Trevithick's expression was half grin, half grimace. Then he looked around, and dismay replaced them both. Down in the pit, he had not been able to see the fight that had raged up and down the length of his train. Most of the bodies spilled on the ground, most of the blood splashed on waggons and grass, belonged to sims, but not all.
"Oh, the poor lads," the engine handler exclaimed.
Some of the survivors of his crew had joined Preen Chand's men in pursuit of the sims, which made his losses appear at first even worse than they were. But Trevithick, pointing with his left hand, counted four bodies, and one of his brakemen added, "Pat Bailey and One-eye Jim is dead but we can't find 'em nowheres."
“Filthy creatures," Trevithick muttered.
Preen Chand knew he was not talking about the missing men. Trying to give what consolation he could, he said "This sort of thing will not happen hereabouts much longer. Soon this part of the country will be too thickly settled for wild sim bands big enough to attack a train to flourish. "
"Yes, of course. That's been happening for more than I50 years, since settlers came to Virginia and Plymouth. It does little good for me at the moment, however, and even less for One-eye Jim and Patrick Bailey."
Preen Chand had no good answer to that. He led Trevithick over to Paul Tilak, who knew enough first aid to splint a broken arm. Ignoring an injured man's howls Tilak was washing a bleeding bite with whiskey.
"Don't be a fool," he told the fellow. "Do you want it to fester?"
"Couldn't hurt more'n what you just done," the man said sullenly.
"That only shows how little you know," Tilak snorted.
He moved on to a brakeman with a torn shirt and blood running down his chest. "You are very lucky. That spear could as easily have gone in as slid along your ribs." He soaked his rag at the mouth of the whiskey bottle. The brakeman flinched.
"There's one attention I won't regret being spared," Trevithick said, waiting for Tilak to get round to him.
"I do not doubt that." Preen Chand's eyes slipped back to the Iron Elephant. "Richard, may I ask what you will do next?"
The engine handler fol owed his rival's glance. "I expect we'll be able to salvage it, Preen, with the help of your elephants. The damage shouldn't be anything past repair. " His face lit with enthusiasm.
"And back in Boston, my brother is working on another engine, twice as powerful as the Iron Elephant. If I'd had that one here, you never could have stayed close to me!"
"In which case, you and your crew probably would al be dead now," Preen Chand said tartly.
But in spite of his sharp comeback, he felt a hollowness - inside, for he saw that the future belonged to Trevithick. As surely as humans displaced sims, steam engines were going to replace hairy elephants: it was much easier to make an t engine bigger and stronger and faster than it was an elephant.
A way of life was ending.
He let out a long sigh.
Trevithick understood him perfectly. "I told you once, Preen, it won't be so bad. There will always be railroads, no matter what pulls the trains."
"It will not be the same."
"What is, ever?"
"He has you there, Preen," Tilak put in.
"Maybe so, maybe so," Preen Chand said. "Our grand fathers, who sailed halfway round the world to come here, would have agreed with you, I am certain. But do you know what hurts worst of al ?"
Trevithick and Tilak shook their heads.
"When that second engine comes into Springfield, I am going to have to admit George Soephenson is right!""
I804 Though the Fall Heavens
Large-scale agricultural production was very important in several southeastern commonwealths. Indigo, hemp, and cotton, especially the latter, with its vast export market, were grown on plantations that, because they natural y did not have modern farm machinery, required a great many laborers to raise and gather in the crops.
Most of these field laborers were sims. The number of sims in North America had increased greatly since Europeans began settling in the New World, simply because agriculture is so much more efficient a way of producing food than the nomadic hunting life the native subhumans had formerly practiced. There was enough to feed both the swelling human population and the sims, which, now sometimes for many generations, had been tamed to serve humans.
Large labor forces of sims were not the only characteristic of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century southeastern plantation agriculture. Because sims household staff (and also, on proved unsatisfactory occasion, to supplement their number in the fields), black human slaves were imported from Africa.
Shamefully, slavery is a human institution at least as old as civilization itself. It was accepted in ancient Mesopotamian society; by the Hebrews; by the Greeks; and even by the Romans, whose republic is the prototype for the Federated Commonwealths. Philosophers developed elaborate justifications for the institution, most based on the assumption that one group of people, general y speaking, the group that owned the slaves in question, was superior to another and that the latter, therefore, deserved their enslavement.
Such speculation may perhaps have been excusable in the days when humans knew only of other humans. Differences in skin color, features, or type of hair must have seemed large and important in those days.
But when contrasted to sims, it quickly becomes obvious that even the most dissimilar groups of humans are very much alike. Accordingly, in the Federated Commonwealths the institution of slavery was faced with a challenge to its very raison d'tre unlike any it had known in the Old World....
From The Story of the Federated Commonwealths
JEREMIAH SWEPT THE feather
duster over the polished top of his master's chest of drawers. Moving slowly in the building heat of a May morning in Virginia, he raised the duster to the mirror that hung above the chest.
He paused to look at himself; he did not get to see his reflection every day. He raised a hand to brush away some dust stuck in his wooly hair.
His eyeballs and, when he smiled, his white, even teeth gleamed against the polished ebony of his skin.
"You, Jeremiah!" Mrs. Gil en cal ed from the next room "What are you doing in there?"
"Dusting, ma'am," he answered, flailing about with the feather duster so she would see him busy if she came in to check.
Unlike the sims that worked in the fields, houseslaves rarely felt the whip, but he did not intend to tempt fate.
All Mrs. Gil en said, though, was, "Go downstairs and fetch me up a glass of lemonade. Squeeze some fresh; I think the pitcher's empty."
"Yes ma'am." Jeremiah sighed as he went to the kitchen. On a larger estate, other blacks would have shared the household duties.
Here he was cook, cleaner, butler, and coachman by turns, and busy all the time because there was so much to do.
He made a fresh pitcher of lemonade to his own taste, drank a glass, then added more sugar. The Gillens liked it sweeter than he did.
"Took you long enough," Jane Gillen snapped when he got upstairs.
He took no notice of it; that was simply her way. She was in her early thirties, a few years older than Jeremiah, her mousy prettiness beginning to yield to time.
"Oh, that does a body good," she said, emptying the glass and giving it back to him. "Why don't you take the rest of the pitcher out to my husband? He and Mr. Stowe are in the south field, and they'll be suffering from the sun. Go on; they'll thank you for it."
"Yes, ma'am," he said again, this time with something like enthusiasm.
He returned to the kitchen, put the pitcher and two glasses on a tray, and went out to look for his master and the overseer.
A big male sim was chopping logs into firewood behind the house.
It stopped for a moment to nod to Jeremiah as he went by.
He nodded back. "Hello, Joe," he said, a faint edge of contempt riding his words. He might be a slave, but by God he was a man!