A Different Flesh

Kenton made a semi-permanent camp near the salt lick, building a lean-to of branches and leaves for protection against the warm summer rain. He went back to the lick for both deer and buffalo, and added three more sets of spearfang teeth in less hair raising fashion than he had col ected the first.

The hunting was so easy it required only a small part of his time.

He ranged widely over the countryside, adding to his map and journal.

The more he traveled, the richer he judged the land. Not only was it full of game, but the rich soil and abundant water were made for farming.

Sometimes Charles accompanied him on his journeys, sometimes he went alone. The sim traveled too, though not as widely as Kenton.

Often he would bring back to camp smal game he had slain himself rabbits, turkey, a beaver, a porcupine that proved amazingly tasty once it was skinned. They made a welcome change of diet.

Saw strange thing, Charles signed after one of his solitary jaunts. Many buffalo bones. He opened and closed his hands several times, indicating some number larger than he could count.

He led Kenton to the spot the next morning. The scout whistled in surprise as he looked down into a dry wash at the tangle of whitened bones there. "Must be a hundred head, easy," he said.

Charles repeated the sign for an indefinitely large number.

Together they scrambled down the steep side of the ravine, going slowly and often grabbing at bushes for support. Kenton tried to imagine what could have made a herd plunge down such a slope. Even at fuII stampede, the buffalo should have turned aside.

Then the scout was among the bones. Scavengers had pul ed apart many skeletons. Bushes were pushing through rib cages, climbing over skulls.

The herd had met disaster at least a year ago, Kenton judged.

Many great legbones were neatly split lengthwise, almost al the skul s smashed open. When Kenton found a fist sized lump of stone with an edge chipped sharp, it only confirmed what he had already guessed.

He tossed the hand-axe up and down.

Charles recognized it at once. Sims. Wild sims.

"Aye. No animal could've gone for the beasts' brains and marrow so."

Likely, Kenton thought, the subhumans had driven the buffalo into the gully. He glanced round, as if expecting to see a sim crouching behind every shrub. He had never doubted sims lived west of the mountains, but this was the first sure sign of it, and a sobering reminder.

Big killing, Charles signed, his eyes traveling the scatered bones.

Kenton wondered what was going through his mind, wondered if he was proud of the slaughter his distant cousins had worked. Some Englishmen trained their sims to hate and fear the wild ones. The scout had never seen the need for that. Finding out he was wrong might prove costly.

He did his best to keep his voice casual. "Let me know before you join them, eh?"

Charles's face was troubled. Joke? he signed at last.

Kenton dimly realized how hard it had to be for sims to keep track of men's vagaries they could not share. "Joke," he said firmly.

Charles nodded.

They spent a while longer investigating the ravine.

Kenton turned up a few more stone tools, but nothing to show that the sims had come back to this immediate area since the year before.

That was some relief, if not much.

When Charles wanted to go off for some purpose of his own, Kenton said only, "I'll see you back at the camp this evening." The last thing he wanted was the sim thinking he mistrusted him. He wished he had kept his mouth shut instead of letting his stupid wisecrack out.

Thinking such dark thoughts, the scout decided to return to the salt lick. The chunk of venison he had cached in a tree probably would not be fit to eat by nightfal , not in this heat. And game was so easy to come by west mountains that he did not have to put up with meat even a little off.

He wormed his way to his familiar cover. Excitment coursed through him as he looked into the clearing of the lick. A spearfang had just slain a plump doe dragging the carcass back into the bushes to feed, without conscious volition, his rifle sprang to his shoulder and spoke.

The spearfang yowled with anguish as it staggering from its kill.

Kenton reloaded, hurried after it. He held the gun at the ready, although he did not think he would need it for such desperate work as before. The big cat's gait reflected a wound that would soon be fatal.

So it proved. Less than a furlong from the fallen doe the scout found the spearfang dead, its mouth gaping in defiant snarl. Insects were already lighting on the cat They buzzed away as Kenton stooped beside it.

He set down his rifle, used his knife and a stone out the beast's fangs. They were a fine pair, not much shorter than the gap between his thumb and little finger when he splayed them wide. He bound the two long teeth with a rawhide thong, slipped them into his pouch rest.

He caught a slight motion out of the corner of his eye. Still on his knees, he turned. "See, I'll be rich yet.” The words caught in his throat. The sim behind was naked, and shorter and stockier than his companion and hefted a stone in its right hand.

The tableau held for several seconds. The sim looked at Kenton as if unsure it believed its eyes. He beratted himself for putting his musket to one side. The sim might hurl its rock before he grabbed the gun.

And at twenty feet, he might miss with a pistol. .

All the same, his right hand was easing towardthe musket when three more sims, all adult males, slid silently out. No chance now he could frighten them off.

He drew a pistol. That alone would have sent wild Virginia sims running; They knew what guns could do. But these sims did not know filearms.

One drew back its arm to cast its stone into the air. At the report and the noise the sims shouted in fright. The scout could flee, but the one that had its rock ready and that rallied the others. They rushed at him the missile, snatched out his other gun, and at blank range. As happens too mournful y outside of action romances, he missed. He brought the gun down club-fashion on a sims head. The stunned sim stil surged forward to grapple him, as they had thicker skulls than humans. The scout was just as glad not to remember the fight with the sims. What he could recal hurt. He soon lost consciousness The sims were not sophisticated enough to use deliberate cruelty, but when four of them beat him into submission the result came close enough to foolall, but the most exacting critic.

When he came back to himself, one sim was carrying his gun and another with its hands dug into his pack. Why the sims had not killed him on lug his head, he saw that the four he had fought with were part of a larger band. There mwt have Xber, mose of them bearing big joints lwdeer the spearfang had killed and from the her food, he thought, they could afford curiosity about him.

Humans were as Ws-aa the leverse; indeed, sims had kidnapped his grandmother when she was a baby, which proved interesting enough to distract a good part of the troop from his person.

The fine black grains of gunpowder made the sims sneeze; some tasted the stuff, and made faces at the result. The scout hoped they would toss the powderhorn onto the fire. The blast might scare them away long enough for him to get free. Of course, afoer a pound of gunpowder went off close by, he might not be in any condition to try.

Given his present predicament, though, he was willing to take the risk.

The sims poured the powder out onto the ground, scotching that chance.

His tin water jar enthral ed them a good deal more. Like his belt, it was an idea they had not thought of. One rushed over to a tiny creek a few hundred yards away, filled the jar, and brought it back.

The sim that had bound the stone to the vine belt suddenly snatched up the powderhorn. It hurried to the streamlet and filled the powderhorn with water. Adapting a tool from one use to another showed quicker wit than most sims could boast.

They came to his shot-pouch next. The bul ets cascaded out. As soon as the sims discovered they were not some queer kind of fruit, their youngsters pounced on the musket balls, which made toys unlike the sticks, leaves, and stones they had known before.

The older sims went on exploring the scout's gear. He ground his teeth as they opened the leather bag that held the canines of the spearfangs he had killed. The sims recognized the fangs at once.

Surprised hoots arose. The sims stared wide-eyed at Kenton, unable to imagine how he had slain so many of the big cats.

Last of all, the sims pulled his knife from its sheath. The only sharp edges they knew were the ones they laboriously chipped and flaked onto stone. They did not recognize the gleaming steel blade as something familiar until one of them closed her hand round it. She shrieked at the unexpected pain, gaped to see blood streaming down her fingers.

One of the males seized the knife then, by the hilt, more through luck than design. The sim brandished the weapon wildly, then suddenly stopped, realizing what it was for. Again Kenton fought panic; men likely would have tested the blade on his flesh.

But sims had minds more strictly utilitarian. The male squatted in front of one of the joints of meat the hunting party had brought back.

It screeched in pleasure at the ease with which the knife slid through the flesh. Another sim stuck the carved-off gobbet on a stick and held it over the fire.

The first smel of roasting meat made most of the sims forget about Kenton. They armed themselves with sticks and dashed over to the butcher, who, grinning, was cutting chunk afKr chunk from the doe's hindquarters. The males jostled round the fire; such a feast did not often come their way. Females and youngsters beseechingly held out their hands. With so much food, the males were generous in sharing.

The wind had shifted til it came out of the west, fil ing the sky with clouds and blowing smoke from the fire straight into Kenton's face. It made him cough and his eyes water. Mixed with it, though, was enough of the aroma of cookery to drive him nearly wild. He could hear his stomach growling above the racket the sims were making.

He loudly smacked his lips, a signal sims gave one another when they were hungry. The sims who heard him sent him the same curious look they had when he imitated their greeting-cal . But they did not feed him.

Taking a captive was so unusual for them that they had no idea how to treat one. Any being outside their troop was not one of them, and so was entitled to nothing.

Things might have been worse, Kenton decided. Instead of begging for food, he could have been food. That the sims showed no signs of moving in that direction was mildly heartening, enough at any rate to help him resist his hunger pangs.

He wondered what Charles was doing. By now the sim should long since have returned to their camp, and it was - late enough for him to be wondering what had happened to Kenton.

He might, the scout decided, be clever enough to visit the salt lick, Kenton went there most often. The scout could not guess what Charles would do after that. He was used to the company of humans, maybe he would try to go back to Virginia. Kenton wondered if the men at Portsmouth would believe his explanations, or kil him for doing away with his master. He hoped they would believe him; Charles deserved a better fate than disbelief would get him.

The sim might have a better chance here west of the mountains. He was an able hunter; he would have no trouble feeding himself.

Eventually he should be able to find a home among the wild sims here, suspicious though they were of al strangers.

Charles would be able to show them so much that he could prove himself too valuable to exclude. Apart from the knife and hatchet he carried, he had learned a great deal in Virginia that wild sims were ignorant of.

Even something as simple as the art of tying knots was unknown here.

These sims, if they were like the ones along the Atlantic, would not know how to set snares. Charles might even be able to show them how to tan leather, which would give them footwear and many new tools.

All that would make the wild sims harder to push aside when English settlers began coming over the mountains. Kenton found he did not much care. He and Charles had been a team for years now; he could not find it in his heart to wish the sim anything but good, no matter what resulted afterwards.

The wind was blowing harder now, bringing with it cool, moist air.

It must have felt wonderful to the sims, who because of their thick hair suffered worse than humans from the usual run of summer weather. That dislike of heat, though, did not keep them from feeding the fire with branches and dry shrubs whenever it began to get low. - The amount the sims could eat was astonishing. Because they spent so much time hungry, they were extravagantly able to make up for it when the chance came. They also let nothing go to waste, eating eyes, tongues, and lungs from carcasses, smashing big bones and sucking smaller ones to get every scrap of marrow.

At last, a sort of happy torpor came to the encampment.

females nursed their infants. Youngsters gradual y lost -intrest in throwing Kenton's musket balls at each other and bedded down in nests of dry grass and leaves. Most of the atults followed them before long, singly or in pairs.

A few males stayed awake. One kept the fire going. Three more went to the edge of the clearing as sentries. One of those carried a club, another a couple of chipped stones. The third, a large, hulking sim, bore Kenton's rifle. It carried the gun by the muzzle end of the barrel and swung it menacingly every minute or so, as if daring anything dangerous to come close.

The clever sim sat cross-legged by the fire not far from the scout. It stared down at the dagger it held in its lap.

From time to time it would run a hand along its chinless jaw, the very image of studious concentration.

Kenton felt a touch of sympathy; the sim could study the knife till doomsday without learning how it was made. At that moment the sim looked his way. It shook its head, exactly as a frustrated man might: it was full of questions, and had no way to ask them.

Some of the wild Virginia sims had learned sign-speech from runaways and used it among themselves, but it had not come over the mountains.

The wild troops had so little contact with one another that ideas spread very slowly among them.

The sim picked up a stone chopper, took it in its left hand and the knife in its right. The crudeness of its own product next to the other must have infuriated it, for it suddenly

scrambled to its feet and hurled the stone far into the night.

All three of the males standing watch whirled at the sound of the rejected tool landing in the bushes. The clever sim let out an apologetic hoot. The others relaxed.

The clever sim came over to glare at Kenton. The scout thought what a man would be feeling, confronted with skil s and knowledge so far ahead of anything he possessed, and confronted with a being like and yet unlike himself. Sims were less imaginative than humans, but surely some of that combination of anger, fear, and awe was on the subhuman's face.

Anger quickly came to predominaoe. Kenton uselessly tightened his muscles against the knife thrust he expected.

He hardly noticed the first raindrop that landed on his cheek, or the second. Even when a drop hit him in the eye, it distracted him only briefly from his fearful focus on the blade in the sims hairy hand.

The sim shook its head in annoyance as the rain began. To it, too, the early sprinkles were but an irritation. As the rain kept up, though, it forgot Kenton, forgot the knife it held. Its cry of alarm brought the rest of the troop bounding from their rest.

For a moment, Kenton wondered if the clever sim had gone mad. But soon he understood its concern, for the rain grew harder. The fire began to hiss as water poured down on it, and no wild sim could start a fire once it went out.

Because that was so, the sims had had to learn to keep their flames alive even in the face of rain. Some of the males held hides above the fire to shield it from the storm. Females dug ditches and built little dams of mud so the water on the ground would not get the fuel wet.

Their efforts worked for a time. The sims with the hide shield coughed and choked on the smoke it trapped, but they did not leave their post.

The fire continued to crackle.

Kenton all but ignored it. His mouth was wide open, to catch as much of the rain as he could. The sims had given him no more water than food, and his throat felt raspy as a file.

It took a while to get enough for a swallow, but every one was bliss.

The downpour grew heavier, the wind stronger. Soon it was blowing sheets of water horizontal y. The sims' hides were less and less use.

They wailed in dismay as the fire went out. Kenton could hardly hear them over the drumming of the rain. He was glad they had not dumped him face down; he might have drowned.

The storm lasted through the night, and began to ease only when light returned. Drenched, Kenton was relieved the rain was warm; had the cloudburst come, say, in fal , he would have been all too vulnerable to chest fever. He imagined it carried off many of the sims.

They huddled together, sodden and miserable, around their dead fire, their arms up to keep some of the rain from their faces. Now and then one would let out a mournful, keening cry that several others would echo. It reminded the scout eerily of a wake.

When the rain was final y over, the clever sim raked through the ashes, searching for hot coals that might be coaxed back to life. But the storm had been too strong; everything was soaked. As the sims saw they were indeed without the heat to cook their food and, in days to come, to keep them warm, they broke out in a fresh round of lamentation.

Kenton wondered if they would seek to have him restart the blaze.

If that meant getting free of them, he would do so in an instant. He would have offered, if they understood his speech or if he could have used his arms to gesture. But they did not even look his way; it did not occur to them that anyone could start a fire. His strangeness, and the curious tools he bore, were not enough to overcome that automatic assumption.

Slowly, morosely, the sims began to pick up the usual business of the camp. A grizzled male chipped away at a chunk of flint to shape a new hand-axe. Females dug roots with sticks and went into the nearby forest after early ripening berries. Youngsters turned over rocks and popped whatever crawling things they found into their mouths.

A hunting party set out, armed with an assortment of wooden clubs and sharp stones. The sim with Kenton's musket apparently decided the long gun would be too clumsy to swing in tight quarters, for it exchanged the rifle for a stout bludgeon. The scout shook his head, relieved that the sim did not grasp what the musket could do.

The clever sim did not go with the band of hunting males. Its arms were filthy to the elbows from grubbing in the ruins of the fire.

it kept staring at Kenton, as if he were a puzzle to be pieced together.

When a couple of toddlers came over and prodded him, it bared its formidable teeth and shouted so fiercely that they tumbled backward in fright.

It came over and squatted by him; it made squelching sounds as it sat in the mud. "I am not your enemy," Kenton said, as he had the night before.

It grunted. He thought it sought to converse with him, but his words meant nothing to it. Sims came to understand human speech, but their own calls in the wild, even eked out by gestures, did not make up a language. The clever sim felt the lack, yet was powerless to remedy it.

Had his arms been free Kenton might have, but he needed dumb show to ask to be released, and could not use it until he had been.

Contemplating that paradox led only to discomfiture.

If the sim and he could not converse, though, only one thing was likely to happen to him. No sims he knew kept captives, and the treatment he was getting here showed this troop to be no different.

His flesh might not be so toothsome raw as roasted, but he did not think that would save him.

The way the clever sim was licking its lips now as it looked at him told him it had come to the same conclusion. The only reason he could find for its not kil ing him immediately was to keep his meat fresh for the hunting party when they came back. That did little to improve his spirits. He was getting thirsty again, too, and very hungry.

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 sims 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 scoout'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 tel whether Charles meant the sign for him or it was simply the sims 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 individual y, togther 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 sims 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 Kentons 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 bul ets 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 skil s beyond any it could have imagined, and here, afoer 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 sims 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 get 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 foot 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 kil ed 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 shellfish, even hungry as he was he wanted to roast the frog and snake.

His stomach stil 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 sims 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 fol owed 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.

I782 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 elephants 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 fol owing 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 I780, 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.

From The Story of the Federated Commonwealths

THE TRAIN RATTLED east

across the prairie toward Springfield. Preen Chand kept his rifle across his knees, in case of sims. From his perch atop Caesar, the lead hairy elephant, he could see a long way over the grassland.

"We should make town in another hour," Paul Tilak called from Hannibal, the trail beast. "An easy trip, this one."

Preen Chand turned around. "So it is, for which I am not sorry."

He and Tilak were both small, light-brown men with delicate features.

Their grandfathers had come to America when the English decided to see if elephant handlers from India could tame the great auburn-haired beasts of the New World.

The two dozen waggons stretched out behind the pair of elephants showed that the answer was yes, though the Federated Commonwealths had been free of England for a generation. With people even then beginning to settle west of the New Nile, no country aaoss the sea could hope to enforce its will on its one-time colonies.

"Sim" Tilak shouted suddenly. "There, to the north!" Preen Chand's head whipped round. He followed his friend's pointing finger.

Sure enough, the subhuman was loping along paral el to the train, about three hundred yards away. Preen Chand muttered something unpleasant under his breath. Sims might have no foreheads to speak of, but they had learned how far a gun could shoot with hope of accuracy.

"Shall we give him a volley?" Tilak asked.

"Yes, let us," Preen Chand said. Three hundred yards was not quite impossibly long range, not with more than a dozen rifles speaking together. And the sims arrogant confidence in its own safety irked the elephant driver.

He waved a red flag back and forth to make sure the brakemen posted on top of every other car saw it. Tilak peered back over his shoulder.

"They're ready."

Preen Chand swung the flag down, snatched up his rifle.

It bellowed along with the others, and bucked against his shoulder. The acrid smell of gunpowder fil ed his nose.

The hairy elephant beneath him started at the volley. It threw up its trunk and let out a trumpeting roar almost as loud as the gunshots.

Preen Chand shouted, "Choro, Caesar, choro: stop, stop!" Elephant commands were the only Urdu he still knew. His father had preferred them to English, and passed them on to him.

He prodded Caesar behind the ear with his foot, spoke soothingly to him. Being on the whole a good-natured beast, the elephant soon calmed. Tilak's Hannibal was more excitable; the other driver had to whack him with a brass ankus to make him behave. Hannibal's ears twitched resentfully.

Preen Chand peered through the smoke to see whether all that gunfire had actual y hit the sim. It hadn't The subhuman let out a raucous hoot, shook its fist at the train and bounded away.

Preen Chand sighed. "I do not like those pests, not at al .

One day I would like to unharness Caesar and go hunting sims from elephant-back."

"Men only began settling hereabouts a few years ago," Tilak said resignedly. "Sims will be less common before long."

"Yes, but they are so clever it's almost impossible to root them out altogether. Even on the eastern coast, where the land has been settled for a hundred-fifty years, wild bands still linger. Not so many as here west of the New Nile, true, but they exist."

"Mere vermin fail to worry me," Paul Tilak said. He put a hand to his forehead to shade his eyes. "We should be able to see Springfield soon."'

"Oh, not yet," Preen Chand said. But he also looked ahead, and saw the thin line of black smoke against the sky. Alarm flashed through him.

"Fire!" he shouted. "The town must be burning!"

He dug his heels into Caesar's shoulders, yelled, "MAIImal : go ant" He heard Tilak using the elephant goad to urge Hannibal on. The two beasts had to pull hard to gain speed against the dead weight of the train.

Preen Chand hoped the brakemen were alert. If he had to slow suddenly, they would need to halt the waggons before they could barrel into the elephants ahead of them.

The line of smoke grew taller, but no wider. Preen Chand scratched his head. Funny kind of fire, he thought.

"What's burning?" a farmer called as the train rolled by, farms sprouted like mushrooms along the tracks close to town, though they were still scarce farther away. Preen Chand shrugged. Even then, in the back of his mind, he might have known the truth, but it was not the sort of truth he felt like facing before he had to.

Then he could see Springfield in the distance. Its wooden buildings looked quite intact. The smoke had stopped rising. The prairie breezes played with the plume, dispersing it.

Houses, stables, a church, warehouses passed in swift succession.

Preen Chand guided Caesar gto the last turn before the station.

"Choro!" he called agalg. Caesar slowed. The brakemen worked their levers. Sparks flew as the waggons' iron wheels squealed on the track.

The train pulled to a halt.

"Seventeen minutes ahead of schedule," Paul Tilak said with satisfaction, checking his pocket watch. "No one will be able to complain we are late on this run, Preen."

"No indeed," Preen Chand said. "But where is everybody?" Their being early was no reason for the eastbound side of the station to be empty, they had been in sight quite a while.

Where were the men and tame sims to unload the train's freight? Where were the people coming to meet arriving passengers? Where were the ostlers, with fodder and water and giant currycombs for the elephants?

Come to think of it, where had the smal boys who always gawked at the train disappeared to?

Preen Chand tapped Caesar's left shoulder, as far down as he could reach.

The hairy elephant obligingly raised its left leg. Preen Chand shinnied down to the broad, leathery foot, then dropped to the ground.

A passenger stuck his head out the window of a forward wagon.

"See here, sir," he cal ed to the elephant driver, "what is the meaning of this? I am an important man, and expect to be properly greeted. I have business to transact here before I go on to Cairo." He glared at Preen Chand as if he thought everything was his fault.

"I am very sorry, sir," Preen Chand said politely, which was not at all what he was thinking. "I will try to find out."

At that moment, a door in the station house opened. Finally, Preen Chand thought, someone's come to take a look at us. It was George Stephenson, the stationmaster, a plump little man who always wore a stovepipe hat that went badly with his build.

"What is the meaning of this?" Preen Chand shouted at him, stealing the pompous passenger's phrase. "Where are the men to take care of the elephants?" To a driver, everything else was secondary to that.

Stephenson should have felt the same way. Instead, he blinked; the idea did not seem to have occurred to him. "I'll have Wil ie and Jake get round to it," he said grudgingly. "Get round to it?" Preen Chand clapped a hand to his forehead in extravagant disbelief. "How else will they make enough money for their whiskey?

What is wrong with this town today? Has everyone here gone out of his mind?"

"Not hardly," Stephenson said. He was looking at Caesar and Hannibal in a way Preen Chand had never seen before. Was that pity in his eyes?

"We've just seen the future, is al . Maybe you better take a peep too, Preen, so as you and Paul there can start hunting' out a new line of work."

Then Preen Chaud did know what had happened, knew it with a certainty that gripped his guts. Even so, he had to make Stephenson spell it out.

"You mean, ?"

"Ayah, that's right, Preen. One o' them newfangled steam railroad engines has done come to Springfield. How do you propose outdoin' a machine?"

The pennant tied to the front of the steam engine called it "The Iron Elephant." To Preen Chand, the name was an obscene parody. The upjutting smokestack reminded him of Caesar's trunk, yes, but that trunk frozen in,rkgor mortis. Painting the boiler red-brown to imitate a hairy elephant's pelt did not disguise its being made of non. And the massive gears and wheels on either side of that boiler seemed to Preen Chand affixed as an afterthought, not parts of the device in the way Caesar's great legs were part of the elephant.

Besides, the thing stank. Used to the clean, earthy smel of elephant, Preen Chand's nostrils twitched at the odors of coal smoke and damp, cooling iron.

Had he been able to get closer, he thought, he probably would have been able to find other things to dislike about the Iron Elephant. As it was, he had to despise the contraption at a distance. Almost everybody in Springfield had jammed into the westbound side of the station to stare at the steam engine.

Stephenson turned to Preen Chand, saying, "I know you'll want to meet Mr. Trevithick, the engine handler, and compare notes. He's been waiting here for you. Come on, I'll take you to him." He plunged into the crowd, using his weight to shove people aside.

Meeting this Trevithick person was the last thing Preen Chand wanted. He also had a schedule to keep. He grabbed Stephenson by the shoulder. "Of course he's been waiting, he only has that damned engine. Me, I have an entire train to see to. You have my elephants fed, this instant. You have them watered. You unload what comes off here, and get your eastbound freight on board. Get your passengers moving. If I am one minute late coming into Cairo on the New Nile, I will complain to the company, yes I will, and with any luck we will bypass Springfield afterwards."

He knew he was bluffing. Likely Stephenson did too, but he could not afford to ignore the threat. Without a rail stop, Springfield would wither and die. With poor grace, he started pul ing station hands out of the crush and shouting for passengers to get over to the eastbound track. The press of people thinned, a little.

"Satisfied?" the stationmaster asked ironical y.

'Better, at any rate," Preen Chand said.

"One fine day soon you won't be able to throw your weight around just on account of you drive elephants, Preen. When steam comes in, we won't need stables, we won't need the big hay yards. This operation'll run on half the people and a quarter the cost. " Stephenson rubbed his hands at the prospect.

"And what do you do, pray tell me, when one of these engines breaks down? Whom will you hire? How much will you have to pay him?

More than your ostlers or a leech, I would wager. And how long will the repairs take? Caesar and Hannibal are reliable. What sort of schedule will you be able to keep up."

"The Iron Elephant's reliable too," Stephenson insisted, though Preen Chand's objections made him sound as if he were also trying to convince himself. But his voice steadied as he went on. "It's steamed all the way out from Boston in Plymouth Commonwealth without coming to grief. I reckon that says something'."

In spite of himself, Preen Chand was impressed: that was more than I,300

miles. Still, he said scornfully, "Yes, hauling nothing but itself and its coal-waggon." No passenger coaches or freight waggons stood behind the Iron Elephant. "How will it do, pulling a real load?"

"I don't know anything about that. Like I told you before, fellow you want to talk to is the engine handler. Come on, Preen, you may as well.

You know they'll be a good while yet over on the other side."

"Oh, very well." Preen Chand followed Stephenson as the stationmaster forced his way through the crowd, which had thinned more while they argued.

"Mr. Trevithickl" Stephenson called, and then again, louder, "Mr.

Trevithickl" A pale, almost consumptivelooking young man standing by the traveling stem engine lifted his head inquiringly. "Mr. Trevithick, this here is Mr. Preen Chand, the elephant driver you wanted to see."

"Ahl" The engine handler broke oft the conversation he was having, came hurrying over to pump Preen Chand's hand. "They spoke very well of you in Cairo, sir, when I was arranging permits to travel this line, said your Caesar and Hannibal were first-rate beasts. I see they were right; you're here a good deal ahead of schedule." Like any railroad man, Trevithick always had a watch handy.

"Thank you so very much, sir." Preen Chand saw he was going to have to work to dislike this man; Trevithick was perfectly sincere.

Looking into his intense blue eyes, Preen Chand suspected he was one of those people who always said just what they thought because it never occurred to them to do anything else.

"Call me Richard, couldn't stand going as Dick Trevithick, you know. And you're Preen? Shouldn't be any stuffiness between folks in the same line of work."

Again Preen Chand realized that he meant it. As gently as he could, he said, "Richard, it is a line of work that you and that, thing", he could not make himself call it the Iron Elephant, "are trying to get me out of."

'Am I? How?" Trevithick's surprise was genuine, which in turn surplised Preen Chand. "Who better to work the railroads under, than someone long familiar with them as an elephant driver?

Everything about them will be the same, except for what pulls the waggons."

"And, Richard, with all respect, everything about iron and wood is the same, except when I need to start a fire. I've spent a lifetime learning to care for elephants; what good will that do me in dealing with your boiler there?"

"A child could manage the throttle. And we have a whole new kind of boiler in the Iron Elephant, with tubes passing through it to heat the water more effectively. And the cylinders are almost horizontal; they work much betoer than the old vertical design did." Trevithick glowed with enthusiasm, and plainly wanted Preen Chand to catch fire too. "Why, on level ground, with the extra power the new system gives, we can do close to thirty miles an hour, practically flying along the ground!"

Had Stephenson named the figure, Preen Chand would have cal ed him a liar on the spot. He did not think Trevithick a man given to exaggeration, though. Thirty miles an hour He tried to imagine what the wind would be like, whipping in his face: as if he were on a madly galloping racehorse, but for some long time, not just the few minutes the beast would take to tire.

"How about that, Preen?" Stephenson put in, nudging him in the ribs.

"Only way you'd get Caesar and Hannibal moving that fast'd be to drop

'em off a roof."

Preen Chand grunted. He thought of the stationmaster's boasts about how much he could cut back his operation. The elephant driver smiled sardonically at Trevithick's naivete. Everything would be the same, would it?

"Thirty miles an hour is a marvelous speed, Richard; it is most marvelous indeed. But that is unloaded, I take it. What can your steam engine", he would not call it the Iron Elephant, not even for politeness' sake, "do pul ing a load of, say, fifty tons?"

"Tel him, Mr. Trevithick." This time the engine handler was the recipient of Stephenson's conspiratorial elbow.

He did not seem to notice. The gleam in his eyes turned inward as he calculated. At last he said, "That is a great deal of weight. Does your team real y pul so much?" For the first time, his voice held a trace of doubt.

"They can, yes," Preen Chand said proudly.

"Truth to tell, I hate to wonder if the machinery could stand it.

But I think we should be able to do something on the order of three miles an hour, not counting stops for water or for any breakdowns that might happen."

"Three miles an hour? Is that all?" George Stephenson sounded more betrayed than disappoinoed.

"If that." Trevithick looked amused. "Now you see why I tend to put more stress on the engine's top speed."

Preen Chand, though, was still impressed, and worried. His beloved elephants were faster, but they were only flesh and blood. They had to rest, where the steam engine could go on and on and on. And yet, he thought, if I can show everyone how the elephants outdo this stinking contraption"Richard, load your train up, and I will load mine, and I will race you from here to Carthage."

"A race, eh?" Trevithick's bright eyes glowed. "How far is this Carthage place from here?"

"Fifty-three miles, a-tiny bit south of west. The railroad ends soon after it."

"Hmm." Preen Chand watched the engine handler go into that near-tranoe of conoentration again. When he emerged from it, he gave the elephant driver a respectful look. "That will be a very close thing, Preen. You know how embarrassing, and I mean financially as well as in the sense of a blow to my pride, it would be for me to lose?"

Preen Chand returned a bland shrug. "You've come all this way from Plymouth, Richard, to show off your ironmongery. How embarrassing would it be for word to get out that you refused a challenge from your competition?"

Trevithick laughed out loud. "You misunderstand me. I have no intention of refusing. When shall we start?"

"Tomorrow morning?"

"What?" George Soephenson let out a howl. "You're eastbound for Cairo tomorrow morning, Preen! What about your precious schedule?"

"Wel , what about it? If this steam engine comes in and replaces Caesar and Hannibal, then I will have to do as you suggested before and find other work, so it will not matter if the company fires me. But if elephants are better than machinery, the company should know that too.

They will thank me more for finding that out than they will be angry with me for being late. And besides, George, why should you worry?

Don't you own the town hotel?"

Stephenson suddenly looked crafty. "Well, yes, now that you mention it, I do."

"Here is a man who thinks of everything," Trevithick said admiringly. "I wonder if I ought to race against you after all, no, my friend, only a joke. But tomorrow morning will be too soon. We will have to load up waggons so both our trains carry equal weight....

George, you live i here, unlike either Preen or myself. Can you hire some sims from the locals to help the ones at the station here with that work?"

"Reckon so." Stephenson gave Trevithick a sidelong glanoe. "So long as I ain't payin' for it, that is."

Preen Chand gulped; he was never going to be rich on an elephant driver's salary. But Trevithick said, "I'll cover it, never fear.

What I don't make up on bets will come back in the long run through the ballyhoo this race will cause."

"Whatever you say. All I know is, you can't put no bal yhoo in the bank. Them folks are partial to gold."

"Who isn't?" Trevithick chuckled.

Preen Chand went back to the other side of the station to stop the unloading of his train, the less that came off, the less that would have to be put back tomorrow. The straw boss who oversaw Stephenson's gang of sims looked at him as if he were crazy. "First you was in a hurry to unload and now you want them put back. Can't you make up your fool mind?"

"Truly I am sorry, Mr. Dubois." Preen Chand had always thought the straw boss more capable than Stephenson, and treated him accordingly.

Dubois only grunted in disgust, then turned and shouted to the dozen sims that were unloading sacks of grain from the waggons. He gave hand signals to back his oral instructions. Sims could fol ow human speech, but had trouble imitating it. They much preferred to use gestures, and many overseers gave orders both ways, taking no chances on being misunderstood.

That care paid off now. One of the sims gaped in disbelief at the overseer. Its long, chinless jaw fell open to reveal yellow teeth bigger and stouoer than any man's. It ran a hand over what would have been a human's forehead, but was in the sim only a smooth slope behind bony browridges.

Back, it signed, adding the little gesture that turned the word to a question. Preen Chand usual y had some trouble following hand-talk, but the sim made the sign so emphatic, the way a man might shout an objection, that he understood it with ease.

Back, Dubois signed firmly. Put bags back.

The sim scratched its hairy cheek, let out a wordless hoot of protest.

It signed, Bad. Very bad. Work all gar e. From its point of view, Preen Chand supposed it had a point. But under Dubois's uncompromising eye, it and its comrades began putting the produce back aboard the train.

"What are they doing, Preen?" Paul Tilak demanded. "That should go in the warehouses here, look at the bill of lading. And why were they so slow getting here in the first place? Where was everyone, and why is everyone so excited?"

Very much the same set of questions, Preen Chand thought wryly, that he had thrown at George Stephenson. They had the same answer, too: "Steam engine."

"Damnation!" Tilak shouted, so loudly that Hannibal let out an alarmed snort and swung its shaggy head to see what was wrong with its driver.

"It is all right, real y it is," Tilak reassured him. The elephant snorted again, doubt ful y, but subsided.

"These accursed engines will be the ruination of us," Tilak said.

"I hope not."

"Of course they will." Tilak was gloomier by nature than Preen Chand. He noticed Dubois's gang of sims again.

"What are they doing, Preen?"

Preen Chand told him. Tilak's jaw dropped. He frowned.

"I do not know if we can beat this Trevithick, Preen, if his machine performs as he says it will."

"He does not know if he can beat us, either, which makes for a fair trial. Cheer up, Paul. Even if we lose, how are we worse off?

What will happen? The company will buy engines, just as it would without any race at all. But if we win, perhaps they will not."

Tilak looked unconvinced. Before the argument could go further, the passenger who had bothered Preen Chand from the coach window now grabbed him by the arm. "See here, sir Do I understand you to mean that this train will not proceed to Cairo, but rather is returning to Carthage?"

"I am afraid that is correct, sir." As gently as he could, Preen Chand shook free of the man's grasp. "I am so very sorry for any inconvenience this may, "

"Inconvenience?" the man exclaimed.

His face was al most as red as his waistcoat. "Do you know, sir, that I stand to lose out on a very profitable investment opportunity if I am delayed here?"

That was too much for Preen Chand. The deference that was part of his railroading persona went by the board. He stuck his face an inch from the pasnger's nose and bel owed, "God damn you to hel , do you know that I stand to lose out on a job I have loved for twenty-five years and that my father and grandfather held before me. I piss on your investment opportunity, and for a copper sester I'd black your eye, tool" Tilak quickly stepped between them before they could start a fight. The passenger stamped away, still yelling threats.

Preen Chand looked toward his beloved elephants. The ostlers had set out big wooden tubs of water for them.

"Derrl" he shouoed to Caesar "Splash!" He thrust out his arm, pointing to the obnoxious fellow with whom he'd been quarreling. Caesar snorted up a big trunkful of water and let it go in s a sudden shower, that drenched Preen Chand. Tilak and Dubois got wet too, and hopped back swearing. The fellow the elephant driver had intended to soak got off unscathed.

"It has been that kind of day," Preen Chand sighed. "Fetch me a towel, please, someone."

Instead of starting the next morning, as Preen Chand had proposed, the race did not begin until three days later. Part of the delay was from loading waggons so that the elephants and the steam engine would pul about the same amount of weight. The rest came from dickering over conditions.

Since the flesh-and-blood elephants were ready at once, while the Iron Elephant had to build up steam, Trevithick wanted Preen Chand not to start until the engine could move. This the elephant driver indignantly refused, on the grounds that the start-up delay was an inherent part of the mechanical device's function. Public opinion in Spring field backed him, and Trevithick gave way.

But Preen Chand had to yield in turn on the load the Iron Elephant would have to haul. He wanted the weight of the waggons added on to that of the engine and coal-waggon.

Trevithick, though, neatly turned the tables on him, pointing out that the Iron Elephant natural y got lighter as it traveled and consumed its fuel. The coal, he said, should count as part of its initial burden. He won his point.

Most of Springfield was there to see the race begin. The Iron Elephant was on the regular westbound track; Caesar and Hannibal took the track usually reserved for eastbound trains. Trevithick doffed his dapper cap to Preen Ghand.

The elephant driver returned a curt nod. Trevithick was not a bad sort.

If anything, that made matters worse.

The mayor of Springfield cried, "Are all you gentlemen ready?" He held a pistol in the air. It would have taken more pul than a steam engine or a couple of hairy elephants put out to keep His Honor away.

Hearing no objections, he fired the starting gun. Caesar's ears flapped at the report. "Mal -mall!" Preen Chand shouted. Behind him, he heard Paul Tilak give Hannibal the same command, and emphasize it with a whack of the elephant goad.

The hairy elephants surged forward as far as their harness would al ow.

Then, grunting with effort, they lowered their heads, dug in their big round feet, and pulled for al they were worth. Fifty tons of dead weight was a lot \ even for such powerful beasts to overcome.

From the other track, Preen Chand heard the clatter of coal being shoveled into the Iron Elephant's firebox. He did not look over. He knew his train would get rol ing first, and inoended to wring every inch out of his advantage.

"Mall-mal !" he shouted again.

The spectators started to slide out of his field of vision.

"We're moving!"" he and Tilak shouted in the same breath.

"Mall-mal !" In his urgency, Preen Chand used the anhus on Caesar.

The elephant shook his head reproachfully.

Each step Caesar and Hannibal took came more easily than the one before.

Horses paral eled the twaek, as riders came along to watch the race.

Preen Chand kin d back over his shoulder. The Iron Elephant stil had not moved "We may do this yet" he called to Paul Tilak. He hoped so. He had bet as many big silver denaires as he could afford, and perhaps a few more, on the great animal straining beneath him.

"We shall see," was all Tilak said. As far as Preen Chand knew, he had not made any bets for the elephants. Hie had - not made any against them, either. Had he done so, Preen Chand would have kicked him off Hannibal even if it meant putting an unschooled oxherd aboard the beast.

He had already filed one brakeman, he wanted no one with him who had a stake in losing.

Buildings hid the Iron Elephant as Caesar and Hannibal pul ed their train round a curve. They had made a good quarter of a mile and were approaching the outskirts of town when Tilak said, "The machine is coming after us."

Preen Chand looked back again. Sure enough, a plume of steam and smoke was rising above the train station. The elephant driver grunoed, sounding very much like Caesar. "Whatever Trevithick does, we are stil faster, so long as we are moving. What worries me is that he will go al night."

"Do you want us to try that?" Tilak asked.

"No," Preen Chand said regretfully; he had thought long and hard about it. "If we do, Caesar and Hannibal will be worth nothing tomorrow. Even as is, I am not sure they will be able to match today's pace. And I am so afraid they will have to. If Trevithick's engine works as he hopes, we will have to catch him from behind."

Soon they were out among farms once more. Cows and sheep stared incuriously as the hairy elephants tramped past. Rifle-toting farmers guarded their stock. Even so close to Springfield, sims were a constant nuisance. They might not have the brains of humans, but they were too clever to trap.

Preen Chand decided he was going to get a stiff neck if he kept turning around to look back, but he could not help it. He had to see the Iron Elephant in action. Here it came, with its train behind it.

He put a spyglass to his eye for a better view.

He thought it even uglier moving than stationary. Shafts connected to its pistons drove small gears at either side of the back of the engine.

Those, in turn, meshed with larger gears in front of them, and the larger gears joined with the ones on the outside of the engine's four wheels. Smoke belched from the stack as the contraption crawled along.

Even from close to half a mile away, Preen Chand could hear it chug and wheeze and rattle. It reminded him more of a flatulent iron cockroach than an elephant.

When he said that out loud, Tilak chuckled, remarking, "The farm animals would agree with you, it seems."

Preen Chand had been too busy studying the Iron Elephant to pay atoention to them. A quick glance showed his fellow driver to be right.

The livestock had reacted to their own train as they would have toward a couple of mules hauling a waggon past, which is to say they did not react at all.

The noisy, smoky, stinking steam engine was something else again.

Animals' ears went up in surprise, then back in alarm. Terrified flocks pounded across the fields, farmers trying without much luck to halt them and now and then pausing to shake their fists at the Iron Elephant.

"I never thought of that," Preen Chand exclaimed. "How can these machines ever accomplish anything, if sheep and cattle and horses will not go near them?"

"Trevithick has come this far," Paul Tilak pointed out, which made Preen Chand give him a dirty look.

The sun climbed the sky. One by one, the townsfolk who had ridden out to watch the race began turning back for Springfield. It was not the sort of event to be easily watched.

Neither contestant moved very fast, and they were drawing steadily farther apart. The only drama lay in who would finish first, but the answer to that was stil more than a day away.

This time Tilak was the one who looked back. What he saw raised even his unsanguine spirits. "They have broken down!" he shouted.

Preen Chand slapped the spyglass to his eye. Sure enough, the Iron Elephant was barely limping along. Less smoke poured from the stack, and what there was had changed color.

The brakemen raised a cheer. "Come on, Caesar!"

"Go, Hannibal, gal"

"Run that hunk of tin back to the blacksmith's shop where it belongs!" But Preen Chand kept watching. As he had been certain, Richard Trevithick was rot a man to yield tamely to misfortune. The engine handler worked furiously on his machine. Once he leaped away; Preen Chand saw one of his henchmen rush up to help him bandage his hand. Together they plunged back to their repairs. After a while, the Iron Elephant picked up speed again.

All the same, Caesar and Hannibal gained on the steam engine with every soep they took. They were pul ing magnificently now, their heads down, their double-curved tusks, bigger by far than those of the Indian elephants Preen Chand's grandfather had fondly remembered, almost dragging the ground.

A small stream ran not far from the tracks. "They should water themselves," Tilak said.

Preen Chand haoedto stop for any reason, but knew his friend was right.

He raised a signal flag to warn the brakemen to stop, cal ed, "Choro!"

to Caesar. Tilak echoed him. The brakes squealed as they halted. The two elephant drivers unharnessed their beasts and rode them over to the creek. "I'd like to see Trevithick do this when his boiler runs dry,"

Preen Chand said. Tilak nodded.

Caesar and Hannibal lowered their trunks into the water. They squiroed it down their throats, a good gal on and a half at a squirt.

Tilak had been right, they were thirsty. They drank close to thirty gallons each before they slowed down.

Their exertion had also made them hot. "DeTT-tol!" Preen Chand cal ed:

"Squirt water on your back." Caesar did. Preen Chand scrambled forward onto the hairy elephant's head to keep from getting soaked.

As the elephant drivers led their charges back to the train, Caesar and Hannibal used their trunks to uproot a couple of bushes and stuff them into their mouths. They had eaoen well before the race staroed and would be fed again come evening, but they were not the sort of animals to miss any chance for a snack.

"Mall-mal !" Preen Chand shouted, and the train headed west once more.

Behind them, the smoke that marked the Iron Elephant sank lower and lower in the east. Finally Preen Chand had to use the spyglass to see it. It never quite disappeared, though, any more than an aching tooth that has stopped hurting for the moment ceases to give little reminders of its prence.

The farms that ran west along the railway from Spring field began to peoer out. Not many ran east from Carthage; the tracks had reached it only a few years before. Between \ l the two towns was a broad stretch where the four bands of iron ran through still-virgin prairie.

A herd of big-horned buffalo grazed north of the tracks.

It was not one of the huge aggregations of spring or fall, ' when migrating throngs made the ground shake and could delay a train for hours or days as they crossed the rail line.

Preen Chand knew some of his brakemen were swearing becau the buffalo were out of rifle range. He did not care e l himself; he did not eat beef. l A pronghorn pranced daintily by, a good deal closer than i l the buffalo. A gun barked. Caesar jerked beneath Preen Chand; he heard Paul Tilak cursing and pounding Hanni- 0 hal back under control. S

a When Preen Chand could spare a moment, he saw the pronghorn lying in the grass, kicking. He raised an eye brow, impressed at the shooting.

The little antelope was at least as &r away as the sima whole volley had missed on the way to Springfield.

Several men swung down from the waggons to pick up the pronghorn.

All but one, presumably the felbw who had kil ed it, had rifles at the ready. The waist-high plains grass could hide almost anything: sims, wolves, a spear fanged cat.

The brakemen had to run hard to catch up to the train with their booty.

None of them cal ed to Preen Chand to slow down. They knew what the odds were for that.

The elephant driver had his cap pulled low to shield his eyes from the westering sun when the train went by anoNer creek. "What do you say we stop here?" Tilak called "Hannibal is tired."

Preen Chand did not want to stop for anything, but he could feel that Caesar was not pul ing as powerfully as he had earlier in the day.

The hairy elephants were so large making the same mental calculations he was. "We stay," he said at last. "We can catch them before noon, a few miles outside Carthage. And if we race them now we risk running the elephants into the ground. They worked hard yesoerday, and they need as much rest as they can get."

The brakemen accepted his decision without argument as he would have taken their word over anything concerning the waggons. Tilak, though, took him aside and said quietly, "I hope we can catch them.

Hannibal was flagging badly there at the end yRay."

"Caesar too." Preen Chand hated to make the admission as if saying it out loud somehow made it more real. He was, however, far from giving up hope. "The steam engine has its problems too, I thought it would. If it were running as well as Trevithick claimed it could, it would have been here hours ago."

"And if it had, we could have waved goodbye to the race."

"That is true. But it passed us now, not then. We, at least know how far we can hope to go on any given day. What will that smel y piece of ironwork do to schedules?"

"It has certainly played the very devil with mine." Tilak yawned.

"I am going back to bed."

"There, for once, my friend, I cannot argue with you," Preen Chand said.

His only consolation was reflecting that Trevithick probably needed sleep even more than he did.

Afoer eating enormously at sunrise, Caesar and Hannibal seemed eager to pull. The train rattled forward at a pace betoer than Preen Chand had expected. The Iron Elephant's plume of smoke, which had shrunk behind them the day before, now grew larger and blacker and stood tal er in the sky as they gained. Only a couple o "What do you say we stop here?"

Tilak called "Hannibal is tired."

Preen Chand did not want to stop for anything, but he could feel that Caesar was not pul ing as powerfully as he had earlier in the day.

The hairy elephants were so large making the same mental calculations he was. "We stay," he said at last. "We can catch them before noon, a few miles outside Carthage. And if we race them now we risk running the elephants into the ground. They worked hard yesoerday, and they need as much rest as they can get."

The brakemen accepted his decision without argument as he would have taken their word over anything concerning the waggons. Tilak, though, took him aside and said quietly, "I hope we can catch them.

Hannibal was flagging badly there at the end yRay."

"Caesar too." Preen Chand hated to make the admission as if saying it out loud somehow made it more real. He was, however, far from giving up hope. "The steam engine has its problems too, I thought it would. If it were running as well as Trevithick claimed it could, it would have been here hours ago."

"And if it had, we could have waved goodbye to the race."

"That is true. But it passed us now, not then. We, at least know how far we can hope to go on any given day. What will that smel y piece of ironwork do to schedules?"

"It has certainly played the very devil with mine." Tilak yawned.

"I am going back to bed."

"There, for once, my friend, I cannot argue with you," Preen Chand said.

His only consolation was reflecting that Trevithick probably needed sleep even more than he did.

Afoer eating enormously at sunrise, Caesar and Hannibal seemed eager to pull. The train rattled forward at a pace betoer than Preen Chand had expected. The Iron Elephant's plume of smoke, which had shrunk behind them the day before, now grew larger and blacker and stood tal er in the sky as they gained. Only a couple of hours passed until the steam engine's train became visible, a long, black centipede stretched out along its track.

"Go ahead and run, Richard," Preen Chand called though Trevithick, of course, could not hear. "You cannot run fast enough."

The engine handler must have seen his rival's train and disliked the raoe at which it was gaining. He must have tied down a safety valve, for more smoke poured from the Iron Elephant's stack. All the same, the flesh-and-blood beasts continued to gain.

Closer and closer they came. Now they were only a mile behind, now half a mile. And there, heartbreakingly, they stuck. Caesar's and Hannibal's morning burst of energy faded. However much Preen Chand and Paul Tilak urged them on, they could come no closer. And as the elephant . drivers watched and cursed, the Iron Elephant began to pull away once more.

Preen Chand felt like weeping from frustration. Through his spyglass, the men aboard the Iron Elephant seemed close enough to reach out and touch. Yet as he watched helplessly, they drew ever farther from him.

He refused to lower the spyglass, cherishing the illusion it gave of a neck and-neck race. And so he was watching stil when the Iron Elephant slid into a pit.

Preen Chand stared, not believing what he saw. He knew how hastily this stretch of the railbed had been laid; it had only gravel underneath it, not a good solid foundation of stone rammed earth.

All the same, he had crossed the same stretch of track only a few days before, and there had been no storms since to undermine it.

But something had. Paul Tilak saw what it was. "Sims!" he shouoed.

Suddenly and most uncharacteristically, he burst out laughing. "Their trap caught a harder-skinned elephant than they bargained for" Once Preen Chand's attention was diverted from the train ahead, he too saw the subhumans rushing to the attack.

Some carried wooden spears, their points fire-hardened.

Others bore clubs, still others held stones chipped sharp that they could throw a long way. He spied the glint of a few axeheads and steel knives, perhaps stolen, perhaps gotten in trade.

Tilak was right: the sims would not gorge on hairy elephant, as they hoped. But they were not fussy about what they ate, brakeman would do well enough. And with everyone thrown in a heap by the Iron Elephant's sudden and unexpeted stop, only a couple of men were able to shoot at the charging hunoers. After that it was a melee, and the sims were stronger, fiercer, sometimes even better armed than their foes.

Preen Chand threw up the red flag to warn his crew, then yelled "Choro!"

as loud as he could. The train stopped "Get Hannibal out of his harness!" he told Paul Tilak. Preen Chand was already unbuckling the thick leather straps that linked Caesar to Hannibal. He stood up on his elephant's back, cal ed to the train crew, "Grab your rifles and climb onto the two beasts. It is a rescue now!"

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, Preen 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.

"Fol ow us as closely as you can," Preen Chand told the disappointed latecomers from the back of the train. Then he dug in his toe behind Caesar's ear. "Mall-mal !" he shouoed: 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 rol ed 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 minuoes at the elephants' best pace, which they were certainly making. When they had covered about half the distance, Preen 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.

Preen 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 battler 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. Preen Chand's bul et 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, Preen 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 tal grass concealed.

The railroad men moved up cautiously. A couple went ahead to reclaim a body the sims had dropped in their flight. Preen 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. Preen 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. Preen Chand looked down into it. "Hel o, Preen, very good to see you indeed," Richard Trevithick said. He held a pistol clubfashion 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," Preen 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 kil 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 Ieaning 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," Preen Chand poinoed out.

"Something to that, I suppose."

A rope snaked into the hole. Preen Chand tied it around Trevithick's body under his arms. "Is it hooked up to Caesar?" he cal ed.

"Sure is," a brakeman answered.

"Good. Mall-mal !"

The rope went taut. Preen Chand helped Trevithick to 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. Preen 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," Trevit hick remarked.

"You are quite right. My apologies. I will dirty you again, if you like," Preen 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 Preen 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.

Preen 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 I50 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."

Preen 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." Preen Chand's eyes slipped back to the Iron Elephant. "Richard, may I ask what you will do next?"

The engine handler fol owed his rival's glance. "I expect we'll be able to salvage it, Preen, 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 al be dead now," Preen 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 t 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, Preen, 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, Preen," Tilak put in.

"Maybe so, maybe so," Preen Chand said. "Our grand fathers, 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 al ?"

Trevithick and Tilak shook their heads.

"When that second engine comes into Springfield, I am going to have to admit George Soephenson is right!""

I804 Though the Fall Heavens

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 natural y 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 household staff (and also, on proved unsatisfactory 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, general y 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'tre 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. Gil en cal ed 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, houseslaves rarely felt the whip, but he did not intend to tempt fate.

All Mrs. Gil en 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."

"Yes, ma'am," he said again, this time with something like enthusiasm.

He returned to the kitchen, put the pitcher and two glasses on a tray, and went out to look for his master and the overseer.

A big male sim was chopping logs into firewood behind the house.

It stopped for a moment to nod to Jeremiah as he went by.

He nodded back. "Hello, Joe," he said, a faint edge of contempt riding his words. He might be a slave, but by God he was a man!

Joe did not notice Jeremiah's condescension. Muscles bulged under the thick coat of hair on the sims arms as it swung the axe up for another stroke. The axe descended. Chips flew. One flew right over Joe's head, landed in the dust behind the sim.

Jeremiah chuckled as he walked on. Had he been wielding the axe, the chip would have caught him right in the forehead and probably made him bleed. But sims had no foreheads. Above Joe's deep-set eyes was only a beetling ridge of bone that retreated smoothly toward the back of his head.

More sims worked in the fields, some sowing hemp seeds broadcast on the land devoted to the farm's main cash crop others weeding among the growing green stalks of wheat. They would have done a better job with lighter hoes, but the native American subhumans lacked the sense to take proper care of tools of good quality.

Mostly the sims worked in silenoe. Now and then one would let its long, chinless jaw fall open to emit a grunt of effort, and once Jeremiah heard a screech as a sim hit its own foot instead of a weed.

But unlike humans, the sims did not talk among themselves. Few ever mastered English, and their own grunts and hoots were too restricted to make up a real language.

Instead, they used hand signs like the ones the deaf and dumb employed; those came easier to them than speech. Jeremiah had heard Mr. Gil en say even the wild sims that still lurked in the forests and mountains two centuries after colonists came to Virginia used hand signs taught them by runaways in preference to their native cal s.

Charles Gillen and Harry Stowe were standing together, watching the sims work. Gillen turned and saw Jeremiah. "Well, well, what have we here?"

he said, smiling. He was a large man, about the same age as his wife, with perpetually ruddy features and a strong body beginning to go to fat.

"Lemonade, sir, for you and Mr. Stowe." Jeremiah poured for each man, handed them their glasses.

Gillen drained his without taking it from his lips; his face turned even redder than usual. "Ahhl" he said, wiping his mouth.

"Now that was a kindly thought, and surely it's no part of your regular duties to go traipsing al over the farm looking for me." He rummaged through the pockets of his blue cotton breeches. "Here's a ten-sester for your trouble."

"I thank you very much, sir." Jeremiah's trousers did not have pockets.

He stowed the small silver coin in a leather pouch he wore on a thong round his neck under his shirt. The hope for just such a reward was one of the things that had made him eager to go to his master. Besides, it beat working.

He did not mention that the lemonade had been Mrs. Gillen's idea.

Even if her husband found out, though, he would not take the ten-sester back; he was a fair-minded man.

Harry Stowe kept his glass in his left hand as he drank. His right hand held his whip, as it always did when he was in the field.

The whip was a yard-long strip of untanned cowhide, an inch thick at the grip and tapering to a point.

Stowe was a small, compact man with fine features and cold blue eyes that never stopped moving. He snarled an oath and stepped forward. The whip cracked. A sim shouted in alarm, clutched at its right arm.

"Oh, nonsense, Tom," Stowe snapped. "I didn't hurt you, and well you know it. But damn you, have more care with what you do. That was wheat you were rooting out there, not a weed."

The sim understood English well enough, even if it could not speak. Its hands moved. Sorry, it signed. Its broad, flat features were unreadable. When it went back to weeding, though, it soon uprooted another stalk of wheat.

Stowe's hand tightened on the butt of the whip until his knuckles whitened. But he did not lash out. His shoulders sagged. "In a man, that would be insolenoe," he said to Charles Gillen. "But sims cannot, will not attend as a man would. I could wear out my arm, my cowskin, and my temper, sir, and not improve them much."

"Your being here at all keeps them working, Harry. We shouldn't expect them to be fine farmers," Gillen replied. "When men first came to Virginia, they found the sims here unable to make fire, with no tools but chipped stones."

"You are an educated man, to know such things," the overseer said.

"For myself, all I know is that they do not work as I would wish, and so waste your substance. I wish you could afford to have niggers in the fields. I would make fine farmers of them, I wager." He looked speculatively toward Jeremiah.

The house-slave wished he could become invisible; suddenly he was not glad at all he had come out to the fields. He stretched out his hands to his master. "Mr. Gil en, you wouldn't treat me like no sim, would you, sir?" The wobble of fear in his voice was real.

"No, no, Jeremiah, don't fret yourself," Gillen reassured him, sending a look-at-the-trouble-you-caud glance Stowe's way. "I find it hard to imagine a circumstance that would force me to use you so."

"Thank you, sir, thank you." Jeremiah knew he was laying it on thick, but he took no chances. Not only was labor in the fields exhausting, but he could imagine nothing more degrading. Even as a slave, he had a measure of self-respect. One day he hoped to be able to buy his liberation. The ten-ster his master had given him put his private hoard at over eighty denaires. Maybe he would buy land, end up owning a few sims himself. It was something to dream about, anyway.

But if Gil en worked him as he would a sim, would he not think of him in the same way, instead of as a person? He might never get free then!

Why, his master had already turned his back on him and was talking politics with Stowe as if he were not there. "So whom will you vote for in the censoral elections this fall, Harry?"

"I favor Adams and Westerbrook: two men from the same party will work together, instead of us having to suffer through another five years of divided government like this last term."

"I don't know," Gillen said judiciously. "When the Conscript Fathers wrote the Articles of Independence after we broke from England in '38, they gave us two censors to keep the power of the executive from growing too strong, as it had in the person of the king. To me that says they intended the two men to be of opposing view, to check each other's excesses."

"To check excesses, aye. But I'm partial to a government that governs, not one that spends all its time arguing with itself."

Gillen chuckled. "Something to that, I suppose. Still, don't you think, "

Jeremiah stopped listening. What did politics matter to him? As a slave, he could no more vote than a sim could. His head hung as he made his slow way back to the house.

Mrs. Gillen saw him dawdling, and scolded him. She kept an eye on him the rest of the day, which meant he had to work at the pace she set, not his own. That, he thought resentful y, was more trouble than a ten-sester was worth. To make things worse, he burnt the ham the Gillens, Stowe, and he were going to have for supper. That earned him another scolding from his mistress and a contemptuous stare from the overseer.

At sunset, Stowe blew a long, unmusical blast on a bugle, the signal for the sims to come in from the fields for their evening meal.

Their food was unexciting but filling: mostly barley bread and salt pork, eked out once or twice a week, as tonight, with vegetables from the garden plot and with molasses. The sims also ate whatever small live things they could catch. Some owners discouraged that as a disgusting habit (Jeremiah certainly thought it was; stepping on a well-gnawed rat tail could be counted on to make his stomach turn over).

Most, like Charles Gillen, did not mind, for it made their property cheaper to feed.

"Never catch me eating rats, not if I'm starving," Jeremiah said as he blew out the candle in his smal stuffy room. He listened to make sure the Gillens were asleep. (Stowe had his own cottage, close by the log huts where the sims lived.)

When he was sure all was quiet, the slave lifted a loose floorboard and drew out a small flask of whiskey. Any sim caught with spirits was lashed till the blood ran through the matted hair on its back. Jeremiah ran the same risk, and willingly. Sometimes he needed that soothing fire in his belly to sleep.

Tonight, though, he drank the flask dry, and tossed and turned for hours al the same.

Spring gave way to summer. The big sim Joe stepped on a thorn, and died three weeks later of lockjaw. The loss cast a pal of gloom over Charles Gillen, for Joe was worth a hundred denaires.

Gillen's spirits lifted only when his son and daughter returned to the farm from the boarding schools they attended in Portsmouth, the commonwealth capital. Jeremiah was also glad to see them. Caleb was fourteen and Sally eleven; the slave sometimes felt he was almost as much a father to them as Charles Gillen himself.

But Caleb, at least, came home changed this year. Before, he had always talked of what he would do when the Gil en farm was his.

Jeremiah had spoken of buying his own freedom once, a couple of years before; Caleb had looked so hurt at the idea of his leaving that he never brought it up again, for fear of turning the boy against it for good. He thought Caleb had long since forgotten.

One day, though, Caleb came up to him when the two of them were alone in the house. He spoke with the painful seriousness adolescence brings: "I owe you an apology, Jeremiah."

"How's that, young master?" the slave asked in surprise "You haven't done nothing to me." And even if you had, he added silently, you would not be required to apologize for it.

"Oh, but I have," Caleb said, "though I've taken too long to see it. Do you remember when you told me once you would like to be free and go away?"

"Yes, young sir, I do remember that," Jeremiah said cautiously.

Any time the issue of liberation came up, a slave walked the most perilous ground there was.

"I was too little to understand then," the boy said. "Now I think I may, because I want to go away too."

"You do? Why could that be?" Jeremiah was not pretending. This declaration of Caleb's was almost as startling as his recalling their conversation at all. To someone that young, two years was like an age.

"Because I want to read the law and set up my own shingle one day.

The law is the most important thing in the whole world, Jeremiah." His voice burned with conviction; at fourteen, one is passionately certain about everything.

"I don't know about that, young master. Nobody can eat law."

Caleb looked at him in exasperation. "Nobody could eat food either, or even grow it, if his neighbor could take it whenever he had a mind to.

What keeps him from it, even if he has guns and men and sims enough to do it by force? Only the law."

"Something to that," Jeremiah admitted. He agreed only partly from policy; Caleb's idea had not occurred to him. He thought of the law only as something to keep from descending on him. That it might be a positive good was a new notion, one easier to arrive at for a free man, he thought without much bitoerness.

Enthusiasm carried Caleb along. "Of course there's something to it!

People who make the law and apply the law rule the country. I don't mean just the censors or the Senate or the Popular Assembly, though one day I'll serve, I think, but judges and lawyers too."

"That may be so, young master, but what will become of the farm when you've gone to Portsmouth to do your lawyering, or up to Philadelphia for the Assembly?" Jeremiah knew vaguely where Portsmouth was (somewhere southeast, a journey of a week or two); he knew Philadelphia was some long ways north, but had no idea how far. Half as far as the moon, maybe.

"One day Sally will get married," Caleb shrugged. "It will stay in the family. And lawyers get rich, don't forget. Who knows? maybe one day I'll buy the Pickens place next door to retire on."

Jeremiah's opinion was that old man Pickens would have to be dragged kicking and screaming into his grave before he turned loose of his farm.

He knew, however, when to keep his mouth shut. He also noticed that any talk about his freedom had vanished from the conversation.

Nevertheless, Caleb had not forgotten. One day he took Jeremiah aside and asked him, "Would you like me to teach you to read and cypher?"

The slave thought about it. He answered cautiously "Your father, I don't know if he'd like that." Most masters discouraged literacy among their blacks (sims did not count; no sim had ever learned to read). In some commonwealths, though not Virginia, teaching a black his letters was against the law.

"I've already talked with him about it," Caleb said. "I asked him if he didn't think it would be useful to have you able to keep accounts and such. He hates that kind of business himself."

The lad already had a good deal of politician in him Jeremiah thought.

Caleb went on, "Once you learn, maybe you can hire yourself out to other farmers, and keep some of what you earn. That would help you buy yourself free sooner, and knowing how to read and figure can only help you afterwards."

"You're right about that, young sir. I'd be pleased to start, so long as your father won't give me no grief on account of it."

The hope of money first impelled Jeremiah to the lessons, but he quickly grew fascinated with them for their own sake. He found setting down his name in shaky letters awe-inspiring: there it was, recorded for al time. It gave him a feeling of immortality, almost as if he had had a child. And struggling through first Caleb's little reader and then, haltingly, the Bible was more of the same. He wished he could spend al his time over the books.

He could not, of course. Chores around the house kept him busy al through the day. Most of his reading time was snatched from sleep. He yawned and did not complain.

His stock of money slowly grew, five sesters here, ten there.

Once he made a whole denaire for himself, when Mr. Pickens's cook fell sick just before a family gathering and Charles Gillen loaned Jeremiah to the neighbor for the day.

From anyone else, he would have expected two or even three denaires; from Pickens he counted himself lucky to get one.

He did not save every sester he earned: a man needs more than the distant hope of freedom to stay happy. One night he made his way to a dilapidated cabin that housed a widow inclined to be complaisant toward silver, no matter who brought it.

Jeremiah was heading home, feeling pleased with the entire world (except for the mosquitoes), when the moon light showed a figure coming down the path toward him. It was Harry Stowe. Jeremiah's pleasure evaporated.

He was afraid of the overseer, and tried to stay out of his way. Too late to step aside into the bushes, Stowe had seen him.

"Evening, sir," Jeremiah said amiably as the overseer approached.

Stowe set hands on hips, looked Jeremiah up and down.

"Evening, sir," he echoed, voice mockingly high. There was whiskey on his breath. "I'm tired of your uppity airs-always sucking up to young Caleb. What do you need to read for? You're a stinking slave, and.

don't you ever forget it."

"I could never do that, sir, no indeed. But al the same, a man wants to make himself better if he can."

He never saw the punch that knocked him down. Drunk or sober, Stowe was fast and dangerous. Jeremiah lay in the dirt. He did not try to fight back. Caleb's law descended swiftly and savagely on any slave who dared strike a white man. But fear of punishment was not what held him back now. He knew Stowe would have no trouble taking him, even in a fair fight.

Man? I don't see any man there," the overseer said. "All I see's a nigger. " He laughed harshly, swung back his foot.

Instead of delivering the kick, though, he turned away and went on toward the widow's.

Jeremiah rubbed the bruise on the side of his jaw, felt around with his tongue to see if Stowe had loosened any of his teeth. No, he decided, but only by luck. He stayed down until the overseer disappeared round a bend in the path. Then he slowly rose, brushing the dust from his trousers.

"Not a man, huh?" he muttered to himself. "Not a man? Wel , let that trash talk however he wants, but whose sloppy seconds is he getting tonight." Feeling a little better, he headed back to the Gillen house.

Summer wore on. The wheat grew tall. The stalks bent heavy with the weight of grain. Caleb and Sal y returned to Portsmouth for school. The sims went into the fields to start cutting the hemp so it could dry on the ground.

The sickness struck them then, abruptly and savagely. Stowe came rushing in from their huts at sunrise one morning to cry to Charles Gillen, "Half the stupid creatures are down and choking and moaning!"

Gillen spil ed coffee as he sprang to his feet with an oath. Fear on his face, he followed the overseer out. Jeremiah silently stepped out of the way. He understood his master's alarm. Disease among the sims, especial y now when the harvest was just under way, would be a disaster from which the farm might never recover.

Jane Gil en waited anxiously for her husband to return. When he did, his mouth was set in a tight, grim line. "Diphtheria," he said.

"We may lose a good many." He strode over to the cupboard, uncorked a bottle of rum, took a long pul . He was not normally an intemperate man, but what he had seen left him shaken.

As Jeremiah washed and dried the breakfast dishes, he felt a certain amount of relief, at least as far as his own risk was concerned. Sims were enough like humans for illnesses to pass freely from them to the people around them. But he had had diphtheria as a boy, and did not have to worry about catching it again.

A sadly shrunken work force trooped out to cut the hemp. Charles served soup, that being the easiest nourishment for the sick sims to get past the membranes clogging their throats. Then Gillen hurried back out to the sim quarters, to do what little doctoring he could.

The first deaths came that evening. One was Rare, the powerful woodcutter who had replaced Joe. Not all his - strength sufficed against the illness that choked the life -. from him. The tired sims returning from the fields had to labor further to dig graves.

"I always feel so futile, laying a sim to rest," Gillen told Jane as they ate a late supper that Jeremiah had made.

"With a man, there's always the hope of heaven to give consolation.

But no churchman I've ever heard of can say for certain whether sims have souls."

Jeremiah doubted it. He thought of sims as nothing more than animals that happened to walk on two legs and have hands. That made them more useful than, say, horses, but not much smarter. He rejected any resemblance between their status and his own; he at least knew he was a slave and planned to do something about it one day. His hoard had reached nearly ninety denaires.

The next day, even fewer of the sims could work. Charles Gillen rode over to the Pickens farm to see if he could borrow some, but the diphtheria was there ahead of him.

Mr. Pickens was down with it too, and not doing well.

Gillen bit his lip at the smal amount of hemp cut so far.

Jeremiah had had just enough practice ciphering over the farm accounts to understand why: the cash Gillen raised from selling the hemp was what let him buy the goods his acres could not produoe.

After supper that evening, Gil en took Jeremiah aside.

"Don't bother with breakfast tomorrow, or with more soup for the sims,"

he said. "Jane will take care of all that for a while."

"Mrs. Gil en, sir?" Jeremiah stared at his master. He groped for the only explanation he could think of. "You don't care for what I've been making? You tel me what you want, and I'l see you get it." A gentleman to the core, Gil en replied quickly,

"Jeremiah, it's nothing like that, I assure you. You've very well." Then he stopped cold, his cheeks reds plainly embarrassed to continue.

"You've gone and sold me." Jeremiah blurted first, and worst, fear that came to his mind. Ever dreaded the announcement that would turn his life down. And Charles Gillen was on the whole an easy master; any number of tales Jeremiah had heard convinced him of that.

"I have not sold you, Jeremiah. Your place is here. Again Gil en's reply was swift and firm; again I trouble going on.

"Wel , what is it, then?" Jeremiah demanded. His master's hesitations set them in oddly reversed roles, thef probing and seeking, Gil en trying to evade the Jeremiah did when caught at something he knew wrong. Having the moral high ground was a new heady feeling.

He did not enjoy it long. Brought up short, Gillen I choice but to answer, "I'm sending you out to the fields tomorrow, Jeremiah, to help cut hemp."

With sick misery, the slave realized he would rather have been sold.

"But that's sim work, Mr. Gillen," he protested.

"I know it is, and I feel badly for it. But so many sims are down with the sickness, and you are strong and healthy. The hemp must be cut.

It does not care who swings the sickle. And I will not think less of you working in the fields, rather the contrary, because you have helped me at a time of great need. When the day that you approach me to ask to buy your freedom, be shall not forget."

Had he promised Jeremiah manumission as soon hemp-cutting was done, he would have gained a worker. As it was, though, the slave again protested, ' Don’t send me out to do sim work, sir."

Why not?" Gillen's voice had acquired a dangerous

" Jeremiah knew he was faltering and cursed it, but could not do anything about it. Charles a decent man, as decent as a slave owner could be was also a white man. He knew himself the equal , of farmers and townsmen; his son dreamed of leading the Federated Commonwealths one day.

He was assuradly far above both blacks and sims.

also felt the gulf between himself and his course. Even gaining his freedom would not it, certainly not in Gil en's eyes. But Jeremiah nother gulf, one with him at the top looking at sims below.

From Gillen's lofty perch, that one was invisible, but immensely important to Jeremiah. Even a slave superior to the subhuman natives of America, himself on things he could do that they would pable of.

Learning his letters was something of reminder that, even if his body was owned, his mind could still roam free.

Gillen, without understanding at al what he was shoving him down with the sims, as if there difference between him and them. Harry Stowe no difference either, indeed would relish getting on Jeremiah.

He had made that quite clear.

It’[s bad enough, but the white men already looked at Jeremiah. He had some status, though, among the neighborhood. It would disappear the instant t to the fields. Even the stupid sims would laugh open-mouthed, empty-headed laughs at him, and no better than themselves. He would never be st his authority over them again.

passed through his mind in a matter of seconds, the realization that none of it would make sense certainly not when measured against the denaires was losinsr every day. "It just wouldn't be right, sir," was the weak best Jeremiah could do.

He knew it was not good enough even before he saw Gillen's face cloud with anger. "How would it not be right? It pains me to have to remind you, Jeremiah, but you are my slave, my personal chattel. How I employ you, especial y in this emergency, is my affair and mine alone.

Now I tell you that you shall report to the field gang tomorrow at sunrise or your back will be striped and then you will report anyway.

Do you fol ow me?"

"Yes, sir," Jeremiah said. He did not dare look at Gillen, for fear his expression would earn him the whipping on the spot.

"Wel , good." Having got his way, Gil en was prepared to be magnanimous.

He patted Jeremiah on the shoulder. "It will be only for a few days, a couple of weeks at most. Then everything will be back the way it was."

"Yes, sir," Jeremiah said again, but he knew better. Nothing would ever be the same, not between him and other blacks, not between him and the sims, and not between him and Gil en either. One reason Gillen was a bearable master was that he treated Jeremiah like a person. Now the thin veil of politeness was ripped aside. At need, Gillen could use Jeremiah like any other beast of burden and at need he would. It was as simple as that.

When Jeremiah lifted the loose board in his room, he found his little flask of spirits was empty. "I might have known," he muttered under his breath. "It's been that kind of day." He blew out his candle.

He was already awake when Stowe blasted away on the horn to summon the sims, and him, to labor. He had been awake most of the night; he was too full of mortification and swallowed rage to sleep. His stomach had tied itself into a tight, painful knot.

His eyes felt as though someone had thrown sand in them. He rubbed at them as he pul ed on breeches, shoes and shirt and went out to the waiting overseer.

Stowe was doling out hardtack and bacon to the sims still well enough to work. "Well, well," he said, smiling broadly as Jeremiah came up.

"What a pleasure to see our new field hand, and just in time for breakfast, too. Get in line and wait your turn."

The overseer watched for any sign of resistance, but Jeremiah silently took his place. The hardtack was a jawbreaker, and the bacon, heavily salted so it would keep almost forever, brought tears to his eyes. If his belly had churned before, it snarled now. He gulped down two dippers of water.

They did not help.

The sims' big yellow teeth effortlessly disposed of the hardtack biscuits. The salt in the bacon did not faze them either. Jeremiah's presence seemed to bother them a good deal more. They kept staring at him, then quickly looking away whenever his eyes met theirs. The low-voiced calls and hoots they gave each other held a questioning note.

Those cal s, though, could convey only emotion, not real meaning.

For that, the sims had to use the hand signs men had given them. Their fingers flashed, most often in the gesture equivalent to a question mark. Finally, one worked up the nerve to approach Jeremiah and sign, Why you here

"To work," he said shortly. He spoke instead of signing, to emphasize to the sim that, despite his present humiliation, he was still a man.

Harry Stowe, who missed very little, noted the exchange.

Grinning, he sabotaged Jeremiah's effort to keep his plaoe by signing, He work with you he work like you, he one of i you til job done. No different. "Isn't that right." he added aloud, for Jeremiah's benefit.

The slave felt his face grow hot. He bit his lip, but did not Stowe's message disturbed even the sims. One directed hesitant signs at the overseer: "He man, not sim. Why work like sim!"

"He's a slave. He does what he's told, just like you'd better.

If the master tells him to work like a sim, he works like a sim, and that's all there is to it. Enough dawdling, now, let's get on with it."

The overseer distributed seythes and sickles to his charges, careful y counting them so the sims could not hold any back to use against their owners, or against each other, in fights over food or females. Jeremiah wished he had a pair of gloves; his hands were too soft for the work he was about to do.

He knew better than to ask for any.

As he started down a row of hemp plants, he saw the sims to either side quickly move past him. It was not just that they were stronger, though few men could match the subhumans for strength. They were also more skil ed which was really galling. Bend, slash, stoop, spread, rise step, bend . . . they had a rhythm the black man lacked.

"Hurry it up, Jeremiah," Stowe said. "They're getting way ahead there."

"They know what they're doing," the slave grunted stung by the taunt.

"Turn one loose in my kitchen and see what kind of mess you'd get." To his surprise, Stowe laughed.

Jeremiah soon grew sore, stiff, and winded. He did not think he could have gone on without the half-grown sim that carried a bucket of water from one worker to the next.

At first it would not stop for him, passing him by for members of its own kind. A growl from Stowe, though fixed that in a hurry.

Reluctantly, Jeremiah came to see that the overseer did not use his charges with undue harshness. To have done so would have wrung less work from them, and work was what Stowe was after. He treated the sims, and Jeremiah-like so many other beasts of burden, with impersonal efficiency. The slave even wished for the malice Stowe had shown on the path that summer night. That, at least, would have been an acknowledgment of his humanity.

Before long, he found out what it meant to have such wishes granted.

"Spread the hemp out better once you cut it, Stowe snapped.

Jeremiah jumped; he had not heard the l overseer come up behind him.

"Spread it out," Stowe repeated. "It won't dry as well if you don't."

"I'm doing as well as the sims are," Jeremiah said, nodding toward the long, sharp, dark-green leaves lying to his right and left.

Stowe snorted. "I could wear out my whip arm and they'd still be slipshod. I expect better from you, and by Christ I'll get it." His arm went back, then forward, fast as a striking snake. The whip cracked less than a foot from Jeremiah's eye. He flinched. He could not help it. "The next one you'll feel," the overseer promised. He paused to let the message sink in, then moved on to keep the sims busy.

Jeremiah had a shirt of dark green silk. He mostly wore it for show, when his master was entertaining guests. He had never noticed it was the exact color of hemp leaves.

Now he did, and told himself he would never put it on again.

The day seemed endless. Jeremiah did not dare look at his hands. He did know that, when he shifted them on the handle of the sickle, he saw red-brown stains on the gray, smooth wood.

Craach! "God damn you, Jeremiah, I told you what I wantedl" Stowe shouted. The slave screamed at the hot touch of whip on his back.

"Oh, stop your whining," the overseer said. "I've not even marked you, past a bruise. You keep provoking me, though, and I'll give you stripes you'll wear the rest of your life."

Several sims watched the byplay, taking advantage of Stowe's preoccupation to rest from their labor. Work more, work better, one signed at Jeremiah. Its wide, stupid grin was infuriatingly smug.

"Go to the devil," Jeremiah muttered. For once, he hoped sims had souls, so they could spend eternity roasting in hellfire.

He thought the day would never end, but at last the sun set.

"Enough!" Stowe shouted. This time Jeremiah had no trouble understanding the sims' whoops. He felt like adding some himself.

Stowe collected the tools, counting them as carefully as he had in the morning to make sure none was missing. His chilly gaze swung toward Jeremiah, "I'l see you tomorrow come sunrise. Now that you know what to do, I won't have to go easy on you anymore." The whip twitched in his hand, ever so slightly.

"No, sir, Mr. Stowe, you surely won't," Jeremiah said.

The overseer nodded, for once satisfied.

Jeremiah had been afraid he would have to sleep in the sim barracks, but Stowe did not object when he went back to his room in the big house.

Probably hadn't thought of it the slave decided. He stopped at the kitchen for leftovers from the meal Jane Gil en had cooked. They were better than what the sims ate, but not much. His lip curled; he had forgotten more about cooking than Mrs. Gil en knew.

His hands felt as if they were on fire. He could not ignore them any more. There was a crock of lard in the kitchen. He rubbed it into both palms. The fat soothed the raw, broken skin.

Jeremiah went to his room. His back twinged again when he took off his shirt. Stowe knew exactly what he was doing with a lash, though; he had not drawn blood. But Jeremiah remembered the overseer's warning. His aching muscles contracted involuntarily, as if anticipating a blow that was sure to come.

Looking back, Jeremiah thought that unwilled, mortifying twinge was what made him do what he did next. "I don't care how white he is, he ain't gonna get the chance to whip me again," he said out loud.

He put his shirt back on took out the pouch with his hard-saved sesters and denaires opened the door, stepped into the hallway, shut the door behind him.

He could have gone back with no one the wiser, but from that moment on he was irrevocably a runaway in his own mind. Being one, he stopped in the kitchen again, to steal a carving knife. He had held that blade in his hand a hundred times with the Gillens or their children close by, and never thought of lifting it against them. "No more," he whispered.

"No more."

And yet, as he left the dark and quiet house, he had trouble fighting the paralyzing tide of fear that rose inside him. He had his place here, his known duties and expectations. His master had let him earn the money he was carrying just so he could buy his freedom one day.

He turned back. His hand was on the doorknob when the pain that light touch brought returned him to his purpose.

How was it real y his place, he wondered, if Gil en could take it from him whenever he chose?

The question had no answer. He walked down the wooden steps and into the night.

Eleven days later, he came down the West Norfolk Road into Portsmouth.

He was ragged and dirty and thin and tired; only on the last day had he dared actually travel the highway. Before that, fearing dogs and hunters on his track, he had gone by winding, back-country paths and through the woods.

Those held terrors of their own. Spearfangs had been hunted almost to extinction in Virginia years ago. Almost, however, was the operative word; Jeremiah had spent an uncomfortable night in a tree because of a thunderous coughing roar that erupted from the undergrowth a few hundred yards to his left.

He also had an encounter with a wild sim. It was hard to say which of the two got a worse fright from it. In the old days, Jeremiah had heard, sims would hunt down and eat any humans they could catch. But now, brought low by gunpowder and by man's greater native wit, the wild sims were only skulking pests in the land they had once roamed freely. And when this one saw the knife Jeremiah jerked out, it hooted and ran before it had a chance to hear his teeth chattering.

After those adventures and a couple of more like them, he wished he had taken his chances on hounds and trackers. With them, at least, he knew what to expect.

Portsmouth was the biggest town he had ever seen, ever imagined.

By the bay, masts of merchantmen and naval vessels made a bare-branched forest against the sky. The gilded dome of the commonwealth capitol dominated the skyhne. Jeremiah did not know that was what it was. He only knew it was grand and beautiful.