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Authors: John C. Wright

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To be sure, a world without death did not seem too much more unimaginable than a world without hate, without race-hate or church-hate.

Menelaus wondered for the first time if this comic had been meant just for kids. Maybe it was talking about something more important. Maybe these writers of these long-dead future dreams had been a companionship, like a sworn brotherhood of knights, sworn to the proposition that tomorrow could be better.

Menelaus crumpled up his library, stuffed it back under his pillow.

Where had that dream gone? How long before the future came, the real future, the way it had always been supposed to be?

It was a long time before he fell to sleep that night.

Being trapped as an apprentice gunsmith and a Constable’s roustabout was certainly not the future he’d ever wanted. If he was ever going to make it to the stars someday, he had to find his way out of Bridge-to-Nowhere.

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.

BOOK: Count to a Trillion
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