It turned out to be more complicated than Russian. As far as Annarita was concerned, that wasn't easy, but Rails across Europe managed. Building your railroad and shipping things from here to there were pretty straightforward. After that, though, things got stickier. You could let the other player use your track if he paid you, but how did you know how much to ask for? What happened if you were both shipping the same product into the same town? How did you deal with natural disasters? And so on, and so on.

Gianfranco did a better job of explaining than Annarita would have expected. He knew the game backward and forward and inside out. Sometimes he tried to tell her more than she needed to know. Mostly, though, he stuck with the basics till they ran into something hard. Then he told her how that worked.

As far as she could see, he didn't try to take unfair advantage because she wasn't sure what she was doing. When she thanked him for that, he looked surprised. "It wouldn't be any fun if I did," he said. "Who cares if you win if you've got to cheat to do it?"

"Lots of people would say the point of winning is winning, and who cares how you do it?" Annarita answered.

"But if you know you didn't win square, it leaves a bad taste in your mouth," Gianfranco said. "Or if it doesn't, it ought to."

"Si. I think the same thing. But plenty of people don't," she said.

After about half an hour, her mother called her to help cook. "What do you think?" Gianfranco asked as he marked places and put their cards and play money into separate envelopes.

"It's not bad," Annarita said. "I can see it's not the kind of game where you get good as soon as you've played once. I've still got a lot to learn."

"I’m still learning," Gianfranco said. "That loss-leader trick Carlo tried to pull on me a while ago… I had no idea that was in the rules, but it is." He held up the rule book.

"It's thick enough," Annarita said. "Probably all kinds of other sneaky things hiding in there, too."

"Do you want to study it?" Gianfranco asked.

"Maybe another time," she said. "If I start looking at it, I won't study my Russian, and I've got to." She sighed. "I think Comrade Montefusco's teaching us to speak it better than the Russians do themselves." She told him about the classroom visitors they'd had.

"I don't care if the Russians were the first Communists," Gianfranco said. "Nobody'd pay any attention to them if they weren't the biggest, strongest country in the world."

"That's true, but be careful who hears you say it," Annarita warned. She was glad to get away to help her mother cut up a chicken and chop vegetables.

Quietly, so her voice wouldn't carry over the sound of chopping, her mother asked, "Are you really playing that silly game with Gianfranco?"

"It's not silly. It's kind of interesting, as a matter of fact," Annarita answered, also in a low voice. Her mother snorted. "It is," Annarita insisted. "It's complicated as anything, too."

"So is a car's engine. That doesn't make it interesting, not unless you're a mechanic," her mother said.

"It's got to be as complicated as bridge," Annarita said. Her mother loved to play cards. Her father didn't, but he went along to keep his wife sweet. In self-defense, he'd become at least as good a player as she was.

"Don't be silly," her mother sniffed. "You don't know what you're talking about."

Since Annarita didn't care anything about bridge, her mother had a point. But the coin had two sides, whether her mother wanted to see it or not. "Well, you don't know anything about Rails across Europe."

"I know most of the boys who play it have thick glasses and funny clothes and never comb their hair," her mother said. "What else do I need to know?"

"You could say the same thing about chess players," Annarita answered.

"That's different. Chess is respectable," her mother said. "Even the Russians take good chess players seriously."

Even the Russians, Annarita thought as she sliced a green pepper into long strips. Gianfranco was right-if they weren't top dogs, nobody would pay any attention to them. Comrade Montefusco had talked about the Russian insult-nye kul-turny-that meant uncultured, and that foreigners shouldn't use against them. The Russians used it against one another, though. If they didn't have soldiers and rockets from Poland to the Atlantic, everybody in Western Europe would have thrown it in their faces. Sometimes, though, saying what you thought came at too high a price.

104 Harry Turtledove

Following that line of thought, Annarita made her voice as innocent as she could when she asked, "So you want us to act just like the Russians, then?"

"No!" Her mother's knife came down hard on the joint be-tween thigh and drumstick. It crunched through gristle and bone. "I didn't say that. I didn't mean that. But Gianfranco's silly game isn't chess, either."

"I didn't say it was. But it's not easy, and it's not silly, either." Annarita passed her mother the cut-up pepper and squashes. Her mother browned the chicken in olive oil, then put it in a pan with the vegetables, with wine and tomato sauce and chopped tomatoes, and with spices and bits of crumbled prosciutto. Into the oven it went.

As her mother was washing her hands, she said, "I hope you're not playing just to make Gianfranco happy. You can do better than that, sweetheart."

"Maybe." It wasn't as if Annarita hadn't had the same thought herself. But she said, "He's kind of like the game, you know? There's more to him than meets the eye."

"And so? His father's still an apparatchik." Her mother used another Russian word that had spread all over Europe and America. It didn't just mean a petty bureaucrat. It meant someone who was born to be a petty bureaucrat. People who really did things, like Annarita's father, naturally looked down their noses at the ones who made a living by shuffling pieces of paper back and forth.

"Comrade Mazzilli's not so bad," Annarita said. "Plenty worse."

"Well, heaven knows that's true," her mother agreed. "But still…"

"You don't need to get all upset," Annarita said. "You and Father always go on about how I should work hard to get along with Gianfranco. So here I am, working hard to get along with him, and you don't like that, either."

"I didn't expect you to play his silly game." Her mother seemed stuck on the word. "That goes too far."

"I told you-it's not silly," Annarita came back again- and there they were, starting again from square one.

The more her mother argued with her about it, the more interested in Rails across Europe Annarita got. She would have angrily denied that any such thing would happen. She didn't like to think of herself as so predictable. But it did work out that way.

When she got to school the next morning, Maria Tenace was gloating some more. "So much for your majority report," Maria sneered. "The reactionary lackeys at The Gladiator must have known the fat was in the fire. They fled yesterday, one jump ahead of the Security Police. Sooner or later, the vanguard of the people's justice will catch up with them. I don't think it will take long."

She could seriously say things even a TV announcer would have had trouble bringing out with a straight face. A TV announcer would have known how silly and stupid they were. Maria didn't. She believed every scrap of Party doctrine. A few hundred years earlier, she would have got just as excited about the Inquisition, and would have been just as sure it was necessary.

She let out one piece of information without even noticing she was doing it. "So the people at The Gladiator did get away?" Annarita asked.

"Si," Maria said reluctantly. "But not for long. The hand of every decent Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist is raised against them in iron condemnation of their wicked and corrupt manipulation of the social order and class structure."