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

has moved to the
Inner Frontier.”
    “I’m getting a little tired of
hearing about him,” said Cain with a trace of irritation.
    “So, I suspect, is every fugitive
within ten thousand light-years,” she replied. “Mr. Terwilliger, I think it is
time for you to leave the room. What I have to say to Mr. Cain is for his ears
alone.”
    “Why?” asked the gambler.
    “For the same reason that you are
denied free access to the goods in my warehouse: I don’t want you selling
something that’s mine to the first qualified buyer who comes along.”
    “I resent that,” said Terwilliger,
trying to muster a show of sincerity and not quite succeeding.
    “You are welcome to resent it to your
heart’s content,” said the Sargasso Rose. “What you are not welcome to do is remain in my office.”
    Terwilliger seemed about to
protest, thought better of it, and walked to the door.
    “I’ll be right outside,” he told
Cain. “Yell out if you need me.”
    Cain stared at him in amusement,
and a moment later the door slid shut behind the little gambler.
    “If you plan to hunt Santiago, you
really should choose your traveling companions more carefully, Mr. Cain,” said
the Sargasso Rose, leaning back in her chair.
    “Perhaps.” replied Cain. “But on
his behalf, I should point out that he brought me to you. Otherwise I’d be
wasting my time hunting for Duncan Black, or else I’d be heading back for Port
étrange to beat my money out of Jonathan Stern.”
    “True,” she admitted with a shrug.
“May I offer you a drink?”
    “Why not?” he said agreeably.
    She pressed a button on her
computer console, and a small, furry red alien, definitely not humanoid,
entered by a different door and set a bottle and two glasses down on her desk.
    “Do you have any Men at all on
Deadly Nightshade?” asked Cain as the alien left the office.
    “The race or the gender?” asked
the Sargasso Rose. “In either case, the answer is no. Both tend to desert you
when you need them the most—especially the gender.”
    “It must get lonely up here,”
commented Cain.
    “Eventually one gets used to it.”
She filled the two glasses, and Cain stepped over and took one.
    “Thank you,” he said after
returning to his chair and taking a sip. Suddenly he laughed in
self-deprecation.
    “What is it, Mr. Cain?”
    He held up the glass. “I just
realized that there’s normal gravity in this room,” he replied. “Some observant
hunter I am! If I hadn’t noticed that this stuff didn’t float away, I would
never have known.”
    “The Orange Monkeys like zero
gravity. I find continued exposure to it a bit upsetting, so I tailor my office
to my own needs.”
    “It must cost a fortune,” he
commented.
    “It does. Thankfully, I’ve got a
fortune to spare.”
    He took another sip. “This is
pretty good stuff.”
    “It ought to be,” she said. “It
comes straight from Deluros Eight.”
    “You handle merchandise from that
far away?”
    “You’d be surprised at what passes
through Deadly Nightshade, Mr. Cain,” she replied. “Or perhaps you wouldn’t.
Exactly how much did Stern tell you about Duncan Black?”
    “Only that Black handled stolen
goods, and that he was a middleman between Stern and Santiago,” replied Cain.
“I know he had access to some of the gold that Santiago picked up in the
Epsilon Eridani raid.”
    “Now that was a cargo!” she said with a smile. “Six hundred million credits’ worth of
pure bullion!”
    “I got the impression from
Terwilliger that you decided to follow in Black’s footsteps.”
    “Terwilliger talks too much.”
    “Most people do,” agreed Cain.
    “Besides, they were my footsteps to begin with,” she continued. “I was dealing
in stolen commodities long before Duncan Black ever thought of it.” She paused.
“I gave him a share of the business to insure his loyalty.” She looked at Cain.
“Does that seem manipulative and immoral to you?”
    “I gave up making moral judgments
a