Star of Gypsies

  "Romany Star had turned red again?" Chorian asked.

  "Yes. Exactly as the wise men had predicted, so did it come to pass: it had turned brighter, all of a sudden, and had flailed out with a quick lethal flare, and then it had subsided and all was as it had been before."

  "But we didn't go back, even so."

  "That had been only the first swelling of the sun. We knew there would be two more."

  "And have there been?"

  "One," I said. "Almost six thousand years after we left. We saw it in the sky, a great blue-white blaze. That was at the time when Jesu Cretchuno was born, the Christ-child who some say is the son of God; and perhaps you know the tale of the three kings who came to worship him in his cradle. One of those kings was Rom; and he knew that the star that had announced the child's birth was the star that had given us birth also, and that it was blazing up for the second time, just as our wise ones had foretold."

  Chorian stared at the sky for a long while. Then he said, "And the third swelling?"

  "Soon," I said. "Another thousand years. Or five hundred, or maybe tomorrow. That's the sign we're all waiting for, the call, that third swelling. And then at last it will be safe for the Rom to return to their true home. If your precious emperor will let us have it, of course. Which is our chief task in the universe, to work toward regaining possession of our star; and I tell you, boy, I'll be there to see that day."

  A sudden shadow darkened the darkness, cutting a black swath across the stars. For an instant Romany Star vanished from sight; and I heard the deep hooting voice of the bird of the dead, who had just passed overhead and was roosting now in a nearby tree. Her enormous black wings enfolded her like a shroud, and her sapphire eyes glinted in the night.

  "Mulesko Chiriklo," I said. "A bird of good omen. She follows the Rom from world to world."

  I waved to her, making a Rom salute; and Mulesko Chiriklo hooted her greeting to me in turn. I knew what she was saying. It was what she always said to me. She was offering the King of the Gypsies the blessing of the night, and the hope of a swift return to the ancient motherland. I looked at Chorian. He seemed terrified. His teeth were chattering and he was standing in a peculiar hunched way not at all proper to one so young and strong.

  I slapped him on the shoulder.

  "Come, boy. Let's go inside and see if there's some decent wine left."

  As we headed for my ice-bubble I heard the laughter of Rom ghosts on the night wind.

  11.

  BY THE FOURTH DAY CHORIAN HAD HIS SWEEP ANTENNA tuned to its farthest vector and it was time for him to go. He packed the few belongings he had brought with him into the smallest possible space, and unfurled his journey-helmet, that soft webwork of coppery mesh, no larger than a handkerchief when it is folded for storage, that would protect him during his lonely flight through the interstellar spaces.

  Just before he put his helmet on he turned to me and I saw him struggling to say something, but the words wouldn't come for him. That troubled me. One Rom should never be afraid of saying the true things of the heart to another.

  I went close to him and put my hands on his shoulders. I had to reach far up, though I am not small.

  "What is it, cousin? What do you want to tell me?"

  "That… that I'm going to leave now…"

  "I know that, cousin," I said, very gently.

  "And I wanted to say… just to say…"

  He faltered. I let my hands continue to rest on his shoulders and I waited.

  "I was trouble for you, wasn't I, Yakoub?"

  "Trouble?"

  "I came here where you had come to live by yourself, and I bothered you when you had no wish to be bothered. And you put up with me because it is Rom law that guests must not be turned away, but you were angry within that I was here."

  "Dinosaur dung," I said, and I said it with vigor, and I said it in Romany, which was not easy, for although there are many words for "dung" in Romany there is not precisely one that means "dinosaur." Nevertheless I said it and he understood what I had said.

  "You've been very kind, Yakoub."

  "Enough preamble, boy. We are Rom. Tell me what's in your heart."

  He looked down and scuffed the tip of his boot against the fresh snow. He was very young and getting younger every minute. Watching him, I tried to understand what it was like to be so young, tried to remember how it had been. My God, it was so long ago! To exist in the moment, not yet wound in layer upon opaque layer of experience. To be transparent, bones visible through the skin, every motivation lying in clear view just below the surface. I hadn't felt that way for a hundred fifty years. Perhaps not ever.

  "These past few days-" he began, and faltered again.

  "Yes?"

  "I never knew my father, Yakoub. I was sold away from my kumpania when I was seven."

  "I know, boy. And I know what that's like. I was sold at seven myself, the first time."

  "The Lord Sunteil's been something like a father to me, in his way. He's not evil, you know. He's a Gajo and he's the emperor's right hand but he's not evil, and as close as anyone's been a father to me, it's been Lord Sunteil. But it isn't the same. He isn't of the blood."

  "I know what you're saying."

  "And these past few days… these past few days, Yakoub…"

  He turned away and stared off to his left, far across the snow-field, as though thinking that he had to hide from me the tears that were threatening to break through and burst past his eyelids. He pretended to be searching for the sweep aura, but I knew what he was really doing, and I felt sad for him for thinking that he had to conceal his soul from me. This is what comes of growing up among the Gaje, I thought.

  "Listening to you as you told me the stories from the Swatura-hearing from your own lips about Romany Star, the Tale of the Swelling Sun-" He took a deep breath and swung around, looking down at me, and, yes, his eyes were moist, and sell me again into slavery if mine weren't getting the same way, just a bit. Then he said, all in a rush, "For a little while these last few days I understood what it must be like to have had a real father, Yakoub."

  So he had managed to get it out at last.

  There was nothing I needed to say in return. I smiled at him and embraced him and kissed him on the mouth in the old Rom fashion, and gave his shoulders one good hard final squeeze and lifted my hands from him, and we stood there together in silence. Double Day was dawning now. The orange sun was coming into the sky opposite the yellow one and the ice was ablaze with warring colors.

  After a time he said, "I fear that I'll never see you again."

  "Because you think our paths will never cross, or that you think my time is nearly over?"

  "Oh, Yakoub-"

  "The first day you were here you told me that I'd live forever. I don't think that's true and I don't think I want it to be true. But I have to last long enough to set foot on Romany Star. You know that. And you know that I will."

  "Yes. You will, Yakoub."

  "And we'll meet again long before that day. I don't know how or where or why it will be, but we will. Somewhere. Somewhen. And meanwhile there are tasks waiting for you, boy, which you ought to be off and doing. Go now. Take care. May you remain with God."

  "May you remain with God, Yakoub."

  He grinned at me. I think he was relieved to have all this weepy business of farewell behind him, and I have to confess that I was too.

  The sweep aura now was rising. A surging fountain of brilliant green light came from the antenna that he had mounted out on the ice-field a few hundred meters away.

  "You'd better go out there," I said.

  He slipped the journey-helmet over his head and the flimsy folds of coppery mesh tumbled down about him almost to the ground.

  Just before he touched the switch at his shoulder that would make any communication between us impossible, he looked down into my eyes and said, "You are still king, Yakoub. You will always be king."

  Then he touched the switch and the frail web lit
up and bellied out like a balloon, sealing him in a protective sphere of chilly Mulano air that no force could breach. So long as the helmet's field remained activated he would be shielded in that sphere against anything. Even the awful darkness and cold of the void that lies between one space and another.

  For a long time I watched him from my doorway as he stood out there on the ice, bathed in the green glow of the sweep aura and the blended orange and yellow of the double suns. He was waiting for some roving scanning-strand of a relay sweep to find him and carry him away, back to the worlds of the Imperium.

  I felt sorry for him. Relay-sweep travel is not at all jolly nor is it exhilarating. In fact, it's a great pain in the buliasa. Believe me. I have had plenty of opportunity to find that out at first hand over the years. You stand and wait; you stand and wait. At a thousand different nexuses around the inner universe the sweep-stations sit like giant spiders, stroking the nether regions of space with their far-ranging arms. Sooner or later one will find you, if you are patient enough and have set up the right coordinates on your beacon. And then it will seize you and lift you and carry you away, and shunt you through this auxiliary space and that, not following any route that particularly serves your needs, but simply one that suits the pattern of openings in the space-time lattice that it happens to find. And sooner or later, but usually later, it will deposit you-no more ceremoniously than it would a bundle of laundry -at a relay drop on one of the Empire worlds. It's a slow and cumbersome and basically humiliating process, in which you surrender all control of your destiny to an inanimate force that is not only unresponsive to any of your wishes but also completely beyond your comprehension. For hours, days, months, sometimes years, you drift like a child's toy lost in an infinite sea, floating along inside your protective sphere with no way of amusing yourself and no company but your own remorselessly ticking thoughts; for although your metabolic processes are suspended while you are held outside the ordinary space-time continuum, your mind goes right on working, business as usual. A tiresome way to travel. Not that I mean to whine. There are too many worlds, not enough starships, for the Empire to be able to run standard tourist service to places like Mulano. I had come here by relay-sweep myself; and when the time came for me to leave here, that was how I would go.

  Chorian stood straight and tall like a good soldier in the light of the two suns for what seemed to me like an eternity and a half without moving. After a time I began to think that perhaps by watching him I was somehow hindering the coming of his sweep-strand, for things sometimes work that way. So I went inside and I conjured up the bahtalo drom for him, the spell of safe voyage. I wasn't sure that it would have any effect, since Chorian was enclosed in his protective sphere where possibly even the spell of safe voyage couldn't reach. But it was worth trying. The spell of safe voyage is one of the true spells, one of the ones that reliably does the job. It isn't simply witch-nonsense, something that some old drabarni of the Middle Ages might have put together out of bathwater and scythe-blades and the wombs of frogs; it is grounded in the great lines of force that run across the curving axes of the universe from shore to shore.

  At any rate I wove the spell for him; and then I think I must have fallen into a light sleep; and when I went outside again to look for him, he was gone.

  The suns were setting. I said a little prayer and waited for the moment of Romany Star.

  TWO

  The One Word

  I was with Loiza la Vakako when a messenger came to him and told him that a certain wild Rom of his family, while drunk, had challenged five Gaje to follow him across a mountain pass that was not much wider than the blade of a sword. All six of them had fallen to their deaths, but the Rom had been the last to fall, and those who had watched this event had praised him extravagantly for his courage.

  Loiza la Vakako laughed. "Sometimes courage about dying is cowardice about living," he said. And he never mentioned the man again.

  1.

  A DAY OR TWO AFTER CHORIAN LEFT, I DECIDED TO PICK myself up and move to some other part of the territory. It wasn't that I was trying to hide from further visitors, now that I knew I could be found. I was never lost-to those who know how to see. But I had lived in this place long enough. There is something in the Rom soul that will not let us live in the same place for very long.

  In the old days when Earth existed, most of us were nomads. Wanderers. We lived in caravans and roamed wherever we pleased. At night we slept under the stars unless the weather was foul. In winter we might pull the wagons together and hole up for the season; but as soon as spring arrived, off we went again. In at least a dozen of the languages of Earth the word "Gypsy" came to mean "wanderer." Poets would say things like, "I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life." Which is bullshit, of course, I have to point out, with all due respect to the literary folk. A real Gypsy would no more go to sea than he would grind his horse up into sausages. The sea, the sea, the stinking fishy sea-it's never been a place where any Gypsy cares to find himself. Live by the seashore, yes, that's fine. Nice breezes, good eating. But go and toss about on the waves? No, never. Better the broader seas of space, calm and-well, you get the general idea of what those old misguided but well-meaning poets were trying to say. At least they were thinking about us.

  For some reason our wandering ways were tremendously bothersome to the Gaje. Whatever they can't control gives them an itch on the inside of their skulls. Sometimes they tried to pass laws requiring us to settle down. Hah! What good could that do? We used to say that making a Gypsy live in one place was like harnessing a lion to a plow. To be tied all your life to the same four walls and a roof, the same little plot of ground, the same dusty street-why, that was torment, that was slavery. We were meant to wander.

  Well, things change, more or less; but the more things change the more they remain the same. (I can't take credit for that line. It's Gaje wisdom, spoken by one of their wise men a thousand years ago. Don't look so surprised. Even the Gaje have their moments of wisdom.) There aren't any lions any more and there are no more plows and Gypsies stopped living in caravans a long time back. But we still have trouble with the idea of being tied down. We may live in houses for a while, but only for a while. Sooner or later we move on. And when we move on it isn't from one little country to another on the same continent of the same small planet. It is by great leaps across thousands of light-years.

  (There wouldn't be an Empire today, but for us. The Gaje can't deny that. They may have built the starships, but we were the ones who piloted them to the far reaches of the sky. And all because we are a restless people; and all because we can never call any place home, except our true home that was cruelly taken from us ten thousand years ago. Other places aren't home. Just shelter. Places to wait.)

  So. Moving day. Blue-green clouds scudding across a lemon sky. The air crisp and triple-cold. Not even any ghosts hovering around. A good day for taking to the road, Yakoub Rom. Take yourself onward, before the old Devil hangs his weights on your heart and pulls you down. The old Devil, that sly one, o Beng, yes. He may be my cousin too but I won't ask him to dinner.

  I emptied out the ice-bubble where I had lived for the past year or so and gathered all my things together and packed them into my elegant little hundred-cubic-meter overpocket, and when I drew the drawstring I sent ninety-nine point ninety-five cubic meters' worth of the overpocket's contents into a handy storage dimension in a nearby continuum. What was left had negligible mass and no weight at all. I tied it to my sleeve with a string and let it bob along beside me as I went on to my new home base.

  It was on the other side of the Gombo glacier and about a hundred kilometers to the north. That was a good little walk. I sang to myself in Rom the whole way, not bothering always to make sense, for who was listening? And when my toes began to grumble I stopped and put my head back and yelled my name into the wind and grabbed my crotch and flung out my arms and lifted my knees to my chin and stomped them down again and capered around like a lunatic
, doing one of the old dances. Hoy! Hootchka pootchka hoya zim! And then I went forward, laughing, with the sweat running around and down and through the tangled black jungle on my chest and belly. Hoy! Yakoub of the Rom is on the road again!

  It started to snow an hour after I set out. The sky turned white and the horizon disappeared and there were no longer any landmarks to guide me. From then on there was snow flying in my face all the way. I drank it in and spit it back out. Even in the whiteness and the blankness I kept to my course. Long ago on a planet called Trinigalee Chase that I would otherwise rather not talk about I was taught a trick for keeping on course with no instrument other than the one between my ears, and it stood me in good stead now. It's the one thing I remember from Trinigalee Chase that I'm glad not to have forgotten.

  Wherever you go on Mulano the scenery is the same: ice, snow, ice, snow. The place has no tilt to the plane of the ecliptic, so it has nothing much by way of a change of seasons, and even though it has two fancy suns that give it plenty of lively light it's too far from them to enjoy any real warmth from them. So both hemispheres of Mulano are winter-bound all the time. I hadn't had a day without snow since I had arrived.

  But that was all right. I'd spent enough of my life on tropical worlds. Generally speaking the planets where humanity has chosen to settle are ones where the climate is easy; maybe a little wintry around the poles on some, but usually balmy everywhere else all the year round. Soft translucent surf, powdery beaches, green fronds waving in the gentle breeze: that's your basic Gaje world. If they colonize any nastier ones-Megalo Kastro, say, or Alta Hannalanna-it's because there are raw materials on it that are too valuable to pass up. Otherwise, considering how many millions of planets there are just in our one galaxy, the Gaje don't see much reason to settle on the uncomfortable ones. Can't say I blame them, either.