by Mike Resnick
"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.
Part 2: WALTZIN’ MATILDA'S BOOK
8.
Matilda waltzes, and she grinds.
Matilda gets inside men's minds.
Matilda plunders and she robs;
Matilda's pulled a thousand jobs.
It was an exaggeration. At the time Dante found her, Matilda had pulled only 516 jobs, which was still sufficient to make her one of the most wanted criminals on the Frontier.
Her specialty was that she didn't specialize. Gold, diamonds, artwork, fissionable materials, promissory notes, she stole them all. She'd done two years in the hellhole prison on Spica II, and another four months on Sugarcane. She escaped from both, the only prisoner ever to break out of either penitentiary.
She was a lot of things Dante wasn't—skilled in the martial arts, skilled in the ways of haute couture society, exceptionally well-read—and a few things that Dante was, such as an outlaw with a price on her head. It didn't bother her much; she figured that if she could survive Spica II, she could survive anything the Democracy or the Frontier threw at her.
The most interesting aspect of her past was that she came from money, and had every whim catered to. At eight she was so graceful a ballerina that her family mapped out her entire future—and at nine she proved to be even more independent than graceful by leaving the Democracy forever. She stowed away on a cargo ship bound for Roosevelt III, somehow made her way to the carnival world of Calliope, bought a fake ID with money she'd stolen from her brother, and soon found work dancing in various stage shows.
As she grew older she learned every dance from a tango to a striptease, and made her way from one world to another as an entertainer, dancing solo when possible, with partners when necessary. She changed her name as often as most people changed clothes, and changed her worlds almost as frequently—but she never left a world without some trinket, some banknote, some negotiable bond, something, that she hadn't possessed when she arrived.
Just once she made the error of stealing within the Democracy's borders. That was when she was apprehended and incarcerated on Spica II. She never went back again.
No one knew her real name. She liked the sound of Matilda, and used it with half a hundred different surnames. She was Waltzin' Matilda just once, on Sugarcane, but that was where she was arrested the second time, and after she escaped from jail, that was the name that was on all the Wanted posters.
She still used a different name, sometimes more than one, on every world, but she was resigned to the fact that to most of her friends and almost all of her enemies she had become Waltzin' Matilda, despite the fact that she could not recall ever having performed a single waltz on stage.
It was a pleasant life, punctuated only by the occasional narrow escape from the mignons of the Democracy or those bounty hunters who wished to claim its reward. She liked appearing on stage, and she found her secret vocation as a thief sexually exciting, especially when she knew that her movements were being watched.
Like tonight.
Dimitrios of the Three Burners was in the audience. He hadn't come to Prateep IV to find her—he was after other prey—but he had a notion that Matilda Montez was really Waltzin' Matilda, and since he hadn't turned up his quarry yet, he'd dropped in to check her out, maybe keep an eye on her in case she was up to her usual tricks.
She watched him out of the corner of her eye as she spun and dipped, jumped and pirouetted. It was Dimitrios, all right, with his trademarked burners in two well-worn holsters and the handle of the third peeking out from the top of his boot. He seemed relaxed, sipping his drink, staring at her with the same appreciative smile she'd seen on so many other men in so many other audiences. Well, you just keep drinking and smiling, bounty killer, because before you leave here I'm going to be two million credits richer—and even you, who's seen it all and heard it all, won't believe the only eyewitness.
She spun around twice more, then stopped and bowed, perfectly willing to let the audience think her smile was for them. They were informed that she would take a twenty-minute break, and then return for the evening's finale.
She waited for the applause to die down and bowed one last time, then began making her way to her dressing room. A drunken man jumped up from his chair and tried to climb onstage. She dispatched him almost effortlessly with a spinning kick to the chest, and got another standing ovation as she finally left the stage.
Once there, she locked the door behind her, peeled off her clothes, and donned a thin robe. She picked up a tiny receiving device and inserted it in her ear, then hit the control on her make-up table.
"Twenty minutes . . . nineteen minutes 50 seconds . . . nineteen minutes 40 seconds . . ." droned a mechanical voice.
She slid her feet into a pair of rubber-soled shoes, then ordered her window to open. She climbed up onto the ledge and leaped lightly to the roof of the adjoining brokerage house with the grace of an athlete. A cloth bag was suspended on a very thin line from her room. She walked over to it, removed a pint of hard liquor from the neighboring system of Ribot, walked to a door leading to the building's interior, whispered the code that opened it, and stepped inside.
"Eighteen minutes, 30 seconds . . ."
She removed her shoes, took off her robe, and unstrapped the shocker from her leg. Then, totally naked, she descended two levels on the airlift.
A middle-aged man, dressed in a guard's uniform, suddenly looked up from the musical holo he had been watching on his pocket computer. His jaw dropped when he saw Matilda.
She smiled at him and began walking straight toward him.
"My God!" muttered the man. "Who . . . what are you doing here?"
Her smile widened, promising no end of wonders as she approached him, her hands behind her back.
"You . . . you . . . you shouldn't be here!" he stammered.
She considered replying, but decided that total silence would be more effective as she continued walking toward him.
"This is . . ." he began, and then seemed to run out of words for a moment. He blinked his eyes. "Things like this don't happen to me!"
Her left hand held the whiskey. She stretched it out to him, offering it, and as if in a dreamlike trance, he took a step toward her and reached out his arms.
And then, before he quite knew what hit him, she brought the shocker out in her right hand, aimed it at him, and felt it vibrate with power as it sent its voltage coursing through his body. For a moment he seemed to be a life-sized puppet dancing spasmodically on strings; then he fell to the floor in a silent heap.
She knelt down next to him, poured as much of the whiskey as she could into his mouth without choking him, spilled the rest on his clothes, and, after carefully wiping her fingerprints from the bottle, tossed it onto the floor, where it broke into pieces. She then raced to his desk and began manipulating his pocket computer.
"Fifteen minutes, ten seconds . . ."
She was still trying to find what she needed five minutes later. Then, finally, she broke through the encryption, found the code words she needed, walked to the safe, uttered the words in the proper order, and a minute later was thumbing through a score of negotiable currencies. She finally settled on New Stalin rubles and Far London pounds, since they were the largest denominations, took two huge handfuls, and raced to the airlift. Once she reached the third level she donned her robe and shoes and walked out onto the building's roof.
The guard would be out cold for at least five more hours. More to the point, he'd stink of booze, and no one on this or any other would believe his story about a gor
geous naked woman entering the building and turning a shocker on him. It sounded too much like a drunken fantasy—and the remains of the drink were there to prove it.
She went to the bag that was suspended from her window, the one where she'd found the whiskey, and put the money into it. Then she tested the line that held it to make sure it was secure. It was, and a moment later she scrambled up the wall, feet on the slick metal exterior, hands on the line, until she reached her window.
She climbed back into her dressing room, raised the line high enough so that in the unlikely event someone else were to walk on the brokerage house's roof, they wouldn't be able to reach the bag, then removed her shoes and robe, put them in a closet, and began climbing back into her costume.
"Four minutes, 20 seconds . . ."
She felt proud of herself. She didn't believe in repeating her methods—that was the quickest way to give the police and the bounty hunters a line on you—and she thought tonight's job was one of her most creative to date. She'd stolen the equivalent of two million credits in currency that would be almost impossible to trace, and the only witness an old man stinking of alcohol and raving about a naked lady. It was beautiful.
"Two minutes, 30 seconds . . ."
She took the receiver out of her ear, deactivated it, and placed it in a jar of face cream, covering it so no one could see it—not that anyone had a reason to look for it, but she hadn't made it this far by not being thorough.
Then, nineteen minutes after she left the stage, she walked out again and stood in the wings, waiting to be introduced, her take suspended from a window where no one could see it, and another perfect crime to her credit. If she was a little flushed from her efforts, well, that could be written off to excitement at appearing on stage, or satisfaction at the wild applause she generated.
She waited for the emcee to run through her intro, then stepped out and faced the audience, smiling and bowing before beginning to dance again.
