In High Places

Eight

Day followed day. Annette quickly lost track of which day of the week it was. That didn't seem to matter. About all she had to measure time were the ripening of the vegetables and the slow swing of the sun to the south. The weather got cooler—cooler, yes, but not really cold.

Emishtar greeted the sun with a prayer every morning. At first, it was just noise to Annette. A few words at a time, a few phrases at a time, she learned to understand the whole thing. It was rather pretty. It was also another sign of how much time she'd spent here. Too much, too much, she thought.

More slaves, men and women, came up from the subbase-ment one night. They were blonds and redheads, with fair, freckled skins and eyes of blue or green or gray. When summer's full heat came back, they would roast. None of the slaves spoke a language they understood, while theirs made no sense to anyone else. The guards could shout at them and make sense, but the guards had implants, so they were able to learn languages in a hurry.

What alternate were the newcomers from? One where Crosstime Traffic did business? Or one like this, where the slavers had it all to themselves? Annette couldn't tell on her own, and had no way to ask.

With the newcomers getting the hardest jobs, some of the women who'd been tending vegetables became house slaves. When Annette stayed put in the garden plot, Emishtar said, "They should have brought you in. You are too smart for this." Her Arabic was getting pretty good, too.

"I do not mind," Annette said.

Emishtar laughed. "I know why you do not mind, too. That is one of the things that can happen to a slave woman."

"I do not want it to happen to me." Annette was proud of herself. She just said it. She didn't scream it.

"It can happen to you if you stay out here, too," the older woman said.

"Don't remind me," Annette answered in Arabic—she didn't know how to put that into Emishtar's language.

Emishtar either understood it or figured out what it had to mean. She laughed again. "I do not think you have to worry so much, though, not for a while," she said.

"No? Why not?" Annette asked.

"The master and the guards will try the new ones. They are new. And they look strange. That will make them seem . . . interesting."

Annette thought Emishtar was half right. Blondes and redheads might seem unusual to the older woman, but they wouldn't to somebody from the home timeline. Still, the rest of what the older woman said was true. The blondes and redheads were the new fish, so they probably would seem extra interesting for a while. Who'd said variety was the life of spice? Annette didn't think it was Ambrose Bierce, even if it sounded cynical enough to come from him.

While they were in the garden plots, the guards spent most of their time yelling at the new slave women. The language they used was oddly musical. It reminded Annette a little of an Irish brogue. On a visit to the west of Ireland a couple of years before, she and her folks had stopped at a pub for lunch. She'd needed a while to realize most of the Irishmen and -women eating and drinking there were speaking Erse, not English. The sounds of the older tongue had flavored the way they spoke hers.

So maybe these are Celts, too, she thought. Their looks argued for it. But that didn't say anything about which alternate they'd been stolen from.

They exclaimed at the hoes and trowels and three-tined cultivators they were supposed to use. To Annette, the tools were the most ordinary things in the world. They looked like Home Depot or Wal-Mart specials. They likely were—Annette's skirt had a label that said Wal-Mart—made in Bangladesh on it. Why get anything fancy and expensive for slaves? But they seemed something special to the fair-skinned women.

Watching them, Emishtar smiled, showing off her crooked front teeth. "When I first come here, I thinks tools very good, too," she said.

"They're all right." Annette didn't want to get excited about them.

"Gooder than all right." Emishtar's grammar slipped—so did Annette's a lot of the time—but she made herself understood. She went on, "All tools this kind, all tools that kind, all same. AW just the same. All good, smooth handles. Not too heavy. Not too—" She paused and raised an eyebrow, looking for help.

"Light?" Annette said. She picked up a pebble and easily tossed it up and down. "Light."

"Light. Yes. Thank you. Is the word." Emishtar nodded. "Not too heavy. Not too light. All good to use."

To her, as to the—Celtic?—women, tools were made one at a time, by hand. No wonder they got excited when they saw several that were just alike. / should have figured that out sooner, Annette thought, feeling dumb. She might take mass production for granted, but people from a low-tech alternate wouldn't. To them, it was as strange and marvelous as a transposition chamber, maybe more so.

Once she'd read a story—she didn't know if it was true—set in the days when high technology hadn't yet spread all over the home timeline. An African from a tiny village in the middle of nowhere had to come into the big city for some reason or other. He saw an airplane flying overhead, but it didn't mean much to him. Maybe he thought it was magic, or maybe he didn't realize people rode inside it. Then he saw a two-horse team pulling a carriage. He laughed and snapped his fingers and exclaimed, "Why didn't I think of that?"

The horse and carriage lay within the range of what he could understand, even if he hadn't thought of the arrangement till he saw it. The airplane was as far over his head in terms of ideas as it was high up in the sky. In the same way, the Celts—and Emishtar—could admire the gardening tools. They could see what those were for and how well they were made. The transposition chamber was beyond them. Even the safety on an assault rifle had been beyond that luckless slave in Jacques' gang.

"Come on, get to work!" a guard shouted to her in Arabic. "You think you can stand around lollygagging all day long? Things don't work that way around here. You better believe they don't!"

"I am so sorry. Please forgive me," Annette said. She got down on her hands and knees and started weeding. The guard went off to yell at somebody else. Annette hated acting like— well, like a slave. But sometimes the guards didn't just yell. Sometimes they smacked somebody with a billy club or a rifle butt or gave somebody a kick in the backside or in the ribs. Annette thought that enjoying hitting people who couldn't hit back was part of what went into being a guard.

After this one got out of earshot, Emishtar whispered, "I so sorry, too. I so sorry guard not dead. I so sorry guard not on fire. I so sorry guard not in pile of manure. I so sorry guard not sick, horrible sick. I so sorry—"

She went on for quite a while. She might not have known much Arabic. Everything she did know that was bad, she aimed at the guards. Long before she ran down, Annette was giggling helplessly. A guard sent her a suspicious look, but she was working as well as giggling. The guard didn't do anything but look.

Emishtar said some things in her own language, too. Annette didn't understand all of that. What she could follow was along the same lines as the Arabic, but even juicier. She tried to remember some of the best parts.

And Emishtar also showed her something else. The older woman had to do the work, just as Annette did. Even so, her spirit stayed free. Some of the slave women—and some of the slave men—seemed hardly more than beasts of burden to Annette. They'd accepted their fate. They were resigned to it. Emishtar reminded her it didn't have to be that way.

And there were times when she needed reminding, too. Sometimes the home timeline felt a million miles away. Sometimes the transposition chamber in the subbasement also felt a million miles away. It might come and go, but how could a slave get down to it? Try as she would, Annette couldn't figure out a way to sneak past the guards or overpower them. And if she couldn't, she'd stay a slave forever.

Here came the guards who'd ridden out like knights. Jacques counted them. They hadn't lost a man. What a shame, he thought. One of them had a bandaged forearm. He seemed more angry at himself than badly hurt. By the way his friends teased him, they thought the wound was pretty funny.

For a moment, Jacques wondered why. War was a serious business, and the people on the other side were trying to hurt you just as hard as you were trying to hurt them. His leg still twinged every now and then to remind him the raiders who'd overrun his caravan had put a bullet through it.

But that had been an even fight. Men on both sides used the same kinds of weapons. It didn't look as if the people around here had any firearms at all, let alone quick-shooting muskets like the ones the guards carried. Going up against them wouldn't be war, not in the true sense of the word. It wouldn't even be like hunting wolves, where your quarry was ferocious and had sharp teeth. It would be a lot more like hunting rabbits.

Or, since you were hunting people, wouldn't it be a lot like murder?

The guards didn't seem to think so. They were laughing and joking and telling stories. Jacques couldn't follow what they were saying, but he didn't need to know what the words meant. Their smiles and their gestures said they'd had a terrific time doing whatever they'd done out there.

One of them wore a strange necklace. That surprised Jacques—the guards didn't usually go in for display the way soldiers from the Kingdom of Versailles and its Muslim neighbors did. Then the man came close enough to let Jacques see what he'd strung on that cord.

It was a necklace of human ears.

A few bloodthirsty men in Jacques' kingdom kept souvenirs of their kills like that. Most, though, thought it was bragging. Jacques looked at it that way, too. And he wondered why anybody would want to brag about killing enemies who could hardly fight back. It didn't seem sporting.

The guards keeping an eye on the roadbuilding gang called to the ones who'd gone . . . hunting. The horsemen in mottled clothes shouted back. Again, Jacques didn't need to know their language to have a notion of the kind of things they were saying. When a man threw back his head and thumped his chest as he spoke, he wasn't likely to be doing anything but boasting.

One of the guards with the roadbuilders called, "We just taught the chicken thieves and cattle rustlers a lesson. See if they come bothering us any more."

Jacques didn't know they'd come around before. He shrugged. Whatever the locals had done, what the guards did to them was like killing a mouse by dropping a building on its head.

That guard went on talking in the language that sounded a little like Arabic, and then in the one that was full of hisses and sneezes. Jacques kept an eye on the slaves who spoke that tongue. He thought they were from right around here. They didn't look very happy. A couple of them muttered back and forth. But what could they do besides mutter? Not much, not that he could see.

Then the guard spoke to the new men, the fair-haired men, who'd come up from the subbasement a few days earlier. Their speech reminded Jacques of the language men from Brittany used. He knew a few words of that tongue. The Duke of Brittany was a vassal—of sorts—to the King of Versailles. Some of the duke's men hardly spoke any French at all. If you didn't talk to them in Breton, you didn't talk to them.

"Hello," Jacques said to a redheaded man with a droopy mustache. "Understand me?"

He got back a wide-eyed stare. The other man's eyes were almost as green as leaves. "Understand," he said—or Jacques thought he did, anyway. It wasn't the same language as Breton, just one close to it, the way Catalan was close to French. When the redhead went on in a hurry, Jacques couldn't follow him at all.

"No understand," he said, and threw his hands in the air. He knew only a few words of Breton. It wasn't like Arabic, which he actually spoke, even if he didn't speak it well. "Go slow," he added.

Maybe the redhead didn't understand that, because he babbled on, fast as a galloping horse. Jacques put his two index fingers together, then very slowly moved them apart. Maybe sign language would work.

And maybe nothing would. A guard yelled in the redhead's language—he had no trouble using it. Jacques wondered how the guards all spoke so many languages so well. Maybe Khadija knew. She knew all kinds of curious things. But Jacques didn't get a chance to wonder much about that. As soon as the guard got done yelling at the redhead, he switched to Arabic and yelled at Jacques: "Go on, you lazy good-for-nothing, dig! You didn't come out here so you could gab!" He set a hand on the club he wore on his belt to show what would happen if Jacques didn't dig.

Jacques dug. Most of the time, the guards didn't threaten more than once. After that, they really walloped you. If you were dumb enough not to work while they were keeping an eye on you, you almost deserved to get clobbered. And if you were dumb enough to work hard when the guards weren't watching, you almost deserved . . . what?

To be a slave, that's what, Jacques decided.

After a bit, the man in the mottled clothes decided to bother somebody else. Jacques hadn't expected anything else. As soon as the fellow's eyes weren't on him any more, he slacked off. He had the chance to look this way and that and see what was going on around him. The first thing he saw was that the redhead with the droopy mustache was watching him.

Plainly, the new slave didn't speak Arabic. Jacques tried him with French. So far, the only person here with whom he could speak his own language was Khadija—one more reason for him to think she was special. The redheaded man shook his head and spread his hands and shrugged. French didn't work.

It would have to be Breton, then, or Jacques' tiny bits and pieces of it. He pointed towards a guard and said the nastiest thing he knew how to say. Would that make any sense to the redhead?

The man's eyes widened again. He snorted. He almost giggled. He turned very red—his skin was so fair, it made the flush easy to see. He pointed toward the guard and said something else. Jacques wasn't sure exactly what it meant. He thought it had to do with horses—parts of horses, anyway. He knew which part of a horse he thought the guard was. He grinned at the redhead and nodded.

"Dumnorix." The man with the mustache pointed at himself.

Jacques gave his own name. He pointed at the redhead and tried to pronounce Dumnorix. The other man corrected him. When Dumnorix tried to say Jacques, he had trouble with the first sound. Jacques repeated it. On Dumnorix's second try, he got it right—or close enough, anyhow.

That still didn't give them much to talk about. They could swear at the guards, but they'd been doing that before they found they had any words in common. Now Jacques could follow some of Dumnorix's bad language. And if Jacques cursed in Breton instead of French or Arabic, Dumnorix could understand some of that.

Can I tell him about the safety on the guards' muskets? Jacques wondered. That was something Dumnorix needed to know. If he wanted to make trouble, and if he wanted to do it without getting killed right away, he had to know it.

But when Jacques tried to explain, he ran into a stone wall. The man with the red mustache figured out he was talking about muskets. Jacques' sign language and his handful of words were plenty for that. To Dumnorix, though, the weapons weren't tools like picks and shovels. If Jacques understood him rightly, he thought they were magical.

Try as Jacques would, he couldn't convince Dumnorix that magic had nothing to do with it. Dumnorix saw a thing that went bang! over here and killed somebody over there. He didn't see how the one was connected to the other.

How did gunpowder work? Jacques couldn't explain that, though there were men back in the Kingdom of Versailles who could have. Jacques just knew that it worked. That wasn't enough for Dumnorix.

Sometimes Jacques wanted to knock sense into the older man's foolish head. And then he wondered how Khadija felt when she was trying to explain things like the transposition chamber to him. Would it ever be anything but magic, as far as he was concerned? You got in it, it didn't seem to move, but you were somewhere else when you got out again. If that wasn't magic, what was it?

It wasn't magic to Khadija, because she knew that it worked, maybe even how it worked. Jacques stopped being quite so annoyed with Dumnorix. Weren't the two of them in the same boat?

Emishtar turned out to be right about the newly arrived women. The master forgot about the slaves who'd been there for a while. He started summoning the blondes and redheads who had come out of the subbasement. Some of them just went. Some raised a fuss. They ended up going anyway. They came back in tears.

"Is part of being slave," Emishtar said in her halting Arabic.

"It shouldn't be." Annette was furious. She'd read about things like this, but she'd never dreamt she would see them. She'd especially never dreamt they would happen because of people from the home timeline. "Women shouldn't have to put up with things like this."

Emishtar's laugh sounded old as time. "Go ahead. Make men listen to you." She laughed again.

In the home timeline, there were laws against things like this. Not only that, strong customs backed up the laws there. Annette would have said everybody followed those customs. And she would have been wrong, wrong, wrong. The proof of that was right here. Some people—not many, but enough—behaved the way they should as long as anybody was watching. As soon as the eyes went away . . .

As soon as the eyes went away, they turned into slave drivers. Literally.

What did they say, back in the home timeline, to explain why they were away so much? Were they supposed to be on vacation? On business trips? Working in some foreign country. If you googled them thoroughly, would a pattern show up? Of course it would. It would have to. Keeping a secret these days was next to impossible once somebody decided to look for it.

The only way to keep a secret was not to let anybody know you had one in the first place. Then no one would start searching to see what it was.

Too late, Annette thought. Much too late. Somebody from the home timeline who isn't in on it knows. All Annette had to do was get back and start sending e-mail and calling people on the phone.

Now she laughed, almost as bitterly as Emishtar had. Yeah, that was all. Easy. Ha!

Her friend eyed her. "What is joke?" Emishtar asked. If you had a joke, you told it. You didn't just sit on it. There were no written rules here, but that seemed to be one of the strongest unwritten rules. Things that were funny were too precious to be hoarded.

"It's on me," Annette said. "If I could get away, if I could get back to where I come from, I have friends I could tell what's happened, friends who would rescue me." She spoke in short phrases to give Emishtar a better chance to understand.

And the older woman did—or at least she understood the words. "But what is the joke?" she asked again, using her own language instead of Arabic.

"If I could go back where I come from, I wouldn't need rescuing!" Annette exclaimed. "I would be free." She laughed again.

This time, so did Emishtar. "Oh, yes. That is funny. That would be funny, only. . . ." She pantomimed laughing and crying at the same time. She was a natural mimic and actress. Annette wondered if they had theaters in whatever alternate she came from. If they did, she wondered whether women could perform in them. Or were they like the ones in ancient Greece and Shakespeare's London, where men and boys played all the parts?

She did the best she could to ask in Emishtar's language. When she ran out of words, she used Arabic. They had to go back and forth several times before Emishtar caught on. "Ah!" she said. "Yes, we have. We do. But we do only with men. In your country, with women, too?"

"Yes," Annette said. "We call them actresses." She used the Arabic word. "The men who do it are actors."

Emishtar taught her the word for actor in that other Semitic language. It sounded nothing like the one in Arabic. The two tongues had plainly got them from different places. The languages were cousins, which helped Annette learn bits and pieces of the other one, but they weren't close cousins.

A guard strode towards Annette and Emishtar. They both started weeding and pruning harder. The guard tramped on past them. They breathed sighs of relief.

One of the blond women was weeding not far away. She'd been out in the sun too long. Even though it was autumn, she'd got burned. One of Annette's friends back in Ohio had what she called phosphorescent Irish skin. This woman was like that— she would burn if the sun looked at her sideways.

She must have sensed Annette's eye on her. She looked across the onions and leeks and garlic and managed a weary smile. She brushed her filthy hair back from her face with a dirty hand. Sweat ran down her cheek. She said something in her musical language.

However musical it was, it didn't mean anything to Annette. "I'm sorry, but I don't understand," she said in Arabic.

The blond woman made a face. She said something else. Annette also couldn't follow that. It was probably something like, / don't know what you're talking about, either. The blond woman tried to smooth back her hair again. With a wry shrug, she gave up—it was hopeless.

She spoke again. It must have made her feel better, even if Annette and Emishtar didn't understand. She was halfway between the two of them in age, which put her at the end of her twenties. Annette thought the master had summoned her once or twice. If he had, it didn't seem to have ruined her, the way it had some women. People were all different, and took things different ways.

She's one of the lucky ones, Annette thought. Then she laughed at herself. Had the blond woman been lucky, she would still have been living in her own alternate. She wouldn't have been a slave—or maybe she would have. Maybe the slavers from the home timeline bought her the same way they'd bought Annette.

Annette wondered if she would ever know. To find out, either she would have to learn some of that language that sounded like Erse or she would have to teach the blond woman some Arabic, or maybe some French. She tried not to groan. Another new language to learn without an implant? How would she keep this one and Emishtar's from bumping together in her head?

"Work!" a guard shouted—luckily, not at her. She worked faster anyway. She had more than languages to worry about.

"Oh, them," Jacques said. "Yes, I think they were slaves before. I'm pretty sure, in fact."

For the first time ever, he thought he'd really impressed Khadija. "How do you know?" she demanded.

"Well, it sounds like that's what Dumnorix is saying," Jacques answered.

Her eyes widened. "You can understand him?"

He held his thumb and forefinger close together. "About that much. The language he speaks, it's kind of like Breton. If I knew more Breton, I'd be in good shape, but mostly I just cuss in it a little." He said something.

"What's that?" Khadija asked.

"Well, in French it'd be sacrée merde" he said.

She giggled. "Oh. All right. I understand that. But you can talk with this what's-his-name a little bit? Breton!" She shook her head in amazement. "I suppose I shouldn't be that surprised. I thought it reminded me of the Irish language, but I don't speak Erse."

"You mean there are things you can't do?" Jacques wasn't sure whether he was being sarcastic or he really meant it. "Who would have imagined such a thing?"

Khadija turned away from him, there in the courtyard. He thought she was joking till he saw her shoulders shake. "That's not funny," she said in a strange, muffled voice.

Was she crying? That wasn't what he'd meant to do. He set a hand on her shoulder. "I'm sorry," he said.

Angrily, she shook off the hand. He remembered how the raiders who'd captured them said she'd thrown men around till somebody knocked her cold. If even a quarter of that was true, he was lucky not to go flying himself. She said, "If I could do everything the way you think I can, would I be here?"

He had no answer for that. He didn't think anyone would have. He did his best: "I said I was sorry." Now—would she believe him or would she stay angry?

"All right," she said, but it didn't sound all right. Sure enough, she went on, "I must be in worse shape than I thought if what you say matters so much to me."

"What you say matters to me, too," Jacques said. "We're the only two people who speak French." He paused to think. "Do they even speak French in the Kingdom of Versailles here?"

"I wouldn't bet on it," Khadija answered. "I wouldn't bet there is a Kingdom of Versailles here."

Jacques nodded. The idea made sense to him, however much he wished it didn't. "That makes you my oldest friend," he said seriously. "That makes you my only friend who remembers my kingdom. I really am sorry, Khadija. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. You know so much—can you wonder when I think you know everything there is to know?"

"Well, I don't." Her voice was tart. "I didn't know this place was here, for instance. I didn't know my own people were running it. And I can't figure out how to get away, either. They watch the way to the chamber down below too well for anybody to sneak by." She stared down at the ground. "Knowing all the things I can't do is one of the reasons I got so mad at you."

"I know. I feel bad. I shouldn't have said that." Jacques paused, listening to her words over again. "One of the reasons? There are others?"

"There are others," Khadija agreed. "You're my oldest friend here, too, you know. It's easy for somebody like that to hurt your feelings, even if he doesn't mean to."

"Yes, I suppose so." Jacques knew Khadija could hurt his feelings. She hadn't tried, but then, he hadn't been trying with her, either. "Here. Maybe this will make things better." He kissed her on the cheek.

She looked so surprised, he wondered again if he was going to go flying. Then she managed a sort of a smile, even if only one corner of her mouth twisted up. "Maybe it makes things better. Maybe it makes them worse, too."

"I—" Jacques began.

Khadija held up a hand and cut him off. "Whatever you're going to say, you'd probably be smarter not to. Maybe the time will come when we can talk about things like that. If it does, we'll both know it, I think. It's not here yet."

Jacques thought it was. But if Khadija didn't, who cared what he thought? Things like that, as she'd put it, took two. If only one was ready, what did you have? A disappointment, that was all. "Well, you know how I feel," he said.

This time, she managed a real smile. "Thank you. It's always a compliment. But. . . here? It's not a good idea, Jacques. If we knew we could never get away—then, maybe, we'd have to make the best of things."

"I never thought I'd find a reason to want to go on being a slave," Jacques said.

Khadija turned away from him again. "Don't be stupid," she snapped. "No reason in the world is good enough to make you want to stay a slave."

Looked at one way, she was right. Looked at another . . . But if he looked at things like that, he would make her angry at him, which was the last thing he wanted. And he did want to get away. E he stayed here too long, he was liable to try to get a guard's musket away from him. But even if he did, so what? Even if he killed all the guards and set himself up as king here, so what? He'd be King of Nowhere.

Seeing that made him nod. "Well, when you're right, you're right."

"Oh, good." Khadija sounded relieved. "I'm glad you can be sensible."

"I can be tired, is what I can be," Jacques answered.

She yawned. "So can I. They work us hard. It's how they have part of their fun." She walked back toward the women's barracks, leaving Jacques scratching his head. He'd never thought much about people who had fun being cruel to other people. But if you had a good time shooting enemies who didn't have muskets of their own, why wouldn't you have fun working your slaves hard and watching them sweat?

On that cheerful note, Jacques headed for bed himself.

Emishtar had trouble saying Jacques' name, but not keeping her eyes open. They sparkled as she said, "He kiss you." She smacked her lips together so Annette wouldn't doubt what she meant. "Last night, he kiss you."

"Not like that," Annette said.

"No?" Her older friend sounded disappointed. "Too bad."

"Just a little one." Annette held her thumb and first finger so they almost touched. "Little."

"Too bad," Emishtar said again. She pulled up a weed by the roots. "What you got better to do?"

Get out of here, Annette thought. But Emishtar wouldn't believe that. Emishtar thought they were stuck in this alternate forever. Given what she knew, how could she think anything else? Annette didn't think so, but none of what she knew would make sense to Emishtar. Most of it didn't make sense to Jacques, and he came from a much higher-tech alternate than Emishtar did.

"It wouldn't be a good idea," was all Annette could come up with.

Emishtar rolled her eyes and went back to pulling weeds. She didn't say what she thought, but every line of her body shouted, Fool! at Annette. Had Annette come from her alternate, or from Jacques', Emishtar would have been right. A little happiness mixed in with the misery of being a slave would have been the most she could hope for.

But she was what she was, and she still had real hope. Sometimes she wondered why. This operation was slick, no two ways about it. The people who ran things here didn't slip up.

The blond woman who'd tried to talk with Annette was working not far away. Annette had found out the woman's name was Birigida, or something like that. She'd managed to get across that her own name was Khadija, which the blond woman had a devil of a time pronouncing. They hadn't gone much past that. The languages they used were too different from each other.

A guard yelled at Birigida. She was one of those people who did as little as they could to get by. All slaves did as little as they could, but Birigida did as little as she could even for a slave. She sped up a little when he shouted, but only a tiny bit. And she slowed down again as soon as he turned his back.

That was too soon. The guard might have been a jackass, but he wasn't a stupid jackass. He spun around to see if he could catch her goofing off. When he did, he pulled out his billy club and whacked her across the backside.

She yelped and jerked. The guard did some more shouting. He shook the billy club in her face. If you don't work harder, you'll get more! Annette didn't need to understand a word of the language to know what was going on.

Did Birigida get it? Annette wouldn't have bet a dollar on it, and the little aluminum coins were as near worthless as made no difference. Some people just wouldn't make an effort, even if they got in trouble for not making one. Annette had no idea why that was so, but she'd seen it was. She'd known half a dozen smart people in high school who either weren't going to college at all or weren't going to the one they wanted because they hadn't cared about their grades.

Some of them would find something that interested them and do all right anyway. Some . . . wouldn't. Birigida didn't have the choice. Nothing could make gardening and weeding interesting. But not getting whacked in the fanny should have been reason enough for her to keep her mind on her work.

The women around Birigida worked harder and faster—the guard would be keeping an eye on them, too. Annette knew she did more than she would have otherwise. She scowled at the blond woman for making her speed up.

No, Birigida didn't get it. Nothing under the sun could make her work harder than she felt like working. The guard yelled at her again. That didn't do much. Then he hit her again. She yelped louder this time—he must have hit harder. She started to cry. He shouted again, and waved his hands. What do you expect? Didn't I warn you? Again, Annette could follow along.

"That one trouble for everybody." Emishtar nodded toward Birigida.

"Well—yes," Annette agreed.

"One of her people should make her work," Emishtar said.

"Yes," Annette said again. "But they do not talk with her much." She'd noticed that before. Birigida spoke the same language as the other blondes and redheads, but she didn't seem to have a lot to do with them.

"Different clan," Emishtar guessed.

"Maybe," Annette said. "But how much difference does it make here?"

Emishtar shrugged. "How much? As much as anybody wants it to make."

She was bound to be right about that. If Birigida's clan or tribe was enemy to the one the rest of the new women came from, they might not want anything to do with her. But why—why!— couldn't she work enough to stay out of trouble?