The Gladiator

by Harry Turtledove

  “Maria’s a lot of things, but silly isn’t any of them,” Annarita said grimly. “She was giving me a hard time because the Security Police closed the place down. Suspicion of capitalism, I guess you’d say. But all the people who worked there seemed to vanish into thin air.”

  “Lucky for them,” her father remarked. Not for the first time, he reminded her of someone who would smoke a pipe. He didn’t, or anything else. But he had that kind of thoughtful air.

  “Not for all of them.” Annarita nudged Gianfranco.

  He jumped. His voice wobbled and broke as he said, “I ran into one of them—a guy named Eduardo. I brought him here. What are we going to do with him, Dottor Crosetti? I don’t want to give him to the Security Police, not when he really hasn’t done anything.”

  “Hasn’t done anything you know of,” Annarita’s father corrected. He frowned. With a lot of people, it would have been an angry frown. Why not, when Gianfranco and Annarita were involving him in something not only illegal but dangerous? Everybody did illegal things to get by now and then. You almost had to. Most of them couldn’t land you in too much trouble. Not letting the Security Police get their hands on a fugitive they wanted? That was a different story.

  “They don’t want him for anything but working in the shop.” Gianfranco sounded more sure of himself now.

  “How do you know that?” Dr. Crosetti asked. He didn’t sound angry.

  “Because a Security Police officer was asking me questions outside The Gladiator this afternoon,” Gianfranco answered. Annarita hadn’t heard that. He went on, “It was all he cared about.”

  Annarita’s father grunted. “I think I’d better talk to this fellow. If he makes me believe he’s harmless—well, we’ll see. If he doesn’t, I’ll send him away from here with a flea in his ear. Is that a deal?”

  “It sounds wonderful,” Gianfranco said.

  “It’s fine, Father,” Annarita agreed.

  “Well, then, go get him, and we’ll see what’s what,” Dr. Crosetti said. “And then you can both disappear. I’ve already talked with you. I want to talk to him.”

  Gianfranco looked miffed. “It’s all right,” Annarita told him. “That’s how Papa works.” He didn’t seem convinced. She asked, “Have you got any better ideas?” Reluctantly, he shook his head. “Well, then,” she said. “Come on. Let’s get Eduardo, before he decides he’d better run away.”

  Back to the stairwell they went. To Annarita’s relief, the clerk from The Gladiator was still there. He looked up at them. “And?” he said.

  “Come talk to my father. If anybody can figure out what to do for you, he can,” Annarita said.

  “I’ve already talked too much. I don’t want to do any more,” Eduardo said.

  “If you don’t want to talk to my father, you can talk to the Security Police instead,” she said. Eduardo winced and climbed to his feet. Annarita had thought that would get him moving. He muttered something under his breath. She couldn’t make out what it was. Maybe that was just as well.

  Down the hall they went. Gianfranco did the introduction: “Dr. Crosetti, this is Eduardo … You know what, Eduardo? I don’t know your last name.”

  “Caruso,” the clerk said. “Only I can’t sing.”

  That made Annarita’s father smile, but only for a moment. “Oh, you’ll sing for me, Comrade Caruso. Or else we’re both wasting our time.” He gestured to Annarita and Gianfranco. “Out, out, out. Give us some room to talk, some room to breath, per piacere.”

  None too willingly, they left the living room. “What’s he going to ask him?” Gianfranco whispered. “What’s he going to find out that we didn’t?”

  “I don’t know,” Annarita answered. “But we can’t do this by ourselves, and you didn’t seem to want to go to your folks.”

  “I hope not!” Gianfranco exclaimed. “My father would either make speeches at him or hand him to the Security Police. Or both.”

  That was about what Annarita thought Comrade Mazzilli would do, too. “There you are, then,” she said.

  Gianfranco nodded. “Here I am, all right, and I wish I were somewhere else.”

  Algebra homework wasn’t what Gianfranco wanted to be doing. Across the kitchen table from him, Annarita went through her schoolwork as if she had not a care in the world. What was her father talking about with Eduardo? How long would it take? Forever? It felt that way.

  They got chased away from the table about eight o’clock, so their mothers could set it for supper. Dr. Crosetti came out to eat. Eduardo didn’t. What had Annarita’s father done with him—done to him? Stuck him in a bookcase? Preserved him in a specimen bottle? Stuffed him under the rug? Whatever it was, he gave no sign. He talked a little about a strange case he’d seen that afternoon, but said not a word about the strange clerk he’d—probably—left in his living room.

  As for Gianfranco’s father, he talked about some bureaucratic silliness even he wouldn’t care about day after tomorrow. Nobody else cared now. Even Gianfranco’s mother looked bored. The Crosettis didn’t, but they weren’t family. They worked harder to stay polite.

  Supper was good, but Gianfranco paid it less attention than he might have. He wanted to know where Eduardo was and what would happen to him. He couldn’t ask, though, not without letting his own folks know what was going on. He was sure he didn’t want to do that.

  As people were getting up from the table, Annarita said, “Why don’t you come over to our place, Gianfranco, and I’ll see if I can help you with that algebra.”

  He hadn’t asked her for any help. That had to mean … “Sure!” Gianfranco had to work not to sound too eager. Annarita had seemed perfectly casual. He hadn’t known she was such a good actress.

  Beaming, his father said, “That’s good. It’s right out of The Communist Manifesto—from each according to her abilities, to each according to his needs.” Then the smile slipped. “Of course, maybe Gianfranco wouldn’t need the help if he worked harder on his own.”

  “I do work hard,” Gianfranco protested. “It just doesn’t stick as well as I wish it did.”

  “What did you get in algebra when you were in school?” his mother asked his father. Instead of answering, his father went back to talking about the Manifesto. That told Gianfranco everything he needed to know.

  He got his algebra book, then followed Annarita into the Crosettis’ apartment. “Well?” he said as soon as his own folks couldn’t hear him. “Where’s Eduardo? What are you going to do with him?”

  “What? You don’t want to do algebra?” Annarita said, as innocently as if she thought he did.

  What he said about algebra wasn’t quite suited to polite company, even if, at the last moment, he made it milder than he’d first intended. “Where’s Eduardo?” he asked.

  “Who?” Annarita said. Gianfranco didn’t clobber her and he didn’t scream, which only proved he had more self-control than he thought. She took him by the arm. “Come on.” She led him into the Crosettis’ living room.

  Eduardo sat on the sofa there, a glass of wine in front of him. Dr. Crosetti sat in his favorite chair, a glass of wine on the end table next to him. They both looked pleased with themselves. “Ciao, Gianfranco,” Annarita’s father said. “I’d like you to meet my distant cousin, Silvio Pagnozzi.” He waved towards Eduardo.

  Gianfranco gaped. He started to squawk. Then he realized something was going on. He held out his hand. “Molto lieto … Silvio.”

  Eduardo stood up and gravely shook hands with him. “Pleased to meet you, too, Gianfranco,” he said, for all the world as if Gianfranco weren’t a regular at The Gladiator.

  “I hope your papers are in order … Silvio,” Gianfranco said. “They’re liable to be doing a lot of checking for a while. Looking for dangerous criminals like murderers and bank robbers and gaming-store clerks, you know.”

  “Sì, sì.” Eduardo pulled out an identity card and an internal passport. Gianfranco wasn’t astonished to see that they had Eduardo’s photo, a fingerprin
t likely to be his, and the name of Silvio Pagnozzi. The internal passport said he was born in Acireale, down on Sicily, but had moved to Milan when he was only two. That made sense—he didn’t talk like a Sicilian, so he couldn’t have lived in the south for long.

  “What happens if the Security Police telephone Acireale to find out if you were really born there?” Gianfranco asked.

  Eduardo shrugged. “Acireale’s right by Mount Etna. Most of the records there were lost in the earthquake of 2081,” he said. “They can’t prove anything one way or the other.”

  “I see.” Gianfranco nodded and gave the documents back. “These look good. They look real.”

  “They’re as good as the ones you’ve got,” Eduardo—Silvio?—answered.

  “If someone with a different name who looks like you had papers, would his be just as good, too?”

  “Well, of course,” Eduardo answered, smiling. “You’re not a human being at all if you don’t have papers that say you are, eh?” He winked.

  Gianfranco didn’t. “Where do you get papers like that?” he asked. Are you a spy? he meant. He hadn’t wanted to believe that, but seeing those perfect documents in a false name made him wonder. Or was Silvio Pagnozzi a false name? Gianfranco realized he couldn’t be sure.

  Eduardo stopped smiling. “I’ve told Dr. Crosetti where I got them. The fewer people who know, the fewer who can tell.”

  That wasn’t good enough for Gianfranco. “I’ve earned the right to know. The Security Police can already slice me into carpaccio or chop me up for salami. If I’m putting my neck on the line, I’ve got a right to know why.”

  “He’s right,” Annarita said. “I feel the same way.”

  Her father looked surprised—mutiny in the family? And Gianfranco was surprised, and tried to hide it. So Dr. Crosetti hadn’t told Annarita whatever it was, either. Gianfranco would have guessed she’d know. Evidently not.

  “What do you think?” Annarita’s father asked Eduardo.

  “Maybe I’d better tell them,” answered the man with the interesting papers.

  “They’re children,” Dr. Crosetti said.

  Before Gianfranco could get angry, Eduardo said, “If not for them, I’d be wandering the streets right now—or else the Security Police would have grabbed me. They’re acting like grown-ups. Don’t you think we ought to treat them that way?”

  “Mmrm.” Dr. Crosetti made a discontented noise, down deep in his throat. “I wouldn’t trust grown-ups with this, either. Who saw you on the stairwell?”

  “Nobody who paid any attention to me. I made a point of looking away from the two or three people who came by—you’d better believe I did,” Eduardo said.

  Annarita’s father grunted again. “And you may have looked straight into a surveillance camera, too. Those miserable things are common as cockroaches.”

  Eduardo smiled again. “They won’t have picked me up. I have the power to cloud cameras’ minds—or at least to jam their signals.”

  “How do you do that?” Gianfranco blurted.

  “It has to do with where I come from,” Eduardo said.

  “And where’s that?” Annarita asked. “From right around here, by the way you talk.”

  “I do come from Milan—from Arese, actually,” Eduardo said. Gianfranco and Annarita both nodded—that was a suburb northwest of the city. “But I come from Milan in the Italian Republic, not Milan in the Italian People’s Republic.”

  “Huh?” Gianfranco said, at the same time as Annarita asked, “What does that mean?” They both amounted to the same thing, even if Annarita was more polite.

  “In my world”—Eduardo brought the phrase out as calmly as if it were something as ordinary as on my block—“Communism didn’t win the Cold War. Capitalism did.”

  “Marx says that’s impossible.” Gianfranco brought out the first objection that popped into his head. Others stood in line behind it, waiting their turn.

  “Sì,” Eduardo said. “What about it? A believer might think the sun goes around the earth because the Bible says the sun stood still. Does that make it true? Do you want to believe something because a book says it’s so, or do you want to look at the evidence?”

  “What is your evidence?” Annarita asked, beating Gianfranco to the punch. “So far, we’ve heard nothing but talk, and talk is cheap.”

  “It’s also very light,” Gianfranco said with a grin. “You can haul boxcars of it with a beat-up old locomotive in Rails across Europe.”

  “The game is part of my evidence,” Eduardo said. “Do you think it would be legal—or safe—to make it anywhere in this world?”

  Annarita looked very unhappy. “You sound like one of the hardcore people in the Young Socialists’ League.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. They’re not all blind. I wish they were. My life would be easier,” Eduardo answered.

  “How do we know this isn’t some sort of fancy scam?” Gianfranco asked.

  Dr. Crosetti beamed at him. “I said the same thing. I didn’t think the game was enough, either.”

  Eduardo sighed. “By rights, I shouldn’t show you anything like this. By rights, I shouldn’t be here at all. I should be back in the home timeline.” He looked even more unhappy than Annarita had. “I should have gone home with everybody else. I should have been in The Gladiator before the Security Police raided it. But they must have planned the raid in a place where we didn’t have bugs. I thought we’d done a better job of covering them than we must have.”

  “You … bugged the Security Police?” Gianfranco said slowly. Eduardo nodded. Gianfranco stared at him. “Nobody can do that—except the Russians, I guess. They can do whatever they want.”

  “They make junk. Everybody here makes junk.” Eduardo’s flat, take-it-or-leave-it tone was hard to disbelieve. Either he believed himself or he was one devil of an actor. Still gloomily, he went on, “But anyway, I was out shopping when the raid went down. I almost walked into the Security Police when I came back.”

  “That doesn’t do anything toward showing me what I asked for,” Gianfranco said.

  “I know. The point of it is, though, I’ve got my mini in my pocket.”

  “Your mini what?” Gianfranco and Annarita asked the question at the same time.

  “My minicomputer, that’s what. Against regulations to take it out of the shop, but now I’m kind of glad I did,” Eduardo said.

  Gianfranco almost decided on the spot that he was lying. Computers were even more carefully regulated than typewriters. The Security Police knew where every single one of them was, and who was authorized to use it. Hoxha Polytechnic had a couple of small ones, but only the most politically reliable kids could get close to them. And they were the size of a small refrigerator. The idea that anybody could carry one around in his pocket was ridiculous.

  What Eduardo pulled out of his pocket sure didn’t look like any computer Gianfranco had seen or imagined. It was smaller than a pack of cigarettes, and made of white plastic. On one side, something was stamped into it. Eduardo’s thumb stayed on the emblem most of the time, but when he moved it Gianfranco saw what looked like an apple with a bite taken out of one side. He wondered what that meant.

  Eduardo poked the gadget in a particular way. Then he said, “On,” and then he said, “Screen.”

  It came out of the top of the little plastic box and spread out like a Japanese fan. It seemed about as thick as a butterfly’s wing. At first it was white, but then color spread over it. Gianfranco saw that gnawed apple again, but only for a moment.

  “Tournament,” Eduardo said. “Rails across Europe fourteen.”

  There were the games in the tournament in which Gianfranco had just played, all the way up to his loss to Alfredo. “This isn’t a computer!” he exclaimed. “This is magic!”

  “No.” Eduardo shook his head. “This is technology. Anybody can use it. All you have to do is know how. No hocuspocus, no abracadabra. You don’t have to be a king’s son or go to a sorcerers’ academy. You just
have to walk into a shop, put down a couple of hundred big ones, and it’s yours.”

  “Big ones?” Annarita said.

  “What we use for money,” Eduardo answered. “A hundred euros make a big one all over Western Europe. In the United States, a hundred dollars make a benjamin.”

  “What about the Soviet Union?” Annarita beat Gianfranco to the question by a split second.

  “Well, Russia uses rubles,” Eduardo answered. “Ukraine uses hryvnia, Belarus uses rubels, Armenia has drams, Georgia has lari, Azerbaijan has manats, Moldova uses lei, Estonia uses krooni, Latvia uses—guess what?—lats, Lithuania uses litai—surprise again, right?—and the Central Asian republics all have their own money, too, but I forget what they call it.”

  Gianfranco needed a moment to take all that in and to realize what it had to mean. “You don’t have any Soviet Union?” he blurted. He might have been an antelope on the plain, saying, You don’t have any lions? to another antelope from some distant grassland.

  “Not for more than a hundred years, not in our timeline.” Eduardo chuckled. “You might say Communism withered away.”

  “But that’s …” Gianfranco’s voice withered away before he could bring out impossible. He looked at the computer in the palm of Eduardo’s hand. Before he saw it, he would have said it was impossible. Only the very most important, very most trusted people got to use computers at all. They were just too dangerous, or so the authorities insisted. And no computer looked like a little box that sprouted a screen at an oral command.

  Except this one.

  “What are you doing here?” Annarita asked.

  “Keeping an eye on things, you might say,” Eduardo replied.

  But that wasn’t the whole answer. It couldn’t be—Gianfranco saw as much right away. And he saw what some of the real answer had to be. “You are counterrevolutionaries!” he said.

  Annarita exclaimed softly. Her father blinked. And Eduardo … Eduardo turned red. “We’re not the kind who assassinate people or blow things up,” he said. “We’ve seen way too much of that back home. We still have too much of it there.”