A Different Flesh (14 page)

From
The Story of the Federated Commonwealths

The train rattled east across the prairie toward Springfield. Prem Chand kept his rifle across his knees, in case of sims. From his perch atop Caesar, the lead hairy elephant, he could see a long way over the grassland.

“We should make town in another hour,” Paul Tilak called from Hannibal, the trail beast. “An easy trip, this one.”

Prem Chand turned around. “So it is, for which I am not sorry.” He and Tilak were both small, light-brown men with delicate features. Their grandfathers had come to America when the English decided to see if elephant handlers from India could tame the great auburn-haired beasts of the New World.

The two dozen waggons stretched out behind the pair of elephants showed that the answer was yes, though the Federated Commonwealths had been free of England for a generation. With people even then beginning to settle west of the New Nile, no country across the sea could hope to enforce its will on its one-time colonies.

“Sim!” Tilak shouted suddenly. “There, to the north!”

Prem Chand's head whipped round. He followed his friend's pointing finger. Sure enough, the subhuman was loping along parallel to the train, about three hundred yards away. Prem Chand muttered something unpleasant under his breath. Sims might have no foreheads to speak of, but they had learned how far a gun could shoot with hope of accuracy.

“Shall we give him a volley?” Tilak asked.

“Yes, let us,” Prem Chand said. Three hundred yards was not quite impossibly long range, not with more than a dozen rifles speaking together. And the sim's arrogant confidence in its own safety irked the elephant driver.

He waved a red flag back and forth to make sure the brakemen posted on top of every other car saw it. Tilak peered back over his shoulder. “They're ready.”

Prem Chand swung the flag down, snatched up his rifle. It bellowed along with the others, and bucked against his shoulder. The acrid smell of gunpowder filled his nose.

The hairy elephant beneath him started at the volley. It threw up its trunk and let out a trumpeting roar almost as loud as the gunshots. Prem Chand shouted, “
Choro
, Caesar,
choro
: stop, stop!” Elephant commands were the only Urdu he still knew. His father had preferred them to English, and passed them on to him.

He prodded Caesar behind the ear with his foot, spoke soothingly to him. Being on the whole a good-natured beast, the elephant soon calmed. Tilak's Hannibal was more excitable; the other driver had to whack him with a brass
ankus
to make him behave. Hannibal's ears twitched resentfully.

Prem Chand peered through the smoke to see whether all that gunfire had actually hit the sim. It hadn't. The subhuman let out a raucous hoot, shook its fist at the train, and bounded away.

Prem Chand sighed. “I do not like those pests, not at all. One day I would like to unharness Caesar and go hunting sims from elephant-back.”

“Men only began settling hereabouts a few years ago,” Tilak said resignedly. “Sims will be less common before long.”

“Yes, but they are so clever it's almost impossible to root them out altogether. Even on the eastern coast, where the land has been settled for a hundred-fifty years, wild bands still linger. Not so many as here west of the New Nile, true, but they exist.”

“Mere vermin fail to worry me,” Paul Tilak said. He put a hand to his forehead to shade his eyes. “We should be able to see Springfield soon.”

“Oh, not yet,” Prem Chand said. But he also looked ahead, and saw the thin line of black smoke against the sky. Alarm flashed through him. “Fire!” he shouted. “The town must be burning!”

He dug his heels into Caesar's shoulders, yelled, “
Mallmall
: go on!” He heard Tilak using the elephant goad to urge Hannibal on. The two beasts had to pull hard to gain speed against the dead weight of the train. Prem Chand hoped the brakemen were alert. If he had to slow suddenly, they would need to halt the waggons before they could barrel into the elephants ahead of them.

The line of smoke grew taller, but no wider. Prem Chand scratched his head. Funny kind of fire, he thought.

“What's burning?” a farmer called as the train rolled by—farms sprouted like mushrooms along the tracks close to town, though they were still scarce farther away. Prem Chand shrugged. Even then, in the back of his mind, he might have known the truth, but it was not the sort of truth he felt like facing before he had to.

Then he could see Springfield in the distance. Its wooden buildings looked quite intact. The smoke had stopped rising. The prairie breezes played with the plume, dispersing it.

Houses, stables, a church, warehouses passed in swift succession. Prem Chand guided Caesar into the last turn before the station. “
Choro!
” he called again. Caesar slowed. The brakemen worked their levers. Sparks flew as the waggons' iron wheels squealed on the track. The train pulled to a halt.

“Seventeen minutes ahead of schedule,” Paul Tilak said with satisfaction, checking his pocket watch. “No one will be able to complain we are late on this run, Prem.”

“No indeed,” Prem Chand said. “But where
is
everybody?” Their being early was no reason for the eastbound side of the station to be empty—they had been in sight quite a while. Where were the men and tame sims to unload the train's freight? Where were the people coming to meet arriving passengers? Where were the ostlers, with fodder and water and giant currycombs for the elephants? Come to think of it, where had the small boys who always gawked at the train disappeared to?

Prem Chand tapped Caesar's left shoulder, as far down as he could reach. The hairy elephant obligingly raised its left leg. Prem Chand shinnied down to the broad, leathery foot, then dropped to the ground.

A passenger stuck his head out the window of a forward waggon. “See here, sir,” he called to the elephant driver, “what is the meaning of this? I am an important man, and expect to be properly greeted. I have business to transact here before I go on to Cairo.” He glared at Prem Chand as if he thought everything was his fault.

“I am very sorry, sir,” Prem Chand said politely, which was not at all what he was thinking. “I will try to find out.”

At that moment, a door in the station house opened. Finally, Prem Chand thought, someone's come to take a look at us. It was George Stephenson, the stationmaster, a plump little man who always wore a stovepipe hat that went badly with his build.

“What is the meaning of this?” Prem Chand shouted at him, stealing the pompous passenger's phrase. “Where are the men to take care of the elephants?” To a driver, everything else was secondary to that.

Stephenson should have felt the same way. Instead, he blinked; the idea did not seem to have occurred to him. “I'll have Willie and Jake get round to it,” he said grudgingly.

“Get round to it?” Prem Chand clapped a hand to his forehead in extravagant disbelief. “How else will they make enough money for their whiskey? What is wrong with this town today? Has everyone here gone out of his mind?”

“Not hardly,” Stephenson said. He was looking at Caesar and Hannibal in a way Prem Chand had never seen before. Was that pity in his eyes? “We've just seen the future, is all. Maybe you better take a peep too, Prem, so as you and Paul there can start huntin' out a new line of work.”

Then Prem Chand did know what had happened, knew it with a certainty that gripped his guts. Even so, he had to make Stephenson spell it out. “You mean—?”

“Ayah, that's right, Prem. One o' them newfangled steam railroad engines has done come to Springfield. How do you propose outdoin' a machine?”

The pennant tied to the front of the steam engine called it “The Iron Elephant.” To Prem Chand, the name was an obscene parody. The upjutting smokestack reminded him of Caesar's trunk, yes, but that trunk frozen in rigor mortis. Painting the boiler red-brown to imitate a hairy elephant's pelt did not disguise its being made of iron. And the massive gears and wheels on either side of that boiler seemed to Prem Chand affixed as an afterthought, not parts of the device in the way Caesar's great legs were part of the elephant.

Besides, the thing stank. Used to the clean, earthy smell of elephant, Prem Chand's nostrils twitched at the odors of coal smoke and damp, cooling iron.

Had he been able to get closer, he thought, he probably would have been able to find other things to dislike about the Iron Elephant. As it was, he had to despise the contraption at a distance. Almost everybody in Springfield had jammed into the westbound side of the station to stare at the steam engine.

Stephenson turned to Prem Chand, saying, “I know you'll want to meet Mr. Trevithick, the engine handler, and compare notes. He's been waiting here for you. Come on, I'll take you to him.” He plunged into the crowd, using his weight to shove people aside.

Meeting this Trevithick person was the last thing Prem Chand wanted. He also had a schedule to keep. He grabbed Stephenson by the shoulder. “Of course he's been waiting—he only has that damned engine. Me, I have an entire train to see to. You have my elephants fed, this instant. You have them watered. You unload what comes off here, and get your eastbound freight on board. Get your passengers moving. If I am one minute late coming into Cairo on the New Nile, I will complain to the company, yes I will, and with any luck we will bypass Springfield afterwards.”

He knew he was bluffing. Likely Stephenson did too, but he could not afford to ignore the threat. Without a rail stop, Springfield would wither and die. With poor grace, he started pulling station hands out of the crush and shouting for passengers to get over to the eastbound track. The press of people thinned, a little.

“Satisfied?” the stationmaster asked ironically.

“Better, at any rate,” Prem Chand said.

“One fine day soon you won't be able to throw your weight around just on account of you drive elephants, Prem. When steam comes in, we won't need stables, we won't need the big hay yards. This operation'll run on half the people and a quarter the cost.” Stephenson rubbed his hands at the prospect.

“And what do you do, pray tell me, when one of these engines breaks down? Whom will you hire? How much will you have to pay him? More than your ostlers or a leech, I would wager. And how long will the repairs take? Caesar and Hannibal are reliable. What sort of schedule will you be able to keep up?”

“The Iron Elephant's reliable too,” Stephenson insisted, though Prem Chand's objections made him sound as if he were also trying to convince himself. But his voice steadied as he went on. “It's steamed all the way out from Boston in Plymouth Commonwealth without coming to grief. I reckon that says somethin'.”

In spite of himself, Prem Chand was impressed: that was more than 1,300 miles. Still, he said scornfully, “Yes, hauling nothing but itself and its coal-waggon.” No passenger coaches or freight waggons stood behind the Iron Elephant. “How will it do, pulling a real load?”

“I don't know anything about that. Like I told you before, fellow you want to talk to is the engine handler. Come on, Prem—you may as well. You know they'll be a good while yet over on the other side.”

“Oh, very well.” Prem Chand followed Stephenson as the stationmaster forced his way through the crowd, which had thinned more while they argued.

“Mr. Trevithick!” Stephenson called, and then again, louder, “Mr. Trevithick!” A pale, almost consumptive-looking young man standing by the traveling steam engine lifted his head inquiringly. “Mr. Trevithick, this here is Mr. Prem Chand, the elephant driver you wanted to see.”

“Ah!” The engine handler broke off the conversation he was having, came hurrying over to pump Prem Chand's hand. “They spoke very well of you in Cairo, sir, when I was arranging permits to travel this line—said your Caesar and Hannibal were first-rate beasts. I see they were right; you're here a good deal ahead of schedule.” Like any railroad man, Trevithick always had a watch handy.

“Thank you so very much, sir.” Prem Chand saw he was going to have to work to dislike this man; Trevithick was perfectly sincere. Looking into his intense blue eyes, Prem Chand suspected he was one of those people who always said just what they thought because it never occurred to them to do anything else.

“Call me Richard—couldn't stand going as Dick Trevithick, you know. And you're Prem? Shouldn't be any stuffiness between folks in the same line of work.”

Again Prem Chand realized that he meant it. As gently as he could, he said, “Richard, it is a line of work that you and that—thing”—he could not make himself call it the Iron Elephant—“are trying to get me out of.”

“Am I? How?” Trevithick's surprise was genuine, which in turn surprised Prem Chand. “Who better to work the railroads under steam than someone long familiar with them as an elephant driver? Everything about them will be the same, except for what pulls the waggons.”

“And, Richard, with all respect, everything about iron and wood is the same, except when I need to start a fire. I've spent a lifetime learning to care for elephants; what good will that do me in dealing with your boiler there?”

“A child could manage the throttle. And we have a whole new kind of boiler in the Iron Elephant, with tubes passing through it to heat the water more effectively. And the cylinders are almost horizontal; they work much better than the old vertical design did.” Trevithick glowed with enthusiasm, and plainly wanted Prem Chand to catch fire too. “Why, on level ground, with the extra power the new system gives, we can do close to thirty miles an hour—practically flying along the ground!”

Had Stephenson named the figure, Prem Chand would have called him a liar on the spot. He did not think Trevithick a man given to exaggeration, though. Thirty miles an hour! He tried to imagine what the wind would be like, whipping in his face: as if he were on a madly galloping racehorse, but for some long time, not just the few minutes the beast would take to tire.