He noticed things he had not seen before, dozens of little errors. The textures were bland and uniform; the depth-perception was off. All the female crewmen were based on the same hourglass-shaped wireframe, just the same girl over and over with different heads. The hair was wrong. The dialog was stiff and stilted. And the backgrounds were simply the same graphic, used and reused.

But still, but still, somehow, it was still great. At the intro frame, the three horncalls rang out, brassy and brave, the clarion of triumph: ¡Hacia adelante! ¡Para el futuro! ¡ … es! ¡ … un viaje! ¡ … sin extremo!

It was so stupid and so fake looking. And yet, when the great ship Emancipation lifted off, surrounded by a surge of boiling flame, to stride roaring above the red-tinged clouds on her single bending leg of fire, his heart soared as well … and magical silence fell when the ship left atmosphere, and in the darkness the distant suns shined untwinkling like lanterns … lanterns beckoning.…

The end credit lyrics were still in Anglo:

Come now traveler, sail the stars!

Go boldly yonder, beyond th’ unknown

The secrets of space shall all be ours

Myriad worlds of tomorrow our own!

He read the fragment, then reread it, the second time with the party comments track running, so he could hear the wisecracks and applause of other audience members. With an eerie feeling, Menelaus realized all these commentators, their laughs and scoffs and foul-mouthed swearing, was like nothing folk these days spoke. He was hearing voices long dead, maybe over a century old.

Then the sun was setting, so the library shined brightly in the gloom. He folded it up. Menelaus did not want his brothers to see him reading. To them it would be kid’s stuff. And both his mom and his master had oversight rights into his viewing habits. His brothers would have tormented him with days or months of mockery, if they found he had spent a whole Spanish dollar on a scabby copy of a spaceman cartoon. Worse, if they told the other prentices, Menelaus would have to lick them in one fight after another, taking a lashing from his master each time. But he could not bring himself to delete it.

That night, after midnight, he put the counterpane over his head and fingered on the library one more time, hoping the light would not leak out under the covers.

With sleep-bleared eyes he studied the frames of the story. With one part of his mind, he could see the hammy acting, the jerky graphics, the ridiculous, predictable ending. He knew it was fake, badly drawn. But with his heart, he was a crewman again, and rode to the stars on wings of fire.

There was something else here, too.

He had not understood it when he was young. Now he saw that the people of the far future, Swarthies and Blondies, were talking as equals, no one noticing or giving a hot hoot about color or kin or any of that.

One character was clearly a Paynim, an enemy, wearing a rag on his head and everything: but he was just a respected member of the Science Council. In one scene, a Blondie captain kissed a cute Swarthy, right on her thick, red lips, like they were man and wife.

(She was really a cute goose, chocolate skin and all, but Menelaus told himself not to find out if this ratty copy could unlock that secret level Hector showed him. While he was curious about what she looked like in her underwear, he was just old enough to realize such titillations were for weaklings. If Captain Sterling were real, would he gawk at smut? If his father were alive, would he?)

In the future of the Asymptote, there was no talk of lynching Mormons or statue-worshipping Catholics, nothing like that: The future-people never mentioned Church at all. It just didn’t come up. Menelaus, when he thought on it, had never had much use for churchgoing anyway. Pray for sun on a rainy day, nothing happens; pray for rain on a sunny day, nothing happens. Any fool could see that. But on the other hand, if there were no Meetings and no preachers, what would widows have to say over the coffins of their menfolk? It didn’t seem right to throw a man into the ground like he was a dead dog or something, without saying words of some kind.

He reckoned these future people didn’t have that problem. Whenever one of them died, it did not take long for him to better up, as some cloning machine would be found, or a new fixup of the teleport ray would allow all and sundry to make back-up copies of themselves, just like a song file.

(’Course, half the time the clone copies came back evil, but that was just one more problem for the Cyrano Widget to solve with that glowing metal helmet-doohickey in his lab that solved problems. The gadget was supposed to be too dangerous to use, since it caused “Neuropositronic Brain Disruption!” but the bold Science Officer ended up using it every other episode anyway.)

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?