Harry Turtledove - The Gladiator

"We ready?" Eduardo asked. When nobody told him no, he put the car in gear and drove off toward the mountain republic.

He shifted gears clumsily. "You're used to an automatic transmission, aren't you?" Gianfranco said.

"Does it show that much?" Eduardo said. Again, nobody told him no. He sighed. "I'm afraid 1 am. Not many stick shifts in the home timeline. Hardly any, in fact."

The Mazzillis' Mercedes had an automatic. That made it special here. Everything in the home timeline seemed better than the way the Italian People's Republic did the same thing.

"Watch out for the traffic lights," Annarita warned.

Eduardo laughed. "Don't worry about that. I know all about red lights and green lights-we've got plenty of them back home."

He stopped when he was supposed to. Once or twice, he stopped when a local would have charged on through. Maybe he didn't want to take any chances. Or maybe they just didn't have any guts in the home timeline. Gianfranco almost got on him about it, but thought better at the last moment.

"Now we see what's what, or some of what's what," Eduardo said as they neared the border crossing. Italians needed only their internal passports to enter San Marino. It wasn't foreign enough to require the other kind. Approval to travel to real foreign countries was harder to come by.

"Papers." The guard on duty sounded bored. Gianfranco hoped he was. He sure seemed to be. He glanced at the three internal passports, stamped them, and handed them back. "Go on. Enjoy your stay."

"Grazie, Comrade," Eduardo said politely. The guard shrugged and waved him forward.

He didn't just go forward. He went up. The city of San Marino sat at the top of a mountain. One side was a sheer drop of most of a kilometer. The other side was only very steep. The fortress at the heart of the town had never fallen. Gianfranco could see why not.

With so many ups and downs, where where you supposed to find a flat place, or even a fairly flat place, to park your car? That, though, the people who ran San Marino had taken care of. There was an enormous parking lot near the bottom of the city. It was crowded when Eduardo drove into it, but not impossibly crowded.

"Whew!" he said when he turned the key and the motor died. "To drive a stick in a country like this, you need one foot on the gas, one foot on the brake, and one foot on the clutch."

Gianfranco thought about a tripod man. "Your seat wouldn't be very comfortable then," he said.

"Mm, no, I suppose not," Eduardo agreed.

"What's San Marino like in the, uh, home timeline?" Annarita asked. "Have you been there? Been here? However you say it?"

"Yes, I've been here," Eduardo answered. "It doesn't look a whole lot different. Most of the buildings are old enough to go back before the breakpoint, so they're pretty much the same. This lot isn't there, though."

"In that case, where do people park?" Gianfranco asked as they got out of the Fiat.

Eduardo locked the car. "Everywhere."

Annarita found a different question: "Why isn't this parking lot there?"

Eduardo looked around. Nobody stood close by. There probably wouldn't be any microphones hidden in a place like this. You'd have to wait forever before you heard anything good. He nodded to himself and said, "In the home timeline, they didn't have who knows how many zeks to use up carving a big flat lot out of the mountainside."

"You think that's how they did it here?" Gianfranco asked.

"I know that's how they did it here." Eduardo pointed back toward the entrance to the lot. "There's a little sign over there that says, This lot built with the help of the Italian Department of Corrective Labor."

"Oh." Gianfranco nodded. "I didn't see that." Corrective Labor meant zeks, all right. Instead of using bulldozers and dynamite, you gave the political prisoners picks and shovels and turned them loose. If you felt especially mean, you also gave them impossible work norms. Then you punished them for not meeting those norms. The Russians and the Chinese went through zeks by the million. Italy was more economical, but even so…

"Come on." Eduardo pointed again, this time towards a stairway. "Let's go."

Gianfranco's shoes crunched on the gravel of the parking lot. He felt as if he were walking on dead men's bones. And maybe he was.

Annarita quickly found there were two ways to get around in San Marino. Both had drawbacks. The streets didn't go straight up the mountainside. They climbed gently, going sideways, then doubled back and went sideways in the other direction. If you followed them, you could get where you were going, but you'd take a while.

If you wanted a more direct route, you could climb stairways between levels. There were lots of them. They were tall and steep and tiring. "This is the first time I wish the repairmen hadn't fixed the elevator," she said as she trudged up and up and up. "I've got out of practice."

"If you're going anywhere here, it helps if you're part mountain goat," Gianfranco said.

"When mountain goats stop, though, other goats don't try to sell them stuff," Eduardo said. "Or I don't think they do, anyway."

You couldn't say that about the people of San Marino. Yes, it was a Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist state. Annarita didn't think there was a country in the world that wasn't-except the Vatican, which was even smaller than San Marino. But it winked at capitalism's sins.

Shops and hotels filled the gray stone buildings that lined the streets. Some of the shops sold cheap glass trinkets-oetopi with staring eyes, yellow lions, dragons. Some sold postage stamps, new and old. San Marino had been printing fancy stamps for collectors since the early days of the twentieth century. Some sold reproductions of antiquities, others the real thing. You could buy recordings of musicians from all over Europe, a lot of them bootlegs the local authorities pretended not to notice. You could buy… anything you had the money for. If you got hungry or thirsty while shopping, you could take care of that, too.

Annarita could see why Eduardo's people had put a shop here. It stood out much less than The Gladiator did even in a busy arcade like the Galleria del Popolo. "What's the name of your place here?" Annarita asked.

"The Triple Six," he answered. That was the best throw you could make in most of the games the shops sold.

"Where is it?" Gianfranco asked, panting a little. Yes, the stairs here put the ones in the apartment building to shame.

"I've never been here before, but I know it's up near the top." Eduardo pointed up toward the castle that crowned the mountain. Gianfranco didn't quite groan, but his face looked mutinous. An-narita's legs felt mutinous.

"Maybe we could stop for a little while before we get there," Gianfranco said.

"Well, maybe we could." Eduardo pointed again, this time towards a little shop that sold cold drinks and snacks. "How about a Fanta? You'll move faster with some sugar in you."

"Now you're talking!" Gianfranco said. Annarita nodded.

You didn't sit down inside. Instead, you stood at tall tables. No doubt that helped move people in and out and made more money for the fellow in the white apron who served up the sodas. It wasn't the kind of place that had, or wanted, regulars.

In keeping with San Marino 's eagerness to draw tourists, it dressed its policemen in comic-opera uniforms. Three of them marched past the snack shop. Several people photographed the procession. "They look like a bunch of clowns," Gianfranco said.

Eduardo shook his head. "They dress like a bunch of clowns. It's not the same thing. Look at their guns. Look at their faces."

He had a point, Annarita decided. No matter what they wore, the policemen carried assault rifles like the ones the Italian Army used: great-grandchildren of the classic AK-47. And, under their silly hats, the men looked tough and capable. Unless you were a fool or you had a death wish, you wouldn't want them angry at you.