Harry Turtledove - Opening Atlantis

And then, one afternoon, a swift, rakish Royal Navy frigate, the Glasgow, sailed into Hanover. When Victor asked the officer of the deck if he had news of the peace, that young lieutenant looked down his nose at him and demanded, "Why do you presume that you deserve to know?"

"I am Major Victor Radcliff. Without me, the ministers wouldn't be talking about French and Spanish Atlantis," Victor answered. "Now, sir, who are you-and who is your next of kin?" His hand dropped to the butt of the pistol he wore on his belt.

The naval officer lost much of his toploftiness. "I…beg your pardon, Major. We do bring that word, as a matter of fact."

"If you tell me what it is-at once-I won't ask any more personal questions of you," Victor said. I won't kill you, he meant, and the lieutenant knew it.

"Well…" The younger man needed to gather himself. At last, he went on, "French Atlantis comes under English sovereignty. It is opened to English settlement without restriction. The dons keep Spanish Atlantis, but England gets trading concessions there. We take most of French Terranova, too, and almost all of French India."

Radcliff cared nothing about India, and only a little about Terranova. The lands on this side of the Hesperian Gulf were wide enough for him. He nodded to the lieutenant. "Thank you. That's good news."

It wasn't so good as it might have been. He would have loved to see the Union Jack flying over Spanish Atlantis, too. But the Spaniards weren't rivals, as the French had been. History had left Spain in a backwater. France, on the other hand, could have stayed ahead of England had she won this war.

She could have. But she hadn't.

"Who the devil are you talking to, Jenkins?" a senior naval officer demanded, scowling down at Victor.

"This is Major Victor Radcliff, sir," the lieutenant answered. "The man who helped our regulars take French Atlantis."

"Huzzah," said the captain, or whatever he was. "More troublemakers for the Crown to worry about."

"Would you rather they were here, sir?" Victor said. "Would you rather all Atlantis flew the fleurs-de-lys?"

"What a ridiculous notion," the senior officer said.

"It is now, sir-because we won," Victor replied.

The officer sputtered and fumed. Victor caught only a few words: "…damned settlers…lot of nerve…arrogant scut…" Then the fellow spoke more coherently: "As if this miserable, half-baked place mattered a farthing's worth in the grand scheme of things."

"Sir, to an Englishman it may not," Radcliff said. "Yet there are those of us who call Atlantis home, and who love it, and who would have grieved to see it lost to the French, not least after so much effort and so much blood expended to preserve it."

"Yes, yes." The naval officer still sounded impatient. "I see you can make pretty speeches when you care to. Well, you've got what you want. The French get a few islands off the Terranovan coast, where they can raise sugar cane to their hearts' content. And we…we get Atlantis, although I'm still damned if I know why we want it. An obstacle to navigation, that's all it is, and no one will ever persuade me otherwise."

Victor Radcliff bowed. "Then I shan't make the effort. But perhaps one day time will tell you what you don't hear from me."

When Victor had the chance to read the full terms of the peace, he found that they said nothing about the race of a prospective settler in French Atlantis. He told Blaise, "You ought to go down there. You're a clever man, and an able one-those two don't always march together. You'd get rich before you know it, and you could throw it in the Frenchmen's faces."

"The only way I get rich there is, I buy niggers and copperskins," Blaise said slowly. "Only way anyone gets rich down there, he runs him a plantation with slaves."

"Well, yes," Victor admitted. "You do need them in French Atlantis-what was French Atlantis, I mean." He paused. "Some slaves who've got free do run slaves themselves now. That isn't against the law down there, either."

"Don't happen real often," Blaise said.

"No, it doesn't, but it's not illegal."

Blaise set his chin. He didn't have the bony promontory that graced the lower jaws of a lot of white men. Somehow, though, the lack made him seem more stubborn, not less. "Done been a slave," he said, and added several French and Spanish pungencies to the remark. "Don't want to do that to anybody else."

"Someone else will if you don't," Victor said. "I daresay you'd make a better master than someone who'd never seen it from the other side."

This time, Blaise laughed in his face. That startled Victor Radcliff, and angered him, too. He wasn't used to such discourtesies from a Negro-certainly not here in Hanover, though he would have tolerated them better on campaign or out in the woods.

"If I'm a master, I'm as rough as anybody else," Blaise said. "You have slaves, you got to be. Or they don't work. They don't do anything. I know. I was one." He jabbed a thumb at his own broad chest. "Don't want to do that. So I won't. I stick with you, Major Radcliff, sir." He saluted, mixing some mockery-but not a lot-into the gesture of respect.

Gravely, Victor returned the salute. "You'll never get rich that way," he said.

Blaise shrugged. "Don't care about gettin' rich. Care about…" He paused, considering. "About not hatin' myself. Yeah. I care about that."

"Have it your way. You will anyhow." With the war over, Victor didn't need a sergeant-cum-body-servant any more. If he went back to exploring, he didn't need a body servant, either. An explorer with a servant was like a musket with a chamber pot: having one added something absolutely unnecessary.

Which wasn't to say Blaise couldn't take care of himself in the wilderness. He could, at least as well as Victor could himself. And, if Victor dismissed him, Blaise could take care of himself in English Atlantis, too. Blaise might be black, but he was as generally competent a man as Victor had ever met.

That went a long way towards explaining why the two of them got along as well as they did, even if Victor had never thought of it in those terms.

"Well, if you don't want a plantation, how do we reward you for shooting Roland Kersauzon?" he asked.

"Money is good," Blaise said seriously. "What you reckon he's worth?" He was always ready to haggle.

He looked so ready now, Victor started to laugh. "Are you sure you're not a Jew under your skin?" he said.

Blaise took the question literally. "Don't even know what a Jew is."

"They're white people who aren't Christians," Victor replied. "Too foolish to know the truth, in other words."

"They don't believe in God?" Blaise asked.

"They believe in God, but they don't believe Jesus is His Son."

"Oh. Like Muslims," Blaise said.

It was Victor's turn to be confused. A bit of back-and-forth made him understand Blaise was talking about Mahometans. A bit more made him understand that the black man knew much more about them than he did. "How do you find yourself so well informed?" he asked.

"Some of the tribes north of us, they Muslim," Blaise answered. "They send their men, want us to be Muslims, too."

"Missionaries. Muslim missionaries," Victor Radcliff said wonderingly. "Now I've heard everything. We Christians send missions to Africa, too, you know."

"Muslims send missionaries. They take slaves. Christians send missionaries. They take slaves," Blaise said. "Us-we believe what we believe. We don't send no missionaries."

"Do you take slaves?" Radcliff asked.

"Oh, yes. People we catch in war, things like that," Blaise said. "We don't work them the way the French and Spaniards do, though. Don't have big plantations." He paused. "These Jews, they send missionaries?"

"No. At least, I've never heard of it if they do." Victor tried to imagine what would happen to a Jew proselytizing in Rome or Paris or London-or Hanover, come to that. Nothing pretty. The Jews knew better. That, in turn, made him wonder why Christians and Mahometans didn't. He found no good answer.