A Different Flesh (17 page)

The brakemen scrambled down from their waggons and rushed forward. Hairy elephants were better haulers than carriers; Caesar and Hannibal could bear only five men apiece. As he had at the Springfield station, Prem Chand made Caesar lift a foreleg to serve as a step. “You, you, you, and you,” he said, pointing at the first four men to reach him. They swarmed onto the elephant.

Just behind them, Tilak was making a similar chant. Hannibal trumpeted at taking on unfamiliar passengers, but subsided when Tilak thwacked its broad head with the elephant goad.

“Follow us as closely as you can,” Prem Chand told the disappointed latecomers from the back of the train. Then he dug in his toe behind Caesar's ear.
“Mall-mall!”
he shouted: forward!

Even with the burden it was carrying, the hairy elephant shot ahead, as if relieved to be free of the burden of the train. Its gait shifted from its usual walk to a pounding rack, with hind and foreleg on the same side of its body advancing together.

Most of the brakemen had ridden elephants before, but not under circumstances like these. They clutched at Caesar's harness to keep from being pitched off. In spite of everything, one did fall. He rolled away, clutching his ankle. The hairy elephant's left hind foot missed his head by inches.

They were a bit more than half a mile from the Iron Elephant, three or four minutes at the elephants' best pace, which they were certainly making. When they had covered about half the distance, Prem Chand told one brakeman, “You shoot.”

“No chance to hit at this range,” the fellow protested.

“Yes, but we will remind the sims we are coming, and you will be able to reload by the time we get there.”

“Never tried reloading on top of an elephant before,” the brakeman said darkly, but he raised the rifle to his shoulder and fired. Caesar trumpeted in surprise. So did Hannibal, a moment later.

Some of the subhumans had already started to break and run—two carried a man's corpse between them, while another fled with a body slung over its shoulder. But others were still fighting, and one stubbornly kept trying to shove a spear into the metal side of the trapped steam engine. Prem Chand had to stop himself from giggling: Paul Tilak had certainly been right about that.

Against men, even men carrying firearms, the sims might have kept up the battle, at least for a little while. But the hairy elephants were the most fearsome beasts on the plains. The sight of two bearing down like an angry avalanche was too much for the subhumans. They took to their heels, hooting in dismay.

The last to run off was the one that had tried to slay the Iron Elephant. Baring its teeth in a furious grimace, it hurled a sharp stone at Caesar before seeking to get away. The rock fell far short, but by then the sim was within easy rifle range. Prem Chand's bullet sent it sprawling forward on its face.

He felt more like a general than like an elephant driver. With gestures and shouted commands, he sent Hannibal and the men he thought of as his foot soldiers after the retreating sims. He walked Caesar up to the head of the rival train.

The brakeman to the contrary, reloading on elephant-back was possible—but then, Prem Chand had more practice at it than the other man did. He fired at a sim. To his disgust, he missed. Many sims were down now, either dead or under cover in hollows the tall grass concealed.

The railroad men moved up cautiously. A couple went ahead to reclaim a body the sims had dropped in their flight. Prem Chand was dismayed to see no sign of the corpse the pair of sims had been carrying; the subhumans who survived this raid, curse them, would not go altogether hungry.

The elephant driver wondered if the body was Trevithick's. He had yet to spot the steam-engine man, and he was close to the upended Iron Elephant. After digging their pit under the rails, the sims had covered it with branches and then covered them over with dirt and gravel so they looked like the rest of the roadbed. Prem Chand shivered. He might well have led Caesar straight into the trap.

He got down from the hairy elephant, walked over to the hole in the ground. The rails had buckled as they tried and failed to support the Iron Elephant. It was tilted at a steep angle, almost nose down in the pit. A real elephant, which did not carry its weight on the rails, would have taken a worse fall.

A dead sim lay half in, half out of the pit. Prem Chand looked down into it. “Hello, Prem, very good to see you indeed,” Richard Trevithick said. He held a pistol club-fashion in his bandaged left hand; his right arm hung limply. “I'm afraid you'll have to help me out of here. I think I broke it. Oh, and congratulations—you seem to have won the race.”

“I had not even thought of that,” Prem Chand said, blinking. He turned to his crew. “Get me a length of rope. Tie one end to Caesar's harness and toss the other down to me.” He slid into the pit.

In India, he thought, hazily remembering his grandfather's stories, there would have been sharpened stakes sticking up from the bottom. Luckily, the sims had not thought of that.

He got to his feet, brushed off himself and Trevithick. “You shot the sim up there?”

The engine handler nodded. “Yes, and then spent the rest of the fight hiding under the Iron Elephant, while another of the creatures tried to kill it.” He laughed ruefully. “Not very glorious, I'm afraid. But then, neither was falling out of the cab when the engine went down. If I hadn't been leaning back for another shovelful of coal, I never would have got this.” He tried to move his arm, winced, and thought better of it.

“But you would have been out in the open, then, and the second sim might have speared you instead of your machine,” Prem Chand pointed out.

“Something to that, I suppose.”

A rope snaked into the hole. Prem Chand tied it around Trevithick's body under his arms. “Is it hooked up to Caesar?” he called.

“Sure is,” a brakeman answered.

“Good.
Mall-mall
!”

The rope went taut. Prem Chand helped Trevithick scramble up the sloping side of the pit while the elephant pulled him out. The engine handler yelped once, then set his teeth and bore the jouncing in grim silence. Prem Chand yelled
“Choro!”
as soon as Trevithick was out, then crawled slowly after him.

“You didn't need to get us clean the first time,” Trevithick remarked.

“You are quite right. My apologies. I will dirty you again, if you like,” Prem Chand said, deadpan.

Trevithick's expression was half grin, half grimace. Then he looked around, and dismay replaced them both. Down in the pit, he had not been able to see the fight that had raged up and down the length of his train. Most of the bodies spilled on the ground, most of the blood splashed on waggons and grass, belonged to sims—but not all.

“Oh, the poor lads,” the engine handler exclaimed.

Some of the survivors of his crew had joined Prem Chand's men in pursuit of the sims, which made his losses appear at first even worse than they were. But Trevithick, pointing with his left hand, counted four bodies, and one of his brakemen added, “Pat Bailey and One-eye Jim is dead, but we can't find 'em nowheres.”

“Filthy creatures,” Trevithick muttered.

Prem Chand knew he was not talking about the missing men. Trying to give what consolation he could, he said, “This sort of thing will not happen hereabouts much longer. Soon this part of the country will be too thickly settled for wild sim bands big enough to attack a train to flourish.”

“Yes, of course. That's been happening for more than 150 years, since settlers came to Virginia and Plymouth. It does little good for me at the moment, however—and even less for One-eye Jim and Patrick Bailey.”

Prem Chand had no good answer to that. He led Trevithick over to Paul Tilak, who knew enough first aid to splint a broken arm. Ignoring an injured man's howls, Tilak was washing a bleeding bite with whiskey. “Don't be a fool,” he told the fellow. “Do you want it to fester?”

“Couldn't hurt more'n what you just done,” the man said sullenly.

“That only shows how little you know,” Tilak snorted. He moved on to a brakeman with a torn shirt and blood running down his chest. “You are very lucky. That spear could as easily have gone in as slid along your ribs.” He soaked his rag at the mouth of the whiskey bottle. The brakeman flinched.

“There's one attention I won't regret being spared,” Trevithick said, waiting for Tilak to get round to him.

“I do not doubt that.” Prem Chand's eyes slipped back to the Iron Elephant. “Richard, may I ask what you will do next?”

The engine handler followed his rival's glance. “I expect we'll be able to salvage it, Prem, with the help of your elephants. The damage shouldn't be anything past repair.” His face lit with enthusiasm. “And back in Boston, my brother is working on another engine, twice as powerful as the Iron Elephant. If I'd had that one here, you never could have stayed close to me!”

“In which case, you and your crew probably would all be dead now,” Prem Chand said tartly.

But in spite of his sharp comeback, he felt a hollowness inside, for he saw that the future belonged to Trevithick. As surely as humans displaced sims, steam engines were going to replace hairy elephants: it was much easier to make an engine bigger and stronger and faster than it was an elephant. A way of life was ending.

He let out a long sigh.

Trevithick understood him perfectly. “I told you once, Prem, it won't be so bad. There will always be railroads, no matter what pulls the trains.”

“It will not be the same.”

“What is, ever?”

“He has you there, Prem,” Tilak put in.

“Maybe so, maybe so,” Prem Chand said. “Our grandfathers, who sailed halfway round the world to come here, would have agreed with you, I am certain. But do you know what hurts worst of all?”

Trevithick and Tilak shook their heads.

“When that second engine comes into Springfield, I am going to have to admit George Stephenson is right!”

1804

Though the Heavens Fall

Large-scale agricultural production was very important in several southeastern commonwealths. Indigo, hemp, and cotton—especially the latter, with its vast export market—were grown on plantations that, because they naturally did not have modern farm machinery, required a great many laborers to raise and gather in the crops.

Most of these field laborers were sims. The number of sims in North America had increased greatly since Europeans began settling in the New World, simply because agriculture is so much more efficient a way of producing food than the nomadic hunting life the native subhumans had formerly practiced. There was enough to feed both the swelling human population and the sims—which, now sometimes for many generations, had been tamed to serve humans.

Large labor forces of sims were not the only characteristic of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century southeastern plantation agriculture. Because sims proved unsatisfactory household staff (and also, on occasion, to supplement their number in the fields), black human slaves were imported from Africa.

Shamefully, slavery is a human institution at least as old as civilization itself. It was accepted in ancient Mesopotamian society; by the Hebrews; by the Greeks; and even by the Romans, whose republic is the prototype for the Federated Commonwealths. Philosophers developed elaborate justifications for the institution, most based on the assumption that one group of people—generally speaking, the group that owned the slaves in question—was superior to another and that the latter, therefore, deserved their enslavement.

Such speculation may perhaps have been excusable in the days when humans knew only of other humans. Differences in skin color, features, or type of hair must have seemed large and important in those days. But when contrasted to sims, it quickly becomes obvious that even the most dissimilar groups of humans are very much alike. Accordingly, in the Federated Commonwealths the institution of slavery was faced with a challenge to its very
raison d'être
unlike any it had known in the Old World.…

From
The Story of the Federated Commonwealths

Jeremiah swept the feather duster over the polished top of his master's chest of drawers. Moving slowly in the building heat of a May morning in Virginia, he raised the duster to the mirror that hung above the chest.

He paused to look at himself; he did not get to see his reflection every day. He raised a hand to brush away some dust stuck in his wooly hair. His eyeballs and, when he smiled, his white, even teeth gleamed against the polished ebony of his skin.

“You, Jeremiah!” Mrs. Gillen called from the next room. “What are you doing in there?”

“Dusting, ma'am,” he answered, flailing about with the feather duster so she would see him busy if she came in to check. Unlike the sims that worked in the fields, house-slaves rarely felt the whip, but he did not intend to tempt fate.

All Mrs. Gillen said, though, was, “Go downstairs and fetch me up a glass of lemonade. Squeeze some fresh; I think the pitcher's empty.”

“Yes, ma'am.” Jeremiah sighed as he went to the kitchen. On a larger estate, other blacks would have shared the household duties. Here he was cook, cleaner, butler, and coachman by turns, and busy all the time because there was so much to do.

He made a fresh pitcher of lemonade to his own taste, drank a glass, then added more sugar. The Gillens liked it sweeter than he did.

“Took you long enough,” Jane Gillen snapped when he got upstairs. He took no notice of it; that was simply her way. She was in her early thirties, a few years older than Jeremiah, her mousy prettiness beginning to yield to time.

“Oh, that does a body good,” she said, emptying the glass and giving it back to him. “Why don't you take the rest of the pitcher out to my husband? He and Mr. Stowe are in the south field, and they'll be suffering from the sun. Go on; they'll thank you for it.”