Liberating Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  “When we find it, we’ll know it,” Newton said.

  “Yes, I suppose we will,” Stafford . . . agreed?

  Colonel Sinapis sighed like a wolf that had failed to outrun a deer. So many images in our language of animals not native here, Newton thought. The colonel said, “What you mean is, you have not got the faintest idea of what you want the army to do. Or perhaps each of you has an idea, but you have not got the same idea. Is this true? Am I right or am I wrong?”

  The two Consuls looked at each other. They both sighed, too, at the same time and on the same note. “You may be right—for now,” Newton said. “I think we both hope we will have the answer once the army goes into action.”

  Sinapis’ brows came down over his eyes like battlements protecting a keep. The lines on his cheeks deepened like entrenchments in a siege. “Meaning no disrespect to you gentlemen,” he said, a phrase that always meant disrespect to its targets, “but an army without a plan is like a drunkard on a stroll. If you have no notion where you are going, how will you know when you get there? Or if you get there?”

  “Let’s get there first,” Consul Newton said. “Once we do, I expect we’ll sort things out.”

  “I hope we’ll sort things out,” Consul Stafford said. That wasn’t exactly agreement, but it wasn’t exactly disagreement, either. Newton decided he would take it.

  By the way Balthasar Sinapis whuffled out air through his mustache, he was less satisfied. “Politics,” he said disdainfully. “Gamemeno politics.”

  That sounded like a participle derived from gameo, the classical Greek verb meaning to marry. Leland Newton was mildly surprised and pleased that he recognized the form, and that he remembered what the verb meant . . . or had meant. Marrying politics made no sense. Perhaps the word had changed meaning in the centuries since Plato and Xenophon used it.

  Before he could ask, the emigré officer went on, “All you think of are your gamemeno political points.” There it was again, just as incomprehensible as before. “What I think of, gentlemen—and you had better keep it in mind—is the blood of my soldiers. It is what you intend to spend to make your political points, and I do not believe you care a cent for it.”

  Newton started to deny that indignantly. He stopped with the words unspoken. It wasn’t that he didn’t care what happened to the Atlantean soldiers rattling along behind him. Sinapis had that wrong, but Newton hadn’t thought at all about what might befall the gray-uniformed men. If he admitted as much, the colonel would be within his rights to call him on it.

  “I have been thinking more of what our army will do to the insurrectionists,” Consul Stafford said.

  “Of course you have—you are a politician, too.” No, Sinapis didn’t bother hiding his dislike for the men who outranked him. “You leave it to a soldier to worry about the other, don’t you?”

  Stafford seemed to have no comeback for that. Newton knew too well he didn’t. Except for the dull, metallic rumble of iron wheels on iron rails, silence filled the compartment.

  Wheee-oooo! The locomotive whistle screamed as the train crossed the railroad bridge from the state of Freetown to the state of Cosquer. The land on the south side of the Stour looked no different from that on the northern side. All the same, Jeremiah Stafford let out a long sigh of relief. At last, he was back in God’s country—or at least in a country with civilized laws.

  Before long, the train stopped in a sleepy little town called Pontivy. A gang of black and copperskinned slaves lugged fresh lumber to the tender. A swag-bellied white man in overalls had a pistol on his belt, but Stafford would have bet he hadn’t had to draw it for years. Thump! Thump! The sawed lengths of wood replaced what the locomotive had devoured since the last stop.

  Another slave went down the train, oiling the wheels. The lazy black devil didn’t bother lifting the spout of his oil can between one set of wheels and the next. He just let the expensive oil spill out onto the dirt. Why should he worry? He wasn’t paying for it.

  Seeing that kind of thing made Stafford grind his teeth. The overseer either didn’t notice or didn’t care—he wasn’t paying for the oil, either. Somebody was, though, dammit: the railroad company’s supply department, or the shareholders, or, on this journey, the Atlantean government.

  Stafford hated waste. He knew slaves generated more of it than he would have liked. Because things weren’t their own, they didn’t care about them. That was why, for instance, planters had to give their field hands those heavy, clumsy tools. They would have broken the better ones white farmers used, and in short order, too.

  “We have to do something about that,” he muttered. Atlantean slaveholders had been saying the same thing since the seventeenth century. The only answer anyone had come up with was making the slaves afraid to be careless with their tools—their owners’ tools. And that worked only up to a point. Press a nigger or a mudface too hard and he’d either try to murder you or he’d run off. Both were more expensive than broken tools.

  Consul Newton had also got off the train to watch the refuel ing and to stretch his legs. He didn’t seem to notice the Negro wasting oil, which relieved Stafford. But he did notice Stafford mumbling to himself, and asked, “What was that?”

  “I wish we would make our workers more efficient and considerate,” Stafford said.

  “Why don’t you try paying them?” Newton asked, his tone not in the least ironic. “Nothing makes a man a careful worker like the fear of getting docked.”

  “The whole point of our system is to keep from enslaving workers to money,” Stafford said.

  His fellow Consul raised an eyebrow. “So you enslave them to their masters instead? A dubious improvement, I fear. And I have never yet heard of a slaveowner who broke out in hives when some cash came his way. No, the owners only worry when their slaves see a coin once in a blue moon.”

  “Slaves don’t need money,” Stafford said. “Remember, their masters feed and clothe and shelter them.”

  “None too well, more often than not,” Newton said.

  “They live better than factory hands in Hanover—or in Croydon, come to that,” Stafford retorted. “Who said that the first freedom was the freedom to starve? Whoever he was, he knew what he was talking about.”

  “I don’t see white factory hands swimming across the Stour to work on your plantations,” Newton said tartly.

  “We would not enslave them if they did, and you know it perfectly well,” Stafford said.

  “Fine. Have it however you please. I don’t see free Negroes and copperskins volunteering to go back under the lash, either.”

  “It has happened,” Stafford said. “I recall one such case just a couple of years ago. The copperskin couldn’t make a go of it in Freetown, so he decided to come south. He knew he wouldn’t starve here, and his children wouldn’t, either.”

  “It must not happen very often, by God, or you would not be able to call particular instances to mind,” his colleague said.

  Since that was true, Stafford maintained a discreet silence. The train whistle blared again. It was even louder when heard out in the open than from inside a railroad car. The windows, commonly closed against soot and cinders, muffled some of the ferocious squeal.

  “All aboard!” the locomotive driver bawled from the back of his iron chariot. He might have been piloting a ferry boat, not the most modern conveyance in the world. “All aboard!” The whistle shrilled once more.

  Colonel Sinapis nodded coolly to the Consuls when they joined him in the compartment they shared. He hadn’t got off the train. Reading glasses perched on that curved blade of a nose, he pored over maps of the southwest. Regardless of whether the Consuls were ready for whatever might happen when the army got where it was going, he intended to be.

  What he wasn’t ready for, any more than they were, was their train derailing just outside of Pontivy. The only thing that saved them from worse misfortune was that they hadn’t got going very fast yet. There was a jolt and a crash. The next thing Stafford knew,
the locomotive and tender had flipped over onto their sides—and so had the car he was riding in. He had time for one startled exclamation before he landed on what had been the side of the car and Colonel Sinapis landed on him.

  “Oof!” Stafford said, which summed up exactly how he felt about the situation. The colonel had a more detailed opinion, which he expressed in English and what sounded like several other languages. Stafford didn’t understand them all, but admired the effects, especially the one that sounded like ripping canvas.

  Leland Newton had also fetched up against the side of the car. He, however, was not festooned with a colonel, so his remarks were less impassioned. “Are you all right, Jeremiah?” he asked.

  It was, as far as Stafford could remember, the first time his colleague had used his Christian name. “I seem to be, Leland,” he said, returning the courtesy, “or I will be, if the good Colonel Sinapis would remove his elbow from the vicinity of my navel.”

  The good colonel did move the pointed part in question, and the Consul did gain considerable relief as a result. Sinapis scrambled to his feet. He stepped on Stafford once more in the process, but without malice. “We must help the injured—and there will be some,” he said.

  Stafford only grunted, because Sinapis was bound to be right. Derailments were lamentably common, and produced more than their fair share of lost limbs and broken bones. The colonel wrestled the door open. It didn’t want to open sideways, but he made it obey. He scrambled out. Stafford and Newton followed.

  Sinapis’ prophecy was confirmed at once. A couple of the stokers lay on the fern-splashed ground. One was clutching his leg and groaning. The leg had a bend in a place where it shouldn’t.

  Consul Stafford’s stomach did a slow lurch. He looked away in a hurry. If an injury like this threatened to sicken him, how would he do on a battlefield with bullets and cannonballs ripping flesh? He hadn’t thought about that when he set out from New Hastings. Maybe he should have.

  The engine driver limped out of the capsized locomotive. He was not only hurt but incandescently furious. “A rock!” he screamed. “Some God-damned fucking son of a bitch put a fucking boulder on the fucking tracks!” He started to hop up and down in his rage, but his ankle made him think better of it. “That shit-eating bastard, whoever the devil he was, he went and derailed us on purpose! I hope he rots in hell and Old Scratch uses his short ribs for toothpicks!”

  Slow, cold certainty formed inside Jeremiah Stafford’s mind. “That shit-eating bastard, whoever the devil he was, was a mudface or a nigger.” He sounded as sure of himself as any Biblical prophet.

  “Yes. Very likely.” Colonel Sinapis nodded. “Those people are the ones with the most reason to slow us down or stop us.”

  Rounding on his colleague, Stafford said, “You don’t say anything, sir.”

  Consul Newton spread his hands. “What would you have me say? I agree: most likely a slave did place a rock there to derail us. I have never claimed slaves loved us. The most I have ever said is that they may well have good reason not to love us.”

  “Bah!” Stafford turned away from him in disgust. That let him look down the track. Half a dozen cars after the one in which he’d been riding had also overturned. Some of the soldiers inside them were bound to be hurt, too. The cars farther back had managed to stay on the rails. Had the train been moving faster, more of them would have gone off.

  Those slaves were fools, the Consul thought. They would have done better to plant their boulder farther from town, so we would have built up more speed. Or maybe they didn’t know we would stop in Pontivy.

  A horrible shriek derailed his train of thought. The phrase had quickly become a commonplace after railroad lines began crisscrossing Atlantis. Now Stafford was reminded of the reality that had given rise to it.

  Colonel Sinapis crouched beside the stoker with the broken leg. Among other things, the colonel knew how to set fractures, even if the process was painful. Stafford hoped the army surgeons had laid in a good supply of nitrous oxide and ether. The newfangled medicines seemed sovereign against even the worst agony.

  “Hold still,” Sinapis told the stoker. His strong hands made sure the man obeyed. The officer nodded to the other stoker, who hovered nearby. “Draw my sword. Cut a couple of saplings. Cut strips of cloth, too, so I can splint this leg. Don’t just stand there, man! Move!”

  Move the other stoker did, and smartly, too. When Balthasar Sinapis told you to do something, you did it first and worried about why later. He would have made a marvelous overseer. Consul Stafford chuckled softly. What was a colonel but an overseer who used a uniform and army regulations instead of a bullwhip to get his way?

  Stafford stared this way and that. No slaves in sight now. He’d wondered if they would stick around to enjoy the chaos they’d caused, but no such luck. Even stupid slaves knew better. Too bad.

  And the army was going to be later than it had expected getting to the insurrection. That was also too damned bad.

  The train derailed once more before it got to Nouveau Redon. This time, people—no doubt colored people—had set logs on the rails. The train was going faster when it hit them. Leland Newton ended up with a knot on the side of his head and a left wrist sprained so badly, he had to wear it in a sling.

  One of the army surgeons gave him a tiny bottle of laudanum for the pain. The potent mixture of brandy and opium pushed it off to one side, anyhow. The opium also settled his bowels, which had been flighty on a traveling diet of hardtack and salt pork: army rations.

  “Slaves don’t love you, either,” Consul Stafford pointed out to him. “No matter how splendid you think they are, they’ll kill you if they get the chance.”

  Worst of it was, Newton’s colleague wasn’t wrong. Newton hadn’t let that enter his calculations when he left with the army. He wondered what else he hadn’t thought about that he should have. He hoped he didn’t find out the hard way.

  When he remarked on that, Colonel Sinapis said, “Plan ahead. Always plan ahead. It will not be perfect, but it will help.”

  The latest dose of laudanum had worn off, leaving Newton sore and irritable. He wiggled his arm in the sling the surgeon had put on him. That only hurt more. “How do you propose to plan against what happens in a derailment?” he snapped.

  To his amazement, the colonel had a sensible answer for him: “Belts across the seats would hold the passengers in place and not let them fly about promiscuously in an accident. That would save many casualties.”

  “Damned if it wouldn’t,” Newton said in surprise, his pique evaporating. “I wonder why we don’t do it now.”

  “Because the railroad companies say it would cost money to put all these belts into place. Because, they say, some people do not care to be closed in with a belt. Because, they say, feminine costume would be inconvenienced. And so people break limbs and sometimes break their heads, but a few cents are saved! Hallelujah!” Sinapis did not so much as raise his voice, which only made the irony more cutting.

  Gingerly feeling the side of his own head, Newton could sympathize with that irony. He turned to Jeremiah Stafford, who’d come through the latest derailment unscathed. “Here is something about which the government should have its say, don’t you think?”

  “Not quite so urgent as a servile insurrection,” Stafford remarked. But that wasn’t necessarily a veto, for he went on, “Bound to be easier to gain consensus on account of that.”

  “One would hope so, yes.” Consul Newton was not about to let anyone display more sangfroid than he did.

  “A plan,” Colonel Sinapis said again. “Have you gentlemen yet devised one?” He was relentless as a hurricane.

  “How can we?” Newton did his best to sound reasonable. “We won’t fully know the situation till we arrive. Many telegraph lines are down—”

  “Slaves’ doing,” Stafford broke in.

  Newton shrugged. “As may be. But what comes over the surviving wires is the most amazing twaddle. If you tell me the slaves are re
sponsible for that, I shall be most surprised.”

  “No, no,” the other Consul said impatiently. “Do you expect calm and good judgment in the middle of an uprising, though?”

  “Perhaps not. Occasional accuracy, however, would be welcome,” Newton said.

  “Do we fight the colored rebels? Do we fight the people fighting the colored rebels?” Sinapis persisted. “Do we try to keep them from fighting? What do we do if they don’t feel like stopping?”

  Those were all good questions. Newton had answers to none of them. Well, that wasn’t strictly true. He had his own answers. Unfortunately, Consul Stafford also had his own answers, which weren’t the same . . . which were, in fact, as different as coal and kohlrabi.

  At least Stafford also didn’t try to tell Colonel Sinapis exactly what would happen when the army got off the train in the state of New Marseille. He knew Newton had different answers, too.

  Sinapis looked from one Consul to the other and back again. He might have been examining two insects with revolting habits. His voice suggested that he was: “Or will the army try to do one thing one day and something else the next, depending on who is in command? I tell you, gentlemen, this army is not a toy to be pulled back and forth between you as if you were a couple of spoiled children who needed spanking. You will cost me soldiers if you try to do things that way, and I remind you that soldiers are not toys.”

  “The innocent white men and women being despoiled by the insurrectionists are not toys, either,” Stafford said.

  “Neither are the slaves who have been despoiled for centuries by these so-called innocents,” Newton returned. He stared steadily back at Balthasar Sinapis. “What is your personal view of slavery, Colonel?”

  “It is my personal view, sir, and I prefer to keep it that way,” Sinapis said. “Whatever it is, it is less important than my view that throwing away an army on account of lack of foresight and cooperation will do Atlantis more harm than good.”

  “We are all three of us men of strong opinions.” Stafford sounded—amused? Yes, amused: Newton was sure of it. The other Consul went on, “Now, if only any two of us shared some of those opinions.”