In High Places Read online

  How many alternates did these slavers visit? How long had this been going on? Annette had no way to be sure, except by noting that the manor seemed new. The roadbuilding Jacques and the other men were doing also argued this place hadn't been here very long. If it had, the road would already have been in place, wouldn't it? Annette thought so, but she couldn't prove a thing.

  If word of this ever reached the home timeline . . . Somewhere under downtown Madrid was a subbasement with an outlaw transposition chamber. What would people do? Say they were coming into town on business or on vacation? Travel to this alternate or the one with the Great Black Deaths or some other unknown one and play at being masters for a while, then go back to the home timeline with a suntan and with memories they didn't dare share? Again, that was how it looked. Again, Annette knew she couldn't prove it.

  She couldn't prove it as long as she was here. Even if she could prove it while she was here, it wouldn't do her any good. But if she could get back ... If she could ride that transposition chamber back to the home timeline . . .

  Most chambers had a human operator in them to take over if anything went wrong with the computers. The slavers hadn't bothered here. Annette could see why not, too. An operator would be one more person, maybe one person too many, who knew the secret. And the computer hardly ever went wrong. Even when it did, the operator couldn't do much about it most of the time. But transposition chambers did have manual controls.

  Annette laughed at herself again. It was either that or break down and cry, which she didn't want to do. Suppose everything went just right. Suppose she could hop into the transposition chamber and pilot it back to the home timeline. Then what? Then somebody in that Madrid would knock her over the head, and she would have wasted a thrilling escape.

  It wouldn't have worked out like that in a video game. There would have been some puzzle to solve. You might have to look real hard for it, but it would be there. You could win the game.

  Here .. . She laughed one more time—those tears she didn't want to shed were much too close. The only way she saw now to win the game and get out of that subbasement in home-timeline Madrid was to look like a master on the way back from her time as lord of all she surveyed. Only one thing was wrong with that.

  She couldn't do it.

  All she had in this alternate were the clothes on her back. They wouldn't convince anybody she was anything but a slave. She hadn't seen any women from the home timeline here. Even if she did, how likely were any of them to be eighteen years old?

  Young people weren't likely to do anything like this to begin with. The passion to lord it over other people, to set yourself up as a little tin god, got worse with age.

  "You!" a—middle-aged—guard yelled at her in Arabic. "Work harder!"

  As long as he was watching her, she did. Then she slacked off again. She'd already learned one lesson of slavery—never do more than you had to.

  Seven

  When these people built a road, they didn't fool around. Jacques found that out in a hurry. A track already led east. The road went in the same general direction, but ignored the track. The track meandered and took the easiest way across the hot, dry countryside. The road went straight as a string. In fact, strings stretched from posts driven into the ground marked out the way it would go on.

  It was about twenty feet wide, and built on a foundation four or five feet deep. Digging out that much dirt was hard work. The slaves traded off with pick and with shovel and with a wicker basket with which to dump out the spoil. They argued about which job was hardest, using both signs and words. Everybody claimed whatever he was doing at that moment was the hardest thing in the world.

  Jacques learned Arabic curses he hadn't known before. He learned some curses in the other two languages, too. He didn't always know what they meant, but liked the way they rolled off his tongue.

  The one good thing he could say was that the guards gave the slaves plenty to drink. Without that, men would have died like flies, and they wouldn't have got much roadbuilding done. Some of the swarthier men and the few blacks left after Musa ibn Ibrahim got killed worked stripped to the waist. Jacques couldn't do it. This hot southern sun burned him wherever it touched his skin. He kept his shirt on. He sometimes thought the breeze blowing through the sweat-soaked linen helped cool him. Other times . . .

  "I feel like a sausage in an oven," he said, grunting as he lifted a basket of earth and rocks and dumped it to one side of the trench.

  "You're still wearing your casing," a slave named Muhammad said with a grin. Four or five of the slaves who'd come over to this place—wherever it was—had that name. This one was short and lean and tough and a brown that staying out in the sun only made browner. He had no trouble shedding his shirt.

  Behind the gang that dug down to the foundation came another that filled in the trench to make the roadbed. They threw in dirt mixed with sand, then gravel, then bigger pebbles. Once they'd built the roadbed up close to ground level, they tamped everything down so it was good and firm. Then they set flat, close-fitting paving stones on top of the foundation. Another gang somewhere was probably cutting those stones. Curbstones denned the edge of the road.

  There were highways like this in the Kingdom of Versailles. People said they went back to the days of the Romans. Jacques didn't know a lot about the Romans. They'd been strong before Henri's time, before the Great Black Deaths. And they'd crucified Jesus, Henri's older brother. Once you know that much, what else did you need to know?

  Because the road was so much work, it didn't move forward very fast. That didn't seem to worry the guards, as long as the road gang worked hard. They kept an eye on the slaves and talked among themselves. Sometimes they used Arabic, sometimes one of the two tongues the slaves who didn't speak Arabic spoke, and sometimes another language Jacques didn't understand. The sounds of that one reminded him a little of the ones in the speech of traders from England.

  One day a couple of weeks after Jacques got to the manor, a guard pointed down the track. It ran straight east here—the fancy road was eating it a foot at a time.

  A horsemen rode up the track toward the roadbuilding crew. As he drew near, Jacques saw he was waving something in his right hand. It was an olive branch—no mistaking the small, gray-green leaves. A sign of peace? The rider wore a baggy tunic, something that looked like a divided skirt, and rawhide boots. He had on a floppy hat that shielded his face from the sun. Jacques wished he had one like it. The man's face was strong and square, with a big, straight nose, a thick black beard, and bushy eyebrows that grew together in the middle.

  The stranger reined in about fifty yards from Jacques and the closest guards. He yelled something in the sneezing, hissing language some of the slaves used. One of the guards shouted back in the same tongue. When he did, the one-eyebrowed man on horseback looked as if he'd got a big mouthful of vinegar. He called out again. The guard answered, and gestured with his musket. Come ahead—Jacques could figure that out without understanding a word.

  Still with that sour expression on his face, the horseman rode forward. His mount's hooves thumped in the dirt, then clattered on the paving stones of the finished section of road. A guard near Jacques talked into something small that he held in the palm of his hand. Jacques thought he heard the—the thing answer back. That was impossible, though. Or maybe not, he thought, remembering the voice that had spoken out of the air in the transposition chamber. Who could say for sure what these—wizards?—were able to do?

  Khadija might know, Jacques thought. He hadn't had much chance to talk with her since they got here. Both of them were too busy. He promised himself he would ask when he did get the chance.

  As the stranger rode on, the guards started to laugh. "What's so funny, sir?" Jacques asked the closest one. If you stayed polite to them, they would sometimes answer.

  This one did. Still smiling, he said, "The flea-bitten fool is angry because we speak his language as well as he does."

  Jacques scratched his head.
His hair was filthy and matted with sweat. "I don't understand, sir," he said.

  "His people say foreigners can't learn their language," the guard told him. "They say demons tried to learn their language and couldn't do it. But we can." He laughed some more.

  And what does that make you? Jacques wondered. He didn't ask. He didn't think the guard would tell him. He wasn't sure he wanted to know, either.

  Annette was weeding when she heard a sound that reminded her heartbreakingly of home: a telephone rang. A guard took it out of his pocket, listened, and said, "Yeah?" He listened some more, then said, "Okay," and put the phone away again.

  Emishtar was weeding next to her. They'd got into the habit of doing that, so they could teach each other bits of their languages. The guards didn't seem to mind. Emishtar made strange gestures in the direction of the guard who'd used the telephone. To her, it had to be some sort of magical gadget. Maybe she was trying to make sure the magic didn't come down on her.

  The guard pointed down the road. Annette looked that way, too, when she was sure nobody was looking at her. A stranger! The first man she'd seen who didn't belong to the manor. He looked . . . like a man. The olive branch seemed to serve as a flag of truce. His horse trappings and his clothes all seemed made by hand. He probably wasn't riding for fun, then, the way he would have in the home timeline. He was riding because this was the best way he knew to go from one place to another. Annette nodded to herself. She'd known this couldn't be a high-tech alternate.

  Another guard stepped out into the roadway as the horseman neared. He held up his hand, palm out. The rider reined in. The guard spoke to him. The language sounded like the one some of the slaves used, not Emishtar's tongue but the other one. The horseman answered in what seemed like the same language. After some back-and-forth, the guard waved him on toward the manor.

  Once the horseman rode off, the fellow who'd spoken to him came over to the guard near Annette. They were both grinning. Annette wouldn't have wanted those nasty grins aimed at her.

  "Lord Wog's not so high and mighty any more?" one of them said.

  "Nope," the other answered. "We taught the savages that all kinds of horrible things happen to 'em if they mess with us. They're like any other dogs. Kick 'em a few times and they'll roll over and show you their bellies." He laughed. So did his pal.

  Annette kept her head down. She didn't want them to see the look on her face. Savages was bad enough. But wog! And dogs! In the home timeline, calling people names like that was almost as sick as wearing furs. Crosstime Traffic training went on and on till everyone's eyes glazed over about how the people in the alternates were people just like anybody else. They might believe some things that weren't so, but that was because they didn't know better, not because they were stupid. Annette could have repeated those lessons in her sleep. She'd believed them, too. She'd thought everybody believed them.

  Shows what I know, went through her head.

  She'd had some notion of what the masters here got from keeping slaves. It sickened her, but she thought she understood how it worked. What the guards got out of being here—besides piles of benjamins—hadn't been so obvious. She wouldn't have trusted money alone to make people keep their mouths shut. And it didn't look as if the slavers did, either.

  If you thought you were better than someone else because you came from here and he came from there, or because your skin was this color and hers was that one, you couldn't show it in the home timeline. If you did, nobody would want anything to do with you. You had to keep those feelings to yourself, to hide them. If you came to a place where you could let them out instead . . .

  Wouldn't that be fun? It sure would, if you were the right kind of wrong person.

  What had the guards done to the locals? Taken slaves from among them, plainly. What else? Do I really want to know? Annette wondered. Her stomach twisted. The locals would have swords and bows and arrows. The guards had assault rifles and body armor and night-vision goggles and all the other tools of twenty-first-century war. They'd won. They probably thought they were heroes because they'd won, too.

  Or maybe this was like a duck-hunting trip for them, not even war at all. A lot of people in the home timeline looked down their noses at hunting, but some still enjoyed it. If Annette had her opinion, she knew it was only an opinion. On other things, where just about everyone around her thought the way she did, she sometimes confused her opinions with laws of nature.

  People in other alternates were apt to do the same thing. The difference—to her mind, anyway—was that they were likely to be wrong. She couldn't imagine sensible people approving of slavery, for instance, or of male chauvinism, or of furs.

  "What are you doing sitting there like a mushroom?" a guard shouted at her in harsh, guttural Arabic. "You didn't come out here to get a suntan, sweetheart. You came out here to work. You'd better remember it, too, or you'll be sorry."

  Annette started weeding like a machine. The guard scowled. He didn't have a whip, like an overseer in the South before the Civil War. But he did have a billy club on his belt to go with his automatic rifle. Guards didn't hit slaves here very often. That didn't mean they wouldn't if you gave them an excuse, though, or sometimes just if they felt like it.

  "He bad man," Emishtar whispered in bad Arabic.

  "He very bad man," Annette agreed in the older woman's language. They'd taught each other man and bad by pointing at the guards. Annette wished she could ask Emishtar about the man who'd just ridden into the manor, but she didn't have the words. Trying to remember the ones she'd learned without an implant wasn't easy, and she knew she was pronouncing them wrong.

  An accent. I've got an accent. She'd never had to worry about that before. The implant let her speak perfectly when she used it. Emishtar had an accent when she used Arabic. That made Annette feel a bit better.

  A small bit better. Feeling good about something else while you were a slave was like feeling good about something else while you had two broken legs. You could do it, but not for long and not very well. After a while, you got over a broken leg. How did you get over being a slave if you couldn't escape and there was nobody in this whole alternate to ransom you?

  Yes, how did you? Did you? Could you?

  When Jacques came in from a day of work on the road, he began to understand how a pack horse felt. The guards insisted on getting so much work out of him. If he could do that much work without trouble, all right. If he couldn't. . . They insisted on getting that much work out of him anyway, and out of the other slaves. "You've got to do it!" the guards yelled. "You'll be sorry if you don't!"

  And if men didn't, if men couldn't, the guards made them sorry. They did excuse people who were really sick. But if you goofed off, they made you regret it. Those sticks they carried could raise welts almost like a whip. They didn't always bother with them, though. Sometimes they would use a boot or a musket butt to get their point across.

  Once, brutality led to tragedy in short order. A guard clouted one of the men who'd come here in the transposition chamber with Jacques. The man leaped to his feet and smacked the guard in the face. Taken by surprise, the guard fell down and dropped his musket. With a roar of triumph, the slave snatched it up. He squeezed the trigger.

  And nothing happened.

  The slave cried out again, this time in despair. The other guards gave him the ultimate insult—they took the time to laugh at him before they shot him. The muskets worked fine for them. They spat bullets like a boy spitting melon seeds to annoy his sister. The slave fell, with as many holes in him as a colander. The bullets made horrible wounds, worse than any Jacques had ever seen. When they tore through a man, they tore his insides out with them. Jacques wondered why they were so much nastier than any other musket balls. Maybe they traveled faster. The gunshots certainly sounded quicker and harsher than any he'd known before. They went crack! instead of boom!

  After the slave lay dead, his blood soaking into the dirt, the guards rounded on the rest of the roadbuilding gan
g. "Anybody else feel brave?" one of them shouted in Arabic. "Anybody else feel stupid? You mess with us, only one thing happens—you end up like this." He stirred the body with his boot. Then he shouted some more, in the other languages the slaves here used.

  None of the roadbuilders said a word. What could you say? The guards even seemed to have a spell on their muskets, so they could use them and no one else could. How were you supposed to fight men like that? Jacques saw no way, however much he wished he could.

  "You and you and you." The guard who'd shouted picked a pikeman and two shovelers near Jacques. "Get off to the side of the road and dig him a grave. You don't need to make it too deep—just enough so the animals won't dig him out."

  "May we pray for him?" one of the shovelers asked.

  By the look on the guard's face, he wanted to say no. He wanted to, but he didn't. "Yes, go ahead," he said gruffly. "And while you're at it, pray he's got more sense in the next world than he did in this one."

  The gravediggers set to work. It was the same work they would have been doing preparing the roadbed. The dead slave would never get out of this bed once they laid him in it, though.

  Jacques eyed the guard. The man seemed vicious but not stupid. The slaves needed to see they couldn't hope to get away with rising up. But if he hadn't let them pray over the dead body, that might have given them reason to rise whether they had hope or not. Reluctantly, Jacques decided the men in the mottled tunics and trousers knew what they were doing. Too bad, he thought. He would rather have had a bunch of bungling idiots watching him.

  Even for three men, digging a grave took a while. When the hole was big enough and deep enough, they dragged the dead man over and slid him down into it. That shoveler murmured prayers in Arabic. All the Muslims paused and lowered their heads in respect. The guards rolled their eyes, but they didn't complain out loud.