Eric Flint - Time spike

"Yes." He smiled again. "On the other side, the disparity is every bit as great. Meaning no disrespect, but except for your Lieutenant Hulbert I don't think any of you out here in the wilds can… what's that really delightful expression? The one Hulbert uses so often?" "Find our ass with both hands." "Yes." His smile widened. "Astonishing, really. What sort of superstitious savage doesn't understand that a big bug is food?" Andy laughed. The reaction of the modern Americans-any creed or color; it didn't matter in the least-when the Cherokees had passed around a big platter of roasted grasshoppers at the first welcoming feast, had been a sight to behold.

His, too. He still thought it was yucky. But he'd eaten the stuff.

That night and ever since. The grasshoppers-that Jeff insisted really weren't grasshoppers but an earlier species of Orthoptera, as if that made it any better-had become a staple of the Cherokee diet only slightly less important than the meat and fish the hunters brought in and the nutmeal. Every Cherokee child had been assigned the task of hunting and catching the big insects. Which they did gleefully. For them, it was a great game. The nineteenth-century U.S. soldiers in Kershner's squad refused to eat the bugs at all. But by anybody's culinary standards, those men were Neanderthals. So far as Andy could tell, they were firmly convinced that the only food fit for human consumption was salt pork and potatoes sauced in hog lard, and were deeply aggrieved that the Really New World didn't seem to have a single pig or potato in it. "So what's bothering you, Geoffrey?" Andy asked quietly. "I understand why you'd have hard feelings toward the United States, believe me. I was born almost a hundred and forty years after the Trail of Tears, but it's something that's still remembered.

And with a great deal of guilt, now. But-at least for us, if not you-that was a long time ago. The attitudes of Americans in my day has changed enormously since then." Watkins made a little motion with his hand, as if waving something down. "That's not really the problem, Andy. Yes, it's very fresh for us still." He took a long, slow, almost shuddering breath. "My wife was killed by that Trail of Tears, and she died not more than a few weeks ago. And she wasn't the only one in my band of people who died on the Trail. Many did." He nodded toward the town. "Walk through there and talk to any Cherokee, and you will find a similar story. And for them, as for me, it happened just a few weeks or months ago. Not a century and half." He made the same little hand motion, but much more peremptorily. "But we're not little children, who can't react to anything except emotionally. Even during the Trail of Tears, we were constantly dickering and bargaining with the Americans over the details-and sometimes we got what we wanted. Even from that fucking asshole Van Buren. Or at least some of it. Many more of us would have died otherwise." He fell silent. Brooding, maybe, it was hard to know. Watkins was certainly not what you'd call "inscrutable," but he did come from a somewhat different culture. Andy had had to remind himself of that more than once. You simply couldn't assume that you were interpreting facial expressions and so-called body language quite the right way. So, he waited again. After about a minute, Watkins stirred. "I'm not worried about the past, Andy. And it bean't necessary for you to keep reassuring me that the America you came from had changed its attitudes. That's obvious to anyone but an idiot. All I have to do is turn my head right now and contemplate the fact that about half of the people you have with you carrying those marvelous guns have black skins. In my day, black people were slaves-for us as well as the whites." He chuckled, rather harshly.

"All things considered, it's probably a good thing that the Cherokees you encountered here were my band. Not that mine was the only one that favored traditionalism, by any means. If you'd run into John Ross or any of the bands of rich Cherokees, I can imagine things would have gotten tense." Andy scratched his chin. "Yeah, they probably would. I can just imagine Brian Carmichael's reaction-worse still, Leroy Ingram's-when they saw a dozen black people being used as slaves."

"Speaking of Carmichael," Watkins said, "will you tell him to please restrain himself a bit? He's starting to annoy the older people. Well, the most traditional ones, anyway." Andy made a face. "Yeah, I'll speak to him again. Won't be easy, though. Brian's a very nice guy, but he's firmly convinced now that the Quiver was God's way of telling him he'd been slacking off." Carmichael really was a nice guy.

Easygoing, friendly, genial, good-humored, everything you could ask for. He'd been popular among the guards since the day he started working at the prison. Even a lot of the cons had liked him, at least the black ones. The problem was that he also belonged to a fundamentalist church that took missionary duties seriously-and he'd had a bad conscience for years that he hadn't really done his fair share of that work. So, now, he was making up for it with a vengeance.

Thankfully, he wasn't patronizing, in his attitudes. It might be that Brian saw himself as bringing the word of God to heathen Cherokees-the fact that most of them were already Christians didn't matter, since they weren't the right kind of Christians-but he wasn't at all snotty about it. In fact, he considered them what you might call a high-class clientele. His church had done most of its missionary work in the slums of East St. Louis. Brian was preachifying to stalwart and upright folk, compared to gangbangers. At the very least, he didn't have to worry about getting mugged. Still, it could get annoying, simply because the man didn't know when to quit. Having even the nicest and friendliest person in the world jabbering at you endlessly about the need to save your soul gets tiresome after a while. If anything, the Cherokees had been more patient with Brian than people from Brian's own time would have been. They were used to missionaries jabbering endlessly. The real problem, Andy suspected, was one aspect of the overall problem-that he was pretty sure Watkins was still circling. Part of the reason the Cherokees were patient with jabbering missionaries was that they'd put them towork. They could jabber all they wanted-as long as they also set up a school and taught the children how to read and write. But how do you make a schoolteacher out of an armed man who belonged to what amounted to a military force, instead of a church? Analien military force, to boot. Maybe not hostile, but still alien. Andy was pretty sure, by now, that that was the core of the issue, for Watkins. Not Brian Carmichael, by himself, but the problem he embodied. He decided to just bring it all out in the open, since Watkins still seemed reticent. They really didn't have much time. He'd been willing to spend days negotiating, but he wasn't willing to spend weeks. More to point, he couldn't, whether he wanted to or not. Leaving aside the threat posed by de Soto, he couldn't leave less than seventy guards back at the prison to watch over thousands of convicts for much longer. "You want me to give you people. Or swap them." Watkins eyed him sideways. "People-and some of your guns." They'd been sitting together on a log. Now, Watkins swiveled to face Andy more squarely. "Yes, that is the problem. Not the past, but the future. It doesn't matter what a people's attitudes are. Well. It matters, but it's not enough. Power also matters. In the end-we chiefs all knew this, had known it for two or three generations-the real problem we had with the Americans of our time wasn't their attitudes toward us." He barked a laugh. "Ha! Trust me. I can name ten Indian tribes whose attitudes toward us were just as bad if not worse. The real problem was that the Americans were powerful enough to simply push us aside. It wasn't even a fight. A squirrel can't fight a buffalo. When the Red Stick Creeks tried to fight, Sharp Knife crushed them." Sharp Knife was their term for Andrew Jackson, Andy had learned. When they weren't referring to him as a fucking asshole. Slowly, Andy drew the pistol out of his holster and looked at it. He had it in the palm of his hand, not held by the grip.