Harry Turtledove - Liberating Atlantis

"What kind of shit is he going on about now?" Lorenzo asked.

All Frederick said was, "Uh-oh." He knew what the preacher was going on about. The House of Universal Devotion hadn't attracted many slaves, but he'd heard of it. He thought the Preacher and his followers were a flock of loons.

He wasn't the only one who did, either. A white prisoner threw a clod of dirt at the man preaching over the graves. "Shut your lying mouth!" the prisoner yelled.

"That's right!" another white man shouted. "The House of Universal Devotion is the doorway to hell!"

"Liar!" yet another captive said. "God talks to the Preacher, and the Preacher tells his people the truth!"

The preacher-without a capital letter ornamenting his calling-standing by the mass grave tried to go on, but his audience didn't want to listen to him any more. The white prisoners shook their fists at one another and bawled out curses and catcalls. They might have started brawling if not for the bemused insurrectionists standing guard over them.

"White folks are crazy. Crazy, I tell you." Lorenzo spoke with great sincerity. "Only one who cares which church you go to ought to be God. He's the only one with the answers, anyways."

"Of course white folks are crazy," Frederick answered. "They reckon they can keep slaves and keep 'em like beasts, and they reckon God loves 'em. You believe both those things at the same time, you got to be nuts."

"Yeah. Hadn't looked at it like that, but yeah." Lorenzo pointed at the angry prisoners. "What are we gonna do about those sorry bastards?"

"Long as they're just yelling, it doesn't hurt anybody. It's like a waddayacallit-a safety valve-on a steam engine," Frederick said. "They blow off steam against each other, they won't give us so much trouble."

One of the white men chose that moment to decide he didn't care whether the Negroes and copperskins were carrying guns. Full of crusading zeal, he decked another white who presumed to hold an opinion different from his about the House of Universal Devotion. A few seconds later, another enthusiast flattened the first fellow who'd used fists to make his point.

Frederick drew his eight-shooter and fired a round into the air. Nothing got people's instant, undivided attention like a gunshot. Christians who'd been about to swing on their fellow Christians suddenly had second thoughts.

"That will be enough of that," Frederick said into the pool of silence that spread as the echoes of the shot died away. "What you think about God is your business. When you punch somebody in the nose on account of what he thinks about God, that's my business. You leave other folks alone, and hope like hell they leave you alone, too. You start acting like mad dogs, you get what mad dogs deserve." Whites called slaves who dared rebel mad dogs. Frederick enjoyed throwing the phrase back in their faces. He pulled the trigger again. Another tongue of flame spat from the revolver's muzzle.

To his amazement, some of the prisoners wanted to argue with him. "I'm trying to save that ignorant fool's soul from hell," one white protested earnestly.

"He reckons you're headed that way yourself," Frederick answered. "What makes you so sure you're right and he's wrong?"

"Why, the Bible says so," the white man replied, as if to a fool.

"Suppose he reads it some different way? Or suppose he doesn't care about it at all?"

"Then he's surely bound for hell. And you'd better look to your own soul, too." The captive edged away from Frederick, as if afraid God would strike the Negro dead for presuming to ask such questions-and might singe him, too, if he stayed too near.

"I will. I do. I look to mine. You look to yours. Let that other fella look to his," Frederick said. "I promise you one thing: you start that kind of stupid trouble, we'll be the ones who end it."

Some of the prisoners thought the Preacher and the House of Universal Devotion were the fount of true doctrine. Many more were of the opinion that everything about them came straight from Satan. Frederick had heard that the Preacher opposed slaveholding. That inclined him toward giving the House of Universal Devotion the benefit of the doubt. Otherwise, he had a hard time caring one way or the other.

His main goal was to keep the captives from quarreling among themselves. Sooner or later, he hoped to exchange them for fighters captured by the white Atlanteans. Under the laws of war, both sides got treated the same way. What color a combatant was didn't matter. (The Europeans who put those laws together hadn't imagined fighting people of a different color. But that was all right-the laws had more stretch to them than their framers figured.)

Just by treating with Frederick and his fighters under the laws of war, the white Atlanteans granted them more equality than they'd ever enjoyed here before. If the whites won, that equality would vanish. Both sides recognized as much.

And, up till lately, neither side had seriously wondered what would happen if the Negroes and copperskins won. The whites hadn't dreamt it was possible. Neither had Frederick, not really. But dreaming time was over. Reality was here. Now both sides had to try to make the best of it.

Back in New Marseille, the telegraphers were proud of themselves and their colleagues farther east. In spite of the insurrection, they'd managed to open a connection with New Hastings on the other coast. Most of the time, Jeremiah Stafford would have been proud right along with them.

Most of the time. When the news he had to give the capital was of a disaster, his heart wouldn't have broken had the line stayed down a little longer. As things were, he had no choice.

Neither did Consul Newton or Colonel Sinapis. Each man composed his own report and gave it to the telegraphers. Stafford collaborated with neither of the other leaders. As far as he knew, the other two didn't collaborate with each other. He wondered how much the reports differed. He wondered if anyone, reading all three, would be sure they talked about the same event.

He couldn't do anything about that. He thought he was telling the unvarnished truth. If Sinapis or Newton felt like lying, that wasn't his affair. If they thought he would stoop to lying, they didn't know him very well.

Besides, while you could write around the awful news as much as you pleased, you couldn't make it go away. The insurrectionists beat the Atlantean army. They made it surrender. In lieu of slaughtering it to the last man, they made it march away without its weapons.

No one responsible could deny any of that. If anybody tried, it wouldn't do him any good. No, the remaining interesting questions were two. First, who was to blame for the catastrophe? And, second, what the devil was the Atlantean government supposed to do about it now?

Newspapers in New Marseille had no doubt on that score. They printed highly colored interviews with soldiers they didn't name (and a good thing for the soldiers that they remained anonymous, or all the dreadful things they'd escaped in the battle would have landed on them in the aftermath). They also printed headlines like STRING UP THE CONSULS! and EXILE THE COLONEL!

"Nice to know we're loved," Leland Newton said, holding up one of the more inflammatory papers.

"Don't worry about it, your Excellency," Stafford answered as he corrected his breakfast coffee with a healthy splash of barrel-tree rum. "They loved you before we lost the battle."

"I'm sure they did." If the prospect dismayed Newton, he hid it very well. "After all, I disagreed with them, and what crime is more heinous than that?"

Stafford knew the answer to that particular question: losing the battle that was liable to mean liberty for all the copperskins and Negroes in the USA. Instead of saying so, he sipped his rum-laced coffee. The other Consul could see the answer as well as he could himself. The only difference was, Newton wouldn't think liberating slaves was a heinous offense. He was a northern man, after all, so what did he know?