The Gladiator

by Harry Turtledove

  Apparatchiks weren’t all bad. They made the wheels of government turn … when the wheels did turn. Gianfranco’s father was an apparatchik, though he would have got mad if you said so. Apparatchiks always thought other people were apparatchiks. What they did themselves was important. If you didn’t believe it, you could just ask them.

  And Eduardo had hit that nail right on the head. Apparatchiks might not have a lot of money in the bank. But they got the best apartments, the best summer houses, the best cars, and doctors. Annarita’s father had this flat because a lot of his patients were apparatchiks.

  Apparatchiks also got to travel more than ordinary people did. Their children got into good universities whether they deserved to or not. If you quarreled with an apparatchik and you were just somebody ordinary, you were in trouble if he took you to court. They might not have money, no, but they sure had privileges.

  “What can we do about that?” Annarita asked.

  “Make those people really work for a living,” Eduardo answered. “If they don’t do anything useful, throw the bums out.”

  “Easy to say. Not so easy to do,” Annarita pointed out.

  She wondered if he would deny that and try to make a counterrevolution sound simple. She gave him credit when he didn’t. “Well, you’re right,” he said. “That’s why we were trying to come at it sideways. We thought we could get new ideas in with the games.”

  “It didn’t work,” Annarita said.

  “Tell me about it!” Eduardo exclaimed. “We were hoping your government was fatter and lazier than it turned out to be. I’m sure we won’t give up, but I’m not sure what we can do right now. I hope like anything I’m not stuck here.”

  “What about your friends, wherever they are?” she asked.

  “If they don’t find me, I’ll have to try to get hold of them sooner or later,” he said. “I hope they didn’t have to pull out, too. If they did … If they did, I’m in trouble. Sooner or later, the Security Police will start getting closer to me, too.” He smiled a crooked smile. “Isn’t life grand?”

  He had his wonderful computer. He had the memories of all the things his people could do that no one here knew anything about. And all of that did him not one bit of good. Had anyone in the history of the world—in the history of many worlds—ever been so alone?

  Comrade Donofrio gave Gianfranco his report card. The algebra teacher actually smiled when he did. “You’ve improved, Mazzilli,” he said.

  “Grazie, Comrade,” Gianfranco answered.

  He looked at his grade. A B! He hadn’t got a B in math since … He couldn’t remember the last time he got a B. His grades in his other subjects were up, too. He wouldn’t get first honors, but he might get second.

  He knew Annarita would get first honors. She always did. He knew he would hear about it from his parents, too. If she does it, why don’t you? How many times had he heard that? More than he wanted to, anyhow. But if he came home with some kind of honors for a change, maybe they wouldn’t rag on him so much.

  And he did. He got a B+ in history to put him over the top. That was another bolt out of the blue. If Rails across Europe hadn’t got him interested in the subject, he never could have done it. But the game had, and he did.

  He missed The Gladiator. Even with Eduardo next door, he missed the camaraderie and the arguments and the games with different people. He missed having somewhere besides home to go when school let out. He missed the models and the books.

  Those books! No wonder you couldn’t find them anywhere else! A lot of them came from what Eduardo called the home timeline. Nobody there thought they were subversive. They were just … books. And that, or so it seemed to Gianfranco, was how things were supposed to be.

  He even got a B− in literature, though he didn’t think he had much of a future as a poet. Italian would just have to go on making do with Dante. Gianfranco Mazzilli had other things on his plate.

  First among those other things was taking his report card home and showing it off. He walked back with Annarita and showed it to her. “Good for you, Gianfranco,” she said, really sounding pleased. “You mother and father will be happy for you.”

  “I know you’ve got a better one,” he said.

  “So what?” she answered. “You haven’t even been interested till now. It’s hard to do good work if you don’t care.”

  “Sì,” he said, and left it right there. Had he said anything more, he might have started babbling out thanks. Annarita understood! He hadn’t thought anybody in the world did. In that glowing moment, he wasn’t far from being in love.

  And what would she do if he said something like that? She wouldn’t laugh in his face—she was too nice. But she wouldn’t take him seriously, either. He didn’t feel like listening to jokes, even from Annarita, so he kept his mouth shut.

  When he got up to the apartment, his mother was out shopping and his father hadn’t come home yet. That left him all dressed up with no place to go. Like an atheist at his own funeral, he thought. Even with a good report card, he didn’t feel like starting in on his homework right away.

  He turned on the TV. He’d always taken it for granted before. Now he saw that the picture wasn’t nearly so sharp as the one on the screen of Eduardo’s impossible handheld computer. The colors weren’t so bright and vivid, either. Gianfranco wanted a machine like that. He wanted a world where everybody used a machine like that.

  He had … this. Four channels showed different flavors of propaganda. The news told him how the goals for the twenty-third Five-Year Plan were being exceeded. The goals for the other Five-Year Plans had all been exceeded, too. So why weren’t things better?

  On another channel, a Russian and an Italian were hunting down an American spy. If a villain wasn’t a Nazi, he was bound to be an American. Sometimes he was an American who wanted to bring back the Nazis. These days, the USA was harmless. It did what the USSR told it to do. If it didn’t, it suffered. Sometimes it suffered anyway, just because it had been the Soviet Union’s most dangerous rival before the Russians won the Cold War.

  Eduardo said the USA was top dog where he came from. Gianfranco wondered what that was like. Were all the villains on American TV Russians? The ones who weren’t Nazis, anyhow? He wouldn’t have been surprised.

  But Eduardo also said the USA was where the idea for computers came from. He said some of the games The Gladiator sold—had sold—came from there. That made Gianfranco think better of it than he would have otherwise.

  The door opened. In came his father, with a heavy briefcase. “Buon giorno, Father,” Gianfranco said. “How are you?”

  “Tired,” his father answered. “Some of the people in the provincial planning administration are donkeys. Real donkeys. They should have reins and harness, so they could haul bread carts around. We’d get some use out of them that way.” He sank into a chair with a martyred sigh.

  He came home complaining about the people he worked with maybe one day in three. “Guess what?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” his father said. “Will you fetch me a bottle of beer?”

  “Sure.” Gianfranco brought him one from the refrigerator. Then he said, “Guess what?” again.

  His father drank half the bottle at one long, blissful pull. “Ah!” he said. “That’s good. Takes the edge off the day—know what I mean?”

  “I suppose.” Gianfranco liked wine much better than beer. He tried once more: “Guess what?”

  His father paused with the beer bottle halfway to his mouth. “What?” he said at last, and the bottle finished the journey.

  “I got second honors,” Gianfranco said.

  “No kidding?” That made his father stop without emptying the beer. “Not bad, kid, not bad.” Then he said what Gianfranco knew what he would say: “I bet Annarita made first.”

  “She did.” Gianfranco couldn’t very well deny it, not when it was true. “She always does. Some people are like that.”

  “Greasy grinds.” But his father caught
himself. “Can’t say Annarita’s one of those. She’s smart, but she’s not stuck-up about it.” He did kill the beer then, and set the bottle on the little table next to his chair. “But you got second, eh? How about that? Your first time. Way to go.”

  “Grazie,” Gianfranco said.

  The way his father looked at the beer bottle, he was thinking about having another one. But he didn’t get up, and he didn’t send Gianfranco after it, either. “What took you so long?” he asked. “I didn’t think you’d ever do it. I didn’t think you cared enough.”

  “Up till this semester, I didn’t,” Gianfranco said. “Things seemed to get more interesting, though, so I guess I worked harder.”

  “Well, a little hard work never hurt anybody much,” his father said.

  Maybe that was a joke. Then again, maybe it wasn’t. That joke about pretending to work and pretending to get paid ran through Gianfranco’s mind. Workers got money, but a lot of the time money couldn’t buy what they wanted. When the wait for things like TVs and cars and apartments was so long, getting excited about money wasn’t easy. Getting excited about work wasn’t easy, either.

  His father proved as much, saying, “Sometimes I don’t know why I bother getting upset with those asini. How much will it matter ten years from now? How much will it matter ten days from now?”

  Before Gianfranco could answer, his mother walked in. “They had the outfit I wanted in the window at three different shops,” she said unhappily. “But when I went in, two were sold out and it was a two months’ wait at the third one. Sometimes I think you can only buy things with a prescription.”

  “If that were so, the Crosettis would have more, and they don’t,” his father said. “Guess what, though?”

  “What?” his mother asked. Only one try—Gianfranco was jealous.

  His father pointed at him. “Second honors.”

  “Gianfranco?” His mother’s eyes went big and round. She couldn’t have been more surprised had his father said he’d been kidnapped by green men from outer space. “How about that?”

  “Not bad, eh?” his father said. “I don’t think he takes after either one of us. Must be the milkman.”

  “Oh, stop that, you—man, you,” his mother said. “Besides, when did this building ever have a milkman? Not since before we lived here, that’s for sure.”

  “All right. The plumber, then,” his father said.

  His mother made as if to throw her purse at his father. She seemed satisfied when he ducked. Then she turned back to Gianfranco. “So why didn’t you do this a long time ago? The Crosetti girl always does, regular as clockwork.”

  There it was again, thrown in his face in a different way. It would have made him angrier if he hadn’t known ahead of time it was coming. He shrugged. “I don’t know. Things seem more interesting now.”

  “Annarita’s smart. Maybe he thinks he has to be smart, too, if he wants to keep taking her out.” His mother talked about him as if he weren’t there. That did make him mad.

  “Whatever works,” his father said. Then he did the same thing: “That can’t be all of it, though. The grades are for more time than when he started going out with her.”

  “Is there anything else you want to say about me?” Gianfranco asked. “Do you want to talk about my shoes, maybe? Or this cut I got shaving my chin?”

  “No, I don’t think we need to worry about those.” His father didn’t even notice the sarcasm, which only ticked him off worse. “And your beard isn’t as heavy as mine, I don’t think, so you won’t cut yourself very often.”

  “My father and my brother—your Uncle Luigi, Gianfranco—only have to shave maybe once every other day,” his mother said, so she didn’t get it, either. Gianfranco wondered how he’d ended up stuck with such totally normal parents. It didn’t seem fair, not when he prided himself on being strange.

  “You’ll have to tell that Silvio. He’ll be happy for you,” his father said. “He looks like the kind who got high marks in school.”

  “Much good it did him,” his mother said. “Here he is, scrounging off of family instead of going out and finding work for himself.”

  “Sì.” His father nodded. “He doesn’t go anywhere, does he? He couldn’t stick any closer to the Crosettis’ flat if the Security Police were waiting for him outside.”

  He was joking. Gianfranco understood that, but only after a split second of something worse than alarm. He felt as if someone dropped a big icicle down the back of his shirt. The laugh he managed sounded hollow in his own ears, and his smile must have looked pasted on. But his parents didn’t notice anything wrong. Most of the time, they just saw what they expected to see.

  He often got angry at them for not paying more attention to him. Every once in a while, though, that was nothing but good luck.

  He did mention his second honors at dinner, but only after his mother poked him in the ribs three different times. “Yes, Annarita already told us,” her father said. “Good for you. Sooner or later, studying usually pays off. Sometimes it’s so much later that it hardly seems worth it at the time, though. I can’t say anything different.”

  A lot of families would have thrown Annarita’s first honors back in the Mazzillis’ faces like a grenade. None of the Crosettis said a word. To listen to them, she might have earned ordinary marks, not outstanding ones. In their own quiet way, they had style.

  “Bravo, Gianfranco!” Eduardo—“Cousin Silvio”—said. “Good grades impress people—more than they should sometimes, but they do.”

  Is that true in his home timeline, too? Gianfranco wondered. Too bad if it is. Because the home timeline was the source of the games and books and ideas he liked so much, he thought everything about it should be perfect.

  He got a chance to talk with Eduardo about that a couple of days later. “No, no, no.” Eduardo shook his head. “Don’t idealize us. If you think you’ve found paradise anywhere, you’re bound to be wrong. That’s one of the things that’s wrong with Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. The proletariat isn’t made up of nothing but saints, and capitalists aren’t all devils.”

  Gianfranco felt a delicious thrill at hearing him say anything was wrong with the world’s leading—the world’s only legal—ideology. He supposed a priest hearing clever talk of heresy might have felt the same way. Like any Communist state, the Italian People’s Republic glorified the workers. It said so, loudly, whenever it got the chance—especially on May Day every year. But the apartments the proletariat lived in made Gianfranco’s seem a palace by comparison.

  He knew hypocrisy when he saw and heard it. Some things, though, he didn’t know. Shyly, he asked, “What are capitalists like? Do they really think of nothing but money? Do they really want to exploit their workers as much as they can?”

  “Some of them do think about nothing but money,” Eduardo answered, which disappointed him. “You need to think about money. And some of them would exploit workers as much as they could. That’s why you have taxes, so some of the money capitalists make helps everybody. And that’s why you have labor unions and you have laws regulating what corporations can do. The idea isn’t to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. It’s to keep the goose healthy and get some of the gold.”

  “How do we get capitalists here, then?” Gianfranco found something else to ask: “How do we do it without making the government crack down, the way it did on you?”

  “Good question. If there are no other good questions, class is dismissed,” Eduardo said.

  “Come on!” Gianfranco yelped.

  “I don’t know how you do that. Nobody in the home timeline knows. That’s why we were trying the shops. They didn’t work—or maybe they worked too well,” Eduardo said. “However you do it, it’ll have to be by stealth. That seems plain.”

  “Stealth? What do you mean?”

  “People will have to start buying and selling and investing without realizing it’s capitalism. You’d have to call it something else, something that sounds properly Communist
. Stakhanovite economic effort, maybe. The idea of working harder than other people doesn’t go away—it just gets changed around.”

  “It sure does,” Gianfranco said. “Stakhanovites aren’t supposed to work for themselves, though. They work for the state.”

  “But they can get rewarded for it,” Eduardo said. “That’s the point. If the state thinks your work toward getting rich will help it, it won’t get in the way—except states always get in the way some, because they’re like that.”

  “Hang on.” Gianfranco raised a warning hand. “A minute ago, you said states needed laws to keep capitalists from exploiting workers. Now you say states get in the way. You can’t have it both ways.”

  “Sure you can—why not?” Eduardo answered. “You need some laws, and ways to enforce them. That’s why there are states in the first place. Otherwise, the strong and the rich would oppress the weak and the poor. But if you have too many laws and too many taxes, who’s strong and rich then? The state is. And it oppresses everybody. Does that sound familiar?”

  “Oh, maybe a little,” Gianfranco allowed.

  Eduardo laughed. “I thought it might. The question is, what kind of laws do you really need? Drawing the line is what politics ought to be all about, if you ask me.”

  Gianfranco had been asking him. His own political ideas were murky before he started going to The Gladiator. He largely accepted the system he was born into. Why not? It was all he knew, and his father had done well under it.

  But now he saw some reasons why not. He hadn’t missed freedom because he hadn’t known there was anything to miss. Talking with Eduardo was like looking at another world. Just like that, he thought. And, no matter how Eduardo downplayed it, Gianfranco was convinced it was a better world.

  How could it be anything else? People from Eduardo’s home timeline knew how to come here. The cleverest scientists in this whole world had no idea any others lay off to the side, as it were. That right there said everything that needed saying about who knew more.

  And Eduardo’s computer put all the electronics in this whole world to shame. People here wouldn’t be able to make anything so small yet powerful for a hundred years—if they ever figured out how. And even if they did, chances were the government wouldn’t let them build the machine.