Count to a Trillion

3

Decentralized Conflict Resolution

A.D. 2232–2233

1. Out-of-Court Settlement

The way out proved to be through the barrel of a gun.

When was the last time he had looked down a pistol bore?

Spring of ’32. It had been cold, unseasonably cold, even in mid-April that year, and the groom who saddled his horse, a sorrel named Res Ipsa, joked that the Japanese Winter was come back. (The full name of the horse was Res Ipsa Loquitur, Sed Quid In Infernis Dicit?—but he only used that on formal occasions.)

In theory, his journeyman indenture to Barton Throwster should have lasted until age twenty-one, even if interrupted by two years of service as a horse soldier. At seventeen years, the same year he returned from the war, Menelaus became the youngest of the attorneys in Houston, but his skill with his weapon was undoubted.

Menelaus had but one way out of his prentice contract, and that was somehow to become a Professional man, for the law held that no one of the licensed professions, doctor or lawyer or minister-in-orders, could be held to a master, no matter what his debt. It was a way out, and he took it.

Most of the real work of the office was done by the elder partner, Solomon Ervin. Menelaus escaped his last year of journeyman obligation and was made a junior partner, mostly for his ability to stand and answer when an Out-of-Court settlement was needed. He did not do much real lawyering. Actually, none at all. It was the rattler-cold and rattler-quick reflexes of late youth the firm craved.

Now, at twenty-two, he had sent six men to the hospital and two to the boneyard, and his late youth was turning into early manhood. The smart money said his winning streak must soon end.

The day a man lost his nerve, on that day by rights he died.

It was not that Menelaus did not want to do this anymore—it was just that the moment he admitted to himself that he did not want to do this anymore, he would lose his nerve. So Menelaus told himself to enjoy the day, not to think of the other things he might have made of his life. It was making hard cash for his family, was it not?

There were places outside Houston where attorneys could meet for Out-of-Court settlements, usually with two witnesses, at most four, and, of course, a judge. The witnesses had to be bold enough to act as Seconds, if one of the attorneys had an attack of nerves, or of conscience, or of common sense. The judge had to be a man of utmost discretion, one who would not talk. Not a real judge, of course. An honor judge.

Agreeing on a field was a delicate matter. It had to be close to the city, an hour’s ride on horseback, no farther, so that the survivor could get back to the Courthouse if he had cases on the docket that day, or (if it was Sabbath) get back to St. Mary’s Cathedral on Church Street for mass—the Military Governor was Spanish Catholic, and it was a politically astute move to be seen at services by the Archbishop, his brother.

The field could also not be so far from the inhabited buildings in the great, broken city that a ground-effects ambulance from the nearest monastery infirmary, if radioed promptly, might not be able in time to rush to the scene over the rubble, weed, marshgrass, and shattered walls of the long-vanished suburbia. It was thriftier to radio the monastery rather than the University Hospital on Harborside Street, because the law, for the sake of economy, demanded patients had to pay back the doctor’s fee into the public till; whereas the Brothers made no such demand, for the sake of charity. Also, if the patient converted quickly enough and sincerely enough, and confessed the sin of pistol dueling, it was possible that the Abbot might not report the bullet-wound to the Reeve.

But the field also had to be far enough away from the inhabited buildings that the Regulators would not come to inquire, nor the Deputies, nor a patrol from the Federal Mounted Military Police.

The Spaniards had the practice of keeping a doctor on the field, a man who would not talk. The rules and niceties were all set out by the Spanish code of duels, of course. The custom had been dead for centuries until Hispanosphere weapon-technology, delicate Spanish honor, and, of course, the Jihads, revived it. After the breakdown of centralized law on the Iberian peninsula last century, the Spaniards dared not involve their families in blood-feuds, not when there were still Paynims in Moorish Spain to drive yet again into Africa; and the kind of men who lived in continual danger of craven-bombs and plagues tended to be too bold and too impatient to settle matters peaceably. The Texmexicans had adopted the custom from their enemies, the Aztlans, for similar reasons.

Unlike the more civilized Spanish, the Texans merely revoked the license of a doctor found helping the injured in a duel, as being in violation of his Hippocratic Oath if he stood there before and while the shooting took place. Why the law held doctors to be blameless if they rushed to the scene after was based on a legal theory too subtle for the other members of his firm to make clear to Menelaus. The upshot of it was that the doctor could be close, but not too close.

So the distance had to be chosen with care, and in utmost secrecy.

This time, it was the spot still called Law Park, not far from the haunted ruins of Hobby Airport. Aside from the name, which had outlasted, as names do, any change of feature, this was known to have once been a park since the trees nearby lacked the knobby, concrete-piercing roots and drunken postures of boles grown up across the toppled rubble and cracked streets. These were slim and straight trees here, almost elfin.

Menelaus had been here more than once, during the day. It was a beautiful, sylvan spot, one a man could spend the whole rest of his life admiring; or his next twenty minutes, whichever was longer.

It was April 15th, still a day celebrated by fireworks, when the Last Congress gave up direct taxation. (Menelaus saw no point in fireworks. It was not as if the direct goods appropriation, land-tax, and forced-labor system used these days by the Pentagon was so much better than a tax on income.)

April: and yet this year there was a bitter frost upon the ground. The sky was still dark, and the churchbells had not yet pealed, but the birds all sang. He could not see the knee-high dried grass of the marsh, poking up through the old stones of the Space Age ruins, not in the pre-dawn, but the icy wind that bit his ankles made their blades clash and rattle.

Menelaus shivered, thinking how warm this region had been in his great-grandfather’s day, how dry, free of bog and bug-water. Back when apes and leopards lived. Thank God for the Nippon Winter. The ponds here were square, following the foundations and basements of houses time had swept aside; and they were rimmed by mossy tumble.

Why was he here to kill a man, instead of off somewhere, Brasilia or Bombay, where people were putting civilization together again? It was the Imperials’ fault, as most things were. The damn Virginians. The damn Pentagon.

The land records had been conserved in a national database, and had survived the diebacks, the Mexican Reconquista, and the Texan Counterreconquest. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had determined that where DNA testing could identify the heirs of deeds of records, no matter what the squatter’s rights, no matter what the improvements made, no matter what the intervening plagues had done, the original plots of territory as described by metes and bounds were to be delivered per stirpes to the descendants, wherever found, who had gene-traces of the original pre-war owners.

So to be a land-claim attorney during these unsettled years was the quickest way to wealth. The disputes between original owners and remotest descendants, the quibbles over slightest medical opinions of gene statistics, the sheer unfairness of turning rich land, improved for seventy or eighty years, over to unknowns, all combined to create endless legal controversy, endless opportunity. The Pentagon wanted Anglo-American laws to be enforced, they wanted continuity to be maintained, they wanted the citizens of Greater Texas, and the subjects of the People’s Republic of the Northeast, and the landowners of the Confederation, all to count themselves as United-States-of-Americans once more. They wanted the past to seem like it was still alive: as if come again were the glory days of old.

But the Texan law allowed for jury nullification, which meant finding a man not guilty of breaking an unpopular law, even when he broke the law. In effect, a sufficiently emotional appeal to the honor or the pity of the twelve good men, would allow them to ignore the laws of remote and weak Pentagon administrators, and find, without any more legality than that, for the local landowner. But if the landowner was unpopular, too rich or too poor, or if he could be made to seem so by the clever question or a sly turn of phrase, well, the mercurial jury would enforce the cruel law to its letter.

These were jurors of a frontier society. Depopulations had returned the lands here to wilderness with shocking swiftness. Without the amenities and mutual assistance of wired urban life, without good roads and good communications, the isolated towns remembered an earlier Texas, a period recalled in song and story, when men were self-reliant. Self-reliant men stood on their honor, because they had nothing else.

Now, to plead to a panel of touchy individualists, many of whom rode or tramped over bad roads a day or more for the privilege of serving as jurors, one had to be an orator, but also a figure commanding respect. It was not like a murder trial, where a defendant was present: usually these claims were for remote parties, reached only by Pony Mail, in Chicago or Charleston or Newer Orleans. All eyes were on the lawyer, all thoughts on his reputation. Where the laws were so clearly unfair, the merits of a case did not count.

And so it was the insults that the attorneys flung or insinuated at each other that tended to decide the matter. If an attorney accepted with philosophical meekness some slight against his name or family or truthfulness during the hot arguments in the airlessly hot sunlit chambers of the law, the jurors would assume he was not man enough to be representing an honest case, law or no law, and would find for the other party.

The only way, the only certain way, to still such talk, to make the prospect of sarcasm too dangerous to contemplate … was this.

And the rewards were immense. Letters could be sent away with only a tenth value of the land, and the remainder sold back to the original owners, and if handled with dispatch, a man could get the value of a large ranch or farmstead or silk apiary for a day’s arguing.

All he had to do was be willing to shoot and be shot at.

Menelaus grimaced, and lit the tiny read-out in the grip of his pistol, examining the chaff distribution patterns, the targeting priorities and variances of his main shot, the calculated turbulence vortices of his eight smaller escort shots.

Everything depended on the vortex equations, on Navier-Stokes partial differentials that described the flow of incompressible fluids.

He did not need to take out a library cloth to do his figuring. He could do it in his head. All those bored hours he had spent alone with his library, once his mother erased his music and pictures, he had spent on calculus, juggling rate of stress and strain tensors, trying to get the patterns of signs to do new tricks for him. It wasn’t easy, but he had a knack for it.

Back when he had been packing weapons for Barton Throwster, any calculation shortcuts he could program into the fire-counterfire ballistics of the pistols, anything to save critical nanoseconds of computation time for the main shot’s onboard micropackage, might save a customer’s life. His fame with guns was what had brought him to the attention of the legal profession in Houston, and broke him early out of his apprenticeship.

Too bad there was no cash in it. Who ever heard of a rich mathematician? Maybe if he had been an orphan, he could have taken what job he pleased, and thought no more on it, or joined a monastery, and lived with nothing but a sack for a shirt, a rope for a belt, a stone for a pillow. A boy with nine brothers and no father cannot be so picky.

To shoot and be shot at. He would have done anything to get out of his small township. The world was recovering from a Dark Ages. Somewhere, the future was being born, being made, all those bright futures he dreamed about as a child. Somewhere else.

And here he was, shooting at another lawyer no more qualified in law than he was, to make it easier for the Imperials to steal land from the family that worked the land.

It was as bitter in his mouth as the taste of iron.

In the gloom he saw lantern lights approaching. The lanterns were half-hooded, furtive, shining a beam only now and again. Here was a plump little man, Amiens Rainsville, who now came moving heavily through the morning mists toward him, red-faced and puffing. He was someone both duelists trusted to act as judge and drop the scarf. He was the clerk in the Medical Defense Proconsul’s office who had the Seal to sign off on intoxicants, so all the alehouses and smokehouses and opium dens in the district were all on good terms with the man, but also had various degrees of indiscretions in back-up files to blackmail him, if he should prove too efficient at his work. He was placid and cheery enough to get along both with Anglos and Oddlings, Aztecs and Texans, French traders from Louisiana, and Imperials from the Union’s capitol in Virginia, and canny enough to satisfy the Pentagon without dissatisfying the powerful men in Austin. For affairs of this type, there was no one else in the district to trust, aside from Amiens.

With him was a heavy man, slow and big. Menelaus recognized the footstep. His foe.

Something was wrong. There were four lanterns, and one burned more brightly than the others, a wide beam. The man behind moved with slower pace: an old man’s walk.

His little brother Leonidas was acting as his second. Leo jogged over to Amiens to discover why there was an extra man present. In a moment he was back. Menelaus could not see Leo’s features, save as an outline against the brightening red sky beyond.

“What’s the deal? Only supposed to be two witnesses for me, two for Nails.” Mike Nails was the disputant in this party, and a man with a steady aim and rich enough to have a team of five to program and pack his pistol. “Who might that stranger be?”

“A … man … from the Coast as wants to espy the fighting. Amiens says to trust him, no worries.”

The way his brother drawled the word “man” caught his ear. “You mean a foreigner? Which is he, a beaneater or a grasseater?”

“Not neither. He’s a Frenchman.”

“I don’t give a tinker’s damn, but why is Amiens willing to let a man-whore watch straight-ups at our quarreling? That don’t seem much like in his character.”

“Not that kind of Frenchman, man from France. Or Monaco, leastways. A Prince.”

“What do you mean a Prince? He got a crown of gold on his head?”

“Nope, but he got a fat wallet full a cash and everything. Bet the phone on his wrist cost more ’n our whole digs, back home.”

Menelaus spat on the ground. “Pshaw. The Euros already think we’re uncivilized. Are we dancing bears for the tourists to gawp at? Go tell ’em no. My client and I find the conditions of the settlement unacceptable relating to reasons of the dignity of my person as officer of the court. Got that? And talk fine, like Mama told you.”

Leonidas trotted back over. Menelaus could not hear the voices, but he saw how the lamps moved as men gestured with their hands.

He came back. “The guy is not here to watch the fight. He just wants to see you.”

“I keep regular office hours. Walk-ins welcome.”

“Yeah, but he’s afraid you might be dead tomorrow.”

“Pshaw!” said Menelaus. “Mike Nails ain’t putting me in the ground.”

“He says it’s your destiny.”

“What?”

“You’re destined for greater things, he says. To go to the stars, not die down here in the mud.”

“Issat what he said?”

“It sure is.”

“What’s his name?”

“Ronny-yay. The Seventh.”

“Come again?”

“His Serene Highness, Rainier VII Sovereign Prince of Monaco, Duke of Valentinois, Marquis of Baux, Count of Polignac, Baron of this, Lord of that, Sire of somemother damn thing. You know how Euros are. Ever since their lands shrunk up, their damn titles get longer. But get this: He’s got the mark on his head.”

“What kinda mark?”

Leonidas solemnly touched finger to brow. “Right there. Hindu caste mark. He’s a Brahmin.”

“Damnation,” whispered Menelaus, impressed in spite of himself. “Ain’t so many White Men get that. No wonder he’s rich … I … Leo, I know who this is. It’s Grimaldi! It’s him!”

“Him? Him who?”

“Him, the Captain!”

Leonidas looked left and right, unhurriedly, but clearly scoping out escape routes. “Captain of what?” His voice betrayed his tension.

“Not that kind of captain, not a trooper-captain, a ship-captain. The ship!”

“So who is he?”

Menelaus had to grin. “Smartest man alive. Luckiest, too. The Hindus and the Spaniards could not agree on anyone else. He showed up at Sriharikota Island, at the main launch-site, with a bankful of his own money. Monaco had not signed the anti-space proliferation treaty, so if the whole project was in his name, the Sinosphere couldn’t stop it, so they made him Captain! It was in all the chatterboxes. They have a setting for verbal, if’n you can’t be troubled to read ’em.”

“O-Ooh. You mean that ship what ain’t never going to sail?” replied Leonidas. “’Course you do. What the plague other ship you ever the plague talk about? They been building that ship for ten years now.”

Takes a fair piece of time to build a cathedral, Menelaus said. But he did not say it aloud.

Menelaus stared at the dark ground, the tall, straight, beautiful trees. Then he craned his neck up and inspected the sky. One bright star still hung overhead. Perhaps it was an artificial satellite, a Hindu Sputnik. Just like the Americans used to put up, back before civilization threw a shoe, fell, broke its leg, and had to be put down.

They were out there. He was down here.

Down here with his family. His reputation would not survive if he walked away from the settlement, just to go talk to the Star Captain. Even if he walked off the field for a minute, five minutes, the whispers would start.

The more he thought on it, the stranger it seemed. What was Amiens thinking? The breach of secrecy was unheard-of. Menelaus could claim grounds to walk away, but then … would he have the nerve to come back here again?

He never wanted to do anything more ferociously in his life. The desire to go see the man who would fly to the stars boiled like bad whiskey in Menelaus’s belly, it was so strong.

“Tell him to go rut himself,” Menelaus said. “Tell him to get lost. He can see me during office hours. But talk fine, Leon, like Mama…”

“Sure, Meany. Just like Mama says. My principle is affronted at this breach of the security, and politely demands the extraneous party to remove him beyond the bounds set aside for this exercise. How’s that?”

“Like you was born in a skyscraper with running water, little brother.”

2. Mike Nails

The pink sky was now bright enough, merely. Amiens, acting as judge, inspected first one duelist and his weapon, and then the other. He took up his position.

Amiens, in a loud voice, politely asked the Seconds if their Principals could settle the matter in any other way. “Even now, if an accommodation can be reached, both parties may withdraw in honor. Gentlemen! Will your principals seek reconciliation?”

Both Seconds politely returned a negative answer.

“Have all measures to avoid this conflict been exhausted?”

Both Seconds solemnly answered that they had.

At his signal, the distance was paced out by the seconds, and the Principals were posted at thirty yards apart. The sun was still below the horizon: only the eastern clouds were aflame. Menelaus could scarcely see his foe. Mike Nails was no more than a stocky shape against the trees, a dark silhouette against a gray background. The man was bulky to begin with. In his dueling armor, he looked like a black ape with a bald metal head.

Amiens called out again. “Gentlemen, see to your countermeasures!”

There was no change to the naked eye. Menelaus through his helmet monocle could see the view his bullet would see: a confusing blur of ghosts, dancing and fading. Nails had turned on his camouflage. Menelaus put his thumb on the switch on his fanny-pack, and powered his coat circuits also.

Amiens called, “Gentlemen, ready your weapons! On peril of your honor, do not fire before the signal!”

Nails shouted, his voice strangely flat in the cold pre-dawn air, half-unheard beneath the cheery calls of birds. “Backwoodsman! The Frog and his Wogs would have you for their star-venture, eh? I would hate to shoot an aaasssss—tronaut. Go ’way, fly off, and freeze! I’ll be safely in my grave before you wake!”

Menelaus was more puzzled than angered. What was this talk of being an astronaut? Menelaus assumed Mike Nails must have heard something from the rich Monegasque stranger who’d walked up with him. Or recognized the Star Captain. Unlike his brother, Nails read the newsboxes.

Was that wisecrack about a destiny among the stars supposed to mean something? Something for real?

For a moment, Menelaus felt as if some childhood dream, long-forgotten, was stirring in his heart. It lived in his thoughts as a child, usurping golden afternoons. But he could not recall it to mind, not now.

Tradition commanded that each was to address each other only through their Seconds. Amiens called out in a solemn, grave voice, “The Principals are to be respectful in meeting, and neither by look nor expression irritate each other! They are to be wholly passive, being entirely under the guidance of their Seconds, who keep their honor for them, and answer for them!”

He could not recall his dreams to mind. Not now. There was no time.

Menelaus cried, “My answer is here.” And with a ponderously slow gesture put his pistol overhead, arm straight.

His brother’s voice came from the gloom. “Stand firm until the signal is dropped. When the signal is dropped, you are at liberty to fire.” The other second, Mike’s nephew Zechariah, said the same words to Mike Nails, as if an echo hung in the cool dawn air.

There was a flutter of red as Amiens raised the scarf. Both men saluted by holding up their off hands, palm out and fingers spread, indicating ready. As was the Spanish custom, copied here, the left glove of a duelist was sewn with a black palm, so that this gesture could be seen from afar.

The second for Mike Nails called out that he was ready. Leonidas called out likewise.

Amiens released the scarf.

3. Pistolshot

Dueling, as a custom, does not exist if pistols are too capable. In Menelaus’s great-grandfather’s day, when a sniper in Austin could shoot a satellite-triangulated beam-guided bullet to Fort Worth and down a man’s chimney and into his left ear, duelists within eyeshot of each other would have been certain to die. It was not the inaccuracy of the guns that revived the custom in this generation; it was the perfection of the defensive measures.

Menelaus was confident. He had a Krupp 5 MegAmp railgun with a 250 IQ that fired two pounds of smart shot and a nine-meter globe of effective counterfire. The main slug could dance and jink like a drop of mercury on a skillet.

The pistol, a six-pound behemoth, was only good for one shot. Most of the mass of the gun was in the packed chaff, which consisted of hundreds of spinning, irregular bits of self-propelled interceptors. The computing technology needed to hit a bullet out of the air with a bullet had long been known; but the chaff did not need to hit a bullet straight-on to deflect it, merely to put a vortex of sufficient overpressure in the path. The Bernoulli effect, the same thing that gave curved wings lift or tennis balls backspin, would do the rest.

To counter this, gunsmiths developed bullets as large as miniature rockets. The heavier the slug, the less partial vacuums created by counterfire could deflect it, and also a large slug could carry retrorockets and a simple calculator to correct deflection errors. Escort bullets, which were smaller and lighter, could run interference, feinting the chaff into premature discharge and clearing a path, or setting up vortices of their own to pull the main shot back onto its flightpath.

And the inner globe of chaff which followed the outer globe corrected for feints, bringing more chaff-mass suddenly to one vector to deflect the bullet.

And, of course, the bullet could be programmed to feint and correct, as could the escorts, to trick the chaff into mistaking one for the other; and chaff could be counterprogrammed to correct for this feint or ignore it, or …

The chaff flight pattern and distribution was based on the microscopic differences in shape of their various lifting surfaces. Which shape of chaff went in which of the eight launchers that distributed the load was, of course, a question of pure game-theory, whose solution would maximize defensive flightpaths in minimum time, while leaving maximum correction options. It all depended on what you loaded where, how you packed your weapon.

And then there was a simple psychological question: Was the opponent someone who programmed a dogleg feint and a straight-line correction, or a straight-line feint and a dogleg correction? If the first, you packed your gun to spread your chaff in a toroid like a smoke-ring; if the second, in a cone centered on his line of fire.

Once the shot encountered the chaff cloud, it was all a chessgame on autopilot, with the bullet calculating the possible vortices of the chaff based on their presumed shapes, and the chaff attempting to deflect the bullet based on its presumed flightpath. The duel depended on the skill with which the chaff had been packed, the programming of the decision trees, and the intelligence of the pistol.

Menelaus smiled. He had been packing chaff since boyhood. And his Krupp 5M could do the New New York Times sudoku puzzle.

Menelaus was standing with his arm overhead, as if he meant to delope, and shoot in a right line into the air. It would have been the gentlemanly thing to do, if Nails had been convinced he meant it. If Nails had followed suit, both men could have discharged harmlessly and, with no dishonor, walked away alive. Merely to come to this field preserved one’s name.

Menelaus normally shot straight-line and corrected: swift, direct, bloody. This time he was not. Why did he give his opponent one last clear chance to walk away, both of them unbloodied, unashamed? Nails must have thought it was weakness.

Thought? There was no time, really, to think through the options once the scarf dropped. These things are decided on instant and instinctive levels. Perhaps Nails sensed Menelaus had no more nerve. Perhaps he just wanted to get in the shot first.

So Nails fired from the hip, not taking the extra eighth-second to raise his arm. Perhaps he sprained his wrist; certainly the kick threw him back, off balance, as if a hammer struck his shooting arm. His heavy armor clanged like a bell around him. Jets of black chaff erupted in eight directions from his barrel, making the man vanish in an opaque cloud, from which only radar aiming beams emerged. A smoke-ring. He had guessed Menelaus was firing on an indirect path.

Menelaus had the swifter reflexes, and had fired an instant before his foe, sensing by the tilt of the shoulder-armor that Nails had committed himself. So he was also hidden in a cloud, but this one was a cone reaching straight overhead, like a black tornado. His own aiming beam was pointed straight up.

It was only an instant, but that instant was long enough, because the leading edge of Nails’s chaff cloud, approaching faster than the speed of sound, sensed the aiming beam of Menelaus’s pistol, and flew upward, following it. This distorted the cloud directly between the two, thinning Nails’s defense.

Menelaus brought his arm down like Zeus calling a lightning bolt down from heaven, like a samurai chopping with an immense but unseen blade. This was purely theatric motion, of course. His main shot, which had been loaded in his escort-bullet’s lower Six O’clock launcher, had already found and piled through the thin cloud. The bullet had been programmed to pull the tightest possible angle, so its flightpath was as near to straight as a man with his gun pointed away from his target could manage.

Menelaus, by this stunt, of course, had almost none of his cloud around him. It was all streaming up overhead. Even so, his pistol computers with casual genius located and deflected the enemy main shot.

Nails’s head exploded, for Menelaus’s bullet entered his helmet, but did not have enough velocity to exit, and so ricocheted like a bead in a baby’s rattle, a momentary pentagram of burning metal.

And because Menelaus was a serious man when he fought, he had programmed his escort bullets to follow the wake, and so Nails was struck again and again and again as slug after slug hit his skull, collar, shoulder, neck.

A serious man. When he saw his headless opponent fall, Menelaus, who was covered with sweat, his heartbeat hot in his face, not consciously believing that the corpse might get up again, nonetheless drew his Bowie knife and started forward. (The picture in his mind was of plunging the knife again and again into a metal-hard torso, into bloodless plastic limbs, to make sure they would not keep moving.)

He did not even know he was seriously wounded until he took that step. It was not even an escort bullet that had traveled through his leg and shattered his kneecap. It had been a splinter of granite, half-buried in the dry winter grass, some stray escort bullet struck. His leggings were red, and his boot was already full of blood, for a major vein had been severed. Then the sky turned a funny metallic black, lit with flashes of colorless light, and he had the sensation of stepping into an elevator whose cable was cut.

Hitting the ground woke him for a moment. He saw the scarf flutter to the grass and lie still.

4. The Harvest Is Great

He woke to the smell of mown hay, the sound of bees buzzing. Out the window, brothers in brown cassocks were bent over, a line of men with sickles, working in devout silence, piling the harvest in bundles along the parallel paths they made in the standing wheat. In the silence, one voice spoke: et dicebat illis messis quidem multa operarii autem pauci rogate ergo Dominum messis ut mittat operarios in messem. Menelaus did not understand the words, but there was a lilt of humor there.

Leonidas was slouched, perhaps asleep, balancing on a stool near his bed, tilted back so not all the stool legs were on the floorstones, his crossed boots making the only mark on an otherwise clean and white wall. Perhaps he was awake, for a thin blue trail of smoke was spilling slowly upward from beneath his hat brim.

“Little brother,” said Menelaus.

A low chuckle answered him. “Not no more. I’m older than you, now.”

“You froze me?”

“The bone-grower messed up, started your ribs and stuff getting all crinkly. Had to bring in a Jap to redo your skeleton, and that cost. Specialist from Osaka.”

“How long was I out?”

“Year and a half.”

“Why so long?” Menelaus asked.

“We had to keep you stiff until Nelson could raise the money.”

“Nelson? He even got a job?”

“In Newer Orleans. Some scratch he got gambling, some he got diving for treasure in the sunk part of the city. Some he got from some Anglo pumpkin with dollar signs in his eyes, just for drawing a map and making sweet talk.”

“Damn stupid of him, going into hot water.”

“He says its clean these days, the water.”

“If there’s no fish, it’s not clean. Don’t care what the Geiger counter says. Fish know.” Menelaus shook his head. “Hope he’s planning to be a monk. No women’ll marry a man with nuked-up stones.”

“Maybe Nelson wore a lead jockstrap. But funny you should mention…”

Menelaus looked around the room. The crucifix on the wall was Spanish-style, with the figure of the torture all carved and painted in grotesque and vivid likeness, and adorned with gold leaf. “You didn’t. You surely didn’t.”

“We did. We surely did.”

“Can’t baptize a man without his say-so. They got rules. A catechism.”

“We told ’em it was your last words, dying wish, all that.”

“I ain’t joining no beaneater church.”

“Been done. The Governor’s brother came by and put oil on your face and everything. Washed all your sins away, prettied up your soul to go meet St. Peter. But I guess you’ll call him San Pedro now, eh? Got to go to Rome and kiss the toe of the Pope.”

“Preacher Brown says the Pope got horns and a split hoof like a goat.”

Leonidas grinned, which made his cigarette tilt up at a jaunty angle. “Preacher Brown will take a strap to you, he finds out you say your prayers in Latin.”

“I don’t say prayers.”

“You do. Before your meals. I heard you.”

“Saying “thank God, its time to eat” ain’t saying grace. Saying the blessing don’t do nothing.”

“Well, cussing a man to hell don’t do nothing, neither, but I heard you do that, too.”

“Well, go get the brother or whoever. Tell ’em I changed my mind, and I’m going back to … what is Preacher Brown? Whatever the hell he is, tell ’em I had a vision or something calling me back to, uh…”

“Mormon. Preacher Brown’s a Mormon.”

“He ain’t no Mormon. In the first case, Mormons got two wives, and in the second, we hang them when we catch them, like they do us. Utah’s enemy ground. It just ain’t possible! Umm—is it? He’s not really a Mormon, is he?”

“Just ain’t possible you can be born and raised from a pup and don’t even know what Church you are.”

“Which is the one that believes in hellfire?”

“All of ’em. How many years you been a-going to Meeting? You didn’t pay not the least attention in all that time?”

“I was thinking of something else.”

“What?”

“Maybe we could make a promised land by our own lone selves, asking no help and bowing to none. Maybe the Garden of Eden weren’t at the beginning of time, but at the end, a garden we can make as soon as we figure how to make it. That’s what I was thinking. Old Preacher Brown’s spook stories didn’t seem like much to me, held up against that. Call the brother.”

“Don’t be a mule, Meany. The Governor’s brother, the Bishop, came by and tended to you while you were sick, and he didn’t turn you over to the Regulators.”

“Bishop? Ain’t no bishops in Texas.”

“So is. Bishop of the Diocese of Galveston-Houston. He’s shielding you. You step off of sanctuary ground, you might as well put your head in a bucket of boiling pork-lard. Mike Nails was setting to get married, did you know that?”

“No. Who is the girl?”

“Lil Palmer. Josiah Palmer’s girl, the man who owns half the county. See? Might have been okay if you had killed him clean, but word got out that you drilled Mike over and over.”

“Because his gun was stupid and his chaff was packed like crap.”

“Blew his head clean off, you did. If you’d’ve drilled him in the heart and left a good-looking corpse…”

“Bugger that. Gunfighting ain’t a game. Besides, it’s not my fault I win.”

“Win? You shoot like the devil’s in you, little brother. Lookit this. Got you a memento.”

Leonidas pulled out a slug of metal. It was two bullets, melted into one shape, curled like a question-mark. The payload of Mike Nails’s main shot had been fused by the heat of impact to one of Menelaus’s escort bullets—a rare, perfect interception.

Looking at the shape, Menelaus could see it in his head: the patterns, the pretty patterns of vortices. He could see the math needed to describe how that impact had been done, and he could guess at a way to solve for simultaneous partial differentials, more elegant than what he’d been doing before.

“Shoot like the devil is in you,” Leonidas said again, this time more softly.

“I just got a knack, is all,” muttered Menelaus.

“That’s not what Rainier says.”

“Who?”

“Your Prince. The Prince of Monaco.”

“Captain Grimaldi. Ain’t no titles in space.”

“Ship ain’t done a-building yet. Most likely never will be.”

“The Hermetic. He’s still the Captain,” said Menelaus. And in his heart, he wanted the words to be: my Captain.

Leonidas shrugged. “Whatever his name is, His Serene Highness helped pay for some of your fixup. He was talking about a scholarship. They’ll pay your way to go to Oddifornia and study math.” Leonidas shook his head in wonder, as if baffled by rich foreigners and their lunatic ways. “Guess when it takes you more’n ten years to build a ship, you might as well put the kids through schooling what might grow up to be your crew. Train ’em up to the job, like.”

For a moment, Menelaus had the strangest feeling, as if time itself had forgotten how to let the seconds pass. Pay? To study?

It was the future. A doorway to the future had just become unlocked for him.

In one part of his mind, he noticed how much joy was like horror: The same horripilation tingled his skin electrically, the same faintness of breath, the same prickling of the scalp, the same sensation that something too enormous to grasp was upon him.

His gunfighter’s nerve knew how to deal with horror, and so he could master this wild bucking-bronco feeling, too. Menelaus controlled his voice and spoke nonchalantly.

“So … pay my way outta here. He said that?”

“He did indeed. And seeing as how pretty Lil Palmer will kiss any man who shoots you in the back, and her dad will give him a thousand acres of prime land, this might be a good time to pack up and go study. Pox, I’d beef you myself to get a lip-dicker from sweet Lilly: just as fine as cream gravy and easy on the eyes, she is.”

“Did the brothers say how soon I’d be fit to travel?”

“Your body’s got to flush out the cellular machinery used to hold you in life-suspension: so you’ll be crapping black ink for a while. Aside from that, we can leave as soon as…”

“We?”

Leonidas looked shy, and pulled his hatbrim down, but eventually said: “Well, I’m your brother, Meany Louse. Older brother now. Can’t let you go off by your lonesome. Lookit what all kinds of trouble you make.”

Menelaus was not in the mind to argue the point. “You got a cigarette?”

“Sure do.”

“Old or new?”

“New. This is newbacco. You don’t think I touch that poison stuff, do you?”

So Menelaus leaned back comfortably in his bed, watching the blue plume of cigarette smoke drift toward the ceiling. The two brothers shared the silence, neither feeling much need to talk, not yet. The smoke trickled up.

Up. The direction the stars were in.