Until the party, anyway. It turned out not to be a merry time for Francine. The religion police stormed in and carried her away, on the charge of proselytizing Christianity. How? Through her heretical lights-covered Christmas tree, which affronted every true believer who passed by. Or would affront him anyway, if he happened to climb onto a neighbor’s rooftop so he could see through the windows of her third-floor flat.
I had a problem about then, too. I had been manufacturing papyrus copies of that old Egyptian best seller, The Book of the Dead, and took on one of our drivers, a man with a modest police record named Faroukh, to do the selling for me. He did it very well, too, and even immediately turned my share of the cash over to me. Only after a number of profitable weeks he informed me that, while our seventy-five/twenty-five split was fine with him he wanted the order reversed so he got the seventy-five. Or else, he said, he would turn me in for the reward.
And so, taking one thing with another, the writing on the wall was clear. It was time for me to be going somewhere else.
Trouble was, I didn’t know where to go. I checked into all the employment openings I could find, but most of them were terrible—manual labor in unpleasant surroundings, the kind of job none of the natives would touch, so they had to take on desperate Americans.
Then a different one of our Egyptian drivers showed me an advertisement in one of the Cairo papers, and that was when I heard about the Anno Giubileo della Citta di Pompeii.
The Jubilee sounded good. I was pretty sure there would be a shot at as much off-the-books business for me in Pompeii as there was in Egypt, and there would be a better climate, and not so much sand in my underwear at night. And, if I made the right connections, possibly a chance at moving up to something better than Pompeii later on—maybe even becoming a gastarbeiter in Germany, which, if I was lucky, could possibly even turn into a lifetime career.
And one other thing.
I know it doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that a person like me would do, but I had been faithfully sending money back to the old folks at 16-A Liberty Crescent, Floor 15, in the Molly Pitcher Redeployment Village on Staten Island. The Jubilee gave its employees free health insurance. That wasn’t the thing that caught my eye. I was just twenty-five at the time. I was already thinking of getting out of Egypt, and what twenty-five-year-old thinks he’ll ever get really sick? But there was also life insurance. You needed it to protect your dear ones, the ad said coaxingly, and whose dear ones needed protection more than mine?
It was tempting. The more I thought about it the more it seemed to me that Pompeii had everything going for it, except one thing. When I checked they flatly refused to assume the remaining €7,000 on my Indenture. They said the term they would need me for was only the one season and they didn’t think I could work the whole debt off in that time.
I fixed that, though. I let them make the Indenture even bigger—a thousand euros bigger—so if I didn’t earn out at the Jubilee they could sell me to somebody else when the season was over. When I also put up another thousand out of my privately acquired funds, they grudgingly took me on. I was on my way out of the country in forty-eight hours. I was pretty sure that would be well before the Egyptian tax people might catch up on their double-entry bookkeeping and discover the rather significant discrepancy between the amounts of money I’d been observed to spend or send home and the considerably smaller sums I could have earned legitimately as a guide.
Then, when I was turning in my keys and IDs to the chief of Security, Fazim Ineverdidgethislastname, he gave me a scare. He studied my file for a long time, and then looked up and gave me his false-toothed grin. “Hah,” he said, and, “Ah.” I thought he was thinking about arresting me for God-knows-what, but he was just having fun. “So this change is for out of frying pan into fire, is that how you speak of such things? Is danger attracting to you?”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then he told me about the thing that had happened that morning in the Vatican. The truck that blew up in St. Peter’s Square was driven by a member of the group that called themselves True Original Child of Christ Catholics, and what they were protesting was the ordination of married bishops. Their bomb was a pretty nasty one, too. They had wrapped twenty or thirty kilograms of chemical explosive with ten times as much of whatever radionuclides they could get. Most of that side of the basilica wasn’t going to be useful for a long time.
But Fazim finally got tired of his jokes, and stamped my exit visa, and I was on my way.
3
BUON GIORNO, BELLA ITALIA
I couldn’t afford airfare, so I had to take a surface ship to Italy. I didn’t mind. I was happy to see the gangplanks go down and the ship begin to chug its way out of the Alexandria harbor, en route to Naples.
The vessel that took me out of harm’s way had once been a cruise ship called La Bella Donna di Palermo, back in the days when things like cruise ships still sailed on the world’s oceans. It was way better than the four-decker that had brought me to Egypt, though the Bella Donna, like all those old local cruise ships, wasn’t very luxurious anymore. It wasn’t very full, either. Near as I could tell there were maybe two hundred or so of us aboard, Ghanians and Sudanese, Palestinians and Tibetans, Cambodians and Tierra del Fuegans. And Americans. Male Americans and female ones. Young and old. The one thing we had in common was that we were all poor, well, that plus the fact that nearly all of us spoke some kind of English.
That was a hangover from the days when the US of A still amounted to something in the world. I guess the reason the language survived all the troubles was that Argentinians and Japanese always needed a way to talk to Moroccans and Finns. What with aviation lingo and the American troops that had once been stationed all over the place, the English language filled the bill.
My father had a joke about that. He used to say our language was the last thing of ours that anyone in the rest of the world had ever wanted, and if we’d only had the sense to charge them some kind of a license fee for using it we could all be living on the profits. Jokes about money were about the only kind of jokes my father made anymore. They were usually grim.
I put in a few hours trying to find as much about Pompeii as I could in the ship’s pathetic excuse for a library. At least it made the time pass pretty quickly. When we got to the port of Naples it was late afternoon.
Most of the passengers left us as soon as we were disembarked, presumably for better jobs than mine. But there were a couple of other new Pompeiians on the ship, too, two young men from Ghana and a girl from Myanmar.
At the foot of the pier, just past the customs people who had waved us through without even looking up, a hydrovan was waiting, along with a youngish (but also beginning to lose his hairish) man who was carrying a cellboard. He clicked it four times, checking the pictures of each of us while we studied him. He was older than I, and a good bit plumper. He had a heart-shaped stud in his right nostril, so he wasn’t gay, but nothing in either eyebrow, so he wasn’t actively looking, either. When he’d given us a chance for a good inspection he looked up and grinned. “Welcome to the First Century AD, folks. I’m Maury Tesch, and I’m the one that came down to get you because the Welsh Bastard’s got something else he’d rather be doing than meeting you. Throw your bags in the back and get in.” As we climbed aboard, though, he made the Myanmar girl sit in back and patted the seat next to his own for me. “You’re Bradley Sheridan? Nice to meet you. Tell me, do you play chess?”
He didn’t wait for an answer, just kicked off the brake and stepped on the gas, and we were off through Naples’s horrible rush hour traffic, a couple dozen kilometers down the coast, right to a traffic circle before a clutch of not very attractive dormitory buildings. A taffy-haired man with the build of a professional wrestler came down to look us over. “That’s him,” Tesch muttered. “The Welsh Bastard, only you better not let him hear you call him that. He’s your boss.”
The man looked like a boss, too. He waved Tesch away, then watched us u
nload our gear before he lifted a hand in a sort of greeting. “I’m Jeremy Jonathan Jones,” he informed us, “and I’m the one you’ll be taking orders from. You will live here in the transient barracks until you get your jobs lined up, then you’ll be with the rest of the migrants. Now take your crap inside and leave it there, and then, the first thing we do, I’m going to take you all on an orientation trip inside the gates.”
He turned and got behind the wheel of the van. He waited just long enough for us to obey his orders and not a moment longer; one of the Ghanians was just getting up out of the entrance well as the Welsh Bastard pulled the lever that closed the door. Over his shoulder he called, “You guys got a great opportunity here. Don’t louse it up.”
He sounded like he was doing us a favor, or, anyway, trying to make us think he was. He did impress me, though. So did the ancient city itself when we came to it.
On the ship’s library machines the city had looked like a total wreck, the old buildings nothing but ruins. The ones that had ever had a second story didn’t have one anymore, because the last two thousand years had removed it. The hundreds of little shops that had lined the stone-slabbed avenues were now nothing but cubbyholes with bare stone shelves, or more usually with no shelves left at all. Even the villas that had belonged to the rich people were junk. There was nothing remaining in them, or for that matter anywhere else in Pompeii, that looked like a flowering tree, a formal garden, or a lawn.
That was what it had looked like in the opticles of the ship’s library. But the place the Welsh Bastard (as I learned to call him from everybody else who worked for him) showed us didn’t look like that Pompeii at all. This city wasn’t in the least empty, and it wasn’t ruined. Although the hour was getting late it was a whole, live city, full of whole, live people.
The people on the streets of this reborn Pompeii came in two kinds. One kind was flesh-and-blood. Those were tourists who were coming from every country in the world that could afford tourism, wearing shorts and slacks and gowns and kilts and monokinis and burkas and headdresses, or any combination thereof.
The other kind was the Romans. I hadn’t yet found out that some of them were plain Indentureds, like me, only dressed up in Roman costume, while others—well—weren’t. To me they all looked the same: like people who were real, authentic Romans from two thousand years ago. Some were wearing slave gowns, working in the (now again well-stocked) shops or carrying goods of one kind or another in yokes on their shoulders. Some were in togas, gravely strolling the streets.
The buildings all had their upper stories back, too. Through the street doors of the villas we could see what the Bastard told us were called atria, with reflecting pools and flower beds and caged birds singing away. And—well, here’s the thing. I knew very well that what I was looking at was all virts and not anywhere near real, but it all looked pretty damn good anyhow. It looked like a place I might even have been willing to pay my own money to visit, if I weren’t going to be paid to work there, that is if I could ever have hoped to have the kind of money that visiting the Jubilee would cost.
We weren’t there just to gawk at the sights, though. The Bastard had things to teach us. When we passed one undistinguished-looking alley entrance he hustled us by with a finger to his lips. Then, “Did you see what was in there?” he asked.
I had. There had been an open three-wheeler parked down the alley with a man and a woman having some kind of an argument inside. They were both wearing big, fly-eye goggles that glowed in a kind of muted purplish light and covered so much of their faces that I couldn’t tell whether they were kidding around with each other or really mad. “Right,” he said, when we had all indicated that, sure, we saw the vehicle. “Those two guys are from the Ufficio dell’Antica. They’re here to make sure nobody damages any of the real old stuff that’s around—not that you probably could, really, since whatever didn’t get ruined by now isn’t likely to, ever. All the same, don’t fool with them. The Antica people are almost as bad as Security. Don’t make jokes about bombs or stuff, they’ve got no sense of humor. And they’re all over the place, and a lot of them don’t wear the uniforms. Oh, yeah, and there’s UN people around, too. They’re the ones that wear the blue helmets, but they’re only really worried about possible, you know, international criminals. Big ones, I mean. They won’t usually bother people like you.” He explained to us that Pompeii was blessed with three separate police forces, and they didn’t necessarily cooperate with each other. “So the best thing you new fish can do is stay out of the way of all of them. Got that? And—well, that brings us up to the real deal.”
He looked around to see if anybody was paying special attention to us, then muttered, “Look over there. You see where I’m looking, right behind the fountain where those Roman soldier virts are loafing around. See that thing that looks like part of the villa wall, only there’s no ivy on it?”
“It does not look like any particular thing at all,” the girl from Myanmar said.
“That’s the way it’s supposed to look. That’s Security, there. They don’t want people looking at their offices. They’ve got weapons carriers and guys in full battle gear and all kinds of stuff inside there. That’s just in case. And they’re the ones you specially don’t want taking any kind of an interest in you. The Antica and the UN guys could toss your asses into jail, sure, but Security can kill.” He looked to see if we had appreciated the importance of his advice. Then he said, “Okay. Now look here.”
He marched us across to another alley, this one wide enough for a wagon. One wagon was rattling toward us over the paving stones, mule-drawn. Its driver was an elderly man in a slave’s smock, hair unkempt, waving a whip. He didn’t look like the dressed-up college kid I might have expected. He looked pretty convincingly ancient Roman, and then the Bastard showed us why. “Watch this,” he said, grinning, and planted himself right in the way of the vehicle.
One of the Ghanians couldn’t help shouting a warning, and the Myanmar girl swallowed hard. The Welsh Bastard just kept on grinning as the mule kept plodding right at him, its slobbery muzzle almost touching him—
Then it actually did touch him—
Then it kept right on going. It looked like the whole shebang went right through the Bastard, or the Bastard went through it. Anyway mule, driver, wagon and all kept right on going as though he weren’t there at all. The Bastard got sort of fuzzily hard to see for a moment, and then reappeared behind the wagon as it rattled on away.
He laughed out loud at the expressions on our faces. “Simulations,” he explained. “We’ve got the best virts in the business here; you won’t see any better than these anywhere in the world. You’re going to see a lot of these, you know, simulated guys marching around all over the city. Just pay them no attention. They aren’t there. They’re just images, really, except they also got sound, right?” He looked at the timekeeper on his opticle. “Wait a minute,” he said.
It wasn’t just a minute, it was like a long five or ten minutes, and then I nearly jumped out of my skin. From somewhere not too far from where we were standing came one of the most horrible shrieks I have ever heard. The woman from Myanmar whispered a little prayer, I think, it wasn’t in English. I said, “What the hell is that?”
He was grinning. “It’s the elephant.”
“Elephant? What elephant?”
“What you’re hearing is the last show in the arena. That’s the one where large animals are getting killed and Christians are getting crucified and so on. Oh,” he said, looking at the expression on my face, “they’re all virts. You think the Jubilee is going to pay to kill a whole real elephant three times a day? That’d be stupid. Now let me show you the refectory where you’ll mostly eat.”
Once I got over that elephant’s scream I began to cheer up. In fact, I have to say that at that moment I was feeling pretty pleased with myself for having the intelligence to come here. Pompeii made those old Egyptian rock piles look sick. Taken all in all, I thought that it was going to b
e a good place to build up my stash, or anyway I thought that until I met with the folks from Security.
4
BAD NEWS FROM THE COPS
I think I already mentioned that in Egypt if you stayed out of the cities you didn’t have much of a problem with terrorists. Even better, you didn’t have a problem with the kind of heavy-duty police presence that came when the authorities were worried about terrorists—and, given a choice between a lot of bomb throwers and a lot of cops, I might have preferred the bomb throwers. At least they wouldn’t have thought their best target was me.
It’s true that even in the Valley of the Kings every now and then some splinter group might try a drive-through tourist shoot, spraying fletches and bullets at the crowds in the Valley, just to show that they were still pissed off about Basque rights or the subjection of the Turkic Uighurs to the Han Chinese or the secession of French-speaking Canada. Or whatever. There wouldn’t be any big, scary stuff, though. The powerful and well-financed terror groups didn’t bother with Egypt.
All the Lives He Led-A Novel Page 3