Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future (8 page)

“Why does
anyone
want to kill him?” replied Cain with a smile. “There’s a hell of a big reward.”

“That is not an acceptable
answer,” she said. “You are a very wealthy man, Mr. Cain, so surely money is
not your primary objective.”

“Money is always an objective,”
said Cain. “And,” he added thoughtfully, “it would
mean
something.”

“What would it mean?”

“That I made a difference,” he
replied. “That just once, something I did
mattered
.”

“How about the men you helped
place in positions of power?” asked the Sargasso Rose.

“They were the wrong men,”
answered Cain wryly. “They won’t even be footnotes in the history books.”

“And the criminals you’ve hunted
down?”

“Even
I
hadn’t heard of most of them before I went after them.” He paused. “But
Santiago is different.
He
matters, so the man who brings
him down will matter, too.”

She smiled. “So you want to be
written up in song and story yourself.”

“I’ve
been
in a song. I don’t like it much.” He finished his drink. “I don’t care who else
knows what I did—just so long as
I
know it.”

“Well, it’s a novel approach, I’ll
grant you that,” said the Sargasso Rose.

“Now let me ask you a question,”
said Cain.

“We haven’t settled on a price
yet,” she pointed out.

“That wasn’t the question.”

“Then go ahead.”

“You’ve obviously made a lot of
money off of Santiago. Why are you willing to help me?”

“Santiago took his business
elsewhere shortly after Duncan died. I owe him nothing. Besides, I’m a
businesswoman: everything I own is for sale—including information.”

“Have you sold it to anyone else
yet?”

“No one has asked—but if they do,
I will.”

“All right,” said Cain. “What,
exactly, do you have for sale?”

“I have the name, holograph, and
current location of a man who dealt directly with Santiago. I have the names
and holographs of four of Santiago’s agents with whom I did business three
years ago. I have some of the gold bullion with its point of origin listed on
the packing crates. And I know who killed Kastartos.”

“Kastartos?” asked Cain. “The man
who tried to get Stern to turn Santiago in for the reward?”

She nodded. “From what I hear, it
was a pretty dismal attempt.”

“And what do you want for all
this?”

“I want you to kill Santiago.”

He looked his surprise. “That’s
all?”

“That’s all.”

“Might I ask why?”

“Duncan Black was a good man,” she
began. “Well, no, he wasn’t. He was petty and undependable and weak—but he was
mine
. Then he found out that we were dealing with
Santiago, and he thought we could make a little more money by joining the
organization. I don’t know what sort of proposal he made to them, but it didn’t
work.” She took a sip of her drink. “He was found dead on Binder Ten two weeks
later. The official cause of death was heart failure.”

“Are you telling me Santiago had
him killed?”

“Santiago probably didn’t even
know he existed. But
somebody
had him killed, and if
it hadn’t been for Santiago, he’d still be here.” She paused. “He wasn’t much,
but he was all I had.” She stared at Cain. “Santiago didn’t know Duncan, and I
don’t know Santiago. It will be a fair trade.”

“All right,” said Cain. “Let’s see
what you have.”

She rose, walked to a wall safe
that was concealed behind a large, lightweight computer screen, punched out a
combination on the lock, and opened it.

“You can take these with you,” she
said, withdrawing a number of items from the safe and returning to her chair.
“I have copies.”

“Somehow I was sure you did,” he
remarked, reaching over and taking a number of holographs from her.

“The top four are the agents I
dealt with,” she explained. “Their names are on the backs.”

“One of them looks like a
methane-breather,” said Cain, holding up a holograph of a delicate crystalline
being.

“He is,” she said. “I only saw him
once. He was very uncomfortable in his life-support paraphernalia. I suspect
after his initial trip here he found a convenient drop point for his
merchandise.”

“Who’s this?” asked Cain, holding
up the holograph of a very exotic dark-haired woman with chalk-white skin.

“Altair of Altair,” answered the
Sargasso Rose. “She murdered Kastartos.”

He studied the holograph. “She’s a
professional killer?”

“One of the best. I’m surprised
you haven’t heard of her.”

“It’s a big galaxy,” he said.
“There are a lot of people I haven’t heard of.” He looked at Altair of Altair
again. “Are you sure she’s human?”

“Who knows? But I’m sure she’s an
assassin.”

He came to the final holograph.

“This is the man who met with
Santiago?”

“Yes. His name is Socrates. I
haven’t dealt with him in more than a year, but I know where to find him. We do
a little business together from time to time.”

“Maybe it’s not such a big galaxy
after all,” said Cain, staring at the pudgy, smiling face in the holograph.

“What do you mean?”

“I knew this man when his name was
Whittaker Drum.”

“The name’s not familiar to me,”
said the Sargasso Rose.

“No, I don’t suppose it would be.”

“Who is he?”

Cain smiled ironically. “The man I
helped put in power back on Sylaria.”

“Will he recognize you?”

“I hope so,”
answered Cain.

Socrates is
hard to please:

He lives in
the shade of the gallows-trees;

He prays for
life on bended knees—

But he’s bound for hell, is Socrates.

There weren’t a lot of people on
the Inner Frontier that Black Orpheus didn’t like, but Socrates was one of
them. You’d think that cutthroats and bandits and gamblers would have bothered
him more, but for the most part they were pretty honest and aboveboard about
what they did, and if there was one thing Black Orpheus couldn’t abide, it was
a hypocrite.

Now, there are people who say that
Black Orpheus must have had some respect for Socrates or he wouldn’t have given
him even the single verse that he did, but Black Orpheus knew that Socrates was
the ruler of an entire planet back when he was plain old Whittaker Drum—and
besides, his job as he saw it was to write up the folks that he met and leave
it to others to judge them.

Still, he was known to
editorialize a little, and there’s not much doubt that he felt Socrates was
earmarked for the pits of hell. Oh, he’d said something like that about
Halfpenny Terwilliger and a few others, but you got the feeling that he was
joking—and he never said it at all about Schussler the Cyborg, who thought he
was
already
in hell, nor even about Santiago
himself. There was just something about Socrates that rubbed him the wrong way,
and since most people on the Frontier were pretty much inclined to take Black
Orpheus’ word about characters they hadn’t met, it’s probably just as well that
Socrates didn’t survive too long after that verse was written.

Actually, nobody knows how he got
the name Socrates, but it’s a pretty safe bet that Black Orpheus didn’t hang it
on him. He was Whittaker Drum when he wrote his revolutionary tracts, he was
Whittaker Drum when he took over the reins of Sylaria’s government, and he was
still Whittaker Drum when they threw him out a few years later; then one day he
showed up on Declan IV and suddenly he was Socrates. First he caught a
particularly virulent venereal disease, and then he caught an equally strong
case of religion, and neither of them stopped him from making a living as an
entrepreneur who specialized in providing venture capital to what could be
euphemistically termed high-risk businesses.

He probably didn’t know it, but he
had a lot of company on Declan IV. Nobody knew what the planet’s attraction
was, except perhaps that it was a last jumping-off point to the Inner Frontier,
but during the seven years that Socrates lived there it was also the home of
five exiled planetary presidents, two kings, and a ranking member of the navy
who had resigned in black disgrace.

Declan IV was a frontier society
that had outgrown its origins and was uncomfortably trying to fit neatly into
the pattern of the worlds of the Democracy. It had grown from two grubby
Tradertowns into six sprawling modern cities, it had first pacified and later
decimated the six-legged marsupials that had once been the planet’s dominant
life-form, it imported—always a decade after they were out of style—the latest
fashions and entertainments from Deluros VIII, it bribed the major retail
chains to open outlets on the planet and practically subsidized them once they
arrived, it entered teams in various interplanetary sporting leagues, and it
was making impressive progress at polluting its atmosphere. It was too young a
colony to have much sense of its own past, so buildings, some of them quite
lovely, were constantly being torn down to be replaced by newer versions of the
same things, some of them quite ugly. The citizenry had also belatedly decided
that killing off the native population was perhaps not the most civilized
approach to take, and suddenly every business, every school, and every landlord
began fighting tooth and nail to hire, teach, and house the planet’s few
remaining native inhabitants, who cool-headedly and cold-bloodedly hired out to
the highest bidders, swallowed any humiliation they may have felt, and became
almost wealthy enough to achieve a sort of second-class respectability.

Cain and Terwilliger landed at a
rather large spaceport that possessed hundreds of flashing, blinking signs
proclaiming that work on an orbiting hangar would be completed within the year.
They spent ten minutes passing through customs, wasted another five white
Terwilliger created a completely logical and totally false story to explain why
his passport card was seven years out of date, and finally caught a monorail that
took them into the city of Commonweal.

“Would you believe that?”
complained the gambler, sitting down beside Cain. “I’ve been on maybe a hundred
worlds in the last ten years, and this is the first time anyone’s ever asked me
for my passport.”

“We’re not on the Frontier
anymore,” replied Cain, staring out the window at the cultivated fields. “They
do things differently here.”

“How come they didn’t hassle you?”
asked Terwilliger.

“Mine’s up to date.”

“Why?”

“I never know when someone I’m
looking for may head back into the Democracy,” said Cain.

He pulled out a map of the city
that he had purchased and I began studying it. There were twenty main
slidewalks in Commonweal, eight north-south, eight east-west, and four
diagonal. He pinpointed the address the Sargasso Rose had given him, figured
out the easiest way to reach it, and put the map back in his pocket.

They spent ten minutes on a
northeasterly slidewalk, passing through a heavily trafficked, shining
metal-and-glass commercial area, transferred to a westbound one for another
ten, and then stepped off the moving walkways onto a brightly tiled street.

“About two more blocks,” announced
Cain, checking the map once more.

“I’m starting to remember what I
don’t like about populated planets,” said Terwilliger unhappily as they began
walking through a residential section topped by hundreds of transparent spires.
“Too damned crowded.” He looked up at the buildings. “The streets are too
narrow, and you can’t see the sky.”

“Yes you can.”

“Well, it
feels
like you can’t,” persisted Terwilliger. “And it’s dirty.”

“So are most Tradertowns.”

“That’s
clean
dirt. This stuff is soot and grease and garbage.”

“An interesting distinction,”
remarked Cain.

“It’s noisy, too. There’s too much
traffic and too many people. Hell, even the slidewalk creaks and rumbles.”

“This is nothing,” replied Cain.
“You ought to go to Deluros Eight sometime.”

“No, thanks,” said the gambler.
“Visiting a whole planet covered by a single building just isn’t my idea of a
good time.”

“Actually, there are a few million
buildings. They’re just packed so close together that it seems like there’s
only one.”

“I don’t know how to tell you
this,” said Terwilliger, “but you’re not exactly piquing my interest. I was
born on the Frontier, and I’ve got every intention of dying there.”

“Especially if ManMountain Bates
catches up with you,” remarked Cain.

“Then I’ll just unleash you, and
that’ll be the end of ManMountain Bates,” replied the gambler with a smile. He
paused for a moment. “By the way, have you figured out how you’re going to get
Socrates to talk?”

“The same way people have always
gotten him to do things—with money.”

They crossed a street and Cain
checked the number on the corner building. “We’re just about there,” he
announced.

When they came to the building
they sought, a sleek high rise boasting four separate penthouse towers and
taking up half a block at its base, they went to the main entrance and found
themselves in a spacious foyer. A uniformed alien that resembled nothing more
than a six-legged kangaroo with a panda’s face approached them and spoke into a
translating mechanism.

“Greetings and salutations, joy be
upon you,” it said. “My name is Wixtol; I am the concierge of the Tudor
Apartments. How may I help you?”

“We’ve come to visit an old
friend,” said Cain. “Where can we find the building directory?”

“I will be immeasurably pleased to
direct you to your party,” replied the alien, “if you will only be so generous
as to furnish me with its name.”