House slaves didn't have to work as hard as the ones who went out to the gardens. For a little while, Annette had hoped she would get called back to the manor. That was the kind of hope a slave had—not to do what she wanted, but to do something a little less nasty than something else. Now, though, Annette decided she didn't mind going out to the vegetable gardens. She didn't want anybody noticing her the way that pretty house slave had been noticed.
To help keep that from happening, Annette didn't keep herself as clean as she might have. If she had a smudge of dirt on one cheek, if her hair was matted and greasy, if she didn't smell very good, if onions filled her breath, who would pay attention to her like that? She wanted to wash. She wanted hardly anything more. One of the hardest things about going to the alternates was dealing with filth. Here, though, it made for protective coloration. Annette shook her head. No, protective discoloration was more like it.
In a bed not far away, Emishtar was snoring. The other woman had as much to worry about as Annette. In fact, since she was older and from a low-tech alternate, she probably wasn't anywhere near as healthy, so she had more to worry about. But she didn't seem to worry nearly so much. She just went on doing as little as she could get away with. The only thing that did seem to bother her was too much work.
/ should be so lucky, Annette thought. In spite of her worries, she found herself yawning. All of them put together couldn't keep her awake till midnight, not with the day she'd put in. She yawned again, and fell asleep.
Somebody banging on a gong woke her much too early the next morning. That was low-tech, which didn't mean it didn't work. She yawned and rolled out of bed. Every time she did that, she shook her head in disbelief. This was her life? All she had to look forward to was another day of pulling weeds under the hot sun? Such as it was, this was it, all right.
And she had to move fast, too, or she wouldn't have time to finish breakfast, or maybe even get any. As she left the women's barracks, her eyes went toward the building she'd come out of when she got to this alternate. Somewhere down in the subbase-ment, a transposition chamber came and went. If she could get aboard it...
She laughed at herself. That would have been funny if it weren't so sad. For one thing, she had no idea when the chamber came and went. For another, the way down was always guarded. In the movies, one unarmed person could take on a swarm of guards with assault rifles and win. Annette wished life imitated art. The third-quarter moon rode high in the southern sky. She could wish for that, too, while she was at it.
Men and women were lining up for breakfast. They mingled only at meals and in the little stretch of time after supper and before sleep. Whoever set this place up might have been—had been—evil, but wasn't stupid. Far from it, worse luck. Making attachments hard to form let everything run more smoothly. People in love would take chances for the ones they loved that they wouldn't take in ordinary times.
Jacques came in a few minutes after Annette. He waved to her. She smiled and nodded back. If she got out of here, she would have to try to bring him with her, or to come back if she made it alone. It wasn't just that she'd promised, though she had. But getting down to that subbasement might take more muscle than any one person had.
What would Crosstime Traffic do with her—do to her—if she brought Jacques back to the home timeline? What would the company do with—do to—Jacques? Annette shrugged. She'd worry about that when the time came, if it came. She had plenty of worse things to worry about now.
One of those worries was, what if getting down to the sub-basement took more muscle than any two people had? What was she supposed to do then? Lead a slave revolt? She quailed at the thought. She didn't like leading any better than she liked following. She couldn't even talk to most of the slaves. And if they did rise, the guards would massacre them—and would laugh while they were doing it, too. She was as sure of that as she was of her own name.
Details, details. She mocked herself. It might have been funny if it weren't so sad.
She took a bowl. She took a spoon. A cook—another slave— dipped a ladle in a big pot of porridge and filled her bowl. She got plenty. The one cruelty they seemed to skip here was starving the slaves. It wasn't exciting—barley and peas and beans stewed forever, with chopped sausage and onions thrown in for flavor. But it wasn't terrible. Some of the slaves said they were eating better than they ever had in their lives.
Emishtar sat down beside her. "Good morning," Annette said in the language that sounded a little like Arabic but wasn't.
"Good morning," the older woman answered in Arabic.
"You good?" Annette asked.
Emishtar nodded. "I good. Thank you. You good?"
"I good, too. Thank you."
On they went, each using the other's language as best she could. As long as they stuck to clichés and stock phrases, they did all right. When they tried to go beyond those, they had more trouble. Every day, though, each of them learned a few more words. Almost every day, one of them figured out something new about the grammar in the other's language. They had a long way to go, but they were gaining.
Emishtar glanced over toward Jacques. "Nice young man," she remarked, her voice very, very casual.
"Is she?" Annette tried to be casual, too. Making a mistake like that didn't help. Emishtar laughed her head off. Annette tried again: "Is he?"
"I think so," the older woman said. "I think you think so, too."
Annette's ears heated. "And so?" she said. That made a handy, all-purpose question.
Emishtar grinned at her. "And so nothing. Nice young man, is all." It wasn't all. It wasn't even close to all, not by that grin. She enjoyed teasing Annette. She wasn't mean about it—she did it the way a friend would.
If I'm stuck here for good. . . Annette didn't want to think like that, not when she knew the transposition chamber came and went down there in the subbasement. But the slavers were careful. They had to be. If they slipped up, they knew what kind of trouble they'd land in.
In the movies and on TV, bad guys did dumb things and got caught because of it. Annette supposed that was true a lot of the time in real life, too. But the only mistake these people had made that she could see was buying her for a slave—and they didn't know she was from the home timeline.
"Come on! Time to work!" a guard shouted. Annette understood the words in Arabic, and she understood them in Em-ishtar's language, too. Was that progress, or was it a sign she'd already been here too long?
Men on horseback trotted up the road from the manor toward Jacques and the rest of the roadbuilding gang. Jacques would have ridden by the side of the road, not on the paving stones—horses liked soft ground underfoot better than hard rock. Maybe the guards on the horses didn't know that. They didn't seem like especially good riders. But they had those quick-shooting muskets slung over their shoulders. They weren't going out there to mix it up. They were going out to shoot whatever got in their way. How good a horseman did you need to be to do that?
The guards keeping an eye on the roadbuilders waved to the riders as they went past. Some of the horsemen waved back. They called out in the language that sounded like the one Englishmen used. That would have done Jacques more good if he'd spoken any English.
Off the riders went, down the track in the direction from which that horseman had come before. On the track, the horses kicked up a cloud of dust. People who were paying attention would have time to disappear before the riders got dangerously close. If a dozen men with muskets like that had been after Jacques, he would have done his best to disappear.