The Gladiator (15 page)

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Authors: Harry Turtledove

BOOK: The Gladiator
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“Well, what if I was?” Gianfranco said. “He likes to talk, you know.”
He does not!
But the hot retort never came out. If Annarita said something like that, Gianfranco would be sure she was sweet on Eduardo. And she wasn't, not really. So all she did say was, “What else were you talking about?”
“Oh, stuff,” Gianfranco answered vaguely. Annarita wanted to clout him. She kept quiet and waited instead. It wasn't easy, but she did it. When Gianfranco spoke again, a few steps later, he sounded almost like a gruff old man: “He said he wasn't going to run off to Sicily with you.”
“I should hope not!” Annarita exclaimed. “It's too hot down there in the summertime, and I wouldn't want to have to try to understand that funny dialect.” She paused, too. “I suppose they think we talk funny, too.”
“Wouldn't be surprised.” Gianfranco took a deep breath. He seemed to look every which way but right at her. “Maybe we could go to a movie or something one of these days before too long.”
“Maybe we could,” Annarita said. Nothing wrong with a movie. “It might be fun.”
Gianfranco lit up like a neon sign. He hopped in the air. He seemed so happy, Annarita wondered if he would come down. He did, of course. “Wonderful!” he said. “How about Friday night?”
“All right,” Annarita answered, and he lit up all over again. He didn't seem so worried about freedom and overthrowing the Italian People's Republic any more. He didn't seem so worried about Eduardo, either, which was also good.
Would he have blamed Eduardo if Annarita told him she didn't want to go out with him? She hoped she hadn't said yes to keep him from blaming Eduardo. That was no reason to go to a movie with somebody.
What would I have done if Eduardo asked me?
she wondered. After a moment, she shrugged. She didn't know, and she didn't seem likely to find out, either. Eduardo made a point—even stretched a point—of being a gentleman. And he was playing the role of her cousin.
Was that just as well, or was it a shame?
Before she could come close to finding an answer, they got to Hoxha Polytechnic. Then she had to worry about Russian prepositions instead. At least with Russian prepositions, you knew when you were right and when you were wrong. This other stuff? It wasn't nearly so obvious.
 
 
Gianfranco wanted to use the bathroom mirror to comb his hair. He'd already used it twice, but that didn't matter to him. He wanted to look perfect, or as close to perfect as he could. He was unhappily aware of the distance between the one and the other.
He couldn't use the bathroom right now because Annarita
was in it. His mother saw his glance toward the door and smiled at him. “She'll be out soon,” she said. “She wants to look nice for you. That's good.”
“Is it? I guess so.” To Gianfranco, Annarita already looked nice. Why did she need to do anything more?
But when she came out, she looked nicer. Gianfranco couldn't have said how, but she did. He ducked in there, ran the comb through his hair again, and wished he wouldn't have picked this exact moment to get a zit on his chin. He couldn't do much about that, though.
He stuck the comb in his pocket and went out again. “Shall we go?” he said, trying to sound like someone who did this all the time.
“Sure.” Annarita seemed to take it for granted. Maybe that would help him do the same. He could hope so, anyway.
“Have fun, you two.” Eduardo sounded as if he meant it. Gianfranco hoped he did.
“
Grazie
, Cousin Silvio,” Annarita said.
She and Gianfranco walked down the stairs together. He wondered if his feet were touching the ground. When they got to the bottom, Annarita said, “It would be nice if the elevator worked. Coming down is easy, but going back up, especially when you're tired … .” She shook her head.
“If somebody could make a nice profit fixing elevators, it would have been fixed a long time ago,” Gianfranco said.
She looked at him as if he'd just told a dirty joke. His ears got hot. Profit was evil—everybody learned that in school. But then she sighed. She looked around to make sure no one could overhear, then said, “Cousin Silvio tells me the same thing. It still feels wrong, though—know what I mean?”
“
Sì
,” he answered. “But what we've got doesn't work the
way it's supposed to. If it did, the elevator would run. So shouldn't we think differently?”
“I don't know if we should think that different,” Annarita said.
“Why not?” he asked.
She gave a perfectly practical answer: “Because we'll get in trouble with the Security Police if we make too much noise about profit. Look what happened to The Gladiator.”
“Somebody ought to do something about the Security Police,” Gianfranco said. “They just hold us back.”
Annarita stopped, right there outside the apartment building. “If you keep talking like that, I'm going back upstairs. It's not safe to be around you. It's not safe to be anywhere near you. Cut it out, all right?”
He wished he could tell her she was worrying too much. He wished he could, but he knew he couldn't. “All right,” he said meekly. “Let's go watch the movie.”
“That's more like it,” Annarita said. “This other stuff … Do you
want
to end up a zek in a camp?”
There shouldn't be zeks. There shouldn't be camps
. If Gianfranco said that, he'd just get in more trouble with Annarita, no matter how true it was. But people who couldn't learn to keep their mouths shut were the kind who did end up in camps. So all he said was, “No,” which was also true. Annarita nodded. Not only was it true, it was the right answer—not always the same thing.
The theater was about three blocks from their apartment building. It was showing a remake of the great early Soviet film,
Battleship Potemkin
. Gianfranco had seen the black-and-white original—with Italian subtitles—in his history class. So had almost everybody. He knew Annarita had. Even though it was
more than 150 years old, with acting ridiculously over the top, it still had the power of a punch in the face.
He bought tickets, then sodas and roasted chestnuts when he went inside. When he and Annarita sat down, other people nearby were already crunching away. “Do you think it will be as good as the first one?” he asked her—that was a safe question.
“Remakes hardly ever are,” she said. “People who do something the first time really mean it. The ones who do remakes are just copycats.”
Gianfranco thought about that for a little while, then nodded. “You say interesting things, you know?” he said.
She shrugged. The house lights dimmed. The newsreel came on. Halfway through a story about a dam going up in South America (and how many of the laborers building it were zeks?), something went wrong with the projector. The house lights came up again. “One moment, please!” someone called from the projectionist's booth.
That moment stretched and stretched. People got restless. “Fix it, you bums!” a man with a deep voice yelled.
“Don't you know how to fix it?” somebody else said. No one from up in the booth answered. Gianfranco feared that meant nobody up there did know.
After a few minutes where nothing happened, a wit sang out: “You must be the jerks who worked on my car!” He won a laugh.
The house lights went down again. Sarcastic cheers rose. The newsreel started once more—upside down. Billions of liters of water seemed ready to spill out from behind the dam. The audience booed and jeered. The newsreel stopped. The lights brightened. “Sorry about that!” a man called from the booth. People went on booing.
At last, after half an hour or so, they got it right and finished
the newsreel. It probably got more applause at that theater than anywhere else in Italy. The remake of
Battleship Potemkin
started. It was a Russian film dubbed into Italian. All the effects were bigger and fancier than the ones in the original. It was in color. The actors didn't ham it up. It should have been better than Eisenstein's version, but Gianfranco found himself yawning, not getting excited.
“You're right,” he whispered to Annarita. “It's no big deal.”
“Well, so what?” she whispered back. “We got to watch an upside-down newsreel instead. That's more interesting than the movie would have been even if it were good.”
She was right again. Gianfranco wouldn't have thought of it like that, but he knew the truth when he heard it. He stopped being so disappointed in
Battleship Potemkin
and settled down to watch it—and to listen to it. All the boring speeches about the glorious Soviet Revolution, all the propaganda about the wicked Russian landowners and capitalists … Everything seemed different to him now that he knew Eduardo.
He wasn't the only one yawning. People had a lot of practice tuning out propaganda. But being bored didn't seem enough. What would happen if he yelled,
We'd be better off if the Revolution failed!
?
That was a dumb question. He knew what would happen. They'd grab him and haul him off to a camp. His father would get in trouble, too, for raising a subversive son. However much he wanted to come out and tell the truth, the price would be too high to pay.
Can we ever change things, then?
he wondered. If they were ever going to,
somebody
would have to stand up and tell the government it was wrong. Somebody, yes, but who? Who would be that brave? Gianfranco wished he knew.
“Did you have a good time at the movie?” Eduardo asked after Annarita came back to her apartment.
“Well, the remake wasn't anything much, but we had fun anyway.” She told him about the foul-up with the newsreel.
“That's pretty good,” he said, smiling. “Or pretty bad, depending on how you look at things. They make movies over again in the home timeline, too, and most of the time you wish they didn't.”
“Why do they, then?” Annarita said. “If you're so free, why don't you make new things all the time?”
“Because doing old, familiar ones over again makes the studios money,” Eduardo answered.
Annarita's mouth twisted. “Profit doesn't sound so wonderful, then.”
“It's not perfect. Nothing's perfect, far as I can see,” Eduardo said. “But it works better than this—most of the time, anyhow.”
“Have they remade
Battleship Potemkin
in the, uh, home timeline?” Annarita asked. Then another question occurred to her: “Do you even have
Battleship Potemkin
there?”
“We've got the original,
sì
,” Eduardo replied. “It dates from before the breakpoint. Up till then, everything's the same in
both alternates. But here, the Soviet Union won the Cold War. There, the United States did. The United States is still the strongest country in the home timeline. It throws its weight around sometimes, but it doesn't sit on everybody else all the time the way the USSR does here.”
Annarita tried to imagine a world that had branched off from hers somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century. Why did the two alternates separate? Somebody decided something one way here, a different way over there. And this alternate turned out ordinary, and in that one … . In that one, they had computers that fit in your pocket. They had a way to travel between alternates.
They had freedom, too. Annarita had hardly known she missed it till Eduardo's arrival made her think about it. She didn't want to run up barricades and start an uprising the way Gianfranco seemed to, but she could tell what wasn't there and should have been.
“And yes, they did make
Potemkin
again in the home timeline,” Eduardo said. “This was before I was born, you understand. The remake sank like a rock. When people watch now, they watch the original.”
“In theaters, you mean,” Annarita said.
“Well, there, too,” Eduardo said. “But we can get recorded disks with movies on them and watch on our TVs. Or we can pay a little and download the films from the Net and watch them on our computers.”
“You showed me that before,” Annarita said. “I still don't see how you can put a whole movie, let alone lots of movies, on a little thing like the one in your pocket.”
He grinned at her. “Easy as pie. You could do it here, too—
not as well, but you could. You know enough. Your governments won't let you, though. Anything that spreads information around so easily is dangerous to them.”
Annarita found herself nodding. In a country that registered typewriters like guns and kept computers under lock and key for the trusted elite, the idea that everybody could own a computer and use it all kinds of ways had to seem like anarchy loosed upon the world. But that wasn't the main thing on her mind. “You've just let me see little bits of the movies from your home timeline, to show that they weren't from here,” she said. “Could I watch a whole one?”
“I'm supposed to tell you no,” he answered. “You're not supposed to know what things are like there. But sometimes you've got to bend the rules. And so …” He pulled the little box from his pocket and told it to display its screen. Annarita had to lean forward to see well. It wasn't like watching a movie in the theater, or even on TV.
The movie was called
The Incredibles
. It wasn't like anything Annarita had ever seen before, or even imagined. It wasn't live action, but it wasn't exactly a cartoon, either. “How do they do that?” she asked partway through.
“More computers,” Eduardo said. “This one's ninety years old. It's a classic, sure, but they can do a lot more now.”
She wasn't fussy.
The Incredibles
might seem old-fashioned to him, but it was thousands of kilometers ahead of anything people here were doing. And it was a good movie, no matter how they did it. It was funny, and the plot made sense. The writers didn't lose track of details, the way they did too often here.
When Annarita remarked on that, Eduardo nodded. “It
happens in the home timeline, too. Some people are stupid. Some people are lazy. Some are greedy, and out for quick money. But I bet it happens more here, because there's less competition. Bad movies here don't bomb. They just bore people over and over again.”
“Well, you're right.” Annarita remembered how many times she'd seen some movies. The authorities put them out there, and they didn't put anything else out there opposite them. If you wanted to go to a movie, you went to one of them. “They call them classics.”
“That would be fine if they really were,” Eduardo said. “The original
Battleship Potemkin
is—no arguments. But a lot of them are just turkeys from the Propaganda Ministry.”
“Turkeys?” Annarita needed a second to figure that out. Maybe it was slang in his home timeline, but it wasn't here. When she got it, she laughed. “You know what else was amazing in
The Incredibles
?”
“No, but you're going to tell me, so that's all right.” Eduardo could tease without making it sting. From everything Annarita had seen, that was a rare talent.
“I
am
going to tell you,” she agreed. “All those houses. Rows and rows of houses, with lots of middle-class people—well, middle-class cartoon people—living in them. Even though the movie is animated, it's based on something real, isn't it?”
“
Sì
,” Eduardo said. “But it's based on the United States, where they have more room than they do here. And the United States had more room at the start of the twenty-first century than it does now. But Italy was mostly apartments even then—only rich people had houses.”
“Rich people.” Annarita said the words as if they were almost obscene. And, in the Italian People's Republic, they were. “We don't have rich people here.” She spoke with more than a little pride.
Eduardo wasn't impressed. “You ought to have rich people. Rich people aren't what's wrong. Poor people are. Compared to the way people live in the home timeline, everybody here is poor.”
“You can say that,” Annarita sniffed. Yes, she took pride in her country the way it was. Who wouldn't? It was
hers
. Inside, though, she feared Eduardo was right. If everybody in his world had a pocket computer, who could guess what else people there had? He'd talked about fasartas, and she didn't even know just what they did.
Instead of reminding her of that, he took a different tack: “You know what you have instead of rich people?”
“What?” she asked suspiciously.
“Apparatchiks,” he said.
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?

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