Star of Gypsies

5. Into The Mouth Of The Lion

What had this prophet done? What did he tell us, above all to do? He told us to deny all consolations-gods, fatherlands, moralities, truths-and, remaining apart and companionless, using nothing but our own strength, to begin to fashion a world which would not shame our hearts. Which is the most dangerous way? That is the one I want! Where is the abyss? That is where I am headed. What is the most valiant joy? To assume complete responsibility!

- Kazantzakis

DESPITE BIBI SAVINAS DECREE THERE WAS STILL PLENTY of uproar. By twos and threes they came to me and worked at changing my mind. Think of the risks, they said. Think of the danger. Think of the loss to our people if Shandor harms you, Yakoub. Think of this, think of that. You are indispensable, they told me. How can you simply hand yourself over to Shandor like this?

He is my son, I said. He will do me no harm.

Polarca told me flat out that I was crazy. I had never seen him so exasperated. He ranted, he stormed, he threatened to resign his office. I pointed out that he had no office to resign from, just now. He wasn't amused. He started ghosting around almost uncontrollably, leaping back across space and time in an altogether hysterical way. He was in a frenzy. I thought he would begin frothing at the mouth.

The person of the king is sacrosanct, I insisted. Even Shandor will recognize that, when I come to him on Galgala.

Valerian wanted to go to Galgala in my place and end Shandor's usurpation by force. He would gather up his entire pirate fleet and descend on him and march to the house of power and evict him from the throne. Biznaga remarked on the improbability of that, asking if Valerian seriously thought Shandor would let him get within a lightyear of Galgala with his ships. At the first sign of his approach, Biznaga suggested, Shandor would simply let the imperial government know that the notorious pirate Valerian was in the vicinity, and an armada of the Imperium would be waiting for him when he arrived.

Biznaga too urged me not to go: calmly, quietly, in his best diplomatic manner. Jacinto, Ammagante, the same. Damiano was more volatile, and ranted and stormed almost as fiercely as Polarca. There was talk of finding one or two of my other sons, wherever they might be-my children are scattered all over the universe, God knows where - and bringing them to Xamur to plead with me. Or sending them to their brother Shandor as my ambassadors. Small mercy they would have had from him, too. Someone, I forget who (and just as well that I did) suggested appealing to the aged emperor for help in deposing Shandor, the most laughable thing I have ever heard. And so on for several days. The only allies I had were Thivt and Bibi Savina. And possibly Syluise, though she held herself aloof as usual from most of the discussions and it wasn't easy to know where she stood. But I looked into her cool blue eyes and seemed to find support in them. In her remote and unfathomable way she appeared to be telling me to do as I pleased, accept the risks, reap the reward.

So I simply lied to them. Be calm, I told them, I know what I'm doing. Everything is written in the book of the future, and all will be for the best.

Somehow that settled them down. I let them think that I had received some sort of privileged information out of the future: an obliging ghost, possibly my own, coming to me and letting me know in the customary oblique ghostly way that my gamble had paid off somewhere down the line, that Shandor indeed had backed off when faced with the live and legitimate King of the Rom, that I would be restored to the throne and we would once more be traveling the path toward Romany Star. And they bought it.

But the truth is my ghosts were keeping away. Sometimes I saw a little flicker out of the corner of my eye that might have been some ghost hovering near, but I never was sure. That could have bothered me, if I had allowed it to. I told myself that the reason I was getting no ghosts was that I was being tested, my resolve, my courage: those who might have ghosted me, even my own self, were making me go through this thing unaided. I was on my own in this thing. Well, that was all right. I would simply proceed into the future at a rate of one second per second, with no hints of what was to come, the same as everyone else. Shandor was a wild man but there was logic to my strategy and I felt that no harm ultimately would come to me. Still and all, it would have been pleasant to get a little visit from some future self of mine, just a quick little reassuring flash, a wink, during those days when I was getting myself ready to walk into the mouth of the lion.

SO IT WAS AGREED, IN THE END. YOU CAN'T REALLY ARGUE with a king once he's made up his mind. I would go to Galgala, I would confront Shandor, and then, well, we would all see what happened after that. I made only one concession to my friends' fears. My plan had been to go to Galgala alone, but Damiano talked me into taking Chorian along as an escort. Chorian was, after all, a servant of the Imperium, and Shandor might just think twice about laying violent hands on him, regardless of what he might feel like doing to me.

I could see a little logic in that. Chorian could come to Galgala with me. But I let it be known that even so I was going to enter into the presence of Shandor alone, unescorted, not cowering behind the shield of the Imperium and some boy still wet with mother's milk. And I dared them to give me any further argument.

I am, basically, a very cautious man. You don't get to live as long as I have by being reckless. My father drilled the Three Laws and the One Word into me when I was very young, and the fact that I have survived as well as I have for as long as I have ought to be sufficient proof that I was a careful student at least of that much. Those who live by common sense, my father taught me, are righteous in the eyes of God. So they are. I would live no other way. Still and all, there is common sense and common sense, and some kinds of common sense make more sense than others. Time and again I've discovered that the conventional "safe" ways of doing things are often wildly risky. And that what looks impossibly crazy to conventional people is really the only reasonable course to take.

For example, that time when I was living in slavery on Alta Hannalanna. Do you think common sense has any value in a place like Alta Hannalanna? Common sense would have gotten me killed there, that's what common sense would have done.

What a foul brute of a world that was! How I detested it, how I suffered, how I toiled in misery! A thousand times a day did I curse the soul of Pulika Boshengro, he who had sent me there in slavery to get rid of me after overthrowing his brother, my beloved mentor and foster father, Loiza la Vakako. That planet could well have been the end of me, if I hadn't been willing to take a crazy chance.

They shipped me there, as you know, by relay-sweep. It was my first taste of that dismal mode of travel and it was like a nightmare for me, those hours and weeks and perhaps even months-who could tell?- a prisoner in my little sphere of force as I hurtled across the galaxy. I raged and screamed until my throat felt like rags, and still the journey went on and on. Still I hung, suspended between life and death. For the second time in my life there was a slave-mark on my forehead and there was no way I could rip it off, not even by tearing at the skin. I was helpless. I was, I think, twenty years old, twenty-five, something like that. It all seems the same from this distance. I was very young, anyway. My life had hardly even begun and now it seemed all over. When I had been a babe in my cradle the wise old crone had come to me and whispered great prophecies of kingship and glory, and where had they gone? The little Gypsy boy on Vietoris, the beggar-slave on Megalo Kastro, the shoveler of snail-shit on Nabomba Zom: this was glory? This was kingship? Indeed for a time only a little while before I had lived the life of high privilege, when I was the heir to kingly Loiza la Vakako. I was the future husband of his lovely daughter. The gentle world of Nabomba Zom would one day be my domain. And then suddenly it all had been torn away from me and I was a slave again, stuffed into a relay-sphere and flung into nowhere, heading for a world so dreadful that Loiza la Vakako had not been able to bring himself to describe it to me. I don't remember my landing on Alta Hannalanna. It must have been a bad one, though. I had lived in my relay-sphere for so long that it had become like a womb to me, and when I was dumped out onto the surface of that sickening planet I think the shock of it separated me from my sanity for a while. The first thing I can recall is crouching on my knees with my head down, sweating and puking and trembling, while a tall man in a gray uniform jabbed me again and again in the kidneys with a truncheon. I didn't know where I was. I didn't even know who I was.

"Get up," he said. "Slave."

The air was hot and dank and the world was quivering like a trampoline beneath me. I wasn't imagining it. There was no solid surface, only a bewildering grotesque lacework of interwoven rubbery yellow vines thick as a man's thigh that stretched from horizon to horizon. The texture of the vines was rough and sticky, with warts and humps rising everywhere. They quivered like the strings of a fiddle. I thought I could feel the planet breathing below them, heavy groaning exhalations that set the vines in motion, and then long slow sighing inward draughts. A dense clammy rain was falling. The gravity was very light, but there was nothing exhilarating about that; it simply made everything seem even more unstable. I was dizzy and sick.

"Up," the guard said again, and prodded me without mercy.

He shoved me aboard a weird kind of vehicle that had no wheels, only peculiar spiderleg-like limbs that ended in huge hand-shaped clamps. It made its way across the face of Alta Hannalanna like some sort of giant bug, grasping and then releasing the strands of the planetary vines as it pulled itself forward. In time it came to a place where the vines parted to create a vast dark hole, and it plunged down into it, and down and down and down, until I was somewhere deep within the heart of the planet.

I was not to see the surface of Alta Hannalanna again for many months. Not that there was much virtue in being up there, for the whole place is an impassable maze of those evil sticky vines; a veil of thick gray clouds perpetually hides the sun; and the rain never ceases, not even for a moment. But down below is even worse. It is all one great solid spongy mass, hundreds of kilometers thick. Wide low-roofed tunnels run through it, crossing and crossing again. The walls of those tunnels are moist and pink, like intestines, and a sort of sickly phosphorescent illumination comes from them, a feeble glow that breaks the darkness without giving comfort to the eyes. The whole planet is like that, from pole to pole. Afterward I learned that the spongy underground of Alta Hannalanna is the substructure of the vines, their mother-substance, a gigantic mass of vegetable matter that completely engulfs the entire globe. The vines that spring from it are its organs of nourishment. They bring moisture to it, and by exposing themselves to the foggy light of the surface they allow some sort of photosynthetic processes to take place below. Apparently the whole thing is one vast organism of planetary size, the vegetable equivalent of the living sea of Megalo Kastro. The real surface of Alta Hannalanna lies buried somewhere beneath it, far down. It shows up on sonar probes, an underlying layer of solid rock, but no one has ever seen any reason to penetrate deep enough to find it.

By God, it is an awful place! I blush to think that it was a Rom who discovered it, that great Gypsy spacefarer Claude Varna, five hundred years ago. To his credit Varna thought it was a horror not worth further examination; but something in the report he filed aroused the curiosity of a biologist in the employ of one of the huge Gaje trading companies a century later, and a second expedition went forth. Alas that it did.

The tunnels are inhabited. Indeed the tunnels were created by their own inhabitants. For they are nothing more than colossal worm-holes, excavated by enormous sluggish flat-topped creatures whose bodies are three times the width of a man's and extend to unbelievable lengths. Slowly, patiently, these things have been gnawing their way through the underground world of Alta Hannalanna since the beginning of time. They are mere eating-machines, mindless, implacable. What they deyour they digest and excrete as thin slime that runs in rivers behind them, gradually to be reabsorbed by the tunnel walls.

There are other life-forms in those tunnels, comparatively insignificant in size, that live as parasites on the great worms or on the surrounding vegetable matter. One of them is a kind of insect, a creature the size of a large dog with a savage beak and huge glittering golden-green eyes, repellent to behold. It is because of these creatures that I spent two years of my life in terrible torment in the tunnels of Alta Hannalanna.

The insects live within the worms. They use their beaks to inject the worms with their gastric juices and actually tunnel into their bodies, where they feed on their tissues and in time lay their eggs. Huge as the worms are, I suppose they would eventually be completely consumed by these little monsters within their bodies if they were not capable of defending themselves. The worm's defense is a chemical one: when it becomes aware that it has been entered-and it may be years before that news penetrates to its dim brain-it secretes a substance that trickles toward the zone of irritation and causes its own tissues to harden into a stony mass. Thus it forms a cyst around the invader, which is trapped within it until it starves. The stony material that forms these cysts is a rich lustrous yellow in color, smooth to the touch, and can be polished to a high gloss. In the commerce of the starways it is sold as Alta Hannalanna jade, although in truth it is more akin to amber. And it fetches a very high price indeed.

The filthy trick of collecting this jade was taught to me by one of my fellow slaves, a gaunt white-haired man named Vabrikant. He was a native of one of the Sempitern worlds; he said he had been on Alta Hannalanna five years; and he looked at me with such appalling pity when I was handed over to him for instruction that I felt my soul beginning to curdle.

In silence he handed me tools: a sort of curving scimitar, a pick, a two-pronged thing with a spring attachment. "All right," he said. "Come on with me."

Together we set out from the slave dormitory, an oval antechamber where several of the tunnels met. Quickly the path narrowed and the ceiling grew lower, until we had to walk with knees bent. Though there was barely light enough to see by, Vabrikant moved from intersection to intersection with the ease of long familiarity. The atmosphere was damp and close and the air had a nauseating sweetness.

We went forward for hours. I couldn't begin to see how we would ever find our way back. Now and then Vabrikant halted and hacked a chunk from the tunnel wall to eat. The first time he offered some to me I refused, and he shrugged; but later he said, "You might as well. It's all you're going to get today."

I nibbled it warily. It was like eating a sponge; but there was a faint residue of musty flavor in my mouth afterward, and the hunger-gripings that I had been feeling were allayed at least for a little while.

Vabrikant smiled. "Better than starving, eh?" "Not by much."

"You get used to it. Gypsy, are you?" "Rom, yes."

"I knew a Gypsy once. A woman. Sweet, she was. The most beautiful little thing, dark eyes, the darkest hair you ever saw. I wanted to marry her, that's how I felt about her. I chased after her across six worlds. She was always kind to me. Married one of her own sort, though." "We seldom marry outside," I said.

"So I discovered. Well, makes no difference now, I guess. I'm in this fucking place for life." He straightened up, sniffed, nodded. "Come on. We're almost there." He shook his head. "You poor bastard. Shipped here so young. You sure must have done something really shitty to have been sent to Alta Hannalanna."

"No. Don't tell me what it was. We don't ever talk about what it was that got us sent up." He pointed ahead. "Look there, Gypsy-lad. There's worm-waste. We've got our worm."

Indeed I saw a stream of pale fluid spreading toward us on the tunnel floor, the worm excretion that I was to get to know all too well. Soon we were moving thigh-deep through it, sliding and slipping with every step. Vabrikant shined his helmet-light ahead. A worm was in the corridor.

We came up behind it. It filled the tunnel nearly from wall to wall, so that we had to walk sideways, our backs to the wall; and even so we could barely get through. We crept on and on for what seemed like miles, stooping so low that I thought my back would crack. The reek of the worm's fluid made me gag at first, but I began to get used to it. Its body was soft, almost buttery. It would have been easy to put my hand right through the yielding skin, deep into its flesh. Vabrikant said nothing for perhaps half an hour. Then he halted and tapped my shoulder.

"You see? Jade-light."

"I don't-"

"There. The yellow fire."

Yes. The worm's skin seemed to be blazing just ahead over a patch bigger than I was. When we were closer I saw the strange transformation of the giant creature's flesh within that patch: something dark and hard was visible deep within, and all about it was the fiery glow of inflammation that Vabrikant called jade-light. He went to work unhesitatingly, hacking open the side of the worm with the pick, then using the scimitar to widen the incision. He inserted the two-pronged device as a clamp. With steady even strokes he cut his way inward. The worm showed no reaction to what he was doing.

"That's the critter in there," he said. "This is the jade, growing around it. Reach in and touch it with your hand."

"In there?" "Reach in, boy."

I crawled forward, shuddering, and thrust my arm deep within the quivering incision until I touched something hard and smooth as glass. It was the wall of the cyst that surrounded the trapped parasitical insect.

"I feel it," I said. "What do we do now?"

"We cut it out. The danger is that the critter won't be dead. If it isn't, it's going to be awful hungry and not in a real good mood. When we open the wall it's likely to jump out at us. It's got one hell of a beak." "How can we tell if it's dead?"

"By opening the wall," Vabrikant said. "If it don't jump at us, then it's dead. If it do, we're in trouble. We lose a devil of a lot of jade miners every year."

I stared at him. But he simply shrugged and set to work.

It took half an hour, working with a drilling-bit and chisel, to cut the jade cyst from its matrix in the worm's soft flesh. When I pointed out that a laser knife would have done the job a lot faster he looked at me in sorrow, as though I were mentally defective. "Give us lasers, sure. The overmasters would really go for that idea." I felt worse than foolish. We were not merely slaves but prisoners.

Luck was with us this time. The worm had done its job of self-defense; when we lifted the jade slab that Vabrikant had cut free we saw the husk of the insect dead within, dry and empty. "There are days I almost hope one of them will pop out and kill me," he said. "But I guess I don't really want that or I'd go looking for it, I guess. Here. Take hold with me." He caught the inner face of the jade cyst and pulled it free, dumping the shell of the dead insect back into the depths of the worm's flesh. As we stepped away, the wound was already beginning to close; we got our tools out just in time. And the worm moved on.

That was how jade was mined on Alta Hannalanna. You'd trek endlessly for hours down the clammy tunnels searching for a worm, scan up and down the length of its immense body for the jade-light that marked an entrapped parasite, start cutting and hope for the best. Hours of numbing boredom relieved only by a few minutes of terror, followed by hours of boredom again. With that revolting sickly-sweet stench in your nostrils all the time. And then try to find your way back to the dormitory. Vabrikant always knew the way, but I wasn't always paired with Vabrikant; sometimes I went out with younger men who didn't have much more of a sense of the tunnels than I did, and we got lost, and then after a while I was often the senior member of the mining team, for new slaves arrived all the time, and it became my job to try to find the way. Sometimes we wandered for days trying to return, and there was nothing to eat but the stuff we carved from the walls of the tunnel.

About one worm out of three carried an encysted parasite. Maybe one parasite out of three was still alive when we cut into the jade. You had to be ready to bash it with your pick if it came charging out; that was why we traveled in pairs, one to cut, one to stand guard. Even so slaves died all the time. Sometimes you met a free parasite that was wandering the tunnels looking for a worm. That was always bad. They came charging at you like demons. When we did manage to find our way back to the dormitory after filling our quota of jade it was cold comfort indeed. All we did was rest and brood until it was time to go out again. It was a bleak, hopeless existence. Life at the dorm was so grim that after a little while we started looking forward to our next tour out in the tunnels. We talked constantly about escaping, of somehow getting on board one of the relay-sweep capsules that periodically took the jade away to be sold. To do that we'd have to mount an attack on the overmasters, who guarded us when we were at the base. The overmasters were slaves themselves; no one would work for pay alone on a planet like this; but they set themselves up as our enemies and there was no hope of conspiring with them. They were armed with truncheons and with sensory-whips and they went swaggering about glowering at us as though we were troublesome dogs. Usually the truncheons were enough to keep us in line, but once in a while some miner went seriously berserk and then the sensory-whip would come into play. Those who had felt its lash never risked it a second time. But I did.

TO KEEP FROM GOING OUT OF MY MIND I GHOSTED OBSESSIVELY, compulsively, all over space and time, taking the big jump fifty times a day. Sometimes I even did it when I was crawling down a tunnel toward a worm, although you aren't supposed to ghost in dangerous circumstances because it diverts your attention for a fraction of a moment, and sometimes that can be fatal. Maybe I didn't give a damn; maybe I was feeling a little suicidal, or just reckless. Or maybe I thought that if I jumped often enough, one time I just wouldn't return to Alta Hannalanna at the end of the trip. But of course it doesn't work that way. You always come back.

My present was a nightmare and my future promised nothing but more of the same. So I went ghosting back into my own past most of the time, a special torment, sweet and prickly. I ghosted Nabomba Zom and I saw myself out riding with Malilini, and it broke my heart. But as I hovered invisible above that young happy pair I didn't dare make myself known to them; I remembered Loiza la Vakako's admonitions about interfering with the past, and I feared making the attempt, much as I longed to. I told myself that one ghostly word from me on the eve of Loiza la Vakako's fatal banquet could save Malilini's life and spare me from this hell of Alta Hannalanna, and yet I held my tongue. Crazy? Maybe. But my fear was even greater than my pain.

I ghosted Megalo Kastro and watched myself begging among the gentle kindly whores. I saw myself swimming for my life in that strange ocean. I went back even farther, to my life on Vietoris. I had never ghosted that far back before. I looked down at myself standing beside my father on the slopes of Mount Salvat, with Romany Star blazing in the sky.

Then I wanted to see my father again, to find out how things had gone for him after the company had sold me away into slavery. But I couldn't find him, though I roamed Vietoris from end to end. My whole family had disappeared. I thought perhaps there was something missing from my ghosting skills, that I didn't yet know all there was to know about locating particular people in space and time. That was the easy thing to believe, that it was my own fault if I couldn't find my father anywhere.

I grew bolder. I went to worlds I had never seen, Duud Shabeel, Kalimaka, Fenix, Clard Msat. They became real to me and Alta Hannalanna was only a dream. I would be right inside a worm, hacking away at its flesh, and between one second and the next I would disappear for hours on Estrilidis, Iriarte, Xamur. When I came back nothing had changed: I was still in mid-stroke, the scimitar descending. Sometimes I went away again in that very moment. It was as easy to go back a hundred years as it was to travel back a month. I swung in wider and wider loops, hurling myself backward without giving a damn about the consequences.

One day I summoned the ghosting force and sent myself out without pausing to think about where I might be going. What did it matter? Any place would be better than Alta Hannalanna. There was the familiar disorientation and dizziness and then I was looking at blue sky, heavy fleecy white clouds, a yellow sun. What place was this? Short widecrowned trees with brown trunks and green leaves, and a meadow of thick green grass, and tents in the meadow, and men and women gathered around a huge cauldron. The men wore plush waistcoasts, velvet riding-breeches, long black coats, gleaming boots that came up to mid-calf. The women had satin dresses loose and open on top to show their breasts, colorful shawls, plumed turbans. Three or four of the younger ones were singing and beating on tambourines. The men were clapping and stamping their feet. A great shaggy brown animal tethered to a pole was dancing too, comically, lurching from side to side on its powerful heavy legs. I knew at once where I was and the knowledge stunned me. Where else but lost dead Earth? Who else could these people be but a band of traveling Gypsies? How handsome they were, how vital and strong! I floated through their encampment, listening to them shouting to one another in a language that I could only understand in snatches but which beyond any doubt was some ancient form of Romany, and I felt a joy and a wonder that lifted me entirely out of my misery and swept me off into exaltation.

Now that I knew I could ghost as far back in time as Earth, I went there often, hoping to find my people again. And very often I did; but it was a long time before I saw them in such merriment again. Instead I saw them huddling in leaking leantos under a cold rain, wearing nothing but ragged scraps of old clothing. I saw them cooped up in prisons, living a filthy life in squalid wooden huts while grunting bailiffs strode among them with whips. I saw them living on roots and leaves in the forest. I saw them marching on dry dusty roads, looking fearfully back over their shoulders. I saw their dark eyes peering out through barbed wire fences. Again and again and again I went to Earth and sought out my people and whenever I found them I found them suffering and hungry. That was when I knew that for the Rom old Earth had been Alta Hannalanna all the time, when they lived as homeless strangers, despised and hungry among the uncaring Gaje. It was then that the resolution was born in me to devote the rest of my life to setting right that ancient wrong, to end the years of wandering at last. I would bring my people home to Romany Star.

But first I had to get myself free of this hideous place where I was trapped.

ONE DAY THEY BROUGHT VABRIKANT BACK BADLY wounded from the tunnels. He had gone out a couple of days before with a novice, a long-legged boy from Darma Barma-that was what they mostly used Vabrikant for, the training of novices-and this time he had been imprudent or too slow or he had simply not cared; and when he opened the cyst the insect was alive and waiting. It sprang out already fighting and laid him open from side to side with a single swipe of its beak.

I give the boy from Darma Barma credit: he struggled with the thing and killed it, and staggered back all the way to the dormitory with Vabrikant in his arms although he had been seriously cut and gouged himself. A couple of the overmasters came out to see what had happened. Vabrikant was a horrifying sight and he seemed close to death. He was unconscious, breathing slowly and hoarsely, his mouth slack. His eyes were open, but they looked like little slits of glass. The overmasters studied him a moment, shrugged, walked away.

The merciful thing would probably have been to help him die as quickly as possible, but I was too young to understand that. I went running after the overmasters, shouting, "Hey! Are you just going to leave him lying there?"

One of them didn't even look back. The other turned and peered at me in disbelief. Nobody spoke to overmasters here unless they spoke to you first.

"You said something?"

"He's still alive. He's in pain. For God's sake, aren't you going to do anything for him?"

"Why is that your problem?"

"That's Vabrikant there. He's the best man in this whole godforsaken place."

The overmaster stared at me as if I had gone insane and made a quick offhand gesture with his thumb, telling me to get back where I belonged. I wasn't having that. I came up close to him, practically nose to nose, and pointed angrily at Vabrikant. "He doesn't have to die! Get him into surgery, will you? At least give him a pain-killer." A chilly stare was the only response I got. "God damn it, aren't you human? A man's lying there on the ground with his guts hanging out and you won't even do anything?"

The overmaster had his truncheon in one hand and his sensory whip in the other. I saw the blaze of irritation and fury in his eyes and I knew that if I didn't back off in another moment he was going to jab me. But I didn't care. I went on pointing and shouting and then, when that seemed to do no good, I grabbed him by the arm and swung him around.

He didn't give me the truncheon. He gave me the sensory whip.

I wasn't prepared for that. Not that you could ever be; but the sensory whip was a weapon that ordinarily was used only in extreme jeopardy. It could kill. I thought it had killed me. I had never known such pain as that in my life. I felt as if I had been speared in the skull with a mining pick. My head rolled until it almost fell off my shoulders and my heart stopped beating and my feet went out from under me and I fell down, choking and gagging, biting at the spongy flooring.

When I came back to consciousness the walls seemed to be spinning. The roof of the dormitory was gone and the hundreds of kilometers of sponge-stuff above us had blown away and I saw the open sky, and it was all bright yellow swirls of lightning dancing up and down. Gradually my vision cleared and I saw the overmaster against the blare of yellow light. He was standing over me, waiting to see what I would do next.

The sensible move would have been to get myself away from him fast. To forget all about Vabrikant and creep or crawl or drag myself back into some dark quiet corner of the dormitory, if indeed I had enough strength left in me to do anything like that, and lick my wounds, if I could remember where my tongue was. Otherwise, if I made any sort of further trouble at all, the overmaster was going to lash me with the sensory whip a second time, and the second time would almost certainly kill me. I was young and I was very strong, but I had just taken a tremendous jolt of force through my entire nervous system. A second hit of that magnitude and I was done for.

Any sensible person would have known that. And I was a sensible person. Usually.

But I also knew that Vabrikant was going to die very soon if I didn't do something. And that I was probably going to die before long too, for I had grabbed an overmaster's arm in anger, and that marked me as extremely dangerous. Slaves were not supposed to tell overmasters what to do. They certainly weren't supposed to lay hands on them. The next time I got out of line the overmasters would finish me off.

Feebly, numbly, I got to my feet. I was shaking like a man with the palsy. My arms dangled as though they had no bones. I was a thousand years old. The overmaster watched me smugly. He held the sensory whip cocked and ready, but he knew I was going to shuffle away in defeat. A man who has been hit like that doesn't come back for more. It's only common sense. So when I took a couple of shambling steps in his direction he understood that I was simply disoriented. I must have meant to go the other way. Yellow lightning was still crackling through my brain and I could barely focus my eyes. A moment went by before he realized that I had no common sense at all and that I was about to do a very foolish thing; and by then it was too late for him. He raised the whip and started to squeeze off the fatal hit, but I came in smoothly underneath his arm, moving much more rapidly than I had any right to, surprising us both. And I took the whip away from him and told him what I was going to do to him; and then I turned the whip's force down to its lowest level and I lashed him with it.

I didn't want to kill him. I didn't even want to make him lose consciousness. I just wanted to hurt him, again and again, until he groveled, until he begged, until he screamed. I wanted to give him as much torment in five minutes as I had absorbed in two years on this world. So I lashed him at the lowest setting and I lashed him again, and then again. His sphincter control went on the third hit. He fell down and scrabbled about, sobbing, moaning, biting the ground, slapping his hands and feet against the floor in desperate pain. Begging me to stop. I enjoyed not stopping.

Other overmasters came running, of course. With one foot on the fallen one's back I faced them down. "Keep back or I'll whip him again. I won't kill him right away. I'll just go on whipping him."

They looked at each other, bewildered. Maybe they didn't even give a damn what I did to him. But no one was going to take responsibility for it.

"Call out the med-robot," I said. "Take Vabrikant inside and have him sewn up."

"He's dead," one of the overmasters said.

"Take him in anyway. Try to resuscitate him. Do whatever you can." I waggled the sensory whip menacingly in their direction. "Go on. Do it!"

Nobody moved. I gave the overmaster on the ground another jolt. "Do it," he screamed. "Do it!"

"Vabrikant is dead." "Do it anyway!"

They sent for the med-robot. It gathered Vabrikant up, holding him like a doll that was losing its stuffing, and went clanking away. Now what? Keeping the overmaster as a hostage wouldn't protect me for long. He might die any minute from the effects of the lashings, even at the lowest setting, and then I'd have no leverage at all over the rest of them. Or else the others would decide not to worry about him and they'd simply rush me from every side. By now they must be thinking that if they didn't get me under control fast they could have a full-scale slave rebellion on their hands. They had sensory whips, sure, but there were a lot of us and not very many of them.

I had to get out of there.

"Get up," I said to the overmaster at my feet.

"I can't."

"Get up or I'll kill you."

Somehow he managed to do it. He was trembling and whimpering. I could smell his fear. He was the prisoner of a crazy Rom and he expected me to do almost anything now. He was right.

"Start backing out of here," I said. "Where are you taking me?"

"Just get moving. One step at a time, very carefully. The sensory whip is just behind your neck. If you do anything wrong I'll scramble you up so much that you won't be able to remember to take it out of your pants before you pee. We're going out into the tunnels."

"Please-" "Come on."

"I'm afraid. I hate it out there. What are you going to do to me?" "You'll find out when you find out."

I edged him out into one of the eastern tunnels, keeping him between me and the other overmasters. They followed us a little way, but they had no rules to cover this situation and they hung back uncertainly. In ten minutes we reached a place where seven or eight tunnels intersected. I had had two years now of roaming these tunnels and I had a pretty good idea of how they ran; the overmasters didn't. Entering the intersection, I grabbed my shivering shit-stinking hostage and shoved him with all my might back down the corridor toward the dormitory. The last I saw of him he was hurtling toward the other overmasters like a boulder tumbling down a mountainside. I turned and disappeared into the maze of tunnels.

They hunted me for days. But they came close only once, when I was slithering along the flank of some fat worm and I thought I heard the sounds of pursuit from both directions. There was jade-light just ahead and I went for it. With my bare hands I tunneled into the worm's flesh at the glowing place until I reached the shining stony cyst within. It was a new one; I could see the furious giant insect glaring at me through the still transparent walls. I slipped down underneath the cyst with that terrible beak only a finger's breadth from my belly on the other side of the thin jade wall, and there I huddled, smothering and nauseated, for what felt like a hundred years. It was crazy, taking refuge right inside a worm. I might have been encysted myself, if I stayed in there very long. But I stayed as long as I dared; and when I could stand it no longer, I burrowed my way out. There was no sign of overmasters at either end of the tunnel. For days more I wandered in that hellish maze until by some miracle I came to one of the passages that led to the surface. When I reached the upper level, the vine-level, I found myself at the relay-sweep station where the jade was shipped out. A little persuasion with the sensory whip and I had myself shipped out instead. It was a crazy escape from beginning to end. But if I'd relied upon prudence and sober judgment, I might still be slicing open jade-worms in the tunnels of Alta Hannalanna. Or dead a long time by now.

THEY DIDN'T EXACTLY HAVE PARADES AND PYROTECHNIKONS waiting for me when Chorian and I landed on Galgala. But there is no question that I was the center of everybody's attention. This was a situation that had no parallel in all our thousands of years of history.

A former king of the Rom was coming to visit the Rom capital world. Who ever heard of such a thing, a former king of the Rom? And the former king's own sinister and dangerous son was on the throne. That was a new concept too, a second-generation king. It was all brand new. Everyone was waiting to see what I was going to do. And what Shandor would.

We took the starship Jewel of the Imperium from Xamur to Galgala. It was one of the new ones, the so-called Supernova-class starships. I thought Jewel of the Imperium was a dumb name for a ship, flat and obvious and clunking, and I didn't think a lot of that Supernova-class label either. In my day starships had the names of people-Mara Kalugra, Claude Varna, Cristoforo Colombo-and we didn't need to call the models Comets or Supernovas or Black Holes. But I will say this for these new ships: they certainly are elegant. It had been a decade or so since I had last been on an actual starship, though I had done plenty of running around the galaxy by relay-sweep in that time. Maybe it's a mark of the decadence of our era, the luxury of modern-day starships. The Jewel of the Imperium was like the finest hotel you could imagine: immense, palatial, pink polished marble everywhere, huge and fantastically costly statuettes in Alta Hannalanna jade looking down at you from a million recessed niches, plasma lighting that changed color according to your mood, six passenger levels with a gravity-well dining room on every one, and so on and so on. The captain was a very slick young Gaje named Therione, a Fenixi, probably one of Sunteil's proteges. I was invited to dine at his table, naturally. The pilot, a fat grizzled old Tchurari Rom from Zimbalou named Petsha le Stevo, sat there too, though I could tell that Therione wasn't happy about that. With a Rom ex-king on board, the captain could hardly snub his own pilot. But Petsha le Stevo had table manners of the old school. He was a snorter, a guzzler, a belcher. He gloried in it. And each time he patted his belly and let a good one fly I could see Therione cringe. He was a dapper one, that Therione, absolutely up to the mark. Pink skin glowing, his nails gleaming, his little mustache trimmed every day. After every belch Petsha le Stevo would look across the table at me and wink and grin, as if to say, Ah there, you Yakoub, wasn't that something! Compared with him I felt positively fastidious, myself. I wondered what a primordial fossil like that was doing aboard a starship of the Supernova class. But in fact he was right on top of his skills, a totally state-of-the-art pilot. I found that out when I paid a ceremonial visit to the jump-room.

I couldn't make any sense out of it. Everything sleek, metal and tile, like a lavatory. An empty-looking room, some little nozzles here, some shining metal plates there, not much else. You have to understand that I am no stranger to starship jump-rooms. I put in fifty or sixty years behind the handles myself, you know. But here was neither rhyme nor reason. Where was the star-tank? Where was the wink-wall? Where in the name of two-headed Melalo were the handles themselves?

Petsha le Stevo beamed like a proud father as I stared around in bewilderment.

"This is a jump-room?" I said.

"New. Everything new. You like it, huh?" "I hate it. I can't understand any of it."

He grinned. "Very simple. Even a Gajo could jump here. Of course we do it better. For them, always, sweating, struggling. For us, as easy as taking a shit. You want to see?"

"See you taking a shit?" "See me make a jump, king." "We've already jumped."

"No problem, king. We jump again." He laughed and went lumbering forward. Held his enormous deep-seamed hands high like Moses announcing the Ten Commandments. Suddenly there was blue light dancing from his fingertips. He made a gesture. I saw stars suspended in mid-air, as though he had a star-tank in front of him, but there was no tank, only blue light and flecks of brighter light gleaming within it. He wiggled his left index finger. "There," he said. "You feel it?" Yes, I had: the sense of slipping a leash, of sliding free down the secret alleyways of space-time, that was wink-out. Nothing else in the universe feels like that. "No longer heading for Galgala," Petsha le Stevo said gleefully. "Iriarte, now. You see, how easy?" He held up his hands again and again he summoned the blue light. A movement of his right thumb. "Sidri Akrak, now! No problem! Just like that! Here, you try. You stand here, on the foot-plate-"

A chime went off. The face of Therione appeared on the viewscreen. The captain's finely groomed Fenixi features were livid and his voice sounded oddly strangled as he demanded to know what the hell was going on. Petsha le Stevo urged him not to worry. "Course correction, is all," he said, telling me with frantic waves of his hand to step back out of viewscreen range. "A little routine stuff, boss. We got to do the triangulum, is all."

I thought Therione would have a stroke.

"The triangulum? What triangulum? I don't know what the fuck you're talking about."

"Five seconds more, boss. Everything's all right." Petsha le Stevo grinned and held up his hands once more. Blue light; wink-slide; we were heading for Galgala once more. Therione started to say something; Petsha le Stevo pointed to some indicator I couldn't even find; Therione muttered and the viewscreen went blank. Turning to me he said, "You see? Nothing to it. You make any jump you like, and you don't like it, you just jump right over it. Even a Gajo could do it, maybe. Easier than before. Though still not very easy, for a Gajo."

Of course it has always been possible for GaJe to operate starships. They invented them; they would not have built something they were totally incapable of using. But up till now it has been real toil for them to carry a ship through wink-out. They needed fifty different computers operating at once to tell them what to do, and even at that they would tremble and quail at the difficulty of the task, and six times out of a dozen they had to abort the jump at the last instant and start it all over. And those were the gifted ones, those few who could touch the handles and have something happen, maybe one out of a million. They burned out fast, those Gaje pilots. Three jumps, five, ten, and they were through forever. They would go cross-eyed with shock if they went near a jump-room after that. It was hardly worth bothering to learn how, was it? Just to make three jumps? For us it has always been much easier. Those of us who have the gift, which for us is about one out of ten, we walk up to the handles and we grasp them and we feel the force flowing through us, and we add our power to the power of the ship and give it the force that carries it up over the brink into wink-out, and away we go. I tell you, I did it fifty, sixty years, and I never grew weary. It is in our blood, by which I really mean in our nervous systems, in our brains. We are different: but of course we are of different birth. Which is why, after the first years of star travel, the Gaje stopped trying to drive the ships and left all that to us. They figure we have the gift, something passed down in our genes, like a natural sense of rhythm; and they are right. Not that they understand the real reason why we have these skills that they don't have. If they only knew. Our true birth, our nativity on Romany Star. There is so much they don't know about us. Even our ghosting is something we have kept hidden from them.

I wondered, though, about these changes in the technology of starship piloting. If the Gaje were designing new ships that made it reasonably possible for them to operate them themselves, there were going to be consequences for the Rom. If not now, then in ten years, twenty, fifty. It was something the Rom king ought to be giving some thought to. But the Rom king was Shandor, and all that Shandor had ever given thought to was Shandor.

As I stood there trying to figure out this strange new jump-room, Petsha le Stevo said, "Maybe I shouldn't have put the course back the right way, huh, king? Maybe we should keep going to Iriarte instead? Sidri Akrak?"

"What do you mean?"

Gloomily he said, "You go to Galgala, there'll be big trouble for you there. I hate to see it, it isn't my business, but I don't like what's been going on. And you going to Galgala, you walking right in on Shandor-"

So even he knew. And was wondering what was going to happen. And was worrying about me. Good.

I knew what was going to happen too, and it didn't worry me at all. It was what would happen after what was going to happen that I wasn't so sure about. But all I could do was wait and see, just the same as anyone else.

IT WAS GOOD TO SEE GALGALA AGAIN. ALL THAT WONDERFUL gleaming gold everywhere, all the throbbing yellowness of the place.

Considering our ancient love for the yellow stuff, it's not amazing that we chose Galgala to be our capital world when we went out into space. Gold may be meaningless nowadays, but it continues to gleam just as brightly as it did in the days when whole nations went to war over it. So the headquarters of the Rom monarchy lies smack in the middle of Aureus Highlands on Galgala the golden. And the house of power of the King of the Gypsies is bedecked with enough gold to choke an army of Renaissance popes. Golden walls, golden banners, gold dust suspended in clouds to give the air that glittering, glimmering look of richness and warmth.

I thought Shandor's first moves when I landed on Galgala would give me some clue to the pattern of things, but Shandor didn't make any first moves. I was traveling on a diplomatic passport, and I half expected to find that he had had the gall to revoke it-for of course he knew I was heading his way; the whole universe probably knew it-but no, I got the full V.I.P. treatment when I arrived. On Xamur the immigration officials hadn't had any protocol for dealing with former Gypsy kings, but by now the word had gotten around that I was back in circulation, and I was waved right through the customs barriers, and three limousines were waiting for me and my entourage, and there was a suite set aside for me at the Hotel Galgala. Not the royal suite, because there is no royal suite at the Hotel Galgala; when the King of the Rom is on Galgala he stays in his own house of power, naturally. But it was good enough. I didn't need the three limousines, since my entourage consisted entirely of Chorian, but I accepted them anyway. And spent a week living it up in the hotel, hot baths and masseurs, glorious feasts, much bowing and scraping from the staff. Everyone stared at me as though I were some kind of sacred monster. Hardly anyone spoke to me except in tones of greatest reverence. They even backed in and out of my presence, which was bullshit. Such abject obeisance to a Rom king? What did they think I was, some Gaje lord who required that sort of pomp?

I waited for Shandor to acknowledge my arrival in some way, but I didn't hear from him. The little turd. Nor were there any ceremonial visits from the great Rom nobles of Galgala, which I might reasonably have expected. After all, I was the one who had raised most of them to the nobility, wasn't I? But nobody came to see me. Evidently Shandor had them all cowed. Well, it must have been tough for them, choosing between the king and the ex-king. Especially when the king was someone with Shandor's lethal reputation. I wondered what I would have done if I had been in their position.

But I wasn't in their position. I was in my position, and the time had come to set things in motion. At the end of the first week I told Chorian to stay there and wait for me and by no means to follow me inland, which was an order that he accepted with very ill grace indeed; and then I sent for one of those limousines and I had myself taken from the city of Grand Galgala out into Aureus Highlands to the royal house of power. And went the last stretch of the distance on foot, up the golden steps, to beard Shandor in his lair, to tell him that I wanted him to get his tail off my throne this very instant.

I didn't expect him to react positively to that. I figured, in truth, that he would hesitate only slightly before clapping me in one of his dungeons.

Good old Shandor. He so rarely disappoints.

I STOOD ON THE STEPS OF THE HOUSE OF POWER AND THE light of Galgala's sun, reverberating off all that gold leaf and gold chain and gold plate, hammered me like a gong. I came close to flinging my arm across my face to shield my eyes when I turned the corner and that fantastic radiance started banging away at me.

But I didn't. I stood tall and met the glare and glitter with a glare of my own. You can't show up at a king's house of power and start things off by cringing on the front steps. Not if it's your intention to knock that king off his throne, and that was what I had come here to do. In a manner of speaking, that is.

There were armed guards out front, wearing fancy tunics of cloth-of-gold. I had to laugh at that. Guards! At the house of power of the King of the Rom! Since when did the King of the Rom need to cower behind a bunch of guards? God knows it hadn't been like that when I was king.

But I wasn't king now. Shandor was. And Shandor did things differently.

The guards faced me down. They looked swaggering and arrogant and mean, but I could see them sweating behind their arrogance, because they knew who I was and I frightened them. I terrified them.

"Identify yourself," said the guard in front, flat-faced and beady-eyed.

"You damned well know my name," I told him. "Nobody gets up these steps without identification."

"My face is my identification."

His face went green. He was starting to look sort of sick.

I put my nose close to his. "You see these eyes? Hey? You see this mustache?"

The guards exchanged troubled glances. A second one, tall and swarthy with a classic Rom face-he could have been one of my grandsons, or maybe great-grandsons-stepped forward and said, "Sir, the rules require-"

"Screw the rules. I'm here to see Shandor." "There are formalities-"

"For me? You ought to be down on the ground kissing my boots, and here you are telling me about formalities!"

The second guard sighed. "Put it down in the records. His Former Majesty Yakoub-"

"His Excellence and Beneficence," I added.

"His Excellence and Beneficence His Former Majesty Yakoub-ah -seeks audience with King Shandor, is that it?"

"Seeks audience with Shandor, yes."

"Put it down. Seeks audience with King Shandor at the house of power on Galgala, the fourteenth day of Beryllium, 3162. And on and on with their precious formalities. I barely paid attention. My mind was a million parsecs away. Leaping from world to world, remembering old glories, hatching new plans. A bad habit of mine. I'm too old to break bad habits, I think. I don't even want to. But after a minute I got hold of myself and tuned in on the palace guards again and discovered that they were on the intercom to some functionary in the interior of the building, setting up an appointment for me for a time two or three weeks hence. I don't make appointments. I reached out and broke the contact and said, "Tell Shandor that Yakoub will see him right now."

"But-" I was already in motion. They would have had to stop me forcibly to keep me out. For a moment they actually considered that, I think; but they didn't quite dare. Instead the two who had been speaking with me came up beside me, one on each side and clinging close like busy fluttering wings, and the others ran on ahead to spread the word that something unusual was happening. I went up the steps at a hard stride, steaming past the banners of kingship, past the clouds of gold dust in their magnetic pinch-containers, past the emblems of all the worlds that Rom voyagers have discovered, past the rest of the host of regalia and memorabilia that I knew so well from my own fifty years or so of residence in this building when I had been King of All Gypsies. And then I was inside.

It isn't much of a palace, really. Nobody ever meant it to be. It's all flash and gleam on the outside, but that's because of the gold. Inside it is a very humble sort of building. That's intentional. We want to honor our humble origins, when we lived in little rickety horse-drawn wagons and went roaming around old Earth sharpening knives and telling fortunes and picking pockets. So we deck our house of power out with a lot of superficial glitz-a king has to be at least a little kingly-but the building itself basically isn't much of an advance on those old wagons. We leave the grand and imposing edifices for our colleague the emperor, far away at the Capital, as the Gaje call that exceedingly grand and imposing world of theirs at the heart of the Imperium.

They need that sort of stuff, those people. It makes them feel important, and God knows they need that. A house of power doesn't need grandeur. It is grandeur, just by being.

Our own royal throne room, to give it a name it doesn't deserve, is hung with dark carpets and lit with ancient smoky lamps. Shandor was sitting practically in the dark, scowling at me, when I walked in. I think one of his Gaje women was lurking somewhere in there too, but she vanished when I entered. The unmistakable whiff of her remained behind in the air.

I almost didn't recognize him. He must have had a remake not long before and he looked no more than thirty or forty years old. Smooth olive skin, black hair, even a nose job. But underneath all the changes that his vanity had dictated I could still see Shandor's hard bright eyes, his broad cheekbones, his full lips. The Rom features. Like mine. Like my father's. Ineradicable. The tyranny of the genes.

"What the hell are you doing here?" he snapped. Then he shook his head. "But you aren't here, are you? You're just his doppelganger." He was trying to look fierce, and by and large he was succeeding at it. Shandor was a fierce man, all right, and a dangerous one. The blood of innocents was on his hands. Don't forget that The Butcher of Djebel Abdullah is what people used to call him, before he got himself absolved of that revolting atrocity. But he was fidgety also. He has always had fidgety moves. He was different from me in that respect, and from all my other sons. We know how to keep calm, at least on the outside. There was something wrong about Shandor right from the start.

"No doppelganger," I said. "The real thing. The genuine item. I thought I'd pay you a little visit."

"Don't try to play games with me. We've known each other too long. What gives you the right to barge in here like this?"

"The right? The right? I have to ask permission to greet my own son?"

"The king," he said.

I stared at him. "You little bastard," I said. "You snot. How do you come off setting yourself up to be king? You know who the king is, Shandor."

I thought his eyes would pop from his head. Nobody had spoken to him like this in ninety years, probably.

His face twitched. He did twitchy things with his fingers too. He moved his lips but nothing came out except little hoarse croakings. I wanted to think that it was fear that was clamping down on his voice, and maybe it was, a little. But mainly it was anger. It took him a moment to regain control and when he did manage to speak it was a ragged squeaking blurt, almost pathetic:

"You abdicated!"

"So? You believed me?"

"You stormed around telling everyone on fifty worlds that you had had it with being king. You disappeared and no one heard a peep out of you for years. You hid yourself away on God knows what uninhabited planet somewhere outside the Imperium, walking out flat on your responsibilities, letting your own beloved people shift for themselves, ignoring the-"

"Shandor." "Don't interrupt me."

"What? Who the hell do you think you are?" I almost went up the wall in a wild fit of wrath. Telling me to shut up? Me. ME. "You viper. You miserable shit."

His face was white. "I won't hear crap like that. I'm your legally anointed king-"

"My king? My king?" I started to rant and rave. I wanted to throttle him. He saw it in my eyes and I think this time he really was afraid of me. And if he was, it was probably for the first time in his life.

I looked back across the years, across what seemed like geological eons, and I saw him at his mother's breast. My sweet and comforting Esmeralda, first of my wives, holding little red-faced sniveling Shandor, first of all my sons, and he was biting her breast. Really sinking his fangs in.

King? Him? I wanted to swat his behind.

"The abdication was conditional," I said. "It's invalid." "Conditional? Conditional on what?"

"On my continuing to stay abdicated. I voluntarily gave up the kingship and now I voluntarily take it back. The throne was never vacant. The alleged election that allegedly put you where you think you are was illegal."

"You're out of your mind-"

"You need your mouth washed out," I told him.

You have to bear in mind that this Shandor I was berating was no kid. I figure he must have been something close to a hundred years old, which once upon a time was considered a ripe old age. Even now it's a little past the prime of life, though the easy availability of remakes makes it hard to say when the prime of life really is.

But to me Shandor had always been a snot, a shit, and a worthless treacherous villain. That's a hell of a thing to have to say about your own first-born son, I know.

I gave him some three non-stop minutes on the subject of laws and customs and the kingship and filial obligation, and he was so stunned that for once he listened to me without saying a word. He was frightened and angry at first, and then troubled and angry, and then annoyed and angry, and then the anger disappeared and I saw him starting to look crafty. I could read every emotion as though he was sending up beacons. Shandor might be dangerous but he wasn't really smart. He just thought he was. Now that everyone lives so long, you see false wisdom all over the place. Just because someone has lived a long time doesn't make him a sage. You accumulate smarts up to a point, and then you stop, and often you start to slide backward.

(Except me, that is. I'm always the exception. Does that sound to you like I'm kidding myself? All right, then I'm kidding myself. Go ahead and fuck around with me because you think I'm senile. You'll find out.) I paused for breath finally and he said, "Are you finished?"

"More or less. I'm calling a session of the krisatora to have you deposed and me reinstated. I just wanted to give you the courtesy of knowing that ahead of time."

He didn't react. He didn't even seem mildly irritated. Now he was being crafty.

"You have nothing to say to that?" I asked. "I have plenty to say."

"Go on."

He sat there looking at me. I saw my own face staring back at me, except his was dark and bleak and joyless, my face with all the true essence of my soul burned out of it.

After a time he said, very quietly but with a really ugly, menacing undertone in his voice, "I say that you're a crazy old fool. I say that if I have to listen to any more of your garbage it's likely to start seriously bothering me. I say that if you bother me in any serious way you're likely to make me do something that you'll regret. I may even regret it too. Now get your ass out of here or I'll have you thrown out." "You say that to me?"

"I say that to you. If I didn't think you were insane I'd have you locked up. And maybe brainburned to keep you harmless. But you are harmless."

"You know who I am, Shandor?"

"I know who you were, yes. But that was a long time ago. I feel sorry for you. Now get out of here. Shoo, old man. Shoo. Beat it."

I took a deep breath. It was time to make a real move, I saw. Things were starting to slide off in the wrong direction. It wouldn't do anybody any good for me to go slinking away from Shandor like a whipped dog. Getting thrown out of the house of power like some grubby panhandler might be marginally more useful, but it still wasn't what I had had in mind.

Glowering, fuming, I took a couple of steps toward him.

"You pig, Shandor. You unmentionable stench. You loathsome offense in the eyes of God."

He looked really troubled. He didn't have any idea what I was likely to do.

"Keep back-" "You need a lesson." "I warn you-"

"Discipline, that's what you need." I brought my arm swooping up on a sharp curve and slapped him hard in the face. My hand left red marks on his cheek. He stared at me, amazed. Utterly astounded.

"I don't believe this. Laying hands on God's anointed-"

"You wish," I said. I slapped him again. This time his lower lip, the fat one, started to bleed.

"Guards!" he yelled.

Alarms were going off all over the room. Just like Shandor to have filled the room with all these alarm systems, too. In his own house of power, cowering with fear, hiding behind electronic nonsense.

"Guards. Guards. "

They came running, and paused, panting, baffled, looking at us. Shandor waved his arms wildly. He was crazy with rage. Suddenly he was six years old again and Daddy was beating the shit out of him, and he couldn't stand it.

"Grab him! Take him out of here! Lock him up! Put him in chains! Throw him in the bottom dungeon! The one with the snakes! With the riptoads!"

"I am your anointed king," I said calmly.

They were paralyzed. They didn't know what to do. Afraid to touch me, afraid to disobey Shandor. They gaped like fools. There was a long ugly moment of absolute stillness. I felt a certain sympathy for them. In the end Shandor had to call for his robots, and they had no compunction at all about dragging me out of the room. Down to the bottom dungeon, yes, the foulest and smelliest hole on the entire planet. I was in for it now. I was really going to suffer, that was absolutely certain. At my age. After all that I had achieved. Well, I was pretty sure I could take it. I wouldn't be the first wise and venerable old relic to get himself locked up and tormented in the name of some high cause. And in fact that was precisely what I had come here to accomplish. All I hoped was that I hadn't underestimated Shandor's ferocity and overestimated his political savvy. I had really pushed his buttons just now; he might really make me suffer for it, regardless of the cost to himself. He might even have me killed.

Ah, well. Even that would be worth it, in the long run. Or so I told myself.

The last thing I heard as they took me away was Shandor, starting to sound as though he was getting control of himself again, saying in a venomous voice, "I'll fix you, old man! I'll have you brainburned! I'll have you disconnected! When I get through with you you'll be too stupid to drool! Be sure you put him in chains. Tight ones."

In chains, no less.

You might think that your own first-born son might show more respect for you. But then again, this was Shandor. He was always a bastard, my son Shandor.

BY THE TIME SHANDOR WAS BORN I WAS ALREADY SEVENTY, eighty years old or even more, what used to be considered a full long life. And he was my first son, remember. But of course people live a lot longer than they used to and it's considered a little gauche to start your family too young, even if you like kids, which I suppose I do.

Even for the modern era I was late in getting married, though. That wasn't my fault. I would gladly have settled down on Nabomba Zom with Malilini when I was only in my twenties, but as you know marrying Malilini wasn't in my cards. After that came the small detour of Alta Hannalanna, and when I had made my escape from that particular holiday camp I needed a few years to relax and enjoy life a little, which I did, though I'm damned if I can tell you where I spent those years, or who with. Anyone is entitled to lose a few years in simple amusements after he's had an experience like Alta Hannalanna. Somewhere along the way I realized I needed to earn a living, and, since knife-grinding and horse-trading no longer hold much glamor for a promising Gypsy lad, I took up the trade of starship-piloting instead. I knew I had the gift; I had never had any doubt of that.

But a pilot, being even more of a traveling man than your usual Gypsy, generally doesn't tend to establish really sound marital arrangements. He-or she, if that is what she happens to be-simply moves around too much. In my case I went into the service of one of the exploration companies, which meant I was out there on the remote reaches most of the time, finding planets that no one had ever visited before. Doing that gives you a good sense of the diversity of geography in our universe but you don't meet a lot of nice girls in those places. Then, too, my career as a jump-room jockey was interrupted for a while by the minor matter of my third tour in slavery, the unfortunate Mentiroso episode, out of which came my enduring friendship with Polarca but which was not otherwise a real joy. So it was a considerable time.

Her name was Esmeralda, a fine old Gypsy name if there ever was one. I didn't pick her. She picked me, or to be more precise her family did, her brothers and cousins. The reason why they picked me apparently was that they knew I was the one who was going to marry Esmeralda, so they had to find me and make sure that I did it. It was one of those typical upside-down inside-out deals that ghosting brings about, where causes and effects get all tangled up, past and future all come out of the same stew-pot in the same dip of the ladle, and there never really is any clear sense of the beginnings of things. You go along and you go along and suddenly you realize that you're already hip deep in a complicated situation that you didn't even know existed.

Esmeralda was all right. I didn't love her at first-how could I? I didn't even know her-but I think I came to. Or at least to feel fond of her. So long ago I have trouble remembering. Certain things I remember in absolute detail down to the last syllable, others get a little blurry.

The way she looked, for instance. A fine-looking woman, that's what I remember, but I have some difficulty about the details. A big woman, yes, long strong legs and powerful hips, child-bearing hips. Dark sparkling eyes, lustrous hair. About her other features, the nose and lips and chin, I'm not so sure. I think she was pretty. She gained weight after a time, mostly from the waist down: it anchored her, it was a kind of ballast. Didn't have to put it on, could have taken the treatment, but she didn't care. I think she liked being heavy. Might have been a tradition in her family, the women being heavy.

She was an Iriarte woman. That's a good world, Iriarte. I have always liked spending time there. It has a small yellow sun very much like the one that Earth used to circle, and broad blue seas. A lot of Iriarte is dry and mountainous and cool, but there are splendid vineyards that produce some of the finest wine in the galaxy, and its cities have the rich, throbbing feel of life and power about them. The population is mostly Rom, and in the main a tough brawling kind of Rom, a mercantile sort of people, entrepreneurs, traders, shippers. The Rom of Iriarte are the craziest gamblers I know: they'll bet any amount on any kind of deal, and usually they don't have cause to regret it.

Esmeralda came from a wealthy family. Not wealthy in the Loiza la Vakako sense, owning whole worlds, but wealthy enough. And in a sense they did own whole worlds, though they were uninhabited ones.

They were dealers in reconditioned planets. That was a fine Rom thing to be. In the old days on Earth a lot of us were dealers in reconditioned livestock, of course. This was the same thing on a larger scale. Take an old horse with worn-out teeth and fill the crowns with tar so they look like a young horse's teeth with black centers, yes. Touch up the gray hair with ink or permanganate of potash. Make a cut above the eye and use a straw to blow air in, so the horse seems healthier. Prick him with a hedgehog just before he goes to market to make him look livelier, or put a piece of ginger in his ass so he struts like a cavalry charger. Yes, yes, good old tricks, a grand tradition, deceive the Gaje every time. What choice did we have? We had to eat. And the Gaje made it so hard for us.

Esmeralda's people were in a similar line of work. They sent out explorers-I was one-looking for planets with reasonably habitable specs, an oxygen atmosphere, a manageable gravitational pull. A reliable water supply was desirable but not always necessary. A decent climate helped. There are plenty of such worlds around, waiting to be found. Of course some of them need a little retouching before they can be sold off to developers and colony-promoters. Unfriendly native lifeforms? Chase them far out of sight. Problems of chemical incompatibilities? It isn't that big a deal to make local adjustments before showing a world to potential buyers. Amazing what a few tons of nitrogen or ammonium sulphate can accomplish. Dismal scenery? Do some quick landscaping. Every planet can use some handsome new native shrubs and ground covers. Shortages of raw materials? Plant some trees, salt the ground here and there with useful minerals, set up fish hatcheries to improve the quality of the rivers and lakes. It sounds complicated but they had it all down to a science and they could polish a scruffy planet to a high gloss in an astonishingly short time. They didn't believe in carrying a big inventory: fast turnover, that was their secret. Fix it up, put it on the market, move it quickly. And start all over somewhere else.

They offered me a job while I was visiting Iriarte. It sounded good to me and I became one of their scouts, remained one for years. My home base was on Xamur-I had already begun to buy the land that would eventually become my Kamaviben estate-but I didn't mind commuting to Iriarte to pick up my assignments. I led a number of expeditions to the outer regions and among my discoveries were such worlds as Cambaluc, Sandunga, Mengave, La Chunga, and Fulero, all of which were sold eventually by Esmeralda's family for pleasant profits. You probably haven't heard of most of them. For some reason nearly all the worlds I found turned out to be much less congenial to human colonization than they had seemed to be at the time the original explorers' reports and brokers' analyses were filed. The great exception is, of course, Fulero, which you certainly have heard of and where you probably have spent some highly pleasurable holidays. Frankly, we thought Fulero was worthless and we were happy to sell it for the pittance we got for it, but that was one case where the buyers had the last laugh, since it took only the most minor of planetary refurbishments by its new owners to transform it into the lush garden spot and delightful resort world it has become today. Well, even a Gypsy gets fooled now and then, as the saying goes. And in the long run it was very helpful to Esmeralda's people in other transactions to be able to say, "This is the most promising world we've handled since Fulero. And you know what a bargain that was."

I'm not sure how long the family was scouting me while I was scouting for them. It may have been quite a while, since they were methodical people in their way, and they weren't going to marry off their prize daughter to any scamp. It isn't clear to me what good it would have done them to disapprove of me, since in the book of the future it was written that I had married Esmeralda, but they checked me out in great detail all the same. I was pretty slow in realizing this. Esmeralda had a great many brothers and cousins, and one of them, Jacko Bakht, looked so familiar to me at first meeting that I asked him if he had ever done time in the tunnels on Alta Hannalanna or belonged to the Guild of Beggars on Megalo Kastro. He gave me a peculiar look and said, No, no, never. Of course it was impossible: he was a lot younger than me, and not just from remakes. There was no way I could have met him before. A couple of years later I suddenly clicked on who he was. He was one of the two ghosts who had lurked around silently watching me on Megalo Kastro so often when I was a boy. The other had been Malilini. I decided it had been some kind of employment review, checking back along my time-line. It began to seem to me that I had been ghosted now and then by various other members of the family on other occasions, but I wasn't sure; of Jacko Bakht I was positive. I ghosted back to Megalo Kastro myself, one day, and saw him there with my own eyes, haunting my childish self.

Then came the day when I was on Iriarte for reassignment and the company dispatcher, a clever bright-eyed young GaJo, said to me out of the blue, "Yakoub, have you ever thought of getting married?"

He was very young, that dispatcher, not much more than a boy. But his manner was slick and amazingly self-assured and he carried himself like a born aristocrat. Which he was. His name was Julien de Gramont, and when you asked him where he came from he didn't say Copperfield or Olympus or the Capital or any place like that: he said France. I didn't have any idea then where France might be, but in the ninety-odd years of my subsequent acquaintance with Julien de Gramont, some of which you know about, I certainly have heard a great deal about it from him.

It was Julien who let me know that the lovely and voluptuous Esmeralda was of marriageable age, that the family was looking for an appropriate Rom husband for her, and that I would not be treated with disdain if I were to go courting her. The notion had never even crossed my mind. She seemed far beyond me, a rich prize for some interstellar tycoon: why would they want to marry her off to an obscure space pilot with no family background at all, someone who had been born into slavery and who had managed to get himself sold three more times in his first seventy years? I didn't know and maybe they didn't know themselves; but what I came to see after a little while was that it was a done deal, that my fate had been sealed somewhere in the mysterious coils of time, that I was going to marry Esmeralda because somewhere down the line I had married her, and that was that.

I went to Polarca and asked him what he thought I ought to do. He just laughed. "Is she a good lay?"

"How would I know?"'

"And you don't stand much chance of finding out, do you?" "After the wedding patshiv, I do. Not before."'

"Well, let's say she isn't. She's still rich. And if she's rich and she's a good lay, you've got yourself a bonus. If not, well, you travel a lot. And you'll still be rich."

"Oh, you Polarca," I said. "You bastard." "You asked me, didn't you?"

It wasn't so bad. Esmeralda was sweet and kind and although I have trouble remembering the shape of her nose I do remember what she was like that first night, when the endless patshiv finally had ended and she and I staggered off to our marital bed. That says a great deal in her favor, that I can still remember that night, after something like a hundred years. Of course, there's more to being married than a terrific wedding night. Still, Polarca's advice was wise, as it usually was. I could have done a lot worse than marrying Esmeralda. I liked being with her. I can't say she ever really excited me in any way, but she was a warm and good person, very solid and stable, what you might call an old-fashioned kind of woman. I continued to scout for the family; I was away from home something like three quarters of the time; being married to Esmeralda was in some ways pretty much like not being married to Esmeralda, except that I was rich now. When I came home she was always glad to see me and, truth to tell, I was glad to see her. I would sink down gratefully into that big strong body of hers and she would enfold me like a sea.

I bought more land on Xamur. Between my voyages Esmeralda and I went there often. We talked of living there all the time, on my estate, when I gave up the exploration business. As if I could ever live in one place all the time. But I thought I could, then. One time we spent close to a year there. That was when Shandor was born. I don't even have the excuse, with Shandor, of trying to pretend that he wasn't my true son, because I was with Esmeralda all during that year. Not that I think she ever fooled around while I was away, but there have been times when I would have been glad to declare myself cuckolded for the sake of not having to take the blame for Shandor's existence. Alas, alas. Gene of my genes is what that little bastard truly was and there's simply no getting away from it, I loved him inordinately. That's true too. See how he repaid me; but I loved him.

He was wild from the start. A small fidgety child, always screaming and kicking and biting. I don't know where it came from, that nervousness of his. I certainly don't have it and God knows Esmeralda never did. But Shandor was always a bundle of wires.

I didn't notice that, at first. I thought he was just like me, my absolute duplicate. That was because he had my eyes, my mouth, my face exactly, that classic Rom face that rides like an invincible surfer on all the wild tides of evolutionary change. I expected him to have my big mustache too by the time he was six months old. I loved him for that look of me that he had about him, I suppose. My father and all my father's fathers. Looking at my firstborn son, I came to see myself in a new way: as a link in the great chain of Rom existence that stretched across the eons from the time of Romany Star. How had I dared wait so long to forge that next link in the chain? What if I had died without playing my part in joining the past and the future? Well, now I had done it, and I was proud; and I felt grateful to Shandor for having made it possible for me to fulfill my responsibilities to the race. That was before I discovered what a louse he was.

How did he turn out that way? Was it because I was away from home too much and Esmeralda, bless her, was too gentle, too indulgent, to discipline him in the way that any boy must be disciplined? I don't know. I think it must not have had anything to do with the way that he was raised, that there had simply been some curse on the seed that spawned him. These things happen. Whenever I was home-we lived mainly on Xamur now-he always had my fullest attention. I taught him the things my father had taught me and when it seemed necessary for me to bring him into line I brought him into line the way a father must. When I was away there were other men in the family, his uncles and cousins, to show him the right way. From Esmeralda came love and kindness, constantly. Could there have been a better mother? And yet I began to hear Shandor stories, each time I came home from the stars. I suspect the worst of them were withheld from me, but what I did hear was bad enough. The pets that he mistreated and even mutilated. His haughtiness with the servants. The damage he did to our household robots, who were not, after all, completely without feelings. His callous abuse of his playmates and, eventually, of his younger brothers and sisters. "Shandor is a problem," is the way people put it to me. Nobody seemed to have the courage to say, "Shandor is a monster."

I never would have accepted that word for him. I was still blinded by my love for him. I knew he was bad, but I told myself it was just boyish mischief. He would change. He laughed at me to my face, and I told myself he would change. I struck him, because I had to, and still he laughed. I actually admired him for that. How strong he is, I thought, how unafraid even of his own father. But he will be a good boy one of these days. I would not see the rottenness that ran through him from front to back. By the time I understood what he was like, it was too late for me even to try to do much about it. And then I lost all further opportunity to do anything about Shandor; for history repeated itself, as it seems to try to do whenever you look the other way for a moment. Bankruptcy, family breakup, exile, the loss of the woman I loved, the separation of a father and his children: I got all those things all over again, as if I hadn't managed to learn the full lesson from them the first time around. None of what happened was particularly my fault. So what? When the time comes for you to bear the brunt, fate doesn't give a crap who is at fault.

What happened was that Esmeralda's family sold one phonied-up planet too many. This was a place called Varuna in the solar system of a star known as Corposanto, somewhere out by Jerusalem Spill. Esmeralda's people really did a job on this one. It was a planet so miserable that the rivers ran salt water and the butterflies had poisonous stings. But they redecorated it inside and out, magically transforming it until it was the prettiest thing this side of Xamur, and sold it for an enormous sum to a bunch of eager hotshot GaJe developers who were going to subdivide it into incredibly costly estates for lords of the Imperium.

There must have been really dizzying overconfidence involved in this deal all around. Not only did the buyers pay us a spectacular amount for Varuna, but when they made their own arrangements with the imperial purchasers they worked out low-and-slow payment schedules, in accordance with the age-old tradition that you should always give aristocrats favorable terms, far better than you would give ordinary people. They are flattered by the apparent subservience implied in your generosity and they don't mind being flagrantly overcharged, so long as they don't have to pay the bill right now.

Then the various fraudulations that had been performed on Varuna began to unravel ahead of schedule and the planet reverted to its original deplorable state much sooner than we were figuring on. The developers had not yet realized any income on their resale deals and the lords of the Imperium canceled their purchases in droves. When the developers came around to Iriarte to get their own money back, Esmeralda's people waved the bill of sale in their faces. See, here, clause

22A, they said. We assume no responsibility for environmental changes after the transfer of title. The developers protested that they were going to go bankrupt. Esmeralda's people offered their sympathy, as they had done on various such occasions in the past, and then they shrugged and went about their business. They figured the GaJe developers would take them to court, which would not have been the first time, and the Gaje would lose their case-See, here, clause 22A-and that would be that. Tough shit, greedy GaJe.

But instead of going to court, the GaJe developers simply hired an army of mercenaries and invaded Iriarte. That must have seemed like a more productive tactic than trying to sue. I was off on a year-long expedition when it happened. When I got back I discovered that the kumpania of Esmeralda's people had been totally wiped out, their assets and lands confiscated by force, many of the members of the family killed and the survivors scattered in every direction. Esmeralda and all our children had been on Iriarte when the army landed. Where were they now? A shrug. We think they are dead, I was told. Yes. Yes, all dead.

I went away in despair and I was a long time recovering. All I had left was my place on Xamur. I hid there for a while and then I did some traveling. I made attempts to locate Esmeralda and the children, but nothing came of them. After a time I married again, and then yet again. They weren't good marriages, but they were marriages. I wasn't meant to live alone. There were other children, many of them. My first family began to fade from my mind; the wound healed.

In the end I did find Jacko Bakht living under another name at the Capital, earning a meager livelihood running pathetic minor scams at the expense of the less perceptive imperial princes, and he confirmed that Esmeralda had indeed perished when the first implosion bombs went off. My children? They had died too. Jacko Bakht seemed like a dead man himself. I left him by himself and I didn't see him again. I suppose he was telling the truth, because though I made some further inquiries I never heard anything more about any of them, Esmeralda, the children. Nobody ever vanishes completely, in this galaxy, unless he's dead. So they must really all be dead, as Jacko Bakht had said. All but one, that is.

By some monstrous malfunction of karmic justice Shandor had survived the cataclysm of our family. Twelve years old, and cunning as ice. It was years later that I began hearing stories about a daredevil starpilot, Shandor by name. He was Rom, of course, although he seemed to be mixed up with a lot of glamorous and celebrated women and they were always GaJe women. That's a bad sign right there, a Rom who fools with Gaje women. The stories they told about him were horrifying stories but I didn't pay close attention. I had begun to forget my firstborn son. It didn't occur to me that this man Shandor could be my Shandor. The stories kept cropping up, though. Shandor this, Shandor that, this lunatic pilot who did things that anyone else would have been severely punished for. Somehow he never was. People seemed only to admire him for what he did. As I had admired him for laughing in his own father's face when I tried to discipline him. In his boldness, in his ruthlessness, this Shandor made a habit of taking unacceptable risks, and on one occasion-the infamous Djebel Abdullah affair-he had actually lost an entire starship, causing it to be wrecked on one of the nastiest planets known. He denied any negligence. Worse, there were monstrous charges that there had been cannibalism among the survivors and that he, as the senior surviving officer, had not only condoned but even had organized that. He denied that too.

Now it came to my attention that this man was named Shandor son of Yakoub and that he had been born on Xamur. I was stunned. I tried to re ect the whole idea. But there could be no coincidence in that, Shandor son of Yakoub. I remembered the red-faced babe screaming and biting Esmeralda's breast. I held high posts in our government now -Cesaro o Nano was getting old and sick and they were beginning to talk of me as the next king, though I discouraged the mere thoughtand the deeds of this Shandor were hard to hide from, and after a time I had to acknowledge that he was my son. It was a great shame to me, though all my friends stood by me when he was brought before the kris and charged with the crimes of Djebel Abdullah. And found guilty and expelled from our nation. Although even there he managed to exonerate himself somehow, later on. I don't know how. He was charming, I suppose. Or just wicked. I had as little to do with him as possible. And he with me. It is the only good thing I can say for him. At least he kept far out of my way, when I was king.

THE DUNGEON THAT SHANDOR PUT ME IN WAS ABOUT what I would have expected from him. I hadn't forgotten it was there and I was entirely unsurprised that he had chosen it to keep me in. It was the species of dungeon known in the dungeon trade as an oubliette, the name of which comes from Julien de Gramont's lost and beloved France and is derived from the verb oublier, which means "to forget." That is, an oubliette is a hole where you dump a prisoner that you want to forget about.

This particular oubliette was six or seven levels down below the ground, deep in the dark bowels of the royal house of power. It isn't one of the building's famous features. Not something that they show you when they take you on the guided tours. I had been king myself for ten or twenty years before I discovered it one day while I was wandering around in the lower levels trying to find one of the archive chambers. But then, by its very nature an oubliette isn't supposed to be conspicuous.

Since the whole concept of dungeons and oubliettes sounds medieval as hell, you may be wondering how it came to pass that such up-to-date people as we modern high-tech stargoing Rom happened to include one in our royal headquarters. The answer is that I don't know; and the secondary answer is that we are not as modern and high-tech and up-to-date as some of us like to pretend we are. In fact we really are medieval types, when you come right down to it. We live by all sorts of traditions thousands of years old. We are tribal. We have kings. We cast spells. We say ancient prayers in an ancient language. We sing out loud when something moves us and we are not too shy to dance on the tops of tables in the fine old uninhibited manner at our tribal celebrations. We believe in things like duty and family and the sanctity of oaths. We are a people of fierce loyalties and strong passions. In short, we are absolutely medieval, triumphantly medieval. Even me. Even you, for all your modernist pretensions. Why not have a dungeon or two? You never can tell when a dungeon might be useful, even in this modern era. Especially in this modern era.

I settled into mine as though it was the finest hotel suite on any of the kingly worlds. It felt almost like coming back to an old, familiar nest. The very first time I had laid eyes on it, decades earlier, it had seemed that way. I had known right away, all the way back then, that this dungeon was going to be my home one day. A presentiment. A little leap, not unusual among us, across the boundaries of time. So when I found myself at long last taking possession of the premises it was with a sense of closing a transaction that had been carried on the books unfinished for a long time.

Not that my dungeon was a great place to live. Dungeons rarely are. This one was about two and a half inches above the water table, and appropriately moist and clammy. An underground stream runs below the king's house on Galgala. The oubliette had its feet right in it. A slick little trickle of water ran across the stone floor at the lower end of the room. Even in the dimness the water had a nice shimmer to it. It was shot through with dissolved gold, like everything else on Galgala. The very walls of my little prison cell were full of gold. I suppose that if this were medieval Earth instead of fantastic futuristic Galgala I might have been able to bribe my way out of the dungeon after spending thirty years or so extracting the gold from the walls by the heat of my candle, or something like that. But this was, after all, fantastic futuristic Galgala where gold is everywhere, and my guards were no more likely to be bought with the pretty yellow metal than they would be with a cupful of air.

Shandor had promised me snakes and riptoads as my companions down there. He didn't deliver on the riptoads, which was just as well. They have unpleasant little barbed teeth and they make nasty roommates. But I did get a family of snakes, as promised. They were slender and green with large golden eyes-the Galgala touch-and they lived in a niche in -the wall, coming out now and then to glide around. They didn't look dangerous or even unfriendly, though I suspect that the rats who lived in the passageways behind the walls thought otherwise about them. Once in a while one of my snakes would show up with a ratshaped bulge in his belly. The rats, in fact, which Shandor hadn't threatened me with, were a considerable nuisance. They had six little jointed legs like some sort of crustacean and beady little black eyes and nasty luminous needle-shaped teeth that gleamed blue-violet in the dark. Occasionally one would go scuttering across me while I was trying to sleep, and I would open an eye to see that hideous tiny glow piercing the blackness. I figured that if I was friendly enough to the snakes, they would discourage the rats from coming around, and that worked pretty well most of the time. I stroked and tickled them, offered them bits of my dinner, told them tales out of the Swatura, sang mournful ballads to them in my most beautiful voice. Even so, my nights weren't totally rat-free and there were a few disagreeable moments.

I also had insects of assorted shapes and sizes and something that I think was an ambulatory slime mold and what may have been giant protozoa that ran in furious circles over the walls and sometimes over me. I have marvelous vision but I could barely see them, and sometimes I thought I was imagining them. And sometimes not. They were transparent, with wheel-like limbs. They made me sneeze. I didn't imagine the sneezing.

Food came something like twice a day-it was hard to reckon the passing of time, there being no windows-brought by robot jailers who never said a word, just slipped the tray through the slot in the door. It was not outstanding food. On the other hand, I didn't starve. That's the best I can say for it: I didn't starve. Later on in my imprisonment the quality of the food improved considerably, as I will shortly describe. I wasn't tortured. No racks, no thumbscrews, no visits from threatening inquisitors. No visits from anyone at all, in fact. Maybe that was supposed to be my torture. I am nothing if not a sociable man. Of course I had my snakes to talk to, and even the bugs and the slime mold, if I got really lonely. There was also the option of ghosting around, which Shandor was powerless to prevent. I did a lot of that. I spent as much time out ghosting as I did in my cell. That helped.

Chorian, I assumed, had gotten himself off Galgala as soon as he realized that I wasn't going to return from my interview with Shandor. He knew that I was most probably going to be detained, and I had made him swear a terrible oath to keep him from launching any crazy rescue schemes. "I have come here to get myself imprisoned," I told him. "Not to get myself killed, or to get you killed. Your job is to get out of here and spread the word that the vile usurper Shandor has incarcerated his father Yakoub, the dearly beloved Rom king. I want everyone in the Imperium to know what the bastard has done. Do you understand me, Chorian?"

Chorian understood, all right. Unfortunately, he didn't succeed in getting away from Galgala to spread the word, because Shandor had been keeping tabs on him, and Shandor had other dungeon cells available. This I discovered much later, and it explained why the public reaction to my jailing was so slow to build. Sooner or later, of course, Polarca and Damiano and the others realized what had happened to us both, and they started to get the news around. But it took time.

Well, I had time. But even I can get impatient eventually.

ONCE LONG AGO I FOUND MYSELF LIVING ON DUUD SHABELL, which is a fairly backward place populated by a curious colony of strange religious fanatics. An anthropologist surely would find their habits of self-flagellation and, indeed, self-mutilation altogether fascinating, but to me they seemed more sickening than anything else. On the other hand, they are wondrous craftsmen and their weavings are in great demand throughout the galaxy, which is what I was doing there. For the sake of filthy profit I spent two or three years among them, building up a stock of their merchandise to sell on Marajo and Galgala and Xamur.

After a time I could no longer stand living in their city and watching them go through their rituals of torment and austerity. I left my partner in charge of our trading post and went off to live for a few months by myself in the vast desert that lies to the west of the habitable zone on Duud Shabeel. And there I witnessed a remarkable thing.

There is in that desert a small amphibian whose scientific name I do not know, but which the Duud Shabeel folk call a mudpuppy. It is a blue-green creature with radiant fluorescent red speckles, about the length of a man's hand, that stands upright on sturdy little legs and a long thick tail. It has a large mouth and four bulging eyes at the very top of its head.

Since mud is something infrequently encountered in a desert, and this desert was even more bleak and parched than deserts normally are, you may be wondering why this creature is called a mudpuppy. Sandpuppy might be more accurate. There is a reason. The mudpuppy spends almost its entire existence burrowed deep down in the desert sand, far below the scorching heat of Duud Shabeel's remorseless sun. It lies asleep in its tunnel, scarcely even breathing. Once every five years-or ten, or twenty-rain comes to that desert. Sometimes it is the merest light shower, but more often, when it rains there at all, it rains a deluge. Trickles of water make their way between the grains of sand and awaken the mudpuppies. Hastily they begin to dig toward the surface. If they are lucky, they emerge while it is still raining. The torrential downpour turns the sand to mud and creates short-lived ponds and pools in the low-lying places. In a single frenzied night of mating the mudpuppies dance wildly around, choose their partners, and copulate desperately until dawn. The males die at the break of day; the females lay their eggs in the pools and ponds and then they die too. Forty-eight hours later the tadpoles begin to hatch.

The childhoods of these creatures last about two weeks. That is all they can possibly get, for after the rain comes the heat again, and the desert begins to dry. Within a couple of weeks the little ponds and pools have vanished. The tadpoles, if they have reached maturity before that happens, hastily begin burrowing into the sand, digging themselves down far below the surface. There they rest, slumbering, dormant, until the next time it rains, years hence, when it will be their turn to arise and dance and mate and die.

It rained while I was living in the desert of Duud Shabeel. I watched the mudpuppies emerge, I saw them do their dance. And I wondered: What is the virtue of such a life? What merit is there in sleeping under the sand for years and years in order to have a single night of joy? What purpose can there be in it? These poor creatures are victims of nature's blind impulse toward self-perpetuation. The only purpose they serve is to create the next generation, whose sole purpose it will be to create the next.

And then I thought, Is it not the same with us? Are not we just a more elaborate kind of mudpuppy, arising and going through our little mating dance and dying so that our places can be taken by those who follow after?

I confess that these thoughts threw me into the deepest despair I have experienced in my life, worse even than when I lay imprisoned with the overthrown Loiza la Vakako, worse than when I suffered in the passageways of Alta Hannalanna. For suddenly I saw life as purposeless, and that was terrifying to me. I saw us as mere prisoners throughout all our days, as the mudpuppies are in their burrows in the sand: hoaxed and deceived by nature, filled with philosophical nonsense designed to keep us working at our task of replacing old life with new. If I had been less sturdy and resilient of soul I think I might have wanted to kill myself, thinking these thoughts, alone in that melancholy desert.

And then I thought: What does it matter if we are nothing but mudpuppies? How does it change anything, knowing that? We still must rise in the morning and go through our days and do what is required of us. And if there is no point to it, why, then there is no point to it: but we must go on, and we must do the best job of it that we can. The mudpuppies understand that. They waste none of their strength in weeping and wailing and railing against their destiny. No, they wait and sleep, and then they arise and dance. Let it be the same with us. Let us live as though there is purpose, and go through each day joyously and with vigor, doing the task that is our task. For there is no alternative. This is the only road. Therefore it has to be the right road. Even if everything seems meaningless, nevertheless there must be some meaning beneath that meaninglessness; and even if we are no more able to see that meaning than are the mudpuppies of Duud Shabeel, yet it is better to go onward than not to go onward. So live. Seek. Learn. Grow.

I found great comfort flooding in upon me when I came to understand the truth of that conclusion. My despair lifted and I returned from the desert and went about my business on Duud Shabeel, and I have gone about my business, whatever it has happened to be, without doubts ever since. From that day onward I have known no despair. Anger, yes, and dismay, and anguish, from time to time; but never despair. For despair means the loss of hope, and I am no longer capable of achieving a loss of hope, now that I have absorbed and understood the lesson of the mudpuppies. The memory of their joyous dancing in the desert rain has carried me through many a black hour ever since.

I thought of these things again as I lay imprisoned in Shandor's oubliette. Waiting for the endless hours to pass, waiting for the moment when I could rise once more to the surface and begin my dance.

GHOSTING MY ONE AMUSEMENT, MYANODYNE THE SOLE consolation of the hapless prisoner in the clammy cell. Once again it became my joy and my escape, as it had been for me long ago on Alta Hannalanna. And on many another occasion after that.

It was a long time since I had done any serious ghosting. You pass through giddy phases, especially at the beginning, where you do it all the time. The whole vast range of the past lies open before you and you can't get enough of it. You go everywhere. Mars. Venus. Atlantis. New Jersey. It's like being a god. That freedom, that sense of omnipotence. But eventually you do get enough. Everyone who ghosts grows sated sooner or later, except maybe Polarca, who seems insatiable. Even I did. I wasn't bored with it. How can you get bored with infinity? But after you have been everywhere and a half, there are times when it seems as if you don't need to go anywhere else. Maybe gods come to feel the same way now and then. Do they get weary of godding, I wonder? Envy the lowly humans their tedious toil?

You may go without ghosting for years at a time, but you don't ever forget the knack of it. You know it's there, whenever you need or want it. And then you find yourself cast into somebody's dark oubliette and you give thanks to the Holy Spirit that you can do it. Off you go. Up and out, far and away.

I LIKED BEST OF ALL TO DO MY GHOSTING ON EARTH. BACK to my roots, back to the solid terra firma, land where my fathers died. The old Rom blood drew me like a magnet. Again, again, again Earth, any epoch, any of its myriad nations.

WHERE AM I NOW? A WALLED CITY, PROTECTED ON TWO sides by two great ramparts, on two sides by the sea. The sky is fair, the sun is strong. Who are these dour thick-bearded men in armor? Ah. They wear the emblem of the Cross. These must be Crusader knights. Within the city are Saracen defenders. And here, these darker men and women in tattered white robes and gowns, at the edge of the camp? I hear them chattering in Romany. Or something that sounds as if it might have been Romany once, long ago. They go among the warriors offiering services. This man is a blacksmith who carries his own forge on his back. Three stones for a hearth, a bellows that he works with his toes, charcoal for fuel. A file, a vice, a hammer. Sharpen your sword, good knight? Mend your armor? And this one here, the coppersmith. And the old woman who looks like our phuri dai, doing the dukkeripen, saying the future. You will be a great lord, immense estates will be yours, your sons will be dukes and your grandsons will be kings.

We help the good Christian warriors fight their war. We build a great four-story machine for them to invade the Saracen city. The first story is of wood, the second of lead, the third of iron, the fourth of bronze. But it catches fire and the defenders rejoice. So we build for them a stone-catapult that they call the Evil Neighbor, and a grappling ladder called the Cat. And two catapults that fling stones night and day against the besieged city.

I float over the wall and discover that there are Rom within. In this war we work for Christian Gaje and we work for Saracen GaJe. The work is what matters. The issues for which they fight are absurd to us. For the Saracens we mix pots of Greek fire-naphtha and other substances, a monstrous weapon that sticks to your skin and burns you alive-and they hurl them over the walls at the Crusaders. "Allah is Great," the defenders cry. They look at us expectantly and we cry it too, "Allah is Great." Why not? Allah is great.

God is great under any of His names. These foolish Gaje will kill each other to show the superiority of their name for Him. And they will kill us too, unless we say the words they love. Very well. Allah is great. And Christ is our savior. Whatever they want. The One Word is: Survive.

ANOTHER LEAR WHO SURVIVES HERE? A FLAT HIDEOUS landscape. Mounds of dirty snow, bare trees. Barbed wire. This is a prison. I see Gypsies in prison uniforms, stripes, a brown triangle on the left breast. But some of them carry violins. They stroll from building to building, playing: prisoners of special privilege, wandering entertainers. There are other prisoners here, peering out hopelessly from their dismal shacks. Gaunt hollow faces, dark tragic eyes. Staring, weeping. Listening to the Gypsy violins.

I drift down beside one of the violinists and make myself visible. He gives me a strange look but goes on playing. A sad wild tune. You could sing to it, or you could break into tears. He plays me the sound of a question.

"Sarishan," I say. "I am Rom."

"Are you?" Cool, distant, barely seeming to care. "Yakoub son of Romano Nirano. Kalderash. And you?" A shrug. "Daweli Shukarnak. You are new here?"

"A visitor."

"A visitor," he says, as if the word has no meaning for him. "Well, enjoy your holiday."

He turns away and fiercely strikes his bow across the strings of his violin, making a terrible noise. I am reminded of the grinding sound of Pulika Boshengro's fiddle as he gave the signal for his henchmen to attack his kinsmen, and for an instant I feel like cringing. Like screaming.

"Wait," I say. "Is this place a prison?" "What do you think?"

"And those half-dead Gaje over there?" "Jews. This is a prison for Jews."

"But there are Rom here too?"

"There are some Rom, yes. They treat us a little better than they do the Jews. They feed us, and we play music for the other prisoners on Sundays. And for the Hitlari."

"The Hitlari?" I ask.

"The prison-camp keepers. The Nazis." He begins to play again, sweetly, a melancholy tune that tears at my heart. "They hate us and they hate the Jews, but they hate the Jews a little more. When they are finished killing the Jews, they will kill us. They want to kill everybody, the Hitlari, everybody who is not like them, and they will, sooner or later. They think they are being kind to us, killing us later. But what sort of life is this for a Rom, inside a prison camp? They have killed us already, penning us up in here." He looks at me as though seeing me for the first time. "You are really Rom?"

"You doubt me?"

"You speak the Romany strangely." "I come from far away."

"Well, go back there, wherever it is. If you can. Fly away and forget this place. This place is hell. This place is the house of the devil." "Tell me its name," I say.

"Auschwitz," he says.

IT'S VERY MISTY HERE. I MUST BE FAR, FAR BACK IN TIME. But through the thick white fog I see a great blazing sun overhead. The air is moist and hot. This is a marketplace. In its center grows a gigantic tree with a thousand trunks, and a bewildering tangle of roots and vines descending from its myriad limbs. All around it flows the throbbing life of the market, peddlers, holy men, thieves, mule-carts, children, scribes, magicians.

The people are slender and they have dark skins and sharp bony faces. Their eyes are very bright. They speak a language I don't understand, though I hear a word or two that sounds almost like Romany. At first all these people look Rom to me. But then I see that most of them are not. I see the real Rom among them. They look very much like the others, but the difference, though barely perceptible, is real. They have the Rom glow.

I watch the Rom moving through the marketplace. A juggler here, a team of acrobats there. Five who have mounted a little stage and are acting a play. One is playing a pipe. One who grins and waves a box of dice, and invites passersby to game with him. And one who has trained an elephant to dance: I see the great beast lumbering from side to side like a clown.

Some sort of turbaned prince advances solemnly through the marketplace. Servants with gilded pikes precede him, scattering the crowd. One of the Rom runs up to him, nut-brown, agile as a monkey. All he wears is a white cloth twisted at his waist. He turns handsprings; he shouts and laughs; he makes intricate fortune-telling signs. He holds out the palm of his hand. One of the servants puts a coin in it. Then he pushes the Gypsy roughly away with the flat of his pike. He has come too close to the prince. We are outcasts here. We follow the forbidden trades. It would be a disgrace for these others to juggle in the marketplace or to offer to foretell the future. We do what the decent folk may not do, and we do it with much skill.

Where am I? The mist is so thick. It is so very long ago. The heavy air is rich with spices. This must be history's dawn. We are newly come out of our lost and ruined land of Atlantis and we are refugees here. Perhaps this place is Babylon. Perhaps it is one of the island kingdoms of the Mediterranean Sea. I think it is the land that was called India, though. Where we lived so long after we left Atlantis. That elephant, the heat, the vines dangling from the many-trunked tree. It is the same in this India as everywhere else, for us. Somehow we are jugglers and acrobats, tinkers and soothsayers, wherever we go. Outsiders. Outcasts.

I allow myself to become visible. I am by far the biggest man in the marketplace and my clothing is strange and my skin is too light a color. Yet only one person seems to notice me. He is the agile Rom boy who was turning handsprings for the prince. Our eyes meet across nearly the entire width of the marketplace, and he grins at me. That warm grin shines like a beacon in the mist.

Does he take me for some Gaje prince from a far-off land, newly arrived and foolish enough to pay him a fortune in gold for a quick dance and a bit of prophecy?

No. No. He grins again, and winks. It is a wink of recognition and kinship. He sees the Rom in me.

I wink back, and grin. My lips shape a word for him: Sarishan. And back through the mist from him comes an answering word: Sarishan, cousin.

Did he truly say that? Cousin? He laughs and nods. And turns, that unknown ancient cousin of mine, and disappears into the crowd. And I am alone, separated from him by five thousand years of white fog.

I KNOW WHERE I AM, HERE. THIS IS JULIEN DE GRAMONT'S lost and beloved France, and I am at the shrine of Sara the Black Virgin. Festival time for the Rom: we have come from all over Europe for it. I have been here before, many times, many different years. I may even be here now, another ghost of me. Or perhaps many of me. So be it. I look around. A familiar sight. The Gypsy women in long swirling skirts of a thousand hues, with masses of gold gleaming on their throats and breasts, the men in dark suits and brilliant scarves, everyone carrying lighted tapers down the gentle slope to the beach. And around them, as always, surging throngs of GaJe spectators, elbow to elbow. Pressing close, trying to catch a glimpse of the Gypsies at their rites. Always watching us. And we are splendid in our alienness. Men on white horses, priests in black cassocks. Hooves clopping on cobblestones. Violins and guitars ringing with liquid melodies. The long lines of Rom winding through the narrow streets to the church where the black statue of the saint is displayed. Sweet incense on the air and the thick smell of candle-tallow. Laughter, singing, men, women, children, pickpockets and policemen, Rom and Gaje.

"Do you want to know how we steal chickens?" Rom boy teases wide-eyed Gajo. "Use a horsewhip, that's best. A quick flick of the whip and you lift her right out of the yard, not even a squawk out of her. Or else tie a bit of corn to a string and dangle it where the hen can swallow it. One yank and you have her."

"You still do these things?" "Oh, that and plenty more!"

"Tell him how to drab the bawlo, Hojok!" A blink, a smile. "What's that?"

"It means poisoning the pig. A sponge dipped in lard: feed it to some farmer's pig. The lard melts, the sponge gets big, the pig dies of the blockage in his gut. Then go to the farmer. Will you give us that dead pig? We can feed the meat to our dogs. Farmer doesn't know why the pig died, doesn't dare use the meat. Gives it to us. Roast pork at the feast!"

"Is that how it's done?"

"We steal small children, too. Bring them up as Gypsies." "I think you're just having fun with me."

"Oh, no, Sir, no, no. Authentic tales of Gypsy folkways. You spare a hundred francs, maybe? Fifty?"

Sara-la-Kali in the church, the black image. Servant-girl to the sisters of the Virgin Mary, Mary Jacob and Mary Salome, when they fled the Holy Land. A Gypsy girl, devout and good, daughter of a great Rom long ago. The sea cast the sisters up on the coast of Julien's France and Sara, because a vision had told her to do it, made a raft from her dress and went out to save them. And afterward the sisters baptized her and she taught the gospel among the Gaje and the Rom. "You know of the Black Virgin?" I once asked him. "Our Gypsy saint? Her statue in an old church in France?" But no, he knew nothing about her. Not a Catholic saint, I explained. Just our saint. But they kept her in a Catholic church all the same. Visited regularly-a big pilgrimage every year. He knew nothing. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I had been there, to his France, to see the pilgrimage of Sara-la-Kali. More than once, even. Poor Julien, almost a Rom at his soul, but ghosting will always be beyond his abilities. And so I have seen the very France, that burns so brightly in his dreams, that he will never see.

The long night's vigil in the crypt. On the left the old pagan altar, on the right the statue of Sara, in the center a Christian altar almost two thousand years old. All gone now, of course, all vanished when Earth ended. Not a trace left. But I can still go there, ghosting. To see my forefathers at their devotions. Put pieces of clothing on the hooks as offerings to Sara. Rub the holy medals and photographs and be healed, if you are sick. Then the march to the sea, carrying the holy images into the surf. Dip yourselves in too, pour the water over each other's heads, even dip your fortune-telling cards in the water to make them holier. Guitars. Violins. Candle-smoke. Crowds. All of us Rom marching together, and the Gaje looking on, awed and frightened. So long ago. I go there and I march with them. No one questions my right to be there.

"Mandi Angitrako Rom?" someone asks me. "Are you an English Gypsy?"

"No," I said. "Not English. Much farther away."

"Ah, yes. From America. From New York! From Romville in America! Sarishan, cousin! Sarishan!"

Just names to me. America. New York. All so long ago. My people. And I their king to be, walking among them, the man from the stars, laughing, weeping, singing.

THIS CASTLE IS GREAT IDEA. STONE BATTLEMENTS, LOFTY arches, deep moat green with age. I see a ghost myself on an earlier visit glimmering on the far wall as the cannons boom. Here and there other Rom ghosts flicker in and out of sight like candleflames along the ramparts. There must be as many ghosts here as there are defenders.

Down in the trenches at the foot of the hill the invading Austrians roar insults at us. From on high in the castle the Gypsy defenders roar right back. The Austrians roar in one language and the Gypsies in another, but to me it is just noise. Hootchka! Pootchka! Hoya! Zim! Polarca appears at my elbow. "Some fun, eh, you Yakoub?"

"But it always ends the same way." "Still, how brave we are, yes?"

Yes. How brave. A thousand Gypsies in the service of Ferenc Perenyi, the Hungarian lord of the keep. When the Austrian army came he couldn't find any of his own people to defend his castle; but there were the Gypsies. Look at them! Twenty days under siege, and how they battle! We are always loyal when we are asked to fight. We never run away under attack. Except, of course, when it would be crazy to stay. Perenyi is long gone, out the back gate and fled, leaving his castle to its fate. So it is a Gypsy castle now. If we save it, we can keep it. But of course we have no way of saving it. The Austrians are unrelenting. "Keep on fighting!" Polarca yells. "You're going to win!"

Sweaty men in grimy rags load the big guns and touch lights to them. Far below, the landscape erupts in flame and the Austrians scatter. The Gypsies reload. I would take a hand in it myself if I could. Reload, aim, fire. Reload, aim, fire. Polarca capers from battlement to battlement. The other Yakoubs run madly about, grinning, shouting, encouraging the fighters. We will save Ferenc Perenyi's castle from the Austrians for him, and if Perenyi never comes back the castle will be ours. Fire! Fire! The Austrians are fleeing!

But the cannons of the castle begin to fall silent. "Shoot! Why don't you shoot?" Polarca screams.

No one can understand what he says. The din of the battle blots him out. The howling of the wind, the cries of the wounded. And who would understand the Romany of a Rom of the Kingdom, anyway, here on Earth sixteen centuries in the past? But still he tries to rally the fighters. "Shoot! Shoot!"

"They're out of gunpowder," I say quietly in his ear.

So they are. The Gypsy leader stands on the battlements, shaking his fists. "You bastards!" he cries at the Austrians. That must be what he's saying. "You bastards! If we had any more powder we'd finish you off!"

The attackers are starting to realize, now, that the firing has stopped. "Come on!" Polarca screams. "Bare hands! Knuckles and fists!" The Austrians come racing up the hill. We can do nothing against them. Here and there a rifle fires a single shot; but our powder is gone and they sweep over the rim of the castle walls. The battle is lost. The castle is lost.

One lovely moment right at the end. The Austrian troops close in on the brave Gypsies, who are fighting to the last, clubs, knives, fists, anything. And the attackers see that there are no Hungarians here, that only Gypsies remain to defend the castle. The Austrian general appears. He makes a sweeping gesture with both his arms. And calls out. "Run, Gypsy, run as fast as you can!" There will be no attempt to take prisoners. The defeated Gypsies quickly slip away, and the Austrians let them do it, and Great Ida is lost. Only a few Rom ghosts remain. There is Polarca, far off up there. There is another Yakoub, and yet another, high in the battlements. And there? Valerian? Familiar faces everywhere. It was a glorious defeat and we have all come to see it. Some of us many times. That is what all our history is like, I suppose. One glorious defeat after another. Always defeats, alas. But always glorious.