Liberating Atlantis

XXVI

Jeremiah Stafford hated waiting. When you had to sit there twiddling your thumbs, what you were waiting for usually wasn't anything you wanted. It might be something you needed, but that was a different story. If you had a toothache, you waited for the dentist to get to work on you. Then you waited for whatever horrible things he was doing to be over. Ether was supposed to help with that torment, as it did with so many others. Stafford hadn't had to visit a tooth-drawer since the stuff came into use. He wasn't so eager to test its virtues that he wanted to visit one, either. Nobody with a full set of marbles wanted to visit the dentist.

What the Consul waited for now wasn't the cessation of pain. If the news here proved bad, though, it could end up causing more pain than all the toothaches he'd ever had put together. Bad news here could split Atlantis like a jeweler splitting a sapphire-or, less neatly, like a drunk falling out of a second-story window and breaking his leg. The second comparison seemed to Stafford to fit better. He wished it didn't.

Ever since the redcoats sailed away, New Hastings had been the place where important things happened in the USA. Now, all of a sudden, it wasn't. As history had been made in Slug Hollow (Stafford did his best to forget all the fighting preceding that bit of history), so now it would be made somewhere outside of St. Augustine, in the heat and humidity and insignificance of Gernika.

But what kind of history would be made there? That was what Stafford waited to discover, along with the rest of official New Hastings. He didn't have a flannel rag tied around his head to keep a swollen jaw from tormenting him quite so much, but he might as well have.

He was pretending to go through paperwork in his office when his secretary stuck his head in and said, "Your Excellency, a soldier wants to see you."

"A soldier?" Stafford echoed, and the secretary nodded. With a shrug, the Consul said, "All right, Ned. Send him in." Whatever the soldier wanted, talking to him was bound to be more interesting than a report on the previous fiscal year's revenues and expenses pertaining to canals.

The soldier strode in and delivered a salute as stiff as a marionette's. He was a young second lieutenant, so new in his uniform that he all but squeaked. "Your Excellency!" he said, and saluted again. "I am Lieutenant Morris Radcliffe, and I have the honor to bring you a report Colonel Sinapis has just received from Lieutenant Braun, who commands the security detail assigned to Frederick Radcliff in Gernika."

Stafford wondered which twig Morris Radcliffe represented on the family's huge, many-branched tree. He wondered how the lieutenant was related to him, and how the youngster was related to Frederick Radcliff. He also wondered what Morris Radcliffe thought of being related to a Negro.

But he wondered none of those things for more than a split second. "News from Colonel Sinapis? From this Lieutenant Braun?" he barked. "Well, out with it, man!"

"Sir? Uh, yes, sir!" Startled by Stafford's outburst, Lieutenant Radcliffe had to compose himself before he could remember what he was supposed to say. "Colonel Sinapis told me to tell you that Lieutenant Braun told him that Frederick Radcliff has arranged an end to the hostilities between whites and slaves in and around St. Augustine."

"He has arranged that?" Stafford wanted to make sure he'd got it straight. Sometimes you heard with your heart, not your ears.

"Yes, your Excellency, he has." Young Radcliffe confirmed it. "At the present moment-or at the moment Lieutenant Braun sent the telegram-there is, uh, was no fighting in Gernika. The Negroes and copperskins who had rebelled against established authority are coming in from the woods and swamps."

What else would they be coming in from? As far as Stafford knew, Gernika had precious little territory that wasn't woods or swamps. He forced his wandering wits back to the matter at hand. "Well," he said, and then "Well" again. On the third try, he managed something better: "It's a great day for Atlantis."

"Yes, sir. I think so, too." Lieutenant Radcliffe looked confused. "Colonel Sinapis told me he thought you would say something like that. What with where you come from and all, I wasn't so sure he was right."

By the way the lieutenant talked, he'd been born north of the Stour. Some northerners thought anybody who favored slavery had been issued horns and pitchforks by Satan himself. (Some men from Stafford's part of the country felt the same about people who opposed slavery. Stafford had himself, not so long before. He declined to dwell on that now.)

Wearily, the Consul answered, "Even when you wish they would, things don't always last. When they wear out, you've got to patch 'em up or get rid of 'em and try something new. Doesn't look like we can patch slavery. Since we can't, we'd better figure out how to get along without it, don't you think?"

"Me? Uh, yes, sir." Lieutenant Radcliffe gulped and blushed like a girl. "That's my personal opinion, you understand, your Excellency. My opinion as a soldier… Well, soldiers aren't supposed to have opinions about stuff that has to do with politics."

"Of course," Stafford said dryly, and the junior-very junior-officer turned pinker yet. But it was a sound rule. Soldiers were supposed to do what the people who did concern themselves with politics told them to do. They weren't supposed to give their superiors any back talk about it, either.

If opinions got hot enough, the system would break down. If commanded to put down slaveholders, some soldiers from south of the Stour would refuse. As Stafford had seen for himself, fewer from north of the river would refuse to fight slaves. That had been true before the Slug Hollow agreement, anyhow. Maybe it wasn't any more. Northerners were liable to figure the south had had its chance for a tolerable peace, and to refuse to help it any further if it turned its back on that chance.

He hoped that wouldn't come up. If there was any justice in the world, it wouldn't. "Whether you have opinions about politics or not, Lieutenant, I do, and I will give you one of mine," Stafford said. "If I can't get the Slug Hollow agreement through the Senate after this, I will go home."

While Leland Newton was campaigning against the slave insurrectionists, the newspapers called him and Consul Stafford and Colonel Sinapis every kind of idiot under the sun. They called Frederick Radcliff worse than that. Now, conveniently forgetting what they'd said then, they sported headlines with words like peace and justice and dignity and statesmanship prominently displayed. They applied those words not only to Frederick but also to the two Consuls, who got credit for sending him south to St. Augustine.

Even Sinapis came in for praise. The papers said generous things about his common sense and restraint. Those same qualities had been conspicuously absent in his conduct of the campaign against the rebels west of the Green Ridge Mountains-again, if you believed the newspapers.

Newton didn't, which didn't stop him from reading them. If you added them all together-the ones that loved you and the ones that loathed you-you might come within spitting distance of the truth. Even if you didn't, you would find out what editors-and the men who paid them-thought to be the truth. And, in politics, what people thought to be true was at least as important as what was true.

The Consul from Croydon also found his colleague from Cosquer as eager as he was to get the Slug Hollow accord through the Senate. The only problem was, southern Senators kept using every delaying tactic they could find. Newton had known fools like Storm Whitson would go right on being foolish. He had expected canny politicos like Abel Marquard to see which way the wind was blowing.

"Didn't you make some kind of arrangement with Frederick Radcliff before he left for Gernika?" Newton asked. "Aren't you reneging on it now?"

Marquard's expressive nostrils flared. "I would never make an arrangement with a Negro-except the kind his grandfather made with his grandmother. How could I renege on an arrangement I did not make?"

"What if he claims you did?" asked Newton, who knew better than to take everything the slippery Senator said at face value.

"What if he does?" Senator Marquard answered easily. "People claim all kinds of things they can't prove."

"He may not need to prove it. He'll be a very popular man when he comes back from St. Augustine," Newton said. "If he tells the papers you said this, that, or the other thing, don't you think most people who read that will believe it?"

"People not of our profession may, but who worries about what people not of our profession believe? Only other people not of our profession." Marquard snapped his fingers to show what he thought of such people.

"They elect the burgesses who'll vote on whether to reelect you," Newton said. Senator Marquard snapped his fingers again. He seemed bound and determined to stay unimpressed.

And, on the Senate floor, he seemed bound and determined to keep the Slug Hollow agreement from ever reaching a vote. He had friends, too, friends Newton hadn't expected him to have. "Can't you do anything about those people?" Newton asked Jeremiah Stafford. "Most of them come from your state."

"I'm trying," Stafford said.

"So are they," Newton answered. "Exceedingly trying."

"Heh," the other Consul said. "Let me put that another way: I am doing everything I know how to do."

"Well, then, you'd better come up with something new, because what you know how to do isn't working," Newton said.

Stafford glared. "I don't see that I'm getting much help from you."

"From me? Any Senator from south of the Stour would just as soon cut me as look at me." Newton exaggerated, but not by much. "Maybe we really do need to wait and see if the Negro can bring them to their senses."

"Maybe we do." But Stafford didn't seem convinced, for he went on, "Have you any idea-any idea at all-how strange relying on a Negro for anything at all seems to me?"

"Perhaps not. In Croydon, though, Negroes-and copperskins-have been citizens for longer than I've been alive. They've been citizens longer than Atlantis has been free of England. We-whites, I mean-don't always love them, but we're used to treating them like men, not like children or farm animals," Newton said.

"And how often do they leave you sorry you've treated them that way?" the other Consul asked.

"Well, I don't have statistics at my fingertips, the way the Minister of the Fisc does with his accounts. My impression is that they're about as reliable as white men-not much worse, not much better," Newton replied.

"Fair enough," Stafford said. "Is it any wonder I'm worried, then?"

"When you put it that way… no." Consul Newton wished he could give a different answer, but any politico learned early in the game not to count on other people too much, regardless of their color. If he didn't learn that, he didn't stay in the game long enough to learn much else.

When Frederick Radcliff came back to New Hastings, he got a parade through the town's old, old streets. People cheered him-whites, blacks, and copperskins. He waved to the crowd. As a brass band thumped behind him, he took off his tall hat and waved it, too. Sitting beside him in the open carriage, Helen seemed ready to burst with pride.

The next day, Frederick called on Senator Marquard at Marquard's offices in the Senate House. Marquard's white secretary gravely told him the politico was indisposed and could not see him. Frederick said, "Oh, too bad," and went away. But when Abel Marquard was also "indisposed" the following day and the day after that, the Negro began to suspect a trend.

He went to the house Marquard rented in New Hastings, only a couple of blocks from the Senate House. The Senator's Negro butler received him there. "Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Radcliff," said the other black man, whose name was Clarence. "Everybody's proud of you-you'd best believe that."

"Thank you kindly," Frederick said. By everybody, Clarence doubtless meant everybody our color. He had to be a highly trusted man, or the Senator wouldn't have brought him to a state where he could run off if he chose. Frederick went on, "Can I see himself?" He hadn't had such a prominent master, but he'd done Clarence's job for Henry Barford.

"He's here. I'm sure he'd be glad to see you. Wait just a minute," the butler answered.

"Obliged." Frederick wasn't so sure of that, but he didn't say so.

Clarence came back almost as fast as he'd promised. His smile had disappeared, though. "Well, he will see you," he said, and took it no further than that.

Senator Marquard's study would have made Master Barford jealous. The Senator did shake hands with Frederick, but didn't look happy doing it. "I kept my half of the bargain, sir," Frederick said without preamble. "Now it's time for you to keep yours."

"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 Frederick 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.

From within, the justice of the peace called, "Who's next? Got to keep things moving today."

"Here we come, your Honor," Frederick said. He and Helen walked in together.

Books filled the shelves behind the justice's desk. The half-empty glass of amber liquid on the desk said he'd already needed fortifying. But his motions were steady and his voice had no slur as he said, "Raise your right hands and set your left hands on the Bibles there."

"Yes, sir," Frederick said. He didn't mind giving respect to a white man whose position deserved it. Helen nodded to the justice of the peace as she obeyed.

"I perform this marriage ceremony by virtue of the authority vested in me by the sovereign state of New Hastings," the justice of the peace intoned, as he already had so many times before on this special day. He looked at Frederick. "Repeat after me: I-state your name-"

"Frederick Radcliff."

The white man's eyebrows rose, but he didn't miss a beat. He led Frederick through his part of the brief proceeding, then took Helen through hers. When they'd both said everything required of them, the justice of the peace went on, "By virtue of the said authority vested in me by the sovereign state of New Hastings, I now pronounce you man and wife." To Frederick, he added, "You may kiss your bride."

It wasn't as if Frederick hadn't been kissing Helen, and going to bed with her, for all of their adult lives. But kissing his bride? That was a different story. White men's laws-slaveholders' laws-hadn't let them be man and wife till the Slug Hollow agreement passed the Atlantean Senate. He made the most of the kiss.

With a cough, the justice of the peace said, "Don't like to hurry you along, folks, but I've got to do it. Big long line there behind you. I want to get through as many folks as I can. Nobody's going to hold things up, not today."

"Sorry," Frederick said. "Not sorry I kissed her, but-"

"Oh, come on," Helen told him. "His Honor knows what you mean."

Without a doubt, his Honor did. Frederick Radcliff and his wife, Helen Radcliff, left the white man's chamber together. This was the first time she'd had a surname to call her own. For that matter, Frederick's surname had been highly unofficial. No more. Ex-slaves who didn't have surnames would need to acquire them as fast as they could. State governments and the government of the United States of Atlantis would want to keep track of their new citizens: if for no other reason then to tax them more efficiently.

Taxes. Frederick's lip curled. He'd never had to worry about those while Henry Barford owned him. Freedom had some rough spots, sure as the devil. Nobody took care of free men who were down on their luck or too old and feeble to work, either. But, compared to the alternative… "Come on, Mrs. Radcliff," Frederick said. They walked past the secretary and out into the street together.