by Mike Resnick
"Besides, they were my footsteps to begin with," she continued. "I was dealing in stolen commodities long before Duncan Black ever thought of it." She paused. "I gave him a share of the business to insure his loyalty." She looked at Cain. "Does that seem manipulative and immoral to you?"
"I gave up making moral judgments a long time ago," he replied.
"Anyway," said the Sargasso Rose, sipping her drink, "Duncan liked dealing with people more than I did, so he became our front man for places like Port étrange and people like Stern."
"Then you made the initial contact with Santiago, not Black."
"Actually, Santiago made the initial contact with me," she answered him. "Though it took a few years before I knew beyond any doubt that I was dealing with him."
"Have you ever met him?" asked Cain.
She shook her head. "No. Or perhaps I should say, not to my knowledge."
"But you might have?"
"Who's to say?" she replied with a shrug of her shoulders. "I met any number of people who delivered goods that Santiago may have stolen—though in truth I can't imagine why he would have risked exposure by coming here."
"Do you know anyone who has actually met him face to face?" persisted Cain.
"Yes, I do."
"Who?"
"Before I tell you, Mr. Cain," said the Sargasso Rose, "there are a few things I would like to know, just to satisfy my own curiosity."
"Such as?"
"You spent most of your young manhood fighting to overthrow various governments. Santiago, to the best of my knowledge, has primarily attacked and looted those enterprises that are owned or controlled by the Democracy, or are at least vital to its well-being. You were branded as a revolutionary, and once had a price on your head. The magnitude of his actions is certainly far greater, but he might also be considered a revolutionary, insofar as most of his crimes are against the State. You have so many things in common with him that I'm just a little puzzled about why you want so desperately to kill him."
"The bulk of his crimes are committed against the Democracy simply because the Democracy has more assets than any other potential target," said Cain. "As for his being a revolutionary, you might say the same for any train robber back on old Earth who ever robbed a government payroll. The man's a criminal, plain and simple."
"Have you ever known him to kill anyone?" she asked.
"He killed seventeen colonists on Silverblue just last year," replied Cain.
"Rubbish!" said the Sargasso Rose. "He hasn't been to the Outer Frontier in years."
"You know that for a fact?" he asked sharply.
"Why else would the Angel have moved into this area?" she replied.
"Maybe he's chasing him," suggested Cain.
"You don't believe that for a moment. The Angel catches anyone he chases."
"He's just a bounty hunter, not a superman."
"You still haven't told me why you want to kill Santiago."
"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.
5.
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."
"Whittaker Drum."
"Infinite sorrow, dear friends," announced Wixtol. "I prostrate myself to inform you that we have no such resident."
"He also uses the name Socrates," said Cain.
The alien gave them a delighted grin. "Joy supreme! Socrates lives in apartment twenty-nine fourteen, praise be. If you will condescend to follow your humble servant, I will lead you to the elevator."
It waddled off to the right, and Cain and Terwilliger fell into step behind it.
"Is that him, or is something wrong with the translator?" whispered the gambler.
"Who knows?" replied Cain. "Maybe they told him that's the way a concierge speaks."
They soon reached the elevators. Wixtol held the door open for them, pressed the button for the twenty-ninth floor, thanked them profusely for coming, and wished them a safe and happy ascent. Then the door slid shut, and a moment later they were walking down a mirrored corridor leading to apartment 2914.
When they arrived at the front door, Cain stopped and waited silently.
"I've seen you somewhere before," said a hoarse, masculine voice. "Who are you?"
"My name is Cain."
There was a pause. "Sebastian Cain?"
"Yes."
"Well, I'll be damned!" exclaimed the voice. "What have you been doing with yourself?"
"Hello. Whittaker. It's been a long time."
"What are you doing here?"
"The Sargasso Rose gave me your new name and told me to hunt you up. I'd like to talk to you, if you can spare me the time."
"I'd be delighted. Just move a step to your left so my security system can scan you."
Cain did so, and became aware of a soft humming noise.
"Do you think you're going to need two guns and a knife to talk to me?" asked the voice.
"No."
The door slid open a few inches.
"Toss them inside, Sebastian. I'll return them when we're done."