by Mike Resnick
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.
&nb
sp; "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.
E
ven 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.
