All the Lives He Led
Page 1
FOR DICK SMITH
—who can make the most felonious-minded of computers
disgorge its ill-gotten gains
Table of Contents
Title Page
1 - INTRODUCING MYSELF
2 - HOW I BETTERED MYSELF
3 - BUON GIORNO, BELLA ITALIA
4 - BAD NEWS FROM THE COPS
5 - THE CITY THAT CAME BACK TO LIFE
6 - MY LIFE AS AN ANCIENT POMPEIIAN
7 - MY GIRL
8 - SHARING
9 - WORLD WITHOUT GERDA
10 - REMEMBERING UNCLE DEVIOUS AGAIN
11 - MY DEAR LOVE GONE, AGAIN
12 - THE BIG THING
13 - DOGHOUSE DAYS
14 - THAT UNFUNNY FUNNY BUSINESS WITH MAURY TESCH
15 - MY LIFE AS A MURDER SUSPECT
16 - BACK IN THE HANDS OF SECURITY, ALAS
17 - THE VERY WORST BLOW EVER
18 - COFFEE WITH THE COLONEL
19 - THE BIGGEST ZEP IN THE WORLD
20 - RUNNING AWAY, FIRST CLASS
21 - CAIRO AGAIN
22 - MY HOME FROM HOME
23 - HOME AGAIN, JIGGETY-JIG
24 - GETTING TO KNOW THE MAN WHO WAS THE WOMAN I LOVE
25 - THE LIMITATIONS OF DEEP PENETRATION
26 - ONE LAST KISS
27 - MY CAREER AS AN EVIDENCE THIEF
28 - ANOTHER UNDESERVED REPRIEVE
29 - GERDA IN THE STANS
30 - PRESENTING MY GERDA
31 - THE SURGEON’S TROPHY HO
32 - A VOICE FROM THE PAST
33 - WAITING FOR ARTIE
34 - THE PHONE CALL
35 - COMING BACK TO PRESENT TIME
36 - SHARING A BED AGAIN
37 - THE EDUCATION OF SHAO-PIN
38 - WHAT TO DO WITH MY PRIZE
39 - COMING CLEAN WITH THE OTHER WOMAN I LOVED
40 - MY DAUGHTER
BOOKS BY FREDERIK POHL
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Copyright Page
1
INTRODUCING MYSELF
The first thing I remember is learning to duck-and-cover at Mme. Printemp’s École et Académie, though I didn’t know why I was doing it. Of course I knew something was wrong, because it made my mother very sad and my father angry, and I was glad when what they called the Treaty of Spitzbergen was signed with the Stans and we could all go back to being happy. Of course, I didn’t know anything about a treaty. In fact I would have had no idea what a “treaty” was and I don’t think I had actually ever heard the word “Stans.” Then it was all peaceful days for quite a long time, until they weren’t.
Well, I’ll tell you all about that, though it gives me no pleasure. I’m not sure I should. What I know for sure is that it certainly isn’t going to make me look good.
Come right down to it, there isn’t very much of my life that does, is there? Robber of old people as a teen, worker at all sorts of illegal activities as a grown-up. No, I’m not proud of myself. If there’s a reason to do this experiment in Telling All it isn’t because I want everybody to know what a great guy I am. Anyway, let’s get on with the introduction.
My name is Brad Sheridan. The year I want to tell you about is the summer of ’79, which is when I was working at what they called the Giubileo. When I say Giubileo, you know what I’m talking about, right? That is, to give it its full name, L’Anno Giubileo della Citta di Pompeii, or, as I mostly called it when I had to call it anything, the Pompeii Jubilee.
That’s where I was, that summer of 2079. If you were a tourist then I might not have to tell you much about the Jubilee, because if you were rich enough to afford it you were probably there yourself. Some thirty or forty million of you guys from the wealthy countries were. You came from places all over Europe and in both of the two Easts, the Near as well as the Far, plus the Pacific islands from Tahiti down to Tasmania, and just about everywhere in the world. Well, from some parts of the world, anyway. Not from the American Midwest. For sure not from some of the most heavily populated chunks of Canada either, especially from around Toronto and southern Quebec. Even there, there were a few surprises. Some people from North America did show up at Giubileo, at least from the lucky places like California and British Columbia.
Anyway, wherever you came from, you all seemed to enjoy the Jubilee. At least you did until everything went rotten at once, but we haven’t come to that part of the story yet.
You should have enjoyed it. You got your money’s worth at the Giubileo, because whatever you liked, the Jubilee had it for you. If your thing was sports you could watch the chariot races. If you liked thrill rides you could go to the Ferris wheel that gave you a four-minute overview of the whole city, both as it really was or as the Giubileo’s virts had improved it. Or you could pay to get into the simulation chamber where they reproduced the whole bloody eruption of Vesuvius, exactly as any unfortunate AD 79 family would have experienced it, except that it was all virts and you didn’t get killed. Or you could go for a ride on a slave (read: Jubilee-employee-) carried litter. If you wanted gore and brutality, you could go to the old Roman amphitheater, where they had plenty of both of those things. Twenty or thirty pairs of gladiators, a few of them real, would hack each other to death every afternoon for your sporting enjoyment. (Well, not all the way to death. Not for the real, live gladiators, anyway, and you could tell easily enough which ones were real. Those were the ones who worked for the Jubilee and never actually got a scratch, being mostly college kids enjoying a paid vacation in Italy, or Indentureds from poor countries, like me, trying to support family members in the old country on what we could send back. The gladiators who you could see really getting chewed up, of course, couldn’t actually feel any of their ghastly wounds. They were all virts.)
If you weren’t all that into sports or spectacles there were plenty of other ways to spend your Pompeii sestertia, that is, the counterfeit Roman coins that the sidewalk money-changers sold you as you checked in. You could buy a meal in the Refectorium, where you would get approximately First Century Roman food, although at Twenty-first Century prices. If you wanted more authenticity while you were eating, that was available too. All you had to do was find seven other people who were willing to pay to eat with you, and then you had it made. To those seven you added in yourself and the “host”—or actually, more often the hostess, because, screw historical authenticity, the tourists liked having good-looking young women presiding over the meal they could make themselves imagine might turn into a regular Roman orgy. That would make up the right number of diners for a traditional nine-person Roman dinner party. Then the eight of you “guests” would get a more believable Roman meal. Exactly how believable depended on what you were willing to spend. Boar stuffed with kid stuffed with goose stuffed with lark didn’t come cheap, and, so they told me, tasted lousy anyway, though it was, I guess, authentic. For the price of that meal you got heavy doses of atmosphere as well. You ate in one of the restored villas, all as authentic as anything, or at least looking that way, and you ate triclinum style, also adequately authentic. This meant that the nine of you diners lounged on three great couches and practiced the art of eating with one hand while you were resting your head on the other elbow. “Slaves,” by which of course I mean volunteers (Indentureds rarely got jobs where there might be good tips), served the meal and watered the wine and stood by with bowls to catch the end product of all that ingesting in case you, as many couldn’t help doing, puked it all right up again.
Or you could strip down and try the baths. They were a reliable crowd-pleaser. There you could get yourself oiled and scraped clean by another “slave” using a copper thing like a dull straight razor, called a strigil. Or, if your tastes went that way, you could visit one of P
ompeii’s second-story whorehouses.
You couldn’t actually get laid there, though. What you could do, for a little extra fee, was watch one of the whores, male or female, going at it with one or more of their customers, also with a choice of genders. That was pretty exciting, I guess I myself never wanted to see it enough to pay for even a reduced-rate employee ticket. Of course you knew going in that they would just be virts. It wasn’t that the Jubilee couldn’t have recruited live men and women for the job. They just weren’t allowed to. Union rules.
Or getting closer to present cases you could’ve bought a cup of really bad “Greek” or “Roman” wine, and sat down to drink it on a bench beside one of those open-air Pompeiian wineshops—maybe the one I myself wound up running, halfway down the Via dell’Abbondanza—while you watched other tourists giggling to each other as they poked their fingers through the strolling virts of what were claimed to be historically accurate First Century Pompeiian citizens.
It was actually not a bad show. I might have enjoyed being there myself if I hadn’t had to work so hard, both on the job the Jubilee paid me for as well as on the less legal ones I organized for myself. I didn’t do those extra scams just for my own personal greed, you know. I did them because they were the only way I could send enough money home so that my mom and dad could keep on living some kind of a life in the Staten Island refugee village.
I think it must have surprised my parents that I was being such a dutiful son. Well, it surprised me, too. For most of my life I had been a long way from dutiful, parent-wise. But then, once I was out of the refugee villages, I decided I didn’t care, I might as well be nice to the old farts. They were far enough away that they didn’t bother me much anymore.
Taken all in all, working at the Jubilee wasn’t the worst way to make a living. Some of my colleagues used to go on and on about how much they hated their jobs, and how different their lives would’ve been if only they’d been born to rich parents.
I didn’t join in those sessions, though. I couldn’t. I had been rich, I mean, or my family had, and look what it got me.
The thing about my parents having money was that they stopped having it at the same time everybody else did. I’m talking Yellowstone National Park.
I was about eight years old when Yellowstone happened, and pretty perplexed by the whole thing. I knew it was possible for people to lose their money and have to move away. I’m not just talking about my Uncle Devious (that crook) now. Sandy Stearman’s family had had to do that when I was four, something about stock fraud that took his daddy away and left the rest of the family broke. But it wasn’t even what happened when dear dishonest Uncle Devious was caught swindling that did our family in. That was bad enough—IRS agents, FBI, all kinds of people looking for that notorious swindler, my mother’s brother-in-law—but we got past that (though somewhat poorer, because one of the people he swindled was my mom). But the real ruination of my life was done by Mother Nature herself, the old bitch. That was the Yellowstone ka-boom.
So by the time I was in my teens I hardly remembered what prosperity had been like.
I don’t mean I hadn’t noticed any changes. I certainly saw the difference between the eight-bedroom house overlooking the Missouri River where I’d lived since I was born and the tiny, shared-bath hovel that the government provided for us refugees on Staten Island. I did notice such things as, for instance, that Mom began looking older, and that she cried a lot. My father didn’t, though. He not only didn’t cry, he didn’t even seem to care much one way or the other. He just sort of lost interest in wherever the hell we were, or whatever the hell we were doing. I couldn’t help noticing that I wasn’t going to a private school anymore, either. I was by then going to the Staten Island public schools, where the children of the old-time local families really hated us refugee kids from the villages, and showed it by beating us up after school. That is, they did until the refugee villages got completed. Then a couple thousand more of us refugees moved in and we began to outnumber the locals.
We didn’t beat them up as much as they had done us, though. We couldn’t afford to. The Staten Island cops were also recruited from the families of the old settlers. We quickly found out that whenever there was a fight we were the ones who were going to get slapped around, no matter whether it was us or the locals who started it.
Then, when the time came, I signed up as a freshman to go to New York A&M.
I guess I should explain what NYA&M was. Its full name was New York Agricultural and Mechanical University. It was not the kind of university that was intended for the academically gifted. Its purpose for being was to turn as many as possible of New York’s wildblood youths into reasonably respectable citizens, capable of holding such minimally skilled jobs as waiter or, well, faculty member at NYA&M. I guess it was more or less a success. That is, when we wildbloods were in class we weren’t out mugging tourists.
Anyway there was a good reason why I was there, and the reason was that no other college was going to give me a scholarship.
Well, to be truthful I should admit that I didn’t really go to NYA&M, exactly, at least not in the sense of showing up for very many classes. I didn’t have any reason to. NYA&M wasn’t teaching anything I wanted to learn. I didn’t have to know how to plant a Recovery Garden in my backyard; we didn’t have a backyard. I wasn’t going off to run earth-movers in Ohio or Kentucky for the Citizens Recovery Corps, either. It didn’t pay much, and, anyway, who wanted to breathe all that lung-choking dust? So I attended classes at NYA&M just often enough to keep my scholarship, with its pitiful little stipend.
I did, once or twice, make the mistake of confusing NYA&M with some kind of actual institution for learning, like when I discovered that the recreational drug somadone had been invented in the Stans. You see, the Stans had been a fascinating mystery to me since childhood. Nobody would talk about them, but they were the people that manufactured the terrible drugs you could buy on any street corner that my mother said if I ever took I would turn into one of those haggard wrecks you saw in the government’s “Don’t Say Yes!” commercials. That was about all I did know about them, too, except that they were the reason we had the duck-and-cover drills at Mme. Printemp’s, although my father said that if the talks broke down and the Stans started firing off those illegal nukes they were supposed to be hiding, a kitchen table wouldn’t help. And where did these Stans live? Oh, somewhere in Europe, everyone said. Where exactly in Europe no one could say. Couldn’t even confirm or deny my childish guess that maybe it was near the North Pole part of Europe, maybe floating around with Santa Claus in his great candy-striped houseboat.
So then I was a teen, and got into NYA&M. I had almost forgotten about the Stans because nobody wanted to talk about them, but one of our professors made me think of them. Well, sort of. He greeted us all, old fart pretending to be our friend, though he was at least fifty. He gave us a big smile and told us if we ever had any problems or questions we could always come to him. So I did. It took me five or ten minutes to come up with that nearly forgotten question about the Stans. So Professor A. Adrian Minkis turned away from the whiteboard and gave me another big grin. “Yes?”
“It’s something I’ve always wondered about. What are the Stans?”
The smile didn’t go away, but it shrank a bit. “Can I ask you, uh, Mr. Sheridan”—looking at his locator chart—“why you want to know?”
I was ready for that. “Well, Professor, uh, Minkis”—glancing at my locator card—“all anybody ever says is that it’s better not to talk.”
“It is,” he said, looking around the room and obviously getting ready to ask, “Any other questions?”
I wasn’t letting him get away with that. “But I thought it was important. Like having any contact with the Stans was against the law. Weren’t they like threatening the whole world once?”
Mr. Minkis scowled at me, but then shrugged. “The Stans,” he began, swinging into full lecture mode, “were a group of republics—Kazakhsta
n, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan—that had been part of the old Soviet Union, long ago. They had been used by the Soviets to relocate important military and research facilities far from Moscow, and when the Soviet Union fell apart the Stans still had all those enormous facilities. Nuclear weapons, biowarfare research installations, all sorts of things. The rest of the world didn’t trust them with all that weaponry and demanded they give it up, and they refused, and things looked pretty dicey there for a while, oh, fifteen years ago or so.”
I said, “I remember! Duck-and-cover!”
“Yes, Sheridan,” he said heavily, “exactly. It was an intolerable situation which was solved by the world expelling the Stans from all international organizations and forbidding anyone from going there.”
He looked up at the big clock on the wall as though getting ready to end the session. I got one last question in, though. “But then how does stuff like somadone get out?”
“Oh,” he said, “not everybody obeys the law, do they? Class dismissed.” And never would he talk about the Stans again.
So NYA&M was a washout, but I didn’t really care. I had better things to do with my time. Specifically, I spent most of my time on the street, hustling bucks in the Big Apple.
I don’t like to talk too much about that period in my life.
That isn’t conscience speaking, exactly. I was doing a lot of illegal things, sure, but so were the ten thousand other kids, refugees like me or even the local-born, who roamed the city’s streets, working pretty much the same scams I was. Panhandling. “Guiding” the tourists, or anyway the dumber ones among them. Hanging around the side-street bars to roll the most nearly paralyzed of the drunks as they staggered in the general direction of their hotels.
That wasn’t particularly profitable. Even drunks didn’t carry much actual currency, and what can you do with cash cards that are keyed to the owner’s sweat chemistry? There’d be jewelry, maybe, if you could find a fence who wouldn’t cheat you and then turn you in anyway. But at best the profits were small.