Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future (31 page)

“I didn’t know that he did.”

“You’re not exactly a fount of
information,” she said caustically.

“I’m supposed to be gathering it,
not dispensing it,” replied the gambler.

There was a momentary silence.

“Maybe he threw him out,” she
suggested thoughtfully.

“Maybe
who
threw
who
out?”

“Cain,” she said. “Maybe he
decided he didn’t need the Swagman any longer. Maybe he’s come to the
conclusion that this cyborg holds the key.”

The waiter entered the room again.

“I thought I told you to leave us
alone,” said Terwilliger irritably.

“I know, sir, but if you are Mr.
Terwilliger, I have a message for you.”

The gambler’s face turned pale.
“Was it given to you personally?”

“No, sir. It came from the
spaceport.”

“Get out.”

“But the message, sir.”

“I don’t want to hear it!” snapped
Terwilliger.

The waiter stared at him for a
moment, then shrugged and left.

“Damn!” muttered the gambler.

“What was that all about?” asked
Virtue.

“ManMountain Bates,” said
Terwilliger. “He’s landed on Sunnybeach—and he’s got someone keeping tabs on
me, or he wouldn’t have known I was here.”

“Your friend Bates isn’t very long
on brainpower,” commented Virtue, pouring her beer into a glass. “Why announce
his presence if he’s hunting for you?”

“You haven’t seen him.” said
Terwilliger unhappily. “There’s no way he can
hide
his presence.”

“But calling ahead, for God’s
sake!” she snorted contemptuously.

“He’s just letting me know that he
knows I’m here,” said Terwilliger. “It’s his idea of a joke. He thinks it’ll
terrify me.” He paused and smiled wanly. “He’s right.”

“What are you going to do about
him?”

He laughed nervously. “I’m going
to have a couple of drinks, and then I’m going to run so fast it’ll make your
head spin.”

“Back to Cain?”

“He’s my guardian angel.” He
paused thoughtfully. “Unless...”

“Unless what?”

“Cain’s a few thousand light-years
from here, and you’ve got an angel of your own. I’ll forget about my report if
you’ll get him to protect me.”

“For how long?” she asked.

“Until I’m safely out of this
system.”

“There’s one condition.”

“What?” he asked suspiciously.

“Before you leave, you contact
Cain and tell him that I’m delaying and misleading the Angel, and that I’m
still loyal to him,” said Virtue.

“Just in case he gets there
first?” asked the gambler sardonically.

“It’s always a possibility.”

“I don’t know,” said Terwilliger
dubiously. “If he finds out, I’ll lost my piece of the action.”

“Bates is between you and your
ship,” she pointed out. “What’s ten percent to a dead man?”

He stared at the backs of his
cards for a moment, then nodded. “It’s a deal,” he said at last. “You
can
get the Angel to protect me, can’t you?”

Virtue flashed him a confident
smile.

“He’ll do anything
I say,” she assured him.

He’s bigger
than big, he’s taller than tall,

He’s meaner
than mean, and that isn’t all—

He drinks straight
from morning right through to the night,

He’s ManMountain Bates, and he’s anxious to fight.

His real name was Hiram Ezekial
Bates. He was born on the colony planet of Hera, and when he was eight years
old he stood six feet two inches tall.

His parents consulted with
numerous specialists. The incompetent among them suggested that he had merely
done his growing early; the others knew he had a pituitary system gone berserk,
but after subjecting him to countless examinations and tests could recommend nothing
to stop it. Finally, when he was twelve years old—he stood seven feet three
inches tall by then—they found a doctor who could arrest his growth.

The problem was that nobody had
asked Hiram
his
opinion, and the fact of the matter
was that he relished the notion of being the biggest human being in the galaxy.
When they finally took him to the doctor, he dislocated four vertebrae in the
poor man’s back, broke both of his legs, and quite literally tore his office
apart.

That was the day that he became ManMountain
Bates.

They put him in a home for
disturbed juveniles. He battered down the brick wall with his bare hands and
took off for points unknown, surfacing some five years later on the Inner
Frontier. By then he had finally reached his full growth—eight feet seven
inches, and close to 575 pounds of burly, rock-hard muscle—and he worked his
way through a number of menial jobs before he chucked it all and became a
gambler.

He was close to thirty years old
the first time that Black Orpheus saw him. He was sitting in a poker game in
the back room of a bar on Binder X, surrounded by five rugged miners. He’d been
losing pretty heavily, and he was none too happy about it. Finally he glared
around the table and announced in a loud, belligerent voice that his luck had
just changed and he intended to win the next few hands.

The pot reached six thousand
credits on the ensuing hand when Bates finally slammed his cards down on the
table. He had a pair of sixes. Two of his opponents had flushes and one had a
full house; all tossed their cards into the middle of the table, face down, and
opined that they had nothing that could beat him. In a manner of speaking, they
were right.

Two more such displays followed,
and when Bates had recouped his evening’s losses he took his money and left the
game, heading deeper into the Frontier. It made a lasting impression on Black
Orpheus.

Their paths crossed once more,
about five years later, on Barios IV. Orpheus was attracted by the sounds of a
barroom brawl and upon arriving at the scene found that ManMountain Bates had
challenged the entire clientele of a sleazy spaceport bar. They were a
hard-living, hard-drinking lot, prospectors and cargo hands and traders, but
Bates threw them around the barroom as if they were so many toothpicks,
laughing all the while in his deep bass. One after another was tossed through
windows or into walls, until only Bates and Orpheus remained standing.

“Write
that
in your goddamned song!” he bellowed happily, tossing enough money on the bar
to pay for the damages and walking off into the hazy night.

Orpheus took him at his word and
gave him six verses. He also tried to line up a fight between Bates and
Skullcracker Murchison, who was the unofficial freehand heavyweight champion of
the Inner Frontier, but Murchison did a little checking up and decided he
wanted no part of ManMountain Bates.

As he stood in the lobby of the
Welcome Inn, staring apprehensively out into the street while Virtue Mackenzie
registered at the front desk, Halfpenny Terwilliger found himself in complete
agreement with Murchison.

“All right,” said Virtue, walking
over to him. “I’m all set.”

“Good,” replied the little
gambler. “Let’s go up to your room and wait for the Angel there.”

“He’s supposed to meet me right
here.”

“How soon?”

“At sunset.”

“That’s another two hours or
more,” complained Terwilliger. “Hell, Bates could walk here from the spaceport
by then.”

“Nobody walks in this climate.”

“Damn it! You know what I mean!”
He tried to regain his composure. “I’m not going to sit around this idiot
hotel’s idiot lobby for two hours. I might just as well stand out in the street
with a bull’s-eye painted on my forehead.”

“Okay,” assented Virtue. “Send the
message and you can hide in my room.”

“Message? What message?”

“To Cain.”

“Right now?” he demanded.

“Whenever you want to,” replied
Virtue sweetly. “But you can’t go up to my room until you do it.”

Terwilliger glared at her, then
uttered a sigh of resignation. “You win. Where do I send it from?”

“I’m sure the hotel has a subspace
tightbeam transmitter. Just ask at the desk.”

“What’s your room number?”

“Why?” asked Virtue suspiciously.

“I’m going to have to bill it to
your room.”

“The hell you are.”

“But I don’t have any money.”

“Come on, you little rodent,” said
Virtue. “I saw you bribing the waiter back in the restaurant.”

“That was Cain’s money,” he said
lamely.

“I don’t give a damn whose money
you spend, as long as it isn’t mine.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to
pay for it?” he persisted. “It seems kind of immoral to use his money to send
him a phony message.”

“Not as immoral as lying to me
about your finances,” she said firmly. “Now reach into your pocket and dig.”

He shrugged, approached the desk,
had the tightbeam booth pointed out to him, and began walking across the lobby
to it.

“I’m sure you don’t mind if I come
along,” said Virtue, joining him.

“You’re very distrusting,” said
the gambler. “It’ll turn you into a grouchy old lady.”

“A grouchy,
rich
old lady,” she corrected him with a smile.

It took him about two minutes to
compose the message and another minute to issue routing and coding instructions
so that Schussler would receive it. Then he paid his charges at the desk and
turned to Virtue.

“Are you satisfied now?” he asked.
“Or would you rather I stood on the street with a bunch of signs pointing to
me?”

“Don’t tempt me,” she said,
heading off toward the elevators. He followed her, and a minute later they were
walking down the corridor of the fourth floor.

“Here we are,” she said, pressing
her thumb up against the lock mechanism. It took less than a second to scan her
print and check it through the front desk’s computer, and the door receded into
the wall.

“Nice,” commented Terwilliger,
stepping into the room ahead of her. “Very nice.”

“Not bad,” she agreed, entering
the room and ordering the door to slide shut behind them.

The room was large and airy, some
twenty-five feet on a side, with a plush carpet, a king-sized bed, and a pair
of very comfortable chairs. One wall housed a recessed cabinet which contained
a holographic entertainment system that was currently displaying an assortment
of paid advertisements for Sunnybeach’s rather mundane night life. A small
table between the chairs had instructions for expanding it into a gaming table,
with boards for chess, backgammon, and
jabob
, an
alien card game that was all the rage in the trendiest human gambling
establishments.

“I haven’t stayed in a place like
this since I made my second fortune!” exclaimed Terwilliger.

“Your
second
fortune?” repeated Virtue. “What happened to it?”

He grinned ruefully. “The same
thing that happened to my first one.”

She looked at him, sighed, shook
her head, and walked over to the closet.

“Open,” she muttered.

Nothing happened.

“Open,” she repeated.

Still nothing.

“Damn! It’s on the blink. If I had
anything to put in it, I’d call the desk and complain.”

“Just a minute,” said Terwilliger.
“I’ve seen one of these before.”

He walked up to the ornate door
and reached his hand straight through it.

“What the hell did you do?” she
asked.

“Nothing,” he answered. “There’s
no door here. It’s a holographic projection.” He smiled and pointed to a pair
of well-camouflaged holo lenses. “It’s cheaper than actually installing a
hand-carved door like that, and once you get used to it it’s more convenient,
too. And,” he added, “you get to redecorate for the cost of a couple of new
image tapes.”

“How much else is fake, I wonder?”
said Virtue, pacing around the room and touching various objects. “Just the
closet door, I guess,” she concluded.

“Try the bathroom,” he suggested.

She walked to the door, tried to
pass through it, and bounced off.

“I didn’t mean the door,” he said,
ordering it to open. “But I’ll bet you credits to pebbles that those gold-spun
curtains around the dryshower aren’t really there.”

“A dryshower?” she said irritably.
“Shit! I was planning to take a long hot bath tonight.”

“On a desert world?” he said.
“Hell, I’ll bet even their suites don’t supply any water except from the
drinking tap.”

“Oh, well,” she said, returning to
the bedroom and walking to one of the chairs. “We might as well relax and wait
for the Angel.”

“Suits me,” assented Terwilliger,
sitting down opposite her. He pulled out his cards and began shuffling them on
the table. “Care for a little game of chance?”

“No, thanks.”

“You’re sure?”

“If you played games of chance
instead of games with predetermined results, you wouldn’t be hiding here right
now,” she replied.

“You can deal,” he offered.

“Blackjack,” she said promptly,
taking the cards from him. “Ten credits a hand. Dealer wins all ties.”

“Fine—as long as you’ll accept my
IOUs if I lose.”

“You can play with Cain’s money,”
she said. “After all, we’re all partners, so we’ll be keeping it in the family,
so to speak.”

“What the hell,” he said with a
shrug. “Why not?”

They played for almost two hours,
during which time Terwilliger won four hundred credits without ever once being
allowed to deal. Finally Virtue looked out the window, handed the deck back to
him, pulled four hundred-credit notes out of her satchel, placed them on the
table, and got to her feet.

“It’s just about time,” she said.

“Why don’t you meet him and bring
him back up here?” suggested Terwilliger nervously.