Harry Turtledove: The Gladiator

"There ought to be a law," Gianfranco said.

"There are laws," Annarita said. "People don't pay any attention to them."

"That trolleyman should have photographed the guy's license plate," Gianfranco said. "When they found out who he was, they could have fixed him good."

"Maybe the trolleyman did," Annarita said.

"Yeah, maybe." Gianfranco sounded as if he liked the idea. Annarita wasn't so sure she did. They already had so many ways to keep an eye on you. Who needed a motorman with a camera? Even typewriters were registered. As far as the Italian People's Republic was concerned, they were more dangerous than assault rifles. And computers… Her school had a couple, which made it special, but only the most trusted teachers and the very most trusted students got to use them.

She thought the progress to real Communism, the kind where the state withered away, would come faster if people could more freely use the tools they had. No matter what she thought, she kept her ideas to herself. What you didn't tell anybody, you couldn't get in trouble for.

While she was thinking dark thoughts, her feet kept walking. She turned right and then left and then right again. She hardly noticed the apartment blocks and shops she passed.

"We're here," Gianfranco said.

"Si," Annarita said. "We're here. Oh, boy." Gianfranco laughed. He was more likely to say something like that. She was the good student-he just squeaked by. But she couldn't make herself get excited about school today.

Enver Hoxha Polytechnic Academy was named for a Communist hero, but not for an Italian Communist hero. Hoxha had administered Albania for most of the second half of the twentieth century. A lot of Italians laughed at Albanians, their neighbors across the Adriatic Sea. Few did it it where Albanians could hear them, though. Albanians were supposed to have nasty tempers, and to be fond of carrying knives.

Students from other schools jeered Hoxha Polytechnic's soccer and basketball teams because the academy bore a foreigner's name. "Odd jobs!" they shouted. "Odd jobs!" Despite a century and a half of Socialism, Albania remained the poorest country in Europe. Young Albanians sometimes crossed the Adriatic in small boats. Working as farm laborers or handymen-or thieves-in Italy seemed better to them than going hungry back home.

A big black-and-white photo of Hoxha stared down at An-narita and Gianfranco from over the entrance. He didn't look as if he approved of them. He didn't look as if he approved of anybody. Considering what he'd had to do to drive the Fascists out of Albania during the Second World War and then rule the country for so long afterwards, he probably didn't.

"See you," Gianfranco said, and hurried off to his first class.

"Ciao," Annarita called after him. She didn't want to go to Russian. It drove her crazy. Everybody who wanted to be anybody had to learn it. It was the most important language in the world, after all. When the Soviet Union sneezed, the rest of the world started sniffling. But still…

Annarita had had a couple of years of Latin. She understood the idea of cases, of using endings instead of prepositions to show how words worked in a sentence. Homo was a man as the subject of a sentence. If a man thanked you, he was homo. But if you thanked him, if he was the object, he was hominem. In the possessive, he was hominis. A man's dog was canus hominis- or hominis canus. Word order mattered much less in Latin than in Italian. The same was true in Russian, only more so.

But if Latin's grammar was weird, an awful lot of the vocabulary looked familiar. Man in Italian was uomo, while dog was cane. You didn't need to know any history to see that Latin and Italian were related.

Russian's vocabulary, though, seemed even weirder to Annarita than its grammar did. Man in Russian was chelovek, and dog was sobaka. Worse, the Russians used a different alphabet, so everything looked funny. Man looked like HejiOBeK, and dog looked like CObaKa. Some of the letters were recognizable, but others would fool you. C was sounded like "s," P was "r," and H was "n." If you weren't careful, if you absentmindedly thought the way you usually did, Russian could really bite you.

"Dobry den," the teacher said when Annarita walked into the classroom.

"Dobry den, Tovarishch Montefusco," she answered. Good day, Comrade Montefusco. That was polite, but she wondered if she really meant it. How could a day with a test in it be a good day?

He waited till the bell, and not an instant longer. "And now, the test," he said, still in Russian. His accent was very good. He'd spent a long time studying in Russia. Some people whispered that he'd spent some time in a camp there. Annarita had no idea if that was true. Nobody'd ever had the nerve to ask him.

He handed out the mimeographed sheets. Mimeograph machines and copiers were kept under lock and key. Annarita understood that. Counterrevolutionaries could use them to reproduce propaganda harmful to the state. As far as she was concerned, this test was harmful to her state of mind.

It was hard. She'd known it would be. They wanted to find out who was just good and who was the very best. The very best-and the ones with the very best connections-would run things when they grew up. The ones who weren't quite good enough for that would get more ordinary jobs instead.

The ones who didn't measure up would miss out on other things, too. They wouldn't be able to travel abroad. They wouldn't get the best vacation houses by the ocean or up in the mountains. They wouldn't get the best apartments in the city, either. And they would spend years on the waiting list for a tiny, miserable Trabant, with a motor that sounded like a tin can full of rocks and angry bees, instead of getting a fancy Zis or a Ferrari or a Mercedes.

So Annarita knew what was at stake every time she wrote her name-AHHapirra KpocTTH-on a test form. The privileges and luxuries that went with being the very best didn't drive her all that much, though they were nice. But the idea of being at the center of things, being where the action was-that pushed her. So did the idea of proving she really was the best to a world that didn't care one way or the other.

She got to work. Even counting in Russian was complicated. Numbers changed case like any other adjectives. And the nouns that followed them changed case, too, with strange rules. One house stayed in the nominative-the case for the subject. Two, three, or four houses (or anything else) went to the genitive singular-the case for the possessive. Three of house, it meant literally. Five or more houses and you used the genitive again, but the plural this time. Seven of houses was the literal meaning.

"Bozhemoi!" Annarita muttered to herself. That meant My God! It wasn't good Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist doctrine, but it was perfectly good Russian. Comrade Montefusco said it when somebody made a dumb mistake in class. Annarita had heard real Russians say it on TV and on the radio, too. From everything she could tell, Russians were less polite than Italians, or polite in a different way.

She fought through the test. She was still in the middle of rechecking when the teacher said, "Pass them forward, please." She sighed and did. She wasn't sure about a couple of things, but she thought she'd done well.

Analytic geometry next. It was interesting, in a way. Annarita didn't know what she'd ever do with it, but it made her think. Her father kept telling her that was good all by itself. Of course, he didn't have to do the homework and the studying. (He'd done them years before, but Annarita didn't think about that.)

She settled into her chair in the new classroom. Analytic geometry had one thing going for it. No matter what happened, no matter which Party faction rose and which one fell, the answers wouldn't change. Ideology could change history. It could change literature. It could even change biology. But math? Math didn't change. In a world where everything else might, that was reassuring.