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."