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.

Menelaus normally shot straight-line and corrected: swift, direct, bloody. This time he was not. Why did he give his opponent one last clear chance to walk away, both of them unbloodied, unashamed? Nails must have thought it was weakness.

Thought? There was no time, really, to think through the options once the scarf dropped. These things are decided on instant and instinctive levels. Perhaps Nails sensed Menelaus had no more nerve. Perhaps he just wanted to get in the shot first.

So Nails fired from the hip, not taking the extra eighth-second to raise his arm. Perhaps he sprained his wrist; certainly the kick threw him back, off balance, as if a hammer struck his shooting arm. His heavy armor clanged like a bell around him. Jets of black chaff erupted in eight directions from his barrel, making the man vanish in an opaque cloud, from which only radar aiming beams emerged. A smoke-ring. He had guessed Menelaus was firing on an indirect path.

Menelaus had the swifter reflexes, and had fired an instant before his foe, sensing by the tilt of the shoulder-armor that Nails had committed himself. So he was also hidden in a cloud, but this one was a cone reaching straight overhead, like a black tornado. His own aiming beam was pointed straight up.

It was only an instant, but that instant was long enough, because the leading edge of Nails’s chaff cloud, approaching faster than the speed of sound, sensed the aiming beam of Menelaus’s pistol, and flew upward, following it. This distorted the cloud directly between the two, thinning Nails’s defense.

Menelaus brought his arm down like Zeus calling a lightning bolt down from heaven, like a samurai chopping with an immense but unseen blade. This was purely theatric motion, of course. His main shot, which had been loaded in his escort-bullet’s lower Six O’clock launcher, had already found and piled through the thin cloud. The bullet had been programmed to pull the tightest possible angle, so its flightpath was as near to straight as a man with his gun pointed away from his target could manage.

Menelaus, by this stunt, of course, had almost none of his cloud around him. It was all streaming up overhead. Even so, his pistol computers with casual genius located and deflected the enemy main shot.

Nails’s head exploded, for Menelaus’s bullet entered his helmet, but did not have enough velocity to exit, and so ricocheted like a bead in a baby’s rattle, a momentary pentagram of burning metal.

And because Menelaus was a serious man when he fought, he had programmed his escort bullets to follow the wake, and so Nails was struck again and again and again as slug after slug hit his skull, collar, shoulder, neck.

A serious man. When he saw his headless opponent fall, Menelaus, who was covered with sweat, his heartbeat hot in his face, not consciously believing that the corpse might get up again, nonetheless drew his Bowie knife and started forward. (The picture in his mind was of plunging the knife again and again into a metal-hard torso, into bloodless plastic limbs, to make sure they would not keep moving.)

He did not even know he was seriously wounded until he took that step. It was not even an escort bullet that had traveled through his leg and shattered his kneecap. It had been a splinter of granite, half-buried in the dry winter grass, some stray escort bullet struck. His leggings were red, and his boot was already full of blood, for a major vein had been severed. Then the sky turned a funny metallic black, lit with flashes of colorless light, and he had the sensation of stepping into an elevator whose cable was cut.

Hitting the ground woke him for a moment. He saw the scarf flutter to the grass and lie still.

4. The Harvest Is Great

He woke to the smell of mown hay, the sound of bees buzzing. Out the window, brothers in brown cassocks were bent over, a line of men with sickles, working in devout silence, piling the harvest in bundles along the parallel paths they made in the standing wheat. In the silence, one voice spoke: et dicebat illis messis quidem multa operarii autem pauci rogate ergo Dominum messis ut mittat operarios in messem. Menelaus did not understand the words, but there was a lilt of humor there.

Leonidas was slouched, perhaps asleep, balancing on a stool near his bed, tilted back so not all the stool legs were on the floorstones, his crossed boots making the only mark on an otherwise clean and white wall. Perhaps he was awake, for a thin blue trail of smoke was spilling slowly upward from beneath his hat brim.

“Little brother,” said Menelaus.

A low chuckle answered him. “Not no more. I’m older than you, now.”

“You froze me?”

“The bone-grower messed up, started your ribs and stuff getting all crinkly. Had to bring in a Jap to redo your skeleton, and that cost. Specialist from Osaka.”

“How long was I out?”

“Year and a half.”

“Why so long?” Menelaus asked.

“We had to keep you stiff until Nelson could raise the money.”

“Nelson? He even got a job?”

“In Newer Orleans. Some scratch he got gambling, some he got diving for treasure in the sunk part of the city. Some he got from some Anglo pumpkin with dollar signs in his eyes, just for drawing a map and making sweet talk.”

“Damn stupid of him, going into hot water.”

“He says its clean these days, the water.”

“If there’s no fish, it’s not clean. Don’t care what the Geiger counter says. Fish know.” Menelaus shook his head. “Hope he’s planning to be a monk. No women’ll marry a man with nuked-up stones.”

“Maybe Nelson wore a lead jockstrap. But funny you should mention…”

Menelaus looked around the room. The crucifix on the wall was Spanish-style, with the figure of the torture all carved and painted in grotesque and vivid likeness, and adorned with gold leaf. “You didn’t. You surely didn’t.”

“We did. We surely did.”

“Can’t baptize a man without his say-so. They got rules. A catechism.”

“We told ’em it was your last words, dying wish, all that.”

“I ain’t joining no beaneater church.”

“Been done. The Governor’s brother came by and put oil on your face and everything. Washed all your sins away, prettied up your soul to go meet St. Peter. But I guess you’ll call him San Pedro now, eh? Got to go to Rome and kiss the toe of the Pope.”

“Preacher Brown says the Pope got horns and a split hoof like a goat.”

Leonidas grinned, which made his cigarette tilt up at a jaunty angle. “Preacher Brown will take a strap to you, he finds out you say your prayers in Latin.”