Star of Gypsies

  "Of course I understand, Valerian."

  He fell silent. He became fainter and fainter. He was almost invisible now, a thin shadow high overhead. I was sure that he was leaving me. I could have killed him. Try killing a ghost. The son of a bitch. Coming here and doing this crazy dance of past and present and future and then bugging out on me without providing me with any real satisfaction. I knew that in another moment he'd be gone, and me no better off than when he had come.

  No. Wrong. Suddenly he grew solid again. He swooped down toward me, his feet practically touching the golden floor. Bright green sparks radiated from him. He was crackling with all his old vitality and energy again. We stood face to face, nose to nose. Valerian pressing in hard on me.

  The abrupt shift amazed me.

  "And you, Yakoub?" he challenged. "Is it your turn now? We were talking about fear, weren't we? My fear, when I was on trial? But now you're the one who's afraid."

  He had me off balance, baffled, confused. There was a buzzing in my mind. Valerian was rough around the edges but he could be perceptive just when you least expected it.

  "Afraid? Of what?"

  "I don't know. Shandor?"

  I shook my head. "No. He's never scared me. He doesn't scare me now."

  "Good. Just hold on. Keep your courage."

  I felt my annoyance with him vanishing in a flash.

  "Yes. That is what I must do, Valerian."

  He said, "And yet there is still fear in you, isn't there?"

  Just when I was beginning to love him again, he has to start bothering me some more about my being afraid.

  "No," I said, even more annoyed than before. "It isn't so."

  "I think you do fear something. I see it in your eyes."

  "Listen, Valerian-"

  "I want to help you. Tell me what you fear."

  "You aren't helping me. You're pestering me."

  "I was afraid once. You can be afraid too. It's all right to be afraid, Yakoub. You just have to remember which is the fear and which is Yakoub. The fear can be in you but it mustn't become you."

  I turned my back on him and started to count to ten. Ek, dui, trin, chtar, pansh…

  But he kept after me. He was determined to pursue me forever on this thing.

  "What do you say to that, Yakoub?"

  "I don't know what you're talking about. Nothing has ever made me afraid and I'm not afraid of anything now."

  "That sounds good."

  "It's the truth."

  "Is it?"

  "No," I said, after a moment, in a different voice. Something had snapped in me, all of a sudden. A strange feeling but a liberating one.

  Why keep secrets from Valerian? Open up, let the truth out. "It's a lie," I said.

  It was. Of course it was.

  I had feared many things great and small, just like anyone else, although I had always been able to conquer my fear. That had been just so much noise, when I tried to tell Valerian that I had never been afraid.

  And also I was beginning to bring myself to acknowledge-after the first moment of anger, after the first sting of pride-that Valerian was right, that he wasn't deceiving himself when he felt that he saw fear in me. For I did fear one thing above everything else, and I feared it terribly. Not death. Not Shandor. Not sitting here being a prisoner. Not even civil war among the Rom. It was something I feared so much I had never been able to speak of it to another person. Or even to confront it squarely myself. It was something I had kept locked for years in the deepest oubliette of my soul.

  Valerian said, "Will you tell me what you're afraid of, Yakoub?"

  I hesitated. This was very hard for me.

  "I've never told this to anyone."

  "Tell it to me. What is it that you fear?"

  "Why should I tell you, Valerian?"

  "So that perhaps I can help you stop fearing whatever it is that you fear."

  "No one can do that."

  "Perhaps I can. Tell me."

  He hovered very close to me. The hum and crackle of his ghost-aura thundered in my ears.

  Uncertainly I said, "I fear… I fear…"

  "Go on, Yakoub."

  I was soaked with sweat. There was a hand at my throat, choking back my voice.

  Suddenly I felt the words escaping from me in a hoarse ragged blurt.

  "What I fear, Valerian, is that Romany Star is a lie."

  "What?"

  "That the whole story is just a myth," I said. It amazed me to hear the dread words coming out. But somehow it calmed me to be saying these things. I was speaking more evenly and freely now. "That the red star we pray to doesn't have a damned thing to do with us. That we never came from any such place, that the swelling of the sun never happened, that if we ever do go there we'll find that it's just one more uninhabited planet."

  Valerian was silent a while, thinking, frowning.

  "That's the thing that you fear, is it?"

  I nodded. I felt easier, having it out at last.

  "Why?" he asked.

  "Because I've aimed myself toward Romany Star for my entire life. Because all this lunatic scheming of mine has been devoted to one thing and only one thing, which is to bring us back to the Homeworld, to restore us to the place where we belong, the one place where we aren't intruders and outsiders and aliens. I've thrown myself headlong toward Romany Star, do you understand? I live only for the day when I set foot on that place, do you realize that, Valerian? And if it isn't there? And if some day I find out that it's all nonsense, that we really started from Earth just as the Gaje did, that all we really are is funny-looking Gaje who speak a funny old language, that Romany Star is nothing but somebody's poetic fantasy-"

  "No. That isn't how it is," Valerian said. He sounded confident.

  I paused, sweating, astounded. "No?"

  "The whole story is true, everything that's in the Swatura. Believe me. The life we had there, the great cities, the omens, the swelling of the sun. The sixteen ships that went off into the Great Dark and brought us to Earth."

  It was a different Valerian who was speaking now, no swaggerer, no blusterer. Quiet, serious, intense. I scarcely recognized the man.

  "How can you possibly know that?"

  "Because I've been there," he said. "I've seen the burned hills. I've seen the melted valleys. I've held the ashes of Romany Star in my hands, Yakoub."

  I stared at him, not believing a word. He was only trying to tell me what he knew I desperately needed to hear.

  "You couldn't have done that."

  "Why not? It's a place, isn't it? I have a starship, don't I? What could stop me from going to take a look?"

  "But it's forbidden!" I yelled. "It's absolute sacrilege for anyone to set foot on Romany Star until after the third swelling, until we get the call, until-"

  "Yakoub," he said. "Don't be naive. It doesn't sound right, coming from you."

  He said it gently, almost tenderly. He was smiling. There was something a little shamefaced about that smile, and also something a little patronizing.

  I realized that I was trembling uncontrollably.

  "You're serious? You actually and literally went there?"

  Softly Valerian said, "When did I ever give a shit about the rules, Yakoub?"

  7.

  HE WAS GONE BEFORE I REALIZED WHAT WAS happening. I thought he had just faded from visibility for a moment, but no, he was really gone. Leaving me alone with my astonishment.

  Typhoons were roaring through my soul. Hurricanes, tidal waves, earthquakes. I was hanging on to my sanity by my fingertips.

  I had told him the one thing I had struggled to keep from everyone, even myself, since the day the poisonous filthy idea first had crawled into my mind. The unthinkable thing, the truly unthinkable thing: today I had not only thought it but I had spoken it. But that wasn't all.

  What he had told me-his own little secret, that he had given me by way of exchange-

  I was stunned. A voyage to Romany Star? Landfall on the holy of holies, t
he forbidden planet, violating the sacred Motherworld? Before we had received the call to return? Amazing. Incredible. Only Valerian could have done something like that. How I despised him for it! And how I envied him! Such casual blasphemy, such lighthearted trespassing against the holiest of Rom beliefs? Against the Law itself. "It's a place, isn't it? I have a starship, don't I?" And then casually to tell me about it? The king? I could have him up before the kris for that. Even now, here in my prison, one word from me and he would be cut off forever from his own kind. They would crucify him. They would slaughter him.

  Of course I wouldn't call down the kris on him. He knew that or he would never have said a word. No matter what his indiscretions, I had always protected him, somehow. He was like a part of me, shameless and wanton and uncontrollable but part of me all the same. You don't go mutilating your own arm simply because it reaches out and pinches the empress' ass while your attention is directed elsewhere.

  But still…

  Romany Star? Romany Star!

  "I've seen the burned hills," he had said. "I've seen the melted valleys. I've held the ashes of Romany Star in my hands, Yakoub."

  I was sick with envy and longing, with anger and joy. I was furious with him for not having asked me to go along, whenever it was that he made that blasphemous expedition. I would have refused to go, of course-in fact I would have threatened him with life imprisonment if he had tried to go through with the voyage, and by God and all His demons I would have made good my threat, too. But I wished he had asked me. I wished I had been there. To see with my own eyes that it was all real, to sift those ashes through my own fingers. I could taste it like bile in my throat, my yearning to have gone with him. No wonder I protect Valerian. I am as wanton as he is. Worse. I pretend that I will uphold the laws. And the Law. He does as he pleases and makes no pretenses. Which is the more moral man, the pirate or the hypocrite?

  Romany Star.

  I thought my breast would burst with the amazement and excitement within it. I thought my head would spin loose from my shoulders. I wanted to weep. To dance. To sing.

  I've seen the burned hills. I've seen the melted valleys.

  A soaring craziness enveloped me and I went spontaneously ghosting off, flinging myself into the darkness like a skittering meteor tumbling freely through the cosmos. I went here and there and there and here, back and forth and forth and back, Xamur, Megalo Kastro, Nabomba Zom, Vietoris, even the Capital. Nothing would come into clear focus. Nothing would hold still. I was floating free, unmoored from time and space, blowing in a gale that had come rushing up wildly out of my own soul.

  One scene recurred again and again. At first it was only fragmentary but then I was able to make it hold, and I entered it to see what it was, where and when I was. Faces drifted past me. Damiano. Valerian. The phuri dai. A row of solemn-faced krisatora sitting in the judgment hall. So I was still on Galgala. But when? They were all much younger, Valerian, Damiano, all of them. Look, there I was myself, sitting in the king's chair, listening to the deliberations. I looked younger too. Not younger in the face, but younger in the eyes.

  "I have never knowingly done harm to any Rom in my life," Valerian was saying. He looked pale, sweaty-faced, frightened. His mustache was drooping. "I ask the court to take it into consideration that my spirit has always been true to the Way. May God rip my tongue from my throat if I have spoken falsehood."

  He was squirming like something skewered on a barbed hook.

  Valerian at his trial, yes. That time long ago, brought up on charges before the great kris.

  Everything wavered and for an instant I went wandering away, sliding like a stone on ice into some other epoch in some other quadrant of the galaxy. I think the place where I went may have been Earth, though it could just as easily have been Barma Darma or Duud Shabeel. I pulled myself back. I wanted to watch Valerian's trial.

  We had had him but good that time, not for piracy but for unethical mercantile practices. It was all coming back to me as I hovered there, invisible. What he had done was intercept a cargo tanker loaded with belisoogra oil, the stuff used to make the blood-flushing drug essential to the remake process. In a moment of sudden magnanimity Valerian had decided to wipe out the belisoogra cartel by making the whole cargo available in one shot to some drug-brokers on Marajo, instead of dribbling it out over a number of years the way the cartel does. Break the market, he figured, make cheap remakes possible for all the poor folk who can't afford the treatment.

  That's Valerian's Robin Hood facet. Comes over him like a fit, sometimes.

  I saw Damiano rise, eyes bright with anger and outrage. "This man who says he is our brother, who says that he serves the interests of the Great People-he stands indicted for his greed, but I say we must punish him for his stupidity!" There was laughter. I joined in it myself: not my ghost-self that was watching but the other Yakoub who was slouched there in the royal chair. Poor Valerian. "A greedy Rom we can accept," Damiano went on. "Greed is not unusual nor is it entirely to be deplored. But a stupid Rom, my friends-ah, a stupid Rom endangers us all. Should we not chastise such a creature with whips and with scorpions, to teach him a little sense? I ask you!"

  Poor Valerian.

  He had made one big mistake. Valerian in all his grand magnanimity had unfortunately overlooked the fact that the belisoogra cartel happens to be a Rom operation from top to bottom-one of our greatest mercantile triumphs, in fact. We own the market and that gives us a death-grip on the whole remake industry, though the Gaje don't fully comprehend how important we really are to their continued good health and youthful vigor. In some subliminal way I think they know that we have them by the balls, but we don't go out of our way to call it to their attention. Apparently it had escaped Valerian's attention too.

  By shattering the price structure of the belisoogra market that way he had skunked a few thousand of his cousins, bankrupting a surprising number of them who had rashly gone too far out on that particular limb, not expecting one of their own people to cut it off behind them. He had also cost us a lot of good political leverage vis-a-vis the Gaje. It would be years before all the cheap belisoogra he had dumped could be absorbed by demand. I have always been fond of Valerian but this time he had been really dumb, and, as Damiano so eloquently had told the kris, dumbness in a Rom has to be punished. The universe will punish dumbness in anyone, sooner or later, of course. But our position in the universe has always been pretty precarious and we can't afford the luxury of waiting for natural corrective processes to do our work for us.

  "I call upon the victims of this man's foolish greed to stand forth and tell the kris of the injuries they have suffered through his unthinking action-"

  We had gone through the whole formal traditional procedure. Bayura were brought in against him, the bills of complaint. Then we waited for Valerian to turn up on Galgala-he came for a feast in his honor, all unawares-and he was duly taken into custody and brought up on trial, actually for the first time in his life. The Gaje had never been able to hang anything on him in all his years as a pirate. But we did. Damiano himself was the krisatori o baro, the chief judge, and Damiano was out for blood. He could easily have been an injured member of the belisoogra cartel himself, he was so fierce and angry. Not that anyone seriously accused him of that. We are a civilized people, after all. Still, Damiano has a real dislike of losing money and he probably wouldn't have seen any particular conflict of interest in sitting as judge over the man who had done it to him.

  I drifted through the judgement hall, keeping myself invisible. Once I saw myself look up at the place where I hovered, and I wondered if I was seeing me. I couldn't remember.

  What I did remember was that the trial had started badly for Valerian and gone downhill all the way. He swore mighty oaths that his intent had been purely humanitarian, which in this instance may actually have been true. But he had cost a lot of Rom a lot of money, all the same. He offered to pay it back. Well, that sounded good. But Damiano kept hammering away. What about t
he weakening of our position among the Gaje by the breaking of our belisoogra monopoly? How did the defendant plan to reimburse for that? The krisatora nodded and murmured. Everyone loved Valerian but he had plenty of enemies too, and many of them were the same ones who loved him. In the course of piracies past he had done more than a little injury to various Rom merchants, all in the same casual and almost accidental way. The krisatora very clearly were out to get him. He knew it and so did everyone else.

  Now came the solakh, the final interrogations and the sentencing. Valerian was somber and subdued. He knew what was coming. And what was coming was terrible. We were going to cast him from our midst. To proclaim him marhime, unclean. To call down the wrath of all Rom past and present, alive and dead, upon anyone who had any further dealings with him. Which would not only have deprived him of the comforts of his family, of the whole grand kumpania of the Rom, but would also have stripped him of his crew and his livelihood, and left him exposed to the vengeance of the Gaje, who had been trying to get their hands on him for a very long time indeed. And then for Valerian there would never be any voyages to Romany Star.

  Like a wraith I floated over the heads of the krisatora as they moved toward their verdict. I paused above Yakoub the king. The king looked bored. The king was bored. Trials like this had always wearied me; it was a part of the job I would gladly have handed off to someone else. The endless medieval taking of oaths and crying out of curses upon would-be perjurers, the interminable trotting forth of evidence, the vast outpourings of woe and sweat and anguish and complaining-I saw the virtue and importance of it all. And I hated it. But nevertheless I did my duty. I have a great sense of duty. But that doesn't mean I have to enjoy it.

  I made myself visible for only a moment, and only to my earlier self.

  "Be merciful," I whispered. And winked. And went skittering off again in a ghost-ricochet to God knows where at the far end of time and the far end of the galaxy. When I knew where I was again I was back in my cell, sitting quietly on my couch hearing Valerian's voice in my mind for the eighty thousandth time, saying, I've seen the burned hills. I've seen the melted valleys.