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Authors: Harry Turtledove

BOOK: The Gladiator
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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.
If everybody had a computer like that, what would stop people from hooking all their computers together? They'd be able to figure out in an instant if somebody in the government was lying. And people in the government lied all the time. All those Five-Year Plans got overfulfilled again and again, yet somehow life never looked any better. The state didn't wither away—it got stronger. And anyone who said out loud that the Emperor had no clothes discovered that, while the Emperor might be naked, he did have the Security Police.

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