by Mike Resnick
Anyway, while Orpheus wasn't especially interested in aliens, he had nothing against putting them in his poem if they were really unique—not in physical terms, since all species are physically unique; but unique in their relationship to Man. And in that regard, the Great Sioux Nation was a little more unique than most.
It wasn't really a nation at all. It possessed only eighty-four members, and only twice since its inception had all of them been on the same planet at the same time. They represented seven sentient races, all oxygen-breathers, each of them from a world that had been militarily conquered and economically subjugated either by the Republic or by the Democracy that succeeded it.
Some races were so alien that subjugation was meaningless to them; a goodly number of races resented it; but only a tiny handful learned from it.
Such a handful was the Great Sioux Nation.
They were outlaws and thieves, cutthroats and smugglers, playing Man's game on Man's turf—the Inner Frontier. But unlike their less enlightened brothers, they went directly to the source for their indoctrination. Each of them had served time as a member of some human band of desperadoes, and each had realized that if one was to play in Man's ballpark, he/she/it had better learn Man's ground rules.
And while they were studying the rule book, they studied the history books as well. They realized that before Man had turned to conquering and exploiting the races he had found among the stars, he had put in long centuries of practice back on his home planet. Their leader, a gold-feathered humanoid from Morioth II, found that he felt a special empathy toward the Amerinds, which had been methodically decimated on one of Man's last home-world frontiers. He took the name of Sitting Bull, though he was physiologically incapable of sitting and had no idea what a bull was, gave every member of his band an Indian name (oddly enough, Crazy Horse was the only other one derived from the Sioux), adopted certain practices of the Plains Indians, and named the group the Great Sioux Nation. Before long he had instilled in them the conviction that it was their destiny to adjust the balance of power on the Inner Frontier, while realizing a handsome profit in the process. They would commit no crime against any race except Man; they would accept no commission from any race except Man; and they would use no weapons against Man except those he had created himself.
Once Orpheus had written them up, neglecting to mention that they were aliens (though he revised it some years later), most of his audience thought they were a band of fanatics bent on revenge for injustices that had been perpetrated on the Amerinds in aeons past. Others held that they were a group of misguided idealists out to redress an imagined grievance on behalf of a small branch of humanity that had long since been exterminated or assimilated. Only the handful of people who had actually had dealings with them knew that they were simply alien outlaws and opportunists, trying their best to fit into a frontier culture that they could never fully comprehend.
But whatever the Great Sioux Nation's motivation, its efficiency was never in question. Sitting Bull's headquarters were on the mining world of Diamond Strike, some twenty-five miles south of Mother Lode, the planet's sole Tradertown. Through him, one could purchase contracts for anything from human contraband to human life.
One could also purchase information, which was why the Swagman had instructed Virtue MacKenzie's navigational computer to lay in a course for Diamond Strike.
Two days later Virtue set the ship down at the tiny spaceport just outside of Mother Lode. It was midmorning, and the distant sun glowed a dull orange through the heat-haze that blanketed the area.
The Swagman promptly walked to a local garage, where he spent the better part of ten minutes haggling with the proprietor over the rental price of a very old landcar.
"Why didn't you just pay him what he wanted?" Virtue asked irritably, opening a window to let in some air as they began driving the ancient vehicle down a narrow dirt road toward the Great Sioux Nation's headquarters. "Certainly we can afford it."
"Of course we can, my dear," he agreed amiably. "But this is Sitting Bull's world, just as Goldenrod is mine. By now he already knows we're here, and since he's not in the business of giving information away for free, it's not a bad idea to let him know that we don't always agree to pay the first price that's proposed to us."
"Will he offer a second one?"
The Swagman nodded. "And a third, and a fourth. He's a wholehearted believer in the barter system."
"He sounds like an interesting character," she commented, pulling out a handkerchief and wiping the sweat that was already starting to roll down her face.
"He's a dangerous character." the Swagman corrected her. "In fact I think it would be best if I did the talking and the negotiating for us."
"What makes you any better at it than me?" she demanded. "If you'd have let me bargain for the landcar, I'd have gotten us one with air-conditioning—or at least something with better shock absorbers."
"This was the only one available."
"You didn't answer my question: What makes you think you're better qualified than me?"
"Because he's an alien," said the Swagman.
"So what?"
"I was raised by aliens. I know how his mind works."
"Are you trying to tell me you were raised by members of Sitting Bull's race?" she said skeptically.
"No."
"Then what difference does it make?"
"I'm used to dealing with aliens."
"Apples and oranges," she replied. "That's like saying that since you're used to firing pistols, you'd be good with a saber." She grunted as the vehicle swerved to avoid an enormous pothole, then turned to him. "How the hell did you ever wind up living with aliens in the first place?"
"When I was three years old, my family was aboard a colony ship that crashed on Pellinath Four. There were only two survivors, and the other one died a couple of days later. The Bellum took care of me until I was seventeen."
"The Bellum?" repeated Virtue. "I've never heard of them."
"Most people haven't," replied the Swagman. "They keep pretty much to themselves."
"Why didn't they notify the Democracy that they had you?"
"Strange as it may seem to you, they didn't even know the Democracy existed. So I stayed there until a team from the Pioneer Corps landed and started charting the planet, and then they took me back with them."
"What was it like, growing up without any other members of your own race?" she asked curiously.
"Not that bad, all things considered. I think it was harder on the Bellum than on me."
"Oh? Why?"
"They were a dedicated communal society, and the concept of individual ownership wasn't very popular with them." He grinned. "Needless to say, this was a worldview that I didn't exactly share. I've been gone for close to thirty years now, and I'll bet some portions of their economy still haven't recovered."
"I would have thought they got you young enough to properly indoctrinate you." commented Virtue.
"That's what they thought," he said with an amused laugh. "But give a two-year-old child a rag doll and tell him that it's his, and he's got an understanding of property that even a planet filled with Bellum isn't going to shake." He paused. "Anyway, I've never been very good at taking orders, so when they told me that no right-thinking entity would ever want to possess any material goods, I immediately began accumulating things at a phenomenal rate!" He grinned again. "I guess it carried over into adulthood."
"Interesting," she said, deciding that the heat was preferable to the dust and closing her window. "But I don't see that any of this makes you more qualified than me to speak to Sitting Bull."
"He's an alien who's trying to act like a human," said the Swagman. "That's much the same position I was in three decades ago." He paused. "Also, I've dealt with him once before, so I know the form."
"Form? What form?"
"He's very big on Amerind rituals. I suspect most of them never existed, but he's read a lot of books and tapes by a lot of half-baked anthropolog
ists."
"And that's what interested Black Orpheus enough to write him up?" said Virtue, obviously unimpressed.
"He's written up less colorful characters," replied the Swagman. "You and me, for instance."
"This may come as a surprise to you, but I didn't even know I was in his damned song until after my verse appeared." She snorted contemptuously. "I still don't know when and where he saw me, and I don't think I'll ever know where he got that Virgin Queen crap."
"So you're not a virgin and you're not a queen," said the Swagman easily. "I was never chased by a posse, either, no matter what the song says. But Black Orpheus never lets facts get in the way of truth. After all, he's a myth-maker, not an historian."
"He's not a myth-maker or an historian." said Virtue. "He's just a ballad-writer, and not a very good one, at that."
The Swagman shook his head. "He may put his story in ballad form, but he's not one to let meter interfere with what he wants to say. The last time he visited me I pointed out that the meter was all wrong in his songs about Socrates and Altair of Altair and One-Time Charlie, and he just smiled and said that he'd rather have his songs ring true than scan properly."
"The man's a fool."
"If he is, then he's a very popular fool."
"You think so?" she said. "You ought to hear Cain's opinion about being dubbed the Songbird."
"Instead of complaining about it, he ought to be pleased," said the Swagman. "Orpheus has made him famous." He paused. "Hell, he's made all of us famous."
"You know," she said thoughtfully, wiping her forehead again, "maybe we're missing a bet here."
"In what way?"
"Maybe we ought to hunt Orpheus up and ask him where we can find Santiago."
"He doesn't know," said the Swagman. "He's been hunting for him for the past ten years."
"But he wrote him up!" protested Virtue. "I thought he never did that until he'd met his subject."
"Santiago's a special case. After all, an epic about the Inner Frontier that doesn't mention him just doesn't make much sense. Besides, Orpheus is like every other artist I've ever met: the further along he gets on a piece of work, the more frightened he becomes that he's going to die before it's finished and that some total incompetent will complete it for him. He wanted to make sure that the Santiago verses were done before that happened; I imagine they'll be rewritten if he ever finds him."
"Who commissioned this damned song, anyway?" asked Virtue.
"No one. He does it because he wants to."
"Then I was right the first time," she said decisively. "He's a fool."
"For doing something that makes him happy?"
"For giving it away for free."
"Maybe he's got enough money," suggested the Swagman.
She turned and stared at him. "Do you know anyone who's got enough money?"
The Swagman smiled. "Maybe he's a fool," he said at last.
The road suddenly dipped through a wooded hollow, and the Swagman began slowing down.
"What's the matter?" asked Virtue.
"We're almost there," he replied, pulling off to the side of the road just after it climbed out of the hollow and ran across a narrow ridge. "See that clearing about half a mile ahead?"
"What are those weird-looking structures in the middle of it?" asked Virtue, peering through the trees.
"Wigwams," replied the Swagman.
"What's a wigwam?"
"A kind of tent that Amerinds used to live in—or so Sitting Bull tells me. Personally, I doubt that anyone ever slept in anything like that. It looks much too inefficient, and it certainly doesn't afford any protection against your enemies." He shrugged. "Still, it's hardly worth arguing the point; I've got better things to do than go around researching aborigines."
He turned off the ignition.
"What now?" asked Virtue.
"Now we get out and walk," he continued, opening his door as she followed suit.
"Why? We're still almost half a mile away."
"Because Sitting Bull likes his supplicants to approach on foot. I can't really say that I blame him; there are a goodly number of ways to rig some pretty powerful weaponry to a motor vehicle, and he does have more than his fair share of enemies." He paused. "Besides, this way he gets to show off."
"I don't follow you," said Virtue.
"If the last time I came here was at all typical, we'll pick up some company along the way and march into his camp under armed guard. I imagine it makes him feel as if he's in control of the situation."
As if on cue, four aliens stepped out from behind trees and bushes. Or rather, three—tall, bald, emaciated blue beings, each carrying a multitude of weapons—stepped out; the fourth, which resembled a shaggy yellow caterpillar, merely slithered. All four aliens wore war paint and headbands. The Swagman thought they looked absolutely ludicrous, but Virtue found them interesting enough to capture with a miniaturized holographic camera that she had built into her belt buckle.
Finally one of the blue aliens, who identified himself as Cochise, pointed a sonic rifle at them. They stood motionless while the caterpillar literally sniffed out their weapons, appropriated the Swagman's two concealed pistols, and turned them over to another of the blue aliens. Finally Cochise jerked his head in the direction of the camp, and the two humans began walking toward it once again.
When they arrived, Cochise ushered them to the site of a campfire that had died sometime during the night, told them to sit down, and left them in the care of another blue alien.
"Anything out of the ordinary yet?" whispered Virtue.
"Just standard operating procedure so far," said the Swagman reassuringly.
Then the flaps of a nearby teepee were thrust apart, and Sitting Bull stepped out as Virtue surreptitiously activated her belt-buckle camera and a hidden recording device.
The first thing she noticed about him was the gold feathers. Initially she thought they were part of his costume, like the huge ceremonial headdress he wore, but she quickly saw that they were part and parcel of Sitting Bull himself.
He stood about five feet tall and was almost as broad as he was high. He covered his genitalia so inadequately with a beaded loincloth that she knew at a glance that he was a he and not an it; and he waddled on thick, muscular legs that were jointed so strangely that she couldn't imagine how he could possibly sit down, or even squat on his haunches.
His face, like those of the other aliens, was covered by a painted design, but seemed, if not human, at least very expressive. Virtue couldn't imagine any being with so many feathers not having a beak to go along with them, but Sitting Bull possessed a broad, flat nose and a narrow, puckered mouth. His eyes were umber, his pupils mere vertical slits. If he had ears, she couldn't spot them, but she decided that they may very well have been covered by the substantial headdress.
"Hello, Sitting Bull," said the Swagman, starting to get to his feet. "It's good to see you again."
"Remain seated," replied Sitting Bull in a harsh, croaking voice that grated on Virtue's ears; it seemed so out of place that she felt he was purposely deepening it to impress them. The Swagman sat back down and re-crossed his legs. "Who is your companion?"
"Virtue MacKenzie," said Virtue, wondering whether to extend her hand and deciding not to. "I'm a journalist."
Sitting Bull stared at her expressionlessly for a moment, then turned back to the Swagman and cleared his throat, a grating noise that sounded like metal rubbing against metal and caused Virtue to conclude that she was hearing his normal voice after all.
"What favor do you seek from the Great Sioux Nation?"
"Information," responded the Swagman promptly.
"Will the acquisition of this information bring harm to one or more Men?" asked Sitting Bull.
"It will," said the Swagman.
The feathered alien made a sudden awkward jerking motion with his head, which Virtue took to be a nod of approval.
"Will the acquisition of this information bring harm to on
e or more members of any other race?"
"Absolutely not," the Swagman assured him.
"Are you aware of the penalty for lying?"
"Let us say that I can hazard a remarkably accurate guess."
"Do not guess, Jolly Swagman." Sitting Bull leaned forward and stared intently at him, and suddenly Virtue decided that he looked a lot more like an alien than an Indian. "Should any harm befall anyone other than a Man as a result of the information that you seek, you and Virtue MacKenzie will be found no matter where you try to hide. You will be brought back to Diamond Strike, you will be tortured, and eventually you will be tethered to a stake and burned to death. Is that understood?"
"Perfectly."
"Then you may make your request."
"We're looking for Santiago. Do you know where he is?"
"Yes."
There was a long silence.
"Well?" demanded Virtue.
"This I will not tell you."
"Will not or cannot?" asked the Swagman.
"I said what I said," replied Sitting Bull stoically.
"I didn't realize you were afraid of him," said the Swagman condescendingly.
"I fear no one."
"Then why won't you tell us what we want to know?"
"Because he makes war against Men. Because he brings grief to Men. Because he brings chaos to Men. Because he is Santiago."
"Cut the crap and name your price," said Virtue irritably.
Sitting Bull turned to her, his pupils dilating and contracting as he breathed. "Women do not speak in council."
"Women with money do," she replied. "How much do you want?"
"You are very irritating, even for a member of your race," said the alien. "I begin to understand why Dimitri Sokol wants you dead." He stared coldly at her. "There is no price. I will not tell you."
"You mean you haven't got the guts!" snapped Virtue.
"We fear no one," said Sitting Bull, pulling back his lips and exposing a row of bright yellow teeth. "Even the Democracy cringes in fear of the Great Sioux Nation."