Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future by Mike Resnick Read Free Book Online Page A

wasn’t built with an extra passenger in mind.” He uttered a grunt of
triumph as he finally found the coffee in amongst a stack of condensed rations.
    “Go a little easy on that stuff,”
said Cain. “It’s expensive.”
    “It tastes expensive. Where’s it from—Belore or Canphor?”
    “Brazil.”
    “Never heard of it.”
    “It’s a country back on Earth.”
    “You mean I’ve been drinking
coffee from Earth itself?” said Terwilliger. “I’m impressed! You do right well
by a guest, Songbird.”
    “Thanks—and I keep telling you: my
name’s Cain.”
    “I’ve been meaning to ask you
about that. You don’t sound like you’ve got much of a singing voice, so how
come he dubbed you the Songbird?”
    “Because my name’s Sebastian
Nightingale Cain. He fell in love with my middle name, and I told him he
couldn’t use it.” Cain grimaced. “I should have been more explicit.”
    “Come to think of it, Black
Orpheus does a lot of dumb things,” said
Terwilliger. “Like that line about me being a martinet. I’m the sweetest,
friendliest guy in the galaxy. He just used it to make a rhyme.”
    “I notice you don’t object to the
part about pawning your soul,” noted Cain.
    Terwilliger laughed. “Hell, that’s
the first thing a man gets rid of when he comes to the Frontier. Excess
baggage, nothing more.”
    “Losing at cards seems to make you
cynical,” said Cain.
    “It’s got nothing to do with
cards,” replied the little gambler. “It’s an obvious fact. You kill men for a
living; where would you be with a soul?”
    “Back on Sylaria, I suppose,” said
Cain thoughtfully.
    “That’s the world where you were a
revolutionary?”
    “One of them.”
    “You should have known better,”
said Terwilliger. “No matter what kind of promises a man who’s looking for
power makes, he’s not going to turn out to be any different from the one he
replaces.”
    “I was very young,” said Cain.
    “It’s hard to imagine you as a
callow youth.”
    Cain chuckled. “I wasn’t so much
callow as idealistic.”
    “Well, cheer up—the Frontier is
filled with men who were going to make the galaxy a better place to live.”
    “So are the seats of power,” said
Cain wryly. “You’d think some body would know how.”
    “You keep talking like that and
you’re going to convince me you still believe in all that idealistic nonsense.”
    “Don’t worry about it,” replied
Cain, leaning back and propping a foot up against a bulkhead. “That was a long,
long time ago.”
    The gambler walked over to a
sensor terminal, as he had done every few hours since leaving Port étrange, and
satisfied himself that there was still no sign of pursuit by ManMountain Bates.
    “You know,” said Terwilliger,
finally pouring himself some coffee and handing a cup over to Cain, “you never
did tell me why you became a bounty hunter.”
    “I’d been a terrorist for twelve
years. The only thing I knew how to do really well was kill people.”
    “How about that?” said the gambler
with mock regret. “And here I thought it was because you believed in justice.”
    Cain patted the weapon at his
side. “I learned to use this gun because I believed in truth and honor and
freedom and a lot of other fine-sounding things. I spent twelve years fighting
for them and then took a good look at the results.” He paused. “Now all I
believe in is the gun.”
    “Well, I’ve met disillusioned
revolutionaries before, but you’re the first one who ever fought on a
free-lance basis.”
    “Nobody paid me for what I did.”
    “What I meant was that you seemed
to go from one war to another.”
    “When the first man I thought
could put things right turned out to have feet of clay, I looked around for
another. It took me three revolutions before I finally realized just how much
clay God put into the universe.” He smiled ruefully. “I was a slow learner.”
    “At least you fought the good
fight,” said Terwilliger.
    “I fought