But I did what I had to do to get them.
Let’s face it. I was a mean little turd. The only thing that I can say in my defense is that I hadn’t chosen that life. It was just the only life that was available for me. When I watched those old-time kid shows on the screen—that is, the pre-Yellowstone ones, all of them about well-washed boys of about my age who had moms who packed them lunches and went to parent-teacher meetings for them, and, especially, had dads who went to the office and brought home presents for their kids—well, while I watched those old shows I really wished I was in one of them.
But I wasn’t. If Yellowstone hadn’t happened I might have become one of those kids once, but Yellowstone did happen and I wasn’t. And at least I had the sense to stay away from the kid terrorist groups that were getting organized about then.
Well, all right, maybe I didn’t always stay totally away, because there was this one time that happened when I was about eleven. That one was a biggie, all right, although it wasn’t actually about anything that was going on in the city of New York itself. What it was was this terror bunch that called themselves the Crusaders for the True Bishop of Rome. I had no idea what that meant, but I knew what they had done. They had firebombed the Sistine Chapel when the cardinals were supposed to be electing a new pope there. According to the news, they killed three of the cardinals, but it didn’t make much difference. Old Jerome II got elected anyway. So, going home that night on the hydroferry, about six of us kids were talking about it, and one thing I said must have rung a bell.
A neighbor kid named Artie Mason pulled me aside when we got to the Staten Island dock. “You sound like a man with principles,” he told me—an assessment that really took me by surprise. I don’t just mean the bit about having principles; it was also the first time anybody had ever called me a man. “Would you risk your life for something important?”
“Depends on the money,” I said, being a smart-assed kid with, really, no detectable principles at all. It was the wrong answer for Artie, I guess. He dropped the matter. And a couple of weeks later he was missing from class. From all of his classes. Permanently. It wasn’t until nearly five years had passed and I heard he was in the Southeast Alaska Correction Center—residence limited to suspected terrorists—that I figured out what the question was that he had been going to ask me.
That’s the way it went. Petty crime is what kept us going. I didn’t do as much as some of the others. I didn’t sell drugs, especially the old harmfully addictive ones like heroin or cocaine. There wasn’t much of a market for them when somadone came along, but I didn’t actually sell even that. Well, I mean I didn’t sell it myself. I did stand lookout while dealers sold any amount of their somadone smokes or salves or licky sticks or whatever the fashion was at that moment in those remote and mysterious places called the Stans that nobody seemed to want to talk about, where the somadone and all kinds of other strange things came from.
Actually somadone is what put the Afghan and Colombian drug lords out of business—as good at making you feel good as the hard stuff but with no harmful physical effects at all. Unless you stopped taking it, in which case you got all the withdrawal symptoms of any cold-turkey quitting. Of course everybody knew that, which is why the only people who got hooked voluntarily were addicts to one of the older, harder drugs who were having their health totally destroyed thereby. This was a problem for our local drug dealers, which they dealt with in various ways—by giving away free somadone-laced lemonade, or by handing out somadone-enriched jelly beans at kindergartens. That’s when I learned never to take anything edible from a stranger—or, for that matter, from most of the people who weren’t strangers to me at all. The person I learned it from was my poor old aunt Carrie, but I’ll tell you more about her later.
Anyway, the cops didn’t bother with the likes of lookouts like me. The dealers did bother, though. The one or two times a cop did succeed in getting past me I got a pretty good working over from my employer of the moment to remind me to be more vigilant. That was bad enough but what was hard work then was trying to keep my mother from looking at me too closely for a few days, until the bruises lightened up. (My father wouldn’t have noticed anything as trivial as a few dozen black-and-blues. Maybe if I’d turned up with an ear missing.) Oh, and I never pimped anybody, either. I might have tried, before I got good at other skills, but I was only fourteen years old then and the girls just laughed at me. Besides all the good-looking girls had gone off to be nanas or au pairs—or hookers—in Kuwait and Madagascar, and it was only the homely ones that had stuck around New York.
So those were the things we did. Since they couldn’t put all of us in jail, we kept right on doing them.
Actually the cops were a lot more worried about terrorism than our kiddy crime. They had all the reason in the world to feel that way, of course. I mean, you just had to look down Fifth Avenue at the stump of the old Empire State Building to see what kind of thing they were worrying about. That had been the Unborn Babies Are Worth More Than Living Sinners attack, back in ’47 or so.
I don’t want to give the impression that it was all one-sided. The news said otherwise. They’d rounded up and convicted everybody involved in chopping the top off the old Empire State, and in our civics class at NYA&M the teacher bragged that the government had finally got positive proof that the master terrorist of the age, somebody named Brian Bossert, had died of his wounds after his attack on the city of Toronto, Canada.
It was the first time I’d heard the name Brian Bossert, and, oh, how I wish it had been the last.
I didn’t really care what terrorists did, you know. Why then did I spend time watching terrorist actions on the news channels? Simple. They were doing something interesting, which the other news wasn’t. It was of no interest to me that the king of England had to face a parliamentary committee of inquiry because it had been alleged that he was considering turning Catholic, or that the vice president of the United States of America, or what was left of it, was having an affair with the president’s wife. None of that had anything to do with me.
I did wonder sometimes why the US loonies didn’t employ their own gangs of terrorists, doing things like maybe going around and setting off bombs to punish the rest of the world for not—I don’t know—maybe for not somehow preventing Yellowstone? It wasn’t that Americans didn’t have the skills for terror. I mean, look at all the home-brew nutties who showed their annoyance by blowing up a building here or there, or taking the occasional computer net down, in the old days. New York was still a pretty good target for the crazies, too, though usually on a smaller scale. It was a slow day when we didn’t hear guns going off somewhere or see smoke coming out of a building. Some days it was a relief to go back home at night, because back in Staten Island we weren’t much bothered by terrorists. Once, I remember, a bunch of descendants of the old Lenni Lenape Indian tribe got liquored up and shot up a police station in Freehold, New Jersey, because they wanted their ancestral lands back. But even if you counted the one-eighths and the one-sixteenths among them there weren’t enough authentic Lenni Lenapes left to signify.
Anyway, I knew very well that there was nothing in New York for me. Nothing anywhere else in North America, either, it looked like, because even the parts of the continent that had been spared by damn Yellowstone were full of young people exactly like myself. Even the native East Coast kids couldn’t find jobs at any decent pay, because us refugee kids were taking any jobs there were for practically nothing.
It wasn’t much of a life for a growing boy, and that’s a fact.
I did manage to stay out of jail most of the time. The reason for that was because when the cops did happen to pick me up, they mostly preferred to deal with whatever municipal ordinance I had infracted by punching me out in some alley to save the paperwork. So my life was pretty much crap.
I did know how I might be able to make it better, though. I knew where the money was, and I knew it wasn’t anywhere near Staten Island.
As a kid, like every little kid, I had fantasies of running away, maybe to what was left of the Amazon to start a career as a highwayman, or maybe as a sheriff who put the highwaymen away, or running off to the semi-mythical Stans, those rogue countries that had faced down the whole rest of the world by the threat of starting World War Last.
And maybe I had another reason for venturing out into the wide world—like maybe looking for my Uncle Devious, who was more appropriately known, though not by us, as the Reverend Delmore DeVries Maddingsley. And maybe then making him cough up whatever he had left unspent of my mother’s trust fund that he had embezzled.
That wasn’t realistic. I knew that. But what I also knew was that any place would be better than Staten Island.
2
HOW I BETTERED MYSELF
You have to be twenty-one years old to wear sex-preference jewelry or to sign the Indenture for foreign employment. I didn’t care about the jewelry but I signed the Indenture the day I made the cut.
My mother went to the Egyptian consulate with me. My dad wouldn’t. He wouldn’t have anything to do with it at all, because he was still pissed about the fact that the well-known Kansas City real estate firm of Daniel S. Sheridan & Associates was never going to turn into the firm of Daniel S. Sheridan & Son. Certainly not back in Kansas City. It would be at least another twenty years before they cleaned Kansas City up. And not anywhere else, either, because who needed a real estate business anymore when most of the country’s real estate was buried under a gazillion tons of ash and pumice from the eruption of the super-volcano at Yellowstone National Park?
So I left the consulate’s office in the old World Trade Center Memorial Building owing somebody in Egypt 2.5 million US dollars for airfare and training.
All right, that sounds worse than it was. When you translated that into euros it only came to a little over €18,000, but it was still a lot of money. It was more money than I and my dad and my mother put together could hope to earn in the rest of our lives in the refugee villages. But it was a good investment for us to make, because a week later I was being airsick on a four-decker en route to Cairo.
I don’t know if you’ve ever crossed the Atlantic, but if that was what you wanted to do then you had four options: hardwing, zeppelin, four-decker, and surface ship. The hyperjet hardwings were a long way the fastest but they were also wildly expensive; only governments and the hugest of corporations could afford them. The zep liners were by far the most luxurious, but costly and not very fast. For most trans-Atlantic passengers the four-decked, sixteen-engine turboprops were the crossing of choice. In maximum seating configuration, and nearly all their configurations were for maximum seating, four-deckers could carry some 2,650 passengers apiece. They weren’t fancy, of course. Mostly the passengers bought Meals RTE at the airports, and the use of the toilets was by appointment only. But they got you there and you didn’t have to pay an arm and a leg. (Well, just a leg, maybe.)
The four-deckers weren’t the very cheapest way of crossing the ocean. That was the surface ships. They were also definitely the slowest—up to ten or twelve days, and depending on the weather, especially for the wind-aided ones, sometimes even more. No one who could possibly scrape four-decker fare together ever chose supercargo status on a surface freighter. But halfway across, in my six-abreast seat in the bowels of my own four-decker, The Spirit of Juneau, Alaska, sitting five meters from the nearest window and fifteen from the nearest toilet, I almost wished I had. But then it was over and I had arrived at the Gamal Nasser International Airport on its island in the bay of Alexandria.
What should I say about my four years in Cleopatra-land? Probably not much. It was interesting, kind of, but it was also a long time ago. Years’ve gone by, and God knows how many innocent deaths, and besides you’re expecting me to tell you about Pompeii, not Egypt. Well, I’m doing that, but think it through. I couldn’t sign up for the Jubilee in 2075, could I? It didn’t exist until 2079, so there was this detour along the way. Four years of it.
I spent those years mostly guiding German and Russian and Bolivian tourists around as many of Egypt’s historical sites as they had finished making into theme parks. That was most of them. And they were big, big business for a country that had been dirt poor for centuries.
I never got to some of their biggies, like Saqqara and Tutankhamen’s tomb and his personal city, Amarna. Or to Karnak in Luxor, with its obelisks that the ancients had clothed in pure gold. Well, the modern Egyptians did their own cladding—only with them the gold, of course, was only virts.
The police were not much of a problem, as long as we weren’t selling fake antiquities to tourists (which most of us were on the side, but we were generally good at not getting caught). Egypt in general loved having us there. They were used to having foreigners come to admire their ruins as far back as the time of the ancient Greeks. Then that Twentieth Century invention called the theme park taught them how profitable those ruins could become, and they had all the raw materials they needed standing idle there—sixty-two tombs in the Valley of the Kings alone, not to mention the temples, the pyramids, and that greatest of all tourist traps, the hoary old Sphinx itself. And when zeppelin tour cruises began to carry passengers in comfort to destinations far from any seaport, why, then the money really began to roll in.
So it wasn’t bad in Egypt. Sure, the pay was crap, especially after they deducted the regular installments on the Indenture, but the tips were all right and I had a sideline or two going. Those wasted years on the streets of the Big Apple weren’t altogether wasted.
The main thing that was wrong with Egypt was the inadequate supply of women. I did make contact with another guide, name of Patricia Hopper, and we shared a bed now and then. (Of course that was a firing offense. We weren’t even allowed to wear sex-preference jewelry on the job, but we did well enough in the old-fashioned ways.) Patty and I also shared a few buck-hustles, but then she got caught doing illegal currency exchanges and the Egyptian police in their fezzes took her away. So, apart from paying one of the Cairo pros for half an hour’s rental of her bod now and then, I was womanless for the next year or so.
On the good side, in Egypt we guides weren’t bothered much by terrorists. That wasn’t surprising, because who would be dumb enough to try to blow up a pyramid? Naturally the Egyptian cities were crawling with secret terrorist militias, Islamic ones and secular ones, more flavors of them than I could count. Sometimes we heard talk about some village that had been put under martial law. But in Cairo on my days off, although I occasionally heard gunfire or explosions or emergency vehicles screaming around, I didn’t have much personal worry. The Egyptian terrorists didn’t bother civilians much. They were usually too busy trying to assassinate each other’s leaders.
Not always, though.
There was a new breed of terrorists, the Neue Fur—they pronounced it “noya foor”—who had been spotted in the Valley of Kings and were said to be active near the pyramids and the Sphinx. So I paid the right bribes to get away from those areas, and got myself posted to Siwa, the place where, a long time ago, Alexander the Great had worshipped a few ancient Egyptian gods. It had a good reputation among us guides. That is, it was said to be great for tips.
Probably it was. I never found out for myself, in fact I never actually set foot on that ground. While I was on my way up there the Fur did their thing. They weren’t really mad at the Egyptians, just at their own government back in Sudan. But they worked a lot of Egypt over because there wasn’t that much left to blow up in Sudan.
See, like I said, no terrorist with an IQ over forty was going to bomb the pyramids. The Furs didn’t. They found a better target.
The big thing about Siwa was the temple of their head god, and it had an inner temple that was a really big Egyptian deal. In Pharaonic times only priests were allowed inside it. By the latter Twenty-first Century the rules were changed and now the only congregation for any of those gods was rich-country tourists. They came to spectate rather than worsh
ip and admission was now restricted to anyone who was willing to pay for a ticket.
What the Fur did, they quietly removed the government ticket-takers at the inner temple one day and replaced them with their own guys. Then they sent barkers around to announce that, for the next thirty minutes only, admission to the inner temple would be free. And then, when the inner temple was packed solid with wealthy Arabs and Europeans and Asians, they blew it up.
As I say, I wasn’t there when the killing happened. I was fat and happy and airborne in my short-haul blimp, enjoying my free (free!) cup of Egyptian coffee that the stewardess handed around to all us passengers, and looking out the window (imagine having a window of your own to look out of!) at the sands and the occasional scrub and the even more occasional glimpses of the Nile no more than a couple hundred meters below us, and thinking about all the money I was going to make.
Of course the pilots heard about what was going on at Siwa right away over the radio. They didn’t tell us, though. Didn’t want to start a panic, I guess. But then it got onto the news, and the first-class passengers that had their sets turned on heard all about it. Then the pilots had their panic, all right.
By the time we got there the airport was packed with Intersec and Egyptian Air Force hardwings, and you could smell the deaths.
I took the hint. I didn’t even get off the blimp, just stayed where I was until—hours later, because they were one by one security-screening every passenger coming to or leaving Siwa—we finally lifted off for the return flight to Cairo.
All that gave me plenty of time to consider what I wanted to be doing there. By then I had got the Indenture debt down to about €7,000, but those street hustles were beginning to attract the wrong kind of attention. And then there was the religion thing.
The Egyptian Muslims were beginning to throw their weight around again after the big suppression of 2065. It was getting on toward Christmas, and one of our Indentureds, Francine Robles-Espada, made the mistake of deciding to have a little traditional kind of a party. You know, mistletoe over the doorway and eggnog to drink. She’d been having a pretty good year selling fake funeral dishes and ushabti to gullible rich people from Peru and Madagascar—actually it was originally Patty Hopper’s scam, but Francine inherited it, that and the far-away old flat where Patti kept her inventory, when Patti was taken from us. Francine was smarter than Patti, though. She never sold the stuff herself. She would be taking a tour group around and she would tell them how no decent ancient Egyptian would have allowed himself to be entombed without a crew of ushabti, the little ten-centimeter figurines made of the glazed quartz powder that the French call faience. Hers were made of baked clay, actually, but the tourists didn’t know the difference. Then she would turn the group loose for free time just where one of her associates, usually an old drunk named Mohammed, was waiting, who happened to have a couple of the things in his pocket. Mohammed might get arrested, but Francine never would.
All the Lives He Led-A Novel Page 2