A different Flesh
By Harry Turtledove
Synopsis:
How would we treat our cousin, Neanderthal man, if he were alive today?
In this alternate history, bands of Homo erectus had crossed the Siberian land bridges to America, but no modern humans made the same trip later. The world where sims (the European settlers' name for Homo erectus) rather than Indians live is different from ours. North America would have been easier for Europeans to settle than it was in our history, where the Indians were strong enough to slow if not to stop the expansion. The presence of sims, intel igent beings, but different from and less than us, shaped European thought.
Those Sims were enough like us to be very useful, different enough from us to be exploited with minimal guilt, and too weak to resist effectively for themselves.
The urge to treat them better would have to come from the ranks of humanity, and to compete against the many reasons, some of them arguably valid, for continuing exploitation.
This is the story of Europeans conquoring the New World, and the story of the Sims as theyy move from slavery to true humanity.
This is a work of fiction. Al the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.
Copyright O 1988 by Harry Turtledove
copyright 01988 by Nightfal , Inc.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Book Baen Publishing Enterprises P.O. Box 1403 Riverdale, NY
10471
ISBN: 0-671-876224
Cover art by Kevin Murphy
First Baen printing, September 1994
Distributed by Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas NewYork, NY
10020
WHEN TWO ORGANISMS overlap too closely in a single environmental niche, they compete. It may not be purposeful, the organisms may not have the kind of brains that will make anything at al purposeful, but they will compete just the same. They will try to use the same habitats; live on the same food; and it is very likely that one will prove a bit more efficient than the other. The stronger will beat off, damage, or kill the weaker; the better hunter or forager will leave the poorer to starve.
It is one of the mechanisms of evolution, usually expressed by the cliche "survival of the fittest" (except that you define the "fittest"
as the one who survives, so that you have a nice circular argument).
To get a bit closer to home . . . We don't know exactly what killed off the australopithecines after their having lived in eastern and southern Africa for two million years, but it may well be that genus Homo, wittingly or unwittingly, helped.
And Homo erectus may have been done in, at least to some extent, by Homo sapiens, while the Neanderthal variety of the latter was in turn done in by the modern variety.
We can't put ourselves into the minds of Homo erectus or Australopithecus africanus, let alone into what might pass as the mind of trannosaurus rex, but we know very well what our own minds are like. We have minds that make it possible for us to know what we are doing when we cal ously mistreat others who are very much like ourselves, and do you know what we do? We rationalize our cruelty, and justify ourselves, and even make ourselves sound moral and noble.
Here is the first example I know of. Immediately after the Flood (according to the Bible) Noah planted a vineyard, made wine, drank it, and was drunken. And his youngest son, Ham, the father of Canaan, didn't show the old man the proper respect. (The Bible doesn't go into detail.) Noah therefore said, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." (Genesis 9:25.) In the time of King David and King Solomon, the Israelites control ed al of Canaan and enslaved the Canaanites and put them to forced labor, it was not because the Israelites were a master race and did as master races always do. Not at all. They did it (they said) because of a Biblical curse on Canaan. (One that was undoubtedly inserted into the Bible after the fact.)
Very well, then, that was ancient times, and people were primitive and knew no better.
However, in modern times, it was suggested that Ham, the youngest son of Noah, was a black and the ancestor of all the blacks that have existed since. This, of course, is entirely wrong, Ear the Canaanites, if we go by linguistic divisions, were as Semitic as the Israelites, the Arameans, the Babylonians, and the Arabs. They were not blacks.
However, it suited the slavemasters of Europe and America to pretend that Ham was black because that made black slavery a divine institution and placed the blacks under that same curse the Israelites had made use of three thousand years before. When preachers from the slave states said that the Bible enjoined black slavery, Noah's curse was what they referred to.
In fact, you don't have to refer to a particular Biblical verse to make yourself sound moral and noble. After all, when you enslave a black, you free him from his slavery to his superstitions, his false religions, his primitive way of life, and you introduce him to the benefits of Christianity and save his soul. Since his soul is worth infinitely more than everything else he possesses or can possess, you are doing the slave an enormous favor by enslaving him and you're earning for yourself kudos in heaven and flights of angels will sing you to your rest for being a noble slaveowner. (If you think that slaveowners didn't use this argument to justify themselves, you are very naive.)
In fact, to slaveowners, slaves were always responsible for their own slavery. To Aristotle, that great Greek thinker, those people who weren't Greeks were slaves by nature. These "barbarians" (so-called because they didn't talk "people-talk" the way the Greeks did, but made uncouth incomprehensible sounds like "bar-bar"), being natural slaves, were natural y enslaved. You do them a favor, obviously, by letting them be what they naturally are.
The very word "slave" comes, I believe, from "Slav" since to the Romans and the Germans, Slavs were slaves by nature.
It's not even just slavery. The German Nazis killed hosts of Jews, Poles, Russians, Gypsies, and others. Did they do it because they were blood-thirsty, ravening beasts? Not to hear them tel it.
They were purifying the race and getting rid of disgusting sub-men for the benefit of true humanity. I'm sure they thoroughly expected the gratitude of al decent people for their noble deeds.
And we Americans as well, there is a story that the Turkish sultan, Abdul Hamid II, a bloody and villainous tyrant, visited the United States once and was tackled over the matter of the Armenian massacres.
In response, he looked about him calmly and said, "Where are your Indians" Yes, indeed, we wiped them out. It was their land but we didn't enslave them; we killed them. We kil ed them in defiance of treaties, we kil ed them when they tried to assert their legal rights under those treaties, and we killed them when they submitted and did not defend themselves. And we had no qualms about it. They were "savages"
and we were doing God's work by ridding the Earth of them.
There is a (possibly apocryphal) story that after Custer's Last Stand (the Massacre at Little Big Horn, it's only a massacre when white men get kil ed) a Comanche chief was introduced to General Sheridan (a Northern hero of the Civil War). The Comanche said, "Me Tach-a-way. Me good Indian.
" To this General Sheridan is reported to have replied, "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.", A very nice genocidal remark.
The history of human cruelty is revolting enough, but the history of human justification thereof is infinitely more revolting.
Would it be any different in an alternate world, where Homo erectus still existed alongside of us Would we treat our evolutionary cousins any better than we've ever treated our own kind? Harry Turtledove takes a hard look at this question in A Different Flesh, and comes up with some answers we'd probably just as soon not hear.