Harry Turtledove - Liberating Atlantis

Over on the east side of Atlantis, Cosquer had real seasons. Oh, they were milder than New Hastings'-and much milder than Hanover's or Croydon's-but they were there. Once in a while, it even snowed in Cosquer. Washed by the warm current of the Bay Stream, New Marseille seemed to bask in an eternal June. It was always warm. It was always humid-not muggy, the way it got in Cosquer in the summertime, but moist.

And Cosquer was an old place, the second oldest city in Atlantis: four hundred years old now, or as close as made no difference, only a year or two younger than New Hastings. The Bretons, after all, had found Atlantis even before the English fisherfolk. But the Radcliffes had seen right away that the new land needed settling, while the Kersauzons were slower on the uptake.

Well, the Kersauzons paid for it, the way slowcoaches commonly did.

New Marseille, by contrast, was new, as new as a freshly minted gold eagle. It hadn't been much more than a fort and a trading post back in Victor Radcliff's day. The best harbor south of Avalon on the West Coast, but so what? When it was hundreds of miles from the settled regions of Atlantis, that hardly mattered.

Once the railroad and then the telegraph connected New Marseille to the rest of the world, it mattered a lot. Over the past twenty years, New Marseille had seen a growth spurt the likes of which the world had never seen the likes of, as one local boaster put it. He wasn't so far wrong, either.

There was one other big difference, too. Right this minute, all the white people in New Marseille were scared out of their wits. Many of them-most of the more prosperous ones-owned slaves. And it was impossible to look at a slave without wondering if he wanted to wring your neck as if you were a chicken, or to accept a cup of coffee from a house slave without fearing she'd slipped rat poison into it.

(Even worse was the idea that New Marseille might not be so different from Cosquer. Had servile insurrection raised its ugly head back there, too? Did whites look askance at Negroes and copperskins there, too? The cut telegraph wires made it impossible to know for sure. But they let Stafford's imagination run wild, and he could imagine things far worse than reality was likely to be. Or maybe, in the present disordered state of affairs, he couldn't-and that was a genuinely terrifying thought.)

Every so often, somebody in an upstairs window would fire at somebody down in the street. The somebody in the street-the target-was invariably white. The somebody in the window almost invariably got away. Jeremiah Stafford would have been willing to bet the shooter was bound to be colored.

He would have been willing to bet, yes, but he couldn't find anyone who would put up money against him. Not even Consul Newton was that big a sucker.

Towns in eastern Atlantis had broad cleared belts around them. New Marseille didn't. Insurrectionists lurked in the woods right outside the city limits. Sometimes they sneaked in to stir up the slaves in town. Colonel Sinapis' soldiers tried to seal off the perimeter. There was too much of it, and there were not enough of them.

The garrison that had held New Marseille was pathetically grateful for reinforcements. "Don't know what we would've done if those devils got in here first," was something Consul Stafford heard again and again.

Stafford had a pretty good notion of what the garrison and the white populace would have done had New Marseille been forcibly incorporated into the Free Republic of Atlantis. They would have died: that was what.

Big guns bore on the stretch of the Hesperian Gulf in front of New Marseille. They crouched in casemates of brick and iron and earth and cement. No naval cannon could smash them, except by luck. But they pointed only out to sea. Their giant iron cannonballs and bursting shells wouldn't cover the landward side of the city. When engineers laid out New Marseille's works, they never imagined anyone would attack from that direction.

Well, life was full of surprises. Aside from small arms, the only pieces that would bear on the insurrectionists were three- and six-and twelve-pounders like the ones Colonel Sinapis had brought from New Hastings. Field guns were better than nothing-and they frightened the copperskins and Negroes in a way that rifle muskets didn't-but Consul Stafford couldn't help longing for all the massive firepower that pointed the wrong way.

"Can we get those big guns out of their works and turn them around so they give the niggers and mudfaces a dose of what for?" he asked Sinapis.

"It might be possible," the colonel said slowly, and Stafford's hopes leaped. But then Sinapis went on, "Even if it is, it would not be easy or quick or cheap. If you seek my professional opinion, your Excellency, the project would not be worth the trouble it causes them."

Stafford did want Sinapis' professional opinion. He wanted that opinion to match his own. When it didn't, his temper frayed. "What would some of the other soldiers here say if I asked them the same question?" he inquired, his voice holding a certain edge.

Balthasar Sinapis looked him over. Stafford got the feeling he reminded the Atlantean officer of something nasty squashed on the bottom of his boot. After a moment, Sinapis answered, "Well, that is your prerogative, your Excellency. If you find someone who asserts that this is a practicable step, perhaps the army would be better served with a new commander."

If you don't care for my judgment, I resign. That was what he meant, in plain English. Stafford might not have been sorry to see Sinapis go, had he had someone in mind to replace him. But accepting his resignation would no doubt cause a flaming row with Leland Newton. The Senate would wonder whether either one of them had the faintest idea of what he was doing. And the Senate might have good reason to wonder, too.

Colonel Sinapis stood there calmly, waiting to hear what Stafford chose. Sinapis had the courage of his convictions. Stafford was uncomfortably aware that on this issue he lacked the courage of his own. "Well, I expect you know what you're talking about," he said gruffly.

"One always wonders," Sinapis said. "At the beginning, we thought this would be an easy campaign…"

He was generous to say we, not you. Stafford had thought it would be easy. The insurrectionists were more in earnest than he'd dreamt they could be. They also showed more in the way of courage and discipline than he'd dreamt they could. He associated those traits with white men, not with what he thought of as the dusky races. But Frederick Radcliff's fighters had them.

Stafford didn't want to admit that, even to himself. He especially didn't want to admit it any place where Leland Newton might hear. He knew what would happen then. Newton would start yapping about full freedom for natives of Africa and Terranova. Well, he could yap all he pleased. He wasn't going to convince Stafford.

That Stafford might convince himself was one more possibility he hadn't imagined before he set out from New Hastings.

While he was woolgathering, Sinapis said something he missed entirely. "I'm sorry, Colonel?" he said in faint embarrassment.

"I said that we are lucky we made it here. We would have had to live off the already bare countryside or else commenced to starve if we had not," Sinapis repeated. "If the insurrectionists were a little more energetic, they would have done everything they could to block our progress."

"Could they really have managed that?" Stafford asked.

"I do not know, your Excellency," the colonel replied. "But I tell you this: I am not altogether disappointed that we did not find out."

"Now that we have a sea connection to keep us supplied, how soon can we move against the enemy again?" Stafford asked.

"Whenever you and your colleague agree that we should, we can," Sinapis said. "Sooner or later, also, the roads and railroad line from the east will become passable again. They had better, anyhow, or this uprising is far more severe than we imagined, and certainly far more severe than any that came before it."