"How did you find out about all that stuff?" Annarita asked.

"I told you-they've got books there. The more you know, the better you can play," Gianfranco answered. Playing well mattered to him-she could see that. He didn't care much about school, so he didn't work any harder than he had to there.

"Do you ever do anything… political at The Gladiator?" she asked.

He looked at her as if she were crazy. "I play games. I talk with the other guys who play games. What could be political about old-time railroads or soccer teams or hunting dragons?"

"Dragons? You're confusing me," Annarita said.

"Some of the games are in this pretend world," Gianfranco explained. "They're all right, I guess, but the railroad's my favorite."

"How come?" Annarita asked.

"I don't know. I just like it," Gianfranco answered. She made an exasperated noise. He carried his books in his left hand, which kept his right free for gesturing. "Why do you like a song or a movie? You just do, that's all."

"I know why 1 like a movie," Annarita said. "The actors are good, or the plot is interesting, or it's funny, or something."

"All right, all right. Let me think." Gianfranco did-Annarita could watch him doing it. That impressed her all by itself. He wasn't stupid or anything. They'd been living in each other's pockets since they were little, so she knew that. But he hardly ever wanted to do more than he had to to get by. At last, he said, "When I'm playing, it's like the railroad is really mine. I'm in charge of everything from paying the workers to fixing the track if a flood washes out a stretch to figuring out how much to charge for hauling freight."

He'd talked about that when he was trying to explain what he'd done to Carlo. Carefully, Annarita said, "It sounds like a very, uh, individualistic game." People in the Italian People's Republic weren't supposed to be individualists. They were all supposed to work together for the eventual coming of true Communism, when the state would wither away.