Liberating Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  “I suppose so,” the Senator answered. “One of the things Victor must’ve wanted was a nigger wench, eh? Might’ve been better for everybody if he hadn’t got her. We would have bought more time to work out how to deal with this mess without tearing the country apart.”

  “It could be,” Newton said, but he didn’t believe it for a minute. The United States of Atlantis had been busy quarreling about slavery for longer than he’d been in public life, with no sign they were getting anywhere. The insurrection was only one more proof that they hadn’t been. And . . . “If Frederick Radcliff were never born, my guess is that some other Negro or copperskin would have kicked up an uprising anyway before very long.”

  The Senator blinked. “Now there’s an interesting notion. Did the slaves rise up because this fellow Radcliff led them into insurrection, or would they have gone off anyway if he weren’t around?”

  It was an interesting question . . . as long as you didn’t start chasing it round and round like a puppy in hot pursuit of its own tail. “I hope you don’t expect me to prove anything, as if we were back in plane geometry at college,” Newton said.

  “God forbid!” the other man replied. “My cousin’s friend taught geometry himself. If he hadn’t tutored me, I never would have got through it.”

  “Well, all right. I know how you feel, believe me,” Newton said, remembering his own struggles with Euclid’s axioms and theorems. “My guess is, we got the insurrection we got because of Frederick Radcliff. If he’d never been born, we would have got a different one before too long. How different? A little? A lot?” He spread his hands. “I couldn’t begin to tell you.”

  “Seems reasonable,” the Senator from Hanover said after some thought of his own.

  “It does, doesn’t it?” Newton said. “All of which, again, proves exactly nothing.”

  New Hastings held more people than Frederick Radcliff would have dreamt could live together. It dwarfed New Marseille, the biggest town he’d seen up till then. And Croydon was supposed to be bigger, and Hanover was supposed to be bigger still.

  Frederick had trouble believing any such thing was possible. But then, he’d also had trouble believing a city like this was possible. He didn’t know everything there was to know—a fact he’d got his nose rubbed in time after time. He suspected everybody ever born had that happen.

  The Consuls put Helen and him up in a hotel. That had to cost a lot of money, but they didn’t seem to worry about it. People waited on the two Negroes as if they were important whites. Not all the hotel staff consisted of Negroes and copperskins, either. Some of the waiters and sweepers and what-have-you were white men and women, most of whom spoke English with one odd accent or another. They were as professionally deferential as the colored people beside whom they worked.

  “I could get to like this,” Frederick remarked as a white man in a boiled shirt bowed him and Helen to their table at the hotel restaurant.

  “Don’t let it go to your head,” she said, even as the servitor pulled out a chair so she could sit in it. “Talks don’t work out the way folks hope, we’re nothin’ but a couple of no-account niggers again.”

  Her pungent good sense made Frederick smile. “Oh, I know,” he said as he sat down himself. “But look how they fuss over us now. They can treat us like real people if they want to bad enough.”

  “Sure. You treat a coral snake or a lancehead polite, too, long as it’s got a chance to bite you,” his wife answered. “Soon as it can’t, though, you try and figure out how you’re gonna smash in its head.”

  That also seemed more sensible than Frederick wished it did. The other thing that seemed sensible was enjoying himself while other people were paying for it. He ordered roast duck with loaf sugar and a wine the waiter recommended. The wine came all the way from France, and was almost as tasty as its price proclaimed it ought to be.

  “Master Barford, he didn’t know about stuff like this,” Helen said after she tried it.

  “Even if he did, he didn’t have the eagles to buy stuff like this,” Frederick answered. He’d known some other planters had more money than his master. Just the same, all slaveholders had seemed rich to him.

  From a slave’s perspective, all slaveholders were rich. What Frederick hadn’t realized was that there were plenty of people richer than any of the backwoods planters out near New Marseille. He suspected that among their number were both the Consuls and most Atlantean Senators.

  He was also beginning to suspect that, if he played his cards right, he could end up rich himself. He was, after all, the man who represented Negroes and copperskins to the rest of the USA. If the man who did that didn’t end up dead, he would end up prominent. And didn’t a prominent man always have influence to sell?

  Do I want to get rich? Frederick wondered. But that was the wrong question. Anybody who wasn’t an idiot knew having money was better than not having it. No one wanted to go hungry or barefoot or to wear rags or live in a leaky, tumbledown shack. The real question was, did Frederick want to get rich badly enough to sell himself, to sell out the people who counted on him, so he could pile up stacks of golden eagles?

  The sweetened roast duck suddenly tasted like carrion in his mouth. If he did something like that, wouldn’t he still be a slave? And wouldn’t he be a slave who’d willingly—no, eagerly—sold himself to his new masters when he might have stayed free? How could you look at yourself in the mirror after you did something like that? Every time you lathered up to shave, wouldn’t you want to cut your throat instead?

  “Well, then, I won’t do nothin’ like that,” he muttered.

  “Won’t do nothin’ like what?” Helen asked. Even if it often seemed as if she could, she couldn’t read his mind after all.

  “Never mind,” Frederick said. They’d been together all these years; she’d earned the right to push him. She used it, too. It didn’t do her any good, not this time.

  “You traitorous son of a bitch!” That was what most of Jeremiah Stafford’s friends called him these days. The rest called him “You treasonous son of a bitch!” The only difference lay in his erstwhile friends’ attitude toward the language, not in their attitude toward him.

  They all seemed to hate him. And the more they pushed him and mocked him and called him a jackass, the more they provoked him to push back. When his train pulled in at New Hastings, he’d still despised liberation and everything that went with it. They kept telling him it was impossible and he’d had no business agreeing to it in the first place.

  Naturally, he defended what he’d done. “You would have signed that paper, too, if you were there,” he told anyone who would listen. But nobody wanted to listen to him. That was a big part of the problem.

  Supporters of slavery organized marches through the streets of New Hastings. The marchers made the city almost unlivable with drums and horns during the day. At night, they used their noisemakers and carried torches as well. Stafford feared they would burn down the capital over his head.

  He didn’t think his fears were misplaced. Whenever the marchers came upon a copperskin or a Negro, they beat him with an inch of his life. Colored men in New Hastings were free, not slaves. That worried the marchers not a cent’s worth. If anything, it only inflamed them more.

  New Hastings had no real police force. As far as Consul Stafford knew, London was the only city that did. The few watchmen on the city payroll here were no match for the marchers—or for the marchers’ white foes, who waded into them whenever the odds seemed decent. They weren’t content with clouting one another over the head with placards. Knives came out. So did pistols.

  And so did soldiers. Stafford never found out who gave the order. Afterwards, no one seemed to want to admit it. But hard-looking men in gray uniforms who carried bayoneted rifle muskets appeared on street corners at sunup one morning. When the antiliberation marchers disobeyed their orders in any particular, they opened fire without warning.

  That probably wouldn’t have worked in a southern city like
Cosquer or Nouveau Redon or Gernika. It would have stirred up more trouble than it put down. But it served its purpose in New Hastings. The marchers rapidly discovered they didn’t have enough popular backing to take on the soldiers. Making the discovery cost them more casualties. Order returned to the capital.

  Order failed to return to the Senate floor. Stafford and Newton had presided over tempestuous sessions before. Those were as nothing compared to what the Consuls met now. Shaking his fist at Stafford, a Senator from Gernika cried, “You’ve changed!”

  “Indeed,” Stafford replied. “No matter what the honorable gentleman may believe, it is not against the rules of this house.”

  He might as well have saved his breath. “You’ve changed!” the Senator repeated, as if it were forbidden in the sterner books of the Bible. “We haven’t, and we aren’t about to.”

  “Fools never do,” Stafford said.

  That, of course, only poured oil on the fire. Several Senators screamed abuse at him in English, French, and Spanish.

  Bang! Bang! Consul Newton plied the gavel with might and main. “The honorable gentlemen are out of order,” he said—you could sound all the more insulting when you were exquisitely polite. “They would do well to remember to look toward the future, not the past.”

  Take your heads out of the sand, Stafford translated to himself. Did ostriches really stick their heads in the sand? He had no idea. He’d never seen an ostrich. They were supposed to be pretty stupid, just like honkers. He’d never seen a honker, either, even though they were Atlantean birds. As far as he knew, nobody’d seen any honkers since Audubon found some to paint . . . which probably meant backwoodsmen had shot and eaten the last few survivors.

  Back around the time when the United States of Atlantis freed themselves from England, there’d been proposals to set land aside as a preserve for Atlantis’ native creatures. Nothing ever came of those proposals—no state cared to give up land from which it might one day draw taxes. It was probably too late for honkers now, anyhow. It might not be for some other creatures. . . .

  But even if it wasn’t, Consul Stafford had more urgent things to worry about at the moment. “My colleague is right,” he said—a sentence that hadn’t crossed his lips very often before the failed campaign to put down the slave insurrection. “We may not like going forward, but we have no other choice—not unless you would rather spend the rest of your lives fighting a war we are unlikely to win, and one that will not bring us the benefits we seek even if we should win.”

  “If you hadn’t buggered up the fight against the niggers, you’d sing a different tune now,” a Senator from Nouveau Redon said.

  “You wouldn’t go along with everything the Croydon man says,” another southern Senator added.

  “We did the best we could,” Stafford answered. “We faced danger together, and we made the agreement with Frederick Radcliff together, too.”

  “And you get the blame together!” shouted the Senator from Nouveau Redon.

  “The credit, you mean,” Leland Newton said. “History will justify us. It always justifies people who believe in progress.”

  Did it? Stafford had his doubts. But the way his former friends howled made him have doubts about his doubts, too.

  XXIV

  The clerk of the Senate eyed Frederick Radcliff with as much warmth as he would have given a cucumber slug in his salad. “Do you solemnly swear the testimony you are about to give will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” he droned.

  “I do,” Frederick said.

  “Are you aware that perjury is a felony punishable by fine or imprisonment or both?”

  “I wasn’t, but I am now,” Frederick answered. A couple of Senators chuckled. A few more smiled. All of them were northern men. The dignitaries from south of the Stour seemed affronted that a Negro should testify before them at all. Well, too damned bad, Frederick thought.

  As for the clerk, he was impervious. All he said was, “State your name for the record.”

  “I am Frederick Radcliff,” Frederick said. That probably affronted the southern Senators all over again. A Negro with any surname would have been bad enough. A Negro with the most prominent surname in Atlantis was more than twice as bad. A Negro grandson of the famous First Consul was much more than twice as bad.

  Even the clerk’s eyes said as much. If he wasn’t from a slaveholding state himself, Frederick would have been mightily surprised. But all that came out of his mouth was, “You may be seated.”

  Frederick sat in the witness’ chair. The angle at which it was turned let him see the two Consuls on their dais as well as the Senators on the floor of the chamber. Consul Newton said, “For the record, you are the man who was styled Tribune of the Free Republic of Atlantis, are you not?”

  “That’s right,” Frederick replied.

  “Treason!” three Senators shouted at the same time.

  “No such thing,” Frederick said, though that wasn’t a question. “Was it treason when my grandfather rose up against England?” My grandfather. If they didn’t care for that, too damned bad again.

  “It would have been treason, if Victor Radcliff and the Atlantean army had lost,” Newton said.

  “And it would have been treason if you and your army had lost, too.” By the way Consul Stafford sounded, he was still sorry it hadn’t been.

  “But we didn’t, and so it ain’t—isn’t.” Frederick corrected himself. Quite a few Senators would think of him as a dumb nigger no matter what he did, but he didn’t want to give them extra ammunition.

  “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” Newton seemed to be quoting something. By the ring of it, it was old-fashioned. Shakespeare? Frederick had read some, but didn’t remember seeing it there.

  “If you say that about my grandfather, you can say it about me. If you don’t, saying it about me isn’t fair,” he said.

  “I’m not saying it about anyone, because, by the terms of the agreement we signed, there is no such thing as the Free Republic of Atlantis any more. The slave insurrection is over and done with—isn’t that right?” Newton said.

  “Yes, sir, long as the rest of the agreement gets carried out,” Frederick answered. “Long as the slaves get freed, and we get the same rights in law as any other Atlanteans.”

  Several southern Senators started yelling abuse at him. Several northern Senators applauded him, trying to drown out the southerners. Newton and Stafford both used their gavels. No one seemed to want to pay any attention to them. “The Sergeant at Arms will restore order by any means necessary,” Stafford warned.

  That worthy looked at him as if he’d taken leave of his senses. Frederick sympathized with the functionary. Quite a few Senators carried stout sticks, more often as weapons than as aids to keeping them on their pins. And how many more hid a dirk or a pistol under their waistcoats? Frederick didn’t know. He wouldn’t have wanted to find out the hard way, either.

  Finally, something like order did return. “Why do you suppose Consul Stafford and I agreed to terms like those?” Newton asked. “Was it out of the goodness of our hearts, say?”

  “Not likely . . . sir,” Frederick said, which startled laughter out of Senators from both sides of the Stour. He went on, “Probably because we had you in a place where we could’ve slaughtered you, but we didn’t do it.”

  “Yes, you did have us in a place like that,” the Consul agreed. “Why did you let us go, then?”

  “So we could get terms instead of fighting forever,” Frederick said.

  “And now you have those terms,” Newton said.

  Frederick nodded. “We sure do.”

  “What do you think of them?”

  “They’re fair. We can live with them.”

  “They’re an outrage! They don’t punish you for what you did in the insurrection!” a southern Senator shouted.

  Newton and Stafford used their gavels again. Frederick talke
d through the sharp thuds: “They don’t punish the slaveholders for everything they did before the insurrection, either.”

  That set the Senator to spluttering without words. “Both sides agreed that recriminations were pointless,” Consul Newton said. Frederick nodded once more, though he’d learned the word recriminations after the talks with the white men started.

  “We did,” Consul Stafford agreed. “I don’t believe that made anyone happy. I know it didn’t make me happy. But I also know doing anything else would have made everyone even more unhappy.”

  “I want all the Conscript Fathers to think about that,” Newton said. “I understand that you may not wish to ratify the agreement we made in Slug Hollow. Believe me, though—the consequences of rejecting it are far worse than the consequences of accepting it.”

  “Easy for you to say—you aren’t losing half your property!” that stubborn southerner cried.

  “We intend to arrange compensation for slaveholders—after the agreement is accepted,” Newton said.

  The southerner only jeered: “You say now you intend to. But when will we see cash for our niggers and mudfaces? When pigs fly, is my guess. You’ll get what you want, and you won’t give us what we need.”

  He sounded like a girl trying not to give in to a man who wanted to go to bed with her. Noting how much the Senator sounded like that kind of girl, Frederick had all he could do not to laugh out loud. “We will meet all our obligations,” Consul Newton insisted. Of course I’ll marry you afterwards, he might have been saying. And maybe a man who told a girl something like that meant it, and maybe he didn’t.

  “May I say somethin’, your Excellency?” Frederick asked.

  “Go ahead,” Newton said. Stafford nodded.