Harry Turtledove - A Different Flesh

From The Story of the Federated Commonwealths

THOMAS KENTON PAUSED to

look westward at land no man had seen before. The gap in the mountains revealed an endless sea of deep green rolling woods ahead.

Virginia had been such a wilderness once, before the English landed eighty-odd years ago.

"But no more, eh, Charles?" he said to the sim at his side.

"Virginia fills with farmers, and the time has come to find what this western country is like."

Find, Charles signed. Like most of the New World's native subhumans, he understood speech well enough, but had trouble reproducing it. Signals based on those used by the deaf and dumb came easier for him.

The sim was close to Kenton's own rangy six feet one. His eyes, in fact, were on a level with the scout's, but where Kenton's forehead rose, his sloped smoothly back from beetling brow ridges. His nose was low, broad, and flat; his mouth wide; his teeth large, heavy, and yellow; his jaw long and chinless. As an Englishman, he would have been hideous. Kenton did not think of him so; by the standards of his own kind, he was on the handsome side.

On, Charles signed, adding the finger-twist that turned it into a question. At the scout's nod, he strode ahead, his deerskin buskins silent on the mossy ground. His only other clothing was a leather belt that held water bottle, hatchet, knife, and pouches for this and that.

His thick brown hair served him as well as did Kenton's leather tunic and trousers.

A turkey called from a stand of elms off to one side.

Kenton felt his stomach rumble hungrily, and an instant later heard Charles's. They grinned at each other. Hunt, the scout signed, not wanting to make any noise to alert the bird.

The sim nodded and trotted toward the far side of the trees.

Kenton gauged distances. If all went well, the shot would be only about fifty yards, a half-charge of powder should serve. He poured it into the little charge-cup that hung from the bottom of his powderhorn, then down his musket barrel it went.

Working with practiced speed, he set a greased linen patch on the gun's muzzle, laid the round ball on it, and rammed it home til it just touched the powder. Then he squeezed down on the first of the musket's two triggers, setting the second so it would go off at the lightest touch.

The whole procedure took about fifteen seconds.

And it was al needless. Kenton waited, expecting the frightened turkey to burst from cover at any moment. What emerged, however, was Charles, carrying the bird by the feet in one hand and his bloody hatchet in the other. He was laughing.

"Good hunting," Kenton said. He careful y reset the first trigger, making sure he heard it click back into place. He did not begrudge the sim the kill; he welcomed anything that saved powder and bul ets.

Stupid bird, Charles signed. I get close, throw. He pantomimed casting the hatchet. It had a weighted knob at the end of the handle to give it proper balance for the task. Even wild sims were dangerous, flinging the sharp-chipped stones they made.

The sun was going down over the vast forest ahead. "We may as well camp," Kenton decided when they came to a smal , cool, quick-flowing stream. He and Charles washed their heads and soaked their feet in it. They drank til they sloshed, preferring the stream's water to the warm, stale stuff in their canteens.

Then they scoured the neighborhood for dry twigs and brush for the evening's fire. Kenton was careful to make sure trees and bushes screened the site from the west. When he took out flint and steel to set off the tinder at the end of the fire, Charles touched his arm.

Me, please, the sim Kenton passed him the metal and stone. Charles briskly clashed them together, blew on the sparks that fell to the tinder. Soon he had a small smokeless blaze going.

When he started to pass the flint and steel back to L Kenton, the scout said, "You may as well keep them; you use them more than I do, anyway."

The flickering firelight revealed the awe on Charles's face. That awe was there even though he was of the third generation of sims to grow up as part of Virginia. In the wild, sims used fire if they came across it, and kept it alive as best they could, but they could not start one.

To Charles, Kenton's simple tools conveyed a power that must have felt godlike.

The scout burned his hands and his mouth on hot roasoed turkey, but did not care. Blowing on his fingers, he chuckled, "Better than going hungry, eh, Charles?"

The sim grunted around a mouthful. He did not bother with any more formal reply; he took his eating seriously.

They tossed the offal into the stream. Charles had taken the first watch the night before, so tonight it belonged to Kenton. The sim stripped off his shoes and belt, curled up by the fire, with his hair, he needed no blanket, and fel asleep with the ease and speed Kenton always envied. Charles and his breed never brought the day's troubles into the evening with them. Were they too simple or too wise?

The scout often wondered.

He let the fire die to red embers that hardly interfered with his night sight. The moon, rounding toward ful , spilled pale light over the forest ahead, smoothing its contours till it resembled nothing so much as a calm, peaceful sea.

The ear pierced the il usion that lulled the eye. Somewhere close by, a field mouse squeaked, briefly, as an owl or ferret found it.

Farther away, Kenton heard a wolf howl to salute the moon, then another and another, until the whole pack was at cry.

The eerie chorus made the hair prickle upright at the nape of the scout's neck. Charles stirred and muttered in his sleep. No one, human or sim, was immune to the fear of wolves.

The pack also disturbed the rest of a hairy elephant, whose trumpet call of protest instantly silenced the wolves. They might pull down a calf that strayed too far from its mother, but no beasts hunted ful -grown elephants. Not more than once, anyway, Kenton thought.

The normal small night noises took a while to come back after the hairy elephant's cry. The scout strained his ears listening for one set in particular: the grunts and shouts that would have warned of wild sims.

No camp was in earshot, at any rate. Hunting males ranged widely, though, and these sims would from long acquaintance not be in awe of men, and thus doubly dangerous.

A coughing roar only a couple of hundred yards away cut short his reverie on the sims. The scout sprang to his feet, his finger darting to the trigger of his musket. That cry also roused Charles. The sim stood at Kenton's side, hatchet ready in his hand.

The roar came again, this time fiercely triumphant. Spearfang, Charles signed, with kil .

"Yes," Kenton said. Now that the beast had found a victim, it would not be interested in hunting for others, such as, for instance, himself and the sim. In dead of night, he welcomed that lack of interest.

All the same, excitement prickled in him. The big cats were not common along the Atlantic seaboard, and relentless hunting had reduced their numbers even in the hinterlands of the Virginia colony. Not many men, these days, came to the governor at Portsmouth to col ect the 5 pound bounty on a pair of fangs.

Kenton imagined the consternation that would ensue if he marched into the Hal of Burgesses with a score of six inch-long ivory daggers.

Most of the clerks he knew would sooner pass a kidney stone than pay out fifty pounds of what was not even their own money.

The scout snorted contemptuously. "I'd sooner reason with a sim," he said. Charles grunted and made the question-mark gesture. "Never mind," Kenton said. "You may as well go back to sleep."

Charles did, with the same ease he had shown before. Nothing troubled him for long. On the other hand, he lacked the sense for long-term planning.