Liberating Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  “We are what the country has,” Newton said. “If from among us we can’t piece together a course that will do the country good, then Lord have mercy on the USA.”

  “Yes. Kyrie eleison,” Sinapis said, which meant the same thing but sounded much more elegant.

  In the eastern foothills of the Green Ridge Mountains, the insurrection really caught up with the army. Like his colleague, Jeremiah Stafford was discovering that a diet of salt pork and hardtack left a lot to be desired to start with, and went downhill in a hurry from there. When the train stopped in the evening, some soldiers pounded their hardtack crackers into crumbs and fried them in pork fat. Stafford tried that himself—once. He found that different and better meant two widely separate things.

  He also found he hardly needed pipeweed. The inside of the car in which he and Newton and Colonel Sinapis traveled was smoky enough without pipes or cigars. The derailments had broken several windows. He supposed they were lucky all of them hadn’t broken. Even as things were, he feared he looked like the end man in a minstrel show. The soot on his white shirtfront told him how much he was likely to have on his face. The rasping coughs he let out every so often certainly warned him how much he had in his lungs.

  Iron squealed on iron and sparks flew up from the wheels as the locomotive driver braked as hard as he could. “What the deuce?” Stafford said.

  “I wonder if some of our not-quite-friends put something new on the tracks.” Leland Newton sounded pleased with his own cleverness.

  Colonel Sinapis, by contrast, sniffed scornfully. “If they had any tactical sense, they would have put the boulder or log or whatever it was around a bend in the track,” he said. “Then the driver would not have been able to see it until he had no chance to stop.”

  But the insurrectionists did have tactical sense, even if not of the sort Balthasar Sinapis had looked for. As the train slowed, they started shooting at it from the pines and redwoods to either side of the roadbed.

  For a moment, those bangs meant nothing to Stafford. But when a bullet punched through the side wall of the car and cracked past his head before drilling out the far side, he figured things out in a hurry. “They’re firing at us!” he exclaimed, more angry than frightened.

  “What do we do?” Newton added.

  “For the sake of the country and for the sake of your own skins, I suggest you get low and flat—now,” Colonel Sinapis said.

  He couldn’t give the two Consuls orders; they outranked him. But his “suggestion” had the snap of what would have been a command. It also seemed a very good idea. No sooner had Stafford got down than another bullet smashed through the space where he had been.

  Sinapis did not get down. He drew his eight-shooter and started banging away through one of the broken windows. The reports only a few feet from Stafford’s head stunned his ears. Lying beside him on the none-too-clean planks, Leland Newton grimaced every time the colonel fired. “This is most undignified,” Newton said.

  “Among other things,” Stafford agreed.

  He wondered what would happen if they both got killed here. He knew what the Atlantean Charter prescribed. If both Consuls died or abandoned their office for other reason, the Senate had to choose an interrex to serve as the chief executive till the next Consular elections were held. It had to choose him by a two-thirds majority, too. The way the Senate was divided these days, Stafford doubted whether Jesus Christ Himself could win a two-thirds majority of the Conscript Fathers.

  Which meant that, if they both perished, chaos would descend on the United States of Atlantis. Worse chaos, Stafford amended as another bullet snarled by not nearly far enough above his prostrate frame.

  If only one of them died here, the other Consul would serve alone till the next election. Stafford eyed Newton, and found his colleague eyeing him right back. “Isn’t it nice that we’re friends?” Newton said.

  “Wonderful,” Stafford said in distinctly hollow tones. His colleague laughed.

  That the USA did not suffer a Charter crisis lay to the credit of the army’s junior officers and sergeants. The cars in which they rode farther back were getting peppered with bullets, too. They rushed their gray-uniformed soldiers out with fixed bayonets to drive the insurrectionists away. A few of the soldiers went down as soon as they jumped from their cars. The rest, stolidly professional, advanced into the woods regardless, shouting as they went.

  The firing kept on, but it wasn’t aimed at the train any more. The rebels were shooting at the soldiers, and vice versa. Stafford and Newton got up again to watch. Colonel Sinapis grunted. “That ought to shift them,” he said.

  And it did. When the soldiers came back, some of them dragged rebel corpses by the feet. One rebel they caught wasn’t a corpse—and then, quite suddenly, he was. They brought out their own casualties, too. The surgeons attended to them as best they could. Consul Stafford watched with great—if slightly nauseated—interest. His colleague might admire the rebels, but these men sent to put them down would probably feel differently.

  X

  Down the west side of the Green Ridge Mountains the train chugged . . . slowly. Coughing a little, Leland Newton peered out through the swirling smoke that belched from the locomotive’s stack. “Well,” he said, “I did think we would get to New Marseille faster than a horse can walk.”

  “So did I,” Consul Stafford said fretfully.

  Balthasar Sinapis coughed, too: a cough of correction, Newton judged, not one caused by smoke. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “we are going at the speed a horse can trot.”

  So they were. Atlantean dragoons in their tall black felt hats trotted along to either side of the railroad track. They had eight-shooters, shotguns, and carbines. Their job was to keep the Negroes and copperskins who’d risen in these parts from attacking the train. The foot soldiers inside the cars carried loaded weapons. Sinapis had made it plain he didn’t like doing that, but he recognized the need.

  The dragoons had done their job up till now. No more bullet holes marred the battered railroad cars. No more screams rose as surgeons probed for musket balls. Newton missed them not at all.

  But if the copperskins and Negroes thought of themselves as the army’s enemies, as they seemed to, wouldn’t the soldiers in the army think of those Negroes and copperskins the same way? If that wasn’t what Consul Stafford expected, Consul Newton would have been astonished.

  Setting out from New Hastings, Newton would have called Stafford’s expectations so much foolishness. The Consul from Croydon wasn’t so sure now. If a man was willing to lay his life on the line to try to kill you, you weren’t going to love him on account of it. No: you were going to want to keep him away, or else to do unto him before he could do unto you.

  And if the soldiers got off the train with the notion that they needed to kill any slave who looked at them sideways firmly fixed in their heads, they wouldn’t be interested in interposing themselves between the rebels and the whites they were rebelling against. No: they’d want to join the local whites in slaughtering every insurrectionist they could catch.

  Stafford had clearly seen that from the beginning. Why didn’t I? Newton wondered. Like a lot of northern foes of slavery, he’d tended to romanticize the men and women who were the victims of the institution. It was much harder to romanticize someone who was trying to blow your head off. You were much more likely to make someone like that into a demon, there in the fortress of your mind.

  Maybe that was why Stafford had foreseen so clearly what was coming. He didn’t suddenly need to turn the uprisen slaves to demons inside his head. As far as he was concerned, slaves who rose against their masters demonized themselves.

  Muttering to himself, Newton looked out through the swirling smoke again. He could imagine that it was the veil of time, and that he was looking back into the past. The tall trees, some of them with moss hanging from their branches, the understory of squat barrel trees, the ferns growing in green profusion below them . . . The only signs of modernity
were the railroad line—and the dragoons.

  “We might see a honker pulling up leaves somewhere,” he remarked.

  “I wonder if any honkers are left alive,” Stafford said.

  “A few years ago, that artist fellow set out from Avalon to find some, remember? And he did, too, in some hidden mountain valley.” Newton scratched his head. “What was his name, anyhow?”

  “Audubon.” That wasn’t Consul Stafford—it was Colonel Sinapis. “A very fine artist indeed.”

  “You know him?” Newton asked in surprise. Imagining the fierce and dour Sinapis with any interests beyond those of his sanguinary trade wasn’t easy.

  But he sighed now as he shook his head. “Alas, I did not have that privilege—he died last year. No one could match his paintings of viviparous quadrupeds and especially of birds for their accurate vivacity. No one came close. Even if honkers are no more, they will still live for us in his portrayal of them.”

  “I had not thought you such a friend of nature,” Stafford said, so the colonel had surprised him, too.

  “Time often hangs heavy in the Ministry of War,” Sinapis answered. “Having a hobbyhorse to ride helps make the hours pass. One of my colleagues translates chronicles from the medieval Latin. Another has become an expert on the history of mining iron. Several drink or play cards. Me, I prefer nature.”

  A career soldier’s life in Atlantis: one more thing Newton hadn’t thought through. The country had no serious foreign threats. Lying where it did, how could it? And the navy, not the army, would deal first with any threats that did appear. In his time in Europe, Colonel Sinapis would have been used to adventure and upheaval. Sitting around gathering dust in the Ministry of War couldn’t have been easy for him. No wonder he’d found something besides soldiering to interest him.

  Well, Atlantis had its own share of adventure and upheaval now. The navy couldn’t do much about it, either, not unless the rebels came close enough to the water’s edge to be bombarded by sea. If any part of the national government was going to restore order, it would have to be the small, sleepy, much-maligned army.

  “Can our soldiers do the job required of them?” Consul Newton asked the colonel.

  “If you and Consul Stafford tell me what the job is and stick with it, they will do it, whatever it may be,” Sinapis answered. “They do not have much experience fighting, but they are well-disciplined men. You can rely on them—if I know, and they know, what they must do. If the two of you cannot make up your minds, or if you change them more often than you change your drawers, we shall have trouble.”

  He looked melancholy, but then he usually looked melancholy. He sounded melancholy, too: as if he expected they would have troubles. But it was a peculiar kind of melancholy, because he also sounded as if he was looking forward to whatever troubles they found.

  Leland Newton had been looking forward to whatever troubles they found when he set out from New Hastings. He wasn’t so sure any more.

  Jeremiah Stafford had always been a man of the Atlantic coast. In that, he was like most of his countrymen. Atlantis had been settled from the east, and remained most densely populated on the coast facing England and the European mainland. Only one real city—Avalon—lay on the Hesperian Gulf and looked toward Terranova. New Marseille gave itself airs, but wasn’t in the same league.

  During the fight for freedom, Victor Radcliff had marched an Atlantean army through western Atlantis to face the redcoats in New Marseille. The country on this side of the mountains had been a howling wilderness then. Now, a lifetime later, the pursuit of profits from cotton had turned much of it into an imitation of the plantations farther east. Much of it, but not all.

  Here and there, the wilderness still howled. In stretches between plantations, only the railroad line proved that anyone had come this way before. Ferns and barrel trees and conifers got dull in a hurry. Like Consul Newton—and, no doubt, like Colonel Sinapis—Stafford wondered if he would see a honker, but he didn’t.

  Even market towns were fewer and farther between on this side of the mountains than in the longer-settled east. But people turned out to cheer the soldiers whenever the train stopped for fuel and water. Stafford couldn’t resist pointing that out to his colleague in the Consulship.

  “Well, some people do,” Leland Newton allowed. “But I don’t see any blacks or copperskins dancing in the streets and singing hosannas because we’ve come.”

  “Good God in heaven! Who cares about them?” Stafford said. “White people made Atlantis.”

  “They did indeed: on the backs of the colored people they fetched here to do the hard, dirty work they didn’t care to do themselves,” Newton answered.

  “You’re spewing that rubbish again,” Stafford said. “If you think white people don’t work in this country, you’ve been walking around with your eyes closed. Without white men and their work and their capital, slaves would have nothing to do.”

  “This part of Atlantis would be better off if it had been settled by small freeholders, the way the lands farther north were,” Newton said.

  “Better off how, pray?” Stafford retorted. “Would you rather come to this climate in a wool shirt, and sweat and itch nine months of the year? If you would, by God, you’re welcome to it. But I see you are wearing cotton instead, the same as I am. Try growing cotton on one of your precious small freeholds. It takes too much labor to make that possible.”

  “I could wear linen in a pinch,” Newton said in musing tones. “Linen is tolerably cool, or better than tolerably.”

  “And it wrinkles if you give it a hard look, and it costs far more than cotton does—all of which, I have no doubt, you understand perfectly well,” Stafford said. “You are being difficult for the sake of being difficult.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Newton said. Stafford only snorted. He’d come to politics from the practice of the law, just as his colleague had. He knew a denial that wasn’t a denial when he heard one.

  While he and Newton bickered, Colonel Sinapis looked out the window. The Atlantean officer suddenly pointed. “There,” he said. “This is part of the trouble of the countryside.”

  This was a rude encampment alongside the railroad tracks. Tents and lean-tos sheltered white people who were dirty and wore ragged clothes. A few of them waved to the train. More just sat or sprawled where they were, too apathetic to salute the men who had come to rescue them.

  “You see.” Stafford rounded on Newton and made the words an accusation. “This is what the insurrection does. These poor innocents got away with their necks, nothing more. All they worked for through their lives is gone now.”

  “Yes, it’s very sad,” the other Consul said. But that was at best a barbed agreement, for Newton went on, “They seem to have it as hard as the slaves did before the uprising.”

  The monstrous unfairness of that almost choked Jeremiah Stafford with rage. “Every time you open your mouth, all you prove is that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Any master who housed his slaves like that would get a quick talking-to from his neighbors, or maybe a horsewhipping. Putting mudfaces and niggers in such miserable quarters would be begging for an insurrection.”

  “I see,” Newton said, nodding wisely. “You house your slaves better than this for the sake of your own safety, not on account of their comfort.”

  He doubtless thought that would make Stafford angrier. If so, he was doomed to disappointment. Stafford only laughed at him. “And I suppose the factory owners in Croydon pay their workers even one cent more than the least they could give while still keeping the workers alive. We were talking about freedom and the freedom to starve not long ago, if I recall rightly.”

  By Leland Newton’s sour expression, the other Consul did. “We are not perfect paragons, either,” Newton said. “But we hire our workers’ labor. We don’t buy it and sell it. Our workers are free to—”

  “Starve in a different job if they don’t like the one they have,” Stafford interrupted.
That probably wasn’t what Newton had been about to say, which didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

  “To change jobs as they please,” Newton went on, as if the other Consul hadn’t spoken. “They can move about as they please. They can marry as they please, and raise their own legitimate children.”

  “They can watch them starve, too, you mean, or waste away from consumption,” Stafford shot back. “And who gives a damn whether mudfaces and niggers have legitimate children?”

  “They do,” Newton said. “Do you suppose they enjoy it when the father is sold to one plantation, the mother to another, and the children, maybe, to a third?”

  Jeremiah Stafford’s snort was full of exasperation. “You have been reading sensational novels again. That rarely happens, and is always condemned when it does.”

  “But the law allows it, which is the point,” Newton said.

  “Only if you make it the point,” Stafford replied. “And how often do women in Croydon have to sell themselves on the streets to survive? How often are the children they bear legitimate?” He laced the word with scorn.

  By the way his colleague grimaced, that happened more often than Newton would have wanted. Before the other Consul could answer, Colonel Sinapis said, “Whether these slaves are legitimate or not, we are going to have to try to deal with them. The two of you are in command here.” That plainly disgusted him, but he couldn’t change it. He continued, “You had better figure out a way to work together, because you will get my men killed, and pretty likely yourselves with them, if you go on like this.”

  “You know what we need to do, Colonel,” Stafford said. “I know what we need to do. I think even Consul Newton knows what we need to do. The question is, is he willing to do it?”

  Newton didn’t say anything. He did look like a man who knew what needed doing. But whether what he knew was the same as what Stafford knew was liable to be a different question.