Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

It is interesting to contemplate the fact that Christopher Columbus was the first slave-master of this hemi

sphere. He shipped several thousand Indians to Europe and enslaved or killed many thousands more on the islands themselves. He might have wiped out the entire indigenous population if the Pope had not intervened with threats of excommunication.” “The Pope probably stopped it because he wasn’t getting a big enough share of the action,” said the Reverend Jimmy Wayne Sutter.

“Black man invented plasma. Fellow named Charles Drew. I read somewhere that he bled to death after a car accident in the nineteen fifties because some cracker North Carolina hospital didn’t have any ‘Negro blood’ in the fridge and refused to give him ‘white blood.’”