Star of Gypsies

3. I Am Come As Time

Krishna: I am come as Time, the waster of the peoples Ready for that hour that ripens to their ruin.

All these hosts must die; strike, stay your hand-no matter.

Therefore, strike. Win kingdom, wealth and glory.

- Bhagavad-Gita

I NEVER EXPECTED TO BE KING OF ANYTHING. THAT'S THE truth, no matter what Syluise thinks. Of course the prophecy was on me practically from the time I could blow my own nose, but it was years -a lifetime, really-before I came to understand what Bibi Savina's ghost had been trying to say to me, back there in my infancy on Vietoris. Only by hindsight did I finally penetrate the mysteries of her chanting and magicking. I suppose I could tell you that from the start I was full of the passion to be top man and tell everyone what to do and have my boots licked daily, but it would be a lie. I wasn't like that at all when I was small. Maybe I got that way later, a little, but remember that being king does strange things to otherwise modest men. All I wanted in the beginning was just to live until tomorrow, and then to live until the tomorrow after that, and to make my way down the narrow path between pain on the one side and the end of all pain on the other side, living each day in joy. Even though I might be a slave, even though I was condemned to everlasting exile, yet what I wanted was as simple as that: not a kingdom but only joy.

My father was Romano Nirano, a Rom among Rom, a man who had kingliness in his smallest fingertip. As you know I was sold away from him when I was seven, but I can see him now as if he were standing right beside me, the broad face with heavy cheekbones, the powerful brooding eyes deep in their hoods, the heavy flowing mustache, the grand sweep of black hair streaming across his forehead. It is my face too. We have borne that face down through all the thousands of years since we were driven forth from Romany Star and I think it is a face that will endure to the end of all time. As will we.

He was already a slave when I was born. From his father he had inherited such a grand catastrophe of debts that there was no question of paying it off in five lifetimes. The old man had been a speculator in moons and was caught short in the Panic of 2814 when all the heavy metals completely lost their value; and after that we were destined to be paupers for centuries. My father could have wiped it all off by a bankruptcy, but my father thought bankruptcy was cowardly.

So he sold himself and my mother and my five brothers and sisters and me in return for a quit-claim. The family debts were wiped off the books and we became the slaves of Volstead Factors, a great interstellar corporation that was itself an imperial fiefdom.

"There's no disgrace in being a slave," my father told me. I was five years old and I had just discovered that I was different from most other children. I belonged to someone else. "It's a business arrangement, that's all. It may be an inconvenience but it's never a disgrace. It's an arrangement that you want to alter as soon as you can, of course, and if you have the chance and you don't take it then that's a disgrace. But aside from that there's no shame involved in it."

He was referring to modern slavery, you must realize. The institution was very different in ancient times. But then everything was. We may use the same name for a thing today that the ancients did-"slave," "king," "emperor," "ghost"-but the meaning that the word contains is not at all the same. The distant past is not simply a foreign country, as someone once said, but another universe altogether.

I learned that I was a slave before I learned that I was Rom. Or to put it more accurately I always knew that I was Rom but it wasn't until I was six that I came to know that most other people were not.

We spoke Romany at home and Imperial outside and we shifted from one to the other without difficulty. I thought that everyone did the same. My mother told us old Rom tales, stories of gods and demons, of sorceries and witchcraft, of heroic journeys by caravan across strange far-off lands. I thought that everyone knew those tales. We kept Rom treasures in our house, gold pieces, musical instruments, brightly colored scarves, sacred icons. I never entered the houses of my playmates and so I never knew that they had no such possessions.

When I was six I went out one day to carve a gloryball from the gloryball tree on the riverbank and when I got there I found my sister Tereina being attacked by a band of other children. Tereina was twelve then and her attackers, both boys and girls, must have been eight or nine years old, so that she towered over them; but there were half a dozen of them and they were tormenting her. "Rom trash, Rom trash, Rom trash!" they were chanting as they circled round and round her. "Rom, Rom, Rom, Rom!"

They were trying to snatch away the necklace at her throat. It was a chain of gleaming wind-scarab shells that my father's brother had brought back as a gift for her from Iriarte and it was the most precious thing she had, pulsing with light of a hundred subtle colors. Tereina slapped frantically at the clutching hands. She was too tall for them, but they had managed to rip open her blouse and her breasts were showing, and I saw long red scratches on her skin.

"Rom trash, Rom trash, Rom trash-"

She saw me and cried my name. And asked me in Romany to help her, and then said in Imperial, "Yakoub, give them the evil eye! Put the spell on them, Yakoub!"

I was only six. But I was big and strong and I had no reason to be afraid of them. And my mother had told me the legends of the evil eye, the black magic that the drabarne, the old Gypsy witches, had used to make their enemies suffer. Some of those legends are pure fantasy and some are real, though at that age I had no way of knowing which was which. To me everything was real then and I thought I could hurl my sister's tormentors into the heart of the sun if only I said the right words and made the right gestures. I think they thought so too; for I made my eyes change and puffed out my cheeks and crooked my arms above my head and marched toward them, chanting, "iachalipe, iachalipe, iachalipe!"- enchantment, enchantment, enchantment-and they turned and fled, squealing like frightened pigs. I roared with laughter and screamed curses at them and squirted my urine after them to mock them.

Tereina was weeping and trembling. I comforted her the way a man comforts a woman, reaching up and putting my arms around her, though I was only a child. Then I asked, "Why were they doing that? Because we are slaves?"

"Why would they care that we are slaves? Half of them are slaves too."

"Then why-"

"Because we are Rom, little brother. Because we are Rom."

So that evening it was necessary for my father to explain a great many things to me that I had never known, and after that evening life would always be different for me.

"We call them Gaje," he told me. "Which means, in Imperial, a fool, a bumpkin, a clod-hopper. Their minds are slower than ours and they think in a clumsy plodding way. We go from one to five to three to ten while they are moving slowly along, one two three four. Of course some of the GaJe are quicker than others. The emperor is a Gajo and so are his high lords, and they all have very quick minds indeed. But most of the Gaje are simpletons and we have had to put up with their stupidity ever since we came to live among them. And they know how much quicker we are than they. Which is why they once persecuted and oppressed us, and why even now they fear us and mistrust us, though most of them would deny that they do."

"And are there many of these Gaje?" I asked.

"Ten thousand of them," my father said, "for every one of us. Or maybe more. Who can count the Gaje? They are like the stars in the heavens. And we are very few, Yakoub. We are very few."

My head was swimming with these surprises. My father, when he walked down the street, carried himself like a king; and I had thought we were people of great worth indeed, even though just now we might happen to be slaves. And now to learn that I belonged to a sparse and insignificant race, that we Rom were like scattered flecks of white foam in a vast sea of Gaje, came to me with stunning impact. In the eye of my mind I saw now my father's face and the faces of my father's brothers standing out in a crowd of Gaje and I understood for the first time how different they were, different in the set of their jaws, in the fire of their eyes, in the black luster of their thick strong hair. A race apart, an alien people-more alien even than I could suspect"You know there once was a place called Earth, Yakoub?" "Earth, yes."

"Destroyed long ago, ruined, shattered by Gaje idiocy. We lived there, we and the Gaje, before we all came out into the worlds of the stars. They called us Gypsies then. And a great many other names, Zigeuners, Romanichels, Gitanes, Tsigani, Zingari, Mirlifiches, Karaghi, dozens of names, because they had dozens of languages. Because they were too stupid and quarrelsome to speak only one, and so they befuddled themselves with tongues. We wandered among them, always strangers. Never staying in the same place for long, for what was the point of that? No one wanted us. They despised us and always schemed to harm us; so we stayed put only until we had earned a few coins by begging or telling fortunes or sharpening their knives, or until we had stolen enough to eat for a few days more, and then we moved along." "Stolen?" I said, shocked.

He laughed and put his huge hands on my shoulders, gripping me in that firm loving way of his, and he gently rocked me back and forth as I stood before him. "They called it stealing. We called it harvesting. The fruits of the earth belong to all men, eh, boy? God gave us appetites and put into the world the means to satisfy those appetites; when we take what we need, we are simply obeying God's commandment."

"But if we took things that didn't belong to us-" I said, thinking of those clutching Gaje fingers reaching for my sister's precious necklace.

"This was long ago and life was harsh. They would have let us starve, so we took what we needed, grass for our horses, wood for our fires, some pieces of fruit from the trees, perhaps a stray chicken or two. How could they deny us the things that were in the world to use when we were hungry, when we were thirsty?"

And my father sketched a picture for me of Rom life on the Gaje Earth that left me dazed and chilled. A race of shabby unkempt people, vagabonds, charlatans, beggars, thieves, weavers of spells, charmers of snakes, dancers and blacksmiths and tinkers and acrobats, traveling in rickety caravans from land to land, making their camps on the outskirts of towns amid terrible filth and squalor, keeping themselves together by an endless juggling act of trickeries and improvisations. Forced into a life of lying and cheating, of begging, of all manner of desperate struggles. Scorned and despised, feared, whispered about. Even put to death - put to death! - for no crime other than that of being unlike the dreary settled folk among whom they roamed. I began to see this lost world of Earth as a kind of hell where my ancestors had undergone a torment for thousands of years.

As he spoke I began to cry.

"No," he said, and he shook me, hard. "There's nothing to sniffle about. They made us suffer but they never broke our spirit. We had our life and the Ga e had theirs, and perhaps theirs was more comfortable, but ours was truer. Ours was the right life. We were kings of the road, Yakoub! We soared on the high winds. We tasted joys that were altogether unknown to them. And we still do. Look what has become of us, Yakoub: the former thieves, the former beggars, the raggle-taggle Gypsies! Kings of the road, yes, and now it is the road between the stars! Down through the years we have kept to our ways. Maybe some of us slipping away from them now and then, sure, but always coming back, always bringing the Rom way back to life. And that way has brought us great comfort and goodness, with even greater things yet to come. We speak the Great Tongue. We live the Great Life. We travel the Great Road. And always the One Word guides us."

"The One Word?" I said. "What is that?" "The One Word is: Survive!"

OF COURSE I STILL UNDERSTOOD VERY LITTLE OF THE full tale. He had told me nothing of how the Rom had led the way into the stars, of how the Imperium had come into being, or how we founded a Rom kingdom and wove it betwixt and between the fabric of the Imperium to become the true force that governed mankind. Pointless to try to explain all that to a child of six, even a Rom child. Nor did he tell me then of Romany Star and why it was that the Rom were a people apart from the Gaje; for it would have been cruelty to have me know so soon that we were set apart from the Gaje in a secret way that could admit of no compromise, that there was no kinship at all, that we were of a wholly alien blood. Not just different by customs and languages, but by the blood itself. There would be time for that dark knowledge later on.

All this took place in the city of Vietorion on the world Vietoris. I have not set eyes on that planet since I was taken from it by my second owners, more than a hundred sixty years ago, but it is forever bright in my memory: the first home, the starting point. The dazzling sky streaked with gold and green. The great sprawl of the city like a black shawl across the crumpled ridges of the vast plain. The astounding jagged red spear of Mount Salvat rising with the force of a trumpet-blast in an overwhelming steep thrust above us. Perhaps nothing was as immense as I remember it but I prefer to remember it that way. Even our house seems palatial to me: white tiles flashing in the sunlight, rooms beyond rooms, soft music far away, heavy musky-scented yellow flowers everywhere in the courtyard. Was it truly like that? On Vietoris we were slaves.

There is slavery and slavery. My father had sold us to Volstead Factors but not so that we would be chained and whipped and left to make a dinner out of crusts. Our slavery was, as he so often said, a business arrangement. We lived the way other people, ordinary free people, lived. Each day my father went to the staryard where the great bronze-nosed ships of the company lay in their hangars and he worked on them like any other mechanic, and at night he came home. My mother taught in the company school. My brothers and sisters and I went to school, a different one. When we were older we would work for the company, too, in whatever jobs were chosen for us. We ate well and dressed well. Because we were slaves we were bound to the company, and could never work for anyone else, or leave Vietoris to seek a new life for ourselves; that way the company was certain to recover its investment in our educations. But we were not mistreated. Of course the company could choose to sell us if it felt it had no need for us. And in time it did.

I would watch the starships sailing across the night, lighting up the northern sky like flaring comets as they raced up toward wink-out speed and the interstellar leap across the light-years, and I would tell myself, "That ship flies because my father's hands were on it in the staryard. My father knows the magic of starships. My father could fly a starship himself, if they would let him."

Was that true? I suppose not. Even then I knew that all the starship pilots were Rom: I often saw them swaggering through the city, big black-haired men with Rom eyes, in the puff-shouldered silken blue uniforms that pilots of the Imperium affected in those days. But that didn't mean that all Rom were starship pilots. And I suspect that I didn't comprehend, at that time, the distinction between a starship mechanic and a starship pilot. Pilots were Rom; my father was Rom and worked with starships; therefore my father knew how to pilot a starship as well as any of the men in blue silk. In truth my father had great skill with tools of all sorts-the old Rom gift, coursing through our blood since the days when we had been wandering coppersmiths and tinsmiths and workers in iron and repairers of locks-he could do anything with his hands, fix anything, fashion miracles out of a scrap of wire and a bit of wood-but even he probably would have found it a challenge, I think, to take the controls of a starship in his grasp. And then again perhaps he would have known what to do: intuitively, automatically. He had great skills. He was a great man.

He taught me the names of the tribes of the Rom. We were Kalderash, and then there were the Lowara, the Sinti, the Luri, the Tchurari, the Manush, the Gitanos. And many more. I suspect I have come to forget some. Old names, names springing out of our wandering-time on Earth. Later, when I learned about Romany Star and the sixteen original tribes, I decided that the names my father had taught me were names that went back to the time of Romany Star. Now I know that that is wrong, that those are names we took when we were scattered among the Gaje of Earth only a few thousand years ago, in that time when we roamed in wagons, living as outcasts. Those names have lost meaning now, for we are spread very thin over a great many worlds and the only tribe that can matter to us is the tribe of tribes, the grand kumpania, the tribe of all Rom. But yet the names are a part of the tradition that we maintain and must maintain. And so Kalderash parents tell their children that they are Kalderash, and Lowara Lowara, and Sinti Sinti, even if it is a distinction without distinction.

My father taught me, also, the Rom way as it had been handed down from generation to generation over the centuries and through all the migrations. Not just the special customs of our people, the folkways, the rites and festivals and rituals and ceremonies. Those things are important. They are the instruments of survival. They unite and preserve us: the knowledge of what is clean and unclean, of how birth and marriage and death must be celebrated, of how authority is apportioned within a tribe, of how the invisible powers are to be dealt with, all those things which we know to be true beliefs. We must be tenacious of such things, or we will be lost; and so I was instructed in them as all Rom children are. But the rites and rituals are not the essence of the Rom way; they are only the devices by which that way is sustained and nurtured. My father took care to teach me what lay underneath them, that which is far more significant, that is, a sense of what it is to be Rom. To know that one is part of a tiny band of people, driven by misfortune from its homeland, that has clung together against a swarm of enemies in many strange lands over thousands of years. To remember that all Rom are cousins and that in one another is our only safety. To consider at all times that one must live with grace and courage but that the primary thing is to survive and endure until we can bring our long pilgrimage to its end and return to our home again. To realize that the universe is our enemy and that we must do whatever we can to protect ourselves.

At first I felt very little connection with the wandering Rom in their caravans, those ragged old mountebanks and jugglers who wandered the roads of medieval Earth. To me we seemed nothing much like those ancients, we of the far-flung Imperium who live in cities and fly between the stars. They were curiosities; they were folklore; they were quaint.

Then came the night when my father took me up the side of mighty Mount Salvat to the lookout point five thousand meters above the city, and there, in the air that was so thin and piercing that it stung my nostrils, he showed me Romany Star in the sky and told me the last piece of the story. And then everything came together, and I knew that I was one with those far-off Kalderash and Sinti and Gitanos and Lowara of vanished Earth, that we were truly of a single blood and a single soul, that they were part of me and I was part of them.

Now at last I understood the stealing of chickens and apples in the wandering-time long ago: hunger kills, and we must go on living if we are to reach our goal, and if the Gaje will not let us eat then we must help ourselves. Now I understood the contempt for Gaje law: what was Gaje law to us, except a weapon held at our throats? I understood the lies and casual deceptions, the six conflicting answers to any prying Gaje question, the refusal to be swallowed UP in the Gaje world in any way. The Gajo is the enemy. We could not let ourselves be deceived in that. They are the ancient foe; and all our striving must be aimed toward leaving them behind us, not toward entering into any union with them. For as surely as a river of fresh water is lost in the sea we would be lost forever if we let the Gaje once engulf us. So my father taught me when I was very young.

ONE AFTERNOON WHEN I WAS SEVEN A PRETTY WOMAN in a yellow robe came into the classroom where we were learning about the emperor, how he labored night and day to make life better for every boy and girl in the Imperium. She glanced quickly around the room and pointed to half a dozen of us, saying, -you, you, you, you, come with me." I was one of the ones chosen.

We went outside. It was a mild misty day and rain had fallen a little while before: the leaves of the trees were gleaming as if they had been polished. A car was waiting in the street, long and low and sleek, a silvery metallic color with the red comet-tail emblem of Volstead Factors on its hood. I remember all this as if it happened the day before yesterday.

I didn't mind leaving school. To tell you the truth I had never cared much for it anyway. Me, a schoolteacher's son. And that day's lesson had seemed foolish to me: the poor silly emperor, working night and day! If he was so powerful, why didn't he have people doing his work for him? And they had showed his picture on the screen in the classroom, a small frail man, very old and thin, who looked as though he might die at any minute. This was the Thirteenth Emperor, and actually he lived a surprisingly long time after that, but I doubted that anyone so wizened and feeble could manage even to take care of himself, let alone look after the needs of every boy and girl in the Imperium. School seemed nothing but Gaje nonsense to me: already I was dismissing anything I didn't like as Gaje nonsense, you see. In this case I was probably right, although I have learned over the years that not everything that is Gaje is nonsense, and now and then that not everything that is nonsense is Gaje.

I was the only Rom boy in the car. There was a Rom girl, too, one of my sisters' friends. The other four were Gaje. The Rom girl was a slave like me, and so was at least one of the Gaje boys. I wasn't sure about the rest. It wasn't easy to tell who was a slave and who wasn't. But in fact all six of us had been picked from the classroom because we were slaves. The company was undergoing an economy drive. A certain percentage of its slave-holdings was to be sold off, particularly young slaves still in school, who would not begin to provide a return on investment for many years. We were being taken to the marketplace to be sold, right then and there. I would never see my home again, my father, my mother, my brothers, my sisters. I would lose my little collection of music cubes, my storybooks and my playthings. I would never have my share of the old Rom treasures from Earth in our house. None of this was explained to me as they drove us to the marketplace. There are some ways in which even modern slavery is very much like the ancient kind.

In the vestibule of the marketplace they looked me over, tapped me here and there, ran me in front of some kind of scanner. No one wanted to know my age or name or any other information about me. A robot stamped my arm; it stung a moment and left a circular purple mark.

"Lot ninety-seven," I heard a hoarse bored voice say. "A boy." "Move on inside, ninety-seven," said someone else. "That line over there. "

It was a short bit of business to dispose of us, there in the slavemarket of Vietorion. There was something dreamlike about it for me. When I think now of that afternoon I feel the roaring in my ears that I sometimes feel in dreams, and everything moves very slowly, hardly moving at all, and there are fierce shadows everywhere.

We stood on a circular dais beneath a glaring globe of hot bright light in the center of an immense drafty bare room that looked like a warehouse. There were hundreds of us up for sale at once, most of us children but not all. Some were quite old and I felt sorry for them. We were all naked. I had no trouble with being naked but some of the others huddled miserably with their hands over their middles or their arms folded across their breasts, trying to hide themselves. Much later, when I understood more about the way slave-markets worked, I realized that the ones who try to hide themselves usually are bought last, for the lowest prices, by the stingiest masters. The theory is that a slave concerned with such matters as privacy and shame is bound to be troublesome in other ways too.

A snub-nosed metal housing that looked a little like a neutron cannon descended from the distant ceiling and started to turn. A red warning light on the wall began to glow. Medical scanning beams now were playing over our bodies. If the beams found any sort of defect, some internal sore or ulcer, a badly healed bone fracture, a weakness of the heart or lungs, it would instantly be picked up and entered on the sales screen where prospective buyers could take note of it.

Meanwhile the bidding was going on, click click click. The buyers had electromyograph terminals fastened to their cheeks and the auction was conducted at the speed of thought. A certain twitch of the facial muscles indicated the choice of a slave, a different kind of twitch registered the offer. A quick voltage spike gave the buyer a yes or no and the next round began until bidding closed. The whole process took no more than three or four minutes.

Of course I understood nothing of this or of anything else that was going on. It all drifted past me in a strange serene way. Like a dream, yes. Sometimes the most frightening dreams are the serene ones.

"Ninety-seven," a little robot said. I turned around and it stamped me on the forehead with the code number of my purchaser, and that was that.

Before night had come I was on board a starship bound for Megalo Kastro.

"What price did you go for?" a tall flat-faced boy asked me.

There were ten of us in the cabin. I was the youngest. I simply blinked at him.

"He's too young," said one with strange limp orange hair. "He can't read."

"I can too!" I cried. "You think I'm a child?"

"I went for sixty-five cerces," the flat-faced boy announced. "Eighty, me," came from one who had a bright green jewel set in the center of his left cheek.

The flat-faced boy glared at him. I hoped maybe they would fight. "How can you tell the price?" I asked one of the other boys, a small quiet one.

"It's in your forehead code. You need a mirror to see." He peered close at me. "You went for a hundred."

"My price was a hundred," I told the flat-faced boy. "How do you like that?"

They all swung around to look, crowding in around me. They looked skeptical, and then they looked angry, and then awed. I pulled my shoulders back and clapped my hands and laughed. "A hundred," I said again. "A hundred!"

To this day I'm proud of that. Someone must have seen merit in me even then.

I HAD BEEN BOUGHT BY THE GUILD OF BEGGARS, MEGALO Kastro Lodge 63. My lodgemaster's name was Lanista, and I shared my cabin with four boys named Kalasiris, Anxur, Sphinx, and Focale. I put their names down here because all of them have been dead for many years and it is a kindness to mention the names of the forgotten dead, even if they were no members of your clan. Lanista was Rom and my four cabinmates were not. I think I fetched such a high price because anyone could see at a glance that I was Rom. The Guild of Beggars is a Gaje enterprise but they get all the Rom they can for it because they regard us as superior beggars. Begging is in our genes, they believe. Not far from the truth, you know.

Although I can remember names and faces and places and all these other details of my being sold away from my family I can't tell you how long it was before it first dawned on me that I was never going to see my home again. Sometimes the very big patterns escape a child's notice completely while the fine ones stick fast. I don't know what I thought of all that was happening to me. Taken out of school, yes; sold, yes; put aboard a starship, yes; going somewhere far away, yes. But forever? Never to return? No more mother, father, brothers, sisters? I don't remember being troubled by any of that, then. All I felt was a wonderful strange sense of floating free. Seed on the wind, drifting in the gusts. Go wherever the wind goes.

But I am Rom, of course. When we stay too long in one place we begin to rust. The slavemasters were simply doing me a favor by plucking me away. Setting me free by sending me off into new slavery. They were the ones who put me on the road I was meant to travel.

There's no world anything like Megalo Kastro in the known-that is, the human-inhabited-part of the galaxy. The name means Great Fortress in Greek, one of the ancient languages of Earth, and indeed there is a great stone fortress there, looming like a colossal crouching beast at the top of a rugged cliff overlooking the sea. But it wasn't built by Greeks. It wasn't built by anyone who could claim kinship to either of the two human races.

You don't have to walk more than a dozen paces down the Equinox Hall of the fortress of Megalo Kastro to realize that. The hall gets its name because twice a year the pulsing golden-red light of the sun comes through an archway and strikes the pommel of an altar at its western end, precisely at the equinoctial moment. Nothing extraordinary about that; paleolithic men were setting up altars like that on Earth twenty thousand years ago.

But the geometry of Equinox Hall takes your breath away. I mean that literally. Walk a few paces along that twisting corridor of roughhewn green stone and you begin gasping a little. It's like walking on the deck of a heaving ship. Everything is disorderly and unstable. You expect the walls to start gliding back and forth. A few paces more and you start to sweat. The vaulted roof twenty meters overhead is undulating, or seems to be. Your eyes are throbbing next, because they can't quite follow the lines of the architecture and keep going in and out of focus. The whole structure is like that: alien, oppressive, fascinating.

No one knows who built it. There it stands, gigantic, terrifying, mysterious, half in ruins, telling us nothing. The archaeologists think it's five or ten million years old. It can't be much older than that, they say, because Megalo Kastro is a young planet and tremendous geotectonic stuff is going on all the time; at the rate continents rise and fall there, the fortress can't be enormously ancient. But it looks a billion years old. In one of the cellar rooms there's the outline of a single large hand in what looks like chalk, but isn't, on the wall, and that hand has seven fingers of equal size and a pair of opposable thumbs, one on each side. Perhaps one of the builders amused himself by sketching it in during his lunch break. Perhaps it was put there as a joke by some member of the exploration team from Earth that first found the place. Who can say? If we could dig up some alien artifacts in the vicinity, that might tell us something, but the only artifact we have is the fortress itself, brooding at the edge of the sea.

And that sea-that nightmare of a sea. There are many life-forms on Megalo Kastro, nearly all of them large, predatory, and nasty. It's a young world, as I say: this is its Mesozoic that's going on now, and everything has fangs and scales. But the biggest life-form of all is one that is, thank God, unique to Megalo Kastro. The sea itself, I mean. Not a true sea at all, but a horrendous vast pudding of pale pink mud, warm, quivering, sinister, unfathomably deep, that stretches across an uncharted gulf ten thousand kilometers wide.

That sea is alive. I don't mean that it's full of living things. I mean that it is a living thing, a single malign entity with some sort of low-level intelligence. Or, for all anybody knows, intelligence on the genius level. It thinks. It perceives. You can actually observe its mental workings: questing ripples on its surface rising in little interrogative quivers, short-lived protuberances like exclamatory worms, puckered bubbling orifices that come and go. God knows what evolutionary process brought it into being. God knows, but no one else does. Scoop a section out to study it and all you have is a lump of watery mud, rapidly growing cool. And the thing from which it was taken lies there with its feet basking in the warmth of Megalo Kastro's subterranean magma and its arms resting on the shores of the far-flung continents, laughing at you. And it will eat you if you give it the chance.

Believe me. I know.

The crust of Megalo Kastro is loaded with all manner of valuable elements that were consumed long ago on older worlds, and a dozen different mining companies operate there. Most of them are looking for transuranics, which fetch a good price in nearly every solar system, but there was also a Rom outfit at work hunting for rare earths, especially the scarcest of them, thulium, europium, holmium, lutetium.

(Those who rarely leave their home worlds are forever surprised to learn that all the planets of the galaxy, no matter how far away or how strange they may be, are composed of the same general bunch of elements. I think they believe that alien worlds ought to be made up of alien elements, and that there's something improper-boring, even -about finding such things as oxygen and carbon and nitrogen on them. As though an atom with the atomic number and weight of hydrogen could be something else besides hydrogen on some other world. Only an idiot would think that every planet has its own periodic table. There's only one set of building blocks in this universe: did you think otherwise?)

Mining on Megalo Kastro is an unpretty business, considering the heat, the humidity, the toothy monsters lurking behind every toothy bush, the frequency of devastating volcanic eruptions, and the various other disagreeable qualities of the place. Nevertheless it's a profitable industry, to say the very least, and the whole planet has a wild boomtown atmosphere where money flows freely from pocket to pocket. Which makes it a fertile sphere of operations for the Guild of Beggars.

It was Lanista who taught me how to beg. Our lodgemaster. He was of the Sinti Rom, twenty years old or maybe thirty, with strangely pale skin and cool eyes set very far apart in his head. "You smile at them," he said. "That's the key thing, to smile. You make your eyes shine. You make yourself look pathetic and appealing all at once. You put out your hand and you break their hearts."

I began to see why the guild had paid a premium price for me. I had the shine in my eyes. I had the smile. I was a choice urchin, winsome, irresistible, clever.

"What if they won't give?" I asked.

"When they say no and shake their heads, you look them right in the eyes. You smile your sweetest smile. And you say with a voice like an angel's,

'Your mother sleeps with camels.' And then you move along as though you have given them your greatest blessing."

I liked the idea of being a beggar. It didn't offend my sense of pride. It was a challenge; it required technique. I wanted to be good at it. By o Beng the Devil, I wanted to be the best!

Later when I went ghosting forth on Earth and saw the Rom of the old days I watched them at their begging with the eye of one professional for another. They were good. Very good. I saw the Gypsy mothers in the street whisper to their little ones, four years old, five, "Mong, chavo, mong"-beg, boy, beg!-and send them out among the Gaje. To train them, to develop their skills early. Begging helps to teach you not to know fear. Fear is a useless luxury when it is the Rom life that you live. A little of it gives you the spice of wisdom, any more than that and you are made helpless.

Begging is useful in another way. It makes you invisible. Most people don't want to see a beggar, because the sight of him stirs guilt and anxiety and niggardliness and other negative feelings. So a beggar can move among a crowd practically unnoticed except when he insists on being seen.

(I should make it clear that the prime activity of the Guild of Beggars isn't begging. Begging pays the company's expenses, more or less, but the main work of the guild is espionage. No one spelled that out for me when I came to Megalo Kastro. But it became obvious as time went along.)

When he was finished instructing me Lanista furnished me with the accoutrements and regalia of my profession. My alms bowl, into which money could be dropped but out of which money could not be taken without setting off an alarm. (The bowl would also sound its alarm, loud enough to shake a comet from its orbit, if it ever wandered more than three and a half meters from my body.) My staff of office, signifying that I was a licensed beggar and that all funds I took in would be put to pious uses. My red neckerchief, which all guild beggars wear so that they can recognize each other at a glance and keep a proper distance. And my holy amulet, a small flat plaque of silvery metal chased with intricate coruscating patterns in some scintillating darker substance, which I was to hang about my throat under the neckerchief to protect me from unspecified perils of the soul. The amulet contained a recorder sensitive enough to pick up anything spoken within a fivemeter radius of me, but Lanista saw no need to tell me that.

"You are all ready now, Yakoub," he said. A car was waiting outside the lodge to take all the beggars to town for the morning's work. Gently he shoved me toward it. I turned and looked back and he made a secret Rom sign at me and winked. "Go," he said. "Mong, chavo, mong!"

IT WAS A HIDEOUS TOWN, NOTHING MORE THAN SHACKS of corrugated tin splotched with purple mud from the unpaved streets. Light rain fell about six hours out of every ten and the air was so thick with mildew and mold that it had a greenish cast. White furry things sprouted in your lungs every time you drew a breath.

But the begging was good. The miners would come back from their shifts and draw money from their pay accounts for a quick holiday, and they thought it was bad luck to let the money stay in their pockets too long. Mainly they spent it on gambling, drink, drugs, and whores, as men in such towns have done since time began. But there wasn't one of them who wouldn't toss a handful of obols into a little beggar-boy's bowl, and when you happened upon one at just the right moment of exuberance he'd grandly fling you fifty minims, a tetradrachm, even a cerce piece or two, whatever happened to be in his purse. It added up.

Though I was the youngest and cutest and probably the cleverest, I was also the newest and maybe the most innocent. That cost me at first. You had to have a territory; and of course the established boys of the guild already had staked out the most lucrative zones for themselves. As for the other boys who had arrived with me, they were anywhere from two to five years older than I was, and were quick to grab the best of what was left for themselves. The best I could do was lurk around the edges of the town. I was lucky to bring in five obols a day.

That was bad. We were credited with a percentage of our take toward the price of buying our freedom, and if I kept on at that rate I'd still be a slave to the guild when I was a hundred years old. I didn't want that and neither did the guild: a beggar older than about twelve was useless to them and they wanted us to be able to buy our writs and clear out when we were no longer efficient producers. Often they would ask the most capable ex-beggars to sign on as freedmen in the upper hierarchy,though.

Once I realized what was happening I found a niche for myself that the other boys hadn't bothered to notice. Instead of soliciting the miners I solicited the whores.

Their guild had the same buy-out deal that ours did, but they were bound by a minimum ten-year indenture and so they didn't feel the same pressure that we did to earn and save, earn and save. And quickly I found how easy it was to wheedle the coins from them. Just bring out the maternal in them, that was the ticket. Let them mother you. And they'd pay and pay and pay.

Good God, how I wish I'd been older! I spent my working days in this perfumed crib and that, letting them hug me against their shining jiggling breasts or nuzzling up with my cheek to their plump jewelsocketed bellies. Even after all this time I still remember them vividly, even their names: Mermela, Andriole, Salathastra, Shivelle. The fragrance of their bodies. The silken sheen of their thighs. Those rosy nipples, that rippling resilient flesh. Every one of them was beautiful. (Perhaps it wasn't really so, but that is how I remember them, at any rate, and so be it: they were all beautiful.) They let me touch them everywhere. They giggled, they laughed, they loved it. And they loved me. When the customers showed up I quickly went out the back way, though some would let me stay, hiding behind the curtains and listening to all the panting and groaning. I would watch now and then, too. I learned a great deal very young. And into my begging bowl went the obols and tetradrachms and once in a while a gorgeous five-cerce piece shining with all the colors of the rainbow.

In the whorehouse district I was everybody's mascot, everybody's toy. Some of the younger ones-they weren't more than thirteen or fourteen years old themselves-were even willing to give me a little first-hand instruction in the mysteries of love. But of course I was only seven and that would have been not only an abomination but a waste of their time and mine besides. I was content to learn by observing, at least for another couple of years.

How the money rolled in! There were days when I could barely carry my bowl back to the lodge, it was so stuffed with coins. (My recorder was stuffed, too, with the intimate chatter of the whorehouses. I still had no idea that the senior members of the guild were miners of sorts themselves, that they spent hours every night processing our tapes, filtering the idle noise and panning for the data that we beggars were being paid to collect, such nuggets of information as whether the men in the mines were cheating their employers by withholding the locations of rich lodes of ore.)

In short order I was the star of the guild. The big producer: the number-one beggar. I knew that because Lanista and the other senior brothers of the lodge treated me with great warmth and respect and also because of the obvious envy and even coldness of my fellow beggars. Well, I could handle that part of it. When my cabin-mate Sphinx tried to cut in on my bordello territory I took him aside and beat him bloody. I was eight and he was eleven; but I had my career to look out for.

Now for the first time ghosts were beginning to visit me with some regularity, too. That was the most exciting thing of all, even more than the games I was beginning to play with the whores in the cribs, even more than the occasional sight of some snarling giant reptile looming outside the force-field that protected the town.

I knew a little about ghosting. There had been that old witch-ghost in my earliest boyhood, though I had never spoken of her to anyone. But when I was a little older I heard something concerning ghosts from my father, who had strived with such skill to prepare me for everything that was coming in adult life, and I came to suspect that a ghost was probably what that old woman had been. But though she must have visited me five or six times when I was very young, I had not seen her since I had left Vietoris, or anyone like her. And so it was a little startling, years later, when the ghosts began to come to me on Megalo Kastro.

"It's something that only the Rom can do," is what my father had told me. "And not every Rom; for it takes training, it takes will. And you must have the power in you in the first place. To leave the body, to split yourself off and go wandering across time and space-"

When the first ghost came I thought he was my father. He hovered by my side: big, powerful body, blazing eyes, black mustache, somehow transparent and solid both at the same time. There was an aura around him. His laugh was wondrous: like the rolling thunder that descends from the mist-plateaus of Darma Barma, where great lightnings crackle every moment of the day. Anxur was with me, and Focale, but the ghost didn't let them see him. Nor did they hear that splendid laughter.

He looked liked my father but something was wrong, something about his face was a little off. Of course. The ghost wasn't my father: he was me. But he didn't tell me that. All he did was grin and touch my shoulder and say, "Ah there, you Yakoub. How big you're getting!

How well you're doing! Keep it up, boy. Everything's moving in the right direction!"

That ghost came three or four times a year, and that was about all he ever said to me. There were two other ghosts I sometimes saw, a youngish man and a very beautiful woman, who never said anything to me, simply stared and stared as if I was some kind of curiosity or freak. I had no idea who they were and it was a long time before I found out. But I came to welcome their very infrequent visits. It was a warm, secure feeling, knowing they were near. I thought of my ghosts as guardian angels of a sort. And so I guess they were.

It was all right, those first few years on Megalo Kastro. I was growing fast and getting shrewd. I was putting money aside for my freedom. I had vague thoughts of buying my writ by the time I was ten and going swaggering back to Vietoris as a freedman to work at my father's side in the staryard.

But then everything started to change, very quickly and very much for the worse.

First there were shifts in the top levels of the guild lodge. Apparently this was a custom of the guild, to keep anyone from building a private power base. The preceptor-general was transferred to some other world and a new man came in from one of the Haj Qaldun planets, and then the procularius was replaced, and soon afterward we got a new abbotprincipal. The last to go of the original guild officers was Lanista, the lodgemaster, the only Rom in the hierarchy of our lodge and my particular ally; and once he was gone I felt suddenly very alone. Especially since the new hierarchs proceeded to impose a set of startlingly cruel new regulations upon us.

I never learned whether they instituted their "reforms" because orders had come down from the high command of the guild to tighten the expenses of the lodges or simply because they were persons of cold and astringent spirit. Perhaps it was some of each. But we were informed, a week after Lanista's departure, that from then on our share of our daily take would be cut to one fifth of its former amount, and that the calculations would be adjusted retroactively for the past eighteen months. Also daily begging hours were to be extended and we would be expected to contribute ten obols a day toward our meals, which until then had been provided by the lodge without cost. There was a sudden sharp drop in the quantity and quality of lodge food, too -not that it had ever been anything extraordinarily fine.

None of this made much sense to me then nor does it now. Starving your workers is not a good way to increase production. Making it virtually impossible to buy our freedom not only went against the stated guild policy of trying to clear us out by the time we were twelve, but completely removed our incentive to fill our begging bowls. (But of course it was the conversations we were taping, not the coins we were wheedling, that the guild was really interested in. Even so, our earnings were far from trifling.) The best explanation I can give is that they were trying to turn us into malcontents so that they would have a pretext for selling us off while still under indenture rather than letting us work our way free. A petty policy and a self-defeating one, but human history is full of such things.

Did we protest all this, you ask? To whom? And for what purpose? We were slaves.

I still felt such joy at going forth among my voluptuous ladies-and now I was nearly ten; I was daily being initiated into new mysteries that the changes at the lodge made little difference to me at first. But I was growing swiftly and I felt hungry all the time under the new rations, which made me furious. And at the monthly accounting I discovered that I was now hopelessly far away from my writ of freedom, my return to Vietoris, my family, my father. So when my fellow beggars began to agitate and conspire among themselves, I found myself very willing to throw in my lot with them.

Focale was the leader. He was the tall flat-faced boy who had asked me my price on that first day of our journey to Megalo Kastro. I had disliked him then. But we had become friends, more or less, afterward. He was taller now and even less lovely of face, with strange tiny features and little washed-out eyes.

"We should escape," he said, one day when we were in the baths. Because we were not wearing our amulets, his words would not be recorded for our masters. "They can't hold us. We'll make our way to the starport and smuggle ourselves on one of the outbound ships."

It was complete foolishness, of course. But you must remember we were still only children.

All the same we gave it a try, not once but four times. We slipped out of the lodge and went on foot through town and to the port, hoping to stow away.

We were caught every time. The proctors suddenly looming up before us and behind us, the hands clamping down on the backs of our necks, the kicks and slaps, the days of bread and water: it happened that way every time. We never had a chance of getting away. There were televector transmitters in our holy amulets that constantly broadcast our locations, but we didn't know that. One time they actually let us get within sight of the port. We stared at the great ships standing nose to the sky and tried to imagine what worlds they might be bound for. "Galgala!" cried Focale. "Where everything is golden." And Anxur whispered, "No, Marajo! There's a desert there that has sand bright as diamonds." Sphinx spoke of the lush glistening forests of Estrilidis, where the cats had two tails. And then the proctors rose up and seized us and beat us until we whimpered for mercy.

That was our third attempt. We never saw Focale again after that. We assumed he had been sold off the planet, for he was the worst troublemaker in the lodge.

Even without him we were determined to escape. I more than the others; I became the ringleader in his place, though I was one of the youngest. My slavery, which had rested comfortably enough on me during the first few years, now was an intolerable burden. I was furious all the time. I bubbled with wrath and impatience. Why should I spend my boyhood on this miserable sweaty world, nibbling on dry crusts and begging in grimy whorehouses for small coins? I lived day and night only for the moment of attaining freedom. As I made my way through the town I studied the maze of alleyways and covered passages, plotting a course that I imagined would allow me to give the proctors the slip. My friends the whores would help me. I meant to scramble from crib to crib, hiding behind their skirts and under their beds, zigzagging across the town until I reached the place where I could run for freedom. Then I'd have to take my chances with the winged and beaked horrors of the jungle outside, but I had a plan. I would go west, away from the port, and seek refuge for the night in the great fortress overlooking the sea. They would never expect that; they would think I was terrified of going near that place. Everyone was. But I was Rom; why should I fear a pile of old stones? I would hide there and let them believe I had been eaten by some monster of the wilderness, and after a time I would slip away, bypassing the town entirely. When I reached the spaceport I would cry sanctuary to the first Rom I spied and that would be an end to my slavery. Or so I thought.

They caught me before I got halfway across town and this time they beat me without pity. I thought all my bones would break, and perhaps they would have, except that I was young and limber. Then they took me before the procularius. That bleak and frosty man glowered at me and asked the lodgemaster, "How many times does this make for him?" "His fourth attempt, Sir."

"Where did we get such trash? Do with him as you did with the other. The ugly one."

So they would ship me wherever they had shipped Focale. I didn't care. It couldn't be any worse than staying at the lodge.

A guild proctor with a beefy red face and thick hulking shoulders ordered me into a land-car and we drove north and then west for half an hour or so. It was a sweltering day and the sun had a heavy gray-green veil over its face. After a time I saw the dark looming bulk of the ancient fortress outlined against the sky ahead.

Despite all my bravado I caught my breath sharply and shrank back into my seat. Why were we going there?

But we weren't. The proctor turned off on a side road that led straight to the sea. We halted at a turnoff and he ordered me out. The road here ran along the seaward side of a steep cliff made of some soapy-looking soft green stone, badly chipped and cracked. The sea lay twenty or thirty meters below; it was a straight drop down from the shoulder of the road. I looked over the edge. I had never had a close look at the sea of Megalo Kastro before. It was nothing at all like water; it was pink and stiff-looking, like some kind of disgusting custard, and steam was rising from it. The surface of it was rough and gritty. There was nothing like surf or waves. It lay almost inert, pressing up against the shore, making small, sinister rippling motions.

The proctor seized my amulet and pulled it away from my neck. "You won't be needing this any more, little Rom." He was too I saw what was about to happen and tried to break free. quick for me. He seized me by the waist and lifted me high overhead in one swift motion and hurled me far out into that loathsome sea.

I WAS DEAD. I HAD NO DOUBT OF THAT IF I DIDN'T BREAK my neck as I hit the surface of the sea I would be devoured in an instant by it. As I soared and plummeted I was sick with fear, knowing that this was my end. For years I had heard tales of this strange sea, how it was one giant living organism thousands of kilometers deep and broad. How it fed on the creatures of the land that tumbled into it, how sometimes it even would extend a sticky tendril of itself onto the shore to snare something passing by.

I was a long time falling. It seemed to take an hour. It went on so long that my fear left me and I grew impatient to know what would come next. I felt the warmth of the sea rising toward me and its strange odor, sweet and not unpleasant, struck my nostrils. Hot wind-currents played over the surface. I thought of my father and my sister Tereina and of the plump little whore Salathastra. Then I hit.

Despite the height from which I had fallen my landing was soft and easy. The sea seemed to reach up to catch me and it drew me down into itself Quietly I lay just beneath the surface, unmoving, not even bothering to breathe, cushioned by the density of the strange warm fluid.

Was this what being dead is like? How restful!

I floated. I drifted. The sea took me and carried me. I felt my clothing dissolve. Perhaps my skin and flesh were gone too and I was nothing but bones glistening in the steaming pink mud. I kept my eyes closed. I felt fingers of the sea caressing me everywhere, my thighs, my belly, my loins, unseen slithering serpents sliding over my body. There was a kind of ecstasy in that. The sea made soft sucking noises. It burbled and squeaked and hissed. I stretched out my arms and I could touch the fingertips of one hand to the shore and the other to the shore of the distant unknown western continent ten thousand kilometers away. My toes dangled down to the roots of the planet, where hidden volcanoes poured forth fiery lava.

It is digesting me, I thought.

It is making me part of itself.

I didn't care. I was dead. I loved the sea and I loved being eaten by it. Being absorbed by it. Becoming part of it.

Then a deep voice said, "Swim, Yakoub." "Swim where?"

"To the shore. This stuff can't hold you." "It's eating me."

"It will if you let it. But why let it?" "Who are you?"

"Open your eyes, Yakoub."

I didn't. I went on drifting. Warm, safe, sleepy.

"Yakoub." The deep voice again. More insistent. "Wake up. Wake up, you coward!"

That stung. "Coward? Me?" "You heard me."

"Why coward?"

"Because you are selling your whole life to this thing, and for a foolish price. Are you afraid to live? Are you afraid to do all the great things that destiny holds for you?"

I opened my eyes. There was purple haze all around me. I saw a ghost above me in a shimmering golden aura. Blazing eyes, black mustache. My father's face, almost. Almost. Not my father, but close kin all the same, someone I knew well. Knew better than my father, even. He looked angry but he was smiling also. "Yakoub," he murmured. Gently, now. "Swim, Yakoub. You must. This death is not for you." "What death is, father?"

"I am not your father."

"What is it you want me to do?" "Swim."

"How?" "Lift your arm. Good. Now the other one. Kick. Kick. Kick. Good, Yakoub. Kick. Kick."

The wriggling fingers of the sea danced about me like worms standing on their tails. Sea-stuff was in my mouth, my eyes, my ears. A strand of it held me around my throat. Another stroked my genitals, and I grew stiff there, and thrust with my hips, driving against the resilient warm mud. Now and again I opened my eyes. Colors flashed everywhere. The shore was far away, a black line against the sky. The ghost still hovered over me, eyes bright with encouragement. He said nothing.

But I could hear his booming laughter every time I swam another stroke. I saw other ghosts now, too, five, six, a dozen of them. The beautiful woman again. Beckoning to me, urging me on. Images flickered in the air, throngs of people, grand robes, glittering headdresses, strange planets, awesome ceremonies. Was it the sea that was throwing up these scenes, or my guardian ghosts? Swim, Yakoub. Swim. Swim! What a struggle it was! I yearned to let go, to relax, to give myself to the sea, to allow myself to slip down into that vast warm caressing body. That great mother. But the ghosts were unrelenting. Swim, they insisted. Swim. Swim. Swim!

And I swam.

I discovered how to pull energy from the sea, to draw on it instead of letting it draw on me, and I swam toward shore with steady strokes now. Never pausing. Never faltering. I gained in strength with each stroke. How could I let myself die here? There was so much for me yet to do! Life was calling to me. Swim, Yakoub! Live, Yakoub!

I saw a colossal tree growing right at the edge of the sea. Its roots were deep down in the sea-bed and its trunk, a vast white shaft streaked with strands of pale purple, rose swift and straight for a hundred meters or two, not branching at all except at the top. I think the tree was sea-stuff too, for its enormous crown, spreading like a huge umbrella and casting a giant blue shadow, was in constant metamorphosis. Eyes, faces, coiled serpents, long fluttering leaves, fiercely beating wings, cool flickering flames, everything swarming, writhing, changing, nothing the same for two seconds in a row. I thought that one of the faces I saw was that of Focale, but it came and went too quickly for me to be certain.

That tree was life to me. It throbbed and surged with the vigor of constant transformation that is life. I swam toward it. I knew it was my sanctuary. I could hear it singing to me, and as I neared it I sang also.

I saw the gnarled roots rising above the sea-surface, and I seized one and clung to it and pulled myself hand over hand across its smooth slippery sides until I was up out of the sea entirely. I lay there for a time, gasping. Then I rose and walked down the narrow ridge of the root's upper face until I came to the trunk itself, and I embraced it, stretching out my arms as wide as they would go, which was scarcely enough to reach a fiftieth of the way around that trunk.

And then I was ashore. I was naked and my skin was glowing with the warmth of the sea. Nothing could frighten me now. It was like a birth, coming forth from that sea. Under a glowering sky I began to walk eastward, not caring if I had to walk across half a world. I would make it.

I walked for days. No creature molested me. A bird-like thing with rubbery wings the width of a house flew above me much of the way, enfolding me in its purple shadow. Sometimes I saw familiar ghosts. At last I came to a place where the belly of the earth had been split open and the pistoning arms of huge dark machines rose and fell, rose and fell, sending up clouds of white steam and black geysers of mud. Some men standing beside one of the machines pointed at me. I went to them. A smiling Rom face looked down at me.

"Sarishan, cousin," I said in Romany. "I am a runaway slave and I cry sanctuary, for my masters have treated me wrongly." I felt calm and strong. I had come into my manhood in that sea.

THE OUTPOST I HAD REACHED WAS THE ONE WHERE ROM miners were at work excavating for rare earths. They fed me and clothed me and kept me with them for a month or two. Then they put me aboard a starship that was heading into the arm of the galaxy known as Jerusalem Spill, where the worlds are packed thick and close. I would have gone home to Vietoris if I could, but no one at the mining camp had so much as heard of Vietoris, and when I tried one night to show them, in what was probably a completely wrongheaded and incorrect way, where in the sky Vietoris was located, they said that there never were any ships out of Megalo Kastro that headed in that direction. Perhaps that was so. In any case it was probably best for me that I ultimately went where I did, for that was where I was meant to go. The gods had decreed that the Vietoris part of my life was over.

The ship I did take was a third-class freighter with a Gaje captain but a Rom pilot and crew. They found out quickly that I was Rom too and I spent most of my time in the jump-room, watching them gear the ship up to wink-out. They even let me stay there for the leap itself, when the pilot grasped the jump-handles and poured his soul into the soul of the starship and sent it across the light-years. I watched the pilot's face in the moment of leap, when he did that special thing that only the Rom of all mankind are capable of doing properly. I saw the ecstasy in it, the sudden beauty that came over him-and he was not a beautiful man-and in that moment the yearning awoke and burned in me to grasp jump-handles myself, to give my soul to a starship's soul, to be one of those who pilots the great ships in the enormous void.

"My father works on starships," I said. "You probably know him. His name is Romano Nirano. He fixes the ships that come to Vietoris." But they had never heard of Romano Nirano, and they had never heard of Vietoris. Because they liked me, they opened their big startank for me, a black sphere in whose swirling opal-hued depths all the stars of the galaxy were shown, and they tried to look up Vietoris. But they had trouble finding it because I was unable to tell them the name of Vietoris' sun; it had always been just "the sun" to me, and that wasn't good enough. Finally someone keyed into a planetary atlas and located Vietoris for me and they showed it to me in the star-tank. It was off in an unimportant corner of the galaxy and we were getting farther and farther from it with every leap. So I would not get to go home.

It saddened me that none of these Rom starmen knew of my father. I had thought he was famous from one end of the universe to the other. "Here's where you'll get off, boy," the pilot said. He picked up the pointer and showed me a star-system midway across Jerusalem Spill, where five worlds whirled around a mighty blue sun. "The end of the line. There are Rom aplenty there, but beyond these worlds you won't have a chance of finding your own kind."

That was how I came to live on the kingly planet of Nabomba Zom, in the palace of Loiza la Vakako, who would be like a second father to me, and more than a father. I was twelve years old, or perhaps thirteen. On Nabomba Zom I grew and blossomed. On Nabomba Zom I became who I was meant to become.

LOIZA LA VAKAKO WAS LOWARA ROM, OF FABULOUS wealth and legendary shrewdness. Lowara are always good at amassing money and shrewdness is their second nature. The entire planet of Nabomba Zom belonged to him, and fourteen of its twenty moons. He ruled this great domain and its kumpania of many thousands of Rom like a Gypsy king of old, without cheap pomp or foolish pretension but with complete strength and assurance. Much later, when I was king, I patterned my style more than a little after that of Loiza la Vakako. At least in superficials. Of course he and I were really very different sorts. He was a natural aristocrat, cool and self-contained, and 1-well, I am not like that. Kingly, yes. Cool, no.

I was covered from head to toe with the bright crimson manure of salizonga snails on the day he and I first met.

My friends the starmen had dropped me off at Port Nabomba as part of a cargo of agricultural implements: the cargo manifest listed so many tractor drives, so many rotary aerators, so many ground-effect harvesters, and "one Yakoub-class agricultural robot, humanoid model, one half standard size, expandable, self-maintaining." I stood in the midst of all the crates with a yellow cargo tag dangling from my ear. The customs inspector stared at me a long while and said finally, "What the hell are you?"

"The Yakoub-class agricultural robot, humanoid model." I grinned at him. "Sarishan, cousin."

He was Rom, but he gave me no greeting in return nor did he seem amused. Scowling, he checked through the cargo manifest, and his scowl grew deeper and blacker when he found the entry in question. "You're a robot?"

"Humanoid model."

"Very funny. Expandable, it says." "That means I'll grow."

"Expendable is more like it. How old are you?" "Almost twelve."

"That's pretty old for a robot. What the hell are they doing dumping obsolete machinery on us?"

"I'm not really a-"

"Stand over there and keep quiet," he said, checking me off. "Item twenty-nine, one crate tractor drives-"

So I entered the kingly planet of Nabomba Zom as a unit of agricultural machinery and that was almost exactly how they treated me at first. Still wearing my tag and clutching the little overpocket containing the gifts from the starmen that were my only possessions, I was unceremoniously loaded on a truck a few hours later, along with a crate or two of the other newly arrived farm gear, and taken out to a plantation in the heart of a wide, lush valley somewhere in the interior of the continent. I spent the next six months there, shoveling the precious manure of the salizonga snails.

You would quiver in your boots if you ever saw a salizonga snail bearing down on you in its inexorable way, snorting and snuffling and dropping tons of vivid excreta in its wake. The salizonga snail is the biggest gastropod in the known universe, a ponderous creature eight meters long and three or four meters high, encased in a domed shell of overlapping glossy yellow plates thick as armor. Terrifying as it looks -the great waving eye-stalks, the tremendous rubbery pedestal of a foot-the worst it can do to you is trample you to death, which it certainly will do if you don't get out of its way. It won't eat you, though. It won't eat anything except a certain red-leafed moss that will grow only in the interior of Nabomba Zom, which by not much of a coincidence is the only place in the universe where the salizonga snail is to be found.

No one would give a shit-so to speak-about this bulky monstrosity, if not for the fecal matter which it deposits with irrepressible zeal and in astonishing quantity as it thunders through its favorite pastures. This brightly colored stuff contains an alkaloid from which a perfume is distilled that is desperately coveted by the women of five thousand worlds. Only the male salizonga secretes the valuable alkaloid, and unless the manure is collected and refrigerated within a few minutes of excretion the alkaloid will break down and become worthless. Therefore it is necessary for human workers to follow the snails around robots don't seem capable of distinguishing between male and female salizongas, the distinction being an extremely subtle one-and hastily shovel the newly dumped male-snail dung into refrigeration tanks before it loses its commercial value. This was the job that I was given on my second day on Nabomba Zom. It did not strike me as an enormous improvement over panhandling in the fleshpits of Megalo Kastro.

Well, it is the decree of God that man born of woman shall work for his daily bread, and woman born of woman likewise; but nowhere did God specify that anybody was entitled to pretty work. At that moment of my life shit-shoveling seemed to be my assignment, and at that moment of my life I saw no immediate alternative at hand. I will not pretend that I came to enjoy the work, but in truth it was less unpleasant than you might imagine, and without any effort at all I can think of eight or ten far less delightful professions, though I would rather not. In astonishingly short order I stopped thinking entirely about the nature of the commodity I was handling and simply kept my mind focused on staying alive out there in the manure-fields. (There was some risk involved because the huffing and puffing of the snail you were following would drown out the sound of any other one in the vicinity, and it was all too easy to be crushed under one of those massive whopping ambulatory mountains if it came up behind you while you were concentrating intently on the snail just ahead.)

Nabomba Zom is one of those worlds that has no seasons. Night and day are of precisely equal lengths and the climate is nothing but delightful all the year round. So I am me rely guessing when I say that six months went by while I was on that plantation. During that time my voice grew deeper and my beard began to sprout. And one day there was much excitement at the far end of the plantation-cars, shouts, people running back and forth. I wondered if some careless soul had been fatally flattened by a snail. Then the foreman buzzed me on my ear-phone and told me to head for the plantation-house that minute.

As it happened I had suffered a little accident just a few moments earlier. The snail I was following had suddenly gone into high gear, and in my effort to keep up with him I had slipped on a patch of the red-leafed moss and gone skidding belly-down into a mound of dung the size of a small asteroid.

"I need to wash first," I told the foreman. "I'm all covered with-" "Now," he said.

"But I'M-', "Now.

They brought me before a man of astounding presence and power, who might have been fifty years old, or eighty, or a hundred fifty. I never knew, and he never seemed to grow a day older in all the years I was with him. He was slender for a Rom, almost slight, with narrow sloping shoulders and a shallow chest, and he wore no mustache. In his left ear were two silver rings, an ancient style just coming back into favor among us then. There was wondrous shrewdness in his face: a quick sly smile, just a wry twitch of his cheek, really, that warned potential adversaries to beware. He was no one you would want to try to best in a bargain. To say he looked shrewd was like saying that water looks wet. His eyes were ferociously penetrating. I felt transparent before those eyes: he was seeing my guts and my bones. As I stood before this formidable regal man all splattered and plastered and encrusted with snail-slops, he reached out his hand toward me.

"Closer." "Sir, I-"

"Closer, boy. What's your name?"

"Yakoub. My father is Romano Nirano of Vietoris."

"Romano Nirano, eh?" He seemed impressed, or so I imagined. "How old are you?"'

"Going to be thirteen, I think."'

"You think. Runaway slave, are you?" "A traveler, sir."

"Ah. A traveler. Of course. The grand tour of the universe, beginning with the celebrated snail-honey farms of Nabomba Zom. What are you, Kalderash Rom?"'

"Yes, sir."

"Are you good with machines, as all the Kalderash are supposed to be?"

"My father is the greatest mechanic in the staryard of Vietorion."', "Your father is, yes." He nodded and pondered a moment. Then he turned and beckoned into another room. "Malilini? Is this the one you meant?"

A woman came out, or a girl; I was never sure. She might have been sixteen, or twenty-six, or thirty-six. Her age would always be her secret. She was unusually beautiful, and beautifully unusual. Her hair was an azure cloud, her eyes were warm and dark and set very far apart, her lips were full and inviting. I had seen that face before, but where? One of the whores in the mining town? No, none of them had been as beautiful as this. Some passenger on the starship? No. No, I remembered now: it was the face of the lovely ghost who had come to me several times on Megalo Kastro, both at the beggars' lodge and when I lay drifting on the living sea. She had never spoken to me, only stared and smiled. We looked at each other now as though we had known each other a long while.

"Yakoub," she said. "At last."

I was bitterly ashamed, standing before such beauty in my dungstained work-clothes.

V "My daughter Malilini," said the kingly man. "I am Loiza la akako." He gestured to his robots. "Clean him. Dress him." They stripped me naked in an instant. I felt less ashamed being naked before her, before him, than I had been in my dreadful filth. They sprayed me and dried me and trimmed my hair and to my amazement they even ran a shaving-beam over my downy cheeks, and then they wrapped me in a pearly gray robe with a red sash and a high collar of deep rich blue. One of the robots spun a mirror out of air molecules in front of me to let me inspect myself. I was lovely. I was lost in admiration of myself. All this had taken only minutes. Malilini was glowing with pleasure at my transformation. Loiza la Vakako came close and examined me. He was scarcely any taller than I was. He studied me, nodding, obviously satisfied.

Then he took my elegant collar in both his hands and with one quick yank he ripped it halfway loose on the left side. I was stunned and appalled.

Loiza la Vakako laughed, a great whooping Rom laugh.

"May all your clothes rip and wear out like that! But may you live in health to a great old age!"

I realized that he was speaking to me in Romany. It was one of his Lowara customs, this ceremonial tearing of my new finery. He clapped me on the back and led me outside. By this time I understood that he was the Rom baro here, the great man of this planet, and I was going to live with him. I was not allowed to go to my hut for my things; but when we arrived at his palace after a three-hour flight across the shimmering wonder of that magnificent continent, my few pitiful little possessions were waiting for me in my suite of rooms, along with a host of lavish new belongings whose uses I was barely able to comprehend.

Now did I truly come to learn the meaning of splendor. The palace of Loiza la Vakako stood on the shore of a sea nearly as strange as the one that had come close to claiming my life on Megalo Kastro, for its water was red as blood, and throbbing heat came from it, almost at boiling temperature. Then there was a beach of pale lavender sand sloping steeply up toward a broad ridge where, amid a dense garden of shrubs and trees from a hundred worlds, the palace rose in airy swoops and arabesques. I never knew how many rooms it had, and very likely the number changed from day to day, for the palace was a thing of billowing fabric and sliding struts, light as a spider's web, forever transforming itself in new and ever more lovely ways as the rays of the hot blue sun waxed and waned through the day. Here I would live as a young Rom prince, dressed in the finest of robes, a new one every day, and dining on delicacies such as I had never imagined before and have never tasted since; here I would discover the meaning of wealth and power and the responsibilities that such things bring; I would have my first understanding of the mysteries of ghosting; here too I would learn a thing or two about the nature of love. But the greatest lesson of all that I would learn on Nabomba Zom had to do with the impermanence of grandeur and pleasure and comfort: for after having lived in the greatest of luxury until I had come to take such things utterly for granted, I was to see it all snatched from me in a moment. And snatched from the lordly Loiza la Vakako as well; but that was far in the future just then.

HE HAD EIGHTDA UGHTERSBUTNO SONS. DAUGHTERSARE a delight-I have had many of them myself, and would gladly have had more-but there is a way that a man feels about his sons that is quite diffierent from the way he feels about daughters, and it has to do with the fact that some day we must die. When a man sees his son he sees the image of himself- himself reborn, himself regenerated, his own replacement, his claim on the future. Through his sons he marches onward into the centuries to come. They bear his face; they have his eyes, his chin, his mustache, his heart and balls. I love my daughters with all my heart but they cannot do that special thing for me that a son can do, and there is a difference in that, and any man who says it is not so is lying to you or to himself or both. At least this is it how it is among the Rom, and has been since the beginning of time. It may be otherwise for the Gaje; I have no way of knowing and no great concern about it.

I would not make too much of this matter. But when a man is as powerful as Loiza la Vakako, and has no sons, and takes in an unknown little dung-splattered boy to live in his home, there might be significance in it. Six of his daughters were married and lived in the far reaches of Nabomba Zom or on its major moons. He treated their husbands as princes but not, I think, as sons. A seventh daughter-Malilini-lived with him at the palace. Nothing was ever said of the eighth, though her portrait hung beside the other seven in the great hall; she had quarreled with her father long before, over what I will never know, and had taken up residence in some far corner of the galaxy.

Loiza la Vakako also had a brother, who ruled two of the outer and less blessed worlds of this solar system. Pulika Boshengro was his name and Loiza la Vakako rarely spoke of him, though he too was in the family portrait gallery, a dark man with a narrow forehead and a long dour face. In the portrait he looked so little like Loiza la Vakako that it was hard for me to believe that they had sprung from the same womb; but when I finally met him, many years later, I was able to see the resemblance instantly: in the bones beneath the flesh, in the soul behind the eyes.

Grand though his palace was, Loiza la Vakako allowed himself surprisingly little time to take joy of it. Even in him, that settled and contemplative man, the Rom restlessness dominated. He was constantly on the move, forever setting forth on journeys of inspection across his far-flung domain. He had to know what was going on everywhere. Though all the overseers of his plantations were capable and loyal, Loiza la Vakako could not allow himself to be a mere absentee master. And also he was Rom baro here, he was head of the Gypsy kumpania of Nabomba Zom, which meant that he had all manner of judicial and ritual responsibilities to carry out among his people.

From the beginning I often rode beside him when he made these tours. And learned more of the art of governing in a single afternoon than six years at a university could have given me.

Nabomba Zom is one of the nine kingly worlds of the galaxy. That is, it is a planet that was especially chosen by the Rorn as their own, when the first settlement of the stars was carried out nine hundred or a thousand years ago. The rulers of the kingly worlds-the others are Galgala, Zimbalou, Xamur, Marajo, Iriarte, Darma Barma, Clard O Msat, and Estrilidis-hold their power, technically speaking, by direct grace of the King of the Rom, and each has the privilege of nominating one of the nine krisatora, the judges of the highest Rom court. Of course I knew very little of all this when I first came to live with Loiza la Vakako, but gradually he educated me in the intricacies of the system by which we hold our sprawling realm together.

As I traveled with him I came to comprehend something I had never suspected as a schoolboy on Vietoris or as a slave on Megalo Kastro: that to rule is a burden, not a privilege. There are certain rewards, yes. But only a fool would accept that burden for the sake of the rewards. Those who hold power do so because they have no choice: it is God's decree that has descended upon their heads and they must obey. Even if Syluise thinks it is not so.

I watched Loiza la Vakako, then, making decisions about the planting of crops or the damming of streams, about the price of grain, about trade with other planets, about taxes and import duties. I watched him holding court and settling the bewildering disputes of petty people in outlying provinces. And I thought of the lesson they had been trying to teach me on my last day at school, about the Thirteenth Emperor and how hard he worked. I had wondered then why an emperor would want to work so hard, when supreme power was his. Why not spend all your days and nights in feasting and singing and sipping fine wine? Now I understood that there was no choice about the work. It was the price of supreme power. It was what supreme power was: the privilege of toil beyond the comprehension of ordinary beings. There had never been any ruler, I realized-not even the famous wicked tyrants, not even the murderous monstrous villains-who had not found himself harnessed to the plow the moment he ascended the throne of office.

Still, there were comforts if you wanted them. A bit of compensation, I suppose. Loiza la Vakako toured his realm in an air-car that was a little palace in itself, a sleek teardrop-shaped vehicle bright as fire that moved with the speed of dreams. When you were aloft you had no sense of motion: you might have been drifting on a magic carpet. And there were soft wondrous draperies fashioned from the black-and-scarlet mantles of the great clam of the Sea of Poets, there were cushions upholstered in the shining leather of sand-dragon skin, there were floating globes of pure cool light. When we dismounted we were greeted by bowing officials who had strewn carpets of petals for us, and servants were waiting with fresh robes, bowls of fragrant juices, ripe fruits, smoked meats of mysterious origin.

Yet despite all this magnificence Loiza la Vakako's private quarters, both aboard the air-car and wherever he stopped to spend the night, were always strangely austere: a thin mattress on the floor, plain white wall-hangings, a pitcher of water by his side. It was as if he accepted the grandeur as something necessary, a requirement of office, but gladly put it all aside when he could be alone. If you would see the truth of a man, look at the room where he sleeps.

Nabomba Zom is a world that lends itself to magnificence. I have never seen any place more beautiful except for Xamur the matchless, which no world could surpass. But Nabomba Zom comes close. There is the amazing scarlet sea, which at sunrise reverberates as though struck by a hammer when the first blue rays of morning fall upon it. There are the pale green mountains soft as velvet that run down the spine of the great central continent, and the chain of lakes known as the Hundred Eyes, black as onyx and just as glistening, that lies east of them. The Viper Rift, that serpentine chasm five thousand kilometers long, whose walls shine like gold as they descend an unmeasurable distance to the fiery river in its remote depths. The Fountain of Wine, where invisible creatures carry out natural fermentation in a subterranean basin and a geyser sprays their delightful product into the air every hour. The Wall of Flame-the Dancing Hills-the Web of Jewels -the Great Sickle. And all the fertile fields, from which every manner of crop pours forth. There is no world more bountiful. Even the dung of the giant snails, as I had already had occasion to discover, was of no little value.

Of course I didn't spend all my time touring this planet of wonders in Loiza la Vakako's air-car. There was the rest of my education to consider. I could read and write, more or less, but that was all the formal learning that I had arrived with. Loiza la Vakako had reasons -sound ones, as I would discover-for wanting me frequently to travel by his side as he carried out his official functions, but he also brought in tutors for me at the palace and he required me to take them seriously. Which I did; I have many appetites, and one of them is for knowledge. There is more to life than belching. I applied myself to my studies with zeal and dedication.

And then there was Malilini.

I didn't know what to make of her. She moved through the palace like a sprite, a goddess, a ghost-like anything but an ordinary mortal. I don't think I spoke six words to her, or she to me, in the first three years I lived there. But often I saw her watching me-she had her father's sly eyes-covertly from a distance, or simply staring frankly at me when we were in the same room.

She terrified me. Her beauty, her grace, her strangeness. I knew that she had come ghosting to visit me on Megalo Kastro-staring at me then too, never saying a word-and that she had watched over me as I lay adrift in that warm quivering sea into which the guild's man had thrown me. Why? Why, when they had summoned me from my dungshoveling duties, had she said "Yakoub. At last," at our first true meeting? art of my character; but I didn't dare ask. Shyness has never been in this one instance I was afraid to seek explanations, for fear I would shatter some fragile spell that was binding the two of us together. I told myself that in time I would know. Until then, wait. So I waited. I grew tall and broad and strong, and I let a mustache grow so that when I looked in the mirror I began to see myself with my father's face, and I learned languages and astronomy and history and many other things, and at dawn I would ride across the plateau behind the palace on the supple six-legged Iriarte horse that Loiza la Vakako had given me for my last birthday. Sometimes I would see her far away, glowing in the blue sunrise, riding an even swifter horse. Though I grew daily deeper into manhood, she never seemed to change: always a girl at the edge of woman's estate, radiant, without flaw.

Sometimes it wasn't Malilini that I saw, but Malilini's ghost. I saw her aura. And her ghostly smile, flickering only a moment out of that aura before she vanished, could set me ablaze with strange and troublesome emotion.

In those days I understood very little about ghosting, nor was there anyone I could turn to for information: it has never been something that we discuss easily even among ourselves, let alone care to set down in books. I had known since my days on Megalo Kastro that it is somehow possible for certain people to split their spirits loose from their bodies and go roaming around in far places, apparently invisible to most people but capable of making themselves seen-in a strange not-entirely-there way-whenever and to whomever they chose. These ghosts had an aura, an electrical crackling about them.

I realized now that one of the ghosts that had visited me on Megalo Kastro was Malilini's. And-now that I was beginning to wear my adult face-1 became aware that one ghost, the one with the long mustache and the great roaring laugh, was very likely my own. Even now I saw him from time to time. Hovering for a flashing instant in the air in front of me, winking, grinning, amiably slapping my cheek in a lusty greeting.

If that man was me, I reasoned, then I must be capable of going ghosting. But how was it done? How? How?

Sometimes I would sit by myself for hours at a time on a great throne-shaped green rock at the edge of the scarlet sea and try to do it. I imagined myself driving a wedge down the side of my brain the way a stonemason would split a block of marble with a chisel, and spalling off a part of my soul that would be free to go floating to other worlds, other times. It never worked. I gave myself monumental headaches, as though someone really was hammering at my brain with a mason's wedge, but nothing else ever happened.

And then one day I found Malilini suddenly sitting beside me on that great green throne. I hadn't noticed her approaching at all.

"You'd like to know how to do it, wouldn't you?" "What?"

"Ghosting. That's what you're trying to do. I know."

My cheeks flamed. My eyes would not meet hers. "What makes you think so?"

"Yakoub, Yakoub-"

"I'm simply trying to review my quadratic equations."

Her hand came to rest on mine. Her fragrance dizzied me. "Let me show you how," she said.

THE FIRST TIME YOU GO GHOSTING IS THE MOST FRIGHTENING experience you will ever have in your life. I think even dying must be a trifle, compared with that.

Your soul breaks in half. Part of you drops like a leaden turd to the ground and the other part bursts free, soaring up wildly, a starship out of control making random leaps across the cosmos. But it isn't just the cosmos you're traveling through. It's the river of time. That river flows from past to future, and you are heading upstream.

You see everything that ever was in all of time and space and none of it makes any sense to you. Whatever you see you are seeing for the first time. A chair explains itself to you, or a flower, or a fish, and you are incapable of understanding. You walk down a highway and you are not sure whether you are going east or west, until you realize that you are going in both directions at once. You are lost beyond hope. You choke on your own bewilderment. You wish you could cry but you have no idea what crying is like, or wishing.

A primeval terror takes hold of you, a fear that shakes you like a hundred earthquakes at once.

People you have never seen before smile at you and greet you-or are they saying goodbye? You take five steps up the hill and discover that you are descending. There are no landmarks. The world is water. The horizon bends. The stars fall like rain and make hot golden splashes all around you. You hear the sound of weeping; you hear laughter; you hear nothing. Silence tolls like a great bell. The world is a whirlpool. You begin to drown. Some creature is lodged in your throat. Your eyes are spinning in your head. That primeval terror intensifies and now you begin to understand what it is. It comes from the heart of the universe. The fear that you feel is the force that binds the atoms of the universe together. It is the fundamental substance. What makes all those particles cling to one another is terror: the dread of chaos. Of loneliness. Of loss. And with that understanding the fear begins to ebb. All bonds are loosened and it does not matter. You can learn to love chaos. Everything is streaming away from the center and all is well.

When the fear goes and the atoms lose their grip on one another, then at last you find your footing. You are floating freely in utter void. There is no way for you to fall because nothing exists. And in that emptiness you are able to make any choice you desire.

Here, you say. I will go here. You get there just like that. No one can see you unless you want to be seen. You don't collide with anything that's already there because you're surrounded by a thing called an interpolation zone that pushes everything out of the way. So you want to go to Megalo Kastro. Sure: there you are, Megalo Kastro. And you hover in the air over a steaming bowl of warm pink mud that spans half a world. A naked boy lies bobbing on the breast of that quivering fluid mass. He seems asleep. Dreaming. You smile at him.

"Yakoub?" you say. Your aura crackles. He opens his eyes. They shine with strength and fearlessness. Your ringing laughter enfolds him. "Swim, Yakoub. Swim. Swim."

How easy this is, now that you know the way!

HER HAND WAS STILL RESTING ON MINE. WHEN SHE MADE a small movement as though to draw it away, I held it, and she did not resist. tro in the I said, "Why did you want to go ghosting on Megalo Kas first place?"

"To look at you."

"But you couldn't have any idea I existed!"

"Oh, yes," she said. "Of course I knew you existed." "How could you?"

"Because you were going to come here."

"And how could you have known that?" I asked.

"Because you are here now," she said. And then she laughed. "Don't you understand? There is never any in the first place.