Harry Turtledove Crosstime 01 Gunpowder Empire (v1.0)

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slaves in the South before the Civil War... and who'd called themselves good
Christians. He sighed. Things weren't so simple as they looked at first.
He saw things like that more and more often as he got older. He'd begun to
suspect that no small part of growing up was seeing that more and more things
weren't so simple as they looked at first. Trouble was, he liked being sure.
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Watching certainties disappear under the magnifying glass was a jolt every
time.
You could, of course, pretend things were as simple as you'd believed when you
were a kid. You could if you didn't mind living a lie. Or maybe if you just
refused to look facts in the face. Some people did. Lots of people did, in
fact. Jeremy wondered how.
Then he had to make a quick grab to keep the ball from hitting him in the eye.
Fabio Lentulo screeched laughter. I thought you'd gone to sleep there, he
said. If you had, I was going to slit your belt pouch.
Jeremy threw the ball back. To the crows with you, he said, an insult the
locals often used. Good to your friends and bad to your enemies, you said? Am
I your enemy, if you want to steal from me?
My enemy? Nah. The silversmith's apprentice shook his head. But you sure were
acting like a dopey friend there. He heaved the ball high in the air.
After a run that involved dodging two women and almost tripping over a dog,
Jeremy caught it at his belt buckle. Willie Mays had invented that kind of
catch a century and a half before his time. He'd seen old video. He wasn't so
smooth as Willie Mays, but he was plenty smooth enough to impress Fabio
Lentulo. Let me try that! the apprentice called.
Jeremy flung it high. Fabio staggered he almost tripped over that dog, too
and tried his own basket catch. The ball thudded to the cobbles at his feet.
Jeremy jeered. Fabio Lentulo came back with something just as nasty. They both
laughed. The game went on.
Every day, Amanda would go into the secret part of the basement, hoping to see
a message on the PowerBook's screen. Every day, she would be disappointed.
Every day, she would try to send her own message. Every day, the computer
would tell her she couldn't. And every day, she would go back up to the main
level wishing none of this were happening.
Wishes like that were worth their weight in gold. Amanda knew as much. Knowing
didn't keep her from making them. Every day no message came, every day she and
Jeremy remained cut off in PoNssa, was an argument no message would ever
come,, an argument they'd stay cut off forever. She thought about Livia
Plurabella. If she was stuck here, would she turn into someone like that in
another twenty-five years? Wondering what you would be like when you grew up
was scary enough when you were doing it in your own world. When you might be
stranded forever in a place where you didn't want to live...
Then again, stranded forever might be stretching things. The Lietuvan traders
still left in Polisso got out of town the day after the city prefect and the
garrison commander finally issued the order expelling them. Some of their
wagons rattled past the house where Amanda and Jeremy were staying.
Amanda peered out through one of the handful of narrow windows that opened on
the street. Traffic in Polisso was as insane as usual. That meant the
Lietuvans couldn't get out of town in a hurry, no matter how much they wanted
to. It also gave the locals the chance to pay them a not so fond farewell.
Get out! Never come back! Gods-cursed blond barbarians! Those were a few of
the nicer good-byes people yelled. The rest... Amanda had heard some vile
things at Canoga Park High. What the people of Polisso called the departing
Lietuvans would have made the toughest kid there turn green.
They didn't just call them names, either. They threw things. They had nastier
things to throw than they would have in Los Angeles. Squishy vegetables and
balls of manure were bad enough. But the stench of rotten eggs seemed ten
times worse. Amanda couldn't get away from it, either. The windows had no
glass. Closing the shutters didn't do a dollar's worth of good.
The worst of it was, the Lietuvans had to take the abuse. If they'd tried to
hit back, they wouldn't have got out of Polisso alive. If they'd tried to hit
back, the people in the street wouldn't have thrown dung and rotten eggs. They
would have thrown rocks and jars instead. They probably would have mobbed the
foreigners, too. And so, stone-faced, the Lietuvans pushed on toward the gate.
They tried to keep the flying garbage from spooking their horses and mules and
oxen too badly. They also tried to duck so they didn't get too filthy.
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Some of the Lietuvans had been in Polisso a long time, long enough to have
brought their wives down from their own country. The fair-haired women, tall
by the standards of this world, left the town with their men. The locals
spattered them with filth, too. Some of the things they called them made the
names they gave the Lietuvan men sound friendly by comparison.
At last, after what seemed much too long, the hubbub moved closer to the gate.
Amanda retreated to the courtyard, but the stink of hydrogen sulfide lingered
there, too. Jeremy walked into the courtyard a minute or so later. He looked
grim. He must have been watching the Lietuvans leave from another window.
Nice people, he said. He didn't mean the Lietuvans. He meant the locals who
had harried them on their way.
Amanda nodded. Really.
We wouldn't do anything like that, Jeremy said.
Oh, I don't know. Amanda remembered her U.S. History class again. Look what
happened to the Japanese-Americans during the Second World War.
So? Her brother didn't buy the argument. That was a hundred fifty years ago.
Are you saying we'd keep slaves because they kept slaves in the South before
the Civil War?
Well... maybe not, Amanda admitted. But the Second World War was a lot closer
to now than the Civil War was. People acted more like us.
A little, maybe, but not a whole lot, Jeremy said. It was still a long time
ago. They didn't have any computers. They only had one telephone for every
seven people in the country. You ask me, that's backward.
He'd just finished a high-school U.S. History course. Now that he reminded her
of it, Amanda remembered running into that statistic, too. But she never would
have thought of it on her own. She asked, How do you come up with that stuff?
She'd asked him questions like that before, so he knew what she meant. He'd
never been able to give her a good answer, though. He couldn't now, either. He
said, I don't know. I just do, which told her nothing whatsoever. But then he
said, How do you know what people are feeling? I can't do that, or not very
well.
No? Amanda said in surprise surprise that vanished when she thought it over
and realized Jeremy was right. He didn't just see how people worked. He always
had to work it through inside his mind. Sometimes he didn't come up with the
right answers even then. Maybe that was the other side of the coin to being
able to remember how many telephones the United States had during World War
II. Given a choice, Amanda knew which one she would rather be able to do.
But people didn't get choices like that. They were what they were, and had to
make the most of it. Some remembered better and thought straighter than [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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