The Return of Santiago

Part 1: THE RHYMER'S BOOK

1.

Some say that he's a hundred,

Some say that he is more;

Some say he'll live forever—

This outlaw commodore!

That was the last verse ever written by Black Orpheus, the Bard of the Inner Frontier. Though Santiago's name doesn't appear in it, it is generally considered to have been about the notorious King of the Outlaws.

And with that, Black Orpheus's history of the Frontier was done. Not finished in the sense that it was complete, but done. Shortly after writing those words he disappeared forever. Some say he found an idyllic world on which to live out his life. Others say that Santiago himself gunned him down. A handful believe that he found the task of codifying the entire history of the Inner Frontier in verse too daunting, and that he simply gave it up and went off to live out his years in solitude.

At the moment that he became a catalyst for history, Danny Briggs knew little of Santiago and even less of Black Orpheus. Like most kids he'd grown up thrilled by legends about both, but that was the extent of his knowledge and his interest. On the third night of the fifth month of the year 3407 of the Galactic Era, Danny Briggs had other things on his mind as he scaled the end of a long, low building, a cloth bag slung over his right shoulder.

He moved slowly, carefully, trying not to make a sound—but then the wind shifted, carrying his scent to the creatures below, and all his precautions were for nothing. A huge Moondevil, 200 pounds of muscle and sinew, saw him creeping across the roof and began howling. A Polarcat, glistening white in the moonlight, leaped up from its own enclosure and tried to dig its claws into Danny's leg.

As the young man sidestepped the Polarcat, two more animals of a type he'd never seen before launched themselves toward him, falling back as they hit the edge of the gently-pitched roof.

Danny cursed under his breath. There was no sense moving cautiously any longer. The only way to shut all the animals up was to get out of their sight as quickly as possible. He raced the length of the roof, ignoring the increasing din, and finally jumped down to a small atrium. He adjusted his pocket computer to set up a signal that disrupted the security cameras, found the door he was looking for, used the code he had stolen months earlier, and entered the office.

He ignored the safe and instead activated the computer. In seconds he had accessed the data he needed. He pulled out his tiny scanner, transferred the data to it, and put it back in a pocket. Then he deactivated the computer. The entire operation took less than a minute.

He considered killing the security system and just walking out the front door, but that would have given away the fact that he'd been there, and all his efforts would be wasted if the police suspected that anyone had invaded this particular office—especially when they discovered that no money had been taken.

Instead he went back the way he'd come. The animals were silent now, but he knew they wouldn't stay that way for long. Choosing speed over stealth, he climbed onto the roof of the long low building again, raced the length of it in the face of the ever-increasing howls, growls, and screams. When he came to the Moondevil, he reached into his leather bag, withdrew a small dead animal, and tossed it into the Moondevil's enclosure. Now if enough neighbors reported all the noise and the police investigated, they'd find the remains of the animal and assume that it had somehow wandered into the kennel and caused all the commotion.

An hour later he was sitting at his usual table at the Golden Fleece, a tavern on the outskirts of New Punjab, a small city that had nothing in common with the original Punjab except the subjugation of its natives, in this case the orange-skinned humanoids of Bailiwick. The world wasn't a very large or very important one: it held no fissionable materials, few precious stones or metals, and the farmland wasn't among the best. But it did have two million natives—it had had close to five million before the Navy pacified them—and three human cities, of which New Punjab, with almost 40,000 residents, was the largest.

It was said that Black Orpheus had once spent a night on Bailiwick, but there were no holographs or other records to prove it. Bailiwick's main claim to fame was Milos Jannis, who had been born there and was now the Democracy's middleweight freehand champion. Two minor actors and a second-rate novelist were the only other things Bailiwick had to brag about.

Danny Briggs didn't want to add to that total. He was content to remain relatively unknown and unapprehended. He shunned publicity the way bad politicians seek it out. Even when he turned a profit at what he considered to be his business, he always made sure to deposit and spend it offworld.

He ordered a drink and sat there, staring at himself in the mirror behind the bar. He wasn't thrilled with what he saw: a few inches under six feet in an era when the average man stood two inches above six feet. He was thin; not emaciated, but somewhere between slender and wiry. His head was covered by nondescript brown hair. He didn't like his chin much; too pointy. For the hundredth time he considered growing a beard to cover it, but his mustache was so sparse he hated to think of what a beard would look like. His ears stuck out too far; he figured one of these days he was going to lose one or both in a fight.

No, on the whole, there wasn't much about Danny Briggs that he liked. Hell, he didn't even like the way he made his living. He didn't believe in God, so he didn't believe that God had some nobler purpose for him. He had no fire burning in his belly, but rather a certain unfocused dissatisfaction, a desire to make some kind of mark, to scratch his name on the boulder of Time so people would know he'd been here. Not that he was a hero, because he wasn't; not because he would someday make a difference to the handful of misfits and criminals that formed his circle of friends, because he knew he was incapable of making one; but simply to show those who came after him that once upon a time there was a man named Danny Briggs, and he had lived right here on Bailiwick, and that, just once, he'd done something worth remembering.

Except that everything he'd done up to now was aimed at letting no one know he'd been here, and far from remembering him, he wanted nothing more than for the police and the Democracy to completely ignore his existence.

Interesting conflict, he thought wryly. The urge to be known versus the need to be hidden. Perhaps someday he'd resolve it, though he doubted it.

A grizzled, white-haired man with a noticeable limp entered the Golden Fleece, looked around, and walked directly to Danny's table.

"I'm not too early, am I?" he asked.

"No, I've got it," said Danny.

"The usual price?"

"Three hundred Maria Theresa dollars up front and twenty percent of whatever you make."

"It was two hundred fifty last time," grumbled the man.

"Success breeds inflation."

"You sure you won't take Democracy credits?" asked the old man.

"I don't want anything to do with them," said Danny. Besides, he added mentally, you start spending too many Democracy credits, you start attracting a little too much Democracy attention—but I guess you haven't figured that out, have you?

"Okay, okay," said the old man. He removed a prosthetic hand, pulled a wad of money out of it, counted out three hundred Maria Theresa dollars, and pushed it across the table.

"Thanks," said Danny. He pulled out a tiny computer, retrieved an address, and transferred it to a hologram for the old man to study. "This is it."

"You're sure?"

"Have I ever been wrong yet?" asked Danny, nodding to another client who entered the Golden Fleece and caught his eye.

"No, you never have been," said the old man. "I don't know how you do it." That's because you and every other fool I deal with would have broken into the kennel's safe tonight and come away with a couple of hundred credits if you were lucky. Not one of you would ever think of stealing a list of the animals' owners, complete with their addresses and the dates that they're gone.

"Memorize it," said Danny, indicating the hologram that the tiny computer was projecting.

The man studied it, then nodded his head. Danny wiped the information from the machine and deactivated it.

"Thanks, Danny," said the old man, getting to his feet. The next client sat down opposite him.

Jesus! I rob the data from that computer every three or four months and don't take any other risks, and I get twenty percent of three hundred robberies a year. It's almost too easy. Doesn't anyone else on this dirtball have a brain?

Their negotiation completed, the man got up and left, and Danny was alone with his drink once again. A redhead, a bit

overweight but still pretty, smiled a greeting at him from a nearby table.

"Hi, Danny," she said.

"Hi yourself, Duchess," said Danny. "I just finished tonight's business. Why don't you come over and join me?" He flashed a wad of money. "I'm solvent tonight."

"You never give up, do you?" she said, amused.

"Of course not," replied Danny. "You don't hit the moon if you don't shoot for it."

"Am I the moon?"

"You'll do."

"Boy, you sure know how to turn a girl on," she said sardonically.

He smiled. "It works with all the other girls."

"So turn your charm on one of them."

"Anything worthwhile takes effort," he replied. "You take effort."

"I suppose I'm flattered," said the Duchess.

"So join me."

"I said I was flattered, not interested."

"One of the days you're going to say yes, and it'll be a race to see which of us drops dead from shock first."

"One of these days you'll get an honest job, and maybe I'll say yes."

"If I had an honest job, I couldn't afford you." He smiled. "I'm sure someone somewhere has based an entire philosophical system on a paradox just like that one."

"Not funny, Danny."

"Look, some people are great rulers of men, some are great cleaners of stables. I found out what I was good at early on."

"I think it's criminal that you feel that way."

He smiled again. "Criminal's the word. Still, I'm willing to be shown the error of my ways. Come have a drink."

"No, thanks."

"You really won't join me?"

"I really won't."

"But your heart would be broken if I hadn't asked, right?"

"Try not asking some night and we'll see."

"You drive a hard bargain, Duchess," said Danny. "But one of these days you'll see me as I really am."

"Maybe I already do."

"Fate forfend," he said in mock dismay.

A moment later he got up and made his way to the men's room. As he was washing his hands the door dilated and two burly men entered the small cubicle.

"Hi, Danny," said the taller of them.

"Hi, Mr. Balsam," replied Danny, trying to hide his apprehension. "Hi, Mr. Gibbs."

"That's Commander Balsam."

"And Lieutenant Gibbs," added the shorter, wider man.

"That's only when you're on duty," said Danny. "And if you were on duty, you wouldn't be drinking in a tavern."

"We're not drinking," said Balsam. "And it's still Commander."

"Whatever makes you happy," said Danny. "Good evening, Commander."

"Well, it didn't start out that way, but it's improving," replied Balsam. A grin that boded no good spread across his face. "You fucked up big time tonight, Danny."

"I don't know what you're talking about. I've been in the bar all night."

"No, you've been swiping data from a kennel. We've got you cold."

"You have holographs of me breaking into a kennel? I doubt that."

"Of course we don't have any holos, Danny. You disabled the cameras, remember?"

"Fingerprints, then? Or maybe voiceprints, or a retinagram?" suggested Danny.

"We know you've wiped your prints, and you've got contacts that give a false retina reading," said Gibbs.

"Well, you're certainly welcome to search me for this mysterious data you're referring to."

"You're a bright lad, Danny," said Balsam. "You've either got it hidden away or committed to memory."

"I wish I could help you," said Danny with a smile, "but aren't you supposed to have evidence before you start making accusations?"

"Oh, we've got it, Danny. Holographs, retinagrams, voiceprints, everything."

Danny frowned. "But you just said—"

"We didn't get it at the kennel," said Balsam. "We got it at the market."

"What market?"

Balsam grinned again. "For a smart guy, you did a really dumb thing, Danny. You went to the biggest, best-protected market in town, and you bought a dead minipor to feed the animals if they got noisy."

"I assume you're going to get to the point sometime this evening," said Danny, already scanning the room for some means of escape.

"The minipor's a rare item, Danny. And the reason it's a rarity is because it comes from Churchill II. The store has security cameras showing you buying the only minipor imported to Bailiwick in the past half year—and there was enough of its skeleton left in the Moondevil's enclosure so that we could identify it." He paused. "It was a nice scam, Danny. Of all the scum I deal with, only you would have figured out there was a hundred times more profit in a list of empty houses than in the kennel's cash box."

Danny glanced at the small window on the back wall of the washroom.

"Don't even think of it," said Gibbs. "You'd never fit through, and we'd tack on another two years for trying to escape."

"Who's escaping?" said Danny pleasantly. "I hope you have a comfortable cell. My lawyer doesn't like getting up before noon, so I'll be spending the night with you."

"This night and the next thousand," said Balsam. He withdrew a pair of glowing manacles. "Hands behind your back, Danny."

"Can I get a drink of water first?"

"Okay, but no funny stuff."

"You tell me what's funny about a glass of water," said Danny, pulling a cup out of the wall and holding it beneath the faucet. "Cold," he ordered.

Cold water filled the cup, and Danny drank it down.

"One more?"

"Come on, Danny. You had your drink."

"You know what the water's like in jail," said Danny. "Let me have one more drink. How can it hurt."

Balsam shrugged. "Yeah, okay, go ahead."

"Thanks," said Danny. He turned to the sink and held the glass under the tap as the two officers relaxed and waited for him.

"Hot!" he croaked.

Boiling hot water filled the glass, and in a single motion he hurled it in Balsam's face, grabbed the manacles, connected Gibbs' wrist to the sink, and raced out the door.

Danny had a three-step lead on Balsam as he raced to the door of the Golden Fleece. The Commander pulled out a screecher, a sonic pistol that would put him out for the rest of the night and give him a headache for a week, but as he was running after Danny and taking aim, the Duchess stuck out a foot and tripped him. He fell with a bone-jarring thud.

Danny raced back to the table, took her hand, and began pulling her toward the door.

"I didn't mean to do that!" she said, panic-stricken. "It was instinct! I just didn't want him to shoot you!"

"I believe you!" said Danny urgently. "He never will! Come on! He's not going to stay down forever, and he's got a partner!"

Suddenly Gibbs, the manacle hanging from his wrist, burst into the tavern.

"Now!" said Danny urgently. The Duchess took a quick glance at Gibbs, screamed, and actually beat Danny out the door.

"Left!" he whispered as he caught up with her. They reached the corner and had just turned out of the line of sight when the two policemen emerged, weapons in hand, from the tavern.

"Now they're going to kill us!" whispered the Duchess, terrified.

"They're never going to find us," answered Danny. "Just trust me and do what I say."

They ran through the streets, turning frequently, never seeing any sign of their pursuers, always moving farther and farther from the center of the small city. After a few minutes the buildings took on new and different shapes: some were triangular, some trapezoidal, some seemed to follow no rational plan at all.

"Where are we?" asked the Duchess, as Danny led her down narrow winding streets that seemed totally patternless.

"The native quarter," he said. "They won't follow us here."

"Is it dangerous?" she asked, looking around.

"It is if they know you work for the Democracy. They'll leave us alone."

"How do you know?"

"I've spent a lot of time here," said Danny, nodding to an orange-skinned being who stared right through him as if he didn't exist. "They know I won't do them any harm."

"You have alien friends?"

"They're not aliens, they've natives," answered Danny. "And yes, I have friends here."

She began looking panicky again. "I can't believe it! I'm a fugitive, and I'm hiding out in the alien quarter!"

"Calm down," said Danny. "You're safe now."

"You calm down!" she snapped. "Maybe you're used to having the police after you, but it's a new experience for me, and I don't like it very much!"

"They won't come to the quarter," he said confidently.

"Are we going to spend the night here?"

He shook his head. "We'll give the police half an hour to figure out where I went, and another couple of minutes to decide it's not worth the effort to search for us here."

"Then what?"

He smiled. "Then we have our choice of 53 empty houses."

She lit a smokeless cigarette. "So it's not enough that I helped a criminal escape capture," she said bitterly. "Now the police can add breaking and entering to the charges."

"I'm grateful that you stopped my friend Commander Balsam from shooting me," said Danny, "but no one asked you to. It was your choice to hinder a police officer in the pursuit of a criminal, so don't blame me."

"I told you: I wasn't thinking clearly," she said. "I was just reacting."

"Believe me, no one's going to arrest you," Danny assured her. "Any red-blooded man who was at the tavern will swear that Balsam tripped over you."

"Do you really think so?"

"I do. Besides, if I don't know your real name, neither do they. If you choose to stay with me, all they know is they're after someone who called herself the Duchess. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'll give plenty of ten-to-one that that's not the name on your ID disk or your passport."

"It isn't. I didn't like my name, so I changed it."

"They do that on the Inner Frontier, not here on the Democracy worlds. How can the government keep tabs on you if they don't know who you are?"

"I never thought of it that way," she said, "but maybe choosing a new name wasn't a bad idea."

"Beats the hell out of being a Myrtle."

"Do I look like a Myrtle to you?"

He stared at her and shook his head. "You look like a Duchess who saved my life. Of course, you won't drink with me, but if I have to choose between your doing one or the other . . ." He ended with a smile.

"Well, you look exactly like a Danny Briggs."

"That bad, huh?"

"If you don't like the name, change it like I did."

"What would I change it to?"

"That's for you to decide."

"I never had a hero," he admitted. "I guess I'll keep it and stay who I am."

They stood in silence for a few more minutes, engulfed in angular shadows. Then Danny checked his timepiece.

"We've been here almost an hour," he announced. "I think we can start hunting up a place to stay while we figure out our next move."

"Where are we going?" she asked as he began walking back toward the city.

"Where do you want to go?"

"You know that little hill at the south end of town, the one overlooking Lake Belora?" she said. "Have you got anything there?"

"I've got two houses in the area," he replied. "I won't know if either of them has a lake view until we get there."

The first house was actually in a valley just beyond the hill, but the second, still luxurious but less impressive, looked like they would be able see the lake from the second level.

"It's too bad I didn't know this would be happening," remarked Danny. "There's an empty villa fronting the lake. It even has a dock and a couple of boats."

"So let's go there."

He shook his head. "It's going to be robbed sometime tonight. We don't want to be anywhere near it, just in case."

"How will we get in?" asked the Duchess as they approached the front door of the house they had chosen. "I don't know how to break into a house. Won't it have a security system?"

"Have a little trust in the man whose life you saved," he replied, kneeling down to study the computer lock. "Shit!"

"What is it?"

"I can crack the combination in a couple of minutes, but it's got a bone reader."

"A bone reader?"

"Yeah. I can get around almost any retina ID system, but bone readers are tough. They scan your skeleton and compare it to anyone who the computer's been programmed to accept. I've got a couple of healed fractures that won't match up against anyone else's."

"Then we'll do without our lake view and go to the other house."

"Give me a minute," he said. "There's never been a security system that couldn't be penetrated."

"By you?"

"By somebody." He flashed her a smile. "I am but a talented amateur."

"Sure," she retorted. "And I'm a millionaire virgin."

"That gives me all the more reason to find a way into the house."

He touched the lock, and a holographic screen appeared in the air, filled with dozens of icons. His fingers began moving expertly over the lock, and the icons began racing across the screen in near-hypnotic patterns.

"How's it coming?" asked the Duchess after a few minutes.

"Oh, it's been unlocked for awhile," he said.

"But you can't hide your fractures."

"I'm not trying to."

After another minute he stood up. "Okay," he said. "I'm done."

The door dilated, and she began to step through it. He grabbed her arm and held her back.

"Gentlemen first," he said, stepping through.

The door slammed shut in her face. He disappeared for a moment, then opened the door and invited her in.

"What was that all about?" she said, entering the house.

"I fed the computer the data about my skeleton and told it I'd been approved. But I didn't know what your skeletal history might be, so after I went in I deactivated the security system." He paused. "I also ordered all the windows to polarize. We can see out, but no one on the outside can see in, even if we have the lights on."

"Do you do this kind of thing often?" she asked.

"Certainly not," he replied. "I get people who are hungrier than I am to do it for me."

She stared at him with an expression that was a cross between concern and admiration. "There's a lot more to you than meets the eye."

"Thank you," said Danny. "I won't even offer an obscene rejoinder." He looked around. "So what do you think of our new quarters?"

"Elegant," she said, walking through the entry room. The carpet anticipated her steps and thickened as she walked, and the mural on the wall slowly, almost imperceptibly, began turning into a three-dimensional scene, then gradually added motion. It went back to being a flat painting as they passed into the next room.

"This is some house!" she said. "I've never been close to anything like this!"

"Yeah, a person could get used to this without much effort," agreed Danny, as a chair positioned itself to accommodate him.

"As long as we're going to be stuck here for a day or two, let's go upstairs and see if we can see the lake," suggested the Duchess.

"Why not?" assented Danny, following her to a staircase. As they put their feet on the first wide stair, it metamorphosed into a carpeted escalator, totally silent, and gently transported them up to the second floor.

They walked to a window and stared out.

"You can almost see it," she said. "If we were even one floor higher we'd have a magnificent view."

"I saw a third level of windows when we were outside," said Danny. "There's probably an attic above us somewhere. We should be able to see it from there."

They searched through the rooms, and finally came to an airlift next to a storage closet.

"This has got to be it," said Danny. "It's the only thing leading up."

"What do we stand on?" asked the Duchess nervously as she looked down to the basement some thirty feet below.

"Just step into the shaft," explained Danny. "It'll sense your presence, and you'll stand on a cushion of air that'll take you up to the attic."

"You're sure? I've never seen one of these things before."

"They're all the rage on Deluros VIII and the bigger worlds," said Danny. "Give it another twenty years and they'll be just as popular here."

She looked skeptical, so he stepped into the shaft first. When she saw him standing on air she joined him, and they floated gently up to the attic.

"Lights," he ordered, and suddenly the attic was illuminated with soft, indirect lighting. As tidy as the house had been, the attic was that chaotic. Books, tapes, disks and cubes were stacked awkwardly on the floor, paintings were piled against a wall, each leaning on the other. Piles of old wrinkled clothes sat side by side with piles of unmarked plastic boxes.

"Take a look, Danny!" she enthused, staring out a window. "You can see the whole lake. It's gorgeous!"

"Just a minute," he replied, walking to another window. He knelt down, pushing a few plastic boxes aside. One of the ancient boxes literally cracked open and fell apart.

"Don't you just love the way the moonlight plays on the water?" said the Duchess.

"Oh, Jesus!" whispered Danny.

"I didn't hear you."

There was no answer, and she turned to him.

"I thought you were looking out the window," she said, staring at him as he fingered through a stack of ancient, crumbling papers. He paid no attention to her. "Danny!" she said irritably. "What's the matter with you?"

Finally he looked up, the strangest expression on his face. "Who'd have guessed it?" he whispered. "I mean, this is just another house. Nothing special, nothing to indicate . . ." His voice trailed off.

"What are you talking about?" she demanded.

He held up a sheet of paper.

"We just hit the mother lode," he said in awed tones.

2.

Come if you dare, come but beware,

Come to the lair of Altair of Altair.

Offer a prayer to the men foul and fair,

Trapped in the snare of Altair of Altair.

That was the first thing Danny read. Soon he was making his way through the thousands of verses.

"They don't even know what they've got here!" he said excitedly. "If they did, it would be under lock and key in a vault, not out in the open in a plastic box that's falling apart."

"What is it?" asked the Duchess.

"Listen," said Danny. He picked up another page and read to her:

"They call him the Angel, the Angel of Death,

If ever you've seen him, you've drawn your last breath.

He's got cold lifeless eyes, he's got brains, he's got skill,

He's got weapons galore, and a yearning to kill."

"Is that supposed to mean something to me?" she asked.

"That's the Angel he's writing about!" enthused Danny. "The Angel! Haven't you heard of him?"

She shrugged.

"He was the greatest bounty hunter of them all! They say he killed more than two hundred men!"

"So you found a poem about the Angel," said the Duchess, her interest fading. "So what?"

"You don't understand!" said Danny. He held up a sheaf of papers with the same scrawl on all of them. "This isn't just any poem! This is Black Orpheus' original manuscript!"

"Yeah?" she said, walking over to look at it. "What makes you think so?"

"The verses themselves. They're all about the characters he met on the Frontier. And I've heard about these characters—Altair of Altair and the Angel. Heard about them, read about them. They've even made some videos about them."

"But anyone could write a few verses."

He opened three more ancient boxes, and pulled verse-covered pages from each. "A few verses, sure. Ten thousand verses, I don't think so. This is it!"

"What's it worth?" asked the Duchess.

"Who knows? Ten million, thirty million. What's history worth to a people who don't have any?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said.

"He was the Bard of the Inner Frontier. There's no law on the Frontier, no government, and there's sure as hell no historians. He was all they had, him and this poem. Bits and pieces have been printed here and there, but no one's ever seen the whole thing." He patted the pile of papers. "Until tonight."

"Who would buy a bundle of crumbling old papers?"

"Every museum and every library in the galaxy," answered Danny. "And probably every collector." He held up a long, thick feather. "This is the quill pen he wrote with. This alone ought to bring half a million."

"You're kidding!"

"The hell I am. All I have to do is check through the whole manuscript and make sure it's authentic."

"And you can really auction it for that much?"

"Not publicly," he said. "I'm stealing it, remember?"

"Well, if the people who own this place don't know what they've got . . ."

"It makes no difference. The bidders—well, the legitimate bidders, the ones I plan to avoid—will want to know how I got it. They'll want to take it away to authenticate it, and once it's out of my possession, I can't control what happens to it."

"So it'll be a private sale?"

"A very limited auction, let's call it," he corrected her. "Market value could be fifty million credits. I'll take twenty million and be happy with it."

"I hear a lot of I's," she said suddenly. "What happened to we?"

"I thought you didn't want to be a criminal."

"I'm already a criminal. I might as well be a rich one."

"I'll take care of you," promised Danny.

"I don't want to be taken care of," complained the Duchess. "I want to be a partner—an equal partner."

"I don't have equal partners," said Danny.

"You'd never have found it if I hadn't wanted a view of the lake," she persisted.

"And you still wouldn't know what it was if I hadn't told you," retorted Danny. "I said I'd take care of you and I will. Now get off my back and let me look at what we've got here."

"We should pack it up and leave Bailiwick tonight," said the Duchess.

He shook his head. "Too soon. They'll have men posted at the spaceport, and I don't own a private ship."

"What makes you think they won't still have men posted in another day or two?"

"Look, I embarrassed them, but it was a small-time crime. Pretty soon there'll be a nice juicy murder or two, and they'll decide to go after bigger fish."

"You'd better be right," she said.

"You're free to leave any time you want," said Danny. "But I stay here, and so"—he patted the boxes—"do these."

She stared at him sullenly for a long moment, then walked to the air shaft. "I'm going down to the kitchen to see what kind of food they've got." She paused, then added reluctantly: "Do you want anything?"

"Yeah. Bring me back a beer if they have any."

She disappeared down the chute, and returned five minutes later with a pair of beers. She walked across the cluttered floor to hand one to Danny.

"Listen to this," he said excitedly:

"The Songbird stalks, the Singbird kills,

The Songbird works to pay his bills.

So, friend, beware the Songbird's glance:

If you're his prey, you'll have no chance."

Danny looked up, his face aglow with excitement. "You know what I think? I think he's writing about Sebastian Cain!"

"Never heard of him," said the bored Duchess.

"What kind of education have you had?" he said contemptuously.

"Math, science, computers, literature—the usual."

"Sadly lacking."

"Not everyone studies killers and cutthroats," she shot back.

"They should. They're much more interesting than vectors and angles."

"So who was the Songbird?"

"I told you: Sebastian Cain."

"That's what I meant: who was Sebastian Cain?"

"Another bounty hunter. And a revolutionary early in his life."

"Why is he the Songbird?" she asked. "And don't tell me something silly like he whistled whenever he killed a man."

"His full name was Sebastian Nightingale Cain. I think Orpheus took it from his middle name."

"And everyone knew him as the Songbird?"

Danny shook his head. "No, I don't know if anyone did." He paused and stared at the paper in his hand. "I could be wrong, but I'd bet the farm that the Songbird was Cain!"

"Why is that so important?"

"Cain was a major figure on the Frontier a century ago. There's nothing written about it here, but I've got a feeling he's the one who killed the Angel."

"You got all that from a few verses?" she asked skeptically.

"Like every kid, I grew up learning everything I could about the Inner Frontier. That's where the action was, where all the bigger-than-life heroes and villains lived and died. I'm just adding what I already knew to what I've read here." He paused. "Black Orpheus hid a lot of things inside those verses. It's like putting together a very complex jigsaw puzzle."

"Well, you play detective," said the Duchess, making no attempt to feign interest. "I'm going to find a bedroom."

"Fine, you do that," he said, never looking up from the manuscript.

When she woke up alone in the morning, she went up to the attic and found him still sitting there, pouring over the manuscript.

"I take it you haven't been to bed yet," she said.

He looked up, his face aglow with excitement. "Listen to this:

His name is Father William,

His aim is hard to ken:

His game is saving sinners;

His fame is killing men.

"Father William was a preacher. They say he tipped the scales at more than 400 pounds. According to legend, he was also a bounty hunter."

"It sounds like your friend Black Orpheus went to a bounty hunters' convention," she observed.

"That's all the law there was on the Inner Frontier," replied Danny. "All the law there is even today." He looked up from the papers. "I've been piecing things together all night, and you know what I think?"

"What?" she asked in bored tones.

"I think Father William actually worked for Santiago. In fact, I think he was a conduit for most of the money that Santiago stole."

"That doesn't make any sense," said the Duchess.

"Why not?"

"Santiago was the greatest outlaw in the galaxy, right? Why would he use this preacher as a conduit to move money he stole? Move it where? You don't steal money just to give it away again. You keep it, or else you spend it on yourself. So it makes no sense." She made no attempt to hide her annoyance.

"I've still got thousands of verses to read," said Danny, "but there's something very strange about this manuscript, and it has to do with Santiago. I'm not sure what, but I'll find out before I'm done."

"Well, at least you know now that Santiago existed."

"I always did."

"You took it on faith," she said.

"And now my faith has been rewarded."

"Good. Now let's pack up and get the hell off the planet and sell the damned thing."

"Too soon," said Danny. "We'll give Balsam and Gibbs another day to get tired of looking for us."

"Just one day, and then we go!"

"Probably."

"What's this 'probably' shit?" she demanded. "One day and we're out of here!"

"There's no rush," he replied. "The owners aren't coming home for two more weeks."

"I'm not staying here two weeks!"

"Just a day or two."

"One day. And even so, I don't like it."

"You're free to go any time you want," said Danny. "But the manuscript stays with me."

"Don't get so cocky," she warned him. "I might leave right now and turn you in for the reward."

Danny smiled. "You might, but you won't."

"Why not?"

"Because whatever the reward comes to, it's peanuts next to what I'll give you once we've sold the poem." His smile vanished. "Now leave me alone and let me get back to work."

He spent the day pouring over the manuscript. At sunset the Duchess insisted he come down to the kitchen for dinner. He ate quickly and unenthusiastically, then went back to the attic to continue reading.

She heard a loud thump! in the middle of the night and went upstairs to see what had happened. Danny had been sitting on the floor, reading, and finally fell asleep. He had fallen over on his side, and now lay, snoring gently, a page still clutched in his hand. She figured he was out for the next twelve to sixteen hours, but when she checked on him again in the morning he was up and reading.

"Danny!" she insisted. "Put it down for a few hours. You'll kill yourself!"

"I didn't know you cared."

"I don't want you dying before we sell the poem. I wouldn't begin to know how or where to do it."

"You sure know how to flatter a guy," he said.

"So are you going to get some sleep?" she said, ignoring his remark.

"Not right away," he said. "I'm getting close."

"Close to what? Finishing?"

"To understanding."

"What's to understand? They're all just four-line verses. There's nothing very difficult about them. In fact, I thought Black Orpheus would be a better poet. The things you've read to me sounded wimpy and literary and kind of lame."

"It's what he says, and what he doesn't say, not how he says it," replied Danny. "This thing is nothing short of the secret history of the Inner Frontier up to a century ago."

"Everything's a mystery," she said with no show of interest. "Why does it have to be a secret history? Why not a public one? After all, the public read it."

"The men and women and aliens he wrote about were alive when he wrote these verses. Many of them had prices on their heads. Still more confided in him, told him of deeds, some good, some bad, that no one knew about. You have to understand: Black Orpheus was the Bard of the Inner Frontier. He was welcomed everywhere he went. No one ever turned away from him—but to earn that kind of trust, he couldn't openly say anything more than you might find on a Wanted poster." Danny paused, his eyes still bright with excitement. "So he found secret ways to say what he wanted to say. This manuscript is to the Inner Frontier what, oh, I don't know, what Homer was to the Trojan War. Except that Homer exaggerated like hell and told everything out in the open, and Orpheus is concealing things all over the place. Including something huge, right in the middle."

"You said that yesterday. What is it?"

"I don't know. I think I'm getting close to piecing it together, but I won't know what it is until I'm done. It's as if he were holding someone for ransom, and I had the money, and he wanted to make sure the police weren't tailing me, so he ran me all over the city to make sure I was clean." He emitted an exhausted sigh. "He's running me all over the history of the Inner Frontier before I can discover what he's hiding."

"Maybe you're not supposed to find it."

"That would make a mockery of the whole thing. No, it's there—but he didn't want it to be easy." Danny looked at her. "That means it's something big. Otherwise, he wouldn't have taken such trouble to hide it. I spotted Cain and some of the others right away, but this whatever-it-is is taking a lot more work. Still, another few hours, another day or two, and I'll have it."

"Hey!" she shouted. "We're leaving today, remember?"

"We'll see."

"You promised!"

"You wanted me to promise," answered Danny. "That's not the same thing."

"Every day we stay here we increase our risk. A neighbor could report us. The police could find us. The owners could return early. We've been pushing our luck, Danny. Why can't we leave?"

"I'm still piecing things together," he said. "I don't want to stop, not even for a day."

"You act like it's some kind of treasure map."

"I doubt it. Legend has it that Orpheus died broke on an uninhabited world that he named after his dead wife, Eurydice."

"He doesn't sound all that brilliant to me," said the Duchess. "He writes little rhymes that anyone can do—"

"I told you—" Danny interrupted her.

"I know what you said. But you haven't discovered any deep dark secrets yet, so maybe there aren't any. He's famous all over the Frontier, all over the Democracy too, and he died penniless." She snorted contemptuously. "Some genius."

"Most poets die penniless," said Danny. "Anyway, I envy him."

"Why?"

"He traveled the Frontier, saw a new world every few days, lived every kid's dream, every romantic's dream. He did important work—and look at the people he got to meet, men and women like the Songbird, Father William, the Jolly Swagman, Peacemaker MacDougal, Johnny One-Note, the Angel, the Sargasso Rose. Just the names alone conjure up such fantastic pictures." He picked up another sheet and began reading:

"Moonripple, Moonripple, touring the stars,

Has polished the wax on a thousand bars,

Has trod on the soil of a hundred worlds,

Has found only pebbles while searching for pearls.

Listen to her name: Moonripple. A girl named Moonripple, who's been to a hundred worlds. Now, that's evocative—especially when you live on a dirtball like"—he grimaced—"Bailiwick."

The Duchess was unimpressed. "Read the rest of the verse. She found only pebbles while searching for pearls."

"She found a lot more than that," said Danny. "You just have to know where to look and how to read it."

"It sounds to me like she died as broke as Orpheus," said the Duchess with finality, walking to the chute. "I'm not kidding, Danny. I want to leave here today. I keep looking out the windows every five minutes, expecting to see the police surrounding us."

"Soon," he said distractedly, his attention already back on the manuscript.

Two hours later he went down to the kitchen and made some coffee.

"Well?" she demanded.

"I just need a little time away from the poem, time to think."

"To think about what, or am I going to be sorry I asked?"

"There's stuff there even Orpheus didn't know about," said Danny. "He was too close to the forest to see the trees."

"Whatever that means."

"I don't know what it means." He paused, swaying slightly from lack of food and sleep. "But I will know," he promised as he downed his coffee and went back up to the attic.

He was back down an hour later, a triumphant smile on his face.

"All right," he said. "Now we can leave."

"Why now?" she asked. "What do you think you've learned?"

"The secret."

"This is about the poem?"

"This is about the Inner Frontier," he replied. "It's all there in the poem, but even Black Orpheus didn't know how to interpret it." He shook his head in wonderment. "The greatest character of all, and he never knew!"

"Orpheus was the greatest character?" she asked, puzzled.

"No," he said distractedly. "I'm talking about Santiago!"

"That's what you learned?" she said incredulously. "Everyone knows that Santiago was the greatest outlaw in the history of the Inner Frontier."

"But he wasn't," said Danny, still smiling. "That's what I learned."

"What are you talking about?" demanded the Duchess.

"Santiago," explained Danny. "He wasn't an outlaw, not in the normal sense of the word. Oh, he did illegal things, but he was actually a revolutionary. I knew that yesterday afternoon."

"That's rubbish! Everything I've ever heard about him—"

"—was what he wanted people to hear," concluded Danny. "You asked once about bounty hunters. Here's your answer: if the Democracy had known he was a revolutionary, they'd have sent the whole fleet, five billion strong, to the Inner Frontier to hunt him down—so he made them think he was an outlaw, and all he had to deal with was a handful of bounty hunters. Orpheus guessed at that, but he never knew for sure."

"So Santiago killed all the bounty hunters?" she said.

Danny smiled again. "He tried, but he didn't always succeed—and that's the secret that's hidden in the poem, the secret even Orpheus didn't know."

"You're not making sense. How could he have stayed in business if he hadn't killed them?"

"There wasn't just one Santiago!" said Danny, unable to contain his excitement. "There was a series of them! I'm sure Sebastian Cain was one, and I think his successor was Esteban Cordoba." He paused for effect. "There were at least six Santiagos, maybe as many as eight!"

"You're crazy!"

"I'm right! Virtue MacKenzie, his biographer—she tried to hide it, but she was so sloppy that scholars never put much stock in her books, even though they sold tens of millions of copies." His arms shot up in a sign of triumph. "The most important single thing in the history of the Inner Frontier, and we're the only two people who know it!"

"So now we can leave the planet and then sell the manuscript?" she asked with a look of relief.

"We'll leave the planet," he agreed.

"And sell the manuscript."

He shook his head. "I'm not selling anything, not yet."

"Then what are you going to do with it?" she demanded.

"Add to it."

"What are you talking about?"

"Maybe it's time for the Inner Frontier to have a chronicler again."

"You?" said the Duchess incredulously.

"Why not?"

"I thought you were a criminal."

"I've been a criminal. I've never tried being a poet or an chronicler."

"What does the job pay?"

"What's the going price on immortality?"

"Immortality?"

"I plan to create something that outlasts me, just as Orpheus did." He looked off into the distance, at some exotic place only he could see. "Think of all those worlds I've never seen—Serengeti, Greenveldt, Walpurgis III, Binder X, the Roosevelt system, Oceana . . . worlds I only heard about and dreamed about when I was a kid. You know," he added confidentially, "this is the first time I've been excited—really excited—about anything since I was that little kid, dreaming of those worlds."

"You're really considering it, aren't you?" she said.

"I'm done considering it," he said with a sudden decisiveness. "I'm doing it."

"But why?" she demanded, as visions of the auction receded into the distance.

"There are hundreds of thieves here on Bailiwick. There are millions in the Democracy, dozens of millions in the galaxy. But there was only one Black Orpheus, and there will be only one me. A century after I'm dead, someone will read my poem the way I'm reading his, and I'll have made my mark on the universe. I'll have done something that outlasts me. People will know I was here."

"And is that so important to you?"

"It always was."

"And what about me?" she said bitterly. "Three days ago I was a law-abiding citizen. Three minutes ago I was a fugitive, but one who'd been promised a substantial amount of money from selling Orpheus' poem. Now I'm still a fugitive, but with no financial prospects again! You owe me something!"

"I said I'd take care of you. I will."

"How?"

"I don't know yet—but a million opportunities are opening up, and one thing I've always been good at is seizing opportunities."

"You'd damned well better be," the Duchess shot back. "In the meantime, you'd better work at making the name of Danny Briggs worth something."

He shook his head. "That's no name for a Bard."

"Did you have one in mind?"

"Give me a few minutes," he said, walking to a computer and activating it.

She went to the kitchen to pour herself a beer, and she drank it before returning. When she entered the room he looked up at her, a happy smile on his face.

"You found one," she said.

"We may be going to worlds that seem like paradise, and we may be going to worlds that reek of hellfire. Now I'm prepared for both." He paused. "From this day forward, my name is Dante Alighieri."

3.

They call him the Rhymer, a wordsmith by trade,

He can bring you to tears or use words like a blade.

He roams the Frontier writing down what he sees,

And he makes men immortal, dotting i's, crossing t's.

That was the first verse Dante Alighieri ever put to paper. Internal evidence suggests he wrote it while still on Bailiwick, though of course that is impossible to prove.

It wasn't true when he wrote it. No one had yet called him the Rhymer (or even Dante), and he had never been to the Inner Frontier. But before long the verse would gain an aura of absolute truth, and eventually it was so widely accepted that people forgot that it was merely a prediction when it first appeared.

Finding Black Orpheus' manuscript may have given him his initial impetus to go to the Frontier, but it was the arrival of the police that gave him a more immediate reason.

"Hey, Danny!" hissed the Duchess, staring out the kitchen window.

"I keep telling you," he replied irritably, looking up from his coffee cup, "the name's Dante."

"I don't care what the name is!" she snapped. "Whoever you are today, you'd better know a way out of here!"

"What are you talking about?" asked Dante.

"Take a look," she said. "We've got company."

"You must be mistaken. The owners aren't due back for almost two weeks!"

"These aren't the owners! They're the police!"

He raced to the window and saw two policemen standing about fifty feet away, staring at the house and speaking to each other. "Shit!"

"I thought you told me no one could see in!" said the Duchess accusingly.

"They can't," answered Dante. "But I should have figured once Balsam knew what I'd stolen from the kennel, he'd put a lookout on every house that was boarding an animal there."

"So they're just going to set up shop out there and watch the house?" she asked.

"Probably," he said. "But we can't count on that. They might decide to check and see if anything's been stolen."

"They don't seem to be moving any closer."

"They could be waiting for orders to enter, or for a back-up team, or for some heat and motion sensors that will tell them we're here." He stepped back from the window. "We're not going to wait for that."

"What will we do?"

"Leave, of course."

"You're crazy!" she said. "It's broad daylight, and neither of us is armed."

"I don't like guns. If you carry one, sooner or later you have to use it. I'm a thief, not a killer." He paused. "By nighttime they'll definitely have the place under electronic surveillance. We're better off leaving right now."

"You think we can just go out the door and wave to them as we walk past?" she said sardonically.

"They're both in front," said Dante. "We'll go out the back. With a little luck and a little maneuvering, we can keep the house between us and them until we make it to the next street." He saw the doubt on her face. "Trust me. I've gotten out of worse scrapes than this."

He walked to the airlift.

"What are you doing?"

"I've got to get the manuscript."

"Five boxes? Do you know how heavy that will be?"

"Then you can help me carry it."

"What if we have to run?" she persisted. "I know what you think it's worth—but it's not worth a thing to us if they throw us in jail."

"I'm not leaving without it. Look through the closets and see if there's something we can carry it in. Most of the boxes it's in now are falling apart."

He returned a moment later, and found her waiting for him with a small overnight bag.

"You're going to look damned silly walking through our neighbor's yard and down the street carrying that," she noted.

"Not as silly as I'd look carrying three thousand pages in busted boxes," he replied, transferring the manuscript to the bag. "One thing I've learn over the years: act as if whatever you're doing, no matter how aberrant, is normal, and nobody will give you a second glance." He examined the bag. "Has this thing got a strap?"

"I didn't see one."

"Then let me rig something with one of our host's belts. I'll be a lot happier if I can sling it over my shoulder and have both hands free."

"Why bother? As you pointed out, you're unarmed."

"Don't get too melodramatic," he said. "I'm more likely to need my hands to solve a computer lock or even hold a sandwich than to shoot anyone."

She walked to a closet, found a belt, and tossed it to him. "You got me into this," she said. "I hope to hell that you can get me out."

"Just don't lose your head and you'll be fine."

He connected both ends of the belt to the bag, slung it over his shoulder, was surprised at how heavy it was, and walked to the back door.

"Okay," he said. "Take one last look to make sure they haven't moved, and then we'll leave."

She walked to the window, peered out, then turned to him. "They're in the same place," she informed him.

"Good," he said. "It's less than one hundred feet to all that shrubbery our neighbor planted at the back of his yard. See the tallest bush there? Just walk to it in a straight line from the back door, and I guarantee that no one on the street will be able to see you."

"And when I get there?" she asked, staring at the bush.

"I think there's room to walk around it on the left without getting tangled up in any thorns. Then walk straight through, and if anyone sees you just act like you've got a perfect right to be there. I promise no one will challenge you."

"What if someone does?"

"Not to worry—I'll be right behind you."

"Then what?"

"Then we walk to the nearest public conveyance, take it to the spaceport, and figure out a way to get the hell off this dirtball."

"Have you got any money?"

"You know I do. You saw me getting paid at the Golden Fleece."

"Then let's take a private aircab to the spaceport," she said. "For all you know, our faces are plastered all over the public transports."

He considered her suggestion, then nodded his assent. "Yeah, probably we're safe either way, but there's no sense taking chances."

"If we're safe, why are the police watching the house?"

"If they thought there was even a one in a hundred chance that Danny Briggs was in the house, they'd have blown the door away and come after me," answered Dante confidently. "They're the crime prevention unit, not the criminal catchers." He opened the back door. "Now let's go."

The Duchess walked out into the warm dry air and he followed her. They made it to the largest shrub undetected, then circled it, walked through the neighbor's yard—not undetected, but unhindered by an orange-skinned native gardener who stared at them for a moment and then went back to work—and then they were on the next street.

They walked to a corner and summoned an aircab, then rode in silence to the spaceport. Dante waited while the robot driver scanned the cash he'd given it and made change. He looked around for the Duchess and saw that she was walking toward the spaceport's entrance. He quickly caught up with her, linked his arm with hers, and turned her so they were walking parallel to the large departure building.

"What's the matter?" she complained.

"If they're watching houses, they're watching the spaceport too," he said. "Don't be in such a hurry to walk right into their hands."

"You've spotted them?" she asked as they walked past an upscale luggage store flanked by a pair of restaurants, one catering to humans, one to aliens.

"I don't plan to get close enough to spot them. It's enough that I know they're there."

"Then how are we going to get on the spaceliner that takes us away from here?" demanded the Duchess.

"We're not going to take a spaceliner."

"We're not?"

"We never were," said Dante. He glanced carefully around to make sure they weren't being followed. "It's too dangerous to book passage on it—and why tell them where to find us? Even if God drops everything else and we make it out of here on a liner, they'll simply signal ahead to wherever it's bound and have their counterparts waiting for us."

"I thought most Frontier worlds don't have police forces," she said.

"So you'll be met by a couple of bounty hunters," he replied with a grimace. "Is that any better?"

"Come on, Danny," she said, annoyed. "Why are you trying to scare me? You know we didn't do anything to put a dead-or-alive price on our heads."

"You know it and I know it, but I don't think they're real fussy about that on the Frontier. If the reward isn't big enough, it's not cost-effective to keep you alive and deliver you back into the Democracy. That's another reason we want a private ship: we don't want anyone knowing where we're going."

She frowned as the logic of his answer registered. "What the hell have you gotten me into?" she asked in panicky tones. "All I did was trip a man—and suddenly we're leaving Bailiwick and you're telling me that bounty hunters may want to kill me!"

"I didn't get you into anything at all," said Dante. "I'm grateful that you tripped Balsam, but it was your idea. I think it was a fine idea, and it kept me out of jail, but it wasn't mine." He paused. "Try to calm down. Neither of us was doing all that well here. Maybe it's time to go to the Frontier and start over."

"I was doing just fine!" she snapped.

"Well, you can stay if you want . . ."

"No!" she shouted.

"Well, that's settled."

"Some hero!" she muttered.

"I'm no hero. I'm just a guy who's trying to get the hell off the planet before the police catch up with me." He spotted a small hotel that catered to travelers who were changing flights on Bailiwick, and began walking toward it. "And it's time I started putting the wheels in motion."

"What are you going to do?" she asked, unable to slow down while their arms remained linked.

"I thought I'd warn the spaceport that we're coming in," he said with a smile.

"You're kidding, right?"

"I was never more serious in my life."

They reached the hotel, and Dante approached the front desk.

"May I help you?" asked the robot clerk in obsequious tones.

"Yeah. I want to contact the spaceport about my connecting flight. Where's a communicator?"

"There is a row of communication booths on the west wall, sir," said the robot. "Allow the booth of your choice time to scan your retina and verify your credit rating, and then follow the instructions."

"I know," said Dante. "I've done it before."

"In that case, have a most pleasant day, sir," said the robot as Dante walked to an empty booth.

"Wait here," he said to the Duchess. "There's only room for one in a booth."

He went in and emerged less than a minute later.

"Okay, that takes care of Step One," he announced.

"What did you do?"

"I reserved two seats on the spaceliner to Far London. It leaves in about two hours."

She frowned, trying to comprehend. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought we were trying to escape from Bailiwick. Why did you announce our presence?"

"So that every spaceport official, every security guard and policeman, will be alerted that we're going to show up in the next hour or so and board the liner." He smiled. "I didn't stay connected long enough to them to trace my location."

"Okay, so now the spaceport is swarming with men and women whose sole desire is to capture us. Now what?"

"Now, while they're all trying to hide themselves near Passport Control or the boarding gate and appear unobtrusive, we choose a private ship to steal." He looked out the window. "You'll notice that they're all at this end of the spaceport."

Suddenly she smiled. "Maybe you should stay a thief. I don't know how good a poet you'll be, but you were born to be a thief."

"Well, it's still not that simple. We won't move until dark."

"Why not? By then they'll know we're not showing up for the Far London flight."

"We've got them all tense. The next step is to make them relax so they don't react as quickly."

"I'm not following you at all."

"In about an hour and a half, I'm going to cancel Far London and book us on a flight to Deluros VIII. Then I'll cancel that and book it to Sirius V. By the time I've changed flights six or seven times, they'll be convinced we're just having fun with them, and most of them will go home. The ones who are left behind will assume we're not showing up, and if anything alerts them, they'll be reasonably sure it's not us."

"So we're staying here for what, another eight or nine hours?" she asked.

"Yeah, about that. I don't know what the robot's programmed to think of as unusual behavior, so I think we'd better rent a room for three or four days."

"Three or four?"

"Right. We're not going to pay for it regardless, but I'm sure the police are monitoring every hotel desk. If someone takes a day room, or even a room for one night, anywhere near the spaceport, alarms are going to go off in every police station within 50 miles."

"All right, that makes sense," she agreed. "Now, how do we know which ship to take?"

He handed her his pocket computer. "I've put all the proper codes in for you to get past any security walls. Find out which ships have been fueled in the past six hours. Then check the registry; we're not interested in any ships that are owned by citizens of Bailiwick."

"Why not?"

"Because they have to file new flight plans, so if we take one we'll run a pretty fair chance of getting shot out of the sky. But a ship that's just stopped for fuel, or business, will already have a flight plan filed. They might think it's been stolen, but unless the owner reports it within two minutes of our taking off, they won't know it before we're at light speeds and out of the system, and they really aren't about to blow away a ship on a suspicion."

Dante approached the desk and rented a room, then went up to the fourth floor with the Duchess. A moment later they were inside the room, and she was starting to assemble her list of possible ships on Dante's computer while he stood by the window, looking out at the rows of private ships across the street. There was a sparkling force field surrounding the area, but he spotted the entrance, recognized the locking mechanism, knew he could break its code, and nodded in satisfaction.

Then he walked over to the large bed and lay down on it, cupping his hands behind his head. He wanted to read more of the poem, but he knew it would only annoy the Duchess, so he simply stared at her as she worked. Finally she put the computer down and turned to him. "I've got the perfect ship," she announced.

"Perfect in what way?" asked Dante.

"It's a six-man ship, so there will be plenty of room. Three sleeping cabins and a fully-equipped galley. Owned by a mining baron from Goldstrike, which is 'way into the Inner Frontier. Refreshed its atomic pile this morning, but it's not due to leave until tomorrow afternoon." She paused. "And best of all, it's close! You can see it from the window!"

He walked over.

"See that row?" she continued. "It's the fourth one back from the fence. We won't have to walk 100 yards once we're inside the fence."

"Okay," said Dante. "Let's go for a walk."

"Now? I thought you wanted to steal it after dark."

"I do. But if I can disable that lock on the fence right now, it'll be even easier tonight."

"You can't just kneel down and work on a computer lock in broad daylight!" protested the Duchess.

"I don't plan to," he said. He walked to the door and ordered it to open. "Come on."

They emerged in the lobby a moment later. He stopped by the desk to speak to the robot clerk, then rejoined her.

"What was all that about?" she asked.

"I told it we're going shopping."

"Why does a robot care?"

"It doesn't—but if the police start searching all the hotels near the spaceport, and it won't be too long before the thought occurs to them, I don't want it to respond that it doesn't know where we are. It should take them a day to figure out that I used a phony ID to register—but if they have a reason to want to learn more about us, they'll break that identity in five minutes." He looked out into the street, then slung the bag containing Orpheus' poem over his shoulder. "Okay, let's go."

"Are you planning on stealing the ship now?" she asked, indicating the manuscript.

"No, I'm just not willing to leave it in a spaceport hotel."

They walked out, arm in arm, and began window-shopping up and down the street. Dante kept looking for an excuse to cross to the spaceport's side of the thoroughfare if anyone was watching them. He needed a stray animal, a child who might step into traffic while his parents were concentrating on each other, anything like that—but nothing turned up.

"Okay, we'll do it the bothersome way," he said after about ten minutes.

"What way is that?"

"We walk about a mile down the road, far enough that no one from the spaceport is still watching us, and then cross the street and walk back. We're no longer window-shopping; now we're taking our afternoon constitutional."

They walked away from the spaceport for ten more minutes. Then, as they reached the outskirts of the small city, they crossed the street and began walking back.

As they neared the spaceport, Dante, looking straight ahead, said, "When we get opposite the entrance through the force field, twist an ankle."

"What?"

"Twist an ankle. Fall to one knee. Make a bit of a fuss about it. I'll kneel down and examine it."

"What does this have to do with the lock?"

"Just trust me."

They walked another two hundred yards. Then, when they were within five yards of the door, the Duchess lurched forward, fell to her knees, and began holding and massaging her left ankle.

Dante knelt down beside her, his back to the entrance, his hands shielded from any onlookers by her body.

"What's that?" she asked as she heard a faint beeping.

"Quiet!"

She fell silent, and concentrated on her ankle.

More beeps, and suddenly he looked at her and grinned. "Okay, we can walk through it any time we want."

"You could do that with your pocket computer?" she asked, surprised.

"Well, it's not an ordinary computer. It's been jury-rigged by experts. Well-paid experts, but on days like today I decide they were worth the money."

"Why don't we walk through right now? We could be at the ship in less than a minute."

He shook his head. "If anyone's been watching, your being able to walk or run without a limp will be a dead giveaway."

"So I'll limp."

He looked up and down the force field. "We'll wait until dark."

"But the place is deserted."

"It's too deserted," he said. "I haven't made any more reservations yet. They're all still here. Someone's got to be watching the private ships."

"Why? They're waiting for us to show up for the spaceliner to Far London."

He shook his head. "It's already taken off. Besides, most of them will be there, but the bright ones—and that includes Balsam—will know we'll never show up at the public terminal, and the only other way off the planet is to swipe a ship."

"But there's no one here! Now is the perfect time. We don't have to take off until you want, but they're more likely to search our room than the ship."

"It's too easy," he said, frowning. "I don't see a single guard. Do you?"

"No. That's why—"

"It's wrong," he said. "It's almost as if they're inviting us to try to steal a ship." He helped her to her feet. "Come on, lean on me and limp back to the hotel. I'll start making some more reservations."

"I don't want to," said the Duchess. "You've unlocked the entry, and there's no one around. I say we go to the ship. Even if they know we're there, we can take off before they can do anything about it."

"They'll blow us out of the sky."

"It's owned by Schyler McNeil. Just call the tower and tell them you're McNeil and you've got an emergency back on Goldstrike. They may not believe you, but they'll hesitate about destroying the ship until they find the real McNeil."

Dante studied the area once more, then shook his head. Something felt wrong, and he always listened to his instincts.

"Tonight," he said, still scanning the spaceport. "Now let's go back to the hotel."

She made no reply, so he turned back to her—and found that she was gone.

"Shit!" he muttered, trying and failing to grab her arm as she darted through the entrance and raced toward the private ships.

He didn't know how they would stop her, but he knew in his gut that she'd never make it to McNeil's ship. Then he heard a hideous roar, and he turned to see a huge animal, almost four feet at the shoulder, not canine and not feline but clearly a predator, racing toward the Duchess.

"Get into a ship now!" he yelled, breaking into a run.

The Duchess turned back to him, startled, then saw the creature bearing down on her. It was possible that she couldn't even have made it into the ship she had just passed, but she didn't even try. She screamed and raced toward McNeil's ship, and the animal swerved to run her down.

Dante saw that he couldn't reach her in time, even if he hadn't been carrying the huge manuscript. He looked for a weapon, even something as primitive as a club, as he ran, but the spaceport was neat as a pin, and he couldn't see anything he could use. Then he saw another motion out of the corner of his eye—the animal's keeper.

It made sense. Someone had to be able to control it, or it might savage someone with a legitimate reason for being there. The keeper, armed with a pulse gun, was walking leisurely after the animal, obviously in no hurry to call it off. Dante raced to him, knocked him down just as the creature reached the Duchess. It took about ten seconds to wrestle the pulse gun away from the keeper and crack him across the head with it—and those were ten seconds the Duchess didn't have.

Dante whirled and fired at the animal, killing it instantly—but it fell across the Duchess's torn, lifeless body.

"Damn you!" yelled Dante at the senseless body by his feet. "She didn't do anything worth dying for!" He stared at the main terminal. "Damn you all!"

He knew he couldn't stay where he was or return to the hotel. A sweeping security camera or another beast and keeper would spot the Duchess in a matter of seconds. He tucked the gun into his belt and ran to McNeil's ship.

He followed the Duchess's instructions, claiming to be McNeil. That bought him enough time to reach the stratosphere. Then came all the warning messages, which meant they'd either found the Duchess or McNeil or both. He alternately lied and threatened for the next thirty seconds, spent another fifteen seconds admitting that he was Danny Briggs and promising to return to the spaceport—and while they were debating whether to shoot him down his ship passed through the stratosphere and reached light speeds.

And because he was Dante Alighieri and not one of the larger- than-life characters he planned to write about, he did not vow to avenge the Duchess. Someone would avenge her; that much he did promise himself. When he found the right person, he would tell him the story of the Duchess and point him toward Bailiwick, and he would enjoy the results every bit as much as if he had physically extracted his vengeance himself.

Then he was on his way to the Inner Frontier, where he would assume his new identity and his new career among legendary heroes and villains who, he suspected, couldn't be any more dangerous than the Democracy's finest.

4.

Hamlet MacBeth, a well-named rogue,

Loves the women, when in vogue.

Loves the gents when no one cares,

Gets rich off his perverse affairs.

That was the first poem that Dante Alighieri wrote once he reached the Inner Frontier. There was nothing very special about Hamlet MacBeth except his name, which fired Dante's imagination. He decided he couldn't leave anyone named Hamlet MacBeth out of his history, so he began finding out what he could about the man.

What he found out was a little embarrassing to both parties, because it turned out that what Hamlet MacBeth was was a gigolo who rented himself out to both sexes. The people of Nasrullah II, his home world, didn't much give a damn what MacBeth did as long as he didn't do it to or with them, but some of the men who were just passing through found that they were not only expected to pay for MacBeth's sexual skills, but also for his silence.

Nasrullah II was the first world that Dante touched down on. He stayed only long enough to trade in his stolen ship for another one and to have a drink in a local bar, which was where he heard about MacBeth. He didn't write the poem until he had landed on New Tangier IV in the neighboring system, where he proceeded to recite it in a couple of taverns.

He spent a couple of days on New Tangier, a dusty, ugly reddish world with nothing much to recommend it except one diamond mine about ten miles east of the planet's only Tradertown. There was one hotel—a boarding house, actually, since not enough people visited New Tangier to support a hotel; one casino, which was so obviously rigged that the humans gave it a wide berth and the only players were the Bextigians, the mole-like aliens that had been imported to work the mine; and the two taverns.

Dante was standing at the bar in the larger of the taverns, sipping a beer and idly wondering how Orpheus had been able to spot colorful people when they weren't doing colorful things, when a slender man with sunken cheeks, dark piercing eyes, and braided black hair sidled up to him. Everyone else instantly moved away.

"Hi," said the man, paying no attention to anyone but Dante.

"Hi," replied Dante.

"I heard your little poem yesterday. Have you written any others?"

"Some," lied Dante. "Why?"

"Just curious. I like poems. Especially erotic ones. You ever read anything by Tanblixt?"

"The Canphorite? No."

"You should. Now there's someone who truly understands the beauty of interspecies sex."

"If you say so."

"I also like epic poems of good and evil, especially if Satan himself is in them." He smiled. "It gives me someone to root for."

"You have interesting taste in poetry."

"I have interesting taste in everything." The man paused. "What's your name, poet?"

"Dante. But people call me the Rhymer."

"They do?"

"They will."

The man smiled. "I think I'll call you Dante. We were made for each other."

"Oh?"

"I'm Virgil Soaring Hawk." He paused, waiting for the connection to become apparent. "Dante and Virgil."

"Virgil Soaring Hawk—what kind of a name is that?"

"It's an Injun name."

"Okay, what's an Injun?"

"It takes too long to explain. But once, when we were still Earthbound, white men and Injuns were mortal enemies—or so they say."

Dante frowned. "White men? You mean albinos?"

"No," replied Virgil with a sigh. "The Injuns were redskins, except that our skins weren't really red. And the white men weren't really white, either—they ranged from pink to tan. But a lot of people died on both sides because of what they thought their color was."

"You're making all this up, right?" said Dante.

"Yeah, what the hell, I'm making it all up." Virgil signaled to the bartender. "Two Dust Whores."

"What's a Dust Whore?" asked Dante.

"You're about to find out."

"I don't understand."

"You've got Democracy written all over you, poet," said Virgil Soaring Hawk. "Virgil was Dante's guide through Heaven and Hell. I figure a new Dante needs a new Virgil to show him the ropes. Right now I'm going to introduce you to one of our local drinks."

"What the hell, why not?" agreed Dante.

"Let's go sit at a table," suggested Virgil.

"What's wrong with standing here at the bar?"

"I don't like turning my back to the door. You never know what's going to come through it."

"Whatever you say," said Dante, walking to a table in the farthest corner of the tavern.

"Glad you agree," said Virgil, sitting down opposite him. The men at the two nearest tables immediately got up and moved to the other side of the tavern.

"Why does everyone move away from you?" asked Dante.

Virgil sighed deeply. "They don't like me very much."

"Have they got some reason?"

"Not any that I agree with," said Virgil.

"What the hell did you do?" asked Dante.

"I don't think I'm going to tell you."

"Why not?"

"I don't want you making a rhyme out of it and reciting it in bars all over the Frontier."

"I can always ask someone on the other side of the tavern," said Dante.

"You'd do that to the only friend you've made on the Frontier?" asked Virgil.

Dante stared at him in silence for a long moment. Virgil stared right back.

The bartender dropped off the drinks and left immediately.

"What goes into them?" asked Dante, staring at the purple- green liquid that was smoking as if on fire. "They look like they're going to explode."

"It varies from planet to planet," said Virgil, taking a long swallow of his own drink. When he didn't clutch his throat or collapse across the table, Dante followed suit, and promptly grimaced.

"Jesus! This stuff'll take the enamel off your teeth!" He paused. "Still," said Dante at last, "it's kind of warming. Got an interesting aftertaste." He frowned. "I don't know if I like it."

"After you've had a few more, you'll know," said Virgil with conviction.

"All right," said Dante. "Now the drinks are here and I've had half of mine. So why did you approach me and what do you want to talk about?"

"I want to talk about you."

"Me?" repeated Dante, surprised.

"And me."

"So talk."

"What are you doing out here?" asked Virgil. "Why have you come to the Inner Frontier? You're no settler, and you don't strike me as a killer. No human comes to New Tangier IV to play at the casino, so I know you're not a gambler. You haven't offered to trade or sell anything. So why are you here?"

"Did you ever hear of Black Orpheus?"

"Everyone out here has heard of Black Orpheus," answered Virgil. He grimaced. "He was probably about as black as you are white."

"I'm here to finish his poem."

Virgil Soaring Hawk stared at him expressionlessly.

"Well?" said Dante.

"Why not choose something easy, like going up against Tyrannosaur Bailey?"

"Who's Tyrannosaur Bailey?"

"It doesn't matter. Black Orpheus was one of a kind. He was unique in our history. What makes you think you can be another Orpheus?"

"I can't be," admitted Dante. "But I can follow in his footsteps." He paused, then added with conviction: "It's time."

"What do you mean?"

"I take it Tyrannosaur Bailey is a formidable figure?"

"He's about fifteen formidable figures all rolled into one ugly sonuvabitch."

"You make him sound fascinating—but I've never heard of him until just now. No one in the Democracy has, and probably ninety percent of the Inner Frontier hasn't either." Dante took another sip of his drink. "The Democracy is so damned regimented! All the really interesting characters are out here on the Frontier. It's time someone wrote them up the way Orpheus did, before they're gone and we have no record of them."

"You don't think the Secretary of the Democracy is interesting? What about Admiral Yokamina, who has six billion men under his command?"

"They got where they are by following the rules and fitting the mold," replied Dante. "All the men who broke the mold are out here, or on the Outer Frontier."

"Or dead," said Virgil.

"Or dead," agreed Dante. "Killing is one of the Democracy's specialties. They killed a friend of mine as we were preparing to come here."

"Did he have it coming?"

"Nobody has it coming—and it was a she."

"What was her crime?"

"She tripped a man," said Dante.

"That's all?"

"That's all," repeated Dante. "The Democracy doesn't seem to care who trips it these days."

"What uniquely individual crimes did you commit?" asked Virgil.

"Nothing that deserved that kind of retaliation."

"They obviously saw it differently."

"They always do. That's why I'm here. The Democracy stops at the borders to the Inner and Outer Frontiers."

Virgil stared at him as one would stare at a child. It was a look that seemed to say: If you're that dumb, is it even worth the effort to set you straight? "The law may stop," he said at last. "But the Democracy doesn't."

"What are you talking about?"

"They come out in force and take what they need," said Virgil, "whether it's fissionable material, or food for newly colonized worlds, or conscripts for the military. Any Man or planet that objects gets the same treatment that any alien or alien planet would get."

"I didn't know," admitted Dante. "None of us do."

Virgil shrugged. "Maybe I'm being a little hard on them. Sometimes they pay for what they take, though it's never what it's worth. And if they come to a mining world with, say, thirty miners working it, and grab a couple of hundred pounds of plutonium, well, they'll probably use it to fight off some alien army that would otherwise subjugate a planet with ten million Men on it." Virgil paused. "But we don't know that. We just know they come and they take and they leave and no one can stand up to them. So maybe it's comforting to think they have some noble purpose for plundering the Frontier whenever they want."

"Are they on New Tangier IV?"

"The Democracy?" Virgil shook his head. "You might go years without running into them. Or you might run into them three times in a month. It depends on where you are and what they want at the moment."

"Okay, forewarned is forearmed. But in the meantime, I still need material for my poems, so I still plan to travel the Frontier."

"I was hoping you'd say that."

"Why?"

"Because we're going to make a deal," said Virgil. "You'll need a guide, and I've worn out my welcome in the New Tangier system."

"How?" asked Dante.

"How," replied Virgil, holding up his right hand in a sign of greeting.

"I beg your pardon?"

"An old Injun joke. Forget it."

"How did you wear out your welcome?"

"How can I put this delicately?" said Virgil. "I indulge in certain, shall we say, unmentionable acts with members of . . ."

"The opposite sex?" Dante offered.

"The opposite species," Virgil corrected him.

"Is that against the law?"

"We don't have too many laws on the Frontier," answered Virgil. "It's against at least 400 laws back in the Democracy."

"What species do you perform these unmentionable acts with?" asked Dante.

"Why should I limit myself to one species?"

"So what's you're saying is . . ."

"What I'm saying is that I've worn out my welcome," answered Virgil. "We'll talk about it more after you've adjusted to the Frontier."

"Okay—but I'll probably spend all my spare time wondering who you did what with."

"It'll give you something to do while we're traveling between planets."

Dante finished his drink and slapped some bills on the table. "I'll have another one of these."

"Credits," noted Virgil. "They'll take them here, but most Frontier worlds don't have much use for Democracy currency."

"Speaking of Frontier worlds, where are we going next?"

"As I remember my Inferno, I guide you through the nine circles of hell." Virgil paused. "Of course, you were in hell when you lived in the Democracy. You just didn't know it."

"I knew it. That's why I came out here."

"Oh, you're still in hell. It's just a less structured, less orderly one."

At that moment a tall, burly man appeared in the doorway. He was covered with reddish dust, which he brushed from his heavy coat.

"I'm looking for the poet," he announced.

"You mean the Rhymer," Dante corrected him.

The tall man glared at Dante. "I'm Hamlet MacBeth," he said furiously. "Does that mean anything to you?"

"I know who you are."

"Have we ever met before?"

"No," answered Dante.

"Then why are you spreading lies about me?"

"What I wrote was the truth and you know it," said Dante.

"Hi, Hamlet," interjected Virgil. "Come join us."

Hamlet stared at Dante. "You're with him?" he demanded, jerking a thumb in Virgil's direction.

"That's right," answered Dante.

"You don't choose your friends any more carefully than you choose your subject," said MacBeth. He stepped into the tavern, and two more men entered with him. "How many worlds have you been kicked off of, Injun?"

"I stopped counting when I ran out of fingers and toes," replied Virgil easily.

"I hear tell you turned a couple of your mutant ladyfriends into corpses," added one of the other men, staring at Virgil through narrowed eyes.

"That's a lie," replied Virgil. "They were corpses before I met them."

"Did you hear that?" roared the man. "Did you hear what he just said?"

"Excuse me for a moment," Virgil said softly to Dante. "I'll be back as soon as I clear up this little misunderstanding." He got up and began walking toward the three men. "I know you don't mean what you say, but I wish you wouldn't embarrass me in front of my new friend."

"Your new friend ain't gonna be around that long, Injun, " said MacBeth. "We got nothing against you, at least not today. If you're smart you'll keep out of our way."

"Come on over to the bar," said Virgil. "I'll buy you a round of drinks, and then maybe we can all be friends."

"Keep your distance, scumbag!"

"You really shouldn't call people names like that," remarked Virgil, still approaching them. "Even scumbags have feelings."

"What are you going to do about it?" demanded MacBeth pugnaciously, his right hand resting on the butt of his holstered burner.

"This," said Virgil softly.

His hands moved so fast that Dante couldn't follow them, but suddenly he had a knife in each, and an instant later all three men lay writhing on the floor, gagging and clutching their necks as blood spurted forth. None of them had had a chance to draw a weapon.

Virgil calmly walked back to the table, paying no attention to any of the other patrons, who stared at him but made no move to stop him. By the time he rejoined Dante, all three men had stopped thrashing and were still, each lying in an increasing pool of his own blood.

"You killed them!" exclaimed Dante, staring in fascination at the corpses. "All three of them!"

"They would have killed you," said Virgil. "And me, too, if they thought they could get away with it."

"You just walked right over and killed them!" repeated Dante. "In front of witnesses."

"So what?"

"So they'll report what they saw."

Virgil stared at him. "To who?"

Dante blinked rapidly. He tried to come up with an answer but realized he had none.

"Welcome to the Inner Frontier, poet."

"Just who the hell are you?" demanded Dante,

Virgil got up to leave. "You're the new Bard of the Inner Frontier," he said. "I'm sure you'll tell me before we hit the next world.

5.

The Scarlet Infidel is odd—

He has no quality of shame.

He spits into the eye of God,

And commits sins that have no name.

Virgil Soaring Hawk's skin wasn't really red, but Dante decided to exercise some poetic license, especially since Virgil kept referring to himself as a redskin.

Besides, the Scarlet part didn't interest Dante anywhere near as much as the Infidel part. Virgil would never discuss any details, but from what Dante heard on his first few worlds, the poet concluded that if a race of oxygen breathers—any race—was divided into sexes, Virgil had spent a night or two with a female member of that race and another night with a male. There were a few races that boasted more than two sexes, and Virgil had sampled some of their wares as well.

Virgil also didn't speak much about his other areas of physical prowess, but Dante noted most people were content to disapprove of the Scarlet Infidel from afar, that no one wanted any part of him in a fight.

As for Virgil, he was thrilled to be written up by the new Orpheus, and was constantly nagging Dante to give him more verses.

"Come on, now," he was saying as Dante's ship neared Tusculum II. "Orpheus gave Giles Sans Pitie nine verses. Giles Sans Pitie, for Christ's sake! Take away his metal hand and he was nothing, a second-rate bounty hunter. I mean, really, who the hell did he ever kill?"

"Who did you?" asked Dante.

"I'm not a bounty hunter, so I'm not in a position where I can brag about it without certain legal repercussions. But the things I've done, the places I've been, surely they're worth as many verses as Giles Sans Pitie!"

"He only gave one verse to the Angel," Dante shot back. "And Peacemaker MacDougal and Sebastian Cain got just three apiece. Are you sure you want all those verses?"

Virgil grimaced. "Well, I was sure until about twenty seconds ago. Now I have to think about it."

"While you're thinking, suppose you tell me why we're going to the Tusculum system?"

"You said you wanted to meet Tyrannosaur Bailey."

"What makes you think he'll be on Tusculum II?"

Virgil smiled. "He owns it."

"He owns the whole world?"

"Well, there's not that much to own—a couple of Tradertowns and a landing field."

"How did he get to own a world?" asked Dante. "Did he win it in a card game?"

"Nothing so romantic," replied Virgil. "He killed the man who owned it before him."

"I take it the laws of inheritance don't work quite the same out here as in the Democracy."

"Well, yes and no."

"What does that mean?"

"It means they might very well work the same, but no one felt compelled to argue the point with Tyrannosaur."

"No one hired any mercenaries?" asked Dante. "I mean, hell, with a whole planet at stake . . ."

"Tyrannosaur Bailey eats mercenaries for breakfast," answered Virgil.

"Has he got a price on his head?"

"A big one," said Virgil. He smiled. "He eats bounty hunters for lunch."

"How did you get to know him?"

"I met him at a gaming table out on the Rim, years ago. One of the players accused him of cheating, and he killed him. Literally ripped his head off his body."

"Was he cheating?"

"Absolutely."

"But you didn't complain?"

"I don't have that kind of death wish," said Virgil.

"So you just kept playing?"

"For another hour or so," replied Virgil. "I won forty thousand New Stalin ruples. He asked me if I was cheating, and I said of course I was, that after playing a couple of hands I just naturally assumed everyone at the table was supposed to cheat. Well, he could have killed me for that, but instead he laughed so hard I thought he'd bring down the ceiling, and we've been friends ever since."

"How many men has he killed?"

"You'll have to ask him. First, I don't know, and second, even if I did know it's been better than a year since I've seen him, and he's probably added to his total since then."

"If he's such a fearsome killer, why does anyone else live on Tusculum II?" asked Dante.

Virgil stared at him. "The Bard of the Inner Frontier doesn't ask stupid questions."

"Was it a stupid question?"

"Figure it out."

Dante considered it for a moment, then nodded. "Of course. They're there for protection." He paused. "How does it work? They pay him a fee to live there, and he doesn't allow any bounty hunters to land?"

"Well, you got the first part right. They pay for the privilege of living on Tusculum. But Tyrannosaur will let anyone land. He owns a casino, and he doesn't much care whose money he takes. He just makes it clear that if you kill a resident, one of 'his children', as he calls them, you won't live to enjoy the reward."

Dante chuckled. "I take it Tusculum II is a pretty peaceful place."

"So far. But you never know what'll happen tomorrow."

"You made it sound like no one could kill this Tyrannosaur."

"You're on the Inner Frontier now, where just about every man and woman carries a weapon and can be hazardous to your health."

"What are you getting at?"

"If they're alive and they're carrying weapons, what does it imply to you?"

"Stop with the guessing games," said Dante irritably. "What is it supposed to mean to me?"

"That every last one of them is undefeated in mortal combat," said Virgil. "They don't all have big reputations. In fact, mighty few have reputations to rival Tyrannosaur's. But there's fifty, maybe sixty million people out here, all of 'em undefeated. It seems unrealistic to assume a few dozen of them couldn't kill Tyrannosaur if push came to shove." He paused. "That's why you have to be a little cautious out here. You know the odds, but you never can tell which of those nondescript men has it within him to be the next Santiago."

"Hey, I'm just a poet and an historian," said Dante. "I don't plan on challenging anyone."

"And I'm a lover," said Virgil wryly. "Problem is, you don't always have a choice."

"As far as I know, no one ever called Black Orpheus out for a duel to the death."

"Yeah—but he was the real thing. You're just an apprentice Orpheus."

"Keep talking like that and I may tear up your verse," said Dante.

"Keep thinking you're above the fray and you may not live long enough to write a second one."

The ship jerked just then, as it entered Tusculum II's stratosphere at an oblique angle.

Dante stared at his instrument panel. "Now what?"

"Now you land."

"But no one's fed any landing coordinates into the navigational computer."

"You're not in the Democracy any more," said Virgil. "Have the sensors pinpoint the larger Tradertown, and then find the landing field just north of it."

"And then?"

"And then tell it to land."

"Just like that?" asked Dante.

"Just like that."

"Amazing," said Dante after issuing instructions to the sensors and the computer. "Have you ever been to Deluros VIII?"

"Nope."

"It's got more than two thousand orbiting space docks that can each handle something like ten thousand ships. There are dozens of passenger platforms miles above the planet, and thousands of shuttles working around the clock, carrying people to and from the surface. I don't think a ship has actually landed on Deluros VIII in two millennia." He shook his head in wonderment. "And here we just point and land."

"You'll get used to it."

"I suppose so."

The ship touched down, and the two men soon emerged from it.

"I assume there's no Customs or Passport Control?" asked Dante.

"You see anything like that?" responded Virgil, walking over to a row of empty aircarts. "We'll take one of these into town."

"Fine," said Dante as he climbed in.

"Uh . . . you want to let it read your retina?" said Virgil.

"Is something wrong with your eye?"

"Something's wrong with my credit. It won't start until the fee has been transferred to the rental company's account."

"No problem," said Dante, walking up to the scanner. His credit was approved in a matter of seconds, and shortly thereafter they were skimming into town, eighteen inches above the ground.

"Tell it to stop here," said Virgil as they cruised along the Tradertown's only major street.

"Why don't you tell it yourself?"

"Your credit, your voiceprint. It won't obey me."

Dante ordered the aircart to stop. "The casino's up the street."

"Yeah, but we need a place to stay. We'll register at the hotel first, and then go hunting for dinosaur."

They entered a small hotel, and Dante ordered two adjacent rooms, both of which were to be billed to his account.

They decided to stop at the hotel's restaurant for lunch before going to the casino, and they emerged half an hour later, ready to meet Tyrannosaur Bailey.

A nondescript man of medium height and medium build was standing outside the hotel, leaning against a wall. As Dante and Virgil emerged, he stepped forward and faced them.

"You're Danny Briggs, right?" he said.

"I'm Dante Alighieri."

"Well, yeah, you're him, too," agreed the man. "But it's Danny Briggs I want to speak to."

"Never heard of him," said Dante, trying to walk past the man, who took a sidestep and blocked his way again.

"That's too bad," said the man. "Because I have a business proposition for Danny Briggs."

"I know who you are," said Virgil. "Get the hell out of our way."

"Now, is that any way to talk to a businessman?" asked the man. His hand shot out and pushed Virgil backwards. The Scarlet Infidel took a heavy flop onto the street, and his hand snaked toward his pocket.

"Don't even think about it, Injun!" said the man harshly. "If you know who I am, you know I don't die as easily as those assholes you took out on New Tangier."

Virgil tensed, then looked into the man's eyes, and slowly, gradually relaxed again.

"Good thinking, Injun," said the man. "You get to live another day and deflower another corpse." He turned to Dante. "My name is Wait-a-bit Bennett. Does it mean anything to you?"

"No," said Dante.

"We have something in common, Danny. You come from the Democracy, and I work for the Democracy. On a freelance basis, anyway."

"Get to the point."

"The point is that the bank account the aircart computer okayed was in the name of Danny Briggs, not Dante Alighieri." Bennett smiled. "It seems that the Democracy has issued a 50,000- credit reward for you, dead or alive."

"Bullshit!" said Dante. "That dead or alive crap is for killers. I never killed anyone."

"Sure you did," said Bennett. "You killed Felicia Milan, alias the Duchess, back on Bailiwick."

"I didn't kill her!" snapped Dante. "The police did!"

"The Democracy says you did," replied Bennett. He smiled. "What's a poor bounty hunter to believe?"

"You're going to believe whoever's offering the money, so why are you wasting both our time talking about it?"

"I do believe you've got a firm grasp of the situation, Danny, my boy," said Bennett. "I always believe the man with the money. That could be you."

"What are you talking about?" demanded Dante.

"A business deal," said Bennett. "A transaction, so to speak." Suddenly he turned to Virgil. "Keep those hands where I can see 'em, Injun!" Then back to Dante: "Before I can get paid, I have to take your body back to the Democracy for identification, or to one of the Democracy outposts, and I think the nearest one is fifteen hundred lightyears away. That's a lot of bother."

"My heart bleeds for you," said Dante.

"It doesn't have to. Bleed, I mean."

"So what's the deal?"

"Pay me the 50,000 credits and I let you walk."

"When do you need an answer?" asked Dante.

"I'm a reasonable man," said Bennett. "If I wasn't, you'd be dead already." He looked up toward the sky. "It's getting toward noon. I'll give you until noon tomorrow. Either you hand me the money then, or I'll kill you and your pal."

"Why Virgil?"

"I don't like him very much."

"He hasn't done anything to you."

"No corpse is safe around him. That's reason enough." He turned to Virgil. "I'm going into the hotel now. I think it might be a good idea for you to stay where you are until I'm inside."

He turned and walked through the hotel's doorway and vanished into its interior.

"Wait-a-bit Bennett," said Dante, staring after him. "You never mentioned him to me."

"I didn't know he was in this part of the Frontier."

"Tell me about him."

"There's not much to tell," said Virgil, finally getting to his feet. "He's a bounty hunter. A good one. He's up around twenty kills, maybe twenty-five."

"Then let's go meet Tyrannosaur Bailey and get the hell off the planet before morning," said Dante.

Virgil shook his head. "You're 50,000 credits on the hoof. You don't think he's just going to let you walk just because you can't pay him the reward, do you?"

"He can't watch us forever."

"Forever ends tomorrow at noon."

"I meant that he's got to sleep sometime. We'll sneak out tonight."

"He knows that nobody comes to Tusculum without a reason. He's gone off to take a nap while you take care of whatever business brought you here. He'll be awake by dinnertime, and he'll seek out your ship and wait there until noon, just in case you're thinking of leaving."

"This is ridiculous!" said Dante. "I came here to get away from the Democracy and now they're paying bounty hunters to kill me!"

"The only difference between here and where you came from," said Virgil, "is that out here there are no voters and no journalists to restrain the Democracy's worst instincts."

"Is Wait-a-bit Bennett as good at his trade as he thinks he is?" asked Dante.

"Better," answered Virgil. "You didn't see me move when he told me to be still, did you?"

"How am I going to get 50,000 credits to buy him off by noon?"

"You've got a bigger problem than that."

"Oh?"

Virgil nodded. "Even if you get the money, you don't think he's the only bounty hunter who reads Wanted posters, do you?"

Suddenly Dante's stomach began to hurt.

6.

Wait-a-Bit Bennett, calm and cool,

Sips his drink by the swimming pool.

His prey appears, all unaware;

He'll wait a bit, and then—beware!

Virgil Soaring Hawk hit the roof when he sneaked a look at the poem. Here was this bounty hunter who had already manhandled the notorious Scarlet Infidel himself and was preparing to extort money from the poet in the morning or (more likely) kill him, and Dante was actually writing him into the poem.

Even worse, he gave three verses to Bennett—but of course, Bennett was the first man on the Frontier to threaten Dante's life, so Virgil reluctantly admitted that it made sense in a way.

Bennett had threatened a lot of lives, and had taken more than his share of them. Rumor had it that he'd been a hired killer before he started doing his killing for the Democracy. They said he'd been shot up pretty badly on Halcyon V, but he certainly didn't move like a man who was supposedly half prosthetic, and he never ducked a fight.

Somewhere along the way, he'd decided that it was easier to make money for not killing men than for killing them, and from that day forward, he always offered to let a wanted man walk free if the man paid him the reward. And he was a man of his word: more than one man paid the price, and none of them were ever bothered by Bennett again. (Well, none except Willie Harmonica, who went out and committed another murder after buying his way out of the first one. He refused to pay Bennett the reward the second time, and wound up paying with his life instead.)

And now Dante Alighieri had less than a day to raise 50,000 credits or somehow escape from one of the deadlier bounty hunters on the Inner Frontier.

"I can't spend all day working on the poem," he announced after giving Bennett his third verse. He put down his quill pen and got up from the desk in the corner of his room. "Let's go visit your friend."

"I've been ready for an hour," remarked Virgil.

"I had to write those verses," explained Dante. "Who knows if I'll be alive to write them tomorrow?"

"Son of a bitch doesn't deserve three verses!" muttered Virgil, ordering the door to dilate.

"Kill him tonight and maybe I'll give you four," said Dante, stepping through into the hallway.

"Mighty few people out here can kill him," answered Virgil. "And I'm honest enough to admit I'm not one of them."

"I saw what you did to those three guys in the bar back on New Tangier."

"Those were two miners and a gigolo. This guy is a professional killer. There's a difference."

"He didn't look that formidable."

"Fine," said Virgil. "You kill him."

"I'm no killer," replied Dante. "I'm a poet. I can out-think him, but I have a feeling that won't help much in a pitched battle."

"Look around the galaxy and you'd be hard-pressed to prove that intelligence is a survival trait," agreed Virgil.

They reached the street and walked out of the hotel, turned right, and headed to Rex's, which was the name Tyrannosaur Bailey had chosen for his establishment.

"Anything else I should know?" asked Dante as they reached the door to the casino.

"Yeah," said Virgil. "No dinosaur jokes."

"I don't know any."

"Good. You'll live longer that way."

They entered, and Dante was surprised at the level of luxury that confronted him. From outside, Rex's seemed like every other nondescript Tradertown building. Inside it was a haven of taste and money. The floors gripped his feet, then released him as he took another step, and another. The gaming tables were made of the finest alien hardwood, meticulously carved by some unknown race, while the matching chairs hovered a few inches above the floor, changing their shapes to fit each player's form—and the players were not merely men, but giant Torquals, tripodal beings from Hesporite III, Canphorites and Lodinites and a couple of races that Dante had never seen before.

Atonal but seductive alien music filtered into the casino, and nubile young men and women dressed in shimmering metallic outfits ran the tables.

Sitting alone in the farthest corner was a huge man, easily seven feet tall, muscled like an athlete. His hair was the color of desert sand, and tumbled down to his shoulders. His nose had been broken at least twice, maybe more, and looked irregular from every angle. One ear was cauliflower; the lobe of the other was stretched enough that it was able to hold an unwrapped cigar that had been placed in an exceptionally large hole there. When he smiled, he displayed a mouthful of ruby and sapphire teeth, all carefully filed to dangerous-looking points.

His shirt was loose-fitting, which added to the impression of enormous size. Dante couldn't see his legs or feet, but he managed to glimpse the tops of three or four weapons stuck in the man's belt.

The man looked up, saw Virgil, and smiled a red-and-blue smile.

"Virgil, you corpse-fucking old bastard, how the hell are you?"

"Hi, Tyrannosaur. I've got a friend who'd like to meet you."

Tyrannosaur Bailey studied Dante for a long moment. "You're the one that Wait-a-bit Bennett is after?"

"How did you know that?" asked Dante.

"This is my world," answered Bailey. "Not much goes on here that I don't know."

"Then you know who I am and why I want to see you," suggested Dante.

"I know who both of you are," laughed Bailey. "You're Danny Briggs, a thief from the Democracy, and you're Dante Alighieri, the self-proclaimed successor to Black Orpheus." He gestured to a pair of chairs. "Have a seat. You too, Virgil."

"He's the one who wants to speak with you," replied Virgil. "I could go spend a little money at your gaming tables, if you wish."

"You don't want to gamble," said Bailey.

"I don't?"

Bailey shook his head. "No, you don't. What you want is to get my Stelargan bar girl into the sack while I'm paying attention to your friend."

"What a thing to suggest!" said Virgil with mock outrage.

"Virgil, the last time you were here, two of my human girls and one of my Tilarbians had to seek psychiatric help to get over the experience. Next time it happens, you pay the bill."

"It was worth it."

"That's it!" snapped Tyrannosaur. "You sit here or you wait outside. There's no third way."

"I thought we were friends."

"We are—but we're not close friends. Now make your choice."

"I think I'll get a breath of air," said Virgil with all the dignity he could muster. He turned and slowly walked out into the street.

"Have a seat, poet," said Tyrannosaur after Virgil had left the casino.

"Thank you," said Dante, sitting down opposite the huge man.

"I approve of what you're doing," continued Bailey. "That poem is all the history we've got—and there's tens of millions of us out here. It's time someone added to it. I'm just as loyal to the Frontier as all those people we left behind are to the Democracy."

Dante didn't quite know what to say except to thank him again, so he remained silent.

"Interesting friend you've picked up," continued Bailey. "They're going to have to write two or three books just to cover the new perversions he's invented." He paused. "How many verses did you give him?"

"One."

Bailey nodded thoughtfully. "Who else have you written up?"

"Not too many," said Dante noncommittally. "I'm still getting my feet wet, so to speak."

"Well, assuming you live past tomorrow, you should find it a pretty easy job."

"Being the only historian for a third of the galaxy isn't all that easy. I suspect it can be quite a burden from time to time."

"I'm sure it was a burden for Orpheus," agreed Tyrannosaur. "But that's because someone had to be first. He paved the way. It should be a cakewalk for you."

"It'll be harder for me."

"Don't have the talent, huh?"

"I don't know. That's for others to judge. But Orpheus had a unifying theme."

"What theme was that?" asked Bailey.

"He had Santiago."

"Santiago wasn't a theme. He was a man."

"He was both. Everyone in the poem is valued based on how he related to Santiago."

"What are you talking about?" said Bailey. "I grew up on that poem! I can quote whole sections of it to you, and we both know that most of them never even knew Santiago!"

"The outlaws were compared to him, never very favorably. The bounty hunters and lawmen were measured based on how close they got to him. Preachers, thieves, aliens, even an itinerant barmaid, they all formed a kind of nebula around him. They were caught in the field generated by his strength and his charisma; Orpheus knew it, even if they didn't."

"So who's your Santiago?" asked Bailey.

"I don't have one . . . yet." The poet sighed. "That's why my job's harder."

"And you may not live past noon tomorrow."

Dante smiled ruefully. "That's another reason why my job's harder."

"So what's your name—Danny or Dante?"

"Dante Alighieri—but they call me the Rhymer."

"Who does?"

Dante made a grand gesture that encompassed half the universe. "Them."

"Them?"

"Well, they will someday."

"We'll see," said Bailey dubiously.

"What makes you an expert on poetry?" demanded Dante.

"I'm not," answered Bailey. "I'm an expert on survival." He stared at Dante. "You've already made a lot of mistakes. You're lucky you're still alive."

"What mistakes?"

"You hooked up with my friend Virgil, who attracts outraged moralists everywhere he goes. You made some kind of mistake at the spaceport, or Wait-a-bit Bennett would never have spotted you. You made a third mistake by sticking around after he made you that offer. He probably has a confederate watching your ship, but by tonight he'll be there himself, and I guarantee he's more dangerous than anyone he might hire." He paused. "How long have you been on the Frontier, poet? A week? Ten days? And you've already made three fatal blunders. Tomorrow you'll probably make a fourth."

"I don't know what I can do about it," said Dante. "I can't raise 50,000 credits by tomorrow morning."

"Sell your ship."

"Uh . . . it's not exactly my ship," said Dante.

"Make that four fatal blunders. The spaceport's got to have reported the registration back to the Democracy. You'll have another warrant out on you by dinnertime, and you've almost certainly got a squad of soldiers already flying out here to reclaim the ship—after they kill you for putting them to the trouble."

"So what do you think I should do?"

"I thought you'd never ask," said Tyrannosaur with a grin. "What you should do is hire a protector, someone who can stomp on Wait-a-bit Bennett as easily as you stomp on an insect."

"If I can't afford to buy him off, I can't afford to pay you to protect me," explained Dante.

"I don't want your money."

"What do you want?"

Bailey learned forward. "How many verses did you give Bennett? I want the truth, now."

"Three," said Dante.

"Then the man who kills him ought to get at least four, right?"

"Maybe five," agreed Dante.

Tyrannosaur extended an enormous hand. "You've got yourself a deal, poet."

Dante shook the giant's hand. "Call me Rhymer," he said with a smile.

"Rhymer it is!" said Bailey, gesturing to the purple-skinned Stelargan barmaid. "This calls for a drink!"

This calls for more than that. It calls for some serious thought. Here I am, the objective observer, the non-participant, the man who reports history but doesn't make it, and I've just commissioned a man's death. Sure, it's a man who's planning to kill me, but that's his job, and he did offer me a way out.

And then: I'm the only historian out here, as well as the only poet. What I write will become future generations' truth. Is Tyrannosaur Bailey worth five verses? Was Bennett worth three? What criteria do I apply—who saves me and who threatens me? Is that the way history really gets created?

And because he was nothing if not a realist, he had one last thought:

What the hell. Orpheus didn't leave any guidelines for the job, either. I'll just have to play it by ear and do the best I can—and how can I serve history or art if I die tomorrow at noon?

"Here you are, Rhymer," said Tyrannosaur, taking a drink in his massive paw and handing another to Dante.

"Thanks."

"Here's to five verses!"

"You've got 'em, even if he runs."

"Bennett?" asked Tyrannosaur. "He won't run."

"But he can't beat you." Suddenly Dante frowned. "Can he?"

"Not a chance."

"Well, then?"

"A man in his profession can't run," said Bailey. "He's got to believe he's invincible, that nothing can kill him, even when he knows better. Otherwise he'll never be able to face a wanted killer again. He'll flinch, he'll hesitate, he'll back down, he'll run, he'll do something to fuck it up."

"But if he wants to back down, if it's his last day as a bounty hunter, let him walk," said Dante. "You'll get your verses anyway."

"Whatever you say," agreed Tyrannosaur. "But he won't back down."

"Against a monster like you?" said Dante, then quickly added: "Meaning no offense."

"None taken," said Bailey. "But size isn't everything. They say the guy who killed Conrad Bland wasn't much bigger than you are. And I know the Angel was supposed to be normal in size, maybe even a little undernourished. Men have developed more than two hundred different martial arts, and we've picked up dozens more from aliens. Those are great equalizers." He uttered a sigh of regret. "Size just isn't what it used to be."

"Then why does everyone come here to live under your protection?"

"Because I've mastered seventy-two of those martial arts, and I'm the best shot you ever saw with a burner or a screecher."

"Yeah, those are good reasons," agreed Dante. "And the fact that half the guys you fight can't reach your head probably doesn't hurt either."

"Neither does spreading the word."

"I beg your pardon?"

"When I was a young man, I was an adventurer," answered Bailey. "I wanted to pit my skills against the best opponents I could find. I was a mercenary, and for two years I was the freehand heavyweight champion of the Albion Cluster, and I even put in some time as a lawman out in the Roosevelt system. But eventually a man wants to settle down."

"What does that have to do with spreading the word?" asked Dante, confused.

"I still needed an income, so I passed the word that anyone who was willing to tithe me ten percent of their income and their holdings could live here under my protection. My reputation drew more than a thousand immigrants to Tusculum II and kept an awful lot of bill collectors and bounty hunters away."

"I see."

"You're a man of letters," continued Bailey, "so let me ask you your professional opinion about something."

"Shoot."

"I think Tusculum II is a really dull name for a world. I'm thinking of changing it."

"To what?"

"I don't know. Tyrannosaur's World, maybe." He looked across the table. "You don't like it."

"It's a little too, well, egomaniacal."

"I'm open to suggestions."

"How many planets are there in the system?"

"Six."

"Okay," said Dante. "As long as you're a Tyrannosaur, name them after periods in Earth's prehistory."

"I like that. What are the periods?"

"Damned if I know—but there were dozens of them. Have you got a pocket computer?"

"Sure. Don't you?"

"No."

"How do you write?"

"With a quill pen, just like Orpheus."

Bailey withdrew his computer and slid it across the table to Dante, who instructed it to list the various prehistoric eras.

"All right, this should work," announced Dante. "Call the first planet Cambria. This world is Devonia. The next four, in order, are Permia, Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. If any of them have moons, name the moons after the animals that existed in their eras."

"You've got a head on you, Rhymer!" enthused Bailey. "It would have been a shame to let Wait-a-bit Bennett remove it from your shoulders." He paused. "What'll we call the star?"

"Well, it's on all the charts as Tusculum, but that shouldn't matter. All the planets are Tusculum I through VI, but if you're giving them names that appeal to you, there's no reason why you can't do the same to the star. How about Dinosaur, since that's the idea that gave birth to all the names?"

"Sounds good to me," said Bailey. "Tomorrow I'll have the spaceport computer start signaling ships that we're Dinosaur."

"Make sure it adds that you were formerly Tusculum or you'll drive 'em all crazy."

"Right. I'm sure glad I ran into you, Rhymer."

"Not half as glad as I am," said Dante as Wait-a-bit Bennett entered the casino.

Bennett saw Dante and walked over to him.

"Got my 50,000 credits yet, Danny?" he asked pleasantly.

"No."

"Well, you've got a little over half a day left. I'm sure a bright young lad like you can come up with the money." Bennett paused. "But until that happy moment occurs, I'm not letting you out of my sight."

"You've made two mistakes, Wait-a-bit Bennett," said Tyrannosaur.

"Oh?"

"First, his name's Rhymer, not Danny, And second, no one's laying a finger on him as long as he stays on Devonia."

"Where the hell's Devonia?" asked Bennett.

"You're standing on it."

"You don't have to stand up for him, Tyrannosaur," said Bennett. "The kid's not worth it."

"This is my world!" bellowed Bailey, getting to his feet. "I'm the only one who decides who lives and who dies!"

"I have nothing against you," persisted Bennett. "My business is with Danny Briggs and no one else."

"You have no business on Devonia."

"Like I say, my business is with Danny here . . . but if you try to hinder me in the pursuit of my legal livelihood, I'll have to kill you too."

Tyrannosaur smiled. "Is that a threat?"

"You may consider it such," acknowledged Bennett.

His hand moved slowly down toward his burner, but before he could reach it Tyrannosaur's hands shot out with blinding swiftness, one grabbing him by the neck, the other holding his hand away from his weapon.

Bailey lifted Bennett straight up two, then three, then four feet above the ground. The bounty hunter struggled to free himself. His free hand chopped at Tyrannosaur's massive arm. He landed a pair of devastating kicks in his attacker's stomach. Bailey merely frowned and began squeezing.

Soon Bennett was gasping for air. He landed two more kicks, and poked a thumb at Bailey's right eye, but Bailey simply lowered his head, and Dante could hear the bounty hunter's thumb break with a loud cracking sound at it collided with Bailey's skull.

Bennett's struggles became more desperate, and finally Bailey released his grip on Bennett's arm, used both hands to lift the bounty hunter above his head, and hurled him into the wall. There was a strange, undefinable sound as all the air left Bennett's lungs, and he dropped to the floor, where he lay motionless.

Suddenly a cheer went up from the assembled gamblers and drinkers.

"What the hell are they applauding?" asked Dante, staring at the dead bounty hunter.

"They're paying for my protection, remember?" said Bailey, who wasn't even panting from his efforts. "They're cheering because I've just shown them they're getting their money's worth. Bennett came after you, but he could have been any bounty hunter coming after any of them."

Virgil stuck his head in the door in response to the cheering, and gazed impassively at Bennett's corpse.

"Couldn't wait til tomorrow, huh?" he said.

"Out!" ordered Bailey, and Virgil removed himself from the doorway. Tyrannosaur then ordered two of the men on his staff to remove the body and dispose of it.

"The usual method, sir?" asked one of the men.

"Unless you've got a better way," answered Bailey. He turned back to Dante, who was staring at him intently. "I thought I just solved your problem. Suddenly you look like you've got another one?"

"No." Just a question.

"Good. And don't forget our bargain: I get five verses."

"At the very least," said Dante. Who knows? You may get a hundred or more. It's become clear to me that I can't be an Orpheus without a Santiago. Could I possibly have found you this soon?

7.

Tyrannosaur, Tyrannosaur,

Whatever you give him, he wants more,

The world is his oyster, the stars are his sea;

He fishes for souls, a man on a spree.

That was about as political as the Rhymer ever got to be.

The first three verses were about Bailey's size, his strength, his mastery of martial arts and martial weapons. It glorified his fighting abilities, and in time it made his name a household word.

But it was the fourth verse, the one you see above, that was written with a purpose, for the new Orpheus sought a new Santiago, and the mythic proportions he drew—"the stars are his sea" and "He fishes for souls"—were written expressly to get Tyrannosaur Bailey thinking along those lines, to consider himself as something unique and special, a man not so much on a spree as on a holy mission.

"I like it," said Bailey enthusiastically after Dante had read it aloud to him the morning after he killed Wait-a-bit Bennett. "I don't know that I understand it, especially that last bit, but I like it. You've fulfilled your end of the bargain, Rhymer."

"Maybe I could explain the parts you don't understand," offered Dante.

"Sure, why not?"

"It means you collect lost souls, just as you've been doing here on Devonia. But you don't just collect them here; like the poem says, the stars are your sea."

"Well, that's right," agreed Bailey. "They come from all over."

"I don't see you being so passive, just sitting here and waiting for them to come to you," said Dante, selecting his words carefully. "As a matter of fact, I can see you going out and recruiting them."

"Devonia can't support that many more people," Bailey pointed out.

"Then you'll leave Devonia," said Dante. "Maybe you'll come back here from time to time for spiritual refreshment, but you'll find you have a greater purpose and you'll have to go abroad to fulfill it."

"I doubt it," said the huge man. "I'm happy with the purpose I've got."

"The choice may not be yours. It may be thrust upon you by powers that are beyond your control."

"I still don't know what you're talking about, Rhymer," said Bailey. "You almost make it sound like I'll be recruiting an army."

"Not the kind anyone else would recruit."

"We've already got the Democracy protecting us from the rest of the galaxy."

Dante leaned forward. "Who's protecting you from the Democracy?"

Bailey stared at him for a long moment, then laughed. "You're crazy!"

"Why?" demanded Dante. "Exceptional times call for exceptional men. You're an exceptional man."

"I'm a live man. I plan to stay that way." The huge man paused. "And you'd better get off the planet soon if you want to stay a live man. The Democracy's got to have traced your ship by now."

"Send them packing when they show up."

"Me? Take on the whole Democracy?"

"Just one squad. How the hell many men are they going to send to find a thief and his ship?"

"You don't understand much about geometrical progressions, do you, Rhymer?" said Bailey. "Say they send ten men, and I kill them all. Next week they'll send fifty to exact revenge. Maybe I'll hire some help and kill them, too. Then they'll send five hundred, and then thirty thousand, and then six million. If there are two things they can spare, they're men and ships—and if there's one thing they can't tolerate, it's having someone stand up to them."

"There are ways," said Dante.

"The hell there are!" growled Bailey.

"It's been done before."

"Never!"

"It has!" insisted Dante.

"By who?"

"Santiago."

"Come off it—he was just an outlaw!"

"He was a revolutionary," Dante corrected him. "And what kept him alive was that the Democracy never understood that he wasn't just an outlaw."

"What do you know about it?"

"Everything! If the Democracy had ever guessed what his real purpose was, they'd have send five billion men to the Frontier and destroyed every habitable world until they were sure they'd killed him. But because they thought he was just an outlaw—the most successful of his era, but nothing more than that—they were content to post rewards and hope the bounty hunters could deliver him."

"Let me get this straight," said Bailey. "You're saying that you want me to pretend I'm Santiago?" He snorted derisively. "They may be dumb, Rhymer, but they can count. He'd be close to 175 years old."

"I don't want you to pretend anything," said Dante. "I want you to be Santiago!"

Tyrannosaur Bailey downed his drink in a single swallow and stared across the table. "I never used to believe all artists were crazy. You've just convinced me I was wrong."

Dante was about to argue his case further when Virgil Soaring Hawk burst into Rex's and walked directly over to him.

"Time to go," he said, a note of urgency in his voice. "Say your good-byes, pay your bar tab, and let's get the hell out of here!"

"What's your problem?" asked Dante irritably.

"You haven't paid any attention to the news, have you?" said Virgil.

"What news?"

"Remember New Tangier IV, that pleasant little planet where you and I met?"

"Yeah. What about it?"

"It's become a piece of uninhabited rock, courtesy of the Democracy."

"What are you talking about?" demanded Dante.

"They sent a Navy squadron to find you and your ship," explained Virgil, figiting with impatience. "No one there knew where you'd gone. The Navy didn't believe them, so to punish them for withholding information they dropped an exceptionally dirty bomb in the atmosphere." He paused. "Nothing's going to live on New Tangier IV for about seven thousand years."

Dante turned to Tyrannosaur. "Did you hear that? The time is ripe!"

"The time is ripe to get our asses out of here, and to lose that fucking ship as soon as we can," said Virgil.

"Shut up!" bellowed Dante, and Virgil, startled, fell silent. "It's time for him to come back."

"The Democracy does things like that all the time."

"Then it's time to stop them."

"Maybe it is," agreed Bailey reluctantly. "But I'm not the one to do it."

"You've got all the attributes."

"You don't even know what his attributes were," said Bailey. "And neither do I. No one does."

"Someone has to stand up to the Democracy!"

"And have them do to Devonia what they did to New Tangier IV?" snapped Bailey irritably. "How do you stand up to a force like that?"

"He found a way. You will, too."

"Not me, Rhymer. I'm no revolutionary, and I'm no leader of men."

"You could be."

"I've done my time in the trenches. You'd better listen to the Injun and get the hell out of here, because if it comes to a choice between fighting the Navy or telling them where you've gone, I'll be the fastest talker you ever saw."

Dante stared at him, as if seeing him for the first time. "You mean it, don't you?"

"You bet your ass I mean it. You may have a death wish; I don't."

Dante blinked his eyes rapidly for a moment, as if disoriented. Then he sat erect. "I'm sorry. I was mistaken. You're not the one."

"I've been telling you that."

"But I'll find him."

"If he exists."

"If the times call exceptional men forth, they're practically screaming his name. He exists, all right—or he will, once I find him and convince him of his destiny."

"I wish you luck, Rhymer."

"You do?" said Dante, surprised.

"I live here. I know we need him." Bailey paused. "Are you going to keep my four verses?"

"Yes."

"Even that last one?"

"Even the last one," replied Dante. "It's not your fault you're not Santiago."

"Okay," said Bailey. "You played square with me. Maybe I can do you a favor."

"We're even," said Dante. "You killed Bennett, I gave you four verses."

Bailey shook his head. "A couple of hours from now the Navy is going to show up and ask me what I know about you, and I'm going to tell them. So I owe you another favor."

"All right."

"If you want to find a new Santiago, you'd better learn everything you can about the old one."

"I know everything Orpheus knew."

"Orpheus was a wandering poet who may never even have seen Santiago," said Bailey dismissively. "If you really want to know what there is to know about Santiago, there's a person you need to talk to."

"What's his name and where can I find him?"

"He's a she, and all I know is the name she's using these days—Waltzin' Matilda. She's used a lot of other names in the past."

"Waltzin' Matilda," repeated Dante. "She sounds like a dancer."

Bailey smiled. "She's a lot more than a dancer."

"Where is she?"

"Beats me. She moves around a lot."

"That's all I have to go on—just a name?"

"That's better than you had two minutes ago," said Bailey. Suddenly he looked amused. "Or did someone tell you that defeating the Democracy was going to be easy?"

The giant's laughter was still ringing in Dante's ears as he and Virgil left the casino and hurried to their ship.