Liberating Atlantis

XXII

Jeremiah Stafford was drunk. Even though Slug Hollow had that miserable wreck of a tavern, the place no longer held spirits or wine or beer. The insurrectionists-or maybe the locals, as they decamped-had made off with its stock in trade. Such impediments did not stop a determined man. Stafford had paid a cavalry sergeant half an eagle for a jug of barrel-tree rum, and proceeded to get outside of as much of it as he could.

It was harsh stuff. It burned all the way down. He would feel like death come morning, or maybe a little worse than that. Right this minute, he didn't care.

He did care that the cheap, fierce rum wasn't doing what he wanted it to do. Like so many men, he drank to forget. But he still remembered. The more he poured down, the more sharply he seemed to remember, too.

He'd told Leland Newton the slaves would have to be free. Worse, he'd been cold sober when he did it. I can take it back, he thought. Newton would never be able to prove the words had come out of his mouth. Prove it or not, though, they would both know. And it was true. It might be loathsome-it was loathsome! sweet Jesus, was it loathsome!-but it was true.

"They'll kill me," he mumbled as he staggered through Slug Hollow's narrow, fern-choked streets. "They'll murder me." No one had ever murdered a Consul of the United States of Atlantis. No one had even tried to assassinate one. There'd been brawls on the Senator floor, but that wasn't the same thing. No, not even close.

Of course, no Consul of the USA had ever tried to tell half his country that it couldn't go on the way it had for the past two hundred years and more. If-no, when-Stafford tried to do that, how many people would start loading their muskets?

How many people lived south of the Stour? How many of them weren't Negroes or copperskins? Stafford laughed raucously. An easy calculation, even for a drunk man: enough to make pretty sure one of them would get him. You couldn't stop a determined man. Stafford laughed some more. Frederick Radcliff, damn his black hide and blacker heart, sure had proved that.

"Radcliffs!" Stafford muttered. "Radcliffes!" He pronounced the e the second time. He laughed some more. He was part Radcliff himself. So was Newton. Few prominent people in Atlantis weren't. Few indeed-no matter what color they were!

Why couldn't Victor Radcliff have kept it in his trousers? Stafford took it out of his trousers and watered some of the ferns that had sprung up since Slug Hollow was abandoned. Or maybe the ferns had been here all along-in a pisspot hole in the ground like this one, who could say for sure? Come to that, who cared?

A big green katydid, long as one of his fingers, hopped away and disappeared under a rotting board. This was the back of beyond, all right. In most towns, mice and rats had supplanted the native Atlantean bugs. Not here, not yet. Maybe not for a long time, either. By all the signs, Slug Hollow was going back to the wilderness from which it had sprung.

Stafford veered around a corner. He stopped short-so short that he almost fell over. Someone else was promenading through the streets of Slug Hollow. The nerve of the fellow!

A second look told the Consul promenading wasn't the right word. The other man listed like a ship on a windswept sea. He was as drunk as Stafford was. He might have been drunker, if such a thing was possible.

Evidently it was, because he needed longer to notice Stafford than Stafford had to notice him. When he did, a sozzled grin slowly spread across his copperskinned face. "What are you doing here, you shun-son-of a bitch?" he asked.

"I could ashk-ask-you the same question, Lorenzo," Stafford said.

"I can come here," the insurrectionists' war leader replied. "Slug Hollow isn't yours."

"It isn't yours, either," Stafford said. "It doesn't belong to anybody any more."

Lorenzo's grin got wider. "Who'd want it?" He pulled a small, flat bottle from the waistband of his trousers. "Have a snort?"

"Take one of mine." Stafford held out the larger jug he was carrying. Each man drank from the other's liquor. Lorenzo's bottle held whisky every bit as raw and snarling as Stafford's rum.

"Whoosh!" Lorenzo wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "That's fine stuff!" He had to be drunk as a lord to say such a thing. Stafford at least knew he was drinking slop. It didn't stop him, or even slow him down, but he knew it.

I could kill him, Stafford thought. Lorenzo wouldn't expect a sudden attack. But what good would it do? The rebels would only find someone else, and the new man might prove smarter.

And Stafford realized the copperskin was eyeing him in a peculiar and unpleasant way. "I could cut your heart out like I was butchering a shoat," Lorenzo said.

"You could try," Stafford said, trying to steady his feet under him.

"Ahh, what's the use?" Lorenzo said. "You bastards might find somebody who really knows what he's doing."

That set Stafford laughing. "I was thinking the same thing about you," he said.

"Well, fuck you, then!" the copperskin exclaimed. A couple of seconds later, he started laughing again, too. "You son of a bitch. God damn me to hell and gone if we ain't pretty much alike after all."

"Fuck you!" Stafford said-what could be more offensive than hearing you were like a rebel slave?

But what if it was true? They were both drunker than a leader had any business getting. Their thoughts had been running down the same track, as if in lockstep. Maybe copperskin chiefs in Terranova and black kinglets in Africa had to worry about the same kinds of things as white Consuls and emperors in Atlantis and Europe. And, when they worried about them, maybe they came up with the same kinds of answers. If they did…

"Sweet, suffering Jesus," Stafford whispered. If that was true, maybe-just maybe-liberating the slaves in Atlantis wouldn't be the catastrophe he'd always dreaded. Which didn't mean it wouldn't turn into some other catastrophe. And which also didn't mean he could convince the rest of the whites south of the Stour that it wouldn't be exactly the catastrophe they'd always feared.

But it did mean he would have to try.

White men always said copperskins drank like fish. Frederick Radcliff knew he had good reason to distrust anything white men said about the people they'd enslaved. That didn't mean he hadn't seen the same thing: not from every copperskin he'd known, and not all the time, but from a good many, and more often than from Negroes or whites.

He couldn't remember when he'd seen anyone of any color worse for wear than Lorenzo was now. The copperskin's hands trembled. The whites of his eyes were almost as yellow as egg yolks. Like fertile egg yolks, they were tracked with red. Even inside Frederick's tent, Lorenzo squinted as if the dim light were much too bright. He spoke in something close to a whisper-the sound of his own voice seemed enough to hurt his ears. He moved very carefully, as though pieces might break off if he bumped into anything.

"Hell of a spree," Frederick remarked, his tone as neutral as he could make it.

"And so?" Lorenzo replied. Frederick had never heard a whispered snarl before.

"You be able to talk to the white folks when we start dickering again?" Frederick asked. That was the only question that counted.

Lorenzo gave back the ghost of a grin. "Yes, Mother."

"Ahhh…" Frederick made a disgusted noise, down deep in his throat. No matter what Lorenzo thought, he did need to know such things.

But the copperskin went on, "Matter of fact, I've been talkin' with 'em while I was drunk."

"What? With one of their soldiers in Slug Hollow?" Frederick was glad his marshal felt like talking with a white man instead of trying to murder him. Even drunk, Lorenzo was much too likely to succeed. And if he did, that was much too likely to touch the fighting off again.

Lorenzo shook his head, then winced: sure as the devil, moving anything must have hurt. "Nah," he said. "With one of the big fellas-that Stafford asswipe."

"You… talked with… Jeremiah Stafford?" Disbelief clogged the way Frederick's words came out. The Negro couldn't imagine why the war leader hadn't hurled himself at the southern Consul's throat.

No matter what Frederick couldn't imagine, Lorenzo nodded… gingerly. "Sure did," he said. "He was as toasted as I was, pretty near. Had some rum that'd strip the paint off a wall in nothin' flat." He smacked his lips, remembering.

"How about that?" Frederick said. Along with Isn't that interesting?, it was one of the handful of phrases that wouldn't land anybody in trouble. A plantation owner's black butler often found a use for phrases like that.

"Yeah. How about that?" In Lorenzo's mouth, by contrast, the phrase became one of wonder. "You know something else? He ain't such a bad fellow."

"How about that?" Frederick repeated. Now wonder filled his voice, too. Lorenzo couldn't have surprised him more if he'd said that Jeremiah Stafford was really a woman under his clothes.

"It's a fact. Damned if it ain't," the copperskin declared.

It was no such thing. It was what Lorenzo thought right this minute. Frederick understood the difference, whether Lorenzo did or not. What Frederick didn't come within miles of understanding was why Lorenzo thought so right this minute. Since he didn't, he asked him.

"Why? I'll tell you why-on account of him and me, we think the same way," Lorenzo answered.

If that wasn't a judgment on the copperskin, what would be? Frederick had no idea. "How do you mean?" he inquired.

"Well, I'll tell you-it was like this," Lorenzo said. "When I seen him, first thing I thought was I ought to murder this stinking shithead."

"I believe that," Frederick said. It was almost the first thing Lorenzo'd said that he did believe.

"And you know what?" the war leader continued. "First thing he thought was I should murder this God-damned copperskin."

"I believe that, too," Frederick said. As far as he could see, the only reason Consul Stafford didn't want to murder every Negro and copperskin in the USA was that, if he did, nobody would be left to do the hard, sweaty work white folks didn't care to do for themselves. Stafford scared him more than any of his other opponents. He asked, "Why didn't you try? Why didn't he try?" If they were both falling-down drunk, what could possibly have held them back?

Lorenzo proceeded to tell him: "I didn't, on account of I was worried that, if I just left him there dead, the white bastards were liable to come up with somebody who's smarter and meaner."

"Mm," Frederick said-even How about that? wouldn't do. Stretching his mind, he could imagine the whites coming up with somebody smarter than Stafford, though the Consul from Cosquer was nobody's fool. But meaner? Frederick didn't think such a thing was possible. He hoped it wasn't.

"And do you know what?" Lorenzo said. "Do you know?"

"No. What?" Frederick said.

"He told me the only reason he didn't go for me was because he was afraid we'd find somebody better. Is that funny, or is that funny?"

"That's funny, all right," Frederick agreed, though he didn't feel like laughing. Could he replace Lorenzo at need? If something happened to the copperskin, he'd have to try. Would any other insurrectionist make as good a general? Frederick Radcliff feared the answer was no.

"He gave me some of his rum to drink, and I gave him some of the tanglefoot I had." Lorenzo shook his head again: small motions this time, ones that might not hurt so much. "I was a fool to mix 'em. My damned head wouldn't want to fall off so bad if I stuck to whiskey."

"You drink enough of it, and it'll get to you any which way," Frederick said.

"Well, yeah, but…" Lorenzo sighed. "You know what I want now? I want the scale of the snake that bit me, that's what. Got any?"

"Not in here," Frederick said.

"I'm gonna go get me some, then." Lorenzo turned back toward the tent flap.

"Take it easy this time," Frederick warned.

"Yes, Mother," the copperskin said once more. He added, "I pour down that much shit two days in a row, I'm liable to wake up dead tomorrow morning."

"Doesn't stop some people," Frederick said. More than a few of the people it didn't stop were copperskins.

But Lorenzo said, "I bet Stafford's lookin' for the scale of the snake right now, too. Like I say, he's quite a fella." Away he went, muttering a low-voiced curse at the bright sunshine outside.

"Quite a fella," Frederick echoed. He wished he did have something strong inside the tent now. He didn't feel like getting drunk, but he sure could have used a knock.

Things were going better than Leland Newton had dreamt they could. His colleague from Cosquer had stuck to his agreement that the slaves in the USA would have to be freed. Newton hadn't really expected that. He knew Stafford had got head-over-heels drunk after agreeing, but he hadn't thought even getting drunk would make him go on.

Go on Stafford did, though. Something might have happened while he was drunk. If it had, the Consul from Cosquer didn't want to talk about it. Newton had probed a couple of times, as discreetly as he knew how. He wasn't discreet enough. Stafford rebuffed every query.

Newton did notice Stafford and Lorenzo the copperskin eyeing each other whenever the two sides met in the tumbledown tavern. They still differed, often loudly, but they didn't seem ready-no, eager-to go at each other with knives any more. Newton asked Stafford about that, too.

"Oh, he's a rotten copperskin, but he's not such a bad fellow," the other Consul answered.

"You never said anything like that before," Newton observed.

Stafford only shrugged. "If we're going to make this work, we need to make it work," he replied, and Newton couldn't very well quarrel with that.

Agreeing that Negroes and copperskins needed to be free turned out to be the easy part of the bargain. Agreeing on what that freedom meant and how far it should stretch proved much harder.

Frederick Radcliff knew what he wanted. "If we're gonna be equal, we gotta be equal," he said, over and over again. "Anything a white man can do, a black man or a copperskin has to be able to do. If you can vote, we can vote. If you can make contracts, we can make contracts. If you go to school, we go to school with you. We especially need to go to school, on account of you people wouldn't let us do that for so long."

That especially made Consul Stafford stir. "If you want to be equal, you shouldn't get to claim you especially deserve to do something."

Radcliff looked back at him. "Haven't you been saying we especially can't marry white folks?"

Stafford turned red. "Miscegenation is contrary to nature."

"Who told you?" the leader of the insurrection retorted. "Sure never bothers white men when they feel like laying colored women. If you don't believe me, you oughta ask my grandfather."

That made Stafford turn redder. "There's a difference," he mumbled.

"How come?" Lorenzo asked him. "Miscegenation either way, ain't it? Don't matter whether a white man sticks it in or a white woman gets it stuck into her."

"You are crude, sir," Newton told him. His own ears felt as if they were on fire-he wasn't used to such blunt talk.

"Fucking is crude," Lorenzo answered. "Don't need fancy clothes to do it in. Hell, clothes just get in the way."

Newton did his best to turn the subject: "Maybe we can make a bargain. If you give up the right to intermarry, we can consider granting you preferential access to schooling."

"Yes. That might be possible." Stafford almost fell over himself agreeing. He didn't like the idea of educated Negroes and copperskins in the USA. But he liked the idea of their walking down the aisle with white women even less. That was what politics was all about: yielding something you didn't care for so you wouldn't have to accept something you really couldn't stand.

The proposition made Frederick Radcliff and Lorenzo hesitate, anyhow. They put their heads together and argued in low voices. At last, Radcliff said, "Let's talk some more in the mornin', if that's all right by you. We got to take this back to our people, see how they feel about it."

"Fair enough," Newton said before Stafford could respond. The other Consul didn't object. Newton hadn't thought he would: Stafford might recognize the need for these bargaining sessions, but that didn't mean he cared for them.

After Radcliff and Lorenzo had left, Stafford turned to Newton and asked, "How would you like your sister or your daughter marrying a nigger?"

"I wouldn't like it much," Newton answered honestly. "I don't think any of the women would like the notion very much, either. I doubt whether many white women would. That's why I hope the insurrectionists will give up their claim to intermarriage in exchange for schooling."

"Hmp. You've got some sense, anyhow. Who would have thought so?" Stafford managed a crooked grin.

"May I speak to this point?" Colonel Sinapis asked.

Newton and Stafford both eyed him in surprise. Neither intermarriage nor education had much to do with soldiering, which was his province. But Newton said, "By all means, Colonel," and Stafford nodded.

"Thank you, your Excellencies," Sinapis said. "In Europe we have only a handful of copperskins and Negroes-not enough for people to get excited about. What we have instead is a great plenty of Jews."

"We have some here, too," Newton said. "We treat them more or less like any other white men." Consul Stafford nodded again. Newton finished, "My secretary, Mr. Ricardo, is a Jew, and a very able man."

"I have seen what you do here. Even in your army you have some officers who are Jews-not many, but some. In Europe, this would never happen." By the way the colonel sounded, he approved of the European practice. But he went on, "I understand why this is so, too. You have not so many Jews here. And you have so much dislike for colored people, not much for Jews is left over."

"That's an… interesting way of looking at things," Consul Newton said uncomfortably. It made more sense than he wished it did.

"But what's your point, Colonel?" Stafford asked.

"Ah. My point, yes." Before coming to it, Balthasar Sinapis made a small production of lighting a cigar. Once it was drawing well, he went on, "In my lifetime, European laws against intermarriage with Jews have mostly fallen into disuse. Some people said the sky would fall or the Antichrist would come after this happened, but the world still goes on as it always did. Maybe things would turn out the same way here."

"Maybe they would," Newton said thoughtfully. "We can hope so, anyhow."

"I wouldn't bet anything I wasn't ready to lose," Stafford said. "Marrying Jews, at least you're marrying money. Marrying a nigger…" His disgusted look told what he thought of that.

"No one would make anybody marry someone of a different color," Newton said. "The question is whether it ought to be legally possible."

"I know what the question is," Stafford replied. "I know what the answer ought to be, too."

"When you make a treaty to settle a war, you do not always get everything you want," Colonel Sinapis said.

"I understand that. But I'd like to get some of what I want," Consul Stafford said.

"So would the Negroes and copperskins," Newton reminded him. Stafford's expression said he didn't need-or, more likely, didn't want-reminding.

Every time Frederick Radcliff walked into the tumbledown tavern to talk with the white Consuls and colonel, he felt like a trainer sticking his head into a tiger's mouth. He'd come away safe every time up till now, but things only had to go wrong once and…

He felt doubly nervous walking in there this particular morning. It must have shown, because Lorenzo said, "Don't worry. This is what we decided. If the white folks don't like it, that's their hard luck."

Frederick shook his head. "Liable to be everybody's hard luck. That's what I'm worried about."

"We whipped them," Lorenzo said. "Let them sweat."

With an effort, Frederick made himself nod. The white men sat there waiting for him and Lorenzo to join them. Frederick didn't trust any of them. Consul Stafford was an open enemy. Consul Newton was less of one, at least openly, but Frederick wondered what he thought down deep of Negroes and copperskins. As for Colonel Sinapis… Maybe it was Frederick's imagination, but he thought the foreign officer looked down on the two Consuls almost as much as they looked down on the uprisen slaves they faced. That puzzled Frederick. Did coming from Europe count for so much? He thought Colonel Sinapis thought it did.

"Good morning," Newton said as Frederick and Lorenzo sat down across the table from him. "What have you decided about my proposal?"

After a deep breath, Frederick answered, "Sorry, but we aren't going to take it."

Newton looked as if he'd bitten into something sour. "Are you sure? Many-even most-of your people would benefit from education. Only a handful would take advantage of intermarrying, and chances are some of them would end up sorry they'd ever tried it."

"You may be right. You likely are. But that isn't the point," Frederick said.

"Oh? Suppose you tell me what is, then." Newton's voice was light and clear, as usual, but the Consul was provoked enough to show the iron underneath, which he seldom did.

Frederick took another deep breath. He needed one. He tried to hold his own voice steady as he answered, "Point is, if we're gonna be equal with white folks, we got to be equal every way there is. We deserve to get schooled same as white folks if we're equal. And we deserve the right to marry no matter what color somebody is. If we say you can take that away from us, what are we sayin'? We're sayin' you're better'n we are, an' all the talk about bein' equal is just that-talk."

The white men glowered at him and Lorenzo. Lorenzo glowered right back. Frederick only sat there waiting. Slowly, Consul Newton said, "It's hard to negotiate with you if you give us nothing to negotiate about."

"That's what I'm trying to tell you. That's why we rose up," Frederick said. "How can you negotiate about freedom? Either a man's free, or he ain't. If we got to be free, we got to be all the way free."

"A matter of principle." Consul Stafford sounded less scornful than he often did.

"That's right. A matter of principle." Frederick nodded. The white man had come out with what he was trying to say.

"We have our own principles, you know," Stafford said.

"Sure you do." That was Lorenzo, answering before Frederick could speak. "You can buy us and sell us and lay our women whenever you've got a stiff dick you don't know what to do with. Only you can't, not any more. That's how come we rose up, too."

Stafford didn't explode, the way Frederick thought he might. All he said was, "Getting this past the Senate will be harder than you seem to think."

"Tell 'em you're doing what's right," Frederick said. "It's the truth."

"As if that matters," Leland Newton muttered, more to himself than to anyone else.

"It better matter," Frederick said. "If it don't, we got to start over. An' startin' over means the Free Republic of Atlantis an' lots more shootin'."

"I told you before-we can start shooting again if you push us hard enough. You won't like what happens if we do," Stafford said.

"You won't like it, either," Lorenzo promised, and exchanged more glares with the Consul from Cosquer. But they weren't the same kind of glares as they had been before the two leaders drank together on the overgrown streets of Slug Hollow. Then, Stafford might have been scowling at a dangerous dog, Lorenzo eyeing a fierce red-crested eagle. Now each recognized the other as a man. That much was plain. Whether such recognition improved things was, unfortunately, a different question.

"We rose up on account of freedom," Frederick said. "If we could've got it without fighting, we would've done that. But it wasn't about to happen-you folks know it wasn't, and you know why, too."

"Do you see the day, then, when one of the Consuls of the United States of Atlantis will be a Negro and the other a copperskin?" Jeremiah Stafford didn't sound as if he saw that day, but he didn't-quite-sound as if he were mocking Frederick, either.

Since he didn't, Frederick judged he deserved a serious answer: "Not any time soon. More white folks than there are colored, and people just naturally vote for their own. But maybe the day will come when nobody cares what color a man is, as long as he's a good man and he knows what he's doin'."

"A noble sentiment," Consul Newton said softly.

"Well, so it is," Stafford agreed. He looked across the table at Frederick. "You'd better not hold your breath waiting for that day, though."

Frederick looked back at him. "No need to worry about that, your Excellency. I don't aim to."

"I don't care if a copperskin gets to be Consul," Lorenzo said. "What I care about is whether it's against the law for him to try. Long as he can try-long as nobody ties him to the whipping post and stripes his back for even thinking about it-I won't fuss. Same with marryin' out of your color: I don't reckon it'll happen real often, but there shouldn't be a law against it."

"That's right," Frederick said. "That's just right. That's how it ought to be."

"Easy enough for you to say so, out here in the middle of nowhere," Consul Stafford said. "As I told you a little while ago, it won't be so easy to convince the Senate in New Hastings."

"Do we have to bring the war across the mountains, then? We can do that." Frederick wasn't really sure the insurrectionists could do any such thing, but he wanted to keep the white men worried.

By the looks on their faces, he did. "Even if we give you everything you say you want, you may not end up happy with it," Newton said.

"If the law says we're free, we'll be happy with it," Frederick answered.

"If the law says we're equal, we'll be happy," Lorenzo added.

Colonel Sinapis suddenly spoke up: "Not matter what the law says, white men will keep running Atlantis for a long time to come. You are right-there are more of them than there are of you. And they have more money. They have more experience running things, too. You may not be slaves in law any more, but you will not at once become equals, no matter what the law says."

Frederick Radcliff glanced over at Lorenzo. The foreign colonel's words seemed much too likely for comfort. Lorenzo spread his hands, as if to say he felt the same way. But what came out of his mouth was, "Chance we've got to take."

"I think so, too," Frederick said. "We have to start somewhere."

Leland Newton had drafted the accord that would, with luck, put an end to what almost everyone these days was calling the Great Servile Insurrection. He wrote it in language more simple than he would have used most of the time. He was a barrister; keeping things simple wasn't something he normally did. But, while Frederick Radcliff could read and write, he wasn't trained in the law. Newton didn't want him to be able to claim he'd signed something he didn't fully understand.

"Why not?" Stafford said when Newton remarked on that. "It'd served the damned nigger right."

"We came to Slug Hollow to stop trouble, not to stir up more of it," Newton said.

"We came west to stamp out the insurrection," Stafford replied, "and look what a good job of it we did."

"If we bring home a peace the whole country can live with, we will have done well enough here," Newton said.

"If." The other Consul bore down heavily on the word. "And if the whites south of the Stour rebel because of the peace we've brought home, how well will we have done here? That may yet happen, you know."

"I do intend to propose that they be compensated for the loss of what has been their property," Newton said.

"That may do some good. Then again, it may not," Stafford replied. "If living in houses were to be made illegal tomorrow, how happy would you be to get money for a house you had to leave?"

"Happier than if I didn't get any, I suppose," Newton answered.

"You would still be angry, though, wouldn't you? You might be angry enough to go to war about it," Stafford said.

"I hope not." Newton heard less conviction in his own voice than he would have liked. He gathered strength as he went on, "White men south of the Stour can't go back to living in the house they had before. Their neighbors will burn it down around their ears if they try. You know that's so."

Unwillingly, his colleague nodded. "But a good many of them don't understand that it's so," Stafford said.

"We've got to convince them. You've got to convince them," Newton said. "They admire you. They respect you. They believe you. They believe in you."

"And much good any of that will do me. As soon as I tell them they really do have to give up their slaves, they'll start plotting to assassinate me. And if you think I'm exaggerating, you'd better think again," Stafford said.

Newton didn't think the other Consul was. He knew how high passions ran among slaveholders. "Maybe what's happened to our army-and what's happened to some of them-will give them the idea that times have changed," Newton said hopefully.

"Maybe." Stafford didn't sound as if he believed it for a minute.

"If you feel the way you do, why are you signing the agreement?" Newton asked.

"This will be bad. Not signing would be worse," Stafford said. "I can see that much. I'm not a blind man, no matter how often you've called me one on the Consuls' dais. But you and the insurrectionists seem sure angels will sing hosannas as soon as everyone's name goes on that paper. I am here to tell you things won't be so simple."

Do I think everything will be wonderful once we have an agreement? Newton wondered. Maybe he did. And maybe Stafford was right to have his doubts. But he was also right about something else: "Not signing would be worse."

"I said so." Jeremiah Stafford gestured impatiently. "But that doesn't mean signing will be good. It just means signing won't be so bad. You can say right away that a man is free. How long does it take before he truly believes he's free, though? And how long before his neighbors believe it?"

He was full of hard questions this morning. Newton wished he himself were as full of answers. He said, "All we can do is find out." He handed the other Consul the paper he'd been working on. "Does this say everything we need to say? Is it clear? Have I forgotten anything?"

Stafford perused it. He suggested two or three small changes. The points he raised were cogent; Newton made the changes without a murmur. His colleague sighed. "Now I suppose it is as good as it can be. Whether it should be…" Stafford sighed again. "I think not, but events have overtaken me."

"General Cornwallis must have said the same thing when Victor Radcliff trapped him in Croydon," Newton remarked.

"He ended up doing well for himself-and for England-in India," Stafford said. "Atlantis can't send me so far away. When the country learns what we're about to do here today, it may wish it could."

"The Treaty of Slug Hollow, or perhaps the Slug Hollow Agreement. Schoolchildren from now till the end of time will have to learn about it, and about the people who signed it," Newton said.

"But what will they learn?" Stafford asked. "Will teachers say we were heroes, or will they call us a pack of fools and thrash all the little brats who can't remember how we made a hash of things?"

More hard questions. Newton could only shrug. "We'll have to do it and then find out, that's all," he said. "Are you ready?"

"No, but we're going to do it anyhow," the other Consul answered. "Then we have to persuade the Senate not to crucify us because we did it. And good luck on that score, your Excellency."

"We'll both need all the luck we can find," Newton said. "So will the United States of Atlantis." He carefully folded the Slug Hollow Agreement and put it in a jacket pocket. It meant nothing till it was signed. But that moment was only a few steps away now.