Star of Gypsies

  As I traveled with him I came to comprehend something I had never suspected as a schoolboy on Vietoris or as a slave on Megalo Kastro: that to rule is a burden, not a privilege. There are certain rewards, yes.

  But only a fool would accept that burden for the sake of the rewards. Those who hold power do so because they have no choice: it is God's decree that has descended upon their heads and they must obey. Even if Syluise thinks it is not so.

  I watched Loiza la Vakako, then, making decisions about the planting of crops or the damming of streams, about the price of grain, about trade with other planets, about taxes and import duties. I watched him holding court and settling the bewildering disputes of petty people in outlying provinces. And I thought of the lesson they had been trying to teach me on my last day at school, about the Thirteenth Emperor and how hard he worked. I had wondered then why an emperor would want to work so hard, when supreme power was his. Why not spend all your days and nights in feasting and singing and sipping fine wine? Now I understood that there was no choice about the work. It was the price of supreme power. It was what supreme power was: the privilege of toil beyond the comprehension of ordinary beings. There had never been any ruler, I realized-not even the famous wicked tyrants, not even the murderous monstrous villains-who had not found himself harnessed to the plow the moment he ascended the throne of office.

  Still, there were comforts if you wanted them. A bit of compensation, I suppose. Loiza la Vakako toured his realm in an air-car that was a little palace in itself, a sleek teardrop-shaped vehicle bright as fire that moved with the speed of dreams. When you were aloft you had no sense of motion: you might have been drifting on a magic carpet. And there were soft wondrous draperies fashioned from the black-and-scarlet mantles of the great clam of the Sea of Poets, there were cushions upholstered in the shining leather of sand-dragon skin, there were floating globes of pure cool light. When we dismounted we were greeted by bowing officials who had strewn carpets of petals for us, and servants were waiting with fresh robes, bowls of fragrant juices, ripe fruits, smoked meats of mysterious origin.

  Yet despite all this magnificence Loiza la Vakako's private quarters, both aboard the air-car and wherever he stopped to spend the night, were always strangely austere: a thin mattress on the floor, plain white wall-hangings, a pitcher of water by his side. It was as if he accepted the grandeur as something necessary, a requirement of office, but gladly put it all aside when he could be alone. If you would see the truth of a man, look at the room where he sleeps.

  Nabomba Zom is a world that lends itself to magnificence. I have never seen any place more beautiful except for Xamur the matchless, which no world could surpass. But Nabomba Zom comes close. There is the amazing scarlet sea, which at sunrise reverberates as though struck by a hammer when the first blue rays of morning fall upon it. There are the pale green mountains soft as velvet that run down the spine of the great central continent, and the chain of lakes known as the Hundred Eyes, black as onyx and just as glistening, that lies east of them. The Viper Rift, that serpentine chasm five thousand kilometers long, whose walls shine like gold as they descend an unmeasurable distance to the fiery river in its remote depths. The Fountain of Wine, where invisible creatures carry out natural fermentation in a subterranean basin and a geyser sprays their delightful product into the air every hour. The Wall of Flame… the Dancing Hills… the Web of Jewels… the Great Sickle…

  And all the fertile fields, from which every manner of crop pours forth. There is no world more bountiful. Even the dung of the giant snails, as I had already had occasion to discover, was of no little value.

  Of course I didn't spend all my time touring this planet of wonders in Loiza la Vakako's air-car. There was the rest of my education to consider. I could read and write, more or less, but that was all the formal learning that I had arrived with. Loiza la Vakako had reasons-sound ones, as I would discover-for wanting me frequently to travel by his side as he carried out his official functions, but he also brought in tutors for me at the palace and he required me to take them seriously. Which I did; I have many appetites, and one of them is for knowledge. There is more to life than belching. I applied myself to my studies with zeal and dedication.

  And then there was Malilini.

  I didn't know what to make of her. She moved through the palace like a sprite, a goddess, a ghost-like anything but an ordinary mortal. I don't think I spoke six words to her, or she to me, in the first three years I lived there. But often I saw her watching me-she had her father's sly eyes-covertly from a distance, or simply staring frankly at me when we were in the same room.

  She terrified me. Her beauty, her grace, her strangeness. I knew that she had come ghosting to visit me on Megalo Kastro-staring at me then too, never saying a word-and that she had watched over me as I lay adrift in that warm quivering sea into which the guild's man had thrown me. Why? Why, when they had summoned me from my dung-shoveling duties, had she said "Yakoub. At last," at our first true meeting?

  I didn't dare ask. Shyness has never been part of my character; but in this one instance I was afraid to seek explanations, for fear I would shatter some fragile spell that was binding the two of us together. I told myself that in time I would know. Until then, wait. So I waited. I grew tall and broad and strong, and I let a mustache grow so that when I looked in the mirror I began to see myself with my father's face, and I learned languages and astronomy and history and many other things, and at dawn I would ride across the plateau behind the palace on the supple six-legged Iriarte horse that Loiza la Vakako had given me for my last birthday. Sometimes I would see her far away, glowing in the blue sunrise, riding an even swifter horse. Though I grew daily deeper into manhood, she never seemed to change: always a girl at the edge of woman's estate, radiant, without flaw.

  Sometimes it wasn't Malilini that I saw, but Malilini's ghost. I saw her aura. And her ghostly smile, flickering only a moment out of that aura before she vanished, could set me ablaze with strange and troublesome emotion.

  In those days I understood very little about ghosting, nor was there anyone I could turn to for information: it has never been something that we discuss easily even among ourselves, let alone care to set down in books. I had known since my days on Megalo Kastro that it is somehow possible for certain people to split their spirits loose from their bodies and go roaming around in far places, apparently invisible to most people but capable of making themselves seen-in a strange not-entirely-there way-whenever and to whomever they chose. These ghosts had an aura, an electrical crackling about them.

  I realized now that one of the ghosts that had visited me on Megalo Kastro was Malilini's. And-now that I was beginning to wear my adult face-I became aware that one ghost, the one with the long mustache and the great roaring laugh, was very likely my own. Even now I saw him from time to time. Hovering for a flashing instant in the air in front of me, winking, grinning, amiably slapping my cheek in a lusty greeting.

  If that man was me, I reasoned, then I must be capable of going ghosting. But how was it done? How? How?

  Sometimes I would sit by myself for hours at a time on a great throne-shaped green rock at the edge of the scarlet sea and try to do it. I imagined myself driving a wedge down the side of my brain the way a stonemason would split a block of marble with a chisel, and spalling off a part of my soul that would be free to go floating to other worlds, other times. It never worked. I gave myself monumental headaches, as though someone really was hammering at my brain with a mason's wedge, but nothing else ever happened.

  And then one day I found Malilini suddenly sitting beside me on that great green throne. I hadn't noticed her approaching at all.

  "You'd like to know how to do it, wouldn't you?"

  "What?"

  "Ghosting. That's what you're trying to do. I know."

  My cheeks flamed. My eyes would not meet hers. "What makes you think so?"

  "Yakoub, Yakoub-"

  "I'm simply trying to review my quadratic equa
tions."

  Her hand came to rest on mine. Her fragrance dizzied me. "Let me show you how," she said.

  10.

  THE FIRST TIME YOU GO GHOSTING IS THE MOST frightening experience you will ever have in your life. I think even dying must be a trifle, compared with that.

  Your soul breaks in half. Part of you drops like a leaden turd to the ground and the other part bursts free, soaring up wildly, a starship out of control making random leaps across the cosmos. But it isn't just the cosmos you're traveling through. It's the river of time. That river flows from past to future, and you are heading upstream.

  You see everything that ever was in all of time and space and none of it makes any sense to you. Whatever you see you are seeing for the first time. A chair explains itself to you, or a flower, or a fish, and you are incapable of understanding. You walk down a highway and you are not sure whether you are going east or west, until you realize that you are going in both directions at once. You are lost beyond hope. You choke on your own bewilderment. You wish you could cry but you have no idea what crying is like, or wishing.

  A primeval terror takes hold of you, a fear that shakes you like a hundred earthquakes at once.

  People you have never seen before smile at you and greet you-or are they saying goodbye? You take five steps up the hill and discover that you are descending. There are no landmarks. The world is water. The horizon bends. The stars fall like rain and make hot golden splashes all around you. You hear the sound of weeping; you hear laughter; you hear nothing. Silence tolls like a great bell. The world is a whirlpool. You begin to drown. Some creature is lodged in your throat. Your eyes are spinning in your head. That primeval terror intensifies and now you begin to understand what it is. It comes from the heart of the universe. The fear that you feel is the force that binds the atoms of the universe together. It is the fundamental substance. What makes all those particles cling to one another is terror: the dread of chaos. Of loneliness. Of loss. And with that understanding the fear begins to ebb. All bonds are loosened and it does not matter. You can learn to love chaos. Everything is streaming away from the center and all is well.

  When the fear goes and the atoms lose their grip on one another, then at last you find your footing. You are floating freely in utter void. There is no way for you to fall because nothing exists. And in that emptiness you are able to make any choice you desire.

  Here, you say. I will go here. You get there just like that. No one can see you unless you want to be seen. You don't collide with anything that's already there because you're surrounded by a thing called an interpolation zone that pushes everything out of the way. So you want to go to Megalo Kastro. Sure: there you are, Megalo Kastro. And you hover in the air over a steaming bowl of warm pink mud that spans half a world. A naked boy lies bobbing on the breast of that quivering fluid mass. He seems asleep. Dreaming. You smile at him.

  "Yakoub?" you say. Your aura crackles. He opens his eyes. They shine with strength and fearlessness. Your ringing laughter enfolds him. "Swim, Yakoub. Swim. Swim."

  How easy this is, now that you know the way!

  11.

  HER HAND WAS STILL RESTING ON MINE. WHEN SHE made a small movement as though to draw it away, I held it, and she did not resist.

  I said, "Why did you want to go ghosting on Megalo Kastro in the first place?"

  "To look at you."

  "But you couldn't have any idea I existed!"

  "Oh, yes," she said. "Of course I knew you existed."

  "How could you?"

  "Because you were going to come here."

  "And how could you have known that?" I asked.

  "Because you are here now," she said. And then she laughed. "Don't you understand? There is never any in the first place."

  FOUR

  People, Places, Worlds

  Consider, for example, the times of Vespasian. Thou wilt see all these things, people marrying, bringing up children, sick, dying, warring, feasting, trafficking, cultivating the ground, flattering, obstinately arrogant, suspecting, plotting, wishing for some to die, grumbling about the present, loving, heaping up treasure, desiring consulship, kingly power. Well, then, the life of these people no longer exists at all. Again, remove to the times of Trajan. Again, all is the same. Their life too is gone. In like manner view all the other epochs of time and of whole nations, and see how many after great efforts soon fell and were resolved into the elements. But chiefly thou shouldst think of those whom thou hast thyself known distracting themselves about idle things, neglecting to do what was in accordance with their proper constitution, and to hold firmly to this and to be content with it…

  What then is that about which we ought to employ our serious pains? This one thing: thoughts just, and acts social, and words which never lie, and a disposition which gladly accepts all that happens, as necessary, as usual.

  -Marcus Aurelius

  1.

  I THOUGHT OF MALILINI NOW AS I STOOD IN A BROAD glittering field of Mulano's crusted ice, waiting for the relay-sweep to carry me into space. How she had brought magic and mystery into my life; how I had loved her; how she had been swept away from me down the river of time. What if she had lived, and I had been able to take her to be my wife? An idle thought. Meaningless. Useless. Like asking myself, What if rain were to fall upward, What if gold grew on trees, What if I had been born a Gajo instead of a Rom? On Galgala gold does grow on trees. But I am Rom and the rain falls as it has always fallen and Malilini is long dead and will be dead forever more.

  I was alone. Damiano had already gone on ahead to make his own plans and preparations. We would meet again later. It was nearly the last moment of Double Day. The two suns of Mulano hovered on the horizon, about to plummet from view. The sky was dark green, quickly deepening into the gray of the momentary twilight. I narrowed my eyes and searched the heavens for Romany Star, as I had always done at that moment of the day.

  And in that moment the dazzling radiance of the relay-sweep aura burst high into the air and a roving tendril of the sweep found me and caught me up and flung me far out into the Great Dark. Goodbye, goodbye, a long goodbye to my quiet life on Mulano! Yakoub's on his way again.

  Only a madman could enjoy traveling by relay-sweep. And if you aren't a madman when you set out, there's a fair chance that you will be by the time the sweep turns you loose.

  For some people it's the sheer peril of the process that sends them around the bend, or the absurd implausibility of the whole thing. What you are doing, after all, is going out by yourself into space without a starship around you or anything else except an invisible sphere of force, and dropping in free fall through hundreds or even thousands of light-years, which is one hell of a drop. The sweep picks you up and flicks you out into nowhere, and there you stand, neatly cocooned in the little sphere of safety that your journey-helmet has woven about you, plummeting across the universe with nothing but empty space at your elbow. It's vertigo to the fiftieth power for anyone who allows himself to buy into the notion that he's actually falling from one end of the galaxy to the other.

  That part of it has never bothered me at all. When you have held the jump-handles in your hands as often as I have, when you have lifted starships through wink-out and hurled them across the sky, a little bit of relay-sweep travel doesn't seem like much of a challenge.

  Gypsies were born for traveling, anyway, and any means of transportation that takes you from one place to another is all right with us. It isn't as though you see stars and planets flashing by all the time: you aren't in realspace at all, but in this or that adjacent auxiliary space, taking zigzag shortcuts through wormholes in the continuum. Which is why the journey doesn't take you thousands of years and why you aren't in any danger of getting tossed into some star or crashing into a planet that happens to lie in your path. So there's no serious risk in it. Oh, maybe one traveler in a hundred thousand gets caught in a shunt malfunction and spends the rest of his life out there in his sweep-sphere, hanging suspended in the midd
le of nowhere for ten or twenty thousand realtime years. That's a miserable kind of fate but the odds against its happening to you are pretty favorable ones. Practically every relay-sweep traveler gets where he wants to go. Eventually.

  No, what troubled me wasn't the risk: as I've already said, it was the boredom. The stasis. The utter inexorable inescapable solitude. The mind going clickety-clack while the body rests in metabolic slowdown. The clamor of your thoughts. No one to talk to but yourself as the random search of the space-time lattice goes on and on and you wait for the shunt that will bring you out on an inhabited world reasonably close to the one you intended to reach. A starship's wink-jump is fast. Relay isn't. You dangle out there and you wait. And you wait.

  I am, God knows, enormously fond of my own company. I can amuse myself thoroughly and consistently. All the same, enough can sometimes be enough, and maybe even a little more than that.

  What the hell. Nobody had forced me to go creeping around in remote worlds that didn't have regular starship service. Of my own free will had I chosen to go to Mulano. Now, of my own free will-more or less-did I choose to return, and the only way to get back was by relay-sweep, and so be it. I would simply be patient until my patience was exhausted, and then I would find some more patience somewhere.

  As it happened, I was lucky this time.

  I braced myself for the long haul and muttered a bahtalo drom for myself, and off I went. I took a deep breath as the stars winked out all around me and I dropped into auxiliary space. And in that gray dreary nowhereness I sang and told myself jokes and laughed loud enough to bend the walls of my sphere. I recited the whole Rom Swatura from beginning to end, the entire ancient chronicle starting with the departure from Romany Star and running through all that had followed it; and when I ran out of that I dreamed up a fanciful continuation of it that stretched over the next ten thousand years that are to come. I made a poem out of the names of all the Kings of the Rom spelled backwards. I drew up lists of all the other kings and emperors I could think of out of Earth history. I made a list of every woman whose breasts had ever felt the touch of my hands. Oh, yes, I passed the time.