All the Lives He Led-A Novel Read Online Free PDF

They were usually grim.
    I put in a few hours trying to find as much about Pompeii as I could in the ship’s pathetic excuse for a library. At least it made the time pass pretty quickly. When we got to the port of Naples it was late afternoon.
    Most of the passengers left us as soon as we were disembarked, presumably for better jobs than mine. But there were a couple of other new Pompeiians on the ship, too, two young men from Ghana and a girl from Myanmar.
    At the foot of the pier, just past the customs people who had waved us through without even looking up, a hydrovan was waiting, along with a youngish (but also beginning to lose his hairish) man who was carrying a cellboard. He clicked it four times, checking the pictures of each of us while we studied him. He was older than I, and a good bit plumper. He had a heart-shaped stud in his right nostril, so he wasn’t gay, but nothing in either eyebrow, so he wasn’t actively looking, either. When he’d given us a chance for a good inspection he looked up and grinned. “Welcome to the First Century AD, folks. I’m Maury Tesch, and I’m the one that came down to get you because the Welsh Bastard’s got something else he’d rather be doing than meeting you. Throw your bags in the back and get in.” As we climbed aboard, though, he made the Myanmar girl sit in back and patted the seat next to his own for me. “You’re Bradley Sheridan? Nice to meet you. Tell me, do you play chess?”
    He didn’t wait for an answer, just kicked off the brake and stepped on the gas, and we were off through Naples’s horrible rush hour traffic, a couple dozen kilometers down the coast, right to a traffic circle before a clutch of not very attractive dormitory buildings. A taffy-haired man with the build of a professional wrestler came down to look us over. “That’s him,” Tesch muttered. “The Welsh Bastard, only you better not let him hear you call him that. He’s your boss.”
    The man looked like a boss, too. He waved Tesch away, then watched us unload our gear before he lifted a hand in a sort of greeting. “I’m Jeremy Jonathan Jones,” he informed us, “and I’m the one you’ll be taking orders from. You will live here in the transient barracks until you get your jobs lined up, then you’ll be with the rest of the migrants. Now take your crap inside and leave it there, and then, the first thing we do, I’m going to take you all on an orientation trip inside the gates.”
    He turned and got behind the wheel of the van. He waited just long enough for us to obey his orders and not a moment longer; one of the Ghanians was just getting up out of the entrance well as the Welsh Bastard pulled the lever that closed the door. Over his shoulder he called, “You guys got a great opportunity here. Don’t louse it up.”
    He sounded like he was doing us a favor, or, anyway, trying to make us think he was. He did impress me, though. So did the ancient city itself when we came to it.
    On the ship’s library machines the city had looked like a total wreck, the old buildings nothing but ruins. The ones that had ever had a second story didn’t have one anymore, because the last two thousand years had removed it. The hundreds of little shops that had lined the stone-slabbed avenues were now nothing but cubbyholes with bare stone shelves, or more usually with no shelves left at all. Even the villas that had belonged to the rich people were junk. There was nothing remaining in them, or for that matter anywhere else in Pompeii, that looked like a flowering tree, a formal garden, or a lawn.
    That was what it had looked like in the opticles of the ship’s library. But the place the Welsh Bastard (as I learned to call him from everybody else who worked for him) showed us didn’t look like that Pompeii at all. This city wasn’t in the least empty, and it wasn’t ruined. Although the hour was getting late it was a whole, live city, full of whole, live people.
    The people on the streets