The Return of Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future (40 page)

      
Blossom sighed deeply. "All right. Maybe you're right, maybe you're not—but it's all academic now anyway, since he's banished us and plans to kill us on sight. So what do we do now?"

      
"I don't know," said Dante. "Find the true Santiago, I suppose."

      
"While this one's killing people right and left and telling everyone Santiago's to blame for it?" asked Virgil.

      
"What do you suggest?" said Dante.

      
"Kill him."

      
"Who's going to do it?" Dante shot back. "You? Me? Matilda? You've seen him in action. Even Dimitrios of the Three Burners wouldn't stand much chance against him."

      
"There must be someone out there."

      
"So you find a better killer," said Matilda. "Then what?"

      
"Then you hope he's more reasonable than the Bandit," replied Virgil.

      
"We're going about this all wrong," said Dante. "Santiago is more than merely a competent killer. We chose the Bandit not just because of his physical abilities, but because we thought he was a moral man."

      
"He is," answered Virgil. "Too moral. Sometimes that can be as much a fault as not being moral enough."

      
Dante turned to Matilda. "Have you got any suggestions?"

      
"He's not an evil man," she began.

      
"But he's done evil things, and he's almost certainly going to do more."

      
"Let me finish," she said. "He's not an evil man. He's wrong- headed in some respects, but he's willing to put his life on the line for the cause—as he perceives it—every day, he's willing to be hated and feared and mistrusted by all the people he's trying to defend, he's willing to do everything required of Santiago. The problem isn't that he's a shirker, but that, because of his misconceptions, he's willing to do too much, not too little."

      
"What's your point?" said Dante.

      
"I think it's more practical to educate him than replace him," she said. "After all, he's already set up shop as Santiago. Even if you found a way to kill him, there's no guarantee that the next one would be as moral, or as self-sacrificing."

      
"How are we going to educate him if he's going to shoot us on sight?" demanded Dante in exasperation.

      
"
We
aren't," said Matilda. "That much is obvious."

      
"So . . . ?"

      
"So we find someone who can."

      
"You're saying we get someone to join his organization and try to influence him?" asked Dante. "That strikes me as a pretty slim hope."

      
"Do
you
want to kill him?"

      
"You know we can't."

      
"Anyone can be ambushed. We're smarter than he is. It wouldn't be that hard—especially now, before he builds a truly formidable organization." She stared at him. "Now answer my question."

      
"No," he admitted. "No, I don't want to kill him."

      
"Then we have two choices: we can hope someone else kills him, or we can try—by proxy—to change the way he looks at things."

      
"Do you have anyone in mind?"

      
"Not yet."

      
"I don't want to cast a pall of gloom here," volunteered Virgil, who looked only too happy to do so, "but you're the guys who chose the Bandit in the first place. What makes you think you'll do any better this time around?"

      
"If we don't find a replacement, who will?" asked Dante.

      
"Me."

      
"You have a candidate in mind?"

      
"Yeah. I figure the easiest way to make the Bandit accept our candidate is to send him someone with a reputation, someone with bona fides, so to speak—but a freelancer, not someone who proposes to share his business out of the blue."

      
"All right," said Dante. "Who is it?"

      
"You ever hear of the Black Death?"

      
"He's a killer for hire?"

      
"Everyone's a killer for hire," said the Injun. "The difference is the he don't make any bones about it."

      
"And what makes you think he can influence the One-Armed Bandit?" asked Matilda.

      
"He owes me a couple of favors."

      
"Sexual, of course," said Dante distastefully.

      
"Personal, anyway," said Virgil noncommittally.

      
"Can you trust him?"

      
"Probably."

      
"Just 'probably'?" asked Matilda, frowning.

      
"'Probably' is as high a rating as I'd give the Rhymer here," retorted Virgil, "and he and I are connected at the soul."

      
"The hell we are!" snapped Dante.

      
Virgil grinned. "You see? My closest friend in the galaxy, and he's pissed that I cherish our friendship. One of these days he'll sell me out for thirty pieces of silver."

      
"Two pieces of lead alloy would do it," muttered Dante.

      
"Get back to the point," said Matilda. "Can we trust the Black Death?"

      
"As much as you can trust anyone," answered Virgil.

      
"
Can
he kill the Bandit if he has to?"

      
"Hell,
I
can kill him when he's back's turned. How many times did he turn his back on you in the past month? A hundred? A thousand?"

      
"So your friend shoots people in the back?" said Dante.

      
"Not really, though I'm sure he'd have no serious objection to it." Virgil lit a smokeless cigar. "His job is killing people. He doesn't care if you subtract points for form."

      
"Where can we find him?" said Dante. "I'll want to talk to him before we agree to this."

      
"Not a good idea," said Virgil.

      
"Why not?"

      
"He doesn't like being hemmed in. Let me talk to him one-on- one."

      
"Not a chance," said Dante.

      
"Why not?"

      
"Not to put too fine a point on it, you're a moral dwarf compared to the Bandit. I don't want you telling anyone how we want the Bandit to behave."

      
"You really know how to hurt a guy, Rhymer," said Virgil with an obvious lack of sincerity. "Say that in public and someone might think you disapproved of my lifestyle or my ethics."

      
"There's nothing wrong with either that castration and a couple of decades in solitary confinement wouldn't cure," said Dante. "Now tell me where we can find this Black Death."

      
"He's not like the Tyrannosaur," replied Virgil. "He doesn't have his own world, and he doesn't stand out in a crowd—at least, not the way you'd think. He's a freelancer. It might take me a few days to track him down."

      
"Start."

      
"Start how? We're eight lightyears from the nearest inhabited planet."

      
"Get on the subspace radio. Ask your contacts. Pass the word that you've got a lucrative job for him."

      
"I'll ask around, but you don't want me to lie about a the paycheck. He might take it as an insult."

      
"Just get your ass over to the radio and do what you have to do," said Dante irritably.

      
Virgil started to say something, thought better of it, and went over to the subspace radio, where he tried to track down the Black Death.

      
"We can't just sit around and hope this works out," said Dante. "If I know Virgil, this Black Death is more likely to kill for the Bandit than persuade for us."

      
"So what do you want us to do?" asked Blossom, who had been silent for the past few minutes.

      
"I'm glad to see you're talking to me again," said Dante dryly. "And to answer your question: we'll keep looking."

      
"For what?"

      
"I wish I knew. Some way to educate or depose the Bandit." He stared at her for a long minute. "If we can't come up with something, maybe we'll send you back."

      
"He'll kill me!"

      
"What if you contacted him and convinced him that we made you leave against your will, that you believe in him and everything he's doing and you want to come back?"

      
"Which probably isn't too far from the truth," commented Matilda.

      
"He won't care about the truth," said Blossom. "You know how rigid he is. He's already said he'll kill us. He never changes his mind."

      
"Well, it's something to keep in reserve," said Dante.

      
"Fuck your reserve!" snapped Blossom. "I believed in him, and now you've fixed it so he'll kill me the next time he sees me! I want out. The next planet we touch down on, you go your way and I'm going mine."

      
"I can't stop you," said Dante.

      
"You're damned right you can't," she replied. "You're a fool, you know that? You've got a saint on Valhalla, and that's not good enough for you. You want a god."

      
"I just want Santiago."

      
"The
real
Santiagos were killers and thieves. You want yours to walk on water!" She got to her feet. "I'm going to my cabin. Leave me alone until we land."

      
She walked through the galley to the cabins and entered the nearest of them.

      
"Well, I handled that with my usual aplomb," said Dante bitterly. "Virgil, the Bandit, and her." He grimaced. "Sometimes I wish I'd never found that goddamned poem."

      
"Sometimes I wish I were Queen of the Universe," replied Matilda. "Tell me when you want to stop talking drivel and get back to business."

      
"I think you'd make a rather nice queen."

      
"You heard me."

      
"I heard you. I just don't see any viable options." He sighed deeply. "Maybe the kids were an aberration. Maybe he'll work out after all."

      
"Maybe he will."

      
"Except it wasn't just the kids," complained Dante. "It was all those people in the Maze. And the old lady at the bank, too—and the fact that he couldn't think his way out of it, couldn't come up with a lie that would allow him to let her live."

      
"I know," she agreed. "At first I thought he was right, but after I heard you explain how we could have avoided killing her, could even put her to use explaining that we all worked for Santiago, I knew he was wrong." She paused. "He's just not very quick on his mental feet."

      
"Most fanatics aren't," said Dante.

      
Suddenly Virgil stood up and turned to them. "It's all arranged," he announced. "Lay in a course for Tosca III."

      
"What's on Tosca?" asked Dante.

      
"The Black Death."

27.

      
      
The Black Death comes, the Black Death goes,

      
      
The Black Death can be bellicose.

      
      
So friend, be on your guard today—

      
      
His blood is up, he lives to slay.

      
As Dante became more comfortable with his epic, he began using poetic license here and there. The first time was when he wrote of the Black Death.

      
He was writing about heroes and villains so big they blotted out the stars, so memorable that children would be telling their stories decades after he wrote them, and once in a while he came across such an aberration that he felt free to embellish, or in this case, to out-and-out falsify.

      
Not that the Black Death wasn't every bit as deadly as Dante said. In point of fact, he was even deadlier. Not that he didn't deserve the three verses Dante gave him, or that he wasn't feared wherever he went—once he was recognized.

      
The interesting fact is that he was almost never recognized.

      
Until it was too late.

      
The name itself conjures up fantastic images. A tall, muscular black man clad in muted colors, plain blazers or screechers in worn holsters, shopworn shoes or boots.

      
Or perhaps a slender man, looking like Death itself, wearing a black frock coat, his clothes and his drawn skin absorbing all color and reflecting only the total absence of color.

      
You can picture an unforgiving, unsmiling face, cold lifeless eyes like those of a shark, a thin-lipped mouth that never smiles. Some kind of hat or headpiece so that the sun never illuminates that deathmask countenance.

      
Expensive gloves, that never slip off the handles of his weapons, that leave no fingerprints, that never expose his surprisingly delicate fingers to prying eyes.

      
That's the image of a man called the Black Death—and yet the only thing it had in common with the
real
Black Death was the gloves.