“I kind of guessed that,” I told him.
He nodded. “For that reason,” he said, “you will be quite well compensated for your assistance. The figure my father mentioned was two thousand euros.”
He stopped, absentmindedly stroking the chalice in his lap, waiting for me to respond to the offer. But I knew better than to do that just then. I said, “Sounds like you’re in a hurry.”
He gave me an unfriendly look. “Is that so strange, with all the stories about disease vectors here at the Giubileo?” He paused. A moment later he nodded and said, “I will take it upon myself to increase the offer to five thousand. So can we count on your help, Mr. Sheridan?”
Well, when it came right down to it, they couldn’t.
None of the guys I roamed the streets with back in the Apple would have believed it if anyone had told them about it, but I backed away from the offer.
Before I did that I listened to everything he had to say, though, and I could see that he had really thought the thing through. “Yes, Mr. Sheridan, it is true that only passengers and crew are allowed by the zeppelin’s security to board it, but you must simply be more creative. After all, one need not pass through the established checkpoints. There are areas where their surveillance is somewhat lax, one of which being what is called the ‘honey-bucket system.’”
As I say, he’d thought it through.
Actually I was pretty sure that his schemes could work. Like all zeps, the Chang Jang had to remain in as close to neutral buoyancy as it could. So at every port of call, while the shoregoing passengers were doing their touristy things down below, the zep would make a quick trip to a pumping station on the ground. There the zep would settle down close to the surface. Mooring cables, along with three big hose pipes, then held it securely in place. One hose piped the zep’s accumulated waste water and sewage down to the honey wagons waiting below, while one of the other two sucked up an appropriate weight of fuel for their tank and the last one pumped up fresh water to go into the ballast tanks and the swimming pool, which doubled as their water reserve. The fuel would be burned. Much of the water became the carrier for the new sewage at their next stop.
And, Chi-Leong said, hardly anybody bothered to check on the sewage system. All a person would have to do was put on a uniform, possibly one that was a little bit stained; stick some pipe wrenches in his utility belt, climb the ladder attached to the sewage hose, tapping and listening to it from time to time to add plausibility in case, against the odds, anyone happened to look in that direction. And that was it. At the top a nervous but well-paid room steward would be waiting to take the package off the climber’s hands. Then he would be free to climb back down and live his life, five thousand euros richer.
Or, I considered, maybe ten thousand. Or more. Because if the kid could raise the price from two thousand to five, then probably the old man could be pushed a little higher, too.
But I still said no.
It wasn’t that I was unwilling to break a law—assuming that the price was right, and this price wasn’t bad at all. It was just that my personal situation didn’t make it worthwhile. See, if Gerda had still been around she and I could have had a hell of a fine time with a few thousand extra euros. She wasn’t.
The Antica people still were, though.
I clearly remembered what they had done to Abukar Abdu, the Somali from down the hall, for picking up a couple of mosaic tiles to sell to the tourists as souvenirs. This wasn’t a matter of a few tiles. I could barely imagine what the Anticas might do to someone caught trying to smuggle a national treasure out of the country. The Krakow coal mines looked very near.
So I kept on saying no, even when Chi-Leong upped the ante again. He wagged his head at me. “My father, Dr. Basil Chi-Leong, expected a better answer from you, Bradley Sheridan. He will be extremely disappointed at your refusal. As am I.”
He rewrapped the chalice in its purple cloths and made it disappear into his bellybag. At the door he paused. “You have made a very poor decision,” he told me, and was gone.
Things didn’t get better for me. They got worse.
Well, hell, everything else was getting worse, too. Every day the news became another degree more horrific, when I hadn’t thought that was possible. Within a week over eighty thousand people were dead from this Pompeii Flu, all around the world, most of them having done their dying in excruciating pain and horrid disfigurement. Then there were at least another hundred thousand, probably more, presently going through the dying-in-disfigurement process, but with their lungs still pumping air and their hearts chugging along—for the time being, anyway. And then there were the ones who had been infected but hadn’t found out yet.
The statistics didn’t have anything like a firm number for those, but the assortment of guesses all had one thing in common. The low estimate might be any number at all, but the high-end one was always in the millions.
And for me personally …
Well, that wasn’t great, either. The Welsh Bastard had finally begun to notice that my wine vats were still pretty full at the end of my shift, and was getting suspicious. “What the hell’re you doing there, Sheridan? You insulting the customers? Let them catch you pissing in the wine? Torco and Molderman both do twice the business you do, and you got the good location.” That part about the location was certainly untrue, but the heat was on. I temporarily had to cut down on the number of cups I recycled, and that made my cash flow even worse.
And then there was Maury Tesch’s problem.
Before Jiri died Maury had carried the pieces of his nonkosher delicacy away to, I supposed, savor them in private. But then, a week or so after Gerda took off, Maury came knocking at the door, not grinning and not looking at all happy. He was waving something in my face, and I knew without looking what it was. The smell told me everything. “Brad,” he said, voice tight and either seriously pissed off or pretty thoroughly scared, “somebody’s been into my wurst. See? The wrapping’s been torn.”
I pushed his hand away. “For Christ’s sake, Maury, get it out of my face! I didn’t touch it. Maybe Jiri did before he got sick.”
He stood. “Oh, hell,” he said, and stopped there.
It struck me that he was now looking sick himself. “Hey,” I said. “Sit down, why don’t you? Can’t you like send away for more of your—” And then, as the penny dropped, “Oh, Jesus! You think it was your stuff that made him sick?”
He didn’t have to say yes. The way he looked as he sank into the chair said it all. I offered him a cup of tea or some of his own Israeli red, thinking hard. By the time he was finished turning down everything I had to offer I thought I had the answer for him. “There’s nothing to worry about,” I said. “Nobody knew about your stash but you and me and Jiri himself—and Gerda, but she’s not around right now. Jiri could’ve told his wife, maybe. But I don’t think she knew about them. She didn’t say anything. So I don’t think anybody’s going to come after you for his death.”
Maury’s expression had changed again, and this time I couldn’t read it at all. He just sat there, gazing at me—or maybe looking straight through me at God knows what.
Finally he sighed. “You think?” he asked.
I did think that. I told him so.
And then his whole look changed. He managed a kind of a smile. “Oh, Brad, Brad,” he said, “you don’t know what it means to me to have a friend like you.” And many more repetitions of the same sentiment, until at last I pushed him out the door.
I was glad to see him go. As far as I was concerned Maury and his damn sausages were just another annoyance that kept me from concentrating on how much I was hating my present life. He wasn’t even a big pain in the ass, just a little one.
But then the next thing that happened was big, all right, just about big enough for anybody.
12
THE BIG THING
I suppose that that next big thing was going to happen whatever I did. Maybe so. Still, if it hadn’t been for the sky show the
y gave on the day before at least one thing would have been different. I wouldn’t have been there to see it.
It happened when I was about two hours into my wine selling, the day already hot and my mental state pretty maximally depressed. Then the show began. First the sky overhead just rolled itself back, and then its summery blue turned into icy white. The spotty clouds vanished. When I looked up that blue sky had suddenly become a close-up of something that was unlike sky of any kind and had no business being there. The clouds became floating heads. That giant thing in the air was old Mount Vesuvius itself. In the proper world the mountain should have been squatting peacefully way over against the horizon, where it belonged, but now there it impossibly was, up there in the air and puffing out its plume of white steam as though it had every right to be there.
“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 hap
pen 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.