Star of Gypsies

  I heard laughter in the distance. I knew, without looking around, that it was the laughter of ghosts. Mulano is a place of many ghosts. There are the native ghosts and then there are the visiting ghosts, and the two are not at all the same sort of thing. The native ghosts are life-forms that happen not to be flesh-life; there are billions of them and they are everywhere, glowing at you in mid-air like little lanterns, a friendly presence but not much for conversation. Those are the ghosts that gave this world its name. Mulo, ghost, a fine Romany word. Mulano, place of ghosts. It was a Rom who named this world, for all the ghosts that live there. But since I came to Mulano a good many ghosts of the more familiar kind had taken to visiting it, my cousins, drifting across the void of space and the gulfs of time to this icy place to keep me company: Polarca, Valerian, sometimes Thivt, who is also my cousin even if he is not Rom, and various others now and then. You don't need to know who they are, just yet. Old friends, coming to visit: that's enough for now. A dozen times a day I felt the electric crackling of their auras on the air and the lilting of their laughter drifted towards me, and I knew that someone close and dear to me was hovering nearby. I could feel their presence now. They were laughing now. These were cousin-ghosts. The other kind don't laugh.

  I knew why they were laughing.

  "Don't any of you doubt me either," I told them.

  5.

  I HUNG MY FISH UP TO STEW IN A GRAVITY-GLOBE, where the juices would circle round and round and baste all sides equally. Some Mulano ghosts attracted by the electromagnetic stresses of the cooking process came nosing around to see if there was anything for them to eat. They weren't after my fish, only the fish-flavored infrared waves that were emanating from it. It's possible to impart flavor to energy anywhere along the spectrum, you know, simply by cooking something interesting in it. Maybe you aren't able to detect it, but just ask any Mulano ghost.

  While the fish was cooking the yellow sun began to crawl into the western sky and Double Day began. The usual auroras of Double Daybreak started to jump around behind the mountains, and the ghosts immediately lost interest in my fish: there were much better things for them to eat outside. Chorian stared at the amazing lighting effects in disbelief.

  "What's going on?" he asked.

  "Happens every day about this time. Go and watch."

  "Can't I help you do anything in here?"

  "Go and watch," I said. "You don't see stuff like this on Empire worlds."

  He went out. I love cooking but I hate having an audience. For other things, yes, but not when I'm trying to put a meal together. Cooking, like lovemaking, needs to be done in private. I went on bustling around inside the ice-bubble, calling up items for dinner, a flask of chilled Marajo wine and a bunch of gleaming black Iriarte grapes and a platter of Galgala oysterines, out of the various dimensional pockets where I stored such things. When everything was organized I stuck my head out of the bubble to call the boy. Gaudy winding-sheets of sinuous color were flapping like tremendous electric banners overhead and the broad ice-fields were ablaze with a million subtle shifting shades of aquamarine and emerald and jade, ruby and burgundy and scarlet, citron, cobalt, amethyst, magenta, gold.

  The lights hit me all at once and I felt a torrent of ghost-force come rushing toward me out of the past, tumbling over me like an avalanche.

  I hadn't done any ghosting around since I had come to Mulano. It wasn't that I was too old or had lost interest; it was simply that it seemed more important for me to remain rooted in present time here than it did to cut myself loose and go floating through other epochs. But that didn't mean that other epochs wouldn't go floating through me. There's no escaping the past. Either you ghost it or it ghosts you; and that night in the sudden dazzle of the aurora the walls of time swung back and a million yesterdays engulfed me in a wild crimson surge.

  "Are you all right, Yakoub?" I heard the boy saying, far away. "Yakoub? Yakoub?"

  The blue pearl of old Earth hung suddenly in the midst of a deafening hush of pure silence between one sun and the other. It was the only quiet thing in that noisy sky but once it appeared I wasn't able to look at anything else. Even when it existed Earth must have been far from the most beautiful planet in the universe, but seeing it appearing now out of nowhere in all its ancient cool blueness was so wonderful that the sight of it held me in an unbreakable grip.

  "What do you see, Yakoub? What's there?"

  It wasn't really Earth, of course. It was just Earth's ghost. You think it's only the ghosts of people that go wandering around the continuum? Planets have ghosts too. The difference is that people-ghosts can go only one way in time, from front to back, but planet-ghosts can move either way. Earth lay a thousand years away, but here it was reaching out for me across half the galaxy. It was like a special gift. For me, only for me.

  "Hey," I said. "Hey, Earth! Earth, look here! It's me, Yakoub! Here I am! I'm who you came here to visit, you Earth!"

  This was magic. I forgot all about Chorian. I laughed and waved to that dazzling blue planet up there, and put my arms high overhead and shook my fists into the blazing sky, and burst out onto the ice-field and began to dance and caper. And sang Rom songs of love to the Earth at the top of my lungs with my head thrown back and my shoulders high.

  Maybe that seems strange to you. Why should I give even half a damn for Earth? I wasn't born there and I had never lived there and in fact I had never even really seen the place. How could I have? It perished long before my time. I had ghosted it often enough but there was no way I could have visited it in the flesh.

  Yet I loved it, in a peculiar way.

  Consider that Earth was our second mother, and don't ever forget that: a harsh mother but one who shaped us well. Romany Star may have given us birth but it was Earth that was our shaping-place, the forge in which we were tempered. For us Earth was a miserable place of exile, and maybe we should have hated it for that; but how could we hate the place that had made us strong? On Earth we were made fit for the life we now lead as we voyage among the stars. So I sang to it and danced to it and cried out my love to it, to that ghostly blue world, separated from me by centuries, hanging there in silence between those two alien suns. "Here I am," I yelled. "Me, Yakoub. You remember me?"

  "You can see Earth!" Chorian whispered. I could barely see him, he seemed so far away. But I saw his eyes. They were shining. "Where is it? Show it to me, Yakoub!"

  I saw Earth and I saw much more. It was all flooding upon me at once. I was a boy-slave again, swimming for my life through the warm living mud of Megalo Kastro and feeling an entire planet pulse and throb against my bare legs and belly. And then I was at the controls of my starship, feeling the energy of the cosmos shuddering through me and taking it and focusing it and hurling it back, and sending the great shining vessel leaping across the light-years. And then I was standing at the kinging-session of the great kris on Galgala, the high hall of judgment where destinies are decreed, looking down at the nine solemn krisatora of the Rom, the judges who hold the reins of the universe in their hands. They were offering me the kingship, for Cesaro o Nano who had been king had died; and I was refusing it. And then one by one they made the sign of kingship at me again until I was bowed down under the ninefold weight of their force, which was the collective will of all my people since the beginning of time, and I nodded and knelt to them, and then they knelt to me, and I was king. As the old woman had said I would be, the withered and wrinkled phuri dai who had come to me with magical words when I was hardly out of my cradle.

  And now, still caught in visions, I was at my estate by the shore of the gentlest of the oceans of Xamur, which I think is the most beautiful of the nine kingly planets. But this must have been earlier, before I was king, because my son Shandor stood before me, the first of my sons and the one I loved best, and he was only a little child. There was defiance in Shandor's eyes. He had done something forbidden, and I had spoken with him, and now they had brought him to me and they said that he had done it again. I hit h
im and the mark of my hand sprang up on his cheek and still he defied me, and I hit him again. He looked to be eight, nine, maybe ten years old. I loved him terribly then, God only knows why. I raised my hand to him a third time. "Stop," someone said, and I said, "No, not yet." And they said, "He's only a child, Yakoub," and I said, hitting him again, "I have two things to teach him. One is to respect the Law, and the other is to feel no fear. So I hit him to prevent him from being lawless, and I hit him to keep him from becoming a coward." And I saw anger and love in Shandor's eyes, which was what I felt for him. So I hit him again and this time blood ran from his lip.

  And the blood was the color of the hot sea that bathes the shores of Nabomba Zom. The palace of Loiza la Vakako was there, who was more than a father to me, though he never once lifted his hand against me. We stood side by side in the red surf under the stupefying thunder of the great blue sun of Nabomba Zom and Loiza la Vakako said to me, "You know, Yakoub, that every Rom is given two lives, one in which you live as you please and make as many mistakes as you care to make, and then a second in which it is your task to atone for the errors of your first life." And I laughed and said, "I'll try to remember that, father, when I enter my second life." But the sly face of Loiza la Vakako turned solemn and dark and he said to me, "This is your second life, Yakoub." That was just before I was taken by force from Nabomba Zom and sold into slavery the second time, to suffer like a miserable frog in the terrible tunnels of Alta Hannalanna. It was on Alta Hannalanna that I first felt the sting of the sensory-whip lash my forebrain, which nearly ended me before I had fairly begun. I saw the overmaster again raise the whip now, and swirls of yellow force blared in the heavens, and I rushed toward him and took the whip from him, saying, "Now the blood of your soul will flow." For there are many kinds of blood and I have seen them all.

  There was no end to it. All my wives marched in a vision before me, the ones that I loved and the ones I did not, Esmeralda and Mimi and Isabella and Micaela and also some others that I have pretty well forgotten, and some women that were never my wives but through no fault of my own. I embraced my lost Malilini again, my first true sweet love. And Mona Elena, my forbidden Gaje woman. And golden faithless Syluise. Friends came and I threw my arms around them, Polarca, Valerian, Biznaga. A hundred alien landscapes danced in my brain. Worlds with rings in the sky, worlds with many suns, worlds with none. My God, what a vision it was! I had a hundred seventy-two years of ghosts in me and they were all on a rampage at once. Like a good Rom I have been everywhere and seen everything and it all lives in me, and it all is happening at the same instant, for such words as "past" and "present" and "future" are mere Gaje foolishness, really. All there is is now. Now I stare at the auroras sizzling in the sky over Mulano and now I walk the flowered meadows of Romany Star and now I stand in the Plaza of the Thousand Columns in Atlantis and now I advance toward the throne of the Fifteenth Emperor, and now I sharpen the blades of the Frankish swordsmen who will take Jerusalem from the Saracens in the morning, and now I sit in the royal council of the Rom on golden Galgala with old Bibi Savina the phuri dai beside me, and now I am with my father in the city of Vietorion as he points toward a red star in the sky. Sometimes my lady Syluise is by my side, and sometimes it is someone else, and sometimes I am alone. I see crystal temples and bridges that span the skies. The visions will not end. A thousand thousand souls crowd in on me, Rom souls, Gaje souls, the souls of creatures that are not at all human; and they are all my own. There is an infinity of worlds and I am everywhere. I writhe in the mud and I soar between the stars. And wondrous laughter rings out. filling the heavens so that there is scarcely room for anything else. The laughter is mine.

  I was a hundred meters from the ice-bubble and hordes of Mulano ghosts were swarming all around me, orbiting me like furious insects. I must have been putting out enough energy to feed their entire nation for a month.

  Chorian, brushing them warily aside, put his face close to mine. "Yakoub? Can you hear me, Yakoub?"

  "What do you think? Of course I can, boy."

  "I didn't know what was happening to you. I thought you might have been ghosting."

  I shook my head. "No, boy, I was being ghosted. It's not the same thing."

  "I don't underst-"

  "You don't have to. Dinner's ready. Let's go inside and have ourselves that royal feast."

  6.

  THE BOY STAYED WITH ME FOR ANOTHER FOUR DAYS or so, and I had to put up with his awe and reverence the whole time. That look of utter adoration, the hushed deferential tone of his voice, the unwillingness to let me do even the simplest task without jumping up to offer to help-it got so I wanted to kick him to bring him to his senses. My very belches were ecstasy for him. Nobody had ever behaved like that toward me when I really was king. The way this boy was carrying on, you'd think I was some frail and pampered lord of the Empire, some pallid decadent Gaje prince, and not true Rom at all.

  Well, he was very young. And, Rom though he was, I gathered that he had spent more of his short life in high Imperial circles than he had among his own people. So perhaps he felt that that was how he ought to behave in the presence of the King of the Gypsies. Or maybe-God blight the thought!-maybe that is how deeply the Empire has corrupted and perverted the young Rom these days, so that everybody goes around bowing and scraping and kowtowing to anyone of superior rank and power.

  King of the Gypsies! The whole idea was nothing but Gaje nonsense in the first place!

  There never was such a thing as a King of All Gypsies in the old days on Earth. That was only a myth, a fable that the Rom folk invented for the sake of befuddling the Gaje, or perhaps the Gaje invented it to befuddle themselves, since that is often their way. We had kings, all right, plenty of them, one for every tribe, every kumpania, every roaming band. There had to be a chief of some sort, after all, someone with intelligence, strength, a sense of what is just, in order to maintain authority within the tribe and hold it together against all challenges as it traveled about through hostile lands with strange laws. But a king? A single mighty King of the Gypsies to rule over millions of wandering Rom scattered across the six continents of Earth? There never was such a thing.

  We were poor people then. Scum of the Earth, that was us, dirty shabby wanderers that no one trusted. Because they feared and mistrusted us so much the Gaje were always prying, bothering us, asking us a host of foolish petty questions. It was their way of trying to make us fit into their foolish petty way of life. When we came into a new place we had to apply for residence permits, for citizenship documents, for passports, for all manner of absurd papers. We had no respect for those requests, for why should we have been bound by Gaje law when we had perfectly good laws of our own? Still, Earth was Gaje territory and they were many and we were few, they were rich and we were poor, they had power and we had nothing, and so we played their game, we answered their questions. We told them what they wanted to hear, because that was the simplest and most efficient way of dealing with their idiocies.

  And one of the things they most wanted to hear when one of our caravans came to their town was that we had a leader, a man of high authority who could maintain some sort of control over us and keep us from spreading chaos in the town. If they found out who our leader was, they would have someone to deal with, and in that way they could control us. Or so they imagined.

  Who is in charge here, they would ask us. Why, our king, we would say. (Or our duke, or our count, or our marquis, whatever title seemed to please them best.) He is that man right over there.

  And the king or duke or count or marquis would step forward and tell them, speaking in their own language, everything they wanted to hear. Usually he wasn't the true chief of the tribe. The real chief tended to keep himself in the background, so that the Gaje couldn't take him hostage or otherwise interfere with him, if that was what they were minded to do, and sometimes they were. Instead we would send forth someone who looked like a king, some tall broad-shouldered Rom with bright eyes and long flowing
mustaches, who might have been a nobody in the tribe but who enjoyed strutting about and speaking in a loud voice and playing the part of a great man. He would tell the Gaje everything they wanted to hear. Yes, he would say, we are good law-abiding Christians and we mean no trouble for you. We will just stay here a little while, mending your pots and sharpening your knives, and then we will move along.

  So the word got around that the way to deal with a tribe of Gypsies that came to your town was to find the king of the tribe-because every tribe had a king-and deal with him; otherwise it was like trying to deal with the wind, the waves, the sands of the beach. And sooner or later they would think to ask, Is there a king of kings, a king over all your tribes? And we would tell them, Yes, yes, we have a great king. Why not? It pleased them to hear that. They had a powerful need to believe that: that we were a nation scattered among other nations, that we had a king just as they had a king, and his word was law throughout all our tribes in every land. It was exciting and frightening to them to believe that. We were strange, mysterious, we were alien. We had our own customs and we had our own language and we came and went in the night, and we told fortunes and picked pockets and stole chickens and given the chance we would run off with pretty children and turn them into Gypsies. And we had a king who ruled over us and directed us in the secret war that we were waging against all of civilized mankind. So they liked to believe; so they needed to believe.