The Gladiator

by Harry Turtledove

  “What on earth is The Gladiator?” the Russian teacher said. “There haven’t been any gladiators in Milan for almost two thousand years.”

  The angry student rolled his eyes. Several others in the classroom whispered behind their hands. Annarita didn’t, but her heart beat faster. So Abbaticchio’s father was a big shot in the Security Police, was he? If he found out about Eduardo … Cousin Silvio, she told herself fiercely. He’s Cousin Silvio.

  No matter how Abbaticchio blustered, Comrade Montefusco wouldn’t change his grade. When the bell rang at the end of the shortened period, Abbaticchio stormed out of the classroom. Some of the things he said would have got him suspended, or maybe expelled, any other time. Students had some license on Judgment Day. The authorities knew the kind of pressure they were under. Did they have that much license? Annarita wouldn’t have thought so, but the teacher didn’t call Abbaticchio on it.

  Now all I need is for him to get together with Maria Tenace, Annarita thought. That would really make a mess of things, wouldn’t it? She had no idea if they knew each other. She didn’t keep track of who their friends were. She wouldn’t have guessed either one of them had any friends.

  She sighed. All she could do was try not to draw attention to herself. Usually, that was easy for her. Now, when she needed it to be easy, it wasn’t. How unfair was that?

  She didn’t quite get straight A’s. Her dialectics teacher didn’t believe in giving them. People said Karl Marx himself couldn’t get an A in that class. People also said the teacher had given an A once, and the girl who got it fainted and fell over and split her forehead open. Annarita didn’t believe that. As far as she could tell, the teacher had always been the way he was. She wasn’t so sure about Marx.

  Other than the dialectics class, she made a clean sweep. Even with a B+ there, her grades were plenty good enough for first honors again. She wondered how Gianfranco was doing. She hoped he’d held on to second honors. His folks would be on him something fierce if he didn’t. She would be disappointed herself if he didn’t, too. One corner of her mouth quirked up. That probably mattered more to him than all the yelling in the world from his parents would.

  And what he thought about the things she did mattered to her, too. A year earlier, it wouldn’t have. They’d just been a couple of people kind of stuck with each other because of their living arrangements. I didn’t think I’d have a boyfriend a year younger than I am went through her mind.

  She wondered how long he would stay her boyfriend. Till they stopped getting along, she supposed. Right now, everything seemed fine. Why borrow trouble?

  Here he came. He was grinning, which was a good sign. Annarita thought it was safe to ask, “Did you?”

  “You’d better believe it!” he answered, and waved his report card like a flag. “I should have started busting my hump sooner. I might have got firsts like you … . You did, right?”

  “Sì.” She felt better about admitting it than she would have if he hadn’t made seconds. It was easy this way. “Maybe you will be up there too next year.”

  “Hope so,” Gianfranco said. “I think I can do it. Now the question is whether I’ll kick myself in the rear and make myself do it.”

  “You did it over the last couple of grading periods this time,” Annarita said. “You’ll start fresh next year, so if you push hard right from the start … .”

  “If,” he agreed. “Well, I’ll give it my best shot and see what happens, that’s all.” He waved the report card again, and almost hit somebody in the face with it. “Now I want to go home and show this off.”

  “I don’t blame you.” Annarita was proud of him, but she didn’t want to come right out and say so. It would make him feel he was listening to his mother.

  When they got back to the apartment building, a truck was parked in front of it, two wheels on the street, the other two on the sidewalk. That was illegal, of course, but people did it all the time. What was more surprising was the word painted in big green letters on the truck’s door: REPAIRS.

  Annarita and Gianfranco looked at each other. “You don’t suppose—?” Gianfranco sounded like someone in whom hope had just flowered against all odds.

  “Let’s go look!” Annarita said. They hurried into the lobby together.

  Sure enough, the elevator door was open. Annarita couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen that. A man in coveralls and a cap and wearing a fat belt full of tools came out of the elevator car. Another man in the same getup stayed in there working.

  “Are you really going to fix it?” Gianfranco might have been an acolyte in church witnessing a miracle.

  “Better believe it, kid.” The man who’d come out of the elevator paused to light a cigar and puff smoke towards Annarita and Gianfranco. She coughed—the cigar was vile. The repairman went on, “Nothing real big wrong with it. Somebody could’ve got it working a long time ago.”

  “How come nobody did, then?” Annarita asked.

  He shrugged. “Beats me. Probably on account of nobody bothered to look and see how hard it’d be. Probably on account of nobody figured he’d make any money fixing it.”

  “But you will?” Annarita said.

  “I … sure will.” Plainly, the repairman almost said something more pungent. “I wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t some loot in it for me and Giulio. Isn’t that right, Giulio?” This time, he blew a noxious cloud toward the other workman.

  “Isn’t what right?” Giulio asked, looking up from whatever he was doing inside the elevator car.

  “We wouldn’t be doing this if they weren’t paying us good money.”

  “What? You think I’m dumb or something? Of course not,” Giulio said.

  “You guys sound like capitalists,” Gianfranco said.

  He meant it as a compliment. Annarita knew that. She wasn’t sure the repairman would. The cigar twitched in the man’s mouth. But all he said was, “Never yet been anybody born who was allergic to cash.” He turned again. “Isn’t that right, Giulio?”

  “I dunno, Rocco,” Giulio said. “I know I’m not.”

  “I wouldn’t be allergic to riding the elevator instead of climbing stairs every time I need to go to the apartment,” Annarita said.

  “Won’t be long,” said the man with the cigar—Rocco.

  She and Gianfranco still had to climb the stairs now. The trudge seemed twice as long as usual because soon she wouldn’t have to make it any more. Halfway up, Gianfranco said, “They really did sound like capitalists. They only seemed to care about making a profit for their work.”

  “Even if that is all they care about, you don’t expect them to come right out and admit it, do you?” Annarita was surprised they’d come so close. “It would be like admitting you eat with your fingers or pick your nose or something.”

  “I suppose.” Gianfranco climbed a few more steps. Then he turned to her and said, “It shouldn’t be like that, you know? It’s not like that in the game. You want to make as much money as you can there.”

  “That’s a game,” Annarita said gently. “This is life. It’s not the same thing, and you’ll get in trouble—you’ll get everybody in trouble—if you think it is.” The game could suck you in. Even she knew that, and she played much more casually than Gianfranco did. But he had to remember what was real and what wasn’t.

  With an impatient gesture, he showed he did. “I know, I know. Those guys down there didn’t exactly deny they were doing it for the money.”

  “No, they didn’t.” Annarita didn’t say that showed what a crude pair they were. To her, it was obvious. It should have been obvious to Gianfranco, too. No doubt it would have been if the game didn’t make it hard for him to think straight.

  The game. The game from another world. The game from a world where capitalism worked—by the things Eduardo said and by the things he had, it worked better than Communism did. The game from a world where Communism lay on—what was Marx’s phrase?—the ash-heap of history, that was it. The game from a world with n
o Security Police. No wonder it made Gianfranco think dangerous thoughts. No wonder it made him think political thoughts, economic thoughts.

  Annarita laughed at herself. As if political and economic thoughts weren’t dangerous by definition!

  “What’s funny?” Gianfranco asked, so she must have snorted out loud. She told him. He thought about it for two or three steps. Then he said, “Ideas like that shouldn’t be dangerous. That’s the point, right?—to make it so they aren’t dangerous any more.”

  “Sì, that’s the point,” Annarita said. “The other point is, it hasn’t happened yet, and it won’t happen any time soon.”

  “I know,” he said again, and gave her a crooked grin. “I won’t slip up, Annarita. Honest, I won’t.”

  “I didn’t think you would,” Annarita answered, which was … close enough to true that she didn’t feel too much like a liar saying it.

  Mechanical noises came from the elevator shaft when she and Gianfranco walked past it. They looked at it. Annarita saw something close to awe on Gianfranco’s face. Her own probably held the same expression. “Wow!” he said. “They really are fixing it.”

  “I don’t remember the last time it worked,” Annarita said. “Do you?”

  He shook his head. “Not really. I was a lot smaller than I am now—I know that. I remember how hard climbing all those stairs seemed then. Now I’m used to it. But I could get used to riding the elevator real quick, I bet.”

  “Me, too.” Annarita stopped at the door to her apartment. “See you at dinner. And congratulations again!”

  “Grazie!” Gianfranco grinned at her. “I only get second-class congratulations. You get first.”

  “Next year,” she said. She’d got first honors plenty of times before, too. They didn’t seem such a big deal to her. For Gianfranco to earn second honors—especially on year-end grades—was further out of the ordinary.

  Eduardo was reading the newspaper when she came in. “Ciao,” he said. “How did you do?”

  “Pretty well,” she answered. “I didn’t get the grade in dialectics, though. I don’t know what kind of hoop I was supposed to jump through. Whatever it was, I didn’t.”

  “Too bad.” He shook his head in sympathy. “There’s always somebody like that.”

  “Even in your perfect home timeline?” Annarita teased.

  “It’s not perfect. All kinds of things wrong there. Our troubles are different from yours, but we’ve still got ’em. Some of them, I guess you say, are the troubles that go with too much freedom,” Eduardo answered.

  “How can you have too much freedom?” Annarita asked. “Don’t you just do whatever you want then?”

  “Sure. I mean, that’s what you do, sì, but it’s not always so simple. If what I’m doing makes me happy but bothers other people, where do you draw the line? How much should the state do to take care of poor people and people who don’t want to work? Countries all find different answers.”

  “Different how?”

  “Well, in Italy—in most of Europe—people pay more taxes, and the countries do more for their people who don’t have so much. In America, taxes are lower, but the state does less to take care of you. If you make it in America, you can make it bigger than you can on this side of the Atlantic. If you don’t, you’ll have a harder time than you would here.”

  “Which is better?” Annarita asked.

  “Depends on who’s answering,” Eduardo said, which struck her as an honest reply. “Me, I’m an Italian, and I think our way works pretty well. But the Americans like what they do, too. If they didn’t, they’d change it.”

  “Don’t they make everybody do things their way, like the Russians here?”

  He shook his head. “They do throw their weight around, but not like that. Most of the time, anyway.”

  She wondered how big an exception came with that handful of words. But his world and hers had been different—evidently, very different—for a century and a half. She couldn’t expect him to fill her in on all that history in one lump. She did ask, “So you have teachers who think they’re little tin gods, too?”

  “You’d better believe it,” he answered. “Every alternate that has teachers has some like that. They’ve got the power, and the students don’t, and they enjoy rubbing it in. Human nature doesn’t change from one alternate to another. The way it comes out changes because of religion and technology and culture, but people are still pretty much people.” He winked at her. “I’m a people, aren’t I?”

  “I thought so, till now,” she answered tartly, and he laughed. She went on, “This is a world—an alternate—where Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism came out on top.”

  “That’s right.” Eduardo nodded. “And anybody who can say ‘Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism’ and make it sound natural the way you do has a pretty good handle on the dialectic, no matter what your dumb teacher thinks.”

  Annarita smiled, but she continued with her own train of thought: “And you come from an alternate where capitalism won.”

  He nodded again. “That’s me.”

  “Are there … alternates where the Fascists won?” Eduardo nodded one more time. “Yes, and they’re just as bad as you’d think they would be. They’re even worse than this one.”

  The way he said it was like a fist in the stomach. “Are we really that bad?” Annarita asked in a small voice. Of course she took the only world she knew for granted—how could she do anything else?

  “Well … You’re not so good, not when it comes to treating people the way you ought to,” Eduardo answered. “But I’ll tell you what the difference is. If somebody here gets out of line, he goes to a camp. If they decide to kill him later, it’s just part of doing business, and nobody gets excited about it. In the Fascist alternates, he still goes to a camp. But if they kill him there, they enjoy it.”

  “Oh.” Annarita winced. That got the message across, all right. “And what about in your home timeline?” she asked.

  “We don’t have camps for people who commit political crimes,” Eduardo said. “We don’t send important people who commit political crimes to psychiatric hospitals, either. We don’t really even arrest people for political crimes, not the way you do here. We don’t in Europe and America, anyway—not even in Russia any more, not very much. Asia, Africa, sometimes South America … Things are different there. We could be better, heaven knows. But going out to the alternates has shown us we could be worse, too.”

  “They don’t have political arrests in the Soviet Union?” More than anything else, that told Annarita how different from her world the home timeline was.

  But she’d forgotten something. “No, in Russia, I said,” Eduardo answered. “There is no Soviet Union in the home timeline, remember? It broke up in … 1991? Or was it 1992? I don’t remember which—it’s only a question on a history test for us, not something that really matters any more. Russia and Belarus got together for a while, but then they separated again.”

  “Bozhemoi!” Annarita exclaimed. Somehow, only Russian fit the moment. She tried to picture a world without the USSR. Even the effort made her dizzy. It was like trying to imagine Milan without the rivalry between AC Milan and Inter Milan, the two great soccer clubs.

  “I told you—it’s not the same place. It’s not the same at all,” Eduardo said—in Russian much more fluent than hers.

  She gaped at him. “I didn’t know you spoke Russian,” she said in that language, pronouncing it as carefully as she could.

  “Well, I do,” he answered, dropping back into Italian. “Might come in handy here—you never can tell—so I learned it. We have ways of doing that in nothing flat.” He snapped his fingers.

  “I wish we did!” Annarita thought of all the time she’d spent sitting in class and doing homework and memorizing vocabulary and declensions and conjugations. She thought of all the time she still needed to put in. Learning a language in nothing flat seemed like a party trick—one she didn’t know.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, plainly
guessing what was on her mind. “Things kind of, well, stagnated here once the competition with capitalism ended.”

  Banging noises from outside and then a smoother mechanical hum made them both turn their heads. “At least we’ve finally got the miserable elevator fixed,” Annarita said. That didn’t seem much next to picking up Russian with pills or however Eduardo did it, but it was better than nothing.

  His smile said he understood what that finally meant. Anyone who’d grown up in the Italian People’s Republic would have, of course. But Eduardo, despite speaking perfect Milanese Italian, was in some ways more foreign than a man from Mongolia. Still, he had the right amount of sympathy in his voice as he asked, “How long has it been out?”

  “I don’t remember exactly—it’s been that long,” Annarita said. “Years. Years and years. Now we won’t have to clump up and down all those times every day.”

  “Good for you,” he said, and then, “Sometimes, in the home timeline, people climb stairs so they can get exercise.”

  Annarita thought about that for a little while. “Maybe it’s different if you don’t have to do it,” she said at last, which was the kindest thing she could come up with.

  Her father walked into the apartment. He was grinning. “Ciao,” he said. “I just rode the elevator up here. How about that?”

  “Good for you!” Annarita said. She shot Eduardo a glance. Exercise, indeed! He didn’t say a word.

  Gianfranco wanted to play Rails across Europe all through the break between school years. That didn’t thrill Annarita. He needed a little longer than he might have to realize it didn’t. And he needed longer still to see that even Eduardo might rather have been doing something else.

  “I thought you enjoyed it,” Gianfranco said reproachfully when the light dawned at last.

  “Well, I do … some,” Eduardo answered. “But we brought the games here as a means to an end. We wanted to use them to get people in this alternate to think different. They aren’t an end in themselves, not for us.”