Harry Turtledove - Liberating Atlantis

It was an interesting question… as long as you didn't start chasing it round and round like a puppy in hot pursuit of its own tail. "I hope you don't expect me to prove anything, as if we were back in plane geometry at college," Newton said.

"God forbid!" the other man replied. "My cousin's friend taught geometry himself. If he hadn't tutored me, I never would have got through it."

"Well, all right. I know how you feel, believe me," Newton said, remembering his own struggles with Euclid's axioms and theorems. "My guess is, we got the insurrection we got because of Frederick Radcliff. If he'd never been born, we would have got a different one before too long. How different? A little? A lot?" He spread his hands. "I couldn't begin to tell you."

"Seems reasonable," the Senator from Hanover said after some thought of his own.

"It does, doesn't it?" Newton said. "All of which, again, proves exactly nothing."

New Hastings held more people than Frederick Radcliff would have dreamt could live together. It dwarfed New Marseille, the biggest town he'd seen up till then. And Croydon was supposed to be bigger, and Hanover was supposed to be bigger still.

Frederick had trouble believing any such thing was possible. But then, he'd also had trouble believing a city like this was possible. He didn't know everything there was to know-a fact he'd got his nose rubbed in time after time. He suspected everybody ever born had that happen.

The Consuls put Helen and him up in a hotel. That had to cost a lot of money, but they didn't seem to worry about it. People waited on the two Negroes as if they were important whites. Not all the hotel staff consisted of Negroes and copperskins, either. Some of the waiters and sweepers and what-have-you were white men and women, most of whom spoke English with one odd accent or another. They were as professionally deferential as the colored people beside whom they worked.

"I could get to like this," Frederick remarked as a white man in a boiled shirt bowed him and Helen to their table at the hotel restaurant.

"Don't let it go to your head," she said, even as the servitor pulled out a chair so she could sit in it. "Talks don't work out the way folks hope, we're nothin' but a couple of no-account niggers again."

Her pungent good sense made Frederick smile. "Oh, I know," he said as he sat down himself. "But look how they fuss over us now. They can treat us like real people if they want to bad enough."

"Sure. You treat a coral snake or a lancehead polite, too, long as it's got a chance to bite you," his wife answered. "Soon as it can't, though, you try and figure out how you're gonna smash in its head."

That also seemed more sensible than Frederick wished it did. The other thing that seemed sensible was enjoying himself while other people were paying for it. He ordered roast duck with loaf sugar and a wine the waiter recommended. The wine came all the way from France, and was almost as tasty as its price proclaimed it ought to be.

"Master Barford, he didn't know about stuff like this," Helen said after she tried it.

"Even if he did, he didn't have the eagles to buy stuff like this," Frederick answered. He'd known some other planters had more money than his master. Just the same, all slaveholders had seemed rich to him.

From a slave's perspective, all slaveholders were rich. What Frederick hadn't realized was that there were plenty of people richer than any of the backwoods planters out near New Marseille. He suspected that among their number were both the Consuls and most Atlantean Senators.

He was also beginning to suspect that, if he played his cards right, he could end up rich himself. He was, after all, the man who represented Negroes and copperskins to the rest of the USA. If the man who did that didn't end up dead, he would end up prominent. And didn't a prominent man always have influence to sell?

Do I want to get rich? Frederick wondered. But that was the wrong question. Anybody who wasn't an idiot knew having money was better than not having it. No one wanted to go hungry or barefoot or to wear rags or live in a leaky, tumbledown shack. The real question was, did Frederick want to get rich badly enough to sell himself, to sell out the people who counted on him, so he could pile up stacks of golden eagles?

The sweetened roast duck suddenly tasted like carrion in his mouth. If he did something like that, wouldn't he still be a slave? And wouldn't he be a slave who'd willingly-no, eagerly-sold himself to his new masters when he might have stayed free? How could you look at yourself in the mirror after you did something like that? Every time you lathered up to shave, wouldn't you want to cut your throat instead?

"Well, then, I won't do nothin' like that," he muttered.

"Won't do nothin' like what?" Helen asked. Even if it often seemed as if she could, she couldn't read his mind after all.

"Never mind," Frederick said. They'd been together all these years; she'd earned the right to push him. She used it, too. It didn't do her any good, not this time.

"You traitorous son of a bitch!" That was what most of Jeremiah Stafford's friends called him these days. The rest called him "You treasonous son of a bitch!" The only difference lay in his erstwhile friends' attitude toward the language, not in their attitude toward him.

They all seemed to hate him. And the more they pushed him and mocked him and called him a jackass, the more they provoked him to push back. When his train pulled in at New Hastings, he'd still despised liberation and everything that went with it. They kept telling him it was impossible and he'd had no business agreeing to it in the first place.

Naturally, he defended what he'd done. "You would have signed that paper, too, if you were there," he told anyone who would listen. But nobody wanted to listen to him. That was a big part of the problem.

Supporters of slavery organized marches through the streets of New Hastings. The marchers made the city almost unlivable with drums and horns during the day. At night, they used their noisemakers and carried torches as well. Stafford feared they would burn down the capital over his head.

He didn't think his fears were misplaced. Whenever the marchers came upon a copperskin or a Negro, they beat him with an inch of his life. Colored men in New Hastings were free, not slaves. That worried the marchers not a cent's worth. If anything, it only inflamed them more.

New Hastings had no real police force. As far as Consul Stafford knew, London was the only city that did. The few watchmen on the city payroll here were no match for the marchers-or for the marchers' white foes, who waded into them whenever the odds seemed decent. They weren't content with clouting one another over the head with placards. Knives came out. So did pistols.

And so did soldiers. Stafford never found out who gave the order. Afterwards, no one seemed to want to admit it. But hard-looking men in gray uniforms who carried bayoneted rifle muskets appeared on street corners at sunup one morning. When the antiliberation marchers disobeyed their orders in any particular, they opened fire without warning.

That probably wouldn't have worked in a southern city like Cosquer or Nouveau Redon or Gernika. It would have stirred up more trouble than it put down. But it served its purpose in New Hastings. The marchers rapidly discovered they didn't have enough popular backing to take on the soldiers. Making the discovery cost them more casualties. Order returned to the capital.

Order failed to return to the Senate floor. Stafford and Newton had presided over tempestuous sessions before. Those were as nothing compared to what the Consuls met now. Shaking his fist at Stafford, a Senator from Gernika cried, "You've changed!"

"Indeed," Stafford replied. "No matter what the honorable gentleman may believe, it is not against the rules of this house."