Harry Turtledove - The Gladiator

"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?"

"Si," 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."

"Si," 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?