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.