"Oh." Gianfranco nodded. " St. I guess you're right." Eduardo wouldn't be coming back to see Annarita any more, then. That didn't break Gianfranco's heart, even if he did his best not to show it.
The higher-ups at Crosstime Traffic figured out what to do faster than Eduardo had made Gianfranco think they would. That afternoon, he and Eduardo got into an A If a Romeo to go back to Milan. "Please fasten your seat belt," a woman's voice said after he sat down.
He did. "How does it know?" he asked the guy who was driving, a fellow in his mid-twenties named Moreno. Whether that was first name or last Gianfranco never found out.
"Sensor in the seat, and another one in the lock mechanism." Moreno spoke a French-flavored dialect. Gianfranco had to listen to him closely to follow what he said.
He drove like a maniac. Gianfranco had never imagined going from Rimini to Milan so fast, not unless he flew. He was glad he wore the seat belt. How much good it would do in case of a crash at that speed was a different question. Every time the Alfa hit a bump, Gianfranco almost went through the ceiling.
They were doing better than 160 kilometers an hour when an unlucky sparrow bounded off the windshield. "That little bird is-"
"Kaput," Moreno finished for him, with a wag of the hand. Gianfranco would have said something like very unhappy, which didn't mean Moreno was wrong-there was a tiny splash of blood on the window glass.
The Italian countryside here didn't look much different from the way it did in Gianfranco's world. Milan was a different story. Parts of it hadn't changed. The old buildings-La Scala, the Duorao, the Galleria del Popolo or Galleria Vittorio Emanuele-seemed the same. But massive skyscrapers of glass and steel gave the skyline an alien look. And…
"What's that?" Gianfranco asked. Whatever it was, it covered a lot of space.
"That's the soccer stadium," Eduardo answered. "One of them, I mean. AC Milan plays there. Inter Milan has a stadium about the same size on the other side of town."
"Oh, my," Gianfranco said. Milan's two big soccer clubs had the same names here as they did in his alternate. But the size of that stadium said soccer was a much bigger business in the home timeline. He wasn't sure whether that was good or bad. "Is the game better here than it is in my Milan?" he asked.
"Sometimes," Eduardo answered. "The big teams here have the best players from all over the world, not just from one country. The seasons are longer here, though, and the players don't always try as hard as they might. When it's good, it's better, I guess. When it's not…" He shrugged. Moreno said something rude. Eduardo went on, "The top players get so much money, they don't always want to take chances, either."
Gianfranco started to laugh. "We always hear about the capitalists exploiting the workers. It sounds like the soccer workers exploit the capitalists, too."
That made Eduardo laugh. "Si. It can happen. But the players make so much, they're capitalists, too."
Moreno had to drive around the Galleria del Popolo several times before he could nab a parking space. (Gianfranco knew that wasn't the right name here, but he still thought of the place that way.) "Traffic here is even worse than it is back home," he said. Moreno swore again.
"We've got more cars," Eduardo said. "We don't have to wait for years before we buy one. We just put down the money and drive away. We don't have to put down very much, either. There's a lot more buying on credit here than in your alternate."
"Doesn't that suck people into debt?" Gianfranco asked as he got out.
"It can," Eduardo said. Moreno zoomed off. Eduardo continued, "Yeah, it can-I'm not going to lie to you. But with most people, it doesn't. And they get to buy things they would have trouble affording if they had to save up the money ahead of time."
"Advertisements everywhere," Gianfranco remarked as they walked through the Galleria. Electric signs and TV screens shouted at him to buy cars and cologne and (asartas and soda. He didn't even know what a fasarta was. He didn't want to ask Eduardo, for fear of seeming ignorant. After a while, though, he did ask, "Doesn't all this drive people crazy?"
"Oh, you'd better believe it," Eduardo said. "Most people try to tune it out. But that just means the people who put the ads together make the new ones even bigger and noisier than the ones that came before. It's a war, like any other war. Ignore this if you can! the advertisers say. So people do."
Gianfranco couldn't ignore the ads. He didn't have the practice people here did. In his Italian People's Republic, goods were scarce. There wasn't much competition. If you had something, people rushed out and bought it. Whether it was overcoats or avocados, they didn't know when they would see the like again. But everything seemed to be available all the time here. You had to persuade people to part with their money, make them want to buy your shoes and not Tod's. Gianfranco had no idea who Tod was or whether his-her?-shoes were good or bad. But ads for them were all over the Galleria.
So were ads for Crosstime Traffic. That surprised Gianfranco, though he didn't know why it should have. "You really do work for a capitalist corporation," he said to Eduardo.
"Yes, and I don't think it's evil or gross, either," Eduardo said. "Without Crosstime Traffic, the home timeline would be a mess. Oh, you'll get lots of people who tell you it's a mess anyhow, but it would be a different mess, and a worse one."
He knew what Gianfranco was thinking, all right. In the Italian People's Republic, looking out for a profit first was shameful. It wasn't quite illegal, but you didn't want to get caught doing it. Here… nobody cared.
A lot of the buildings in the Galleria looked the same as the ones in Gianfranco's alternate. They were the same buildings, like La Scala and the Duomo. They'd gone up before the two worlds split apart, so they existed in both. Strange to think of two sets of the same buildings in different worlds.
Or maybe more than two… "How many alternates have the Galleria in them?" Gianfranco asked. Eduardo looked startled. "I don't know. A lot-that's all I can tell you. All the ones where the breakpoint is after it was built. Some of them, though, you don't want to visit."
"Alternates where the Fascists won?" That was the worst thing Gianfranco could think of.
"Those are bad, but some of them aren't too much worse than yours," Eduardo answered. That gave Gianfranco a look at his own alternate, and at how it seemed to the home timeline, that he hadn't had before. He could have done without it. Eduardo went on, "Those are bad, but the ones where they really went and fought an atomic war are worse."
"Oh." Gianfranco winced. "How many of those are there?"
"Too many. We stay out of most of them," Eduardo said. "They've been knocked too flat to be worth doing business with. They've been knocked too flat to be dangerous, too. Nobody in any of them will find the crosstime secret any time soon."
"I guess not," Gianfranco said. "Do you try to nudge the fascist alternates the way you've been nudging mine?"
"Si," Eduardo said, and not another word.
"Any luck?"
Eduardo doled out two more words: "Not much." A little defensively, he added, "It's not easy. A world is a big place, and we don't have a lot of resources to put into any one alternate."
"I wasn't complaining. I was just wondering," Gianfranco said. "Boy, the buildings may be the same here, but the shops sure aren't." The one they'd just walked past would have got the shopkeeper flung into a camp in his Milan. Here, nobody but a couple of customers walking in paid any attention to it.
"Different alternates, different customs." Eduardo seemed glad Gianfranco had changed the subject. Was he embarrassed the home timeline couldn't do more with alternates it didn't like? Or was he embarrassed it wasn't trying harder? Its first job was to turn a profit. If it didn't do that, it wouldn't have the money to try to do anything else.