Harry Turtledove: The Gladiator

Gianfranco bombed an algebra quiz. He'd studied. He'd even had Annarita help him get ready for it, though she was rushed-she had her own Russian test to worry about. He'd thought he knew what was coming and how to do it. But when he looked at the questions, his brain turned to polenta.

And when his father found out, he probably would get pounded into cornmeal mush. Not that his old man had been any great shakes in school. He would be something better, something more interesting, than a mid-level paper shuffler if he had. He wanted Gianfranco to do what he hadn't been able to.

No matter what he wanted, chances were he wouldn't get it. Gianfranco cared more about basketball and soccer than he did about schoolwork. He was better at them than he was at school-work, too. He wasn't great or anything, even if he wished he were. He wasn't tall enough to be anything special as a basketball player, either. He enjoyed the games, though, where he felt like a caged animal in the classroom.

He was shaking his head and muttering to himself when he trudged off to history. He knew he would have trouble paying attention. He was still worrying about that stupid quiz, and about why he was too stupid to get things right. And who cared what happened back in the twentieth century, anyway? Tt seemed as far from his own life as Julius Caesar did.

Besides, Comrade Pontevecchio was a bore.

"Let's get to work!" the history teacher barked as soon as the bell rang. "Let's all be Stakhanovites in our quest for knowledge!"

He said the same thing every morning. Gianfranco didn't yawn-you got in trouble if you showed you wanted to go to sleep. But he thought this particular Party slogan was dumb. Doing more than your assigned quota made sense if you worked in a factory and made bricks or brushes or something like that. How could you learn more than was in your book, though?

Of course, Gianfranco hadn't learned all of what was in the book, let alone more than that. "In the nineteen sixties, what two events showed that the corrupt, capitalist, imperialist United States was only a paper tiger?" Comrade Pontevecchio asked. His finger shot out. "Mazzilli! Yes, you! Recite!"

Gianfranco jumped to his feet. "Yes, Comrade Teacher!" But it wasn't yes. "Uh…" His wits seemed frozen. "The Vietnam missile crisis?" There was something about Vietnam in the chapter, and something about missiles. He remembered that much, anyhow.

It wasn't enough. Titters ran through the classroom. Some of the laughter was probably relief. Not everybody would have known the answer. Gianfranco could tell it was wrong. He stood there, waiting for the teacher to put him out of his misery-or to give him more of it.

Comrade Pontevecchio made a production of taking a red pen out of his shirt pocket and writing in the roll book with it. "No," he said coldly. "Be seated. If you don't care about the past, how can the present matter to you?"

Fm living in the present, Gianfranco thought. The past is dead. But the history teacher didn't want an answer. He wanted Gianfranco to sit down and shut up. Miserably, Gianfranco did.

"What is the real answer? What is the right answer?" the teacher asked.

Teobaldo Montefiore threw his hand in the air. He did everything but sing it out, which would have got him in trouble. Yeah, show off how smart you are, you little suck-up, Gianfranco thought scornfully. If you were really smart, you'd be in the advanced track, not stuck here with me.

When the teacher called on Teobaldo, he jumped to his feet. "The Vietnam War and the Cuban missile crisis!" he said, squeaking with excitement.

"Very good-so far," Comrade Pontevecchio said. "Why are they important?"

All of a sudden, Teobaldo didn't look so happy. "Because they showed capitalism was doomed?" You could hear the question mark in his voice. He wasn't sure he was right any more, even if he gave an answer that was almost always safe.

"Sit down," the teacher snapped, and wrote something in the roll book in red. Comrade Pontevecchio looked out over the class. "Anyone?" His scorn grew by the second when nobody took a chance. "Knowing what is only half the battle, and the small half at that. You have to know why. Do you think Marx could have invented dialectical materialism if he didn't understand why?"

Nobody said anything. When Comrade Pontevecchio got into one of these moods, keeping quiet was the safest thing you could do. Gianfranco stared down at his desk. People had been trying to drum dialectical materialism into his head since he was five years old, but he still didn't get it.

"When the United States backed down and let the Soviet Union keep missiles in Cuba to balance the American missiles in Turkey, what did that show?" the teacher demanded.

Gianfranco thought he knew, but he wasn't about to stick his neck out. Luisa Orlandini cautiously raised her hand. Luisa was pretty. Even if she got it wrong, Comrade Pontevecchio probably wouldn't bite her head off.

Probably.

He nodded to her. She stood up. "It showed the American capitalist regime was only a paper tiger, Comrade Pontevecchio," she said.

"That's right," he agreed-he'd called the USA a paper tiger himself. "And what does the Vietnam War have to do with this?"

"The Vietnamese were trying to liberate the south from a neocolonialist dictatorship, and the Americans tried to prop up the reactionary elements," Luisa answered.

"Yes, that's also right." Comrade Pontevecchio warmed all the way up to chilly. "And what happened then, and why?"

"Well, the Americans and their reactionary running dogs lost. I know that," Luisa said.

"Si. They lost. But how? Why? How could America lose? In those days, it was very rich. It was much bigger and richer than Vietnam. What happened?" Luisa didn't know. Comrade Pontevecchio waved her to her seat. He looked around for somebody else. When no one volunteered, he pointed at somebody. "Crespi!"

Paolo Crespi got up. "The Americans stopped wanting to fight, didn't they, Comrade Pontevecchio?"

"Are you asking me or telling me?"

"Uh, I'm telling you, Comrade."

"Well, you're right. When the United States brought its soldiers home from Vietnam in 1968, that was another signal to progressive forces around the world that not even the heartland of capitalism would go on defending an outdated ideology anymore. And so the cause of Socialism advanced in Asia and Africa and South America. One war of national liberation after another broke out and triumphed. Meanwhile, what was happening here in Europe. Does the term 'popular front' mean anything to you?"

It was in the textbook. Gianfranco remembered that much, but no more. Comrade Pontevecchio frowned when no hands went up. "You haven't been studying as hard as you should have." He pointed at a girl. " Sofia! Tell me about popular fronts!"

She got to her feet. "I-I'm sorry, Comrade Teacher, but I don't know."

"And what excuse do you have for not knowing?"

"No excuse, Comrade Teacher." That was the only right answer. You were supposed to know. If you didn't, it was your fault, nobody else's. That was how teachers and the rest of the school system looked at things, anyhow. If the textbook was boring and the teacher hated students… well, so what? Textbooks had been boring ever since they were written on clay tablets, and teachers couldn't wallop kids the way they had in the old days.

Comrade Pontevecchio picked on a boy. He didn't know what a popular front was, either.

"This will not do," the teacher snapped. "Get out your books. Write me a fifteen-minute essay on what popular fronts were and why they were important. Anyone who does poorly will have more work assigned. These are your lessons. You will learn them."

Gianfranco almost hadn't brought his textbook. The miserable thing was thick as a brick and weighed a ton. But he would have been in big trouble if Comrade Pontevecchio caught him unprepared. He opened the book and looked in the index. There they were-popular fronts. Oh, boy, he thought. He flipped to the right page and started scribbling as fast as he could. If he parroted the text, he couldn't go wrong. And he didn't have to think while he wrote, either. Comrade Pontevecchio didn't care what he thought or if he thought, as long as he ground out the right answers.