Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future (41 page)

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“There’s something I have to do
first.”

“Does it have to do with
Santiago?” she asked suspiciously.

“Indirectly. There’s a promise I
have to keep.”

“To whom?”

“To a friend.” He walked to the door.
“I’ll be back.”

She nodded, and he left her small
house and began walking down the road that led through the little village.
Within half an hour he had arrived at his destination.

“You look unhappy,” said Schussler
as he came through the hatch.

“I am,” answered Cain.

“Then you were wrong about Safe
Harbor?”

He shook his head. “I was right.”

“Santiago’s coming?” asked
Schussler excitedly.

“He’s here now.”

“Thank God!” said Schussler with a
sound that was as close as a thing of metal and machinery could come to a sigh
of relief.

There was a momentary pause.

“Do you remember our bargain?”
asked the cyborg.

“That’s why I’m here.”

“You’re an honorable man,
Sebastian.”

“How do I go about it?” asked
Cain, walking over to the panel that hid Schussler’s essence from view. “Is
there a way I can disconnect you without causing you too much pain?”

“I can’t feel pain,” said
Schussler. “If I could, I might even choose to live.”

“That’s a stupid thing to say.”

“Only to a man who can feel,
Sebastian.”

“All right,” said Cain, touching
the code that exposed Schussler’s tiny enclosure. “What do I do now?”

“I am compelled to obey your
orders, even at the cost of my own existence,” said Schussler. “Simply order me
to cease functioning and I’ll die.”

Cain stared at the small box. “You
mean that’s all there is to it?”

“Yes.”

“I could have done that at any
time.”

“But we had an agreement,” said
Schussler. “I was also compelled to fulfill my end of it.”

“Are you ready?” asked Cain.

“Yes.... Sebastian?”

“What?”

“I’ve put down on oxygen planets,
and chlorine, and methane. I’ve been to Deluros Eight, and to the most obscure
dead worlds on the edges of the Frontier. I’ve flown faster than light, and twisted
my way through meteor storms.”

“I know.”

“There’s one thing I’ve never
done, one place I’ve never been.”

“Where is that?”

“I’ve never seen the inside of a
star.”

“Nobody has.”

“Then I’ll be the first,” said
Schussler. “What a beautiful image to carry with me into eternity!”

“Then I so command it,” said Cain
unhappily.

“Thank you, Sebastian,” said the
cyborg. “You’d better leave me now.”

“Good-bye, Schussler,” said Cain,
walking to the hatch.

“Watch for me, Sebastian,” said
Schussler. “It will be twilight soon. I’ll wait until then, so that you can see
me.” He paused. “I’ll be the first shooting star of the evening.”

“I’ll be watching,” promised Cain.

And an hour later,
as he and Silent Annie were finally setting out on their quest, he stopped to
look up. For a moment he saw nothing out of the ordinary; and then—and it was
probably just his imagination, for the sun was still quite brilliant and
Schussler was some eighty million miles distant—he thought, for a fleeting
instant, that he could see an unbelievably bright form streaking toward Safe
Harbor’s golden sun. It moved faster and faster, and then flickered gratefully
out of existence.

Santiago’s Book

His sire was a
comet,

His dam a
cosmic wind.

God wept when
first He saw him,

But Satan merely grinned.

An even forty verses: that’s what
Black Orpheus gave him.

Nobody else ever got more than a
dozen—but then, nobody else was Santiago.

Orpheus was faced with a moral and
artistic dilemma when he finally confronted the subject of Santiago, for all of
his verbal portraits were based on firsthand knowledge, and he had never seen
the notorious outlaw. (In point of fact, he had seen him on five separate
occasions over the years, and spoken to him twice, but he didn’t know it, then
or ever.)

On the other hand, he knew that
any ballad that aspired to describe the men and events that had shaped the
Inner Frontier would be laughably incomplete if it didn’t include a major
section on Santiago.

So he compromised. He gave him
forty verses, but he never once referred to him by name. It was his way of
saying that the Santiago stanzas were somehow incomplete.

Sebastian Cain was fast coming to
the conclusion that the legend of Santiago was as incomplete as the ballad. He
sat beside Silent Annie as her vehicle sliced between lush fields that seemed
to writhe and ripple in the dim light of Safe Harbor’s moons, finally coming to
a halt in front of a small barn.

“First stop,” she announced,
opening the door and getting out.

“A barn?” asked Cain as the warmth
and humidity hit him full force.

She smiled. “I was rather hoping
that you’d learned not to judge anything associated with Santiago by its
appearance.”

She walked up to the prefabricated
structure, tapped out a combination on the lock, and the door slowly opened
inward.

“Come along, Mr. Cain,” she said,
uttering a low command that illuminated the darkened building.

Cain followed her into the cool
interior of the barn and found himself facing a row of drying bins, each filled
to the brim with ears of mutated corn. High above him was a loft that had once
contained hay but looked as if it hadn’t been used in the past twenty years.

“Well?” he said.

“Take a look in the third bin.”

He walked over and stared at it.

“It looks like corn,” he said.

“That’s what it’s supposed to look
like,” she replied. “Look a little more closely.”

He reached in with both hands,
tossing ears of corn aside, and came to a gold bar.

“The Epsilon Eridani raid?” he
asked, laboriously lifting the bar with both hands and studying it.

She nodded. “We’ve got about forty
of them left.”

“All in this bin?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to the rest of it?”
asked Cain. “I saw one bar with Jonathan Stem back on Port Étrange, but no one
seems to know what became of the others.”

“Most of them have been dispersed,”
she replied. “Would you like to know where?”

“Why not?” He shrugged.

“Follow me.”

Silent Annie walked into the
barn’s tiny office, which contained two vidphones, a pinup calendar printed on
real paper, a small wooden desk, an ancient swivel chair, and a computer.
Everything except one phone and the computer was covered by a layer of dust.

She activated the computer, waited
for it to identify her retina pattern and thumbprint, and then ordered it to
bring up the details concerning the Epsilon Eridani gold.

Cain studied the readout as it
appeared on the small screen.

“I see that Father William got
about a third of it,” he noted.

“He’s one of the conduits Santiago
uses to feed the hungry and medicate the sick. The bulk of the Epsilon Eridani
gold was sold on the Kabalka Five black market.”

“Kabalka Five? That’s an alien
world, isn’t it?”

“It doesn’t take aliens long to
find out what men will do for gold,” she replied.

“What became of the money you got
for the gold?”

She called up another chart on the
screen.

“
All
of
it went to hospitals?” he asked.

“Not quite. It also sponsored a
raid on Pico Two.”

“What the hell is on Pico Two?
It’s just a little dirtball of a world, out by the Quinellus cluster.”

“Some of our friends were
incarcerated there.”

“So you got them out?”

She shook her head. “That was
impossible.”

“Then what?”

“We blew up the jail.”

“With your friends inside it?”

“The Democracy will stop at
nothing to find Santiago,” replied Silent Annie. “These were loyal men, but
they would have talked. If torture didn’t work, there are drugs that would
have.”

“So much for loyalty,” said Cain
dryly.

“He’s not a god and he’s not a
saint,” she said. “He’s just a man, and he’s fighting against the most powerful
political and military machine in the galaxy. Our people know what might befall
them when they go out on a mission.”

Cain made no comment.

“Secrecy is our only weapon,” she
continued. “It must be preserved at all costs.” She paused, searching for the
words to drive home her point. “How do you think he’s kept his identity and his
whereabouts hidden all these years?” she said at last. “We return from our
missions, or we die—but we do not allow ourselves to be taken prisoner.”

“Then what happened to your men on
Pico Two?”

“They were taken by surprise,
before they could destroy themselves.” She stared at him levelly. “You look
disapproving, Mr. Cain. I should think that you of all people would know that
revolution is not a gentleman’s sport and is not played by gentleman’s rules.”

“True enough,” he said after some
consideration. “I just don’t like the thought of killing one’s own people.”

“I hope you don’t think
he
does,” replied Silent Annie. “This is a grim business.
There’s nothing romantic about harassing an overwhelming power with no hope of
winning.”

“If he knows he can’t win, why
does he do it?”

“To avoid losing.”

“That sounds profound, but it
doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense,” said Cain.

“I’m sure he’ll be happy to expand
upon it for you.”

“When?”

“Soon,” she replied, deactivating
the computer and heading back toward the vehicle. “Come along, Mr. Cain.”

He fell into step behind her, and
a moment later they were once again driving through the humid night air on a
single-lane country road.

“Was he born on Safe Harbor?”
asked Cain after a momentary silence.

“No.”

“How long has he been here?”

“Safe Harbor has been his
headquarters for about fifteen years now, though he spends about half his time
off-planet.”

“Have I ever seen him?” he asked,
curious.

“I really couldn’t say,” she
replied. “It’s possible.” She smiled. “Black Orpheus has, though he doesn’t
know it.”

“There are a lot of things that
damned folksinger doesn’t know,” said Cain.

“You’re a very disapproving man,
Mr. Cain,” said Silent Annie. “Your life must have been filled with
disappointments.”

“No more than most,” he answered.
Then he smiled wryly. “On the other hand, there has been a noticeable lack of
triumphs.”

“Let’s have no false modesty.
You’re a very successful bounty hunter.”

“You’ve been watching too many
video fictions,” he said. “I don’t call villains out to fight in the midday
sun. There’s nothing very challenging about walking up to a man who’s never
seen you before and blowing him away before he knows what you’re up to.”

“And is that what you did to
Altair of Altair and the Jack of Diamonds?” she asked with a smile.

“No,” he admitted. “I was careless
in one case and clumsy in the other.”

“What about Alexander the Elder?
He had six men protecting him when you took him.”

“Four.” he corrected her.

“You’re evading the point.”

“I thought the point was that you
were interested in me because of the people I
didn’t
kill.”

“That’s true. But you’re a man of
many talents, and I’m sure Santiago can make use of all of them.”

“We’ll see,” he said
noncommittally.

They rode in silence for another
half hour, the corn and wheat fields broken only by an occasional methane
production plant, where the waste of Safe Harbor’s farm animals was converted
into energy. Finally she turned off the road and approached a row of silos.

“More spoils of conquest?” he asked
as the vehicle came to a halt.

“A medical center,” she replied.

“Why camouflage it?” he asked.
“The Democracy has got better things to do than make raids on hospitals.”

“Because Safe Harbor’s population
isn’t large enough to support a facility of this size,” explained Silent Annie.
“A complex like this would draw unwanted attention to ourselves.”

He got out of the vehicle and
followed her into one of the silos. She led him to an elevator, and after a
brief descent he found himself in a white, sterile environment some sixty feet
beneath the ground.

“How big is this place?” he asked,
looking down the polished corridors that radiated in all directions.

“I don’t know the square footage,”
she replied, “but it extends beneath the entire silo complex. We have twenty-three
laboratories, half a dozen observation wards, a pair of surgeries, and four
isolation wards. There’s also a commissary, as well as extensive staff quarters
so that our people aren’t seen arriving and leaving every day.”

They began walking past the
laboratories, each with its white-frocked medics and scientists, and finally
came to the first of the observation wards. Cain paused to look in through a
thick, one-way glass and saw nine men and women lying in beds, plugged in to
life-support and monitoring units. They reminded him of burn victims, with
blackened skins that blistered and peeled away from their bodies.

“What happened to them?” asked
Cain, staring at an elderly woman whose cheekbones were both exposed.

“They’re from Hyperion.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It was opened up five years ago,”
she said. “There were about five thousand initial settlers, all of them members
of an obscure religious sect.”

“They look like they believe in
walking through fire,” he commented.