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.