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but only for a moment.
"Tournament," Eduardo said. ''''Rails across Europe fourteen."
There were the games in the tournament in which Gian-
128 Harry Turtledove
franco had just played, all the way up to his loss to Alfredo. "This isn't a
computer!" he exclaimed. "This is magic!"
"No." Eduardo shook his head. "This is technology. Anybody can use it. All you
have to do is know how. No hocus-pocus, no abracadabra. You don't have to be a
king's son or go to a sorcerers' academy. You just have to walk into a shop,
put down a couple of hundred big ones, and it's yours."
"Big ones?" Annarita said.
"What we use for money," Eduardo answered. "A hundred euros make a big one all
over Western Europe. In the United States, a hundred dollars make a benjamin."
"What about the Soviet Union?" Annarita beat Gianfranco to the question by a
split second.
"Well, Russia uses rubles," Eduardo answered. "Ukraine uses hryvnia, Belarus
uses rubels, Armenia has drams, Georgia has lari, Azerbaijan has manats,
Moldova uses lei, Estonia uses krooni, Latvia uses guess what? lats, Lithuania
uses litai surprise again, right? and the Central Asian republics all have
their own money, too, but I forget what they call it."
Gianfranco needed a moment to take all that in and to realize what it had to
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mean. "You don't have any Soviet Union?" he blurted. He might have been an
antelope on the plain, saying, You don't have any lions? to another antelope
from some distant grassland.
"Not for more than a hundred years, not in our timeline." Eduardo chuckled.
"You might say Communism withered away."
"But that's . . ." Gianfranco's voice withered away before he could bring out
impossible. He looked at the computer in the palm of Eduardo's hand. Before he
saw it, he would have said it was impossible. Only the very most important,
very most trusted people got to use computers at all. They were just too
dangerous, or so the authorities insisted. And no computer looked like a
little box that sprouted a screen at an oral command.
Except this one.
"What are you doing here?" Annarita asked.
"Keeping an eye on things, you might say," Eduardo replied.
But that wasn't the whole answer. It couldn't be Gianfranco saw as much right
away. And he saw what some of the real answer had to be. "You are
counterrevolutionaries!" he said.
Annarita exclaimed softly. Her father blinked. And Eduardo . . . Eduardo
turned red. "We're not the kind who assassinate people or blow things up," he
said. "We've seen way too much of that back home. We still have too much of it
there."
"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 lather 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. 1 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." Gian-franco 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?"
"1 guess I do," she said, and nodded at Eduardo. "Ciao, Cousin Silvio."
"Ciao, Cousin Annarita," Eduardo answered gravely. He didn't look much like [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]