A Different Flesh (13 page)

The day dragged on. The clever sim no longer bothered to keep the troop's youngsters away from Kenton. The small indignities they inflicted in their curiosity added to his misery. Still, human children would have done worse.

He heard a rustling in the woods, from the direction in which the hunters had gone. The old male who had been making tools gave the grunted greeting-noise. Kenton turned his head as the clever sim moved toward him, his knife in its hand. He expected the returning hunters would be the last thing he ever saw.

Then the old sim and several females cried out in alarm. The clever sim sucked in its breath in a harsh gasp. Coming into the clearing was not one of the hunters—it was Charles instead.

Charles's eyes went wide when he saw Kenton lying tied in the mud by the drowned fire. He was too far away for the scout to read his expression clearly. Kenton wondered what was going through his mind, observing his master bound and helpless in the hands of his wild cousins. Was he tempted to throw in his lot with them? How could he help it, with the scout's vulnerability so displayed? Superior wit was not all that let humans rule sims; their aura of might played no little role.

If Kenton's weakness gave Charles qualms, the sim from Virginia was as disturbing to the wild sims. The scout's clothes and possessions were strange to them, but so was he himself. Charles was of their own kind, yet he too wore a belt and buskins, and bore tools of the same alien sort as Kenton's.

The clever sim glanced from the knife he was holding to the one swinging at Charles's belt, and to the bright steel head of the hatchet Charles carried. The clever sim's face was the picture of bewilderment. Kenton could hardly blame it. It had seen its world turned upside down twice now in two days.

Raising the hatchet in a plain warning gesture, Charles advanced into the clearing. Females and young scurried away from him. He was more frightening than Kenton, and not just because he was free. The familiar turned bizarre is always harder to face than something wildly different.

Charles strode toward Kenton, the hatchet still held high. The scout spoke through lips dry from thirst and fear: “Good to see you again.” He had all he could do to hold his voice steady. Nothing, he knew, might more quickly ingratiate Charles with the wild sims than slaughtering him.

Charles surveyed the encampment. The clever sim was the only male there of vigorous years. When it saw that Charles understood Kenton, it scowled fiercely and tightened its grip on the scout's knife.

Kenton had no choice but to wait to see what Charles would do. But Charles also seemed unsure, staring from the scout to the clever sim and back again. At last his left hand moved in a sign Kenton understood:
Trouble
.

“Trouble indeed,” Kenton said, though he could not tell whether Charles meant the sign for him or it was simply the sim's equivalent of talking to himself. Daring to hope hurt, as an arm that has fallen asleep will tingle when the blood rushes in again.

Then Charles signed,
I help
, and squatted over him to cut his bonds. The clever sim shouted angrily and brandished the scout's knife. Charles shouted back, but drew away from Kenton. Had it just been the clever sim and he, the hatchet would have given him all the advantage he needed. But though none of the other sims was his match individually, together they could overwhelm him.

“Give them something to think about,” Kenton exclaimed suddenly. “The storm put out their fire—start it again.”

The way Charles's face lit was almost enough to kindle a blaze by itself. He deliberately turned his back on the clever sim, doing it with as much aplomb as any nobleman scoring off some rival. In spite of everything, Kenton could not help smiling; here was something unexpected that Charles had learned in Virginia.

Charles knelt and took out his tinderbox. The scout heard him strike flint and steel together several times, saw him bend further to blow to life the sparks that had fallen on his tinder. Then, with a satisfied snort, Charles stepped away.

Because he had no dry fuel close by, he had made a pile of all the powdered bark and lint in the tinderbox. The little fire crackled briskly.

The wild sims stood transfixed, as if turned to stone. Then one of the old males hooted softly, the most nearly awed sound Kenton had ever heard from a sim's throat. The old male scrabbled through the remains of the dead fire for wood dry enough to burn. Having found a couple of sticks, it approached the blaze Charles had set, glancing at him as though for permission. When he did not object, it set the sticks on the fire. After a while, they caught.

Half a dozen wild sims dashed off after more fuel. The rest crowded toward the blaze, drawn to the flames like moths.

Not even the clever sim was immune to the fascination. This time it did not object when Charles stooped and began cutting Kenton's bonds.

The scout grimaced at the sting of returning circulation he had imagined a few minutes before. He clenched and unclenched his fingers and toes, trying to work feeling back into them. All the same, it was some minutes before he could stand. When he finally did, he had to clutch undignifiedly at his trousers; their sueded leather had stretched from the soaking it had taken.

He did not think he could get his knife back from the clever sim, but did go over to where the other male had discarded his musket. With his powder spilled and bullets scattered, he had only the one shot till he got back to his pack, but that was better than nothing. And the wild sim had been right, in its way—at need, the rifle would make a good club.

Kenton also gathered up the spearfang canines, although to his annoyance one had disappeared in the mud. He had come by them through hard, dangerous hunting, and they represented wealth too great and too easily portable for him to abandon.

Though the scout hurried, Charles waited with barely concealed impatience.
We go
? he signed, adding the emphatic gesture to the questioning one.

“Indeed we do!” Kenton wanted to be as far from the encampment as he could when the hunting party returned.

The clever sim watched them withdraw. Its massive jaw muscles worked. The scout could all but taste its frustration. It had met beings and found tools and skills beyond any it could have imagined, and here, after only a brief moment, they were vanishing from its life again.

That proved more than it could bear. With a harsh cry, it rushed Kenton and Charles. The scout flung his musket to his shoulder, but hesitated with his finger still on the first trigger. The males in the hunting party had heard gunfire before; the sound of a shot would surely bring them on the run.

Charles had no such worries. His arm went back, then forward. The hatchet spun through the air. It buried itself deep in the clever sim's chest.

The clever sim shrieked. It wrenched the hatchet out, heedless of the blood that gushed from the wound. The clever sim flung the hatchet back at Charles, but its throw was wild. It staggered on rubbery legs, sat heavily. Kenton could hear how its breath bubbled in its throat.

The rest of the wild sims came out of their trance round the fire. They shouted and hooted. Hands groped for stones to throw. Saving his single bullet against desperate need, Kenton ran. Charles fled with him, stopping only to seize the hatchet from where it lay on the ground. Red streaked the gray steel blade.

Kenton never found out whether the clever sim lived or died. He was everlastingly grateful it was the only robust male at the encampment. He and Charles outdistanced the gray-hairs and youngsters that tried to pursue them. They might not have had such good fortune if tested against the members of the hunting band, the more so as the scout's abused limbs could not carry him at full speed.

Kenton knew the troop's hunters would be expert trackers. They would have to be, living as they did from what they could run down. And so, no matter how urgently he wanted to put distance between himself and the camp, he and Charles did not neglect muddling their trail, doubling back on their tracks and splashing down streams so they would not leave footprints.

A large bullfrog sat on a half-submerged log, staring stupidly, as Kenton and Charles drew near. Too late, it decided to leap away. The scout grabbed it and broke its neck.

A bit farther on, they came upon clumps of freshwater mussels growing on some rocks. Charles used his knife and Kenton borrowed his hatchet to sever the byssi by which the shellfish moored themselves.

By then it was nearly dark. Neither of them knew the countryside well enough to head back toward the camp by night. They would have to shift camp anyway, Kenton realized; it was too close to the salt lick. The wild sims would surely scour that whole area in search of them. The scout hoped he could recover his pistols from the spot where he had killed the spearfang.

All that, though, could wait. Finding a hiding place for the night came first. A hollow with a rock pile down one side proved suitable, after Kenton stoned to death a fat rattling-snake that had been nesting among the rocks.

Fire
? Charles signed.

The scout considered the lay of the land. “Yes,” he said, “a small one.” If the wild sims came close enough to spot a tiny blaze by night, they would be on top of him anyway. And while he did not mind eating raw mussels, even hungry as he was he wanted to roast the frog and snake.

His stomach still growled when he was done with his share, but he felt better for it. He licked his fingers clean of grease and looked across the fire at Charles, who was still worrying tiny fragments of meat from a frogleg with his tongue.

In the dim, flickering red light, the sim's eyes were sunk in pits of shadow, unreadable. “Charles,” Kenton began, and then stopped, unsure how—or if—to go on.

Charles tossed the bones, by now quite naked, to one side. He gave a low-voiced, questioning hoot.

“I thank you,” the scout said.

Charles grunted, a noncommittal sound.

Kenton almost let it rest there. His curiosity, though, was too great. People had been trying to understand sims—and to see how close sims could come to understanding them—for close to two centuries. And so the scout asked, “Why did you decide to rescue me?”

The skin moved on Charles's brow-ridges; a man would have been wrinkling his forehead in concentration.
You, I come here together
, he signed.
We go back together
.

The scout wondered if that indeed was the whole answer. Because they were less imaginative than men, sims rigidly followed plans. Kenton had often talked about the return trip; perhaps Charles had simply been unable to conceive of anything else happening, and had acted as he did more for the picture of the future the scout had outlined than for Kenton's sake.

Kenton's lips twisted wryly; there was a thought to put him in his place. He persisted, “It would have been easier and less risky for you to join the wild sims.”

He knew he was treading on dangerous ground. Back in Virginia, many sims fled to the wild troops that still lurked in the backwoods. There was always the risk of putting ideas in Charles's head that had not been there before.

The sim surprised him with an immediate gesture of rejection.
Not leave you
, Charles signed.
You, me, together, good. Years and years—not want end
.

“I thank you,” Kenton said again. Had he followed the course of some colonists—who treated their sims as much like beasts as possible—he was sure he would have been shared among the wild sims in raw gobbets, with Charles likely joining the feast.

But the sim, to his surprise, was not done signing:
Not want to live with wild sims. Want to live with people. Wild sims boring
—an enormous yawn rendered that—
not know houses, not know music, not know knives, not know bread
. Charles sniffed with the same disdain a Portsmouth grandee would have shown on learning his daughter's prospective bridegroom wore no shoes and shared a cabin with his mule.

Kenton burst out laughing. Charles snorted indignantly. The scout apologized, both in words and with the customary sim gesture: he smacked his lips loudly and spread his hands, meaning he had intended no harm. Charles accepted, once more with a lord's grace.

Inside, though, Kenton kept chuckling, though he was careful not to show it. He did not want to hurt Charles's feelings. But how on earth, he wondered, was he going to explain to Lord Emerson that he had been saved because his sim was a snob?

1782

The Iron Elephant

The Americas proved to possess a number of animals unlike any with which Europeans had been familiar: the ground sloth, the spearfang, and the several varieties of armadillo, of which the largest was bigger than a man. Others, such as the hairy elephant, had counterparts in distant areas of the Old World but still seemed exotic to early generations of settlers.

Just before the American colonies broke away from English tyranny and banded together to form the Federated Commonwealths of America, however, efforts began to exploit the hairy elephant's great strength in a new way. The first rail systems, with waggons pulled by horses, appeared in England at about this time to haul coal from mines to rivers and canals. Hairy elephants began their railroad work in this same capacity, but soon were pulling other freight, and passengers as well.

In the decades following the creation of the republic, railroads spread across the country. Because the Federated Commonwealths is so much larger than any European nation, such a web of steel was a vital link in knitting the country together. By 1780, tracks had reached across the New Nile. The mighty river remained unbridged, but ferry barges joined the settled east with the new lands that were just beginning to be farmed.

But the hairy elephant's trumpet was not destined to remain the characteristic sound of the railroads. Coal mining also resulted in the development of the steam engine. At first used only in place, to pump water from the mines, the steam engine soon proved capable of broader application. Soon the hairy elephants that had been for more than a generation the mainstay of the American railway system began to feel the effects of mechanical competition.