Liberating Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  “Consuls! Consuls! Let an honest man address the honorable Consuls!” cried Senator Bainbridge of New Marseille.

  Oh? Do you know one? went through Newton’s mind. Justinian Bainbridge was as slippery as a sleet-coated sidewalk, and everybody knew it. But he had followed the rituals of the Senate—no mean feat in these turbulent times. “You may speak,” Newton said. Jeremiah Stafford did not forbid it. Why should he, when Bainbridge belonged to his faction?

  “I thank the honorable Consul,” the Senator said. “I rise to protest the government’s impotence in the face of the vicious and cruel slave insurrection convulsing my state at this very moment.”

  That touched off the match under the powder barrel. Everybody in the chamber started yelling at everybody else. Somebody swung a cane. Someone else blocked it with his own. The noise, like a gunshot—much too much like a gunshot—cut through the rest of the furious racket. It seemed to sober the Senators, at least for a little while.

  Consul Newton turned to Consul Stafford. “May I speak to that?”

  His colleague’s gaze was full of contempt. “You may as well, yes. Since you are the main reason the government remains impotent, putting yourself on the record would make a pleasant novelty.”

  “I thank you.” Newton, as was his habit, met contempt with irony. He looked out at Justinian Bainbridge. “Are you not the man who commonly trumpets loudest when the Atlantean government proposes to do anything that infringes upon what you style state sovereignty?”

  “I am,” Bainbridge answered proudly; he wouldn’t have recognized irony had it tiptoed up to him and piddled in his boot. “But the circumstances differ this time.”

  “If you say that in English, doesn’t it mean, This time, my ox is being gored?” Newton’s manner was pleasant, his words and expression anything but.

  “My ox is being gored, God damn it to hell!” Yes, Senator Bainbridge was irony-proof. “These miserable niggers and mudfaces running around loose as if they’re as good as white men, killing, stealing—!” He broke off, spluttering in indignation.

  “Yes, white men have proved remarkably good at killing and stealing,” Newton agreed in his politest tones. “It must be surprising to see our colored brethren imitate us so well.”

  Jeremiah Stafford favored him with a glance that could have curdled milk. Stafford and Bainbridge believed the same things. Bainbridge believed them because he believed them—for the same reason he accepted the mysteries of his faith. Stafford had carefully examined slavery and what it did for his section of the United States of Atlantis. Having examined it, he’d found it good. And he knew all the reasons he found it good, and could—and did—argue most cogently from them.

  To Newton, that he could find it good to begin with was incomprehensible. But the depth of the other Consul’s knowledge of the subject made him formidable in debate. So did his native cleverness. People didn’t call him the Greased Snake for nothing.

  “May I ask my fellow Consul a question?” Stafford inquired in his politest, and most dangerous, tones.

  “By all means, sir.” Leland Newton could also be formidably ironic. He gestured in invitation. “You see? I refuse you nothing.”

  “Why refuse when you can veto?” Consul Stafford shook his head. “Never mind. That was not the question I intended. This is: imagine, sir, if you will, that an insurrection has broken out in the sovereign state of New Marseille, an insurrection marked by murder and arson and all manner of lesser crimes.”

  “He doesn’t need to imagine it!” Justinian Bainbridge howled. “It’s happening right this minute!”

  “Bear with me, Senator,” Stafford said easily. He turned back to Consul Newton. “Now imagine that this insurrection is the product of white ruffians and robbers, with not a single mudface or nigger attached to it. If New Marseille appealed to the Senate of the United States of Atlantis for aid under those circumstances, would you prevent that aid from coming?”

  Howls and whoops rose from the slaveholding states’ Senators. Porfirio Cardenas of Gernika roared so loud, he suffered a coughing fit. One of his colleagues had to pound him on the back. Newton muttered under his breath. He supposed it had been necessary to incorporate what once was Spanish Atlantis into the USA. Now the red-crested eagle flew over the whole mid-Atlantic land mass. But adding the new state gave weight to the pro-slavery side, and the Spaniards had a name for being harsh masters. So did the Atlanteans from farther north who’d flocked into the new state to try to get rich quick.

  Newton had waited too long. Stafford called him on it: “You see? Against white rebels, dragoons and artillery would already be on the way.”

  “Not necessarily,” Newton said, buying himself time to think.

  “Oh? How not?” Stafford returned with ominous calm.

  “If white men rebelled because they were dreadfully mistreated, because they could suffer any sort of punishment at their masters’ hands without due process of law, because they were not allowed to take wives, and because the women with whom they cohabited could be forced into a master’s arms at his whim, would we not applaud them? Would we not send them dragoons and artillery to aid their fight against injustice?” Consul Newton took a deep breath.

  He got the same tumultuous cheers for his answer as Stafford had for his question, but not from the same men. The Senators from north of the Stour (the Erdre, southern men still sometimes called the river, preserving the French name) clapped their hands and shouted. Those who favored slavery tried to drown them out with hoots and catcalls, but couldn’t quite.

  When something close to order returned, Jeremiah Stafford said, “There is a difference, you know.”

  “Oh? And that would be . . . ?” Newton asked.

  “Simply that white men are of our own kind, our equals by nature. Niggers and mudfaces are not, and never can be.”

  “Such an assertion would be all the better for proof,” Newton remarked.

  “I have a great plenty of it, and should be delighted to give you as much as you require,” Consul Stafford said.

  “Move we adjourn!” shouted Harris Mitchell of Freetown. His state bordered the Stour on the north. Slavery had lasted longer there than elsewhere in the north of Atlantis. Freetown wasn’t neutral ground, but came closer than any other state.

  And a motion to adjourn was always in order. Half a dozen Senators roared seconds. The motion passed overwhelmingly. Everyone seemed relieved to stream out of the Senate chamber. One more day without blood on the floor . . . One more day, yes, but it had been a damned near-run thing.

  When Jeremiah Stafford talked with officers in the Ministry of War, he was exceeding his authority under the Atlantean Charter. Consuls commanded an army in the field on alternate days—if an army was in the field. If not, they were supposed to fight shy of matters military.

  You had to know where a man came from. More than anything else, that told you where he stood. Oh, there were exceptions. Some northern officers despised Negroes and copperskins enough to lean toward keeping them in bondage. Rather fewer southerners thought slavery morally wrong. On the whole, though, geography and politics walked hand in hand.

  Major Sam Duncan was from Cosquer. Consul Stafford had known him for years. Duncan had Radcliffe blood, too, which made them kinsmen of sorts. Stafford passed his latest news on to the officer: “Do you know what the nigger leading the rising is claiming? He says he’s Victor Radcliff’s grandson.”

  “Likely tell!” Duncan said. He was a solidly built man in his early forties, with bushy muttonchop whiskers that didn’t suit the shape of his face. “One of my brother’s copperskins said he was descended from the Holy Ghost. A good dose of the lash changed his mind in a hurry.”

  “I expect it would,” Stafford agreed.

  “When are we going to be able to send our soldiers over there and clean out those coons, sir?” Duncan asked. “The longer the government shilly-shallies, the more trouble they’ll kick up. Liable to be insurrections all the way from the He
sperian Gulf to the Atlantic coast.”

  “You understand that, Major, and I understand it, and most men of sense do as well,” the Consul said. “Too many people, though, don’t appreciate the difficulties inherent in the situation.”

  “Damn fools, if you care what I think,” Duncan said.

  “Oh, I agree with you,” Stafford answered. “But our founders, in their wisdom—if that’s what it was—made it possible for determined folk, wise or not, to hamstring the government. Consul Newton remains opposed to the national government’s movement against the insurrectionists. This being so, nothing official may be done.”

  He waited. He’d always thought Sam Duncan politically astute. That was one of the reasons he’d cultivated the man. But, if the major didn’t hear what he was saying, he might have to change his mind.

  Duncan tugged at one of his muttonchops. He didn’t smoke; the side whiskers gave him something to do with his hands while he thought. His eyes, always heavy-lidded, narrowed further. “Nothing official, you say?”

  Jeremiah Stafford smiled—inside himself, where it didn’t show. He hadn’t been wrong after all. Major Duncan did have ears to hear. “Unfortunately, that is correct,” Stafford said, sounding grave as a doctor delivering a gloomy prognosis.

  “Some unofficial things might be done, though?” Duncan, by contrast, spoke in musing tones. “Give some fellows leave to return home, say? Or transfer weapons to state militias without worrying too much about paperwork? Things like that?”

  “If they’re done unofficially, I don’t need to know about them,” Stafford answered. “No one needs to know about them, not officially.”

  “All right, Consul. I get you.” Duncan laid a finger by the side of his nose. “Nobody will find out. We’ll do—”

  Stafford held up a hand. “This discussion has been purely hypothetical, you understand. I would prefer that it stay that way. What I have not heard, I am not in the least responsible for.”

  “I get you.” Major Duncan nodded. “I wouldn’t be surprised if something like that happened.”

  “Well, it might be interesting if something like that did.” Now Jeremiah Stafford let the outside of his physiognomy show amusement. He felt muscles creaking under his skin; he didn’t smile all that often. “I wager the mudfaces and niggers would think it was pretty interesting, too.”

  “That’s the idea, isn’t it?” Duncan sketched a salute. “A pleasure talking hypothetically with you, your Excellency.”

  “Always glad to visit with someone from the old stand.” Stafford meant that. To him, New Hastings was another world. People here didn’t see things with the same simple certainties they used down in Cosquer. They had their own convictions. Those often struck Stafford as lunatic if not wicked, but the locals clung to them all the same.

  The Consul left the Ministry of War: an impressive neoclassical marble pile with an even more impressive statue of Mars (done by a Frenchman who’d ended up quarreling about his fee) in front of it. In the streets around the Ministry stood a number of eateries and other shops that catered to the soldiers and civilian employees who worked there. If Stafford ever needed a cavalry saber or a waterproof oilskin cape, he knew where to get one.

  A gray-uniformed sentry came to attention as Stafford loosed his horse’s reins from the hitching rail and swung up onto the animal. Then, gravely nodding in return, he rode back toward the center of town. As the horse walked along, Stafford felt the weight of history pressing down on him. Despite the New in its name, New Hastings was the oldest town in Atlantis—four centuries old now. Everyone learned the jingle “In fourteen hundred and fifty-two, Ed Radcliffe sailed the ocean blue.”

  Not everyone remembered that François Kersauzon, a Breton fisherman, showed Edward Radcliffe the way to Atlantis. Cosquer, Consul Stafford’s hometown, was a Breton foundation. But it dated from after New Hastings. The Radcliffes and Radcliffs always seemed to be half a step ahead of the Kersauzons—always when it mattered most, anyhow.

  And, while Cosquer grew, it never thrived the way New Hastings did. Only a few years after the first settlement, people from New Hastings had founded Bredestown, miles up the river from the coast. They’d kept pushing west ever since, too.

  The great redwood church still dominated the center of New Hastings. Built before the Reformation, it had begun as a Catholic cathedral. It stayed Catholic for some years after England went Protestant but eventually conformed to the Anglican rite. The Atlantean Assembly had met there to plan the war against England . . . till the redcoats ran the Conscript Fathers out, after which they carried on as best they could from the hamlet of Honker’s Mill. Once victory was won—rather to the Atlantean Assembly’s surprise, unless Stafford missed his guess—the country’s leading lights returned to hammer out the Charter that bedeviled Atlantis to this day.

  Stafford muttered under his breath. Maybe things would have gone differently, gone better, had the Senate chosen to build a new capital away from everything instead of settling down in a northern city already opposed to slavery. There was talk of it, but it had seemed too expensive to a country bedeviled by debt from the war for liberty.

  He muttered again. The black grandson of Victor Radcliff demanding liberty for bondsmen? Jeremiah Stafford knew it was possible. The First Consul would have been no more immune to the lusts of the flesh than any other man. Possible or not, though, it had to be denied. If true—no, if believed true—it gave the rising too much prestige.

  A constable held up a white-gloved hand. Stafford halted his horse. So did the other riders and drivers on his street. The constable turned and waved, letting cross traffic through. After a while, he held up his hand to stop it, and Stafford’s forward progress resumed. Not all of New Hastings’ notions were ancient. The Consul quite liked the traffic-control scheme.

  By contrast, he could have lived without the railroad station. It resembled nothing so much as an enormous, soot-stained brick barn. The rumble from arriving and departing trains frightened horses, and the smoke their engines belched fouled the air. Yes, they made travel much faster than it had ever been before. Yes, they could haul far more people and goods than horse-drawn coaches and wagons. But they were filthy. That was the only word that fit.

  He wasn’t sure he liked gas lamps, either. They threw more light than candles and lanterns, true. But they were also more dangerous. When a gas line broke and caught fire . . . Several square blocks had burned in Hanover two years before, or was it three now?

  Telegraph wires crowded the sky. They had their uses. News that would have needed days, maybe weeks, to cross the country now raced at the speed of lightning. The government could have taken advantage of that to help put down this insurrection quickly. It could have, but it hadn’t. That made the wires seem even uglier to Consul Stafford than they would have otherwise. His lips moved as he silently damned Leland Newton.

  Well, no matter what the other Consul thought, there were ways around things even if there weren’t ways straight through them. He’d started using some of those ways. Now he had to hope his machinations would let the local whites do the job that needed doing.

  A moment later, he found his own way straight through to the Senate House and adjoining Consular residences blocked. A wagon had lost a wheel, spilling barrels and clogging the street. The pungent smell of beer hung in the air. A teamster cursed in a sonorous brogue. People milled about, trying to escape the jam.

  The way around, Jeremiah Stafford thought. He turned his own horse back the way he’d come. First to find the way out. Then to find the side streets that would, eventually, get him where he wanted to go.

  Consul Stafford gave a newsboy a cent for a copy of the new day’s New Hastings Strand. “Here you are, sir,” the boy said, handing him the paper.

  “Thank you kindly.” Newton held it out almost at arm’s length. The print was small, and his eyes seemed to have more trouble with it every month. He had a pair of reading glasses, but didn’t like them. They turned the more
distant world to a fuzzy blur.

  By wire from New Marseille, a story boasted. It told of people fleeing to the West Coast city from plantations and smaller towns to the east. The rampage of the colored desperadoes only continues and intensifies! the reporter in New Marseille wrote. Local authorities seem powerless to quell their depredations, while the national government does nothing.

  Anyone could guess where his affiliations on the question of slavery lay. But the Strand wasn’t a pro-slavery paper. There weren’t many of those north of the Stour. Maybe it printed this story because the choice lay between printing it and going without news. Or maybe the Strand had decided the uprising needed quashing even if mistreated slaves—a redundancy if ever there was one—had finally had more than they could stand.

  The governor of New Marseille had proclaimed a state of emergency, the piece went on. He was drafting all able-bodied men into the state militia. He wasn’t quite begging the Atlantean soldiers in New Marseille to desert and sign up with the militia, but he was quoted as saying, “We’re looking for men experienced in handling weapons.”

  Governor Donovan was also appealing for aid from other states “that share our institutions and our dangers.” Reading the rest of the front page, Consul Newton doubted whether Donovan would get as much help as he wanted. Insurrections were breaking out in the states of Cosquer and Gernika and Nouveau Redon: like forest fires in a lightning storm after a long drought. The slaveholding states east of the Green Ridge Mountains might be too busy closer to home to send men or guns off to the west.

  A man in a plug hat came up to Newton and demanded, “What are you going to do about the niggers, Consul?”

  No one would have spoken to Queen Victoria that way. No one would have addressed her Prime Minister like that, either. Atlanteans were convinced they were as good—and as smart—as their magistrates. The United States of Atlantis rested on that presumption of equality . . . for white men. The idea that men of other breeds might crave the same presumption hadn’t sunk in, not south of the Stour it hadn’t.