All the Lives He Led

288 Pages·2011·1.26 MB·English

by  Pohl Frederik

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
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 Pompeii’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?”