Back in New Marseille, the telegraphers were proud of themselves and their colleagues farther east. In spite of the insurrection, they'd managed to open a connection with New Hastings on the other coast. Most of the time, Jeremiah Stafford would have been proud right along with them.

Most of the time. When the news he had to give the capital was of a disaster, his heart wouldn't have broken had the line stayed down a little longer. As things were, he had no choice.

Neither did Consul Newton or Colonel Sinapis. Each man composed his own report and gave it to the telegraphers. Stafford collaborated with neither of the other leaders. As far as he knew, the other two didn't collaborate with each other. He wondered how much the reports differed. He wondered if anyone, reading all three, would be sure they talked about the same event.

He couldn't do anything about that. He thought he was telling the unvarnished truth. If Sinapis or Newton felt like lying, that wasn't his affair. If they thought he would stoop to lying, they didn't know him very well.

Besides, while you could write around the awful news as much as you pleased, you couldn't make it go away. The insurrectionists beat the Atlantean army. They made it surrender. In lieu of slaughtering it to the last man, they made it march away without its weapons.

No one responsible could deny any of that. If anybody tried, it wouldn't do him any good. No, the remaining interesting questions were two. First, who was to blame for the catastrophe? And, second, what the devil was the Atlantean government supposed to do about it now?

Newspapers in New Marseille had no doubt on that score. They printed highly colored interviews with soldiers they didn't name (and a good thing for the soldiers that they remained anonymous, or all the dreadful things they'd escaped in the battle would have landed on them in the aftermath). They also printed headlines like STRING UP THE CONSULS! and EXILE THE COLONEL!

"Nice to know we're loved," Leland Newton said, holding up one of the more inflammatory papers.

"Don't worry about it, your Excellency," Stafford answered as he corrected his breakfast coffee with a healthy splash of barrel-tree rum. "They loved you before we lost the battle."

"I'm sure they did." If the prospect dismayed Newton, he hid it very well. "After all, I disagreed with them, and what crime is more heinous than that?"

Stafford knew the answer to that particular question: losing the battle that was liable to mean liberty for all the copperskins and Negroes in the USA. Instead of saying so, he sipped his rum-laced coffee. The other Consul could see the answer as well as he could himself. The only difference was, Newton wouldn't think liberating slaves was a heinous offense. He was a northern man, after all, so what did he know?

A raised eyebrow said Newton guessed most of what was going on in Stafford's mind. The other Consul made a small production out of lighting a cigar. He said, "We both must be getting old. Seems too early in the day to quarrel, doesn't it?"

"Now that you mention it, yes," Stafford answered. "I will if you really want to, though. I don't want to disappoint you."

"I'll pass, thanks," Newton said. "The papers are quarrelsome enough, and whatever New Hastings has to say is bound to be worse. When do you suppose we'll hear from the Conscript Fathers?"

After someone flings water in their faces, because they're bound to faint when they get the news, Stafford thought morosely. "Are you really so eager?" he asked aloud.

"Eager? Well, as a matter of fact, no," the other Consul replied. "Say rather curious, in a clinical way, as if I'm wondering whether the dentist will tell me whether he has to pull one tooth or two."

Stafford winced. He'd had some agonizing encounters with tooth-pullers before they found out about ether. No one went to one of those quacks unless he was already in pain, and what they did to you only made you hurt worse-for a while, anyhow. Afterwards, you won relief. But that was afterwards. During was another story altogether.

And what sort of relief could the United States of Atlantis win from the abscess of insurrection? They'd tried to lance it, tried and failed. Now the poison was spreading through the country's system. Stafford had no idea how to stop it. He would have been amazed if the Senators on the far coast did.

He hadn't finished his ham and eggs and fried yams when a messenger who hadn't started shaving yet handed him one telegram and Consul Newton another. "Oh, joy," Stafford said as he unfolded his.

"Looking forward to it, are you?" Newton said.

"Well… no," Stafford answered. The other Consul managed a chuckle of sorts, but one with a distinct graveyard quality to it.

Senate expresses its disappointment at failure to suppress slave insurrection, the wire read. It wasn't quite You clumsy idiot!, but it might as well have been. The telegram continued, Use any-repeat, any-measures necessary to end uprising. Manumission not mandatory but not-repeat, not-ruled out.

That was all. That was quite enough. That was, as far as Jeremiah Stafford was concerned, much too much. "What does yours say?" he asked Newton.

"They want us to patch up a peace. That's what it amounts to, anyhow," his colleague answered. "How about yours?"

"The same, more or less," Stafford said heavily. "By God, it frosts my pumpkin. If we fight a proper war, we can win it."

"Maybe we can, but how much more money will it cost?" Newton said. "How many more lives will we lose? How much longer will the Senate put up with that? How long will the Atlantean people put up with it?"

"Even Colonel Sinapis thinks we can win it." Stafford was clutching at straws, and he knew as much.

In case he hadn't, Consul Newton rubbed his nose in it: "Right now, how far will anyone follow Colonel Sinapis?"

Stafford didn't answer. No answer seemed necessary-or possible. Anyone who didn't blame the two Consuls for surrendering to Frederick Radcliff and the insurrectionists blamed Colonel Sinapis instead. Quite a few Atlanteans were sure there was plenty of blame to go around. That seemed to be the sense of the Senate's telegram.

Gently, Leland Newton said, "It won't be so bad. Truly, it won't. We've had free Negroes and copperskins in Croydon for more than a hundred years now. Our republic hasn't fallen apart. Your states won't, either."

"Easy for you to say," Stafford replied. "You may have freed them, but you never had very many for you to free. Things are different down here."

"They certainly are," Newton said. "The copperskins and blacks in Croydon are peaceful citizens, just like anyone else. They're up in arms here. Don't you see the connection? It's time to admit that what you've been doing here isn't working, even if it has made white people money."

That made Stafford scratch his head. As far as he was concerned, making money and working meant the same thing. At last, he saw, or thought he saw, some of what Newton had in mind: "You mean a few of the slaves don't fancy it."

"More than a few, don't you think? And 'don't fancy it' is like saying 'The ocean isn't small,' " Newton answered. "They 'don't fancy it' enough to pick up guns and risk their lives to try to do something about it. Shouldn't that tell you something?"

"You want me to say slavery is wicked and horrid, and everyone who has anything to do with it ought to be ashamed of himself, don't you?" Stafford said. "I'm very sorry, your Excellency, but I honestly don't believe that."

"I know. But whether you believe it isn't the point any more," Newton said.

That puzzled Stafford again. "How do you mean?"

"The point is, the slaves-the people who were slaves, I should say-do believe it. They would rather die than go on being slaves," Newton said. "A lot of them have died. They've made a lot of us die, too. Shouldn't that tell you something?"