Star of Gypsies

2. The One Word

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Valerian's never tactful. He's the black sheep of the Rom, an old space-pirate. Once he was a commander in the Imperial navy until he found that he preferred piracy and now there's a bounty on his head, though it would surprise me extremely if anybody ever manages to collect it. As a nation we Rom deplore piracy, at least publicly, and so we deplore our cousin Valerian, but he practices his trade as if it were poetry and you have to admire him for that.

"Have you ever seen anything like that before?" I asked him. But he was gone. I made a fist and shook it at the place where he had been glowing in the air. "Hey, you Valerian! Hey, this is the place for me, this place! You watch and see!")

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

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

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

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

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

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

My treasures. The things which root me to myself and remind me of who I have been and who I must yet become. The deep-piled rug, two Yakoubs long and three Yakoubs wide, woven in wondrous red and green and blue and black on lost Earth itself by a sultan's fifty castrated slaves. The three brass lamps, fat-bellied and squat, with the names of my fathers inscribed on their sides. The necklace strung with Byzantine gold coins that had belonged to that wondrous whore Mona Elena, and which I meant to return to her if ever I saw her again.

The silken scroll of office, spun for me by nine blind eye-beaters of Duud Shabeel, which I should have surrendered upon my abdication but did not because I could not bear to part with anything so ingenious: look at it long enough and you begin to know with complete certainty that you can never die. The starstone, plucked from a sand-dragon's bloody throat on Nabomba Zom, in whose depths the red light of Romany Star shines with wondrous warmth. The wonderwheel. The shadowstick. The Rom scepter, bareshti rovli rupui, the chief s silver wand, with its eight-sided red-tasseled head engraved with the five great symbols, nijako, chJam, shion, netchaphoro, trushul: axe, sun, moon, star, cross. The statue of the Black Virgin Sara, our patron saint. The veil that had belonged to La Chunga, the Gitana dancer. The set of tinsmith's tools, worn and bent. The frayed and tattered bearskin, last of its kind in the universe. The golden candlesticks. The Tarot cards. The scythe that was dipped in my bath-water when I was born, to drive the demons away. The amulet of sea-urchin fossils. The dear little prickly niglo, the hedgehog that we brought with us from Earth into half the worlds of the galaxy, carved from the fiery yellow jade of Alta Hannalanna. And more, much more, the treasures of a long life, the gatherings of all my great odyssey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Syluise. Always opening with a jab.

"I've thought of no one else the whole time," I told her. Sounding romantic and sarcastic both at once. Which was it? How would I know? Billowing waves of electromagnetic splendor surrounded her like an aurora, shooting off a halo of emerald, scarlet, violet, gold. She looked gorgeous within it. I have never seen her looking anything but gorgeous, no matter the season, the time of day, the geophysical or emotional weather. That's her specialty: beauty so intense that it's unreal. She is like her own statue.

"It's been a long time, hasn't it, Syluise?" "I've been traveling."

"Polarca tells me he saw you in Atlantis."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Is it?"

"My mind works well in cold weather. And stark scenery like this helps me get down to essentials."

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

"Which essentials do you mean, Yakoub?"

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

I said, "The future of the Kingdom is the only essential, Syluise." "But what concern is that of yours now?"

"I still am king."

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

"I'm taking a holiday from the kingship, is all." "Ah, is that what it is? A holiday?"

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

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

"You do think you can be king and not be king at the same time. I should have realized that from the start. If anybody knows how your mind works, I do."

"What are you trying to say, Syluise?"

"I knew you in Cesaro o Nano's time, before you were king. I remember how you used to insist that you would never accept the throne in a million years, that the whole idea disgusted you, that you'd fling it in their faces if they ever tried to offer it to you. You said that again and again, and then when they did come to you you grabbed it as fast as you could and you didn't let go for fifty years. You think I take anything you say at face value, Yakoub? You're the only man I know who can hold six contradictory ideas at once and feel perfectly comfortable about it."

"I didn't want to be king. I did refuse the throne. Again and again, until I saw that I had to be king, that there was no option about it. And then I let them give it to me."

"And the abdication? Why did you do that?"

There was a sudden astonishing softening in her tone. For an instant she wasn't just dueling with me. She seemed actually to care. I felt myself melting with love. Like a boy, like a Chorian. Like a ninny.

"Do you really want to know?" I asked.

She came closer. The aurora around her died away and she descended until she was almost at ground level and almost within my reach. Just one kiss, I thought. Those rosy nipples hardening against my palms.

"I want to know, yes." Still soft, her voice. "A tactical move," I told her.

Hot in my mind burned the memory of those last days before I had gone before the great kris to resign. That time of despair and turmoil in my soul, when wherever I looked I saw chaos and decay. The prancing young men and women decking themselves out to look like Gaje, the intermarriages, the star-pilots taking their little detours to do their little smuggling operations, and all the rest: the final decadence of an ancient great race, so it had seemed to me. I had tried to tell myself I was exaggerating, that I was growing crochety and conservative with age. But at last it had all exploded within me, suddenly, uncontrollably: a sense that everything was falling apart and that some desperate measure had to be taken. That was when I called the krisatora together and told them I was abdicating; and if I live ten thousand years I will never forget the looks of utter astonishment on their faces as I gave them the news.

She frowned. Like a cloud crossing the face of the sun. "A tactical move?" she said. "I don't understand."

I took a deep breath. I had never spoken explicitly about this before, not with Polarca, not with anyone. But I had never been able to withhold anything from Syluise. "It seemed to me that things were going wrong in the Kingdom, that we had lost our direction, that we had forgotten our purpose. I needed to upset people. To shake people up. In order to get the Kingdom back on its course."

"Its course?"

"I'm speaking of Romany Star," I said. "Oh, Yakoub!"

She sounded sad and loving and patronizing all at once. But more patronizing than anything else.

"Where are the Rom of Romany Star?" I demanded. "Do we want our true world again, or are we willing to live in exile forever? Do we even think of such things any more? The One True Place, Syluise: does that mean anything to you?"

Her aurora flared up again. I could no longer see her face.

"A fat, complacent people, rich and settled: is that who we are, Syluise? Piloting our ships, serving the Gaje, snuggling up to the Imperium? No. No. Once we lose sight of what really matters, we lose sight of our own selves. We become no better than Gaje. Is that what you want, Syluise? Maybe it is. Your beautiful Gaje hair. Your narrow Gaje waist." I felt anger mounting suddenly, rising and rising. "Do you understand? I saw my own people losing their way. And I their king, presiding over the whole catastrophe."

A sharp gust of wind cut across the ice-plain, lifting drifts of snow and hurling them at us. The hard white swirls went through her without her seeming to notice.

46 And abdicating, Yakoub?" she said gently. "How is that going to make things better?"

"They need me," I said. "They've already sent one messenger out to urge me to come back. There'll be more. They'll beg me. They'll ask to know my terms. I'll tell them, then. And they'll have no choice. I'll be king again, Syluise. But this time they'll have to follow me wherever I lead them. And where I lead them will be Romany Star."

"Oh, Yakoub," she said again. Her aurora grew dense as the heart of a sun. I could no longer see her, but I heard her. Was she weeping, within that searing blaze of energy?

No. That was laughter, that sound.

Syluise! That heartless bitch. The force of the hatred I felt for her just then could have driven a fleet of starships from one end of the galaxy to the other.

SOME TIMES WHEN I WAS ALONE I COULD FEEL THE PRESENCE of the Gypsy kings of centuries gone by, crowding close within my soul. I felt Chavula close by, that little hard-edged man who had forced the Gaje to let us aboard their ships. And Ilika, with the flaming red beard, the one who showed how the leap was made, the quick conversion of Rom mind-force into the power of spanning the lightyears. Claude Varna the great explorer, the finder of worlds. Tavelara, Markko, Mateo, Pavlo Gitano, all jostling within me, sharing their spirit with me, urging me onward. And there were other kings too, dark figures without names or faces, the kings of time immemorial, kings of the old world, the rough kings of the roads of Earth; and even older kings, kings of Gypsy Atlantis, kings even of Romany Star. On the day I became the high Rom baro they all had entered me and still they rode with me and I felt them within. And was grateful.

And who were these, these others lurking in the mists? I was unable to see them but I could feel them, mysterious, unknown. I had an idea who they were. Kings yet to come is who they were, Yakoub's successors, the kings of the unborn future, stirring in my soul. I knew that I would have to die in order to set them free to live out their destinies, and I felt some pain, knowing that; but it would have to be. That was all right. Give me a chance to live out my destiny, all you kings to come, and then you can have your own!

Syluise had laughed at me. Well, let her laugh. I knew why I had been given the kingship and I meant to accomplish what I had been chosen to bring about. They had chosen me because the vision was stronger in me than in anyone else; and even if all the others had lost sight of the vision now, I had not. I asked only one thing, that I would be allowed to live long enough. That was all I asked. One thing that I feared was that I would die without having given Romany Star back to my people. But what of it, you ask, if I did die too soon? I would be dead: what would anything matter to me then?

If you ask that, you understand nothing.

The power was within me, to achieve what must be achieved. If I had the power and I failed to make use of it, that was contemptible. My people would curse me forever. If there is a life after this life, I would blister and blacken there forever in their scorn. And if not-well, no matter. I must live as though all the Rom yet to be born are watching me. As though I dwell each day in the beacon glare of their scrutiny.

YOU MIGHT THINK ID HA VE HAD A CHANCE TO ENJOY A reprieve from all this socializing. But it wasn't long before I had company again.

This next visitor was confusing, because he was the Duc de Gramont.

Or his doppelganger. I wasn't sure which, and that was what was confusing. And disturbing.

Julien de Gramont is an old friend who has managed to tread a very neat line between the overlapping spheres of authority of the Rom Kingdom and the Empire. That's a measure of Julien's cleverness. By way of a profession Julien has set himself up in business as the pretender to the throne of ancient France, France having been one of the important countries of Earth around the year 1600 or so. France got rid of its kings a long time back, but that's all right; I can't see any real harm in claiming a lapsed throne. What I don't exactly understand, even though Julien has tried to explain it to me seven or eight times, is the point of claiming the throne of a country on a planet that doesn't even exist any more. It has something to do with grandeur, he said. And gloire. That word is pronounced glwahr, approximately. French is a very strange language.

(Just in passing I want to point out, since the notion is not likely to occur to you on your own, that the Duc de Gramont's beloved France was a place no bigger than a medium-big plantation would be on an average-size world such as Galgala or Xamur. Nevertheless France had kings of its own, and its own language and laws and literature and history and all the rest. And in fact was a very considerable place, in its time. I know that because I was there once-right around the time they were getting rid of their kings, as a matter of fact. It's an odd and somehow endearing thing about the Gaje of Earth that they found it necessary to divide up their one little planet into a hundred little separate countries. Of course that arrangement was a great pain in the buliasa for us when we lived among them. But all that came to an end a long time ago.)

The first couple of years I lived on Mulano I had had a doppelganger of the Duc de Gramont living here with me. Julien had had it made up for me as a going-away gift when he heard of my abdication, because he knows I am fond of French cuisine, a field in which he has great expertise; so he thought I might like to have my own private French chef while I was living in my self-imposed exile.

But doppelgangers generally last only a year or two, or maybe a little longer in a cold climate like Mulano's. Then they fade away. They don't come back to life, either. My Julien doppelganger had vanished in the usual way at the usual time, several years back. When I saw what I took to be the doppelganger of the Duc de Gramont picking his way toward me between the wiggling arms of my forest-pausing once or twice to pull off a leaf and pop it into his mouth, as if tasting it to see if it was worth using in some sauce-I couldn't make sense of it at all. "Alors, mon vieux!" he cried. "Mes hommages! Comment ca va? Sacre bleu, how cold it is here!"

I gave him a blank look and backed away a little. Ghosts I understand, doppelgangers I understand, but the ghost of a doppelganger?- No.

In a ragged shred of a voice I said, "Where did you come from?" "Ah, is this the best greeting you can manage, mon ami?" Speaking to me coolly, from on high, ultra-French, miffed, deeply wounded. "I spend half a dreary interminability in the capsule of relay to get to this dreadful place, and you show no jubilation upon the sight of me, you evince no delight, you merely ask me, brusquely, without the littlest shred of courtesy, Where did I come from? Quel type! Where is the embrace? Where is the kiss on the cheeks?" He threw up his hands and burst into a crazy flurry of random French, like a robot translator gone berserk. "Joyeux Noel! Bonne Annee! A quelle heure part le prochain bateau? Fai mal de mer! Faites venir le garcon! Par ici! Le voici! 11 faut payer!" And went capering around like a madman.

After a little while he subsided, as though his gears were winding down, and stood there sadly watching his own breath congeal in front of him.

"So you are not in any way glad to see me?" he said very quietly. I studied him. Doppelgangers sometimes look a little transparent around the edges. This one didn't. This one didn't really seem like a doppelganger at all. It had Julien's quick darting piercing eyes, Julien's elegant movements. Its little dark mustache and small pointed beard were trimmed precisely in the right way, not a fraction of a hair askew, just as Julien's always were. Doppelgangers lose those small fine touches quickly. Entropic creep sets in and their definition starts to blur.

"You really are you, then?" "Oui," he said. "I really are I." "Truly Julien?"

"Sacre bleu! Norn d'un chien! Truly, truly, truly! What is the matter with you, cher ami? Where has your brain gone? Is it that this terrible cold-"

"The doppelganger you gave me," I said. "I couldn't figure out how a doppelganger could come back."

"Ah, the doppelganger! The doppelganger, mon vieux-"

"It faded away long ago, you know. So when I saw it again-when I thought I saw it-"

"Oui. Bien sur."

"How could I know? A doppelganger returning after it had faded? That isn't supposed to be possible. Some kind of trick? Some way of slipping an assassin past my guard? The devil's hairy hole, man! What was I supposed to think?"

"And what do you think now?"

I gave him another long close look.

He grew upset again when I didn't say anything. Waving his hands around, tossing his head in that stylishly frantic way of his. "Cordieu, cher ami! Mon petit Romanichel. Gitan bien-aime. Dear Mirlifiche, esteemed Cascarrot. It is only me! The true Julien! Vraiment, I am not a doppelganger. Nor an assassin. I am merely your own Julien de Gramont. N'est-ce pas? Can you believe that? What do you say, Gypsy king?"

Yes. Of course. How could I doubt it? He was the genuine item. No doppelganger could possibly generate so much heat, so much frenzy, so much exasperated passion.

I felt embarrassed. I felt contrite.

I felt like a damned fool.

To mistake a man for his own doppelganger may not be a dueling offense, but it certainly isn't much of a compliment. And to do it to poor Julien de Gramont, with his royal pretensions and his excitable Gallic temperament. Well, I apologized most profusely and he insisted that it was a harmless mistake and I invited him into my bubble and brewed up a batch of steaming coffee for him, the ancient Rom coffee, black as sin, hot as hell, sweet as love, and in five minutes it was all a forgotten matter, no offense intended, none taken. Julien had brought presents for me, two overpockets' worth of them, and he proceeded now to conjure them out of the storage dimension and stack them up in heaps on my floor. Sweet old Julien, still worrying about my gastronomic comfort! "Homard en civet de vieux Bourgogne," he announced, pulling out one of those cunning flasks that will prepare and heat your meal just so if you merely touch your finger to the go-button. "Carre d'agneu roti au poivre vert. Fricassee de poulet au vinaigre de vin. Pommes purees. Les filets mignons de veau au citron. Everything is labeled, mon ami. Everything is true French, no grotesque dishes of the Galgala herdsmen, no foul porridges of Kalimaka, no quivering monstrosities from the swamps of Megalo Kastro. Here. Here. You like kidney? You like sweetbreads? Fricassee de rognons et de ris de veau aux feuilles d'epinards. Eh, mon frere? Coquilles Saint-Jacques? Pate de fruits de mer en croute? Bouillabaisse Marseillaise? I have brought you everything." "You're much too good to me, Julien."

"I have brought enough so that you can eat like a human being for two years, perhaps three. It is the least I can do for you, in this terrible savage solitude. Two years of the fine French cuisine." He gave me a sly look. "How long more do you think you stay here, mon cher? Two years, is it? Three, four?"

"Is that what you came here to find out, old friend?" Color rose to his cheeks.

"It is of concern to me, your long absence from the worlds of civilization. I sorrow for you. Your people sorrow for you. You are a man of importance, Yakoub."

"Among the Rom," I told him, "we say 'important' when we mean 'corpulent.' Did you know that? 'A man of importance' means to us a man with a big belly." I looked at the flasks stacked all over the bubble, dozens of them, with any number of their cousins still tucked away in the storage dimension. I patted my middle, which has become kingly indeed in these my later years. "So that's why you brought all this stuff, Julien? You want me to be even more important than I already am?"

"The worlds call out for you, Yakoub." His stagy French accent suddenly was gone; he spoke in the purest Imperial. "There is great chaos out there, because there is no king. Ships are lost in the star-lanes; piracy increases; quarrels of great men are left unresolved. Your people have a great need for you. Even the Empire has a need for you. Do you realize that, Yakoub?"

"I intend no offense, Julien. But I want to know who told you to come here."

He looked uncomfortable. He toyed with his little pointed beard. He fiddled with his flasks, he fooled with the labels. I left the question lying there in the air between us.

"What do you mean, who told me to come here?" he said finally. "It's not a very complicated question, is it?"

"I came here because you are missed. You are needed."

"Don't hide behind passive verbs, Julien. Who misses me? Who needs me? Who paid you to stick yourself in a relay-sweep depot and come out to talk to me?"

Glumly he said, after a bit, "It was Periandros." "Ah. The grand surprise."

"If you knew, why did you ask?" "To see what you would say." "Yakoub!"

"All right. So Periandros sent you. Does that mean Naria's man will be here next?"

He frowned. "What do you mean?"

"The three lords of the Imperium is what I mean. Sunteil's man left here a little while ago. Now you're here on behalf of Periandros. It stands to reason that Number Three will want to touch base with me too, and maybe the archimandrite as well, or even, God forbid, the emperor himself. If the emperor's still alive."

"The emperor is still alive," Julien said. "What's this about Sunteil?" "He sent a Rom boy named Chorian."

"I know Chorian. Extremely young, but very competent. And very tricky, like all you Rom."

"Is he? Are we?"

"What is Sunteil troubled about?"

"That my abdication is some kind of hoax, and that I'll be coming back to the Empire when I'm least expected, to cause the greatest amount of trouble."

Julien beamed serenely. "Of course your abdication is some kind of hoax. The question that should be in Sunteil's mind is why you have perpetrated it, and what can be done to persuade you to give up the game you are playing." To that I made no response, but he didn't seem to have expected any. He watched me for a moment and then, with only the smallest knowing twitch of his exquisite eyebrow, he turned away and began to wander around my bubble, picking up this thing and that, handling my dearest possessions with the practiced touch of a fleamarket antiquities dealer, which is one of the professions he has practiced in his time. I let him. He would do no harm. He fondled a bright yellow silken diklo, a Rom scarf that someone had worn in the lost and fabled land of Bulgaria fifteen centuries ago. He caressed the veil of La Chunga. He tapped out a quick rhythm on my ancient tambourine and then he laid his hands reverently on my lavuta, my Gypsy violin, passed down from Rom to Rom like all the rest of this stuff since the time when Earth still was.

"May I?' he said. "My guest."

He fitted it in place under his chin, strummed its sounding-box a moment with his fingertips, reached for the bow. And made that old fiddle laugh, and then he made it weep, and then he made it sing. All in eight or nine measures. He looked at me, eyes bright, triumphant. "You play like a Rom," I told him.

A self-deprecating shrug. "You flatter like a Rom." "Where did you learn?"

He fiddled off another measure or two. "Years ago, on Sidri Akrak, there was an old Rom who called himself the Zigeuner Bicazului. He played in the marketplace outside the Palace of the Trierarch and Periandros sent one of his phalangarii to invite him in; and for a year and a half this Bicazului was court musician. He played the lavuta, the cithera, the pandero, everything. I asked him to teach me a few of the old tunes. "

"There are times I have to remind myself you are not Rom, Julien." "There are times I have to do the same," he said.

"What happened to him, that Bicazului of yours? Where is he now, do you think?"

"It was long ago," Julien said, gesturing vaguely. "He was very old." He put the violin down and walked to the window. For a long while he stared out. The yellow sun was low in the sky and clouds were thickening; a storm was coming on. The tentacles of the trees were moving more slowly than usual. After a time he said, "You like it here, Yakoub?"

"To me it seems very beautiful, Julien. I'm at peace here." "Vraiment?"

"Yes. Vraiment. I am truly at peace here."

"A strange place for you in the autumn of your life, Yakoub. These fields of ice, this tempestuous snow-"

"The peace. Don't forget the peace. What does a little snow matter, if you have peace?"

"And those repellent green things? What are they?" There was distaste in his voice. "Les tentacules terribles. Les poulpes terrestres, the octopus of the land?" He shuddered, a precise, elegant motion.

"They are trees," I said. "Trees?"

"Trees, yes."

"I see. And these trees, do they seem beautiful to you as well?" "This place is my home now, Julien."

"Ah. Oui. Oui. Forgive me, mon ami."

We stood together by the window. The sound of his fiddling was still in my ears. And also I heard the last words I had spoken just now, echoing and echoing and echoing, This place is my home, this place is my home.

For a moment I thought I would ask him to go outside with me so I could show him the place where on a clear night the red fire of Romany Star glowed in the sky. Julien, I would say, I did not speak the truth. There is my home, Julien, I would say. And then I thought, No. No. He is dear to me but he could never understand, and in any case I must not say such things to him, for he is Gaje. Truly, he is Gaje. I thought again of the music he had made with my fiddle; and I told myself, There are times I have to remind myself you are not Rom, Julien.

HE SEEMED ABASHED FOR HAVING SPOKEN SO HARSHLY against Mulano, and after a time he asked if we might go out for a stroll, so that I could show him the beauties of the landscape. I knew that he had already had more than enough of a taste of the beauties of the landscape when he came through the forest from whatever place the relay-sweep capsule had dropped him; this was his way of making amends. But we went out anyway and I showed him the trees at close range, and pointed out the great sweeping flow of the glaciers, and told him the names I had given to the mountains that rose like a jagged wall on the horizon. "You are right," he said finally. "It is very beautiful in its way, Yakoub."

"In its way, yes."

"I meant that truly." "I know, Julien."

"Dear friend. Come: it is time now for the lunch, do you think?" We went inside. He peered for a long while at his flasks and selected one finally, and flicked his thumb against its go-button. The inner surface of the flask grew misty as it heated up. Reaching into one of the overpockets, he brought forth a bottle of red wine and popped the cork with his thumbs. "Le dejeuner," he proclaimed. "Cassoulet en la maniere de Languedoc. It has been a long cold afternoon, but this will heal me. Do you wish bread?" He rummaged in the overpocket and drew out a baguette that might have been baked three hours ago in Paris. For a few moments he busied himself with the task of serving our lunch.

Then he said, continuing our earlier conversation as though there had been no break in it at all, "I don't believe Sunteil is afraid of your returning. I think it's your not returning that he fears."

"Polarca has the same theory." "Polarca? Has he been here too?"

"His ghost. Still is. Perhaps hovering right over your shoulder as we eat." I shoveled down the cassoulet in silence for a while, washing it along with splendiferous gulps of the wine, and belched him a belch of great resonance and grandeur to show my appreciation. "This is truly fine, Julien. If I had to come back in my next life as a Gajo, I would want to be a Frenchman of France, and eat like this three times a day."

"The King of the Gypsies does me great honor by such lavish praise, Yakoub."

"Former King of the Gypsies, Julien."

"You hold the title until your death, or until the judges of the great kris formally depose you. Your abdication is not binding on the Rom government. As you well know."

"Are you a lawyer now as well as a chef?" I asked.

"You also know that matters of succession are of deep importance to me, Yakoub. It is my great passion, my overwhelming obsession." "I thought your great passion was for food," I said, maybe too sharply. "And your overwhelming obsession was something to do with women."

"Don't mock me, Yakoub."

I had stung him that time. I was sorry, and I said so. Perhaps he did have his little pretensions. But he was an old friend, and a dear one. He said, after a while, "No one understands your abdication. They see it as a betrayal of all that you have worked for during a long and honorable life."

I could have explained myself then, I suppose. Did he think, did any of them think, that there had been no reason for my going away, that I had simply tossed my crown away for the sheer spiteful fun of it? I will admit to you here and now that there had been times on Mulano when I woke up in the night in a sweat, convinced of my own utter idiocy. But generally I didn't think that was the situation and I certainly didn't want them to, neither the high lords of the Imperium nor those who were now the big Gypsies. Did they believe I was that flighty, that capricious, that irresponsible? Me? Speak, Yakoub, explain yourself, defend yourself. Here's your moment.

But Syluise's laughter rang in my ears. And also I reminded myself yet again that this old and dear friend of mine was a GaJo, and a confidante of the emperor and in the direct pay of the Lord Periandros besides, and all I said was, "Power kept too long goes flat, Julien. You know, when you leave a bottle of champagne open too long, what happens to it?"

"I cannot believe that any such thing has happened to you, mon ami."

"How long was I king? Forty years? Fifty years? Enough."

"So this is what you will do? Will you sit here in all this ice and snow -forgive me, I truly cannot like this place, my friend-will you watch these unpleasant green tentacles writhe and quiver at you for the rest of your days, and do nothing else?"

"For the rest of my days? I don't know that. This is what I have been doing. It pleases me to do it. This is what I intend to continue doing, Julien, until it stops pleasing me, if it does. If."

"This I do not understand. A moment of boredom, a fit of mere pique, Yakoub, and you allow yourself to throw away everything that you-'5

"Let me be, Julien. I know what I'm doing." "Do you?"

"I know that I'm done with being king. Isn't that sufficient for you? Damn it, Julien, let me be!"

I pushed my plate aside and walked to the door of the bubble and stared out at the gently undulating arms of the forest. I listened to my breath go in and out, in and out. I sent little messages of greetings to my liver, my pancreas, my alimentary canal. Hello there, old friends. And my bodily organs sent friendly little messages back. Hello there, you. We know each other so well, my organs and I. I basked in their admiration. The high regard in which they held me pleased me very much. We had a good thing going. If we played our cards right we could stick together another two hundred years. Maybe even more. I thought about that and it felt good. I thought about tonight's dinner. I thought about the wine. I thought about the snow that was starting to fall in counterclockwise swirls. The one thing I didn't want to think about was being king again. I wanted to think about not being king. The presence of the absence of my power was what gave me life and vigor these days.

Into my mind came lovely lascivious thoughts that had nothing to do with anything Julien had been saying. Watching the forest's green limbs writhing voluptuously about, I felt strange stirrings within myself. I could go out there, I thought, and lie down naked in their midst, and then they would embrace me like a lover. I imagined all those myriad tentacles caressing my body, slithering here and there in all the sensitive places, knowing just what I liked best. Sucking, stroking, tickling, poking. Ooh. Ah. Oh, yes, good! Very good! Gently I drifted into profound eroto-botanical fantasies, odd but pleasing floral delights. There was fine food in my belly and good red wine in my brain and now my loins were coming alive with these delectable new yearnings. At my age, still capable of responding to something strange and new! Pay heed to that, all of you. Hearken and learn. You might think the old fires die down, but they don't. No. Not even on this chilly world. Not at all. Ever.

Julien came up behind me. His voice drilled cruelly into my reverie. "And your people, Yakoub? You will leave them kingless forever? You will allow the guild of pilots to disintegrate?"

The vision of tentacular delight shattered and popped like a punctured balloon. I was furious with him for breaking in on me. He should have known. A moment of solitary reflection, a sacred interlude. Private and sacrosanct. And he had smashed it without a thought. And him claiming to be French, too.

But I held my wrath in check. For ancient friendship's sake. Sourly I said, "The krisatora know what to do. If they want another king, they can declare the office vacant and elect someone. Otherwise the Rom can manage well enough without a king for five years, for fifty, for five hundred if necessary. The French have managed without one, haven't they, for something like thirteen hundred years."

"And there are no more French," said Julien bleakly. "What do you mean?"

"We are nowhere. We are nothing. We are a memory, a book of recipes, and a difficult language that scarcely anyone understands. Is that what you want for your people, Yakoub?"

"We are Rom. We have been since before there were French or English or Germans or any of the million tribes of Earth. We will go on being Rom whether we have a king at this moment or not." I found my wine and took a deep draught of it. That calmed me a little. It was splendid stuff, and when my temper had cooled I told him so. The French might be an extinct culture, but someone still understood how to make a decent Bordeaux. After a moment I said, "Why am I in the thoughts of the Lord Periandros?"

"The emperor is old and feeble." "That is hardly news, Julien."

"But now the end seems to be in sight. A year or two, perhaps, but he can't last much longer than that."

"So? The Rom won't be the only ones with a succession problem, then. What else is new?"

"This is serious, Yakoub. There are three high lords and the emperor has shown no strong inclination toward any of them."

"I know that. Let them draw straws to see who gets it, then." "They are very strong men, and very determined. If the emperor dies without indicating a preference, there could be a war for the throne."

"No," I said, with a fierce shake of my head. "That's completely inconceivable. What do you think this is, the Middle Ages?"

"I think this is the year 3159 A.D., Yakoub, and there is an Empire of many hundreds of worlds at stake, and nothing essential has changed in the human soul since the time of Rome and Byzantium. Periandros won't sit idly by and see Sunteil have the throne, nor will Naria step aside gracefully for Periandros, nor-"

"There won't be any more wars, Julien. Humanity has changed. Going to the stars is what did it."

"You think?"

"War is an outmoded notion," I told him grandly. "Like the appendix, like the little toe. Another five hundred years and nobody's going to be born with an appendix any more, and good riddance to it. A thousand years beyond that and there'll be no more little toes either. And war is already gone. You know that as well as I do. It's an obsolete concept in this age of galactic empire." I was getting heated up by my own rhetoric. That's always a danger sign. But I went steaming right on. "There hasn't been a real war since-since I don't know when. Hundreds of years. A thousand, maybe. Not since Earth went down the drain and all its petty little garbage went with it." I was wondrously worked up now. "Wars are unthinkable in today's galactic society! Not just unthinkable but logistically impossible!"

"Don't be so sure of that."

"Why are you such a pessimist, Julien?"

"Only a realist, mon ami." There was a sudden wintry bleakness in his eyes that I could hardly bear to see. He had given much thought to all this. Not that I hadn't; but I had been away from it for five years. Had I let myself get too far out of touch with reality? No. No. No. He said, "I think the idea of war might be all too easy to revive. Perhaps some entirely new kind of war, a war between stars, but bloody and horrible all the same."

Yes? No. This is all nonsense, I thought. I laughed in his face. Poor gloomy Julien, lost in these morbid apocalyptic fantasies. Scared shitless by phantoms. War? Between stars? If wine did this to him, maybe he ought to stick to water. He was starting to annoy me now.

"Come off it," I told him. "I'm too old to be frightened by this sort of stuff. "

"Then I envy you. For I myself am greatly frightened." "Of what?" I shouted.

He kept calm. Calm as death. "It is too great a vacuum, this absence of a clear line of succession. A vacuum can engender disruptive forces, my friend, and the greater the vacuum the greater the disruptions."

I couldn't argue with that. It was verging across the line from politics into physics. I never argue with physics.

"They'll work it out," I said, more quietly and without much confidence. I think I was beginning to experience a slow confidence leak. "An agreement among themselves. A rational division of authority. Maybe even a partition of the Empire, who knows? Would that be such a bad idea?"

"There is not one vacuum but two," he went on, as if I had not spoken at all. "For what also is absent is the King of the Rom." "Don't start with me again on that, Julicn."

"Just tell me this, Yakoub: putting aside the question of your resuming authority again, what if you were to return to the Imperium and request a meeting with the emperor-he'll see you, whether you're king or not-and make the nature of the crisis clear to him?"

Now I saw his real game. I didn't like it.

I said, "And advocate the naming of the Lord Periandros, perhaps, as his successor?"

Julien reddened. "Do you think I am so clumsy as to ask that of you?"

"You do favor Periandros, don't you?"

"I favor stability. I am close to Periandros. But I would rather see Sunteil wear the crown, or Naria, than have the Imperium shattered by civil war. What matters is that there be some succession. You might be able to bring that about. No one else would dare to speak of such things with the emperor."

"I've abdicated, Julien."

"The system is out of balance with you gone."

"Polarca said the same thing in virtually as many words. Polarca's ghost. Let it be out of balance, then. A rat's ass for the balance of the system, Julien."

"Yakoub-" "A rat's ass!"

"The possibility of war-"

I waved my hands around impatiently as though his words were farts and I was trying to clear the air.

"If you would only consider, Yakoub, the risk of allowing such instability to-"

Again I cut him off "No," I said. "Enough of this." And then I said, "What did you say this thing we were eating is called, Julien?" With a sigh he answered, "Cassoulet, mon ami."

"And how is it made?"

You can always distract a Frenchman by asking him for a recipe. "It is the garlic sausage, and the breast of lamb, and the filet of pork, to which one adds the white beans, and-"

"It's superb," I said. "Absolutely superb. I must have some more."

NIGHT CAME WE SAT QUIETLY OLD FRIENDS HAVE THE privilege of being silent with one another. Sleet beat furiously against my window for a time. Then the storm moved on and the sky began to clear. Stars cut their way through the thinning storm-clouds, sparkling with fierce intensity against that deep backdrop of blackness that is seen only on a world where no one dwells.

I sat quietly, yes. Feeling the fullness of my belly, feeling also a certain pressure on my shoulders that I knew was the weight of all the universe moving above me. That immense inconceivable clockwork mechanism, the billion billion soundless stars gliding on their tracks in the heavens, whipping their billion billion billion worlds along as they turned on the unknown axis that was at the center of it all somewhere. Everything interwoven, everything connected by invisible rods and struts that we imagine we understand.

And then I thought of our own little corner of it all, that speck, our few hundreds of worlds within our one galaxy-the galaxy that seems so vast when we are out traveling in it, but which is only one small stitch in the whole colossal tapestry. The worlds of men, of Gaje, of Rom. Kingdom and Empire. All our intricate struggles and maneuverings: they were so tiny against that great sky. Tiny, yes, but not trivial, for what was the universe, after all, except one atom and another and another and another, each one as important as any other in the structure of the whole thing? No, not trivial. Nothing is trivial. Subtract one atom from the universe and all is lost.

So they would need a new emperor soon, in this little corner of the universe that is everything to us? Well, I knew what that situation was like. I was around when the Fourteenth Emperor was dying and I am even old enough to remember the last days of the Thirteenth. To be close to a dying emperor has its perils, as it is perilous to be close to a star about to burn out. The star has been blazing away for nine billion years and now its course is just about run: in a little while the wild dance of the hot little nuclei will be stilled forever and there will be only a sphere of cold blackness where there had been ferocious light. Then it happens and in that moment of the birth of void a great whistling inrush of air comes bellowing in from every corner of the cosmos at once. You can get swept willy-nilly to the ends of the universe if you happen to be in the way when that wind goes rushing by.

(Of course I know that there's no air in the space between the stars. Don't be a literal-minded fool. Just try to understand the sense of what I'm telling you.)

The Fifteenth was dying and mighty tornados would spawn in his wake. And afterward, when the roaring had stopped and a deathly stillness was setting in, they would have to anoint someone as the Sixteenth and give the universe into his hand. Sunteil, Periandros, Naria, those were the choices. The three lords of the Imperium. Well, no surprises there. I knew them all. I had seen them come up and I had watched them move themselves into position. Year after year of subtle jostling and maneuvering until power came within reach; and just one more maneuver left to go. And everybody's nerves cranked to the breaking point until the outcome was settled.

(How much easier for everyone it would have been, I suppose, if we had set the Empire up as a hereditary monarchy in the first place. The heir apparent known to all, well in advance. None of this nasty fear of a chaotic interregnum. Plenty of time for the bureaucrats on whose shoulders the whole system really rests to scope out the new man and get some sense of how to keep him under control, so that everything would go purring along the right way after the shift in power.)

(Easier all around, yes. But very stupid, too, and in the long run catastrophic. The history of hereditary monarchies tells us that it's just like rolling dice-you can get hot and have five or eight good throws in a row, but you can't do it forever, and sooner or later you're absolutely certain to crap out. History is littered with the rusting wreckage of dynastic monarchies. Gaje history, that is. Since the beginning of time we Rom have had sense enough to rely on elected leaders only.)

Among the contenders in the struggle coming up in the Imperium, Sunteil was most to my liking. There was the old devil in that man. You could see the wickedness in his eyes, the shine, the sparkle. Sunteil was a man of Fenix in Haj Qaldun, Chorian's home world, a place of tawny desert sands and steady unremitting heat. If the heat of Fenix doesn't drive you crazy, it makes you sharp and glistening. Among the Rom of the Kingdom there is a saying, Count your teeth three times when it's a Fenixi that you kiss. Sunteil was of that sort. Dark and devious. My kind of man. He could almost have been Rom, that one.

Julien had chosen to throw in his lot with Periandros. I couldn't see it. That drab little bookkeeper! Not Julien's sort of person at all. What had Periandros done to buy him-promise Julien that he would construct a new France for him somewhere, and set him up as its king?

Sidri Akrak was Periandros' native planet, a world where shaggy monsters with nightmare faces run screaming down the streets of the cities, things with black fangs and red wattles, with bulging fiery eyes the size of saucers, with horns that branch a thousand times and turn into devilish stinging tentacles at their tips. Visitors to Sidri Akrak, if they aren't warned, sometimes have total nervous breakdowns in the first fifteen minutes. And yet the Akrakikan take their monstrositiles utterly casually, as though they were nothing more than dogs or cats. That's how they are: souls of bookkeepers. Nothing reaches them. They have no blood and no balls and nothing in their heads but some kind of clicking chattering arrangement of gears, or so it seems to me. How I despise them! And Periandros was an Akraki of the Akrakikan, the pure item. I have known robots with greater passion in a single swivel joint than he had in his entire body. Yet he had been favored by the Fifteenth Emperor and lifted up out of obscurity within reach of the throne. Now it seemed he might actually attain it. I don't know: maybe something like Periandros is the sort of creature best suited to reign in the GaJe Imperium. There have been Akraki emperors before and they were not the worst. I suppose the Gaje get the kind of emperors they deserve.

And Naria. The youngest; I knew him least well of the three. A man native to Vietoris who wore his skin in the deepest of purple hues and his hair a flaming scarlet, cascading to his shoulders. He appeared too cold and calculating for my taste. Don't misunderstand me-a little calculation is all right; we are all calculating; but coldness is another matter. Perhaps I was prejudiced against him because of his Vietoris origins, my own home world, in a manner of speaking, except that it was never "home" to me, simply the place where I happened to be born -into slavery-and where I was taken from my father and sold again before I knew anything of anything. It's hard for me to think of Vietoris or any of its Gaje folk without shuddering, though they tell me it's a gentle lovely world. Lord Naria of Vietoris might have many kindly traits glinting like buried treasure somewhere deep within his soul, but I had never seen evidence of them, and I wished him chilly luck in the contest that lay ahead.

Sunteil, Periandros, Naria. If I returned to the Empire, could I influence the choice? Should I? Would I? Julien de Gramont was right that I should care about the coming struggle. Who rules the Imperium is a matter that concerns Rom as much as it concerns GaJe: we share one galaxy, after all. And only a fool would think that it is possible to separate the interests of the Rom in any real way from the interests of the Gaje; the two races are interdependent, and we know that all too well. Which is why we Rom set up the Empire in the first place.

(Try to get a GaJo to believe that! But why would we want to try?) "Well, and in the end will you return?" Julien asked.

We had eaten and eaten and we had eaten some more, and now he had drawn a flask of fine old gold-flecked cognac of Galgala from the overpocket and it was sliding into us with no difficulty at all. But I had learned when I was not much more than a boy, living in the elegant palace of Loiza la Vakako, how to keep my brains from flowing out as the alcohol flows in.

"Votre sante," I cried, lifting my glass to him.

He lifted his. "Horses and wealth," he said in good Romany. We drank. I signalled that he should fill the glasses again. "Splendor and grace," he said.

"Joy and mischief," I responded. "Delights and delicacies!" "Deviltry and debauchery!"

"At your age," he said. "You are a rogue, Yakoub!"

"Ah, no. I am a very prosaic person, within myself I am as dull as your Lord Periandros, my friend. Shall we drink one more and say that the feast is over?"

"Why won't you go back to the Empire?" he asked one more time. "You've been away five years. Is that not enough?"

"It doesn't seem that way to me."

"Chaos will descend when the emperor dies. Can you allow that to happen?"

"How can I prevent it? Anyway, sometimes chaos is a thing to be desired. "

"Not by me, Yakoub."

"You are a sweet man, Julien, but you are a Gajo. There are many things you don't understand. I will stay here, I think."

"How much longer?" "Until it is time to go." "The time is now, Yakoub."

I shrugged. "Let the chaos come. It's not my affair."

"How can you say that, Yakoub? You, a man of honor, of responsibility, a king-"

"Former king, Julien." I rose and stretched and yawned. "We've been eating and drinking half the night. The stars come and go in the sky. Shall we say this is enough, and say goodnight?" It was not like me ever to say that anything was enough; but perhaps I was changing. Perhaps I was starting to grow old. Could that be? No. No, I didn't think so. Perhaps it was simply that I had grown weary of defending myself against Julien's persistence.

He stared at me for a long while without answering.

Then he said in a soft voice, and in Romany without flaw, "I forgive you and may God forgive you."

I was stunned by that. Those are words that are spoken among us at the time when consciences are settled, words that are said to a dying man or by a dying man by way of clearing all accounts. Did Julien know that? He must. He had been close to Rom much of his life. Surely he knew what we meant when we said those words. Te aves yertime mandar! I forgive you! He frightened and troubled me with those words as I had rarely been frightened or troubled in my long life.

"One last drink?" he said, after a time.

"I think we have had enough for one night," I replied.

JULIEN STAYED WITH ME ANOTHER THREE DAYS, FIVE, ten, something like that. He could have stayed a month, or forever, if he had wanted to. We were very careful about what we talked about. Mostly we talked about food, which was always a safe subject. We went out hunting or fishing every day and came back with sleds laden with the creatures of Mulano, and in the evenings Julien prepared whatever we had caught in the classic French manner, explaining every step to me as he worked.

He was a chef of miracles. I caught a spice-fish for him and instinctively he knew it needed nothing more than poaching in its own broth; but with the other things he worked wonders using only the little collection of herbs and spices I had brought with me from the Empire. It was astonishing, the effects he achieved. On a wintry world like Mulano where there isn't much in the way of vegetation the animal life is pretty sparse also. Except for the ghosts, of course, which feed on electromagnetic energy and don't give a damn whether there's any grass. Such creatures as there are to be had had never seemed to have much flavor to me. The spice-fishes are splendid, certainly. But the other things were bland at best. Even so, Julien made something spectacular out of a netful of ice-runners. Flat little beastly things, with half a dozen bright blue eyes on the top of their round bodies and an infinity of scuttling legs underneath. He made a ragout of them; and it was awesome. He turned a basket of leopard-snails into something fit for the gods. And what he was able to do with cloud-eels defied belief. I think he might have been seriously thinking of trying his hand at cooking snow-serpents, too. Until I told him that I wouldn't countenance the hunting of scavengers. Julien probably would have cooked up a batch of ghosts if he could have figured out some way of catching them. Once when I was busy elsewhere he went out and snipped some young tender tendrils from the trees near my bubble to use in a salad. That bothered me. I imagined the wounded trees whipping about in pain beneath the snow. But the salad was amazing.

Now and then we spoke of the old times we had spent together on this world or that, Xamur, Galgala, Iriarte. We talked of women, Syluise, Esmeralda, Mona Elena. And women of his. That was pleasant enough. Julien made all his women sound like goddesses. I imagine he made them feel like goddesses, too: there are men with that skill, though there should be more. He talked of feasts of years gone by, sweet friends also gone by, the changes that time brings. But never again did Julien mention the imperial succession or the problems that my abdication had caused. I loved him for that, his willingness to relent. He had relented too late, though. That first night he had put something under my skin with his Romany prayer of forgiveness, and it was burrowing through my flesh without mercy.

I thought he was going to make one last effort to get me to end my exile on the day he left Mulano. The words were there, just behind his teeth, I could tell; but he kept them caged and would not release them.

For a long time we looked at one another without saying anything. And I felt a great rush of pity for him. I saw in his burning eyes the piercing desperate loneliness of the man whose race is gone, whose nation is a fantasy. For Julien it was all la cuisine, la belle langue Francaise, la gloire, la gloire; but France was no more likely to come again than a river is to flow backward to its source, and what a secret crucifixion that knowledge must have been to him! So he busied himself in the affairs of realms that were, and perhaps it seemed to him that by his diplomatic shuttling about he was somehow maintaining the memory of the realm that had been. Poor Julien!

We embraced in silence and in silence he went away, trudging off due east through the forest of tentacles toward the rendezvous point where he would wait for his relay-sweep. The last I saw of him he had paused by one of the trees and was patting its rubbery trunk, as though commending it for the sweet flavor of its succulent tips.

I WAS ALONE A LONG WHILE AFTER THAT I WENT QUIETLY through my days and my evenings, thinking more of the past than of the future. Death was on my mind much of the time. That was strange. I had never given much thought to death. What use is that, to ponder death? Death is something to defy, not something to think about. I had been close to death many times but never once had I believed that it would take me, not even that time when the mud of Megalo Kastro, which is alive and loves to eat life, was sucking at my skin. Perhaps that is because there have always been ghosts about me, telling me my own future, though telling it in their tricky ghostly way. Not in the way we used to use fool the Gaje, no cards, no crystal balls. When a ghost tells you your future, you taste the certainty that you will have one. Through much of my early life one of those protective ghosts that sometimes visited me was my own. He never said so, but I came to recognize myself in him, for he was booming and uproarious with a laugh that could shatter worlds. That is me; that is how I have always been, even when I was young, constantly unfolding toward that kind of overwhelming vigor. How I relished seeing him, that big barrel-chested wide-shouldered man with the thick black mustache and the fiery eyes, drifting toward me out of the fog and mist of time! As long as he was with me what did I have to fear?

But there were no Yakoub-ghosts visiting me now, nor had I seen any for a great long while. I began to wonder why. Was my time almost up? The devil it was! Still, I let myself imagine it. It is a dirty pleasure, imagining your own death. I saw myself coming in from a day on the ice, sweating and struggling under the burden of some animal I had caught. And lying down just a moment, and feeling something within my body seeking suddenly to get out. They teach us the One Word when we are young, and the One Word is: Survive! But to everyone and everything there comes a time when that word no longer applies and the striving no longer is proper, and when that time comes it is folly to oppose it. Even for me, that time must come, try as I do to deny it. It maddens me, knowing that it must come even for me. Yet here in my imaginings I felt calm as it arrived. What is this, the death of Yakoub? Here on this bleak snowy world? Ah. I see. I see. Well, then, this is the time. No more struggling against it. What a philosopher a man can become, suddenly, when he knows at long last that he has no choice! So then I rose and went outside, and dug a grave for myself in the snow, and lay down under the light of Romany Star. And buried myself, and said the words over myself, and wept for myself, and danced and got drunk for myself, and spilled my drink out on the white breast of the ice-field as a libation, and at the very last I sang the lament for the dead over my own grave, the mulengi djili, the tale of my long life and magnificent deeds. And as I played all this out in my head I heard the voice of Yakoub the Rom asking me, What is this nonsense, Yakoub? Why are you playing with yourself this way? But I could give him no answer, and again and again I found myself letting such thoughts as these invade my mind, and I confess I took pleasure in it, a dirty pleasure, pretending that I no longer cared, that I no longer held life by the balls in a grip that could not be broken, that I was ready to lie down, that I had had enough at last.

Then I had the third of my visitors. This one came at noon, which for all Rom is the strange time, the dark time, the most mysterious moment of the day.

This was noon of Double Day, you understand, and so a doubly strange moment, when both the suns of Mulano are at their highest at once and the light of one erases the shadows of the other. A shadowless instant, a dead moment in time. When that moment comes I halt wherever I am and seal my nostrils against the air, for who knows what spirits travel freely in that instant?

On the day of the third visitor the air was curiously warm-warm for Mulano, I mean-as though a springtime might actually be on its way. There was a faint glaze on the surface of the ice, a sort of millimeter-thick melting, and indigenous ghosts by the thousand clustered overhead, crackling and buzzing with peculiar excitement.

I had been out for a long walk that Double Day morning, to the edge of the glacier and halfway up its slow fluid side, carving my way with an ice-axe like some prehistoric huntsman. There was a cave I liked on the glacier's slope. It was deep and low-roofed, with glassy walls that glowed with vermilion fire when the light of both suns came striking down through its ceiling, and far in the back was a spiraling tongue of ice that ramped up from the cave floor as though it were some sort of ancient altar, though I doubted that it was anything more than an'dental formation. I would often go to it, lay my gloved hands on ccia its sleek curves, and close my eyes and feel all the stars in their courses go spinning through my brain.

On my way back from this place the moment of noon overtook me, and I stood still with my openings sealed. In that moment between moments a deep rich voice spoke:

"Sarishan, cousin."

The surprise of it came with the force of a kick. I would have started and perhaps even fled instinctively. A sudden spontaneous flood of primeval fear-hormones came pouring into my blood. But I reacted just as quickly to regain control, turning off the flow, instructing the cells of my blood to devour that wild flow before it could reach my brain. "Damiano!" I cried. "Cousin!"

As if he had materialized out of a snowbank. A lean long figure who bore himself with the tense powerful force of a coiled whip. All Rom are my cousins but Damiano is my cousin truly, the son of the son of my father's youngest brother. His eyes are Rom and his heavy sweeping mustache is Rom but he has lived most of his life under the baking white sun of Marajo of the sparkling sands, and for protection's sake he wears his skin in thick leathery folds that to me look neither Rom nor Gaje but like something not even human.

Holding himself at a distance from me, he looked around and shook his head. "What a place, cousin! The boy said it was forlorn but I never imagined anything like this!"

"There is great beauty here, cousin. There is wondrous peace. Stay here a week or two and you'll come to see it. "

"I'll take that on faith," said Damiano. "Do I disturb you, cousin?" "Disturb?"

"I think you are not glad to see me."

"Devlesa avilan," I said, the old formula of welcome. "It is God who brought you. "

"Devlesa araklam tume," Damiano responded. "It is with God that I found you. The boy said this place was all ice, but I didn't believe him. He didn't tell me the half. Is there nothing alive here but you?"

"There are frozen rivers where shining fish swim as though through water.

There are ghost-creatures of pure energy all around us as we talk.

There are little animals that scamper over the ice and eat invisible plants, or one another. And on the far side of that hill there is a great forest, cousin, although I think you will not recognize the trees to be trees.

"And you're happy here?" "I have never been happier."

"I am only Damiano, cousin. No need for dancing around the truth with me."

My eyes blazed. "You come five thousand light-years to call me a liar?"

"Yakoub, Yakoub-"

"Did the boy say I seemed to be happy?" "Yes. He did."

"And I say it now. Shall we ask the ghosts for affidavits too?" "Yakoub."

"Damiano -cousin-" Then we were laughing, and then finally we were embracing, and pounding each other on the back, and doing a little dance of gladness on the shining thin-crusted ice. "Come," I said, and led him, half-running, back over the hills and valleys to my icebubble.

He gaped at the forest.

"Chorian said nothing about this!"

"He never saw it. I was living on the other side when he was here." "These are your trees?"

"I could show you how they grow, beneath the ice." He shivered. "Another time, perhaps."

I opened several of the flasks that Julien de Gramont had left me, and gave him a meal such as I think Damiano had not dared to expect from me on Mulano; the wine flowed freely and he gulped it in the manner of any wandering Rom, a whole goblet in a single swallow. I think that would have turned Julian apoplectic, to see wine of such rare vintage poured down my cousin's gullet that way. But Julien was far away and we didn't feel any need to honor his French niceties in absentia: I matched Damiano guzzle for guzzle, until we were easy and loose with each other and his strange leathery skin was glowing like a charcoal fire.

I knew he hadn't come here to see the sights. Damiano is a great man on Marajo, with rich business interests of every kind, fire-egg plantations and magnetic farms and a vast slave-breeding establishment and much more, and if there had been nine of him he still would not have time to oversee everything properly, so he had often declared. Yet he had made the journey to my bleak little hiding-place, and he had come alone and in the real self, sending no mere ghost, no doppelganger. That was a great compliment. Well, and so he wanted to add his voice to the chorus urging me to give up my exile. We drank and ate and ate and drank and I waited for him to make his appeal, but instead he talked only of family things, the cousins on Kalimaka who were pulling transuranic elements out of their sun and selling them to all comers, and the ones on Iriarte who had gambled away five solar systems on a single toss of the dice and then had won them all back before dawn, and those of Shurarara who without even bothering to ask permission of the Imperium had yanked their world out of orbit and were taking it off into nomadry, telling everyone that they were going to leave the galaxy entirely. That last astounded me. "Are they serious, Damiano? What will they use for a sun, as they cross those hundreds of thousands of light-years?"

"Oh, they have a sun, cousin. Or its equivalent: enough to keep themselves warm, at any rate. That part's no problem. But nobody believes that they'll actually leave the galaxy. They're just putting that story around to cover their disappearance, when all they mean to do is head for the Outer Colonies and live as pirates, eight or ten thousand light-years beyond the Center. Strike and run,strike and run."

"This is not the Rom way," I said gloomily. "Valerian?"

"One pirate, yes. But a whole world of them?"

"These are strange times, Yakoub. With both the Empire and the Kingdom headless-"

Ah. Here it comes, now.

He held out his glass for more wine. I filled, he guzzled. "Is the emperor still dying?" I asked.

"They give him six months, a year." "And then?"

"Sunteil, I think." "It could be worse."

"It could. I think he's manageable. But the question is, Will the new king be able to manage him?"

"The new king."

That sounded strange in my ears. More than strange. I felt the echo of those words go clanging and clamoring through my soul and my bones began to ache.

"The new king, yes." Again he extended the glass to me. The devil! He had his hook deep into me now.

I poured for him. "There is a new king?"

Damiano shrugged, nodded, shrugged again. Then he rose and strolled around the bubble, fingering this old Gypsy artifact and that one, taking in the immemorial past through his fingertips. I boiled and bubbled with eagerness to know. The devil! The devil! How beautifully he had caught me!

I said, working at indifference, "Chorian did say that the krisatora were thinking of holding an election, since I seemed to be sincere about my abdication. But Julien de Gramont-you know him, the French pretender?-was here a little while afterward. He was still working on me to go back to Galgala and reclaim the throne."

"You told him you weren't interested, cousin."

"You know that already? Julien was in touch with you too?" "Julien has been in touch with everyone," said Damiano. "In particular the krisatora. He reported what you had told him."

"Ah." "And so there has been a new election."

"About time," I said. Casually. Keeping tight control, though I was on fire inside. I allowed myself a little more wine, and forced myself to drink it as Julien might have done, savoring its bouquet. "So we should rejoice that the Imperium is saved from chaos and there will be no more worlds turned pirate. The Rom again have a king and Sunteil will be emperor soon, and all is well."

Curiosity was raging at my gut. But I wasn't going to ask. Damiano smiled in an angular, off-center way. "It isn't certain yet, about Sunteil, you know. And we have no reason to think that all will be well for the Rom, either."

"Because of the new king, you mean?" "Because of the new king, yes."

I sat absolutely still, staring at him. And Damiano, for all the flush of wine burning in the deep-hued folds of his heavy skin, sat just as still, stared back at me just as stolidly. I felt the great strength of him. Truly he had the blood of my fathers in his veins. Was he the new king? No, no, he could never have gone so far from Galgala this soon after the election, if that were the case.

"All right," I said. "Who is he, Damiano?" "You care?"'

"You know I care."

"You have taken yourself far from it all. You live beyond the Imperium now, in a place of ice and ghosts and shining fishes."

"Who is he?"

"Why did you do this to us, Yakoub?" "A time comes when a change is needed." "For the Rom, or for Yakoub?"

"Yakoub is who I was thinking of," I said. "I had to leave, or I would have choked on my office."

"Well, so you left, and there has been a change. Not only for you but for all of us."

"Who is he, Damiano?" He gave me a terrible look. "Shandor," he said.

"My son Shandor is King of the Gypsies?" "Shandor, Yes."

It was like a giant blade twisting and churning through my entrails, that one simple statement. I could feel rivers of my own blood rising and surging and spewing forth. It was with the greatest effort of my life that I kept myself from leaping across the table and digging my hands into Damiano's throat, to throttle the words back into him and make him not have said them. But I did not move and I did not speak. It was a calamity beyond all measure, and I had been its unwitting architect.

Into my stunned and shattered silence my cousin Damiano said, "Well, Yakoub?"

"I never foresaw that. In all my dreaming and planning I never foresaw that." I shook my head again and again. "How long ago was it done?"

"Very recently."

"If any of this is untrue, Damiano, what you have told me here today-"

"Shandor is king. May my sons die within this hour if I have told you any untruths."

"My God. My God."

Wild angry Shandor, the one man in the universe I had never known how to control! Shandor the red, Shandor the murderous. Him? King? I should have taken him from his cradle and hurled him down into the dark sizzling heart of the Idradin crater. There might still have been the chance to halt him, back then. How could I not have seen that this would happen?

"And are the worlds accepting him?" I asked.

"They flock to him. They rush to him. There is such hunger to have a king again, Yakoub. Even a king like Shandor."

"My God," I said again. "Shandor!"

"Is this what you wanted when you went away, Yakoub?"

"They are not supposed to give the kingship to the son of a king." My voice was leaden. "It is against the custom. It is not hereditary, the kingship."

"He asked. He forced them." "Forced the krisatora?"

"You know what Shandor is."

"Yes," I said. "I know what Shandor is." I felt an earthquake beginning in my soul. Great boulders were breaking loose from my spirit and tumbling down upon me, and I was being crushed by them. Now I saw the full immensity of the mistake I had made by leaving Galgala. I had left an open place for him, never suspecting the reach of his ambitions, or that he could ever realize them. And he had rushed in to fill that place. What a fool I had been, and telling myself all the while that I was being supremely clever! To be shrewd and invulnerable for a hundred seventy-two years, and then to play one final card, thinking it was the shrewdest play of all, and in that way to destroy in one moment of misplaced cleverness all that I had worked to build. I have never known such shame as I did in that moment. Damiano must have seen it in my face, some outward show of the horror and anguish I felt, for it was reflected in his own; he looked into my eyes and he seemed startled and shaken by what he saw there. I could not face that. I turned my back on him and went to the door of my bubble and kept on going, out into the bitter night. Double Day had ended while we talked, and the searing light of the stars bore down on me from every corner of the heavens. It was about to start snowing again. The first few flakes spiraled past my head. I stood alone in the midst of the ice-field, aware that there were ghosts around me everywhere, Mulano ghosts and perhaps Polarca's or Valerian's also: their chilly laughter was everywhere in the night. But I knew I would not be hearing that laughter much longer. The game was up for me here, sooner than I had thought, and without my winning what I had hoped for. The question now was one of salvage, not one of victory.

Damiano stood behind me, saying nothing.

"Give me a day and a half to pack my things," I said.