United States of Atlantis a-2

by Harry Turtledove

  "If only it were so simple," Victor said, not without regret.

  "Wherefore is it not?" Hartley asked.

  "The Assembly chooses war and peace for all Atlantis. It treats with foreign powers. It coins specie. It arranges for the dealings of the Atlantean settlements-ah, states-one with another," Victor said. "But each state, within its own boundaries, retains its sovereignty. The Assembly has not the authority to command the several states to treat the loyalists within 'em thus and so. Did it make the attempt, the states' Assemblies and Parliaments and Legislatures would surely rise against it, reckoning its impositions as tyrannous as all Atlantis reckoned King George's."

  "This is not government," Richard Oswald said. "This is lunacy let loose upon the world."

  Although inclined to agree with him, Victor knew better than to admit as much. He spread his hands. "It is what we have, sir. I do not intend to touch off a civil war on the heels of the foreign war just past."

  "Lunacy," Oswald repeated. He seemed more inclined to wash his hands of the United States of Atlantis than to spread them.

  But his colleague said, "Perhaps there is a middle ground."

  Oswald snorted. "Between madness and sanity? Give me leave to doubt."

  "How would this be?" David Hartley said. "Let the Atlantean Assembly earnestly recommend to the governing bodies of the respective states that they provide for the restitution of estates, rights, and properties belonging to those who did not take up arms against the United States of Atlantis. This would be consistent not only with justice and equity but also with the spirit of conciliation which on the return of the blessings of peace should universally prevail."

  Victor Radcliff suspected hotheads in the Atlantean Assembly would damn him for a soft-hearted backslider for making an arrangement like that. He also suspected the states' governing bodies might not care to heed the Atlantean Assembly's recommendations, no matter how earnest they were. But a mild occupation of French Atlantis had gone well on the whole, where a harsh one might have sparked festering rebellion. He didn't nod with any great enthusiasm, but nod he did. "Let it be so."

  "Capital!" Hartley wrote swiftly. "I believe this conveys the gist of what I said. Is it acceptable to you?"

  Victor read the proposed article. He nodded again. "It is."

  "By the same token, then, there should be no further confiscations-nor prosecutions, either, for that matter-because of past loyalties," Richard Oswald said. "Any such proceedings now in train should also be stopped."

  "I will agree to that, provided it also applies reciprocally," Victor replied. "England should not prosecute any Atlanteans in her territory for preferring the Assembly to the king."

  Oswald looked as if he'd bitten into an unripe persimmon. But David Hartley nodded judiciously. "That seems only fair," he said. With his own countryman willing to yield the point, Oswald grumbled but did not say no.

  Terms for the evacuation of English troops had already been worked out between Victor and General Cornwallis. It remained but to incorporate them into the treaty. The English also undertook not to destroy any archives or records. Quite a few documents had already gone up in flames, the better to protect informers and quiet collaborators. Well, the Atlanteans had burned their share of papers, too. But enough was enough.

  "One other point remains,'' Victor said. "Operations of which we here know nothing may yet continue against Avalon, New Marseille, or the smaller towns of the west coast. In case it should happen that any place belonging to Atlantis shall have been conquered by English arms before word of this treaty arrives in those parts, let it be restored without difficulty and without compensation."

  The English commissioners looked at each other. They both shrugged at the same time. "Agreed," Oswald said. Again, David Hartley wrote down the clause.

  After he finished, he asked, "Is your west coast as savage as the savants say?"

  "It is sparsely settled, though Avalon makes a fair-sized town," Victor answered. "The truly empty region is the interior between the Green Ridge Mountains and the Hesperian Gulf. Its day will come, I doubt not, but that day is not yet here."

  "Will it come in our lifetime?" Hartley asked.

  "I can hope so," Victor said. "I must admit, I don't particularly expect to see it."

  "Shall we proceed?" Richard Oswald said. "Does anything more need to go into this treaty?" He waited. When neither his countryman nor Victor said anything, he went on, "Then let it go into effect when it is ratified by Parliament and by the Atlantean Assembly, said ratification to take place within sue months unless some matter of surpassing exigency should intervene."

  "Agreed," Victor said. He shook hands with both Englishmen.

  "I shall give you a copy of the articles," David Hartley said.

  "For which I thank you kindly," Victor replied. Amazing how defeat in the field inclined England toward sweet reason. He barely kept himself from clapping his hands in glee. No one now, not King George and not the Emperor of China, either, could claim the United States of Atlantis had no rightful place among the nations of the world!

  Victor was lodged above a public house called the Pleasant Cod. The place had been open for business for upwards of a century; by now, very likely, every possible jest about its name had been made. That didn't keep new guests from making those same jokes over again. Only the glazed look in the taverner's eye kept Victor from exercising his wit at the Cod's expense.

  He-or rather, the Atlantean Assembly-was paying for his lodging. One of the principal grievances Atlantis had against England was the uncouth English practice of quartering troops on the citizenry without so much as a by-your-leave-and without so much as a farthing's worth of payment. And if the taverner gouged him for the room… well, Atlantean paper still wasn't close to par with sterling.

  Someone pounded on the door in the middle of the night, Victor needed a moment to come back to himself, then another to remember where he was and why he was there. He groped for the fine sword from the Atlantean Assembly. In these days of gunpowder, generals rarely bloodied their blades on the battlefield. But the sword would do fine for letting the air out of a robber or two.

  Bang! Bang! Bang! Whoever was out in the hall really wanted to come in. People in other rooms swore at the racket. Victor had no trouble hearing every angry oath through the thin walls.

  "Who's there, dammit?" he called, blade in his right hand, the latch in his left. He wasn't about to open it till he got an answer he liked.

  He made the knocking stop, anyway. "Is that you, Victor?" a voice inquired. A familiar voice?

  "No," he said harshly. "I am the Grand Vizier of the Shah of Persia." He would have assumed a Persian accent had he had the faintest notion of what one sounded like.

  Someone else spouted gibberish in the hall. For all Victor knew, it might have been Persian. It was beyond a doubt Custis Cawthorne. Victor threw the door open. "I thought you were still in France!" he exclaimed.

  "His ship put in at Pomphret Landing," Isaac Fenner said. "We've ridden together from there to Croydon to see you."

  "Perhaps not quite so much of you as this," Cawthorne added. Victor looked down at himself in the dim light of the hallway lantern. All he had on were a linen undershirt and cotton drawers.

  "I was asleep," he said with as much dignity as he could muster. "You might have waited till morning to come to call."

  "That's right! You bloody well might have, you noisy buggers!" someone else yelled from behind a closed door.

  Victor ducked back into his room. After some fumbling, he found the candle stub that had lighted his way up the stairs. He lit it again at the lantern. Then he made a gesture of invitation. "Well, my friends, as long as you are here, by all means come in."

  "Yes-go in and shut up!" that unhappy man shouted.

  "We should have let it wait till morning," Cawthorne said as Victor shut the door behind them.

  His little bit of candle wouldn't last long. Then they could either talk in the dark or go to b
ed. "Why didn't you?" he asked.

  "Because what we came for is too important," Isaac Fenner answered stubbornly. The dim, flickering light only made his ears seem to stick out even more than they would have anyway.

  "And that is…?" Victor prompted.

  "Why, to finish negotiating the treaty with the English commissioners… Confound it, what's so funny?"

  "Only that I reached an accord with them this afternoon," Victor answered. "If the Atlantean Assembly should decide the said accord is not to its liking, it is welcome to change matters to make them more satisfactory. And, should it choose to do so, I shall retire once for all into private life with the greatest delight and relief imaginable."

  Custis Cawthorne burst out laughing, too. "All this rushing might have been avoided with a faster start," he observed. "But then, that proves true more often than any of us commonly cares to contemplate."

  Fenner, implacable as one of the Three Fates, held out his hand to Victor. "Kindly let me see this so-called agreement."

  "No," Victor said.

  Shadows swooped across Fenner's face as it sagged in surprise. "What?" he sputtered. "You dare refuse?"

  "Too right, I do," Victor answered. "God may know what miserable hour of the night it is, but, not being inclined to fumble out my pocket watch, I haven't the faintest notion. I am certain the treaty will keep till daylight. For now, Isaac, shut up and go to bed."

  "But-!" Fenner seemed about to explode.

  "Isaac…" Custis Cawthorne spoke his friend's name in a voice full of gentle, amused melancholy.

  "What is it?" Fenner, by contrast, snapped like the jaws of a steel trap.

  "Shut up and go to bed. I intend to." As if to prove as much, Cawthorne shrugged out of his coat and began undoing the toggles on his tunic.

  His colleague's face was a study in commingled amazement and fury. Fenner's red hair warned of his temper, as a light on a lee shore warned of dangerous rocks. But then the Bredestown Assemblyman also started to laugh. "All right, all right-just as you please. I see there are two beds in the room. Who shall have which?"

  "This one is mine." Victor pointed to the unmade one, in which he'd been sleeping. "The two of you may share the other, this being the price you pay for disturbing me in so untimely a fashion."

  Isaac Fenner looked ready to argue about that, too. Cawthorne, by contrast, took off his shoes. Grunting, he bent to reach under the bed Victor had designated. He picked up the chamber pot that sat there. "I trust you gentlemen will excuse me…" he said, politely turning his back. When he'd finished, he presented the pot to Fenner. "Isaac?"

  "Oh, very well." Fenner used the pot while Cawthorne lay down and made himself comfortable. Victor stretched out on his own bed. Blaise was in the servants' quarters downstairs. Chances were the Negro was asleep right this minute, too. Victor wished he could say the same.

  "You'd better hurry up," he told Isaac Fenner. "This candle won't last much longer." Sure enough, it guttered and almost went out.

  Fenner got into bed. The ropes supporting the mattress creaked under his weight. "Good night, sweetheart," Custis Cawthorne told him, as if men didn't sleep two or three or four to a bed all the time in taverns or inns.

  "Good night-darling," Fenner retorted.

  Victor blew out the candle. Blackness plunged down from the ceiling and swallowed the room whole. Victor didn't know about how his eminent Atlantean comrades fared after that: he went back to sleep himself too soon to have the chance to find out.

  Down in the common room the next morning, Blaise looked grouchy. He usually drank tea, but a steaming mug of coffee sat in front of him now. He sipped from it as he attacked a ham steak and a plate of potatoes fried in lard. When Victor asked what the trouble was, his factotum sent him a wounded look.

  "Some damnfool commotion in the nighttime," Blaise answered, swallowing more coffee. "Didn't you hear it? I thought it was plenty to wake the dead. I know it woke me, and I had a devil of a time getting back to sleep again afterwards."

  "Oh," Victor said. "That."

  "Yes, that. You know what it was?"

  After a glance at the stairway, Victor nodded. "Here it comes now, as a matter of fact."

  Blaise blinked as Isaac Fenner came down. He frankly gaped when Custis Cawthorne followed. "But he's in France," Blaise blurted.

  "I thought so, too," Victor said. "In point of fact, though, he was in my room last night, wanting to see the treaty I hammered out with Oswald and Hartley yesterday. Well, actually, no: Isaac was the one who wanted to see it just then. Custis came with him, though."

  The Atlantean dignitaries bore down on the table where Victor and Blaise sat. Without so much as a good-morning, Fenner said, "You have the terms with you?"

  "I crave your pardon," Victor said. "I must have left them up in the room. After I break my fast, you may rest assured I shall let you examine them at your leisure."

  That produced the desired effect: it incensed Fenner. "Devil fry you black as a griddle cake forgotten over the fire!" he shouted, loud enough to make everyone in the common room stare at him. "Why did you not have the consideration, the common courtesy, the-the plain wit, to bring them down with you? Think on how much time you might have saved, man! Just think!"

  "Easy, Isaac, easy. You might do some thinking yourself, instead of bellowing like a branded calf." Custis Cawthorne set a hand on Fenner's arm. "Unless I find myself much mistaken, General Radcliff would end up holding your leg in his hand if he pulled it any harder."

  "What?" Fenner gaped, goggle-eyed.

  "I do have the treaty here, Isaac," Victor said. The serving girl chose that moment to come up and ask him what he wanted. He got to prolong Fenner's agony by hashing over the virtues and vices of ham, sausages, and bacon. Having finally picked sausages and sent the girl back to the kitchen, Victor produced the draft. "Here is what the Englishmen and I have arrived at. Why don't you and Custis sit down and look it over and order something to put ballast in your bellies?"

  "A capital notion," Cawthorne said. "Capital." He proceeded to follow Victor's suggestion. Isaac Fenner stood there till the older man tugged at his sleeve. "You wanted to see this. Now that you can, aren't you going to?"

  "Errr-" Fenner had to take a deep breath to stop making the noise. He sat down most abruptly. Almost as if against his will, he started reading over Cawthorne's shoulder. Then he tugged the paper away from the other man, so that it lay on the table between them.

  The serving girl came back with Victor's breakfast. She smiled at Fenner and Cawthorne. "What would you gents care for?"

  "I don't care for this fifth article-not even slightly," Fenner said.

  "She means for breakfast, Isaac," Custis Cawthorne said. "As for me, I'll take the ham and potatoes, and a mug of ale to wash'em down."

  "Breakfast." By the way Fenner said it, the possibility had slipped his mind." Hmm… What Custis chose will suit me well enough, too."

  Victor wouldn't have given better than three to two that Fenner had even heard what Custis Cawthorne chose for breakfast. The answer was enough to make the serving girl go away, though, which was what the Bredestown Assemblyman had in mind. Fenner's forefinger descended on the treaty. "This fifth article-" he began again.

  "England wanted us to compel the states to undo their measures against the loyalists," Victor said.

  "Good luck!" Cawthorne exclaimed. "We'd be fighting half a dozen wars at once if we tried."

  "Just what I told 'em," Victor said. "They do have something of a point, after all-loyalists who did not bear arms against the Atlantean Assembly may become good citizens in the circumstances now prevailing. No certainty of it, but they may. And so- what's the phrase Hartley used?-'earnestly recommending' that the states go easy struck me as a reasonable compromise."

  "Why should we compromise?" Fenner said. "We won!"

  Patiently, Victor answered, "The firmer the peace we make with England now, the smaller the chance we'll have to fight another war in ten years' time
, or twenty. God has not sent me word from On High that we are bound to win then. Has He been more generous with you?"

  "When I was a boy, Croydon folk would have thrown you in the stocks for a jape like that," Cawthorne said. "They might do it yet, were the fellow so exercising his wit some abandoned vagabond rather than the hero of Atlantis' liberation."

  "People here are touchy about God," Blaise agreed. "Even touchier than they are most places, I mean."

  "They are certain they are right. Being thus certain, they are equally sure they have the right-nay, more: the duty-to impose their views on everyone they can," Cawthorne said.

  A crack like that might have won him time in the stocks were he less prominent and less notorious. His breakfast, and Isaac Fenner's, interrupted perusal of the treaty. After a while, Fenner said, "This is good." Again, he sounded surprised.

  "A full belly strengthens the spirit." Custis Cawthorne seemed to listen to himself. "Not bad. Not bad at all. I must remember that one."

  Fenner was still eyeing the draft of the treaty. "It will be some time before we can pay our debts at par with sterling," he said sadly.

  Victor also knew the parlous state of the Atlantean Assembly's paper-who didn't? But he answered, "Would you rather I had told the English commissioners we intend to repudiate those debts? They lodge down the street. I will introduce them to you later this morning. If you intend to convey that message, you may do so yourself."

  "No, no," Fenner said. "Now that we are a nation, we must be able to hold up our heads amongst our fellow nations. Even so, putting our house in order will prove more difficult than many of us would wish."

  "Never fear. We can always find some cozening trick or another to befool our creditors," Cawthorne said. "France has proved that year after year."

  "How was France?" Victor asked him. "Most enjoyable, at the level where I traveled," Cawthorne said. "If you have the means to live well-or have friends with the means to let you live well-you can live better in and around Paris than anywhere else on earth. But the peasantry? Dear God in heaven! Upon my oath, the grievances the French peasants have against their king and nobles make ours against England seem light as a feather drifting on the breeze by comparison."