You had to hand it to him, though. He got a lot of mischief done with this primitive tool.
He and his ax had disrupted all the Jubilee’s electronics. Not a single virt exhibit had been left functioning, all the way up to the Villa of the Mysteries, kilometers away from the city of Pompeii itself. That was the impressive part. The rest of what the poor a-hole did wasn’t. When you added up all the actual physical damage he’d done you had to admit it was pretty trivial. Economic harm? The laugh was on him there, because business was better than ever. It wasn’t just in my wineshop that the tourists decided to stick around. All over Pompeii, there were more customers in the city an hour after the shutdown than there had been before.
Of course a lot of the scheduled spectacles had suffered. The sacrificed bull for the Temple of Isis didn’t roar out its virtual agony or spill its liters of virtual blood when they cut its virtual throat. Its throat didn’t get cut at all, there being no even virtual throat there to be even virtually cut. My generally absent roommate, Jiri Kopthellen, was flat-out exhausted by the time the day was done. He had been working the amphitheater as a gladiator that day, and because the crowds kept coming the show had kept going on. They didn’t have the large-animal virts of elephants and rhinos and bears to “kill” over and over. They didn’t even have the virt “Christians” to be eaten by ravenous virt “lions,” so all twelve of the flesh-and-blood gladiators on duty had had to work every show. It came to six pairs of mano-a-mano bouts in that one evening, one show right after the last, and Jiri was just about worn out.
When Gerda came by she planted a kiss on the top of my head. “It was unbelievable, hon! You wouldn’t believe how many people showed up to look at the dirty mosaics—the beat-up old real ones, I mean, not the augmented ones we usually show—and the graffiti.” Then she took off for her orientation class. Which, as I have mentioned, was not the same as mine.
While I was talking to Gerda, Maury Tesch came in. He threw me a kind of quick nod, and then sat himself down before one of the wall screens.
I wondered what was on his mind, so I walked up behind him to see which service had his attention. On the screen was a man in doctor’s whites, in what looked like a hospital room. There was a bed behind him, and in it either a child or a really small grown-up, with a second doctor standing over him, or her, or whatever. The doctor the camera was on was being interviewed by a pretty Ethiopian girl, about what I could not say.
I made a logical, but wrong, assumption. “That guy really screwed up today, didn’t he?” I said to the back of Maury’s head.
When Maury turned to face me his expression was somber. “I guess you’re talking about that clown from Gabon? Sure. He was a nuisance, all right. I had to check every damn flow meter in the Jubilee manually, just in case the power outage screwed up our telemetry. But that isn’t what I was looking at. Have you ever heard of necrotizing fasciitis?”
I not only hadn’t ever heard of it, I had no idea how to spell it. When I shook my head Maury said, “There’s that little girl in Puteoli—you’ve been to Puteoli, right? And she and two of her schoolmates have come down with this really nasty disease. Did you get a good look at her?” He didn’t wait for an answer, just zoomed the picture past the head of the doctor and right onto the figure in the hospital bed. Then I did get a—no, not what Maury had called a good look because there was nothing at all good about what I saw, but certainly a clearer one. The person in the bed was a young Italian girl, maybe ten or twelve years old. Both of her arms were totally bandaged. So was one leg. Unfortunately, the other was not. It was normal looking enough as far down as the knee, but below that it wasn’t. Where there should have been a skinny little-girl calf instead was a pair of the second doctor’s hands holding a sterile cloth, and in the cloth a chunk of raw and bloody meat.
“Holy crap,” I said.
Maury nodded. “Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “it’s pretty ugly to look at.” Then he snapped the picture off and gave me a big smile. I thought it didn’t look very sincere. Was something troubling him? “So,” he said, “want to get something to eat before class? We’ve got plenty of time.”
What he said was true enough. But Maury’s little display had pretty much canceled any appetite I might have had just then. Besides, I had an errand that needed running. “’Fraid not, Maury,” I told him. “I’ve got to do something first.” And I left him standing there.
I won’t say I’d forgotten how that little girl’s leg had looked, but it wasn’t the kind of thing I tried hard to remember, either, and anyway I had to concentrate on trying to find the union headquarters.
To get there you had to duck under the tracks that led to the electric station and climb a slight hill. The office was in an old-fashioned office building, the shape of a truncated cone, five stories high, walls of pearly, translucent glass, with balconies at every level.
The union office didn’t take up the whole building. Not even very much of it, actually, and in fact not even all of the third story. The suite of offices across from the elevator bank belonged to a firm of lawyers, and you had to pass three dentists and a podiatrist before you came to the door marked “Confederazione Sindacale Lavoratori del Giubileo di Pompeii.” Once inside it got easy. The man I needed to see about returning misplaced Jubilee knickknacks was right down the hall and, the receptionist said, would be glad to see me at once.
Actually that turned out to be untrue. He wasn’t glad at all.
His office was nice enough, with a window that looked out on the distant slopes of Mount Vesuvius, but the man who was just rising from his seat behind a desk, with the beginnings of a smile of greeting on his face and his right hand half extended to shake mine, wasn’t a stranger. I’d met him before. He was old Vespasiano Gatti himself. And he was clearly not feeling any more cordial to me today than he had been the last time we met.
The handshake offer was retracted and the potential smile replaced by a scowl even before I got the ring out of my pocket to hand him. Then, for a moment, he almost did smile. “What’s this?” he asked. “Why have you appropriated an item of property belonging to the Giubileo for yourself?”
I didn’t care for the look on his face, but I thought maybe he had just jumped to some wrong conclusions, and all I needed to do was explain the facts.
That wasn’t a maybe, it was plain wrong. Although I gave him a complete and quite truthful explanation of what had happened he didn’t go for it. “You were evidently tempted by the ring,” he mused. “Once having stolen it, however, you realized discovery was inevitable. So, naturally enough, you decided to turn it in.”
“Hey,” I said. “Stop right there. I didn’t steal anything.”
He looked honestly perplexed. “Are you thinking that your decision to return the ring canceled the theft? I doubt that a court will take that view.”
He got me there. “Court? What court?”
“Well,” he said meditatively, “I imagine a municipal police court first. Of course that’s for the prosecutors to decide, isn’t it? Excuse me.”
There was more hostility coming from that man than I could handle. I didn’t know what to do about it, especially when I saw that he was fingering his deskpad. “Hold it,” I said. “What are you writing?”
It was obvious that I was annoying him, but he stopped writing long enough to read back what he’d already put down. “‘The accused, Bradley Wilson Sheridan, American nationality and Indentured, after removing the article in question from its proper custody, retained it for forty-eight hours before deciding to turn it in.’ Anything wrong with that?”
“It’s wrong as hell! The way you have it, I stole it and then changed my mind about keeping it because I was afraid I’d get caught.”
“Yes? Are you claiming that’s incorrect?”
“Of course it’s incorrect! I didn’t steal the damn thing, I just didn’t get around to returning it.”
“I see,” he said. His fingers got busy on his pad again, and then he look
ed up. “I’ve added your claim. Now shall I print this up for your signature?”
By then I was gritting my teeth, which made him look more closely at me. “Is something wrong, Mr. Sheridan?”
I couldn’t help it. “Yes,” I said, hearing the way my voice was almost cracking with anger, unable to do anything about it. “One question. Why do you hate me? Is it just because I’m Indentured?”
For a moment I thought he hadn’t heard me, because he took a long time to speak. Finally he said, “No, it’s not that. I’m Indentured, too, did you not know that? What do you think I’m doing in these three imbecile jobs?” He didn’t wait for an answer to that. He slammed the drawer shut and set its lock and said, quite conversationally, “I do hate you, and all your kind, Mr. Sheridan, but it is simply because you are an American. You people ruined my life.”
Then he went on to tell me in detail just how his life had been ruined. He hadn’t been exaggerating. What had loused his family up was simply good old Yellowstone. At the time the super-volcano sneezed out all that rock and ash and dust his family, he told me bitterly, had just taken a great financial step. His father had sold everything they owned and borrowed all he could. What he did with the proceeds was to purchase twenty-six hectares of prime Lacryma Cristi vinyards, right on Vesuvius’s lower slope—Gatti waved at the mountain, looming over the farmlands and villages past Pompeii. It had been a very sensible move, he told me. The crops had been reliably good. Their existing winemaking facilities could handle the entire harvest, new land and all. It was the obvious right thing to do, and the longer his father waited to do it the more expensive acquiring these new hectares would be. The time, then, was perfect.
Only it wasn’t, because that’s when Yellowstone did its thing.
Before they could pick their first crop Yellowstone’s clouds of stinking dust and burning acid particles had darkened Italy’s sky. Had darkened pretty much the whole world’s skies, when you came right down to it, but it was only those twenty-six hectares of Vesuvian slopes that concerned him, because they were his family’s.
Yellowstone hadn’t doomed all the world’s farmers, but it did cost many of them quite a lot of money—for extra fertilizers, extra irrigation to wash the acid off the plants, insecticides to hold the number of plant-eating bugs to a bearable minimum, anti-mold sprays of a dozen kinds. And at that particular moment money was what his family was fresh out of. Paying for the vineyard had bled them dry. Other grape growers dug deep and weathered the storm, but for his family there was nowhere left to dig.
“They thought it was funny, even those other victims,” he said, morosely reminiscing. “They called my father Fungus-spore Vittorio.” He paused there, his eyes on me. Looking for sympathy? I couldn’t tell.
After a moment I said, “You know, you guys certainly got a lousy break, but it wasn’t our fault. Americans got hurt a lot worse than you did.”
He shrugged. “Do you think that should make a difference to me? It doesn’t. What ruined our family came from America, so America has to pay.”
He actually seemed cheerful about it as he skated a printout across the desk to me. “Don’t forget your receipt for the ring, Mr. Sheridan. I do not know what action Security will take. Perhaps none; they are sometimes unnecessarily credulous, and they may choose to accept your excuses. But perhaps then there will be another time, in which the evidence against you will be more clear. And, Mr. Sheridan, if such a thing comes to my attention, I promise I will see that you receive everything due you.”
So by the time I got to my Security briefing my head was so full of Gatti’s injustice that I barely looked at the teacher’s desk. Actually if I had been thinking about the briefing at all I imagine that I supposed all the old professor was going to do was talk about the day’s inept terrorist.
The old professor didn’t, though. He wasn’t even there.
The person who replaced Bartolomeo Mazzini I recognized, with no pleasure at all, as Piranha Woman, the one who had handled my first Security interview.
What I had mostly hoped concerning her was that I would never have to see her again. So finding that she was my new teacher was that day’s next big disappointment. The one—tiny—consolation was that she seemed to be having a conversation with whomever was on the other end of her opticle link, and thus perhaps hadn’t noticed that I was late.
The nearest empty seat was next to the woman named Elfreda. Her last name, I was told, was Barcowicz. She was dark, slim, short, about as unlike Gerda as any woman could be, except that if Gerda hadn’t been my girl I might very likely have tried sniffing after Elfreda. What might have made that more likely on this particular evening was that, unusual for Elfreda Barcowicz, she didn’t seem to be attached to anyone. Of course, being plentifully supplied with Gerda I wasn’t interested in additional female company. Still, I gave Elfreda a friendly smile. That could have been pushing my luck a little, because Elfreda might have considered herself a little out of my class. Elfreda was Indentured, just like me, but you’d never know it. Somebody said her debt was down under a thousand euros, which meant that before the end of summer she’d be a free agent.
Anyway, all Elfreda gave me back was a blank look. Then our instructor lost that faraway gaze that meant she was having a conversation with someone not physically present, pushed her opticle out of the way, made a note on her pad, gave me a glance that wasn’t blank at all—or friendly—and began to talk.
“Tonight,” Piranha Woman said, “we are going to try to understand what terrorists are motivated by, so that we can better work to defeat them. In my lecture I will occasionally ask a question. When the questions are rhetorical, no response is required from any of you. When the question is not rhetorical I will point to one of you for an answer—who will give it promptly and correctly, or will face consequences. Is that understood? Good. Now let us ask ourselves what terrorism is all about.”
She pursed those narrow lips, looking around the room. If it had been the old guy talking, probably one of us might have answered that question. Piranha Woman wasn’t pointing at any of us, though, and we had just heard her ground rules. So nobody spoke. Then, after a moment, she took a swallow of water from the pitcher on her lectern and began to talk. One by one she went over some of the most famous terrorist groups of those old Twentieth Century days when terrorism first began to be a major concern: the Red Army Faction and the Weathermen and Aum Shinrikyo and Baader-Meinhof and Al-Qaeda and Hamas and the Irgun and the Stern Gang and the Rajneeshees in the American state of Oregon and the RISE group in the American city of Chicago and the IRA and the one the Serbs called “Union or Death.” Then she paused for a moment, and then she said, “The question is, what do they all have in common?”
She looked around the room, very much as though she wanted one of us to volunteer an answer. She didn’t point, though, so none of us did.
Then she gave a swift, stern bob of the head and did point. And the person she pointed at was me.
“Stand up,” she said. I stood up. “So tell me, Mr. Sheridan”—it did not improve the situation for me to discover that she remembered my name—“what is it that all those groups have in common?”
Unsurprisingly, I didn’t know the answer to her question. That caused Piranha Woman to make it clear to me that, while it was bad enough to come late to the briefing, at least I could have come prepared. Then she asked for volunteers. Elfreda’s hand shot up. “Because they were all trying to stop some great social change,” she said. That was the right answer. Piranha Woman told her she could sit down, which I guess was Elfreda’s reward for being right. Since I hadn’t been right, I didn’t get that reward, and in fact Piranha Woman left me standing there, with my bare face hanging out, for the whole rest of the briefing.
She didn’t stop with the Twentieth Century, either. She gave us a synoptic of The Great Terrorist Atrocities of all time, from the Nuovi Risorgimenti who disabled Venice’s flood protectors just when the spring tides were due to the Very Greens
who dynamited the Atchafalaya dams so that the Mississippi River no longer flowed past the ghost town that had once been New Orleans. And she mentioned Brian Bossert, the legendary terrorist mastermind who finished his career by amputating the city of Toronto from Canada’s economy for two full weeks one spring, using a staff of no more than five accomplices of whom four had no skill more complicated than the pulling of a trigger. (“At least there was one good thing about Toronto,” Piranha Woman said, actually sounding quite pleased. “Bossert got himself killed in the explosion. It wasn’t a bad trade.”) And all the while the four walls of our room were showing examples of their master terrorist handiwork. We saw the lopped-off Empire State Building, and the Golden Gate Bridge approaches that no longer led to any bridge, and the long lines of empty caskets waiting to be filled from the hordes of shivering Muscovites when the power lines had been destroyed one January.
But it came to an end.
Piranha Woman turned out to be a stickler for everybody’s punctuality, not just mine. At the thirtieth second of the sixtieth minute she clapped her hands and said, “You are finished for this evening. By the next session you are all required to have familiarized yourselves with the datafile on each of the individuals and groups I have named tonight.”
And she turned and left the room without bothering to say good night.
Outside it was already dark, with a sky full of bright Italian stars overhead. I stretched and yawned. I had turned my opticle off so it wouldn’t buzz at me during Piranha Woman’s briefing. When I pulled it out of my bellybag to put it back on the little blue message flasher was blinking.
The funny thing is that I really didn’t want to turn it back on to take that message. I can’t say that I knew what it was going to be. I was just suddenly pretty sure I wasn’t going to like it.
All the Lives He Led-A Novel Page 11