The Gladiator Read online

  “What other kind could there be?” Annarita sounded bewildered. Gianfranco understood why. Anyone who grew up on the history of the glorious October Revolution and the civil war that followed learned how violence and force drove history forward.

  But Eduardo said, “We try to change people’s minds. The government and social structure you have now are the thesis. There hasn’t been a new antithesis here in a long time, because the powers that be suppress any ideas they don’t like. We were doing our best to make one, and to aim for a better synthesis.”

  He talked in terms of Marx’s dialectic. But he and his friends plainly were—had been—aiming to overthrow the ideas that lay behind the Italian People’s Republic, if not the republic itself.

  “What will you do?” Gianfranco asked. “They’re on to you. You won’t change any minds in the Security Police.”

  Instead of answering, Eduardo turned to Dr. Crosetti. “They’re smart,” he said. “Between them, they’ve come up with the same questions you did.”

  “They’ve come up with better ones,” Annarita’s father said. “And I’d like to know what you’re going to do, too.”

  “So would I,” Eduardo said bleakly. “If I can be Cousin Silvio for a while, that would sure help. But they’ll be watching The Gladiator like a hawk from now on. Same with The Conductor’s Cap down in Rome. Those are two of the places where I could get back to my own timeline. I can’t do it just anywhere. I don’t sprout wings, and it wouldn’t help if I did.”

  “You didn’t say those were the only two places.” Gianfranco felt like a detective listening for clues. “Where are the others?”

  “There’s only one more—if it’s still open,” Eduardo answered. “It’s … Maybe I’d better not say. I’ve said way too much already. I’ll probably get in trouble for it if I do get home, but I’ll worry about that later. I’m in trouble right here. When you’re in this kind of mess, you do what you have to do, that’s all.”

  Gianfranco thought about pushing him, then decided that wasn’t a good idea. Instead, he grinned at Annarita. “So you’ve got a new cousin, do you?”

  “I guess I do,” she said, and nodded at Eduardo. “Ciao, Cousin Silvio.”

  “Ciao, Cousin Annarita,” Eduardo answered gravely. He didn’t look much like her, but cousins didn’t have to.

  Pointing to him, Gianfranco said, “You’re going to have to pay a price for my silence, you know.”

  “Gianfranco!” Annarita sounded as if she’d just found him in her apple.

  “How much?” Eduardo sounded worried, or maybe downright alarmed. “Most of the time, it would be easy, but I can’t get my hands on a whole lot of cash right now. Having the Security Police on your tail will do that to you.” He managed a wry chuckle that he probably didn’t mean.

  “What kind of price have you got in mind, Gianfranco?” By the way Dr. Crosetti asked the question, he’d pitch Gianfranco through a wall head first if he didn’t like the answer.

  But Gianfranco only grinned. “Rails across Europe. Lots and lots of Rails across Europe!”

  Annarita started to giggle. Her father managed a thin smile. Gianfranco got the idea that that was the same as cracking up for most people. Eduardo’s laugh was full of relief. “Well, that can probably be arranged. You’ll wipe the floor with me, though. I just sell the games. I didn’t play them a whole lot.”

  “I bet you’re sandbagging,” Gianfranco said. “That way, you can beat me and then look surprised.”

  “If I beat you, I will look surprised. I promise.”

  “Can three play?” Annarita asked.

  Gianfranco and Eduardo both looked surprised. “Well, yes,” Gianfranco said, “but …” Are you sure you really want to? was what he swallowed this time.

  “I was having fun with the game we started,” she said. “I’d like to play some more … if the two of you don’t mind.”

  “It’s all right with me,” Eduardo said. “How could I tell my cousin no?” He winked again.

  That left it up to Gianfranco—except he didn’t really have a choice. If he said no, he’d look like a jerk. And, even though Annarita didn’t know what she was doing yet, she was plenty smart. If she wanted to, she could learn. “Why not?” he said. “Three people complicate things all kinds of interesting ways.”

  Eduardo laughed out loud again. Dr. Crosetti coughed dryly. Annarita looked annoyed. Gianfranco wondered what he’d said that was so funny.

  Annarita feared the Security Police would swoop down on her apartment and cart Eduardo off to jail. She also feared they would cart her whole family off with him. They did things like that. Everybody knew it.

  When it didn’t happen right away, she relaxed—a little. Gianfranco’s family took Cousin Silvio for granted. She’d never thought his folks were very bright or very curious. Up till now, that had always seemed a shame to her. All of a sudden, it looked like a blessing in disguise.

  Nobody thought anything was strange when Gianfranco dragooned Cousin Silvio into playing his railroad game. Gianfranco would have dragooned the cat into playing if it could roll dice instead of trying to kill them. And if Annarita played too, well, maybe she was just being polite for her cousin’s sake.

  And maybe she was, at least at first. But Rails across Europe was a good game, no two—or three—ways about it. It got harder with three players. Whoever got ahead found the other two ganging up on him … or her.

  At school, Ludovico backed Maria’s motion to change the minority report about The Gladiator to the majority. The motion passed without much comment. Annarita didn’t argue against it. How could she, when the Security Police had closed the place down—and when she had a fugitive in her apartment pretending to be her cousin?

  Victory made Maria smug. “Nice you finally quit complaining,” she said to Annarita after the meeting. “It would have been even better, though, if you’d given some proper self-criticism. Some people will still think you’re a capitalist backslider.”

  “I’ll just have to live with it,” Annarita said. Maria had no idea how much of a capitalist backslider she really was.

  And Maria also had no idea that she had such good reasons for being a backslider. All Maria knew about capitalism was what she’d learned in school. It was dead here, and the people who’d killed it spent all their time afterwards laughing at the corpse. They honestly believed the system they had worked better than the one they’d beaten.

  Annarita had believed the same thing. Why not? It was drummed into everybody every day, even before you started school. Every May Day, the whole world celebrated the rise of Communism and scorned the evils of capitalism. Nobody had any standards of comparison.

  Nobody except Annarita and her father and mother and Gianfranco. Eduardo talked about a world without the Security Police, a world where people could say what they wanted and do as they pleased without getting in trouble with the government. Well, talk was cheap. But people in Eduardo’s world had invented machines that took them across the timelines to this one. No one here even imagined such a thing was possible.

  “It isn’t possible here,” Eduardo said when she mentioned that. “You don’t have the technology to go crosstime.”

  The offhand way he said it made her mad. He might have been telling her that her whole world was nothing but a bunch of South Sea Islanders next to his. “We can do all kinds of things!” she said. “We’ve been to the moon and back. Why do you say we couldn’t build one of your crosstime engines or whatever you call them?”

  “Because you can’t,” he answered, and took his computer out of his shirt pocket. “See this?” Reluctantly, she nodded. She knew her world had nothing like it. He went on, “Anybody—everybody—back home carries one of these, or a laptop that’s a little bigger and stronger. This one’s nothing special, but it’s got more power than one of your mainframes. Our real computers—the ones you can’t carry around—are a lot smarter than this one.”

  How could she help but believe him? He wa
s there, in her front room, holding that impossible gadget. The more of what it could do he showed her, the more amazed she got. It played movies—movies she’d never seen, never heard of, before, which argued that they didn’t come from her world. It created letters and reports. It did complicated math in the blink of an eye. It had a map that showed all of Italy street by street, almost house by house.

  That impressed her, both because the map was so interesting and because he was allowed to have it. “A lot of maps here are secret,” she said.

  “I know,” Eduardo answered, and let it go right there. She’d always taken secrecy for granted. You couldn’t trust just anybody with information … could you? In two words, he asked her, Why can’t you? She found she couldn’t tell him.

  One question she did ask was, “Well, why do you bother with us at all if we’re so backward?”

  “Oh, you’re not,” he said. “You aren’t as far along as we are, but there are plenty of low-tech alternates where the people would think this was heaven on earth. You could be free. We think you ought to be free. We think everybody ought to be free. We were trying to nudge you along a bit, you might say.”

  “With game shops?” Annarita asked.

  “Sure,” Eduardo said. “There’s an old song in my timeline about a spoonful of sugar helping medicine go down easier. If we just showed up here and said, ‘No, no, you’re doing everything all wrong,’ what would happen?”

  “The Security Police would come after you,” Annarita answered. “But they came after you anyway.”

  “Sì,” he said mournfully. “But it took them longer, and we got to spread our ideas more than we would have if we tried to go into politics or something.”

  “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 Un
ion. 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.

  I 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. It 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. Gianfranco 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.”