Harry Turtledove - Opening Atlantis

"Yes, of course it is," the lieutenant-colonel said. "But-"

"No, sir. No buts, not in that case," Radcliff broke in. "If you use what slaves make but don't care to own them yourself, aren't you like a man who eats pork but doesn't care to butcher hogs?"

The Englishman opened his mouth, then closed it again. After a moment, he tried again: "You are a bloody difficult man, Major."

"Thanks. I do my best," Victor said, not without pride.

"This may all prove moot, you understand," the Englishman said.

With a sigh not quite of resignation, Victor Radcliff nodded. "I understand much too well. If the gentlemen who all speak French sit down together and decide to hand this country back to the people who just now lost it, nothing we can do to keep it this side of insurrection."

"I should not recommend that, either," the English officer said. "It would be foredoomed to failure."

"You may well be right, sir," Victor said politely, though less than convinced that the officer from across the Atlantic was. "I am operating on the assumption that it will not come to that. I am also operating on the assumption that those diplomatic gentlemen will not be so foolish as to squander what we won at such cost."

"You are likely to be right yourself," the Englishman said. "England had the power to take French Atlantis, and God has also blessed us with the power to prevail elsewhere in the world. We may throw France some small sop when this war is over, to prevent her utter humiliation, but I see no reason to throw her a large one. In my view, French Atlantis is too large and too important to return, it once having fallen into our hands."

"We agree." Victor smiled. "That is not something a settler and a man from the mother country can often say these days."

"We have been tested in adversity, you and I," the other officer replied. "And, unlike the King of Babylon, God did not weigh us in the measure and find us wanting."

"Not yet, anyhow," Victor said, smiling still. "Do you suppose that, with French Atlantis in our pocket, we could sweep down through it and pick up Spanish Atlantis as well? I tell you frankly, sir, the slaves who've risen against their masters would likely give us a harder fight than the Spaniards can put up."

"I doubt that not at all," the Englishman said. "Still and all, though, that's a long march, and one with uncertain supply lines, into a country notoriously unhealthy. I should hesitate to undertake it without orders from London."

"My greencoats did it," Victor said. "We lived off the land, and we had no trouble doing it."

"What is easy for irregulars is often difficult for regulars," the lieutenant-colonel answered. "Irregulars often have a certain amount of trouble remembering that the converse also applies. Or do you think your men could have stopped the flow from the spring here?"

Radcliff knew his men could have done no such thing. Even trying would never have occurred to him. That long underground burrow…He shuddered. No, he wouldn't have wanted to try that. "Your point is well taken, sir," he admitted.

"Generous of you to say so," the Englishman told him. "I also fear I can't promise the timely appearance of the Royal Navy, which you were able to enjoy. You might have known a certain amount of embarrassment had the French and Spanish Atlanteans succeeded in combining against you."

The ships plucked you off the beach in the nick of time. The lieutenant-colonel had a cat's politeness; he wouldn't come right out and say such a thing. But Victor understood what he meant. "You may be right, sir," he answered insincerely. "Still and all, not much danger of a Franco-Spanish combination against us now, is there?" We've whipped the French settlers once and for all was what he meant, and the Englishman couldn't very well mistake him.

To his credit, the redcoat didn't try. "No, not much," he said, "but I still believe we would do better to ensure our conquest of French Atlantis than to go haring off after something grander yet. Do you on this side of the ocean know the proverb about the bird in the hand and those in the bush?"

"I've…heard it," Victor said. The English lieutenant-colonel chuckled at his reluctant-indeed, his reproachful (to say nothing of nearly mutinous)-subordination. After a victory like the one they'd gained here, chuckles came easy. Had Roland Kersauzon's men beaten the redcoats and greencoats and escaped en masse to continue the war, the English officer wouldn't have taken that hesitation so lightly. Victor went on, "A lot of the birds here, though, don't fit in the hand."

Redcoats led glum French settlers into captivity. Some of those settlers were in their stocking feet. If they hadn't been whipped out of their boots, they'd lost them as spoils of war. Pretty soon, the English settlers and regulars would plunder Nouveau Redon, too. Victor would have been surprised if some of the more enterprising fellows weren't already starting.

"French Atlantis will fit quite nicely, I do believe," the redcoat said.

"It is a good handful," Victor allowed. Why argue now? Sure enough, triumph was a great sweetener. He took off his hat and saluted the English officer. "We won it together, Colonel Cornwallis."

Cornwallis returned the salute. "We did indeed, Major Radcliff."

V ictor Radcliff didn't like Hanover. He never had. He didn't think he ever would. The place crowded too many people into too small a space. Army encampments did the same thing, but encampments were different. Everyone in them-well, almost everyone-accepted military discipline and knew his place.

Not in Hanover. People hopped after their own pursuits, as single-minded-or as mindless-as the big katydids that bounced across Atlantis' fields and forest floors. They all wanted more than they had, and they weren't shy about grabbing what they wanted with both hands.

So if Victor had had any kind of excuse, he would have stayed far away from the brawling metropolis of English Atlantis. But he had none. He was the hero of the war against the French. A hero had to be seen, had to be praised, to make a proper spectacle for the people. Victor dully and dutifully paraded at the head of a regiment of greencoats.

"Ah, well," he said over his shoulder to Blaise, who strode along behind him. "One good thing about this nonsense-if the boys can't get laid tonight, they aren't half trying."

"What about you, sir?" the Negro said, his voice sly.

"Not tonight, anyhow," Victor answered. He was no saint when he was away from Margaret, though he had no bastards he knew about. "Not tonight," he repeated. "I'm going to the feast for all the fancy Radcliffs and Radcliffes. Should be gruesome, but it can't be helped. Your friends you choose, but you're stuck with your relatives."

Not all the Radcliffs and Radcliffes at the banquet proved excessively fancy. Some of the young, pretty women wore the name only because of a marriage connection. They were no blood kin to Victor at all-but they were interested in getting to know him more intimately. He got to know one of them much more intimately in a servant's tiny room under the stairs-and he was smiling benignly at her husband, some distant cousin of his, five minutes later. That was amusing, even if he didn't tell Blaise about it afterwards.

But neither the parade nor the fete nor the naughty sport under the stairs would have drawn him to Hanover by itself. All three of them together wouldn't have. What brought him to London in Small-the town's proud boast-and kept him there was the certainty that details of the peace treaty would come to Hanover before they came anywhere else in Atlantis.

He rode down to the harbor every morning, sometimes with Blaise, sometimes alone. Ships of all sizes and ages came in, from England and her settlements around the world and her allies. Some of the people knew that talks to end the war were going on. No one seemed to know how they were going.