Star of Gypsies

1. In a snowy season

These are the Three Laws:

What is holy is what is efficient.

Those who live by common sense are righteous in the eyes of God.

The one Word is: Survive! This is the One Word: Survive!

WHAT HAD LED ME TO ABDICATE IN THE FIRST PLACE WAS the realization that the time had come to drop everything and run for it. One of my favorite tactics, with which I have often had great success, is attacking by means of retreating. Passive aggression, you might call it.

And so in a snowy season I left Galgala behind, my throne and my house of power and everything, and went off to the world called Mulano, which means the World of Ghosts. What I was looking for on Mulano was nothing more than a quiet place to live-me, who always thrived on noise and bustle and excitement-and that was what I found there, in the middle of all the snow-white brightness. I was a hundred and seventy-two years young and so far as I was concerned I had never been King of the Gypsies in my life and I was damned if anybody was going to talk me into being King of the Gypsies ever again.

I didn't miss the throne. I didn't miss living in my house of power. I didn't miss Galgala. Except for the gold, I guess. Yes: I did miss the gold of Galgala. For its sheen. For its beauty. (Certainly not for its value. What value?)

On Galgala everything is golden. The cats and the dogs, or what you might have called cats and dogs in the old days on Earth, have liquid gold running in their veins. There's gold in the leaves of the trees, there are grains of gold in the sands of the deserts, there are specks of gold in the paving-blocks of the streets. That's right. On Galgala the streets are literally paved with gold. You can imagine what the discovery of a planet like that would have done to the galactic economy if we had still been on the gold standard when they found Galgala. But of course that quaint though sensible ancient idea had been obsolete for centuries by the time the first exploration team landed there.

Gold is pretty much worthless everywhere in the galaxy now, thanks to Galgala. Even so, the stuff still has its fascination for us foolish mortals, despite the hatchet job that the discovery of Galgala performed on its value in commerce. Especially does it fascinate the species of foolish mortals that other folks call Gypsies. My people. Your people too, most likely: for I hope and believe that most of you who read this will be of my own kind. (By which I mean those who call themselves the Rom. Who have called themselves by that name since before Earth was.)

We Rom have always loved gold. In the old days our women used to festoon themselves with gaudy masses of gold coins, threading them on golden chains and letting them dangle down over their lovely jiggling bosoms like so much braided garlic. You practically needed a hacksaw to get through the gold to their breasts, dancing around under those masses of yellow metal. And we men-oh, what tricks we played with our gold, back there in Hungary and Rumania and all those other forgotten places of old lost Earth! The roll of gold napoleons wrapped up in a handkerchief and stuffed into your pants to make a bulge, so you'd look like you were hung like an elephant! Imagine the Gypsy lass' surprise when the trousers came off.

(But of course you can't really surprise a Gypsy lass, because she's seen everything already. And it isn't size that your clear-thinking woman looks for, anyway: it's craft and cunning, and some vigor.)

Well, I had given up Galgala and all its golden glitter forever and ever. My power and my glory were behind me now. And Mulano was my home.

Mulano was a good peaceful sort of world. It was chilly but it wasn't really inhospitable. There was a silence about it that I loved. I had plenty of ghosts and snow-serpents and even a doppelganger or two to keep me company. And then too there was the bird called Mulesko Chiriklo, the bird of the dead. I think I never was happier in all my years. I had told them all to go to hell, all those who had never understood what I was driving at and what was driving me. You want a king? Good: go find yourself a king. I want to be by myself for once. That was what I told them. And even though I was by myself I was still as full of joy and mischief as ever: joy has always overflowed in me. And mischief. On Mulano I felt as sweet as a lamb that is sleeping in a carload of newly harvested garlic and wild onions. Chapite! Which means, in our old Romany tongue, It is true!

The day on Mulano is fourteen hours long and the night is fourteen hours long and also there is a time between day and night that is seven hours long, when both suns are in the sky at once, the yellow one and the blood-orange one. That time of day I called Double Day. I would stand outside my ice-bubble for hours, watching the warring shafts of light collide and crash and struggle until one had enfolded and transformed the other.

And there was always a time at the end of Double Day when the two suns dropped below the horizon in a single instant, so that the sky turned green and then gray and then black between one breath and the next. The stars would come out in that moment. And that was the moment of Romany Star. I would see very suddenly, blazing in the forehead of the sky like the torch of the gods, the great gleaming red ball of hot light that long ago gave my people birth. And I would drop to my knees wherever I might happen to be at that moment, and scoop up snow and rub it on my cheeks to keep myself from crying. (I don't mind crying for joy but it sickens me to cry out of sadness and longing.) And then I would say the words of the prayer of Romany Star. If there was a ghost with me - Thivt, say, or Polarca, or Valerian - I would make him say the words too.

And when we had spoken the words I would say, "You see it up there, do you, you Polarca?"

"I see it, yes, Yakoub."

"How far is it from here, do you think?"

And he would say, shrugging, "Six hundred leagues and then a mile or two."

And then I would say, "The journey of ten thousand years ends with but a single step. Is that not so, you Polarca?"

And he would say, "That is so, Yakoub."

And we would stand there in the cold red glow of distant Romany Star until we could feel the cold snow beginning to melt under our star's hot embrace; and then we would go inside and sing the old sad songs until the night was done. And that was how it was for me on Mulano, among the ghosts and the snow-serpents, in that snowy season, in that time when I had never had been King of the Gypsies and was never going to let them make me King of the Gypsies again.

BEING THE KING, WELL, THAT WAS MY DESTINY I WAS marked for it. I was caught up in the kingship from my childhood on, the way a swimmer can be caught in rough surf and tumble over and over and over, altogether unable to fight his way free. What the swimmer learns is, you will never escape the turmoil of the waves unless you go slack and easy, and let the waves have their way with you, and wait for the moment when you can regain control. The same with being king: if you are marked for it, no sense struggling against it. Go slack and easy, and let your unchangeable fate come up over you and take you where you are meant to go. That is what destiny is all about.

I knew I was supposed to be king because the ghost of an old woman came to me and told me so, when I was just a little Gypsy boy. I didn't know she was a ghost; I didn't know whose ghost she was; I didn't know what she was trying to tell me. But I knew she was there. I thought she was a dream that had somehow detached itself from my sleeping mind and was walking around, free and clear, in the light of common day. This was in the city of Vietorion on the planet Vietoris, my native world, one of the worlds of the great Imperium of the stars. I was who knows? - three years old, four, maybe. A long time ago.

She was horribly ancient and withered, the oldest woman who ever was. I knew at once that there had to be something magical about her, seeing those signs of great age in her face, because even in those days it was an easy thing to get a remake and there was hardly anyone who looked old. Here I am today, with practically two centuries behind me, and my hair is black as ever, my teeth are sound, my skin is firm. You would have to look into my eyes, and beyond them into my soul, to discover how long my journey has been and how far it has taken me.

But she looked old, my childhood ghost. Her face was seamed and wrinkled and I think there were gaps in her teeth and her nose was sharp as a blade. Out of her lean and parched Gypsy face blazed her eyes, two dark stars lit by fiery mysterious furnaces. She was something out of fairy-tales, the witch-woman, the magical crone, the old Gypsy fortune-teller. Hobbling into my little room, putting her claw of a hand on my little wrist. Muttering magical names to me:

"You are Chavula," she whispered. "You are Ilika. You are Terkari."

The names of kings. Great names, names that went booming and roaring down the corridors of time.

I was never afraid of her. She was the old wise woman, the mother of mothers, the seeress. What we call in our Romany language the phuri dai. How could I fear the phuri dai? And I was too young to fear anything, after all.

"You are the chosen one," she sang to me. "You will be the great one."

What could I say? What did I understand? Nothing. Nothing. "You were born at the midnight of noon," she said. "That is the hour of kings. You are Terkari. You are Ilika. You are Chavula. And they are you. Yakoub Nirano Rom, Yakoub the king! You have the sorcery in you. You have the power."

She was chanting prophesy at me, and I thought it was a game. She was laying my life's destiny upon me, weaving the inescapable web of my future around me, and I laughed in wonder and delight, comprehending nothing of the burdens she was giving me. There was a glow around her, a magical shimmer of electricity. Her feet never touched the floor. That was the best of it for me, the way she floated. But of course I was very young. I had never seen a ghost before. I understood nothing of the principles. All magic explains itself, if only you live long enough to let the answers come to you, and later I understood everything. Later I knew that in truth she was prophesying nothing, but only telling me the things that she had already seen come to pass. That is what it means to go ghosting: to carry the future, the absolutely delimited and altogether unchangeable future, backward into the past. I would meet the old woman again much later. When I became king she would be my wise adviser, my phuri dai indeed. But for now I was only a child struggling with the perplexities of my knives and forks, and she was the magical floating woman who came to me by day or by night in a shining aura of sparkling light and touched her hand to mine and whispered, "You will be the one who brings us home."

WHEN I WENT TO MULANO I WASN'T TRYING To ESCAPE from my destiny, however it may seem to you. Believe that or not, as you choose. I know what I was doing. How can you escape your destiny? That's like saying, I was trying to escape my skin, I was trying to escape my breath, I was trying to escape my thoughts. On Mulano I wasn't trying to escape anything: I was trying to fulfill that great design of destiny which I had known all my life I was meant to fulfill. Sometimes it's necessary to run very hard in what seems like the wrong direction if you hope ever to get where you need to go.

Of course the whole universe sent emissaries to bother me when I was on Mulano. Nobody can stay hidden for long in a galaxy as little as this. The first one who came was Rom, naturally. I would have been surprised and probably sore as blazes if he had been Gaje. Rom are always quicker than anyone when it comes to picking up the signs of a trail. You know that already, if you are Rom; or at least you should know that, and I pray to whatever god is closest at hand that you do. And if you are not Rom-if you are of the other kind, if you are Gaje - read and learn. Read and learn!

Four or five years earlier, however many it was, when I decided to put the worlds of the civilized Empire behind me and headed out to lose myself in the snowy wastes of Mulano, I took good care to leave a trail. It was only common sense. Even when you've gone off by yourself to think, or to heal your wounds, or simply to hide for a while, you want to leave the patrin behind you, the trail-signs. If you don't, how will your family find you? And if your family can never find you, who are you?

In the old days on lost Earth the patrin-signs spoke of simple things, and they were posted in simple ways. We were a lot simpler people then. A few marks scratched in the ground, or some charcoal strokes on a wall: that was sufficient. When your path took you far from the wagons of your kumpania, you left the signs behind you to show where you had gone and also to guide your kin as they traveled the same path. There was the sign like this - (D-that meant, "There are very generous people here who are friendly to Gypsies," and there was the one like this- + -that meant, "Here they don't give you a thing," and the one like this- /// -that meant, "We have already robbed this place." And then there were signs that said that water was available for the horses, or that there were pigs and chickens for the taking, or that in this town lived many stupid people who wanted their fortunes told. And also you could leave clues to be used in the fortune-telling by those who followed you: "This woman wants a son," or "They are very greedy for gold here," or "The old man will die soon."

All this I know not only because it is the tradition but because I have walked the trails of old Earth myself, the Earth that existed a thousand or two years ago, when I used to go ghosting around to see what was to be seen.

Do you doubt me? But why would you doubt me?

Believe me. I know whereof I speak. How could it be otherwise? When I tell you something it's because I know it to be true. I'm too old to lie, at least to lie to myself; and what I say here I have to say to myself before I can say it to you. I would lie to you in a flash if I saw anything to gain by it. But not here. Here I can only gain what I want to gain by telling the absolute truth.

(Maybe a little lie once in a while. I'm only human. But no big ones. Believe me.)

When I went to live on Mulano I left my own patrin behind me in fifty places. Of course my patrin wasn't just a matter of charcoal marks scrawled on walls. These are the days of the Empire, after all, when everyone has magic at his fingertips. So I marked my trail in signs of fire in the sunset sky over Galgala, and I wrote it in gleaming blue and gold on the shells of a tribe of wind-scarabs on Iriarte, and I buried it in the nasty dreams of a smelly little thief on Xamur. And I posted it in other ways in other places here and there about the Imperium as well. I had no doubts that I would be found. Only let them not find me too soon, is what I prayed.

The first one who found me, as I say, was Rom. That was gratifying, that a Rom would be the first. You want your own kind to confirm your prejudices about them. He was young and very tall and he was wearing his skin midnight-dark, with glittering white eyes and teeth and a mane of shining black hair tumbling about his shoulders. Because he was so long and slender there was a kind of beauty and fragility about him that made him look almost like a woman, but I could tell he was strong enough to crush rocks in his hands.

He came up to me while I was spice-fishing on the western lip of the Gombo glacier. It was so long since I'd seen another real living human being, not a ghost, not a doppelganger, that for a moment I was really taken aback. I almost wanted to run. I could feel powerful waves of life-vibration emanating from him, clanging off my soul with the impact of a thousand gongs.

But I held my ground and pulled myself together. Whatever he wanted, he wasn't going to get it from me, and if push came to shove I was going to do both the pushing and the shoving. Kings are like that. You don't have to be a son of a bitch to be a king, but you don't usually get to be king by being a patsy, either.

He gave me the Rom sign and the old Rom greeting: "Sarishan, Yakoub."

Then, still speaking Romany, he wished me long life and many sons and the continued favor of the gods and angels, and a few more medieval flourishes of the same sort.

"I speak Imperial, boy," I told him when he seemed to be done. A little gratuitous snottiness is useful, sometimes: it keeps them off balance while you're trying to figure out what they're up to. Although this one looked too innocent to be up to much.

He bit his lip. He had expected me to answer in a patriotic gush of Romany. The Great Tongue and all that.

Staring at me in puzzlement, he said, "You are Yakoub, aren't you?" "What do you think?"

I imagined I could hear the gears going round in his head, clank, gnash, clank. Yes, yes, he might be telling himself, this is Mulano and that is the place where Yakoub has gone, and this man looks like Yakoub and there's nobody else living on this planet, so this must actually be Yakoub. But maybe he wasn't thinking that at all. He was so young and pretty that I tended to underestimate him, I now suspect.

Finally he said, "There were two rumors circulating everywhere, one that you were dead, the other you had gone to some world outside the Empire."

"Which one do you want to believe?"

"There was never any question. Yakoub will live forever."

Oh, Lord! Hero-worship, a bright purple case of it! He was trying hard not to tremble. Quickly he made three of the signs of respect, one after another without pause, including one I hadn't seen for at least forty years. I began to wonder whether he was really all that young, or simply a good remake. But then I saw that he had to be young. There's a look of rapturous awe that comes into a young man's eye in the presence of true masculine power and authority that simply can't be faked and absolutely can't be built back into anyone past the age of thirty by some remake artist. This boy had that look. He knew that he was standing before a king; and that knowledge was melting his bones.

He told me that his name was Chorian and that he came from the world known as Fenix in the Haj Qaldun system and that he was a Rom of the Kalderash stock. That is my branch of the tribe as well. He told me also that he had been trying to find me for three years.

None of that was particularly interesting to me. The first impact of his presence was dying down now. It took a moment or two, but I was calm again. I turned away from him and went on with my fishing.

In this part of the glacier the ice was perfectly clear and you could see the long tubular forms of spice-fish, both the red kind and the superior turquoise variety, gliding serenely through the depths of the frozen river fifty meters down. I had a vibration-net down there, fluttering in the molecular breeze.

He said, "The Lord Sunteil instructed me to find you."

Now that was interesting. Sunteil floated into view in my mind: the emperor's right-hand lordling, the favored successor, smooth and slippery and perhaps a little sinister. I glanced back over my shoulder and gave Chorian a long slow cool look.

"You're in the service of the Empire, are you?"

"No," he said, "I'm in the pay of Lord Sunteil." There was a wink in his voice. "That's not the same thing."

Yes, I definitely had underestimated him. That was a fine distinction, very nicely put: he had allowed himself to be bought, but he hadn't sold them anything. I wanted to hug him for that. The Rom blood may be running thin, I sometimes think, but it hadn't yet turned entirely to water if this boy was any evidence. And of course Fenixi in general have a well-earned reputation for slyness and slipperiness. I had let Chorian's air of seeming naivete mislead me.

I didn't give him so much as a glint of approbation, though. I didn't want him to get too smug too soon. That's a peril to any Rom; you start bamboozling the poor Gaje before you've cut your first teeth, and you find out how easy it is, and it can make you smug, which is just one province away from being careless. We have never been able to afford to be careless. So instead of praising his nice little distinction I simply shrugged. In any case I had my fishing to attend to just then.

My net was nearly in position. The moment was critical and called for all my concentration. It's a ticklish business, lowering a vibrationnet through solid ice. I ran my fingers over the keyboard as if I was coaxing a tune from my zither, and the net dipped and bobbed and billowed.

Down in the ice a turquoise spice-fish picked up the song of the net and swung around to stare at the net's gaping shimmering mouth. Come on, you lovely bastard, wriggle right in! But the fish wasn't about to do that. He looked up through the ice at me and I saw his huge golden-green eyes, wise and solemn, glowing like twin suns. That is one smart fish, I thought. That fish has Romany blood in him. I could hear him laughing at me through fifty meters of ice. That fish is my cousin, I thought.

"You ever do any vibration-fishing?" I asked.

"There's no winter on Fenix. I've never seen ice before." "Ah. I should have remembered that."

"I went a lot of places while I was searching for you. I was on Marajo, I was on Duud Shabeel, I was on Xamur. I never saw any ice in those places either. "

I tickled the keys and swung the mouth of the net away from the turquoise spice-fish. I wasn't eager to catch him any longer, not after the way he had looked at me.

Chorian said, "Xamur is where I finally was able to find out where you had gone."

"God gave you a nose. It's only right that you should use it for smelling things out. Why did Sunteil send you?"

"The Lord Sunteil is afraid that you're planning to return to the Empire," the boy said. "He thinks this abdication of yours is some sort of ruse, that you're just biding your time until you're ready to come back. And when you come back you'll be more powerful than ever before. "

That went right to my gut, those words. In amazement I realized that Sunteil was actually on to me. Even though none of my own people, apparently, had managed so far to figure out my game, somehow Sunteil had.

Which meant not only that Sunteil was smart, which I had known for a long time, but that he might be smarter than I had allowed for. That could cause trouble for us when the old emperor finally died and Sunteil, as most people expected, succeeded him. For I had no doubt at all that I was going to have to deal face to face with Lord Sunteil, I or my immediate successor, concerning matters of the highest importance to the future of the Rom people, when Sunteil became emperor.

But if he had fathomed my strategy, what was the point of his sending Chorian all the way out here to tell me so? There had to be a trick somewhere.

"I don't get it," I said. "The Lord Sunteil sends a young Rom to find out whether the old Rom king means to make trouble? What sense does that make? Does he really think you'll spy on me for him? That's too simple."

"The Lord Sunteil is a subtle man. And devious." "So I have heard, yes."

"Perhaps he thinks you'll tell me things that you'd never tell a GaJo. And maybe he actually does hope that I would tell them to him." "And would you?"

Chorian looked at me in horror.

"I have strong loyalty to Lord Sunteil, and he knows it. But I would never carry the secrets of the King of the Rom to him, not for anything. Never. Never. "

"Even if I wanted you to?" "What?"

"Look," I said, "Sunteil's all wrong about what he thinks I'm up to out here, and it isn't in any way useful to anybody for him to go on believing any of that stuff. I want you to tell him the truth about my abdication. That can't be construed as betraying me. You took Empire money for this job, didn't you? Well, give the Empire what it's paying for. Go and let the Lord Sunteil know that he doesn't need to fret about my coming back to cause trouble. I have completely lost interest in power. Completely. "

God, could I ever lay it on! But just then I believed every word I was saying. That's the first rule of successful lying: believe your own bullshit, or no one else will. Right at that moment I knew as clearly as I knew I had two balls between my legs that I was done with being king. I hadn't felt that way five minutes ago and I probably wouldn't feel that way five minutes later, but what I was saying was what I believed with all my heart, right at that moment.

Chorian stood there listening in that rapt adoring open-mouthed way of his, as though he bought every syllable of the nonsense I was spewing. Grandly I went on, "I've had a bellyful of it, boy, and I'm finishecl with it. The whole power thing has burned out, for me. The time has come for me to step aside for good. Mulano is where I mean to live. If the Lord Sunteil knew how good the fishing is here, he'd understand. "

A nice flourish to finish with, I thought.

But Chorian was more complicated than I had been giving him credit for.

"I'll tell the Lord Sunteil that, yes," the boy said sweetly, when I was done. "And should I tell your cousin Damiano that also?" All innocence, just a good-looking young messenger-lad running errands for his betters. "That you have no plan to return to the Empire? Even though there is great trouble among the Rom, because there has been no king? Even though you are the one who is best able to bring the crisis to an end?"

I WASN'T EVEN REMOTELY EXPECTING THAT IN My amazement I hit the keys so hard that the net turned mouth-downward just as an elegant i-ed spice-fish was becoming curious about it. I should have realized that this was all going to be much less simple than it had seemed at first. Who was this kid really working for, anyway?

"Damiano?" I yelped. "What does he have to do with this? Where did you talk with my cousin Damiano?"

"On Marajo, at the City of Seven Pyramids. I told him that the Lord Sunteil had sent me after you, and he said, Yes, go, find the king and tell him that his throne is waiting for him."

My heart started to pound in a nasty way.

Calmly, calmly. How I hate it, when alarm bells start ringing like that inside my old bones! But between one eyeblink and the next I went into myself and turned down the adrenal flow. Sometimes wisdom is nothing more than proper control of your ductless glands.

"I never had a throne," I said. "I never was king of anything."

Chorian wasn't having any more of that line now, though.

"You were Rom baro," the boy said. "The big Gypsy. The top man." "Never. Absolutely not. Get that whole idea out of your head." My hands were trembling a little. I didn't want Chorian to see that. To distract him I pointed and waved my arms and cried, "Look, there, do you see that fish nosing around the net?"

It was another turquoise one, not as wise-looking as the first. I gave him my full attention. It was a convenient way of changing the subject until I had had a chance to work things out a little in my head.

I could taste the spice-fish's sweet flesh already on my tongue: rosemary, turmeric, cumin, golden pepper. I made the net dance for him. I let it flutter toward him, I pulled it back, I made him beg to be caught. His long nose twitched as he zigged and zagged about. With marvelous agility he swam the crystalline depths, parting the ice as though it were not there.

Come, pretty bastard! Come glide right in!

"What's this crisis you were talking about?" I said carefully. "That there is no king. That ships of exploration are going forth and there is no plan. That disputes are arising and there is no one to settle them."

I stared down at my fish, as though I could snare him by the power of my mind alone.

"There are ways of managing these things even without a king," I said.

"They have. For five years. But things are getting difficult and tense. Damiano says to tell you that now the high ones of the Rom want to elect a new king. They won't wait for you any longer, even the ones who never believed you were serious about abdicating. If you're definitely not going to come back, they're about ready to elect someone in your place."

So that was it!

That had been meant to hook me but good, that quiet statement just now. Push was coming to shove; Sunteil was not the only one who had figured out what I was really up to; and now my cousins of the Rom Kingdom were matching my bluff with one of their own. That was the real message Chorian had come here to deliver. He might be in Sunteil's pay but the one he actually served was Damiano. Which is to say that he served the Rom; which is as it should have been. Sunteil wanted information, yes. But Damiano wanted to make me come back. And this was his way of getting me to do it.

Even now I wasn't going to let myself go for the bait. I couldn't, not now, not yet.

"They need a king? Let them find a king, then." "But you are king!"

"You didn't hear me the first time? How can they elect someone in my place when I never had a place?"

"But that isn't so! How can you say you weren't king when you were king? You are king!"

He was bewildered. He should have been. I had been working hard at bewildering him. I laughed. I left him to puzzle it out and went back to my fishing again. Swiftly, smoothly, I closed the net's mouth and swept it toward the surface of the glacier. The turquoise spice-fish leaped and sprang and writhed. I had him. I pulled the net up until it breached the glacier's skin, and I kept on lifting until it rose twenty meters into the air. The orange sun was high in the east and a streak of scarlet fire ran over the frozen land like a river of molten gold. In that brilliant light my fish changed colors a thousand times, screaming at me from every corner of the spectrum as I held him aloft. Then I sent a quick shaft of force through the rim of the net and the fish was still.

"There," I said. Pride flooded through me. Even an idiot can be a king, and I can list plenty who have, but fishing with a vibration-net is a different story. It takes a quick eye and a pretty wrist. I was years in learning the skill and I doubt that there's anybody better at it. "You see that?" I crowed. "The timing, the coordination? There's real art in what I just did." The boy was gaping, mind still lost in the tangles of interstellar politics. I turned to him. "Boy, you are invited to join me for dinner tonight," I told him expansively. "At least once in your life you should know the taste of spice-fish."

"Your cousin Damiano-"

I glared. "Bugger my cousin Damiano with an ivory tusk! Let him be king, if he wants."

"The kingship belongs by rights to you, Yakoub."

"Where do you get all these idiotic ideas?" I said, sighing. "I never wanted to be king. I tell you ten thousand times: I never was king. I was king in their heads, maybe. All that is behind me. If they need a king, let them find someone else to be their king. Here is where I live. Here is where I'll die."

I said it with real ringing conviction. I would have taken an oath that I was sincere, too. I can remember times when I swore eternal fidelity to Esmeralda with the same throbbing sincerity. And meant it, too. "Yes," I said again, grandiosely. "I have made my farewell to the Imperium. Here is where I'll die!"

"No, Yakoub!"

His eyes were glassy with shock. It went beyond mere love and reverence for me. I had messed up his head completely with my contradictory speeches and with this talk of living out my life on Mulano. Handicapped by his youth, he wasn't able to keep up with my swings and swerves. And when I spoke of dying, it was as if he saw in the mere possibility of my death his own unthinkable extinction sweeping inexorably toward him. If I could die, so could he. He grasped my arm and cried out with the wild silly romantic fervor of the truly young, "You mustn't speak that way. You will never die. Never!"

I shrugged. "Be that as it may. If ever I was king, I'm king no more. Clear?"

"And the succession-"

"Bugger the succession. The succession doesn't interest me. I don't care an ox's foreskin about the succession. That's why I'm here instead of somewhere else. That's why I mean to-"

Chorian gasped. His eyes went very wide. He made a little strangled gargling sound.

It didn't strike me as likely that the web of confusions I had spun around him could have shaken him so profoundly. And I was right. Chorian gasped and gaped and gargled some more, and finally he managed to point past my shoulder, and I looked backward and saw what was really bothering him.

Three snow-serpents had arrived on the scene.

Death's lovely handmaidens, beautiful chilly ribbons of emerald green streaked with ruby and sapphire and speckles of gold leaf They must have looked horrific to him, even though these were only small ones, no more than eight or ten meters long, each one melting a wide glistening track for itself as it slithered in easy curving glides toward the place where we stood.

They had their eyes on my spice-fish. They were zeroing in on it from three different directions.

"Oh, no, no, cousins," I murmured.

Suddenly there was an imploder in Chorian's hand and he was fiddling with the focus. A vein stood out thick as a finger on his forehead. The grand gesture, again. I sighed. You have to be very patient with young men.

"Don't," I told him, reaching up and pushing the weapon back into his pocket. "They're only scavengers. They won't harm us and it's a crime against God to harm them. But I'm not going to let them have my fish." I walked out to meet them. They wriggled down against the ice and became very still, like whipped dogs. The heat and throb of life bothers them. I could have killed them with a touch: I have a lot of heat in me. "Sorry, cousins," I said gently. "This is a matter of me or you, and you ought to know how that has to come out. He's my fish, not yours. I worked damned hard for him."

They wriggled a little. They looked sad and disconsolate. My heart went out to them.

"I tell you what. Tonight let the king enjoyed his royal feast, cousins. Whatever's left will be yours in the morning. Is that all right?" Plainly it wasn't. But there wasn't much they could do about it. They looked to the fish, to me, to the fish again. They made little mournful sounds. My soul wept for them. This was a hard season. But I held my ground and after a moment they turned tail and went slithering away. Chorian was staring at me with that look of awe again.

"They aren't dangerous," I said. "Big, yes, but sweet as pussycats and not half as ferocious. They're strictly carrion-eaters. You know that carrion-eaters are sacred, don't you? For they restore life to the worlds."

But he had forgotten about the snow-serpents already. Something I had said was agitating him now.

"You've been telling me over and over that you never were king. But just now you spoke of yourself as the king. The king will enjoy his royal feast tonight, is what you said. I don't understand you. Are you king or aren't you?"

"I am not the king," I said. "But I am kingly." He looked at me, baffled.

"You spoke of yourself as the king. I heard you." "A figure of speech."

"What?" He was lost.

"I have kingliness about me, and so I can speak of myself as the king, if it pleases me. And I can say I have been king, or I can say I have never been king, as it pleases me. Because the kingliness remains forever. The kingship may go, but not the kingliness, not ever, boy, not ever. Once you've taken on that burden and learned how to stand up underneath it, that strength never leaves you, even if the burden does." I slung the spice-fish over my shoulder. It must have weighed fifty kilos, but I wasn't going to let that trouble me. "So tonight you dine with the king, boy, and what you'll eat will be royal fare. And in a day or two you go back to wherever you came, is that understood? And you tell them that Yakoub meant it when he said he was tired of being king. Yakoub has abdicated. Permanently. Absolutely. Retroactively. You tell that to Sunteil. You tell that to Damiano. You can tell it to the emperor himself. It would be a mistake to doubt me."

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.

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 him 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 faith less 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

64 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."

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 Ga e 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 lawabiding 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.

Give a Gajo a foolish fantasy and he will embrace it and embellish it until it becomes truer than the truth. Whenever five of our tribes came together in the same place for a festival the GaJe would imagine that we were convening to elect a new king. Is that what you are doing, electing a new king? And we would say, pulling long faces, Yes, yes, our old king has died, now we are choosing the wisest and strongest and best among us to rule over us. Sometimes we actually did hold an election of sorts, if we saw something to gain by it. We came forth and told the Gaje, Here is our new king, King Karbaro, King Mijloli, King Porado, whatever his name. Those are all filthy words in the Romany tongue, but what did the Gaje know? The filthier the name we invented the better the joke. And we would find some strong handsome fellow of the tribe with more vanity than brains and we would jump him up to be King of the Gypsies and he would stride around waving and nodding and smiling, and the GaJe would be tremendously impressed. They paid good money to watch the coronation feast, and paid money again to take pictures of us dancing and singing in our quaint tribal costumes, and while all that was going on we moved among them and picked their pockets besides, not because we were criminals at heart but simply to punish them for their silliness.

And the GaJe went away feeling pleased with themselves because they had seen the coronation of the new Gypsy king. And then we also went on our way and nobody among us gave another thought to King Karbaro again. But the Gaje continued to believe that we were the subjects of a supreme ruler whose powers were absolute and whose commands traveled mysteriously across the world by secret couriers.

Eventually came a time when they stopped believing it. This was in the twentieth or perhaps the twenty-first century, when all knowledge became available at the push of a button and every jackass began to think that he knew everything.

This is the modern world, all the jackasses told each other solemnly. And they all felt very proud of themselves for living in the modern world. Nobody was ignorant any more, nobody was superstitious, nobody could be fooled by glib mumbo-jumbo. Among the things that everybody knew now was that there never had been such a thing as a Gypsy king, that the whole notion was nothing but a hoax, one of the innumerable frauds that those wandering rogues the Gypsies had dreamed up to confuse and delude the poor credulous yokels on whom they preyed.

Not only did those well-informed people who lived in the modern world stop believing in the King of the Gypsies, I think they stopped believing in Gypsies altogether. There was no room in that shiny modern world of theirs for Gypsies. Gypsies were ragged and unkempt and untamable; Gypsies were unpredictable; Gypsies were simply an untidy concept.

So they began to think we were extinct. That we were mere antiquarian folklore, the raggle-taggle Gypsies, O! Oh, yes, there had been Gypsies once upon a time, yes, the way there had been smallpox and public hangings and bitter wars over religion; but all that was done with now. This was the modern world, after all. The Gypsies, they said, have all settled down in ordinary houses and married ordinary people and live ordinary lives. They vote and pay taxes and go to church and speak nothing but the language of the land. The Gypsies of old are all gone, swallowed up in modern civilization, they said. What a pity, they said, that the quaint old picturesque Gypsies are no more.

And right about that time, when we had become all but invisible to the whole Gaje society because we had come to seem to belong to it, when we had vanished clear out of sight-that was the time when we understood that we needed to organize ourselves properly and come forth as a true nation. That was when we really did begin to form our Gypsy government-no fantasy, this time, but the genuine item-and elect our first real Gypsy kings.

We had to. Invisibility has its advantages, but sometimes it can be a drawback. The world was changing very fast. Those were the years when the GaJe first were starting to leave their little Earth and go off to nearby planets. Before long, we knew, they would be voyaging to the stars. If we stayed invisible we would be left behind. So we had to emerge from our Gaje camouflage. In that lay our only hope of getting home again. Earth was not our home, though we had never dared tell the Gaje that; our true home was far away, and the one thing we longed for was to return to it and give up our wandering life at last.

So it came to pass that we began to have kings. That was a thousand years ago, on Earth, in the earliest days of star travel, before anyone knew that we would be the ones to lead mankind upward from Earth into the heavens. Chavula was the first king, and after him Ilika, and then Terkari, and then-well, everyone knows the names of the kings. They were the men who took us to the stars and made us what we are today, masters of many worlds, lords of the roads of night.

And eventually in the fullness of time they came to me and said, "The king is dead, Yakoub. Will you be our king?"

What could I say? What could I do? No one in his right mind wants to be a king; and whatever else I am, I have always been in my right mind. Trust me on that score. But I am also a man of my people, and, powerful as we now may be, we are nevertheless a people in exile. That imposes certain responsibilities on you. I was born in exile and so was my father and so were my father's fathers for fifty generations back. If I was the man who could bring that long exile to an end, how could I dare refuse? In any case I had lived all my life under the lash of the knowledge of my fate; and it was my fate to be the king.

When I was a small boy my father took me to the lookout point near the steep summit of Mount Salvat on Vietoris, which is the world where I was born, and he said, "Where is your home, boy?" And I told him that my home was on such-and-such a street in the city of Vietorion on the world Vietoris. Then he showed me the bright red eye of Romany Star blazing in the black forehead of the sky and he said, "You think this place here is home? No, boy. That place is home. And some day our king will lead us there again." And he looked at me and the look in his eyes told me, more clearly than any words could have done, that he hoped I would be that king. I had never told him of the visions I had had when I was very small, the ghost of the old woman coming to me and planting the seed of the future in my soul; and I found myself unable to tell him now, so I had no way of saying, Yes, father, yes, I will be that king, I will be the one to lead us home, there can be no doubt of it: the ghost of an old woman told me so, bringing the word to me out of the future. I wish now that I had had a chance to tell him that. But I never told him or anyone else. I suppose that is every Rom father's hope, that his son would be the one. He was a slave then and so was I, and not long afterward I was sold away from him in the marketplace of Vietorion and I never saw him again. But I have seen Romany Star every night of my life from whatever world I found myself on, and I feel the warmth of its light on my cheeks no matter how cold the night; for it is the light of the star of home. And when they came to me and said, "Will you be our king, Yakoub," how could I say no, when I might be that very king who would lead us home again? So I let the kingship come upon me, which in time also I relinquished, and which I know will come again, as it must, for there are great fulfillments that have to be worked out and I know that I am the vehicle of their doing.

WHILE THE BOY CHORIAN WAS STILL STAYING WITH ME, Polarca's ghost came around to visit. Chorian was out on the ice at the time hunting cloud-eels with my loop and trident: he was young and agile and energetic, and sending him off to hunt was one good way of getting him out of my hair when I grew weary of all that endless adulation.

There was a hum and a buzz and a crackle in the air and Polarca said, out of the mantle of green radiance that he liked to affect when he went ghosting around, "Is he bothering you? I'll scare him away."

"He'll leave soon enough on his own."

"A pretty boy. What did he come here for?"

"To tell me to get myself back to Galgala and be king again, I think." Polarca considered that. He and I have known each other better than a hundred years, since we were galley slaves together in Nikos Hasgard's synapse pit on Mentiroso. Polarca is Rom of the Lowara stock and he claims to come from a long line of emperors, popes, and horsetraders on Earth. I believe only the part about horsetraders but I would never voice suspicion about the rest. He does more ghosting than anyone I know; he is a very restless man.

"You aren't going to go," Polarca said finally. "Are you asking me or telling me?"

"Both, Yakoub."

"I'm not going to go," I said. "That's right."

"Even though Damiano says that a new king will be elected if you don't."

"You overheard that, did you?"

Polarca smiled. When a ghost smiles, it's more like a tiny flash of lightning. "I was standing right next to you. You didn't see me?" "If they need a new king, let them have a new king," I said. "I'm going to stay here."

"Absolutely, Yakoub. Beyond any doubt that's the wisest thing." The trouble with Polarca's ghost is that he doesn't speak with punctuation, so that half the time I can't tell a question from a statement, and he doesn't speak with inflection, so I can't tell sarcasm from sincerity. That isn't a characteristic of all ghosts; it's just Polarca's. Polarca is a smartass and so is his ghost.

"You think it's wise, do you?" I said.

"Of course it is. Just like it was wise for Achilles to go sulk in his tent. "

I still couldn't tell if I was being needled or supported. There aren't many people who can keep me off balance the way Polarca does. "Don't give me Achilles," I said. "He isn't relevant and you goddamned well know it." Then I said, "I actually saw him once. He was nothing at all."

"Achilles? You saw him?"

"A hoodlum. Little mean eyes and thick lips like chunks of meat. A natural-born sulker. Big and strong but there wasn't an ounce of nobility in him. "

"Maybe you saw somebody else," Polarca suggested. "They said Achilles."

"Ghosting that far back, how can you be sure? There's mist all over everything."

"I saw his shield," I said. "It was the right shield, a real masterpiece of art. But he was nothing but a hoodlum. What I'm doing, it isn't the same thing that Achilles was doing in his tent." I was silent a moment, wondering if I might be fooling myself about that. After a time I said, "Sunteil is mixed into this also. Did you know that?"

"The boy is in the service of Sunteil, yes."

"No," I said. "He's in the pay of Sunteil. There's a difference. Didn't you hear him say that? You've been skulking around here all week." "I went away for a time. I was in Babylon when he said that. I was listening to Hammurabi proclaim the code of laws."

"I bet you were. Sunteil sent him because he thinks my abdication is phony and that I'm probably up to something suspicious by hiding out here on Mulano."

"Aren't you?"

"And so he sent the boy around to spy on me. That's what the boy says, anyway.,,

Polarca's mantle crackled and hummed and leaped up-spectrum a few notches. "Send a Rom to spy on the Rom king? Sunteil's not that silly, Yakoub."

"I know that. Then what is Sunteil doing?"

"He misses you, Yakoub. This is his way of asking you to come back."

"Sunteil misses me?"

"The balance of the Empire is askew. The GaJe emperor needs a Rom king as a counterpoise to keep things steady, and right now there isn't any king."

"Do you know this or are you just saying it, Polarca?" "What's your guess?"

"Don't play guessing games with me, you bastard. That's my trick. You've got me at an unfair advantage already because you're a ghost. How far in the future do you come from, anyway?"

"You think I'm going to tell you that?" "You pig, Polarca!"

"Do you tell, when you go ghosting around?"

"That's different. I'm the king. I'm not required to tell anybody anything. And if I request information from one of my subjects-" "One of your subjects? I'm not anybody's subject. I'm a ghost, Yakoub."

"You're the ghost of a subject, then."

"Regardless," he said. "What you're trying to get from me is privileged information."

"And I make a privileged request. I'm the king." "Bullshit, Yakoub. You abdicated five years ago." "Polarca-" I sputtered. I was getting exasperated.

"Besides, no ethical ghost ever reveals the point in time from which he's ghosting from. Not even to his king."

"Even when the welfare of the Rom nation is at stake?" "What makes you think it is?"

"You're trying to drive me crazy," I said.

He laughed. "I'm trying to keep you on your toes, Yakoub. Look, just be patient and everything will make sense to you, all right? Trust me. I see wonderful things ahead for you. Here-let me show you. The truth lies plainly visible in your palm, if only you have eyes to see. For a small fee, no more than a couple of little coins, the wise old Gypsy will pull back the mysterious veils of the future, he will reveal to you-"

"Get the hell out of here," I told him.

And he did, in the twinkling of an eye. I sat there blinking at the place where he had been. A dozen or so native Mulano ghosts, attracted by the little zone of negative energy that Polarca had left behind, came roaming in to feed. They hung in the cold air in front of me like a cloud of shining gnats. And then Polarca came back, sending the Mulano ghosts frantically scrambling out of his interpolation zone.

"Where'd you go?" I asked. "None of your business."

"Is that the way you talk to your king?" "You abdicated," he reminded me again. "I think you're enjoying this."

"I went to Atlantis," he said. "For six weeks. They had just dedicated the Temple of the Dolphins and there were golden flower-petals strewn half a meter deep all along the Concourse of the Sky. I thought I saw your lady Syluise there, riding in the chariot of one of the great princes. I would have given her your regards, but you know how misty everything gets when you go ghosting that far back."

"You saw Syluise in Atlantis? Are you serious?"' "I am if you want me to be."

I love Polarca, but I hate dealing with his ghost. You expect your fellow Rom to tickle and poke you a little once in a while, especially if he's known you a hundred years or so and thus is an expert on the right places to tickle and poke. And he expects you to tickle and poke back at him. But Polarca, when he's ghosting, holds all the cards. A ghost knows not only past and present, but a good chunk of the future too. I've told Polarca many times that he takes unfair advantage. A lot-, he cares. He boxes me in on six different sides at once. He makes me feel like a simpleton, sometimes, and I'm not accustomed to that. He makes me feel like a GaJo trying to deal with a Rom. And yet I know he loves me. Even when he plagues me like this, he says he does it out of love.

AGAIN POLARCA DISAPPEARED. I WAS LEFT WITH A RESIDUE of uneasiness and irritation. He had seen Syluise, he said. In Atlantis, no less. It was a long time since I had even thought about Syluise. I wished Polarca hadn't taken the trouble to bring her to my mind now.

I could just see her, riding around in chariots back there in Atlantis. Driving the ancient lords of that great city berserk, and probably the ladies too. What would they have made of her there, with her golden hair and all? They would never have seen anyone with golden hair before, those swarthy dark-haired Atlanteans: she would have glittered among them like a goddess. Like a Venus, a bright shimmering Venus.

Atlantis was a Rom city, you know. Whatever other fables you may have heard, the real truth is that we founded it, we created its wondrous grandeur, we were the ones who suffered when it sank beneath the sea. It was our first settlement on Earth, long ago, when we came there after the destruction of Romany Star. Later on the Greeks tried to claim it as their own, but you know what Greeks are like: a shady bunch, half ignorance and half lies. Atlantis was ours. Not for five thousand years after it was destroyed did the Gaje of Earth build anything that even remotely approached it in architectural splendor. It was Earth's first city. And I don't just mean magnificent buildings and marble colonnades. We had sewers and flush toilets while the rest of the population of Earth was still dressing in animal hides and hunting with throwingsticks.

A great city, yes. Too good to last. Anyway it was never our fate to be a settled people. Maybe it was presumptuous of us to build anything as wonderful as Atlantis. It had to be taken away from us. The volcano roared, the Earth heaved, the sea ate Atlantis, and we went forth in ships, poor battered survivors, to follow our luck on the highways of the world. (That's where the notorious Gypsy aversion to travel by sea came from, you know: the horrendous sufferings we experienced during the escape from Atlantis.) But it was wondrous while it lasted, and those of us who know the secret of ghosting go back there often to stare in awe. Getting there takes some work: Atlantis, we found out long ago, lies just about at the limit of our ghosting range. And it's hard for us to see things in much detail there, because as you've heard the farther back you ghost, the more deeply everything gets shrouded in mist. But we go all the same.

And Syluise-golden hair flying in the wind as she rides in the chariot of some Atlantean lord. No woman in my life has held such power over me as Syluise. For better, for worse. I can never escape her spell. That infuriates me, that power of hers over me, and yet if I could change the past and remove all trace of her from my life, God knows I would not do it.

Estrilidis is where I met her. Fifty years ago? Something like that. Cesaro o Nano was still king and I was a diplomatic envoy. A hot humid world, Estrilidis, dense unspoiled forests, all kinds of strange creatures. The cats have two tails there, that I remember. And the insects-ah, the insects, what amazing things they are! Like rubies on legs, like emeralds, like blue diamonds. I was watching them one night marching up the walls of my lodging-place, an astounding procession of great gaudy bugs, when suddenly I saw something even more astounding: a golden woman, bare as the dawn, floating past my window. Perfect pink breasts, swelling hips, long supple legs. Shining like wildfire, shimmering like a ghost, she was. But how could she be a ghost? She was plainly no Rom, not with that glistening yellow hair, not with those startling blue eyes. And only Rom can ghost. Of course she was Rom, for vanity's sake totally transformed to that lustrous Gaje form. I found that out afterward. But even so, not a ghost. This was the real Syluise that I saw, magically holding herself aloft. She beckoned. I followed her into the night. She floating like the will-o'-the-wisp, I running behind her. She smiling, I staring. Gaping. Awed.

In the depths of the forest she halted and turned to me, and when she rushed into my arms I felt that I had captured a flame. We sank down together on the warm moist soil. She laughed; she raked my bare back with her fingernails; she arched her neck like a cat.

"Do you want me to make you a king?" she asked.

Rain was falling, but the heat of our bodies was such that it burned the water away before it could strike us. It was like a fever.

She laughed again. My hands to her breasts: nipples hot and hard, throbbing against my palms. I stroked her silken thighs and they parted for me. And then she clasped me. Oh, the sweetness of that embrace! I closed my eyes and saw the light of a thousand stars of a thousand colors. And felt the heat of those thousand suns searing me. You might have thought she was my first woman, it was so shattering a moment for me. And me a hundred twenty years old then, more or less. But in that thunderclap of a moment all those who had preceded her in that long life of mine were eradicated from my memory. There was only this one. Who was she? Did it matter? Did I care? I was lost in her.

As we moved she began to speak, a soft low chanting; and after a moment I realized that she was speaking in Romany, that from those perfect lips was coming an astonishing flow of the vilest words in our tongue. How could she have known those words, this GaJe woman? Well, of course, of course, she was as Rom as I, beneath her assumed facade. As she crooned and murmured that startling filth to me I looked at her in wonder; and then I began to laugh, and so did she. And then she swept me away with her.

"I am Syluise," she said afterward.

That was the beginning. When I returned to Galgala she came with me. When I became king a short while later, I thought of making her MY wife; but when I went to her to speak of such high matters with her, she had disappeared, and it was a year before I saw her again. That was when I began to understand what Syluise was like. But by then it was too late.

BECAUSE MULANO IS NOT AN EMPIRE WORLD, THERE'S NO regular starship service. The only way in or out is by relay sweep, which is a little like trying to travel by tossing yourself into the sea with a hook fastened to your collar and hoping that some giant bird will scoop you up and carry you where you want to go. Chorian, having delivered Damiano's message and having had my answer, was ready to leave, but he needed the better part of a week to set up his sweep for departure. So he was my guest all that time. Not that I begrudged it. I had come to take great delight in my solitude, and I wanted it back as fast as I could have it; but a guest is a guest. Maybe the Gaje will turn kinsmen from their door, but a Rom, never.

It wasn't so bad having him around, really. Aside from overdoing the worship more than slightly-and he couldn't really help that; I was five times as old as he was, and a king besides, or at least a former king, and legendary on fifty or sixty worlds-he was pleasant enough company. He wasn't nearly as naive as he seemed on first encounter; what I had taken for naivete was mostly just his style of wide-eyed innocence, which was probably nothing more than an artifact of his tender years. And it wasn't fair to blame him for being young. That wasn't his fault, and it would wear off soon enough anyway. There was happiness within him, and strength, and a good Rom heart. Besides, he knew all the court gossip. I was surprised how keenly I yearned to be brought up to date on all the petty trivial intrigues of the Capital's inner circle; and he seemed to know everything, the names of the old emperor's current mistresses, the current relative standings of the Lords Sunteil, Naria, and Periandros in the emperor's favor, the latest non-ecclesiastical escapade of the Archimandrite Germanos, and all the rest.

I asked him how he had come to be in the employ of the Empire in the first place.

"I was sold into it," he said. "Our kumpania broke up in the years of the great drought on Fenix and I was put out on offer for slavery. I was seven. The Lord Sunteil's phalangarius Dilvimon spotted me and bought me for fifty cerces. I was Sunteil's slave until I was seventeen, and when he gave me my writ he asked me to stay on in the civil service, and I did. He trusts me and he treats me well. And I think it's good for our people for there to be a Rom at the Lord Sunteil's right hand."

He sounded altogether casual about having been a slave. As well he might; to be sold into slavery is no big disgrace, and, as my own revered mentor Loiza la Vakako put it when I myself was going off to be sold for the second time, it can be a highly educational experience for a young Rom. It is in the water, after all, that you learn how to swim. But I know there are some that don't think as highly of the institution as I do.

I said, "So you're Empire on the outside but you're still Rom within?"

Chorian grinned broadly. "What else? True Rom, blood and bones,' he said. "The only thing that the Lord Sunteil can buy from me is my time. My soul has never been for sale." We had been speaking in imperial, but for that last he switched to Romany. Of course. When it's necessary to speak the absolute truth, a Rom speaks it in the language of his own people. at Tongue. But True Rom he might be, even to knowing the Gre Chorian had grown up among the Gaje and there were sad gaps in his education. No one had ever taught him the old songs and the old dances; he knew nothing of conjuring and spells; he had no idea how to ghost. Worse, he hadn't had any opportunity since he was a boy to steep himself in the Swatura, the chronicles of our race, and the course of our history was beginning to grow jumbled in his mind.

Naturally he was familiar with the events of the past thousand years, how the Kingdom had come into being and the way it had arranged itself in its strange relationship with the Empire. If nothing else, Chorian's responsibilities at the imperial court would have required him to make himself aware of that part of the story. But of the rest of it he knew only the merest hazy outlines, bits and fragments here and there: something of our early days on Romany Star, our going forth into the Great Dark, our wanderings in space and our arrival on Earth. He had some knowledge of the greatness of Romany Atlantis and of the catastrophe that destroyed it. He knew a little about the terrible years of our life as outcasts among the GaJe of Earth. But none of it had any solid meaning for him. It was all cloudy, vague, abstract, mere history, a murky tangle of practically meaningless old migrations and persecutions, long ago and far away. Somebody else's history, at that. He had no sense that any of it had happened to him. But it had; of course it had. Everything that has happened to any Rom has happened to all Rom. If you aren't one with your history, you have no history; and if you don't have any history you aren't anybody at all.

In the few days he stayed with me I tried to help him. Just before the moment when Double Day was ending, I took him out on the glittering ice-fields and showed him where to find Romany Star. "There," I said. "The great red one. O Tchalai, the Star of Wonder. O Netchaphoro, the Luminous Crown, the Carrier of Light, the Halo of God. You see it up there? Do you see it, you Chorian?"

"How could I not see it, Yakoub?"

And he went to his knees before it on the ice.

"There are sixteen streams of light radiating from it," I told him. "One for each of the sixteen original tribes. You can see that on the banner of the Kingdom, the star of sixteen points. That star has one world, Chorian, and it is the most beautiful world in all the billion galaxies. "

"Have you been there, Yakoub?" "In my dreams, yes."

"But you've never seen it with your own eyes?"

"How could I? It's holy ground. It's absolutely forbidden for any of us to go there-the worst kind of sacrilege. No Rom has set foot on that world in ten thousand years."

He had trouble understanding that: why we didn't simply jump into our ships and go zooming off to reclaim our ancient home world. It would be so easy. Who could stop us? We can go wherever we like, can't we? The young are so impetuous. And they have no real comprehension of the nature of the invisible world, of the unseen ties that bind and constrict us. I explained to him that it was a matter of the fulfilling of our long-range destiny, of a plan that was beyond our ability to grasp. I told him that we could not go back to Romany Star until we had received a sign, a call, that the time had come.

And then I said, "But I mean to get there before I die, boy. Why do you think I've lived so long? I've taken an oath. No death for me, boy, until I've touched the soil of Romany Star with both my heels."

He gave me a peculiar look. "Even though it would be sacrilege?" I rounded on him angrily. "What are you saying? I can't go until the call comes, don't you see? But the call will be coming soon. I know that, Chorian. I have absolutely certain knowledge of that. And when it does -the moment it does"You'll be the first one there."

"The first, yes. Showing the way for the rest of us. Now do you understand?"

He nodded. He stared at the black bowl of the sky. Mulano's air is cold and clear and there are no city lights to blur the skyward vision. I have never known another world from which Romany Star can be viewed as readily.

"If it's so beautiful there, Yakoub, why did we ever leave?"'

"We had to," I said. "A wise mother casts her children forth to make their own way in the universe; and Romany Star was a wise mother to US."

Was that so? Suddenly, for a moment there, I wondered. To drive us forth from our home with a flaming sword and force us into thousands of years of dismal wandering-this is wisdom? This is motherhood?

I listened to what I was saying, that glib line about the wise mother who had cast us forth, and for one weird instant my whole sense of the architecture of our destiny wavered and wobbled and shook. Sometimes all this mouthing off of proverbs is just one way of sweeping anguish and pain and even resentment under the rug. But what you sweep under the rug has a way of crawling out again to bite you, and that isn't just a proverb. It's an observation.

Cast forth by our wise mother. Well, yes. Or our father. Romany Star was our mother and God was our father, and God had noticed us, smug and happy on Romany Star, and He had said to Himself, These fat and sassy Rom are getting complacent. They're getting arrogant. They're starting to forget that this universe is really a vale of tears, a chancy risky place where it's only by great good luck that you get through any given day without some monstrous catastrophe. They've had it good for too long, those Rom. All right. I'll throw them out on their asses. Let them learn what life is really like. And so had He done. And we have been suffering for our ancient good fortune ever since.

There was a Gaje people on Earth once called the Jews, who thought they were God's special people. He tossed them out on their asses too, just to teach them that He doesn't have any favorites, or, that if He does, He can give His favorites an even rougher time than He does His enemies. It's a very similar story, in its way: suffering, persecution, poverty, exile. But He wasn't as hard on them as He was on us. Them He made into lawyers, doctors, professors. We had to be knife-sharpeners and fortune-tellers. What kind of a lesson was He trying to teach us, anyway? At least He relented a little later on, and gave us some classier occupations. There are still some Jews around but I don't think many of them pilot starships. I'm pretty sure that none of them are kings, either.

Well, maybe it had all been worthwhile, I told myself. The casting forth into exile, the wandering, the suffering. So I answered my own question with a resounding Yes. Of course it had. Who was I to complain? There was Chorian, looking at me with rapture, me the wise man, me the old king, the embodiment of our race, and he was saying with his eyes, Tell me, Tell me, Tell me, Yakoub. Tell me all our great and wonderful story. How it all happened, how it began. I felt ashamed that I had wavered even for an instant, that I had begun to resent, to question.

And as we stood there in the darkness and the cold, I told him the old tale, the oldest of all our tales, the Tale of the Swelling Sun, just as my father had told it to me while we were standing together on that steep slope of Mount Salvat one night on Vietoris long ago, and just as I had told it to my many sons over many years on many different worlds.

I SPOKE OF OUR ANCIENT DAYS OF GREATNESS, THE WONDROUS cities of Romany Star, the shining palaces and splendid towers, the vast concourses and broad highways, the gleaming columns and plazas. I told him how the sky over Romany Star was forever ablaze with the light of all the heavens. I told him of the eleven moons that were strung like brilliant jewels from horizon to horizon. I told him of rivers that sparkled like new wine, of mountains that challenged the stars, of golden meadows and dazzling lakes. Of the handsome, happy people.

Then I told him of how we came to learn that the splendor would all be snatched from us. First Mulesko Chiriklo, the bird of the dead, making her nest on the highest battlement of the Great Temple. Then the woman's voice crying the mourning-song in the night, which we heard in every city at once; and then the wind that blew from the south, where the dead souls go to live, and would not stop for fourteen months. And other omens after that: a year when there was no summer, and a day when the sun did not rise, and a night when no stars could be seen anywhere in the world.

We had no way of understanding these omens, for we had known nothing but happiness on Romany Star. There had never been a drought, nor an earthquake, nor a flood, nor a plague. The seasons came round in their time and the earth was fertile. There was no sickness among us, and when death came to us it was sudden and clean, in great old age. So when the omens began the call went forth for wise ones who could interpret them for us; and from every part of the world the wise ones came, gathering in the great plaza of the capital city. For ninety-nine months they conferred and studied and asked the gods for guidance. Then in the hundredth month the king locked them all in the Long Chamber of the Great Temple, and let them know that they would have neither food nor drink until they told us what was about to befall us and how we should deal with it; and there was no word from them for ninety-nine hours, but in the hundredth hour they signalled that they had been granted a revelation, and then they were allowed to come forth.

Our sweet Romany Star, they declared, has resolved to cast us forth into the universe to make our own way, and there is no use weeping or wailing or praying, for the time is short and swift action must be taken.

A change, they said, will soon come upon the sun who is our mother. She will swell and grow huge, and in place of her warm life-giving red glow there will come a savage blaze of blue light bearing terrible heat that no living thing can withstand. In one monstrous murderous noontime, the wise ones told us, deadly fire will march across,the fields and meadows, the mountains and valleys, the cities and the plains. The world will turn black and the seas will boil and all life will end on Romany Star. And then the sun will subside as swiftly as she had erupted, and her gentle red light will return, but now it will fall on the charred and shattered ruin of our dear world.

At once there was weeping and there was wailing and there was praying, and the people cried out to the king to save them; and the king said, "This is something that is fated to come upon us, and we can do nothing to prevent it. But there is one way to save ourselves." And the king proposed that we build as many spacegoing ships as we could, and fill them with people and animals and plants and all the treasures of our world, and go forth into the Great Dark with them and wait out there until the cataclysm had run its course; and then we could return to Romany Star and rebuild our life there. So the weeping ceased, and the wailing and the praying; and the building of the ships commenced. But very soon it became clear that we could not possibly build enough of them. For the time of the cataclysm was almost upon us, and we had hardly enough ships to bear one person in a thousand into space. And then came news that was even worse: that there would be not one swelling of the sun but three, during the course of the next ten thousand years, so there was no point in trying to return to Romany Star; whatever we might rebuild would only be destroyed once more in the next swelling, and again in the one after that.

So we knew that most of us would die and the rest of us were to be driven forth from our home to dwell a long time in exile. We could not understand why God had chosen to do this to us, but we knew that it was not our place to find reasons for the doings of God.

"But only one in a thousand could go?" Chorian asked, horrified. "Not even as many as that," I said. "One in five thousand, perhaps. One in ten thousand. We had only sixteen ships. There was a lottery, and names were chosen, and the sixteen ships went off into the Great Dark. And one day they looked behind them and saw a new star in the sky that was blazing a brilliant blue-white, and Romany Star's red glow was nowhere to be seen; and that day they wept and they wailed and prayed, and afterward they turned their faces forward, for they knew there was nothing behind them that they would want to see."

"And these were the Rom who settled on Earth?"

"Yes," I said. "Though we went to a few other places first; but Earth was most like Romany Star, and that was where we chose to live." "Even though the Gaje were already there?"

"Because the Gaje were already there. The Gaje were shaped very much like the Rom, you see, so much so that one race could even interbreed with the other; and that was the proof that the Rom would be able to live and thrive on Earth. So there we settled, on a large uninhabited island of our own where the Gaje would not be able to trouble us; for the Gaje were a crude and stupid and backward people and we knew that they would harass us and bother us and make war on us if we tried to dwell in their midst. We took that island-they were helpless to stop us-and in time we built a great city on it and came to live almost as splendidly as we had on Romany Star; but when night fell we would look toward the heavens and we could see the red light of Romany Star shining there, and we dreamed of all that had once been ours, and we told ourselves that some day we would go back to our own world and make it what had been in the time before we had been cast forth."

"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.

BY THE FOUR TH 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 Swaturahearing 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 spacetime 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.