got a whiff of how it smelled, and it landed in her lap. There wasn’t really anything I could do about that, was there? I even had a witness, the Somali named Abukar Abdu who was bussing my tables; he saw the whole thing and took my side. But the Bastard wasn’t interested in that. For him, the customer was God and I was just a damn Indentured. (I guess the Bastard did pay attention, in his own fashion, because when I ran into Abukar a day or two later he’d been fired from his busboy job and reassigned as a Nubian litter bearer, carrying rich tourists around in the brutal Italian heat. The Bastard said Abukar just happened to be the right color to be a Nubian so he was underutilized in the ristorante. He didn’t mention that Abukar had unwisely stuck up for me.)
The first thing I thought of was my wannabe friend Maury Tesch. So next time he caught me outside the Bastard’s dispatch room I asked him straight out about getting a job in water management. I expected he might turn me down, but not that he would be unpleasant about it.
But I was wrong. His expression froze. “You?” he said. “In hydrology? You don’t have the training.”
“What training do you need to turn a damn valve?” I demanded. “Okay. If we were talking about something like running virt displays maybe I don’t have the background—”
Now he looked offended as well as irritated. “You’re just proving my point, Sheridan. You can’t compare hydrology with entertainment. If the virt crews get something wrong it’s just an annoyance, but if something went wrong with the hydrology it could make people sick.” He stood silent for a moment, and his expression changed again, more worried than anything else. “I’m running late,” he said. “Talk to you later.” And he was gone. And the next time I saw him he was back to wheedling a chess game or two.
Anyway, the way it turned out I didn’t have to go back to the flour mill. The Welsh Bastard was unexpectedly unbastardly enough to try me on a couple of other jobs. I was a trainee at the gladiator school on the outskirts of the city for four days, until I got a little carried away when the audience clapped for me. I had forgotten that those disappearing daggers didn’t disappear unless you pushed the button in the haft.
One sort of good, or almost sort of good, thing came out of that. Good-looking Elfreda What’s-her-name had been coiffed and gowned and was leading a party of tourists in the audience when I stuck that guy’s belly—fortunately not very deeply—and while the tourists were getting into their litters she came up behind and patted my shoulder and said, “Everybody makes mistakes at first. Don’t let it get you down.”
That sounded almost like code for, “Why don’t you buy me a cup of coffee sometime and we’ll see how it goes?” I made a mental note to follow up when I got a chance. She was right, too. The thing really wasn’t my fault. I couldn’t help my reflexes. Back in New York City if somebody came at you with a weapon, and you had a weapon of your own, you responded really fast, or you never got another chance. But after that little episode none of the other gladiators would perform with me. And the Elfreda thing fizzled out; next time I saw her she was heading for the Naples electric with a rich-looking, Asian-looking tourist, and when I said hi she gave me a Do-I-know-you?-and-if-I-do-I-wish-I-didn’t look. So that came to nothing.
Then I was a male whore on the Via Nola for a while. We flesh-and-blood make-believe whores didn’t actually have sex with each other, we just faked it, but then one of my audience members became interested and kind of really got into the spirit of the performance—he’d been drinking, of course—and I punched him out.
The Welsh Bastard didn’t give up on me even then. He even let me guide a group of Californians around the city after all. He figured, I guess, that they’d be tolerant of a fellow American’s incompetence, but I had bad luck. One of the tourists was a history professor from UCLA. I couldn’t fool him. He complained to the management. That time the Bastard swore at me a lot, but he didn’t send me back to the bakery even then. He gave me still another chance. I couldn’t help wondering why, but I didn’t ask. I just took the new job.
What he did was to put me in business for myself, selling wine in one of those hole-in-the-wall shops on the street they called the Via dell’Abbondanza.
When I say “hole-in-the-wall,” I mean it just about literally. The shop was a room just big enough for a qu
arried-stone counter, a bunch of wine tubs, and me, with three featureless walls at the sides and back, and on the other side nothing but the street.
It wasn’t a bad job. Relatively speaking, I mean.
Well, it wasn’t really a good job, either. Those summer days in Pompeii were pretty hot. You might think I’d be used to all that, having just come from sunny Egypt. But the tombs in the Valley of the Kings were air-conditioned. The Via dell’Abbondanza wasn’t.
Then there were the smells. It wasn’t just the pee buckets or the latrines in the street. It was those vats of wine, too. The hotter it got the more vigorously they poured their stale-wine smells into the air. Sometimes I came close to getting a contact high off the fumes.
The pay was no better, either. In the beginning I had some idea of making it up on tips, but what kind of tips can you expect when the most the customers ever buy is a single cup of wine, which they mostly hate?
But I had thought up a list of such matters ahead of time. On my very first day at the wine bar one of my customers, an already fairly tipsy one, ran out of the Jubilee’s fake-denarius tokens. He hadn’t run out of thirst, though, and when he ordered another round he tried to pay me in actual euros.
Taking real money from a tourist was absolutely against the rules, as the Welsh Bastard had made sure I knew before he let me out of his dispatch room. On the other hand, real money had its attractions for me. The denarii were the Giubileo’s own fiddle. They looked like silver, but weren’t, and the beauty part of it for the Giubileo, as I had figured out for myself long since, was that quite a few of the unspent ones got taken home to Sydney and Bangkok and Zagreb for souvenirs.
So why shouldn’t I have a little fiddle of my own? Making change from euros to tokens offered all kinds of possibilities.
There was one thing about the job that really ticked me off. That was the way the tourists would poke at me to see whether I was real or a virt. That’s what nearly all of the children did, that is, but even a fair number of adults, particularly the Koreans and the Australians, gave me the occasional prod.
At least I didn’t have to push that damn wheel. And I no longer had to make believe I was being buggered by somebody I didn’t even know.
The Via dell’Abbondanza was pretty much peripheral to the major restored parts of Pompeii. To the west of my grog shop was a laundry, where you could see virt Romans washing tunics but fortunately couldn’t smell them, then nothing much before you got to the red velvet ropes across the road to keep tourists from going any farther in that direction. There really wasn’t any farther to go to, anyway, except to where the old amphitheater and a bunch of other structures had been left in the shape that time and Mount Vesuvius had given them.
Of course no velvet rope was going to stop a customer who had loaded up on my joy juice. That wasn’t a serious problem, though. Security was ready for such things. If a drunk tried to push past those ropes a phalanx of virt Roman legionaries—breastplates, helmets, short spears, and all—would close ranks before him. If the customer persisted, confident that virts could never hurt him, a detachment of real, live and muscular Security guys were stationed just around the corner.
Those imitation legionaries weren’t the only virts around. That far down the via they didn’t bother to give us very much of that kind of window dressing, certainly nothing like the clusters of imitation citizens that strolled around the Forum. But from time to time a couple of those simulated ancient Pompeiians would walk by, appearing deep in their conversation, or a couple of simulated slaves would show up as they carried some simulated rich person’s litter. Then, of course, there were the customers. They weren’t simulated. Neither was the wine they poured into themselves, though it certainly wasn’t exactly authentic, either.
All the virtual stuff was astonishingly convincing. Early on in my wine-selling career I tried to figure out just what parts of my own little cubbyhole were physically real and which were just insubstantial virts. I wasn’t always right. The counter and the vats beneath it—they had to be real, or at least they had to be physically real Twenty-first Century copies of the two-thousand-year-old originals, because when I stretched out a hand I could feel them. Anyway the wine in my vats didn’t spill out all over my feet as soon as the wine tanker came by with its replenishments.
On the other hand, the walls were visually virts. What the designers had done, they took those ancient walls with cracks like somebody’d gouged them with a chisel and pits you could hide a grapefruit in, and painted a fresh layer of trapped virt photons over it. And there it was, all egg-yolk yellow and coal-ember crimson, with wall paintings of ancient Romans in a heavily sloshed condition, looking as good as new … as long as you didn’t touch them.
The wine, of course, was really as fake as the walls. I was instructed to tell the customers that the first vat was imported Greek, and the second Falernian, and the little one at the end held something that was made out of fermented honey, called hydromels. (I didn’t get many calls for the hydromels.) What they all really were was tap water and grain alcohol, with a bunch of artificial colors and flavors to make them taste more or less the way that Twenty-first Century tourists would expect that First Century wine would. Every morning before the Jubilee opened for business the wine tanker would rumble up the via to my shop—a physically real cart, pulled by a real, animate, living, even smelly mule—so I could sign out for as much wine as it took to fill the vats from the driver’s giant wine boxes, and then I was ready for business.
That was about all there was to my place of business. There was an upstairs, too, probably meant for the real First Century barkeep to sleep in, but that part was all virt.
To the tourists I was just furniture. They would point at me and take pictures of me, but as long as they didn’t actually talk to me I didn’t have to pay much attention to them. Which meant I could go through the motions of wiping off the counter, while what I really was doing was listening to the Italian-language lessons on my earplugs, or to the English-language channel for news and gossip. Or to the historical stuff. Or, when I got really bored, to whatever the Naples soundradio stations were broadcasting, which was mostly last year’s Latin American poprock or those Neapolitan songs they call canzone. And, when I had the opportunity, I made change for the customers who hadn’t converted their euros into the fake Roman stuff, and screw what the Welsh Bastard had ordered.
What with one thing and another, I had pretty nearly forgotten that anybody named Gerda Fleming existed.
That’s what I used to tell myself, anyway. Except when I was feeling particularly lonesome. Or trying to get to sleep on that sack of pebbles they called a mattress. I remembered then, all right. Because have I mentioned that not only had this Gerda woman tipped me to the ristorante job but my estimate of her physical attractions, on second thought, had gone up a few stages. Actually (I was beginning to think) she wasn’t bad looking at all.
If I didn’t have a Gerda, there were at least a few sparse and tiny compensations. Little by little, some of the other Indentureds were beginning to thaw toward me. Cedric Mimsley, for instance, nodded to me across the Via dell’Abbondanza the third or fourth morning I saw him there.
The via wasn’t a very wide street. You could spit across it if you were any kind of a spitter at all, but still, he didn’t come across it to visit with me, perhaps because he felt that a person in his position couldn’t afford to be seen with some lower caste person like me. Cedric’s position, actually, was ticket taker for a virt whorehouse. That annoyed me for a while. Then I found out a little more about Cedric and I switched from annoyed-at to sorry-for. None of us Indentureds had any money to speak of, but Cedric had to be the poorest of the lot. He was a double-dip. Well, so was I, because of those extra euros I’d taken onto my debt to get out of Egypt. What Cedric had borrowed his way out of, however, wasn’t anything that was merely hopeless, as Egypt was for me. His last job had been way lower on the totem pole than that. He’d been a decontamination worker at
the old Soviet nuclear submarine base at Murmansk, and what kind of Indenture he’d had to sign to get out of that I shudder to think of.
And sometimes a few of my colleagues didn’t get up and leave when I sat beside them in the mess. They didn’t talk much, either, except to each other, but they didn’t make me stop listening.
So gradually I was making a kind of a not unbearable life. And I hadn’t forgotten that I was part of a family.
I wasn’t all selfish, you know. Honest. I gave quite a lot of thought to old Dan and Marilyn Sheridan, sitting around with nothing much to do back in 16-A Liberty Crescent, Floor 15 of the Molly Pitcher Redeployment Village on Staten Island.
At least now and then I did.
I guess I bring that up to show that, never mind my fiddles and my history of occasional minor felonies, I still had enough common decency to have feelings for my parents’ problems and needs. It wasn’t their fault that Yellowstone had blown its top. Or that Uncle Devious was never going to give back Mom’s mad money. Or that the US government was so drowned in emergency expenses that the treasury didn’t have enough left over to give the refugees a decent standard of living.
I was doing my usual how-much-can-I-spare-for-Staten-Island arithmetic when more customers showed up and I had to hide my cell in my diaper. (The Welsh Bastard didn’t want us to be seen with anything that was less than two thousand years old. Especially not with anything high-tech. Would spoil the illusion, he said.) But I needn’t have bothered. These particular customers didn’t seem to know I was there, maybe just another virt, but one with skills enough to take their asses and pour their drinks. These were cheap bastards, too. They kept on telling each other, in English and loud enough that I couldn’t miss a word, how outstandingly lousy the wine was … while they were drinking it down, every damn drop. They sounded American, but were not my kind of American, anyway. Maybe Australian? Or Canadian maybe from the Maritime Provinces and thus still rich?
All the Lives He Led Page 7