Count to a Trillion

by John C. Wright

  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, th
eir 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 prema
ture 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.