Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future (25 page)

“I wonder what method the Angel
used on Giles Sans Pitié?” mused Schussler.

Cain shrugged. “I suppose we’ll
find out in good time. I don’t imagine Black Orpheus will be able to resist
putting it into his stupid song.”

“What’s your objection to our
friend Orpheus?” asked the Swagman.

“He’s your friend, not mine.”

“He’s made you famous,” noted the
Swagman. “A century from now, that song is the only way people will know you
and Schussler and I even existed. Consider it a form of immortality.”

“Immortality is a greatly
overrated virtue,” interjected Schussler, the beautiful melodic tones of his
voice ringing with bitterness.

“Most of the people I’ve known
would disagree with that statement,” said the Swagman.

“Most of the people
you’ve
known have spent their whole lives one step ahead
of the hangman,” replied the cyborg.

“Most of the people he’s known
have already met the hangman,” commented Cain.

“Some of them have met less formal
executioners,” retorted the Swagman. “I’m still annoyed with you over that
little affair on Declan Four.”

“You had some use for Socrates?”
asked Cain.

“Socrates?” snorted the Swagman
contemptuously. “Of course not. There are twelve million Men on Declan Four,
all of them interchangeable and infinitely replaceable.” He paused. “But you
destroyed a Robelian bowl that I’d been after for three years.”

“It was just a bowl,” said Cain.
“I was there for something more important.”

“Just a bowl?”
repeated the Swagman, morally outraged. “My good man, it was one of only six
such bowls in existence!”

“I’ve seen lots like it.”

For just a moment the Swagman
looked interested. Then he sighed. “I suppose one bowl looks just like another
to you.”

“Pretty much so,” said Cain,
sliding the barrel of his pistol into place and turning it gently until he felt
a discernible click. “Just the way people all look alike to you.”

“And it means nothing to you that
there are almost a trillion people spread across the Democracy, and only six
Robelian bowls of that shape and design?”

“It means you’ll run out of work
before I do.”

“It means,” the Swagman retorted,
“that you have destroyed an irreplaceable work of art.”

“I also destroyed a man who was in
serious need of destruction,” replied Cain. “On the whole, I’d say the ledger
came out on the plus side.”

“There wasn’t even any paper on
Socrates.”

“Then view killing him as a
service to humanity.”

“I wasn’t aware that you were in
the philanthropy business,” said the Swagman.

“There are more important things
than money,” said Cain.

“True—but all of them
cost
money.” The Swagman raised his arms above his head,
emitted a loud grunt as he stretched, and then turned to Schussler’s panel.
“I’m getting hungry. What have you got in your galley?”

“I have a full complement of soya
products,” answered the cyborg.

“Don’t you have any meat?”

“I’m afraid not—but I can prepare
some dishes that will be almost indistinguishable from meat.”

“I’ve heard
that
before,” muttered the Swagman.

“You might as well take what he’s
got,” said Cain. “We’re not about to divert to a planet with a grocery store.”

The Swagman shrugged. “Can you
come up with something that tastes like shellfish in a cream sauce?”

“I can try.” Schussler paused.
“What would you like, Sebastian?”

“Whatever’s easy,” said Cain.

“How about a steak?” suggested the
cyborg.

“How about a salad?” countered
Cain. “I’ve
had
soya steaks.”

“If you’ll come to the galley,
your dinners are ready,” announced Schussler.

“What are you talking about?” said
the Swagman suspiciously. “We just ordered them.”

“The Graal’s technology makes meal
preparation almost instantaneous,” explained the cyborg. “Especially when I can
work with adaptable raw materials such as soya products.”

Cain and the Swagman exchanged
dubious glances and entered the galley, a long narrow room in which almost all
of the equipment was hidden from view.

“Where are we supposed to eat?”
asked the Swagman.

“I can unfold a small table,” said
Schussler, “but there won’t be room for both of you at it.”

“We’ll stand,” said Cain. “Where’s
the food?”

“I’ll have it in just a second,”
said Schussler. “Ah, here it comes.”

A shining metal panel receded, and
two nondescript plates appeared on a polished counter.

The Swagman reached out for his
shellfish, then withdrew his hand and muttered a curse.

“I forgot to tell you: the plate
is hot.”

“Thanks,” said the Swagman
caustically. He reached into his pocket, withdrew a monogrammed silk
handkerchief, wrapped it around his fingers, and pulled the plate over. “I
could use a knife and fork.”

“I wish I could help you,” said
Schussler apologetically. “But Altair of Altair didn’t use human utensils. She
preferred these.”

A pair of odd-looking metal
objects emerged onto the counter.

The Swagman picked one up and
examined it. “Wonderful,” he said. “It looks about as practical as eating soup
with chopsticks.”

Cain picked up the other, studied
it for a moment, and then began using it on his salad.

“How did you do that?” asked the
Swagman.

“I’ve seen these things in the
Teron system,” said Cain, impaling an artificial tomato and twisting a piece of
artificial lettuce around it. “A Teroni bounty hunter showed me how to use it.
It’s not too bad once you get the hang of it.”

“How are they on cream sauce?”
asked the Swagman, staring at his plate.

“Try it and find out,” said Cain,
returning his attention to his salad.

The Swagman made three or four
false starts but eventually gained a rudimentary mastery of his utensil and
finally managed to get a piece of pseudoshellfish all the way to his mouth
without dropping it.

“Well?” asked Schussler anxiously.
“What do you think of it?”

“It isn’t bad,” said Cain
noncommittally.

“I’ll tell you what it isn’t,”
muttered the Swagman. “It isn’t Goldenrod lobster.” He took another mouthful.
“Still, I suppose it could be worse.”

“Would you do me a favor?” asked
Schussler after a moment’s silence.

“It all depends,” replied the
Swagman. “What did you have in mind?”

“Tell me what it tastes like.”

“To be perfectly truthful, it
tastes like soya byproducts masquerading as shellfish in cream sauce.”

“Please,” persisted Schussler
anxiously. “I processed it and cooked it and served it—but I can’t
taste
it. Describe it for me.”

“As I said: a rudimentary
approximation of fish in cream sauce.”

“You can’t be that unimaginative!”
said Schussler with a note of desperation in his beautiful lilting voice. “Tell
me about the sauce: is it rich? hot? sweet? Can you identify the spices? What
type
of shellfish does it taste like?”

“It’s nothing to write home
about,” said the Swagman. “The flavors are all rather bland.”

“Describe them.”

“You’re forcing me to insult you.
The food is barely worth eating, let alone describing,” said the Swagman
irritably. “You’re ruining what was a totally unmemorable meal to begin with.”

“You owe it to me!” demanded
Schussler.

“Later,” said the Swagman. “It’s
tasting worse by the mouthful, thanks to your nagging.”

Cain sighed, reached over with his
implement, and picked up a piece of the artificial shellfish, after first
rubbing it thoroughly in the cream sauce. He chewed it thoughtfully, then began
describing the nuances of flavor to Schussler while the Swagman picked up his
plate and walked back into the command cabin to finish his meal in isolation.

Cain joined him about twenty
minutes later.

“Is he still sulking?” asked the
Swagman.

“Ask him yourself.”

The Swagman turned to Schussler’s
panel. “You’re not going to spend all night asking me to describe how my bunk
feels, are you?”

There was no answer.

“There’s a first for you—a pouting
spaceship.”

“You hurt his feelings,” said
Cain.

“Not without reason. Either we nip
this behavior in the bud, or he’ll be spending every spare minute asking how
things taste and feel.”

“It’s not that much effort to tell
him. He’s had a rough time of it.”

The Swagman stared at him. “We’re
growing a strange crop of killers this season,” he remarked at last.

“You know,” said Cain, “he could
always ask you how you feel after he reduces the oxygen content in the cabin
down to zero.”

“Not if he wants to die on
schedule, he can’t,” said the Swagman confidently. He paused. “Are you really
going to kill him if we find Santiago’s base?”

“I said I would.”

“I know what you said.”

“I’ll do what I promised.”

“But you won’t be happy about it.”

“I’m never happy about killing
things,” said Cain.

The Swagman
considered that remark, as well as some of the other things Cain had said since
leaving Altair III, and spent the next few minutes studying his new partner,
comparing him to what he knew of the Angel, and wondering if Virtue MacKenzie
had made the correct choice after all.

Alas, Poor
Yorick, I knew him well:

He can’t climb
down from the carousel.

He began with
dreams, with hope and trust;

Alas, Poor Yorick, they turned to dust.

His name wasn’t really Poor
Yorick—not at first, anyway. He was born Herman Ludwig Menke, and he stuck with
that name for twenty years. Then he joined a troupe of actors that traveled the
Galactic Rim, and became Brewster Moss; word has it that he even performed for
the Angel, back before
he
became the Angel.

Anyway, by the time he was forty
he had yet another new name, Sterling Wilkes, which is the one he made famous
when he almost single-handedly brought about the Shakespearean renaissance on
Lodin XI. It is also the one he made notorious, due to his various chemical
dependencies.

Six years later, after he’d had
one hallucinogenic trance too many before a paying audience, he was barred from
the stage. It was time for a new name—Poor Yorick seemed quite apt this time
around—and a new profession. Since he had an artistic bent and all he knew was
the theater, he turned up on the Inner Frontier as a prop manufacturer, and in
the following decade he turned out a never-ending stream of counterfeit crowns
and harmless guns, bogus jewels and bogus thrones, almost real stones in almost
valuable settings.

He also kept a sizable number of
drug peddlers in business, and when he graduated from injecting hallucinogens
to chewing alphanella seeds, he was forced to supplement his income by turning
his fine forger’s hand to less legitimate enterprises than the stage. As the quality
of his work suffered due to his dependency, he lost his legal job and then most
of his illegal commissions as well, and was reduced to selling hasty paintings
of actors he had known, which were turned out during his increasingly rare
periods of lucidity.

A few years later Black Orpheus
came into possession of four of the paintings and instantly knew that he had
stumbled onto an interesting if erratic talent.

It took him almost a year to find
Poor Yorick, who was living in a ramshackle hotel on Hildegarde, still spending
every credit he made to feed his habit. Orpheus tried to convince him to travel
the spaceways with him and illustrate his saga, but Yorick cared more for his
next connection than for posterity, and finally the Bard of the Inner Frontier
admitted defeat, bought the remainder of Yorick’s paintings, commissioned a
painting of his Eurydice which would never be finished, and went away forever.
He gave Poor Yorick only a single verse in his song; he wanted to do more, to
tell his audience what a unique talent lay hidden beneath that wasted exterior,
but he decided that an influx of commissions would only result in more drug
purchases and hasten Yorick’s death.

It must be said on Yorick’s behalf
that he tried to complete the painting of Eurydice, but the money he had
received for it was spent within a week, and he had an ever-present hunger to
feed. Since Orpheus had left him without any art to sell, he returned to
forging, but every now and then, an hour here, a weekend there, he would work
again on his embryonic masterpiece.

In fact, he was working on it when
Schussler landed on Roosevelt III.

“Unpleasant little world,” said
Cain when he and the Swagman had emerged from the cyborg’s interior and stood,
shielding themselves from the planet’s ever-present rain, on the wet surface of
the spaceport.

“It’s only fitting,” said the
Swagman, heading off for the terminal. “We’re looking for an unpleasant little
man.” He paused. “Whoever would have thought that Poor Yorick would be Altair
of Altair’s most recent link to Santiago?”

“I had rather suspected
you
would,” said Cain with a touch of irony. “Especially
after that speech about how I needed you.”

“That’s why you needed both
Schussler
and
me. He knew Yorick was the man we
wanted, and I know where to find him.”

“Isn’t it about time you shared
that little tidbit of knowledge with me?” suggested Cain.

The Swagman shrugged. “I can’t
give you an address. We’ll go into the city, hunt up the cheapest hotel in the
poorest area, and wait.”

“And if he’s not there?”

“He’ll be there, or thereabouts,”
said the Swagman. “If we have to, we’ll just follow the local dream vendor, and
he’ll lead us straight to him.”