All the Lives He Led-A Novel (6 page)

“What was left of it,” the woman said.

“We did find the surgeon who rebuilt Maddingsley into that rather good-looking Negro,” Swinn said. “All the surgeon got for it, though, was a year in prison. Should’ve thrown the key away. There were some money judgments, too—he had to repay what Maddingsley had paid him, and of course we sold Maddingsley’s estate and all his stuff. We think Maddingsley had a lot more squirreled away, though. We’re still looking for it.”

“And we’re not the only ones,” the woman said. “Some appear to believe that the funds were banked with the Stans.”

“Which is of interest to us,” Swinn added, “because of Mrs. Maddingsley’s use of somadone, which comes from the Stans, and we wonder whether your uncle made trips there to secure it for her.”

I thought they were beginning to get silly, but I just shook my head. “I don’t know.”

Swinn sighed. The woman gave him another reprimanding look, but after a moment she sighed, too. “Very well,” she said, “you can now go.”

That was it. They pointed to the door. As I opened it, the woman said, “You have displayed a very sloppy attitude toward providing the Security force with essential information, Sheridan. Do not do this again. Be sure you attend your antiterrorist orientation sessions. Do not miss any of them.”

And the man said, “You’re very lucky in the employment you have been offered here, Sheridan. You don’t want to lose it. The soft-coal distillation mines at Krakow are always looking for new Indentured workers.”

And the woman said, “You’ve made a bad start, Sheridan. You can repair it. If you observe anything suspicious among the people you will be working with report to me at once. My name is Major Yvonne Feliciano. To reach me use any communications facility in Pompeii and ask for my code name, which is Piranha Woman. Do it.”

That was the end of the interrogation.

On my way out I saw my former fellow passengers sprawled out in the waiting room and eyeing me with malice as I passed through. Obviously they had been made to wait while I went through my own inquisition. I was a little sorry for them. Maybe a little sorrier for myself, with the news about Uncle Devious. I hadn’t expected that information to come out of this particular interview. But there it was.

I tried to put it all out of my mind. For a while I succeeded.

5

THE CITY THAT CAME BACK TO LIFE

When you talk about Pompeii you have to remember that two thousand years is a long time. All those years had made significant changes in the way the city of Pompeii looked.

What had happened to that old AD 79 Pompeii was pretty obvious. You could see the cause of it, sitting right down the road from the city itself, and what it was was that humongous neighbor mountain named Vesuvius. And AD 79 was the year when Vesuvius blew itself up and cooked Pompeii in the process.

That was the bad part of that ancient event. Looked at from an AD 2079 viewpoint, it had a lot of good about it. All that rock and ash the volcano dumped on the city had the unexpected and fortunate effect of preserving its bare bones for us two-thousand-years-later people to see.

(When I say “fortunate” I don’t mean that it was good luck for the actual Pompeiians who lived there at that time, of course. They didn’t get any pleasure at all out of being preserved.)

So then, two thousand years later or so, the world is getting close to AD 2079 and suddenly somebody comes up with a great idea. They realized that they could make a pot of money out of having a two-thousand-year birthday party for the ancient city. So they did. They turned it into a kind of a theme park and they called it Pompeii’s Jubilee Year, or L’Anno Giubileo della Citta di Pompeii.

Well, I said that already, didn’t I?

When the mountain did blow its top, back all those twenty long centuries ago, it took everybody by surprise. It hadn’t done anything of that sort in quite a while—in enough of a while, that is, that those old Romans figured it wasn’t ever going to do it again. So they started building summer homes in and around Pompeii. It was very desirable real estate, especially if what you had been used to was Rome’s cold, wet winters.

The situation wasn’t all gravy for the Pompeiians, though.

The city did have a now-and-then history of pretty bad earthquakes. As a matter of fact, the city had still been rebuilding from one of the worst of them, a big one that had knocked down several temples and public buildings, when the big blast from the volcano put a permanent stop to the repair program. That was the end of that chapter in the history of Pompeii.

Nobody saw the city again for a long time. Not until some workmen, with their minds undoubtedly on other matters entirely, accidentally dug up a piece of it almost two thousand years later.

People are stupid, you know that? For instance, you’d think the old Pompeiians would have figured out that this was not a really safe place to settle down in.

They didn’t. Still, hey, I’m not in a position to criticize them. We Americans weren’t all that much smarter. It wouldn’t have taken a genius in, say, 2000 to figure out that all those geysers and hot springs in old Yellowstone Park might just mean that something on a large bad scale could be getting ready to happen there.

Nobody did figure it out, though.

I knew how those old Pompeiians felt. I had felt the same way, back when I was a kid and Yellowstone happened. The big difference between us was that Yellowstone was a couple thousand kilometers away from our house in Kansas City, while for the Pompeiians Vesuvius was right next door.

So when Yellowstone began to do its serious premonitory shaking and rumbling, around 2055, the Americans had the sort of warning that you really shouldn’t ignore. That didn’t stop them. They ignored it anyway. According to the seismologists, Yellowstone only did one of those really big eruptions about every 600,000 years or so, so why worry? They didn’t worry. Not even when other scientists pointed out that the last eruption had been about 640,000 years ago, so a better way to think about it was that it was kind of overdue.

Anyway, in America the people in charge of such matters didn’t choose to do any worrying until it was quite a lot too late. By then the dust from that giant-sized eruption of what they began calling the Yellowstone super-volcano was already two meters deep in Chicago and St. Louis and Milwaukee—and right on top of my family’s house on the old Missouri River as well.

I wondered if, a few thousand years from now, people would reconstruct Kansas City the way the Italians had Pompeii.

Probably not, I decided. Pompeii was pretty much one of a kind, while those thousands-of-years-from-now archeologists would have a large selection of ash-buried cities to choose from, since Yellowstone didn’t stop with Kansas City. Actually it had buried nearly half of the land mass of the old USA’s lower forty-eight before it was over.

So now let’s get back to present time. We’re up to the summer of AD 2079 now and the dead city has come back to life.

I don’t know if some ancient Roman, just waking up from a two-thousand-year nap, would have thought the Giubileo’s restoration of Pompeii was authentic. I guarantee, though, that he would have thought it was gorgeous. And I know there’s one thing about it that would have surprised him a lot. Unlike the AD 79 version, our AD 2079 Pompeii didn’t stink.

Well, didn’t stink much, anyway. Especially if you stayed away from the public latrines, or the barrels of urine outside the laundry—see, the way the Pompeiians cleaned woolen tunics was first to soak them in human pee. For that reason every passerby was invited to relieve himself in one of those barrels so the laundry could have the raw materials it needed to get on with its work.

That was the kind of tourist guide fact I had been trying to fill my head with on the ship from Alexandria. I thought I’d made quite a lot of progress. That seemed to me as though it might justify giving me some preferential treatment, so I asked the Welsh Bastard to let me take one of the tourist groups out as a guide.

He laughed at me. “Asshole. You got to know something before you can tell the customers anything, don’t you? Half of these tourists’ve read the same book you did. Why should they pay to hear it from you?”

However, he promised, they had a job for me that I could handle just the way I was. I could work in the bakery.

That didn’t sound bad, right? Working with that great fresh-bread smell all around me? Chatting with the tourists as they bought their little souvenir loaves to take home? And making sure not to tell them (another fact I’d picked up) that because of the way the flour was ground, between huge millstones, there were tiny crumbs of rock in the ground-up wheat. I even thought that maybe everybody had been wrong about the Welshman’s bastardness, because it certainly looked as though he was being fair with me.

Then I started work, and learned better.

Those sweet baking-bread smells? I never got to smell any. They were probably somewhere around in the air, but where I was they were drowned out by considerably worse ones. The bakery ground its own flour. After you’ve grated the flour out of the original wheat berries what you’re left with is bran. That isn’t a plus. Bran’s worthless. That is, the only thing it’s worth is that you can feed pigs with it if you want.

The Pompeiian bakers wanted. At my bakery their practice was to throw the bran out into the street so their herd of pigs could grow fat on it. Interesting fact: Did you know that bran is a laxative? Not that the pigs really needed one, but it certainly did enhance their natural capacities, and the resultant smell.

That was an example of the Bastard being bastardly, all right. It didn’t stop there, either. The opening he had for me at the bakery wasn’t in the sales department. It was nastier than that.

One of the ways our AD 2079 present-day Pompeii was different from the original was that in the Twenty-first Century we had plenty of electrical power to make the city run, a lot of it geothermal energy from shafts dug into the slopes of Vesuvius itself. Ancient Pompeii hadn’t known how to do that. To run its industries it hadn’t had steam engines or water power or windmills, either. For the energy they needed to make things move what they had was organic beings with organic muscles. So in order to grind that grain into flour the bakery had installed a big turntable that was pushed around and around by played-out horses or mules. Or by slaves.

Slaves were cheaper.

Of course, I wasn’t exactly a slave. There wasn’t much difference, though. I owed the Jubilee the balance of that Indenture money, and until it got paid off I was theirs to command.

I hated the bakery job from the first minute, but not nearly as much as I came to hate it after a day or two. I even hated what I had to wear. They wouldn’t let me keep my own clothes on. They gave me a kind of scratchy woolen smock (which I didn’t really want to put on, because remember what I said about those barrels of urine they cleaned wool with) that came down to about my knees. They wouldn’t even let me wear my own underwear.

I had been kind of expecting being required to wear some kind of native costume. After all, even the Egyptians had sometimes put me in long cotton gowns and sandals while I was guiding there. But the Egyptians hadn’t cared what I wore underneath the gown. The Welsh Bastard did. “What if you bend over?” he asked, grinning. “You got to wear something there, don’t you? And it’s got to be right.” And the undergarment they gave me to wear in case of bending too far over looked pretty much like a grown-up-sized diaper.

There was plenty of other unpleasantness to hate, too. I hated the day-long choking smoke from the ovens. I hated the fact that my stupid dream of ever finding Uncle Devious had blown up in my face. Especially, I hated Pompeii and everything around it, but that was before I met Gerda Fleming.

Actually, I must admit, working at the Giubileo wasn’t all awful. They had given me a reasonably clean room to live in. That was in the Indentureds’ tower flat, though that particular place was a good long trudge up the hill from the bakery. It wasn’t all mine, either. I shared it with somebody—Scandinavian? Dutch? I never did find out—named Jiri Kopthellen. Still, the place had its own little bathroom, which was a step above most of what I’d had in Egypt. Or what I’d had on Staten Island, either. It also not only had a bed—all right, a cot—for each of us and a multichannel wall screen to share, but even a little fridge that Jiri kept filled with Italian beer. And, maybe best of all, I lucked out in having that same Jiri Kopthellen for a roommate. Or, more accurately, in that I usually didn’t have Jiri there at all. He had a wife with an apartment of their own a couple of stops down the electric toward the city of Naples, and he much preferred to spend his off-duty time there.

In my own off-duty time I was kept pretty busy learning how to be a First Century Roman slave. Mostly that meant learning the “Roman” currency that was the only kind of money you could legally spend inside the walls of the Jubilee: The silver denarius was worth sixteen asses or four sestertii; the sestertius, which was made of oricalchum (a kind of silver-copper mixture) was worth four asses; and one copper as, at the Jubilee’s extortionate money-changing rate, equaled one euro.

That part I was interested in, because I was confident that there would be some good fiddles possible with befuddled tourists trying to make change. And apart from that all I really had to learn was to get out of the way of any free Roman, especially if he wore the toga that meant he was of senatorial rank. And also meant that he was invariably a virt, since there weren’t any live Roman senators still around. And, of course, to consider the tourists as honorary senators, since it was their money that paid our bills.

The job itself, of course, continued to be lousy.

I suppose I would have liked it better if I’d managed to make a few friends. I hadn’t. There didn’t seem to be a lot of friendship on offer at Pompeii that year. And twice, in the first few times I tried striking up a conversation with a stranger, I discovered that some of the rest of the world really disliked Americans. They blamed us for letting Yellowstone happen.