He stared at her. "You're joking," he said.
"No. I'm not. It's important for you to understand that I'm not," Annette said. "People here can believe anything they want, most places. We find that works better. We still have quarrels about religion, but fewer than we used to."
"But this Spain is a Christian country, isn't it? I've seen the cathedrals, even if you don't know about Henri." Jacques sounded sad. He'd seen that nobody in the home timeline knew about God's Second Son, but he didn't like it.
'This Spain is mostly a Christian country, yes. But it's not against the law to be a Jew or a Muslim or anything else here. You don't even have to pay a special tax or anything. As long as you don't cause trouble, you can believe whatever you please."
"Oh," he said. She watched him weighing that. She watched him not caring for it very much. He put what troubled him into words: "I didn't mind so much when I thought you were a Muslim. Muslims are wrong, but they're strong, too. Jews aren't just wrong—they're weak."
Part of Annette wanted to take a vase off the end table and bash him over the head with it. She understood he didn't know any better. Even so ... As patiently as she could, she said, "You're judging things by your own alternate. The only reason Jews aren't strong there is that it doesn't have very many of them." That was also partly true here, but she didn't want to complicate things.
She watched Jacques wrestle with it. "I never thought I could like a Jew," he said at last. "All I ever wanted to do was throw rocks at them. That's what they're for."
"Oh?" Annette raised an eyebrow. "How do you suppose they feel about that?"
He blinked. Plainly, wondering how Jews felt had never once occurred to him. Maybe he wouldn't care even after it did. There were still people who didn't care about those who weren't like them, even here in the home timeline. There were way too many of them, as a matter of fact. But Annette knew she couldn't stay friends with anybody like that.
"I don't suppose they'd like it very much, would they?" Jacques said after a long pause.
"No, I don't think so," Annette agreed, glad he'd seen that much. Maybe he could get beyond the prejudices he'd grown up with after all. She went on, "Most places here in the home timeline, it's against the law to discriminate because of religion or race or sex. We think those are good laws—they give everybody a fair chance."
"Race? What do you mean by race?" Jacques asked.
"What color you are." Annette smiled. The Kingdom of Versailles didn't have much racial trouble. How could it? Just about everybody in it was white.
"That's silly," Jacques said. "I didn't mind those Moors because they were black. They couldn't do anything about that. I didn't like it that they were Muslims, though. They could choose there, and they chose wrong."
One step forward, one step back, Annette thought. "Sometimes things that are different are just different, not right or wrong," she said again. "You can't prove anything about religions till after you're dead, and then you can't tell anybody else. We even have people who don't believe in God at all."
Jacques made the sign of the wheel. "Jesus and Henri! What do you do with them? Do you burn them or hang them or put them on the wheel or the cross or—?"
"We don't do anything to them," Annette broke in. "Nothing. As long as they don't hurt other people, they can believe— or not believe—whatever they want. They don't seem to be any worse, or any better, than Christians or Muslims or Jews, taken as a group. We think freedom to believe includes freedom not to believe."
"That's . . . very strange," Jacques said. "If you don't believe in God, how can you be good? If you don't think Anyone can punish you, why not cheat and rob and kill?"
Philosophers still wrestled with that one. Annette knew it. She also knew she was no philosopher herself. She gave a practical answer, not a philosophical one: "Because other people will punish you if you break the law."
"It doesn't seem like enough," Jacques said.
"It's what we've got," Annette told him. "Nothing works all the time, but this seems to work most of the time. One thing you've got to remember is, most of the Christians and Jews and Muslims here in the home timeline don't worry as much about what happens to them in the next world as people in your alternate do." She didn't say everybody. She talked about most people. Some of the exceptions over the past hundred years were pretty horrible.
Jacques scratched his head. She watched him think it through. At last, he said, "You have all these wonderful things. You have your wonderful machines. You have good health. You have plenty to eat. But when it comes to things that really matter, things of the spirit, are you any better off than we are?"
That was a serious question. "Some people will worry about those things no matter what. Some people won't worry about them no matter what," Annette said after some thought of her own. "We feel it's better if everybody is healthy and has enough to eat. That gives people a good start. What you do with it afterwards . . . Whether you want to worry about things of the spirit or you just want to live your life in this world, well, it's up to you. You have to make up your own mind."
It's up to you. You have to make up your own mind. More than anything else, that might have been the slogan of the strange new world in which Jacques found himself. In the Kingdom of Versailles, he'd had a place. Part of it came from what his family was. Part of it came from his service with the king. But he always had a good idea of where he stood, of who could tell him what to do (most people) and whom he could boss around (the rest).
Things were different here in what Annette called the home timeline. Part of that was because he was a stranger here. He didn't know the rules. He understood as much. Part of it, though, was because the rules were so much looser.
Christians and Muslims and Jews all worshiped in the same kingdom? They didn't try to kill one another very often. The country wasn't officially Christian or Muslim or—strange thought!—Jewish. Even the King of this Spain was nothing but a figurehead? The people chose their leaders? It struck him as one short step up from what went on in a peasant revolt, but it seemed to work.
Annette told him laws here didn't discriminate because of religion, and he saw it was so. She told him laws didn't discriminate because of race, and he saw that was so, too. He saw more different kinds of people in Spain and in the United States, her country, than he'd ever imagined, and they all seemed to be ... people, treated pretty much the same. The United States didn't have a king at all. Now that was peculiar.
And she told him laws didn't discriminate because of sex, either. That also turned out to be so. He'd seen that some of the soldiers who shut down the manor were women. Women in the home timeline could be doctors or lawyers or artisans or whatever else they wanted to be. They got into politics. Some of them ran countries. The people under them obeyed them as if they were men.
It was all very confusing.
It was scary, too, maybe even scarier than going into battle. In battle, you had some idea of the kinds of things that could happen. Here, everything seemed up in the air. Jacques felt at home in only one setting in the home timeline.
When he testified before lawyers and a judge, he might almost have been back in the Kingdom of Versailles. Before he even started testifying, he had to take an oath before God to tell the truth. From some of the things Annette said, he gathered that was a formality here. It meant they could charge you with a crime if they caught you lying. Jacques really meant it. The authorities here didn't worry him so much. The idea that God was looking down and listening to what he said did.
Everything was formal in courts. Things weren't the same here as they were in the Kingdom of Versailles, but they weren't all that different. You could tell the courts were two branches growing off the same tree. If what Annette said was true, his whole world and this one were like that—and he had no reason to doubt her. But the worlds as a whole had grown much farther apart than their courts had.
Sometimes people questioned him in the French they spoke here. He could mostly und
erstand it, and they could mostly follow him when he answered. A couple of them, though, went to the trouble of learning the French they spoke in his Kingdom of Versailles. Like Annette, they spoke it as well as he did. Maybe they spoke it better than he did, because they sounded more educated.
"Learning languages is easy for us," Annette told him during a recess at a court somewhere in the United States. "We have these implants." She touched her head behind her left ear. "They can connect our brains to a machine that puts the language in there like that." She snapped her fingers.
"That's how you speak French and Arabic so well," Jacques said.
"Sure it is." Her smile lifted only one corner of her mouth. "I found out how hard it is without implants when I had to learn to talk with Emishtar. Her language was related to Arabic, the way French and Spanish are related to each other, but it still wasn't easy."
"I saw her a couple of days ago," Jacques said. "The same court that was questioning me was going to ask her things, too.
Was that here or back in Spain? I have trouble remembering. I've flown back and forth too many times now."
"People who grow up in the home timeline say things like that," Annette said. "See how well you're starting to fit in?"
She was joking. He knew it, but couldn't help answering seriously: "I don't know if I'll ever fit in here. I can feel how far from home I am. Is Emishtar going to stay here, too?"
That made Annette stop joking. "Maybe she'll try," she answered slowly. "If you think this world is hard for you to get used to, though, it's a lot harder for her."
"She's older than we are," Jacques said. "She's probably older than both of us put together. That makes her more set in her ways than we are."
"That's part of it," Annette agreed, "but that's only part of it. Your alternate is different from the home timeline, Jacques—"
"I'll say it is!" he broke in.
"Yours is different, but hers is a lot more different," Annette said. "Your people know about gunpowder. You have Christians and Muslims and Jews. Her people still use bows and arrows. There was no Roman Empire in her alternate, so nobody like Jesus ever lived there. Christianity never happened. And without Christianity, Islam wouldn't happen, either."
"You don't say anything about Jews," Jacques said.
"Maybe there are Jews there. We don't know that alternate very well yet," Annette said. "Judaism got started before that world and the home timeline separated. But if there are, they'll have different ideas from ours about what being a Jew means."
"Are they really Jews, then?" Jacques asked. "Are the Christians in this home timeline really Christians? How can they be? They don't know anything about Henri."
"That's a good question," Annette told him. "It depends on how you look at things. People in the home timeline would wonder if the Christians in your alternate are really Christians. They would say you added Henri to your faith, not that we don't know him here. Christians in most alternates have beliefs more like ours than like yours, because Henri didn't become God's Second Son in them."
"But Henri is the Second Son!" Jacques exclaimed. "The way you make it sound, the only reason we have Henri and other, uh, alternates don't is because the dice turned up with four sixes for us and with different throws for the rest of them."
To his dismay, Annette (whom he still wanted to think of as Khadija) nodded. "What other reason is there?"
"Because God gave Henri to us," Jacques said stubbornly.
"Well, I can't prove God didn't do that," Annette said, and Jacques felt a little better. But then she asked, "How can you show God did do it, though? And why did He do it that way in your alternate but not in the others?"
He started to tell her the Final Testament proved what God had done. He feared he knew what she would say if he did. The Final Testament was a thing of his alternate, not a thing of all the alternates. Unhappily, he asked, "Is this why some people in this alternate don't believe in God?"
"Maybe some," Annette answered. "People have all kinds of reasons for believing or not believing, though. Why they do, why they don't—that's not simple."
"Nothing here is simple." Jacques wished Annette would tell him he was wrong. She didn't. She just nodded again.
When Annette talked with Emishtar, they used the same mix of Arabic and her language as they had while they were slaves. Nobody in the home timeline knew Emishtar's tongue well enough yet to prepare a scan Annette could learn through her implant.
"When I come here, I think you people must be gods or devils," Emishtar said. "You have carts that go by themselves. You fly through the air like birds. You have pictures that talk. You make it hot when you want. You make it cold when you want. You have so much food. You have the thing that keeps the food fresh. You have the medicine to make my teeth stop hurting. I think they never stop, but you make them stop. You kill my lice, too."
"We're only people," Annette said. They had both just testified against a Crosstime Traffic official in Seattle. So had Bridget Mallory. Annette continued, "We know how to do things your people don't, that's all. It doesn't make us better or worse—only stronger." Stronger was hard enough. They could blow up the world. They hadn't for the past century and a half, but they could.
"I see it," Emishtar said. "People act like people. Not just like my people—you have different customs, different gods, uh, god—but people. Some good, some bad, some wise, some foolish. People with strength of gods or devils."
She had no idea what people in the home timeline had done to one another. Maybe she was lucky. "What do you think about living here?" Annette asked.
Her friend shrugged. "I don't know. To learn a language . . ."
With an implant, learning to speak and understand would be easy. She would have to learn to read and write, though, too, to become fully a part of the home timeline.
"I would have to learn about your strange god," Emishtar went on. "Only one? For everything? It seems foolish. And many of your customs are so strange. Maybe I just go home again."
Annette wasn't sure Emishtar could do that. The authorities might keep her away from her own alternate because she knew so much more than she should. Crosstime Traffic tried to interfere with the other alternates as little as it could while it did business with them. Those were the rules, anyhow.
Annette's mouth twisted. Quite a few Crosstime Traffic people hadn't played by the rules. Spanish authorities were still trying to figure out how they'd got an illicit transposition chamber.
All sorts of governments were looking at Crosstime Traffic more closely these days. By the nature of what it did, the company was the most multinational of all multinationals. It had to have tentacles all over the world to travel to the most interesting and profitable spots in other alternates.
Up till now, Crosstime Traffic hadn't faced a lot of regulation. It was the engine that drove the home timeline's prosperity. No-body'd wanted even to pluck a pinfeather from the goose that brought home so many golden eggs.
But if Crosstime Traffic people went into business for themselves, if they took slaves and became masters, if they let other twisted people from the home timeline play at being slaves (Annette thought of Bridget Mallory and shivered) ... If they did all those things—and they did—maybe (no, certainly) they needed to be watched more closely.
Emishtar tapped Annette on the arm. Even in ordinary clothes, the woman with the crooked front teeth looked out of place in the courtroom waiting room. The way she sat, the way she looked around, said she wasn't used to the furniture or to the fluorescent panels in the ceiling.
"If you have to come to my village for the rest of your days," she said, "could you do that? Would you want to do that?"
"I... could," Annette said. "Would I want to? No. I have to say, we have so many more things than you do, I would not be happy there."
"It is for me like the other side of a plate," Emishtar said.
"You have too many things. I do not know what to do with them. I do not see how I can ever learn."
"You are new here," Annette said. "You may change your mind when you learn more about the way we do things. You may decide you like not working as hard as you did. You may decide you like having enough to eat all the time."
"What would I do here? How would I earn my food?" Em-ishtar asked.
"Teaching us about your people and your alternate would make a good start, I think," Annette answered. "We have a lot of bad things to fix there. You grew up there. You know more about it than we do."
"I would rather farm," Emishtar said.
Farming here was an industry. She didn't understand that. "We use machines to farm in the home timeline," Annette said. "We don't do it the way they did where you grew up." She pictured oxen pulling, men with digging sticks, and others with hoes—an even more primitive way of doing things than they'd had at the manor.
But Emishtar was picturing what she'd known all her life till the slave raiders took her. "If I cannot go where I want to go, if I cannot do what I want to do, am I not still a slave here?" she asked bitterly.
Annette found no answer at all for her.
Jacques rubbed at the skin behind his left ear. He could feel something hard under there. It wasn't much, though—it couldn't have been the size of a grain of barley. Somehow, that little thing connected with his brain, and with the thinking machines they had here. He spoke and understood English now, just about as well as if he'd been born knowing it.
Khadija—no, he had to remember she was really Annette— had told him getting the implant wouldn't hurt much. He'd had trouble believing her. They were cutting his head open, after all. But she'd been right. A sting like a fleabite from a needle—the same sort of needle they'd used at the manor—and then he'd gone numb. The doctors did what they did. He didn't feel it. It did hurt a little when the numbness wore off. They gave him pills that pushed the pain far away.
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