Harry Turtledove - A Different Flesh

Kil far like noise-stick? the male asked. Not that far.

Farther than spear.

The sims shouted at one another, not so much arguing as to intimidate. Finally the male that had brought Quick the marten fur signed Take, and pointed at him. He tried without much luck to stifle a shriek as two sims hauled him upright. Others fell to butchering the bear.

It Soon they were toting slabs of meat bigger than those a man could easily carry.

That strength also helped the pair over whose shoulders he had draped his arms. Al the same, the journey to the band's clearing was a nightmare. It would have been dreadful even with careful men hauling the trapper. It was worse with sims. They were not deliberately cruel, but they were careless. Several times his broken leg hit the ground so hard he thought it would fall off. He rather wished it would. Mercifully, he passed out again before the hunting party got home.

The anguish when his bearers let him down like a sack of meal brought him back to himself. Sims were all he could see as he peered blearily upward. Their thick odor clogged his nostrils.

He felt blood flowing down his leg again. The thought of getting the sims to set the broken bone made him sweat but leaving it untended was worse.

Take off stick, he signed. Take off boots, pants. The sims grunted in puzzle the hand-talk gesture for trousers meant nothing to them, since they had never seen any except his. He pointed, and they understood. Fix bone, put stick back and another stick on, hold bone in place. He thought of thing else. Hold me down. I yell, you do anyhow.

the sims hooted in dismay when they saw how he was.

He die, a female signed flatly.

He live, he make for us, answered the male he knew. he live. That was another female. After a moment, he reconized it as the one that had wanted to couple with him. Well, no danger of that now, he thought, and even in torment almost laughed.

The grizzled sim pushed forward. Maker it signed. Good. if Live.

That was the most sign-talk the trapper had ever seen from it.

He turned his head away. The sight of his red-smeared tibia sticking through his flesh was making him even sicker than he felt already.

Push bone into leg, he signed. straight, like other leg.

Till then, he had only thought he knew what pain was. again, the sims were not cruel on purpose; again, that did help. No one could have set the fracture without hurting him badly. That the would-be healers were inexperenced subhumans made things worse, but perhaps not by much.

Some unmeasurable time later, his agony lessened, by a tiny fraction. He chose to believe that was because two pieces of bone were properly aligned. If not, he knew he could bear no more. His throat was raw from screaming; he could feel the blood slick on his hands, where nails had bitten into his palms.

now sticks on, he signed. Tie tight. Hold bones in place.

senses failed him before the sims were done. This time it did not return to him at once.

When at last he woke again, the sun was in his eyes. It morning His leg felt better; It was, he realized an improvement on how it had felt the day before. He looked around. Most of the Sims were long gone from ring, the males to hunt, the females to forage.

The female that had wanted him came out of the woods its arms were full of berries and roots it set down its prizes and came over to stoop beside him After a moment it rose again, to return with a chunk of food. His stomach twisted. He was not ready for food, but he had a raging thirst. Water, he signed.

The sim handed him the piece of wood He began hollowing out the branch with his dagger. The work took most of the day. It was interrupted when he had void his bowels. After a while, an old female, wrinkling its broad, flat nose got a handful of leaves and carried the dropping away. He hoped the sim would clean him too, but it did not. sighing, he went back to his carving.

When the rude cup was done, he explained with signs what it was good for.

The grizzled male took some time to understand. When at last it did, it hurried off to test the marvel for itself. It came back with a wide grin on its face. Standing where he could see it, it held the cup over its hea and poured water into its mouth from arm's length. It got wet, but it did not seem to care.

The female that had wanted him returned from another foraging trip. It handed him another piece of cold cooked bear meat. Eat, it signed again. This time he felt ready to try. The flesh tasted like beef, but was greasier. His stomach, long empty, churned uneasily.

His bowels moved again not long after that The young female dealt with the mess in the same way the old one had before. It came back, though, with more leaves, and did a rough job of wiping him.

Thanks, he signed. It only grunted; the gesture meant nothing to it.

Back in the settled parts of the Commonwealths, where sims served humans, polite phrases had come into hand-talk.

They had not, however, become part of the rough, abridged version this band used. Quick shook has head, sorry he could not express the gratitude he felt.

The last thing he remembered when he fel asleep that night was seeing the grizzled sim hard at work on another cup. The one he had made was in front of it. Every so often it would pick his up and study it, as if to remind itself what it was doing.

The trapper woke before sunrise, shivering. He had thought of the pain in his leg as a fire before; now it was hot in the most literal sense. He put a hand to his forehead. Water, he thought. It was the last coherent thought he had for a long time.

He never knew how long he lay in delirium; the hours and days stretched and twisted like taffy. Every once in while, something would lodge in his memory. He recalled, young sim bending over to peer down at him, its solemn face so close to his that it filled his field of vision. A mite was crawling across its cheek.

The mite seemed more interesting to him than the little sim.

He remembered tel ing the male that had brought him l, the marten fur how to get coffee stains out of linen. He went into great detail, though the sim knew nothing of either coffee or linen and understood not a word of English. Using hand-talk never occurred to him. After a while, the sims went away. Quick kept on talking until his mind clouded I again.

He remembered being fed two or three times, all of them by the female that had wanted him. The first time, he choked on a piece of meat and had to struggle to spit it out.

After that, the sim gave him only soft, pasty food. He watched it chewing meat and fruit before passing them on b to him, as if he were a just-weaned infant. He knew he should have been disgusted, but he lacked the strength. He did not spit out the food, either.

Quick heard deep, racking coughing, and marveled that , his lungs and throat were not raw. Only gradually, over a couple of days, did he realize he was not the one coughing.

A little after that, the noise stopped, or he stopped noticing it; he did not figure out which until much later.

He remembered the female shaking him back into foggy awareness of the world around him. It held a plant in front l of his face, a plant with downy, gray-green leaves, each cut go into blunt lobes and teeth.

The flower heads held many smal , tubular, pinkish-white flowers. They were sere and , brown now, well past their peak. Dusty maiden, the plant is was called, one of the thousands of little nondescript shrubs that grew in the woods.

He laughed foolishly; he was a good way past his peak too, he thought.

"Not quite ready for flowers, though," he said out loud. The sense of the words brought him closer to real consciousness. He was not far from being ready for flowers, and knew it.

the female held the root against his lips. Eat, it signed over and over until he opened his mouth. It thrust the root he gagged, bit down. Dirt crunched between his teeth as did the root. It tasted horrid. When he tried to spit it out, the female