Harry Turtledove - The Gladiator

Eduardo was reading the newspaper when she came in. "Ciao" he said. "How did you do?"

"Pretty well," she answered. "I didn't get the grade in dialectics, though. I don't know what kind of hoop I was supposed to jump through. Whatever it was, I didn't."

"Too bad." He shook his head in sympathy. "There's always somebody like that."

"Even in your perfect home timeline?" Annarita teased.

"It's not perfect. All kinds of things wrong there. Our troubles are different from yours, but we've still got 'em. Some of them, I guess you say, are the troubles that go with too much freedom," ICduardo answered.

"How can you have too much freedom?" Annarita asked. "Don't you just do whatever you want then?"

"Sure. I mean, that's what you do, si, but it's not always so simple. If what I'm doing makes me happy but bothers other people, where do you draw the line? How much should the state do to take care of poor people and people who don't want to work? Countries all find different answers."

"Different how?"

"Well, in Italy -in most of Europe -people pay more taxes, and the countries do more for their people who don't have so much. In America, taxes are lower, but the state does less to take care of you. If you make it in America, you can make it bigger than you can on this side of the Atlantic. If you don't, you'll have a harder time than you would here."

"Which is better?" Annarita asked.

"Depends on who's answering," Eduardo said, which struck her as an honest reply. "Me, I'm an Italian, and I think our way works pretty well. But the Americans like what they do, too. If they didn't, they'd change it."

"Don't they make everybody do things their way, like the Russians here?"

He shook his head. "They do throw their weight around, but not like that. Most of the time, anyway."

She wondered how big an exception came with that handful of words. But his world and hers had been different-evidently, very different-for a century and a half. She couldn't expect him to fill her in on all that history in one lump. She did ask, "So you have teachers who think they're little tin gods, too?"

"You'd better believe it," he answered. "Every alternate that has teachers has some like that. They've got the power, and the students don't, and they enjoy rubbing it in. Human nature doesn't change from one alternate to another. The way it comes out changes because of religion and technology and culture, but people are still pretty much people." He winked at her. "I'm a people, aren't I?"

"I thought so, till now," she answered tartly, and he laughed. She went on, "This is a world-an alternate-where Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism came out on top."

"That's right." Eduardo nodded. "And anybody who can say 'Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism' and make it sound natural the way you do has a pretty good handle on the dialectic, no matter what your dumb teacher thinks."

Annarita smiled, but she continued with her own train of thought: "And you come from an alternate where capitalism won."

He nodded again. "That's me."

"Are there… alternates where the Fascists won?"

Eduardo nodded one more time. "Yes, and they're just as bad as you'd think they would be. They're even worse than this one."

The way he said it was like a fist in the stomach. "Are we really that bad?" Annarita asked in a small voice. Of course she took the only world she knew for granted-how could she do anything else?

"Well… You're not so good, not when it comes to treating people the way you ought to," Eduardo answered. "But I'll tell you what the difference is. If somebody here gets out of line, he goes to a camp. If they decide to kill him later, it's just part of doing business, and nobody gets excited about it. In the Fascist alternates, he still goes to a camp. But if they kill him there, they enjoy it."

"Oh." Annarita winced. That got the message across, all right. "And what about in your home timeline?" she asked.

"We don't have camps for people who commit political crimes," Eduardo said. "We don't send important people who commit political crimes to psychiatric hospitals, either. We don't really even arrest people for political crimes, not the way you do here. We don't in Europe and America, anyway-not even in Russia any more, not very much. Asia, Africa, sometimes South America… Things are different there. We could be better, heaven knows. But going out to the alternates has shown us we could be worse, too."

"They don't have political arrests in the Soviet Union?" More than anything else, that told Annarita how different from her world the home timeline was.

But she'd forgotten something. "No, in Russia, I said," Eduardo answered. "There is no Soviet Union in the home timeline, remember? It broke up in… 1991? Or was it 1992? I don't remember which-it's only a question on a history test for us, not something that really matters any more. Russia and Belarus got together for a while, but then they separated again."

"Bozhemoi!" Annarita exclaimed. Somehow, only Russian fit the moment. She tried to picture a world without the USSR. Even the effort made her dizzy. It was like trying to imagine Milan without the rivalry between AC Milan and Inter Milan, the two great soccer clubs.

"I told you-it's not the same place. It's not the same at all," Eduardo said-in Russian much more fluent than hers.

She gaped at him. "I didn't know you spoke Russian," she said in that language, pronouncing it as carefully as she could.

"Well, I do," he answered, dropping back into Italian. "Might come in handy here-you never can tell-so I learned it. We have ways of doing that in nothing flat." He snapped his fingers.

"I wish we did!" Annarita thought of all the time she'd spent sitting in class and doing homework and memorizing vocabulary and declensions and conjugations. She thought of all the time she still needed to put in. Learning a language in nothing flat seemed like a party trick-one she didn't know.

"I'm sorry," he said, plainly guessing what was on her mind. "Things kind of, well, stagnated here once the competition with capitalism ended."

Banging noises from outside and then a smoother mechanical hum made them both turn their heads. "At least we've finally got the miserable elevator fixed," Annarita said. That didn't seem much next to picking up Russian with pills or however Eduardo did it, but it was better than nothing.

His smile said he understood what that finally meant. Anyone who'd grown up in the Italian People's Republic would have, of course. But Eduardo, despite speaking perfect Milanese Italian, was in some ways more foreign than a man from Mongolia. Still, he had the right amount of sympathy in his voice as he asked, "How long has it been out?"

"T don't remember exactly-it's been that long," Annarita said. "Years. Years and years. Now we won't have to clump up and down all those times every day."

"Good for you," he said, and then, "Sometimes, in the home timeline, people climb stairs so they can get exercise."

Annarita thought about that for a little while. "Maybe it's different if you don't have to do it," she said at last, which was the kindest thing she could come up with.

Her father walked into the apartment. He was grinning. "Ciao" he said. "1 just rode the elevator up here. How about that?"

"Good for you!" Annarita said. She shot Eduardo a glance. Exercise, indeed! He didn't say a word.

Gianfranco wanted to play Rails across Europe all through the break between school years. That didn't thrill Annarita. He needed a little longer than he might have to realize it didn't. And he needed longer still to see that even Eduardo might rather have been doing something else.

"I thought you enjoyed it," Gianfranco said reproachfully when the light dawned at last.

"Well, 1 do… some," Eduardo answered. "But we brought the games here as a means to an end. We wanted to use them to get people in this alternate to think different. They aren't an end in themselves, not for us."