Star of Gypsies

  The one exception to that is the world they all started from, Earth. Of course they didn't colonize Earth, they simply evolved there. And got away from it as quickly as they could. As any sensible being would have done. Ah, the climate of Earth! A hellish cantankerous thing, that climate. I know that from my studies and my occasional little ghosting trips. Aside from a few really sweet places not very well suited for large blocs of population it was all either too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry, too barren or too lush. Where you had a decent climate you usually got earthquakes or volcanic eruptions or hurricanes as part of the package.

  (The Gaje like to argue that natural adversity of that sort is what makes a race great, and maybe so. But I have to point out that according to the account in the Swatura the climate on Romany Star was absolutely perfect, and we nevertheless managed to create a pretty impressive civilization there, thank you.)

  (On the other hand, Romany Star got hit by two lethal solar flares within six thousand years of each other. You win some and you lose some, I guess.)

  Anyway, a little chilly weather has never bothered me much. And Mulano, being outside Empire control and not totally unlivable even at its most blustery, was just the sort of planet where I could take a quiet little sabbatical from the cares of government. I wasn't likely to be bothered by tourists or slave-traders or synapse-peddlers or body-farmers or agony-mongers or census-agents or stockbrokers or encyclopedia salesmen or prospectors or tax-collectors or any of the million other piffling distractions of 32nd-century life. The snow was piled so deep that even the archaeologists stayed away. Maybe the occasional ghost would turn up, but those were my own people, so no problem. And I knew I could live comfortably enough in an ice-bubble, because I had spent a couple of years once on Zimbalou, which is one of the Rom nomad worlds. Ice-bubbles are standard lodging there for anybody living at surface level. Zimbalou as it wanders here and there around the galaxy is never allowed to get within thawing range of any sun, because its major cities are nestled way down deep in tunnels far below the ice, and anything approaching warmth would mean total disaster. It's a dark and dismal place but its people love it. I almost came to love it myself. At any rate I learned the art of constructing ice-bubbles there.

  So I walked up the side of the glacier and over the top and down the other side and headed north until I came to the right place. It was a special place on a planet that doesn't have many special places. I had found it and marked it for myself a few days before Chorian had turned up.

  Though Mulano is basically nothing but a huge glittering empty white ice-field, this part of it was different. It had one astonishing feature, something truly strange. God, how I love a good strangeness! And this was a strangeness so strange that even from ten kilometers away I could feel it emanating toward me, and the force of it was like the roaring of a tremendous pipe-organ whose music filled half the heavens.

  What it was, you came over a low snubby hill out of the whiteness and suddenly there was green in front of you, stretching ahead as far as you possibly could see, across snow-blinking valleys and hills and up the side of a distant glacier. And what the green was, was thousands upon thousands of fleshy sea-green tentacles as thick as your arm above and as thick as your thigh below, jutting up through the snow every few meters apart to a height of five or ten or twenty meters and ever so slowly waving and twitching about like heavy cables. There was a voluptuous music in their slippery sinuous movements. I imagined those wriggling waving things whispering to me, saying, Come here, Rom baro, come here, come here, come let us stroke your pretty black beard. Let us give you joy, Rom baro.

  The first time I saw that scene I thought they might be the exposed limbs of some enormous herd of strange animals trapped and buried by some tremendous blizzard. The ghost of Valerian was with me that day and I said that and he said, "That's a smart guess, Yakoub," which was his usual way of telling me that I was full of shit.

  (Valerian's never tactful. He's the black sheep of the Rom, an old space-pirate. Once he was a commander in the Imperial navy until he found that he preferred piracy and now there's a bounty on his head, though it would surprise me extremely if anybody ever manages to collect it. As a nation we Rom deplore piracy, at least publicly, and so we deplore our cousin Valerian, but he practices his trade as if it were poetry and you have to admire him for that. "Have you ever seen anything like that before?" I asked him. But he was gone. I made a fist and shook it at the place where he had been glowing in the air. "Hey, you Valerian! Hey, this is the place for me, this place! You watch and see!")

  That was a week or two ago. Now I was back, and meaning to stay. The tentacles were all waving away as before, wiggly as worms, green as grief. The nearest ones were close enough so that I could have reached out and tickled them. Or they me. They were puckered and pockmarked and they had rows of small darker-green nubbins sprouting all over them.

  I unloaded my Riemann projector, so handy for dumping unwanted tangible matter into intangible places, and made ready to carve me a new ice-bubble. But first I had to be sure that I wouldn't be trying to build a nest for myself in the flank of some buried mountain, or some other equally unpromising submerged feature of the local geography. And I wanted to know more about those tentacles anyway. So I switched the projector to scan intensity, which lined up the molecules of the local geography in a convenient way and turned the subsurface more or less transparent for five hundred meters all around me. That was when I discovered that the twitchy rubbery things that were sticking out of the snow were in fact the branches of trees. The little green nubbins were their leaves. I was standing right on top of an enormous forest buried practically to its tips in snow.

  Trees, yes. Weird, slender, seductively curved, undulating like lovely many-armed dancers mysteriously rooted to their places on stage. Maybe they were even intelligent. I suppose they didn't mind being buried like that, snow being a fine insulator and the air temperature being disagreeably low at that time of the year. Perhaps they emerged from their snowy tomb only once every fifty or a hundred years, I thought-during what might pass for summer on Mulano, if there was any such thing as summer here. Or-more likely-they lived perpetually under snow like this, the way the spice-fish lived so happily in the ice of the glaciers. You travel around enough, you get to see everything, and then some.

  Well, I didn't seem to have anything to fear from them, and they broke the monotony. So I tuned my projector up to compaction level and burrowed a hole in the ice for myself, long and deep, slanting downward just at the place where the forest began. I built this bubble a little bigger than the last one, with shining walls and a lovely luminescent floor and a long window running across one side. I spent half a day fashioning an elegant door out of a slab of ice mounted on a thick dowel of the same useful substance. On its inner surface I hung the little shining Vogon sphere that would maintain light and power and a perpetual globe of sweet warm air between me and the wintry world without.

  Then I went inside and closed the door and said the word that activated the Vogon sphere. Everything turned bright and cheerful. Hoy! Yakoub has a roof over his head again!

  Now I set about hauling my possessions back from the various adjacent dimensions where I had stowed them.

  My treasures. The things which root me to myself and remind me of who I have been and who I must yet become. The deep-piled rug, two Yakoubs long and three Yakoubs wide, woven in wondrous red and green and blue and black on lost Earth itself by a sultan's fifty castrated slaves. The three brass lamps, fat-bellied and squat, with the names of my fathers inscribed on their sides. The necklace strung with Byzantine gold coins that had belonged to that wondrous whore Mona Elena, and which I meant to return to her if ever I saw her again. The silken scroll of office, spun for me by nine blind eye-beaters of Duud Shabeel, which I should have surrendered upon my abdication but did not because I could not bear to part with anything so ingenious: look at it long enough and you begin to know with complete certainty that you can neve
r die. The starstone, plucked from a sand-dragon's bloody throat on Nabomba Zom, in whose depths the red light of Romany Star shines with wondrous warmth. The wonderwheel. The shadowstick. The Rom scepter, bareshti rovli rupui, the chief's silver wand, with its eight-sided red-tasseled head engraved with the five great symbols, nijako, chjam, shion, netchaphoro, trushul: axe, sun, moon, star, cross. The statue of the Black Virgin Sara, our patron saint. The veil that had belonged to La Chunga, the Gitana dancer. The set of tinsmith's tools, worn and bent. The frayed and tattered bearskin, last of its kind in the universe. The golden candlesticks. The Tarot cards. The scythe that was dipped in my bath-water when I was born, to drive the demons away. The amulet of sea-urchin fossils. The dear little prickly niglo, the hedgehog that we brought with us from Earth into half the worlds of the galaxy, carved from the fiery yellow jade of Alta Hannalanna. And more, much more, the treasures of a long life, the gatherings of all my great odyssey.

  These things I arranged in the ice-bubble in the ways that I liked to arrange them. Then I stepped outside and saluted the writhing green arms rising from the snow just before me, and called out my name three times, and cried the words of power, and waved my manhood in the frosty air and made water in front of my door, slicing a hot yellow track through the snow in the home-sealing patterns. And laughed and danced one more quick dance, arms and legs flying, hootchka pootchka hoya zim! Yakoub! Yakoub! Yakoub!

  It was almost like being in my house of power again, my shining palace on Galgala where I lived when I was King of the Rom and shaper of the destinies of worlds. I lit the lamps and grasped the scepter and stood upon the carpet and once again they came to me, the chieftains of the Rom, one by one, saying, "I am Frinkelo," "I am Fero," "I am Yakali," "I am Miya," bringing me their disputes and their sorrows and their dreams. Wherever I am, that place is my house of power, my palace. That is one of the great Rom secrets, the reason why we can be wanderers. It is not that we have no roots, but that all places are one to us and we put down the same roots wherever we may be, for every place where we may wander is the same place: it is the place known as Not-Romany-Star. And therefore any place can be home for us, since no place is home.

  So in the silence and the solitude of this new place beside the strange forest I lived and was happy in the company of myself. The ghost of Polarca came to me, and Valerian, and several of the others, misty figures drifting through time to show me that they still loved me. Shrewd old Bibi Savina came once or twice, that wise and cunning woman who has given me so much good advice over the long years, not only while I was king but even before: for she was the one who had gone ghosting back to my childhood to tell me that I would and must be king. "This is the right place," she said now, and winked. "Stay here until it stops being right." It was good to see a woman again, even an old one like Bibi Savina. She was bent and withered, was Bibi Savina, and looked at least twice my age, though I was almost old enough to be her father. She had never been the sort to go in for remakes. Hard to imagine, Bibi Savina with a remake, prancing around like a giddy girl. Would I have desired her, if she had had herself made young and beautiful? Of course I have never felt any such feeling toward Bibi Savina: how could it have been otherwise? Aside from everything else there would have been a fantastic scandal, considering her high role in the government, if I had ever laid a finger on her. Not that I wasn't glad to see Bibi Savina, and more than glad, but I would have liked to be visited while I was on Mulano by someone for whom I felt a little more passion, too. When you're living in an igloo in the middle of an ice-field a couple of pretty breasts and a few sleek thighs provide a wondrous amount of warmth and light. (You think that's disgusting, a man my age talking like that? Just you wait. Except you won't be as lucky as I am; you won't still have the juices flowing when you get to my age, if you do, the way they flow in me.)

  Of course it isn't possible actually to make love to a ghost, but as I say, there's a certain delight in having a beautiful woman around, even if she's intangible. I would have enjoyed a visit from the elegant and supple and perpetually beautiful Syluise, for instance, that extraordinary woman who has haunted me for many too many years; but Syluise paid me no visits. It would have astounded me if she had. That would have been too loving a thing for her to do. Still, I had my hopes, such as they were. She rarely left my mind. I found myself remembering her in a thousand ways. How she used to plunge into a tub filled with that luminescent blue protozoan from-where? Iriarte? Estrilidis?-and rise from it like Venus, glowing, dazzling. And I would lick it off her, all over. The taste of it still with me. Ah! The bitch. How I loved her. I still do. I always will. Every man is fated to have a Syluise in his life, I think. Even a king.

  The ghosts came; the ghosts went. And sometimes when I was alone I closed my eyes and I was on Galgala at my court with clouds of gold all around me, or I was drifting in the pleasure-sea of Xamur, or I was at the Capital and advancing to the sound of a hundred trumpets up the broad crystalline steps of the throne-platform of the Fifteenth Emperor, who rose to welcome me and offer me a cup of sweet wine with his own hands. Me, Yakoub, born a slave and three times sold, and there was the emperor, and Sunteil beside him, and the Lords Naria and Periandros not far away, bidding me welcome! Sweet dreams, true dreams, happy dreams of a life without regret. And I told myself that I could go on this way for a hundred years more, a thousand, living in the bright glow of my memories and completely content.

  2.

  THEN SYLUISE TURNED UP AFTER ALL. OR HER GHOST, rather. I can't say she came just when I had given up hope, because I had never had any real hope of seeing her, just wistful softheaded fantasies that I knew were foredoomed. And then there she was, Syluise the golden, Syluise the glorious, hovering in the air right in front of me.

  "You haven't missed me at all, have you?" she said.

  Dear Syluise. Always opening with a jab.

  "I've thought of no one else the whole time," I told her. Sounding romantic and sarcastic both at once. Which was it? How would I know?

  Billowing waves of electromagnetic splendor surrounded her like an aurora, shooting off a halo of emerald, scarlet, violet, gold. She looked gorgeous within it. I have never seen her looking anything but gorgeous, no matter the season, the time of day, the geophysical or emotional weather. That's her specialty: beauty so intense that it's unreal. She is like her own statue.

  "It's been a long time, hasn't it, Syluise?"

  "I've been traveling."

  "Polarca tells me he saw you in Atlantis."

  "Did he? What keen eyes he has. I looked for you there, but you weren't around."

  "I'm not ghosting these days," I said.

  "No. You're burrowing down in the snow and holding your breath until your face turns blue. Isn't that what you're doing, Yakoub?"

  I could hardly bear to look at her, she was so beautiful. An alien beauty, not Rom at all, cascades of shining golden hair, intense blue eyes, long slender legs. She is Rom, that I know, but long ago she had herself changed into this Gaje form. Which never alters: I have known her eighty years and she has not aged by a day. She is her own statue, yes.

  But there is more to her than her glittering beauty. She poses as a woman for men, a grand courtesan; and God knows she plays the role magnificently. But it's all a game to her, these tempestuous passions. Something else burns inside her, unknowable, untouchable, some deeper ambition than making men kneel to her beauty. The beauty is synthetic, after all. She might have been squat and coarse and bestial, dull-eyed and thick-waisted and mud-faced, before she had herself remade as a goddess. For all I knew she might even have been a man, before the remake.

  "I've given up the kingship," I said.

  "Yes. I know. You've abdicated. But why spend your retirement in a place like this?"

  "Because there were things I needed to think about. This is a good place for thinking."

  "Is it?"

  "My mind works well in cold weather. And stark scenery like this helps me get down to essentials."
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  Essentials. I wanted to reach for her and pull her down against me. Those breasts, those lips. Those were essentials. Her perfume filling the air. Mulano ghosts were clustered around her, dazzled by the energy coming from her. My throat was dry and there was an ache in my balls. Maybe it would have been better if she had never come here. You can't make love to a ghost but you can certainly lust after one.

  "Which essentials do you mean, Yakoub?"

  I have outlived all my wives. Syluise will not have me. I want no others. There's something hard and contrary about her that mesmerizes me. But perhaps I have had enough wives for one life. Probably I would not take Syluise if she ever were to accept me. But still I ask her, from time to time. And always she refuses.

  I said, "The future of the Kingdom is the only essential, Syluise."

  "But what concern is that of yours now?"

  "I still am king."

  "Are you? Make up your mind. You say that you've abdicated. You can't be king and not be king at the same time."

  "I'm taking a holiday from the kingship, is all."

  "Ah, is that what it is? A holiday?"

  "A time for revaluation. For thinking things over. A tactical move. I could have the throne back in a minute if I asked for it." She smiled: a flicker of the flawless lips; a faint gleaming of the matchless eyes. "You doubt that?" I asked.

  "I don't doubt that you believe it."