Harry Turtledove - Liberating Atlantis

"Some of us won't," Clarence predicted.

"Expect you're right. But some white folks don't make it, either, even with everything goin' for them," Frederick answered. "You said it-long as we've got the chance, that's what really counts."

"Yeah." Abel Marquard's butler nodded. His eyes went dreamy and far away. "A chance. Just a God-damned chance…"

"Honest to God, Clarence, I think it'll happen now," Frederick said. "And you've helped make it happen. You know that, an' I know that, an' the Senator, he sure knows that, too, but I bet you anything it never shows up in the history books."

"I ain't gonna touch that bet. I may be dumb, but not so dumb," Clarence said. "When did anything a nigger did ever show up in the history books?"

"One of these day, that may happen, too," Frederick Radcliff said. "One of these days-but not quite yet."

Leland Newton glanced over at Jeremiah Stafford, who nodded. Newton brought his gavel down smartly on the desk in front of him: once, twice, three times. "The Clerk of the Senate will call the roll," he said.

"Yes, your Excellency," the Clerk of the Senate replied. How often had the functionary called the roll? Hundreds-more likely thousands-of times. He'd held his post longer than Newton had been in New Hastings. Newton couldn't remember his ever acknowledging that command from a Consul before. But now poorly suppressed excitement filled his voice, as it filled Newton's.

New Hastings hadn't known a moment like this since… when? Since the Atlantean Assembly reconvened here after the redcoats went home, reconvened and hammered out the system of government the USA had used ever since? No doubt that was an important time, but Newton thought this one topped it. Wouldn't you have to reach all the way back to the fifteenth century, when the Battle of the Strand ensured that no local kings, no local nobility, would lord it over the populace? Newton thought so.

The Clerk of the Senate did his best to return to his usual emotionless tone: "The question before the Conscript Fathers is, Shall the Senate ratify the agreement made by the two Consuls with one Frederick Radcliff and his supporters in the village of Slug Hollow, state of New Marseille?" No matter how hard he tried to sound dull, he didn't quite succeed.

Avalon voted first: the state north of New Marseille headed the alphabetical list. Within each state's contingent, the Senators also voted in alphabetical order. One of Avalon's six Senators voted no. Slavery wasn't legal in Avalon, but it had been up until twenty-five years earlier. Some sympathy for slaveholding lingered yet.

Cosquer came next. It had more Senators than Avalon did, since it held more people; as far as Newton knew, every one of its Conscript Fathers owned slaves. Some of them defiantly voted against the Slug Hollow accord. Consul Newton waited tensely till Abel Marquard's name came up.

"Senator Marquard!" the Clerk of the Senate intoned at last.

"Aye," Marquard said. Newton and the Clerk might have failed to keep their voices emotionless, but the Senator from Cosquer succeeded. Could machines have been made to speak, his voice might have come from one of them.

He had opposed the agreement. Frederick Radcliff had claimed the two of them had an arrangement whereby, if the Negro brought peace to Gernika, Marquard would support Slug Hollow. The Senator denied everything. But, no matter what he'd denied, he'd changed his mind. He'd announced he would support the accord, and now he'd gone and done it.

Newton wondered how and why it came to pass that Abel Marquard had changed his mind. Nobody seemed to know. Or, if anyone-Frederick Radcliff, for instance-did know, he wasn't talking. Something out of the ordinary must have happened, but who could say what?

And, in the end, what difference did it make? As long as Marquard voted the right way (which he did) and as long as he brought some Senatorial colleagues with him (which he also did), everything else was a matter of details.

"The state of Croydon's delegation will now vote," the Clerk of the Senate declared after the last man from Cosquer spoke a defiant nay. One by one, the Clerk polled Croydon's Senators. All of them voted to accept the accord and make slavery a thing of the past. Leland Newton would have been horrified and astonished had they done anything else.

On the Consular dais, Stafford turned and whispered to him: "Next up is the compensation bill, the way we agreed."

"Oh, yes. Of course." For a moment, Newton was tempted to imitate Senator Marquard and say something like, We did? The look on Stafford's face would almost be worth it. But the operative word was almost. Compensation would make freeing the slaves, if not delightful to the whites who owned them, at least possible for those whites. Freeing slaves without compensation would touch off a revolt that would make the one just past (Newton hoped it was just past) seem a children's spat by comparison.

That seemed as obvious to Newton as it did to Stafford. The other Consul's warnings about the country breaking to pieces in the absence of such measures weren't idle. Now Newton would have to persuade northern Senators that their states, their constituents, needed to see their taxes rise to placate a group of people who, they were convinced, were morally wrong.

Southern Senators went out on a limb for you and for Atlantis. He could already see in his mind's eye the shape his argument would take. Now it's your turn to do the same for them.

Newton hoped the northern Senators would keep their country in mind, not just the next election at their local statehouse, the one that might send them back to New Hastings or hurl them into private life again, rejected by their own people. Yes, the kind of revenge the states south of the Stour could take would be far worse than even the Great Servile Insurrection.

Like Avalon, Freetown lay on the border with the slaveholding states. Two Freetown Senators voted against the Slug Hollow agreement. Newton winced. He'd expected to lose one vote there, but not two. Even though Abel Marquard had come through in the end, this would be closer than he wanted.

Storm Whitson looked ready to burst in anger and astonishment when the majority of the delegation from Gernika voted for Slug Hollow. "Brutus, Judas, Habakkuk Biddiscombe, and you sons of bitches!" he cried. "Traitors all!"

"That remark will be stricken from the record," Consul Newton declared. "And you are out of order, Senator."

"Well, sir, if I am, I don't much care to be in order," Whitson shot back.

"While you are on the Senate floor, you will abide by the Senate's rules," Newton said.

Whatever Whitson said after that, the gavel overrode. Then it was on to Hanover, the most heavily populated of the United States of Atlantis and also one of the states staunchest against slavery. As Croydon's had, Hanover's delegation voted unanimously for the Slug Hollow accord.

After that-before that, really, but the unanimous vote made it clear to even the dullest and the most partisan-the result was plain. When the last Senator had voted, the floor erupted in cheers and boos and applause and catcalls. A northern Senator punched a southerner in the nose. "I've wanted to do that for fifteen years!" he yelled. Then, before the Sergeant at Arms could get to them, the southerner picked himself up and decked his uncollegial colleague with a chair.

Eventually, the Sergeant at Arms and nearby Senators untangled them. On any other day, such behavior would have been a great scandal. It would have made headlines in papers on both sides of the Stour. When tomorrow came, though, it might not make the papers at all. The slaves were free! This side of the Second Coming, what news in Atlantis could be bigger than that?

The line that led to the justice of the peace's chambers stretched around the block when Frederick Radcliff and Helen took their places in it. Most of the couples in the line were Negroes and copperskins: the reliable slaves of people who'd come up from south of the Stour to do business of one kind or another in the capital. It hadn't been legal for citizens of New Hastings to own slaves for many years. Southerners could bring them up here, though, the risk being that, if the slaves escaped, nobody would do much to help the owners recover the property that had absconded with itself.