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.”