Harry Turtledove - A Different Flesh

And how will they take their place in a society of free men?

Freedom bestowed as a gift will mean nothing to them, as they will have done nothing to earn it."

judge Hardesty nodded thoughtfully. That frightened Jeremiah, who had come to think of the quiet judg as on his side. "What are we going to do?" he asked. Douglas might as well not have heard him. He waited till he was sure Hayes had finished, then heaved his bulk up.

"When a man shifts his argument from principle to expediency," he remarked, "trust neither. My learned oponent is looking to sow panic where none need exist; he speaks as if we were on the point of civil war. Why do we have courts, if not to treat our abuses before we need the medicine solders give?"

"Very pretty," Hayes said. "You answer none of the points I raised, but very pretty nonetheless."

"Had you not interrupted me, I would have answered," D Douglas replied sweetly. "I don't presume to make the law, but I can offer some suggestions. You quoted the ancients when it suited your purpose.

They had their ways of dealing with freed men, and of easing them into the life of the state. Perhaps some of the first generation would remain as clients to their one-time masters, working for a wage for some length of time before severing all obligations. Given a few years and good will, the thing can be done painlessly."

Hearing Douglas propose curtailing his freedom made Jeremiah scowl. He hated the thought of going back to work for the Gillens, even as a free man. But a moment's reflection reminded him that before he had been willing enough to stay on as a slave, so long as he was treated well and had some hope of buying his liberty one day. He had run away from maltreatment, not slavery.

And, he realized, other blacks would not face the problem of ex-owners with grudges as deep-seated as the Gil ens' against him. Or would they?

Zachary Hayes might have picked the thought from his brain.

"Painlessly, eh?" he sneered, turning Douglas's word against him.

"You can make all the laws you like, sir, but how do you propose making the good white men who built the Federated Commonwealths accept their niggers as their equals?" There was the heart of things, dragged out naked and bleeding.

Before Douglas could get up to respond, Jeremiah found himself on his feet. "Your excellencies, can I say something?"

Judge Kemble glanced toward Douglas, who looked startled but shrugged.

"Is it germane?" the judge asked sternly.

"Sir?"

"Does it apply? Has it a bearing on the case here?"

"Oh. Yes, sir, that it does. Indeed it does."

"Very well. Be brief."

"Thank you, sir." Jeremiah took a deep breath. "Seems to me, sir, a lot of white folks needs to look down at niggers on account of they need to feel they're better'n somebody even if you did free every nigger tomorrow, made 'em just the same as whites to the law, those whites would stil now they were higher in the scheme of things than sims.

"Your excellencies, one of the things helped me get by so long as a slave was knowing the sims were there below me.

truth to tell," he went on, drawing on his thoughts of a few minutes before, "I didn't leave the Gillen farm til they stopped treating me like I was a man and worked me like a sim in the fields.

That's purely not right, sirs, making a man into a sim, and if slavery lets one man do that to an other, why, it's not right either. That's all."

He sat as abruptly as he had risen. Douglas leaned over find patted him on the back, murmuring, "Out to steal my bib? You just might do it."

"Huh," Jeremiah said, but the praise warmed him.

The arguments went on; Hayes was not one to leave a ase so long as he had breath to talk. But he and Douglas here hammering away at smaller points now, thrashing around the edges of things. Douglas got in only one shot he thought telling, a reminder of the historic nature of the case

"That's for Kemble's sake," he told Jeremiah during a recess.

"Letting him think people will remember his name forever for the sake of what he does here can't hurt."

Jeremiah thought about that, and contrasted it to Caleb Gillen's picture of the law as a vast impersonal force poised over the heads of miscreants. He preferred Douglas's way of hoking at things. People were easier to deal with than vast impersonal forces.

Gillen walked down Granby Pike toward the Benjamin and Levi Bank of Portsmouth. Money jingled in his pocket. Even if the Conscript Fathers of Virginia decided to set up a clientage system like the one Alfred Douglas had outlined the year before, by now he had enough money to buy himself out of any further service to the family that had once owned him.

Hayes was still appealing his case, of course, sending up writ after writ based on Judge Scott's narrow interpretation of the law.

But Judge Hardesty had been as narrowly for Jeremiah as Scott was against him, and Judge Kemble's ringing condemnation of human slavery would be hard to overturn. Douglas had been dead right about him, Jeremiah thought, he must have decided the eyes of history were on him.

A sim struggling along with a very fat knapsack bumped into Jeremiah.

"Watch where you're going, you brainless flathead," he snapped.

The sim cringed. It managed to get one hand free of its burden for a moment to sign, Sorry. Then it staggered on.

Jeremiah felt briefly ashamed. After all, were it not for sims, blacks would have been at the bottom of things, the target of everyone's spleen.

He almost went after the subhuman to apologize, but the sim would never have understood. And that was exactly the point.

He kept on toward the bank.

Trapping Run

The range where bands of wild sims could continue to live their lives much as they had before Europeans came to North America continued to shrink as human settlements pushed westward. Few bands remained entirely untouched by human influence. Sign-talk, for example, spread from band to band, even in areas where no people had ever been seen, because it was a conspicuously better means of communication than the subhumans' native assortment of noises and gestures.

Some trappers and explorers were friendly with the wild sims through whose lands they passed. Others, manifestly, were not. Bands of sims, naturally, often responded in kind, being well-disposed toward humans if the first person they met had been friendly to them, and hostile even to those who would not have harmed them if their first experience with humans had been a bad one. In this as in so much else, sims revealed how closely they resembled people.

In colonial days, and in the early years of the Federatdedf CminOre than their shave T attitude not Wdthmuphasize the

elStsedn however in the In tjthewas a trapper WhO beGan what ca 2 the sims i FrOm The Story of the Fedetat forest wed into the l I w 'II k mt tr head, surprised he hladd 5Ptoakleked even to himself and when don’t understand English.

will grasp hit The Six had Law i. by_ ! f , S chopped it down with a few hard swings. Then it checked If the edge of the hatchet head with its thumb. It hooted $ again. Still sharp, no chips, it signed. Good.

In spite of its metal knife, it was still used to the chipped stones sims made for themselves.

Good, Henry Quick agreed. He had paid fifty sesters for the hatchet back in Cairo; the marten fur would be worth easily twenty times as much. Some people in the cities of the Federated Commonwealths called that robbery. Quick did not see it that way.

Back on the other side of the mountains, hatchets were easy to come by, marten furs much less so. The situation was reversed here. Accounts l balanced.

Too, back in the cities of the Commonwealths, Quick [ would have had to put up with the stink of coal smoke, railroad noise, and the endless presence of people. He had little use for pointless chatter.