by Mike Resnick
She had some time to kill, so she left her dressing room and began wandering around the building, trying to acquaint herself with it. She found the staff's bathroom and kitchen, and a small room with a card table, then went out front. A few men and women were already sitting at tables, drinks in front of them, and a holograph of a quartet of guitarists was projected on the stage, with the music coming from everywhere, or so it seemed.
"You look good," said Manolete, approaching her.
"Thanks."
"I mean really good."
"I mean really thanks," she said.
"You know, maybe we could work a little something out here," he continued.
"I doubt it."
"It would mean more money for you."
"It'd mean a quick kick in the balls for you," said Matilda. "Are you sure you want to pay me extra for that?"
He glared at her. "Maybe I'll just turn you over to Hootowl."
"First, I'm not rich enough for him, and second, his life expectancy is probably about an hour."
"We'll see," said Manolete, walking off.
She walked over to the bar, introduced herself to the two bartenders, and sat on a stool for awhile listening to the recorded music.
A few moments later a man with bulging blue eyes and a distinctive widow's peak entered and took a table in the farthest corner, his back to a wall, and she knew Jacobs had arrived. Before long the room was full and she went back to her dressing room, awaiting her signal to perform.
It came after another half hour, and shortly thereafter she was dancing to the music of Jose, her fourteen-fingered Borillian guitarist. He took it easy on her, building his speed and rhythm slowly until he saw that she could keep up with him.
She spun around as Jose reached the final few bars of his song, then stopped and bowed to mild applause. As she looked up, she saw that Dimitrios had entered the room and was walking calmly toward Hootowl Jacobs. She began stamping her feet and whirling around again, with no accompaniment, hoping to attract Jacobs' attention, to keep him looking toward the stage.
She dared a look in his direction, and saw that he was indeed looking at her. Then Dimitrios was next to him, placed a burner in his ear, and fired.
There was a shrill scream from a nearby table as Hootowl Jacobs pitched forward on the table, blood pouring out of his ear.
"There's no cause for alarm," said Dimitrios in a loud, clear voice. He held up a small titanium card. "I am a licensed bounty hunter. This man was wanted for a minimum of ten murders. I'm sorry to have disrupted your evening. I'll have him out of here as soon as possible."
A man at a nearby table stood up.
"You didn't even give him a chance!"
"This is a business, not a sporting event," answered Dimitrios.
"But you just walked up to him and shot him!"
"He was wanted dead or alive. Given the crimes he had committed, I prefer dead."
"I wonder how good you are against someone who knows you're there and can fight back." The man pulled his jacket back, revealing a matched pair of screechers in his gunbelt.
"Well, friend," said Dimitrios, "I'm about to show you. Keep your hands away from those pistols."
Dimitrios whirled and fired three blasts into the upper corners of the room, and three holographic cameras melted.
"Do you still want to see how good I am against someone who knows I'm here?" asked Dimitrios.
The man held his hands out where everyone could see them and then sat down.
"Hey!" yelled Manolete, approaching the bounty hunter. "You destroyed three very expensive cameras."
"You didn't prepare the contract we discussed," said Dimitrios. "I told you I wouldn't let you make those holos if you didn't turn half over to the charities I named."
"You said I couldn't show them."
"Well, now you can't."
"I'm going to remember this!" promised Manolete.
"I hope so," said Dimitrios. "And the next time you promise a contract to someone, you'd better deliver it."
Some of the customers began leaving, giving Dimitrios a wide berth.
"Look at this!" growled Manolete. "Now all my clients are leaving! Get that body out of here!"
"You didn't mind that body when you thought you could rerun his death every night," said Dimitrios.
"Just get him out of here and don't come back!" yelled Manolete. He turned to Matilda. "You get out of here too! You're fired!"
Matilda climbed down from the stage and approached Manolete. "Why are you firing me?" she asked.
"You're connected with him!" he said, jerking a thumb toward Dimitrios. "That's reason enough."
"Well," she said, "as it happens, I would have quit tonight anyway. He's going on to another world, and I'm going with him, so I don't mind being fired. But I mind your reason for it, and I mind your attitude."
"What are you going to do about it?" demanded Manolete pugnaciously.
"I'm going to give you a present."
He frowned in confusion. "What present?"
"Remember the trade we talked about earlier?" she said. Before he could react, she kicked him hard in the groin. He groaned and dropped to his knees. "You don't even have to pay me extra for that."
She turned her back on him and walked to the door, then waited for Dimitrios to sling the corpse over his shoulder and join her.
He summoned a robot car, loaded Jacobs into the back, and ordered it to take them to the spaceport.
"You know," she said, "that's just the way I think Santiago would dispatch an enemy."
He shook his head. "What I did was legal and moral. You've watched too many bad holodramas. I don't know how good Jacobs was with his weapons, so why give him a chance to prove he's better than me?" He paused. "Or take that man who got up and half- threatened me. It's easier to frighten him off with a display of marksmanship than kill him to prove a point."
"Yeah, I suppose so," she said.
"Don't look so depressed," he said. "I told you I'm not a candidate for the job. You ought to be pleased that I'm good at what I do, and that I'm willing to join your army."
"I am," she said. "But . . ."
"But what?"
She signed deeply. "But I still need to find a general."
"Finding him won't be so hard," replied Dimitrios. "Recruiting him will be the difficult part."
Which was as wrong a pair of predictions as he'd ever made.
12.
He used to be a lawman, a master of his tools;
His name was The Rough Rider, his game was killing fools.
He used to be a hero, backing up his boasts—
But now he lives a private life, hiding from his ghosts.
His real name was Wilson Tchanga, and there was a time when he was the most feared lawman on the Inner Frontier.
They tell the story of the day he followed eight members of the notorious Colabara Gang into a small warehouse on Talos II, and less than a minute later he was the only living soul in the building.
They talk about the evening he saved an entire Tradertown from Pedro the Giant, a nine-foot mutant who had gone on a rampage with a laser pistol and was in the process of burning the place down when Tchanga showed up to stop him.
It was when he rode an alien steed halfway across Galapagos V to hunt down an escaping killer that he picked up the sobriquet of the Rough Rider, for the terrain was positively brutal. Men envied him, women loved him, children worshipped him, and criminals all across the Frontier feared him.
He never did become a bounty hunter, because he wasn't in the game for the money. He believed that when you saw Evil you stood up to it, and for twenty years he never flinched, never backed down, never once worried about the odds before he marched into battle, burners blazing, screechers screaming.
And then one day Varese Sarabande, who was only 26 at the time, called him out, just like a cowboy in the Old West, and because he was the Rough Rider he stepped out into the street like Doc Holliday or Johnny Ringo mig
ht have done a few millennia earlier. They went for their guns together, but Varese Sarabande was faster, and a moment later Tchanga lay writhing in the street, blood spurting from an artery in his neck.
They saved him—barely—but as he lay in the hospital recuperating, he finally came to the realization that he was mortal, and that whatever guardian angel had been protecting him over the years had taken up residence on some other lawman's shoulder. He was 43 years old, and he had painful proof that he couldn't outgun a 26-year-old outlaw like Sarabande. And he knew in his gut that he couldn't beat a strong young man—or woman—in any kind of a fair fight, with weapons or without.
His body, which had resisted age for so many years, suddenly felt decades older as he lay there. He was just a day from being released when a gang of three men burst into the hospital, shot two security guards, and began robbing the pharmacy of its narcotics. A young nurse suddenly entered his room, tossed him a burner, and told him what was happening.
He refused to leave his bed.
They almost had to pry him loose from the hospital the next morning. He resigned his job before noon, withdrew his savings—he didn't transfer them to another world, because he didn't want anyone to know where he was going—and left before the day was over.
He set up housekeeping under a new name on Bedrock II, but the Spartan Kid found out he was there and went gunning for him to pay him back for killing his father and two brothers.
He ran.
He wound up on Gingergreen II. No one knew who he was, no one bothered him, and he lived in total obscurity for three years. Then a thief tried to sneak into his house under cover of night, and he killed him. Shot him dead as he stood there, then shot him 30 or 40 more times. And since he was using a burner, he inadvertently set the house on fire.
They saw the blaze and found him still firing into the charred, unrecognizable corpse. He went berserk when they tried to take his weapon away, threatened to kill them all, and finally collapsed as he was about to turn the burner upon himself.
He spent a year in an asylum, and when he came out he was 50 pounds lighter and his eyes were still haunted by visions that no one else could see. This time they knew who he was, but even the young toughs who wanted to make a reputation knew that they couldn't make one by killing this emaciated, fear-ridden old man, and so he was left to live out his years in a kind of peace.
The Rhymer heard about him and was touched by his story, and even though they never met, no one who knew Tchanga ever argued with the truth of the poem.
"So what makes this Rough Rider so special?" asked Matilda as Dimitrios directed their ship to Gingergreen II after dropping Jacobs off at the nearest bounty station. "The word I get is that he's lost his nerve."
"He was my hero when I was a kid."
"That was a long time ago."
"The qualities that made him a hero haven't changed," said Dimitrios.
"But other things have changed him," she said. "So why, of all the people you might have suggested, are we seeing the Rough Rider?"
"To give him a chance to save his soul."
"We're not in the salvation business," said Matilda.
"Really?" said Dimitrios wryly. "I thought Santiago was going to be the salvation of the Inner Frontier."
"You know what I mean."
"Yeah, I know."
"Then why him?"
"When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up to be the Rough Rider," said Dimitrios. "A man who couldn't be bought off or scared off. A man who knew that the humanists are wrong, that there is good and there is evil, and both are abroad in the galaxy, and that someone had to confront evil and destroy it. You slept better knowing there were men like Wilson Tchanga."
She got to her feet and walked to the small galley. "I'm getting hungry. Do you want anything before we land?"
"Yeah, might as well," he said, joining her.
"I hope this Tchanga is everything you think he is."
"He was once."
"That's not much of a recommendation," said Matilda. She sighed. "I've never recruited a Santiago before. I don't know if I'm doing it right." She ordered beer and sandwiches for both of them. "I hope you've got the right man, but somehow I can't believe it's this easy."
"We'll know soon enough," said Dimitrios. "And don't forget, all but the first Santiago had an advantage ours won't have—a ready-made organization. Maybe they had to take it over, convince it, mold it to their needs, but it was there. Our man will have you, me and the poet. That's not much of an army to stand against the Democracy."
"Then we'll get more."
"Where?"
She shrugged. "Where we got you."
"Bounty hunters?" he replied. "There aren't that many of us, and most bounty hunters don't have any reason to be unhappy with the Democracy."
"No, not bounty hunters," answered Matilda. "Just men and woman who know the time has come for Santiago to walk among us again."
"When you describe him like that, he sounds bigger than life," noted Dimitrios.
"He is."
"That's a lot to ask of one man."
"Maybe that's why it's been a century since he last manifested himself."
"You make him sound like he's still alive."
"He is," said Matilda. "He's an idea—and it's harder to kill an idea than a man."
Dimitrios took a bite of his sandwich, then tossed the rest of it into the atomizer. "Next big one I bring in, I'm using the money to buy a ship with a better galley," he announced.
She stared at her sandwich. "It's not spoiled."
"No. It's just not good enough. Like most of your candidates for Santiago. They won't be evil, and they won't be stupid. They just won't be good enough."
"Well, I like it," she said, taking another bite.
"I hope you're choosier when it comes to Santiago."
"You worry about your Rough Rider; I'll worry about my decision."
"Fair enough."
They finished their beer and returned to the control cabin just as the ship went into an elliptical orbit around Gingergreen II. A moment later they received their landing coordinates from the sole spaceport, and shortly thereafter they were on the ground.
"So where do we find the Rough Rider?" asked Matilda when they had cleared Customs.
"I've got directions to his place," answered Dimitrios. "It's out in the country."
She looked around. "Except for maybe a square mile, the whole damned planet's out in the country."
"It's an agricultural world," said Dimitrios. "They grow food for seven nearby mining worlds."
"They don't need a whole world for that. Most of the mining's done by machine."
"Then they sell what's left to the Navy at rock bottom prices . . . or maybe they just give it to them in exchange for being ignored."
"Ignored?" she repeated.
"At tax and conscription time."
"Were you ever in the Navy?"
"The Army."
"For how long?"
"53 days."
"And then what?" she persisted.
"And then I wasn't in the Army any more," said Dimitrios, and for the first time since she'd known him, she felt a trace of fear.
She followed him in silence to a ground vehicle, and a moment later they were speeding out of the planet's only town, skimming a few inches above a dirt road that took them through blue-tinted fields of mutated corn. Finally, after about 20 miles, Dimitrios instructed the vehicle to take the shortest route to a location that consisted only of numbers, no words.
It turned onto a smaller, narrower road, bore right through two forks, and finally came to a halt before a small one-story home. Dimitrios and Matilda got out of the vehicle and approached the front porch.
"That's far enough!" said a voice from within the house. "Who are you?"
"I'm Dimitrios of the Three Burners," said the bounty hunter, holding his hands out where they could be seen. "This is Waltzin' Matilda, a dancer."
"What's your business here
?"
"We want to talk to you."
"What about?"
"Why don't you invite us in and give us something to drink and we'll be happy to tell you," said Matilda.
"The man drops his burners where you stand," said the voice.
Dimitrios unfastened his holster and let it fall to the ground.
"And the one in your boot."
"Good eyes for an old man," said Dimitrios with a smile. He removed the third burner and placed it atop the other two.
"You got any weapons?"
"I just took them off," said Dimitrios.
"Not you. The lady."
"None," said Matilda.
"You'd better be telling the truth. You'll be scanned when you walk through the door, and I'll have the punisher set on near- lethal."
"Well, let me check and make sure," said Matilda. In quick order she found two knives and a miniature screecher and left them next to Dimitrios' pile of weapons. "I must have forgotten about them," she said with an uneasy smile.
"Can we come in now?" asked Dimitrios.
"Yes—and keep your hands where I can see them."
They obeyed his instructions, got past the scanner without incident, and found themselves in a small, modestly-furnished living room. Standing against the far wall was a tall black man, his face ravaged by illness and inner demons, his body emaciated, a pulse gun in his right hand.
"Sit down," said Wilson Tchanga.
They sat on a couch, and he seated himself on a chair about fifteen feet away.
"Why don't you come a little closer?" suggested Matilda. "We're not here to harm you."
"I'll be the judge of that," said Tchanga. "Now talk."
"Do we call you Wilson, or Mr. Tchanga, or Rough Rider?" asked Dimitrios.
"You know who I am?" said Tchanga.
"Why else would we be on your doorstep?" said Dimitrios. "Before we begin, let me tell you that you've been my hero since I was old enough to have a hero. Meeting the Rough Rider is quite an honor, sir."
"I haven't been the Rough Rider in a long, long time."
"You're my hero just the same."
Tchanga stared at him, his face expressionless, for a long moment. "What did you say your name was?" he said at last.
