A Different Flesh by Harry Turtledove Page A

whimper. Kenton could only spread his hands regretfully. Several times he had tried to teach Charles the ABCs, but the sim could not grasp that a sign on paper represented a sound. No sim had ever learned to read or write.
    Then the scout had an idea—maybe his map would be easier than letters for Charles to understand. “Recall the creek we walked along this morning, how it bent north and then southwest?”
    The sim nodded. Kenton pointed to his representation. “Here is a line that moves the same way the creek did.”
    Charles looked reproachfully at the scout. Line not move. Line there .
    â€œNo; I mean the line shows the direction of the creek. D’you see? First it goes up, then down and over, like the stream did.”
    So ? In their deep, shadowed sockets beneath his brow ridges, Charles’s eyes were full of pained incomprehension. Line not like stream. How can line be like stream ?
    â€œThe line is a picture of the stream,” the scout said.
    Line not picture . Charles’s signs were quick and firm. Picture like thing to eyes. Line not like stream .
    Kenton shrugged and gave up. That had been his last, best try at getting the idea across. Sims recognized paintings, even pen-and-ink drawings. Abstract symbols, though, remained beyond their capacity. The scout sighed, got out his blanket, and slept.
    Instead of returning to the clearing, Kenton decided to parallel the game track down which the buffalo had fled. Mockingbirds yammered in the treetops high overhead, while red squirrels and gray frisked along the branches, pausing now and then to peer suspiciously down at the man and the sim.
    â€œAn Englishman I met at Portsmouth told me there are no gray squirrels in England, only red ones,” Kenton remarked.
    No grays? Who ate them ?
    Kenton smiled, then sobered. There was more to the question than Charles, in his innocent ignorance, had meant. People on both sides of the Atlantic were still hotly debating the notion someone had put forward a generation before: that the struggle of predator against prey determined which forms of life would prosper and which would fail.
    The scout liked the idea. To his mind, it explained why such beasts as spearfangs and hairy elephants lived in America but not in Europe, though their ancient bones had been found there. Humans, even savages, were better hunters than sims. Already, after less than a century, spearfangs were scarce in Virginia. No doubt they had been exterminated east of the ocean so long ago that even the memory of them was gone.
    The thought of life changing through time horrified folk who took their Scripture literally. Kenton could not fathom their cries of protest. America had shown so many wonders the Bible did not speak of—sims not the least—that using Scripture to account for them struck him as foolish. Like most colonists, he preferred to judge truth for himself, not receive it from a preacher.
    A little past noon, the scout began hearing the low rumble of many buffalo hooves again. He found a herd gathered at a salt lick, pushing and shoving each other to get at the salt like so many townswomen elbowing their way to a peddler’s cart. He took out his journal and noted the lick. When settlers eventually came, they could use the salt to preserve their meat.
    He had not intended to hunt that day, not when he and Charles were still carrying some of the buffalo hump. But a tawny blur exploded from the far side of the clearing and darted toward a yearling cow at the edge of the herd. The spearfang’s roar sent the buffalo scattering in terror and made ice walk up Kenton’s back.
    The spearfang’s powerful forelimbs wrapped round the buffalo’s neck. Despite the beast’s panic-stricken thrashing and bucking, the spearfang wrestled it to the ground. Excitement made the big cat’s short, stumpy tail quiver absurdly.
    The struggle went on for several minutes, the buffalo trying desperately to