Harry Turtledove - United States of Atlantis

Victor Radcliff didn't like to go into Hanover or New Hastings or any of Atlantis' other seaboard towns. Too many people crowded too close together to suit him in places like that. He lived on a farm well to the west, more than halfway out to the Green Ridge Mountains. Whenever he found-or made-the chance, he ranged farther a'field yet.

But towns were sometimes useful. He had a manuscript to deliver to a printer in Hanover. Unless he cared to buy a printing press himself (which he didn't) or to stop writing (which he also didn't), he needed to deal with the men who could turn his scribble into words someone besides himself and the compositor could understand.

His wife kissed him when he left. "Come home as soon as you can," Margaret said. "I'll miss you."

What might have been lay not far below the surface of her voice. They'd had two boys and a girl. None of the children saw its third birthday. Without Victor, Meg had a lonely time of it. Adam would have been fourteen now…

"I'll miss you, too." Victor meant it, which didn't keep him from plunging into the trackless swamps and forests of western Atlantis as often as he could. A lot of Edward Radcliffe's descendants-those who still kept the e on the end of their surnames and those who didn't-still had the restless spirit that came down from the Discoverer.

No doubt Edward had it, for without it he never would have started the English settlement in Atlantis. On sea and land, his descendants through his sons-and others through his daughters, who didn't wear the family name any more-had kept it through more than three centuries now.

"Give my regards to all the cousins you see," Meg said. "There'll be a swarm of them," Victor replied. Radcliffs and Radcliffes had thrived here as they never would have in England. Without a doubt, old Edward had known what he was doing when he decided this was a better land than the one he'd left behind. Englishmen thought of Atlanteans as colonials, and looked down their noses at them. Atlanteans thought of Englishmen as strait-jacketed on their little island, and felt sorry for them.

Someone knocked on the front door. "That will be Blaise," Margaret said.

"Not likely to be anyone else," Victor agreed. He opened the door. It was Blaise. "You are ready?" the Negro asked, his English flavored both by the French he'd learned as a slave farther south and by the tongue he'd grown up speaking in Africa. He and Victor and two copperskins from Terranova had escaped French Atlantis together. Victor didn't know what had become of the men from the west. Blaise had stuck with him. The black man had been his sergeant during the war against France and Spain, and his factotum ever since. "I'm ready," Victor said.

"Let's go, then. It will be good to get away." Blaise had two boys and two girls. He and his wife had buried only one baby. With the genial chaos in his household, he probably meant what he said. He made sure this trip wouldn't be for nothing: "You have the manuscript?"

"Put it in my saddle bag half an hour ago," Victor replied. "I won't be the kind of author they make jokes about-not that kind of joke, anyhow."

"Good." Blaise lifted his plain tricorn hat from his head for a moment. "I'll bring him back safe, Mrs. Radcliff."

"I know you will." Meg smiled. "I don't think I'd let him go if you weren't along."

"I'm not an infant, Meg. I have been known to take care of myself," Victor said, a touch of asperity in his voice.

"I know, dear, but Blaise does it better." No one could deflate you the way a wife could.

Victor left with such dignity as he could muster. He swung up onto his horse, a sturdy chestnut gelding. Blaise rode a bay mare. Stallions had more fire. They also had more temper. Victor preferred a steady, reliable mount. Blaise had come to horsemanship late in life. He rode to get from here to there, not from a love of riding. A temperamental horse was the last thing he wanted.

They rode off Victor's farm and down a little, winding side road toward the highway east. It had rained a couple of days before-not a lot, but enough to lay the dust and make the journey more pleasant.

Fields were broader than they would have been in England. Most of the crops were the same, though: wheat and barley, rye and oats. Here and there, farmers planted a field in Terranovan maize, but English farmers were doing that these days, too. Horses and cattle and sheep cropped grass in meadows, as they might have on the home island. Chickens and ducks and Terranovan turkeys strutted and waddled across farmyards.

Apple orchards and groves of peaches and plums and walnuts grew among the fields and meadows. Lettuce and cabbage and radishes, turnips and parsnips and carrots flourished in garden plots. Dogs barked and played. Cats sauntered or snoozed or sat by woodpiles waiting for unwary mice. Again, everything was much the way it would have been in England.

Only in the unsettled stretches did Atlantis remind Victor of what it must have been like before Englishmen and Bretons and Basques first began settling here. Pines, and even a few redwoods, made up the woods in those stretches. Barrel-trees, with their strange, short trunks and sheaves of palmlike leaves sticking off from the top of them, showed themselves here and there. All manner of ferns gave the native forest an exuberant, bright green understory.

A bird called from the woods. "An oil thrush!" Victor said. "They're getting scarce in settled country."

Oil thrushes were plainly related to the brick-breasted birds Atlanteans called robins. That name irked Englishmen, who applied it to another, smaller, bird with a red front. It seemed natural to Victor, though; he'd used it all his life. Oil thrushes were much larger: easily the size of chickens. They had wings too small to let them fly and long beaks they thrust into soft ground in search of earthworms. Their fatty flesh gave them their name. Settlers rendered them for grease to make soap or candles. And… "Good eating," Blaise said. "They're mighty good eating."

"Do you want to stop and hunt?" Victor Radcliff asked. As if to tempt a yes, the oil thrush called again. Like a lot of Atlantean creatures, the flightless birds didn't know enough to be wary of men. But, reluctantly, Blaise shook his head. "I reckon not," he said. "We know where our next meal's coming from. I do like that. Don't need to take the time."

"Sensible. I was thinking the same thing." Radcliff laughed at himself. "Funny, isn't it, how often we think He's a sensible fellow means the same thing as He agrees with me?"

Blaise laughed, too. "Hadn't looked at it like that, but you're right, no doubt about it."

Victor's good humor faded faster than he wished it would have. "No wonder Englishmen don't find Atlanteans sensible these days, then, and no wonder we don't think they are, either."

"What can we do about it? Can we do anything about it?" Blaise was, above all else, a practical man. Victor supposed anyone who'd been a slave would have to be.

"I don't know," Victor answered. "Along with seeing my manuscript off to the printer, finding out whether we can do anything makes me put up with going to Hanover. I won't have to wait for the news to come out to the farm."

Blaise looked at him sidelong. "Thought you liked it there."

"I do," Victor said. "God knows I do. But Edward Radcliffe came here three hundred years ago so he wouldn't have lords and kings telling him what to do. They seem to have forgotten that in London." Air hissed out between his lips. "Some people in Hanover seem to have forgotten, too."

They came into the little town of Hooville as afternoon neared evening. Only an antiquarian-of which there were few in Atlantis-would have known it was named for the Baron of Hastings in the mid-fifteenth century. The sun going down toward the Green Ridge Mountains cast Victor's long shadow, and Blaise's, out ahead of them.