I went to sleep, wondering at the strange world I was living in.
And the next morning, now that I didn’t have to pretend to be interested in looking at Chang Jang’s corridor art, I discovered I was.
There was plenty of it. Right at the bottom of a three-story atrium just down the hall from Chi-Leong’s suite there was about the ugliest three-legged statue I had ever seen. Elfreda read from the plaque at its base. “They call it the Toad God of Wealth. Think it’ll make us rich?”
I said, “I wish,” just to be sociable. The thing was big enough, four meters tall at the least. If it had really been carved ivory, as it looked, it would certainly have weighed a couple of hundred kilos—far more mass than the zep’s designers would have permitted. It wasn’t real, of course, but just another virt.
We weren’t the only passengers patrolling the zep’s corridors, in the search for additional ways to get rid of their surplus cash. Actually, it was kind of interesting. Up until then I hadn’t really known what people with excessive money actually did with their time. I discovered that they weren’t idle. In fact, they were often frantically busy, just not busy in any way that produced anything of value. On the Yellow River deck groups of twenty or thirty practiced ancient dance rituals like the Twist and the Charleston, under the tutelage of skilled instructors and to the tune of appropriate music from virt instrumentalists. Non-virt servitors stood by to offer definitely non-virt champagne to the overexerted. Up on the sun deck scantily, even negligibly, clad passengers stretched out on deck chairs, in pursuit of a golden tan. They weren’t going to get it from the actual sun in the actual sky, of course. The whole bulk of the zep’s lift ballonets were between them and it.
The tanning rays for the passengers came from halogen tubes, and they wouldn’t burn any passenger skin because the hard, carcinogenic frequencies were left out. When we peeped into the dining room at the forward end of the uppermost deck, a couple of artists with mini-chainsaws were putting the final touches to an ice statue of a bride in a flowing snow-white dress. I might have wondered what they were doing that for, but not for long. One of the wedding chapels was just down the passage.
For a moment I was puzzled by the thought of loading the zep with all this extra mass, not less than four or five hundred kilos, I was sure. The sculpture wasn’t a virt. It couldn’t be. We were feeling the proof of that, because we got a steady trickle of ice particles flying off the saw. But (Elfreda told me, amused at my ignorance) there was a difference between the toad sculpture and the ice bride. Water was water, whether in a frozen state or not, and however much frozen water the ice sculptors used simply became part of the ship’s ballast when it melted back.
There was a burst of music as the chapel door opened and ten or twelve people spilled out. I could tell which ones were the bride and the groom. They were the drunkest of the lot.
That was another puzzle. See, every passenger on the Chang Jang had news screens in their cabins. Some of them must at least have sometimes glanced at them. They could not be totally ignorant of the hell that was eating up the human race. But if those stomach-turning scenes of dissolving flesh had made them afraid for their own lives there was no sign of it in the way they scarfed down the zep’s edibles and intoxicants.
Elfreda was observing them with the benevolently critical smile of a woman who had never been married, but might not reject a reasonable offer out of hand. It seemed like a good time to try to get a straight answer from her … .
But I didn’t, and the moment passed, and it didn’t return. I lost my best chance of it in the middle of that night. Chi-Leong had reasserted his privileges, so I had been assigned the couch in his sitting room, while he and Elfreda tucked in on his vast, air-cushioned bed.
I wasn’t jealous, you know. Morose, maybe. I didn’t begrudge Chi-Leong a romp with Elfreda, I just resented the fact that the world in general was better off than I in just about every aspect I could imagine.
Well, except for the people who were actually dying of that unwished gift Maury and Gerda seemed to have given to the world.
Those live but doomed people weren’t better off than anybody. They weren’t getting your tactful and unhurried old-man’s-death passing, where you just go to sleep and don’t wake up again, and who could ask for a nicer croaking than that? No. These particular dying people did not go gently into that good night. They were all wide awake when it happened, and the reason they were awake was that the agony of having their flesh rot and dissolve on their bodies kept them from any hope of being sound asleep ever again. Along with the particular nastiness they called necrotizing fasciitis the victims got a breakbone fever that had them sobbing or whimpering, or sometimes screaming out loud, before the poisons in their flesh interrupted the communication of cell to cell, and the overtaxed heart failed, and then they did die, usually—mercifully!—within a few hours of the beginning of their body rot.
And time passed.
Time passed, and the Chang Jang faithfully followed its published itinerary, and I did nothing.
Nothing but enjoy the Chang Jang’s multitudinous creature comforts, anyway. Under the right circumstances I could see that that would be enough—defining the right circumstances as, say, if I had a Gerda with me to enjoy them. But those circumstances didn’t obtain. The ones that did included quite a long and unpleasant list—
1. Maury’s murder.
2. The strong possibility that Gerda was the one who murdered him.
3. Old Dan and Marilyn Sheridan, often in my mind as I thought of them hopefully watching the mail machine every morning for the remittance that wasn’t going to come anymore.
4. The mighty force with which Security was leaning on me, which was what led me to escape in the first place.
5. The fact that, as I was now convinced, that whole escape was a Security setup, which meant I was in even worse trouble than I’d thought, because the stakes had evidently become higher.
And 6, 7, 8, all the way up to the highest number I could think of. That was the lack of Gerda—plus the horrid knowledge that Gerda wasn’t really much of a Gerda, insofar as that name denotes gender, at all.
That’s a funny thing, isn’t it? If a fraction of what I knew or suspected about Gerda were true I wasn’t going to want her back, was I? But it sure as hell felt like I did.
So the days passed, and each hour of Chang Jang’s cruising brought me an hour closer to wherever it was I was going.
The identity of that place, however, was slow to appear. I didn’t get off at the zep’s first stop, which was the island of Malta. Elfreda did, for a short visit—would never get another chance to see where a tattered handful of European knight-crusaders could fight off ten or twenty thousand infidels, she said. (But I thought maybe she was just going to look for a secure line to talk back to Security HQ.) Anyway she made sure that Eustace Chi-Leong stayed aboard to keep an eye on me. Which he did by setting us up in the ship’s library, me at one carrel, him at another between mine and the door. I used the opportunity for checking out every place on the zep’s schedule, hoping that one would reveal itself as the ideal place for me to sneak away and be finally really free of Security.
None did.
I didn’t try to jump ship at the second place, either. That was Lepus Magnus, too small for me to hide in. Then Petra: even smaller, not to mention with no useful way to get out of there except another zep.
The next stop on the tour was good old Cairo.
I woke up early and headed for a window as the zep was gliding toward its mooring place outside of the city. The captain had taken the long way around, and we were coming in right over the Sphinx itself, all bright red and gold and green when the virt replays of its appearance were switched on, the familiar sandblasted ruin when reality was allowed to show. And then from behind me someone cried—screamed—“Oh, my sweet Jesus God!”
It was Elfreda, looking scared. No, terrified. She was standing in the bedroom doorway, and a trickle of sound from behind
her showed that she’d been listening to news. She was wearing a kind of baby-doll nightie that she hadn’t bothered to pull anything over, and hadn’t been wearing anything under, either. “Did you hear?” she yelled. “Christ, we’re really in it now.”
I looked at her in surprise. No doubt the Flu was scary, but I hadn’t thought that even the death in agony of a few million people would get her that upset. I said, “Yes, it’s a pretty serious epidemic, all right, but—”
“Oh, Brad,” she groaned, “who’s talking about the goddamn epidemic? It’s the quarantine. The zep isn’t going on to Aswan! It’s grounded here in goddamn Cairo, because somebody else has been shooting holes in zeps and nobody’s going anywhere until they make it stop!”
Behind her Chi-Leong had appeared, standing in the bedroom doorway and glowering. He wasn’t wearing whatever he usually wore to bed, if that was anything at all. He had put on a kind of Cossack cavalry officer’s leisure robe—I guess—and he had taken the time to button all the score or so of buttons before exposing himself to my eyes. He said, in a tone of deep indignation, “That is extremely troublesome for me, Sheridan.” He didn’t say why, but I could figure that out easily enough by myself. He didn’t say why he looked like he was blaming me, either, but that was almost as easy: He was blaming me for everything he didn’t like.
I stopped paying attention to him as soon as I got the wall screen on. Then I knew what Elfreda was talking about, and I could see why she was scared. From a small boat in the Gulf of Finland somebody had shot down a Russian aerozep dirigible with an incendiary missile on its run from St. Petersburg to Helsinki. Everybody on board was dead, and every passenger zep in the world’s skies was ordered grounded while Security figured this new thing out.
The others were listening, too, Elfreda with the back of her hand pressed against her mouth, Eustace shaking his head, “Dr. Basil Chi-Leong, my father, will be extremely displeased,” he informed me.
Well, I was pretty displeased myself. Set down? Made to leave the ship, as all the others had been in the last attack? And in Cairo? Cairo, Egypt? Egypt, where there was a really good chance that some cop’s villain-scanner might pick up my face out of a crowd and identify it as the man who’d been thrown out of the country a few months before?
Of all the stops on the Chang Jang’s tour Cairo was the last one I would have picked. But I didn’t have the luxury of a free choice anymore.
Chi-Leong had decided to be our group’s alpha male. He looked over his shoulder at Elfreda. “Kindly dress yourself,” he ordered.
Elfreda looked surprised, then rebellious, then resigned. “That makes sense,” she conceded, “because we might have to move pretty fast. You guys, too, you know.”
Chi-Leong gave her a nod, the kind that could have meant he agreed with her point or that he just wanted her to get on with following his orders. She bit her lip, but left the room. When she had closed the bedroom door behind her he turned to me and lowered his voice. “You should go, Mr. Sheridan. Now. Before she finishes dressing.”
He was getting under my skin. “Chi-Leong,” I said, “that would probably be good for you. The thing is, I’m more interested in what would be good for me. How would I get off this damn zep without documents?”
He was losing patience with me. “Are you not aware that I have a considerable supply of the best documents of all, namely euro notes? The person who guarded the uplink will get you past whoever is guarding the ship’s boarding elevators.”
I was getting impatient, too. “You make it sound easy. Suppose I do get down to the ground, what then?”
“That,” he said, “is of course your problem, Mr. Sheridan. I hope you will avoid capture—it is for my sake that I hope this, not yours. Now,” he added, lifting his bellybag to his lap and opening it, “you may need some money. Fortunately I have actual physical currency notes, as you would be unable to use my joystick without my ID. This”—he pulled out five five-euro notes and handed them to me—“should help.” I tried not to laugh. It would, of course, not have been a laughing matter if I hadn’t had the professor’s fifty as well as the wad of ten-euro notes I’d won in the ship’s casino. He went on, “I have sent for my man Miguel. He will help you. Now hurry—no. Wait.”
Elfreda was coming out, dressed and unaware of anything we had been saying, just as we felt the Chang Jang slowing and stopping. The three of us went out onto the viewwalks and gazed down at the hundred or so square kilometers of the town … and the much larger communities that flanked it, bustling Gizeh on one side and colossal Cairo on the other. Elfreda didn’t say a word, not even good-bye, when she hurried off to keep a date for a drink with one of the ship’s assistant pursers—who, she hoped, might tell her enough about the ship’s buoyancy system to suggest a place where I might hide.
And thirty seconds after that there was a knock on the door, and a crewman slipped Chi-Leong a package before scurrying away. I recognized the man. I had seen him in the pipeway when I sneaked on board the zep. When Chi-Leong shook out the contents of the package I recognized them, too: a white shirt and a pair of white shorts like the ones worn by the zep’s crewmen. They were pretty tight, and the badge on my breast described me as someone named John Smith. I was about to complain that no one got away with calling himself John Smith until I realized that in this part of the world “John Smith” was probably as foreign and exotic a name as it needed to be to be ignored.
“So, Sheridan,” Chi-Leong said, inspecting me with mild distaste, “shall we get on with it?”
We should. We did. I changed clothes, packing my own laundered stuff into the bag, and left, heading for the part of the zep all the noise of getting ready for disembarkation was coming from, and I didn’t say good-bye, either.
I don’t know how good Chi-Leong’s suborned helper, Miguel, was at his regular job. I didn’t have any idea what that job was, for that matter. At the work of finding unlawful ways on and off a zep, however, he was just fine.
When I got to the disembarkation lounge all four of the zep’s ship-to-surface gondolas were going busily up and down. Going up they were filled with Egyptian medics, carrying ominous-looking kits of supplies, and soldiers wearing expressions of pop-eyed delight at finding themselves in such unimagined luxury. Going down the gondolas were all but empty. When I was staring at one and wondering how in the world I might board it Miguel appeared behind me at the last minute, shouting “Captain’s orders!” to the zep crewwoman supervising the event. She looked confused, but didn’t attempt to argue with him. Neither did anyone else, as good old Miguel, shouting in a language that wasn’t English and may indeed have been pure gibberish, because no one else seemed to understand it, either—as Miguel, that is, tugged me onto a gondola and slammed the door behind me. Four minutes later I stepped out onto the soil, or at least onto the landing platform, of one of Cairo’s infinite supply of suburbs.
So here I was, finally fully escaped (I supposed) from even the longest-range of Security’s oversight.
But escaped to what?
I didn’t have an answer to that, so I did the next best thing. I just stopped thinking about it.
21
CAIRO AGAIN
Were things going my way at last?
It almost seemed so. There was a squalid little café on the edge of the square, and as soon as I was out of my new best friend’s sight I headed for it. I sat down at a table the size of a quarter-euro coin to think things over, screened from most of the soldiers by a couple of pots of very nearly dead palms.
It was not the most secure place I had ever been in, surrounded by crowds of strangers whose language was impenetrable to me, whose skin color was different from mine—so much so that in this one city, of all the cities I might have been in, there was no hope of vanishing by blending in. And finally also, I was pretty sure, a place that had no friendly feelings toward me at all.
Cars and buses were rolling into an inadequate-looking parking area, controlled by half a dozen sweating and
surly cops. I could see three or four bright-red police cruisers parked nearby, but I was hidden by the palms.
This suburb was not one of the metropolises that every traveler wants to visit. I doubt that many travelers had ever heard of it. On the other hand none of its locals, now engaged in gaping up at the Chang Jang as she tugged against her tethers overhead, were ever going to become world travelers themselves, and thus they were unlikely to recognize me. I should be able to get out of here intact. What I needed was simply a place where I could hole up indefinitely, or at least until Security stopped looking for me.
It was at that moment that my luck really did change, because I remembered.
What I remembered was the wonderful fact that such a place might well exist—really had existed, just a few months ago, and quite possibly existed still. Patty Hopper had owned a shabby old apartment that she used mostly as a storeroom for her stock of fake antiquities to sell to the tourists. She hadn’t had time to clear it out before her trial, and the cops hadn’t confiscated it, because they hadn’t known it existed. It would still be there. I was sure of it. All I had to do was get to it.
And then the latest van to roll into the parking lot supplied a way for me to do it. The legend on its side proclaimed that it belonged to “University of Cairo, Department of Agricultural Statistics.” A middle-aged woman was bustling toward it as fast as her stumpy little legs would carry her, crying, “Abdul! Here I am! Thank heaven you found me!”
And Abdul was leaning out of his window, grinning and saying, “Yes, Dr. Stubb! Is I indeed! Come get in and I will take you at once to university!” And then he saw me, trotting toward him and agitatedly waving, and my luck had changed as far as it was going to go.
When Abdul heard that I was one of the specialists invited to a secret Pompeii Flu seminar, and that the world-famous Professor Heisenstadt—the Professor Heisenstadt! From Gottingen! Truly a name to conjure with, in spite of the fact that I had just made it up—was supposed to send someone to pick me up, but at the main terminal, and now I had no way to get to the university unless Abdul and Dr. Stubb would—
All the Lives He Led Page 23