The Return of Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future (35 page)

      
The Bandit seemed to be considering the offer for a moment. Finally he shook his head. "No, that's not enough."

      
Willowby looked confused. "Not enough?" he repeated.

      
"I think a third makes more sense."

      
"You'd rather pay me a third than a quarter?"

      
"No," said the Bandit. "
You're
going to pay
me
a third."

      
"What are you talking about?"

      
"I want a third of your business. Give it to me and you can leave here alive."

      
"Are you crazy?" snapped Willowby. "I've got 25 men with me!"

      
"You mean these men?" asked the Bandit, waving an arm in their direction. As he pointed, a laser beam shot out of his finger and mowed them down before they knew what was happening. The last seven or eight had time to reach for their weapons, but the beam was replaced by an exploding energy ball, and an instant later Willowby was the only member of his party still standing.

      
"Who
are
you?" he demanded.

      
"I told you: my name is Santiago. And you are a member of the Democracy. That's all I need to know."

      
The Bandit pointed a deadly finger at him, and an instant later Willowby fell to the ground, dead.

      
"That was stupid!" yelled Dante, rushing over to join the Bandit. "I told you—we needed his organization!"

      
"He worked for the Democracy," said the Bandit calmly. "The Democracy is our enemy."

      
"You were always going to kill him, weren't you?"

      
"That's what Santiago does to his enemies."

      
"Yeah, well Santiago could use his brain every now and then!" snapped Dante. "You've cost us billions.
Billions!
"

      
"I don't deal with the enemy."

      
"Then next time let me!"

      
The Bandit turned to him, and for just an instant Dante thought he was going to aim his lethal arm at him.

      
"You're a poet. Go write your poems. I'm Santiago. Let me handle my business in my own way—and don't ever stand between me and the enemy." He turned to one of the men who had run out of the house. "One of them is still alive. The fifth from the left."

      
"You want me to finish him off, Santiago?" asked the man.

      
"No," said the Bandit. "If I'd wanted him dead, I'd have killed him myself. Treat his wounds, drop him off on some colony world, and make sure he knows that it was Santiago who did this. Let him pass the word about what happens to anyone who stands against me." He turned to Dante. "Does that meet with your approval?"

      
"Hell, no!" said the poet bitterly. "What the fuck does
he
know about running an organization that spans a hundred worlds?" He tried to control his temper. "If you were going to let someone live, why not Willowby? He'd have been just as impressed as that poor bastard."

      
"Yes, he would have," agreed the Bandit. "And next time he'd have sent 200 men, or 500, or a thousand, and he'd have stayed away until it was over. He'd never give me another chance at him once he knew what I could do, and he couldn't let me live after I'd grabbed a third of his empire. If he'd shown any weakness of resolve, his own men would have been dividing the rest of his business."

      
"You could have negotiated," complained Dante. "Ten percent would still have been worth hundreds of millions."

      
"You don't negotiate with officers of the Democracy," said the Bandit coldly. "You kill them."

      
"But he was a
corrupt
officer, damn it! We could have reached an accommodation."

      
"They're
all
corrupt," said the Bandit, turning and heading back to the compound. "This conversation is over."

      
Dante watched him walk away.

      
Maybe you're right. Maybe you can't deal with representatives of the Democracy, even thoroughly corrupt ones. But damn it, you sounded a lot more reasonable when you were still just the One-Armed Bandit.

23.

      
      
      
Come inside the Blixtor Maze;

      
      
      
Spend your money, spend your days.

      
      
      
Nameless pleasures lie in wait—

      
      
      
Come along and meet your fate.

      
The Blixtor Maze was the brainchild of an alien architect named Blixtor. No one was quite sure what race he belonged to. Some said he was a Canphorite, but others said no, the Maze wasn't rational enough to have been created by a native of Canphor VI or VII, that he must be a native of Lodin XI. Still others said it was actually created by a human, but that his computer had crashed and he'd given up on the project, and other races built it based on what they could reconstruct from his shattered modules and memory crystals.

      
This much is known: no one ever succeeded in mapping the Blixtor Maze. It was said that parts of it went off into the fourth dimension, other parts were so complex that not even a theoretical mathematician could explain them. It was approximately one mile square. No one knew how many levels there were. The only thing that was certain is that no one had ever walked from one end to the other in less than a week, and even Homing Wolves, those remarkable domesticated creatures from Valos XI, were unable to retrace their steps.

      
It took four centuries to build the Maze on the isolated world of Nandi III. Legend has it that the original Maze was to be four miles on a side, but two crews got lost and starved to death. Nobody believed it—until they tried to find their way out of the Maze. There were some who felt the Maze was constantly moving, or rotating in and out of known dimensions, because you could wander into an antiquarian chart shop or a drug den, and when you walked out the same door nothing was where it had been. Further, if you had left something behind, you could turn and attempt to go back and retrieve it, only to find that the establishment you thought was two paces behind you was nowhere to be seen.

      
There were no warning signs as you approached the Maze, because the authorities operated on the reasonable assumption that you wouldn't be on Nandi II if you didn't have business there. Far from banning weapons, visitors were encouraged to enter the Maze heavily armed, since no lawman or bounty hunter was likely to respond to any entreaties coming from within the Maze. All laws were suspended the moment you took your first step inside the Maze. Murder was no longer a crime; neither were any of a hundred other actions that could get you executed or incarcerated in the Democracy, or the half-dozen that were still illegal across most of the Inner Frontier.

      
Dante was unsurprised to learn that Virgil was guilty of at least three of them. He was contacted by Blue Peter, who explained that Virgil was being held inside the Maze, that a group of permanent residents had him under what passed for house arrest, and that it was going to take a guide to find him and a lot of money to bail him out.

      
"How did
you
get out?" asked Dante over the subspace radio.

      
"The Maze spit me out," answered the alien. "It didn't want me."

      
"It spit you out?" repeated Dante.

      
"Come to Nandi," said Blue Peter. "It'll make more sense once you see it."

      
Two days later the Bandit's ship touched down at the Nandi spaceport. He and Dante passed through customs—both used false IDs and passports—and took a room in a run-down hotel that was 50 yards from the entrance to the Maze.

      
Blue Peter was waiting for them.

      
"I'm glad you got here," he said. "Who knows what they're doing to him?"

      
"Whatever they're doing, he's probably so grogged up on bad booze and worse drugs that he's totally unaware of it," said the Bandit.

      
"Shouldn't we go get him?" asked Blue Peter as the Bandit walked into the hotel's restaurant.

      
"First we'll eat dinner," answered the Bandit. "We'll leave our gear here, get a good night's sleep, and go after him in the morning." He paused. "And tonight, before we're through eating, you'll tell us what you know about the Blixtor Maze."

      
"Nothing," said the alien. "Well, almost nothing."

      
"How could it spit you out?" asked Dante.

      
"That might be the wrong term," admitted Blue Peter. "I hid in this warehouse right across street from the jail where they were holding Virgil. I planned to wait until it was dark and then see if I could break him out." He paused. "When the sun set, I waited an hour and then I stepped out, ready to cross the street—and somehow I wasn't facing the jail. In fact, I wasn't even in the Maze. I was standing on the road that borders the north side of the Maze. I looked for the door I'd come through, but there was nothing but a solid wall for hundreds of yards." He smiled an odd alien smile. "The Maze didn't want me. That's when I knew I'd have to contact you if he was ever to get out of there."

      
"I can see the entrance to the Maze from the front of the hotel," said the Bandit. "Can you find him if we go through it?"

      
"Yes," said Blue Peter. Then, "No." Finally, "Maybe."

      
"Explain."

      
"It's never the same twice," said the blue alien. "If it's the way it was the last time Virgil and I entered it, and nothing inside the Maze has changed, I can find it—but the odds against that are thousands to one. I've been in the Maze a dozen times, and it's never been the same twice. I've talked to people who live in the Maze, who have been there for years, and they never know what they'll see when they walk out their front door."

      
"How do they keep finding their front door when it's time to go home?" asked Dante.

      
"Oh, if the Maze wants you to find something, you will," Blue Peter assured him. "It might even move things around just to accommodate you."

      
"You make it sound sentient."

      
"It's not sentient—I mean, how could it be?—but it's tricky as hell."

      
The Bandit stared at him for a moment, then walked to a table and called up the menu. The other two joined him, and they ate the meal in total silence.

      
"I'll see you in the morning," said the Bandit when he was through. He got to his feet. "Sunrise, right here."

      
He left and headed toward the airlift as Dante turned to Blue Peter.

      
"Just what the hell was Virgil doing that got him incarcerated?" asked the poet. "From what I know of this world, I'd have thought nothing was illegal. Certainly it couldn't just have been drugs."

      
"It wasn't."

      
"Well, then?"

      
The alien looked at him for a long moment. "I don't think I'm going to tell you."

      
"Why not?"

      
"Because you will want to work with him again, and if I told you, you might leave him here forever."

      
"It was that bad?"

      
"Let us say that it was that
unusual
."

      
"Were you involved?"

      
"I think I've told you everything that I'm going to tell you," said Blue Peter. "Goodnight, Rhymer. I'll see you in the morning."

      
"What's your room number?"

      
"This hotel is for humans only," said the alien with no sign of bitterness. "I am staying a few blocks away."

      
"See you in the morning, then," said Dante as Blue Peter left the restaurant and walked out the front door of the hotel. He spent a few minutes sitting at the table, staring at his empty wine glass and trying to imagine what new perversion Virgil had discovered. Finally he got up and went off to his room.

      
His bed woke him gently just before sunrise, as he had instructed it to do, and he showered and dressed quickly, then went down to the restaurant. He decided he couldn't stand the smell of food that early in the day, so he sat in the lobby and waited for the Bandit to finish. Blue Peter joined him a moment later, and the two of them sat, half asleep, until the Bandit emerged from the restaurant.

      
"Okay," he said. "Let's go get him."

      
The three of them went out into the cool dry air of Nandi III, turned right, and rode the slidewalk past a row of low angular buildings to the entrance to the Maze.

      
"This is it?" asked the Bandit.

      
"That's right," said Blue Peter.

      
"If everything moves around, how are we going to find him?" asked the Bandit.

      
"We'll hire a guide."

      
"A guide? You mean someone knows his way around the Maze?"

      
"It's not that simple," began Blue Peter.