Harry Turtledove: The Gladiator

Other people-almost all of them guys from a couple of years younger than Gianfranco up to, say, thirty-sat bent over tables in the back room. They studied game boards with the attention they should have given to schoolwork. Carlo looked up and waved when he saw Gianfranco. "Ciao" he said. "Watch what I do to you."

"You can try," Gianfranco said, and sat down across from his gaming partner. Carlo was nineteen, just starting at the university. His father wanted him to be a pharmacist. He didn't know what he wanted to do with his life-anything but push pills, probably. Gianfranco felt the same way about being a bureaucrat.

For now, they both forgot about the real world. Here, they were railroad magnates building rival lines across Europe. They had to lay track, buy engines, and move passengers and goods from one city to another. Dice and the quality of locomotives controlled how fast they could go. Cards told them what to take where and added disasters and blizzards and floods. But there was still a lot of strategy. Getting your line through the mountain passes, picking the shortest or the safest route (the two weren't always the same) between two towns, building here so the other player wouldn't…

The Gladiator didn't just sell games and offer a place to play. It also sold books, so players who got interested could learn how things really worked. Gianfranco knew much more about nineteenth-century railroads than about twentieth-century history. He'd learned this stuff because he wanted to, and because the more he knew, the better he did in the game.

"Goal!" somebody three tables over shouted. He was running a soccer club. Gianfranco had tried that game, too, but he didn't like it as well as railroading. Playing soccer was great. Running a team? Paying and trading players, keeping up the stadium, getting publicity so your crowds would be large and you could afford to pay better players-that all seemed too much like work.

Carlo was building his own rail line into Paris, an important center where Gianfranco was already operating. Carlo offered lower shipping rates than Gianfranco was charging. Gianfranco lowered his even more so Carlo couldn't steal his business. He cut rates as low as he could while still making money. Then Carlo cut his so he was losing money on that route but trying to make up for it other places.

"Is that in the rules?" Gianfranco asked.

"It sure is." Carlo brandished the rule book, a thick pamphlet. "It's called a 'loss leader.' And it's going to ruin you."

"We'll see about that," Gianfranco said. He built toward Vienna, where Carlo had been operating by himself. Even before he got there, Carlo cut shipping rates. Gianfranco cut them even more. If Carlo wanted to keep him out, he would have to start taking a loss in Vienna, too. He tried it. It didn't work- losing money on two major routes, he couldn't make enough on the others to stay in the black. His whole operation started hemorrhaging money. He had to give up the Paris line.

Gianfranco didn't gloat-too much. "I think you got a little too cute," he said.

"Maybe," Carlo said unhappily. "I didn't expect you to get back at me so fast." He tapped the rule book with his forefinger. "I saw this loss leader thing in here, and it looked so cool I had to try it out."

"I've done stuff like that," Gianfranco said. "I think that one can be good, but you pushed it too hard. The game will bite you if you go with any one thing too much. You've got to stay balanced. That's how you make money."

"You old capitalist, you," Carlo said. They both laughed.

Annarita didn't say anything about The Gladiator to Cianlranco at supper or at breakfast the next morning. She didn't feel like getting worried questions from his parents-or from her own. Right now, all she knew about the place was that Marco Furillo thought it was politically unreliable. That didn't prove much.

So she waited till the two of them went down the stairs together and started (or Hoxha Polytechnic before asking, "You've been to The Gladiator, haven't you?"

"Sure!" He sounded enthusiastic.

"What do you do there?" she asked.

"Play games, mostly. I get books sometimes, too." He started talking about a complicated coup he'd pulled off against somebody named Carlo. It didn't make much sense to her. Then he started talking about how railroads really operated in the nineteenth century. Some of that made even less sense, but he knew a lot about it.

"How did you find out about all that stuff?" Annarita asked.

"I told you-they've got books there. The more you know, the better you can play," Gianfranco answered. Playing well mattered to him-she could see that. He didn't care much about school, so he didn't work any harder than he had to there.

"Do you ever do anything… political at The Gladiator?" she asked.

He looked at her as if she were crazy. "I play games. I talk with the other guys who play games. What could be political about old-time railroads or soccer teams or hunting dragons?"

"Dragons? You're confusing me," Annarita said.

"Some of the games are in this pretend world," Gianfranco explained. "They're all right, I guess, but the railroad's my favorite."

"How come?" Annarita asked.

"I don't know. I just like it," Gianfranco answered. She made an exasperated noise. He carried his books in his left hand, which kept his right free for gesturing. "Why do you like a song or a movie? You just do, that's all."

"I know why 1 like a movie," Annarita said. "The actors are good, or the plot is interesting, or it's funny, or something."

"All right, all right. Let me think." Gianfranco did-Annarita could watch him doing it. That impressed her all by itself. He wasn't stupid or anything. They'd been living in each other's pockets since they were little, so she knew that. But he hardly ever wanted to do more than he had to to get by. At last, he said, "When I'm playing, it's like the railroad is really mine. I'm in charge of everything from paying the workers to fixing the track if a flood washes out a stretch to figuring out how much to charge for hauling freight."

He'd talked about that when he was trying to explain what he'd done to Carlo. Carefully, Annarita said, "It sounds like a very, uh, individualistic game." People in the Italian People's Republic weren't supposed to be individualists. They were all supposed to work together for the eventual coming of true Communism, when the state would wither away.

The state hadn't done any withering lately. It still needed to be strong to guard against reactionaries and backsliders and other enemies. So it insisted, in films, on radio and TV, in the newspapers, and on propaganda posters slapped onto anything that wasn't moving.

Gianfranco understood that individualistic was a code word for something worse. You'd have to be dead not to. "It's no such thing!" he said hotly. "It's no more individualistic than chess is. You run a whole army there."

Annarita knew she had to back up. You couldn't say anything bad about chess, not when the Russians liked it so well. She tried a different approach: "Well, maybe, but people have been playing chess for a long time. I've never heard of a game like this before. Where does The Gladiator get it? Where does the shop get all its games? I don't think other places have any like them."

"I don't know." Gianfranco's shrug, a small masterpiece of its kind, showed that he didn't care, either. Then his eyes narrowed. "How come you're so curious about all this?"

She wondered if she should tell him. After a moment, she decided to-if she said something like I just am, that's all, it would only make him more suspicious. She realized she should have had a cover story ready. She wasn't much of a secret agent. "Don't get mad at me," she said, "but somebody at the Young Socialists' League meeting yesterday said they were politically unreliable."