Read The Return of Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future for Free Online

hunters. Here's your answer: if the Democracy had known he was a revolutionary, they'd have sent the whole fleet, five billion strong, to the Inner Frontier to hunt him down—so he made them think he was an outlaw, and all he had to deal with was a handful of bounty hunters. Orpheus guessed at that, but he never knew for sure."
           "So Santiago killed all the bounty hunters?" she said.
           Danny smiled again. "He tried, but he didn't always succeed—and that's the secret that's hidden in the poem, the secret even Orpheus didn't know."
           "You're not making sense. How could he have stayed in business if he hadn't killed them?"
           "There wasn't just one Santiago!" said Danny, unable to contain his excitement. "There was a series of them! I'm sure Sebastian Cain was one, and I think his successor was Esteban Cordoba." He paused for effect. "There were at least six Santiagos, maybe as many as eight!"
           "You're crazy!"
           "I'm right! Virtue MacKenzie, his biographer—she tried to hide it, but she was so sloppy that scholars never put much stock in her books, even though they sold tens of millions of copies." His arms shot up in a sign of triumph. "The most important single thing in the history of the Inner Frontier, and we're the only two people who know it!"
           "So now we can leave the planet and then sell the manuscript?" she asked with a look of relief.
           "We'll leave the planet," he agreed.
           "And sell the manuscript."
           He shook his head. "I'm not selling anything, not yet."
           "Then what are you going to do with it?" she demanded.
           "Add to it."
           "What are you talking about?"
           "Maybe it's time for the Inner Frontier to have a chronicler again."
           "You?" said the Duchess incredulously.
           "Why not?"
           "I thought you were a criminal."
           "I've been a criminal. I've never tried being a poet or an chronicler."
           "What does the job pay?"
           "What's the going price on immortality?"
           "Immortality?"
           "I plan to create something that outlasts me, just as Orpheus did." He looked off into the distance, at some exotic place only he could see. "Think of all those worlds I've never seen—Serengeti, Greenveldt, Walpurgis III, Binder X, the Roosevelt system, Oceana . . . worlds I only heard about and dreamed about when I was a kid. You know," he added confidentially, "this is the first time I've been excited—really excited —about anything since I was that little kid, dreaming of those worlds."
           "You're really considering it, aren't you?" she said.
           "I'm done considering it," he said with a sudden decisiveness. "I'm doing it."
           "But why?" she demanded, as visions of the auction receded into the distance.
           "There are hundreds of thieves here on Bailiwick. There are millions in the Democracy, dozens of millions in the galaxy. But there was only one Black Orpheus, and there will be only one me. A century after I'm dead, someone will read my poem the way I'm reading his , and I'll have made my mark on the universe. I'll have done something that outlasts me. People will know I was here."
           "And is that so important to you?"
           "It always was."
           "And what about me?" she said bitterly. "Three days ago I was a law-abiding citizen. Three minutes ago I was a fugitive, but one who'd been promised a substantial amount of money from selling Orpheus' poem. Now I'm still a fugitive, but with no financial prospects again! You owe me something!"
           "I said I'd take care of you. I will."
           "How?"
           "I don't know yet—but a million opportunities are opening up, and one thing I've always been good at is seizing opportunities."
           "You'd damned well better be," the