Harry Turtledove - The Gladiator

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 he 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.

Eight

"'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, si," 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 Incredible^. 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."