Star of Gypsies

  "Wrong? Why?"

  "Because no warning was ever given. If it had been meant for there to be a warning, we would have received it, and none of this would have happened."

  "But that's exactly it! If she had managed it she could have changed everything!"

  "Nothing can ever be changed," said Loiza la Vakako.

  There it was again: the fatalism of the Rom, the cool acceptance of what is as what must be. As though it is all written imperishably in the book of time and for all our power of ghosting we dare not try to alter it. A streak of that fatalism runs through our souls like dark oil on the breast of shining water. A thousand times a day I thought of slipping away myself to the hour before the banquet and giving the warning that would save Malilini; but each time I looked toward Loiza la Vakako I came up against his steely acceptance of what had happened, and I didn't dare. No warning could be given because none had been received. As Malilini had said in a happier moment long before, "There is never any in the first place." Everything is circular and everything is fixed. There is no such thing as prophecy: there is only the giving of reports on the known facts of the future, which is as sealed and unchangeable as the past. When I came to do more ghosting myself I would understand that more clearly. That there is a law-call it a moral law; no monarch ever put it on the lawbooks-that we must not use our power to change the past, lest we tumble everything into chaos. Loiza la Vakako meant to live by that law even though it cost him his daughter and his domain. By daring to break the law that must never be broken Malilini had condemned herself and no one now could save her. I had to abide by that. But inside myself I was screaming against the madness of it, telling myself over and over that it still was possible to save Malilini and to spare Loiza la Vakako from overthrow, if only Loiza la Vakako would permit it. And that he would never do. Why, he seemed almost to be blaming her for her own death!

  I waited now for mine. But the days passed and we were left to ourselves, thrown a little food now and then but otherwise ignored. We grew filthy and sour-breathed and our teeth felt as if they were coming loose. I could not believe how far we had fallen. I wondered what depths still gaped for us.

  Loiza la Vakako's serenity never faltered. I asked him how he remained so tranquil in the face of such grief and he shrugged, and said that everything was part of God's plan: who was he to debate strategy with the Master of All? It is God who orders events and we who obey, no matter how strange or wrong or even evil the shape of those events may seem to us.

  I tried to accept his wisdom and make it part of me. But my despair was too great. I could abide the loss of the comforts that my life on Nabomba Zom had brought. Those things had come to me by pranks of fate; I could accept their departure in the same way. But what kind of God was it who let brother cast down brother? How did it serve the welfare of this world to put the tyrant Pulika Boshengro in the place of the wise Loiza la Vakako? And most bitter of all to me-who could justify the slaying of Malilini? To cast such beauty from the world so soon-no. No. No. No.

  Sometimes ghosts came to me as I lay sobbing to myself. They never spoke, but they would hold out their hands to me in gestures of consolation, or smile, or even wink. One who came was the one who I now knew to be my future self, robust and hearty and overflowing with laughter. He was the one who winked. So I understood that I was not going to die in this place. And I saw also, from his wink, that my sense of heavy tragic gloom was one day going to lift, that I would laugh and know joy again. Inconceivable though that was to me in my despondency.

  What was happening during all these days or weeks of captivity was that Pulika Boshengro was negotiating our enslavement. He meant to scatter the family of Loiza la Vakako to the far corners of the sky.

  "All right, come out of there, you two," our jailer told us finally, and we crept forth into the great blue blaze of day.

  I had been sold to a place called Alta Hannalanna, which I had never heard of. Loiza la Vakako's lips quirked ever so slightly when I told him, as if he had to struggle to hold back from me the truth of how dreadful a place that was. He himself was to go to Gran Chingada: again, a world unknown to me. I asked him about it and he said only, with a barely perceptible toss of his head, "They have great forests there, extraordinary trees. Wood from Gran Chingada draws a high price wherever it is sold." Only later did I learn what sort of conditions prevailed in the terrifying forests of that prehistoric world: the men in the logging camps were lucky to last eighteen months on Gran Chingada, where the grass itself would eat you alive if you gave it half a chance. Where vampire lizards the size of your hand came springing up out of scarlet flowers and went straight for your throat. Loiza la Vakako was being sent to his death. And so, I suspected, was I, despite the visits of my ghosts. But Loiza la Vakako would not tell me anything at all of Alta Hannalanna.

  In those days there was no imperial starship service from Nabomba Zom to Alta Hannalanna, or to Gran Chingada. And so I discovered for the first time what it was like to travel by relay-sweep. Loiza la Vakako and I were marched out and trussed up and journey-helmets were clapped over us and our coordinates were set for us, so that we would be caught and thrown out into space toward the worlds of our slavery.

  He was calm to the last. "Think of it as part of your education, Yakoub," he advised me. "Think of everything as part of your education."

  And he smiled and blew a kiss to me, and they closed him into his sphere of force. I never saw that great man again, except once, long afterward. My turn came next. I stood there alone in midday sun, half blinded by the glare, not knowing in any way what was about to befall me and trying to tell myself that it was all for the best, that all of this was, as Loiza la Vakako said, simply part of my education. But I was frightened. I would be lying most wickedly if I tried to tell you I was not frightened. I had my whole life still ahead of me and I knew that if I didn't die in this abominable jaunt through space I would surely perish young on Alta Hannalanna, which made me angry but which also filled me with dread. It wasn't being dead that frightened me, but the moments just before dying, when I would lie there knowing that my life was being taken away from me before it had really begun. I did manage to keep my bowels under control, at least; not everyone would have managed that. I waited a long while in terrible fear and then I was yanked aloft and the world vanished about me. I muttered a spell of protection for myself, though I didn't place much faith in its power just then. And I went whirling away into God knows where on my way toward slavery on Alta Hannalanna.

  Now, something like a hundred fifty years later, I found myself again and again thinking back to that first relay-sweep journey. How miserable I had been, how terrified, how altogether absurd. But I was very young then and I hadn't yet come to see the world the way a wise man like Loiza la Vakako did. Indeed it is all part of your education, everything. You are never taught anything by hiding in the dark and sucking on your thumb. It is in the water, and only in the water, that you learn how to swim.

  Once more now was I flying across the void toward unknown adventures and an unknown fate. But by this time I had already had my education, and I was prepared for whatever would come. And so I sang and laughed and let the time glide by, in my journey back to the Empire from frosty Mulano, until I heard the whistling in my ears that told me that final shunt had been achieved and I was about to make my re-entry into the universe of men.

  3.

  XAMUR.

  I knew at once that that must be where I had landed.

  There's a moment of serious disorientation when you come out of relay, when your mind feels like it's been turned inside out like a hungry starfish's stomach and you can't tell your fingers from your ears. It lasts anywhere from fifteen seconds to fifteen minutes, depending on the resilience of your nervous system, and while it's going on it feels not tremendously different from the sensations you sometimes feel at the beginning of a ghosting. I went through all that now. This time it lasted about half a minute, for me. But that half minute was enough to
tell me that I was on Xamur. More than enough. I knew right away, by the fragrance of the air. By one sweet wondrous whiff of it.

  Xamur is listed among the nine kingly planets, but it really deserves some sort of higher designation, though I can't immediately think of one. Godly is a little too strong, maybe. But you get my drift. The place is simply paradise. It is a land of milk and honey and even better things.

  The air is perfume-I don't mean the air is like perfume, it is perfume -and the sea might just as well be wine, because a sip of it will make you smile and five sips make you euphoric and a dozen good gulps will lay you out with a case of terminal giggles. The sky is a deep rich blue-green boldly streaked with red and yellow, a fantastic array of colors, and the atmosphere has some electric property that gives everything a shimmering halo, a dreamlike aurora. Under that dazzling sky the landscape is serene and orderly and perfect, almost maddeningly restful, every tree placed just so, every brook, every hill. It's all so beautiful you could cry: you stare at it and you feel that beauty in your heart, your belly, your balls. I can't tell you who made the worlds of this universe, but I do know this: that He must have made Xamur last, because all the other planets were the rough drafts and Xamur was plainly His final revised and edited statement on the subject.

  Landing there was a delicious stroke of luck. You can't expect seven decimal accuracy when you travel by relay-sweep, and in dialing up my destination coordinates when I left Mulano I had specified that any of the nine kingly planets would do. Except Galgala, that is. Galgala was in my son Shandor's control, I assumed, and it didn't seem wise for me to walk right into his headquarters alone and undefended before I knew what was going on. Later on I would do exactly that, of course; but that was later on. Right now any of the other kingly planets would have been an acceptable base of operations for me: Iriarte, say, or my cousin Damiano's Marajo, or even wandering Zimbalou. If I could have picked one, though, Xamur is the one I would have picked. And now I had it. And it had me.

  I stood there in that first dizzy moment breathing in the perfume and staring at the swirling colors of the sky and looking across the way at the green and glorious towers of the city of Ashen Devlesa, whose name means "May you remain with God" in Romany. And I felt myself being grabbed by an invisible force and swept into the air. I went soaring across the countryside in a wild swooping ride that ended when I was dumped down like a sack of onions in an open-roofed courtyard.

  I picked myself up, blinking and grumbling, and looked around. Towering columns of speckled blue stone walled me in on all sides.

  "All right, where the hell am I?" I asked the sky.

  And the sky answered me. The sound of my voice activated some sort of responder device and out of mid-air came pleasant synthetic female tones telling me, first in Imperial and then in Romany, "You are in the Ashen Devlesa holding tank of the Imperial Xamur Department of Immigration."

  "You mean I'm a prisoner?"

  A long itchy silence. What were they doing, looking up "prisoner" in the dictionary?

  I breathed perfumed air, in-out, in-out, making little hormonal adjustments to keep myself calm. Vague hissing and buzzing sounds came from overhead.

  Then, finally: "You are not a prisoner. You are in detention. You are awaiting normal clearance procedures."

  Oh.

  That was annoying, sure. But not really surprising. Or very threatening, really. This was just bureaucratic bullshit: I knew how to deal with that. I felt myself easing.

  When you land on a non-imperial world like Mulano you are of course completely on your own from the moment you drop from your force-field. But if the sweep puts you down anywhere in the Imperium, your arrival is a matter of record once the immigration scanner of the planet where you are arriving detects your signal, which is usually six to twelve hours before your landing. So there had been plenty of time for Xamur Immigration to get a fix on me and grab me with a tractor beam the instant my sweep-tendril released me. A routine pickup of an unscheduled arrivee from God knew where.

  "So?" I said. "Let's get on with it, then. Bring on your normal procedures. You think I came to Xamur to stand around in here and admire the architecture of your holding tank?"

  Almost at once someone official-looking poked his nose between two of the stone columns. He looked at me and made a little gleeping sound and went away, and came back with another of his kind. They gleeped and gobbled and honked at each other some more and went back outside for further reinforcements. In a matter of moments half a dozen people in the uniforms of the Imperial Xamur Department of Immigration were staring at me in total wonder and disbelief.

  They couldn't have been much more flabbergasted, I guess, if they had reeled in the Emperor Napoleon, or Mohammed, or the Queen of the Betelgeuse Confederacy.

  They knew right away who I was, of course. Not only by the face, the eyes, the mustachios. Before setting out from Mulano I had taken the trouble to don my seal of office, which I hadn't worn in maybe ten or fifteen years. Now great pulsing heroic splashes of light were cannoning off my brow in that flamboyant gaudy way which is at once so overwhelming and so absurd. It was like a broadcast going out on every wavelength of the spectrum at once, hammering in the news: KING-KING-KING-KING. I might just as well have come out of the relay-sweep wearing a crown of gold and emeralds and rubies half a meter high.

  Two or three of the Immigration people were Rom. They were down on their knees in a flash, making the signs of respect and muttering my name. The Gaje ones did no such thing, naturally. But they were plainly taken aback, and they stood there gaping, goggling, twitching, and yawping.

  I knew what they were thinking, too. They were thinking, This sly old bastard has turned up without warning, without bothering to trouble himself about using diplomatic channels at all. We can't send him away without touching off a terrific uprising among his followers, but we can't admit him without dragging Xamur into whatever enormous Rom power-struggle the old bastard's return is probably going to touch off, and no matter which way we go we are very likely to lose our jobs over this. Or thoughts to that effect.

  I switched off my seal of office. It was blinding everybody in the holding tank. To the Rom who were groveling at my feet I said in Romany, "Get up, you idiots. I'm only your king, not God Almighty." To the others, those miserable terrified Gaje civil servants, I said in a more kindly way, "I'm not here on a visit of state or on any sort of political mission. I've come here purely as a private citizen who owns property on this world."

  "But you are King Yakoub?" one of them stammered.

  "Certainly I am."

  "I don't think we have a protocol on former kings," said one of the others nervously, and brought up something on a screen that was just out of my direct line of sight. "Officials to notify, appropriate municipal response, parades, light-spikes, sky-banners, display of regalia, pyrotechnic celebrations-no, there's nothing here that covers any such-"

  "I'm not a former king," I said quietly.

  The Gaje officials looked at me in bewilderment and the Rom officials looked at me in horror.

  One of the Rom said, "Sir, the covenant of abdication-"

  "Don't worry yourself about it, child. Whatever stories about me that you may have heard coming out of Galgala were highly inaccurate."

  One of the Gaje-he seemed to be the highest ranking of the bunch-made a frantic gesture and something else came sliding up on the screen. This time I moved around and got a squint at it. It was the table of reception protocol for a royal visit.

  "You are still king, then?"

  "When did I say that?"

  They looked more baffled than ever.

  But I wasn't ready to take up the issue of whether I was or was not still king just now. Especially not in a holding tank in front of a bunch of Immigration Department flunkeys. Let them puzzle over it, I thought. He denies being a former king-but he doesn't directly assert that he's the present king-but on the other hand-and furthermore-nevertheless-contrariwise… Yes, let t
hem stew.

  "The question of the kingship is neither here nor there." I said airily. "I just told you: this is a private visit for me. I'm here to inspect my estates at Kamaviben and nothing more. I don't want there to be any fuss made over me." And gave them my most regal glare. "Is that understood?"

  4,

  BUT I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER. OF COURSE THERE was fuss, and plenty of it.

  Bureaucrats! Accursed paper-shuffling functionaries! Pettifogging little tenth-echelon panjandrums! I'd sooner have the honest refreshing company of a herd of salizonga snails any day.

  In general I am not the sort of person whom anyone is likely to call naive. Not at my age. But I would have to agree that I was being naive, and then some, to have entertained the fantasy that they might have just let me walk out of that holding tank without any sort of complication. There was no way that the King of the Gypsies whether incumbent or retired was going to enter Xamur or any other kingly world in secrecy and privacy, no matter how much blustering and storming he did. That I understood. But I did imagine that they would admit me with a minimum of pomp and circumstance, if that was what I seemed to want.

  I was wrong.

  Kings and even ex-kings may have vast power over this and that, but when it comes to matters of protocol the bureaucrats always get the last word. In this case I had the Rom immigration people to blame as much as the Gaje, or more so. The Rom saw their king-or their ex-king, whichever I was-coming to town unexpectedly and they felt it absolutely incumbent upon themselves to cry hallelujah over me so that I would be properly covered with the appropriate glory.

  Therefore they passed the news of my arrival up to the highest levels of the Xamur imperial administration and inevitably from that point on there was no halting the avalanche-like force of the bureaucracy as it swung eagerly into full action. You can't expect governmental functionaries to carry out any sort of useful activities, naturally-the whole concept is practically a contradiction in terms-but give them something meaningless like an official welcome to organize and it's their finest hour. It was all that I could do to head off a full-scale parade along the shining ramparts of Ashen Devlesa. But I did have to go through an interminable reception at the capital, a grand pyrotechnikon that lit up the skies over four continents, a noisy and crashingly boring concert by the Xamur Symphony, and a banquet so ridiculously inept in its overelaboration that it would have sent Julien de Gramont off weeping to light a candle to the memory of Escoffier.