Harry Turtledove - Liberating Atlantis

Stafford had clearly seen that from the beginning. Why didn't I? Newton wondered. Like a lot of northern foes of slavery, he'd tended to romanticize the men and women who were the victims of the institution. It was much harder to romanticize someone who was trying to blow your head off. You were much more likely to make someone like that into a demon, there in the fortress of your mind.

Maybe that was why Stafford had foreseen so clearly what was coming. He didn't suddenly need to turn the uprisen slaves to demons inside his head. As far as he was concerned, slaves who rose against their masters demonized themselves.

Muttering to himself, Newton looked out through the swirling smoke again. He could imagine that it was the veil of time, and that he was looking back into the past. The tall trees, some of them with moss hanging from their branches, the understory of squat barrel trees, the ferns growing in green profusion below them… The only signs of modernity were the railroad line-and the dragoons.

"We might see a honker pulling up leaves somewhere," he remarked.

"I wonder if any honkers are left alive," Stafford said.

"A few years ago, that artist fellow set out from Avalon to find some, remember? And he did, too, in some hidden mountain valley." Newton scratched his head. "What was his name, anyhow?"

"Audubon." That wasn't Consul Stafford-it was Colonel Sinapis. "A very fine artist indeed."

"You know him?" Newton asked in surprise. Imagining the fierce and dour Sinapis with any interests beyond those of his sanguinary trade wasn't easy.

But he sighed now as he shook his head. "Alas, I did not have that privilege-he died last year. No one could match his paintings of viviparous quadrupeds and especially of birds for their accurate vivacity. No one came close. Even if honkers are no more, they will still live for us in his portrayal of them."

"I had not thought you such a friend of nature," Stafford said, so the colonel had surprised him, too.

"Time often hangs heavy in the Ministry of War," Sinapis answered. "Having a hobbyhorse to ride helps make the hours pass. One of my colleagues translates chronicles from the medieval Latin. Another has become an expert on the history of mining iron. Several drink or play cards. Me, I prefer nature."

A career soldier's life in Atlantis: one more thing Newton hadn't thought through. The country had no serious foreign threats. Lying where it did, how could it? And the navy, not the army, would deal first with any threats that did appear. In his time in Europe, Colonel Sinapis would have been used to adventure and upheaval. Sitting around gathering dust in the Ministry of War couldn't have been easy for him. No wonder he'd found something besides soldiering to interest him.

Well, Atlantis had its own share of adventure and upheaval now. The navy couldn't do much about it, either, not unless the rebels came close enough to the water's edge to be bombarded by sea. If any part of the national government was going to restore order, it would have to be the small, sleepy, much-maligned army.

"Can our soldiers do the job required of them?" Consul Newton asked the colonel.

"If you and Consul Stafford tell me what the job is and stick with it, they will do it, whatever it may be," Sinapis answered. "They do not have much experience fighting, but they are well-disciplined men. You can rely on them-if I know, and they know, what they must do. If the two of you cannot make up your minds, or if you change them more often than you change your drawers, we shall have trouble."

He looked melancholy, but then he usually looked melancholy. He sounded melancholy, too: as if he expected they would have troubles. But it was a peculiar kind of melancholy, because he also sounded as if he was looking forward to whatever troubles they found.

Leland Newton had been looking forward to whatever troubles they found when he set out from New Hastings. He wasn't so sure any more.

Jeremiah Stafford had always been a man of the Atlantic coast. In that, he was like most of his countrymen. Atlantis had been settled from the east, and remained most densely populated on the coast facing England and the European mainland. Only one real city-Avalon-lay on the Hesperian Gulf and looked toward Terranova. New Marseille gave itself airs, but wasn't in the same league.

During the fight for freedom, Victor Radcliff had marched an Atlantean army through western Atlantis to face the redcoats in New Marseille. The country on this side of the mountains had been a howling wilderness then. Now, a lifetime later, the pursuit of profits from cotton had turned much of it into an imitation of the plantations farther east. Much of it, but not all.

Here and there, the wilderness still howled. In stretches between plantations, only the railroad line proved that anyone had come this way before. Ferns and barrel trees and conifers got dull in a hurry. Like Consul Newton-and, no doubt, like Colonel Sinapis-Stafford wondered if he would see a honker, but he didn't.

Even market towns were fewer and farther between on this side of the mountains than in the longer-settled east. But people turned out to cheer the soldiers whenever the train stopped for fuel and water. Stafford couldn't resist pointing that out to his colleague in the Consulship.

"Well, some people do," Leland Newton allowed. "But I don't see any blacks or copperskins dancing in the streets and singing hosannas because we've come."

"Good God in heaven! Who cares about them?" Stafford said. "White people made Atlantis."

"They did indeed: on the backs of the colored people they fetched here to do the hard, dirty work they didn't care to do themselves," Newton answered.

"You're spewing that rubbish again," Stafford said. "If you think white people don't work in this country, you've been walking around with your eyes closed. Without white men and their work and their capital, slaves would have nothing to do."

"This part of Atlantis would be better off if it had been settled by small freeholders, the way the lands farther north were," Newton said.

"Better off how, pray?" Stafford retorted. "Would you rather come to this climate in a wool shirt, and sweat and itch nine months of the year? If you would, by God, you're welcome to it. But I see you are wearing cotton instead, the same as I am. Try growing cotton on one of your precious small freeholds. It takes too much labor to make that possible."

"I could wear linen in a pinch," Newton said in musing tones. "Linen is tolerably cool, or better than tolerably."

"And it wrinkles if you give it a hard look, and it costs far more than cotton does-all of which, I have no doubt, you understand perfectly well," Stafford said. "You are being difficult for the sake of being difficult."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Newton said. Stafford only snorted. He'd come to politics from the practice of the law, just as his colleague had. He knew a denial that wasn't a denial when he heard one.

While he and Newton bickered, Colonel Sinapis looked out the window. The Atlantean officer suddenly pointed. "There," he said. "This is part of the trouble of the countryside."

This was a rude encampment alongside the railroad tracks. Tents and lean-tos sheltered white people who were dirty and wore ragged clothes. A few of them waved to the train. More just sat or sprawled where they were, too apathetic to salute the men who had come to rescue them.

"You see." Stafford rounded on Newton and made the words an accusation. "This is what the insurrection does. These poor innocents got away with their necks, nothing more. All they worked for through their lives is gone now."

"Yes, it's very sad," the other Consul said. But that was at best a barbed agreement, for Newton went on, "They seem to have it as hard as the slaves did before the uprising."