Star of Gypsies

  "Keep on fighting!" Polarca yells. "You're going to win!"

  Sweaty men in grimy rags load the big guns and touch lights to them. Far below, the landscape erupts in flame and the Austrians scatter. The Gypsies reload. I would take a hand in it myself if I could. Reload, aim, fire. Reload, aim, fire. Polarca capers from battlement to battlement. The other Yakoubs run madly about, grinning, shouting, encouraging the fighters. We will save Ferenc Perenyi's castle from the Austrians for him, and if Perenyi never comes back the castle will be ours. Fire! Fire! The Austrians are fleeing!

  But the cannons of the castle begin to fall silent.

  "Shoot! Why don't you shoot?" Polarca screams.

  No one can understand what he says. The din of the battle blots him out. The howling of the wind, the cries of the wounded. And who would understand the Romany of a Rom of the Kingdom, anyway, here on Earth sixteen centuries in the past? But still he tries to rally the fighters.

  "Shoot! Shoot!"

  "They're out of gunpowder," I say quietly in his ear.

  So they are. The Gypsy leader stands on the battlements, shaking his fists. "You bastards!" he cries at the Austrians. That must be what he's saying. "You bastards! If we had any more powder we'd finish you off!"

  The attackers are starting to realize, now, that the firing has stopped.

  "Come on!" Polarca screams. "Bare hands! Knuckles and fists!"

  The Austrians come racing up the hill. We can do nothing against them. Here and there a rifle fires a single shot; but our powder is gone and they sweep over the rim of the castle walls. The battle is lost. The castle is lost.

  One lovely moment right at the end. The Austrian troops close in on the brave Gypsies, who are fighting to the last, clubs, knives, fists, anything. And the attackers see that there are no Hungarians here, that only Gypsies remain to defend the castle. The Austrian general appears. He makes a sweeping gesture with both his arms. And calls out. "Run, Gypsy, run as fast as you can!" There will be no attempt to take prisoners. The defeated Gypsies quickly slip away, and the Austrians let them do it, and Great Ida is lost. Only a few Rom ghosts remain. There is Polarca, far off up there. There is another Yakoub, and yet another, high in the battlements. And there? Valerian? Familiar faces everywhere. It was a glorious defeat and we have all come to see it. Some of us many times. That is what all our history is like, I suppose. One glorious defeat after another. Always defeats, alas. But always glorious.

  SIX

  A Candle Is All Flame from Tip to Tip

  Sit on the bank of a river and wait. Sooner or later the corpse of your enemy will come floating by.

  1.

  YOU UNDERSTAND THAT DUNGEON LIFE WASN'T ALL simply a lot of merry ghosting around. You can ghost only so much, and then you start getting sick of it. Up and out, far and away, enough and too much: the ectoplasmic life has its joys but eventually they can pall on you.

  Of course, life in a dungeon palls too, and faster. But it's less strenuous. Ghosting takes a lot out of you at any age. (I think it took more out of me when I was twenty than it does a hundred fifty-odd years later.) So the trick is to hold a balance between the boredom of not ghosting at all and the exhaustion of doing too much of it. That's the trick in every aspect of life. You commit this excess and then you commit that excess and everything averages out in the middle, if you're lucky. If you survive long enough you can say that you've led a nice moderate life. The theory of countervailing excesses. In the long run all forces come into balance and all extremes cancel out. This is known as the process of regression to the mean. It makes for a very happy life, in the long run. Of course, in the short run you can go out of your fucking mind.

  Nothing as drastic as that happened to me in Shandor's oubliette. I ghosted here, I ghosted there, and in the intervals between ghosting I counted the flagstones in the floor, I counted the stones making up the walls, I calculated the quantity of gold that must be scattered atom by atom through the floors and the walls, I played with my snakes, I told stories to my slime mold, I tried to catch my protozoa by their whirling tails, and when the rats came out to dance I made speeches to them in several languages and dialects.

  All in all it was much like taking a very long relay-sweep journey, but somewhat more interesting, because on a relay-sweep journey you don't get snakes and slime molds and protozoa and rats to divert you from the colossal boredom of the journey. Or anything else. On the other hand, you are on a journey, and you will eventually get somewhere. One thing that was beginning to occur to me as the hours turned into days and the days tied themselves into skeins of indeterminable length was that I might not get anywhere at all down here. This was an oubliette, after all. And what is the traditional use of an oubliette? Why, to file away and forget an inconvenient prisoner. Forever, if necessary.

  My intuition had said that it would be a useful move, politically speaking, to allow Shandor to incarcerate me. Ordinary people wouldn't think so. They would say that it's lunacy to hand yourself over to a monstrous wicked villain like Shandor. Well, of course it is. Any simpleton can see that. But I'm not a simpleton and I'm not ordinary people, and I perceive life as a chess game. The good player learns to look five or six moves ahead. Which is what I had done. And thereby had landed myself in this dismal oubliette, precisely as I expected. Now I was starting to think that I might just have outsmarted myself.

  Fortunately, I'm not given to long spells of brooding and despair. Instead I gave myself long spells of counting flagstones and making speeches to rats. And ghosting hither and yon on any number of worlds in all accessible eras. It passed the time.

  And one day Shandor paid me a visit.

  There was the usual clanking and creaking outside that told me that one of the robot jailers was bringing me the evening tray of mush and weak tea. Then I heard some unusual clanking and creaking and the front section of the wall began to slide back. Shandor stood there, glowering in at me. He was wearing a preposterous red robe and a yellow scarf, and he had the seal of office mounted on his breast, going full blast all up and down the spectrum.

  "You're too early for dinner," I said. "But sit down anyway and make yourself at home. Would you like some champagne?"

  He didn't smile. He looked tense and mean, even more so than he generally did. Pulling himself up tall in what he must have hoped was a kingly way, he stalked around the cell like a conqueror.

  The seal of office was blindingly bright in the dimness of the cell. "Do you mind turning that thing off?" I asked. "You're scaring the snakes. You aren't entitled to be wearing it anyway, you know."

  "Don't start in with me, Yakoub."

  "Who started with whom? I was sitting down here minding my own business when you barged in. Scattering all that goddamned noisy light around. I have a right to peace and quiet in my own cell."

  Sourly he said, "You're really a madman."

  "I don't think so."

  "Why are you making this much trouble for me?"

  "Me? Trouble?"

  "And for the entire Rom nation."

  I sat up, all attention. "What's this? Strange words out of Shandor's mouth! You express concern for the welfare of the Rom nation, my son? You?"

  "You are determined to make me angry, aren't you?"

  "Am I?"

  "This time you're not going to succeed. I've come to offer you a deal, father."

  "Father. When did I last hear that word from you?"

  "I will not let you goad me." He sat down on the stone bench facing me, close enough so I could grab him and slap him around again if I felt like it. Slapping him had driven him berserk, that other time. He seemed to be daring me. For a long while he stared at me as though trying to read my mind. Finally he said, "You abandoned the Kingdom. Everyone agrees on that. You announced your abdication and you disappeared, leaving us all in the lurch. For five years there was no king. The whole Rom nation cried out for a new king. Even the Empire called for one. You should have heard Sunteil bitching and moaning. The emperor's a zo
mbie, he said, and the Rom don't have a king either. The whole governmental structure is going to disappear down the power vacuum. What's wrong with you people, Sunteil said. Why don't you elect a new king? So finally we did."

  "The election was invalid," I said mildly.

  His eyes flashed fire, but he kept himself under tight control.

  "Why?"

  "Because the krisatora never ratified my abdication. A Rom king can't abdicate. There's no tradition of abdication."

  "I tell you they did ratify. I was there when they did it."

  "The day they elected you?"

  "Yes," he said.

  "You're the son of a king. A king's son can't be king."

  "Just because it's never happened before doesn't mean it can't ever be done."

  "A convicted criminal has never been elected king either."

  A muscle leaped in Shandor's cheek. But still he held himself still. He was doing very well, was Shandor.

  "A criminal, father?"

  "The Djebel Abdullah business."

  "The first trial was a farce. There was perjury from top to bottom. Afterward I was able to show that I did everything possible to save my passengers and at the second trial I was given a full exoneration."

  "None of your passengers testified at either trial."

  "That isn't true."

  "None of the ones that got eaten for dinner, boy."

  "Don't call me boy! I am your king!"

  "Not mine, Shandor."

  "The second verdict-"

  "Was every bit as legitimate as the session of the great kris that elected you King of the Rom."

  "I am king, father. Whether you like it or not. The krisatora have chosen me and the grand kumpania of Rom on all the worlds have accepted me. And I have been to the Capital and the emperor himself has given me the wand of recognition."

  "Has he, now?"

  "With his own hands. Sunteil and Naria and Periandros right alongside him. And here I live in the king's house of power and my decrees are obeyed throughout the worlds. Face reality, old man. Your abdication really is binding. And you really can't revoke it now."

  "You said you came here to offer me a deal," I reminded him.

  "Yes."

  "Go ahead. What's the quid and what's the pro quo?"

  "I want you to give me your blessing. I want you to make a public avowal of me as King of the Rom and to withdraw all claims of your own to the throne. Also, they tell me you took the scepter with you when you left here. That scepter belongs to me."

  "Ah. That's what you want, is it? My blessing and my scepter."

  "In return," he said, "I'll let you out of here. I'll allow you to go back to Xamur, to your estate, to Kamaviben, and live out your days in wealth and luxury."

  "My freedom is my own property, given to me by God, which no man can take away. You'll give me something that isn't even yours, if I agree to support your claim to something else that isn't yours? What kind of deal is that?"

  "It's a deal that will get you out of this dungeon, father."

  "I like this dungeon."

  "I could have it ghosting-proofed. Would you like it so much then?"

  "A threat, is that? You want my blessing under duress?"

  "I ask for your blessing. I don't demand it. Your being a prisoner here is an embarrassment to me."

  "Yes. I know. That's why I'm here."

  "So long as you continue to claim the throne you damage our entire nation."

  "I could say the same, Shandor."

  "There was a vacancy in the government. That is no longer the case. By your obstinacy you foment dissension, you cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Rom government, you undermine the stability of the entire-"

  "Of course I do. You don't need to tell me that."

  "You are a malicious old man."

  "No. You are." I laughed. "Go away, Shandor. Let me have a little peace."

  "If I go away, you'll rot down here until the end of time!"

  "You would do that to your own father?"

  "Are you my father?"

  "And you would shame the memory of your mother too, I see. You really are a worthless shit, do you know that? I curse the little tickle of pleasure that brought you into the universe. I curse the joy I felt between Esmeralda's thighs." I said these things calmly, even sweetly. "I won't make you king, Shandor, no matter how much you bluster and rant. You don't frighten me by threatening to keep me in this pretty hotel of yours, either. And-incidentally-there isn't any way that you can make this place ghosting-proof. Don't you realize that? If I can breathe, I can ghost. Wherever I am. Whenever." I closed my eyes and ghosted right then and there, in front of him. Back to Xamur, something like a century ago. To see my loving young wife, to see my lovely firstborn babe. Shandor was smoldering when I returned, a fraction of an instant later. "Your mother was a splendid woman, Shandor. I just paid her a visit. To tell her how much I loved her. And to let her know what a wonderful person her eldest son turned out to be. Why don't you go visit her too? I know she'd love to see you."

  "You're going to molder down here forever, old man!" said Shandor venomously.

  2.

  SHANDOR WAS NEVER ONE FOR KEEPING HIS PROMISES. Something like a week later his robots came for me and transferred me without warning to a much fancier cell on a higher level of the building. Still no windows, but also no rats, no giant protozoa, no slime mold. No snakes. I missed the snakes, a little. They had some elegance and they did me no harm. The new cell was warmer and drier and I had a bigger couch. The floor was a solid slab of gold. There have been periods in history when you would have been proud to be imprisoned in a cell where the floor was a slab of gold, I guess. Well, it was okay. But I never could forget that this was Galgala where gold isn't much more valuable than cardboard, and that I might have a golden floor in my prison cell but even so it was still a prison cell. I went about barefoot on it, mostly. It was soft and almost yielding under my toes, the way gold can be. I started scratching lines in it to keep track of the time. Ordinarily, as you know, I don't give a damn about keeping track of the time and I will blithely jumble up whole decades of chronology without seeing any big problem about that. But here in confinement I was starting to wonder about just how much time might be going by. Considerable, as it turned out.

  So much for Shandor's pledge to let me rot in that dank oubliette forever, at any rate. I wasn't foolish enough to think that he had relented. The Shandors of this universe don't know what that word means. No, he had probably just changed his mind about the efficacy of letting me rot. Maybe he had decided that I was so old and mean that I had become permanently rot-resilient, like that rare yellow timber from Gran Chingada that can spend five hundred years submerged in a mungar-thangar swamp without being changed in any way. Or maybe he figured it would be bad politics for the Kingdom to find out that he was keeping his aged father stashed in a den of snakes and rats. I don't know. It could be that he had come up with some entirely new strategy that made it look advantageous to put me in a more comfortable cell. I didn't see what that strategy might be, but I didn't mind.

  Polarca came ghosting in and said, "Well? You like this one any better?"

  "You never saw the last one," I said.

  "Sure I did. I came three times. You were asleep every time. Like a baby, snoozing away. You didn't even mind that there was some kind of a rat sitting on your chest."

  "You could have said hello."

  "You looked so peaceful," Polarca said.

  "Oh, you bastard. What's happening out there?"

  "When?"

  "Right now?"

  "How would I know? I'm not coming from right now."

  "When are you coming from, then?"

  "You know I can't tell you that."

  I could have throttled him. "The Kingdom is in jeopardy, whole worlds are tottering, your oldest and dearest friend is sitting helpless in a dungeon, and you decide to be a stickler for the rules?"

  "These are important rules, Yak
oub. You know that. Do I really need to be telling you this stuff? Once you start abusing ghosting to slip information back in time, the whole universe falls apart."

  "It's falling apart anyway. But you can help me."

  "No. I don't think I can."

  "Then why bother coming here? Just to torment me?"

  "I like to see your sparkling eyes. You look so sexy when you're annoyed."

  "I'll give you sexy, you infuriating hyena!"

  "Ah. Ah. Temper, Yakoub! Your blood pressure!"

  "You will drive me crazy. Do I deserve this? A son like Shandor and a friend like you?"

  "But I am your friend. You don't know how good I am to you. And I don't want you to think I'm not helpful." His ghost-mantle flickered through some fancy electromagnetic changes, the ghost-equivalent of a long-suffering sigh. "All right. Listen to me, Yakoub. Your appeal rends my heart. It's against all the rules but I'm going to let you know the future anyway." He drifted up close to my ear and cocked his head and dropped his voice to a confidential, insinuating level. "It's all going to be okay," he whispered.

  "What is?"

  "It. The fundamental curve of our racial destiny. The Kingdom, the Empire, Romany Star. There. Never say your old friend Polarca isn't helpful. You can thank me now."

  "This is what you call being helpful?"

  "This is what you call being grateful?"

  "Grateful for what?"

  "Look at you, scowling at me. I told you what you wanted to know, didn't I? Don't you find that comforting to know? Aren't you relieved? What an ungrateful son of a bitch you are."

  I scowled even harder at him. "So what good is your big revelation? It isn't the vague ultimate that worries me. It's what happens now. Am I going to live? Am I going to die? Am I ever going to get out of this damned hole? Give me details, will you? I want to know what's on the docket right now, what will happen next, not what's going to happen in a thousand years."