Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future (14 page)

“Did we ever have any dealings
with him?”

“Not directly.”

“Could he have known my name?”

“Anything’s possible.”

“Let’s attack it another way,”
said Sokol. “When was he killed?”

“A couple of weeks ago.”

“Before Virtue MacKenzie landed on
Pegasus?”

“Right.”

Sokol smiled. “Then she never met
him.”

“You can’t be sure of that. She
didn’t have to meet him on Pegasus.”

“Of course she did,” replied
Sokol. “She’d have come straight to me the second she had that interview. She’s
been bluffing all the way.”

“Can you afford to take the
chance?”

He frowned. “Not really. She can’t
do any serious harm to me, but she could screw up this Lodin Eleven
appointment.” He paused, rolling his cigar between his fingers. “Trace Acosta’s
whereabouts for the past year and see if the two of them could possibly have
met somewhere other than Pegasus.”

The blond man was back an hour
later.

“Well?” demanded Sokol.

“You were right: Acosta and
MacKenzie were never within fifty light-years of each other.”

“I knew it!” said Sokol
triumphantly.

“What would you like done next?”
asked the blond man.

“She’s got to have a message drop
somewhere in Hektor. There’s a chance that she’s already contacted Cain, so
tomorrow I want you to find some way to get word to Santiago. Warn him to be on
the alert, just in case Cain or this gambler actually manage to hook up with
the Swagman.”

“Tomorrow?”

Sokol nodded. “This afternoon
you’re going to hunt up Leander Smythe and see to it that he never again
spreads any malicious gossip about me. We don’t want to kill a member of the
press, but I want you to give him a lesson he remembers. And don’t say who sent
you. He’ll figure it out.”

“That takes care of this afternoon
and tomorrow morning,” said the blond man. “What about tonight?”

“Tonight? Go home and go to
sleep.”

“What about Virtue MacKenzie?”

“She doesn’t have the tape, so
she’s no immediate threat. I don’t want any harm to come to her while she’s on
Pegasus.”

“And once she leaves?”

Sokol smiled.
“That’s another matter, isn’t it?”

His name is
Father William,

His aim is
hard to ken:

His game is
saving sinners;

His fame is killing men.

Whenever people would sit around
talking with Black Orpheus, sooner or later the question would come up: Who did
he think was the most memorable character he had met during his wanderings?
He’d lean back, sipping his wine and staring off into the distance, enjoying
the moment and the memories, and then, just when his listeners began to think
that they weren’t going to get an answer, he’d smile and say that he’d seen a
lot of men and women on the Inner Frontier—killers like the Songbird and
One-Time Charlie, tragic figures like Schussler the Cyborg, entrepreneurs like
Descartes White (whom he had renamed Carte Blanche, a sobriquet with which he
was inordinately pleased), good women like Silent Annie and Blessed Sarah, bad
women like Flat-Nosed Sal and Sister Sleaze, even virtual supermen like
ManMountain Bates—but not a one of them held a candle to Father William.

It had been love at first sight.
Not a physical or personal love, but the kind of love a landscape artist feels
toward a beautiful sunset. Black Orpheus painted his word pictures on a very
broad canvas, and even so, Father William was almost too big to fit.

The first time Orpheus ever saw
him was in the Corvus system, preaching hellfire and damnation from a pulpit,
and daring anyone in his audience—which included some pretty notorious
characters—not to make a donation to his personalized, monogrammed poorbox. The
next time was two years later, out by the Quinellus cluster, where Father
William was serenely blessing the departed spirits of four men and a woman he
had just killed. Orpheus ran into him a third and final time on Girodus II and
watched, fascinated, as he shot down two outlaws, turned in their scalps for
the reward (the taking of scalps was unnecessary, but nobody felt obligated to
argue that particular point with Father William), donated the money to the
local church, and spent the next two days spreading the gospel to the
elephantine natives of the planet.

Orpheus tried to find out more
about his past, but it was a fruitless quest. The only thing Father William
wanted to talk about was God, though with a drink or two in his massive belly
he’d be willing to segue into a discussion of Sodom and Gomorrah. He was a
fabulous figure, standing just under six feet five inches, weighing close to
four hundred pounds, always clad in black. He wore a pair of black leather
holsters, each equipped with laser pistols which he insisted contained the
purifying fire of the Lord. He had forsworn all pleasures of the flesh except
gluttony, explaining that a weak evangelist was an ineffective evangelist, and
that he aimed to run through a lot of calories bringing Christianity to the
godless worlds of the Frontier. It was his earnest belief that any world that
played host to a wanted killer was more in need of salvation than most, and it
was his intention to bring those worlds into the fold by eradicating the evil
and spreading the Word among the survivors. The already damned would simply
start serving their infernal sentences a little early, and the remainder, freed
from their evil influence, would be snatched from Satan’s avaricious grasp for
all eternity—or until such time as the government issued paper on them.

Father William wasn’t as famous as
he might have been. Black Orpheus only gave him three verses, a third of what
he’d given to Giles Sans Pitié, who wasn’t anywhere near as colorful or
interesting, but that was mainly because Orpheus figured the Bible-toting
bounty hunter was so much bigger than life that there simply wasn’t a lot more
that could be said about him. And since the stanzas were brief and muted, and
the ever-growing epic was now well past two thousand verses, people who hadn’t
heard Black Orpheus expound upon him could be forgiven for having overlooked
his exploits.

Virtue MacKenzie was one of those
people. She didn’t know that Father William was preaching on Goldenrod, and
wouldn’t have cared even if she had known. Her only interest was in finding the
outlaw known as the Jolly Swagman, and, through him, Santiago.

She landed her ship on Goldenrod,
a temperate little world that was owned by a cartel of farming syndicates. The
crops were harvested by robots, which worked under the direction of a handful
of men and women who pretended that they were executives but knew in their
hearts that they were only mechanics and caretakers. There was only one city,
an ancient Tradertown that predated the farms and had expanded to the point
where it now housed almost eight thousand inhabitants; and, like so many
Tradertowns on the Frontier, it bore the name of the planet.

She had a feeling that she
wouldn’t be staying there long, so rather than reserving a room at a hotel, she
left her gear in her ship and took a shuttlecart into the Tradertown. When the
cart came to a stop, she found herself in the middle of a town square,
surrounded by long, low buildings and standing next to a monument of the
planet’s founder.

Unlike Cain, who had spent two
decades traveling from one Tradertown to the next and usually sought his
information in bars and brothels, she hunted up the local news office—the world
was too small to possess its own network and in fact employed only one
stringer—presented her credentials, and asked for the Jolly Swagman’s
whereabouts.

“You’ve got more important things
to worry about than meeting the Swagman,” said the middle-aged man who had
greeted her.

“Such as?” asked Virtue.

“You might start by giving some
serious thought to getting off the planet alive.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well,” he said, “it’s not news,
so we haven’t released it—not that any other world would give a damn about what
goes on here anyway—but the word on the grapevine is that you made a certain
party on Pegasus very angry with you. He thought it might be bad for business
to redress his grievances too close to home, so he chose Goldenrod as a more
fitting setting.”

“He’s put a hit out on me?”

“I understand that he’s hired
three killers to see to it that you don’t leave Goldenrod.”

“Who are they?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Wonderful,” she muttered. She
glanced out at the street, trying to guess which of the many people that she
could see looked like hired killers, then turned back to the stringer. “How do
I apply for police protection?”

The man shook his head. “You’re
not in the Democracy any longer: We don’t
have
a
police department.”

“You must have
some
way of protecting your citizens,” she persisted.

“Goldenrod is the Swagman’s world—
he
protects it.”

“I thought Goldenrod belonged to a
bunch of corporations that own all the property.”

“Well, legally it does. But
they’re all headquartered on Deluros and Earth and the Canphor Twins, and as
long as the farms continue showing a profit they don’t much care what goes on
here. Besides, when you make an unofficial arrangement to let someone like the
Swagman stay on your world, you expect something in return.”

“So they give him sanctuary here,
and in exchange he sees to it that nobody tries to hijack their goods or
short-change their representatives. Is that it?” asked Virtue.

“Something like that,” said the
man. “I don’t know the exact arrangement, but I’m sure you’re pretty close to
it.”

“Fine,” said Virtue. “Then let’s
get word to him that I want to see him, and get him to extend his protection to
me.”

“I thought you understood the
situation,” said the man irritably. “I guess you don’t.”

“What am I missing?”

“The hit men couldn’t have
accepted the commission without the Swagman’s approval. That’s the way things
work here.”

“I’ve never even met him,” said
Virtue. “What has he got against me?”

“Probably nothing. He’s a very
friendly man, actually. But the killers will pay him a commission in order to
operate here, and it’s not unfair to say that he likes money even more than he
likes people.”

“Then I’d better find
him
before they find
me
.”

“You don’t even know who they
are,” replied the man. “They
could
be those three
grubby-looking men standing together across the street”—he pointed out the
window to a trio of armed men who were standing together a short distance
away—”but they could also be three little old ladies who are out doing their
shopping, or the bartenders down the block, or even some of the mechanics at
the spaceport. If I were you, I’d get back to my ship as fast as I could and
take off before anyone knew I was here.”

“I didn’t come all this way
not
to talk to the Swagman,” Virtue said firmly. “Where
can I find him?”

The man shrugged.

“Damn it!” she snapped. “Are you
going to help me or aren’t you?”

“I don’t
know
where to find him!” replied the man, exasperated. “I don’t even know if he’s on
the planet right now. It’s not in his best professional interests to announce
his comings and goings.”

“All right. If he
is
here, where will he be?”

“He’s got a place up in the
hills—a real fortress—but you can’t get to it. He’s got security devices all
the hell over—and I mean
lethal
devices.”

“How do I get in touch with him,
then?”

“Well, Father William’s set up
shop just outside of town for the next couple of days, so I imagine the Swagman
will be keeping an eye on him, just in case.”

“Who’s Father William?”

He stared at her disbelievingly.
“Just how long have you been on the Frontier?”

“Long enough,” she replied
levelly. “Has Black Orpheus written him up?”

The man nodded. “Did a damned
sight better on him than he did on you. You’re the Virgin Queen, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then you ought to know what’s in
the song.”

“I’ve got better things to do than
commit eight thousand lines to memory. Now, are you going to tell me who he
is?”

“He’s a little bit of
everything—preacher, bounty hunter, benefactor. I suppose it all depends on who
you are.”

“Would
he
know how to reach the Swagman?”

“I suppose so. There’s not a lot
that Father William doesn’t know about outlaws.”

“If he’s a bounty hunter, there’s
a chance that he’s after the Swagman himself,” said Virtue. “Why would the
Swagman let him land on Goldenrod?”

“Probably because he’d have a
revolt on his hands if he tried to stop him. Father William’s the most popular
evangelist on the Frontier—and there are some who think he’s the best shot, as
well. He goes anywhere he wants.”

“Dimitri Sokol wouldn’t have hired
him,
would he?” asked Virtue thoughtfully.

“Not a chance. He’s a bounty
hunter, not a hired killer.”

“Well,” she said with a sigh, “I
suppose he’s the next person I have to see. Where is he?”

“He’s set up his tent about a mile
west of town.”

She checked her timepiece. “When
does he start preaching?”

“Today’s sermon started about two
hours ago.”

“Then he should be just about
through,” she ventured.

He laughed. “He won’t be through
until nightfall.”

“You’re kidding!” said Virtue.
“What the hell has he got to talk about that takes eight hours?”

“Anything that comes into his
head,” replied the stringer. “You’ve got to remember that he’s all the
flesh-and-blood religion most of these people are going to have for the next couple
of years, until he passes through again, so he’s got to cram a lot of hellfire
and damnation into a very short space of time.”