What did you do on your summer vacation, George? someone would ask. And George would answer, Oh, I went off to be a slave for a while. It was great!
Annette giggled. Put that way, it sounded stupid. But that was probably how word about this place spread. You couldn't talk about it in chat rooms or by e-mail or even by telephone. Your chances of getting hacked were much too good. She wondered if temporary slaves from the home timeline got more compulsions than they knew about. Maybe they couldn't give it away in e-mail or chat rooms even if they wanted to. That made sense to Annette. It would be a good insurance policy for the folks who ran this outfit.
There was the manor. Were other people not what they seemed? Don't act too curious, Annette told herself. You'll get in trouble. That made sense, too. But she was so curious, she wondered how she could stand it.
Before, Jacques had seen Khadija excited enough to burst. He thought she was even more excited now than she had been then. Now, though, she'd pushed it down so it didn't show as much. Her being able to do that impressed him. She could use the excitement for fuel without wearing it on her sleeve. People who were able to do things like that often made big names for themselves.
The guards only smiled when Jacques and Khadija went walking in the courtyard. The two of them had been doing it for a while. The guards—and the other slaves, too—took it for granted. In the ordinary way of things, it might have led to a wedding—if the masters here let slaves marry.
Jacques wouldn't have minded if things happened in the ordinary way, not even a little. But when he went walking with Khadija now, he got something even more exciting than love. He got hope.
"Well, what did you find out?" he asked her. He didn't name Birigida. He didn't want to make things easy for anyone who might be spying on them.
"She really is from the place I come from," Khadija answered. "There's no doubt."
"What was she doing with Dumnorix and his people, then?" Jacques said. "Was she pretending to belong to them, the way you pretend to be a trader's daughter? Is that how she got caught?"
"That's what I thought at first, too." Like Jacques, Khadija spoke French. It might help keep people from snooping on them—or it might not. She went on, "But no, it isn't true. She came here because she wanted to be a slave. It's a game for her." Khadija's nostrils flared, as if at a bad smell.
"A game?" Even though her French was as good as his, Jacques wondered if he'd heard right. "Why would anyone play at being a slave if he didn't have to? Henri on the wheel, why would anyone play at being a slave if she didn't have to? That's—mad." He found the politest name for it he could.
Khadija nodded. "Well, my friend, I think so, too." Even then, amazed at what she'd said about Birigida, Jacques smiled to hear her call him a friend. She went on, "But Birigida has more money than sense. I can see that. At home, she's rich and important. That doesn't make her happy."
"It would make me happy!" Jacques exclaimed.
"That's because you have more sense than money," Khadija said.
"Of course I do. Slaves here haven't got any money," Jacques said.
She sent him a severe look. "Before you were a slave, too," she said, and looked ready to flip him over her shoulder if he argued any more. She could do it, too. She thought for a little while. "It's not just that she hasn't got much sense. Part of her needs to do this, too."
"Needs to?" Now Jacques frowned. "What do you mean?"
She thought again. Looking for an example, he realized. And she found one: "Did you ever know, or know about, somebody who couldn't keep from, uh, bothering little girls?"
"Bothering? Oh—like that," Jacques said, and Khadija nodded. A moment later, so did he. "Yes, one of those beasts plagued Paris a few years ago. The father of a girl he outraged finally tracked him down and killed him, and that was the end of it. Nobody misses him a bit—he's bound to be roasting in hell."
"Maybe. Where I come from, we think something like that is a sickness, and we cure it if we can," Khadija said.
"What can a doctor do if a man is an animal inside?" Jacques asked.
"More than you'd imagine, sometimes. We have drugs and medicines that work better than the ones you know," Khadija answered. "But they don't always work, and sometimes we have to lock up people like that to keep them from hurting others."
To Jacques, locking them up wasn't punishment enough. That was beside the point now, though. "You think Birigida is one of those people who can't help it?" he said. Khadija nodded. He asked, "Why not give her these fancy medicines, then? Why not lock her up?"
"If I can get back to where I belong, they probably will," Khadija said. "Till now. . . Well, think about it. The man who goes after little girls hurts other people. He makes other people notice him. When Birigida plays these games, the only one she hurts is herself. That makes her harder to spot."
"You have the answer for everything!" Jacques said.
She laughed a bitter laugh. "If I'm so smart, what am I doing here? I don't get a thrill out of it, even if Birigida does. Sometimes a clout in the head is worth more than a whole pile of fancy answers—and that's what I'm doing here."
"But the answers give you a chance to get away," Jacques said.
"Maybe." No, Khadija didn't want to show how hopeful she was. "Just maybe."
Two weeks—the slowest two weeks of Annette's life. She watched Birigida like a hawk all that time. The last thing she wanted—absolutely the last thing—was for the blond woman to do something so stupid, it would get her killed. Maybe Birigida was ready to go back to her real life, too. She didn't act quite so lazy or quite so foolish as she had before.
The guards gave her a bad time anyway. They'd got used to it by then. They punished her for things they would have ignored from other women. When she yelped, they laughed at her. But she does stuff like that so they will come down on her, Annette thought.
If she'd read about people like Birigida in an abnormal-psychology text, she would have figured she would never meet one for real. She would also have figured running into one for real would make her sick. And, in a way, it did. The idea that anyone would want to be a slave, even if not forever, still bewildered her. She didn't pretend to understand it.
But she didn't despise Birigida the way she despised the people who ran the manor. If the blond woman craved being a slave, craved being shouted at and punished, whom did that hurt? Only herself.
It was a different story for the masters and guards. They took men and women who just wanted to go on about their own business and turned them into slaves. If those men and women got out of line, the people who ran the manor hurt them or killed them. Even if those men and women didn't get out of line, the masters and guards still kept them enslaved and used and abused them for their own pleasure. That was a different wrong from Birigida's, and a worse one.
And it didn't even start to talk about what the masters and guards were doing to the people who lived in this alternate. The manor looked to be the seed of a much larger conquest. Crosstime Traffic wasn't supposed to work like this. It was supposed to be about quiet trade, about interfering in other alternates as little as it could.
A lot of history in the home timeline said that was a good idea. Colonial conquests in the Americas and Africa hadn't been pretty. Plainly, the people with the assault rifles here didn't care.
Did Crosstime Traffic proper even know about this alternate? Annette doubted it. Word of what was going on here in Spain would spread across the world. It would get distorted by the time it reached somebody a couple of thousand kilometers away, but it would go that far. If anyone from the home timeline heard it and got curious . ..