Star of Gypsies

  Glowering, fuming, I took a couple of steps toward him.

  "You pig, Shandor. You unmentionable stench. You loathsome offense in the eyes of God."

  He looked really troubled. He didn't have any idea what I was likely to do.

  "Keep back-"

  "You need a lesson."

  "I warn you-"

  "Discipline, that's what you need." I brought my arm swooping up on a sharp curve and slapped him hard in the face. My hand left red marks on his cheek. He stared at me, amazed. Utterly astounded.

  "I don't believe this. Laying hands on God's anointed-"

  "You wish," I said. I slapped him again. This time his lower lip, the fat one, started to bleed.

  "Guards!" he yelled.

  Alarms were going off all over the room. Just like Shandor to have filled the room with all these alarm systems, too. In his own house of power, cowering with fear, hiding behind electronic nonsense.

  "Guards. Guards."

  They came running, and paused, panting, baffled, looking at us. Shandor waved his arms wildly. He was crazy with rage. Suddenly he was six years old again and Daddy was beating the shit out of him, and he couldn't stand it.

  "Grab him! Take him out of here! Lock him up! Put him in chains! Throw him in the bottom dungeon! The one with the snakes! With the riptoads!"

  "I am your anointed king," I said calmly.

  They were paralyzed. They didn't know what to do. Afraid to touch me, afraid to disobey Shandor. They gaped like fools. There was a long ugly moment of absolute stillness. I felt a certain sympathy for them. In the end Shandor had to call for his robots, and they had no compunction at all about dragging me out of the room. Down to the bottom dungeon, yes, the foulest and smelliest hole on the entire planet. I was in for it now. I was really going to suffer, that was absolutely certain. At my age. After all that I had achieved. Well, I was pretty sure I could take it. I wouldn't be the first wise and venerable old relic to get himself locked up and tormented in the name of some high cause. And in fact that was precisely what I had come here to accomplish. All I hoped was that I hadn't underestimated Shandor's ferocity and overestimated his political savvy. I had really pushed his buttons just now; he might really make me suffer for it, regardless of the cost to himself. He might even have me killed.

  Ah, well. Even that would be worth it, in the long run. Or so I told myself.

  The last thing I heard as they took me away was Shandor, starting to sound as though he was getting control of himself again, saying in a venomous voice, "I'll fix you, old man! I'll have you brainburned! I'll have you disconnected! When I get through with you you'll be too stupid to drool! Be sure you put him in chains. Tight ones."

  In chains, no less.

  You might think that your own first-born son might show more respect for you. But then again, this was Shandor. He was always a bastard, my son Shandor.

  8.

  BY THE TIME SHANDOR WAS BORN I WAS ALREADY seventy, eighty years old or even more, what used to be considered a full long life. And he was my first son, remember. But of course people live a lot longer than they used to and it's considered a little gauche to start your family too young, even if you like kids, which I suppose I do.

  Even for the modern era I was late in getting married, though. That wasn't my fault. I would gladly have settled down on Nabomba Zom with Malilini when I was only in my twenties, but as you know marrying Malilini wasn't in my cards. After that came the small detour of Alta Hannalanna, and when I had made my escape from that particular holiday camp I needed a few years to relax and enjoy life a little, which I did, though I'm damned if I can tell you where I spent those years, or who with. Anyone is entitled to lose a few years in simple amusements after he's had an experience like Alta Hannalanna. Somewhere along the way I realized I needed to earn a living, and, since knife-grinding and horse-trading no longer hold much glamor for a promising Gypsy lad, I took up the trade of starship-piloting instead. I knew I had the gift; I had never had any doubt of that.

  But a pilot, being even more of a traveling man than your usual Gypsy, generally doesn't tend to establish really sound marital arrangements. He-or she, if that is what she happens to be-simply moves around too much. In my case I went into the service of one of the exploration companies, which meant I was out there on the remote reaches most of the time, finding planets that no one had ever visited before. Doing that gives you a good sense of the diversity of geography in our universe but you don't meet a lot of nice girls in those places. Then, too, my career as a jump-room jockey was interrupted for a while by the minor matter of my third tour in slavery, the unfortunate Mentiroso episode, out of which came my enduring friendship with Polarca but which was not otherwise a real joy. So it was a considerable time before I finally took a wife and set about the task of replicating my invaluable genetic heritage.

  Her name was Esmeralda, a fine old Gypsy name if there ever was one. I didn't pick her. She picked me, or to be more precise her family did, her brothers and cousins. The reason why they picked me apparently was that they knew I was the one who was going to marry Esmeralda, so they had to find me and make sure that I did it. It was one of those typical upside-down inside-out deals that ghosting brings about, where causes and effects get all tangled up, past and future all come out of the same stew-pot in the same dip of the ladle, and there never really is any clear sense of the beginnings of things. You go along and you go along and suddenly you realize that you're already hip deep in a complicated situation that you didn't even know existed.

  Esmeralda was all right. I didn't love her at first-how could I? I didn't even know her-but I think I came to. Or at least to feel fond of her. So long ago I have trouble remembering. Certain things I remember in absolute detail down to the last syllable, others get a little blurry.

  The way she looked, for instance. A fine-looking woman, that's what I remember, but I have some difficulty about the details. A big woman, yes, long strong legs and powerful hips, child-bearing hips. Dark sparkling eyes, lustrous hair. About her other features, the nose and lips and chin, I'm not so sure. I think she was pretty. She gained weight after a time, mostly from the waist down: it anchored her, it was a kind of ballast. Didn't have to put it on, could have taken the treatment, but she didn't care. I think she liked being heavy. Might have been a tradition in her family, the women being heavy.

  She was an Iriarte woman. That's a good world, Iriarte. I have always liked spending time there. It has a small yellow sun very much like the one that Earth used to circle, and broad blue seas. A lot of Iriarte is dry and mountainous and cool, but there are splendid vineyards that produce some of the finest wine in the galaxy, and its cities have the rich, throbbing feel of life and power about them. The population is mostly Rom, and in the main a tough brawling kind of Rom, a mercantile sort of people, entrepreneurs, traders, shippers. The Rom of Iriarte are the craziest gamblers I know: they'll bet any amount on any kind of deal, and usually they don't have cause to regret it.

  Esmeralda came from a wealthy family. Not wealthy in the Loiza la Vakako sense, owning whole worlds, but wealthy enough. And in a sense they did own whole worlds, though they were uninhabited ones. They were dealers in reconditioned planets. That was a fine Rom thing to be. In the old days on Earth a lot of us were dealers in reconditioned livestock, of course. This was the same thing on a larger scale. Take an old horse with worn-out teeth and fill the crowns with tar so they look like a young horse's teeth with black centers, yes. Touch up the gray hair with ink or permanganate of potash. Make a cut above the eye and use a straw to blow air in, so the horse seems healthier. Prick him with a hedgehog just before he goes to market to make him look livelier, or put a piece of ginger in his ass so he struts like a cavalry charger. Yes, yes, good old tricks, a grand tradition, deceive the Gaje every time. What choice did we have? We had to eat. And the Gaje made it so hard for us.

  Esmeralda's people were in a similar line of work. They sent out explorers-I was one-looking for plan
ets with reasonably habitable specs, an oxygen atmosphere, a manageable gravitational pull. A reliable water supply was desirable but not always necessary. A decent climate helped. There are plenty of such worlds around, waiting to be found. Of course some of them need a little retouching before they can be sold off to developers and colony-promoters. Unfriendly native life-forms? Chase them far out of sight. Problems of chemical incompatibilities? It isn't that big a deal to make local adjustments before showing a world to potential buyers. Amazing what a few tons of nitrogen or ammonium sulphate can accomplish. Dismal scenery? Do some quick landscaping. Every planet can use some handsome new native shrubs and ground covers. Shortages of raw materials? Plant some trees, salt the ground here and there with useful minerals, set up fish hatcheries to improve the quality of the rivers and lakes. It sounds complicated but they had it all down to a science and they could polish a scruffy planet to a high gloss in an astonishingly short time. They didn't believe in carrying a big inventory: fast turnover, that was their secret. Fix it up, put it on the market, move it quickly. And start all over somewhere else.

  They offered me a job while I was visiting Iriarte. It sounded good to me and I became one of their scouts, remained one for years. My home base was on Xamur-I had already begun to buy the land that would eventually become my Kamaviben estate-but I didn't mind commuting to Iriarte to pick up my assignments. I led a number of expeditions to the outer regions and among my discoveries were such worlds as Cambaluc, Sandunga, Mengave, La Chunga, and Fulero, all of which were sold eventually by Esmeralda's family for pleasant profits. You probably haven't heard of most of them. For some reason nearly all the worlds I found turned out to be much less congenial to human colonization than they had seemed to be at the time the original explorers' reports and brokers' analyses were filed. The great exception is, of course, Fulero, which you certainly have heard of and where you probably have spent some highly pleasurable holidays. Frankly, we thought Fulero was worthless and we were happy to sell it for the pittance we got for it, but that was one case where the buyers had the last laugh, since it took only the most minor of planetary refurbishments by its new owners to transform it into the lush garden spot and delightful resort world it has become today. Well, even a Gypsy gets fooled now and then, as the saying goes. And in the long run it was very helpful to Esmeralda's people in other transactions to be able to say, "This is the most promising world we've handled since Fulero. And you know what a bargain that was."

  I'm not sure how long the family was scouting me while I was scouting for them. It may have been quite a while, since they were methodical people in their way, and they weren't going to marry off their prize daughter to any scamp. It isn't clear to me what good it would have done them to disapprove of me, since in the book of the future it was written that I had married Esmeralda, but they checked me out in great detail all the same. I was pretty slow in realizing this. Esmeralda had a great many brothers and cousins, and one of them, Jacko Bakht, looked so familiar to me at first meeting that I asked him if he had ever done time in the tunnels on Alta Hannalanna or belonged to the Guild of Beggars on Megalo Kastro. He gave me a peculiar look and said, No, no, never. Of course it was impossible: he was a lot younger than me, and not just from remakes. There was no way I could have met him before. A couple of years later I suddenly clicked on who he was. He was one of the two ghosts who had lurked around silently watching me on Megalo Kastro so often when I was a boy. The other had been Malilini. I decided it had been some kind of employment review, checking back along my time-line. It began to seem to me that I had been ghosted now and then by various other members of the family on other occasions, but I wasn't sure; of Jacko Bakht I was positive. I ghosted back to Megalo Kastro myself, one day, and saw him there with my own eyes, haunting my childish self.

  Then came the day when I was on Iriarte for reassignment and the company dispatcher, a clever bright-eyed young Gajo, said to me out of the blue, "Yakoub, have you ever thought of getting married?"

  He was very young, that dispatcher, not much more than a boy. But his manner was slick and amazingly self-assured and he carried himself like a born aristocrat. Which he was. His name was Julien de Gramont, and when you asked him where he came from he didn't say Copperfield or Olympus or the Capital or any place like that: he said France. I didn't have any idea then where France might be, but in the ninety-odd years of my subsequent acquaintance with Julien de Gramont, some of which you know about, I certainly have heard a great deal about it from him.

  It was Julien who let me know that the lovely and voluptuous Esmeralda was of marriageable age, that the family was looking for an appropriate Rom husband for her, and that I would not be treated with disdain if I were to go courting her. The notion had never even crossed my mind. She seemed far beyond me, a rich prize for some interstellar tycoon: why would they want to marry her off to an obscure space pilot with no family background at all, someone who had been born into slavery and who had managed to get himself sold three more times in his first seventy years? I didn't know and maybe they didn't know themselves; but what I came to see after a little while was that it was a done deal, that my fate had been sealed somewhere in the mysterious coils of time, that I was going to marry Esmeralda because somewhere down the line I had married her, and that was that.

  I went to Polarca and asked him what he thought I ought to do.

  He just laughed. "Is she a good lay?"

  "How would I know?"

  "And you don't stand much chance of finding out, do you?"

  "After the wedding patshiv, I do. Not before."

  "Well, let's say she isn't. She's still rich. And if she's rich and she's a good lay, you've got yourself a bonus. If not, well, you travel a lot. And you'll still be rich."

  "Oh, you Polarca," I said. "You bastard."

  "You asked me, didn't you?"

  It wasn't so bad. Esmeralda was sweet and kind and although I have trouble remembering the shape of her nose I do remember what she was like that first night, when the endless patshiv finally had ended and she and I staggered off to our marital bed. That says a great deal in her favor, that I can still remember that night, after something like a hundred years. Of course, there's more to being married than a terrific wedding night. Still, Polarca's advice was wise, as it usually was. I could have done a lot worse than marrying Esmeralda. I liked being with her. I can't say she ever really excited me in any way, but she was a warm and good person, very solid and stable, what you might call an old-fashioned kind of woman. I continued to scout for the family; I was away from home something like three quarters of the time; being married to Esmeralda was in some ways pretty much like not being married to Esmeralda, except that I was rich now. When I came home she was always glad to see me and, truth to tell, I was glad to see her. I would sink down gratefully into that big strong body of hers and she would enfold me like a sea.

  I bought more land on Xamur. Between my voyages Esmeralda and I went there often. We talked of living there all the time, on my estate, when I gave up the exploration business. As if I could ever live in one place all the time. But I thought I could, then. One time we spent close to a year there. That was when Shandor was born. I don't even have the excuse, with Shandor, of trying to pretend that he wasn't my true son, because I was with Esmeralda all during that year. Not that I think she ever fooled around while I was away, but there have been times when I would have been glad to declare myself cuckolded for the sake of not having to take the blame for Shandor's existence. Alas, alas. Gene of my genes is what that little bastard truly was and there's simply no getting away from it.

  I loved him inordinately. That's true too. See how he repaid me; but I loved him.

  He was wild from the start. A small fidgety child, always screaming and kicking and biting. I don't know where it came from, that nervousness of his. I certainly don't have it and God knows Esmeralda never did. But Shandor was always a bundle of wires.

  I didn't notice that, at first. I thought h
e was just like me, my absolute duplicate. That was because he had my eyes, my mouth, my face exactly, that classic Rom face that rides like an invincible surfer on all the wild tides of evolutionary change. I expected him to have my big mustache too by the time he was six months old. I loved him for that look of me that he had about him, I suppose. My father and all my father's fathers. Looking at my firstborn son, I came to see myself in a new way: as a link in the great chain of Rom existence that stretched across the eons from the time of Romany Star. How had I dared wait so long to forge that next link in the chain? What if I had died without playing my part in joining the past and the future? Well, now I had done it, and I was proud; and I felt grateful to Shandor for having made it possible for me to fulfill my responsibilities to the race. That was before I discovered what a louse he was.

  How did he turn out that way? Was it because I was away from home too much and Esmeralda, bless her, was too gentle, too indulgent, to discipline him in the way that any boy must be disciplined? I don't know. I think it must not have had anything to do with the way that he was raised, that there had simply been some curse on the seed that spawned him. These things happen. Whenever I was home-we lived mainly on Xamur now-he always had my fullest attention. I taught him the things my father had taught me and when it seemed necessary for me to bring him into line I brought him into line the way a father must. When I was away there were other men in the family, his uncles and cousins, to show him the right way. From Esmeralda came love and kindness, constantly. Could there have been a better mother? And yet I began to hear Shandor stories, each time I came home from the stars. I suspect the worst of them were withheld from me, but what I did hear was bad enough. The pets that he mistreated and even mutilated. His haughtiness with the servants. The damage he did to our household robots, who were not, after all, completely without feelings. His callous abuse of his playmates and, eventually, of his younger brothers and sisters. "Shandor is a problem," is the way people put it to me. Nobody seemed to have the courage to say, "Shandor is a monster."