In High Places

by Harry Turtledove

  Marwan al-Baghdadi's house was larger than most of the others on its block. Its outer wall was freshly whitewashed. The tiles on the roof were new and bright red—sun and rain hadn't faded them yet. All those things were signs of wealth, but didn't prove it. Coming back to the house with a new troop of slaves—that proved it.

  Once the last slave went inside, Marwan's men closed the door and barred it. They undid the ropes that tied one slave's leg to another's, and also the bonds on their hands. Jacques chafed at his wrists where the rope had rubbed them raw. He looked around the courtyard in which the slaves stood. It held a fountain, a garden of flowers and herbs, and an old-looking statue of a lion.

  "If you work well for me, I will treat you well," Marwan said. "You will have plenty to eat. You will have plenty to do, too, but not too much. If I work you to death, I lose the money I paid for you. But if you try to run away, you will be very, very sorry. I promise you that. You have no idea how sorry you will be. And you will not escape. I promise you that, too."

  As usual, he sounded like a man who knew what he was talking about. Jacques didn't intend to try to disappear right away. He wanted to wait till he had a better notion of the lie of the land and what things were like here. If he saw a chance then . . . That would be a different story.

  The stew Marwan's cooks served was full of mutton and barley and onions. You could have seconds if you wanted. Jacques did. His new owner seemed to be telling the truth about the food, anyway. And the beds in the men's hall were real cots with wood frames and mattresses on leather lashings, not just pallets on the floor. He hadn't slept so soft since he left Paris. It wasn't what he wanted, but it could have been worse.

  It could have been worse. Everyone around Annette said so. She supposed the locals knew what they were talking about. Marwan al-Baghdadi did seem to give his slaves enough to eat. He worked them only till they got very tired, not till they fell over dead. No law told him he had to be so generous. No custom did, either. Everybody seemed to know stories about masters who made him look like a saint by comparison. But if he was such a saint, why did he own slaves?

  Like the others, Annette had to get up at sunrise. After breakfast, she went to Marwan's kitchens. They were always full of women, and the women always had plenty to do. In low-tech kitchens, there always seemed to be more work than people to do it.

  Something as simple as the heat under a pot wasn't simple. You couldn't just turn a valve or a switch to control it. You had to keep a real live fire going, feeding it sticks every so often so it didn't get too big or too small. If it did, whatever was in the pot either burned or didn't cook at all. And you got in trouble.

  Annette had had practice back in Marseille. She needed all of that not to give herself away a dozen times a day. She didn't lose her breakfast when she had to gut freshly beheaded ducks or chickens or pigeons. She just thanked heaven she didn't have to use the hatchet herself.

  Washing dishes was as bad as getting food ready for cooking. There was no hot water. There was no dishwashing soap—even people-washing soap was an expensive luxury. Plates and cups mostly weren't glazed. Things stuck to them and soaked into them. There were no scouring pads, either. There was sand and there was elbow grease and there was time, lots and lots of time.

  People talked. People sang. People scrubbed in rhythm. People chopped vegetables in rhythm. Every so often, people wandered out into the courtyard for a break. If you didn't do it too often or stay out there too long, nobody yelled at you. Annette was cautious. She didn't want to get in trouble. Some of the other women stayed out more. They did get yelled at. Nobody pulled out a cat-o'-nine-tails and whipped them, though.

  Every so often, Annette and Jacques took a break at the same time. Then, not quite by accident, it was more than every so often. Some of the older women in the kitchens smiled behind their hands. But Annette wasn't the only one with a friend. Nobody made any big fuss about it.

  Jacques said, "It could be worse," too. He was pleased with the way he'd helped repair a wagon.

  "You should be working for yourself," Annette said.

  He shrugged. "I suppose so. I hope I will again one of these days. But for now . . ." He shrugged again. Slavery was part of his world. He didn't like it at all, but it didn't sicken his spirit the way it did Annette's.

  "We have to get away," she said. She wouldn't have said that to anyone else. Trusting anyone from an alternate didn't come easy for somebody from the home timeline. But you couldn't stay all alone, either. The poet who said nobody was an island knew what he was talking about.

  Jacques looked around to make sure nobody could overhear. "Wait till they relax about us," he said in a low voice. "Wait till they think we're all right. Then . . ." Annette nodded.

  But they left sooner than that, though not in the way they'd intended. A woman shook Annette awake in the middle of the night, saying, "Come with me. We are going to take you to another of the master's properties."

  She yawned and got out of bed. Several more slaves were already up. The woman woke a couple of others. Then she led them all out of the female slaves' barracks. Annette thought they would go out on the road, but they didn't. Instead, the woman who'd wakened them led them to a doorway that looked like all the rest. When she opened it, it showed nothing but a stairway leading down.

  One of the slaves laughed nervously. "Does this take us to the underworld?" she asked.

  "No, no, no. Don't be foolish." The leader sounded as businesslike as if she came from the home timeline. "Just go down. Others will be waiting for you."

  Down they went, farther than Annette had expected. The chamber at the bottom of the stairway was bigger than she'd thought it would be. Torches on the walls cast a dim, yellow, flickering light. As the woman had said, other slaves—men— already stood there. After a moment, Annette spotted Jacques. He saw her, too, and waved.

  "Stay back near the edges of the chamber, everyone." Mar-wan al-Baghdadi's big voice raised echoes from the ceiling. "Do not go out near the center. It is not safe. By God, no harm will come to you as long as you do what I tell you to do."

  Annette yawned again. What was he talking about? You'd almost think . . .

  One instant, the middle of the underground chamber was empty. Then, silently and without any fuss, a huge, shiny metal box appeared out of nowhere. Slaves screamed and shrank back against the walls. Annette screamed with them. Her amazement was mixed with delight, not fear. That was—could only be—a Crosstime Traffic transposition chamber.

  Six

  Jacques blinked several times. The great metal box stayed there, right before his eyes. He wasn't drunk. These Muslims didn't even give their slaves beer or wine. All he'd had with supper was a tart, orange juice from some kind of fruit that didn't grow in the Kingdom of Versailles.

  A door in the box slid open. Bright light spilled out, light far brighter than that from the torches. It might almost have been daytime inside the box. Jacques sketched the sign of the wheel. Beside him, Musa ibn Ibrahim murmured, "Truly there is no God but God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of God."

  "Go inside. Take seats," Marwan al-Baghdadi called. "I say again, no harm will come to you. This is a ... traveling chamber. It is like a ship or a wagon. There are seats inside. You will be comfortable as you go."

  It wasn't like any ship or wagon Jacques had ever seen. He wasn't the only slave who hung back instead of going forward. But then, to his surprise, Khadija went in as calmly as if she were swinging up onto a horse. If she wasn't afraid, Jacques figured he didn't have to be, either.

  As he was a couple of steps behind Khadija, so Musa was one step behind him. "Let no one claim you go where I dare not follow," the black man said. He sounded angry, not at Jacques but at himself.

  Seeing that nothing bad happened to the first ones who went into the box, others went after them. Inside the box, a voice spoke in Arabic from out of the air: "Please take your seats. All passengers, please take your seats."

  Try as Jacques would,
he couldn't see anyone talking. What he could see was Khadija's face, shining as brightly as the lamps inside the box. What about those lamps? He saw no torches or candles—no oil lamps, either, such as they used in these southern parts. He smelled nothing burning, either. The whole top of the box—the ceiling, he supposed you'd have to call it—glowed. It wasn't too bright to look at, but it shed better light than anything he'd ever seen except the sun.

  "Please take your seats," that voice from the air repeated. "All passengers, please take your seats."

  Khadija sat down right away, still smiling as if she'd just been promised heaven. She knew about boxes like this—knew about them and liked them. That encouraged Jacques to sit down beside her. The chair was comfortable enough, but what was it made of? Something hard and smooth and . . . orange? It wasn't metal or wood or stone or cloth or even bone. What did that leave? Nothing Jacques knew of.

  "What is this place?" he whispered to Khadija in French.

  "It's a transposition chamber," she answered in the same language. That told him nothing he didn't already know. She went on, "It will rescue us. It will take us back to ... to where I come from."

  "To Marseille?" Jacques said, more confused than ever. "It's only a box in the middle of an underground room."

  "No, not to Marseille," Khadija said impatiently. "To . . . Oh, never mind. You'll see when we get out. And it's not just a box. It—"

  As if to prove what she said, the door slid shut all by itself.

  With all the people inside the box, the air should have got hot and stuffy in nothing flat. It didn't—it stayed fresh and cool. Jacques tried to decide whether that was more marvelous than the lamps or the other way around. He couldn't.

  "What are you two talking about?" asked Musa ibn Ibrahim. He had no more reason to understand French than Jacques did to follow whatever language he spoke besides Arabic.

  Before Jacques could explain—no, could answer, because he couldn't explain—some lights at the front of the box started winking on and off. They reminded him of candle flames seen through stained glass. Some were red, some amber, but most a clear green. "We're going," Khadija said. Now she spoke in Arabic, so Musa could also make sense of her words.

  Jacques shook his head. "No, we're not," he said. "We're just standing still." He knew what motion felt like. He felt none of it here. The box might have been nailed to the floor of the underground room. Musa ibn Ibrahim nodded agreement with him.

  But Khadija said, "Remember how the transposition chamber came out of nowhere at Marwan al-Baghdadi's? Well, when it stops it'll come out of nowhere someplace else."

  She sounded very sure. Musa leaned forward so he could look at her past Jacques. "How do you know these things?" he asked in a low voice.

  She bit her lip. "Never mind. It doesn't matter right now, anyway. But I'm right. You'll see."

  Musa eyed Jacques. "What do you think?" the black man asked.

  "I think she has to know more about this—chamber?—than I do, because I don't know anything," Jacques replied. "As for the rest... I don't know. Let's see what happens when that door opens again. One way or another, we'll find out then."

  Musa ibn Muhammad pursed his lips. He looked up at the ceiling—the ceiling that glowed. Maybe the impossible but undeniable glow helped him make up his mind. He nodded. "This is good sense, Jacques of the north. When the door opens again—however it opens—we shall see what we shall see."

  "How long will it take?" Jacques asked Khadija. If anybody knew, she did.

  "It will seem like about half an hour," she said, an odd answer. Then she added something even odder: "It really won't take any time at all."

  It seemed like more than half an hour to Jacques. By the way Khadija frowned and fidgeted, it seemed like more than half an hour to her, too. He wondered if something was wrong. He could only wonder—it wasn't as if he could do anything about it. Then a green light on the front panel turned red. A heartbeat later, the door slid open. "All passengers out," said the voice without a source. "All passengers please leave the chamber at once. All passengers out. All passengers please leave ..."

  Jacques and Khadija and Musa and the others filed out. What else could they do? They found themselves in an underground room. But it wasn't the room where they'd got into the chamber. It was bigger and better lit. When Jacques looked up, he saw glowing tubes that shed the same kind of bright light as the transposition chamber's ceiling. Khadija was nodding to herself and smiling. She'd seen tubes like those before, even if Jacques and Musa hadn't.

  "Over this way! Up these stairs!" a man shouted in Arabic. He wore a tunic and trousers of mottled green and brown. He had stout leather boots on his feet, and wore a helmet with a cloth cover of the same mottled fabric as the rest of his clothes. He carried what was obviously a weapon. It looked something like a matchlock musket, but was much shorter and more compact. And it had a knife sticking out below the muzzle, so it could double as a short thrusting spear. What a clever idea! Jacques thought, wondering why no one in the Kingdom of Versailles had ever thought of it.

  "Be careful," Khadija whispered to him. "It can shoot many bullets quickly, without reloading between shots." Her smile had gone out. Whatever she'd expected, this wasn't it.

  "Up the stairs! Get moving!" yelled the man with the gun-and-knife combination. Unlike the strange voice in the chamber, he didn't repeat himself exactly.

  Up they went. These stairs were iron, and clanged under Jacques' boots. They must have cost a fortune. More men with weapons waited as people came up from below. "Male slaves to the left!" one of them shouted. "Female slaves to the right! Get moving, if you know what's good for you!"

  "No," Khadija whispered. "No, no, no, no!" But the men with the weapons didn't look as if they would take no for an answer. Jacques and Musa went to the left. Still with that look of astonished disbelief on her face, Khadija went to the right.

  Annette had thought she was living a nightmare ever since she got captured and separated from her parents. Now she discovered what nightmare really was. That had been a Crosstime Traffic transposition chamber. She'd thought it would take her back to the home timeline. She hadn't known why it was taking so many people from that alternate with her, but she hadn't worried about it. Why worry when she was on her way home?

  But she wasn't. This seemed more like hell than home— industrialized hell. The rest of the slaves, the ones who really had come from the alternate of the Great Black Deaths, didn't realize what was wrong. How could they? The only timeline they'd ever imagined was their own.

  Wherever this was, it was in a different alternate. The house and grounds above the underground room where the transposition chamber came and went were bigger than the ones in the other Madrid. The house and the other buildings had solar panels on their roofs, too. Those would generate at least some of the electricity this place used. And if the locals were low-tech, they'd have no idea what the panels were for.

  Even before Annette got to the barracks, she decided the locals were low-tech. For one thing, she couldn't see any sky-glow from street lamps over the outer wall. For another, the stench of sewage and garbage filled the air. Again, the other slaves took no special notice. They'd lived with that smell all their lives. They took it for granted.

  They did exclaim when they found fluorescent tubes lighting the barracks. "Our new master must be a strong wizard!" one of them said. She sounded more proud than otherwise, as if being owned by such a man gave her extra status. For all Annette knew, it did.

  She made herself exclaim, too. If she took those glowing tubes too much for granted, the others might wonder why. If they wondered why, Marwan al-Baghdadi—or whatever his real name was—might start wondering, too. Or maybe he didn't even come to this new alternate. Maybe he was just a hired man like the goons with the guns. But having the boss here wonder about her would also be very bad news.

  Slaves! One of Crosstime Traffic's strongest rules was the one against buying or selling other people. Annette would
n't have thought the rule even needed to be there. It had been almost 250 years since the United States fought a civil war over slavery.

  But. . . That was a CT transposition chamber. She'd been in enough of them to recognize another one. It didn't come from some other alternate that also knew how to travel between timelines. That had always been Crosstime Traffic's worst nightmare. This trouble, though, this trouble was homegrown. To Annette, that made it worse, not better.

  She lay down on a bed just like the one she'd had in that other Madrid. The rest of the newly arrived slave women soon went to sleep. They didn't fully understand what had happened to them. Annette did, and her whirling thoughts kept her tossing and turning. People inside Crosstime Traffic were dealing with—dealing in—slaves. They'd got their hands on their own private transposition chamber. If that didn't mean there was corruption in very high places, Annette would have been amazed.

  Why would they want slaves? She worried at that as if it were gristle stuck between her teeth. Whatever they dug up or grew here, Crosstime Traffic could surely get it somewhere else. And besides, how many people connected to Crosstime Traffic needed money? Most of them made more benjamins than they knew what to do with.

  She yawned. However upset she was, she was tired, too. What else besides money would make people want to own other people? For a while, she couldn't think of anything. She yawned again. She was going to fall asleep in spite of herself.

  She'd almost drifted off when she suddenly sat bolt upright instead. Maybe just the thrill of doing something this wrong would be enough. In the home timeline, people didn't wear furs. Up till this moment, Annette had never asked herself why they didn't. That she hadn't asked said a lot about how strong the taboo was. She'd always just taken it for granted.

  Every once in a while, though, you would hear stories on the news . . . Reporters would talk in hushed voices about how so-and-so—sometimes somebody famous, sometimes someone no-body'd ever heard of—had been caught with a fur jacket or a mink stole in the closet. You could only wear something like that where no one (except maybe someone as twisted as you were) saw you do it. The only reason you would do it was because everybody else thought it was sick. You got some sort of perverted pleasure from going against the way everyone else felt.