Harry Turtledove - A Different Flesh

Face more he was frustrated because he could not make polite expressions of sympathy speech would permit. After some thought, he signed Bad for band.

Bad for band, the female agreed. Toolmaker. All sims use and make tools, of course, but as with people, some were better than others.

The grizzled sim had lived enough to gain a great deal of experience, too. If it had passed on al it knew, the band would indeed suffer.

Henry Quick wondered how much he could help there. what hurt the band would also hurt him.

At the end of the day, he had the trunk of the spruce bare ranches and a notch carved in either end. Good help, he led to the female. It smiled back at him. He realized he had to make a conscious effort to smell it these days, probably, he thought, because by now his own odor was as bad as its.

bout then the males came back. They were smeared in blood but triumphant; they carried a plump doe already cut in pieces. The females and youngsters greeted them with glad cries. The band would feast tonight.

The male that had brought Quick the marten fur ambled over and picked up the would-be bow. It scowled, eyebrows king on the heavy brow-ridges.

Not like noise-stick, it signed ominously. Had it had a sign for fake, it would have signed it.

Not like, the trapper admitted, adding Do like, when the sim grunted a noise redolent of skepticism.

Quick's eye fell on the hind leg from which another male carving chunks.

He had intended to use another bootlace as a bowstring, but he had only two, and the sims , _ would need more bows than that . . . assuming he could make any at all. Sinew might serve in place of leather.

Save, he signed, and then paused, grinding his teeth: he not remember the sign for "sinew." Eventually, by pointing to the tendons in his own wrist and at the back of sims ankles, he put across his meaning. The male gave him a dubious look no butler would have been ashamed of, - but went over to the sim acting as butcher and passed the message along. That male shrugged as if to say the trapper was daft, but eventually set beside him several glistening white lengths, each with bits of flesh still clinging to it.

He did not work on the bow for several days after that.

His fever returned. It was not strong enough to drive him into delirium, but it did leave him shivering and miserable.

He glumly crunched the dusty maiden roots the female sim brought him and wished he felt more like a human being, or even a healthy sim.

Because he was stil aware of his surroundings, he real y noticed then the care the female sim gave him. It fed him, got him water, cleansed him, hauled him from place to place to keep him from lying in his own dung. It might not have been as gentle as a human nurse, but it was more conscientious than most. Not only was this spel of fever less severe than the last had been, it was shorter. Yet even after Quick began to feel better, he kept waking up chilled. Only when he saw the sims also clutching themselves, building thicker piles of bedding, and huddling close to the fire did he understand that the weather was changing. Autumn was drawing near, and hard on its heels would come winter.

The sims did what they could to get ready for it. They brought in stones and brush, which they began to work into a windbreak. As the days went by, it grew thicker and taller and extended all the way around the clearing, with a couple of thin spots through which the sims could push. They also stacked up great heaps of firewood; once the snow started, it would not be so easy to collect. Quick's hatchets helped them there. They could not have cut so much wood with their crude tools alone.

Some of them even realized it. The male that had brought Quick the marten pelt hefted its hatchet when it saw he was watching and signed, Good.

It was less happy, however, over the trapper's efforts to make arrows that were worth anything. Finding really straight lengths of branch was hard enough. Getting points on them proved worse. Because the sims used stone tools Quick had assumed they could easily chip out little stone arrowheads. But the tools they were used to making were hand-sized choppers and scrapers.

They had never done the tiny flakework arrowheads required. If Quick had shown them how, they could have duplicated his efforts. He no skill in shaping stone, though, and soon discovered knowing what he wanted was very different from singing how to make it.

About the time the first frost appeared on the windbreak, he worried about getting knocked over the head for failing to produce. If the sims decided to do that, he could not stop them, but that fatalistic certainty was only a small of what gradual y let him relax.

or more important was that the sims accepted him.

They had grown accustomed to him lying by the fire, and no longer saw him as much different from themselves, except that he could not move.

His chief worry now was that would happen if a youngster tripped over his broken leg while playing. Where the young sims had once crowded to gape at him, now they were so careless around him he sometimes wondered if they remembered he was there.

the leg stil hurt. It also itched savagely; he rubbed the leg round the healing gash raw until he understood the itch came from far within. He healed despite the itch, little buy little. Milestones were small, but he treasured them: the day he could sit up, the day he could roll onto his side to air sores on his back and behind, the day those sores started to scab over.

Milestones or not, he remained immobile, save when a sim dragged him along.

Except for his annoyingly troubled work on the bow, he had little to do but lie by the fire and watch the members of the band.

Just as they accepted him, so he came to think of them more and more as individuals, as people, rather than as subhumans, animals to evade or exploit.

Looking back, he supposed the beginning of that probably came when he finally decided that thinking of "the male that had brought him the marten skin" by that clumsy handle was more trouble than it was worth. He decided to call it Martin and have donewith it. Giving the sim a man's name helped him think of it as being more like a man.

One by one, he named all the sims. Most of his names were just tags in his own mind. The sims had so much trouble reproducing the sounds of English that they could not use his names themselves, which made him hesitate to apply them. Martin, however, soon learned what noise meant him. (With a man's name, Martin was also harder think of as it.) The female that cared for Henry Quick also rapidly figured out what names were for. He cal ed her Sol.

Even though he continued to improve, he knew how dependent on her he still was. He whittled away at a couple of branches, slowly turning them into crutches, but he was not ready to try them yet. A fal , a slip, would put paid to weeks of slow recovery. In any case, he had nowhere to go now that the weather was changing.

Sol went right on caring for him as she had all along. She also got better and better as his assistant in the effort to unravel the secrets of the bow. she would have been better yet, he thought glumly, had her mentor been worth a damn. She copied his blunders faithful y, one by one, but stopped making them as soon as he did. He knew a lot of people back in the Commonwealths who, having settled on a particular mistake, would keep making it till the end of time.

He also knew a lot of people who would have turned up their noses, in the most literal sense, at the continuing unpleasant labor involved in disposing of his wastes and getting the filth off him afterwards. Sol never faltered. In the days when he was still on his feet, he had improvised a good many strange wipes for his hindquarters, but in that regard Sol's ingenuity outdid his. He was grateful, and sometimes amused. He would never have thought of using grouse feathers, for instance.