The Gladiator

It turned out to be more complicated than Russian. As far as A

Gianfranco did a better job of explaining than A

As far as she could see, he didn't try to take unfair advantage because she wasn't sure what she was doing. When she thanked him for that, he looked surprised. "It wouldn't be any fun if I did," he said. "Who cares if you win if you've got to cheat to do it?"

"Lots of people would say the point of wi

"But if you know you didn't win square, it leaves a bad taste in your mouth," Gianfranco said. "Or if it doesn't, it ought to."

"Si. I think the same thing. But plenty of people don't," she said.

After about half an hour, her mother called her to help cook. "What do you think?" Gianfranco asked as he marked places and put their cards and play money into separate envelopes.

"It's not bad," A

"I’m still learning," Gianfranco said. "That loss-leader trick Carlo tried to pull on me a while ago… I had no idea that was in the rules, but it is." He held up the rule book.

"It's thick enough," A

"Do you want to study it?" Gianfranco asked.

"Maybe another time," she said. "If I start looking at it, I won't study my Russian, and I've got to." She sighed. "I think Comrade Montefusco's teaching us to speak it better than the Russians do themselves." She told him about the classroom visitors they'd had.

"I don't care if the Russians were the first Communists," Gianfranco said. "Nobody'd pay any attention to them if they weren't the biggest, strongest country in the world."

"That's true, but be careful who hears you say it," A

Quietly, so her voice wouldn't carry over the sound of chopping, her mother asked, "Are you really playing that silly game with Gianfranco?"

"It's not silly. It's kind of interesting, as a matter of fact," A

"So is a car's engine. That doesn't make it interesting, not unless you're a mechanic," her mother said.

"It's got to be as complicated as bridge," A

"Don't be silly," her mother sniffed. "You don't know what you're talking about."

Since A

"I know most of the boys who play it have thick glasses and fu

"You could say the same thing about chess players," A

"That's different. Chess is respectable," her mother said. "Even the Russians take good chess players seriously."

Even the Russians, A

104 Harry Turtledove

Following that line of thought, A

"No!" Her mother's knife came down hard on the joint be-tween thigh and drumstick. It crunched through gristle and bone. "I didn't say that. I didn't mean that. But Gianfranco's silly game isn't chess, either."

"I didn't say it was. But it's not easy, and it's not silly, either." A

As her mother was washing her hands, she said, "I hope you're not playing just to make Gianfranco happy. You can do better than that, sweetheart."

"Maybe." It wasn't as if A

"And so? His father's still an apparatchik." Her mother used another Russian word that had spread all over Europe and America. It didn't just mean a petty bureaucrat. It meant someone who was born to be a petty bureaucrat. People who really did things, like A

"Comrade Mazzilli's not so bad," A

"Well, heaven knows that's true," her mother agreed. "But still…"

"You don't need to get all upset," A

"I didn't expect you to play his silly game." Her mother seemed stuck on the word. "That goes too far."

"I told you-it's not silly," A

The more her mother argued with her about it, the more interested in Rails across Europe A

When she got to school the next morning, Maria Tenace was gloating some more. "So much for your majority report," Maria sneered. "The reactionary lackeys at The Gladiator must have known the fat was in the fire. They fled yesterday, one jump ahead of the Security Police. Sooner or later, the vanguard of the people's justice will catch up with them. I don't think it will take long."

She could seriously say things even a TV a

She let out one piece of information without even noticing she was doing it. "So the people at The Gladiator did get away?" A

"Si," Maria said reluctantly. "But not for long. The hand of every decent Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist is raised against them in iron condemnation of their wicked and corrupt manipulation of the social order and class structure."