Read Online All the Lives He Led-A Novel by Frederik Pohl - Free Book Online Page A

the chance to be somebody’s helper long enough to learn how to do what he did.
    That was the end of the casual chat. He gave me a freezing look, said, “Don’t get your hopes up,” and left me standing there.
    I got the message. He was willing to chat a bit with his social inferiors. But when one of us talked about rising to his level the politeness disappeared.
     
     
    What kept me from total despair was that, no matter the bad parts, there was still a lot to do and a lot to see in Pompeii, and quite a lot of it didn’t carry an extra charge. I saw as much of it as I could.
    The Welsh Bastard had put me on the morning shift on the bakery treadmill, six in the morning until two in the afternoon and—after a long, hot shower to get the kinks out and a change into my own clothes—I had the rest of the day to explore. I explored. I walked the old streets, being jostled by Scandinavian and African and Japanese tourists, and wishing I was one of them. I splurged for swims in the baths—the one bath, right across the street from the villa with the “Beware of the Dog” mosaic, that was the only fully reconstructed one, that is. The other baths were all virts. You could see a batch of ancient Romans eating, reading, bathing, whatever. But you couldn’t touch them because there was nothing tangible there to touch. I ate peculiar cheese and weird fruits sold by the vendors in their little cubbyholes. (That would have been expensive if we Indentureds had had to pay full price for them all. We didn’t.) I even watched a show in the amphitheater once—the little amphitheater in what they called the Triangular Forum, that is, not the big one at the edge of town that was too ruined and too far from the tourist areas to dress up. Those shows were okay if you liked a lot of blood, even make-believe virt blood, squirting out of the virt gladiators and the equally virt wild animals in the arena. But sitting through a whole show meant an hour or so of resting your bun muscles on those cold, hard stone seats, and that took a lot of the joy out of it. Besides, sitting in one place for very long gave me time to think, and I had more time to think pushing the damn wheel around than I really needed.
    What I mostly thought about, of course, was my troubles. Especially my dashed hopes of finding, and collecting from, my rotten old Uncle Devious.
    It was funny how those hopes stayed with me. I wasn’t stupid—honest—and I was generally a realist. I don’t suppose I had ever really expected to run into some tourist face, brilliant blue eyes peering out of a ruddy complexion, and immediately recognize my Uncle Devious. I had always known that that wasn’t going to happen, because how would I have recognized him? Until Piranha Woman had showed me her scenes from Uncle Devious’s last days I had had no real idea of what he might have been looking like by then. I’d always known that with all the money he stole he could buy himself any look he chose—like the one he actually did buy, according to Piranha Woman’s photo, or any other slim or stout body, choice of hair and skin color, even gender, if he wanted badly enough to look that different. Whatever you wanted the cosmetic surgeons could supply, given that you had, and were willing to part with, the astronomical amounts of cash required.
    So there had been no real chance that I’d have identified Uncle Devious even if I’d stood next to him at a men’s urinal. But that hadn’t stopped me from looking and hoping, and I did truly resent the fact that now even those slim hopes were gone.
     
     
    Six hours a day of pushing that damn wheel around weren’t all the Giubileo wanted from me. There was also the compulsory, and I do mean compulsory, Security briefings.
    They weren’t just the Jubilee’s idea, either. They were Italian law. The Italians had had their share of terrorism, notably the fairly frequent attacks on the pope. Well, those and also the occasional secular kook