Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future (23 page)

“I’ve got to talk to him.”

“He’s not going anywhere,” said
the Swagman, turning slightly to protect his face from the dust raised by a
sudden hot breeze. “Why don’t you talk to
me
first?”

“About what?”

“About Santiago.”

“Not interested,” answered Cain.

“In Santiago?”

“In talking to you,” said Cain.
“I’ve heard about you, Swagman.”

“All lies, I can assure you,” said
the Swagman smoothly.

“Can you now?”

“Absolutely,” replied the Swagman
with an amused laugh. “Anyone who can tell you the truth about me is safely
dead and buried.” He pulled out a thin cigar and lit it. “If you don’t want to
talk about Santiago, then how about Virtue?”

“What about Virtue?”

“What Altair of Altair told you is
absolutely true. She’s on her way to join the Angel.”

“How do
you
know what she told me?” asked Cain sharply.

“I was a spectator at your little
encounter,” said the Swagman, dropping an ash on the ground and just missing a
ten-legged purple-and-gold Altairian beetle with it.

“How did you manage
that
?”

“With the help of our cyborg
friend here,” replied the Swagman easily. “He’s hooked into her computer.” He
smiled. “I would be less than candid if I didn’t confess that I knew you were
here to obtain information from Altair of Altair, and based on everything I
knew about her, she wasn’t very likely to give it to you. So, since there was
no sense in both of us risking our lives, I hunted up Schussler and gave you
silent moral support while we observed you from up here.” The Swagman paused.
“Just what did she do to you at the end there?”

“What did it look like?” asked
Cain, curious.

“Nothing special. She kept urging
you to cross a brook, but we couldn’t see any—and I guess she tried to convince
you that your gun was a stick?” His inflection made it a question as much as an
observation.

“Something like that.”

“Well, I must say that you’re
every bit as good as Virtue said you were. Any bookmaker would have made Altair
of Altair a ten-to-one favorite to kill you, especially on her own territory.”

“Doubtless your moral support made
all the difference,” said Cain dryly. “What would you have done if she’d killed
me?”

“There’s very little I
could
have done,” admitted the Swagman. “With you dead and
Virtue gone over to the enemy, I’d have been out of partners.”

“There are worse things than being
out of partners,” said Cain. “Such as
not
being out
of them.” He paused. “Why did Virtue go out after the Angel?”

“I should think that would be
obvious,” replied the Swagman. “She’s come to the conclusion that he’s got a
better chance to kill Santiago than you do.”

“That’s what she told you?”

“Of course not. What she told me
was that she planned to spy on him and perhaps feed him some false
information.”

“Bullshit,” said Cain.

“My feelings precisely. On the
other hand, I wouldn’t take her defection too seriously. Based on what I know
of the Angel, her life expectancy once she meets him is, not to be too
pessimistic about it, perhaps ten minutes.”

“She’s a lot harder to kill than
you might think,” commented Cain. He was silent for a moment, then looked
directly at the Swagman. “All right,” he said. “So Virtue’s gone off to join
the Angel. What makes you think I’m looking for another partner?”

“You needn’t look at all,” said
the Swagman with a confident smile. “I’m right here in front of you.”

“And what do you think
you
can bring to this proposed partnership?” asked Cain
skeptically.

“A lot more than Virtue did,”
replied the Swagman, pulling out a handkerchief and wiping the sweat from his
face. “For one thing, I used to work for Santiago. I can identify him for you.”

“I can identify him myself.”

“You mean by his scar?” The
Swagman laughed. “And what will you do if he’s wearing gloves, or has a
prosthetic hand?” His eyes narrowed. “I know other things, too,” he said
persuasively. “I know what world the Angel is going to run into trouble on. I
know half a dozen men who are still in Santiago’s employ. I know a number of
his drop points for stolen goods.” A satisfied smile crossed his face. “How
does that compare with what Virtue MacKenzie could do for you?”

“What do you want in exchange for
all this?” asked Cain, eyeing him warily.

“Nothing that would interest you,”
said the Swagman. “Though if you felt it incumbent upon you to give me a piece
of the reward, I probably wouldn’t refuse it.”

“And just what is it that
interests you?”

“Do you know what I do for a
living?” responded the Swagman.

“You rob, you smuggle, and you
kill,” said Cain.

The Swagman laughed. “Besides
that, I mean.”

“Suppose you tell me.”

“It would not be inaccurate to say
that I’m an art collector. You want the reward money; I have no interest in it.
I want certain of Santiago’s possessions; you have no interest in them. Virtue,
on the unlikely assumption that she was actually telling me the truth and
hasn’t tried to team up with the Angel, wants only a journalistic feature. None
of our desires overlap at any point. Therefore, I see no reason why we
shouldn’t be able to work together.”

“Why don’t you go after him
yourself?” asked Cain, rubbing his eye as some sweat rolled into it. “That way
you’d have the reward
and
the art objects.”

“I’m no killer,” replied the
Swagman. “As I said, I’m still not sure exactly what it was that Altair of
Altair tried to do to you down there, but I’m certain that I wouldn’t have
survived it—and I can assure you that she was much easier to kill than Santiago
will be. I’ll supply the information; you’ll supply the expertise. That’s the
deal.”

“I’ll take it under
consideration.”

“You’d better consider it
quickly.”

“Why?” asked Cain sardonically.
“Will you find yourself another killer?”

“No,” said the Swagman seriously.
“You’re the one I want. After all, you killed Altair of Altair. Do you know how
many bounty hunters have died trying to do just that?” He slapped at a flying
insect that was buzzing around his face. “But you’re in a race, and every
minute you delay is another minute the Angel gains on you.”

“I thought you said something
about a planet that’s going to give him problems.”

“I did,” the Swagman assured him.
“But he’ll overcome them. He’s the best.”

“Then why didn’t you offer your
services to him?”

“Because he doesn’t need them. You
do.” He reached out his hand. “Well, have we got a deal?”

Cain stared at his hand without
taking it.

“What have you got to lose?” added
the Swagman.

Cain stared at him for a long
moment, then finally nodded his head almost imperceptibly. “All right—until
your information proves wrong.”

“It won’t.”

“Let’s put it to the test. Where
does Virtue MacKenzie plan to find the Angel?”

“Lambda Karos Three if she’s
lucky.”

“And if she’s not?”

“Either New Ecuador or Questados
Four. It depends on what he learns on Lambda Karos.”

Cain stared at him for a moment.
“Halfpenny Terwilliger is waiting for me back at my ship. I think I’d better
send him off to keep an eye on Virtue while she’s keeping an eye on the Angel,
just so we know where we stand.”

“Can you trust him to tell you the
truth?” asked the Swagman.

“I can trust him to act in his own
self-interest,” replied Cain. “And he’ll get a lot richer by staying loyal to
me than by deserting me.”

“Just out of curiosity, if he’s on
your payroll, why wasn’t he helping you against Altair of Altair?”

“For the same reason you weren’t,”
said Cain. “He’d just have been in the way.”

“Touché,” said the Swagman with a
chuckle. “By the way, if he’s the same Terwilliger I’ve heard about,
ManMountain Bates is hot on his trail.”

“I know. That’s another reason why
he’ll stay loyal to me.” Cain paused for a moment while the Swagman tossed his
cigar onto the red-brown dirt and ground it out with his heel. “And now, if
you’ve got nothing further to add, I think I’d better go talk to Schussler.”

“Be on your best behavior,” said
the Swagman, falling into step beside the bounty hunter as he headed off toward
the spaceship. “He may be a little bit strange, but we need him.”

“Him? You mean Schussler?”

The Swagman nodded his head. “I’m
not the only one with information, and his is different from mine. He knows
every place Altair of Altair has been, everyone she’s seen. Even if she never
met Santiago, it was almost certainly Schussler who received the order to
terminate Kastartos; he has to know where it came from.”

“What does one offer a spaceship?”
asked Cain wryly. “He can’t have any use for money.”

“I’m sure he’ll think of
something,” said the Swagman.

“I don’t know,” said Cain. “Any
guy who wanted to become a spaceship...”

“I have a feeling that
want
was never the operative word.”

They reached the ship and came to
a halt. Suddenly a hatch door opened.

“You go ahead,” said the Swagman,
pulling out another cigar. “I’ll join you in a few minutes.”

“Why?” asked Cain suspiciously.

The Swagman held up his cigar. “He
doesn’t like me to smoke inside him.”

Cain grimaced. “I probably
wouldn’t want someone smoking in
my
stomach, either,
if push came to shove.”

He entered the compact ship
through the hatch and found himself in a brightly illuminated cabin. The
control panels and terminals were like nothing he had ever seen, and even the
digital readouts on the screens were in an unfamiliar language.

“Schussler?” he said hesitantly.
“Are you here?”

“I am always here,” replied
Schussler, his melodic voice not at all what Cain had expected.

“I’m Cain.”

“I know. I can see you.”

“You can?” asked Cain, surprised.
“How?”

“I am tied in to various sensing
devices.”

“So you can see inside yourself as
well as outside?”

“And hear, and smell, and use
senses no human can conceive of.”

“It must be handy,” remarked Cain.

“If one likes being a spaceship.”

“Do you?”

“No.”

“Then why are you one?”

“It happened seventeen years ago,”
said Schussler. “I was a businessman, on my way to Alpha Prego for a
conference. My ship crashed on Kalkos Two.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s an outpost world of a
starfaring race called the Graal.”

“I never heard of
them,
either,” commented Cain.

“They haven’t been assimilated
into the Democracy yet,” replied Schussler. “Anyway, I crashed, and they found
me, but by the time they separated me from all the twisted metal there wasn’t
much left to work with.” The voice stopped for a moment and was considerably
shakier when it resumed. “They kept me alive, God knows how, for five months,
until I came out of my coma, and then they offered me my choice: they could let
me die, quickly and painlessly, or they could offer me life as a cyborg.”
Schussler sighed. “I was younger then, and there were many things I still
wanted to see, so I chose the latter.”

“But why as a spaceship?” asked
Cain.

“Kalkos Two is a shipbuilding
world. They used what they had.”

“What about prosthetics?”
persisted Cain. “I’ve got an artificial eye that took a day to hook up, and it
sees better than the one I lost.”

“They weren’t human,” explained
Schussler.

“They could have contacted a human
world.”

“There wasn’t enough left to work
with.” He paused. “Would you like to see the
real
me, the human remnant that’s the driving force of this ship?”

Cain shrugged. “Why not?”

“Walk over to the computer
terminal nearest the viewscreen.”

“This one?”

“That’s it.”

“The keys don’t make any sense.”

“They’re in the Graal’s language.
Touch the third from the left, top row.”

Cain did as he was told, and
Schussler rattled off the directions for hitting seven more keys.

Suddenly an interior wall panel
slid back, revealing a small black box, no more than twelve inches on a side,
with literally hundreds of wires and tubes connected to it.

“Jesus!”
muttered Cain. “That’s all that’s left of you?”

“Now do you see why they didn’t
bother with prosthetics?” asked Schussler bitterly as the panel slid shut.
“Still, they didn’t do too badly, all things considered. When I try to wiggle
my fingers, I alter the gyroscopes. When I feel hunger, it is assuaged by fuel
for my synthetic body. When I want to speak, I activate a complex system of
microscopic vibrational coils which ultimately results in what you are hearing.
I am not in
control
of the ship; I
am
the ship. I monitor all my functions, navigate myself,
communicate with other ships, even aim and fire weapons when the need arises.
In fact, I don’t yet know the full extent of my powers, since the Graal
computers aren’t based on binary language or any other system known to the race
of Man, and I’m still learning new things about myself every day.”

“It sounds like an interesting
existence,” said Cain without much enthusiasm.

“It is a terrible existence,” said
Schussler,

“Well, it’s better than being
dead.”

“I thought so once,” replied
Schussler. “I was wrong.” He paused. “I can analyze the air for you, break it
down into so many atoms of this and so many molecules of that—but I can’t
breathe it. There is no meal you can conceive that I can’t prepare in my
galley—but I can’t taste it.” There was another pause, and then the beautiful
voice spoke again, this time in more anguished tones. “I can count the pores in
the skin on a woman’s hand, give a chemical breakdown of its composition,
measure the fingernails to a millionth of a centimeter—
but
I can’t touch it!
”