Read Online Count to a Trillion by John C. Wright - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: John C. Wright
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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.
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
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
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