A Different Flesh

by Harry Turtledove

  A dead sim lay half in, half out of the pit. Preen Chand looked down into it. "Hel o, Preen, very good to see you indeed," Richard Trevithick said. He held a pistol clubfashion in his bandaged left hand; his right arm hung limply. "I'm afraid you'll have to help me out of here. I think I broke it. Oh, and congratulations, you seem to have won the race."

  "I had not even thought of that," Preen Chand said, blinking. He turned to his crew. "Get me a length of rope. Tie one end to Caesar's harness and toss the other down to me." He slid into the pit.

  In India, he thought, hazily remembering his grandfather's stories, there would have been sharpened stakes sticking up from the bottom.

  Luckily, the sims had not thought of that. , He got to his feet, brushed off himself and Trevithick. "You shot the sim up there?"

  The engine handler nodded. "Yes, and then spent the rest of the fight hiding under the Iron Elephant, while another of the creatures tried to kil it." He laughed ruefully. "Not very glorious, I'm afraid. But then, neither was falling out of the cab when the engine went down. If I hadn't been Ieaning back for another shovelful of coal, I never would have got this." He tried to move his arm, winced, and thought better of it.

  "But you would have been out in the open, then, and the second sim might have speared you instead of your machine," Preen Chand poinoed out.

  "Something to that, I suppose."

  A rope snaked into the hole. Preen Chand tied it around Trevithick's body under his arms. "Is it hooked up to Caesar?" he cal ed.

  "Sure is," a brakeman answered.

  "Good. Mall-mal !"

  The rope went taut. Preen Chand helped Trevithick to scramble up the sloping side of the pit while the elephant pulled him out. The engine handler yelped once, then set his teeth and bore the jouncing in grim silence. Preen Chand yelled "Choro!" as soon as Trevithick was out, then crawled slowly after him.

  "You didn’t need to get us clean the first time," Trevit hick remarked.

  "You are quite right. My apologies. I will dirty you again, if you like," Preen Chand said, deadpan.

  Trevithick's expression was half grin, half grimace. Then he looked around, and dismay replaced them both. Down in the pit, he had not been able to see the fight that had raged up and down the length of his train. Most of the bodies spilled on the ground, most of the blood splashed on waggons and grass, belonged to sims, but not all.

  "Oh, the poor lads," the engine handler exclaimed.

  Some of the survivors of his crew had joined Preen Chand's men in pursuit of the sims, which made his losses appear at first even worse than they were. But Trevithick, pointing with his left hand, counted four bodies, and one of his brakemen added, "Pat Bailey and One-eye Jim is dead but we can't find 'em nowheres."

  “Filthy creatures," Trevithick muttered.

  Preen Chand knew he was not talking about the missing men. Trying to give what consolation he could, he said "This sort of thing will not happen hereabouts much longer. Soon this part of the country will be too thickly settled for wild sim bands big enough to attack a train to flourish. "

  "Yes, of course. That's been happening for more than I50 years, since settlers came to Virginia and Plymouth. It does little good for me at the moment, however, and even less for One-eye Jim and Patrick Bailey."

  Preen Chand had no good answer to that. He led Trevithick over to Paul Tilak, who knew enough first aid to splint a broken arm. Ignoring an injured man's howls Tilak was washing a bleeding bite with whiskey.

  "Don't be a fool," he told the fellow. "Do you want it to fester?"

  "Couldn't hurt more'n what you just done," the man said sullenly.

  "That only shows how little you know," Tilak snorted.

  He moved on to a brakeman with a torn shirt and blood running down his chest. "You are very lucky. That spear could as easily have gone in as slid along your ribs." He soaked his rag at the mouth of the whiskey bottle. The brakeman flinched.

  "There's one attention I won't regret being spared," Trevithick said, waiting for Tilak to get round to him.

  "I do not doubt that." Preen Chand's eyes slipped back to the Iron Elephant. "Richard, may I ask what you will do next?"

  The engine handler fol owed his rival's glance. "I expect we'll be able to salvage it, Preen, with the help of your elephants. The damage shouldn't be anything past repair. " His face lit with enthusiasm.

  "And back in Boston, my brother is working on another engine, twice as powerful as the Iron Elephant. If I'd had that one here, you never could have stayed close to me!"

  "In which case, you and your crew probably would al be dead now," Preen Chand said tartly.

  But in spite of his sharp comeback, he felt a hollowness - inside, for he saw that the future belonged to Trevithick. As surely as humans displaced sims, steam engines were going to replace hairy elephants: it was much easier to make an t engine bigger and stronger and faster than it was an elephant.

  A way of life was ending.

  He let out a long sigh.

  Trevithick understood him perfectly. "I told you once, Preen, it won't be so bad. There will always be railroads, no matter what pulls the trains."

  "It will not be the same."

  "What is, ever?"

  "He has you there, Preen," Tilak put in.

  "Maybe so, maybe so," Preen Chand said. "Our grand fathers, who sailed halfway round the world to come here, would have agreed with you, I am certain. But do you know what hurts worst of al ?"

  Trevithick and Tilak shook their heads.

  "When that second engine comes into Springfield, I am going to have to admit George Soephenson is right!""

  I804 Though the Fall Heavens

  Large-scale agricultural production was very important in several southeastern commonwealths. Indigo, hemp, and cotton, especially the latter, with its vast export market, were grown on plantations that, because they natural y did not have modern farm machinery, required a great many laborers to raise and gather in the crops.

  Most of these field laborers were sims. The number of sims in North America had increased greatly since Europeans began settling in the New World, simply because agriculture is so much more efficient a way of producing food than the nomadic hunting life the native subhumans had formerly practiced. There was enough to feed both the swelling human population and the sims, which, now sometimes for many generations, had been tamed to serve humans.

  Large labor forces of sims were not the only characteristic of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century southeastern plantation agriculture. Because sims household staff (and also, on proved unsatisfactory occasion, to supplement their number in the fields), black human slaves were imported from Africa.

  Shamefully, slavery is a human institution at least as old as civilization itself. It was accepted in ancient Mesopotamian society; by the Hebrews; by the Greeks; and even by the Romans, whose republic is the prototype for the Federated Commonwealths. Philosophers developed elaborate justifications for the institution, most based on the assumption that one group of people, general y speaking, the group that owned the slaves in question, was superior to another and that the latter, therefore, deserved their enslavement.

  Such speculation may perhaps have been excusable in the days when humans knew only of other humans. Differences in skin color, features, or type of hair must have seemed large and important in those days.

  But when contrasted to sims, it quickly becomes obvious that even the most dissimilar groups of humans are very much alike. Accordingly, in the Federated Commonwealths the institution of slavery was faced with a challenge to its very raison d'tre unlike any it had known in the Old World....

  From The Story of the Federated Commonwealths

  JEREMIAH SWEPT THE feather

  duster over the polished top of his master's chest of drawers. Moving slowly in the building heat of a May morning in Virginia, he raised the duster to the mirror that hung above the chest.

  He paused to look at himself; he did not get to see his reflect
ion every day. He raised a hand to brush away some dust stuck in his wooly hair.

  His eyeballs and, when he smiled, his white, even teeth gleamed against the polished ebony of his skin.

  "You, Jeremiah!" Mrs. Gil en cal ed from the next room "What are you doing in there?"

  "Dusting, ma'am," he answered, flailing about with the feather duster so she would see him busy if she came in to check.

  Unlike the sims that worked in the fields, houseslaves rarely felt the whip, but he did not intend to tempt fate.

  All Mrs. Gil en said, though, was, "Go downstairs and fetch me up a glass of lemonade. Squeeze some fresh; I think the pitcher's empty."

  "Yes ma'am." Jeremiah sighed as he went to the kitchen. On a larger estate, other blacks would have shared the household duties.

  Here he was cook, cleaner, butler, and coachman by turns, and busy all the time because there was so much to do.

  He made a fresh pitcher of lemonade to his own taste, drank a glass, then added more sugar. The Gillens liked it sweeter than he did.

  "Took you long enough," Jane Gillen snapped when he got upstairs.

  He took no notice of it; that was simply her way. She was in her early thirties, a few years older than Jeremiah, her mousy prettiness beginning to yield to time.

  "Oh, that does a body good," she said, emptying the glass and giving it back to him. "Why don't you take the rest of the pitcher out to my husband? He and Mr. Stowe are in the south field, and they'll be suffering from the sun. Go on; they'll thank you for it."

  "Yes, ma'am," he said again, this time with something like enthusiasm.

  He returned to the kitchen, put the pitcher and two glasses on a tray, and went out to look for his master and the overseer.

  A big male sim was chopping logs into firewood behind the house.

  It stopped for a moment to nod to Jeremiah as he went by.

  He nodded back. "Hello, Joe," he said, a faint edge of contempt riding his words. He might be a slave, but by God he was a man!

  Joe did not notice Jeremiah's condescension. Muscles bulged under the thick coat of hair on the sims arms as it swung the axe up for another stroke. The axe descended. Chips flew. One flew right over Joe's head, landed in the dust behind the sim.

  Jeremiah chuckled as he walked on. Had he been wielding the axe, the chip would have caught him right in the forehead and probably made him bleed. But sims had no foreheads. Above Joe's deep-set eyes was only a beetling ridge of bone that retreated smoothly toward the back of his head.

  More sims worked in the fields, some sowing hemp seeds broadcast on the land devoted to the farm's main cash crop others weeding among the growing green stalks of wheat. They would have done a better job with lighter hoes, but the native American subhumans lacked the sense to take proper care of tools of good quality.

  Mostly the sims worked in silenoe. Now and then one would let its long, chinless jaw fall open to emit a grunt of effort, and once Jeremiah heard a screech as a sim hit its own foot instead of a weed.

  But unlike humans, the sims did not talk among themselves. Few ever mastered English, and their own grunts and hoots were too restricted to make up a real language.

  Instead, they used hand signs like the ones the deaf and dumb employed; those came easier to them than speech. Jeremiah had heard Mr. Gil en say even the wild sims that still lurked in the forests and mountains two centuries after colonists came to Virginia used hand signs taught them by runaways in preference to their native cal s.

  Charles Gillen and Harry Stowe were standing together, watching the sims work. Gillen turned and saw Jeremiah. "Well, well, what have we here?"

  he said, smiling. He was a large man, about the same age as his wife, with perpetually ruddy features and a strong body beginning to go to fat.

  "Lemonade, sir, for you and Mr. Stowe." Jeremiah poured for each man, handed them their glasses.

  Gillen drained his without taking it from his lips; his face turned even redder than usual. "Ahhl" he said, wiping his mouth.

  "Now that was a kindly thought, and surely it's no part of your regular duties to go traipsing al over the farm looking for me." He rummaged through the pockets of his blue cotton breeches. "Here's a ten-sester for your trouble."

  "I thank you very much, sir." Jeremiah's trousers did not have pockets.

  He stowed the small silver coin in a leather pouch he wore on a thong round his neck under his shirt. The hope for just such a reward was one of the things that had made him eager to go to his master. Besides, it beat working.

  He did not mention that the lemonade had been Mrs. Gillen's idea.

  Even if her husband found out, though, he would not take the ten-sester back; he was a fair-minded man.

  Harry Stowe kept his glass in his left hand as he drank. His right hand held his whip, as it always did when he was in the field.

  The whip was a yard-long strip of untanned cowhide, an inch thick at the grip and tapering to a point.

  Stowe was a small, compact man with fine features and cold blue eyes that never stopped moving. He snarled an oath and stepped forward. The whip cracked. A sim shouted in alarm, clutched at its right arm.

  "Oh, nonsense, Tom," Stowe snapped. "I didn't hurt you, and well you know it. But damn you, have more care with what you do. That was wheat you were rooting out there, not a weed."

  The sim understood English well enough, even if it could not speak. Its hands moved. Sorry, it signed. Its broad, flat features were unreadable. When it went back to weeding, though, it soon uprooted another stalk of wheat.

  Stowe's hand tightened on the butt of the whip until his knuckles whitened. But he did not lash out. His shoulders sagged. "In a man, that would be insolenoe," he said to Charles Gillen. "But sims cannot, will not attend as a man would. I could wear out my arm, my cowskin, and my temper, sir, and not improve them much."

  "Your being here at all keeps them working, Harry. We shouldn't expect them to be fine farmers," Gillen replied. "When men first came to Virginia, they found the sims here unable to make fire, with no tools but chipped stones."

  "You are an educated man, to know such things," the overseer said.

  "For myself, all I know is that they do not work as I would wish, and so waste your substance. I wish you could afford to have niggers in the fields. I would make fine farmers of them, I wager." He looked speculatively toward Jeremiah.

  The house-slave wished he could become invisible; suddenly he was not glad at all he had come out to the fields. He stretched out his hands to his master. "Mr. Gil en, you wouldn't treat me like no sim, would you, sir?" The wobble of fear in his voice was real.

  "No, no, Jeremiah, don't fret yourself," Gillen reassured him, sending a look-at-the-trouble-you-caud glance Stowe's way. "I find it hard to imagine a circumstance that would force me to use you so."

  "Thank you, sir, thank you." Jeremiah knew he was laying it on thick, but he took no chances. Not only was labor in the fields exhausting, but he could imagine nothing more degrading. Even as a slave, he had a measure of self-respect. One day he hoped to be able to buy his liberation. The ten-ster his master had given him put his private hoard at over eighty denaires. Maybe he would buy land, end up owning a few sims himself. It was something to dream about, anyway.

  But if Gil en worked him as he would a sim, would he not think of him in the same way, instead of as a person? He might never get free then!

  Why, his master had already turned his back on him and was talking politics with Stowe as if he were not there. "So whom will you vote for in the censoral elections this fall, Harry?"

  "I favor Adams and Westerbrook: two men from the same party will work together, instead of us having to suffer through another five years of divided government like this last term."

  "I don't know," Gillen said judiciously. "When the Conscript Fathers wrote the Articles of Independence after we broke from England in '38, they gave us two censors to keep the power of the executive from growing too strong, as it had in the person
of the king. To me that says they intended the two men to be of opposing view, to check each other's excesses."

  "To check excesses, aye. But I'm partial to a government that governs, not one that spends all its time arguing with itself."

  Gillen chuckled. "Something to that, I suppose. Still, don't you think, "

  Jeremiah stopped listening. What did politics matter to him? As a slave, he could no more vote than a sim could. His head hung as he made his slow way back to the house.

  Mrs. Gillen saw him dawdling, and scolded him. She kept an eye on him the rest of the day, which meant he had to work at the pace she set, not his own. That, he thought resentful y, was more trouble than a ten-sester was worth. To make things worse, he burnt the ham the Gillens, Stowe, and he were going to have for supper. That earned him another scolding from his mistress and a contemptuous stare from the overseer.

  At sunset, Stowe blew a long, unmusical blast on a bugle, the signal for the sims to come in from the fields for their evening meal.

  Their food was unexciting but filling: mostly barley bread and salt pork, eked out once or twice a week, as tonight, with vegetables from the garden plot and with molasses. The sims also ate whatever small live things they could catch. Some owners discouraged that as a disgusting habit (Jeremiah certainly thought it was; stepping on a well-gnawed rat tail could be counted on to make his stomach turn over).

  Most, like Charles Gillen, did not mind, for it made their property cheaper to feed.

  "Never catch me eating rats, not if I'm starving," Jeremiah said as he blew out the candle in his smal stuffy room. He listened to make sure the Gillens were asleep. (Stowe had his own cottage, close by the log huts where the sims lived.)

  When he was sure all was quiet, the slave lifted a loose floorboard and drew out a small flask of whiskey. Any sim caught with spirits was lashed till the blood ran through the matted hair on its back. Jeremiah ran the same risk, and willingly. Sometimes he needed that soothing fire in his belly to sleep.