There were Radcliff and Radcliffe drunkards in the gutters of towns all over the USA. There were Radcliff and Radcliffe butchers and bakers and candlestick makers-and farmers, always farmers. There were Radcliff and Radcliffe doctors and lawyers and preachers. And there were Radcliff and Radcliffe leaders, as there had always been in Atlantis. More than a quarter of the Consuls who'd headed the United States of Atlantis since the War for Freedom were Radcliffs or Radcliffes, and quite a few others had the blood without the name.

Victor Radcliff had commanded the Atlantean Assembly's army in the war against England. After the war was won, he became one of the two First Consuls. (Isaac Fenner, the other, was descended from a crewman on Edward Radcliffe's fishing boat.) Every Atlantean schoolboy knew the First Consuls' names as well as he knew his own. So did Frederick Radcliff, although slaves, to put it mildly, were not encouraged to acquire an education.

And Frederick Radcliff had a stronger reason to remember the First Consuls' names, or at least one of them, than a schoolboy's fear of the master's switch.

Victor Radcliff was his grandfather.

So his mother had told him, over and over again. The story was that Victor Radcliff had come down into southern Atlantis to join up with the Marquis de la Fayette's French army, and that Frederick's grandmother's owner lent her to the general so he wouldn't have to sleep in a cold bed. Nine months later, his father was born.

Frederick didn't remember his father. Nicholas Radcliff had died when he was three years old. He'd stepped on a rusty nail outside, and lockjaw set in-so Frederick's mother said. She'd been a house slave, too, and taught Frederick what he needed to know so he wouldn't have to go out to the fields and work under the hot sun and the overseer's lash.

He knew he lived pretty soft… for a slave. He was friends with the cooks-also slaves-so he got plenty to eat.