In High Places Read online

  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.

  "Is everything all right?" Annette asked the technician. "Can I take him home?"

  The man eyed a couple of monitors. "It all looks good," he answered. "If he has any kind of problem—anything at all—bring him back. We'll analyze his synapses. If we have to, we'll run the course again."

  "Thanks," Annette said. "Come on, Jacques."

  "Sure," he said. Synapses. He knew what the word meant: the way signals in his brain passed from one nerve cell to another. In his French, he hadn't even known there were cells in his brain. He had thoughts in his French. In English, he understood how he had them. He hadn't just learned a language. He'd learned a different way of looking at the world.

  Cold bit his nose and stung his cheeks when he walked outside. An enormous flock of starlings flew by overhead. They reminded him of the Kingdom of Versailles. When he said so, Annette made a sour face. "The Kingdom of Versailles is welcome to them. They didn't used to live here. Two hundred years ago, a crazy Englishman brought 120 of them across the Atlantic and turned them loose. Millions and millions of them live here now. They're miserable pests, is what they are."

  As if to prove the point, white droppings splashed her car. She said something in English he wouldn't have understood an hour earlier. It made him blush now. So did another thought. "I have been brought here, too, from a far country," he said. "I hope I will not be a pest."

  Annette squeezed his hand. "I expect you'll fit in just fine, Jacques," she said, and winked at him. "Besides, there aren't millions and millions of you. It only seems that way sometimes."

  "Thanks a lot," he said. Laughing, he got into the car. Laughing, Annette drove him home. And he did feel like someone who was at least starting to fit in pretty well.

  Annette sat in a courtroom in Albuquerque. The man about to be sentenced was one
of the masters at the manor. He'd also been a leading Crosstime Traffic security official. "Do you have any statement to make, Mr. Degrelle, before receiving your punishment?"

  "Yes, your Honor." In a suit and tie, Degrelle looked like anybody else. What he'd done didn't stand out in letters of fire on his forehead. Annette thought it should have. He sounded like anyone else, too, as he went on, "I didn't mean any harm. I don't think any of us meant any harm. The people there"—he didn't call them slaves—"had better food and medicine than if they'd stayed in their own alternates."

  His lawyer nodded. Degrelle's wife and children were in the courtroom. They nodded, too. They didn't want to see him going to jail for years. Annette didn't suppose she could blame them, though she didn't agree with them. From what she'd read, the officers at the German death camps in World War II had families that loved them, too, in spite of what they'd done. She'd thought that was a sickness out of the past. She seemed to be wrong.

  The prosecutor got to her feet. She was a little gray-haired woman who looked like somebody's grandmother. She probably was. But fury crackled in her voice as she said, "May it please the court, but 'I didn't mean any harm' from Mr. Degrelle is like a plea for mercy from a man who killed his parents on the grounds that he is an orphan. Evidence at this trial shows he and his followers killed slaves who tried to rebel, to make themselves free. It shows they treated female slaves in a way that shows they forgot about the past 250 years of our history. And it shows they bought slaves and took slaves. And they betrayed the trust Crosstime Traffic had in them. They did it for no better reason than that they enjoyed the feeling of power they got by oppressing—by owning—other human beings. Mr. Degrelle deserves to be punished to the full extent of the law."

  "We have one of the people most closely connected to this case here with us today," the judge said. He found Annette with his eyes. "Miss Klein, will you please come to the microphone?"

  "Yes, your Honor." Annette walked up to the lectern. Cameras followed her. She didn't like standing there in front of the whole world and talking. Who would have? But she'd done so much testifying, it didn't terrify her the way it would have a few months before.

  "I am obliged to hear you before I sentence Mr. Degrelle," the judge said. "I am not obliged to take what you say into account in the sentencing. I may, but I am not obliged to. Do you understand?"

  "Yes, your Honor," Annette said again. "Mr. Degrelle and the people under him didn't give me food and medicine that were better than what I would have got in my own alternate. They didn't know I was from the home timeline, of course. They probably would have killed me to keep my mouth shut if they had."

  Degrelle's lawyer stirred. The judge waved him to silence. Annette could say what she thought now, not just what she knew to be true. The judge nodded to her to go on.

  "They treated us like things," she said. "Like things. They bought us—they bought me. We could have been so many used cars, for all they cared. And they used us like cars. No, it was worse than that, in fact. They could have done so much more with machines, if that was what they wanted. But it wasn't. They wanted to lord it over us, to have fun being in charge of other people. I don't know much about the law, your Honor, but I know that's wrong."

  A few other people spoke. Jacques and Emishtar were testifying at other trials halfway around the world. Crosstime Traffic officials agreed with Annette. Even though they did, she couldn't help wondering if they were tainted, too. Lots of people would be wondering about Crosstime Traffic officials for years to come— one more thing the slave ring had done.

  Character witnesses for Degrelle said he was a very nice man when he wasn't being a slavemaster. That wasn't how they said it, but that was what it amounted to.

  The judge listened to everyone. Then he sentenced the master to life in prison, with the possibility of parole after twenty-five years. Degrelle's shoulders slumped. His family burst into tears.

  Annette didn't know what she felt. Part of her wished they'd thrown away the key. But he was going away for a long, long time, and he'd never have the chance to do anything like that again. It could have been worse.

  It could have been worse. That was one of those adult phrases, one that meant it was as good as it was going to get and you were stuck with it. The more of those phrases she understood, the more of her childhood she left behind. She walked out of the courtroom. She still had a lot of growing in front of her.

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