All in all, it was turning out to be a pretty good summer, not to say absolutely the positively best summer of my whole entire life, and its name was Gerda Fleming.
I didn’t spend all of my time with Gerda. I got the same weekly allowance of 168 hours of time as everybody else, but Gerda, at my very luckiest, didn’t ordinarily fill more than twenty or twenty-five of them for me. I did still have to work. So did she, and sometimes the Welsh Bastard would schedule us, I honestly think out of pure meanness, so that I would be off while she was working. Or vice versa. Then I was thrown on my own pre-Gerda resources, which weren’t much.
Of course, there was always Maury Tesch.
He was almost always up for a game of chess, which I almost always wasn’t, or a gape at whichever Chinese zep happened to be blotting out the sun that day. “Holy Jesus, Brad, you know what that thing can do? A couple hundred kilometers an hour, sliding right over the ocean or the desert or the cities, it doesn’t matter to a zeppelin, does it? And the size of the damn thing! They can easy hold two, three thousand passengers with swimming pools and restaurants and who knows what else?” But when I asked him if he was hoping to fly in one of them sometime he just scowled and wagged his head and said, “I wish,” and wouldn’t talk about it anymore.
He had some funny little ways, like the time in the staff refectory when I went to get a fresh glass of water and brought Maury one, too. He waved it away indignantly. “Drink water from the municipal system? Me? No way! Do you have any idea what the lining of those old pipes looks like?”
“Well,” I said, finishing my glass and reaching for his, “I like it. It’s about all I can afford.”
“You can afford your health. If it has to be water, get the good stuff. Sparkling water, in a bottle. All those bubbles keep your juices flowing.” He paused, looking up at me with that kicked-puppy expression. “Actually,” he said, “I’ve got some up at my place. And maybe a little chess, if you’re in for it?”
Actually I did give it a moment’s thought, but then I shook my head. “I think I’d better—” I began to say, intending to invent some time-consuming and unavoidable errand, but he was ahead of me.
“Or,” he said, “how about a little picnic in my pine grove? It’s really a part of the Giubileo’s water supply system. It isn’t open to the public, just our people and their guests, and there’s a little wine bar that makes sandwiches.”
I had never heard of a grove of pine trees that had a wine bar. Maury didn’t let me mull over it. “Yeah,” he said, getting enthusiastic, “that’s what we want. We can pick up a three-wheeler at the gate.”
So I didn’t argue. The three-wheelers were where he said they would be, the pine grove was a couple of klicks farther up the slope, and when we got to the razor-wire fence around it, the Security man at the gate glanced at the card Maury held up to his face and waved us through.
It was pleasantly coolish under the pines. A couple dozen men and women were at picnic tables scattered around the trees to enjoy it. What Maury was enjoying, I was pretty sure, was the expression on my face as I took all this in. “Nice, isn’t it?” he asked. “We like it. Right here—under the ground, I mean—is where the basic water intake treatments are done for the whole park. Let’s get our sandwiches.”
There was a third class of workers at the Giubileo besides the Indentureds and the volunteers. Maury filled the gaps in. “It has to be like this,” he told me. “They have to have technicians, don’t they? Trained ones. You think they’d let, oh, say, Elfreda or what’s-his-name, Abukar Abdu, run the hydro systems here? They’d have pee coming out of the showers and God knows what in the drinking water!” So the Giubileo hired trained hydrologists like Maury, with certificates from three schools and about a dozen cities around the world. And equally trained virt operators, power engineers, dieticians, medics, machine tenders, technical specialists of a dozen kinds—all of the skills that kept our little town safe and functioning. Even Maury—only a second-floor technician, nowhere near the penthouse elite in pay scale—still drew down a hell of a lot more than either Gerda or I.
He had it made.
We talked. He asked after Gerda, and didn’t leer or make jokes about her, either. And he was interested in my family. He listened patiently—no, not patiently; as though he was really interested—to how tough it was for me to keep sending them money. “At least,” he said, “you do have parents.”
That was right out of left field. “Don’t you?” I asked.
“Not anymore. They died. I’m alone in the world.” Then he sort of shook himself and gave me a grin. “But enough of this depressing stuff. How are you getting along with the Bastard?”
The subject was definitely changed. I did my best to be noncommittal about a person I really disliked. I thought maybe I could get him to answer the question that had been nagging at me. “Oh, he’s not so bad. Why do they call him that, do you know?”
He looked surprised at the question, as though it had never occurred to him. Then he shrugged. “Seems to me I heard it was because he demanded sexual favors from the better-looking female employees. That sound right?”
It sounded right enough. It also sounded like something I might want to ask Gerda about first chance I got—although Gerda wasn’t Indentured, was she? She could’ve simply told him to stuff it if that sort of thing had ever come up.
I must have looked a tad too concerned about something trivial because Maury was giving me a curious look. “Is something the matter?” he asked.
That aspect of Gerda was not a matter I wanted to discuss with Maury. I changed the subject. “I was just thinking about funny nicknames. Like that female Security officer they call Piranha Woman.”
Maury picked right up on that. “Oh, that I know. She isn’t Italian. She started out in South America, pacifying rebellious native tribes who cut the throats of dairy cattle that settlers brought into the Amazon. But don’t say I told you. She doesn’t like that part of her life talked about.”
Then he seemed to run out of conversation. He glanced at the sky, where evening was beginning to become night. He stretched and began picking up our trash. “Sorry for bending your ear with my troubles,” he said over his shoulder.
“Not at all,” I said, for lack of something better to say. It was getting toward the time when Gerda would be free again. I was thinking of leaving when he opened his backpack and took out what looked like a pair of stuffed Christmas stockings.
They weren’t though. “I need to ask you for a favor, Brad. These,” he said, setting them down on the table before me, “are some sausages that my uncle Rob sent me from Turkey. I won’t open them. I guarantee you wouldn’t like them, not even the smell, but I have to admit I’m very fond of them. Only Mordecai isn’t.”
I guess he could see I wasn’t quite following. “Captain Mordecai Glef,” he amplified. “My UN roommate. He’s just arrived and they’ve billeted him with me. Only, you see, he’s very religious and he thinks my sausages are traif—not kosher, in fact extremely nonkosher—and he doesn’t want them in the fridge we share. So—I hope I’m not pushing my luck with you—I wonder if I can ask you for what I need. Do you think you could keep them for me?”
It was a pretty huge windup for a pretty tiny request. I told him my own roommate wasn’t religious and sure I’d keep them. And so that was why Maury was being so nice.
Then, as a different three-wheeler was taking us back in through the Vesuvius Gate, Maury silent, me thinking that he was pretty weird but maybe, after all, I wasn’t the one who had had the lousiest childhood after all, there was something else lousy going on right down the graveled walk. It started with yelling. We pushed our way through a knot of other Indentureds and what we saw was our fake Nubian friend from Somali, Abukar Abdu, being dragged away by a couple of those brawny Security thugs, with a fly-eyed Antica woman giving the orders.
So what had happened? An African sweeper-service woman who was crying gave us the answer: Abdu had been caught ste
aling loose mosaic tiles to sell to the tourists so he could send the money back to his kids in Mogadishu. “You won’t see him around here again,” she said, sobbing.
And that was that. I looked at Maury. Maury looked at me. “See you later,” Maury said, and I said, “I guess you will.”
8
SHARING
So in general I was happy. Relatively speaking, I mean. I was even getting along better with some of the people I hadn’t been getting along with at all before Gerda—even with Elfreda, who seemed to have dumped the Somalian she’d been going around with for the last week or two in favor of a short and fairly homely Indentured from Sierra Leone. I supposed she had some criteria in mind for her boyfriend of the week, but I couldn’t guess at what they were. I was getting along particularly well with Cedric the Pimp, but that wasn’t because of a sudden efflorescence of native charm. It was what I had, more than who I was, that charmed Cedric. Sometimes he would stop by my wineshop in the hope of drinking the unfinished dregs cash customers had left behind, and once in a while I would let him. (That was because sometimes what was left was too little to be worth the trouble of pouring. But not too little for Cedric.) Most surprising of all, I was even—a little bit, anyway, or almost—getting along with the Welsh Bastard. Oh, I don’t want you to think that the world was suddenly a wonderful place. But both things were definitely improved. (Of course at this time I had never heard of Pompeii Flu, or a lot of other unpleasantnesses. But then nobody else had, either.)
Basically, the good parts were the parts right around Gerda and me. The other parts weren’t necessarily good even then, and some weren’t good at all. According to the news, somebody, or somebodies, had set fire to ten of Sao Paolo’s biggest skyscrapers at once, killing hundreds of people, and some other bodies had blown a hole in the side of the Straits of Gibraltar tunnel, drowning other hundreds, and someone closer to home had dropped a hand grenade into one of the women’s toilets at the ristorante, not causing any serious mayhem but making a couple of days of unattractive labor for Maury Tesch’s water supply workforce, and thus for him, as well. And then, just when personal things were going so well, all of a sudden they got just that little bit better.
Like the afternoon when, finishing up for the day and looking forward to a dull evening because the Bastard had put Gerda on a late job, I was just turning the grog shop over to my second-shift replacement when I heard my name being yelled. Cedric the Pimp, running across the street as he called, his cell to his ear, grinning all over because he had a surprise for me. “What, did you turn off your phone?” Which I had, because I always did at change of shift because I didn’t want the Bastard coming up with some new orders, but Cedric didn’t wait for an answer. “So get yourself into a toga, Brad! Gerda had a cancellation! You’re going to make her ninth dinner partner, only you have to get there fast!”
I made it. I was sweating from trotting there in the hot Pompeiian sun, but I arrived minutes before the string of litters that brought the paying guests did.
The villa where Gerda was doing her hosting was the one right across from the Forum that was marked as “The House of the Tragic Poet” on all the souvenir maps. It got its name from a big mural showing a rehearsal of a drama, but Gerda and I didn’t call it that. We called it the Doghouse because of its mosaic of a barking dog, with the words “Cave Canum.” (Meant “Beware of the Dog.” Even I knew that much without checking out the guide chips, because what else would you say to scare people away from a mean mutt?)
All seven of the paying guests were inspecting the dog, and the wall mosaics, and the decorations on the ceiling (virt) and the flowering shrubs in the atrium (real) with the self-conscious tittering of customers who know they’re paying way too much for an obvious tourist trap, but have made up their minds to go along with the gag. This lot was all Korean, five grown-ups and a pair of ten-year-old twin girls. Who, when Gerda came out to greet them, turned out to be a lot more interested in what she was wearing than in her memorized lecture on First Century Roman dining customs.
I didn’t blame them. Gerda was looking particularly gorgeous. It didn’t hurt that she was ten centimeters taller than the tallest of the Koreans, but what the girls were murmuring over were the clothes she wore. I hadn’t ever seen her in her lady-of-the-villa outfit before. She was worth looking at. Her gown was silk, and it clung nicely to her, entertaining the three male Korean grown-ups as well as me. She wore gold rings on all eight fingers of her two hands and on one of her thumbs. There was more gold around her neck, and on her ears and in her hair, and some of the gold was set with nearly marble-sized gems—rubies (maybe), emeralds (I thought), possibly opals, pearls, and what looked like carved amber of several colors and many shapes. I assumed the stones were all fake. They didn’t look fake, though, and Gerda wore them like a queen.
Then the eating began.
I can’t say what we ate, exactly, because a lot of it I couldn’t identify. There wasn’t any of that sheep-stuffed-with-bunny-rabbit kind of thing, but there were almost a dozen each of various sorts of flesh, fish, and fowl. The original Pompeiians appeared to have liked to stew tiny songbirds in honey, but I didn’t, and the hamburgery mess some of the poultry was stuffed with smelled almost as bad as Maury’s wursts. I didn’t eat any of that. All the adult Koreans gamely at least tried it, though, while Gerda, chatting us all up while we ate, kept busy enough giving orders to the servers that the Koreans probably couldn’t tell she was just pushing it around on her plate. Anyway, whatever they were giving us there was a lot of it, served to us by pretty young “slave” girls. They were Indentureds, of course, and I knew one of them. She had sold the tourists those little over-the-counter loaves of fresh-baked bread at Modestus’s enterprise, while I was heaving that damn wheel around. There was wine, seriously watered down for the little girls but tastier and in more varieties than the slop I peddled on the via. There were a dozen kinds of fruit—what looked like authentic First Century Roman varieties of fruits, too, all lumpy and tiny by modern standards, but tastier, too.
The meal went on for hours. Like a good hostess Gerda directed the conversation along appropriate First Century lines.
Did they think the new Flavian amphitheater in Rome—what we moderns called the Colosseum—would be finished in time for the games? And if the Emperor Vespasian should pass away, the gods forfend, would his son Titus do as well as the old man? And how had they liked the morning’s gladiatorial displays? She impressed me. I found out later that one of her earrings concealed a tiny radio, feeding her facts and topics, but she still impressed me. It was a wonderful job. The Koreans apparently thought so, too, in spite of the fact that one of the little girls seemed to have hit her watered wine a little too hard. She puked fish soup and stewed pears all over the floor mosaics of food and flowers and one of Gerda’s sandaled feet. Never mind. I, at least, was having a good time, and I hoped the Korean family thought they’d got their money’s worth.
And then it got better. I don’t mean for the Koreans. They tipped Gerda and the slave girls really well, shook my hand (but didn’t tip me), and then went off to whatever the next thing in their lives was meant to be. I mean that it was better for me because then we had the rest of the day together, just Gerda and me.
Gerda hadn’t known when the dinner would be over so she’d made no plans for the evening. Nor had I. So after we were back in our own clothes and her feet washed of ten-year-old throw-up she had an idea. “It’s a nice day,” she said. “Want to walk around the Jubilee? We could use our passes, maybe see some of the virt shows—there’s a good crucifixion, or the one where they throw the slaves into the water to be eaten alive by the fish.”
I’d heard about those shows but hadn’t had any burning desire to see them. I said, “Not my kind of thing. But if you want to I’ll go along for company.”
She shook her head. “Saw them. So let’s just walk up to the dorm.”
We did, with glowering old Mount Vesuvius frowning down at us from
the far hills and, high on the slopes, the distant figures of virt technicians setting up the projectors for gigantic displays to come. Not many of the other volunteers were about, so when Gerda said it would be nice to just stretch out on the grass by the dorm’s tiny swimming pool we did, her head on my arm, our shoes kicked off and our bare feet touching. She yawned and said, “I wasn’t sure it would be a good idea to have you there for the dinner, but it was fun.”
I didn’t exactly answer. I yawned myself. When I finished yawning I opened my mouth to change the subject—to mention, for instance, the fact that her bed was only a few dozen meters away and why weren’t we getting into it?
But she changed the subject first. It turned out that it wasn’t sex she was interested in just then, it was conversation. “Brad,” she said, leaning back to get comfortable for a good, long chat, “you know what? You’ve never told me much about yourself. So how about it? What were you like as a kid?”
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