The Gladiator (26 page)

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Authors: Harry Turtledove

BOOK: The Gladiator
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“Beats me,” Gianfranco said. “You could ask them yourself if you'd managed to catch them.”
“As far as we can see, they might have disappeared by magic, not by your stupid trap door,” the man from the Security Police grumbled. He was righter than he knew. One of Crosstime Traffic's biggest advantages was that nobody from this alternate really believed in other worlds. Travel from here to the home timeline might as well have been magic. With another sigh, the officer asked, “When did they let you go?”
“This morning. Yesterday morning, I mean.” Gianfranco yawned. His mother had brought espresso for the Security Police officer and for him. Despite the strong coffee, he was still very tired. Too much had happened with not enough sleep.
“You should have let us know you were free as soon as they did,” the officer said.
Gianfranco just looked at him. The officer turned red and made a production out of lighting a cigarette. The Security Police called on you. If you were in your right mind, you didn't call them. Everybody knew that—even Security Policemen. The only reason Gianfranco's father, a loyal Party man, had told them Gianfranco was back was to let them know what a bunch of blundering idiots they were.
After blowing out a long plume of smoke, the man from the Security Police asked, “How did you get back to Milan?”
“I stuck out my thumb,” Gianfranco answered. “One truck took me as far as Bologna. I got another lift there, and it took me here.” Hitchhiking was against the law. That didn't mean people didn't do it, even if it was dangerous. And if he said he'd
taken the train, they could ask who'd seen him at the station and find out if there were records of his ticket. Thumbing a ride didn't leave a paper trail.
The officer tried his best: “What were the names of the men who picked you up? What were they carrying?”
“I think one was Mario and one was Luigi.” Gianfranco pulled ordinary names out of the air—or out of what the Crosstime Traffic people had told him while he was under their drugs. “One of them said he was carrying mushrooms. The other guy didn't talk much. He just smoked smelly cigars.”
“Right.” The Security Policeman sucked in smoke himself. He scribbled notes. Would people start checking to see if a trucker named Luigi—or maybe Mario—who smoked cigars was on the road yesterday? Did Crosstime Traffic have men who looked like Mario and Luigi? He wouldn't have been surprised.
“Anyway, I'm here now and I'm fine,” he said.
His father stepped in and added, “No thanks to the Security Police.”
“We did what we could, Comrade. We're not done yet,” the officer said. “We'll catch those villains—you wait and see.”
Gianfranco knew better. His father didn't, but he also didn't seem much impressed. “I'll believe it when I do see it,” he said.
“We work for the safety of the state and of its people,” the Security Police officer said.
“Shouldn't those be the other way around?” Gianfranco asked.
The officer sent him a hooded look.
Who do you think you are, to doubt that the state comes first?
The man didn't ask that out loud, but he might as well have. In the Italian People's Republic, the question was only too reasonable. The state had
come first here for many, many years. But Gianfranco was just back from an Italy where that wasn't so, an Italian Republic that left the people out of its name but took them more seriously than this one did. He hadn't been able to stay there long, but the attitude rubbed off. Maybe the drugs should have fixed that too, so he didn't pop off.
“Can we finish this another time, Comrade?” his father asked the officer. “Gianfranco has to be tired, and so do you. Could you let him have a little rest, now that he can sleep in his own bed again?”
“Well, all right.” The man from the Security Police didn't seem sorry to have an excuse to go home—and Gianfranco's father was a Party wheel, even if he wasn't a great big one. The officer got to his feet. “I'll report to my superiors, and we'll see if they have more questions to ask.
Ciao
.” He left the apartment.
“
Grazie
, Father,” Gianfranco said around another yawn. “I
am
tired.”
“No wonder, after everything you've been through,” his father answered. Gianfranco had been through more and stranger things than his father imagined. On the other hand, his father's imaginings had to be scarier. “I don't know what I would have done if you didn't come home safe.”
“I'm here. I'm fine—except that I'm sleepy,” Gianfranco said.
Lying down in his own bed did feel good. But one thought kept him from sleeping for quite a while. He understood all the reasons why he couldn't stay in the home timeline. Even so, coming back here after seeing what freedom was like made him feel as if he'd just got a life sentence to a prison camp he couldn't hope to escape from.
 
 
Gianfranco didn't want to talk about things in his apartment or in Annarita's. She knew why, too. The Security Police were too likely to have bugged one of them, or maybe both. He didn't dare tell her the truth if unfriendly ears might also hear it.
And so, as soon as they could, they went for a walk in a little park not far from the apartment building. Annarita thought she was more eager to hear than Gianfranco was to talk. “Well?” she asked.
“Well, he wasn't lying,” Gianfranco said.
“I didn't think he was,” Annarita replied. “And when you disappeared without a trace, I was sure there was only one place you could have gone. What was that like?”
“You mean the chamber?” he asked. Annarita nodded impatiently. “It was like—nothing,” he said. “It was like sitting in a compartment in a railroad car, except it was cleaner and quieter. I couldn't even tell we were moving. We
weren't
moving, not the way the two of us are now when we walk. We were going across instead, but that didn't feel like anything.”
“And when you got there?” she said.
“They wear funny clothes,” Gianfranco said. “They wear brighter colors than we do, and the cuts are strange.
Everything
is brighter there. More paint, more neon lights. Something's always yelling at you, to buy or to try or to fly. They
are
capitalists. They care more about money than we do. But they have a lot more things they can buy, too, and they don't have to wait for years to get them.”
“That's nice.” Annarita remembered her family's seemingly endless wait for their little Fiat. “But are they as free as Eduardo said they were?”
“They are. They really are.” Gianfranco sounded awed.
“They let me watch TV. I listened to the news, and there were people talking about government programs that didn't work. They were going on about how much money the government had wasted—just telling people. They sounded disgusted. It was like,
Well, here we go again
.”
“That's different, all right,” Annarita agreed. Plenty of government programs here didn't work. The government wasted lots of money. Everybody knew that. Everybody took it for granted. But you never heard anything about it on television or the radio. As far as those were concerned, the government could do no wrong. That wasn't a big surprise. It was no surprise at all, in fact. The TV and radio and papers were all instruments of the government. Would they, could they, bite the hand that fed them? Not likely!
No sooner had that thought crossed her mind than Gianfranco said, “And you should have seen the papers!” He clapped a hand to his forehead. “They made the TV seem like nothing. The things they called the Prime Minister! Here, people go to camps for even thinking things like that.
They
put them in print, and nobody gets excited.”
“Why not?” Annarita asked.
“Because they take it for granted. I asked Eduardo about that. Here, everybody would have a stroke if you said anything bad about the Party or the General Secretary, right?” Gianfranco waited for Annarita to nod, then went on, “If you can say anything you want, the way you can there, you have to yell really loud to get noticed at all.”
“Why wouldn't just telling the truth do the job?” she wondered.
“Maybe it would—if it was real important or really interesting,” Gianfranco answered. “But when it comes to politics,
who knows for sure what's true? All the different parties try to sell their ideas, the same way companies try to sell cars or soap.”
Annarita thought it over. She wasn't sure she liked it. It didn't seem … dignified. But she supposed getting lots of different kinds of propaganda was better than getting just one. If you had lots, you could pick and choose among them. With only one, you were stuck. She knew all about that. Everybody in this whole world did.
“Do they all walk around with their little computers all the time?” she asked.
“Do they!” Gianfranco rolled his eyes. “Those things are telephones, too, and they can send messages back and forth on them, and photos, and I don't know what all else. Half the time, people in the home timeline pay more attention to their gadgets than they do to what's going on around them. They'll walk out in the street without even looking. It's a miracle they don't get killed.”
People here walked out in the street without looking all the time, too. Sometimes they did get killed. “Are the drivers there any more polite than they are here?” Annarita asked.
Gianfranco shook his head. “Not even a little bit. And with all those cars … Well, sometimes it jams up so nobody can move. Then it's all horns and cussing.” Annarita laughed. That sounded familiar, all right. Gianfranco added, “But when they can move—well, it's all horns and cussing then, too. All the time, pretty much.”
She'd been skirting what she really wanted to know: “Did you like it there? Would you have stayed if you could?”
“In a minute,” he answered. “I could breathe without filling out a form first, you know what I mean?” He took her hand. “I
would have missed you. I would have missed you like anything. But I would have stayed. This”—his wave took in not just the park, not just Milan, but the whole Italian People's Republic—“this is jail. We've got to find some way to change it, to get free.”
“How?” Annarita asked.
Gianfranco seemed to shrink in on himself. “I don't know. I just don't know.”
 
 
Gianfranco didn't want to go back to San Marino. He especially didn't want to go back to The Three Sixes. When the Security Police put him in one of their cars and got on the autostrada heading east, what he wanted stopped mattering. They intended to take him there, and they could do as they pleased. His only choice besides going to San Marino was going to a camp. All things considered, going to San Marino was better.
Of course, he might end up going to San Marino
and
to a camp. If the Security Police couldn't find the trap door in the wall he'd talked about, what would they do to him? He worried about that more with every kilometer by which he drew closer to San Marino. Since the trap door didn't exist, he figured he had reason to worry.
The Three Sixes was still operating when the Security Police led him into the shop. All the people who worked there belonged to the Security Police. The games they sold were copies they'd made themselves of the originals from the home timeline. How much had that cost? If it helped trap enemies of the state, the Security Police seemed to think it was worth it.
They took him down to the basement. “So your trap door is here somewhere?” one of them said. His name was Iacopo, or
maybe Iacomo. Gianfranco wasn't sure which, and the Security Police didn't bother with formal introductions.
“That's right,” Gianfranco said, knowing it wasn't.
“But you don't know exactly where,” Iacopo or Iacomo said.
“I'm sorry, Comrade, but I don't. I had my back to the wall, and I was scared like you wouldn't believe.” Gianfranco aimed to stick to his story as long as he could.
“Yes, you said so.” The officer didn't sound convinced. “But at least you know which wall it's on, right? Even if you couldn't see that one, you
could
see all the others.”
No, this wouldn't be easy or fun. The Security Police had thought about what he told them, and drawn reasonable conclusions from it. He wished they hadn't bothered. But he was a Party official's son. And, even worse from their point of view, the people who nabbed him had vanished into thin air. They didn't know that was the literal truth.
Cautiously, Gianfranco nodded. Even more cautiously, he said, “I guess so.”
“All right, then.” Iacopo/Iacomo went on sounding reasonable. Gianfranco supposed that was better than having him sound ferocious. It still wasn't good. When Gianfranco still didn't say anything, the officer gestured impatiently. “Well? Which one was it?”

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