The hunting party, never more than a dozen strong to begin with, would take years to recover.
Worse, Quick knew the catastrophe would not have happened in the same way had he not become part of band. The fight between Martin and Caesar without the sharp steel knife, the tool he'd got from the trapper would have remained one of the shove-and-bluff contests typical with sims. Maybe Caesar would have backed down, maybe Martin. No one would have been much hurt either while The subhumans lacked a good part of the trappers reasoning ability. They seemed to have reached the same conclusions he had, though, whatever the means they used to get there. All through the winter, they had treated Quick like one of them. Now they drew apart from him. He saw at once he was no longer one of the band.
Being rejected by mere sims should not have hurt Quick, but it did.
The trapper's fate had been too intimately tied with theirs for too long for him to be indifferent to their feeling about him.
That was especial y true in one case. Quick's gaze went to Sol, who was still busy putting a splint on Martin's leg. Better? she signed when she was through.
Martin's breath hissed through clenched teeth.
He shrugged, as if he did not want to say no but hurt too much to say yes. Quick knew he was not going to get better, with or without the splint.
Sol got to her feet awkwardly. She patted her swollen belly in annoyance, almost in reproach. Most of her attention, though, remained on Martin. At last she looked a CaesarI? Her eyes met the trappers She looked at him, at the sim he had shot (who was stil ululating piteously), at Martin and Caesar (whose skin was pierced in so many places it would have been worthless as a pelt). When she glanced Quick’s way again, it was with no more warmth than if she been looking at a stone. That told him the last thing he needed to know.
If the sims had decided to tear him to pieces; he could not have stopped them.
They ignored him instead. Perhaps they thought ostracism a worse punishment.
In their small band with each member knowing all the others so intimately that made some sense. Quick was never sure. Living like a sim, he found at last, could not make him think like a sim.
He loaded his pistol, put his powderhorn, ammunition (which also held flint and steel), a knife, and a cup on his belt. Leaning on his rifle, he took a couple of steps toward the edge of the clearing, then turned to Caesar. It did not matter what the band did to him, he could not save the wounded sim or have it’s shrieks pursuing him into the woods. He aimed careful y, shot the male in head, reloaded again, limped away. The sims still did not stop him. He looked back at Sol a last time, and at the child he would never see now, the child that would live its life with its mother's band.
Maybe that, at least, was for the best, he told himself, and it because of the social strictures in the Commonwealths against such babies.
In the world of humans, a half sim would always be at a disadvantage, slower than its fellows. But in the world of sims, a man child might prove something of a prodigy, and gain a place in the band higher than any it could look for the mountains.
Quick not know that was so. He could only hope. The trees closed in behind him, hiding the clearing from view.
Henry Quick knocked back wiskey with reverent pleasure. He was wearing clothes left behind before he set out on his last trapping run. He’d been in civilization a month, and regained some of the weight he'd dropped in his slow, painful journey east. All the same, his tunic and the breeches that l have been tight flopped on him as though meant for a lager man.
"Have another," James Cartwright urged. The fur dealer had been generous with Quick, giving him a room in his own house and a place at his table. Quick knew he had an ulterior motive. He did not mind.
Even Martin had had an ulterior motive.
The trapper caught a barmaid's eye, held up his glass. The girl looked bored, but finally nodded and off for a bottle. She was blonde, smooth-skinned, and Quick could easily imagine sharing a bed with her, afterward was something else again.
"Your health," he said to the fur dealer when he had resupplied.
He drank again, sighed contentedly.
"Now, then, Henry," Cartwright said, seeing that relaxation on the trapper's face, "you really ought to tel me more about the clearing where your cache of furs is. It would be worth a pretty pile of silver denaires, I dare say."
"So they would, so they would," Quick admitted, “drunk or sober, I have nothing to say to you about it. You can test it if you like; I'll sponge up as much as yot to buy."
"Worse luck for you, I believe it." But, laughing, the dealer signaled for another round. After it arrived he turned serious again.
"Henry, I just can't fathom you're being so pigheaded. It's not as if you could get those pelts back for yourself. Moving the way you do you needed a special miracle to make the trip out once can't be thinking of going in again for them."
"Oh, I can think about it," Quick said; the urge to get away would never leave him. But whenever he tried to even now, he knew long journeys were really behind
"Why, then?" Cartwright persisted.
The liquor had loosened Quick's tongue enough for him to be willing to justify himself out loud. "Because of the sims," he said. "That band deserves to have men leave them alone, instead of flooding in the way they would after they found my trail and took out my furs. Those sims took me in and saved me, and they've had enough grief for it.
"They're just Sims, Henry," Cartwright said. He knew the trapper's story, as much of it as Quick had told anyone, new about Sol; no one knew about the child. No one ever would.
They were here first, John," Quick said stubbornly. not their fault they're stupider than we are. Having to work fields and such is one thing; we can make better use of good land than they ever could. But let them keep the woods. Some of them ought to stay free."
Maybe you won't want to go trapping after all," Cartwright observed.
"You sound like you've got yourself a new aim in life."
Quick hadn't thought of it in quite those terms. He stroked his chin.
He'd shaved his beard, but wasn't yet used to it feeling smooth skin again. At last he said, "Maybe I do. Sims aren't animals, after al ."
A hunter sitting at the next table turned round at his remark. He grinned drunkenly. "You're right there, pal. they give better sport than any damned beasts." He hooked his thumb under his necklace, drawing Quick's eye to it. The necklace was strung with dried, rather hairy ears.
It took four men to pry Quick's hands from the fel ow's neck.
Freedom
Where can be no doubt that the labor of Sims
contribated greatly to the growth of the Federated Commonwealths of America. As we have seen, this was true in agriculture. It was also the case in the huge factories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: simple, repetitive tasks proved to be within the capacity of the native subhumans. Their treatment at the dormitories next to these factories was all too often worse than any suffered by human workers, who had both the wit and the political ability to combine to improve their conditons.
These workers' alliances were early supporters of he sims' justice movement. if factory owners could use sims instead of people, rewarding them with no more than what was frequently inadequate food and shelter, then wages for all workers were depressed.
Only the fact that humans greatly outnumbered sims Prevented this problem from being even worse than it was.
The steady growth of technology, however, did as much to change conditions for sims as did political agitation. Farming grew increasingly mechanized, and