Harry Turtledove: A Different Flesh

Tanaka, about being ill themselves and two or three million of them have been those, somewhere around a third, maybe more, as it goes by, will actually develop AIDS. And just about al those will die, very unpleasantly. The people who still have symptoms are just as able to pass it on through sex as ones who do, more able because the ones without.

Sims give me my best chance of fighting it, in people. How can I do anything but use them?"

What would you do if there were no sims?" Tanaka asked after thinking a few seconds himself.

the best l could," Howard answered. "Muddle along shimpanses and a lot of in vitro work, I suppose. It wouldn't be the same. I think you've seen that here. A lot people would die while I, and a lot of other reseachers using sims, don't forget, struggled to translate answers we eventually got into clinical terms. We don't that problem with sims.

Their biochemistry is almost identical to ours."

Tanaka nodded and rose, showing the meeting was done.

He stuck out his hand. "Thank you very much, Dr. You've been most interesting."

Have l? I'm glad. What will you tell Censor Jennings, Tanaka blinked.

"You're very forthright."

'I'm concerned about my program, sir."

Reluctantly, Dr. Howard, I have to say you needn't be. I think the Censor will be happy when I tell him that, you've made your points well. you also might have given me another answer to my question just now, in which case I would have said something different to Censor Jennings."

Honestly puzzled, Howard asked, "What might I have said”

“When I asked what you'd do without sims, you might have suggested going on with human defectives."

The doctor felt his face freeze. "Good day, Mr. Tanaka.

Doris I am certain, will show you out." He sat down.

“I understand your reaction, Dr. Howard. As I said, you I the test nicely. The idea revolts me quite as much as you, I assure you. But I had to know."

“Good day," Howard repeated, unmollified. Nodding, he left. Howard was so filled with Fury that he did not whether he had hurt the DRC

political y. He did not think he had Tanaka plainly felt as he did.

He was also, he realized, furious at himself, and took a long while to figure out why. When he did, he wished he hadn't. If there were no sims, who could say what he might do to take a crack at AIDS. And who could say whether he would be able to look at himself in a mirror afterwards? He was not grateful to Tanaka for showing him a part of himself he would sooner have left unseen.

He got very little work done the rest of the day.

The air waggon pulled slowly to a stop outside Terminus. When it was not moving anymore, a steward opened the door. Ken Dixon got his shoulder bag out from under his seat, worked his way up the aisle.

"Thanks for breaking thee trail for me," Melody Porter said from behind him.

"My pleasure," he said, adding "Oaf " a moment later al another passenger stuck an accidental elbow in his bel y. He turned his head back toward Melody. "You'll forgive me it I omit the gallant bow."

"This once," she said graciously. He snorted.

"Have a pleasant stay in Terminus," the steward said as Dixon walked by, and then again to Melody. They walked out of the air waggon's cooled air and into the furious muggy heat of a Terminus August afternoon

"What's the matter?"

Melody asked when Dixon suddenly stopped halfway down the descent ladder. In less polite voices, passengers behind them asked the same thing.

"Sorry. My spectacles just steamed up." Dixon took them off his nose, peered at them in nearsighted wonder, and stuck them in his hip pocket.

Holding tightly to the rail, hat went carefully down the rest of the ladder. Once down on the ground, he was relieved to discover that the fog dissipated as his spectacles reached the same sweltering temperature as their surroundings. He put theg back on. When they went inside the cooled station building he let out a blissful sigh.

Melody echoed him, adding, "Philadelphia summer is bad, but this, "

walking left him covered with a sweaty film. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

Through the station building's broad sweep of plate glass, he and Melody watched a human boss supervise the gang of sims that was loading baggage from the air waggon onto carts. He shook his head. "The seventeenth century, alive and well in the twentieth," he said scornfully.

"Wel ," someone with an amused voice said at his elbow, "you sound like the chap I'm looking for. Look like him too," the young man added.

He looked the way the Philadelphia committee said he would: a tal man with a good many blacks in his ancestry who wore a thick mustache.

"You're Patrick?" Dixon asked, as he had been told to do.

"Sorry, no. Stephen's the name," the fel ow said. They nodded at each other. Amateurs' games, Dixon thought, but good enough, he hoped, for the moment. Later, later was another matter. He put it aside.

"Here comes the luggage." Melody had been watching the sims tossing bags onto the conveyor belt.

They walked over to it. Stephen nudged Dixon. "Is she real y the one who's his great-granddaughter?" he whispered, not wanting her to hear.

"Great-great, yeah."

"Whoa." The respect in Stephen's voice and eyes was just this side of awe.

Dixon's lingering doubts cleared up. No infiltrator could be that impressed over her ancestry

He and Melody had boarded the air waggon early; their bags, naturally, were among the last ones out, having been put aboared beneath everyone else's. "So much for efficiency," Melody sighed when she had hers. Dixon's finally appeared couple of minutes after that.

"Come on," Stephen said. He led them to an omnibus with PEACHTREE

STREET on the destination placard. It roared off, a little more than half full, about ten minutes later. It was, Dixon discovered thankful y, cooled.

Stephen rose from his seat at a stop on Peachtree Street, in the midst of a neighborhood with many more apartment blocks than private houses. Dixon thought himself ready for the blast of heat that would greet him when he got off the omnibus, and was almost right.

"The collegium is over there," Stephen said, pointing west- Dixon could see a couple of tal buildings over the tops of the apartments. "In this neighborhood, no one will , pay any attention to you; everybody will figure you're just a couple of new students here for the start of fal term."

"Good," Melody said briskly. She turned around, trying to orient herself. "Where's the DRC from here? That way?"

Stephen gave her a respectful glance. "Yes, northwest of here, maybe three or four miles."

she said again. "We'll be staying with you, I gather, until we get down to business?"

"That's right. People float in and out of my cube all the time; the landlord's used to it. As long as he gets paid on the first of every month and nobody screams too loud, he doesn't care. Half the cubes in his block are like that."

Stephen started walking down the street. "Come on. It's this , way."

Following, Dixon asked, "How alert are they likely to be at the DRC?"

"Not very, I hope. Since the word came down from Philadelphia that this was going to happen, Terminus hasn't heard much from us about justice for sims. We've been quiet, just letting everybody relax and think we've forgotten what we're for."

"Outstanding," Dixon said. "If they were alert, either this wouldn't work at al or a lot of people might end up hurt on account of us, which wouldn't do the cause any good."

"Not Stephen agreed. "But we have made the two connections we'll need most: one in the calc department, the other in food services."

"The calc department I can see, but why food services." Stephen told him why. He grinned. Melody laughed out loud.