Liberating Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

“Bargain? What bargain?” By the way Marquard said the word, it might have come from Russian or Chinese. “We made no bargain that I recollect.”

  Frederick stared at him. He’d known some pretty fancy liars in his time, but for straight-faced gall the Senator from Cosquer took the prize. “You know damned well what bargain . . . sir,” Frederick said, and proceeded to spell it out in words of one syllable.

  By Abel Marquard’s manner, he might have been hearing of it for the very first time. “My dear fellow!” he exclaimed when Frederick finished. “When you were down in Gernika, you must have eaten some of the mystic mushrooms that grow there—you know, the ones that can make men think they see God or the Devil sitting in front of them till they get better. You are imagining things.”

  “Oh, I am, am I?” Frederick said grimly. “If I think I see the Devil sitting in front of me now, it’s on account of I’m looking right at you.” He stormed out of the Senator’s study.

  “Something wrong?” Clarence asked him.

  “Oh, you might say so. Yeah, you just might.” The story poured out of Frederick.

  “Is that what happened?” Clarence said when he finished.

  “That’s just what happened. So help me God, it is.” Frederick raised his right hand, as if to swear it.

  “I believe you. He’s an old serpent, the master is—a sly old serpent, but a serpent even so.” Senator Marquard’s butler spoke with a certain somber pride. After shaking his head, Clarence went on, “He ain’t gonna get away with it, though, not this time. Slug Hollow’s too important to let him.”

  “Well, I think so, too,” Frederick Radcliff said. “But what can you do about it?” He paused, grinning. “That kind of stuff?”

  Clarence laid a finger by the side of his broad, flat nose and winked. “Yeah, that kind of stuff. You leave it to me, friend.”

  Frederick nodded and left Senator Marquard’s residence. He’d warned the Senator that Marquard’s own slaves wouldn’t let him get away with such double-dealing. Now he had to hope he was right. He intended to give Clarence a week before going to the newspapers himself. He feared that would put the Senator’s back up instead of bringing him around, but it was the only weapon he had.

  He turned out not to need it. Four days after Abel Marquard had denied making any agreement to back the Slug Hollow accord if Frederick quelled the uprising in Gernika, the Senator publicly announced his support for the accord. “It may not be a perfect bargain,” Marquard declared in ringing tones on the Senate floor, “but it is the best one we are likely to get.”

  Marquard was an influential man. When he lined up behind Slug Hollow, he brought a good many other Senators with him. Frederick had hoped he would do exactly that. The Negro almost sought out the Senator to ask him why he’d changed his mind. But Frederick didn’t need long to decide not to do that. He sought out Clarence instead.

  They didn’t meet at Marquard’s house. That might have proved embarrassing to all concerned. A tavern and eatery that catered to Negroes, copperskins, and poor whites served better than well enough. Over fried fish and mugs of beer, Frederick asked, “What did you do?”

  “Who, me?” Clarence might have borrowed that blank look from his master. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything at all, even the things I was supposed to do. You ever listen to a white man who has to find his own cravat and black his own shoes?”

  A slow grin spread across Frederick Radcliff’s face. “I like that!”

  “Oh, it gets better, too,” Clarence said. “It sure does. He had to give his own washing to the laundry gal, too. An’ she made a mess of it—just by accident, of course.”

  “Of course,” Frederick agreed. They both chuckled.

  “Socks and drawers got starched. Shirts an’ trousers didn’t. A jacket got washed in hot water, so it shrank like you wouldn’t believe. Such a shame!” Clarence rolled his eyes. “And I ain’t even started on what the cook’s been up to.”

  “No?” Frederick asked eagerly.

  “No, sir.” Clarence shook his head. “The bread was scorched one day. The next day, it didn’t rise. The shrimp in the stew were a little off—just a little, but enough.” He held his nose. “The master’s were, anyhow. What we got was first-rate. Something in the salad gave the Senator the runs. After that, he got word things weren’t goin’ real well down on his plantation, neither. Soon as he heard that, he started wondering if something funny was goin’ on.”

  “Now why would he think anything like that?” Butter wouldn’t have melted in Frederick’s mouth.

  “Beats me. I haven’t got the slightest idea.” Anybody listening to Clarence would have been convinced he too was one of God’s natural-born innocents. “But then he had a little talk with me. You hear him talk, he figures niggers and mudfaces, they never heard of Slug Hollow or what led up to it.”

  “Likely tell!” Frederick burst out.

  “Uh-huh.” Clarence nodded. “You can’t believe how surprised he acted when I turned out to know as much about it as he did. ‘Clarence,’ he says, ‘Clarence, you really want to be free and have all that trouble taking care of your own self?’ And he looks surprised all over again when I go, ‘I sure do, Master Marquard. An’ I don’t know me one single slave who don’t. There may be some, but I don’t know none.’ ”

  “What did he say then?” Frederick asked eagerly.

  “He says, ‘If I want to live long enough to go home again once I’m done in the Senate, reckon I better go along with Slug Hollow, huh?’ An’ I say, ‘Senator Marquard, sir, I hope you live a real long time. But if you want black folks an’ copper folks to stay happy with you, you got to know we is all for Slug Hollow.’ We had to get his attention, like, but we finally went an’ done it.”

  “Good for you,” Frederick said. “When he made out like I was a liar, looked to me like the only way to . . . to wake him up, like, was to hope his own people could getting him thinkin’ ’bout things.”

  “We did that, all right. Don’t reckon a white man would’ve thought of it, but you ain’t no white man, even if your granddaddy was,” Clarence said. “Takes a fella who was a slave hisself to know how things really work with a planter and his niggers. He votes for Slug Hollow, he gets his friends to do the same, we gonna be free for true?”

  “For true,” Frederick said firmly. “Don’t know what happens after that. Don’t know if there’s any happy endings.”

  “You know what? Me, I don’t care,” Clarence said. “Long as there’s a happy beginning, long as I got a chance, I’ll make it some kind of way.”

  “You ain’t the first fella who told me that kind of thing,” Frederick said. “Lots of us’re figurin’ we can make it some kind of way.”

  “Some of us won’t,” Clarence predicted.

  “Expect you’re right. But some white folks don’t make it, either, even with everything goin’ for them,” Frederick answered. “You said it—long as we’ve got the chance, that’s what really counts.”

  “Yeah.” Abel Marquard’s butler nodded. His eyes went dreamy and far away. “A chance. Just a God-damned chance . . .”

  “Honest to God, Clarence, I think it’ll happen now,” Frederick said. “And you’ve helped make it happen. You know that, an’ I know that, an’ the Senator, he sure knows that, too, but I bet you anything it never shows up in the history books.”

  “I ain’t gonna touch that bet. I may be dumb, but not so dumb,” Clarence said. “When did anything a nigger did ever show up in the history books?”

  “One of these day, that may happen, too,” Frederick Radcliff said. “One of these days—but not quite yet.”

  Leland Newton glanced over at Jeremiah Stafford, who nodded. Newton brought his gavel down smartly on the desk in front of him: once, twice, three times. “The Clerk of the Senate will call the roll,” he said.

  “Yes, your Excellency,” the Clerk of the Senate replied. How often had the functionary called the roll? Hundreds—more likely thousands—of times.
He’d held his post longer than Newton had been in New Hastings. Newton couldn’t remember his ever acknowledging that command from a Consul before. But now poorly suppressed excitement filled his voice, as it filled Newton’s.

  New Hastings hadn’t known a moment like this since . . . when? Since the Atlantean Assembly reconvened here after the redcoats went home, reconvened and hammered out the system of government the USA had used ever since? No doubt that was an important time, but Newton thought this one topped it. Wouldn’t you have to reach all the way back to the fifteenth century, when the Battle of the Strand ensured that no local kings, no local nobility, would lord it over the populace? Newton thought so.

  The Clerk of the Senate did his best to return to his usual emotionless tone: “The question before the Conscript Fathers is, Shall the Senate ratify the agreement made by the two Consuls with one Frederick Radcliff and his supporters in the village of Slug Hollow, state of New Marseille?” No matter how hard he tried to sound dull, he didn’t quite succeed.

  Avalon voted first: the state north of New Marseille headed the alphabetical list. Within each state’s contingent, the Senators also voted in alphabetical order. One of Avalon’s six Senators voted no. Slavery wasn’t legal in Avalon, but it had been up until twenty-five years earlier. Some sympathy for slaveholding lingered yet.

  Cosquer came next. It had more Senators than Avalon did, since it held more people; as far as Newton knew, every one of its Conscript Fathers owned slaves. Some of them defiantly voted against the Slug Hollow accord. Consul Newton waited tensely till Abel Marquard’s name came up.

  “Senator Marquard!” the Clerk of the Senate intoned at last.

  “Aye,” Marquard said. Newton and the Clerk might have failed to keep their voices emotionless, but the Senator from Cosquer succeeded. Could machines have been made to speak, his voice might have come from one of them.

  He had opposed the agreement. Frederick Radcliff had claimed the two of them had an arrangement whereby, if the Negro brought peace to Gernika, Marquard would support Slug Hollow. The Senator denied everything. But, no matter what he’d denied, he’d changed his mind. He’d announced he would support the accord, and now he’d gone and done it.

  Newton wondered how and why it came to pass that Abel Marquard had changed his mind. Nobody seemed to know. Or, if anyone—Frederick Radcliff, for instance—did know, he wasn’t talking. Something out of the ordinary must have happened, but who could say what?

  And, in the end, what difference did it make? As long as Marquard voted the right way (which he did) and as long as he brought some Senatorial colleagues with him (which he also did), everything else was a matter of details.

  “The state of Croydon’s delegation will now vote,” the Clerk of the Senate declared after the last man from Cosquer spoke a defiant nay. One by one, the Clerk polled Croydon’s Senators. All of them voted to accept the accord and make slavery a thing of the past. Leland Newton would have been horrified and astonished had they done anything else.

  On the Consular dais, Stafford turned and whispered to him: “Next up is the compensation bill, the way we agreed.”

  “Oh, yes. Of course.” For a moment, Newton was tempted to imitate Senator Marquard and say something like, We did? The look on Stafford’s face would almost be worth it. But the operative word was almost. Compensation would make freeing the slaves, if not delightful to the whites who owned them, at least possible for those whites. Freeing slaves without compensation would touch off a revolt that would make the one just past (Newton hoped it was just past) seem a children’s spat by comparison.

  That seemed as obvious to Newton as it did to Stafford. The other Consul’s warnings about the country breaking to pieces in the absence of such measures weren’t idle. Now Newton would have to persuade northern Senators that their states, their constituents, needed to see their taxes rise to placate a group of people who, they were convinced, were morally wrong.

  Southern Senators went out on a limb for you and for Atlantis. He could already see in his mind’s eye the shape his argument would take. Now it’s your turn to do the same for them.

  Newton hoped the northern Senators would keep their country in mind, not just the next election at their local statehouse, the one that might send them back to New Hastings or hurl them into private life again, rejected by their own people. Yes, the kind of revenge the states south of the Stour could take would be far worse than even the Great Servile Insurrection.

  Like Avalon, Freetown lay on the border with the slaveholding states. Two Freetown Senators voted against the Slug Hollow agreement. Newton winced. He’d expected to lose one vote there, but not two. Even though Abel Marquard had come through in the end, this would be closer than he wanted.

  Storm Whitson looked ready to burst in anger and astonishment when the majority of the delegation from Gernika voted for Slug Hollow. “Brutus, Judas, Habakkuk Biddiscombe, and you sons of bitches!” he cried. “Traitors all!”

  “That remark will be stricken from the record,” Consul Newton declared. “And you are out of order, Senator.”

  “Well, sir, if I am, I don’t much care to be in order,” Whitson shot back.

  “While you are on the Senate floor, you will abide by the Senate’s rules,” Newton said.

  Whatever Whitson said after that, the gavel overrode. Then it was on to Hanover, the most heavily populated of the United States of Atlantis and also one of the states staunchest against slavery. As Croydon’s had, Hanover’s delegation voted unanimously for the Slug Hollow accord.

  After that—before that, really, but the unanimous vote made it clear to even the dullest and the most partisan—the result was plain. When the last Senator had voted, the floor erupted in cheers and boos and applause and catcalls. A northern Senator punched a southerner in the nose. “I’ve wanted to do that for fifteen years!” he yelled. Then, before the Sergeant at Arms could get to them, the southerner picked himself up and decked his uncollegial colleague with a chair.

  Eventually, the Sergeant at Arms and nearby Senators untangled them. On any other day, such behavior would have been a great scandal. It would have made headlines in papers on both sides of the Stour. When tomorrow came, though, it might not make the papers at all. The slaves were free! This side of the Second Coming, what news in Atlantis could be bigger than that?

  The line that led to the justice of the peace’s chambers stretched around the block when Frederick Radcliff and Helen took their places in it. Most of the couples in the line were Negroes and copperskins: the reliable slaves of people who’d come up from south of the Stour to do business of one kind or another in the capital. It hadn’t been legal for citizens of New Hastings to own slaves for many years. Southerners could bring them up here, though, the risk being that, if the slaves escaped, nobody would do much to help the owners recover the property that had absconded with itself.

  A few white couples—people who’d decided to get married today before so many newly free slaves rushed to make their unions official—stood in line with the copperskins and Negroes. Some seemed nervous about becoming the minority element in that long ribbon of colored people. Others made the best of it. That the Negroes and copperskins were all in high spirits lent everything a quality of easiness. A white man pulled a flask out of a jacket pocket and took a nip. He passed it to his sweetheart, a red-head with skin so pale it was almost phosphorescent. She also drank, then handed it to the copperskinned woman standing behind her. The copperskin smiled and sipped and gave the flask to her man. It went down the line till it ran dry, which didn’t take long.

  But that wasn’t the only flask or bottle going around. Frederick and Helen had a swig of distilled lightning. “Somebody in line’s gonna get too pickled to be able to say his ‘I do’s,” Frederick predicted, smacking his lips.

  “Well, if he is, his woman’ll set him straight.” Helen spoke as if that were a law of nature. To her, it probably was.

  When the line didn’t move as fast as Fred
erick thought it should have, he said, “How come they didn’t hire more judges who could hitch people?”

  “Don’t be silly. They’re white folks,” Helen answered. “They’re too dumb to see we’d all want to do this.”

  “Yeah,” Frederick said with a sigh. A lot of whites honestly believed Negroes and copperskins were no more than animals that happened to be especially useful because they walked erect and had hands. And the whites had done their best to ensure that slaves stayed animallike by making it hard—sometimes impossible—for them to learn to read and write and cipher. Then, seeing how ignorant their colored workers were, they had no trouble deciding slaves truly were stupid.

  When he and Helen finally got into the justice of the peace’s parlor, they had forms to fill out before they could go through the ceremony. A secretary did stand by to help illiterate couples. That wasn’t because of the influx of newly freed slaves; quite a few whites who intended to marry also lacked their letters (though far fewer, proportionally, than was true among copperskins and Negroes).

  Frederick and Helen also had to pay the one-eagle fee required to make things official. Frederick proudly dropped a fat silver coin onto the tabletop. Its sweet ring told the world—and the secretary—it was genuine. The functionary filled in the blank lines on a form in a receipt book, tore it out, and handed it to Frederick. “Here you are, Mr. Radcliff,” he said, for all the world as if he were dealing with a white man, and an important white man at that.

  “Thank you kindly,” Frederick answered, as if he were an important white man. Hearing and understanding that tone, Helen set a hand on his arm. They beamed at each other.

  The newly married couple in line in front of them—he a mulatto, she a copperskin with strong cheekbones and long, lustrous blue-black hair—came out of the justice of the peace’s chamber hand in hand. Both of them were beaming, too. “Congratulations,” Frederick said.

  “Thanks, friend. Same to you,” the man replied.