Harry Turtledove - A Different Flesh

The hope of money first impelled Jeremiah to the lessons, but he quickly grew fascinated with them for their own sake. He found setting down his name in shaky letters awe-inspiring: there it was, recorded for al time. It gave him a feeling of immortality, almost as if he had had a child. And struggling through first Caleb's little reader and then, haltingly, the Bible was more of the same. He wished he could spend al his time over the books.

He could not, of course. Chores around the house kept him busy al through the day. Most of his reading time was snatched from sleep. He yawned and did not complain.

His stock of money slowly grew, five sesters here, ten there.

Once he made a whole denaire for himself, when Mr. Pickens's cook fell sick just before a family gathering and Charles Gillen loaned Jeremiah to the neighbor for the day.

From anyone else, he would have expected two or even three denaires; from Pickens he counted himself lucky to get one.

He did not save every sester he earned: a man needs more than the distant hope of freedom to stay happy. One night he made his way to a dilapidated cabin that housed a widow inclined to be complaisant toward silver, no matter who brought it.

Jeremiah was heading home, feeling pleased with the entire world (except for the mosquitoes), when the moon light showed a figure coming down the path toward him. It was Harry Stowe. Jeremiah's pleasure evaporated.

He was afraid of the overseer, and tried to stay out of his way. Too late to step aside into the bushes, Stowe had seen him.

"Evening, sir," Jeremiah said amiably as the overseer approached.

Stowe set hands on hips, looked Jeremiah up and down.

"Evening, sir," he echoed, voice mockingly high. There was whiskey on his breath. "I'm tired of your uppity airs-always sucking up to young Caleb. What do you need to read for? You're a stinking slave, and.

don't you ever forget it."

"I could never do that, sir, no indeed. But al the same, a man wants to make himself better if he can."

He never saw the punch that knocked him down. Drunk or sober, Stowe was fast and dangerous. Jeremiah lay in the dirt. He did not try to fight back. Caleb's law descended swiftly and savagely on any slave who dared strike a white man. But fear of punishment was not what held him back now. He knew Stowe would have no trouble taking him, even in a fair fight.

Man? I don't see any man there," the overseer said. "All I see's a nigger. " He laughed harshly, swung back his foot.

Instead of delivering the kick, though, he turned away and went on toward the widow's.

Jeremiah rubbed the bruise on the side of his jaw, felt around with his tongue to see if Stowe had loosened any of his teeth. No, he decided, but only by luck. He stayed down until the overseer disappeared round a bend in the path. Then he slowly rose, brushing the dust from his trousers.

"Not a man, huh?" he muttered to himself. "Not a man? Wel , let that trash talk however he wants, but whose sloppy seconds is he getting tonight." Feeling a little better, he headed back to the Gillen house.

Summer wore on. The wheat grew tall. The stalks bent heavy with the weight of grain. Caleb and Sal y returned to Portsmouth for school. The sims went into the fields to start cutting the hemp so it could dry on the ground.

The sickness struck them then, abruptly and savagely. Stowe came rushing in from their huts at sunrise one morning to cry to Charles Gillen, "Half the stupid creatures are down and choking and moaning!"

Gillen spil ed coffee as he sprang to his feet with an oath. Fear on his face, he followed the overseer out. Jeremiah silently stepped out of the way. He understood his master's alarm. Disease among the sims, especial y now when the harvest was just under way, would be a disaster from which the farm might never recover.

Jane Gil en waited anxiously for her husband to return. When he did, his mouth was set in a tight, grim line. "Diphtheria," he said.

"We may lose a good many." He strode over to the cupboard, uncorked a bottle of rum, took a long pul . He was not normally an intemperate man, but what he had seen left him shaken.

As Jeremiah washed and dried the breakfast dishes, he felt a certain amount of relief, at least as far as his own risk was concerned. Sims were enough like humans for illnesses to pass freely from them to the people around them. But he had had diphtheria as a boy, and did not have to worry about catching it again.

A sadly shrunken work force trooped out to cut the hemp. Charles served soup, that being the easiest nourishment for the sick sims to get past the membranes clogging their throats. Then Gillen hurried back out to the sim quarters, to do what little doctoring he could.

The first deaths came that evening. One was Rare, the powerful woodcutter who had replaced Joe. Not all his - strength sufficed against the illness that choked the life -. from him. The tired sims returning from the fields had to labor further to dig graves.

"I always feel so futile, laying a sim to rest," Gillen told Jane as they ate a late supper that Jeremiah had made.

"With a man, there's always the hope of heaven to give consolation.

But no churchman I've ever heard of can say for certain whether sims have souls."

Jeremiah doubted it. He thought of sims as nothing more than animals that happened to walk on two legs and have hands. That made them more useful than, say, horses, but not much smarter. He rejected any resemblance between their status and his own; he at least knew he was a slave and planned to do something about it one day. His hoard had reached nearly ninety denaires.

The next day, even fewer of the sims could work. Charles Gillen rode over to the Pickens farm to see if he could borrow some, but the diphtheria was there ahead of him.

Mr. Pickens was down with it too, and not doing well.

Gillen bit his lip at the smal amount of hemp cut so far.

Jeremiah had had just enough practice ciphering over the farm accounts to understand why: the cash Gillen raised from selling the hemp was what let him buy the goods his acres could not produoe.

After supper that evening, Gil en took Jeremiah aside.

"Don't bother with breakfast tomorrow, or with more soup for the sims,"

he said. "Jane will take care of all that for a while."

"Mrs. Gil en, sir?" Jeremiah stared at his master. He groped for the only explanation he could think of. "You don't care for what I've been making? You tel me what you want, and I'l see you get it." A gentleman to the core, Gil en replied quickly,

"Jeremiah, it's nothing like that, I assure you. You've very well." Then he stopped cold, his cheeks reds plainly embarrassed to continue.

"You've gone and sold me." Jeremiah blurted first, and worst, fear that came to his mind. Ever dreaded the announcement that would turn his life down. And Charles Gillen was on the whole an easy master; any number of tales Jeremiah had heard convinced him of that.

"I have not sold you, Jeremiah. Your place is here. Again Gil en's reply was swift and firm; again I trouble going on.

"Wel , what is it, then?" Jeremiah demanded. His master's hesitations set them in oddly reversed roles, thef probing and seeking, Gil en trying to evade the Jeremiah did when caught at something he knew wrong. Having the moral high ground was a new heady feeling.

He did not enjoy it long. Brought up short, Gillen I choice but to answer, "I'm sending you out to the fields tomorrow, Jeremiah, to help cut hemp."

With sick misery, the slave realized he would rather have been sold.

"But that's sim work, Mr. Gillen," he protested.

"I know it is, and I feel badly for it. But so many sims are down with the sickness, and you are strong and healthy. The hemp must be cut.

It does not care who swings the sickle. And I will not think less of you working in the fields, rather the contrary, because you have helped me at a time of great need. When the day that you approach me to ask to buy your freedom, be shall not forget."