The United States of Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  “But—!” Fenner seemed about to explode.

  “Isaac . . .” Custis Cawthorne spoke his friend’s name in a voice full of gentle, amused melancholy.

  “What is it?” Fenner, by contrast, snapped like the jaws of a steel trap.

  “Shut up and go to bed. I intend to.” As if to prove as much, Cawthorne shrugged out of his coat and began undoing the toggles on his tunic.

  His colleague’s face was a study in commingled amazement and fury. Fenner’s red hair warned of his temper, as a light on a lee shore warned of dangerous rocks. But then the Bredestown Assemblyman also started to laugh. “All right, all right—just as you please. I see there are two beds in the room. Who shall have which?”

  “This one is mine.” Victor pointed to the unmade one, in which he’d been sleeping. “The two of you may share the other, this being the price you pay for disturbing me in so untimely a fashion.”

  Isaac Fenner looked ready to argue about that, too. Cawthorne, by contrast, took off his shoes. Grunting, he bent to reach under the bed Victor had designated. He picked up the chamber pot that sat there. “I trust you gentlemen will excuse me. . . .” he said, politely turning his back. When he’d finished, he presented the pot to Fenner. “Isaac?”

  “Oh, very well.” Fenner used the pot while Cawthorne lay down and made himself comfortable. Victor stretched out on his own bed. Blaise was in the servants’ quarters downstairs. Chances were the Negro was asleep right this minute, too. Victor wished he could say the same.

  “You’d better hurry up,” he told Isaac Fenner. “This candle won’t last much longer.” Sure enough, it guttered and almost went out.

  Fenner got into bed. The ropes supporting the mattress creaked under his weight. “Good night, sweetheart,” Custis Cawthorne told him, as if men didn’t sleep two or three or four to a bed all the time in taverns or inns.

  “Good night—darling,” Fenner retorted.

  Victor blew out the candle. Blackness plunged down from the ceiling and swallowed the room whole. Victor didn’t know about how his eminent Atlantean comrades fared after that: he went back to sleep himself too soon to have the chance to find out.

  Down in the common room the next morning, Blaise looked grouchy. He usually drank tea, but a steaming mug of coffee sat in front of him now. He sipped from it as he attacked a ham steak and a plate of potatoes fried in lard. When Victor asked what the trouble was, his factotum sent him a wounded look.

  “Some damnfool commotion in the nighttime,” Blaise answered, swallowing more coffee. “Didn’t you hear it? I thought it was plenty to wake the dead. I know it woke me, and I had a devil of a time getting back to sleep again afterwards.”

  “Oh,” Victor said. “That.”

  “Yes, that. You know what it was?”

  After a glance at the stairway, Victor nodded. “Here it comes now, as a matter of fact.”

  Blaise blinked as Isaac Fenner came down. He frankly gaped when Custis Cawthorne followed. “But he’s in France,” Blaise blurted.

  “I thought so, too,” Victor said. “In point of fact, though, he was in my room last night, wanting to see the treaty I hammered out with Oswald and Hartley yesterday. Well, actually, no: Isaac was the one who wanted to see it just then. Custis came with him, though.”

  The Atlantean dignitaries bore down on the table where Victor and Blaise sat. Without so much as a good-morning, Fenner said, “You have the terms with you?”

  “I crave your pardon,” Victor said. “I must have left them up in the room. After I break my fast, you may rest assured I shall let you examine them at your leisure.”

  That produced the desired effect: it incensed Fenner. “Devil fry you black as a griddle cake forgotten over the fire!” he shouted, loud enough to make everyone in the common room stare at him. “Why did you not have the consideration, the common courtesy, the—the plain wit, to bring them down with you? Think on how much time you might have saved, man! Just think!”

  “Easy, Isaac, easy. You might do some thinking yourself, instead of bellowing like a branded calf.” Custis Cawthorne set a hand on Fenner’s arm. “Unless I find myself much mistaken, General Radcliff would end up holding your leg in his hand if he pulled it any harder.”

  “What?” Fenner gaped, goggle-eyed.

  “I do have the treaty here, Isaac,” Victor said. The serving girl chose that moment to come up and ask him what he wanted. He got to prolong Fenner’s agony by hashing over the virtues and vices of ham, sausages, and bacon. Having finally picked sausages and sent the girl back to the kitchen, Victor produced the draft. “Here is what the Englishmen and I have arrived at. Why don’t you and Custis sit down and look it over and order something to put ballast in your bellies?”

  “A capital notion,” Cawthorne said. “Capital.” He proceeded to follow Victor’s suggestion. Isaac Fenner stood there till the older man tugged at his sleeve. “You wanted to see this. Now that you can, aren’t you going to?”

  “Errr—” Fenner had to take a deep breath to stop making the noise. He sat down most abruptly. Almost as if against his will, he started reading over Cawthorne’s shoulder. Then he tugged the paper away from the other man, so that it lay on the table between them.

  The serving girl came back with Victor’s breakfast. She smiled at Fenner and Cawthorne. “What would you gents care for?”

  “I don’t care for this fifth article—not even slightly,” Fenner said.

  “She means for breakfast, Isaac,” Custis Cawthorne said. “As for me, I’ll take the ham and potatoes, and a mug of ale to wash ’em down.”

  “Breakfast.” By the way Fenner said it, the possibility had slipped his mind. “Hmm . . . What Custis chose will suit me well enough, too.”

  Victor wouldn’t have given better than three to two that Fenner had even heard what Custis Cawthorne chose for breakfast. The answer was enough to make the serving girl go away, though, which was what the Bredestown Assemblyman had in mind. Fenner’s forefinger descended on the treaty. “This fifth article—” he began again.

  “England wanted us to compel the states to undo their measures against the loyalists,” Victor said.

  “Good luck!” Cawthorne exclaimed. “We’d be fighting half a dozen wars at once if we tried.”

  “Just what I told ’em,” Victor said. “They do have something of a point, after all—loyalists who did not bear arms against the Atlantean Assembly may become good citizens in the circumstances now prevailing. No certainty of it, but they may. And so—what’s the phrase Hartley used?—‘earnestly recommending’ that the states go easy struck me as a reasonable compromise.”

  “Why should we compromise?” Fenner said. “We won!”

  Patiently, Victor answered, “The firmer the peace we make with England now, the smaller the chance we’ll have to fight another war in ten years’ time, or twenty. God has not sent me word from On High that we are bound to win then. Has He been more generous with you?”

  “When I was a boy, Croydon folk would have thrown you in the stocks for a jape like that,” Cawthorne said. “They might do it yet, were the fellow so exercising his wit some abandoned vagabond rather than the hero of Atlantis’ liberation.”

  “People here are touchy about God,” Blaise agreed. “Even touchier than they are most places, I mean.”

  “They are certain they are right. Being thus certain, they are equally sure they have the right—nay, more: the duty—to impose their views on everyone they can,” Cawthorne said.

  A crack like that might have won him time in the stocks were he less prominent and less notorious. His breakfast, and Isaac Fenner’s, interrupted perusal of the treaty. After a while, Fenner said, “This is good.” Again, he sounded surprised.

  “A full belly strengthens the spirit.” Custis Cawthorne seemed to listen to himself. “Not bad. Not bad at all. I must remember that one.”

  Fenner was still eyeing the draft of the treaty. “It will be some time before we can pay our debts at par wit
h sterling,” he said sadly.

  Victor also knew the parlous state of the Atlantean Assembly’s paper—who didn’t? But he answered, “Would you rather I had told the English commissioners we intend to repudiate those debts? They lodge down the street. I will introduce them to you later this morning. If you intend to convey that message, you may do so yourself.”

  “No, no,” Fenner said. “Now that we are a nation, we must be able to hold up our heads amongst our fellow nations. Even so, putting our house in order will prove more difficult than many of us would wish.”

  “Never fear. We can always find some cozening trick or another to befool our creditors,” Cawthorne said. “France has proved that year after year.”

  “How was France?” Victor asked him.

  “Most enjoyable, at the level where I traveled,” Cawthorne said. “If you have the means to live well—or have friends with the means to let you live well—you can live better in and around Paris than anywhere else on earth. But the peasantry? Dear God in heaven! Upon my oath, the grievances the French peasants have against their king and nobles make ours against England seem light as a feather drifting on the breeze by comparison.”

  “Then let them rise, too,” Fenner said. “Freedom is no less contagious than smallpox, and no inoculation wards against it.”

  “Would you say the same, Mr. Fenner, to a Negro slave picking indigo or growing rice in the south of Atlantis?” Blaise asked.

  Custis Cawthorne chuckled softly to himself. Fenner sent him an irritated look. “Speaking for myself, I have no great use for slavery,” he replied. “I hope one day to see it vanish from the United States of Atlantis, as it has already vanished or grown weak in so much of the north here. For the time being, however, it—”

  “Makes the slaveholders piles of filthy lucre,” Cawthorne broke in.

  “Not how I should have phrased it,” Fenner said.

  Why not? Victor wondered. His son could be sold at any time, for no better reason than to line Marcel Freycinet’s pockets. That made him look at holding Negroes and copperskins in perpetual servitude in a whole new light.

  But Fenner hadn’t finished: “One day before too many years have passed, I expect property in slaves to grow hopelessly uneconomic when measured against property in, say, machinery. And when that day comes, slaveholding in Atlantis will be at an end.”

  “How many years?” Blaise pressed, as if wondering how patient he should—or could—be.

  “I should be surprised if it came to pass in fewer than twenty years,” Isaac Fenner answered. “I should also be surprised if slavery still persisted a lifetime from now.”

  Blaise made a noise down deep in his throat. That did not please him. No—it did not satisfy him. Isaac thinks my son Nicholas will grow to manhood a slave, Victor thought. He thinks my son may live out his whole life as a chattel. Put in those terms, Fenner’s reasoned and reasonable estimate didn’t satisfy him, either. But what could he do about it? Freeing slaves was far more explosive than compensating loyalists.

  “Can I bring you anything else, gents?” the serving girl asked.

  Custis Cawthorne shoved his mug across the table toward her. “If you fill this up again, I shall thank you sweetly for it.”

  “And you’ll pay for it, too,” she said, and walked off swinging her hips.

  “One way or another, we always end up paying for it,” Cawthorne said with a sigh.

  Fenner wasn’t watching the girl; he was still methodically going through the treaty. When at last he looked up, Victor asked, “Does it suit you?”

  “We might have squeezed better terms from them here and there.” Fenner tapped the document with the nail on his right index finger. “But, if you have already made the bargain . . .”

  “I have,” Victor said. “They may possibly reconsider: I daresay there are certain small advantages they still hope to wring from us. If you reckon the game worth the candle, I do not object—too much—to your proposing further negotiation to them.”

  Isaac Fenner tapped the treaty again. By his expression, up till Victor’s reply he’d thought only of what the United States of Atlantis might get from England, not of what England might still want from the new nation. “If the agreement as it stands suits you and suits them, we might be wiser to leave it unchanged,” he said.

  “So we might,” Cawthorne said, “not that that necessarily stops anyone.”

  Victor hadn’t thought it would stop Fenner. If it did, he wasn’t about to complain. If he did complain, after all, wouldn’t he fall into the common error himself?

  XXV

  Victor had wondered whether the English commissioners would want anything to do with Isaac Fenner and Custis Cawthorne. After all, he’d already reached agreement with King George’s officials. And, had he brought Fenner alone, the Englishmen might well not have cared to treat with him.

  But Cawthorne made all the difference. Richard Oswald and David Hartley were as delighted to meet him as if he were a young, beautiful, loose-living actress. Oswald used a pair of spectacles of Cawthorne’s design, so that he could read with the lower halves of the lenses while still seeing clearly at a distance through the uppers.

  “Ingenious! Most extraordinarily ingenious!” the Scot exclaimed. “How ever did you come to think of it?”

  “What gave me the idea, actually, was a badly ground set of reading glasses, in which part of the lenses were of improper curvature,” Cawthorne answered. “I thought, if what had chanced by accident were to be done better, and on purpose. . . . Once the notion was in place, bringing it to fruition proved easy enough.”

  “Remarkable,” Oswald said. “It takes an uncommon mind to recognize the importance of the commonplace and obvious.”

  Curtis Cawthorne preened. The only thing he enjoyed more than hearing himself praised was hearing himself praised by someone with the discernment to understand and to state exactly why he deserved all those accolades.

  Because the commissioners so admired Cawthorne, they even put up with Fenner’s urge to fiddle with the treaty. As far as Victor could see, none of the changes from either side made a halfpenny’s worth of difference. A few commas went in; a few others disappeared. Several adjectives and a sprinkling of adverbs were exchanged for others of almost identical import. Fenner seemed happier. The Englishmen didn’t seem dismayed or, more important, irate.

  The one phrase David Hartley declined to change was “earnestly recommend” in the fifth article. Fenner proposed several alternatives. Hartley rejected each in turn. “I do not believe that has quite the meaning his Majesty’s government wishes to convey,” he would say, and the Atlantean would try again.

  Finally, Victor took Fenner aside. “He likes the wording of that article as it is,” Radcliff said. “He is particularly pleased with it because he created the formula himself.”

  “Ah!” Fenner said, as if a great light had dawned. “I had not fully grasped that he was suffering from pride of authorship.”

  Although Victor might not have phrased it just so, he found himself nodding. “That is the condition”—he didn’t want to say disease—“controlling him.”

  “Very well, then.” By Fenner’s tone and expression, it wasn’t. Victor followed him into the meeting room with some apprehension. But Fenner was smiling by the time he sat down across the table from the English commissioners. “Mr. Hartley, General Radcliff has persuaded me that your language will serve. I shall earnestly recommend”—his smile got wider—“to the Atlantean Assembly that it should abide by this article as it does by all the rest.”

  “That is handsomely said, Mr. Fenner,” Hartley replied. “I am pleased to accept it in the spirit in which it is offered. And I also thank you for your good offices, General Radcliff.”

  “My pleasure, sir,” Victor replied. He still wasn’t sure he liked the way Isaac Fenner was smiling. The Atlantean Assembly could earnestly recommend as much as it pleased. That didn’t necessarily mean the Atlantean states would pay any attention
to it. Fenner had to know as much, too. But he said nothing of it to David Hartley. Maybe he had the makings of a diplomat after all.

  “With that matter settled, have we any more outstanding?” Richard Oswald asked, as he had with the draft he and Hartley arranged with Victor. Nobody said anything. Oswald nodded decisively, like an auctioneer bringing down the hammer on. . . . On a slave, Victor thought, and wished he hadn’t. Before he could dive deeper into his own worries, Oswald went on, “Then let us affix our signatures and seals to the document. Mr. Hartley and I will deliver our copy to London, whilst you take yours to Honker’s Mill.”

  His manner was altogether matter-of-fact, which only made the comparison more odious. London was the greatest city in the world, perhaps the greatest in the history of the world. Honker’s Mill . . . wasn’t. A touch of asperity in his voice, Isaac Fenner said, “Now that peace has been restored, New Hastings will become the capital of the United States of Atlantis.”

  “How nice,” Oswald murmured. New Hastings wasn’t the greatest city in the history of the world, either. Maybe one day it would be, or Hanover if it wasn’t so lucky, but neither came anywhere close yet. Not even the most ardent—the most rabid—Atlantean patriot could claim otherwise.

  “Signatures. Seals,” Custis Cawthorne said—and not one word about New Hastings’ honor.

  Men from both sides solemnly initialed the changed adjectives and adverbs on the treaty. They let the altered commas go. Maybe, one day, some historians would note the ones that had been deleted and learnedly guess which ones had been added after the first draft was done. For the time being, nobody thought they were worth getting excited about.

  Richard Oswald and David Hartley signed for England. They splashed hot wax down on both copies and pressed their signet rings into it. Then the Atlanteans followed suit: first Victor, then Isaac Fenner, and finally Custis Cawthorne. One by one, the Atlanteans also used their seals.

  “It is accomplished,” Hartley said as the wax hardened. “Your land is separated from ours.” Jeremiah could have sounded no gloomier. Even Job would have been hard-pressed.