"Maybe I should pluck you for quills next time-you seem prickly enough and to spare," Victor said.

"And here I was going to do you an honor." Cawthorne stared reprovingly over the tops of his gold-rimmed spectacles. They were of a curious design he had devised himself. A horizontal line across each lens separated weaker and stronger magnifications, so he could read and see at a distance without changing pairs.

"A likely story," Victor said. "More likely, you were about to set some libel against me in type."

"Oh, any printer from Croydon down to the border of Spanish Atlantis could do that," Custis Cawthorne said dismissively. "But no-I had something new and interesting and perhaps even important to tell you, and did you want to hear it? It is to laugh."

"Go ahead. Say your say," Radcliff replied. He laughed at himself. "Why should I waste my time encouraging you? You'll do as you please anyhow. You always do."

" 'Do what thou wilt'-there is the whole of the law. Or so said a wiser man than I." Cawthorne might have been-probably was-the wisest man in Atlantis. By mentioning someone he reckoned wiser, he reminded his audience of that truth. "Because you make yourself so obnoxious, I ought not to tell you."

"Fats ce que voudrais," said Victor, who also knew his Rabelais.

He surprised the printer into laughter by knowing. To hear Custis Cawthorne guffaw, anyone would think him fat and jolly, not a somber-seeming beanpole. Victor didn't know how he brought forth such a sound from that narrow chest, but he did.

"I shall do exactly that," the printer said after guffaws subsided to chuckles. "Hear me, then. When that indifferently written drivel of yours-"

Victor bowed. "Your servant, sir. Plenty of rope for all the critics to hang themselves." That was from Rabelais, too.

"If you were my servant, I'd thump you the way you deserve."

As things are, all of Atlantis has that privilege' Cawthorne said. Before Victor could ask him what he meant, he went on, "Here is the honor I propose giving you: setting your work with the first font of type made on this side of the Atlantic. We not only speak English in Atlantis, we write it and we print it… with or without let or hindrance from the so-called mother country."

"So-called?" Victor raised an eyebrow. "Your ancestors did not come from England?"

"There was a Cawthorne aboard the St. George, which you know as well as I," the printer said. "But a proper mother knows when her offspring is grown and ready to set out on his own. She does not garrison soldiers on him to keep him from leaving home."

"If I were an Englishman, I would clap you in irons for that," Victor said.

"If you were an Englishman, I would despair of Atlantis," Custis Cawthorne replied. "But since, by the favor of Providence, you are not, I still have some hope for us. And I also have some hope of turning your manuscript to print without too much butchery along the way. Multifarious as your flaws may be, you do write a tolerably neat hand."

"I hope you will not do yourself an injury, giving forth with such extravagant praise," Victor said.

"Nothing too serious, anyhow," Cawthorne said. "And a good thing, too, for a visit to the sawbones is likelier to leave a man dead than improved."

He had a point. Doctors could set broken bones and repair dislocations. They could inoculate against smallpox-and, in Atlantis' towns, they did so more and more often. That scourge still reared its hideous head, but less often than in years gone by. Doctors could give opium for pain, and could do something about diarrhea and constipation. Past that, a strong constitution gave you a better chance of staying healthy than all the doctors ever born. Victor doled out such praise as he could: "They do try."

"And much good it does them, or their sorely tried patients," Cawthorne said.

"Are you done insulting me and physicians?" Victor asked. "Can I make my escape and let you get back to reviling your 'prentices and journeymen?"

"I do less of that than I like these days," Custis Cawthorne answered. "Good workers are hard to find. Even bad workers are hard to find. The good ones would sooner set up for themselves, whilst the bad ones try to squeeze more money out of an honest man than they're worth."

"Did some honest man tell you that?" Radcliff asked innocently.

"Ah! A fellow who fancies himself a wit but overestimates by a factor of two," the printer said. "You had better go, all right, before I thrash you in a transport of fury."

"I'm leaving-and quivering in my boots." The bell rang again as Victor went out onto the street.

Custis Cawthorne's voice pursued him: "If you think you're quivering now, where will you be in five years' time?"

On my farm, working and writing, Victor thought. I hope.

"More brandy?" Erasmus Radcliff inquired.

Victor was feeling what he'd already drunk, but he nodded anyway. His cousin poured for both of them with becoming liberality. "Your health," Victor said, a little blurrily.

"And yours." Erasmus drank. "Whew! After the first swallow numbs your gullet, the rest doesn't taste quite so much like turpentine."

"We don't make it as well as they do in Europe," Victor agreed. "But it will leave a man wobbly on his pegs, which is a large part of the point to the exercise. We can live with this."

"You can, perhaps," Erasmus Radcliff said. "I find myself compelled to, which is not the same thing. If England treats us unjustly, our only recourse is to refuse intercourse with her, which keeps us from importing anything finer than this… firewater, I believe, is the term they use in Terranova. I could easily trade with France or Holland and once again have a source of fine brandy… save that the Royal Navy would impound or sink my ships if I presumed to try. This leaves me with nothing to do, nothing whatsoever."

"What do you want from me? I can't change anything about it," Victor said. "No one in London will listen to me, not to the extent of changing set policies because I ask it. The policy is to squeeze all the revenue England can from Atlantis. It is the same policy England uses wherever she rules."

"Yes, I know, but most places have to put up with it, because they needs must buy some large proportion of their necessities from the mother country," his cousin replied. "That is no longer the case with us. We can subsist on our own, and England pushes us toward demonstrating the fact with every ill-advised tax she tries to ram down our throats." He drained his glass and filled it again. He would be crapulent come morning. Now… Now he seemed determined. "What we have here may not always be as good, but we can make do with it."

"I suppose so." Victor also drank more; he couldn't let Erasmus get too far ahead of him. "Custis Cawthorne said he would print my latest from type cast here in Atlantis, not brought from England."

"Yet another example," Erasmus agreed. He paused, then went on, "You do realize that, if my fellow settlers keep me from trading with England whilst the English prevent me from dealing with anyone else, I shall in due course commence to starve?"

Victor Radcliff looked around the well-appointed office where they drank. Whale-oil lamps lit it almost as bright as day. Some strange and almost obscene fetish from the South Pacific shared pride of place in a cabinet of curiosities with a bejeweled elephant from India and the mineralized skull of a long-snouted creature from southern Terranova. None of those would have come easy or cheap. Neither would Erasmus' desk, a triumph of marquetry in multicolored wood.

"I concede the eventuality, coz, but it does not strike me as imminent," Victor said.

"Perhaps not. Then again, I am more fortunate than many in similar straits," Erasmus replied. "Not everyone has so much to fall back on when times get hard."