Liberating Atlantis (53 page)

“Like I said, chance I take.” Frederick hoped he sounded calmer than he felt. “And why shouldn’t they love me, or at least like me some? I bet I’m kin to half of ’em, maybe more.”

For some reason, neither Stafford nor Newton seemed to want to answer that. Colonel Sinapis, by contrast, laughed out loud. If looks could have killed, the ones both Consuls sent him would have left the USA looking for a new army commander. But nobody tried any more to tell Frederick he shouldn’t accompany the Consuls back to New Hastings.

 

Jeremiah Stafford had shared railway cars with Negroes before. Porters fetched food and drink and pipeweed to passengers who needed them. He’d always taken those porters as much for granted as seats or windows: they were part of the railroad’s accouterments. It wasn’t as if he had to treat them like human beings.

Sharing a railway car with Negro
passengers
was something else again. During the course of the fighting and the talks, he’d come to respect Frederick Radcliff. Maybe that respect grew not least because of Frederick’s famous white grandfather. Regardless of the reason, it was real.

But Frederick’s woman—Stafford didn’t care to think of her as his wife—was nothing but a dumpy, rather frumpy, middle-aged nigger. Frederick might have reasons for loving her. Whatever they were, Stafford couldn’t see them.

She didn’t put on airs, anyhow. That was the one good thing he could find to say about her. But, as the train rattled and jounced east toward the Green Ridge Mountains, he became more and more certain he could smell her—and Frederick. What white man didn’t know that niggers stank?

He wanted to say something. Had more southerners sat in the car with him, he would have. If either Leland Newton or Balthasar Sinapis had two working nostrils, though, neither man gave any sign of it. Sinapis smoked cigar after cigar, and the pipeweed he favored smelled worse than any Negro ever born. Stafford wanted to open a window, but didn’t want wood smoke and soot flying in.

And so he stayed where he was and stayed quiet, sizzling inside. Neither Frederick Radcliff nor Helen—Stafford supposed he ought to think of her as Helen Radcliff, but the idea of real slave marriages was as repugnant to him as the idea of slaves with surnames—gave him any open cause to complain. All they did was look out the window and exclaim at the scenery every so often. A white couple on their first journey by train might have acted the same way.

“What kind of reception do you think we’ll get when we come into settled country?” Newton asked as the train started into a pass that would take it through the mountains.

“The terms we made will have gone before us, eh?” Stafford said.

“Well, of course. We wired them to New Hastings, after all,” the other Consul replied. “Wherever the wires reach, people will have heard about them.”

Stafford nodded. He knew as much—who didn’t? But he was trying to pretend ignorance. And he had his reasons: “In that case, your Excellency, we should count ourselves lucky if they don’t drag us off the train and lynch us.”

By Newton’s gulp, he hadn’t expected Stafford to be so blunt. “You are joking, I hope,” he said.

“I only wish I were,” Stafford said.

He hadn’t intended that Frederick Radcliff should hear him, but the Negro did. “Welcome to the club, your Excellency,” Radcliff said.

“Huh? What club?” Stafford asked.

“Any time a black goes out amongst whites, he knows he’s a dead man if he gets out of line,” said the leader of the insurrection. “Same goes for copperskins, too. Now you know how it feels.”

“He’s got you there,” Newton said with a sly chuckle.

“Huzzah,” Stafford answered sourly. He feared he’d feel like a hunted animal till the train got north of the Stour—if he lived that long. He didn’t care whether slaves felt that way all the time—or had felt that way all the time—till his own signature on that damned sheet of paper acknowledged that they were slaves no more. You needed to keep such people in line. Keeping them afraid went a long way toward doing just that. But white men had always been the lords of creation in Atlantis. Stafford hated feeling any other way.

He tensed when the train stopped in a hamlet called West Duxbury for wood and water. No ravening mob appeared. West Duxbury didn’t have enough people to make a ravening mob. But someone flung a rock through a window as the train pulled out of the station.

Frederick Radcliff and Helen sat there with the air of people who’d been through worse in their time. Consul Stafford counted himself lucky to have got off so lightly. Leland Newton was the one who let out a startled yip. He almost jumped out of his seat. All in all, he reminded Stafford of a cat that had just made the sudden and unwelcome acquaintance of a rocking chair.

Sure enough, smoke did pour into the car. It masked whatever odor the Negroes in there might have had. It also made Stafford’s eyes water and made him cough. He felt as if he’d been puffing on a pipe without letup for a week, the only difference being that he didn’t get the little lift pipeweed brought with it. All things considered, he would rather have kept the window intact . . . he supposed.

More towns, bigger towns, and more stops lay ahead. How long would it be before somebody decided a rock wasn’t good enough? How long before somebody pulled out an eight-shooter, or maybe a rifle musket? No, Stafford hadn’t been joking about any of that. He knew how white people down here would feel about setting slaves free.

Life was a miserable bastard, all right. But what other choice did you have? At the moment, Stafford knew exactly what other choice he had. Outraged southern men could pull him from the train and hang him or burn him or simply tear him to pieces. Living seemed better . . . if he could get away with it.

 

A conductor whose wool jacket was resplendent with polished brass buttons strode into the car and bawled, “New Hastings! Coming into New Hastings!”

“Thank God!” Leland Newton said. No one in the battered railway carriage seemed angry that he came close to taking the name of the Lord in vain. He knew why not, too: the others were just as glad to make it to the capital in one piece as he was.

Stafford had warned that it would be bad. Newton had thought his colleague was exaggerating to make liberating Negroes and copperskins seem a worse idea than it really was. But the Consul from Cosquer turned out to know what he was talking about. White men south of the Stour really were up in arms at the idea of turning their bondsmen loose.

White women, too. Newton shuddered at the memory of all those screaming, furious faces. Some of the things they called him would have made a deep-sea sailor blanch. Some of the things they called Frederick Radcliff made what they called him seem endearments by comparison.

Senators were chosen because they had a longer view and were better able to deliberate than ordinary people. So Atlantean charter theory said, anyhow. In practice, as Newton knew too well, Senators often became Senators because they were better able to say what most people in their state already thought. If southern Senators were better able to say what those women had been screaming, they would meet this train with bayonets and with cannon loaded with canister.

It pulled into the station. Gray-uniformed Atlantean soldiers did stand on the platform with fixed bayonets. But they faced away from the train, not towards it. They were there to protect the Consuls and Frederick Radcliff and his wife, not to mete out summary justice on them.

The captain commanding the soldiers called, “Don’t you worry, folks! Nothing’s gonna harm you, not while I’m around.” He spoke like a man from Hanover, from the north, which meant—Newton hoped it meant—he had no use for slavery. The Consul presumed that was Colonel Sinapis’ doing. He hoped so, at any rate. Sinapis had got off the train early. Maybe he had a good idea of what they’d go through on the way to New Hastings. Or maybe he just wanted to buy himself a little more time before he had to explain to his superiors at the Ministry of War why he hadn’t crushed the insurrection.

Consul Newton breathed a sigh of relief once he got off the train. As soon as he was traveling by himself, he would be pretty safe. Consuls were the highest magistrates in the USA, yes, but how many people knew what they looked like? They didn’t put their faces on coins like European sovereigns or Terranovan strongmen. They were citizens of the republic over which they presided.

As far as Newton was concerned, things were supposed to work like that. He worried about the way photographs—and woodcuts and lithographs based on them—would change politics. Wouldn’t they make it impossible for anyone who wasn’t handsome to serve his country? And wouldn’t they make it easy for a good-looking scoundrel to subvert freedom?

All that would be trouble for another day, though. The day they already had brought plenty of trouble of its own.

Consul Newton got a better notion of how much trouble it brought when he spent a few big copper cents on the day’s newspapers. The papers in New Hastings were always unrestrained—which was putting it mildly. Today they outdid themselves. Some of them called him and Consul Stafford heroes. To others, they were the worst traitors since Habakkuk Biddiscombe, who’d gone over to King George in the middle of the struggle for freedom and fought harder against the Atlantean Assembly’s army than most of the redcoats.

The
New Hastings Chronicle
showed a front-page cartoon of a Negro who looked something like Frederick Radcliff and something like a gorilla. The caption was NEXT CONSUL OF THE USA? Presumably to no one’s surprise, the
Chronicle
didn’t care for the notion.

Even if everything went well, how long would it be until more than a handful of white men were willing to vote for a Negro? Frederick Radcliff himself didn’t think the day would come any time soon. Newton agreed with him. That might be too bad, which made it no less true.

He found more guards around the Senate building, which also housed the two Consuls. They, or at least some of them, knew who he was. “You really gonna turn them people loose?” one of them demanded, in accents identical to Consul Stafford’s.

“Yes, we are, and you just told me why,” Newton answered. The corporal sent back a blank stare. Newton spelled it out for him: “Because they
are
people, and for one man to own another is wrong.”

“Huh,” the man in gray said—a noise full of nothing but skep ticism. “Ain’t like they’re
white
people, for cryin’ out loud.”

“How would you feel about that if they owned whites and not the other way around?” Newton inquired.

“Huh,” the two-striper said again. After some deliberation, he went on, “Reckon there’d be some niggers and mudfaces who needed killing, and pretty God-damned quick, too . . . your Excellency.”

Newton had never heard a less respectful title of respect. Even so, he said, “They decided the same thing—about white people. And now, if you will excuse me . . .” He didn’t want to spend all day arguing with an underofficer about what he’d done. Sure as the devil, he’d be spending day after day arguing with one Senator after another after another.

Behind him, the corporal and his men started arguing among themselves. Some of them thought Newton had a point, anyhow. That made him feel a little better about what he and Stafford had done in Slug Hollow. Down south of the Stour, everyone seemed to want the Consuls’ scalps.

Men from Croydon and other northern states greeted Newton like a conquering hero as he walked the winding corridors of the Senate House. Yes, he did have some support, at least. A Senator from Hanover asked him, “How did you manage to get the Great Stone Face to do what was right?”

That description of his Consular colleague made Newton chuckle in spite of himself. The Great Stone Face wasn’t there any more. It had been a rocky profile—a cliffside, really—on the eastern slopes of the Green Ridge Mountains not far west of Croydon.
Had been
was the operative term: when Newton was a young man, an avalanche turned the Great Stone Face into the Great Stone Rubble Heap. But the memory of it, like memories of moles and wolves and lions, lingered on modern Atlanteans’ tongues.

And, if old paintings and woodcuts told the truth, that rocky profile did bear a certain resemblance to Consul Stafford’s. Newton feared telling the other Consul as much wouldn’t be the smartest thing he could do.

“Well, how
did
you?” the politico from Hanover persisted.

Newton chuckled again, this time on a rueful note: the distilled residue of terror. “The insurrectionists beat us,” he answered. “They didn’t just beat us, either—they could have massacred us. But they held off. Nothing like that for concentrating the mind, believe me.”

“It must be true. So the newspapers weren’t turning out their usual rubbish when they said the slaves won?” the Senator said.

“No. They weren’t.” With three words, Newton tried to conceal the fear he remembered much too well. Listening to himself, he found he was mournfully certain he’d admitted it instead.

“Well, well,” the Hanover man said. “Is the black Radcliff a man his grandfather would have approved of?”

“Do you know, I rather think he is,” Consul Newton said slowly. “You’ll see Frederick Radcliff for yourself before long, and one of the things you’ll see about him is that he knows what he wants and he doesn’t aim to turn aside till he gets it, no matter what’s in his way. To me, that sounds a lot like Victor Radcliff in the old days. How about you?”

“I suppose so,” the Senator answered. “One of the things Victor must’ve wanted was a nigger wench, eh? Might’ve been better for everybody if he hadn’t got her. We would have bought more time to work out how to deal with this mess without tearing the country apart.”

“It could be,” Newton said, but he didn’t believe it for a minute. The United States of Atlantis had been busy quarreling about slavery for longer than he’d been in public life, with no sign they were getting anywhere. The insurrection was only one more proof that they hadn’t been. And . . . “If Frederick Radcliff were never born, my guess is that some other Negro or copperskin would have kicked up an uprising anyway before very long.”