Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future (17 page)

It was the first one he’d ever
heard.

Men had had accents when they were
still Earthbound, and they would have them again in the future, thousands of
years after the Inner and Outer Frontiers had been totally settled and
civilized. But during the eras of the Republic and the Democracy and even the
early Oligarchy, which spanned almost six millennia between them, every Man
grew up knowing two tongues: that of his native world and Terran (and more
often than not, the tongue of his native world
was
Terran). Out on the Frontier, where Men changed worlds the way their brothers
back on Earth and Deluros VIII changed shirts, Terran was all anybody spoke: it
had been carefully devised over a period of decades to be the kind of language
any Man could pick up with ease, a language that was well-nigh impossible to
speak with an accent.

So when Black Orpheus hunted up
the Swagman and sat down to talk with him, the conversation wasn’t half a
minute old before Orpheus knew that he’d been raised by aliens.

The Swagman never denied it, but
he wouldn’t be coaxed into giving out any of the details. He liked the
creatures who’d brought him up too much to want them to be studied and
exploited by the creatures of his own race, and he knew that that was exactly
what would happen if Black Orpheus incorporated them into his song.

At any rate, the balladeer was
absolutely captivated by the outlaw’s explosive
g
’s
and sibilant
sh
’s. He stayed on Goldenrod for a week
or two, and some people say that the Swagman even took Orpheus on a raid with
him, just to show him what it was like. They became friends, because in spite
of his penchant for lawbreaking, the Swagman was a pretty friendly person. He
saw Black Orpheus a few years later and didn’t even mention that Orpheus had
hurt his feelings by giving him only a single verse; and Black Orpheus was so
impressed that he was still on the loose that, without the Swagman’s requesting
it, he sat right down and added another couple of stanzas, including one about
the bandit’s fortress (which he insisted on calling a
schloss
in order to create a rhyme).

Schloss or fortress, Virtue
decided as she and Father William stood at the massive front door, it was one
hell of a structure. In a less technical age its bulk alone could have
withstood an army; now its incredibly sophisticated defense systems could repel
attacks from above, below, or straight ahead.

Finally the huge portal swung open
with a slight humming noise, revealing the Swagman, who stood in the entry
foyer, hands on hips, staring at Virtue with an amused curiosity.

Whatever it was she had expected
in a bandit chief, he wasn’t it. His uncallused white fingers had been
meticulously manicured; his blond hair had been painstakingly styled in the
latest Deluros fashion; his face was unmarked and clean-shaven; and his
clothing, from the elegant velvet tunic to the sleek lizardskin half boots,
seemed to anticipate the coming fashion among the Democracy’s trendsetters,
rather than echoing the current one.

“Ah!” he said with a smile of
greeting. “The enigmatic Virtue MacKenzie, I presume?”

“And you’re the Swagman?” replied
Virtue.

“The one and only,” he answered.
“Good evening, Father William. How’s the salvation business?”

“The same as always,” replied the
preacher. “Satan is a full-time opponent.”

“I understand that you had him
down for the count this afternoon,” said the Swagman in his unmistakable
accent. “But where are my manners? Do come in.”

They followed him down a short
corridor as the door swung shut behind them, and from there into a massive
great hall, complete with a floor-to-ceiling fireplace wall, a number of rugs
that had been hand-made on Boriga II and Kalamakii, a set of four exquisitely
crafted chairs from far Antares, and numerous hardwood shelving units that
housed art treasures from literally hundreds of worlds across the galaxy.

“What do you think of my
trinkets?” asked the Swagman as Virtue stopped to admire a crystal globe of
Bokar from the incredibly ancient days when the Bokarites were a seafaring race
rather than a planet of starfaring merchants.

“They’re breathtaking!” she said,
turning her attention to a
praque,
the fabled
torture-stick of Sabelius III.

“That’s a more accurate statement
than you might imagine,” said Father William sternly. “A lot of good men gave
their last breaths accumulating this ill-gotten wealth for the Swagman.”

“Come, come, now,” said the bandit
with a chuckle. “You know there’s no paper on me, Father William.”

“There’s a pile of it as high as
the ceiling,” replied the preacher.

“But not for murder,” the Swagman
pointed out. “And you leave the punishment of lesser crimes to lesser servants
of the Lord.”

“True,” admitted Father William.
“But it’s immoral to flaunt your bloodstained treasures like this.”

“You mean by displaying them
behind locked doors in my own home?” asked the Swagman, arching an eyebrow. He
paused. “Shall we change the subject? If we keep talking about my collection,
we’re bound to have a serious disagreement.” He snapped his fingers. “Or better
still, how about dinner? I had my staff start preparing it half an hour ago,
when you identified yourself at the first security barrier.”

“Staff?” repeated Virtue. “I
didn’t notice any staff.”

“They’re all mechanical,”
explained the Swagman. “And
very
discreet.”

“You live alone here?” she asked,
surprised.

“Is that so difficult to believe?”
he replied.

“I would have thought you’d be
surrounded by henchmen,” she admitted.

“One of the advantages about
living with nothing but robots is that you never have to count the silverware
or check the display cases when they’re through for the day,” he said.
“Besides, what would I do with henchmen?”

“Well, you do have a reputation as
a master criminal.”

“So I am told,” he replied dryly.

“You haven’t answered my
question,” she persisted.

“I don’t know what you think a
master criminal does,” said the Swagman, “but in point of fact I am a
large-scale employer of criminal labor, nothing more.” A bell chimed twice, and
he turned to Father William. “Dinner’s ready. I assume you brought along your
appetite?”

“I’m never without it,” said the
preacher heartily.

He led them into the dining hall,
which was surrounded with still more displays of unique alien artifacts. The
room was dominated by a table that could easily have accommodated forty people,
but the three settings were all at one end of it. The chairs were all
one-legged, considerably broader at the base than the top, and were much more
secure than they looked.

“Won’t you please sit down?” asked
the Swagman, pulling out a chair for Virtue.

“Thank you,” she said as Father
William sat down opposite her.

“Ordinarily I’d serve such welcome
guests on my Robelian dinner pieces,” said the Swagman apologetically as he
joined them. “But I’m having them refinished. I hope the Atrian quartz will be
acceptable. It’s really quite lovely in its way.”

“The only thing that matters is
what’s being served on it,” replied Father William, leaning back to allow a
robot to place an appetizer of mutated shellfish before him.

“That’s because you are concerned
only with accumulating energy with which to fight your holy war,” said the
Swagman. “Those of us who are fortunate enough to be spectators at the battle
of Good and Evil, rather than participants, are doubly blessed in that we also
have the opportunity to admire the containers in which the energy arrives.”

“Spectator, my eye!” snapped
Father William, chewing and speaking at the same time. “You’ve got more killers
working for you than Dimitri Sokol!”

“I have more bills to pay,”
replied the Swagman easily. “And I might add that thanks to your little fit of
pique on Darius Ten, I have four less killers than I had last month.” He smiled
at the preacher. “You know, you’ve caused me so much inconvenience that I
really ought to charge you for this meal.”

Father William grinned back at
him. “I won’t ask you for a contribution to my poorbox, and we’ll call it
even.”

“Agreed—as long as you don’t make
a habit of decimating my supply of menials.”

“I’ll take any killer who’s got
paper on him!” said Father William firmly, wiping the corner of his mouth with
a napkin, then tying it around his neck like a bib.

The Swagman shrugged. “Serves me
right for not checking them out better. Still, by taking them when you did, you
cost me the possession of a shipment of art objects from Nelson Seventeen. I do
wish you could have waited another week before you went on your killing spree.”

“Hah!” muttered Father William,
pushing his empty dish away and signaling the robot to bring him another.

The Swagman turned to Virtue.
“Never don the cloth,” he said with mock seriousness. “It drains away all
compassion for your fellow man.”

“You don’t seem especially upset
about losing four men,” remarked Virtue.

“They were just men; I can always
get more,” he replied nonchalantly. “It was losing the
pieces
that hurt. There was a hand-spun Kinrossian bowl that...” He sighed and shook
his head, then looked up. “Still, I suppose our friend here must score points
with his God from time to time.”

“You keep talking blasphemy,” said
Father William harshly, “and I just may forget that all that paper on you
doesn’t mention murder.”

“You don’t really think you can
harm me in my own house, do you?” said the Swagman, vastly amused. “Don’t talk
such nonsense, or pretty soon you’ll start believing it and then we’ll all be
sorry. Especially you.”

The preacher stared at him for a
moment, then went back to demolishing the food in front of him.

Virtue finished her appetizer, and
the instant she did a robot whisked the empty plate away from her.

“They’re very efficient,” she
said, indicating the retreating robot as well as a trio that were bringing out
the main course. “I would think that household robots would cost an arm and a
leg out on the Frontier.”

“They do,” agreed the Swagman.
“Fortunately, it wasn’t
my
arm or leg that paid for
them.”

“Totally immoral,” muttered Father
William between mouthfuls.

“Totally practical,” corrected the
Swagman. “It’s a tried-and-true business axiom: Never use your own money when
you can use someone else’s. I just find creative ways to apply it.” He turned
to Virtue. “Have we pretended that we’re all just good friends long enough, or
do you prefer to play at it a bit more before talking about Santiago?”

She looked startled for just a
moment. “We’ll talk about him later,” she said.

“As you wish,” replied the Swagman
agreeably. “Might I inquire if there’s any particular reason why?”

“Whatever you’ve got to say,” said
Virtue, “I don’t want you saying it in front of a rival.”

“You mean Father William?” asked
the Swagman. Both men seemed to find her remark enormously amusing.

“What’s so funny about that?”
demanded Virtue.

“Shall you tell her, or shall I?”
asked the Swagman.

Father William looked across the
table at Virtue. “I don’t want him,” he said.

“You don’t want Santiago?” she
repeated incredulously.

“That’s right.”

“But I thought you wanted any
killer with a price on his head,” she persisted. “And he’s got the biggest
price of all. Why aren’t you interested in him?”

“A number of reasons,” replied
Father William. “First, as long as he’s on the loose, there will be a couple of
dozen bounty hunters on his trail. That’s two dozen less competitors for
me
. Second, he’s more trouble to dig out than he’s worth,
regardless of the price on him.” He paused. “And third, I don’t know for a fact
that he’s ever killed anyone.”

“Come on,” said Virtue. “He’s
wanted for thirty-eight murders.”

“He’s been
blamed
for thirty-eight murders,” replied Father William. “There’s a difference.”

“We’ve been arguing about this for
years,” interjected the Swagman. “I keep offering to team up with him, and he
keeps turning me down.” He grinned. “It would appear that God is employing very
selective killers these days.” He turned to Father William. “Probably you’re
right,” he said sarcastically. “Probably he only killed thirty-two or
thirty-three of those men and women himself, and hired out the rest.”

“Why do
you
want to kill Santiago?” Virtue asked the Swagman.

“You mean besides the fact that
I’m an upstanding citizen who finds his very existence offensive?” he replied
wryly. “Let’s just say that I have my reasons.”

Father William, who had finished
his main course, pushed his plate away and got to his feet. “If you don’t mind,
I think I’m going to take my leave of you before he starts expounding upon all
those reasons. I don’t like arguing on a full stomach.”

The Swagman remained seated.
“Lemon pie,” he said temptingly.

“With meringue topping?” asked the
preacher.

“I had a feeling you’d be coming
by.”

Father William seemed to wage a
mighty struggle within himself. Finally he sighed. “I’ll be back tomorrow evening
for it.”

“In that case, I won’t detain
you,” said the Swagman. “I’m sure you can find your own way out.”

“You’ll see to it that Virtue gets
back to her hotel safely?” demanded Father William.

“But of course.”

“Have you got all your infernal
machines turned off?”

“All but the two at the bottom of
the hill—and they’ve been instructed to let you pass.”

“Be sure that they do.”