Star of Gypsies

  I never would have accepted that word for him. I was still blinded by my love for him. I knew he was bad, but I told myself it was just boyish mischief. He would change. He laughed at me to my face, and I told myself he would change. I struck him, because I had to, and still he laughed. I actually admired him for that. How strong he is, I thought, how unafraid even of his own father. But he will be a good boy one of these days. I would not see the rottenness that ran through him from front to back. By the time I understood what he was like, it was too late for me even to try to do much about it. And then I lost all further opportunity to do anything about Shandor; for history repeated itself, as it seems to try to do whenever you look the other way for a moment. Bankruptcy, family breakup, exile, the loss of the woman I loved, the separation of a father and his children: I got all those things all over again, as if I hadn't managed to learn the full lesson from them the first time around. None of what happened was particularly my fault. So what? When the time comes for you to bear the brunt, fate doesn't give a crap who is at fault.

  What happened was that Esmeralda's family sold one phonied-up planet too many. This was a place called Varuna in the solar system of a star known as Corposanto, somewhere out by Jerusalem Spill. Esmeralda's people really did a job on this one. It was a planet so miserable that the rivers ran salt water and the butterflies had poisonous stings. But they redecorated it inside and out, magically transforming it until it was the prettiest thing this side of Xamur, and sold it for an enormous sum to a bunch of eager hotshot Gaje developers who were going to subdivide it into incredibly costly estates for lords of the Imperium.

  There must have been really dizzying overconfidence involved in this deal all around. Not only did the buyers pay us a spectacular amount for Varuna, but when they made their own arrangements with the imperial purchasers they worked out low-and-slow payment schedules, in accordance with the age-old tradition that you should always give aristocrats favorable terms, far better than you would give ordinary people. They are flattered by the apparent subservience implied in your generosity and they don't mind being flagrantly overcharged, so long as they don't have to pay the bill right now.

  Then the various fraudulations that had been performed on Varuna began to unravel ahead of schedule and the planet reverted to its original deplorable state much sooner than we were figuring on. The developers had not yet realized any income on their resale deals and the lords of the Imperium canceled their purchases in droves. When the developers came around to Iriarte to get their own money back, Esmeralda's people waved the bill of sale in their faces. See, here, clause 22A, they said. We assume no responsibility for environmental changes after the transfer of title. The developers protested that they were going to go bankrupt. Esmeralda's people offered their sympathy, as they had done on various such occasions in the past, and then they shrugged and went about their business. They figured the Gaje developers would take them to court, which would not have been the first time, and the Gaje would lose their case-see, here, clause 22A-and that would be that. Tough shit, greedy Gaje.

  But instead of going to court, the Gaje developers simply hired an army of mercenaries and invaded Iriarte. That must have seemed like a more productive tactic than trying to sue. I was off on a year-long expedition when it happened. When I got back I discovered that the kumpania of Esmeralda's people had been totally wiped out, their assets and lands confiscated by force, many of the members of the family killed and the survivors scattered in every direction. Esmeralda and all our children had been on Iriarte when the army landed. Where were they now? A shrug. We think they are dead, I was told. Yes. Yes, all dead.

  I went away in despair and I was a long time recovering. All I had left was my place on Xamur. I hid there for a while and then I did some traveling. I made attempts to locate Esmeralda and the children, but nothing came of them. After a time I married again, and then yet again. They weren't good marriages, but they were marriages. I wasn't meant to live alone. There were other children, many of them. My first family began to fade from my mind; the wound healed.

  In the end I did find Jacko Bakht living under another name at the Capital, earning a meager livelihood running pathetic minor scams at the expense of the less perceptive imperial princes, and he confirmed that Esmeralda had indeed perished when the first implosion bombs went off. My children? They had died too. Jacko Bakht seemed like a dead man himself. I left him by himself and I didn't see him again. I suppose he was telling the truth, because though I made some further inquiries I never heard anything more about any of them, Esmeralda, the children. Nobody ever vanishes completely, in this galaxy, unless he's dead. So they must really all be dead, as Jacko Bakht had said.

  All but one, that is.

  By some monstrous malfunction of karmic justice Shandor had survived the cataclysm of our family. Twelve years old, and cunning as ice. It was years later that I began hearing stories about a daredevil star-pilot, Shandor by name. He was Rom, of course, although he seemed to be mixed up with a lot of glamorous and celebrated women and they were always Gaje women. That's a bad sign right there, a Rom who fools with Gaje women. The stories they told about him were horrifying stories but I didn't pay close attention. I had begun to forget my firstborn son. It didn't occur to me that this man Shandor could be my Shandor. The stories kept cropping up, though. Shandor this, Shandor that, this lunatic pilot who did things that anyone else would have been severely punished for. Somehow he never was. People seemed only to admire him for what he did. As I had admired him for laughing in his own father's face when I tried to discipline him. In his boldness, in his ruthlessness, this Shandor made a habit of taking unacceptable risks, and on one occasion-the infamous Djebel Abdullah affair-he had actually lost an entire starship, causing it to be wrecked on one of the nastiest planets known. He denied any negligence. Worse, there were monstrous charges that there had been cannibalism among the survivors and that he, as the senior surviving officer, had not only condoned but even had organized that. He denied that too.

  Now it came to my attention that this man was named Shandor, son of Yakoub and that he had been born on Xamur. I was stunned. I tried to reject the whole idea. But there could be no coincidence in that, Shandor son of Yakoub. I remembered the red-faced babe screaming and biting Esmeralda's breast. I held high posts in our government now-Cesaro o Nano was getting old and sick and they were beginning to talk of me as the next king, though I discouraged the mere thought-and the deeds of this Shandor were hard to hide from, and after a time I had to acknowledge that he was my son. It was a great shame to me, though all my friends stood by me when he was brought before the kris and charged with the crimes of Djebel Abdullah. And found guilty and expelled from our nation. Although even there he managed to exonerate himself somehow, later on. I don't know how. He was charming, I suppose. Or just wicked. I had as little to do with him as possible. And he with me. It is the only good thing I can say for him. At least he kept far out of my way, when I was king.

  9.

  THE DUNGEON THAT SHANDOR PUT ME IN WAS ABOUT what I would have expected from him. I hadn't forgotten it was there and I was entirely unsurprised that he had chosen it to keep me in. It was the species of dungeon known in the dungeon trade as an oubliette, the name of which comes from Julien de Gramont's lost and beloved France and is derived from the verb oublier, which means "to forget." That is, an oubliette is a hole where you dump a prisoner that you want to forget about.

  This particular oubliette was six or seven levels down below the ground, deep in the dark bowels of the royal house of power. It isn't one of the building's famous features. Not something that they show you when they take you on the guided tours. I had been king myself for ten or twenty years before I discovered it one day while I was wandering around in the lower levels trying to find one of the archive chambers. But then, by its very nature an oubliette isn't supposed to be conspicuous.

  Since the whole concept of dungeons and oubliettes sounds medieval as hell, you may b
e wondering how it came to pass that such up-to-date people as we modern high-tech stargoing Rom happened to include one in our royal headquarters. The answer is that I don't know; and the secondary answer is that we are not as modern and high-tech and up-to-date as some of us like to pretend we are. In fact we really are medieval types, when you come right down to it. We live by all sorts of traditions thousands of years old. We are tribal. We have kings. We cast spells. We say ancient prayers in an ancient language. We sing out loud when something moves us and we are not too shy to dance on the tops of tables in the fine old uninhibited manner at our tribal celebrations. We believe in things like duty and family and the sanctity of oaths. We are a people of fierce loyalties and strong passions. In short, we are absolutely medieval, triumphantly medieval. Even me. Even you, for all your modernist pretensions. Why not have a dungeon or two? You never can tell when a dungeon might be useful, even in this modern era. Especially in this modern era.

  I settled into mine as though it was the finest hotel suite on any of the kingly worlds. It felt almost like coming back to an old, familiar nest. The very first time I had laid eyes on it, decades earlier, it had seemed that way. I had known right away, all the way back then, that this dungeon was going to be my home one day. A presentiment. A little leap, not unusual among us, across the boundaries of time. So when I found myself at long last taking possession of the premises it was with a sense of closing a transaction that had been carried on the books unfinished for a long time.

  Not that my dungeon was a great place to live. Dungeons rarely are. This one was about two and a half inches above the water table, and appropriately moist and clammy. An underground stream runs below the king's house on Galgala. The oubliette had its feet right in it. A slick little trickle of water ran across the stone floor at the lower end of the room. Even in the dimness the water had a nice shimmer to it. It was shot through with dissolved gold, like everything else on Galgala. The very walls of my little prison cell were full of gold. I suppose that if this were medieval Earth instead of fantastic futuristic Galgala I might have been able to bribe my way out of the dungeon after spending thirty years or so extracting the gold from the walls by the heat of my candle, or something like that. But this was, after all, fantastic futuristic Galgala where gold is everywhere, and my guards were no more likely to be bought with the pretty yellow metal than they would be with a cupful of air.

  Shandor had promised me snakes and riptoads as my companions down there. He didn't deliver on the riptoads, which was just as well. They have unpleasant little barbed teeth and they make nasty roommates. But I did get a family of snakes, as promised. They were slender and green with large golden eyes-the Galgala touch-and they lived in a niche in the wall, coming out now and then to glide around. They didn't look dangerous or even unfriendly, though I suspect that the rats who lived in the passageways behind the walls thought otherwise about them. Once in a while one of my snakes would show up with a rat-shaped bulge in his belly. The rats, in fact, which Shandor hadn't threatened me with, were a considerable nuisance. They had six little jointed legs like some sort of crustacean and beady little black eyes and nasty luminous needle-shaped teeth that gleamed blue-violet in the dark. Occasionally one would go scuttering across me while I was trying to sleep, and I would open an eye to see that hideous tiny glow piercing the blackness. I figured that if I was friendly enough to the snakes, they would discourage the rats from coming around, and that worked pretty well most of the time. I stroked and tickled them, offered them bits of my dinner, told them tales out of the Swatura, sang mournful ballads to them in my most beautiful voice. Even so, my nights weren't totally rat-free and there were a few disagreeable moments.

  I also had insects of assorted shapes and sizes and something that I think was an ambulatory slime mold and what may have been giant protozoa that ran in furious circles over the walls and sometimes over me. I have marvelous vision but I could barely see them, and sometimes I thought I was imagining them. And sometimes not. They were transparent, with wheel-like limbs. They made me sneeze. I didn't imagine the sneezing.

  Food came something like twice a day-it was hard to reckon the passing of time, there being no windows-brought by robot jailers who never said a word, just slipped the tray through the slot in the door. It was not outstanding food. On the other hand, I didn't starve. That's the best I can say for it: I didn't starve. Later on in my imprisonment the quality of the food improved considerably, as I will shortly describe.

  I wasn't tortured. No racks, no thumbscrews, no visits from threatening inquisitors. No visits from anyone at all, in fact. Maybe that was supposed to be my torture. I am nothing if not a sociable man. Of course I had my snakes to talk to, and even the bugs and the slime mold, if I got really lonely. There was also the option of ghosting around, which Shandor was powerless to prevent. I did a lot of that. I spent as much time out ghosting as I did in my cell. That helped.

  Chorian, I assumed, had gotten himself off Galgala as soon as he realized that I wasn't going to return from my interview with Shandor. He knew that I was most probably going to be detained, and I had made him swear a terrible oath to keep him from launching any crazy rescue schemes. "I have come here to get myself imprisoned," I told him. "Not to get myself killed, or to get you killed. Your job is to get out of here and spread the word that the vile usurper Shandor has incarcerated his father Yakoub, the dearly beloved Rom king. I want everyone in the Imperium to know what the bastard has done. Do you understand me, Chorian?"

  Chorian understood, all right. Unfortunately, he didn't succeed in getting away from Galgala to spread the word, because Shandor had been keeping tabs on him, and Shandor had other dungeon cells available. This I discovered much later, and it explained why the public reaction to my jailing was so slow to build. Sooner or later, of course, Polarca and Damiano and the others realized what had happened to us both, and they started to get the news around. But it took time.

  Well, I had time. But even I can get impatient eventually.

  10.

  ONCE LONG AGO I FOUND MYSELF LIVING ON DUUD Shabeel, which is a fairly backward place populated by a curious colony of strange religious fanatics. An anthropologist surely would find their habits of self-flagellation and, indeed, self-mutilation altogether fascinating, but to me they seemed more sickening than anything else. On the other hand, they are wondrous craftsmen and their weavings are in great demand throughout the galaxy, which is what I was doing there. For the sake of filthy profit I spent two or three years among them, building up a stock of their merchandise to sell on Marajo and Galgala and Xamur.

  After a time I could no longer stand living in their city and watching them go through their rituals of torment and austerity. I left my partner in charge of our trading post and went off to live for a few months by myself in the vast desert that lies to the west of the habitable zone on Duud Shabeel. And there I witnessed a remarkable thing.

  There is in that desert a small amphibian whose scientific name I do not know, but which the Duud Shabeel folk call a mudpuppy. It is a blue-green creature with radiant fluorescent red speckles, about the length of a man's hand, that stands upright on sturdy little legs and a long thick tail. It has a large mouth and four bulging eyes at the very top of its head.

  Since mud is something infrequently encountered in a desert, and this desert was even more bleak and parched than deserts normally are, you may be wondering why this creature is called a mudpuppy. Sandpuppy might be more accurate. There is a reason. The mudpuppy spends almost its entire existence burrowed deep down in the desert sand, far below the scorching heat of Duud Shabeel's remorseless sun. It lies asleep in its tunnel, scarcely even breathing. Once every five years-or ten, or twenty-rain comes to that desert. Sometimes it is the merest light shower, but more often, when it rains there at all, it rains a deluge. Trickles of water make their way between the grains of sand and awaken the mudpuppies. Hastily they begin to dig toward the surface. If they are lucky, they emerge while it is sti
ll raining. The torrential downpour turns the sand to mud and creates short-lived ponds and pools in the low-lying places. In a single frenzied night of mating the mudpuppies dance wildly around, choose their partners, and copulate desperately until dawn. The males die at the break of day; the females lay their eggs in the pools and ponds and then they die too. Forty-eight hours later the tadpoles begin to hatch.

  The childhoods of these creatures last about two weeks. That is all they can possibly get, for after the rain comes the heat again, and the desert begins to dry. Within a couple of weeks the little ponds and pools have vanished. The tadpoles, if they have reached maturity before that happens, hastily begin burrowing into the sand, digging themselves down far below the surface. There they rest, slumbering, dormant, until the next time it rains, years hence, when it will be their turn to arise and dance and mate and die.

  It rained while I was living in the desert of Duud Shabeel. I watched the mudpuppies emerge, I saw them do their dance. And I wondered: What is the virtue of such a life? What merit is there in sleeping under the sand for years and years in order to have a single night of joy? What purpose can there be in it? These poor creatures are victims of nature's blind impulse toward self-perpetuation. The only purpose they serve is to create the next generation, whose sole purpose it will be to create the next.

  And then I thought, Is it not the same with us? Are not we just a more elaborate kind of mudpuppy, arising and going through our little mating dance and dying so that our places can be taken by those who follow after?