Harry Turtledove - A Different Flesh

He used the stock of his rifle to knock the knife out of the sims hand, then hit him in the temple with that second blow might have fel ed a man, but sims had thicker skulls and thicker muscles over them. The male, shook his head, spat blood. He grabbed Quick by the shoulders and threw him to the ground. A lumberjack might have matched it, but the sim was half foot shorter than Quick.

The trapper landed heavily; the rifle came out of his hand and bounced away. Pain flared in his ribs and in his bad leg. That's what you get for sticking your nose in, he thought blurrily. But the male was not done with him. the sim seized his rifle, lifted it high, and stamped toward him plainly intending to beat him to death.

Quick still held on to his pistol. He cocked it with desperate haste and fired. He aimed for the sims chest. The bal took the male in the bel y instead.

The noise of the shot shocked the sims into moment, silence.

Nothing else, perhaps, could have distracted the so effectively from their own quarrels. Leaning up on his elbow, Quick saw one of the two males around whom l bigger squabble had revolved also sitting up, pushing at the inert body of his foe. Martin had won the fight; blood was still flowing from a score of Caesar's wounds. Yet by the way he moved, the victor was also badly hurt.

Quick spared him hardly a glance, though. The traps horrified attention, and that of all the sims in the clearing, was drawn to the male he had shot. Quick had heard tales of the agony of gutshot men.

Now he saw it first hand The sim rolled and thrashed, hands clutched to the h above and to one side of its navel. Blood trickled between fingers.

Soon more came from its anus. When it emptied bladder a moment later, that discharge too was red. The sim shrieked and wailed.

Several females came running from the woods; the gunshot drew those who had not heard the sound of fight. Sol was the last of them; her bulging belly made her move slowly. Quick was glad to see her, and even glad she had not been in the clearing before.

He struggled to his feet. His right leg groaned but he did not scream; he had not rebroken it. He picked up his rifle a hobbled over toward Martin. When Sol came up to help him as she had so many times before, he grateful y let her take some of his weight. The other sims, their eyes Stil on the awful spectacle of the male he had shot, stepped out of the way. None of them signed to him. None of them seemed to want to have anything to do with him.

Pain twisted Martin's face. His hairy hide was scraped in a dozen places to show raw, bleeding flesh. Caesar had bitten half of one ear away. Martin was holding his ribs with one hand, and had the other at the back of his left heel. When the trapper saw that, and saw how the sims left calf bunched but his foot was limp, he had a sinking feeling that made him forget his bruises.

Against all odds, he had recovered from his own crippling injury, at least enough to walk about. Martin never would, not when he was hamstrung.

Martin took his hands from his wounds, signed Fix leg? eyes were ful of desperate appeal. They held Quick's seeing how Martin's thoughts paralleled his own only Henry Quick feel worse. Behind the trapper, the male he had shot screamed on, unceasing and dreadful. Not fix, he had to sign.

Sol stared at him in amazement. Fix, she signed firmly. sticks.

Sticks fix your leg, sticks fix his leg.

Not fix, the trapper repeated miserably. His leg not hurt way. How could he explain that the splints only held pieces of his shattered leg together while the bone mended, but that you could splint a cut tendon from now till doomsday and it would never mend? He could not, not with limited hand-talk Sol knew.

And if he could, she would not have believed him. Sticks, Sol signed, and stepped away from him to get a couple.

At least she was doing something constructive. The rest of the sims in the clearing wandered about dazed, like men and women who had been through a train wreck. Quick could see why. In the space of a few minutes, the band had meet disaster. Two prime males were dead (even if one would go on making horrid noises for hours). The dominant male was at best crippled; at worst, if his wounds went , he would join Caesar and his fol ower.

The hunting party, never more than a dozen strong to begin with, would take years to recover.

Worse, Quick knew the catastrophe would not have happened in the same way had he not become part of band. The fight between Martin and Caesar without the sharp steel knife, the tool he'd got from the trapper would have remained one of the shove-and-bluff contests typical with sims. Maybe Caesar would have backed down, maybe Martin. No one would have been much hurt either while The subhumans lacked a good part of the trappers reasoning ability. They seemed to have reached the same conclusions he had, though, whatever the means they used to get there. All through the winter, they had treated Quick like one of them. Now they drew apart from him. He saw at once he was no longer one of the band.

Being rejected by mere sims should not have hurt Quick, but it did.

The trapper's fate had been too intimately tied with theirs for too long for him to be indifferent to their feeling about him.

That was especial y true in one case. Quick's gaze went to Sol, who was still busy putting a splint on Martin's leg. Better? she signed when she was through.

Martin's breath hissed through clenched teeth.

He shrugged, as if he did not want to say no but hurt too much to say yes. Quick knew he was not going to get better, with or without the splint.

Sol got to her feet awkwardly. She patted her swollen belly in annoyance, almost in reproach. Most of her attention, though, remained on Martin. At last she looked a CaesarI? Her eyes met the trappers She looked at him, at the sim he had shot (who was stil ululating piteously), at Martin and Caesar (whose skin was pierced in so many places it would have been worthless as a pelt). When she glanced Quick’s way again, it was with no more warmth than if she been looking at a stone. That told him the last thing he needed to know.

If the sims had decided to tear him to pieces; he could not have stopped them.

They ignored him instead. Perhaps they thought ostracism a worse punishment.

In their small band with each member knowing all the others so intimately that made some sense. Quick was never sure. Living like a sim, he found at last, could not make him think like a sim.

He loaded his pistol, put his powderhorn, ammunition (which also held flint and steel), a knife, and a cup on his belt. Leaning on his rifle, he took a couple of steps toward the edge of the clearing, then turned to Caesar. It did not matter what the band did to him, he could not save the wounded sim or have it’s shrieks pursuing him into the woods. He aimed careful y, shot the male in head, reloaded again, limped away. The sims still did not stop him. He looked back at Sol a last time, and at the child he would never see now, the child that would live its life with its mother's band.

Maybe that, at least, was for the best, he told himself, and it because of the social strictures in the Commonwealths against such babies.

In the world of humans, a half sim would always be at a disadvantage, slower than its fellows. But in the world of sims, a man child might prove something of a prodigy, and gain a place in the band higher than any it could look for the mountains.

Quick not know that was so. He could only hope. The trees closed in behind him, hiding the clearing from view.

Henry Quick knocked back wiskey with reverent pleasure. He was wearing clothes left behind before he set out on his last trapping run. He’d been in civilization a month, and regained some of the weight he'd dropped in his slow, painful journey east. All the same, his tunic and the breeches that l have been tight flopped on him as though meant for a lager man.