In High Places

Thirteen

Annette was getting sick and tired of hotels. To her, the one in Madrid wasn't much different from those where she'd stayed in the USA. Her room was a little smaller than she would have had back home. The light switches were low and flat—they didn't stick up so much. The bathroom held an extra piece of equipment. But a bed was a bed, a TV was a TV, a computer hookup was a computer hookup all over the world. Just another room. To her.

To Jacques, whose room was right across the hall, it was more like a miracle, or a series of miracles. Crosstime Traffic had decided they weren't going to send him back to his old alternate. He knew too much for that. They hadn't decided what they would do with him. Maybe let him settle in the home timeline. Right now, though, he didn't know nearly enough for that.

Everything here seemed strange to him. Annette found herself being his tutor. She had to show him how to make the running water work. She had to explain—gently—that it was customary to bathe every day, or something close to it, even if he wasn't doing hard work.

"Why?" Jacques asked in honest bewilderment. "You people don't stink. I'm in the middle of a great big city, and it doesn't stink."

"We don't stink because we bathe," she said. There were other reasons, too, of course. She'd also had to explain how to use the toilet. The hotel had to throw away a wastebasket, but she couldn't blame Jacques for that. It was the closest thing to a chamber pot he could find.

And she'd had to show him how to use a fork. He thought that was funny. "Some of the snooty nobles in the Kingdom of Versailles use them," he said. "They want to make like they're as fancy as the Muslims down south. I never thought the likes of me would need to worry about such foolishness."

"It's our custom here. People would talk if you used your fingers," Annette said. "I'm not telling you it's better or worse. I'm just saying it's how you fit in." He nodded. He could see that. He was pretty sharp. And she knew he took it more seriously because she was the one telling him.

There were other complications. Before long, Jacques found out her real name was Annette, not Khadija. He could understand why she used a false one in his alternate. But he jumped to the wrong conclusion. "Then you're really a Christian after all!" he said happily.

"Well, no," Annette told him. "I'm really a Jew." She waited to see what would happen next. People in the Kingdom of Versailles took anti-Semitism as much for granted as people in this Kingdom of Spain took eating with a fork.

He stared at her. "You're joking," he said.

"No. I'm not. It's important for you to understand that I'm not," Annette said. "People here can believe anything they want, most places. We find that works better. We still have quarrels about religion, but fewer than we used to."

"But this Spain is a Christian country, isn't it? I've seen the cathedrals, even if you don't know about Henri." Jacques sounded sad. He'd seen that nobody in the home timeline knew about God's Second Son, but he didn't like it.

'This Spain is mostly a Christian country, yes. But it's not against the law to be a Jew or a Muslim or anything else here. You don't even have to pay a special tax or anything. As long as you don't cause trouble, you can believe whatever you please."

"Oh," he said. She watched him weighing that. She watched him not caring for it very much. He put what troubled him into words: "I didn't mind so much when I thought you were a Muslim. Muslims are wrong, but they're strong, too. Jews aren't just wrong—they're weak."

Part of Annette wanted to take a vase off the end table and bash him over the head with it. She understood he didn't know any better. Even so ... As patiently as she could, she said, "You're judging things by your own alternate. The only reason Jews aren't strong there is that it doesn't have very many of them." That was also partly true here, but she didn't want to complicate things.

She watched Jacques wrestle with it. "I never thought I could like a Jew," he said at last. "All I ever wanted to do was throw rocks at them. That's what they're for."

"Oh?" Annette raised an eyebrow. "How do you suppose they feel about that?"

He blinked. Plainly, wondering how Jews felt had never once occurred to him. Maybe he wouldn't care even after it did. There were still people who didn't care about those who weren't like them, even here in the home timeline. There were way too many of them, as a matter of fact. But Annette knew she couldn't stay friends with anybody like that.

"I don't suppose they'd like it very much, would they?" Jacques said after a long pause.

"No, I don't think so," Annette agreed, glad he'd seen that much. Maybe he could get beyond the prejudices he'd grown up with after all. She went on, "Most places here in the home timeline, it's against the law to discriminate because of religion or race or sex. We think those are good laws—they give everybody a fair chance."

"Race? What do you mean by race?" Jacques asked.

"What color you are." Annette smiled. The Kingdom of Versailles didn't have much racial trouble. How could it? Just about everybody in it was white.

"That's silly," Jacques said. "I didn't mind those Moors because they were black. They couldn't do anything about that. I didn't like it that they were Muslims, though. They could choose there, and they chose wrong."

One step forward, one step back, Annette thought. "Sometimes things that are different are just different, not right or wrong," she said again. "You can't prove anything about religions till after you're dead, and then you can't tell anybody else. We even have people who don't believe in God at all."

Jacques made the sign of the wheel. "Jesus and Henri! What do you do with them? Do you burn them or hang them or put them on the wheel or the cross or—?"

"We don't do anything to them," Annette broke in. "Nothing. As long as they don't hurt other people, they can believe— or not believe—whatever they want. They don't seem to be any worse, or any better, than Christians or Muslims or Jews, taken as a group. We think freedom to believe includes freedom not to believe."

"That's . . . very strange," Jacques said. "If you don't believe in God, how can you be good? If you don't think Anyone can punish you, why not cheat and rob and kill?"

Philosophers still wrestled with that one. Annette knew it. She also knew she was no philosopher herself. She gave a practical answer, not a philosophical one: "Because other people will punish you if you break the law."

"It doesn't seem like enough," Jacques said.

"It's what we've got," Annette told him. "Nothing works all the time, but this seems to work most of the time. One thing you've got to remember is, most of the Christians and Jews and Muslims here in the home timeline don't worry as much about what happens to them in the next world as people in your alternate do." She didn't say everybody. She talked about most people. Some of the exceptions over the past hundred years were pretty horrible.

Jacques scratched his head. She watched him think it through. At last, he said, "You have all these wonderful things. You have your wonderful machines. You have good health. You have plenty to eat. But when it comes to things that really matter, things of the spirit, are you any better off than we are?"

That was a serious question. "Some people will worry about those things no matter what. Some people won't worry about them no matter what," Annette said after some thought of her own. "We feel it's better if everybody is healthy and has enough to eat. That gives people a good start. What you do with it afterwards . . . Whether you want to worry about things of the spirit or you just want to live your life in this world, well, it's up to you. You have to make up your own mind."

It's up to you. You have to make up your own mind. More than anything else, that might have been the slogan of the strange new world in which Jacques found himself. In the Kingdom of Versailles, he'd had a place. Part of it came from what his family was. Part of it came from his service with the king. But he always had a good idea of where he stood, of who could tell him what to do (most people) and whom he could boss around (the rest).

Things were different here in what Annette called the home timeline. Part of that was because he was a stranger here. He didn't know the rules. He understood as much. Part of it, though, was because the rules were so much looser.

Christians and Muslims and Jews all worshiped in the same kingdom? They didn't try to kill one another very often. The country wasn't officially Christian or Muslim or—strange thought!—Jewish. Even the King of this Spain was nothing but a figurehead? The people chose their leaders? It struck him as one short step up from what went on in a peasant revolt, but it seemed to work.

Annette told him laws here didn't discriminate because of religion, and he saw it was so. She told him laws didn't discriminate because of race, and he saw that was so, too. He saw more different kinds of people in Spain and in the United States, her country, than he'd ever imagined, and they all seemed to be ... people, treated pretty much the same. The United States didn't have a king at all. Now that was peculiar.

And she told him laws didn't discriminate because of sex, either. That also turned out to be so. He'd seen that some of the soldiers who shut down the manor were women. Women in the home timeline could be doctors or lawyers or artisans or whatever else they wanted to be. They got into politics. Some of them ran countries. The people under them obeyed them as if they were men.

It was all very confusing.

It was scary, too, maybe even scarier than going into battle. In battle, you had some idea of the kinds of things that could happen. Here, everything seemed up in the air. Jacques felt at home in only one setting in the home timeline.

When he testified before lawyers and a judge, he might almost have been back in the Kingdom of Versailles. Before he even started testifying, he had to take an oath before God to tell the truth. From some of the things Annette said, he gathered that was a formality here. It meant they could charge you with a crime if they caught you lying. Jacques really meant it. The authorities here didn't worry him so much. The idea that God was looking down and listening to what he said did.

Everything was formal in courts. Things weren't the same here as they were in the Kingdom of Versailles, but they weren't all that different. You could tell the courts were two branches growing off the same tree. If what Annette said was true, his whole world and this one were like that—and he had no reason to doubt her. But the worlds as a whole had grown much farther apart than their courts had.

Sometimes people questioned him in the French they spoke here. He could mostly understand it, and they could mostly follow him when he answered. A couple of them, though, went to the trouble of learning the French they spoke in his Kingdom of Versailles. Like Annette, they spoke it as well as he did. Maybe they spoke it better than he did, because they sounded more educated.

"Learning languages is easy for us," Annette told him during a recess at a court somewhere in the United States. "We have these implants." She touched her head behind her left ear. "They can connect our brains to a machine that puts the language in there like that." She snapped her fingers.

"That's how you speak French and Arabic so well," Jacques said.

"Sure it is." Her smile lifted only one corner of her mouth. "I found out how hard it is without implants when I had to learn to talk with Emishtar. Her language was related to Arabic, the way French and Spanish are related to each other, but it still wasn't easy."

"I saw her a couple of days ago," Jacques said. "The same court that was questioning me was going to ask her things, too.

Was that here or back in Spain? I have trouble remembering. I've flown back and forth too many times now."

"People who grow up in the home timeline say things like that," Annette said. "See how well you're starting to fit in?"

She was joking. He knew it, but couldn't help answering seriously: "I don't know if I'll ever fit in here. I can feel how far from home I am. Is Emishtar going to stay here, too?"

That made Annette stop joking. "Maybe she'll try," she answered slowly. "If you think this world is hard for you to get used to, though, it's a lot harder for her."

"She's older than we are," Jacques said. "She's probably older than both of us put together. That makes her more set in her ways than we are."

"That's part of it," Annette agreed, "but that's only part of it. Your alternate is different from the home timeline, Jacques—"

"I'll say it is!" he broke in.

"Yours is different, but hers is a lot more different," Annette said. "Your people know about gunpowder. You have Christians and Muslims and Jews. Her people still use bows and arrows. There was no Roman Empire in her alternate, so nobody like Jesus ever lived there. Christianity never happened. And without Christianity, Islam wouldn't happen, either."

"You don't say anything about Jews," Jacques said.

"Maybe there are Jews there. We don't know that alternate very well yet," Annette said. "Judaism got started before that world and the home timeline separated. But if there are, they'll have different ideas from ours about what being a Jew means."

"Are they really Jews, then?" Jacques asked. "Are the Christians in this home timeline really Christians? How can they be? They don't know anything about Henri."

"That's a good question," Annette told him. "It depends on how you look at things. People in the home timeline would wonder if the Christians in your alternate are really Christians. They would say you added Henri to your faith, not that we don't know him here. Christians in most alternates have beliefs more like ours than like yours, because Henri didn't become God's Second Son in them."

"But Henri is the Second Son!" Jacques exclaimed. "The way you make it sound, the only reason we have Henri and other, uh, alternates don't is because the dice turned up with four sixes for us and with different throws for the rest of them."

To his dismay, Annette (whom he still wanted to think of as Khadija) nodded. "What other reason is there?"

"Because God gave Henri to us," Jacques said stubbornly.

"Well, I can't prove God didn't do that," Annette said, and Jacques felt a little better. But then she asked, "How can you show God did do it, though? And why did He do it that way in your alternate but not in the others?"

He started to tell her the Final Testament proved what God had done. He feared he knew what she would say if he did. The Final Testament was a thing of his alternate, not a thing of all the alternates. Unhappily, he asked, "Is this why some people in this alternate don't believe in God?"

"Maybe some," Annette answered. "People have all kinds of reasons for believing or not believing, though. Why they do, why they don't—that's not simple."

"Nothing here is simple." Jacques wished Annette would tell him he was wrong. She didn't. She just nodded again.

When Annette talked with Emishtar, they used the same mix of Arabic and her language as they had while they were slaves. Nobody in the home timeline knew Emishtar's tongue well enough yet to prepare a scan Annette could learn through her implant.

"When I come here, I think you people must be gods or devils," Emishtar said. "You have carts that go by themselves. You fly through the air like birds. You have pictures that talk. You make it hot when you want. You make it cold when you want. You have so much food. You have the thing that keeps the food fresh. You have the medicine to make my teeth stop hurting. I think they never stop, but you make them stop. You kill my lice, too."

"We're only people," Annette said. They had both just testified against a Crosstime Traffic official in Seattle. So had Bridget Mallory. Annette continued, "We know how to do things your people don't, that's all. It doesn't make us better or worse—only stronger." Stronger was hard enough. They could blow up the world. They hadn't for the past century and a half, but they could.

"I see it," Emishtar said. "People act like people. Not just like my people—you have different customs, different gods, uh, god—but people. Some good, some bad, some wise, some foolish. People with strength of gods or devils."

She had no idea what people in the home timeline had done to one another. Maybe she was lucky. "What do you think about living here?" Annette asked.

Her friend shrugged. "I don't know. To learn a language . . ."

With an implant, learning to speak and understand would be easy. She would have to learn to read and write, though, too, to become fully a part of the home timeline.

"I would have to learn about your strange god," Emishtar went on. "Only one? For everything? It seems foolish. And many of your customs are so strange. Maybe I just go home again."

Annette wasn't sure Emishtar could do that. The authorities might keep her away from her own alternate because she knew so much more than she should. Crosstime Traffic tried to interfere with the other alternates as little as it could while it did business with them. Those were the rules, anyhow.

Annette's mouth twisted. Quite a few Crosstime Traffic people hadn't played by the rules. Spanish authorities were still trying to figure out how they'd got an illicit transposition chamber.

All sorts of governments were looking at Crosstime Traffic more closely these days. By the nature of what it did, the company was the most multinational of all multinationals. It had to have tentacles all over the world to travel to the most interesting and profitable spots in other alternates.

Up till now, Crosstime Traffic hadn't faced a lot of regulation. It was the engine that drove the home timeline's prosperity. No-body'd wanted even to pluck a pinfeather from the goose that brought home so many golden eggs.

But if Crosstime Traffic people went into business for themselves, if they took slaves and became masters, if they let other twisted people from the home timeline play at being slaves (Annette thought of Bridget Mallory and shivered) ... If they did all those things—and they did—maybe (no, certainly) they needed to be watched more closely.

Emishtar tapped Annette on the arm. Even in ordinary clothes, the woman with the crooked front teeth looked out of place in the courtroom waiting room. The way she sat, the way she looked around, said she wasn't used to the furniture or to the fluorescent panels in the ceiling.

"If you have to come to my village for the rest of your days," she said, "could you do that? Would you want to do that?"

"I... could," Annette said. "Would I want to? No. I have to say, we have so many more things than you do, I would not be happy there."

"It is for me like the other side of a plate," Emishtar said.

"You have too many things. I do not know what to do with them. I do not see how I can ever learn."

"You are new here," Annette said. "You may change your mind when you learn more about the way we do things. You may decide you like not working as hard as you did. You may decide you like having enough to eat all the time."

"What would I do here? How would I earn my food?" Em-ishtar asked.

"Teaching us about your people and your alternate would make a good start, I think," Annette answered. "We have a lot of bad things to fix there. You grew up there. You know more about it than we do."

"I would rather farm," Emishtar said.

Farming here was an industry. She didn't understand that. "We use machines to farm in the home timeline," Annette said. "We don't do it the way they did where you grew up." She pictured oxen pulling, men with digging sticks, and others with hoes—an even more primitive way of doing things than they'd had at the manor.

But Emishtar was picturing what she'd known all her life till the slave raiders took her. "If I cannot go where I want to go, if I cannot do what I want to do, am I not still a slave here?" she asked bitterly.

Annette found no answer at all for her.

Jacques rubbed at the skin behind his left ear. He could feel something hard under there. It wasn't much, though—it couldn't have been the size of a grain of barley. Somehow, that little thing connected with his brain, and with the thinking machines they had here. He spoke and understood English now, just about as well as if he'd been born knowing it.

Khadija—no, he had to remember she was really Annette— had told him getting the implant wouldn't hurt much. He'd had trouble believing her. They were cutting his head open, after all. But she'd been right. A sting like a fleabite from a needle—the same sort of needle they'd used at the manor—and then he'd gone numb. The doctors did what they did. He didn't feel it. It did hurt a little when the numbness wore off. They gave him pills that pushed the pain far away.

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.