Liberating Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  “Follow it even when it takes us straight to ruination,” Whitson jeered.

  “Change isn’t ruin. We need to get used to that. We need to remember it,” Consul Newton said. “I’ve had reason to think about that quite a bit lately. Change is only change. It can be good or bad. It doesn’t have to be either one.”

  “When you’ve seen as much change as I have, young fellow, you’ll know it’s mostly bad,” Senator Whitson said. “And this change you want to ram down our throats is the worst one yet. Nigger equality? Pah!” He made as if to spit.

  “The way it looks to me, we have one choice besides liberating our slaves: we can kill them all, or try,” Jeremiah Stafford said. “We can’t trust them to go on serving us the way they did before. The Slug Hollow agreement may not be a wonderful bargain for Atlantis. It is the best bargain we could get, things being as they are.”

  “Nonsense!” the Senator from Gernika said.

  “It isn’t,” Stafford answered. “Even now, part of me wishes it were, but it isn’t.”

  Frederick Radcliff couldn’t have been any more bored waiting for Quince to step out of the undergrowth again. He knew the copperskin might tell him the rebels didn’t intend to lay down their arms. He knew Quince might not come back alone, but at the head of a swarm of slaves. If Quince did, Frederick wouldn’t see New Hastings or Helen again.

  But he couldn’t do anything about any of that. He also couldn’t worry about it all the time. And so . . . he was bored.

  He was so bored, he did get into the cavalry troopers’ seemingly unending dice game. He lost five and a half eagles in less time than it takes to tell. After that, he got out of the game again.

  “Sure we can’t talk you into sticking?” one of the horsemen asked, rattling the bones as temptingly as he could.

  “Nah. I’ve already been as much of a sucker as I can afford to be, and some more besides,” Frederick answered.

  “You might win this time.” The trooper rattled the dice again.

  “Slim odds.” Frederick left it right there. He didn’t know the game was crooked. He didn’t want to waste any more money on a voyage of discovery, either. A lifetime of slavery had convinced him each and every gold eagle—each and every silver ten-cent piece—was precious. Losing so many so fast . . . What Helen would say if she ever found out . . . No, he didn’t want to play any more.

  Then the troopers quit coaxing him. They all grabbed for their eight-shooters. One of them pointed. “Here’s that mudfaced son of a bitch again!”

  Sure enough, there stood Quince at the edge of the open ground. Lots of dirt in the southern states (though not that of Gernika) was reddish, which was how copperskins got their nasty nickname. Quince waved his big white flag. “Come on in!” Frederick called. “The truce holds no matter what you tell us.”

  Maybe so, maybe not. If the cavalrymen decided plugging Quince would help them, they’d do it. How could Frederick stop them? He couldn’t. He knew it, and Quince had to know it, too.

  But the rebel leader did come in. Along with the flag of truce, he had a pepperbox pistol on his right hip. Chances were it had been some planter’s prized possession . . . and chances were that planter needed it no more and would never need it again. Ceremoniously, Quince laid the fancy pistol at Frederick Radcliff’s feet. “We’re gonna try peace,” Quince said, as if it were a dangerous, possibly poisonous, medicine, like mercury for the pox. “If we can put down our guns and still get free . . . That’s worth doing. But if it don’t work out, nigger, you’ll answer to me.”

  One black could call another nigger without a jolt. The word packed some in a copperskin’s mouth, as mudface did in a Negro’s. Quince had used it before, mostly in admiration. Frederick didn’t think he intended malice this time. “Fair enough,” he answered. “But if it don’t work out, you got to stand in line. Plenty of other folks’ll want to nail my hide to the wall.”

  “I believe that,” Quince said. “Nobody’s gonna come down on us ’cause we rose up, or ’cause of stuff we did while we were fighting?”

  “That’s the deal,” Frederick said. “Nobody’ll go to law with you on account of any of that.” White survivors might try to take private revenge. If they came to trial, white juries might—likely would—acquit them. Frederick didn’t know what he could do about that. So far, he hadn’t come up with anything. But it was outside the law, and Negroes and copperskins could also play those games once they were free.

  “They for true gonna pass that arrangement up in New Hastings?” Quince asked.

  “If they don’t, we all start fighting again,” Frederick answered. “They got to know that, too. Chances that they will pass it just got better, too, if your people honest to God do quit fighting.”

  “Still a couple of snowball cocksuckers I wouldn’t mind finishing, but I guess I can let ’em live,” Quince said. Frederick nodded. Those whites were just as sure to want Quince dead. Well, they and he would have to forgo the pleasure . . . if the Slug Hollow accord passed. It has to now, Frederick thought. Doesn’t it?

  XXVI

  Jeremiah Stafford hated waiting. When you had to sit there twiddling your thumbs, what you were waiting for usually wasn’t anything you wanted. It might be something you needed, but that was a different story. If you had a toothache, you waited for the dentist to get to work on you. Then you waited for whatever horrible things he was doing to be over. Ether was supposed to help with that torment, as it did with so many others. Stafford hadn’t had to visit a tooth-drawer since the stuff came into use. He wasn’t so eager to test its virtues that he wanted to visit one, either. Nobody with a full set of marbles wanted to visit the dentist.

  What the Consul waited for now wasn’t the cessation of pain. If the news here proved bad, though, it could end up causing more pain than all the toothaches he’d ever had put together. Bad news here could split Atlantis like a jeweler splitting a sapphire—or, less neatly, like a drunk falling out of a second-story window and breaking his leg. The second comparison seemed to Stafford to fit better. He wished it didn’t.

  Ever since the redcoats sailed away, New Hastings had been the place where important things happened in the USA. Now, all of a sudden, it wasn’t. As history had been made in Slug Hollow (Stafford did his best to forget all the fighting preceding that bit of history), so now it would be made somewhere outside of St. Augustine, in the heat and humidity and insignificance of Gernika.

  But what kind of history would be made there? That was what Stafford waited to discover, along with the rest of official New Hastings. He didn’t have a flannel rag tied around his head to keep a swollen jaw from tormenting him quite so much, but he might as well have.

  He was pretending to go through paperwork in his office when his secretary stuck his head in and said, “Your Excellency, a soldier wants to see you.”

  “A soldier?” Stafford echoed, and the secretary nodded. With a shrug, the Consul said, “All right, Ned. Send him in.” Whatever the soldier wanted, talking to him was bound to be more interesting than a report on the previous fiscal year’s revenues and expenses pertaining to canals.

  The soldier strode in and delivered a salute as stiff as a marionette’s. He was a young second lieutenant, so new in his uniform that he all but squeaked. “Your Excellency!” he said, and saluted again. “I am Lieutenant Morris Radcliffe, and I have the honor to bring you a report Colonel Sinapis has just received from Lieutenant Braun, who commands the security detail assigned to Frederick Radcliff in Gernika.”

  Stafford wondered which twig Morris Radcliffe represented on the family’s huge, many-branched tree. He wondered how the lieutenant was related to him, and how the youngster was related to Frederick Radcliff. He also wondered what Morris Radcliffe thought of being related to a Negro.

  But he wondered none of those things for more than a split second. “News from Colonel Sinapis? From this Lieutenant Braun?” he barked. “Well, out with it, man!”

  “Sir? Uh, yes, sir!” Startled b
y Stafford’s outburst, Lieutenant Radcliffe had to compose himself before he could remember what he was supposed to say. “Colonel Sinapis told me to tell you that Lieutenant Braun told him that Frederick Radcliff has arranged an end to the hostilities between whites and slaves in and around St. Augustine.”

  “He has arranged that?” Stafford wanted to make sure he’d got it straight. Sometimes you heard with your heart, not your ears.

  “Yes, your Excellency, he has.” Young Radcliffe confirmed it. “At the present moment—or at the moment Lieutenant Braun sent the telegram—there is, uh, was no fighting in Gernika. The Negroes and copperskins who had rebelled against established authority are coming in from the woods and swamps.”

  What else would they be coming in from? As far as Stafford knew, Gernika had precious little territory that wasn’t woods or swamps. He forced his wandering wits back to the matter at hand. “Well,” he said, and then “Well” again. On the third try, he managed something better: “It’s a great day for Atlantis.”

  “Yes, sir. I think so, too.” Lieutenant Radcliffe looked confused. “Colonel Sinapis told me he thought you would say something like that. What with where you come from and all, I wasn’t so sure he was right.”

  By the way the lieutenant talked, he’d been born north of the Stour. Some northerners thought anybody who favored slavery had been issued horns and pitchforks by Satan himself. (Some men from Stafford’s part of the country felt the same about people who opposed slavery. Stafford had himself, not so long before. He declined to dwell on that now.)

  Wearily, the Consul answered, “Even when you wish they would, things don’t always last. When they wear out, you’ve got to patch ’em up or get rid of ’em and try something new. Doesn’t look like we can patch slavery. Since we can’t, we’d better figure out how to get along without it, don’t you think?”

  “Me? Uh, yes, sir.” Lieutenant Radcliffe gulped and blushed like a girl. “That’s my personal opinion, you understand, your Excellency. My opinion as a soldier . . . Well, soldiers aren’t supposed to have opinions about stuff that has to do with politics.”

  “Of course,” Stafford said dryly, and the junior—very junior—officer turned pinker yet. But it was a sound rule. Soldiers were supposed to do what the people who did concern themselves with politics told them to do. They weren’t supposed to give their superiors any back talk about it, either.

  If opinions got hot enough, the system would break down. If commanded to put down slaveholders, some soldiers from south of the Stour would refuse. As Stafford had seen for himself, fewer from north of the river would refuse to fight slaves. That had been true before the Slug Hollow agreement, anyhow. Maybe it wasn’t any more. Northerners were liable to figure the south had had its chance for a tolerable peace, and to refuse to help it any further if it turned its back on that chance.

  He hoped that wouldn’t come up. If there was any justice in the world, it wouldn’t. “Whether you have opinions about politics or not, Lieutenant, I do, and I will give you one of mine,” Stafford said. “If I can’t get the Slug Hollow agreement through the Senate after this, I will go home.”

  While Leland Newton was campaigning against the slave insurrectionists, the newspapers called him and Consul Stafford and Colonel Sinapis every kind of idiot under the sun. They called Frederick Radcliff worse than that. Now, conveniently forgetting what they’d said then, they sported headlines with words like peace and justice and dignity and statesmanship prominently displayed. They applied those words not only to Frederick but also to the two Consuls, who got credit for sending him south to St. Augustine.

  Even Sinapis came in for praise. The papers said generous things about his common sense and restraint. Those same qualities had been conspicuously absent in his conduct of the campaign against the rebels west of the Green Ridge Mountains—again, if you believed the newspapers.

  Newton didn’t, which didn’t stop him from reading them. If you added them all together—the ones that loved you and the ones that loathed you—you might come within spitting distance of the truth. Even if you didn’t, you would find out what editors—and the men who paid them—thought to be the truth. And, in politics, what people thought to be true was at least as important as what was true.

  The Consul from Croydon also found his colleague from Cosquer as eager as he was to get the Slug Hollow accord through the Senate. The only problem was, southern Senators kept using every delaying tactic they could find. Newton had known fools like Storm Whitson would go right on being foolish. He had expected canny politicos like Abel Marquard to see which way the wind was blowing.

  “Didn’t you make some kind of arrangement with Frederick Radcliff before he left for Gernika?” Newton asked. “Aren’t you reneging on it now?”

  Marquard’s expressive nostrils flared. “I would never make an arrangement with a Negro—except the kind his grandfather made with his grandmother. How could I renege on an arrangement I did not make?”

  “What if he claims you did?” asked Newton, who knew better than to take everything the slippery Senator said at face value.

  “What if he does?” Senator Marquard answered easily. “People claim all kinds of things they can’t prove.”

  “He may not need to prove it. He’ll be a very popular man when he comes back from St. Augustine,” Newton said. “If he tells the papers you said this, that, or the other thing, don’t you think most people who read that will believe it?”

  “People not of our profession may, but who worries about what people not of our profession believe? Only other people not of our profession.” Marquard snapped his fingers to show what he thought of such people.

  “They elect the burgesses who’ll vote on whether to reelect you,” Newton said. Senator Marquard snapped his fingers again. He seemed bound and determined to stay unimpressed.

  And, on the Senate floor, he seemed bound and determined to keep the Slug Hollow agreement from ever reaching a vote. He had friends, too, friends Newton hadn’t expected him to have. “Can’t you do anything about those people?” Newton asked Jeremiah Stafford. “Most of them come from your state.”

  “I’m trying,” Stafford said.

  “So are they,” Newton answered. “Exceedingly trying.”

  “Heh,” the other Consul said. “Let me put that another way: I am doing everything I know how to do.”

  “Well, then, you’d better come up with something new, because what you know how to do isn’t working,” Newton said.

  Stafford glared. “I don’t see that I’m getting much help from you.”

  “From me? Any Senator from south of the Stour would just as soon cut me as look at me.” Newton exaggerated, but not by much. “Maybe we really do need to wait and see if the Negro can bring them to their senses.”

  “Maybe we do.” But Stafford didn’t seem convinced, for he went on, “Have you any idea—any idea at all—how strange relying on a Negro for anything at all seems to me?”

  “Perhaps not. In Croydon, though, Negroes—and copperskins—have been citizens for longer than I’ve been alive. They’ve been citizens longer than Atlantis has been free of England. We—whites, I mean—don’t always love them, but we’re used to treating them like men, not like children or farm animals,” Newton said.

  “And how often do they leave you sorry you’ve treated them that way?” the other Consul asked.

  “Well, I don’t have statistics at my fingertips, the way the Minister of the Fisc does with his accounts. My impression is that they’re about as reliable as white men—not much worse, not much better,” Newton replied.

  “Fair enough,” Stafford said. “Is it any wonder I’m worried, then?”

  “When you put it that way . . . no.” Consul Newton wished he could give a different answer, but any politico learned early in the game not to count on other people too much, regardless of their color. If he didn’t learn that, he didn’t stay in the game long enough to learn much else.

  When Frederic
k Radcliff came back to New Hastings, he got a parade through the town’s old, old streets. People cheered him—whites, blacks, and copperskins. He waved to the crowd. As a brass band thumped behind him, he took off his tall hat and waved it, too. Sitting beside him in the open carriage, Helen seemed ready to burst with pride.

  The next day, Frederick called on Senator Marquard at Marquard’s offices in the Senate House. Marquard’s white secretary gravely told him the politico was indisposed and could not see him. Frederick said, “Oh, too bad,” and went away. But when Abel Marquard was also “indisposed” the following day and the day after that, the Negro began to suspect a trend.

  He went to the house Marquard rented in New Hastings, only a couple of blocks from the Senate House. The Senator’s Negro butler received him there. “Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Radcliff,” said the other black man, whose name was Clarence. “Everybody’s proud of you—you’d best believe that.”

  “Thank you kindly,” Frederick said. By everybody, Clarence doubtless meant everybody our color. He had to be a highly trusted man, or the Senator wouldn’t have brought him to a state where he could run off if he chose. Frederick went on, “Can I see himself?” He hadn’t had such a prominent master, but he’d done Clarence’s job for Henry Barford.

  “He’s here. I’m sure he’d be glad to see you. Wait just a minute,” the butler answered.

  “Obliged.” Frederick wasn’t so sure of that, but he didn’t say so.

  Clarence came back almost as fast as he’d promised. His smile had disappeared, though. “Well, he will see you,” he said, and took it no further than that.

  Senator Marquard’s study would have made Master Barford jealous. The Senator did shake hands with Frederick, but didn’t look happy doing it. “I kept my half of the bargain, sir,” Frederick said without preamble. “Now it’s time for you to keep yours.”