Harry Turtledove - The Gladiator

"I'm here. I'm fine-except that I'm sleepy," Gianfranco said.

Lying down in his own bed did feel good. But one thought kept him from sleeping for quite a while. He understood all the reasons why he couldn't stay in the home timeline. Even so, coming back here after seeing what freedom was like made him feel as if he'd just got a life sentence to a prison camp he couldn't hope to escape from.

Gianfranco didn't want to talk about things in his apartment or in Annarita's. She knew why, loo. The Security Police were too likely to have bugged one of them, or maybe both. He didn't dare tell her the truth if unfriendly ears might also hear it.

And so, as soon as they could, they went for a walk in a little park not far from the apartment building. Annarita thought she was more eager to hear than Gianfranco was to talk. "Well?" she asked.

"Well, he wasn't lying," Gianfranco said.

"I didn't think he was," Annarita replied. "And when you disappeared without a trace, I was sure there was only one place you could have gone. What was that like?"

"You mean the chamber?" he asked. Annarita nodded impatiently. "It was like-nothing," he said. "It was like sitting in a compartment in a railroad car, except it was cleaner and quieter. I couldn't even tell we were moving. We weren't moving, not the way the two of us are now when we walk. We were going across instead, but that didn't feel like anything."

"And when you got there?" she said.

"They wear funny clothes," Gianfranco said. "They wear brighter colors than we do, and the cuts are strange. Everything is brighter there. More paint, more neon lights. Something's always yelling at you, to buy or to try or to fly. They are capitalists. They care more about money than we do. But they have a lot more things they can buy, too, and they don't have to wait for years to get them."

"That's nice." Annarita remembered her family's seemingly endless wait for their little Fiat. "But are they as free as Eduardo said they were?"

"They are. They really are." Gianfranco sounded awed.

"They let me watch TV. I listened to the news, and there were people talking about government programs that didn't work. They were going on about how much money the government had wasted-just telling people. They sounded disgusted. It was like, Well, here we go again."

"That's different, all right," Annarita agreed. Plenty of government programs here didn't work. The government wasted lots of money. Everybody knew that. Everybody took it for granted. But you never heard anything about it on television or the radio. As far as those were concerned, the government could do no wrong. That wasn't a big surprise, \l was no surprise at all, in fact. The TV and radio and papers were all instruments of the government. Would they, could they, bite the hand that fed them? Not likely!

No sooner had that thought crossed her mind than Gian-franco said, "And you should have seen the papers!" He clapped a hand to his forehead. "They made the TV seem like nothing. The things they called the Prime Minister! Here, people go to camps for even thinking things like that. They put them in print, and nobody gets excited."

"Why not?" Annarita asked.

"Because they take it for granted. I asked Eduardo about that. Here, everybody would have a stroke if you said anything bad about the Party or the General Secretary, right?" Gian-franco waited for Annarita to nod, then went on, "If you can say anything you want, the way you can there, you have to yell really loud to get noticed at all."

"Why wouldn't just telling the truth do the job?" she wondered.

"Maybe it would-if it was real important or really interesting," Gianfranco answered. "But when it comes to politics, who knows for sure what's true? All the different parties try to sell their ideas, the same way companies try to sell cars or soap."

Annarita thought it over. She wasn't sure she liked it. It didn't seem… dignified. But she supposed getting lots of different kinds of propaganda was better than getting just one. If you had lots, you could pick and choose among them. With only one, you were stuck. She knew all about that. Everybody in this whole world did.

"Do they all walk around with their little computers all the time?" she asked.

"Do they!" Gianfranco rolled his eyes. "Those things are telephones, too, and they can send messages back and forth on them, and photos, and I don't know what all else. Half the time, people in the home timeline pay more attention to their gadgets than they do to what's going on around them. They'll walk out in the street without even looking. It's a miracle they don't get killed."

People here walked out in the street without looking all the time, too. Sometimes they did get killed. "Are the drivers there any more polite than they are here?" Annarita asked.

Gianfranco shook his head. "Not even a little bit. And with all those cars… Well, sometimes it jams up so nobody can move. Then it's all horns and cussing." Annarita laughed. That sounded familiar, all right. Gianfranco added, "But when they can move-well, it's all horns and cussing then, too. All the time, pretty much."

She'd been skirting what she really wanted to know: "Did you like it there? Would you have stayed if you could?"

"In a minute," he answered. "1 could breathe without filling out a form first, you know what I mean?" He took her hand. "I would have missed you. I would have missed you like anything. But I would have stayed. This"-his wave took in not just the park, not just Milan, but the whole Italian People's Republic- "this is jail. We've got to find some way to change it, to get free."

"How?" Annarita asked.

Gianfranco seemed to shrink in on himself. "I don't know. I just don't know."

Gianfranco didn't want to go back to San Marino. He especially didn't want to go back to The Three Sixes. When the Security Police put him in one of their cars and got on the autostrada heading east, what he wanted stopped mattering. They intended to take him there, and they could do as they pleased. His only choice besides going to San Marino was going to a camp. All things considered, going to San Marino was better.

Of course, he might end up going to San Marino and to a camp. If the Security Police couldn't find the trap door in the wall he'd talked about, what would they do to him? He worried about that more with every kilometer by which he drew closer to San Marino. Since the trap door didn't exist, he figured he had reason to worry.

The Three Sixes was still operating when the Security Police led him into the shop. All the people who worked there belonged to the Security Police. The games they sold were copies they'd made themselves of the originals from the home timeline. How much had that cost? If it helped trap enemies of the state, the Security Police seemed to think it was worth it.

They took him down to the basement. "So your trap door is here somewhere?" one of them said. His name was Iacopo, or maybe lacomo. Gianlranco wasn't sure which, and the Security Police didn't bother with formal introductions.

"That's right," Gianfranco said, knowing it wasn't.

"But you don't know exactly where," Iacopo or lacomo said.

"I'm sorry, Comrade, but I don't. I had my back to the wall, and I was scared like you wouldn't believe." Gianlranco aimed to slick to his story as long as he could.

"Yes, you said so." The officer didn't sound convinced. "But at least you know which wall it's on, right? Even if you couldn't see that one, you could see all the others."

No, this wouldn't be easy or fun. The Security Police had thought about what he told them, and drawn reasonable conclusions from it. He wished they hadn't bothered. But he was a Party official's son. And, even worse from their point of view, the people who nabbed him had vanished into thin air. They didn't know that was the literal truth.