Of course, if he was wrong…

"It'll work out, your Excellency," Frederick said. "Or I hope it will. My biggest worry isn't the Negroes and copperskins. My biggest worry is some angry white man with a rifle musket. But he's the kind of fella I've got to worry about here in New Hastings, too."

"You're well protected here," Stafford said. "Staying safe in Gernika will be harder, I'm afraid."

"Chance I take," the Negro repeated. "It should be all right… unless some Senator is hiring those fellas with the rifle muskets."

What am I supposed to say to that? Consul Stafford wondered. "Do you want me to tell you they'd never do anything like that?" he asked aloud. "Do you want me to tell you they're too honorable to get those ideas?"

"Nah." Frederick shook his head. "You'd be lying, and we'd both know it. Hell and breakfast, your Excellency, some of 'em'd shoot a white man who said anything about slavery. Most of 'em'd shoot an uppity nigger, or fix it up so somebody else did the shooting for 'em."

Stafford didn't argue the point. How could he? He did say, "Don't you think that's a good argument for staying right where you are?"

"I won't lie-I'd like to," Frederick Radcliff answered. "But if I do, what do you think the chances are the Slug Hollow agreement'll go through?"

"It would still have some chance, I think," Stafford said judiciously.

"Uh-huh. That's about what I think. It'd have some-not too much," Frederick said. "If I do go, if I can calm things down, odds get a lot better. You white folks have already had plenty of chances to kill me. What's one more?" His laughter was not filled with mirth.

Neither was the chuckle Stafford returned. "It's not as if copperskins and Negroes never took a shot at me."

"No, huh?" This time, Frederick Radcliff did sound amused. "If you didn't sign that paper, there'd be plenty of 'em who'd still want to let the air out of you."

"You mean there aren't any now?" Stafford asked.

"Oh, maybe some," Frederick allowed. "But there would be more." He cocked his head to one side. "Nobody here but us chickens right now, your Excellency. How come you didn't back away from Slug Hollow soon as you had the chance? I would've bet my shirt you would-an' I would've lost it, too."

"I thought about it," Stafford said-that wouldn't surprise the black man. The Consul went on, "But what good would it have done me if I had? The fighting would just have started up again. Maybe we would have won it. I think we would, once you provoked us enough to make us push back hard. What would winning mean, though? It wouldn't turn the clock back to where it was before the insurrection started. I think we would have had to kill most of the blacks and copperskins in the country to make the rest quit. The new rising in Gernika says the same thing."

"Yes, I think so, too," Frederick Radcliff agreed quietly.

"All right, then." Consul Stafford spread his hands. "If we killed most of our slaves, we couldn't go on living the way we could when we had them all. And going on the old way would be the only point to repudiating Slug Hollow."

"You can't put Humpty Dumpty together again," Frederick said.

"No, you sure can't." Stafford nodded. "All the king's horses and all the king's men… and since the old way won't work any more, we'd better try to make the new ones work as well as they can."

"That's how it looks to me, all right. I didn't reckon it'd look that way to you," Frederick said.

"No, eh?" This time, Stafford's chuckle was distinctly wry. "The other thing that happened was, as soon as the terms we agreed to in Slug Hollow got out, every idiot in New Hastings started telling me what kind of idiot I was. When a damned fool starts screaming at you, you know he's got to be wrong. And if he's wrong, what does that mean? It means you're right. You follow me?"

"Oh, yes. Ohhh, yes," Frederick answered. The canniest Senator could have sounded no more convincing. "One of the sweetest things in the world is rubbing some dumb son of a bitch's nose in just what a dumb son of a bitch he really is."

"Now that you mention it-yes," the Consul said. Drunk, he'd seen that Lorenzo was a man not so very different from him. Now, sober, he realized the same thing about Frederick Radcliff. Which meant he and his ancestors, back to the earliest days of slaveholding in Atlantis, had been wrongheaded through and through. Which meant the Slug Hollow accord was probably the least the USA should be doing, not the most. But that was a worry for another day. Today had plenty of worries of its own. Among them… "I do wish you the best of luck coming back safe from St. Augustine."

"I believe you," Frederick replied. "I wouldn't have a few months ago, but I do now."

"That's all right. I wouldn't have meant it a few months ago," Stafford said. "Things change. Either you change with them-or you don't, and they roll over you. I don't like that, Lord knows, but it's the only game in town." No, he didn't like it one bit, which, as he'd said, mattered not even a cent's worth.

XXV

Frederick Radcliff thought he knew everything there was to know about living in a warm, muggy climate. As soon as he got off his steamship-another first-and rode inland from St. Augustine, he realized he was an amateur. Sweat sprang out on his skin. But it didn't cool him, because it didn't-it couldn't-evaporate. It just clung, leaving him hot and wet.

One of the men in the cavalry escort the national government had given him wore spectacles. The trooper took them off and polished them with a rag, then set them back on his nose. Ten minutes later, he did it again. "God-damned things keep steaming up," he grumbled.

The ground was flat and swampy. Frederick saw shades of green he'd never imagined before. Ferns grew everywhere. They even sprouted from the sides of brick walls. Herons-blue and gray and white, some of them almost as tall as a man-stood in shallow pools. Every so often, one of those bayonet beaks would plunge into the water. A wriggling fish or frog or salamander would vanish at a gulp.

Vultures spiraling down out of the sky drew Frederick's notice to carrion before his nose caught the sickly-sweet reek. The men from his escort smelled it about the same time he did. "Something's dead," one of them said.

"Something big," added the trooper with the eyeglasses. He tried to wipe the condensation off them one more time. By the way he swore under his breath as he stuffed the rag back into his tunic pocket, he wasn't having much luck.

They rode around a corner, and then all reined in at once. A corpse hung from the branches of a cypress tree. Frederick thought it was a Negro's, but it might have been a copperskin's. Not easy to be sure: it was bloated and blackened, and the carrion birds had already been at it. A turkey vulture perched on the branch, not far from where the noose was tied. It sent the travelers a beady jet stare.

So battered was the body that it might even have been a white man's, hanged by the insurrectionists. It might have been, but it wasn't: a placard tied to it warned SLAVES STAY QUIET. They were still in country white men controlled, then.

"How much longer till we get to where the slaves have kicked off the traces?" Frederick asked.

"Should be pretty soon," a cavalryman answered. "When they start shooting at us from ambush, that's a pretty good sign."

Was it? Frederick wasn't so sure. Rebellious slaves might want to fire at government soldiers, yes. But disgruntled white men could also want to shoot at a Negro who'd already led a much-too-successful uprising.

You knew that before you came down here, Frederick reminded himself. And so he had, but the knowledge hadn't seemed so immediate in New Hastings. What would keep a white man from hiding in the ferns near that tree and potting the fellow who'd helped turn his world inside out?