A Different Flesh by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page A

quiet, the female left it again. This time, it stayed quiet until its mother returned.
    This band did not have one firekeeper as the other had. From time to time, a female or young male would come up to the blaze and toss on a branch or a shrub. The system seemed haphazard to Wingfield, but the fire never looked likely to go out.
    A group of sims had gathered on the far side of the fire around something their bodies kept Wingfield from making out. Whatever it was, it mightily interested them. Some stood, others hunkered down on their haunches for a closer look. They pointed and jabbered; once one shook another, as if to get a point across. Wingfield could not help chuckling to himself—they reminded him of so many Englishmen at a public house.
    Then the chuckle died in his throat, for he saw that one of the males there had a great glob of mud plastered to the hair from its rib cage. The sim moved slowly and painfully. Wingfield touched Cooper’s arm. “On my oath, that is the one I fought. I knew I marked him with my knife.”
    â€œThen we tracked truly, as I thought. Good. Now we—”
    Wingfield’s hand clamped down tight on the guard’s wrist, silencing him. From the center of that tightly packed bunch of sims had come a familiar thin, wailing cry. “Joanna!”
    â€œHow do you know ’tis not one of their cubs yowling?” Henry Dale demanded. “All brats sound alike.”
    â€œOnly to a single man,” Wingfield retorted, too full of exaltation and fear to care how he spoke. Against all hope, his daughter lived, but how was he to free her from her captors? And what—the question ate at him, as it had from the onset—what had prompted the sims to steal her in the first place?
    A couple of sims stepped away to take food, opening a gap in the crowd. “There, do you see?” Wingfield said triumphantly. No matter how dirty she was (quite, at the moment), smooth, pink Joanna could never be mistaken for a baby sim.
    As if to make that pikestaff-plain, one of the sim infants lay beside her on a bed of grass and leaves. Terror stabbed Wingfield as an adult ran its hand down his daughter’s chest and belly, but then it did the same to the hairy baby next to her. It stared at its palm, as if not believing what it had felt.
    The sim Wingfield had wounded held up one of Joanna’s hands, then that of the infant of its own kind. Then it held up their feet in the same way. The other sims grunted. Some looked at their own hands and feet, then toward Joanna’s. Except for size and hairiness, there was not much difference between their members and hers.
    But then the sim patted Joanna’s smooth, rounded head, and that was nothing like what the tiny sim next to her had. Already its brow beetled bonily, and above it the skull quickly retreated. Noticing that, one of the adults rubbed her own receding brow. She scratched, for all the world as if lost in thought.
    â€œWhat are they playing at?” Henry Dale whispered harshly. Wingfield, at a loss, could only shrug.
    Caleb Lucas said, “If a tribe of devils set up housekeeping outside London and we wished to learn of what they were capable, were it not wise for us to seize on a small one, knowing full well a grown devil would drag us straight to perdition?”
    â€œWhy are you dragging in devils?” Dale did not have the type of mind that quickly grasped analogies.
    Allan Cooper did. “Youngster, meseems you’ve thrown your dart dead center,” he said. “To the sodding sims, we must be devils or worse.” He stopped, then went on, sounding surprised at where that line of thought was taking him, “Which would make them men of a sort, not so? I’d not’ve believed it.”
    Wingfield paid more attention to Joanna than to the argument. She was still crying, but did not seem in dreadful distress. It was her hungry cry, not the sharper, shriller one she used when gas