Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future (37 page)

The town, such as it was, was only
about five blocks square, and Schussler had been able to set down less than two
miles away. Once the bounty hunter ascertained which way he had come, he set
about retracing his steps and spent the next ten minutes walking down a dirt
road that fronted an enormous field of mutated corn stalks, each some ten to
twelve feet high and holding an average of twenty ears apiece.

In the distance he could hear a
calf bleating. Logically he knew that imported embryos had to be born and
raised before they could be slaughtered, but while Father William’s roast
hadn’t seemed out of place to him, somehow the sound of a calf growing up on an
alien world untold trillions of miles from where it had been conceived struck
him as highly incongruous.

He continued walking, and after
another fifteen minutes he came to Schussler, who had recognized him when he
was still a few hundred yards away and opened the hatch for him.

“Did Billy Three-Eyes have
anything useful to say?” asked the cyborg when Cain had seated himself in the
command cabin.

“He’s dead,” said Cain.
“Peacemaker MacDougal took him four months ago.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said
Schussler. There was a momentary pause. “I’ll bet the Swagman knew it all
along!” he exclaimed suddenly.

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Where will we go next?”

“Nowhere,” said Cain. “There’s
something funny going on right here.”

“Funny?”

“I ran into Father William.”

“What was he doing?” asked
Schussler.

“He said he was taking a
vacation.”

“Curious,” murmured Schussler.
“Still, I suppose it’s possible.”

“Anything’s possible,” said Cain.
“But why here, and why now?”

“It
does
seem peculiar that so many bounty hunters have recently visited an innocuous
little agricultural world,” admitted Schussler.

“And I met a girl named
Moonripple.”

“The name is unfamiliar to me.”

“She’s just a barmaid,” replied
Cain. “Not very pretty, not very smart. Maybe twenty years old, tops.”

“Then why does she interest you?”

“Because Orpheus wrote her up.”

“Orpheus has written up thousands
of people.”

“And four of us are within two
miles of each other on a little colony world in the middle of nowhere,” said
Cain.

“I hadn’t looked at it that way,”
said Schussler. “That’s very interesting.”

“I’d say so.”

“
Very
interesting,” repeated the cyborg.

“Anyway, according to Orpheus,
Moonripple has been to one hundred planets.”

“I myself have been to more than
three hundred,” said Schussler. “What’s so unusual about that?”

“Nothing. But it means she had to
hit better than a world a month since she was ten or eleven years old—and now,
for some reason, she’s stayed on Safe Harbor for two years. What made her stop
traveling?”

“A good question,” agreed the
cyborg. “What’s the answer?”

“I don’t have one—yet.”

“Did you learn anything else about
her?”

“Yes,” said Cain. “She thinks
Santiago is a hero.”

“Why?” asked Schussler.

“I don’t know,” said Cain. “But I
sure as hell intend to find out.” He paused. “Can you get some information for
me?”

“What kind?”

“I know they don’t have any
spaceports on this planet, but there has to be some regulatory agency that
cleared you for landing and gave you the proper coordinates.”

“Yes, there is.”

“Contact them and see if you can
find out how long Father William has been here.”

Schussler had the information
thirty seconds later. “He’s been on Safe Harbor for almost a month.”

“He told me he landed here with
engine trouble a week ago. Moonripple said the same thing.”

“I can double-check if you like.”

“It’s not necessary.” Cain stared
at the wall and frowned. “I wonder what he’s waiting for?”

“We’re getting close, aren’t we?”
asked Schussler, a note of anticipation momentarily driving the mournful tone
from his musical voice.

“Very,” said Cain
softly.

One-Time
Charlie makes mistakes,

But never
makes them twice.

His heart is
black as anthracite,

His blood is cold as ice.

It was the name that did it.

Certainly Black Orpheus had no other
reason to put him into the ballad. He wasn’t a hero or a villain, a gambler or
a thief, a cyborg or a bounty hunter; in fact, he wasn’t anything colorful at
all. He was just a drifter named Charles Marlowe Felcher, who wandered from one
agricultural world to another, drinking a little too much to make up for not
working quite enough.

He had a mean streak, but he
wasn’t a very imposing physical specimen, and his mastery of fisticuffs and
self-defense left a lot to be desired. He felt no enormous compulsion to pay
his debts, but since that was common knowledge nobody ever gave him a line of
credit, and especially not bartenders. He carried an impressive sonic pistol on
his hip, but he wasn’t very accurate with it, and more often than not he forgot
to keep it charged.

But he had that name, and Orpheus
couldn’t let it pass without putting it into a verse.

Since he wasn’t a very loquacious
man, nobody knew exactly
why
he was called One-Time
Charlie. Some people said it was because he had been married once in his youth,
left his wife behind when he came out to the Frontier, and swore he would never
live with a woman again. Others created a complex legend about how he had
served time for some crime or another and vowed that he would commit every
criminal act in the book just once, so that the police would never again be
able to find a pattern to his behavior. A third story had it that he caused
such havoc on his binges that he never returned to a world he had visited. A
few of his enemies—and he certainly had a number of them—said it was a name
created by Flat-Nosed Sal, one of the more notorious prostitutes of the Tumiga
system, after he paid for an entire weekend of her time but could only perform
once.

Orpheus wasn’t concerned with the
origin of his name, but only with the fascinating images it evoked; and since
he caught him on a bad day, when he had been drinking pretty heavily and wasn’t
in one of his friendlier moods, the verse came out the way it did.

One-Time Charlie’s verse was a
recent addition to the canon, and as a result very few people on Safe Harbor
had heard it—which was probably all for the best, since sooner or later someone
who had heard the song and the stories would start asking him about Flat-Nosed
Sal, and as often as not he and his questioner would both wake up in the local
jail or the local hospital.

He arrived on a typical Safe
Harbor day—warm, sunny, somewhat humid—and spent the next few hours looking for
work at the larger farming combines. He was still making the rounds when Cain
awoke, shaved, showered, and walked into town.

The place had the flavor of a
small village back on old Earth, with rows of frame buildings and houses
divided into neat little rectangles. Even the styling was similar, with many of
the houses possessing dormer windows and huge verandas. He paused to examine
one of them and wasn’t surprised to find that beneath the woodlike veneer was a
layer of a titanium alloy, and that the house ran on fusion power.

He walked another block and saw
the figure of Father William sitting on the front porch of his small hotel,
swaying gently back and forth on the oversized wooden rocking chair. He shaded
his eyes as he watched the bounty hunter approach.

“Good morning, Sebastian,” he
said. “Lovely day, isn’t it?”

Cain nodded. “That it is. Good
morning, Father William.”

“I thought you’d be off in pursuit
of Santiago this morning,” said the preacher.

“There’s no hurry,” said Cain. “I
thought I’d sample some of Moonripple’s cooking myself.” He paused. “Besides,
Santiago’s been out there for thirty years or more. Another couple of days
can’t hurt.”

“I hear tell that the Angel is
closing in on him.”

“That’s what they say.”

“And that doesn’t worry you?”

“I’m trying not to lose any sleep
over it,” answered Cain.

“You’re a confident man, Sebastian
Cain,” said Father William. “If it was me, I’d have taken off from Safe Harbor
last night.”

“But it’s not you,” said Cain.

“True enough.” agreed the
preacher. “Well, enjoy your stay. Possibly you’d like to join me for dinner
tonight?”

“Perhaps.”

“You seem singularly unenthused,”
noted Father William.

“You eat so damned fast, you’re
likely to swallow my arm before you realize you’ve made a mistake,” said Cain
with a smile.

Father William threw back his head
and roared with laughter. Finally he regained his breath. “I like you,
Sebastian! I truly do!” Suddenly he became serious. “I hope we never have to
confront each other as enemies.”

“Are you planning on breaking the
law?” asked Cain.

“Me?” snorted Father William.
“Never!”

“Neither am I.”

Father William stared at him for a
long moment. “Would you care to come up here and sit beside me for a spell?”

“Later, perhaps,” said Cain. “I’ve
got to buy some supplies.”

“Go in peace, Sebastian.” said the
preacher. He looked up at the sky. “A beautiful day—the kind of day that makes
a man forget how much evil there is abroad in the galaxy.”

Cain nodded to him and continued
walking down the street until he came to a small general store. He entered it
and was momentarily chilled by the rush of cold air.

“Good morning, sir.” said the
proprietor, a portly, middle-aged man who had meticulously combed his thinning
hair to cover a bald spot and succeeded only in calling attention to it. “May I
help you?”

“Possibly,” said Cain, looking
down the various aisles. “Do you carry any books or tapes here?”

“Safe Harbor doesn’t have a
newstape,” he said. “Nothing very exciting ever happens here,” he added with an
apologetic smile. “But we do have a selection of tapes and magazines from
nearby worlds. Is there anything in particular you’re looking for?”

“Yes,” said Cain. “Have you got
material about Santiago?”

“Nothing worth looking at,” said
the shopkeeper. “Just the usual stupid speculations written by incompetents who
have nothing better to do with their time.” He sighed. “You’d think somebody
would tell the truth about him after all these years.”

“What
is
the truth?” asked Cain.

“He’s a great man, a
great
man, and they keep treating him like some kind of
common criminal.”

“I don’t mean to seem rude,” said
Cain carefully, “but none of the stories I’ve heard about him make him sound
like anything but an outlaw.”

“You’ve been listening to the
wrong people.”

“Are you one of the right ones?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What can you tell me about
Santiago?”

“Oh, nothing very much,” replied
the shopkeeper.

“Just that he’s a great man,” said
Cain.

“That’s right, sir,” said the
shopkeeper briskly. “You’ll find our magazines and tapes in the middle of aisle
three, just past the computer supplies.”

“Thank you,” said Cain. He
wandered over to the tape section, browsed for a couple of minutes, and walked
out.

His next stop was the barber shop,
where he got a shave while listening to the barber tell him with a straight
face that he had never heard of anyone named Santiago.

Cain spent the rest of the morning
wandering through the small village, striking up conversations wherever he
could. The people were divided almost equally: half of them thought Santiago
was a saint, and the other half seemed not to recognize his name.

Finally he returned to Father
William’s hotel. The preacher was still rocking lazily in the sunlight, sipping
a tall iced drink through a straw.

“Hello, Sebastian,” he said. “Have
you decided to join me?”

“For a couple of minutes, anyway,”
said Cain, pulling up a chair.

“A couple of minutes is all I’ve
got,” replied Father William. “It’s getting on toward lunchtime.” He paused.
“Did you have a successful morning?”

“An interesting one, anyway,”
responded Cain.

“I notice that you’re not
overburdened by supplies,” remarked the preacher with a lazy smile.

“I decided to carry them back
after the heat of the day,” lied Cain.

“Good idea,” said Father William.
“Will you be leaving then?”

Cain shrugged. “Perhaps.”

“Where will you be going next,
Sebastian?”

“I haven’t decided yet. How about
you?”

“Szandor Two, perhaps, or possibly
Greenwillow. It’s been a few years since I’ve preached to either of them.” He
paused. “I suppose I’ll stop by a post office somewhere along the way and make
up my mind after I’ve seen the latest Wanted list.”

“Haven’t they got any post offices
on Safe Harbor?” asked Cain.

Father William shook his head.
“Not a big enough planet. The mail gets delivered every three weeks to the
local chemical company. The townspeople pick it up when it arrives, and the
rest of it gets passed out when they deliver fertilizer and insecticides to the
farms.”

“How many mail deliveries have you
been here for?”

“Two,” said Father William.

“Last night you told me you’d only
been here a week,” said Cain.

“Last night you hadn’t told that
unholy ship of yours to check with the local authorities,” replied the preacher
easily. “That was unwise, Sebastian, challenging the word of a servant of the
Lord.”

“Isn’t lying supposed to be a
sin?” inquired Cain mildly.