Harry Turtledove - Liberating Atlantis

"Don't be silly, Jeremiah. Nothing could make you wish you were a nigger," Newton said with great assurance. His colleague couldn't deny it, either. Newton went on, "And can you see any way around it? As far as the slaves are concerned, everything their masters ever did to them was a crime."

"Oh, piffle," Stafford said. He owns slaves, too, Newton reminded himself. "What about masters who keep slaves on when they're old and useless?"

That did happen. Newton knew as much. He also knew something else: "What about the ones who don't? There are plenty of them, too."

Stafford waved that aside. "From now on, I can see broken-down copperskins begging in the streets and dying in the gutter. Too many slaves can't make a living unless somebody tells them what to do."

"How do you know? How does anyone know?" Newton said. "They deserve a chance, just like everybody else."

"You'll find out. And when they do start starving, do you know what will happen? They'll blame us for turning them loose," Stafford said.

That didn't sound as improbable as Leland Newton would have wished. All the same, he said, "Freedom isn't easy for every white man, either. But how many whites do you know who want to be slaves?"

"You make everything sound so simple," Stafford said. "It won't be. You wait and see-it won't."

"So what?" Newton said. "We've got to start somewhere, unless we go back to the war. Can we do that?" To his vast relief, Stafford shook his head.

Jeremiah Stafford was drunk. Even though Slug Hollow had that miserable wreck of a tavern, the place no longer held spirits or wine or beer. The insurrectionists-or maybe the locals, as they decamped-had made off with its stock in trade. Such impediments did not stop a determined man. Stafford had paid a cavalry sergeant half an eagle for a jug of barrel-tree rum, and proceeded to get outside of as much of it as he could.

It was harsh stuff. It burned all the way down. He would feel like death come morning, or maybe a little worse than that. Right this minute, he didn't care.

He did care that the cheap, fierce rum wasn't doing what he wanted it to do. Like so many men, he drank to forget. But he still remembered. The more he poured down, the more sharply he seemed to remember, too.

He'd told Leland Newton the slaves would have to be free. Worse, he'd been cold sober when he did it. I can take it back, he thought. Newton would never be able to prove the words had come out of his mouth. Prove it or not, though, they would both know. And it was true. It might be loathsome-it was loathsome! sweet Jesus, was it loathsome!-but it was true.

"They'll kill me," he mumbled as he staggered through Slug Hollow's narrow, fern-choked streets. "They'll murder me." No one had ever murdered a Consul of the United States of Atlantis. No one had even tried to assassinate one. There'd been brawls on the Senator floor, but that wasn't the same thing. No, not even close.

Of course, no Consul of the USA had ever tried to tell half his country that it couldn't go on the way it had for the past two hundred years and more. If-no, when-Stafford tried to do that, how many people would start loading their muskets?

How many people lived south of the Stour? How many of them weren't Negroes or copperskins? Stafford laughed raucously. An easy calculation, even for a drunk man: enough to make pretty sure one of them would get him. You couldn't stop a determined man. Stafford laughed some more. Frederick Radcliff, damn his black hide and blacker heart, sure had proved that.

"Radcliffs!" Stafford muttered. "Radcliffes!" He pronounced the e the second time. He laughed some more. He was part Radcliff himself. So was Newton. Few prominent people in Atlantis weren't. Few indeed-no matter what color they were!

Why couldn't Victor Radcliff have kept it in his trousers? Stafford took it out of his trousers and watered some of the ferns that had sprung up since Slug Hollow was abandoned. Or maybe the ferns had been here all along-in a pisspot hole in the ground like this one, who could say for sure? Come to that, who cared?

A big green katydid, long as one of his fingers, hopped away and disappeared under a rotting board. This was the back of beyond, all right. In most towns, mice and rats had supplanted the native Atlantean bugs. Not here, not yet. Maybe not for a long time, either. By all the signs, Slug Hollow was going back to the wilderness from which it had sprung.

Stafford veered around a corner. He stopped short-so short that he almost fell over. Someone else was promenading through the streets of Slug Hollow. The nerve of the fellow!

A second look told the Consul promenading wasn't the right word. The other man listed like a ship on a windswept sea. He was as drunk as Stafford was. He might have been drunker, if such a thing was possible.

Evidently it was, because he needed longer to notice Stafford than Stafford had to notice him. When he did, a sozzled grin slowly spread across his copperskinned face. "What are you doing here, you shun-son-of a bitch?" he asked.

"I could ashk-ask-you the same question, Lorenzo," Stafford said.

"I can come here," the insurrectionists' war leader replied. "Slug Hollow isn't yours."

"It isn't yours, either," Stafford said. "It doesn't belong to anybody any more."

Lorenzo's grin got wider. "Who'd want it?" He pulled a small, flat bottle from the waistband of his trousers. "Have a snort?"

"Take one of mine." Stafford held out the larger jug he was carrying. Each man drank from the other's liquor. Lorenzo's bottle held whisky every bit as raw and snarling as Stafford's rum.

"Whoosh!" Lorenzo wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "That's fine stuff!" He had to be drunk as a lord to say such a thing. Stafford at least knew he was drinking slop. It didn't stop him, or even slow him down, but he knew it.

I could kill him, Stafford thought. Lorenzo wouldn't expect a sudden attack. But what good would it do? The rebels would only find someone else, and the new man might prove smarter.

And Stafford realized the copperskin was eyeing him in a peculiar and unpleasant way. "I could cut your heart out like I was butchering a shoat," Lorenzo said.

"You could try," Stafford said, trying to steady his feet under him.

"Ahh, what's the use?" Lorenzo said. "You bastards might find somebody who really knows what he's doing."

That set Stafford laughing. "I was thinking the same thing about you," he said.

"Well, fuck you, then!" the copperskin exclaimed. A couple of seconds later, he started laughing again, too. "You son of a bitch. God damn me to hell and gone if we ain't pretty much alike after all."

"Fuck you!" Stafford said-what could be more offensive than hearing you were like a rebel slave?

But what if it was true? They were both drunker than a leader had any business getting. Their thoughts had been running down the same track, as if in lockstep. Maybe copperskin chiefs in Terranova and black kinglets in Africa had to worry about the same kinds of things as white Consuls and emperors in Atlantis and Europe. And, when they worried about them, maybe they came up with the same kinds of answers. If they did…

"Sweet, suffering Jesus," Stafford whispered. If that was true, maybe-just maybe-liberating the slaves in Atlantis wouldn't be the catastrophe he'd always dreaded. Which didn't mean it wouldn't turn into some other catastrophe. And which also didn't mean he could convince the rest of the whites south of the Stour that it wouldn't be exactly the catastrophe they'd always feared.

But it did mean he would have to try.

White men always said copperskins drank like fish. Frederick Radcliff knew he had good reason to distrust anything white men said about the people they'd enslaved. That didn't mean he hadn't seen the same thing: not from every copperskin he'd known, and not all the time, but from a good many, and more often than from Negroes or whites.