Harry Turtledove: Gunpowder Empire

Jeremy's phone trilled as the bus rolled past the green of Lanark Park on one side of the street and the rival green of an old, old nursery on the other. His lips moved. His Adam's apple bounced up and down. All Amanda could hear was a faint mumbling with no real words. Like everybody else, she and Jeremy had learned to use throat mikes before they got out of elementary school.

She had to poke Jeremy when the bus stopped in front of the Safeway. “Apples!” she said. He nodded and got up. He kept right on talking while they got off the bus. Probably Michael, Amanda thought. He and her brother had been best friends since the second grade.

When she and Jeremy went into the store, he asked, “Did Mom's note to you say what kind of apples she wanted?”

“I wish!” Amanda exclaimed. “No-we're on our own.” You could have too many choices. Amanda saw that when she walked into the produce department. This was a big store, even for a Safeway. It tried to stock some of everything. As far as fruits and vegetables were concerned, it couldn't. It couldn't even come close. Still, as Amanda peeled a plastic bag off a roll, she looked at a couple of dozen different kinds of apples, all in neat bins.

She eyed red ones, golden ones, green ones, golden ones with reddish blushes, red ones streaked with gold, green ones streaked with gold. The sign above one bin said raised right here, so you know what goes into them! Other signs announced the alternates from which those apples had come.

Amanda pointed to a bin full of apples that were almost the same color as the navel oranges across the aisle from them. “What are these?”

“They're weird,” Jeremy said. He was suspicious of unfamiliar food.

Amanda wasn't. “Let's try them.” She picked out two nice ones and dropped them into the bag. Even though petroleum didn't get burned much any more, it still had a million uses. Making every kind of plastic under the sun was one of the most important.

As if to make up for the orange apples' strangeness, Jeremy chose two golden deliciouses from the raised right here bin. He pulled off a bag of his own. In went the apples. Even so, he pointed at the sign and said, “That's really lame. We're so mixed up with the alternates by now, who can tell what started out here and what didn't? And who cares, anyway?”

“Some people don't like anything new. Some people probably didn't like TV and telephones when they were first starting up,” Amanda said. She took an apple from a different bin.

Her brother grabbed another one, too. “I know, I know. They ought to look at what things are like in some of the alternates. That would teach them a lesson.”

“I doubt it,” Amanda said. “People like that don't learn lessons.”

“Don't I wish you were wrong.” Jeremy put another apple in his sack. “How much have we got?” They set both bags of apples on the tray of a produce scale, and added fruit till they had two kilos. Then they took the bags to the express checkout line.

The checker gave them a dirty look. “Why didn't you buy all the same kind?” he said.

“Because we like different kinds,” Amanda answered.

“But they all have different prices per kilo,” the checker grumbled. Jeremy probably would have got angry by himself. Amanda only smiled, which worked better. The checker muttered something, but he pulled out his handheld so he could see which kind cost what. He looked at the total on the register. “It comes to 557 dollars.”

“Here.” Amanda gave him five benjamins, a fifty-dollar piece, and a smaller ten-dollar coin. He ran the benjamins through a reader to make sure they were genuine, then put them and the coins in the register. He gave her back three little aluminum dollars. She stuck them in the hip pocket of her shorts.

Jeremy grabbed the apples. “Come on,” he said, looking at his watch. “There'll be a northbound bus in five minutes.”

They crossed the street and caught the bus. It wasn't a school bus, so they had to pay 125 dollars each for the ride.

From the stop where they got off, it was two blocks to their house. A squirrel was nibbling something under the mulberry tree in the front yard. Fafhrd watched it wistfully from a window. The big red tabby was an indoor cat. That kept him safe from cars and dogs and the occasional raccoon and coyote, to say nothing of fleas and other cats with bad tempers. He still knew what he was supposed to hunt, though. Every line of his body said, If I ever get the chance, that squirrel is dinner.

“Poor thing,” Amanda said as she walked up the brick path to the front door. She didn't mean it. Fafhrd was an indoor cat because the last one they'd had hadn't looked both ways before he crossed the street.

She opened the door. She and her brother hadn't even got out of the front hall when their mother called from the kitchen, “Did you remember the apples?”

“Yes, Mother,” Amanda said, and then, under her breath, “I knew she was going to do that.” Jeremy nodded. Raising her voice again, Amanda went on, “Why didn't you call when we were on the bus, to make sure?”

She'd intended that for sarcasm. Her mom took it literally. “Well, I was going to,” she said, “but your Aunt Beth called me just then, and I got to talking with her. I forgot what time it was till I saw you out front. I'm glad you remembered all by yourselves.” She'd never believe they weren't still four years old.

As they took the apples into the kitchen. Fafhrd rubbed against their ankles and tried to get them to trip over him. Amanda bent down and scratched behind his whiskers. He purred for fifteen seconds or so, then trotted away. Yes, she still adored him. That was all he'd needed to know.

“What kind did you get?” their mother asked when they plopped the apples on the kitchen table. Melissa Solters looked like an older, shorter version of Amanda. Jeremy got his lighter brown hair and eyes that were hazel instead of brown from their father.

“You didn't say you wanted any kind in particular, so we bought a bunch of different ones,” he said now.

“Don't be ridiculous,” Mom said. “Apples don't-”

“Grow in bunches.” Amanda waved a finger at her. “I knew you were going to do that.” Mom made silly jokes. Dad, on the other hand, made puns. Amanda had never decided which was worse.

“Haven't seen these funny-colored ones before,” Mom said, peering into the bag. “They must be from a newly opened alternate.”

“Orange you glad we got them?” Jeremy asked, deadpan. He took after Dad in more ways than looks. Amanda felt like taking after him, preferably with a baseball bat.

“How was school today?” Mom asked. Either she hadn't noticed what Jeremy had said or she was pretending she hadn't. Sometimes it was one, sometimes the other. Amanda could never be sure which.

“Okay,” she answered. “I got an A-minus on my lit paper.”

“In my day-” Mom shook her head. “They've tightened up since my day. Most people got A's then. An A-minus meant you weren't doing so well.”

“What's the point of having grades if everybody gets the same thing?” Amanda asked.

“I don't know. I guess that's why they tightened up. It's not the first time they've had to do it, either,” Mom said. “Getting rid of grade inflation, they call it. The other kind of inflation, the kind with money, just goes on and on. When your grandfather was little, a dollar was worth almost as much as a benjamin is now.“

Amanda thought about bygone days when people got good grades without working hard. She thought about even more distant days, when dollars were real money instead of afterthoughts in small change. The only answer she could see was that she'd been born in the wrong time.

The last day of school was always a half-day. When the final bell rang at twenty past twelve, soft whoops-and a couple that weren't so soft-came from every corner of Jeremy's homeroom. “Have a great summer,” the teacher said. “See you in September.”