All the Lives He Led-A Novel (21 page)

“Now what the hell?” muttered one of the customers.

The woman he was with answered him in a tone heavy with well-rehearsed sarcasm. “See, Gerald, you old fool, you just don’t remember anything at all anymore, do you? This is the preview they talked about, what we’re seeing now. Like what they’re going to show on the anniversary itself, but only a short version of it, see? Like a coming attraction. For God’s sake, Gerald! I read you all about it right off my opticle when we were still in Norway.”

Gerald wasn’t the only one who had forgotten. I was another, but the virt machines hadn’t. They had been programmed to put on a commercial for the Jubilee’s customers and that’s what they did. What we were gaping at was a sky-wide virt version of that two-thousand-year-old eruption of Vesuvius that had put Pompeii out of business in the first place. It was spectacular. I don’t mean just your usual wow-that’s-a-beaut! spectacular, like you might have said about the Fourth of July fireworks they used to set off from the old Statue of Liberty. I mean it was knock-you-on-your-ass
wonderful
.

Cedric had wandered over in order to be with somebody else for the spectacle. “Remarkable what they do with virts,” he informed me, as a gigantic, if unreal, cloud of flame-laced death billowed in our direction.

Remarkable it was. The best thing about the flame was that we didn’t have to worry about it killing us because it wasn’t real. I particularly appreciated that fact when, a moment later, a sudden hail of pumice particles fell out of the cloud. Back in the year AD 79 those same falling rocks had inflicted pain and death on thousands of Pompeiians as unsheltered as ourselves. Us they didn’t harm at all. Like everything else going on above us the pumice pebbles were a collection of photons and nothing more. When a batch of them hit Cedric on the head they simply disappeared into his bushy hair. When spinning dust devils of smoky gases dropped down on us from the cloud they didn’t hurt. Back in AD 79 those things had been hot enough to sear the flesh off the bones of any human being they touched. But this bunch, heatless and massless as they were, did us no harm at all.

Then it was over.

The gawkers who had been too busy staring at the virt show in the sky to think about visiting Cedric’s brothel had turned back into being potential customers again, as had my wine drinkers.

The show was over, but it did have an effect on my life.

The next morning started out like any other. Sometimes my opticle woke me up, more often I just woke up by myself, long before I wanted to. I’m talking about before-dawn stuff here, maybe just happening because now there wasn’t any nice, warm, Gerda-sized body sharing the cot with me, and my half-awake mind found that worrisome. (My fully awake mind just found it lousy.) Anyway, most days, after half an hour or so of convincing myself that I wasn’t going to go back to sleep in the foreseeable future, I would give in, get up, get dressed. Then maybe I’d stop for a cup of coffee in the refectory kitchen, where the cooks would be starting to think about breakfast for the early shift. Probably I’d walk around for an hour or two. Maybe up the hill to take a look at the sunrise, maybe down to the Marine Gate to see if any of the concessionaires had fired up any calzone yet. Maybe anywhere at all, just because I had nothing better to do.

I know how that makes me sound.

I knew it then, too. I told myself that I should be ashamed of myself for acting like a lovesick high-schooler whose best girl has just been caught in the backseat of a convertible with some damn football player.

I reminded myself often that there wasn’t any reason for me to act that way. I wasn’t that kind of man.

The virt show had included scenes of what that AD 79 eruption had done to the old city itself, including a couple shots of the wrecking of the Forum—toppling the Apollo statue, crushing the upper stories of the buildings—and I guess that was what made me want to take another look at the Forum’s unrestored, unvirted, fully demolished self. So that morning, having got up preposterously early for even my ridiculously early job, I went for a walk in the old Forum.

Not many people were around. That was no surprise. I didn’t expect to see anybody, but then there really was a little bit of a surprise because I did. A woman. Halfway across the Forum, carrying something that looked like a pipe wrench, and then she was gone.

I hadn’t really got a good look at her. It was still dark. I was waiting for the virt generators to come on, bank by bank, turning the old, time-destroyed structures into the pulsing, living, flower-bedecked, statuaryrich city of the Giubileo. While I can’t say that doing this was a lot of fun, just then I settled for small amounts.

With the virts still turned off the Forum didn’t look much like the busy, brightly colored square the tourists saw. The structures that once had had their second stories given back to them by the Jubilee’s virt engineers were beheaded again. The flesh-and-blood vendors of the Forum, the ones who sold actual clay pots and souvenir togas and anything else they could make an as from, were nowhere around, probably still in their beds.

Not everyone was, though. Without warning the quiet was violently shattered as the sound of a shot and then a sudden angry yelling came from somewhere between the Apollo temple and the basilica.

When I turned I saw that the screeches were coming from a woman wearing an Antica uniform, complete with boots and a backpack. Her fly-eye goggles were pulled up to the top of her head so she could do a better job of yelling at a tall, fair-skinned and uniformed woman in the blue helmet of the UN inspection team who had just fired a shot over her head.

That was surprising. What the UN was supposed to be doing in Pompeii was basically what it did in every place where there were large gatherings of strangers—that is, look for loonies who might be terrorists. The Antica woman didn’t fit the profile. Her uniform meant that she wasn’t a stranger. She was someone who had as much right to be there as the UN soldier, and I guess what she was doing was telling the soldier so. I couldn’t be sure, though, because the UN soldier seemed to be speaking something like Swedish and the Antica woman mostly Italian, and neither language was intelligible to me. And the fingers of the soldier’s right hand were playing over the metallic-thread keypad embroidery on her blouse. She was, I was pretty sure, calling her headquarters.

The Antica woman seemed to think so, too. She didn’t like it. The yelling stopped short. She shrugged apologetically and, half-smiling, she turned away.

It seemed that something had suddenly changed for her. I couldn’t see what. Then I did. From down the Via Stabiana I heard the sound of a car turbine. A UN troop carrier was racing toward us, with a dozen armed soldiers on board.

The soldier didn’t let that distract her from watching the Antica woman, and that was a good thing. The Antica woman gave her another of those apologetic smiles as her hand reached up to touch something at the top of her backpack.

She never made it. The UN soldier didn’t hesitate. I heard her yell something that sounded like the words “Bom! Atombom!” And then she lifted her sidearm and, just as the other troops were jumping out of their vehicle, shot the Antica woman point-blank in the throat.

Well, all right, I didn’t really know what had been going on. Still I was pretty sure of what was supposed to happen next. The arriving troops would grab the shooter and drag her away, for—I don’t know, for some kind of court-martial? Or whatever they did to UN soldiers who killed a civilian?

I was wrong about that. It didn’t happen that way. The arriving soldiers didn’t restrain the killer. They paid her no attention at all. All six of them leaped to the side of the fallen Antica woman, two of them grabbing her arms and holding them away from the backpack, just as though there were any chance that the woman was still alive. Two of the others were, with great care, unbuckling the backpack and carrying it to the vehicle. And while I was standing there, dumbfounded, mouth hanging open, somebody grabbed me from behind.

That person was the UN soldier herself. She was saying something I couldn’t understand, probably because it was in that same might-have-been Swedish language. Then she tried English. “Is enough,” she said. “You to go away.” Then she put her fingers to her lips and, pointing to the dead woman, said, “You understand? Bad thing! A-bom-bom terrorista!”

Since I was the only witness to this bloodletting, I didn’t think they were going to give me a hearty handshake and send me on my way. They didn’t. What they did for the next half hour or so was keep me sitting on the steps of the Jupiter temple while they tidied up. First they carried the corpse of the Antica woman away, along with the thing from her backpack that I guessed might have been the thing that might have been a bomb. Then a couple of cleaning machines rumbled up, spraying the blood off the stones and blowing them dry in the same pass. Then the soldiers stuck me on the back of a scooter on which I was carried to the door of the Welsh Bastard’s dispatch room.

The Bastard wasn’t there yet, of course. It was his practice to come in early, yes, but never as early as that. They left me there, sitting next to his desk, with the door locked from outside.

When at last the Bastard did show up he had two messages for me. One was that I was the biggest asshole he had ever seen. The other was to keep my mouth shut and stay out of trouble. Then he got into a deep conversation with one of the soldiers. When finally he came over to me I naturally tried to ask him for some kind of an explanation. Naturally the Bastard told me to shut up and mind my own business or he would mind it for me.

So I did shut up. Not just because the Bastard told me to but also because I didn’t have much to say, since I had no real idea of what the hell was going on.

See, I had never imagined that I would even be a spectator to the murder of an Antica woman. Especially by a UN soldier. Especially when words like “atom bomb” and “terrorist” were being thrown around.

I was still trying to worry some sense out of the episode all the time the Bastard was yelling at me. I didn’t really even hear him. I wasn’t paying much attention to anything but the memories of the surprised look on the Antica woman’s face as the soldier shot her, and the way all that blood came spilling out, and the scary words that the soldier had used.

Out of the window I could see that at last the virts had come on, restoring Pompeii to its resuscitated life. One moment the naked Apollo statue on his marble pedestal was its natural dirty-ashtray black, the next it was brightly gleaming polished bronze, and the bow that Vesuvius had struck from his hands two thousand years earlier had magicked itself back—of course only as a virt—and he was ready to puncture some hapless tourist with one of his restored arrows. I didn’t take time to admire the view, because my head was busy with other things. I only really heard what the Bastard himself said, for that matter, when he was telling me—for, I think, the third or fourth time—to keep my goddamn mouth closed and get my goddamn ass to work. “And,” he added, “what the hell were you doing there anyway?”

I told him the truth. “I couldn’t sleep.”

That got me a full-fledged sneer. “Couldn’t sleep my Welsh ass. Do you know what kind of trouble you could get me in with Security? Now get the hell out of here, and, remember, not one damn word to anybody.”

I couldn’t do that. This was too big to be swept under the carpet. I said reasonably, “But didn’t you hear what the soldier said? She said ‘atom bomb’ and ‘terrorist’!”

The Bastard sighed. “Jesus, Sheridan,” he said, “are you so dumb you don’t know an exercise when you see it? That wasn’t any real goddamn terrorist. Security was
practicing
for the way they would take a real nuclear terrorist out if one of them ever showed up around here.”

I couldn’t buy that. “That blood was about as real as—” I began.

The Bastard gave me a sneer. “Screw the blood! You imagined it! Don’t you know what—Wait a minute.”

He got the absent look of a man being spoken to on his private ear opticle, while his fingers played for a moment with the keys on his own blouse. Then he looked annoyed—at, as usual, the world, I thought at first. But then his eyes focused in my general direction, particularly at me. “You still here?” he demanded.

I tried reason. “The thing is, Bas—Jeremy, I mean, I actually saw that soldier shoot the other one in the throat. I saw the blood!”

“You saw the blood, you saw the blood! My God, Sheridan, how stupid are you? You’ve got virts all around you, and you don’t know virt blood when you see it!”

That was a stopper. “Virt blood?” I said. “Really? But honestly—”

“Go!” he said, mean and loud. “One more word and I’m debiting your account a hundred euros for misconduct.”

That was an injustice I couldn’t accept, but when I opened my mouth to say so he didn’t let me speak. “I said
go
,” he told me. “Do you want me to make it five hundred? And listen, forget about this whole thing. That’s an order. Watch your mouth. Don’t go talking about what you thought you saw or you’ll be getting something a whole lot worse than a fine.”

And that ended the discussion.

Well, I didn’t forget about it. I couldn’t. But I did watch my mouth, at least a little bit.

I didn’t
say
anything to anybody. I just
hinted
. Hinted to Maury Tesch when I saw him in the dressing room, with more than an hour still to spend before opening: “Maury? Did you hear anything about some weird stuff going on in the Forum this morning?”

Maury was speaking to me again, though just barely. “Of course I did,” he said. “Everybody knows that there were two drunken UN soldiers shooting it out. They say one of them’s not likely to live.”

That made me swallow, but I didn’t dispute Maury’s version. I just said, “Wow,” and went to my breakfast. And ten minutes later, feeding coins into the machines in the food court, I caught snatches of four or five other versions of the story, all different. And was no more than halfway through my creamed chipped beef-flavored tofu on toast, which I was eating pretty slowly because my mind was on other things, when someone sat down beside me. It was Elfreda Barcowicz, arriving with a coffee cup and an eager expression.