The Outpost

by Mike Resnick

  Oh, he went through the motions, traveled to the most likely places to find his brothers and sisters, but I could tell by the way he carried himself that he didn’t expect to find anything except more empty spaces where herds of his kind were once so large that it took them a full day to travel past, start to finish.

  He spotted me on the fifth day, and though I was sure he’d been hunted in the past and knew the range and power of a Man’s weapons, he just stood there and stared at me, as if begging me to put him out of his misery. I didn’t do it—I have nothing against breaking the law, but I didn’t want to be remembered as the man who killed the last Landship—and after a while he went back to his endless search. I didn’t make any attempt to keep my presence a secret, and he just kind of tolerated me. Never tried to charge me, never tried to hide from me, just acted like I was simply one more burden to bear in his already over-burdened existence.

  We spent close to two months wandering from forest to savannah to scrub bush, and by the end of that time I was as anxious to find some more of his kind as he was, if only to stop that mournful wailing every time we hit a new area and realized we’d come up blank again.

  Then one day we crossed the track of a safari. I could tell by the signs that they were no more than eight or nine hours ahead of us. I wanted to turn aside so there’d be no chance of running into them, but convincing a wild Landship to turn away when he doesn’t want to takes more skills than I’ve got. My Landship was so desperate that the instant he picked up the scent of the safari, he headed off in their direction. I knew he couldn’t sense any other Landships up ahead, and he had to know there were hunters and guns at the end of the track, but who knows how a Landship’s mind works, especially one that’s been slowly going crazy with loneliness for years and years?

  A couple of hours later I found a discarded laser battery, and I could tell from the customized casing that it belonged to Catamount Greene, and I knew that if Greene saw the Landship nothing could stop him from killing it for its eyestones.

  And suddenly I realized that I didn’t want the last Landship to die for the same stupid reason that all the others of its kind had died (yeah, including all the ones I myself had killed). Greene and I were old friends and had been through a lot together, and I knew him well enough to know I’d never be able to talk him out of shooting the Landship so he could cash in on two more eyestones.

  I don’t know why I cared so much, because it sure as hell didn’t care what happened to its eyestones once it was shot, but somehow I just couldn’t let it happen.

  So I called out to the Landship, the first time I’d said a word in his presence, and suddenly he stopped in his tracks and turned to face me, and I walked up to within about twenty yards of him.

  “I’m sorry to do this to you,” I said, aiming my burner, “but if I ever saw a thing that was tired of life, it’s you, and I’m not going to let them chop you into saleable bits and pieces. You’re one animal whose eyes aren’t going to decorate a jewelry shop and whose feet won’t become barstools and whose tail won’t be sold as a flyswatter. This world and its Landships have been good to me, and I figure I owe you that much.”

  He stood there, swaying gently, and staring at me, and then I pulled the trigger, and I’m not one to get overly sentimental or pretend something’s human when it’s not, but I’ll swear he looked grateful as he tumbled over and sprawled on the ground.

  Then I walked over to him, made sure he was dead because I didn’t want to cause him any extra pain if he wasn’t, and melted his eyestones right there inside his head so no one could ever make a profit on them.

  Peponi didn’t seem all that pretty to me after that, and a week later I took off for Faligor.

  Sinderella wiped away the first tear I’d ever seen on her flawless cheek. “I think that’s a beautiful story,” she said.

  “I got a question,” said Max.

  “Go ahead,” replied Hellfire Van Winkle.

  “What would you have done if you’d known there were five or six other Landships still alive?” said Max. “Would you have killed him anyway?”

  “Sure,” said Van Winkle. “But I’d have taken his eyestones and sold ’em.”

  Max chuckled, but Sahara del Rio kind of snarled at him. “I thought you were a decent man. I guess I was wrong.”

  “I am a decent man,” protested Van Winkle. “I never claimed to be a saint.”

  “You ain’t ever going to be mistaken for one,” she assured him.

  “That don’t bother me none. I’d never know which to put on first, my hat or my halo.”

  “Tell me more about Landships,” said Sinderella, who was all through crying now. “I find them fascinating.”

  “I told you everything I could about ’em,” said Van Winkle.

  “I still can’t get a mental picture of one,” said Sinderella

  Little Mike Picasso, all four feet nine inches of him, spoke up. “I think I can help you.”

  “Oh?”

  He started thumbing through one of his sketchbooks, tossed it aside, and went through another. “Here it is,” he said, opening it to a certain page and handing it to her.

  “My God, that’s awesome!” said Sinderella. “And they went twenty feet at the shoulder?”

  “Closer to fifteen,” said Van Winkle. He reached out for the sketchbook. “May I?” She handed it to him and he studied it for a moment, then looked over at Little Mike. “That’s a Landship!” he said, surprised.

  “Of course it is.”

  “But no one’s seen one for close to 5,000 years. How did you know what they looked like?”

  “Back in my starving artist days, I accepted a commission to create six stamps for the Peponi post office. One of the ones they wanted was a Landship, so they sent me some early holos and drawings.”

  “You got everything right except the eyes,” said Van Winkle.

  “Well, I never knew what the eyes looked like until I heard your story,” said Little Mike. “You’d be surprised how badly faded a five-millennia-old holograph can be.”

  “So you’re a painter.”

  “The best,” answered Little Mike.

  “Modest, too,” said Gravedigger Gaines.

  “I was never one for false modesty,” said Little Mike. “You know the Mona Lisa?”

  “Yeah. It’s hanging somewhere on Deluros VIII.”

  “Bullshit. It was stolen thirty years ago. That’s my Mona Lisa on display. And Morita’s Picnic on Pirhouette IV?”

  “Yours too?”

  “Of course.” Little Mike smiled smugly. “And when they moved the Sistine Chapel to Alpha Prego III and lost half a dozen of the ceiling panels, who do you think they hired to replace them?”

  “Okay, I’m impressed,” said the Gravedigger.

  “You ought to be,” agreed Little Mike.

  “So how come I’ve never heard of you if you’re so good?”

  “Oh, you’ve heard of me. ‘Little Mike’ is just for my friends. My whole name is Michelangelo Gauguin Rembrandt van Gogh Rockwell Picasso.” He paused. “But I do most of my best work incognito.”

  “Why would an artist work incognito?”

  “Oh, there are reasons.”

  “Suppose you share them with us,” persisted Gaines.

  Little Mike took a swig from the bottle he was holding. “Sure, why not?” he said.

  The Greatest Painting of All Time

  What you have to understand (said Little Mike) is that not every work of art is an original. I’ve made more money copying the masters for private collectors, or for museums that didn’t want the public to know that the originals were stolen or decayed, than I’ve ever made for my own creative work, brilliant as it clearly is.

  You know, it’s really quite strange when you come to think of it. I’ve made millions of credits from my copies of The Three Graces and The Persistence of Memory and a trio of Saturday Evening Post covers, but with the one exception that I’m going to tell you about the most I�
�ve ever gotten for anything I signed my name to was the 5,000 credits that Tomahawk paid me for the painting of Sally Six Eyes that’s hanging over the bar. (In retrospect, I should have charged him a thousand credits per eye.)

  That’s always been a dilemma for the supremely talented: the world—or, in my case, the galaxy—just isn’t ready for us. We’re ahead of our time. Look at poor Van Gogh: the man died without ever selling a painting. Or Marcus Pincus, for that matter.

  “Marcus who?” asked Three-Gun Max.

  “Pincus.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “See what I mean?” Little Mike shot back.

  Still (Little Mike continued), I never believed in starving in a garret, so I took on any assignment that paid my bills and built a reputation, even if it wasn’t quite the reputation I’d have wished for a man with my unquestioned talent. I even took that job of painting half a dozen animals for the Peponi post office.

  And then one day I got the most interesting commission of my career. It seemed that the Governor of Solomon, a diamond-mining world in the heart of the Monarchy—sorry; make that the Commonwealth—had seen my work and decided that I was just the man he wanted to design a new set of currency for his world.

  He flew me to Solomon at government expense, sat me down, and laid out the assignment for me: they wanted new banknotes in denominations of one, ten, fifty, one hundred, and five hundred credits. Five engravings, with some thematic connection between them, for a fee of half a million credits.

  As you can well imagine, I was thrilled. I mean, here I was, finally getting a chance to do original work rather than copy some overrated dabbler like Renoir or Degas. Then he gave me the bad news: I couldn’t include my signature on the notes. Yeah, I know it’s not done, but they never went out and hired a true artiste before. Still, argue as I might, I couldn’t talk him into relenting on that one point—though I did get him to double my fee before I finally ran out of words.

  He offered to supply me with holos of all of Solomon’s greatest politicians and military figures, past and present, but I had carte blanche in regard to subject matter … and I saw a way to take my revenge. Although he was married and the father of five daughters, the governor kept a gorgeous blonde mistress on New Rhodesia. It wasn’t exactly the best-kept secret on Solomon, which is how I found out about it, but everyone—including his wife—pretended not to know anything about it.

  I had a year in which to deliver the five engravings, and the first thing I did was rent a ship and fly out to New Rhodesia. I hunted up his mistress, and found that she was getting sick and tired of being kept hidden like a dirty secret. He kept promising to leave his family and make her the First Lady (or First Whatever) of Solomon, but it was obvious that it was all just talk. He had no intention of changing an arrangement he found so congenial.

  She wanted to embarrass him, and she also craved the notoriety, so I proposed my plan to her that evening over drinks—Alphard brandy, as I recall—and it met with her immediate and enthusiastic approval.

  Over the next ten months, I made five exquisite, life-sized paintings of her, which would later be reduced to banknote size and transformed into engravings.

  In the first, which was to become the one-credit note, she was dressed in the traditional uniform worn by both sexes of the Solomon military.

  For the ten-credit note, I painted her in basically the same outfit, but without the helmet and armor.

  She was wearing less in each of the next two notes, and for the five-hundred-credit note she was totally nude, but with her hands and hair modestly covering the more intriguing bits and pieces of her, not unlike The Birth of Venus.

  Then, in the two months remaining to me, I created my masterwork, clearly the greatest painting of all time. Same subject, of course, still nude, but proudly displaying everything she’d hidden on the five-hundred-credit note.

  How I worked on those flesh tones—and how I succeeded! You’d swear you could reach out and touch that delicate pink skin. You’d bet your last credit that she was looking only at you, that her eyes actually followed you as you walked around the room. You knew that she was actually breathing, and that her breasts were fluttering gently with each breath. Her lips were so moist you felt that if you placed your finger against them it would come away damp.

  Usually when you create a masterpiece you want to finish it and frame and hang it. But on this one, I left rectangular areas in each of the four corners—and when I was sure I was done, when it was impossible to improve the painting any further, I spent the last day filling in those four boxes with the number 10,000,000.

  The next day we held a huge reception to launch the new banknotes. One by one I displayed the five paintings. They applauded the first wildly, the next mildly, and then there was a growing uneasiness as I unveiled the last three. I thought the governor was about to have a stroke.

  When the ceremony was almost over, I had a couple of assistants display my ultimate masterpiece. I could hear the assembled dignitaries voice a collective gasp, and I announced that this was the ten-million-credit note, and that this was the only one and there would never be another, and since it was a collector’s item I’d sell it to the highest bidder. I explained that it was unfair to exclude the planetary population at large from the bidding, so I had allowed the local holo stations to broadcast the painting all across the planet for five minutes before the auction began.

  Someone bid five million credits, someone else upped it to seven million, and then the governor finally found his voice. “Arrest that man and kill the holos!”!” he yelled, and I was dragged off to durance vile, where I languished for the next two days.

  I was released in the middle of the night and told to leave Solomon and never come back. I asked the guard to thank the governor for his generosity, and he explained that generosity had nothing to do with it. The painting had sold for seventeen million credits, the governor’s hand-picked judge awarded him five million in damages for the emotional distress I had caused him, and he had then fixed my bail at twelve million credits.

  So that’s the story. I don’t even know if the painting still exists. They’re still using my banknotes—not on Solomon, where the governor outlawed them, but on New Rhodesia, where my model had married the richest man on the planet and then inherited all his wealth when he unexpectedly choked to death on a mutated cherry pit a month later. But it seems a crime that the rarest and greatest banknote of all will never been seen again.

  “I’d give a purty to see that painting,” said Catastrophe Baker. “Or even the model, for that matter. Especially if she’s the richest woman on New Rhodesia.”

  “She was something, all right,” agreed Little Mike. “If art mirrors life, then you have to start with something like her to wind up with something like my painting.”

  “Got a question for you,” said Max, who always seemed to have a question for everyone who told a story.

  “Sure.”

  “What’s your real name?”

  “I thought I told you: Michelangelo Gauguin Rembrandt van Gogh Rockwell Picasso.”

  “I mean your birth name,” said Max.

  Little Mike paused for a long minute. “Montgomery Quiggle,”he said at last, looking decidedly uncomfortable.

  “So like the rest of us, you came out to the Inner Frontier and took a name that suited you?”

  “You have some objection to that?”

  “Nope, but like I said, I got a question. I understand naming yourself after all them famous painters, but why Little Mike? Why not just Mike?”

  “Because I’m little, and I’m not ashamed of it.”

  “No reason to be,” agreed Max. “Course, it ain’t nothing to brag about either.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” said Big Red, who’d been an all-star in a number of the usual sports, but made his real reputation as maybe the greatest murderball player of all time. His body was covered top to bottom with scars, which he wore proudly.


  “Yeah?” said Max. “And what do you know about it?”

  “Enough.”

  “You’re a pretty big man yourself,” observed Max, looking at Big Red’s tall, muscular frame, “and I know you used to be a pro jockstrapper. So suppose you tell me: now that race horses are extinct, what athlete would rather be small than big?”

  “Right now, today?” replied Big Red. “The greatest of them all.”

  “And who is that?”

  “You probably never heard of him.”

  “Then how great can he be?” insisted Max.

  “Trust me, he was the best I ever saw. Hell, he was the best anyone ever saw.” Big Red sighed and shook his head sadly. “The brightest flames burn the briefest time.”

  “His career was cut short by injury, huh?”

  “His career was cut short all right, but not by injury,” said Big Red. He shifted in his chair, trying unsuccessfully to get comfortable. (It’s well-known that murderballers wear their old injuries like medals, and refuse all pain blocks and prostheses.)

  “So are you gonna tell us about him or not?”

  “Of course I am. I might be the very last person who remembers him, and if I stop telling his story, then it’ll be like he never existed.”

  The Short, Star-Crossed Career of Magic Abdul-Jordan

  Nobody knew his real name (began Big Red), but that didn’t matter, because by the time he was ten years old they’d already renamed him Magic Abdul-Jordan, after three of the greatest ancient basketball players. There wasn’t a shot he couldn’t make, and oh, how that boy could jump! He was quicker than a Denebian weaselcat, and nobody ever worked harder at perfecting his game.

  When he was twelve, he stood seven feet tall, and his folks moved to the Delphini system, where they still played basketball for big money. Hired him a private tutor, and let him turn pro when he was thirteen.

  First I ever heard of him was when word reached us out on the Rim about this fifteen-year-old phenom who stood more than eight feet tall and could reach almost twice his height at the top of his jump. A year or two later his team ran out of competition and went barnstorming through the Outer Frontier, and wherever Magic Abdul-Jordan went, he filled the stadiums. I don’t think that young man ever saw an empty seat in any arena he ever played.