A Different Flesh
Harry Turtledove
A different Flesh
By Harry Turtledove
Synopsis:
How would we treat our cousin, Neanderthal man, if he were alive today?
In this alternate history, bands of Homo erectus had crossed the Siberian land bridges to America, but no modern humans made the same trip later. The world where sims (the European settlers' name for Homo erectus) rather than Indians live is different from ours. North America would have been easier for Europeans to settle than it was in our history, where the Indians were strong enough to slow if not to stop the expansion. The presence of sims, intel igent beings, but different from and less than us, shaped European thought.
Those Sims were enough like us to be very useful, different enough from us to be exploited with minimal guilt, and too weak to resist effectively for themselves.
The urge to treat them better would have to come from the ranks of humanity, and to compete against the many reasons, some of them arguably valid, for continuing exploitation.
This is the story of Europeans conquoring the New World, and the story of the Sims as theyy move from slavery to true humanity.
This is a work of fiction. Al the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.
Copyright O 1988 by Harry Turtledove
copyright 01988 by Nightfal , Inc.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Book Baen Publishing Enterprises P.O. Box 1403 Riverdale, NY
10471
ISBN: 0-671-876224
Cover art by Kevin Murphy
First Baen printing, September 1994
Distributed by Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas NewYork, NY
10020
WHEN TWO ORGANISMS overlap too closely in a single environmental niche, they compete. It may not be purposeful, the organisms may not have the kind of brains that will make anything at al purposeful, but they will compete just the same. They will try to use the same habitats; live on the same food; and it is very likely that one will prove a bit more efficient than the other. The stronger will beat off, damage, or kill the weaker; the better hunter or forager will leave the poorer to starve.
It is one of the mechanisms of evolution, usually expressed by the cliche "survival of the fittest" (except that you define the "fittest"
as the one who survives, so that you have a nice circular argument).
To get a bit closer to home . . . We don't know exactly what killed off the australopithecines after their having lived in eastern and southern Africa for two million years, but it may well be that genus Homo, wittingly or unwittingly, helped.
And Homo erectus may have been done in, at least to some extent, by Homo sapiens, while the Neanderthal variety of the latter was in turn done in by the modern variety.
We can't put ourselves into the minds of Homo erectus or Australopithecus africanus, let alone into what might pass as the mind of trannosaurus rex, but we know very well what our own minds are like. We have minds that make it possible for us to know what we are doing when we cal ously mistreat others who are very much like ourselves, and do you know what we do? We rationalize our cruelty, and justify ourselves, and even make ourselves sound moral and noble.
Here is the first example I know of. Immediately after the Flood (according to the Bible) Noah planted a vineyard, made wine, drank it, and was drunken. And his youngest son, Ham, the father of Canaan, didn't show the old man the proper respect. (The Bible doesn't go into detail.) Noah therefore said, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." (Genesis 9:25.) In the time of King David and King Solomon, the Israelites control ed al of Canaan and enslaved the Canaanites and put them to forced labor, it was not because the Israelites were a master race and did as master races always do. Not at all. They did it (they said) because of a Biblical curse on Canaan. (One that was undoubtedly inserted into the Bible after the fact.)
Very well, then, that was ancient times, and people were primitive and knew no better.
However, in modern times, it was suggested that Ham, the youngest son of Noah, was a black and the ancestor of all the blacks that have existed since. This, of course, is entirely wrong, Ear the Canaanites, if we go by linguistic divisions, were as Semitic as the Israelites, the Arameans, the Babylonians, and the Arabs. They were not blacks.
However, it suited the slavemasters of Europe and America to pretend that Ham was black because that made black slavery a divine institution and placed the blacks under that same curse the Israelites had made use of three thousand years before. When preachers from the slave states said that the Bible enjoined black slavery, Noah's curse was what they referred to.
In fact, you don't have to refer to a particular Biblical verse to make yourself sound moral and noble. After all, when you enslave a black, you free him from his slavery to his superstitions, his false religions, his primitive way of life, and you introduce him to the benefits of Christianity and save his soul. Since his soul is worth infinitely more than everything else he possesses or can possess, you are doing the slave an enormous favor by enslaving him and you're earning for yourself kudos in heaven and flights of angels will sing you to your rest for being a noble slaveowner. (If you think that slaveowners didn't use this argument to justify themselves, you are very naive.)
In fact, to slaveowners, slaves were always responsible for their own slavery. To Aristotle, that great Greek thinker, those people who weren't Greeks were slaves by nature. These "barbarians" (so-called because they didn't talk "people-talk" the way the Greeks did, but made uncouth incomprehensible sounds like "bar-bar"), being natural slaves, were natural y enslaved. You do them a favor, obviously, by letting them be what they naturally are.
The very word "slave" comes, I believe, from "Slav" since to the Romans and the Germans, Slavs were slaves by nature.
It's not even just slavery. The German Nazis killed hosts of Jews, Poles, Russians, Gypsies, and others. Did they do it because they were blood-thirsty, ravening beasts? Not to hear them tel it.
They were purifying the race and getting rid of disgusting sub-men for the benefit of true humanity. I'm sure they thoroughly expected the gratitude of al decent people for their noble deeds.
And we Americans as well, there is a story that the Turkish sultan, Abdul Hamid II, a bloody and villainous tyrant, visited the United States once and was tackled over the matter of the Armenian massacres.
In response, he looked about him calmly and said, "Where are your Indians" Yes, indeed, we wiped them out. It was their land but we didn't enslave them; we killed them. We kil ed them in defiance of treaties, we kil ed them when they tried to assert their legal rights under those treaties, and we killed them when they submitted and did not defend themselves. And we had no qualms about it. They were "savages"
and we were doing God's work by ridding the Earth of them.
There is a (possibly apocryphal) story that after Custer's Last Stand (the Massacre at Little Big Horn, it's only a massacre when white men get kil ed) a Comanche chief was introduced to General Sheridan (a Northern hero of the Civil War). The Comanche said, "Me Tach-a-way. Me good Indian.
" To this General Sheridan is reported to have replied, "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.", A very nice genocidal remark.
The history of human cruelty is revolting enough, but the history of human justification thereof is infinitely more revolting.
Would it be any different in an alternate world, where Homo erectus still existed alongside of us Would we treat our evolutionary cousins any better than we've ever treated our
own kind? Harry Turtledove takes a hard look at this question in A Different Flesh, and comes up with some answers we'd probably just as soon not hear.
Preface
WHERE DO:YOU get your ideas?
I've never known a science fiction writer who hasn't been asked that question a good many times. I'm no exception. And, as is true of most of my col eagues, the answers I give often leave guestioners unsatisfied. I've had ideas doing the dishes, taking a shower, driving the freeway. I don't know why they show up at times like those. They just seem to.
Sometimes ideas come because two things that by rights ought to be wildly separate somehow merge in a writer's mind. I had just finished watching the 1984 Winter Olympics when I happened to look at a Voyager picture of Saturn's moon Mimas, the one with the enormous crater that has a huge oentral peak. I wondered what skijumping down that enormous mountain, under that tiny gravity, would be like. A story followed shortly.
And sometimes ideas come because you look for them. Like most science-fiction writers, I read a lot. In late 1984, I was idly wondering how we would treat our primitive ancestor Australopithecus if he were alive today.
What I think of as my story-detector light went on. How would we treat our poor, not-quite-so-bright relations if we met them today. I soon dismissed the very primitive Australopithecus. As far as anyone knows, he lived only in Africa. But Homo crectus, modern man's immediate ancestor, was widespread in the Old World. What if, I thought, bands of Homo erectus had crossed the Siberian land bridges to America, and what if no modern humans made the same trip later? That what-if was the origin of the book you hold in your hands.
The world where sims (the European settlers' name for Homo erectus) rather than Indians inhabit the New World is differem from ours in several ways. For one thing, the grand fauna of the Pleistocene, mammoths, saber-tooth tigers, ground sloths, glyptodons, what have you, might well have survived to the present day. Sims would be less efficient hunters than Indians, and would not have helped hurry the great beasts into extinction.
Human history starts looking different too. North America would have been easier for Europeans to settle than it was in our history, where the Indians were strong enough to slow if not to stop the expansion.
Central and South America, on the other hand, would have been more difficult: Spanish colonial society was based on the ruins of the American Indian empires. And Spain, without the loot it plundered from the Indians, probably would not have dominated sixteenth-century Europe to the extent it did in our history.
Also, the presence of sims, intel igent beings, but different from and less than us, could not have failed to have a powerful effect on European thought. Where did they come from? What was their relationship to humans? Having these questions posed so forcefully might well have led thinkers toward the idea of evolution long before Darwin. Sims might also make us look rather more careful y at the differences between various groups of ourselves.
To return to Gould's question: how would we treat sims. I fear that the short answer is, not very well. They are enough like us to be very useful, different enough from us to be exploited with minimal guilt, and too weak to resist effectively for themselves. The urge to treat them better would have to come from the ranks of humanity, and to compete against the many reasons, some of them arguably valid, for continuing exploitation.
"The proper study of mankind is man." true enough. Sims can, I hope, help us look at ourselves by reflecting our view at an angle different from any we can get in this world. Come to think of it, that's one of the things science fiction in general can do. That's why it's fun.
Viled Bead Simia quam similis, turpissama hestia, nobis!
[The ape, vilest beast, how like us!] , Ennius, quoted in Cicero, De Natura Deorum found the new World a very different land from the one they had left. No people came down to the seashore to greet their ships. Before the arrival of European settlers, there were no people in North or South America. The most nearly human creatures present in the Americas were sims.
In the Old World, sims have been extinct for hundreds of thousands of years. Fossils of creatures very much like present-day sims have been found in East Africa, on the island of Java, and in caves not far from Pekin, China. Sims must have crossed a land bridge from Asia to North America during an early glacial period of the Ice Age, when the sea level was much lower than it is now.
At the time when humans discovered the New World, smal hunting and gathering bands of sims lived throughout North and South America.
Their lives were more primitive than those of any human beings, for they knew how to make onty the most basic stone and wood tools, and were not even able to make fire for themselves (although they could use and maintain it if they found it).
Paradoxically, this very primitiveness makes them interesting to anthropologists, who see in them an il ustration of how humanity's ancient ancestors must have lived.
Despite their lack of weapons more formidable than chipped stones and sticks with fire-hardened points, sims often proved dangerous to colonists in the early days of European settlement of the New World.
As they learned to cope with attacks from bands of sims the settlers also had to learn new farming techniques needed for soils and climates different from those of their native lands. Hunger was their constant companion in the early years of the colonies.
Another reason for this was the necessity of bringing al seed grain across the Atlantic until surpluses could be built up. The Americas offered no native equivalent of wheat, rye, or barley for settlers to use.
Sims, of course, knew nothing of agriculture.
Nevertheless, the Spaniards and Portuguese succeeded in establishing colonies in Central and South ; America during the sixteen century.
The first English settlers in What is now the Federated Commonwealths was at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1600.
From The Story of the Federated Commonwealths, by Ernest Simpson.
Reproduced by permission.
A Different Flesh
AFTER THIRTY MILD English summers, July in Virginia smote Edward Wingfield like a blast from hell. Sweat poured off him as he tramped through the forest a few miles from Jamestown in search of game. It clung, greasily, in the humid heat.
He held his crossbow cocked and ready. He also carried a loaded pistol in each boot, but the crossbow was silent and accurate at longer range, and it wasted no precious powder. The guns were only for emergencies.
Wingfield studied the dappled shadows. A little past noon, he guessed.
Before long he would have to turn round and head home for the colony. He had had a fairly good day: two rabbits, several small birds, and a fat gray squirrel hung from his belt.
He looked forward to fal and the harvest. If al went well this year, the colony would final y have enough wheat for bread and porridge and ale. How he wished, how al the Europeans wished, that this godforsaken new world offered wheat or barley or even oats of its own.
But it did not, so al seed grain had to cross the Atlantic. Jamestown had lived mostly on game and roots for three years now. Lean and leathery, Wingfield had forgotten what a hot, fresh loaf tasted like.
He remembered only that it was wonderful.
Something stirred in the undergrowth ahead. He froze. The motion came again. He spied a fine plump rabbit, its beady black eyes alert, its ears cocked for danger.
Moving slowly and steadily, hardly breathing, he raised the crossbow to his shoulder, aimed down the bolt. Once the rabbit looked toward him.
He stopped moving again until it turned its head away.
He pressed the trigger. The bolt darted and slammed into a treetrunk a finger's breadth above the rabbit's ear. The beast bounded away.
"Hellfire!" Wingfield dashed after it, yanking out one of his pistols.
He almost tripped over the outflung branch of a grapevine. The vine's main stock was as big around as his calf. Virginia grapes, and the rough wine the colonists made from them, were among the few thi
ngs that helped keep Jamestown bearable.
The panic-stricken rabbit, instead of diving into the bushes for cover and losing itself there, burst past a screen of brush into a clearing.
"Your last mistake, beastly" Wingfield cried in triumph. He crashed through the brush himself, swinging up the gun as he did so.
Then the rabbit was almost to the other side of the clearing.
He saw it thrashing in the grass there. Wingfiel paused, puzzled: had a ferret torn out it’s throat as it scampered along, oblivious to everything but its pursuer?
Then his grip tightened on the trigger, for a sim emerged from a thicket and ran toward the rabbit.
It had not seen him. It bent down by the writhing beast if smashed in the rabbit's head with a rock. Undoubtedly it had used another to bring the animal down; sims were deadly accurate throwing sharpened stones.
Wingfield stepped into the clearing. The colony was too hungry to let food go.
The sim heard him. It rose, clutching the bloody rock in a large, knobby-knuclcled hand. It was about as tall as the Englishman, and naked but for its own abundant hair. Its long, chinless jaw opened to let out a hoot of dismay Wingfield gestured with the pistol. Sims had no fore heads to speak of above their bone-ridged brows, but they had learned the colonists' weapons slew at a distance greater than they could cast their rocks. Usually, these days they retreated instead of proving the lesson over again.
This one, though, stood its ground, baring broad, yellow teeth in a threatening grimace. Wingfield gestured again, more sharply, and hoped he seemed more confident than he felt. If his first shot missed, or even wounded but failed to kill, he would have to grab for his other gun while the sim charged, and pistol-range was not that much more than a stone's throw.
Then the bushes quivered on the far side of the clearing, and a second sim came out to stand behind its fel ow. This one carried a large, sharp-edged rock ready to hurl. It shook its other fist at Wingfield, and shouted angrily.
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