A Different Flesh

People of every sort swarmed through the streets, paying no attention to one more newly arrived, none-too-clean black man. Even the four sims bearing a rich trader's sedan chair looked down their broad, flat noses at him. And no wonder, he thought. Charles Gillen was a long way from poor, but he did not own a suit of clothes half so fine as the matched outfits of silk and satin the sims were wearing.

Jeremiah blessed the half-thought-out notion that had brought him to the city. Among these thousands how could anyone hope to find one person in particulari His confidence took a jolt, though, when he passed a cabin whose sign declared: "JASON BROS: RUNAWAY SIMS AND NIGGERS

CATCHED." The picture below showed a sim treed by hounds with improbably sharp teeth and red mouths. Jeremiah shuddered and hurried on.

Before long, his grumbling stomach forced him to face another problem.

On the road, he had raided fruit trees and stolen a couple of chickens, eking them out with fruits and berries. He did not think he could get away with that kind of provisioning for long in Portsmouth.

Food was harder to get at and thieves more likely to be hunted down.

He could eat for a while on the money he had with him, but he would have to find work if he did not want to deplete it. The twenty sesters he paid for a bad breakfast only reinforced the truth of that.

Here he would not have turned down the kind of hard manual labor that had made him run away in the first place. He would have been doing it for himself, of his own free will, and he reasoned that employers who wanted only strong backs would ask few questions.

But no such hauling or digging or carrying jobs were to he had: sims did them all, for no more wages than their keep. "You must be just off the farm, to think you can get that kind of work and get paid for it," a straw boss said. - Jeremiah's heart leaped into his mouth, but the man went on, "If you have a skilled trade, now, like carpenter or mason, I can use you.

How about it?"

Jeremiah had used saw and chisel and plane often enough on the Gillen estate, but he said, "Sorry, sir, no," and left in a hurry. The straw boss's chance reference to real status, even if nothing was behind it, made him too nervous to stay. He wandered aimlessly through Portsmouth for a while, marvelling at the number of buildings that would have dwarfed the Gillen house, till then the grandest he had known. One imposing marble structure near the capitol had an inscription over the columned entrance way. It was in large, clear letters, but even when he spel ed it out twice it made no sense: EIAT IUSTITIA FT RUANT COELI. He shrugged and gave it up.

Not far away, down a winding side street, stood a dilapidaoed clapboard building with a sign nailed to the front door. The sign was hard to read because it needed painting, but the words, at least, made sense: ALFRED P. DOUGLAS, ATTORNEY AT LAW.

Jeremiah was about to pass on by when he remembered Caleb Gillen's talk about lawyers and how important they were. Maybe an important man would have work for him.

And if the important man got too nosy, well, important men tended to be fat, and he could probably outrun this one. He walked up and knocked on the door.

"It's open," someone with a deep voice called from inside. He sounded important. Jeremiah turned the knob and walked in.

The man rummaging through the pile of books by his desk was fat, but that ended his resemblance to anything Jeremiah had imagined. He was about thirty, with a straggling mustache and a thick shock of greasy black hair.

His breeches had a hole in the knee; one shoe had a hole in the sole.

His shirt was no cleaner than Jeremiah's.

Whatever he was digging for, he must have decided he wasn't going to find it. He made a disgusted face, looked up at Jeremiah. "And what can I do for you today, sir."

Jeremiah almost fled, as he had from the straw boss. No white man had ever cal ed him sir, even in mockery. This did not sound like mockery.

He took a chance, stayed. "I'm looking for work from you, sir."

"I'm sorry; I don't need a clerk right now." Douglas muttered something to himself that Jeremiah did not catch.

"I didn't mean that kind of work, sir." Jeremiah tried to keep his mouth from fal ing open. The fel ow thought he wanted to study law under him! "I meant cleaning, cooking, straightening up'." He looked around. "You'll excus me for speaking so bold, sir, but this place could do with some straightening up."

Douglas grunted. "You're right, sir; as I said just now", that must have been the mutter, "what I need is someone to make sense of this mess. You'll not be able to do that, I promise, if you have no letters."

"I can read, sir, some, and write a bit," Jeremiah said, and then had the wit to add as an afterthought, "Mr. Douglas."

Douglas grunted again. "You slave or free?"

Ice ran down Jeremiah's back. "Free," he answered, and got ready to bolt if Douglas asked for papers to prove it.

All the lawyer said, though, was, "Good. I'd sooner line your pockets than your master's. What do I call you."

"Jeremiah." Realizing a second too late that if he was free he should also have a surname, he gave the first one that popped into his head.

"Jeremiah, uh, Gillen."

Douglas showed no sign of noticing the slip. He plopped his bulk into an overstuffed armchair. The springs groaned in protest. "All right, Mr. Gillen, I'l try you, damn me if I don't. Put that stack there into some kind of order and I'll take you on."

The stack was the one the lawyer had been pawing through.

Jeremiah knelt beside it. He almost gave up at once, for the books'

titles were ful of long, incomprehensible words: legal terms, he supposed. But before panic st in, he remembered the ABC Caleb Gillen had drilled into him, and the way Caleb's father kept the books in his library. If he arranged these alphabetically by author, he could not go far wrong.

"Here you are, sir," he said a few minutes later. He held out a handful of coins. "And here are the, uh, ninety-one sesters mixed in with the books."

Douglas stared, then burst into laughter. "Keep them, my friend, keep them! I'd say you've earned them, the more so as I'd long since forgotten they were there. It was honest of you to offer them back, but then who wouldn't be honest with a prospective employer watching?" That last so perfectly summed Jeremiah's thoughts when he found the money that he eyed Douglas with fresh respect.

The lawyer took more care inspecting the books than he had over the coins. He had to correct a mistake Jeremiah had made, and the black's heart sank for fear he would be turned down. But al Douglas said was,

"Be more careful next time. Three denaires a week suit you."

"Yes, sir!" The wage was a long way from kingly, but Jeremiah did not feel sure enough of himself to bargain. If he bought fresh food and did his own cooking, he thought he could scrape by.

Then Douglas went on, "You cook, you say?" At Jeremiah's nod, he broke into a grin that turned his heavy features boyish for a moment.

"Then board with me, why don't you? I've rattled round my house since the swamp fever took my Margaret two years ago." The memory made him somber again. "Help me keep the place neat, and I'll buy supplies for both of us. You deal with them then: if I'm not the worstcook in the commonwealth, he's not been born yet. Do we have a contract?"

"A deal, you mean? Yes, sir!" Jeremiah clasped Douglas's outstretched hand. The lawyer's grip was soft but strong. Jeremiah felt like turning handsprings. With room and board taken care of, three denaires wasn't bad money at all.

Jeremiah spent the rest of the day getting things off the floor so he could sweep it clean of crumpled papers, dust, apple cores, nutshells, and other garbage. Douglas's indifference to filth left his fastidious soul cringing.

He found another denaire and a half in loose change. The lawyer let him keep that too, though he warned, "Bear in mind my generosity doesn't extend to gold, if there is any down there." The thought of coming across a gold piece made Jeremiah work harder than ever; only later did he think to wonder whether that was what Douglas had had in mind.

He had gotten down to bare wood in a few places when Douglas had a visitor, a tall, lean, middle-aged man who wore a stovepipe hat to make himself seem even taller. "Ah Mr. Hayes," Douglas said, setting aside the document he had been studying. "What can I do for you, this fine afternoon? "

Hayes glanced at Jeremiah. "Buy yourself a nigger? Doesn't seem like you, Alfred."

"He's free; I hired him," Douglas said, his color rising. "Mr. Hayes, Jeremiah Gillen. Jeremiah, this is Zachary Hayes." Hayes nodded with the minimum courtesy possible and did not offer to shake hands. Jeremiah went back to work. He was not used to respect from whites, and so did not miss it.

"I came on a gamble," Hayes said, turning away from Jeremiah with obvious relief. "I daresay you own the most law books in the city, and keep them in the worst order Have you a copy of William Watson's Ten Quodlibeticai Questions Concerning Religion and State and, if so, can you lay your hands on it?"

"The title rings a bel , having heard it, how could one forget it?"

Douglas said. "As for where it might be, though, I confess I have no idea. Jeremiah, paw through things and see what you come up with, will you?"

Hayes made a sour face and folded his arms to wait plainly not expecting Jeremiah to find the book. That scorn spurred him more even than Douglas's earlier mention of gold. He dove under tables, climbed on a shaky chair to reach top bookease shelves. On one of those, its calfskin spine to the wall, he found Watson's tome. He wordlessly handed it to Hayes.

"My thanks," Hayes said, not to him, but to Douglas. "I'l have it back to you within a fortnight." He spun on his heel and strode out.

Douglas and Jeremiah looked at each other. They started to laugh at the same time. "Don't mind him," the lawyer said, clapping Jeremiah on the back. "He thinks niggers are stupid as sims. Come on; let's go home."

The house almost made Jeremiah regret his new employment. Douglas had spoken of needing help to keep the place neat; only someone with his studied disdain for order wou}d have imagined there was any neatness to maintain. The house bore a chilling resemblance to his office, except that dirty clothes and dirtier pots were added to the mix.

The only thing that seemed to stand aloof from the clutter was a fine oil painting of a slim, pale, dark-eyed woman. Douglas saw Jeremiah's eyes go to it. "Yes, that's my Margaret," he said sadly; as Jeremiah would learn, he never spoke of her without putting the possessive in front of her name.

The kitchen was worse than the rest of the house: stale bread, moldy flour, greens limp at best, and salt pork like the stuff Charles Gilkn's sims aoe. Jeremiah shook his head; he had looked for nothing better. He pumped some water, set a chunk of pork in it to soak out some of the salt. Meanwhile, he got a fire going in the hearth. The stew he ended up producing would have earned harsh words from his former owner, but Douglas demanded seconds and showered praise on him.

"Let me start with good food, sir, and I'll really give you something worth eating," Jeremiah said.

"I don't know whether I should, or in six months I'l be too wide to go through my own front door," Douglas said, ruefully surveying his rotund form.

Jeremiah had to sweep off what he was coming to think of as the usual layer of junk to get at his cot. It was saggy and lumpy nowhere near as comfortable as the one he'd had on the Gillen estate. He didn't care.

It was his because he wanted it to be, not because it had to be.

He slept wonderfully. As the months went by, he tried more than once to find a name for his relationship with Alfred Douglas. It was something more than servant, something less than friend.

Part of the trouble was that Douglas treated him unlike anyone ever had before. For a long while, because he had never encountered it before, he had trouble recognizing the difference. The lawyer used him as a man, not as a slave.

That did not mean he did not tell Jeremiah what to do.

He did, which further obscured the change to the black man. But he did not speak as to a half-witted, surly child and he did not stand over Jeremiah to make sure he got things done. He assumed Jeremiah would, and went about his own business.

Not used to such liberty, at first Jeremiah took advantage of it to do as little as he could. "Work or get out," Douglas had told him bluntly.

"Do you think I hired you to sit on your arse and sleep?"

But he never complained when he caught Jeremiah reading, which he did more and more often. In the beginning that had been purely practical on Jeremiah's part, so as to keep fresh what Caleb Gillen had taught him.

Then the printed page proved to have a seductive power of its own.

Which is not to say reading came easily. It painfully taught Jeremiah how small his vocabulary was. Sometimes he could figure out what a new word meant from its context. Most of the time, he would have to ask Douglas.

"'Eleemosynary?"" The lawyer raised his eyebrows.

"It's a fancy word for 'charitable."" He saw that meant a nothing to Jeremiah either, simplified again: " 'Giving to those who lack." What are you looking at, anyhow?"

Jeremiah held up a law book, wondering if he was in trouble.

Douglas only said, "Oh," and returned to the brief a he was drafting.

When he was done, he sanded the ink dry, set the paper aside, and pulled a slim volume from the shelf (by this time, things were easy to find).

He offered the book to Jeremiah. "Here, try this. You have to walk before you can run."

"The Articles of Independence of the Federated Commonwealths and the Terms of Their Federation," Jeremiah read aloud.

"Al else springs from those," Douglas said. "Without - them, we'd have only chaos, or a tyrant as they do these days in England.

But go through them and understand them point by point, and you've made a fair beginning toward - becoming a Iawyer."

Jeremiah stared at him. "There's no nigger lawyers in Portsmouth." He spoke with assurance; he had gotten to know the black part of town well.

It boasted scores of preachers, a few doctors, even a printer, but no lawyers.

"I know there aren't," Douglas said. "Perhaps there should be."

When Jeremiah asked him what he meant, he changed the subject, as if afraid he had said too much.

The book Douglas gave Jeremiah perplexed and astonished him at the same time. "This is how the government is put together?" he asked the lawyer after he had struggled through the first third.

"So it is." Douglas looked at him keenly, as if his next question was to be some kind of test. "What do you think of it?"

"I think it's purely crazy, begging your pardon," Jeremiah blurted.

Douglas said nothing, waiting for him to go on. He fumbled ahead, trying to clarify his feelings: "The censors each with a veto on the other one, the Popular Assembly chose by all the free people and the senators by-I forgot how the senators happen."

"Censors and commonwealth governors become senators for life after their terms end," Douglas supplied.

Jeremiah smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand.

"That's right. And the censors enforce the laws-and lead the armies, but only if the Senate decides to spend the money the armies need. And it's the Popular Assembly that makes the laws (if the Senate agrees) and decides if it's peace or war It in the first place. If you ask me, Mr.

Douglas, I don't think any one of 'em knows for certain he can fart without checking the Terms of Federation first."

"That's also why we have courts," Douglas smiled.

"Why do you suppose the Conscript Fathers arranged things this way?

Remember, after we won our freedom from England, we could have done anything we wanted."

Having had scant occasion to think about politics before, Jeremiah took a long time to answer. When he did, all he could remember was the discussion Charles Gil en and ' Harry Stowe had had the spring before.

"For the sake of argufying?" he guessed.

To his surprise, Douglas said, "You know, you're not far wrong.

They tried to strike a balance, so everyone would have some power and no one group could get enough to take anybody else's freedom away. The Conscript Fathers modeled our government on the mixed constitution the Roman Republic had. You know who the Romans were, don't you, Jeremiah?"

"They crucified Jesus, a long time ago," Jeremiah said, exhausting his knowledge of the subject.

"So they did, but they were also fine lawyers and good, practical men of affairs, not showy like the Greeks, but effective, and able to rule a large state for a long time. If we do half so well, we'll have something to be proud of."

The discussion broke off there, because Zachary Hayes came in to borrow a book. Now that Jeremiah had Douglas's Iibrary in order, Hayes stopped by every couple of weeks. He never showed any sign of recognizing why he had more luck these days, and spoke directly to Jeremiah only when he could not help it.

This time, he managed to avoid even looking at the black man.

Instead, he said to Douglas, "If you don't mind, you'll see me more often, Alfred. I've a new young man studying d under me, and long since gave away my most basic texts." "No trouble at all, Zachary," Douglas assured him. Once Hayes was gone, Douglas rolled his eyes. "That buzzard never gave away anything, except maybe the clap. I guaran- a tee you he sold his old books, probably for more than he paid for them too; no denying he's able." Jeremiah did not answer. He was deep in the Terms of Federation again. Once the Conscript Fathers had outlined the Federated Commonwealths's self-regulating government, they went on to set further limits on what it could do.

Reading those limits, Jeremiah began to have a sense of what Douglas had meant by practical ruling. Each restriction was prefaced by a brief explanation of why it wasn’t needed "Establishing dogmas having proven in history to engender civic strife, followers of all faiths shall be forever free to fol ow their own beliefs without let or hindrance."

"So that free men shal not live in fear of the state and its agents and form conspiracies against them, no indiscriminate searches of persons or property shall be permitted." - "To keep the state from the risk of tyranny worse than external subjugation, no foreign mercenaries shal be hired, but liberty shal depend on the vigilance of the free men of the nation."

On and on the book went, checking the government for the benefit of the free man. Jeremiah finished it with a strange mixture of admiration and anger. So much talk of freedom, and not a word against slavery! It was as though the Conscript Fathers had not noticed it existed.

Conscious of his own daring, Jeremiah remarked on that to Douglas.

The lawyer nodded. "Slavery has been with us since Greek and Roman times, and you can search the Bible from one end to the other without finding a word against it.

And, of course, when Englishmen came to America, they found the sims. No one would say the sims should not serve us."

Jeremiah almost blurted, "But I'm no sim" Then he remembered Douglas thought him free. He did say, "Sims is different than men."

"There you are right," Douglas said, sounding uncommanly serious. "The difference makes me wonder about our laws at times, it truly does."

Jeremiah hoped he would go on, but when he did, it was not in the vein the black had expected: "Of course, one could argue as well that the sims manifest inequality only points up subtler differences among various groups of men."

Disgusted, Jeremiah found an excuse to knock off early. One thing he had learned about lawyers was that they delighted in argument for its own sake, without much caring about right and wrong.

He had thought Douglas different, but right now he seemed the same as the rest.

A gang of sims came by, moving slowly under the weigh t of the heavy timbers on their shoulders. He glowered at their hairy backs.

Too many white men were like Zachary J Hayes, lumping sims and blacks together because most blacks were slaves.

As it had back on Charles Gil en's estate, that rankled. He was no subhuman . . . and if Hayes doubted what blacks really were, let him get a sim instead of the fancy cook he owned! Soon enough he'd be skeletal, not just lean. Jeremiah grinned, liking the notion.

Another party of sims emerged from a side street. This group was carrying sacks of beans. Neither gang made any effort to get out of the other's way. In an instant, they were hopelessly tangled. Traffic snarled. Because al the sims had their hands full, they could not use their signs to straighten out the mess. Their native hoots and cal s were not adequate for the job. Indeed, they made matters worse.

The sims glared at each other, peeling back their lips to bare their big yellow teeth and grimacing horribly.

"Call the guards!" a nervous man shouted, and several others took up the cry. Jeremiah ducked down an alleyway.

He had seen enough of sims' brute strength on the farm to be sure he wanted to be far away if they started fighting.

The town did not erupt behind him, so he guessed the overseers had managed to put things to rights. A few words at the outset would have done it: "Coming through!" or "Go ahead; we'll wait." The sims did not have the words to use.

"Poor stupid bastards," Jeremiah said, and headed home.

"Mr. Douglas, you have some of the strangest books in the I world, and that is a fact," Jeremiah said.

Douglas ran his hands through his oily hair. "If you keep excavating among those boxes, God only knows what you'll come up with.

What is it this time?"

"A Proposed Explication of the Survival of Certain Beasts in America and Their Disappearance Hereabouts, by Samuel Pepys." Jeremiah pronounced it pep-eeze.

"Peeps," Douglas corrected, then remarked, "You know, Jeremiah, you read much better now than you did when you started working for me last summer. That's the first time you've slipped in a couple of weeks, and no one could blame you for stumbling over that tongue twister."

"Practice,"Jeremiah said. He held up the book. "What is this, anyhow?"

"It just might interest you, come to think of it. It's the book that sets forth the transformational theory of life: that the kinds of living things change over time."

"That's not what the Bible says."

"I know. Churchmen hate Pepys's theories. As a lawyer, though, I find them attractive, because he presents the evidence for them.

Genesis is so much hearsay by comparison."

"You never were no churchgoing man, sir," Jeremiah said reproachfully.

He started to read al the same; working with Douglas had given him a good bit of the lawyer's attitude. And he respected his boss's brains.

If Douglas thought there was something to this, what had he called it?, transformational theory, there probably was.

The book was almost I50 years old, and written in the ornate style of the seventeenth century. Jeremiah had to ask Douglas to help him with several words and complex phrases. He soon saw what the lawyer meant.

Pepys firmly based his argument on facts, with no pleading to unverifiable

"authorities." Despite himself, Jeremiah was impressed Someone squelched up the walk toward Douglas's door. No, a couple of people, by the sound. It was that transitional time between winter and spring. The rain was Still cold, but Jeremiah knew only relief that he did not have to shovel snow anymore.

Douglas had heard the footsteps too. He rammed quil into inkpot and started writing furiously. "Put Pepys down and get busy for a while, Jeremiah," he said. "It's probably Jasper Carruthers and his son, here for that will I should've finished three days ago. Since it's not done, we ought at least to look busy."

Grinning, Jeremiah got up and started reshelving some, of the books that got pulled down every day. He had his back to the door when it swung open, but heard Douglas's relieved chuckle.

"Good to see you, Zachary," the lawyer said. "Saves me the embarrassment of pleading guilty to nonfeasance."

Hayes let out a dry laugh. "A problem we all face from time to time, Alfred; I'm glad you escaped it here. Do you own an English version of Justinian's Digest? I'm afraid the Latin of my young friend here isn't up to his reading it in the original."

The volume happened to be in front of Jeremiah's face. He pul ed it from the shelf before Douglas had to ask him for it, turned with a smug smile to offer it to Hayes's student.

The smile congealed on his face like fat getting cold in a pan.

The youngster with Hayes was Caleb Gillen.

The tableau held for several frozen seconds, the two of them staring at each other while the lawyers, not understanding what was going on, stared at them both.

"Jeremiah!" Caleb exclaimed. "It's my father's runaway nigger!"

he shouted to Hayes at the same moment Jeremiah bolted for the door.

Pepys's book proved his undoing. It went flying out from under his foot and sent him sprawling. Caleb Gillen landed on his back.

Before he could shake free of the youngster Hayes also grabbed him.

The lawyer was stronger than he looked. Between them, he and Caleb held Jeremiah pinned to the floor.

Panting, his gray hair awry, Hayes said, "You told me he was a free nigger, Alfred."

"He said he was. I had no reason to doubt him," Douglas answered calmly. He had made no move to rise from his desk and help seize Jeremiah, or indeed even to put down - his quil . Now he went on, "For that matter, I still have no reason to do so."

"What? I recognize him!" Caleb Gillen shouted, his voice breaking from excitement. "And what if I didn't? He and That proves it!"

"If I were a free nigger and someone said I was a slave, I'd run too," Douglas said. "Wouldn't you, young sir? (I'm sorry, I don't know your name.) Wouldn't you, Zachary, regardless of the truth or falsehood of the claim?"

"Now you just wait one minute here, Alfred," Hayes snapped.

"Young master Caleb Gillen here told me last year of the absconding from his father's farm of their nigger, Jeremiah. My only regret is not associating the name with this wretch here so he could have been recaptured sooner."

He twisted Jeremiah's arm behind his back.

"That you failed to do so demonstrates the obvious fact that the name may be borne by more than one individual," - Douglas said.

"You see here, sir," Caleb Gillen said, "I've known that nigger as long as I can remember. I'm not likely to make a mistake about who he is."

"If he is free, he'll have papers to prove it." Hayes wrenched Jeremiah's arm again. The black gasped. "Can you show us papers, nigger?"

"You need not answer that, save in a court of law," Douglas said sharply, keeping Jeremiah from surrendering on the spot. He was sunk in despair, tears dripping from his face to the floor. Once sent back to the Gillen estate, he would never regain the position of trust that had let him escape, and probably would never be able to buy his freedom either.

Hayes's voice took on a new note of formality. "Do you deny, then, Alfred, that this nigger is the chattel of Charles Gillen, Caleb's father?"

"Zachary, one lad's accusation is no proof, as well you know."

Douglas took the same tone; Jeremiah recognized it as lawyer-talk. A tiny spark of hope flickered. By il uminating the dark misery that filled him, it only made that misery worse.

Overriding Caleb Gillen's squawk of protest, Hayes said, "Then let him be clapped in irons until such time as determination of his status may be made. That will prevent any further disappearances."

"I have a better idea," Douglas said. He unlocked one of his desk drawers,.took out a strongbox, unlocked that. "What would you say the value of a buck nigger of his age would be? Is 300 denaires a fair figure?"

Above him, Jeremiah felt Caleb and Hayes shift as they looked at each other. "Aye, fair enough," Hayes said at last.

Coins clinked with the sweet music of gold. After a bit, Douglas said,

"Then here are 300 denaires for you to acknowledge by receipt, to be forfeit to Master Gillen's father if Jeremiah should flee before judgment. Do you agree to this bond? Jeremiah, will you also agree to that condition?"

"Caleb, the decision is yours," Hayes said.

"Jeremiah, will you give your word?" the boy asked. He waved aside Hayes's protest before it had well begun, saying, "I've known him to be honest enough, even if a runaway." He slightly emphasized known, and glanced toward Douglas, who sat impassive.

"I won't run off from here, I promise," Jeremiah said wearily.

"Get off him; let him up," Caleb said. He did so himself. Hayes followed more slowly. Jeremiah rose, rubbing at bruises and at a knee that still throbbed from hitting the floor.

"May I borrow your pen?" Hayes asked Douglas. When he got it, he wrote a few quick lines, handed the paper to the other lawyer. "Here is your receipt, sir. I hope it suits you?"

"Be so good as to line out the word 'absconder' and initial the change, if you please. It prejudges a case not yet heard. Hayes snorted but did as he was bid. Douglas dipped his head in acknowledgment. After taking up the money, Hayes said, "Come along, Master Gillen. If Alfred wants to play this game, we shal settle it in court, never fear. Oh, yes, don't forget the copy of the Digest your nigger was kind enough to find for you." With that parting shot, he and, Caleb swept out of the office.

Jeremiah stared miserably at the floor. Douglas said, "I suppose it's no good asking for a miracle. You don't happen to be a free nigger named Jeremiah who just coincidentally Iooks exactly like that lad's father's nigger Jeremiah?" –

"No, sir,"Jeremiah muttered, stil not looking up.

"Wel , we'll have to try a different tack, then," Douglas said.

He did not sound put out; if anything, he sounded eager.

More than anything else, that made Jeremiah lift his head.

"You purely crazy, Mr. Douglas, sir? They'll have me in irons and hauled away fast as the judge can bang his gavel. "

"Maybe, maybe not." Douglas remained ponderously unruffled.

"Shit!" Jeremiah burst out. "And why did you give your bond on me? I could've broke out of jail maybe, gone somewheres else. How can I run off now?"

Douglas chuckled. "Caleb Gil en's right: you are honest enough, even if a runaway. If that were me in your shoes, I'd've been out the door like a shot, no matter what promises I made. But I gambled you wouldn't, because I think we just might get you really free yet."

"You're crazy, Mr. Douglas," Jeremiah repeated. A few seconds later, he asked in a small voice, "Do you really think so?"

"We just might."

"I'd give anything! I'll pay you. I've got I50 denaires saved up, almost. You can have 'em. If I'm free, I can make more." Jeremiah knew he was babbling, but couldn't help it.

"You'll stay, knowing that if we lose you'll be re-enslaved?"

That was a poser. At last, Jeremiah said, "Even if I run, someone'll always be after me to drag me back. If we win, I won't have to look over my shoulder every time I sit with my back to the door. That's worth something."

"Al right, then. I'll take your money. Not only do I need it after going bond for you, but having it in my pocket will give you an incentive to stay in town." Douglas looked knowingly at Jeremiah.

The black felt his cheeks go hot. Maybe he really was honest; once Douglas had given Hayes the money, it had not occurred to him that he could still run away. Once admitted, however, the idea was in his head for good. If things looked grim enough in court, he told himself, he might yet disappear.

For the life of him, he could not see how the upcoming hearing could do anything but send him back to Charles Gil en. After all, he was an escaped slave. He did not doubt his master could prove it.

So why was Douglas willing to take the case before the judges?

When Jeremiah got up the nerve to ask, Douglas did not answer right away. He heaved his bulk up out of his chair, walked over to pick up the volume of Pepys the black had tripped on when he tried to escape. He examined it careful y to make sure it had not been damaged.

Then he came over and slapped Jeremiah on the shoulder. "Be a man," he said. "Be a man, and we'll do all right."

True spring sweetened the air as Jeremiah and Douglas made their way to the Portsmouth courthouse. Jeremiah pointed up at the inscription over the entrance, the one that had baffled him when he arrived in the city.

"What does that mean?" he asked Douglas.

"Fiat iustitia et ruant caeli?" The lawyer seemed surprised for a moment at his ignorance, then laughed. "Well no reason to blame you for knowing even less Latin than Caleb Gillen, is there? It means, 'Let there be justice though the heavens fall."

Jeremiah admired the sentiment without much expecting to find it practiced. If there were justice, he would not be a slave, but he had a fatalistic certainty he soon was going to be one again. Douglas's optimism did little to lighten his gloom.

Douglas was always an optimist. Why not, Jeremiah thought bitterly. He was free.

A sim with a broom scurried out of the way to let Jeremiah pass.

His spirits lifted a little. Even as a slave, he had known there was more to him than to any of the subhumans. His shoulders straightened.

He needed that small encouragement, for he felt how hostile the atmosphere was as soon as he fol owed Douglas into the courtroom.

Hayes had made sure the case was tried in the newspapers constantly during the month since it began. Prosperous-looking white men filled most of the seats: slave owners themselves, Jeremiah guessed from the way they glared at him. Free blacks had only a few chairs; more stood behind the last row of seats.

Hayes, Charles and Caleb Gillen, and Harry Stowe were already in their places in front of the judges' tribunal. Jeremiah tried to read the elder Gillen's face. The man who had owned him for so long sent him a civil nod. He thought about pretending he did not recognize him, decided it would do no good, and nodded back. Hayes, who missed very little, noticed. He smiled a cold smile. Jeremiah grimaced.

"Rise for the honorable judges," the bailiff intoned as the three-man panel filed in from their chambers. In the black robes and powdered wigs, the judges al seemed to Jeremiah to be cut from the same bolt of cloth.

To Douglas, who had argued cases in front of them for years, they were individuals. As the judges and the rest of the people in the courtroom sat, he whispered to Jeremiah, "Hardesty there on the left has an open mind; I'm glad to see him, especially with Scott as the other junior judge. As for Kemble in the middle, only he knows what he'll do on any given day. He has a habit of changing his mind from case to case.

That's not good in a judge, but it can't be helped."

A second look was plenty to warn Jeremiah to beware of Judge Scott. The man had a long, narrow, unsmiling face, a nose sharp and thin as a sword blade, and eyes like black ice. Even when young, he would not have changed his mind often, and he had not been young for many years.

Hardesty's features were nondescript but rather thoughtful. High Judge Kemble looked like a fox. He had a sly mouth, a sharp nose, and wide blue eyes too innocent to be altogether convincing. Jeremiah would have bet he was rich.

"What case, bailiff?" he asked in a mel ifluous tenor.

The bailiff shuffled papers, though both he and the judges knew perfectly well what case it was. He read, "An action brought by Charles Gil en, a citizen of the Commonwealth of Virginia, to regain the services of his absconded black slave Jeremiah, the said Jeremiah stating himself to be a freeman and so not liable to provide said services."

Kemble nodded, Hardesty scribbled something, Scott looked bored.

The High Judge glanced toward Hayes. "The plaintiff may present his opening remarks."

The lawyer rose, bowed to Kemble and to each of the junior judges in turn. "May it please the honorable judges, we propose to prove that the nigger seated at the defendant's bench is and has been the slave of our client Charles Gillen, that he did willfully run away from the estate of Charles Gillen, and that he has received no manumission or other liberation to entitle him in law to so depart."

"What evidence will you produce to demonstrate this claim, sir?"

Kemble intoned.

"I have beside me here the owner of, "

"I protest the word, your excel encies," Douglas broke in. "For al that he borrows books from me, Mr. Hayes is surely too learned to assume what he wishes to prove."

"The claimed owner," Hayes amended before the judges could comment. "The claimed owner of this claimed slave" (Douglas winced at the sarcasm)

"and his son and his overseer, al of whom can identify the individual in question. I shal also produce a bill of sale demonstrating the chattel status of that individual." He sat down, looking as smug as a scrawny man can.

Judge Kemble glanced toward Douglas. "And how does the defendant plan to refute the evidence that counsel for the plaintiff shal put forward?"

The lawyer waited for Jeremiah's hesitant nod before he spoke.

The magnitude of what they were about to undertake still terrified the black, though they had hashed it out togethsr and agreed it was the best chance to squeeze justice from the court. As Douglas had said, "If you hit something, hit it hard."

For all his brave front, Douglas must have felt a trifle daunted tbo.

His voice was uncharacteristically nervous as he replied, "May it please the honorable judges, we do not seek to refute the plaintiff's evidence. Indeed, we stipulate it as part of the record."

All three judges had to work together to quiet the courtroom.

Cries of "Sellout!" from the few black spectatars rose above the buzz of the rest of the audience. The judges stared at Douglas as they wielded their gavels: Hardesty in surprise, Kemble in frank speculation, and Scott resentfully, as if the lawyer had awakened him for no good reason. Zachary Hayes also spent a few seconds gaping at his col eague. He recovered quickly, though, exclaiming, "If our evidence be admitted, then the case is proven for us.

May I ask your excellencies to order the nigger bound over for return to his rightful owner?"

"Bailiff, " Judge Scott began.

Kemble overrode him. "A moment, please. Surely, Mr. Douglas, you could have chosen an easier way to surrender.

Why this one?" - "Surrender, your excellency? Who spoke of surrender?"

Douglas's voice was at its blandest now, and Hayes's face suddenly clouded with suspicion. Douglas went on, "To stipulate that Jeremiah was held in involuntary servitude does our case no harm, as our contention is and shall be that such servitude is not only involuntary but contrary to law."

"On what ground, your excellencies?" Hayes waved the documents he had intended to introduce. "These are all executed according to proper form."

Douglas leaned down to whisper to Jeremiah, "Here we go, no turning back now." The lawyer took a deep breath, faced the judges, and said slowly,

"On the grounds that for any man to hold another man in slavery clearly contravenes the Articles of Federation and must therefore have no standing in law anywhere in the Federated Colonies.

The court was silent for a few seconds, while judges, opponents, and audience worked through the legal language to the implications behind it. Hayes furiously shouted, "Your excellencies, I protest!"

at the same time as a black man raised a whoop and a white growled, "You hush your mouth there or I'l hush it for yout"

Getting quiet back took longer this time, and the bailiff and court scribe had to eject a couple of particularly obstreperous people.

Finally, with some sort of order restored, Judge Scott brought down his gavel and said, "To me, the plaintiff's protest has merit, despite the defense's attempts at obfuscation. This small, open-and-shut case is not one from which to adduce large legal principles."

"Is it not?" Judge Hardesty spoke for the first time. "The principle would appear germane to the issue at hand."

"As Judge Scott has seen, your excellency," Hayes continued his protest to Kemble, "this is but a desperate effort on the part of the defense to shift the case away from the area where they are weakest: the truth. Its merits are clear as they stand; no need to go beyond them."

"On the contrary," Douglas said. "The claim I make is of paramount importance here. If one man may in law own another, when does application of that right end? What would the feelings of the plaintiff and his comrades be, were they at this side of the court, hearing my client lay claim to their services?"

"Any nigger wants me to slave for him'd have to kill me first," Harry Stowe snarled.

Judge Kemble's gavel crashed down, loud as a pistol shot. "Sir, that will be the last such outburst from you. You look to have seen the inside of a courthouse once or twice, enough to have learned the rules of behavior here." The chief judge glowered at Stowe until the overseer dropped his eyes and mumbled agreement. Kemble nodded. "Very well, then; we'll overlook it this time. As for the motion of the defense, however, we rule it is relevant to this case and will hear arguments based thereon." He used the gavel again.

As Hayes rose, he seemed to be fighting to hold his temper. His voice came out steady as he asked for a two-day extension "to study the new situation." Kemble granted it and adjourned the court.

Back in Douglas's office, Jeremiah was jubilant. "That Stowe hurt Mr.

Gillen more'n we did?" he grinned. "Without him opening his fool mouth that way, the judge wouldn't have got mad and gone along with your motion."

"Associating with me has made you cynical," Douglas said, drawing the cork from a bottle of whiskey and taking a long swig. "Ahhl Better.

Actual y, I think you're wrong there. Ruling against us, Kemble probably would have lost on appeal, and he's too clever to leave himself open for anything like that. He'l let us hang ourselves instead of doing the work for us."

That assessment shattered the black's cheery mood. "We ain't won yet, then?"

"A skirmish," Douglas shrugged. "You aren't back in the fields, are you? But no, we haven't won. The real fight is just starting."

When Jeremiah's case reconvened, the courtroom was even more packed than it had been before. At the bailiff's command, the people who had managed to gain seats rose to honor the judges. Those at the back, blacks again, mostly, had been standing for some time already, and would keep on until court adjourned.

Judge Kemble rapped for order. Slowly, silence descended. Kemble nodded to Zachary Hayes. "You may begin, sir."

"Thank you, your excellency," Hayes said, rising. I regret the necessity of belaboring the obvious, I still it may not be amiss to remind some of the citizens of the Federated Commonwealths of the principles upon which it was built."

He sent a sour glance toward Alfred Douglas before continuing, "I shall not even attempt to cite the precedents sanctioning slavery.

Suffice it to say they are both numerous and ancient, dating back on the one hand to the Old Testament, the foundation of our faith; and on the other hand to the history and institutions of the wise and noble Greeks and Romans, upon whose usages we have modeled our own."

Listening, Jeremiah fdt his heart sink. Hayes sounded too knowledgeable, too self-assured. The black's nails bit into his palms.

He should have run while he had the chance. All Douglas wanted to do was show off how bril iant he was. why not? If he lost the case, it would not hurt him any. He would not be the one hauled away in chains.

Douglas might have been reading his thoughts. He leaned over and whispered, "Don't give up just yet. He's not saying anything I didn't expect him to."

"Al right." But Jeremiah remained unconvinced.

Hayes was saying, "At first glance, it might seem strange that the Federated Commonwealths, whose pride is in upholding the freedom of their citizens, should also countenance slavery. Yet when properly examined, no inconsistency appears. More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle demonstrated in the Politics that some men are indeed slaves by nature, and that it is only proper for them to serve so that, by enjoying the fruit of their labors, the rest may be truly free.

"How may we judge those who are slaves by nature? Whenever two groups of men differ widely, so that the inferior group can do no more than use their bodies at the direction of their superiors, that group is and ought to be slaves by nature: they reason only enough to understand what they are told, not to think new thoughts for themselves.

"Finally, for us a kindly providence has distinguished this class of individuals by their dusky skins and other features different from our own, to make display of their servile status. This being the case, I trust your excel encies shal soon bring an end to the farce we have seen played out here, and that you shall return this nigger Jeremiah to the station God has intended for him." Conscious of a job well done, Hayes sat.

"Mr. Douglas, you may reply," Judge Kemble said.

"Thank you, your excellency," Douglas said, slowly getting to his feet,

"although I naturally hesitate to do so when my learned opponent, as he has demonstrated, is on such intimate terms with the Almighty."

Judge Scott's gavel crashed to stifle the small swell of laughter in the court; Hayes gave Douglas a distasteful look.

The younger lawyer brushed a lock of his thick, dark hair back from his forehead. He went on, "I should also like to congratulate Mr. Hayes for the scholarship and energy he has expended to justify the ownership of one man by another. I only find it a pity that he has wasted so much

- ingenuity over an entirely irrelevant result. 'The mountains labor, and bring forth a ridiculous mouse."

" This time, all three judges used their gavels, though Jeremiah saw Judge Hardesty's mouth twitch. Hayes sprang out of his chair as if he had sat on a pin.

"See here, your excellencies he cried. "If this mountebank has a case to make, let him make it, instead of mocking mine."

"The entire proceeding of the defense has skated on thin ice," Judge Scott observed.

"Your excellency, I hope to demonstrate otherwise, "

Douglas said hastily; not all the sweat that beaded on his face came from Portsmouth's humid heat. "If the court will indulge me, I believe I can do so by summoning two individuals to the witness-box. One is currently in the courtroom; the other, whom I should like to cal first, is just outside."

The judges conferred briefly among themselves. "Bunch of damned nonsense!" Jeremiah heard Judge Scott say. He saw the jurist's powdered wig flap indignantly. But after a few minutes, Judge Kemble said,

"You may proceed."

"I thank you, your excellency," Douglas said. "I should like the bailiff to fetch in a certain Rob, whom he will find, I expect, sitting against the wall opposite this courtroom."

Bearing a martyred expression, the things half-smart lawyers put him through!, the bailiff went out into the hallway. Jeremiah heard him cal , "Rob?" He returned a moment later, his face now frozen.

Accompanying him was a male sim, the hair on its head and back and chest grizzled with age.

"Mr. Douglas, I do not know what you are playing at, but I assure you I am no longer amused," Judge Kemble snapped. "You know perfectly well that no testimony by a sim is valid in a court of law, they being incompetent to understand or take oath."

"Yes, your excellency, I am aware of that," Douglas answered. "It was for that very reason that I summoned Rob (who belongs to a friend of mine) before you. The presence of sims on these shores, you see, has a vital impact on the question of slavery."

"Why? Are you planning to liberate them next?" Judge Scott asked.

Such sarcasm from the bench was dangerous. "No, your excellency,"

Douglas replied at once. "I believe it just that they serve mankind.

But their just service points out the injustice of forcing men to similar servitude."

"I fail to see how," Scott grumbled.

"Then let him show us, if he can," Judge Hardesty suggested softly. His partner's face did not clear, but Scott kept to himself the protest he still plainly felt. After glancing at Judge Kemble, Hardesty said to Douglas, "You may proceed."

"Thank you, your excellency." Douglas pointed toward Rob, who sat calmly in the witness-box, looking rather bored and working its massive jaws to help pass the time. 'Here we have a being gifted with intelligence, "

"Not much!" someone called from the audience, which raised a laugh and made the judges pound loudly for order.

A judge spent the next several minutes looking down at the table in front of him, until he trusted his control over his features once more.

Douglas, he knew, had paid the fel ow three denaires for that interruption.

The lawyer's face revealed nothing of his machinations.

", gifted with intelligence," he repeated, "though of a lesser sort than our own. Its existence is not to be denied; in the wild, sims craft crude tools of stone, and attempt to imatate ours, in a fashion no brute beast could match.

"But as most of you know, they have no language of their own, and most fail to master the English tongue. Can you speak, Rob?" Douglas asked, turning to the sim.

Its previously placid face grew tense as it struggled against its own slow wits and balky muscles. "Y-y-y-yess," it got out at last, and sat back, proud and relieved. Speak bad, it added with signs.

"So you do," Douglas acknowledged. He concentrated on the judges again.

"Had I bid the sim read to us from the amplest children's primer, of course, it would have been helpless, as it would have been to write its name. No man has yet succeeded in teaching sims their letters."

"And no man yet has taught a turtle to waltz," Zachary Hayes broke in.

"What of it? The issue here is niggers, not sims. Perhaps my distinguished opponent needs reminding of it."

"Yes, Mr. Douglas, we have been patient for some time aw," Judge Kemble said. "We shall not be pleased if this course of yours leads nowhere."

"It leads to the very heart of the issue, your excellency,"

Douglas assured him. "For consider: in the slavery of ancients, what was their chiefest concern? Why, just as the learned Mr. Hayes has demonstrated, to define who might rightfully be a slave, and who was properly free. The great Aristotle developed the concept my opponent discussed so well, that of the slave by nature. Here, in the person of Rob and in his kind, we see exactly what the Greek sage intended: a being with a body strong enough for the tasks we set, yet without wit enough to set against our will.

"Aristotle admitted that in his day, the most difficult thing to determine was the quality of mind that defined the natural slave.

And no wonder, for he was trying to distinguish among groups of men, and al men far more resemble each other than they differ from sims.

In these modern times, we have a true standard of comparison.

"Mr. Hayes put forth the proposition that the physical appearance of niggers brands them as slaves. That is the same as saying painted plaster will satisfy the stomach because it looks so good. In this court, should we not examine essence rather than exterior? To do so, I should like to summon my client Jeremiah to the witness-box."

While Douglas was signing to Rob that it could go, Hayes sprang up, exclaiming, "I protest this, this charades"

"On what grounds, sir?" Judge Kemble said.

"On the grounds that it is obviously a trick, rehearsed s well in advance, intended to make this nigger out to be Aristotle, Charlemagne, and the Twelve Apostles al rolled into one! "

"Aye, there's a stink of collusion in the air," Judge Scott rumbled.

"How say you, Mr. Douglas?" Kemble asked.

Douglas's smile was beatific, the smile of a man whose enemy has delivered himself into his hands. "your excellency, I say that even if I were to admit that charge, and I do not; I deny it, it would only help my own case. How , could I conspire with Jeremiah unless he had the brains to plot along with me?"

Hayes opened his mouth, closed it again. His eyes were wide and staring. Judge Hardesty let out a most unjudicial snort, then tried to pretend he hadn't. Judge Scott looked grim, which meant his expression changed not at all. Stifled whoops and cheers came from the blacks at the back of the courtroom. Judge Kemble gaveled them down.

"You may proceed, sir," was all he said to Douglas. The lawyer dipped his head, waved Jeremiah forward to take the oath. As Jeremiah raised his hand, he thought Douglas might remind the judges that he, unlike a sim, was able to do so.

But Douglas knew when to be subtle. The fact itself spoke louder than anything he could say about it. Facing the courtroom was harder than Jeremiah had expected.

Except for those of the few blacks, he was hard pressed to find a friendly face. The whites in the audience regarded him with looks ranging from stony disapproval to out and out hatred. Harry Stowe was part of the latter group.

Next to him sat the two people Jeremiah knew best here, Charles and Caleb Gillen. The habits of years died hard; it hurt Jeremiah to see the contempt on the face of the man ho had owned him, and to see his master's son scowling at him as at Iscariot. He started to smile, then let his face freeze. They would re-enslave him without a qualm if the judges said they could. That made them no friends of his.

Douglas produced a small, thick book and presented it to Eli Zachary Hayes, "Would you care to open the Bible at random, sir, so Jeremiah may read the passage you select?" The older lawyer drew back from the book as if it had come from the devil, "You'll not make me part of your trickery, sin Like as not, you've had him memorize Scriptiture for the sake of looking good here."

"Again you prove what you'd sooner oppose," Douglas said. "If Jeremiah were stupid as a sim, he wouldn't be able to memorize the Good Book. You'll make a man of him in spite of yourself."

He turned to the bench. "Would one of you care to make the selection, your excellencies? I don't want any possibility Is of deceit in this, for such as Mr. Hayes to tax me with."

To Jeremiah's surprise, Judge Scott took the Bible from tin Douglas.

The lawyer's face fell when he saw that Scott did not open the book just anywhere, as he had suggested, but began hunting for a specific passage. "Here," the judge said.

Let him read this." He stabbed at the section he wanted with his thumb, adding for the record, "This is the seventh chapter of First Chronicles."

Jeremiah certainly had not memorized it; he had no idea what was in the passage. But when Douglas handed him the Bible, he understood why the lawyer had gone expressionless. The chapter was one of those col ections of begats that crop up every now and then, and ful of names more obscure than most.

Having no choice, he gulped and plunged in, " 'And of the sons of Issachar, Tola, and Puah, Jashub, and Shimron, four. And the sons of Tola: Uzzi, and Rephaiah, and Jeriel, and Jahmai, and Ibsam, and Shemuel...."

" He read slowly and carefully, often pausing to sound out an unfamiliar name. He knew he sometimes stumbled, and hated himself for it, but Judge Scott had set too wicked a trap for him to escape unscathed.

He fought his way through the sons of Bilhan (Jeush, Benjamin, Ehud, Chenanah, Zethan, Tarshish, and Ahishahar), the sons of Shemida (Ahian, Shechem, Likhi, and Aniam), and the sons of Asher (Imnah, Ishvah, Ishvi, and Beriah, to say nothing of their sister, Serah). He almost broke down on Pasach, Bimhal, and Asvath (the sons of Japhlet).

But his voice rose in triumph as he came at last to the sons of Ul a, Arab, and Hanniel, and Rizia.

" 'Al these,' " he finished, " 'were the children of Asher, heads of the fathers' houses, choice and mighty men of valour, chiefs of princes. And the number of them reckoned by genealogy for service in war was twenty and six thousand men."

He closed the Bible. The courtroom was very quiet.; Douglas walked up and took the book from him. Judge Scott looked down at his hands, up to the plaster of the ceiling, anywhere but at Jeremiah.

"I think you can go back to our table now, Jeremiah,"

Douglas murmured.

Jeremiah's feet hardly seemed to touch the ground as he returned to his place. He heard Caleb Gil en whisper to his father, "I'm so sorry, sir. It's my fault he can read at al . I went and put ideas in his head, and see the thanks we get."

There was enough truth in that to sting, a little. Yes, Caleb had taught Jeremiah to read, but he was forgetting, the way that was so easy for someone used to thinking of people as belongings, that Jeremiah had wanted to be free long before he could pick out the word "liberty" on the printed page. Caleb had been willing enough to help last wmmer, when Jeremiah's goal seemed indefinitely far away. Now that it was here, Caleb was finding he did not like it so well.

"Mr. Hayes." Judge Kemble said, and then again, more crisply, "Mr.

Hayes?"

Jeremiah had thought Hayes would have to give in despite having worked so long for Douglas, he was still naive about lawyers. Hayes slowly rose, long and angular.

He made a production out of stretching.

"Begging your excellency's pardon," he said, perfectly leif-possessed. "I was woolgathering there. In considering this case, you must remember that it bears on not a single individual but, by the census of '98, close to a mil ion persons of African descent. What of their masters' property lights. Further, assuming that by some mischance they could become free, how are they to provide for themselves?

And how will they take their place in a society of free men?

Freedom bestowed as a gift will mean nothing to them, as they will have done nothing to earn it."

judge Hardesty nodded thoughtfully. That frightened Jeremiah, who had come to think of the quiet judg as on his side. "What are we going to do?" he asked. Douglas might as well not have heard him. He waited till he was sure Hayes had finished, then heaved his bulk up.

"When a man shifts his argument from principle to expediency," he remarked, "trust neither. My learned oponent is looking to sow panic where none need exist; he speaks as if we were on the point of civil war. Why do we have courts, if not to treat our abuses before we need the medicine solders give?"

"Very pretty," Hayes said. "You answer none of the points I raised, but very pretty nonetheless."

"Had you not interrupted me, I would have answered," D Douglas replied sweetly. "I don't presume to make the law, but I can offer some suggestions. You quoted the ancients when it suited your purpose.

They had their ways of dealing with freed men, and of easing them into the life of the state. Perhaps some of the first generation would remain as clients to their one-time masters, working for a wage for some length of time before severing all obligations. Given a few years and good will, the thing can be done painlessly."

Hearing Douglas propose curtailing his freedom made Jeremiah scowl. He hated the thought of going back to work for the Gillens, even as a free man. But a moment's reflection reminded him that before he had been willing enough to stay on as a slave, so long as he was treated well and had some hope of buying his liberty one day. He had run away from maltreatment, not slavery.

And, he realized, other blacks would not face the problem of ex-owners with grudges as deep-seated as the Gil ens' against him. Or would they?

Zachary Hayes might have picked the thought from his brain.

"Painlessly, eh?" he sneered, turning Douglas's word against him.

"You can make all the laws you like, sir, but how do you propose making the good white men who built the Federated Commonwealths accept their niggers as their equals?" There was the heart of things, dragged out naked and bleeding.

Before Douglas could get up to respond, Jeremiah found himself on his feet. "Your excellencies, can I say something?"

Judge Kemble glanced toward Douglas, who looked startled but shrugged.

"Is it germane?" the judge asked sternly.

"Sir?"

"Does it apply? Has it a bearing on the case here?"

"Oh. Yes, sir, that it does. Indeed it does."

"Very well. Be brief."

"Thank you, sir." Jeremiah took a deep breath. "Seems to me, sir, a lot of white folks needs to look down at niggers on account of they need to feel they're better'n somebody even if you did free every nigger tomorrow, made 'em just the same as whites to the law, those whites would stil now they were higher in the scheme of things than sims.

"Your excellencies, one of the things helped me get by so long as a slave was knowing the sims were there below me.

truth to tell," he went on, drawing on his thoughts of a few minutes before, "I didn't leave the Gillen farm til they stopped treating me like I was a man and worked me like a sim in the fields.

That's purely not right, sirs, making a man into a sim, and if slavery lets one man do that to an other, why, it's not right either. That's all."

He sat as abruptly as he had risen. Douglas leaned over find patted him on the back, murmuring, "Out to steal my bib? You just might do it."

"Huh," Jeremiah said, but the praise warmed him.

The arguments went on; Hayes was not one to leave a ase so long as he had breath to talk. But he and Douglas here hammering away at smaller points now, thrashing around the edges of things. Douglas got in only one shot he thought telling, a reminder of the historic nature of the case

"That's for Kemble's sake," he told Jeremiah during a recess.

"Letting him think people will remember his name forever for the sake of what he does here can't hurt."

Jeremiah thought about that, and contrasted it to Caleb Gillen's picture of the law as a vast impersonal force poised over the heads of miscreants. He preferred Douglas's way of hoking at things. People were easier to deal with than vast impersonal forces.

Gillen walked down Granby Pike toward the Benjamin and Levi Bank of Portsmouth. Money jingled in his pocket. Even if the Conscript Fathers of Virginia decided to set up a clientage system like the one Alfred Douglas had outlined the year before, by now he had enough money to buy himself out of any further service to the family that had once owned him.

Hayes was still appealing his case, of course, sending up writ after writ based on Judge Scott's narrow interpretation of the law.

But Judge Hardesty had been as narrowly for Jeremiah as Scott was against him, and Judge Kemble's ringing condemnation of human slavery would be hard to overturn. Douglas had been dead right about him, Jeremiah thought, he must have decided the eyes of history were on him.

A sim struggling along with a very fat knapsack bumped into Jeremiah.

"Watch where you're going, you brainless flathead," he snapped.

The sim cringed. It managed to get one hand free of its burden for a moment to sign, Sorry. Then it staggered on.

Jeremiah felt briefly ashamed. After all, were it not for sims, blacks would have been at the bottom of things, the target of everyone's spleen.

He almost went after the subhuman to apologize, but the sim would never have understood. And that was exactly the point.

He kept on toward the bank.

Trapping Run

The range where bands of wild sims could continue to live their lives much as they had before Europeans came to North America continued to shrink as human settlements pushed westward. Few bands remained entirely untouched by human influence. Sign-talk, for example, spread from band to band, even in areas where no people had ever been seen, because it was a conspicuously better means of communication than the subhumans' native assortment of noises and gestures.

Some trappers and explorers were friendly with the wild sims through whose lands they passed. Others, manifestly, were not. Bands of sims, naturally, often responded in kind, being well-disposed toward humans if the first person they met had been friendly to them, and hostile even to those who would not have harmed them if their first experience with humans had been a bad one. In this as in so much else, sims revealed how closely they resembled people.

In colonial days, and in the early years of the Federatdedf CminOre than their shave T attitude not Wdthmuphasize the

elStsedn however in the In tjthewas a trapper WhO beGan what ca 2 the sims i FrOm The Story of the Fedetat forest wed into the l I w 'II k mt tr head, surprised he hladd 5Ptoakleked even to himself and when don’t understand English.

will grasp hit The Six had Law i. by_ ! f , S chopped it down with a few hard swings. Then it checked If the edge of the hatchet head with its thumb. It hooted $ again. Still sharp, no chips, it signed. Good.

In spite of its metal knife, it was still used to the chipped stones sims made for themselves.

Good, Henry Quick agreed. He had paid fifty sesters for the hatchet back in Cairo; the marten fur would be worth easily twenty times as much. Some people in the cities of the Federated Commonwealths called that robbery. Quick did not see it that way.

Back on the other side of the mountains, hatchets were easy to come by, marten furs much less so. The situation was reversed here. Accounts l balanced.

Too, back in the cities of the Commonwealths, Quick [ would have had to put up with the stink of coal smoke, railroad noise, and the endless presence of people. He had little use for pointless chatter.

Maybe that was one reason he got on well with sims: they lacked the brains to talk when they did not have something to say. Some trappers, Quick knew, treated sims like wolves or foxes or any other vermin, and hunted them savagely. Sims robbed traps, no doubt of that. They were hungry al the time, and meat already caught was easy meat. Quick was sure the sim in the clearing with him had eaten the marten's carcass as soon as the pelt was off it.

In a way, Quick fol owed the reasoning of the trappers ' who went after sims. Because of their hands and wits, sims made devilish thieves. But those same hands and wits made them dangerous enemies.

By the nature of things, trappers traveled alone or in small groups.

The ones who came down hardest on sims often never returned.

Quick had always felt that making them into al ies worked better.

His initial expense was greater because of the trade goods he bought before every journey, but he thought he got more furs by enlisting the sims' aid than by harassing them. He found a trap robbed every now and again, yes, but more often were cases like this one, sims doing his hunting for him.

The subhuman flourished the hatchet again, making the flair sigh.

Good, it signed, and left the clearing with no more farewell than that.

Henry Quick was not offended; he had scant use for ceremony himself.

He stretched the skin, fur side in, on a piece of wood, and set it aside to dry. He did not have many marten pelts back at his base camp, which made him doubly glad for this one.

He also thought he would have to be a lot hungrier than he was, to want to eat marten meat.

He walked the trap line to check the snares he had set within a couple of miles of the clearing. Blazes he had cut on trees at eye level guided him from one trap to the next. As far

as he knew, sims had not figured out what blazes were for. He had several sets of traps within the territory this band wandered, each grouped around a clearing. He tried to make a complete circuit every couple of weeks or so, to make sure none of the beasts he caught decomposed enough to harm their pelts.

His nose guided him to the first trap. He shook his head in annoyance.

The trap must have taken a victim almost as soon as he reset it the last time through. He was doubly annoyed when

he found the metal jaws holding only a striped ground squirrel, whose skin would have been worthless even if fresh. Doubly disgusted, he threw the little corpse away, set the trap again, stuck on a fresh suet bait, and went on to the next one.

Something, probably a bird but maybe a sim, had stolen the bait from that trap without springing it. Quick sighed and replaced it. The bait on the trap after that was stil intact.

Quick sighed again; he'd have to think about moving it.

When he neared the next trap, he heard a wild, desperate thrashing. He drew his pistol and sidled forward, soft leather boots sliding soundlessly over dirt and grass, leaves and twigs. Catching a sim in the act of robbing a trap would be tricky; finding one caught in a trap might be worse, for that could turn the whole band against him.

His breath hissed out in relief as he saw that the trap held fox.

The animal must have been fighting the spiked iron teeth for some time. It was nearly exhausted, and lay If panting as Quick approached.

His mouth tightened. This was the part of his job he tried not to think about, taking a dead animal from a trap was much easier than dealing with a live one there.

No help for it, he thought. On his belt by his pistol he carried a stout bludgeon for times such as this. He set the gun down, drew it out. The fox's yellow eyes stared unblinkingly at him. Next to the torment of its trapped and broken leg, he was as nothing. He brought down the bludgeon once, twice. The fox writhed and twitched for a few minutes, then sighed, almost in relief, and lay still.

He sat not far from the body, waiting for it to cool and the fleas and other pests to leave it. Then he pried apart the jaws of the trap, rol ed the fox onto its back, and began to skin it. He always took pains at that, and took extra ones today, with the memory of the marten fur still fresh, he did not want any sims work to outdo his.

So intent was he that he had almost finished before he realized he was not alone. A sim stood a few paces away intently watching him. It was a female, he saw with some surprise, unlike the males, they did not usually stray far from the clearing where a band was staying. He kept away from that clearing. Of al his traps, this one was probably closest to it, but it was still a good mile away.

Female sims, Henry Quick thought, were not so brutallooking as males.

Their features were not as heavy, and the bony ridges above their eyes were less pronounced. That did not mean the sim would have made an attractive woman. It lacked both forehead and chin, and short reddish hair covered more of its face than Quick's brown beard concealed of his own.

Like all sims, it wore no clothes, but like all sims, it was hairy enough not to need them. Even its breasts were covered with hair, though the pinkish-brown nipples at their tips were exposed. It had an unwashed reek like that of the one that had traded Quick the marten pelt.

Take shin? it signed. That, at any rate, was what Quick thought it meant. He had trouble being sure; it could not use its fingers well because its hands were ful of roots and grubs, and its gestures were blurry in any case.

Yes, he answered.

He must have understood correctly, for its next question t was, Why club, not noise-stick? It pointed at his pistol.

Not want hole in stil , he signed.

It rubbed its long jaw as it considered that, then grunted, exactly like a person who got an unexpected answer that was still satisfying.

As if putting a hand to its face had reminded it of the food it carried, it popped a grub into its mouth, chewed ; noisily, and swallowed. Like most wild sims, it was on the lean side. Quick glanced down at the fox carcass. To him, it was so much carrion. Not to sims. Want meat? he asked.

Me? It pointed to itself, brown eyes wide with surprise.

Male sims hunted, females gathered; probably, Quick thought, this one had never taken anything bigger than a mouse or ground squirrel.

But it did not need much time to decide. Want meat, it signed firmly, leaving off the gesture that turned the phrase into a question.

Quick handed the fox's body to the sim. It gave a low hoot as it stared at the unaccustomed burden it held. It turned to leave, then looked back at the trapper, as if it expected him to take back the bounty he had given. Keep. Go, he signed. It hooted again and slipped away.

Henry Quick went in a different direction, off to check his next trap. As he walked, he chuckled quietly to himself. There would likely be consternation among the sims toinight, especially if the males had had a luckless day at the chase.

The trapper paused for a moment, frowning. He did not want his gift to land the female sim in trouble. Among humans, that might happen if a woman stepped into men's territory. With sims, on reflection, he did not think it would.

Being less clever than humans, sims lacked much of their capacity for jealousy. Their harsh lives also made them relentless pragmatists.

Meat would be meat, no matter where it came from.

Quick found a rabbit in his last trap. It was freshly dead.

He skinned it, cleaned it, and brought it back to the clearing.

His pack of trade goods was undisturbed. Had he been ," one of the trappers who habitual y maltreated sims, he would not have dared leave it behind . . . but then, had he , been one of that sort, he would not have dared travel alone in this land where men had not yet settled.

He started his fire again, spitted the rabbit on a stick, and , held it over the little blaze. The savory smell the lean meat gave off made his nostrils twitch and his mouth grow suddenly wet. He smiled, wondering what roast fox smelled like.

When he woke the next morning, he rol ed up his ' blanket and went over to wash in a creek that ran near the clearing. The water was bitterly cold; he shivered all the way back to his campfire, and stood grateful y in front of it until he was dry. No wonder sims did not bathe, he thought as he dressed. And this was still August, with the days hot and muggy. In another month, though, snow could start falling among the peaks of the Rockies, the ultimate source of his little stream. He would have to think about heading back to inhabited country soon, unless he wanted to spend a long, cold winter living with the sims.

"Not bloody likely," he said out loud. No trapper had a lot of use for his fellow humans, but Quick ached to spend ' a couple of days with good bouncy company in a bordello.

He was bored with his hand.

His next set of traps surrounded a clearing a few miles northwest of this one. The way was blazed, and to guide him if he got lost he had a sketch map and a list of landmarks he had made when he first scouted this territory.

Except for the ones he had given them, none of the places hereabouts had names. No other man, so far as he knew, g had seen them.

The behavior of the local sims certainly argued for that They had neither fled from him on his first

appearance nor attacked him on sight. Having no hostile memories to overcome made establishing himself much easier than it , would have been otherwise.

As if thinking of the sims had conjured them up, Quick heard a crashing in the undergrowth off to one side of him find the hoarse, excited cries of several males. They must leave been chasing something big, most likely a deer. They ae tireless trackers, and more skil ed even than an out orsman like Henry Quick. They had no guns with which il at a distance, but had to rely on thrown stones and Fars either tipped with fire-hardened wood or made from a knife, gained in trade, lashed to the end of a sapling.

The Sims' voices rose in a chorus of triumph. They Could eat well tonight, and for the next couple of days. buick's stomach rumbled. He was not so sure of a good meal himself. When he got to the clearing that formed the center for his next set of traps, he set down his pack and went out to do some hunting of his own.

He came back near sunset, seething with frustration beneath the calm shell he cultivated. The sims had had more luck than he. He was carrying a squirrel by the tail, bet there wasn't much meat on a squirrel. He made a fire, coated the squirrel with wet clay, and set it among the flames to bake.

When he thought it was done, he nudged it out of the fire with a stick and began breaking the now-hard clay with the hilt of his dagger.

The squirrel's fur and skin came away with the clay, leaving behind sweet, tender meat ready to eat. Quick, unfortunately, also remained quite ready to eat more and the squirrel was gone. Along with his trade goods, he had about ten pounds of dried, smoked buffalo meat in his pack. He worried every time he decided to gnaw on a strip, he might need it later. He was only a little hungry flow, he told himself severely. He turned his back on the pack, avoiding temptation.

A noise in the darkness beyond the edge of the clearing had ice darting up his back and made him forget his bel y.

He grabbed for his rifle, peering out to see what sort of t beast was prowling round his camp. Light came back red From wolves' eyes, green from those of a spearfang. Even with the gun in his hand, he shivered at the thought of confronting one of the great cats at night.

Try as he would, he saw nothing. A moment later, he l realized why. A male sim stepped into the flickering circle of light his campfire threw. Like the eyes of humans, sims' eyes did not reflect the light that reached them. The male came toward him slowly, deliberately. He saw it t was the one that had brought him the marten fur. It carried its knife in one hand, the hatchet he had traded it in the other.

Neither weapon was raised, and the sim showed no hostility. Still, Quick stayed wary. No sim had ever visited t him at night before.

He did not set aside his rifle until the sim put down what it carried.

Even then he had misgivings. Sims were stronger than people; if this one chose to grapple with him, he was in trouble.

But it had only freed its hands so it could use signs. You It give food, it signed, amplifying, Meat. You give to female. Yes, Quick agreed. I not eat fox, not want to, He hesitated. Hand-talk had no way to express waste; the concept was alien to the sim mind., put aside, he finished lamely.

Why not eat fox? Meat good, the sim signed, and the trapper's tight nerves finally eased a bit. Still, the male's next question took him by surprise: Hungry now? Yes, he signed again, with a rueful glance in the direction he had thrown the squirrel's smal bones.

Then he was surprised all over again, for the sim signed, You come with me to our fire, eat there.

Go there? he asked, not quite believing he had seen correctly. He had always made a point of staying away from at the clearing the sims used as their own. That was partly what with people he would have cal ed politeness, but more the simple desire not to draw unwelcome attention to himself. Wel , he seemed to have drawn attention, but not of the unwelcome sort

This wild band owned flint and steel now, fire

and the nary of the time when they had not been able to make it loomed large in sims' lives. Fire meant to this male what home meant to Henry Quick. come, he signed, stepping toward the sim. It picked up its weapons, signed Follow, and plunged the woods. Quick fol owed, as best he could. Again he ; reminded how wild sims perforce became masters of st craft. The sim glided along so quietly that he felt slow t and clumsy by comparison; sometimes only its lingering fir let him stay close to it. He suspected it could have gone er had it not been leading him. kinking on in front of his nose, a firefly made him Up. Other than that, the forest was impenetrably dark.

The sim pressed on with perfect confidence. Just when Quick was beginning to wonder if anything behind that confidence, he scented woodsmoke on the breeze. The sim must also have caught the smell, for it said no!", a breathy, throaty noise, the first sound it had made all night, and hurried ahead. A moment later, Quick smel ed charring meat along with the smoke. He hurried, and soon saw light ahead. The male hooted before it entered the clearing where its band was staying.

Answering calls came back to it. They made Henry Quick think of shouts heard on the breeze, with the words blown away but the sense, here, welcome, remaining. .

Quiet tell as the trapper stepped into the open area. With the male sims, it was a measuring sort of silence. Quick had entered most of the dozen or so of them as they and he hunted; he had traded tools for furs with more than half of them. Meeting them as a group, though, emphasized the Inferences between him and them as solitary contacts could not. The females and youngsters, on the other hand, had Wryer seen him before, except for the one to whom he'd given the fox carcass. Their stillness was more than a little fearful. But they were curious too. A child (for the life of him, Quick could find no better word, especially since young sims, like grown females, had a more human seemblance than did grown males) of perhaps seven came up to him. It touched his suede trousers and tunic, then looked up at him, the picture of puzzlement. Strange skin, it signed.

A couple of males growled warningly, and one hefted a stone as Quick stretched out his arm. Al he did, though, I was roll up the fringed sleeve of his tunic to show what lay beneath. No hair, he signed. That was not strictly true, but by sim standards he might as well have been bald. put on animal skins instead. Warm.

The youngster felt the trapper's bare skin, jerked its hand away with a grimace. Hair better, it signed.

Startled, Quick burst out laughing. The sims laughed too, loud and long. The male that had been holding a stone threw it on the ground, came over to Quick, and hugged him hard enough to make his ribs creak.

He wished he could have taken more credit for winning acceptance, but was glad to get it no matter how it came.

The male that had brought him tugged him toward the fire. Eat, it signed, and the trapper needed no further invitation.

One leg stil remained from the carcass of a buck, likely, Quick thought, the one he had heard the males chasing. The rest was bones, the big ones split to get out the marrow and the skull crushed for the sake of the brains.

A grizzled male had charge of the meat. As Henry Quick came over, the sim picked up a chipped stone and began to carve off a chunk for him. He started to offer his own steel knife instead, but stopped when he saw the stone tool gliding through the leg of venison. A steel knife lasted almost forever, was easy to hone again and again, and did not chip. None of that, however, meant stone could not be sharp. Quick's eyes widened slightly at the size of the piece the old sim gave him. Too much, he signed. Not eat al .

The sim shrugged and grunted. Someone, will if you don't, Quick thought it meant. Even the single gesture had been hesitant.

The trapper wondered on hand-talk had reached this band. Maybe it was so recently that the old sim had already been grown and only knew it imperfectly, as a man will have trouble speaking a foreign language he acquires after his youth.

Catching the meat bubble and brown as he held it on a stick over the fire drove such speculation from his mind. Beside him, the sim that had brought him here was roasting a larger piece. Less patient with cooking than he, it led its gobbet away from the flames, tossed it from hand to hand until it was cool enough to eat, then tore off one bite after another.

The venison disappeared with finishing haste.

quick sat beside the sim and tried valiantly to match its, but its bigger teeth and bigger appetite meant he was classed. Since they starved so much of the time, sims ate the most of good days like this one. The trapper was amazingly full by the time half his piece was gone, yet by then the male had almost finished and showed no signs of sing down.

He was thinking of offering it what was left of his venison when another sim touched him on the knee. He turned round to see the female he had met the day before. The female held out its left hand in a begging gesture, Meat? with the right.

He cut off a piece and gave it to the sim. Two youngsters begging from the male next to him, which gave them some scraps. A little one that could hardly toddle came up one of the children with its hand out, and in turn recieived a few tiny fragments of meat. It stared at the trapper as it ate.

The male turned to Quick. More, it signed, getting up walking over to pluck a handful of whortleberries off a branch heavy with the large, purple-blue fruit. The trapper ate a few himself; their tart sweetness cut through the greasy film coating the inside of his mouth.

Both males and females freely took the berries; no begging was involved. Only dearly won meat required that. Though they usually shared their prey, the males who hunted had some prior claim on it.

With a burst of pride that made him feel foolish a moment later, Quick realized the female sim had treated him as if he were a hunter himself, a dominant member of the band.

Despite that acceptance, he remained an object of curiosity.

That, he knew, was natural enough, he was probably the first live creature ever to share the band's campsite. If they changed their minds about him, he might not stay that way, either. Sims sometimes ate sims from other bands and, when they could catch them, people too.

A good many such grisly episodes punctuated man's westward expansion across America.

But this group found him only interesting. The grizzled elder that tended the meat ran its hands over his clothes, as fascinated by the soft suede as the youngster had been. Make, it signed, and then, after obvious painful groping for the sign, How?

Skins cut to arms, legs, chest. Not stink, rub tree bark-not any tree, right tree. As a trapper, he knew how to tan hides; what he could not do was put it in terms the sim understood. Show one day, he promised. If a sim saw something done, it could copy as well as a human. But sims would not improve on a process, as humans might.

Show, the old sim agreed. It pointed to Quick's fancy silver belt buckle. Show?

Regretfully, he shook his head. He knew nothing of metalworking, save that it was too complex for the subhumans to fathom.

His person fascinated the sims as much as his gear. They pointed at his gray eyes, then at their own, which were uniformly dark. He had to rol up his sleeve several times, and take off his boots to show that under them his feet were like theirs, if less battered and cal used. His forehead, though, intrigued the sims most. They kept patting at it to compare it to their own heads, which sloped sharply.

He shuddered even when he thought of doing so through the winters bouts.

On the face of it, it seemed impossible. The sim to whom he had given the fox carcass was close by.

He signed, How live, when snow come?

the sim signed, repeating for emphasis. Hard. Cold. Hungry. Many die in cold.

A shiver il ustrated the idea. Far more fluent with her signs than the elder had been, the female went on, Dens like bears', brush, branches. Stil . Make fire.

Still cold.

Cold. Cold. Cold. The sims eyes tried with dread. Winter was a worse enemy than spearfang or bear. With their bel ies full, though, the sims, never renective the first place, did not care to look ahead.

The youngsters through the clearing, wrestled with one another, and bred their elders, for al the world like so many unruly hen back in Cairo or Portsmouth or Philadelphia.

Many of the adults made beds of branches and leaves, curled and went to sleep, ignoring the youngsters' squawks shouts. A mother nursed a baby.

The old sim and a young adult male squatted by the fire, chipping stones. The young adult absently swatted at a youngster that disturbed him.

When it came back to watch what they were doing, the male let it stay.

Other adults had a different idea for passing the time.

Three or four couples paired off and mated. The rest of the sims paid them no particular attention, nor did they seem to feel the lack of privacy.

When a running youngster was about to crash into one pair, the male reached out from its , position on its knees behind the female to fend off the little one.

Henry Quick found the rutting sims no more interesting than did the rest of the band. He had been away from men a long time, but not long enough to think of a sim as a partner.

He would as soon have coupled with a pack of dogs! Some trappers, he knew, did that. Some mated with sims, too. He knew what he thought of them: the same as most a people thought. "You son of a sim" would start a fights anywhere in the Commonwealths.

He was taken by surprise when the female sim he had given the fox meat touched him on the leg again, this time much higher up than before. Want, ? the female signed. The last gesture it used was not a standard part of hand-talk, but not easy to get wrong, either.

To remove any possible misunderstanding, the female was on hands and knees, looking back over its shoulder at him. Neither that nor the sight of its cleft between hairy and rather boyish buttocks did anything to rouse his ardor.

No, he signed; hand-talk was not made for tact. He I softened his refusal as much as he could: You, I not same. The sim, luckily, seemed more curious than angry. Not fit? it asked, eyeing his crotch as if to gauge what his trousers concealed. He left that unanswered. He had seen enough sims to know their masculinity was hardly so if rampant as jokes and stories made it out to be, but he was no I more than average that way himself.

Not want, ? the female signed after a moment, and used a that gesture of its own invention again.

Full, Quick temporized. He patted his stomach.

Apparently that impeded performance among sims too because the female gave a small, regretful hoot. Later? it signed.

The trapper shrugged and spread his hands. You, I not same, he repeated. The female shrugged too, and went off to get a few more whortleberries. To Henry Quick's relief, it did not come back to him. He'd meant to imply that men and sims were so different no offspring could come from a mating. He did not know whether the sim was bright enough to follow that. He did know it was a lie.

He had never seen a crossbreed. The repugnance almost everyone felt for coupling with the subhumans had a lot to do with that few of mixed blood were born. Fewer still lived.

The human parent did that, to save themselves from disgrace.

The ones that did survive were good for driving lawyers to distraction, and for host of tales whose truth the trapper was in no position to judge.

He yawned. Back by his own campfire, he would have een asleep hours ago. Here he had neither his own blanket lor the nests sims made for themselves. He stretched out on he ground. The big blaze the sims had going was plenty to seep him warm. He was tired enough not to worry about sleeping soft. He rolled over, threw aside a twig that was Raking his cheek, and knew nothing more til the sun rose.

He woke with a crick in his neck and a bladder ful to bursting.

He walked into the bushes at the edge of the clearing to relieve himself. By the smel , and by the way his shoes squelched once or twice on the short journey, the sims were not so fastidious.

They had already begun their endless daily round of foraging.

Henry Quick was glad to see that the importunate female was gone from the campsite. Otherwise, he thought with wry amusement, it might have wanted to go into the bushes with him to see just what sort of apparatus he had.

The males, who hunted in a group rather than scattering one by one, were still by the fire. The trapper went up to the male that had guided him here. Good food, he signed.

He had a spare bootlace in one of the pouches that hung from his belt. He dug it out. Yes, it was long enough for him to cut a couple of lengths from the end and stil do what he wanted with it.

He cut off the extra pieces, tied them to the main length at one end, and made loops at the other end of each. Then he tied the makeshift belt round the sims middle to Carry knife, axe, he signed. Have them to use. Have hands free. The sim did not seem to understand. It rubbed its chinless jaw, staring at Quick, but made no move to put the tools in the loops.

The old grizzled male looked from the trapper's belt to the leather lace he had given the other sim. Its eyes lit. It let out a soft hiss making the very same noise when, as a boy, he had seen his first steam railroad engine. The grizzled sim stepped forward, took the knife from the younger male's hand, and thrust it through one loop.

Then it pointed, first at the hatchet, then at the second loop.

I'll It gave an imperative barking call, pointed again. It might never have learned hand-talk well, Henry Quick thought but its years had given it a wisdom of its own.

After it repeated its gestures a third time, the younger sim finally got the idea. It pushed the hatchet handle into the vacant loop; the head kept the hatchet from falling through. The sim looked at its empty hands, at the tools it still had with it. Suddenly it grinned an enormous grin.

Good, it signed at Quick. Good. Good. Good.

Have more another male asked. Sorry No more. Henry Quick apologetically spread his hands.

He suggested, Make from plants, from skins. The old sim could follow hand-talk, no matter how It much trouble it had using the gestures.

Make, it signed, and I pointed to itself. Before long, Quick suspected, every sim in the band, or at least every hunting male, would be sporting a belt. Some would be made of vines and would break, others of green hides that would stink and get hard and wear out quickly.

They would be better than no belts at al , he supposed.

He was pleased to have found something to give in exchange for the feast of the night before. Sims had so little that he was surprised they had offered to share, in spite of his earlier gift. Now they were less likely to resent him for accepting.

In daylight, the journey back to his trap line took less than half as long as it had by night. When he returned to the clearing where his latest camp was, he checked his pack.

No sims had been near it, though they never would have had a better chance to steal. On the other hand, he thought, smiling, they'd had plenty just as good.

He went the round of the traps near the clearing, reset the traps that needed it.

He should have had one more; a trap still held the bloody hind leg of a ringtail. That was all that was left of disc black-masked beast, though. When he first saw the tracks around the trap, he thought the sims had robbed him of her al .

Then he noticed the claw marks in front of the toes. A bear had taken the chance to seize prey that could not flee.

He swore, but resignedly; that sort of thing had happened to him many times before, and would again. Bears could be as big a nuisance as sims. Some bands of sims, like the one whose territory he was now, could be made to see that working with him got them more than robbing him did. The only thing a bear understood was a bullet.

A grouse boomed, somewhere off among the spruces. Henry Quick forgot about the bear, at least with the front part of his mind. He sidled toward the noise. The grouse's dull-brown feathers concealed it on its perch, but not well enough. He got almost close enough to knock it down with a club before he shot it.

He bled and gutted the bird, handling the gall bladder with care so it would not break and spil its noxious contents into the body cavity. He wished he were back at his base camp; the grouse would be better eating after hanging for several days. But he was on the move, and had no time for such refinements. The dark, rich meat would be plenty, good enough tonight.

So it proved, though he roasted it a couple of minutes too long; grouse was best rare. He would have liked to flavor it with some bacon instead of crumbs from his salt beef, but the rashers he'd brought were long gone; he'd eaten them as soon as they began to go rancid.

Picking his teeth with the point of his knife, he laughed at himself.

All this fretting about fancy cooking was a sure sign he'd been in the wilderness too long. That night he dreamt of eating pastry full of fruit and cream until he had to cut a new notch in his belt, in its own way as sensual a dream as his more usual imaginings of sweet-scented girls reaching up to him from featherbeds thick enough to smother in.

Waking hungry to a blanket in the middle of a forest clearing was hard.

Even eating what was left of the grouse was not help much, though it would have been an expensive luxury if ordered in a cafe east of the mountains. Too much of what he did involved things that were expensive luxuries east of the mountains.

What he craved were the luxuries he could only get back there.

The intensity of that craving ended up undoing him.

The next clearing around which he had a set of traps was over on the west side of the one the sims used. The trail he had blazed to it swung a lot farther north than it had to, so he could give the sims clearing a wide berth. Now that the subhumans had shown how friendly they were, he decided to take the direct route. If he did that the rest of the time he was there, he thought, he could save several days' travel and set out for the fleshpots of the east that much sooner.

The sims, he told himself, would not mind.

Nor did they. He happened on a party of hunting males not long after he set out. Several saw him, and nodded his l way as they might have to one of their own band. But he had I not reckoned on the bear.

For all his woodscraft, the first he knew of it was when it loomed up on its hind legs like some ancient, brooding god, not fifty feet from him. In that moment he had a good shot at its chest and belly, but he held his fire. Bears, even silvered bears like this one, rarely attacked without being provoked.

But it did not do to count on a bear, either. This one peered his way.

He was close enough to see its nostrils flare as it took his scent. It gave an oddly pig like grunt, dropped to al fours, and barreled toward him.

He threw his rifle to his shoulder, fired, and ran. The bear screamed. He heard its thunderous stride falter. But it stil came on, roaring its pain to the world and crashing through bushes and firs like a runaway railroad engine.

And in a sprint a bear, even a wounded bear, is faster than a man.

He had heard before he set out on this trapping run, they had most of the kinks out of a repeating rifle. He would have given five years' worth of furs to have one now. He threw away the gun he did have so he could run faster. If he lived, he'd come back for it.

He never remembered feeling the blow that shattered his right leg. Al he knew at the time was that, instead of sprinting in one direction, he was suddenly spinning and Sling through the undergrowth in a very different one.

That saved his life. The bear had to change directions too, and it was also hurt.

In the second or two its hobbling charge gave him, he jerked out his pistol, cocked it, and squeezed the trigger. He seemed to have forever to shoot. His hand was steady, with he eerie steadiness the shock of a bad injury can bring. The bear's mouth gaped in a horrible snarl; the pistol bal shattered a fang before burying itself in the beast's brain. The bear sighed and fell over, dead.

"God, that was close," the trapper said in a calm, conversational voice.

He started to pull himself to his feet and the instant he tried to put any weight on his leg, all the pain his nervous system had denied till then flooded over m. He fainted before he could shriek.

The sun had moved a fair distance across the sky when he came back to himself. The moment he did, he wished he but escape to unconsciousness again. He tasted blood, and realized he had bitten his lip. He had not noticed. That pain was a trickle, set against the all-consuming torrent in his leg.

Tears were streaming down his face by the time he managed to sit up; the world had threatened to gray out several times in the process. His trouser leg was wet too, not only from where he'd pissed himself while unconscious but also farther down, where the bear had struck him. Blood was soaking through the suede.

He held himself steady with one hand in a thorn bush while he walked the other down his leg to the injury.

Something hard and sharp was pressing against the inside of his trousers. He groaned, this time not just from the pain. With a compound fracture, and heaven only knew how much other damage in there, he would soon be as dead as if the bear had killed him cleanly.

He wished it had. This way hurt worse.

His hands shook so badly that he took a quarter of an hour to reload his pistol. A lead ball would end his misery no less than the bear's. But after the weapon was ready, he did not raise it to his head. If he had been able to charge it with powder and wadding and bullet, how could pain's grip on him be absolute?

He began to drag himself toward the bear. That took no longer than loading the gun had, though the body was only a handful of paces from him: he passed out several times on the way. At last he reached the carcass. If he was going to try to live, he would need to eat.

The bear was food, for as long as it stayed fresh.

The pistol ball left no visible wound, now that the bear's mouth was closed in death. Quick's first shot, with the rifle, had torn along the left side of the beast's neck and lodged in its shoulder. It might have been a mortal wound, but not quickly enough to do the trapper any good He tried to push the point of his broken shinbone back into his flesh, and failed repeatedly: the pain was too much to stand. He did drag himself to a sapling close by the bear's carcass and cut it down with his knife. Then, using the lace from his left boot, he tied the sapling to his leg. It was not much of a splint, but it was a little better than nothing. With it on, the broken pieces did not grind together quite so agonizingly.

He set out to make a fire, against the coming chill of night and the chill of his damaged body and for cooking a bloody gobbet he had worried off the bear's shoulder. He was still crumbling dry leaves for tinder when the hunting party of male sims came upon him.

He did not realize they were there until they were almost on top of him.

Along with their crude weapons, they carried squirrels and rabbits, a snake, and a couple of birds: . Not a great day's bag by any means. They looked in wonder from Henry Quick to the bear and back again. You kills one asked. After a little while, he recognized it as the male that had brought him the marten fur.

Understanding its hand-talk and responding took all the concentration and strength the trapper had. I kill bear, he answered.

Bear hurt me, break leg bone.

The sims grimaced. One gave an involuntary hiss of pain. Another pointed at the rude splint. Why stick!

Hold bone pieces stil . Hurt less. Quick changed the subject; his leg did not hurt much less. He waved at the dead bear, cut up meat, take to your fire. He could not hope to eat a twentieth part of it before it spoiled.

The sims could have done what they wanted with the bear no matter what he said, but his free giving of it seemed to take them aback.

Come with us, eat with us again! signed the male he knew.

He had prayed it would ask that. The band of sims, he knew, was his only hope of living through the winter, though he had scorned the thought not long before. It was his only hope of living longer than a few days, come to that.

Even if his leg healed well, he would not be able to travel for months. And with the injury he had, he had a bad feeling it would not heal well.

A male with a broken front tooth was signing at the one he knew best: Kil , it urged. More meat.

Kil , another male agreed. No hunt, no walk. Lie by fire, eat.

Cold soon. No food to give. No good to us. kil .

In other circumstances, Quick might have agreed with those sims.

He would be a burden for the band, and one more mouth to feed when they wein hungry themselves. Unless he could find a way to make himself valuable to them, he was done for. Take me to fire, then take all tools in pack, he offered.

One of the sims, unfortunately, was smart enough to see the flaw in that. Kil , then take tools, it signed.

He almost gave up then. Like a bul et, a spear going into his chest or a club breaking his head would put him out of his pain.

But he had not shot himself, and he did not want to end as a feast for subhumans. He forced his battered wits to work. Take me to fire, make more tools. That was the best he could do. If it did not appeal to the sims, he was dead. The male that had brought him the marten pelt hooted.

Make noise-sticks? it asked. He could see the eagerness on its broad features.

No, he signed, hating to have to do it. But even had he had metal to hand, he did not know how to make a gun.

Use noise-stick to kill game near fire.

He happened to think of bows and arrows. They were rare in the Commonwealths, but some rich men back east liked to hunt with them, claiming they were more sporting than guns. Quick cared nothing for sport. He was interested in surviving. Make thing like noise-stick, but quiet, he signed.

Kil far like noise-stick? the male asked. Not that far.

Farther than spear.

The sims shouted at one another, not so much arguing as to intimidate. Finally the male that had brought Quick the marten fur signed Take, and pointed at him. He tried without much luck to stifle a shriek as two sims hauled him upright. Others fell to butchering the bear.

It Soon they were toting slabs of meat bigger than those a man could easily carry.

That strength also helped the pair over whose shoulders he had draped his arms. Al the same, the journey to the band's clearing was a nightmare. It would have been dreadful even with careful men hauling the trapper. It was worse with sims. They were not deliberately cruel, but they were careless. Several times his broken leg hit the ground so hard he thought it would fall off. He rather wished it would. Mercifully, he passed out again before the hunting party got home.

The anguish when his bearers let him down like a sack of meal brought him back to himself. Sims were all he could see as he peered blearily upward. Their thick odor clogged his nostrils.

He felt blood flowing down his leg again. The thought of getting the sims to set the broken bone made him sweat but leaving it untended was worse.

Take off stick, he signed. Take off boots, pants. The sims grunted in puzzle the hand-talk gesture for trousers meant nothing to them, since they had never seen any except his. He pointed, and they understood. Fix bone, put stick back and another stick on, hold bone in place. He thought of thing else. Hold me down. I yell, you do anyhow.

the sims hooted in dismay when they saw how he was.

He die, a female signed flatly.

He live, he make for us, answered the male he knew. he live. That was another female. After a moment, he reconized it as the one that had wanted to couple with him. Well, no danger of that now, he thought, and even in torment almost laughed.

The grizzled sim pushed forward. Maker it signed. Good. if Live.

That was the most sign-talk the trapper had ever seen from it.

He turned his head away. The sight of his red-smeared tibia sticking through his flesh was making him even sicker than he felt already.

Push bone into leg, he signed. straight, like other leg.

Till then, he had only thought he knew what pain was. again, the sims were not cruel on purpose; again, that did help. No one could have set the fracture without hurting him badly. That the would-be healers were inexperenced subhumans made things worse, but perhaps not by much.

Some unmeasurable time later, his agony lessened, by a tiny fraction. He chose to believe that was because two pieces of bone were properly aligned. If not, he knew he could bear no more. His throat was raw from screaming; he could feel the blood slick on his hands, where nails had bitten into his palms.

now sticks on, he signed. Tie tight. Hold bones in place.

senses failed him before the sims were done. This time it did not return to him at once.

When at last he woke again, the sun was in his eyes. It morning His leg felt better; It was, he realized an improvement on how it had felt the day before. He looked around. Most of the Sims were long gone from ring, the males to hunt, the females to forage.

The female that had wanted him came out of the woods its arms were full of berries and roots it set down its prizes and came over to stoop beside him After a moment it rose again, to return with a chunk of food. His stomach twisted. He was not ready for food, but he had a raging thirst. Water, he signed.

The sim handed him the piece of wood He began hollowing out the branch with his dagger. The work took most of the day. It was interrupted when he had void his bowels. After a while, an old female, wrinkling its broad, flat nose got a handful of leaves and carried the dropping away. He hoped the sim would clean him too, but it did not. sighing, he went back to his carving.

When the rude cup was done, he explained with signs what it was good for.

The grizzled male took some time to understand. When at last it did, it hurried off to test the marvel for itself. It came back with a wide grin on its face. Standing where he could see it, it held the cup over its hea and poured water into its mouth from arm's length. It got wet, but it did not seem to care.

The female that had wanted him returned from another foraging trip. It handed him another piece of cold cooked bear meat. Eat, it signed again. This time he felt ready to try. The flesh tasted like beef, but was greasier. His stomach, long empty, churned uneasily.

His bowels moved again not long after that The young female dealt with the mess in the same way the old one had before. It came back, though, with more leaves, and did a rough job of wiping him.

Thanks, he signed. It only grunted; the gesture meant nothing to it.

Back in the settled parts of the Commonwealths, where sims served humans, polite phrases had come into hand-talk.

They had not, however, become part of the rough, abridged version this band used. Quick shook has head, sorry he could not express the gratitude he felt.

The last thing he remembered when he fel asleep that night was seeing the grizzled sim hard at work on another cup. The one he had made was in front of it. Every so often it would pick his up and study it, as if to remind itself what it was doing.

The trapper woke before sunrise, shivering. He had thought of the pain in his leg as a fire before; now it was hot in the most literal sense. He put a hand to his forehead. Water, he thought. It was the last coherent thought he had for a long time.

He never knew how long he lay in delirium; the hours and days stretched and twisted like taffy. Every once in while, something would lodge in his memory. He recalled, young sim bending over to peer down at him, its solemn face so close to his that it filled his field of vision. A mite was crawling across its cheek.

The mite seemed more interesting to him than the little sim.

He remembered tel ing the male that had brought him l, the marten fur how to get coffee stains out of linen. He went into great detail, though the sim knew nothing of either coffee or linen and understood not a word of English. Using hand-talk never occurred to him. After a while, the sims went away. Quick kept on talking until his mind clouded I again.

He remembered being fed two or three times, all of them by the female that had wanted him. The first time, he choked on a piece of meat and had to struggle to spit it out.

After that, the sim gave him only soft, pasty food. He watched it chewing meat and fruit before passing them on b to him, as if he were a just-weaned infant. He knew he should have been disgusted, but he lacked the strength. He did not spit out the food, either.

Quick heard deep, racking coughing, and marveled that , his lungs and throat were not raw. Only gradually, over a couple of days, did he realize he was not the one coughing.

A little after that, the noise stopped, or he stopped noticing it; he did not figure out which until much later.

He remembered the female shaking him back into foggy awareness of the world around him. It held a plant in front l of his face, a plant with downy, gray-green leaves, each cut go into blunt lobes and teeth.

The flower heads held many smal , tubular, pinkish-white flowers. They were sere and , brown now, well past their peak. Dusty maiden, the plant is was called, one of the thousands of little nondescript shrubs that grew in the woods.

He laughed foolishly; he was a good way past his peak too, he thought.

"Not quite ready for flowers, though," he said out loud. The sense of the words brought him closer to real consciousness. He was not far from being ready for flowers, and knew it.

the female held the root against his lips. Eat, it signed over and over until he opened his mouth. It thrust the root he gagged, bit down. Dirt crunched between his teeth as did the root. It tasted horrid. When he tried to spit it out, the female

sim held a hand over his mouth and would not him. It kept signing Eat.

With no other choice, he did. tears of rage and weakness filled his eyes.

The next thing he remembered was thinking it had started to rain.

But when he opened his eyes, the sun was shining. Yet he was wet.

Sweat covered every inch of his body. It dripped from his nose and trickled through his damp and matted hair. He put a hand to his forehead.

It was cooler. His fever had broken. He drifted away again, but something closer to natural sleep than to the oblivion which he had wandered before.

When he woke again, the female sim was trying to feed him another plant like the last one, but even more beraggled. This time, the sim broke off the root and forced it , into his mouth, the taste was just as bad as he remembered, but, gagging, he got the thing down. After he had swallowed, the female brought him a cup of water and held this while he drank it. He did not think the cup was the one he had made.

He had another sweating spell during his next sleep, and stayed awake some little while when he came out of it. The same sim seemed to have taken over his nursing. It greeted him with yet another dusty maiden plant. He no longer tried to fight its ministrations. Enough of his wits were back for him to realize that, however acrid and revolting the plant it was giving him tasted, they were doing him good. He came awake again at dawn, thinking how hungry he was. He tried to raise himself up on an elbow. The effort left him gasping before he finally succeeded. But no matter how weak he was, he was at last in command of his faculties once more.

He took stock of himself, looking down the length of his body. He whistled, soft and low. "No wonder I'm hungry," said out loud, his voice a rusty croak. The fever had melted the flesh from his bones.

Every rib was plainly visible (he had no idea when the sims had taken off his tunic, and his legs were bird-scrawny.

The splints, he saw with relief, were still on his right calf, it ached fiercely, but now the pain was at a level he could bear.

Yellow serum oozed from the scab where the bone had stabbed through his skin, yet his right leg felt not much warmer than the other one.

Despite the splints, the leg had a kink in it that had not been there before.

He did not care. He was healing. A limp, even a cane the rest of his life, would be a smal price to pay. He marveled that he was alive at al .

Because the agony in his leg had diminished, he was abler to take stock of his other bodily shortcomings, which were considerable.

He felt raw, running sores on his back and buttocks, not surprising when he had been lying there so long. There were more on the insides of his thighs, from imperfectly cleaned wastes. But he was not lying in a great stinking pool of his own filth. The sims must have dragged him from spot to spot in their clearing. He had no memory of it.

Most of the subhumans were already out looking for food.

one of the old females that kept an eye on the kids while their parents foraged walked in front of him. Food, he signed.

The old female fell back a pace. "Hoo!" it said in surprise; he must have been an inert lump so long that the sims no longer expected anything else from him. The old female brought him some berries. They were the unripe and overripe ones none of the subhumans had wanted.

Again, Henry Quick did not care.

Half-starved as he was, they still tasted wonderful.

He tried to rol on his side, but even splinted, even beginning to mend, his leg would not let him. His bedsores for could think of no better name for them snarled as his weight came back down on them. He was not going anywhere, even so short a distance, for a while yet. He abandoned the slender dream he'd let grow again of getting back across the mountains before the snow fel .

. The female sim that had been caring for him returned, with what looked like a chunk of log. The old female gave an

excited hoot, pointed to Quick. Seeing him awake, the other sim dropped its burden and dashed over to the maiden plant. This time he took the plant from the sims hand and ate it , before he could be told to. Whatever was in that root was medicine better than most of what the doctors back in Cairo used.

When he had choked it down, he signed Eat?

Yes the female sim echoed, grinning hugely. One of the hatchets from Quick's pack was lying close by. The sim cut the log it had brought in.

Punk flew; the log was old. Two or three more strokes served to split it.

It was ful of at beetle larvae. They squirmed in the dirt.

Youngsters came running up to pop them into their mouths.

the female sim skewered several grubs on a twig, held over the fire, and brought them to Quick. The trapper paused, then sighed. If he was going to live with sims, he d have to live like a sim, and that was that. He screwed his eyes shut, but he ate. Perhaps hunger seasoned the bugs, for he did not find them as disgusting as he thought. Compared to the medicinal root, they were delicious.

The female sim fetched him a cup of water. He wondered many times it had done that while his wits wandered.

Not many human nurses would have been so patient.

The water made his bladder fill up. He did not want to foul himself, not now when he was awake. He called to the sim. When he had its attention, he signed, Fill cup piss from me Not piss on ground here.

boo," the sim said softly, as the subhumans often did a meeting an idea they had not thought of. The sim put the cup between his legs. It took hold of his penis to put tip inside the cup as matter-of-factly as if it were holding his toe. Urinating without fouling himself was one of the pleasures that accompanied healing.

he thought of something. Not drink from this cup, heed This cup, piss only.

“Coo," the female said again.

After al his improvement, the trapper still slept as mum as a young child. He was asleep when the hunting party males returned, a little before sunset. When he woke the next morning, most of them were gone again. The man that had brought him the marten pelt, however, crouched beside him, plainly waiting for him to rouse That waiting was as far as politeness went among sim They had no small talk. As soon as the male saw Quick's eyes on it, it signed. Make thing like noise-stick.

Quick frowned. He had hoped the sim had forgotten the promise he'd made as he thrashed on the ground in anguish. He had only the vaguest idea of how to make bow, to say nothing of arrows. Unfortunately, the sim remembered.

He would have to learn If it was going to propel an arrow, a bow had to be of springy wood. The trapper pointed to one of the spruces at the edge of the clearing. Fetch me little tree like that, has signed. He held his hands about four feet apart. The sim went into the woods. It soon came back with a sapling such as he had described. A knife lay close enough for him to reach it. He began cutting branches off the trunk.

The sim watched for a while, then decided nothing was going to happen right away. It picked up its hatchet and a stout club and went off to hunt.

Because Quick was stuck on his back, trimming the sapling was a slow, awkward job. He managed to twist enough to prop himself up on his left elbow. He used his left hand to hold the fragrant trunk and carved away with his right, but things still did not go well. He looked round for the grizzled sim. The old male could help, and would probably be interested in what he was up to He did not see the old male. Thinking back, he had not seen it since his wits came back. When the female that cared for him returned from a foraging trip, he asked about it. Dead, the female signed, a thumbs-down gesture old as the Roman arena. The sim amplified it with a racking burst of coughs. Quick recalled the paroxysms he had heard in his delirium.

Face more he was frustrated because he could not make polite expressions of sympathy speech would permit. After some thought, he signed Bad for band.

Bad for band, the female agreed. Toolmaker. All sims use and make tools, of course, but as with people, some were better than others.

The grizzled sim had lived enough to gain a great deal of experience, too. If it had passed on al it knew, the band would indeed suffer.

Henry Quick wondered how much he could help there. what hurt the band would also hurt him.

At the end of the day, he had the trunk of the spruce bare ranches and a notch carved in either end. Good help, he led to the female. It smiled back at him. He realized he had to make a conscious effort to smell it these days, probably, he thought, because by now his own odor was as bad as its.

bout then the males came back. They were smeared in blood but triumphant; they carried a plump doe already cut in pieces. The females and youngsters greeted them with glad cries. The band would feast tonight.

The male that had brought Quick the marten fur ambled over and picked up the would-be bow. It scowled, eyebrows king on the heavy brow-ridges.

Not like noise-stick, it signed ominously. Had it had a sign for fake, it would have signed it.

Not like, the trapper admitted, adding Do like, when the sim grunted a noise redolent of skepticism.

Quick's eye fell on the hind leg from which another male carving chunks.

He had intended to use another bootlace as a bowstring, but he had only two, and the sims , _ would need more bows than that . . . assuming he could make any at all. Sinew might serve in place of leather.

Save, he signed, and then paused, grinding his teeth: he not remember the sign for "sinew." Eventually, by pointing to the tendons in his own wrist and at the back of sims ankles, he put across his meaning. The male gave him a dubious look no butler would have been ashamed of, - but went over to the sim acting as butcher and passed the message along. That male shrugged as if to say the trapper was daft, but eventually set beside him several glistening white lengths, each with bits of flesh still clinging to it.

He did not work on the bow for several days after that.

His fever returned. It was not strong enough to drive him into delirium, but it did leave him shivering and miserable.

He glumly crunched the dusty maiden roots the female sim brought him and wished he felt more like a human being, or even a healthy sim.

Because he was stil aware of his surroundings, he real y noticed then the care the female sim gave him. It fed him, got him water, cleansed him, hauled him from place to place to keep him from lying in his own dung. It might not have been as gentle as a human nurse, but it was more conscientious than most. Not only was this spel of fever less severe than the last had been, it was shorter. Yet even after Quick began to feel better, he kept waking up chilled. Only when he saw the sims also clutching themselves, building thicker piles of bedding, and huddling close to the fire did he understand that the weather was changing. Autumn was drawing near, and hard on its heels would come winter.

The sims did what they could to get ready for it. They brought in stones and brush, which they began to work into a windbreak. As the days went by, it grew thicker and taller and extended all the way around the clearing, with a couple of thin spots through which the sims could push. They also stacked up great heaps of firewood; once the snow started, it would not be so easy to collect. Quick's hatchets helped them there. They could not have cut so much wood with their crude tools alone.

Some of them even realized it. The male that had brought Quick the marten pelt hefted its hatchet when it saw he was watching and signed, Good.

It was less happy, however, over the trapper's efforts to make arrows that were worth anything. Finding really straight lengths of branch was hard enough. Getting points on them proved worse. Because the sims used stone tools Quick had assumed they could easily chip out little stone arrowheads. But the tools they were used to making were hand-sized choppers and scrapers.

They had never done the tiny flakework arrowheads required. If Quick had shown them how, they could have duplicated his efforts. He no skill in shaping stone, though, and soon discovered knowing what he wanted was very different from singing how to make it.

About the time the first frost appeared on the windbreak, he worried about getting knocked over the head for failing to produce. If the sims decided to do that, he could not stop them, but that fatalistic certainty was only a small of what gradual y let him relax.

or more important was that the sims accepted him.

They had grown accustomed to him lying by the fire, and no longer saw him as much different from themselves, except that he could not move.

His chief worry now was that would happen if a youngster tripped over his broken leg while playing. Where the young sims had once crowded to gape at him, now they were so careless around him he sometimes wondered if they remembered he was there.

the leg stil hurt. It also itched savagely; he rubbed the leg round the healing gash raw until he understood the itch came from far within. He healed despite the itch, little buy little. Milestones were small, but he treasured them: the day he could sit up, the day he could roll onto his side to air sores on his back and behind, the day those sores started to scab over.

Milestones or not, he remained immobile, save when a sim dragged him along.

Except for his annoyingly troubled work on the bow, he had little to do but lie by the fire and watch the members of the band.

Just as they accepted him, so he came to think of them more and more as individuals, as people, rather than as subhumans, animals to evade or exploit.

Looking back, he supposed the beginning of that probably came when he finally decided that thinking of "the male that had brought him the marten skin" by that clumsy handle was more trouble than it was worth. He decided to call it Martin and have donewith it. Giving the sim a man's name helped him think of it as being more like a man.

One by one, he named all the sims. Most of his names were just tags in his own mind. The sims had so much trouble reproducing the sounds of English that they could not use his names themselves, which made him hesitate to apply them. Martin, however, soon learned what noise meant him. (With a man's name, Martin was also harder think of as it.) The female that cared for Henry Quick also rapidly figured out what names were for. He cal ed her Sol.

Even though he continued to improve, he knew how dependent on her he still was. He whittled away at a couple of branches, slowly turning them into crutches, but he was not ready to try them yet. A fal , a slip, would put paid to weeks of slow recovery. In any case, he had nowhere to go now that the weather was changing.

Sol went right on caring for him as she had all along. She also got better and better as his assistant in the effort to unravel the secrets of the bow. she would have been better yet, he thought glumly, had her mentor been worth a damn. She copied his blunders faithful y, one by one, but stopped making them as soon as he did. He knew a lot of people back in the Commonwealths who, having settled on a particular mistake, would keep making it till the end of time.

He also knew a lot of people who would have turned up their noses, in the most literal sense, at the continuing unpleasant labor involved in disposing of his wastes and getting the filth off him afterwards. Sol never faltered. In the days when he was still on his feet, he had improvised a good many strange wipes for his hindquarters, but in that regard Sol's ingenuity outdid his. He was grateful, and sometimes amused. He would never have thought of using grouse feathers, for instance.

Sol also kept using that same wooden cup to help him pee.

He sometimes thought the simple desire to piss upright would be what finally drove him to his feet. He was glad he had the sense to recognize that urge as a sign of returning health, and did not try to act on it too soon.

Another sign came not long afterward, on a day Where, by the fire, the wind held a chil y promise of the snow would come soon. As he had countless times before, he called Sol's name and asked for the cup. she finished fishing the seeds out of a couple of pinecones she had and brought it over to him. took him in hand, again as she had so often before.

What happened then, though, was new and strange, for he felt himself stiffening at the sims touch.

It was hard to say which of them was more surprised.

Quick had been lustful enough out on the trap line, there is nothing like a compound fracture of the leg and a bout of fever to make a man put aside such concerns. Had Sol ignored his rise, simply put his penis in the cup waited, the moment would have passed. The sim was about to do just that, then paused, looked down, quietly said, "Iloo!"