Harry Turtledove - Liberating Atlantis

It was already the worst insurrection in Atlantean history. Stafford had no doubt of that. And it was worse than it might have been because the other Consul and the northern Senators had kept the national government from doing anything about it till almost too late.

And now Stafford had to persuade his colleague that the army needed to go over to the offensive again. If the soldiers weren't going to fight, why had they come at all?

Leland Newton nodded. "Yes, I think we should move out, too," he said. "We didn't come west to defend New Marseille."

"I couldn't have put that better myself." Stafford sounded astonished.

"We did not come to massacre Negroes and copperskins, either," Newton warned. "We came to establish peace by whatever means prove necessary."

"If they are dead, they are likely to be peaceable," Stafford said. "It's the ones who haven't gone to their eternal reward that you've got to watch out for. Sending them up before the celestial Judge strikes me as a good way to make sure they trouble Atlantis no more."

"Killing every Negro and copperskin in Atlantis might make Tacitus' peace, but it would change the country forever," Newton said. "It would also leave our good name a stench in the nostrils of every other nation in the world."

"Oh, nonsense. The Grand Turk massacres Armenians for the sport of it. The Czar murders Jews instead," Stafford returned. Newton was about to ask him how he liked lumping the USA with the Ottoman Empire and Russia. But before he could, the other Consul continued, "Over in Terranova, they aren't fussy about disposing of their copperskins whenever they need to. And England kills off as many people in India as it has to to keep the nabobs from causing trouble. Stafford paused, then murmured in Latin: "Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant."

"'Where they make a desert, they call it peace,'" Newton agreed. That was the Roman historian's line, all right. He and Stafford might-did-disagree on a great many important things, but they came from the same educational tradition and argued from the same assumptions. Even disagreeing, they talked to each other, not past each other.

"If we can't get rid of the mudfaces and niggers, we might ship the lot of them back to Terranova and Africa," Stafford said. "That would solve our problem, too."

"In your dreams, it would." Newton ticked off points on his fingers: "Item-the Terranovans, as you pointed out yourself, have more copperskins than they want, and they don't want ours. Item-shipping these people away would cost millions of eagles: money we haven't got. Item-even if we had the money, we haven't got the shipping. And item-these people are here in such numbers, they can breed faster than we can send them out of the country. This kind of talk you're spouting has been going round for years. Nothing's ever come of it, and nothing is likely to."

He waited for Stafford to get angry at him. Instead, the other Consul cocked an eyebrow and said, "Well, Leland, if you're going to complain about every little thing…"

Taken by surprise, Newton started to laugh. He wagged a finger at his colleague. "You got me that time, but I'll pay you back."

"Oh, I have no doubt of that," Stafford said. "In the meantime, though, what do you say we snuff out this insurrection if we can?"

"If we can," Newton agreed. "But if that should prove impracticable, we had better try something else."

"Such as?"

"I don't know yet," Newton said. "Something-anything-designed to hold the United States of Atlantis together."

"I can imagine circumstances where it might be better if Atlantis came apart." Before Newton could respond to that, his colleague held up a hand. "Let it be as you say: crush the insurrection first, and worry about everything else afterwards."

Newton didn't think he'd said precisely that. On the other hand, he and Stafford rarely came so close to sharing the same view of anything. His glance slid toward the woods where the rebels lurked. Maybe the Atlantean army could smash them once for all. Maybe. Then why did he have so much trouble believing it?

Yet another messenger found Frederick Radcliff. He was scratching a mosquito bite, which was one of the things you did when you made your headquarters deep in a swamp. He hadn't been deep enough when the Atlanteans assailed him before, which meant they'd almost caught him. The obvious solution was to move where they would have a harder time getting at him. The trouble with the obvious solution was that it meant getting eaten alive.

All of the messengers brought the same news: "They're coming out!" It wasn't what Frederick wanted to hear. He'd hoped the white Atlanteans would hole up in New Marseille and stop taking the war seriously.

No matter what he'd hoped, that wouldn't happen. He sighed. He might have known it wouldn't. Come to that, he had known it wouldn't. As soon as he touched off the uprising, his greatest fear was that the whites would put everything they had into crushing it. From their point of view, ruthlessness made perfect sense. Anything less than a crushed insurrection, and slavery was dead.

What hadn't occurred to him then was that slavery might be dead even if the whites crushed the insurrection. The men and women who fought under him-and the others, all over southern Atlantis, who'd flared into rebellion in his name even if not under his command-could be beaten, but so what? From this day forth, how could any master rely on his two-legged property to stay quiet? And if you couldn't rely on your slaves to stay quiet, how were you going to get any work out of them?

"What are we gonna do?" the messenger asked, bringing him back to the here and now.

"Which road are they using?" Frederick asked.

"Looks like they're marching by the northeast one," the other Negro said.

Frederick swore under his breath. If the Atlantean soldiers had headed straight east again-if they'd started back along the same road they'd used to get to New Marseille-he still could have imagined they were giving up the fight and heading off to the Green Ridge Mountains again. But no. They intended to keep on with their campaign, all right. In fact…

"Ain't that where we got us most of our fighters?" the messenger said.

"Yes," Frederick said, and left it right there. He'd wanted to spread the insurrection towards Avalon. The more of the southwest that fell under the influence of the Free Republic of Atlantis, the better, as far as he was concerned.

None of the whites needed to be Julius Caesar-or, for that matter, Victor Radcliff-to see as much. And they would have taken prisoners, and squeezed them hard. Frederick had to assume they knew as much about his plans as any of his ordinary soldiers.

He thought of something else: "Did they bring everybody out of New Marseille, or did they leave a garrison behind?"

"More soldiers in there now than there was before the white folks marched in," the messenger answered.

That made Frederick swear again. He knew it would make Lorenzo swear even more ferociously. But now he could truthfully tell the copperskin that he'd thought about trying to take the town, and he'd had good reason to decide it wouldn't work.

He got to tell Lorenzo exactly that a couple of hours later. Lorenzo only nodded. "Too damned many snowballs stayed behind," he said. If whites had rude names for their colored bondsmen, it was only natural that the folk who sprang from Terranova and Africa would return the disfavor.

"That's right," Frederick said, wondering how Lorenzo had got the news. Messengers were supposed to bring it straight to Frederick himself, not to anyone else. Well, that was a worry for another day. The worry for today was all those white soldiers on the move.

Lorenzo had to be thinking the same thing. "We can bush-whack 'em," he said.