The Gladiator ct-4 Read online

  "You really are counterrevolutionaries," she said.

  "We didn't have the revolution," Eduardo said. "The home timeline's not a perfect place-not even close. I'd be lying if I said it was. But we live better in our Italy than you do in this one. We don't have to share kitchens and bathrooms-and in the poor people's apartments here they crowd two or three families into one flat. We don't do that."

  Annarita sighed. "A place all to ourselves would be nice."

  "Sure it would. And we eat better than you do, too. You're not starving or anything-I will say that for you-but we eat better. Our clothes are more comfortable. I won't talk about style. That's a matter of taste. Our cars are quieter and safer than yours, and they pollute a lot less. We have plenty of things you don't, too-everything from computers for everybody to fasartas."

  "What's a fasarta?" Annarita asked.

  Eduardo was the one who sighed now. "If I'd gone back in time to 1850 instead of across it and I tried to explain radio, I'd talk about voices and music coming out of the air. People would think I was hearing things. They'd lock me up in an insane asylum and lose the key. Some things you need to experience. Explaining them doesn't make any sense."

  "Try," Annarita said. "I know I'm only a primitive girl from a backward, uh, alternate, but maybe I'll understand a little."

  She said that, but she didn't mean it. No matter what she said, she thought she was bright and sophisticated. She didn't really believe her alternate was backward, either. They had electricity and clean water and atomic energy. What more did they need?

  Then she saw the way Eduardo looked at her. To him, she really was a primitive girl from a backward place. She could tell. It embarrassed her and made her angry at the same time.

  "Fasartas," he said. "Well, I'll do my best." And he talked for a while, and she got the idea that a fasarta made life more worth living, but she couldn't have said exactly how. He saw he wasn't getting through. "For me, a fasarta is like water to a fish. For you, it's more like water to a hedgehog, isn't it?"

  "I'm not prickly!" she said, sounding… prickly.

  "Sure," Eduardo said, sounding all the more smooth and soothing next to her. She'd never heard disagreeing by agreeing done better.

  And so she got mad at Eduardo. She got mad at the place he came from-the home timeline, he called it-for having things her Italy didn't… freedom, for instance. She was already mad at Maria Tenace for being Maria. She was mad at the Young Socialists' League for paying attention to Maria, even if (no, especially because) Maria turned out to be right. A stopped clock is right twice a day, her father sometimes said. She'd thrown that in Maria's face once. And she was mad at Italy- her Italy, the Italy she'd always taken for granted and loved at the same time-for being less perfect, less a workers' paradise, than she'd thought it was.

  And she was mad because she couldn't do anything about anything she was mad at. She had to keep her mouth shut, or somebody would knock on the door in the middle of the night. Then she would learn some things about the workers' paradise that everybody already knew, but no one wanted to discover at first hand. She felt as if she wanted to explode. She knew she couldn't, of course. Maybe that made her maddest of all.

  Seven

  In the Mazzillis' apartment, Gianfranco's father looked up from the report on the latest Communist Party Congress and said, "That cousin the Crosettis have staying with them seems like a nice young fellow."

  "I think so, too." Gianfranco was glad to get away from his literature project, even if it meant talking with his father. The assignment was, Write a canto in the style of Dante's Inferno. Which feudal lords, capitalists, and Fascists would you assign to which circles of hell? Why?

  How was he supposed to do anything like that? To begin with, he was no poet. Then, Dante's language was almost nine hundred years old now. It lay at the core of modern Italian, but nobody had a style like Dante's any more. Would anybody be crazy enough to ask a modern English-speaker to try to write like Chaucer, or even Shakespeare? Gianfranco hoped not, anyhow.

  "Yes, that Silvio seems very friendly," his father went on. "You talk with him like you've known him a long time."

  Oops, Gianfranco thought. He had known Eduardo for a while, of course. But it wasn't supposed to show. "He has interesting things to say," Gianfranco answered.

  "Good. And it's nice that he plays that game you were teaching Annarita." His father paused, looking for a way to say what he wanted. "If he didn't already know about it, you might have wanted to think before you showed it to him. Annarita's all right, but some people might wonder if you were politically reliable for having it around."

  This was the first time he'd said anything about The Gladiator, even in passing. Gianfranco had wondered if he even knew the gaming shop got closed down. There were times when Gianfranco wondered just how connected to the real world his father was. Maybe more than he'd figured. That meant he had to be even more careful than he'd thought.

  "It's only a game, Father," he said, as if no other possibility had ever crossed his mind.

  "Nothing is only anything." His father sounded very sure of that. Gianfranco wondered what it meant, or if it meant anything. He started to ask. Then he noticed his father was deep in the Party Congress report again.

  That meant he had to get back to imitating Dante himself. Rails across Europe had taught him something about dealing with big, complicated projects. If you could break them down into smaller, simpler pieces and tackle those pieces one at a time, you had a better chance than if you tried to tackle everything at once.

  So… If he were traveling through the circles of hell, whom would he see? He needed to figure that out first. Then he could decide why they were there. And after that… Well, after that he could try to sound like Dante. He didn't think he would have much luck, but he didn't think anyone else in the class would, either.

  Feudal lords, capitalists, and Fascists. The assignment made it plain he needed at least one of each. The Fascist would be Hitler. He'd already decided that. And he'd put Hitler as close to Satan as he could, because Hitler attacked Stalin and the Soviet Union. Probably more than half the class would pick Hitler, but Gianfranco couldn't help that. Mussolini was the other choice, and he didn't do as much.

  "Capitalist," Gianfranco muttered, not loud enough for his father to hear him. When you thought of a capitalist, you thought of…

  When Gianfranco thought of a capitalist, he thought of Henry Ford. And Ford would definitely do. He made millions of dollars and exploited his workers doing it. Gianfranco had to check a map of Dante's hell to decide which circle to put him in.

  The fifth, he decided: the circle of hoarders and spendthrifts. Didn't that say what capitalists were all about?

  Now he needed a feudal lord, and one Dante hadn't used. He smiled when Francesco Sforza came to mind. Sforza had ruled here in Milan. The big castle near the heart of town was his creation. Since he'd taken the city by force in 1450, he probably belonged in the sixth circle of hell, that of the wrathful. And Dante had never heard of Francesco Sforza, because the poet was long dead when the soldier of fortune came to power.

  / have my people, Gianfranco thought. Now all I've got to do is sound like Dante. That would have been funny if it weren't so ridiculous. He could think of all kinds of people he might be when he grew up. He could imagine himself as a game designer if everything went just right. He could imagine himself as a gray functionary like his father if everything went wrong. But a poet? A poet wasn't in the cards.

  Still, he had to try. He could steal some lines from Dante and change names. He could adapt some others. But he still had to write some of his own. He had to think about that old-fashioned Italian, and about the rhythm, and about the right number of syllables in every line, and about what he was trying to say. Ft was harder than patting his head and rubbing his stomach at the same time.

  Finally, though, he wasn't too unhappy with what he had. "Do you want to listen to my verses, Father?" he asked.

  His
father looked at the report on the Party Congress. Gian-franco thought he would say no, but he nodded. "Well, why not?" he answered. "They've got to be more interesting than this thing. Doctors could bore patients to sleep with this, and save the cost of ether."

  That didn't mean he was eager to listen to Gianfranco, but he'd said he would. Listening was all that really mattered. Gianfranco did his best imitation of Dante. He'd just started Hitler, whom he'd saved for last, when his father broke out laughing. Gianfranco broke off, insulted. "It's not that bad," he said.

  "Scusi. Semi," his father said, laughing still. "I wasn't laughing at the poetry."

  "No? What, then?" Gianfranco knew he sounded suspicious-he was.

  "When I was in high school, oh, a thousand years ago, we had this same assignment," his father said. "I haven't thought about it from then till now, but we did. And do you know the people I picked?"

  A light went on in Gianfranco's head. "Ford and Sforza and Hitler?"

  His father nodded. "St. Ford and Sforza and Hitler. So that's why I was laughing. Some of what you wrote even sounds familiar, but I can't prove that-it's been too long. Any which way, though, you're a chip off the old block. Now you can finish."

  Gianfranco did. He wasn't sure he liked thinking like his father. Like it or not, he didn't know what he could do about it. Probably nothing. "Well, what do you think?" he asked.

  "It's not exactly Dante." His father held up a hasty hand. "Neither was mine, believe me. The only one who was Dante… was Dante. But it does what it's supposed to do, and I think it's good enough to get you a pretty high grade. All right?"

  "I guess so." Gianfranco didn't want to admit too much.

  His father eyed him. "You've been doing better in school lately, haven't you?"

  "Some, maybe." Gianfranco wondered where that was going. Would his father ask him why he hadn't done so well before? That would be good for a row.

  But it didn't go anywhere much. His father just said, "Well, I'm glad," and went back to the Party Congress report. Gianfranco'd been ready to argue. Now he didn't have anything to argue about. He felt vaguely deflated as tension leaked out of him.

  He'd got rid of the assignment, anyway. He stuck it in his notebook and looked to see what he had to do for history.

  "Why can't you telephone your friends-wherever they are- and find out if they're all right?" Annarita asked Eduardo. Silvio, she told herself. He has to be Silvio.

  "Well, I will if I have to, but I don't much want to," Eduardo answered. "Even if nobody's dropped on them, the Security Police are bound to be tapping their telephone lines. I don't want to do anything to hurt them, or to give myself away, either."

  "Ah." Annarita nodded. "I thought you might have ways to get around the bugs."

  "I don't, not with me. They do," Eduardo said. "But they don't use them all the time-what would the point be? So chances are I'd give myself away before they realized who I was. We don't work miracles. I wish we did."

  "You have that little computer in your pocket, and you tell me you don't?" Annarita worked an eyebrow. If that gadget wasn't a miracle, she'd never seen one.

  But Eduardo shook his head. "The computer can work by itself. If I use the telephone or write a letter, it has to go through the government phone lines or the postal system."

  "You don't have your own phones?" Annarita was disappointed.

  "Sure we do. There's one in the computer, in fact. It works great in the home timeline, but not here," Eduardo said. "A phone isn't just a phone-it's part of a network. The only network it can be part of here is the one you've already got. We don't have our own satellites-people would notice if we launched one. They'd notice if we built our own relay towers, too, even if we did disguise them as trees or something."

  Annarita laughed. He was right, no doubt about it. He and the other people from his home timeline had been thinking about this stuff longer than she had. They had more of the answers worked out than she did.

  But one other thing occurred to her. "If you can use your computer like a phone, can you use it like a radio, too?"

  "Not… as far off as my friends are, if they're still here," Eduardo said. "And even if I could, the Security Police would be listening. Best thing I can do right now is sit tight and wait for the hullabaloo to die down. Maybe the goons will decide everybody got away and stop being interested in me."

  "Maybe." Annarita didn't believe it. "From what Gianfranco said, the Security Police knew you weren't with the others."

  Eduardo sighed. "You're right, of course, no matter how much I wish you were wrong. I don't dare take anything for granted."

  "Do you want to hear something funny?" Annarita asked.

  "Right now, I'd love to hear something funny," Eduardo answered. "What is it?"

  "Talking about Gianfranco put it into my head," Annarita said. "I think he's jealous of you." She laughed to show how silly that was.

  By the look on Eduardo's face, he didn't think it was even a little silly. He seemed ready to jump up from the sofa and run. "How jealous? Jealous why?" he demanded. "That could be very bad. He's a Party official's kid. If he goes to the Security Police, they'll listen to him, sure as the devil."

  "He wouldn't do that!" Annarita could imagine Gianfranco doing a lot of things, but turning informer? She didn't believe it.

  "Hmm." Eduardo didn't sound convinced. He didn't know Gianfranco the way she did. But her neck wasn't on the line- at least not directly-and Eduardo's was. He went on, "You didn't answer my question. What's he jealous about?"

  "Well, he kind of likes me," Annarita said. "And here you are, staying in the same apartment with me. And you're already grown up and everything, and he's… not finished, if you know what I mean."

  "Diavolo!" Eduardo clapped a hand to his forehead. "Will you please tell him nothing's going on? Nothing will be going on, either. Or maybe I should talk to him myself. Si, that'd be better. I'll do it."

  "Grazte," Annarita said. "The whole idea is silly, anyway."

  "Well… Not as silly as you think, maybe," Eduardo said slowly. "If you were twenty-one, say, instead of seventeen… If I weren't in a jam…" He kept starting sentences he didn't finish. "But you aren't, and I am," he went on, confusing Annarita till she figured out what he meant. "And so, the way things are, nothing's going on, and nothing's going to go on. Right?"

  "Uh, right," Annarita said. She wasn't just confused now- she was flustered. She realized Eduardo had paid her a compliment, and not a small one, either. She'd probably never had one, though, that she felt less ready to deal with. If Gianfranco liked her, that was one thing. She knew what she needed to do about it-not much. If Eduardo liked her, or could like her…

  Now she was starting sentences and not finishing them. And maybe that was just as well, too.

  Gianfranco rolled the dice and moved his locomotive from Berlin toward Vienna. When he got there, he was going to unload beer and fill his train with chocolate for the return trip.

  Annarita yawned. "What time is it?" she asked.

  "Getting on towards one in the morning," Eduardo said after looking at his watch.

  She yawned again. "I'm going to bed. I don't care if tomorrow-I mean, today-is Sunday. I'm too sleepy to play anymore. Good night." She slipped away before Gianfranco could even try to talk her into going on a little longer.

  He sighed and shrugged. "We'll just mark everything and pick it up again later on."

  "Right." Eduardo took care of that and put the game back in the box. Then he said, "It ought to be pretty quiet out on the street, right? Come on out, why don't you? I've got some stuff I want to talk to you about."

  "What kind of stuff?" Gianfranco asked.

  "Stuff, that's what." Eduardo got up. "You coming or not?"

  "I'm coming," Gianfranco said. "What do you want to say out there that you don't want to say in here?"

  Eduardo didn't answer. Whatever it was, he didn't want to say it in here. They went down the stairs together. Somebody from the floor a
bove Gianfranco's was coming up. He'd had a good bit to drink. "Ciao" he said thickly. He reeled on the stairs. Gianfranco hoped he wouldn't trip and break his neck.

  It was cool and dark and quiet outside. Well, not too quiet- Milan was a big city. In the distance, car horns blared. Dogs were barking. Somebody yelled at somebody else. But none of that was close. Gianfranco and Eduardo could stand on the sidewalk and not worry about it.

  Gianfranco looked up into the sky. Even at one in the morning, city lights washed out all but the brighter stars. But he hadn't come out here to find the Big Dipper. "So what's going on?" he asked Eduardo.

  "I'm not trying to take your girl away," the older man said bluntly. "I'm not-all right?"

  "Annarita's not my girl," Gianfranco said with a sour laugh. "Ask her if you don't believe me."

  "She's more your girl than she is mine," Eduardo said. "That's how it'll stay, too. She's too young for me, for one thing. And I don't belong here. This isn't my world. What I want most is to get back to the home timeline."

  He'd said that before, but never so strongly. "You have somebody back there waiting for you?" Gianfranco asked.

  "Not… like that, no," Eduardo admitted. "But it's my home. It's where I belong. So I'm not trying to muscle in on you, capisce?"

  "I never said you were," Gianfranco answered. True-he hadn't. But that didn't mean it wasn't on his mind.

  "All right. But I wanted you to know. You don't have anything to worry about there, anyhow," Eduardo said.

  "Thanks." Gianfranco said it even if he wasn't sure he meant it. If Annarita decides she likes Eduardo, what can I do about it? he wondered. But he knew the answer to that-he couldn't do anything. And she might. Eduardo was an older man, he wasn't bad-looking, and he had a genuine mystery hanging over him. What could be more intriguing? And even if she didn't, Gianfranco knew he had other things to worry about. The Security Police, for instance. He shivered, though it wasn't very cold. "Let's go back inside."

  "Sure," Eduardo said. "But I wanted you to hear that, and I wanted to make sure nobody else did."