Liberating Atlantis (16 page)

“Some unofficial things might be done, though?” Duncan, by contrast, spoke in musing tones. “Give some fellows leave to return home, say? Or transfer weapons to state militias without worrying too much about paperwork? Things like that?”

“If they’re done unofficially, I don’t need to know about them,” Stafford answered. “No one needs to know about them, not officially.”

“All right, Consul. I get you.” Duncan laid a finger by the side of his nose. “Nobody will find out. We’ll do—”

Stafford held up a hand. “This discussion has been purely hypothetical, you understand. I would prefer that it stay that way. What I have not heard, I am not in the least responsible for.”

“I get you.” Major Duncan nodded. “I wouldn’t be surprised if something like that happened.”

“Well, it might be interesting if something like that did.” Now Jeremiah Stafford let the outside of his physiognomy show amusement. He felt muscles creaking under his skin; he didn’t smile all that often. “I wager the mudfaces and niggers would think it was pretty interesting, too.”

“That’s the idea, isn’t it?” Duncan sketched a salute. “A pleasure talking hypothetically with you, your Excellency.”

“Always glad to visit with someone from the old stand.” Stafford meant that. To him, New Hastings was another world. People here didn’t see things with the same simple certainties they used down in Cosquer. They had their own convictions. Those often struck Stafford as lunatic if not wicked, but the locals clung to them all the same.

The Consul left the Ministry of War: an impressive neoclassical marble pile with an even more impressive statue of Mars (done by a Frenchman who’d ended up quarreling about his fee) in front of it. In the streets around the Ministry stood a number of eateries and other shops that catered to the soldiers and civilian employees who worked there. If Stafford ever needed a cavalry saber or a waterproof oilskin cape, he knew where to get one.

A gray-uniformed sentry came to attention as Stafford loosed his horse’s reins from the hitching rail and swung up onto the animal. Then, gravely nodding in return, he rode back toward the center of town. As the horse walked along, Stafford felt the weight of history pressing down on him. Despite the New in its name, New Hastings was the oldest town in Atlantis—four centuries old now. Everyone learned the jingle “In fourteen hundred and fifty-two, Ed Radcliffe sailed the ocean blue.”

Not everyone remembered that François Kersauzon, a Breton fisherman, showed Edward Radcliffe the way to Atlantis. Cosquer, Consul Stafford’s hometown, was a Breton foundation. But it dated from after New Hastings. The Radcliffes and Radcliffs always seemed to be half a step ahead of the Kersauzons—always when it mattered most, anyhow.

And, while Cosquer grew, it never thrived the way New Hastings did. Only a few years after the first settlement, people from New Hastings had founded Bredestown, miles up the river from the coast. They’d kept pushing west ever since, too.

The great redwood church still dominated the center of New Hastings. Built before the Reformation, it had begun as a Catholic cathedral. It stayed Catholic for some years after England went Protestant but eventually conformed to the Anglican rite. The Atlantean Assembly had met there to plan the war against England . . . till the redcoats ran the Conscript Fathers out, after which they carried on as best they could from the hamlet of Honker’s Mill. Once victory was won—rather to the Atlantean Assembly’s surprise, unless Stafford missed his guess—the country’s leading lights returned to hammer out the Charter that bedeviled Atlantis to this day.

Stafford muttered under his breath. Maybe things would have gone differently, gone better, had the Senate chosen to build a new capital away from everything instead of settling down in a northern city already opposed to slavery. There was talk of it, but it had seemed too expensive to a country bedeviled by debt from the war for liberty.

He muttered again. The black grandson of Victor Radcliff demanding liberty for bondsmen? Jeremiah Stafford knew it was possible. The First Consul would have been no more immune to the lusts of the flesh than any other man. Possible or not, though, it had to be denied. If true—no, if believed true—it gave the rising too much prestige.

A constable held up a white-gloved hand. Stafford halted his horse. So did the other riders and drivers on his street. The constable turned and waved, letting cross traffic through. After a while, he held up his hand to stop it, and Stafford’s forward progress resumed. Not all of New Hastings’ notions were ancient. The Consul quite liked the traffic-control scheme.

By contrast, he could have lived without the railroad station. It resembled nothing so much as an enormous, soot-stained brick barn. The rumble from arriving and departing trains frightened horses, and the smoke their engines belched fouled the air. Yes, they made travel much faster than it had ever been before. Yes, they could haul far more people and goods than horse-drawn coaches and wagons. But they were filthy. That was the only word that fit.

He wasn’t sure he liked gas lamps, either. They threw more light than candles and lanterns, true. But they were also more dangerous. When a gas line broke and caught fire . . . Several square blocks had burned in Hanover two years before, or was it three now?

Telegraph wires crowded the sky. They had their uses. News that would have needed days, maybe weeks, to cross the country now raced at the speed of lightning. The government could have taken advantage of that to help put down this insurrection quickly. It could have, but it hadn’t. That made the wires seem even uglier to Consul Stafford than they would have otherwise. His lips moved as he silently damned Leland Newton.

Well, no matter what the other Consul thought, there were ways around things even if there weren’t ways straight through them. He’d started using some of those ways. Now he had to hope his machinations would let the local whites do the job that needed doing.

A moment later, he found his own way straight through to the Senate House and adjoining Consular residences blocked. A wagon had lost a wheel, spilling barrels and clogging the street. The pungent smell of beer hung in the air. A teamster cursed in a sonorous brogue. People milled about, trying to escape the jam.

The way around
, Jeremiah Stafford thought. He turned his own horse back the way he’d come. First to find the way out. Then to find the side streets that would, eventually, get him where he wanted to go.

 

Consul Stafford gave a newsboy a cent for a copy of the new day’s
New Hastings Strand
. “Here you are, sir,” the boy said, handing him the paper.

“Thank you kindly.” Newton held it out almost at arm’s length. The print was small, and his eyes seemed to have more trouble with it every month. He had a pair of reading glasses, but didn’t like them. They turned the more distant world to a fuzzy blur.

By wire from New Marseille
, a story boasted. It told of people fleeing to the West Coast city from plantations and smaller towns to the east.
The rampage of the colored desperadoes only continues and intensifies!
the reporter in New Marseille wrote.
Local authorities seem powerless to quell their depredations, while the national government does nothing
.

Anyone could guess where his affiliations on the question of slavery lay. But the
Strand
wasn’t a pro-slavery paper. There weren’t many of those north of the Stour. Maybe it printed this story because the choice lay between printing it and going without news. Or maybe the
Strand
had decided the uprising needed quashing even if mistreated slaves—a redundancy if ever there was one—had finally had more than they could stand.

The governor of New Marseille had proclaimed a state of emergency, the piece went on. He was drafting all able-bodied men into the state militia. He wasn’t quite begging the Atlantean soldiers in New Marseille to desert and sign up with the militia, but he was quoted as saying, “We’re looking for men experienced in handling weapons.”

Governor Donovan was also appealing for aid from other states “that share our institutions and our dangers.” Reading the rest of the front page, Consul Newton doubted whether Donovan would get as much help as he wanted. Insurrections were breaking out in the states of Cosquer and Gernika and Nouveau Redon: like forest fires in a lightning storm after a long drought. The slaveholding states east of the Green Ridge Mountains might be too busy closer to home to send men or guns off to the west.

A man in a plug hat came up to Newton and demanded, “What are you going to do about the niggers, Consul?”

No one would have spoken to Queen Victoria that way. No one would have addressed her Prime Minister like that, either. Atlanteans were convinced they were as good—and as smart—as their magistrates. The United States of Atlantis rested on that presumption of equality . . . for white men. The idea that men of other breeds might crave the same presumption hadn’t sunk in, not south of the Stour it hadn’t.

With a sigh, Newton answered, “Right now, friend, I believe I’m going to wait and see what happens next. A lot of the time, you only make things worse when you move too fast.”

“How could things
get
any worse than they are?” the man inquired.

“I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out by experiment, either,” Newton said. “One thing I’m sure of: the distance between bad and worse is a lot bigger than the difference between good and better.”

“Huh,” said the man in the plug hat. “How about the difference between bad and good? Isn’t that what we’re talking about here?”

“I don’t know. Is it?” the Consul answered. “What is good, and how would you make what you don’t think good better?”

“You’re trying to confuse things.” The man strode off in disgust. Asking questions like that hadn’t done Socrates much good, either.

If Leland Newton’s foes got sick enough of him, they wouldn’t trump up charges against him and make him drink hemlock. They were much more likely to ignore him, to do what they wanted despite justice and Atlantean legality. The Consul opened the paper to see what was on the inside pages. One of the first things that caught his eye was a gunsmith’s advertisement. That made him pause for a moment. Back in Socrates’ day, no one had carried an eight-shooter. Assassination was easier now than it had been then.

Newton shook his head, annoyed at himself. If you let the hobgoblins of modern life get to you, what could you do but spend your time hiding under the bed and quivering? The hobgoblins were there. They weren’t going to go away. You just had to keep on as if they weren’t.

And sometimes they even worked for you. When Newton went to his office in the Senate House, his secretary handed him a sheaf of telegrams and letters. “What are these, Isaac?” he asked.

Isaac Ricardo paused a moment, organizing his thoughts. He was at least as clever and capable as his principal. Newton often though he might make at least as good a Consul, too, if not for the impediment of his religion. Consul’s secretary was as high as a Jew was likely to rise in Atlantis.

“Some of them are from the southern states, calling you a hound and a swine and a snake in the ferns,” Ricardo said. “More come from the north, telling you what a stout fellow you are. After you get through those lots, the rest are the usual sort that want something from you.”

“Nothing much out of the ordinary, then,” Newton said. His mail had divided into those three categories even before this slave insurrection broke out. From what Jeremiah Stafford said, so had the other Consul’s. The only difference was that people from north of the Stour swore at Stafford, while those from his own side of the river praised him to the skies. Newton presumed the people who wanted something from Stafford could come from anywhere.

“Not
too
much out of the ordinary.” Ricardo was also relentlessly precise. “The tone of the political letters—not the begging ones and the scheming ones—seems much more impassioned than it did since the latest unpleasantness commenced.”

“Can’t say I’m surprised. Well, I’ll have a look at them.” Consul Newton shook his head ever so slightly as he went into his inner office. On second thought, his secretary, no matter how clever, no matter how capable, probably didn’t have what it took to try to lead the United States of Atlantis.
The latest unpleasantness?
Isaac Ricardo would have to become more impassioned himself if he aspired to be a political man.

Newton snorted. So far as he knew, Ricardo harbored no such aspirations. Odds were his secretary was too sensible for it. There were times—more and more of them lately, too—when Leland Newton wished he’d been sensible enough to stay away from politics himself.

He went through the stack of correspondence from the slaveholding states first. He already knew what the people who agreed with him thought: the same as he did. The people who disagreed did so in different ways.

Some of them quoted Scripture to prove he was an idiot. Others simply loaded up their pens with grapeshot and scrap metal and commenced firing. No printer would have dared put several of the day’s letters into type, not unless he wanted to spend time behind bars for obscenity. A few of the missives seemed drooled onto the page. Ricardo’s
impassioned
didn’t begin to cover it, either.

One of the less incandescent letters read,
White men are superior. Black men and copperskinned men are inferior. This being so, white men have the natural right to rule over the other races. Any lover of truth can see as much
. The author, one Zebulon James, appended
A true
Christian gentleman
to his signature.

“Well, Mr. James, any lover of truth can see you’re assuming what you wish to prove,” Newton murmured. But if he wrote that back to the true Christian gentleman, would said gentleman understand it? The odds seemed depressingly slim.

A wicked grin spread across the Consul’s face. He inked a pen.
Dear Mr. James
, he wrote,
I am in receipt of yours of the seventeenth
ultimo
, for which I thank you. Before I can act on it, I find that I require more information. Would you be good enough to tell me whether you yourself are a white man, a black man, or a copperskinned man? In any of those cases, I fear your opinion may be imperfectly objective. If perhaps you are a yellow man or a green man, you may have a more dispassionate view of the situation. Do let me know. Kind regards, Leland Newton, Consul, United States of Atlantis
.