Harry Turtledove - Liberating Atlantis

"Let 'em try, and good luck to 'em," Lorenzo said.

"Do you want to live like a hunted animal the rest of your days?" Frederick asked. "If you do, you found the fastest way to get what you want."

"Me? I want to live like the fancy masters wish they could," Lorenzo said. "I want to have servants fan me with those big old feathers-"

"Ostrich plumes," Frederick put in. Sure enough, such fans were in great demand among the richer plantation owners. Or they had been, till the people who would have done the fanning decided they didn't care for the work.

"Yeah. Them," Lorenzo agreed. "And I want pretty girls to drop grapes in my mouth whenever I get hungry, or maybe thirsty."

Frederick didn't know whether to laugh or to be appalled. "How do you propose to get that without turning into a master yourself?"

"Maybe we could make the Consuls slaves instead of killing 'em." Lorenzo was full of ideas today. Not necessarily good ideas, but ideas all the same.

"And where would you get the pretty girls?" Frederick asked, with the air of a man humoring a lunatic.

"Oh, what pretty girl wouldn't want to come to Slug Hollow?" Lorenzo said, and if that wasn't the most lunatic thing Frederick Radcliff had ever heard, he didn't know what would be. No one in his-or her-right mind would want to come to Slug Hollow. No one would have wanted to come here if the place were named Silver Nugget. Slug Hollow by any other name would have been a place people tried to get away from, not one they flocked to.

"They could drop cucumber slugs into your mouth when you got hungry," Frederick said.

"Ain't like I never ate 'em before," Lorenzo answered. "Don't know many field hands who haven't. Maybe it's different with house slaves."

"I know what they taste like," Frederick said, which was true enough. If the copperskin wanted to claim field hands ate such delicacies more often than house slaves did, Frederick couldn't argue with him.

But Lorenzo chose to change the subject instead: "Reckon we'll get what we're after here?"

"Don't know," Frederick answered uneasily. "We don't want to keep fighting forever, though, we gotta try."

"Fighting forever'd be better'n going back to where we were. Damned if I'll ever pick any more cotton for a white man," Lorenzo said.

"That, I know," Frederick said. He felt the same way, and he'd done it for days, not for years. All the Negroes and copperskins who followed him felt the same way. If the whites camped on the far side of Slug Hollow didn't understand that, these talks would fail. And if they failed… fighting forever was what would come next.

He tried to picture what Atlantis would look like after ten years of skirmishing, or twenty, or thirty. Like a restive horse, his mind shied away from what that called up. Would anyone, white or colored, care to live here after something like that? Frederick flinched at all the unpleasant possibilities he could see. And they weren't just possibilities-they struck him as being likelihoods.

Lorenzo said, "Ain't many women here gonna let white men do what they want with 'em no more, neither."

"Uh-huh," Frederick said. That shot hit much too close to the center of the target-much too close to the heart of who he was. What had things been like between his grandmother and Victor Radcliff? Her owner lent her to the other white Atlantean for his pleasure; Frederick knew that. Had she taken any of her own? Had they even liked each other? As far as Frederick knew, his grandmother had never said anything to his father about his father's father beyond letting him know who that famous father was.

Had the insurrection come two generations earlier, would Frederick's grandmother have picked up a musket and tried to blow out Victor Radcliff's brains for using her the way he did? Again, Frederick had no idea.

Lorenzo pressed ahead: "So we've got to get free, or else we've got to keep fighting. No other way we can go." He looked at Frederick. Frederick understood exactly what that look meant, too: no matter what he said about it, if the talks failed the fight would go on with him or without him.

But he didn't disagree with Lorenzo, not here. "Nope. No other way," he said. The copperskin seemed satisfied. The white men camped on the far side of Slug Hollow wouldn't be so easy to placate. Well, if we go back to shooting at each other, how are we worse off? Frederick wondered. He saw no way. And if that wasn't a judgment on the United States of Atlantis, what would be?

Jeremiah Stafford scowled across the table at Frederick Radcliff and Lorenzo. Pretending even for a moment that a Negro and a copperskin had any business treating with him as equals was galling enough. Remembering that they could have killed him but hadn't didn't make him feel any more kindly toward them-not now, when he no longer lay in their grasp.

The table also reminded him what a travesty this was. Back in New Hastings, he'd dickered with Senators across tables ornamented with marquetry so fine and intricate, it must have left the woodworkers shortsighted for life. This one was of roughly planed boards hacked from the local pine. It stood in the taproom of a tavern abandoned when the insurrection flooded over Slug Hollow. Since that day, spider webs had grown thick up near the ceiling and in the corners of the room-or maybe they'd been there all along. In a miserable place like this, who could tell?

"You seem to think turning all the slaves south of the Stour loose will be easy," Stafford said to the leaders of the insurrection. "Wave our hands-abracadabra!-and it's done. I have to tell you, it won't be like that."

"Oh, we know," Frederick Radcliff answered. "You better believe we know."

"If it was gonna be easy, we wouldn't've had to start killing people," Lorenzo added.

Bloodthirsty savage, Stafford thought. "You had no business doing that any which way," he said.

"Oh, yes, we did," Frederick Radcliff said. "It was the only way we could make you notice we were there. White folks don't notice slaves, except to make money off of 'em or to lay the women." Bitterness edged his voice. Considering who his grandfather was, that was understandable enough.

As far as Stafford knew, he'd sired no colored babies himself. Not for lack of effort, though. Admitting as much probably wasn't the smartest thing he could do. Instead, he said, "If we turn you loose, it will break a lot of white families. You said it yourself-people do make money from slaves. That's one of the big reasons they won't want to give them up."

"Good luck making money off of slaves now," Frederick Radcliff said. "The devil's come out. You can't put him down again so easy."

"That is an unfortunate fact, but a fact we must face," Leland Newton said. Stafford sent his fellow Consul a sour look. Much as he wished he could, though, he didn't contradict him. This rebellion had succeeded all too well. It warned that others could succeed, too. Slaves might be ignorant, but they weren't too stupid to see that. If only they were!

"One reason you don't want to turn slaves loose is money," Lorenzo said. "What are the others, Mr. Consul, sir?" He turned the titles of respect into sneers.

Before either Stafford or Newton could answer, Frederick Radcliff said, "C'mon, friend-you know why. White folks reckon they're better'n niggers and mudfaces. Gives 'em somebody to look down their noses at."

"I knew they had those long, pointy ones for some kind of reason," Lorenzo said, even if his was almost as long and sharp as the average white man's. Frederick Radcliff's was lower and flatter. He didn't take after his grandfather there, anyway.

But the Negro hit a nerve with Jeremiah Stafford, all right. "We think so because it's true," Stafford growled. "Everything says so, from the Bible to the most modern scholars. It must be so."