"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 emigre 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."