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alley, this one wide enough for a wagon. One wagon was rattling toward us over the paving stones, mule-drawn. Its driver was an elderly man in a slave’s smock, hair unkempt, waving a whip. He didn’t look like the dressed-up college kid I might have expected. He looked pretty convincingly ancient Roman, and then the Bastard showed us why. “Watch this,” he said, grinning, and planted himself right in the way of the vehicle.
    One of the Ghanians couldn’t help shouting a warning, and the Myanmar girl swallowed hard. The Welsh Bastard just kept on grinning as the mule kept plodding right at him, its slobbery muzzle almost touching him—
    Then it actually did touch him—
    Then it kept right on going. It looked like the whole shebang went right through the Bastard, or the Bastard went through it. Anyway mule, driver, wagon and all kept right on going as though he weren’t there at all. The Bastard got sort of fuzzily hard to see for a moment, and then reappeared behind the wagon as it rattled on away.
    He laughed out loud at the expressions on our faces. “Simulations,” he explained. “We’ve got the best virts in the business here; you won’t see any better than these anywhere in the world. You’re going to see a lot of these, you know, simulated guys marching around all over the city. Just pay them no attention. They aren’t there. They’re just images, really, except they also got sound, right?” He looked at the timekeeper on his opticle. “Wait a minute,” he said.
    It wasn’t just a minute, it was like a long five or ten minutes, and then I nearly jumped out of my skin. From somewhere not too far from where we were standing came one of the most horrible shrieks I have ever heard. The woman from Myanmar whispered a little prayer, I think, it wasn’t in English. I said, “What the hell is that?”
    He was grinning. “It’s the elephant.”
    “Elephant? What elephant?”
    “What you’re hearing is the last show in the arena. That’s the one where large animals are getting killed and Christians are getting crucified and so on. Oh,” he said, looking at the expression on my face, “they’re all virts. You think the Jubilee is going to pay to kill a whole real elephant three times a day? That’d be stupid. Now let me show you the refectory where you’ll mostly eat.”
    Once I got over that elephant’s scream I began to cheer up. In fact, I have to say that at that moment I was feeling pretty pleased with myself for having the intelligence to come here. Pompeii made those old Egyptian rock piles look sick. Taken all in all, I thought that it was going to be a good place to build up my stash, or anyway I thought that until I met with the folks from Security.

4
    BAD NEWS FROM THE COPS
    I think I already mentioned that in Egypt if you stayed out of the cities you didn’t have much of a problem with terrorists. Even better, you didn’t have a problem with the kind of heavy-duty police presence that came when the authorities were worried about terrorists—and, given a choice between a lot of bomb throwers and a lot of cops, I might have preferred the bomb throwers. At least they wouldn’t have thought their best target was me.
    It’s true that even in the Valley of the Kings every now and then some splinter group might try a drive-through tourist shoot, spraying fletches and bullets at the crowds in the Valley, just to show that they were still pissed off about Basque rights or the subjection of the Turkic Uighurs to the Han Chinese or the secession of French-speaking Canada. Or whatever. There wouldn’t be any big, scary stuff, though. The powerful and well-financed terror groups didn’t bother with Egypt.
    The Italians, however, weren’t taking any chances. That very first night, just as I was getting ready to think that sleeping would be a good idea, even in the tiny bunk beds that were in the dorm the Bastard showed us to, a plainclothes woman (whose name, she said, was Brigitta) showed