Harry Turtledove - In High Places

Part of Annette wanted to take a vase off the end table and bash him over the head with it. She understood he didn't know any better. Even so ... As patiently as she could, she said, "You're judging things by your own alternate. The only reason Jews aren't strong there is that it doesn't have very many of them." That was also partly true here, but she didn't want to complicate things.

She watched Jacques wrestle with it. "I never thought I could like a Jew," he said at last. "All I ever wanted to do was throw rocks at them. That's what they're for."

"Oh?" Annette raised an eyebrow. "How do you suppose they feel about that?"

He blinked. Plainly, wondering how Jews felt had never once occurred to him. Maybe he wouldn't care even after it did. There were still people who didn't care about those who weren't like them, even here in the home timeline. There were way too many of them, as a matter of fact. But Annette knew she couldn't stay friends with anybody like that.

"I don't suppose they'd like it very much, would they?" Jacques said after a long pause.

"No, I don't think so," Annette agreed, glad he'd seen that much. Maybe he could get beyond the prejudices he'd grown up with after all. She went on, "Most places here in the home timeline, it's against the law to discriminate because of religion or race or sex. We think those are good laws—they give everybody a fair chance."

"Race? What do you mean by race?" Jacques asked.

"What color you are." Annette smiled. The Kingdom of Versailles didn't have much racial trouble. How could it? Just about everybody in it was white.

"That's silly," Jacques said. "I didn't mind those Moors because they were black. They couldn't do anything about that. I didn't like it that they were Muslims, though. They could choose there, and they chose wrong."

One step forward, one step back, Annette thought. "Sometimes things that are different are just different, not right or wrong," she said again. "You can't prove anything about religions till after you're dead, and then you can't tell anybody else. We even have people who don't believe in God at all."

Jacques made the sign of the wheel. "Jesus and Henri! What do you do with them? Do you burn them or hang them or put them on the wheel or the cross or—?"

"We don't do anything to them," Annette broke in. "Nothing. As long as they don't hurt other people, they can believe— or not believe—whatever they want. They don't seem to be any worse, or any better, than Christians or Muslims or Jews, taken as a group. We think freedom to believe includes freedom not to believe."

"That's . . . very strange," Jacques said. "If you don't believe in God, how can you be good? If you don't think Anyone can punish you, why not cheat and rob and kill?"

Philosophers still wrestled with that one. Annette knew it. She also knew she was no philosopher herself. She gave a practical answer, not a philosophical one: "Because other people will punish you if you break the law."

"It doesn't seem like enough," Jacques said.

"It's what we've got," Annette told him. "Nothing works all the time, but this seems to work most of the time. One thing you've got to remember is, most of the Christians and Jews and Muslims here in the home timeline don't worry as much about what happens to them in the next world as people in your alternate do." She didn't say everybody. She talked about most people. Some of the exceptions over the past hundred years were pretty horrible.

Jacques scratched his head. She watched him think it through. At last, he said, "You have all these wonderful things. You have your wonderful machines. You have good health. You have plenty to eat. But when it comes to things that really matter, things of the spirit, are you any better off than we are?"

That was a serious question. "Some people will worry about those things no matter what. Some people won't worry about them no matter what," Annette said after some thought of her own. "We feel it's better if everybody is healthy and has enough to eat. That gives people a good start. What you do with it afterwards . . . Whether you want to worry about things of the spirit or you just want to live your life in this world, well, it's up to you. You have to make up your own mind."

It's up to you. You have to make up your own mind. More than anything else, that might have been the slogan of the strange new world in which Jacques found himself. In the Kingdom of Versailles, he'd had a place. Part of it came from what his family was. Part of it came from his service with the king. But he always had a good idea of where he stood, of who could tell him what to do (most people) and whom he could boss around (the rest).

Things were different here in what Annette called the home timeline. Part of that was because he was a stranger here. He didn't know the rules. He understood as much. Part of it, though, was because the rules were so much looser.

Christians and Muslims and Jews all worshiped in the same kingdom? They didn't try to kill one another very often. The country wasn't officially Christian or Muslim or—strange thought!—Jewish. Even the King of this Spain was nothing but a figurehead? The people chose their leaders? It struck him as one short step up from what went on in a peasant revolt, but it seemed to work.

Annette told him laws here didn't discriminate because of religion, and he saw it was so. She told him laws didn't discriminate because of race, and he saw that was so, too. He saw more different kinds of people in Spain and in the United States, her country, than he'd ever imagined, and they all seemed to be ... people, treated pretty much the same. The United States didn't have a king at all. Now that was peculiar.

And she told him laws didn't discriminate because of sex, either. That also turned out to be so. He'd seen that some of the soldiers who shut down the manor were women. Women in the home timeline could be doctors or lawyers or artisans or whatever else they wanted to be. They got into politics. Some of them ran countries. The people under them obeyed them as if they were men.

It was all very confusing.

It was scary, too, maybe even scarier than going into battle. In battle, you had some idea of the kinds of things that could happen. Here, everything seemed up in the air. Jacques felt at home in only one setting in the home timeline.

When he testified before lawyers and a judge, he might almost have been back in the Kingdom of Versailles. Before he even started testifying, he had to take an oath before God to tell the truth. From some of the things Annette said, he gathered that was a formality here. It meant they could charge you with a crime if they caught you lying. Jacques really meant it. The authorities here didn't worry him so much. The idea that God was looking down and listening to what he said did.

Everything was formal in courts. Things weren't the same here as they were in the Kingdom of Versailles, but they weren't all that different. You could tell the courts were two branches growing off the same tree. If what Annette said was true, his whole world and this one were like that—and he had no reason to doubt her. But the worlds as a whole had grown much farther apart than their courts had.

Sometimes people questioned him in the French they spoke here. He could mostly understand it, and they could mostly follow him when he answered. A couple of them, though, went to the trouble of learning the French they spoke in his Kingdom of Versailles. Like Annette, they spoke it as well as he did. Maybe they spoke it better than he did, because they sounded more educated.

"Learning languages is easy for us," Annette told him during a recess at a court somewhere in the United States. "We have these implants." She touched her head behind her left ear. "They can connect our brains to a machine that puts the language in there like that." She snapped her fingers.