The Return of Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future

by Mike Resnick

  "So who was the Songbird?"

  "I told you: Sebastian Cain."

  "That's what I meant: who was Sebastian Cain?"

  "Another bounty hunter. And a revolutionary early in his life."

  "Why is he the Songbird?" she asked. "And don't tell me something silly like he whistled whenever he killed a man."

  "His full name was Sebastian Nightingale Cain. I think Orpheus took it from his middle name."

  "And everyone knew him as the Songbird?"

  Danny shook his head. "No, I don't know if anyone did." He paused and stared at the paper in his hand. "I could be wrong, but I'd bet the farm that the Songbird was Cain!"

  "Why is that so important?"

  "Cain was a major figure on the Frontier a century ago. There's nothing written about it here, but I've got a feeling he's the one who killed the Angel."

  "You got all that from a few verses?" she asked skeptically.

  "Like every kid, I grew up learning everything I could about the Inner Frontier. That's where the action was, where all the bigger-than-life heroes and villains lived and died. I'm just adding what I already knew to what I've read here." He paused. "Black Orpheus hid a lot of things inside those verses. It's like putting together a very complex jigsaw puzzle."

  "Well, you play detective," said the Duchess, making no attempt to feign interest. "I'm going to find a bedroom."

  "Fine, you do that," he said, never looking up from the manuscript.

  When she woke up alone in the morning, she went up to the attic and found him still sitting there, pouring over the manuscript.

  "I take it you haven't been to bed yet," she said.

  He looked up, his face aglow with excitement. "Listen to this:

  His name is Father William,

  His aim is hard to ken:

  His game is saving sinners;

  His fame is killing men.

  "Father William was a preacher. They say he tipped the scales at more than 400 pounds. According to legend, he was also a bounty hunter."

  "It sounds like your friend Black Orpheus went to a bounty hunters' convention," she observed.

  "That's all the law there was on the Inner Frontier," replied Danny. "All the law there is even today." He looked up from the papers. "I've been piecing things together all night, and you know what I think?"

  "What?" she asked in bored tones.

  "I think Father William actually worked for Santiago. In fact, I think he was a conduit for most of the money that Santiago stole."

  "That doesn't make any sense," said the Duchess.

  "Why not?"

  "Santiago was the greatest outlaw in the galaxy, right? Why would he use this preacher as a conduit to move money he stole? Move it where? You don't steal money just to give it away again. You keep it, or else you spend it on yourself. So it makes no sense." She made no attempt to hide her annoyance.

  "I've still got thousands of verses to read," said Danny, "but there's something very strange about this manuscript, and it has to do with Santiago. I'm not sure what, but I'll find out before I'm done."

  "Well, at least you know now that Santiago existed."

  "I always did."

  "You took it on faith," she said.

  "And now my faith has been rewarded."

  "Good. Now let's pack up and get the hell off the planet and sell the damned thing."

  "Too soon," said Danny. "We'll give Balsam and Gibbs another day to get tired of looking for us."

  "Just one day, and then we go!"

  "Probably."

  "What's this 'probably' shit?" she demanded. "One day and we're out of here!"

  "There's no rush," he replied. "The owners aren't coming home for two more weeks."

  "I'm not staying here two weeks!"

  "Just a day or two."

  "One day. And even so, I don't like it."

  "You're free to go any time you want," said Danny. "But the manuscript stays with me."

  "Don't get so cocky," she warned him. "I might leave right now and turn you in for the reward."

  Danny smiled. "You might, but you won't."

  "Why not?"

  "Because whatever the reward comes to, it's peanuts next to what I'll give you once we've sold the poem." His smile vanished. "Now leave me alone and let me get back to work."

  He spent the day pouring over the manuscript. At sunset the Duchess insisted he come down to the kitchen for dinner. He ate quickly and unenthusiastically, then went back to the attic to continue reading.

  She heard a loud thump! in the middle of the night and went upstairs to see what had happened. Danny had been sitting on the floor, reading, and finally fell asleep. He had fallen over on his side, and now lay, snoring gently, a page still clutched in his hand. She figured he was out for the next twelve to sixteen hours, but when she checked on him again in the morning he was up and reading.

  "Danny!" she insisted. "Put it down for a few hours. You'll kill yourself!"

  "I didn't know you cared."

  "I don't want you dying before we sell the poem. I wouldn't begin to know how or where to do it."

  "You sure know how to flatter a guy," he said.

  "So are you going to get some sleep?" she said, ignoring his remark.

  "Not right away," he said. "I'm getting close."

  "Close to what? Finishing?"

  "To understanding."

  "What's to understand? They're all just four-line verses. There's nothing very difficult about them. In fact, I thought Black Orpheus would be a better poet. The things you've read to me sounded wimpy and literary and kind of lame."

  "It's what he says, and what he doesn't say, not how he says it," replied Danny. "This thing is nothing short of the secret history of the Inner Frontier up to a century ago."

  "Everything's a mystery," she said with no show of interest. "Why does it have to be a secret history? Why not a public one? After all, the public read it."

  "The men and women and aliens he wrote about were alive when he wrote these verses. Many of them had prices on their heads. Still more confided in him, told him of deeds, some good, some bad, that no one knew about. You have to understand: Black Orpheus was the Bard of the Inner Frontier. He was welcomed everywhere he went. No one ever turned away from him—but to earn that kind of trust, he couldn't openly say anything more than you might find on a Wanted poster." Danny paused, his eyes still bright with excitement. "So he found secret ways to say what he wanted to say. This manuscript is to the Inner Frontier what, oh, I don't know, what Homer was to the Trojan War. Except that Homer exaggerated like hell and told everything out in the open, and Orpheus is concealing things all over the place. Including something huge, right in the middle."

  "You said that yesterday. What is it?"

  "I don't know. I think I'm getting close to piecing it together, but I won't know what it is until I'm done. It's as if he were holding someone for ransom, and I had the money, and he wanted to make sure the police weren't tailing me, so he ran me all over the city to make sure I was clean." He emitted an exhausted sigh. "He's running me all over the history of the Inner Frontier before I can discover what he's hiding."

  "Maybe you're not supposed to find it."

  "That would make a mockery of the whole thing. No, it's there—but he didn't want it to be easy." Danny looked at her. "That means it's something big. Otherwise, he wouldn't have taken such trouble to hide it. I spotted Cain and some of the others right away, but this whatever-it-is is taking a lot more work. Still, another few hours, another day or two, and I'll have it."

  "Hey!" she shouted. "We're leaving today, remember?"

  "We'll see."

  "You promised!"

  "You wanted me to promise," answered Danny. "That's not the same thing."

  "Every day we stay here we increase our risk. A neighbor could report us. The police could find us. The owners could return early. We've been pushing our luck, Danny. Why can't we leave?"

  "I'm still piecing things together,"
he said. "I don't want to stop, not even for a day."

  "You act like it's some kind of treasure map."

  "I doubt it. Legend has it that Orpheus died broke on an uninhabited world that he named after his dead wife, Eurydice."

  "He doesn't sound all that brilliant to me," said the Duchess. "He writes little rhymes that anyone can do—"

  "I told you—" Danny interrupted her.

  "I know what you said. But you haven't discovered any deep dark secrets yet, so maybe there aren't any. He's famous all over the Frontier, all over the Democracy too, and he died penniless." She snorted contemptuously. "Some genius."

  "Most poets die penniless," said Danny. "Anyway, I envy him."

  "Why?"

  "He traveled the Frontier, saw a new world every few days, lived every kid's dream, every romantic's dream. He did important work—and look at the people he got to meet, men and women like the Songbird, Father William, the Jolly Swagman, Peacemaker MacDougal, Johnny One-Note, the Angel, the Sargasso Rose. Just the names alone conjure up such fantastic pictures." He picked up another sheet and began reading:

  "Moonripple, Moonripple, touring the stars,

  Has polished the wax on a thousand bars,

  Has trod on the soil of a hundred worlds,

  Has found only pebbles while searching for pearls.

  Listen to her name: Moonripple. A girl named Moonripple, who's been to a hundred worlds. Now, that's evocative—especially when you live on a dirtball like"—he grimaced—"Bailiwick."

  The Duchess was unimpressed. "Read the rest of the verse. She found only pebbles while searching for pearls."

  "She found a lot more than that," said Danny. "You just have to know where to look and how to read it."

  "It sounds to me like she died as broke as Orpheus," said the Duchess with finality, walking to the chute. "I'm not kidding, Danny. I want to leave here today. I keep looking out the windows every five minutes, expecting to see the police surrounding us."

  "Soon," he said distractedly, his attention already back on the manuscript.

  Two hours later he went down to the kitchen and made some coffee.

  "Well?" she demanded.

  "I just need a little time away from the poem, time to think."

  "To think about what, or am I going to be sorry I asked?"

  "There's stuff there even Orpheus didn't know about," said Danny. "He was too close to the forest to see the trees."

  "Whatever that means."

  "I don't know what it means." He paused, swaying slightly from lack of food and sleep. "But I will know," he promised as he downed his coffee and went back up to the attic.

  He was back down an hour later, a triumphant smile on his face.

  "All right," he said. "Now we can leave."

  "Why now?" she asked. "What do you think you've learned?"

  "The secret."

  "This is about the poem?"

  "This is about the Inner Frontier," he replied. "It's all there in the poem, but even Black Orpheus didn't know how to interpret it." He shook his head in wonderment. "The greatest character of all, and he never knew!"

  "Orpheus was the greatest character?" she asked, puzzled.

  "No," he said distractedly. "I'm talking about Santiago!"

  "That's what you learned?" she said incredulously. "Everyone knows that Santiago was the greatest outlaw in the history of the Inner Frontier."

  "But he wasn't," said Danny, still smiling. "That's what I learned."

  "What are you talking about?" demanded the Duchess.

  "Santiago," explained Danny. "He wasn't an outlaw, not in the normal sense of the word. Oh, he did illegal things, but he was actually a revolutionary. I knew that yesterday afternoon."

  "That's rubbish! Everything I've ever heard about him—"

  "—was what he wanted people to hear," concluded Danny. "You asked once about bounty hunters. Here's your answer: if the Democracy had known he was a revolutionary, they'd have sent the whole fleet, five billion strong, to the Inner Frontier to hunt him down—so he made them think he was an outlaw, and all he had to deal with was a handful of bounty hunters. Orpheus guessed at that, but he never knew for sure."

  "So Santiago killed all the bounty hunters?" she said.

  Danny smiled again. "He tried, but he didn't always succeed—and that's the secret that's hidden in the poem, the secret even Orpheus didn't know."

  "You're not making sense. How could he have stayed in business if he hadn't killed them?"

  "There wasn't just one Santiago!" said Danny, unable to contain his excitement. "There was a series of them! I'm sure Sebastian Cain was one, and I think his successor was Esteban Cordoba." He paused for effect. "There were at least six Santiagos, maybe as many as eight!"

  "You're crazy!"

  "I'm right! Virtue MacKenzie, his biographer—she tried to hide it, but she was so sloppy that scholars never put much stock in her books, even though they sold tens of millions of copies." His arms shot up in a sign of triumph. "The most important single thing in the history of the Inner Frontier, and we're the only two people who know it!"

  "So now we can leave the planet and then sell the manuscript?" she asked with a look of relief.

  "We'll leave the planet," he agreed.

  "And sell the manuscript."

  He shook his head. "I'm not selling anything, not yet."

  "Then what are you going to do with it?" she demanded.

  "Add to it."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Maybe it's time for the Inner Frontier to have a chronicler again."

  "You?" said the Duchess incredulously.

  "Why not?"

  "I thought you were a criminal."

  "I've been a criminal. I've never tried being a poet or an chronicler."

  "What does the job pay?"

  "What's the going price on immortality?"

  "Immortality?"

  "I plan to create something that outlasts me, just as Orpheus did." He looked off into the distance, at some exotic place only he could see. "Think of all those worlds I've never seen—Serengeti, Greenveldt, Walpurgis III, Binder X, the Roosevelt system, Oceana . . . worlds I only heard about and dreamed about when I was a kid. You know," he added confidentially, "this is the first time I've been excited—really excited—about anything since I was that little kid, dreaming of those worlds."

  "You're really considering it, aren't you?" she said.

  "I'm done considering it," he said with a sudden decisiveness. "I'm doing it."

  "But why?" she demanded, as visions of the auction receded into the distance.

  "There are hundreds of thieves here on Bailiwick. There are millions in the Democracy, dozens of millions in the galaxy. But there was only one Black Orpheus, and there will be only one me. A century after I'm dead, someone will read my poem the way I'm reading his, and I'll have made my mark on the universe. I'll have done something that outlasts me. People will know I was here."

  "And is that so important to you?"

  "It always was."

  "And what about me?" she said bitterly. "Three days ago I was a law-abiding citizen. Three minutes ago I was a fugitive, but one who'd been promised a substantial amount of money from selling Orpheus' poem. Now I'm still a fugitive, but with no financial prospects again! You owe me something!"

  "I said I'd take care of you. I will."

  "How?"

  "I don't know yet—but a million opportunities are opening up, and one thing I've always been good at is seizing opportunities."

  "You'd damned well better be," the Duchess shot back. "In the meantime, you'd better work at making the name of Danny Briggs worth something."

  He shook his head. "That's no name for a Bard."

  "Did you have one in mind?"

  "Give me a few minutes," he said, walking to a computer and activating it.

  She went to the kitchen to pour herself a beer, and she drank it before returning. When she entered the room he looked up at her, a h
appy smile on his face.

  "You found one," she said.

  "We may be going to worlds that seem like paradise, and we may be going to worlds that reek of hellfire. Now I'm prepared for both." He paused. "From this day forward, my name is Dante Alighieri."

  3.

  They call him the Rhymer, a wordsmith by trade,

  He can bring you to tears or use words like a blade.

  He roams the Frontier writing down what he sees,

  And he makes men immortal, dotting i's, crossing t's.

  That was the first verse Dante Alighieri ever put to paper. Internal evidence suggests he wrote it while still on Bailiwick, though of course that is impossible to prove.

  It wasn't true when he wrote it. No one had yet called him the Rhymer (or even Dante), and he had never been to the Inner Frontier. But before long the verse would gain an aura of absolute truth, and eventually it was so widely accepted that people forgot that it was merely a prediction when it first appeared.

  Finding Black Orpheus' manuscript may have given him his initial impetus to go to the Frontier, but it was the arrival of the police that gave him a more immediate reason.

  "Hey, Danny!" hissed the Duchess, staring out the kitchen window.

  "I keep telling you," he replied irritably, looking up from his coffee cup, "the name's Dante."

  "I don't care what the name is!" she snapped. "Whoever you are today, you'd better know a way out of here!"

  "What are you talking about?" asked Dante.

  "Take a look," she said. "We've got company."

  "You must be mistaken. The owners aren't due back for almost two weeks!"

  "These aren't the owners! They're the police!"

  He raced to the window and saw two policemen standing about fifty feet away, staring at the house and speaking to each other. "Shit!"

  "I thought you told me no one could see in!" said the Duchess accusingly.

  "They can't," answered Dante. "But I should have figured once Balsam knew what I'd stolen from the kennel, he'd put a lookout on every house that was boarding an animal there."

  "So they're just going to set up shop out there and watch the house?" she asked.

  "Probably," he said. "But we can't count on that. They might decide to check and see if anything's been stolen."