"You really feel you can't reason with him?"
"He's armored in his . . . I was about to say his ignorance, but that's not it. He's armored in his righteousness—and it's been my experience that there's nothing more difficult to reason with than a righteous man."
"So what do we do?"
"We keep in touch, we talk whenever we're alone, we try to keep him from doing any more harm until we can come up with a solution, and we hope we don't cause even more unnecessary deaths by waiting." He paused. "I know this started out as a way for me to add to my poem and you to get the heat off you—but it's much more than that now. He'd still be killing Unicorns back on Heliopolis if it wasn't for us. I don't even blame him; he can't help being what he is, and Lord knows he didn't apply for the job. It's our fault he's here, doing what he's doing, and we've got a moral obligation to put an end to it."
"I never thought I'd hear you argue in favor of moral obligations," she noted wryly.
"Neither did I," he admitted. "I certainly don't think of myself as a moral man. But we've unleashed something very dangerous, something uncontrollable, and I think it's our duty—mine, anyway—to do something about it."
At that moment the door burst open and three recently-hired men entered the room, burners in their hands.
"What the hell's going on?" demanded Matilda.
"He wants to talk to you," said one of the men. He turned to Dante. "To both of you."
"Who does?" asked Dante.
The man looked amused. "Guess."
Dante and Matilda walked out of her room, down the corridor to the living room, and then to the office. The Bandit was sitting at his desk.
"That will be all," he said to the three men. "You can leave now."
"Are you sure, Santiago?" asked the spokesman.
"I am quite capable of protecting myself," he said in a voice that brooked no opposition.
The three men left without another word, and the door slid shut behind them.
"What do you want?" asked Matilda.
"Yeah," said Dante. "We were just about to get romantic."
"Spare me your lies," said the Bandit.
"Who's lying?"
"Just how stupid do you think I am? I heard every word you said."
"What are you talking about?" said Matilda.
"I had both your rooms bugged."
"Why?"
"How can you ask that when I just told you I've been listening to you since Matilda entered her room?" said the Bandit irritably.
"All right, you heard us," said Dante, deciding that further denials were futile. "Now what?"
The Bandit looked from one to the other. "I thought you were more perceptive than you are," he said at last. "You have absolutely no concept of what Santiago is, what I must do if I am to succeed. We don't live in a humanistic universe. There is absolute good and absolute evil abroad in it. The Democracy is the evil, and we can never compromise with it, can never appease it, can never show it any more mercy than it would show to us if it were given the opportunity."
"You're talking about the Democracy, and I was talking about the 300 kids you killed," said Dante. "How evil were they?"
"Can't you understand?" replied the Bandit. "That's 300 armed men who won't be coming after us in 15 years."
"That's 300 kids who might have grown up to be doctors, who might have saved a million lives, including some right here on the Frontier."
"They belonged to the Democracy. They would have been trained to be the enemy."
"That's a crock," Dante shot back. "For all you know, it was a religious school, training ministers to come out to the Frontier."
"No more word games," said the Bandit. "My problem is not what to do with members, however young, of the Democracy. It is what to do with you." He paused. "I should kill you, as you would kill me if you had the chance. That is the only logical course of action, do you agree?"
Dante and Matilda stared at him, but made no reply.
"Well, at least you don't disagree." The Bandit rubbed his chin thoughtfully with his real hand. "On the other hand, I wouldn't have become Santiago without you. I owe you something for that."
"If you can solve this moral problem, you can solve others," said Dante. "Maybe there's hope for you yet."
"Shut up," said the Bandit, making no attempt to hide his annoyance. Not anger, noted Dante. We're not important enough to arouse his anger. He's just annoyed, as if we were insects that were bothering him on a hot summer day.
The Bandit was lost in thought for another moment. Finally he looked up at Dante and Matilda. "I know I can never again trust you, that you will kill me if you are given the opportunity. By the same token, I can't trust anyone you recruited; I don't know where their loyalties lie. So this is my decision: I will give the two of you, as well as Blossom and Virgil, one Standard day to get off Valhalla. If you are still here when the day is over, I'll kill you. I will contact Wilbur and tell him to transmit all my money to an account of my choosing, and that if he doesn't do so within that same Standard day he's a walking dead man."
"Maybe he can't do it in a day," suggested Matilda.
"He'll find a way, or he'll wish he had." The Bandit got to his feet and faced them. "One day and one second from now, we are at hazard. If you don't act against me, I won't seek you out—but know that starting tomorrow, I will kill each and every one of you the next time we meet."
26.
They sat in their ship—Dante Alighieri, Waltzin' Matilda, Virgil Soaring Hawk, and the Flower of Samarkand—half a dozen lightyears from Valhalla, and discussed their situation.
"I don't believe you've told me everything," said Blossom angrily. "What did you do? Why has he turned against us?"
"He hasn't turned against us so much as he has turned against Santiago," said Dante.
"You keep saying that," protested Blossom. "How can he turn against Santiago? He is Santiago!"
"No," said Dante. "He's a man we've been calling Santiago. There's a difference."
"Maybe he had a point about those children," she said. "At least they won't be gunning for him in ten or twelve years."
"Are you saying that if he had the ability to kill every child in the Democracy, he should?" asked Matilda.
"No," said Blossom. "But there are billions, maybe hundreds of billions, of children. He killed 300. Is that any reason to turn against him?"
"If he'd killed one, that would be reason enough," said Dante.
"Didn't all the other Santiagos kill people?" she demanded. "Innocent people as well as guilty?"
"Yes, they all killed people," answered Dante. "And sometimes innocent bystanders were killed. That's the fortunes of the kind of war Santiago has to wage. But no Santiago ever went out of his way to kill innocent bystanders when it could be avoided."
"How old are you?" said Blossom. "30? 35? How do you know what Santiago did more than a century ago?"