Harry Turtledove - A Different Flesh

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 reflection 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.