“I’ve put down on oxygen planets, and chlorine, and methane. I’ve been to Deluros Eight, and to the most obscure dead worlds on the edges of the Frontier. I’ve flown faster than light, and twisted my way through meteor storms.”

“I know.”

“There’s one thing I’ve never done, one place I’ve never been.”

“Where is that?”

“I’ve never seen the inside of a star.”

“Nobody has.”

“Then I’ll be the first,” said Schussler. “What a beautiful image to carry with me into eternity!”

“Then I so command it,” said Cain unhappily.

“Thank you, Sebastian,” said the cyborg. “You’d better leave me now.”

“Good-bye, Schussler,” said Cain, walking to the hatch.

“Watch for me, Sebastian,” said Schussler. “It will be twilight soon. I’ll wait until then, so that you can see me.” He paused. “I’ll be the first shooting star of the evening.”

“I’ll be watching,” promised Cain.

And an hour later, as he and Silent Annie were finally setting out on their quest, he stopped to look up. For a moment he saw nothing out of the ordinary; and then—and it was probably just his imagination, for the sun was still quite brilliant and Schussler was some eighty million miles distant—he thought, for a fleeting instant, that he could see an unbelievably bright form streaking toward Safe Harbor’s golden sun. It moved faster and faster, and then flickered gratefully out of existence.

Part 6

Santiago’s Book

22.

His sire was a comet,

His dam a cosmic wind.

God wept when first He saw him,

But Satan merely grinned.

An even forty verses: that’s what Black Orpheus gave him.

Nobody else ever got more than a dozen—but then, nobody else was Santiago.

Orpheus was faced with a moral and artistic dilemma when he finally confronted the subject of Santiago, for all of his verbal portraits were based on firsthand knowledge, and he had never seen the notorious outlaw. (In point of fact, he had seen him on five separate occasions over the years, and spoken to him twice, but he didn’t know it, then or ever.)

On the other hand, he knew that any ballad that aspired to describe the men and events that had shaped the Inner Frontier would be laughably incomplete if it didn’t include a major section on Santiago.

So he compromised. He gave him forty verses, but he never once referred to him by name. It was his way of saying that the Santiago stanzas were somehow incomplete.

Sebastian Cain was fast coming to the conclusion that the legend of Santiago was as incomplete as the ballad. He sat beside Silent Annie as her vehicle sliced between lush fields that seemed to writhe and ripple in the dim light of Safe Harbor’s moons, finally coming to a halt in front of a small barn.

“First stop,” she announced, opening the door and getting out.