Wherever this was, it was in a different alternate. The house and grounds above the underground room where the transposition chamber came and went were bigger than the ones in the other Madrid. The house and the other buildings had solar panels on their roofs, too. Those would generate at least some of the electricity this place used. And if the locals were low-tech, they'd have no idea what the panels were for.
Even before Annette got to the barracks, she decided the locals were low-tech. For one thing, she couldn't see any sky-glow from street lamps over the outer wall. For another, the stench of sewage and garbage filled the air. Again, the other slaves took no special notice. They'd lived with that smell all their lives. They took it for granted.
They did exclaim when they found fluorescent tubes lighting the barracks. "Our new master must be a strong wizard!" one of them said. She sounded more proud than otherwise, as if being owned by such a man gave her extra status. For all Annette knew, it did.
She made herself exclaim, too. If she took those glowing tubes too much for granted, the others might wonder why. If they wondered why, Marwan al-Baghdadi—or whatever his real name was—might start wondering, too. Or maybe he didn't even come to this new alternate. Maybe he was just a hired man like the goons with the guns. But having the boss here wonder about her would also be very bad news.
Slaves! One of Crosstime Traffic's strongest rules was the one against buying or selling other people. Annette wouldn't have thought the rule even needed to be there. It had been almost 250 years since the United States fought a civil war over slavery.
But. . . That was a CT transposition chamber. She'd been in enough of them to recognize another one. It didn't come from some other alternate that also knew how to travel between timelines. That had always been Crosstime Traffic's worst nightmare. This trouble, though, this trouble was homegrown. To Annette, that made it worse, not better.
She lay down on a bed just like the one she'd had in that other Madrid. The rest of the newly arrived slave women soon went to sleep. They didn't fully understand what had happened to them. Annette did, and her whirling thoughts kept her tossing and turning. People inside Crosstime Traffic were dealing with—dealing in—slaves. They'd got their hands on their own private transposition chamber. If that didn't mean there was corruption in very high places, Annette would have been amazed.
Why would they want slaves? She worried at that as if it were gristle stuck between her teeth. Whatever they dug up or grew here, Crosstime Traffic could surely get it somewhere else. And besides, how many people connected to Crosstime Traffic needed money? Most of them made more benjamins than they knew what to do with.
She yawned. However upset she was, she was tired, too. What else besides money would make people want to own other people? For a while, she couldn't think of anything. She yawned again. She was going to fall asleep in spite of herself.
She'd almost drifted off when she suddenly sat bolt upright instead. Maybe just the thrill of doing something this wrong would be enough. In the home timeline, people didn't wear furs. Up till this moment, Annette had never asked herself why they didn't. That she hadn't asked said a lot about how strong the taboo was. She'd always just taken it for granted.
Every once in a while, though, you would hear stories on the news . . . Reporters would talk in hushed voices about how so-and-so—sometimes somebody famous, sometimes someone no-body'd ever heard of—had been caught with a fur jacket or a mink stole in the closet. You could only wear something like that where no one (except maybe someone as twisted as you were) saw you do it. The only reason you would do it was because everybody else thought it was sick. You got some sort of perverted pleasure from going against the way everyone else felt.
Well, if wearing furs was a perverted kick, wasn't buying and selling and owning people an even bigger one? It sure looked that way to Annette. The idea made more sense than anything else she'd come up with, that was for sure.
Finding something that made sense, even if it was something horrible, helped her relax. She lay down again and began drifting off.
She began, yes. But then she jerked and twisted, there on that slave's bed. Sleep wouldn't come after all. Maybe part of the thrill of slavery was buying and selling and owning people. But wasn't the rest of it doing anything you wanted to them while you had them? Anything at all? Why not? They were just property, weren't they?
Annette lay awake the rest of the night.
When Jacques woke the morning after the strange ride in the transposition chamber, he found that not all the slaves in the barracks were men who'd come with him. He also found he couldn't speak with the strangers. They didn't use Arabic or French. They didn't use Spanish, either—he knew what that sounded like, even if he couldn't speak it. Some of them had a language that reminded him a little of Arabic, though he couldn't follow it. Others made noises that hardly sounded like speech at all to him. Their tongue was full of sneezes and hisses and coughing sounds, and he couldn't tell where one word stopped and the next began.
"I think it is the Tower of Babel," Musa ibn Ibrahim said gravely. "God has confused our speech."
The only answer Jacques could find was, "Why would God want to do that to the likes of us?"
"God is God," Musa said. "He may do as He pleases. We have not the right to question Him."
How could you argue with that? Jacques couldn't, and he knew it. But he did say, "God didn't put us in that—that chamber, Khadija called it. People did. And the people who did know more about it than we do."
"Then we will learn—when God wills that we learn," Musa replied. Jacques gave up.
A man stood in the doorway. He shouted a couple of incomprehensible words. Then he said, "//tor/" That was Breakfast! in Arabic. Jacques guessed he'd said the same thing in the other two languages. Next time the man said those words, Jacques told himself, he would remember what they were. He wasn't sure he could pronounce one of them, but he'd try.
He didn't know where to get breakfast here. The slaves who spoke the strange languages did. He followed them. So did Musa and the other slaves who'd come here in the chamber. A bored-looking cook ladled porridge into bowls. Those bowls, and the spoons that went into them, were of some hard white stuff Jacques hadn't seen before. It reminded him of the orange stuff that went into the seats in the transposition chamber. Maybe Khadija had a name for it. Even if she did, though, would it mean any more than transposition chamber did?
To his relief, the benches and tables where the slaves ate were of ordinary wood. He got a splinter in his hand when he sat down. As he dug it out with a fingernail, it made him feel at home.
This place didn't try to keep its slaves hungry. The bowls were big, and the cook had filled them full. The porridge even had bits of meat in it. Jacques spooned it up. Things could have been worse—and how many times had he had that thought?
"What is this flesh?" Musa ibn Ibrahim asked after eating for a little while. "It does not taste like anything I have had before."
"Ham, I think," Jacques answered with his mouth full. And then, a heartbeat slower than he should have, he said, "Oh."
Grimly, Musa shoved the bowl away from himself. "You are a Christian," he said. "This food is not forbidden for you." By the way he said it, he meant, You don't know any better. Iron in his voice, he went on, "You will know, though, the swine is an unclean beast for Muslims." He called out, "Muslims! My brethren! My sisters! The food has forbidden flesh in it!"
Some of them cursed. Some of them prayed. Some of the women screamed. They all stopped eating breakfast. Some of the other slaves, the one who'd been here before, looked at them as if they were crazy. Others moved away from them on the benches. Jacques knew what that meant. They thought trouble was coming, and they didn't want to get stuck in the middle of it.