Harry Turtledove - In High Places

"What would I do here? How would I earn my food?" Em-ishtar asked.

"Teaching us about your people and your alternate would make a good start, I think," Annette answered. "We have a lot of bad things to fix there. You grew up there. You know more about it than we do."

"I would rather farm," Emishtar said.

Farming here was an industry. She didn't understand that. "We use machines to farm in the home timeline," Annette said. "We don't do it the way they did where you grew up." She pictured oxen pulling, men with digging sticks, and others with hoes—an even more primitive way of doing things than they'd had at the manor.

But Emishtar was picturing what she'd known all her life till the slave raiders took her. "If I cannot go where I want to go, if I cannot do what I want to do, am I not still a slave here?" she asked bitterly.

Annette found no answer at all for her.

Jacques rubbed at the skin behind his left ear. He could feel something hard under there. It wasn't much, though—it couldn't have been the size of a grain of barley. Somehow, that little thing connected with his brain, and with the thinking machines they had here. He spoke and understood English now, just about as well as if he'd been born knowing it.

Khadija—no, he had to remember she was really Annette— had told him getting the implant wouldn't hurt much. He'd had trouble believing her. They were cutting his head open, after all. But she'd been right. A sting like a fleabite from a needle—the same sort of needle they'd used at the manor—and then he'd gone numb. The doctors did what they did. He didn't feel it. It did hurt a little when the numbness wore off. They gave him pills that pushed the pain far away.

The pills made him a little woozy. "They remind me of the way poppy juice makes you feel," he told Annette.

She gave him an odd look. "They're made from poppy juice," she said. "They have other things in them, but that's a big part."

He laughed, which he probably wouldn't have done if not for the pills. "That's funny," he said. "I thought you would have your own fancy things here."

"We have other things that fight pain," Annette said. "But the medicines we get from poppy juice work well. Why shouldn't we use them?"

He'd needed to heal up before they could give him their language. From what Annette said, the implant was making connections inside his head during that time. He almost wished she hadn't told him that. He thought of it like a spider, with legs reaching out to weave a web. ... He didn't suppose it was like that, but that was how he thought of it.

She drove him to what they called a learning center to get his dose of English. Riding in cars fascinated him. Here he was, smoothly gliding along faster than a horse could gallop. It was cold outside, but the car had its own heater. And people could buy these marvels more easily than a man bought a sword back in the Kingdom of Versailles.

"Could I learn to drive one?" he asked as they pulled into the open space around the learning center. It had lines painted on the smooth blackness to show where the cars should stop. He thought that was very clever.

"Yes," she answered. "But you can't learn that through an implant. You have to learn by doing. And you have to be careful. These cars go fast. If they smash into each other, it can be very bad."

He'd seen a few accidents. They did look bad. But he liked the idea of going so fast. Well, that would have to wait for now. Into the learning center he and Annette went.

One of the people there greeted him in English. That was funny, since English was what he'd come to learn. Annette spoke to the person, a woman, who picked up a telephone. Jacques knew what it did even if he didn't understand how. A man came out of another room. He spoke to Jacques in what the home timeline used for French: "Let me see your identification, please."

"Yes, my lord." Jacques took out the little plastic rectangle. It had a picture of him, his name, and a bunch of thick and thin black lines only one of the machines here could read. From what Annette said, you weren't real in the home timeline without your identification.

"I'm not 'my lord.' I'm just a technician," the man said. That meant something like artisan, Jacques gathered. The man fed the card into a machine. Words came up on a screen—a monitor, they called it. The man studied them. He eyed Jacques. "So Crosstime Traffic is picking up the bill for this, n'est-ce pas?"

"That's right," Annette said in the French of the Kingdom of Versailles. The technician nodded, so he could understand her. "He's one of the people who got rescued. Without him, there might not have been any rescue."

"I see." The man eyed Jacques. "You did well there, young fellow, if that's true. What do you think of the home timeline?"

"So far, it's mostly confusing," Jacques answered. The man and Annette both laughed, though he meant it. He went on, "I hope I'll fit in better once I understand the language."

"Well, it can't hurt," the technician said. "Come along with me. Since you're not from here, maybe your, ah, friend should come, too."

"Yes, I'll come," Annette said. "Jacques and I are friends." The technician smiled. Did that mean he wondered if they were more than friends? Back in the Kingdom of Versailles, it would have. Jacques wouldn't have minded. Maybe if he spoke English, Annette wouldn't think of him the way he thought of the savages in the new lands across the sea.

He was in those lands across the sea now. He hadn't seen any savages. People from Europe had known about these lands for centuries here. He supposed they'd conquered the natives and wiped them out. Winners did that to losers in his alternate. Why would it be any different here?

The technician sat him down in a chair that was halfway to being a couch. The man fiddled with a machine behind Jacques' head, and then put something that felt—cold?—above the implant. "Making the connection," he said. Jacques followed the words, but didn't know what they meant. "Are you ready?" the technician asked.

"I guess so," Jacques answered.

He heard a click. Annette spoke in a low voice: "It will be very strange for a little while. Don't worry. It's supposed to feel that way."

And then he was . . . invaded. That was the only word he could think of. He was invaded from the inside out. He could sense not just the new words but the whole shape and feel of English rushing into his head. The pieces seemed to look around and find homes alongside the French and the Arabic and the bits of Breton he already knew.

His head felt very crowded. That was the only word he could find for what was going on in there. And then, all of a sudden, it didn't matter any more. All of a sudden, everything felt the way it was supposed to again.

"How you doing?" the technician asked him.

"I'm okay," Jacques replied. "Boy, that was weird." His mouth fell open. The man in the white coat had asked the question in English. Not only did Jacques understand it, he answered in the same language. He'd felt it going in, but he hadn't imagined it could come out so easily. "Boy, that was really weird," he said, still in English.

Annette spoke in the French of the Kingdom of Versailles: "I felt the same way when I learned this speech. I felt filled too full too fast. Everybody does at first."

Filled too full too fast. Jacques found himself nodding. That fit what had just happened to him, all right. "It's better now," he said in English. He didn't have any trouble making the sounds. When he spoke Arabic, anyone could tell he was someone who'd grown up speaking French and then learned a new language. With English, though, he might have been raised in this Ohio province.

And he could think in English. He was thinking in English. When he spoke Arabic, he thought in French and translated what he wanted to say. Here, it was as if he suddenly had a new map for the land inside his head. It seemed to be a more detailed map, too. English had more words, more ideas, in it than his French did. It was a better language for splitting hairs. The home timeline seemed to have more hairs to split, too.