The Gladiator

"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 gri

A

"1 bet you're sandbagging," Gianfranco said. "That way, you can beat me and then look surprised."

"If 1 beat you, I will look surprised. I promise."

"Can three play?" A

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 A

Eduardo laughed out loud again. Dr. Crosetti coughed dryly. A

A

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 A

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. A

Victory made Maria smug. "Nice you finally quit complaining," she said to A

"I'll just have to live with it," A

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.

A

Nobody except A

"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 was 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?" A

"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," A

"Si," 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."

A

"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?" A

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."