Star of Gypsies

4. People, Places, Worlds

Consider, for example, the times of Vespasian. Thou wilt see all these things, people marrying, bringing up children, sick, dying, warring, feasting, trafficking, cultivating the ground, flattering, obstinately arrogant, suspecting, plotting, wishing for some to die, grumbling about the present, loving, heaping up treasure, desiring consulship, kingly power. Well, then, the life of these people no longer exists at all. Again, remove to the times of Trajan. Again, all is the same. Their life too is gone. In like manner view all the other epochs of time and of whole nations, and see how many after great efforts soon fell and were resolved into the elements. But chiefly thou shouldst think of those whom thou hast thyself known distracting themselves about idle things, neglecting to do what was in accordance with their proper constitution, and to hold firmly to this and to be content with it…

What then is that about which we ought to employ our serious pains? This one thing: thoughts just, and acts social, and words which never lie, and a disposition which gladly accepts all that happens, as necessary, as usual.

- Marcus Aurelius

I THOUGHT OF MALILINI NOW AS I STOOD IN A BROAD GLITTERING field of Mulano's crusted ice, waiting for the relay-sweep to carry me into space. How she had brought magic and mystery into my life; how I had loved her; how she had been swept away from me down the river of time. What if she had lived, and I had been able to take her to be my wife? An idle thought. Meaningless. Useless. Like asking myself, What if rain were to fall upward, What if gold grew on trees, What if I had been born a Gajo instead of a Rom? On Galgala gold does grow on trees. But I am Rom and the rain falls as it has always fallen and Malilini is long dead and will be dead forever more.

I was alone. Damiano had already gone on ahead to make his own plans and preparations. We would meet again later. It was nearly the last moment of Double Day. The two suns of Mulano hovered on the horizon, about to plummet from view. The sky was dark green, quickly deepening into the gray of the momentary twilight. I narrowed my eyes and searched the heavens for Romany Star, as I had always done at that moment of the day.

And in that moment the dazzling radiance of the relay-sweep aura burst high into the air and a roving tendril of the sweep found me and caught me up and flung me far out into the Great Dark. Goodbye, goodbye, a long goodbye to my quiet life on Mulano! Yakoub's on his way again.

Only a madman could enjoy traveling by relay-sweep. And if you aren't a madman when you set out, there's a fair chance that you will be by the time the sweep turns you loose.

For some people it's the sheer peril of the process that sends them around the bend, or the absurd implausibility of the whole thing. What you are doing, after all, is going out by yourself into space without a starship around you or anything else except an invisible sphere of force, and dropping in free fall through hundreds or even thousands of lightyears, which is one hell of a drop. The sweep picks you up and flicks you out into nowhere, and there you stand, neatly cocooned in the little sphere of safety that your journey-helmet has woven about you, plum meting across the universe with nothing but empty space at your elbow. It's vertigo to the fiftieth power for anyone who allows himself to buy into the notion that he's actually falling from one end of the galaxy to the other.

That part of it has never bothered me at all. When you have held the jump-handles in your hands as often as I have, when you have lifted starships through wink-out and hurled them across the sky, a little bit of relay-sweep travel doesn't seem like much of a challenge.

Gypsies were born for traveling, anyway, and any means of transportation that takes you from one place to another is all right with us. It isn't as though you see stars and planets flashing by all the time: you aren't in realspace at all, but in this or that adjacent auxiliary space, taking zigzag shortcuts through wormholes in the continuum. Which is why the journey doesn't take you thousands of years and why you aren't in any danger of getting tossed into some star or crashing into a planet that happens to lie in your path. So there's no serious risk in it. Oh, maybe one traveler in a hundred thousand gets caught in a shunt malfunction and spends the rest of his life out there in his sweep-sphere, hanging suspended in the middle of nowhere for ten or twenty thousand realtime years. That's a miserable kind of fate but the odds against its happening to you are pretty favorable ones. Practically every relay sweep traveler gets where he wants to go. Eventually.

No, what troubled me wasn't the risk: as I've already said, it was the boredom. The stasis. The utter inexorable inescapable solitude. The mind going clickety-clack while the body rests in metabolic slowdown. The clamor of your thoughts. No one to talk to but yourself as the random search of the space-time lattice goes on and on and you wait for the shunt that will bring you out on an inhabited world reasonably close to the one you intended to reach. A starship's wink-jump is fast. Relay isn't. You dangle out there and you wait. And you wait.

I am, God knows, enormously fond of my own company. I can amuse myself thoroughly and consistently. All the same, enough can sometimes be enough, and maybe even a little more than that.

What the hell. Nobody had forced me to go creeping around in remote worlds that didn't have regular starship service. Of my own free will had I chosen to go to Mulano. Now, of my own free will-more or less-did I choose to return, and the only way to get back was by relay-sweep, and so be it. I would simply be patient until my patience was exhausted, and then I would find some more patience somewhere. As it happened, I was lucky this time.

I braced myself for the long haul and muttered a bahtalo drom for myself, and off I went. I took a deep breath as the stars winked out all around me and I dropped into auxiliary space. And in that gray dreary nowhereness I sang and told myself jokes and laughed loud enough to bend the walls of my sphere. I recited the whole Rom Swatura from beginning to end, the entire ancient chronicle starting with the departure from Romany Star and running through all that had followed it; and when I ran out of that I dreamed up a fanciful continuation of it that stretched over the next ten thousand years that are to come. I made a poem out of the names of all the Kings of the Rom spelled backwards. I drew up lists of all the other kings and emperors I could think of out of Earth history. I made a list of every woman whose breasts had ever felt the touch of my hands. Oh, yes, I passed the time.

On and on I plummeted, toppling through space. I don't know how long the journey took. It didn't matter at all. You have no real way of telling anyway. Once I made a relay jump that covered a mere fifty light-years and cost me a full year of elapsed realtime time. On another jump I crossed from Trinigalee Chase to Duud Shabeel, which is about as far as you can go and still remain in the known part of the galaxy, in less than an hour. There's never any way of knowing how it will turn out.

But this time the time passed very swiftly for me. Maybe my body was in suspended animation but my mind was throbbing and pulsing with eager plans. I had been in cold storage on Mulano too long; now I was impatient to get back into the Empire and set to work at the heavy tasks that faced me. Sometimes impatience can make a long journey seem a thousand times as long as it is, but this time it had the opposite effect for me. I was keyed up. I was charged. A hundred seventy-two years old, me? Up your buliasa! I felt like a boy again. Not a day over fifty, me.

Going back, taking charge. Setting straight all that had become snarled during my absence. Doing something about the state of the Empire, the state of the Kingdom, the antics of the high lords, the maneuvers of my terrible son Shandor-oh, yes, there was plenty waiting for me! I loved it. I swam in it all the way back. It was the shortest swiftest jolliest relay-sweep journey I had ever undertaken.

Ah there, you worlds of the Imperium! Remember me? Hoy! Yakoub! Yakoub! Yakoub!

On my way back at last!

IF THINGS HAD BEEN DIFFERENT I WOULD HAVE BEEN Loiza La Vakako's son-in-law and in the fullness of time I would probably have come to inherit the rich overflowing bounty that was Nabomba Zom. Certainly things were heading in that direction. And then someone else would have become King of the Gypsies, most likely, because why would I have let them talk me into leaving my real and glorious domain and my true and splendid palace to take up all the heartaches and struggles of the Kingdom?

But that was not how things worked out. Maybe in some other universe Yakoub grew rich and fat and old and sleepy and died happily in the arms of his beautiful Malilini years ago by the shores of the scarlet sea. And the crown of the Rom went to some dazzling brilliant leader whose cleverness was far superior to mine and who has already reclaimed Romany Star for his people and done many other wonderful things. But in the universe where I live everything has turned out in quite another way.

I regret all those splendors and happinesses that I might have had but lost, I suppose. And I suppose I should lament all the hardships that came my way after the downfall of Nabomba Zom. All the same, though, do I have any real complaint? I've eaten well and lived well and loved well. I have been given great tasks to do and unless I am greatly fooling myself I think I have done them well. Take one thing and another and it seems to me that the life I have lived hasn't been anything to lament about, bumps and bruises notwithstanding. We need a few bruises, and worse than bruises, to teach us the real meaning of happiness. And in any case this was the life I was meant to live: not the other. That one was only a dream.

Strangely I am unable to remember when Malilini and I first became lovers, I who remember so much and in such fine detail. But it was a gradual process and maybe there was no first time. Perhaps we always were lovers. Perhaps never.

We went riding together and swam together in the warm streams that fed the hot scarlet sea and sometimes we went ghosting together, now that I had learned the trick of it. We slipped away in our ghostly way to most of the other kingly worlds, Marajo and Galgala and Darma Barma, Iriarte and Xamur. I had never dreamed such richness could exist, as I saw on those noble planets. The universe seemed to me to be like a great hymn of joy, crying out in beauty from a thousand throats at once.

We went far in space when we ghosted but we never went any great distance in time. A year or two back, five, ten, that was all. I think she feared breaking away into the deeper realms of time. And in those days I never knew that it was possible, or I would have raged hungrily for it: to see old lost Earth, to visit the pyramids of Egypt and the temples of Babylon, to ghost on backward in time into Atlantis itself. Even to visit Romany Star! But none of that did I do, for lack of knowing that it could be done.

I was a man now and Malilini still was whatever Malilini was: beautiful, unchanging, ever young. I suppose we kissed, finally. I suppose we clasped hands and held them that way for an hour. I suppose we came laughing out of the crimson stream and shook our naked bodies dry under the powerful blue sun and turned to each other and embraced. And then I suppose a moment came when the embrace went on and on until there was no longer any boundary between her and me, and we fused into one, her long slender thighs clasped about me, her pale supple slender form and my thick-muscled shagginess joining at last. And then that fiery spurting moment of pleasure. But I have lost the memories of it. I suppose thinking of these things was too painful.

I knew her but I never knew her. She never said much. She was sparkling and airy but also she was elusive, remote, always an enigma. Why hadn't she ever loved before? Why did she love now? I never looked for answers. I know I would never have received them. I would have done as well turning to the stars in the heavens and asking why this one burned with a blue fire and this one with a red, this one yellow and this one white.

Even so, it was understood after a time that we were betrothed. I began calling Loiza la Vakako "father" and it seemed completely nataral. Vietoris and my real family were as forgotten to me as yesterday's dream. When I rode out across Nabomba Zom in the air-car of Loiza la Vakako I knew that I was being groomed to take his place some day as the monarch of this resplendent world. By now I had met the husbands of his other daughters and I could tell that each of them had failed in some way to fulfill the hope that Loiza la Vakako had placed in him. That was a wound and a sadness to Loiza la Vakako, but he would never let it show. They were good men, they ruled their provinces carefully and well, but there was some last measure of depth and breadth missing from them, it seemed, and none of them would inherit the domain, only that part of it that was his own fief.

And V What did I have that they lacked?

I didn't have the foggiest idea. But Loiza la Vakako saw it. Somehow he saw the kingliness in me when I myself felt not a trace of it. I had been a little slave boy and then I had been a snotty street-begging urchin and now by some flukish turn of fate I was living the life of a rich young prince, but rich young princes are generally not very profound characters and neither was I. What I wanted most to do was ride on the moors and swim in the scarlet ocean and plunge into the shimmering depths of the Hundred Eyes, and then to turn to Malilini and slide my trembling hands along the insides of her thighs; and somehow Loiza la Vakako saw in me a king. Well, there was a king hidden inside me, all right. But it took Loiza la Vakako to perceive him there.

To celebrate our betrothal he gave a grand Rom patshiv, a ceremonial feast. And that was the one mistake he made in all his serene and rich life of wisdom and foresight, and it brought his ruination and mine.

The patshiv was months in the planning. Word went out to all corners of Nabomba Zom that the cream of every harvest was to be set aside for it; and the agents of Loiza la Vakako on all the kingly planets and half the worlds of the Imperium were instructed to ship wondrous foods and wines to us. Loiza la Vakako's six married daughters and their six princely husbands were to be there, and even Loiza la Vakako's brother, the dark and somber-faced Pulika Boshengro, would come down from his realm on one of the neighboring worlds.

A great pavilion was built in the courtyard of the palace, and long tables, Rom-fashion, were set up under an arbor of arching glimmervines that would cast a sweet tingling radiance over the feast. Now came the cooks, platoons of them, legions of them, to set to work at mincing meats and chopping garnishes, seasoning the game birds with sage and thyme and marjoram, flavoring the beasts on the spits with peppercorns and rosemary, preparing the huge platters of beans with cream and lentils, mashed peas in vinegar, cucumbers rich with yogurt and dill, the olives, the horseradishes, the meatballs spiced with nutmeg, all the dishes that have been beloved of the Rom for so many thousands of years. And the casks of wine! The flagons of brandy! The barrels of beer!

And when everything was ready and the whole clan had assembled Loiza la Vakako came forth from the palace in robes of such majesty and opulence that it was hard for me to remember the simplicity of his private rooms, the austerity and even asceticism of his inner life. I was in robes of the same magnificence, walking beside him. And Malilini, shimmering with her own beauty and gowned in something that seemed to be nothing more than spun air, against which her dark glowing loveliness burned all the more brilliantly.

Loiza la Vakako had intended this feast to be one such as Nabomba Zom had never seen before. That would go down in the legends of the Rom as unsurpassed in all our history and unsurpassable by the generations to come. Well, there is no denying that it was a feast such as Nabomba Zom had never seen before. But not in the way that Loiza la Vakako had in mind. And as for being unsurpassed and unsurpassable-no, that was not to be.

We took our seats at the high table: Loiza la Vakako in the center, his brother Pulika Boshengro at his left, Malilini to his right, me on Malilini's other side. All about us were lords and ladies of the realm, the six daughters, the six sons-in-law, the local archimandrite and three of his thaumaturges, the imperial consul and a bunch of his hierodules, assorted high vassals from the outlying plantations, and a host of others, including a cadre of nobles that Pulika Boshengro had brought with him from his own court, all garbed in swirling costumes of the most startling brightness.

Loiza la Vakako stretched forth his arms in benediction, inviting everyone to sit.

The servitors poured the first round of wine. They heaped the salads and smoked meats on our plates. We all waited. The guest from the most distant land must taste the first morsel.

That was Pulika Boshengro. He rose-a small, compact man like his brother, full of coiled energy and passion. His eyes gleamed with a chilly sort of intelligence.

Beside him on the table lay his lavuta, his violin, a good old Gypsy fiddle. This Pulika Boshengro was said to be a musician of high attainments, who would open our feast with one of the ancient tunes, a quick fiery melody to start the festivities the right way. A great silence fell. Pulika Boshengro ran his fingers lightly up and down the fingerboard of his fiddle and reached for his bow. All around the pavilion people were smiling and nodding and closing their eyes as if they could already hear the music.

Pulika Boshengro drew the bow across the strings. But what came forth was no sweet old Gypsy tune. It was three harsh fierce discordant scraping notes.

A signal. A cue for action.

The henchmen of Pulika Boshengro moved with astonishing speed. Before the third note had died away I was pulled roughly to my feet and I felt an arm tight across my throat and a knife in the small of my back. All along the head table the same thing was happening to Loiza la Vakako, to Malilini, to the six sons-in-law and their wives. Sharp gasps went up from the guests at the lower tables, but no one moved. In a single instant we were all hostages.

I turned my head to the left and stared across Malilini at Loiza la Vakako. His face was calm and his eyes were untroubled, as though he had seen this coming and wasn't at all surprised, or as though the strength of his soul was such that not even being seized at his own feasting-table could disturb his balance. He smiled at me.

Then one of Pulika Boshengro's men grunted in alarm. He pointed at Malilini.

If I live to be a thousand this moment will blaze furiously in my mind. I looked toward her; and I saw her face going strange. Her eyes were clouded, her nostrils were flaring, the corners of her mouth were pulled back in a grimace that was not a smile.

I knew the meaning of that expression. She was summoning her power so that she could go ghosting.

Pulika Boshengro knew what that face meant too. And saw at once what I was too dense to understand in that first wild moment: that what she intended to do was slip away a short distance into the past, a week perhaps or even less, and warn her father that his brother must not be admitted to the feast.

Now that coiled energy of his came into play, and that chilly intelligence. An imploder leaped into Pulika Boshengro's hand, a little steeljacketed frog-nosed weapon. He fired once-a soft blurping soundand Malilini seemed to rise and float away from him, up and back and across the feasting-table. She lay sprawled face upward amidst the wine-flasks and the platters of meat and she did not move.

For a moment Loiza la Vakako seemed to crumple. His face dissolved and his shoulders heaved as if he had been struck by an enormous mallet. Then his great strength reasserted itself and he stood straight again, unmoving and seemingly unmoved. But I saw that winter had entered his eyes. And then for a time I saw nothing at all, for my tears came flooding forth and with them came such an eruption of fiery anger that it blinded me. I let out a tremendous cry and tried to swing around, giving no thought to the blade that was pricking my back or the arm pressing with choking force against my throat. My hands were still free; I clawed for eyes, lips, nostrils, anything.

"Yakoub," said Loiza la Vakako quietly. "No.

Somehow that voice cut through my madness; or perhaps it was the powerful arm tightening on my windpipe.

I subsided all at once, and stood slumped, looking at my feet. It was over. We were prisoners and Pulika Boshengro had captured Nabomba Zom with three screeches of his fiddle. A whole world had fallen and there had been but a single casualty.

He had brooded in secret for years over what he imagined to be the injustice of the family inheritance that had given Nabomba Zom to his brother, and nothing but two bleak and stormy little worlds to him. All this time Pulika Boshengro had pretended love and fealty, waiting for his moment. No one but a brother could have overthrown Loiza la Vakako; for he was well guarded and even the armies of the Imperium would have been hard pressed to take Nabomba Zom. But who looks for treachery at his own feasting-table? Who places armed guards between himself and his brother? Certainly not a Rom, you would say, not anyone in whose heart the true blood flows. Our family bonds come before all else. Yet we are not all saints, are we? For Pulika Boshengro there was a stronger force than love of family.

It was done and it could not be undone. No matter that there had been hundreds of witnesses, high officials of the Imperium among them, and judges and senators of Nabomba Zom. To the Imperiurn this was purely an internal matter, a squabble among the Rom lords of Nabomba Zom; there was no reason to interfere. And the judges and senators of Nabomba Zom were nothing more than vassals; they owed their allegiance not to some code of laws but to the prince of their world, who was Loiza la Vakako no longer, but now Pulika Boshengro, by right of conquest.

Primitive, barbaric stuff, yes. But we do well to remember that such things still can happen even in our age of magic and miracles. We may live two hundred years instead of sixty, we may dance from star to star like angels, we may wrench whole planets from their orbits and set them spinning through the sky; but even so we carry the primordial ape within us, and the primordial serpent as well. We live by treaties of courtesy and civilized behavior; but treaties are only words. Greed and passion have not yet been expunged from our genes. And so we remain at the mercy of the worst among us. And so we must beware. Only in a village without a dog, the old Rom saying goes, can a man walk without carrying a stick.

I suppose it still might have been possible to overthrow the usurper and restore Loiza la Vakako to his place, if anyone had been willing to lead the way. Pulika Boshengro had come to Nabomba Zom with only a handful of men from his home world. And Loiza la Vakako was wise and good and everyone loved and respected him, while Pulika Boshengro had shown himself to be a man to fear and mistrust.

But there wasn't any uprising of loyal vassals. After the first shock and amazement of the events of the banquet and the coup that had followed it, life went on as usual for the people of Nabomba Zom, both great and small. The family of Loiza la Vakako was in custody-we were all dead, for all anyone on the outside knew-and there was a new master in the palace. A change of government, that was all it was. Within days the vassals of Pulika Boshengro were arriving by the thousands and the spoils were being divided; and that was that. Loiza la Vakako had fallen; his wealth and splendor had passed to his brother; life went on. And I had lost my beloved and all my bright prospects for the future in one terrible moment.

We were kept in cells behind the palace stables, penned in foul little force-spheres like beasts awaiting the butcher. Loiza la Vakako and I shared one cell. I knew we were going to be put to death sooner or later and I started making my final atonements every time I saw the shadow of the jailer outside. But Loiza la Vakako had no such fears. "If he had meant to kill us," he said, when I had voiced my uneasiness for the hundredth time, "he would have done it at the feast. He'll get rid of us some other way."

He was entirely at ease, altogether placid and composed. The loss of his kingdom, his palace, his world itself, seemed to mean nothing to him. I knew that the murder of his daughter before his eyes had seared and withered his soul, but he refused even to speak of her death and showed no sign of grief

"If only your brother had been a moment slower," I blurted finally. "If only she had been able to get away and give us a warning-"

"No," he said. "It was wrong for her to attempt it." "Wrong? Why?"

"Because no warning was ever given. If it had been meant for there to be a warning, we would have received it, and none of this would have happened."

"But that's exactly it! If she had managed it she could have changed everything!"

"Nothing can ever be changed," said Loiza la Vakako.

There it was again: the fatalism of the Rom, the cool acceptance of what is as what must be. As though it is all written imperishably in the book of time and for all our power of ghosting we dare not try to alter it. A streak of that fatalism runs through our souls like dark oil on the breast of shining water. A thousand times a day I thought of slipping away myself to the hour before the banquet and giving the warning that would save Malilini; but each time I looked toward Loiza la Vakako I came up against his steely acceptance of what had happened, and I didn't dare. No warning could be given because none had been received. As Malilini had said in a happier moment long before, "There is never any in the first place. " Everything is circular and everything is fixed. There is no such thing as prophecy: there is only the giving of reports on the known facts of the future, which is as sealed and unchangeable as the past. When I came to do more ghosting myself I would understand that more clearly. That there is a law-call it a moral law; no monarch ever put it on the lawbooks-that we must not use our power to change the past, lest we tumble everything into chaos. Loiza la Vakako meant to live by that law even though it cost him his daughter and his domain. By daring to break the law that must never be broken Malilini had condemned herself and no one now could save her. I had to abide by that. But inside myself I was screaming against the madness of it, telling myself over and over that it still was possible to save Malilini and to spare Loiza la Vakako from overthrow, if only Loiza la Vakako would permit it. And that he would never do. Why, he seemed almost to be blaming her for her own death!

I waited now for mine. But the days passed and we were left to ourselves, thrown a little food now and then but otherwise ignored. We grew filthy and sour-breathed and our teeth felt as if they were coming loose. I could not believe how far we had fallen. I wondered what depths still gaped for us.

Loiza la Vakako's serenity never faltered. I asked him how he remained so tranquil in the face of such grief and he shrugged, and said that everything was part of God's plan: who was he to debate strategy with the Master of All? It is God who orders events and we who obey, no matter how strange or wrong or even evil the shape of those events may seem to us.

I tried to accept his wisdom and make it part of me. But my despair was too great. I could abide the loss of the comforts that my life on Nabomba Zom had brought. Those things had come to me by pranks of fate; I could accept their departure in the same way. But what kind of God was it who let brother cast down brother? How did it serve the welfare of this world to put the tyrant Pulika Boshengro in the place of the wise Loiza la Vakako? And most bitter of all to me-who could justify the slaying of Malilini? To cast such beauty from the world so soon-no. No. No. No.

Sometimes ghosts came to me as I lay sobbing to myself They never spoke, but they would hold out their hands to me in gestures of consolation, or smile, or even wink. One who came was the one who I now knew to be my future self, robust and hearty and overflowing with laughter. He was the one who winked. So I understood that I was not going to die in this place. And I saw also, from his wink, that my sense of heavy tragic gloom was one day going to lift, that I would laugh and know joy again. Inconceivable though that was to me in my despondency.

What was happening during all these days or weeks of captivity was that Pulika Boshengro was negotiating our enslavement. He meant to scatter the family of Loiza la Vakako to the far corners of the sky.

"All right, come out of there, you two," our jailer told us finally, and we crept forth into the great blue blaze of day.

I had been sold to a place called Alta Hannalanna, which I had never heard of. Loiza la Vakako's lips quirked ever so slightly when I told him, as if he had to struggle to hold back from me the truth of how dreadful a place that was. He himself was to go to Gran Chingada: again, a world unknown to me. I asked him about it and he said only, with a barely perceptible toss of his head, "They have great forests there, extraordinary trees. Wood from Gran Chingada draws a high price wherever it is sold." Only later did I learn what sort of conditions prevailed in the terrifying forests of that prehistoric world: the men in the logging camps were lucky to last eighteen months on Gran Chingada, where the grass itself would eat you alive if you gave it half a chance. Where vampire lizards the size of your hand came springing up out of scarlet flowers and went straight for your throat. Loiza la Vakako was being sent to his death. And so, I suspected, was I, despite the visits of my ghosts. But Loiza la Vakako would not tell me anything at all of Alta Hannalanna.

In those days there was no imperial starship service from Nabomba Zom to Alta Hannalanna, or to Gran Chingada. And so I discovered for the first time what it was like to travel by relay-sweep. Loiza la Vakako and I were marched out and trussed up and journey-helmets were clapped over us and our coordinates were set for us, so that we would be caught and thrown out into space toward the worlds of our slavery.

He was calm to the last. "Think of it as part of your education, Yakoub," he advised me. "Think of everything as part of your education."

And he smiled and blew a kiss to me, and they closed him into his sphere of force. I never saw that great man again, except once, long afterward. My turn came next. I stood there alone in midday sun, half blinded by the glare, not knowing in any way what was about to befall me and trying to tell myself that it was all for the best, that all of this was, as Loiza la Vakako said, simply part of my education. But I was frightened. I would be lying most wickedly if I tried to tell you I was not frightened. I had my whole life still ahead of me and I knew that if I didn't die in this abominable jaunt through space I would surely perish young on Alta Hannalanna, which made me angry but which also filled me with dread. It wasn't being dead that frightened me, but the moments just before dying, when I would lie there knowing that my life was being taken away from me before it had really begun. I did manage to keep my bowels under control, at least; not everyone would have managed that. I waited a long while in terrible fear and then I was yanked aloft and the world vanished about me. I muttered a spell of protection for myself, though I didn't place much faith in its power just then. And I went whirling away into God knows where on my way toward slavery on Alta Hannalanna.

Now, something like a hundred fifty years later, I found myself again and again thinking back to that first relay-sweep journey. How miserable I had been, how terrified, how altogether absurd. But I was very young then and I hadn't yet come to see the world the way a wise man like Loiza la Vakako did. Indeed it is all part of your education, everything. You are never taught anything by hiding in the dark and sucking on your thumb. It is in the water, and only in the water, that you learn how to swim.

Once more now was I flying across the void toward unknown adventures and an unknown fate. But by this time I had already had my education, and I was prepared for whatever would come. And so I sang and laughed and let the time glide by, in my journey back to the Empire from frosty Mulano, until I heard the whistling in my ears that told me that final shunt had been achieved and I was about to make my re-entry into the universe of men.

XAMUR. I knew at once that that must be where I had landed.

There's a moment of serious disorientation when you come out of relay, when your mind feels like it's been turned inside out like a hungry starfish's stomach and you can't tell your fingers from your ears. It lasts anywhere from fifteen seconds to fifteen minutes, depending on the resilience of your nervous system, and while it's going on it feels not tremendously different from the sensations you sometimes feel at the beginning of a ghosting. I went through all that now. This time it lasted about half a minute, for me. But that half minute was enough to tell me that I was on Xamur. More than enough. I knew right away, by the fragrance of the air. By one sweet wondrous whiff of it.

Xamur is listed among the nine kingly planets, but it really deserves some sort of higher designation, though I can't immediately think of one. Godly is a little too strong, maybe. But you get my drift. The place is simply paradise. It is a land of milk and honey and even better things.

The air is perfume-I don't mean the air is like perfume, it is perfume-and the sea might just as well be wine, because a sip of it will make you smile and five sips make you euphoric and a dozen good gulps will lay you out with a case of terminal giggles. The sky is a deep rich blue-green boldly streaked with red and yellow, a fantastic array of colors, and the atmosphere has some electric property that gives everything a shimmering halo, a dreamlike aurora. Under that dazzling sky the landscape is serene and orderly and perfect, almost maddeningly restful, every tree placed just so, every brook, every hill. It's all so beautiful you could cry: you stare at it and you feel that beauty in your heart, your belly, your balls. I can't tell you who made the worlds of this universe, but I do know this: that He must have made Xamur last, because all the other planets were the rough drafts and Xamur was plainly His final revised and edited statement on the subject.

Landing there was a delicious stroke of luck. You can't expect seven-decimal accuracy when you travel by relay-sweep, and in dialing up my destination coordinates when I left Mulano I had specified that any of the nine kingly planets would do. Except Galgala, that is. Galgala was in my son Shandor's control, I assumed, and it didn't seem wise for me to walk right into his headquarters alone and undefended before I knew what was going on. Later on I would do exactly that, of course; but that was later on. Right now any of the other kingly planets would have been an acceptable base of operations for me: Iriarte, say, or my cousin Damiano's Mara' wandering Zimbalou. If I could have picked Jo, or even one, though, Xamur is the one I would have picked. And now I had it.

And it had me.

I stood there in that first dizzy moment breathing in the perfume and staring at the swirling colors of the sky and looking across the way at the green and glorious towers of the city of Ashen Devlesa, whose name means "May you remain with God" in Romany. And I felt myself being grabbed by an invisible force and swept into the air. I went soaring across the countryside in a wild swooping ride that ended when I was dumped down like a sack of onions in an open-roofed courtyard.

I picked myself up, blinking and grumbling, and looked around. Towering columns of speckled blue stone walled me in on all sides. "All right, where the hell am I?' I asked the sky.

And the sky answered me. The sound of my voice activated some sort of responder device and out of mid-air came pleasant synthetic female tones telling me, first in Imperial and then in Romany, "You are in the Ashen Devlesa holding tank of the Imperial Xamur Department of Immigration."

"You mean I'm a prisoner?"

A long itchy silence. What were they doing, looking up "prisoner" in the dictionary?

I breathed perfumed air, in-out, in-out, making little hormonal adjustments to keep myself calm. Vague hissing and buzzing sounds came from overhead.

Then, finally: "You are not a prisoner. You are in detention. You are awaiting normal clearance procedures."

Oh. That was annoying, sure. But not really surprising. Or very threatening, really. This was just bureaucratic bullshit: I knew how to deal with that. I felt myself easing.

When you land on a non-imperial world like Mulano you are of course completely on your own from the moment you drop from your force-field. But if the sweep puts you down anywhere in the Imperium, your arrival is a matter of record once the immigration scanner of the planet where you are arriving detects your signal, which is usually six to twelve hours before your landing. So there had been plenty of time for Xamur Immigration to get a fix on me and grab me with a tractor beam the instant my sweep-tendril released me. A routine pickup of an unscheduled arrivee from God knew where.

"So?" I said. "Let's get on with it, then. Bring on your normal procedures. You think I came to Xamur to stand around in here and admire the architecture of your holding tank?"

Almost at once someone official-looking poked his nose between two of the stone columns. He looked at me and made a little gleeping sound and went away, and came back with another of his kind. They gleeped and gobbled and honked at each other some more and went back outside for further reinforcements. In a matter of moments half a dozen people in the uniforms of the Imperial Xamur Department of Immigration were staring at me in total wonder and disbelief.

They couldn't have been much more flabbergasted, I guess, if they had reeled in the Emperor Napoleon, or Mohammed, or the Queen of the Betelgeuse Confederacy.

They knew right away who I was, of course. Not only by the face, the eyes, the mustachios. Before setting out from Mulano I had taken the trouble to don my seal of office, which I hadn't worn in maybe ten or fifteen years. Now great pulsing heroic splashes of light were cannoning off my brow in that flamboyant gaudy way which is at once so overwhelming and so absurd. It was like a broadcast going out on every wavelength of the spectrum at once, hammering in the news: KINGKING-KING-KING. I might just as well have come out of the relay-sweep wearing a crown of gold and emeralds and rubies half a meter high.

Two or three of the Immigration people were Rom. They were down on their knees in a flash, making the signs of respect and muttering my name. The Gaje ones did no such thing, naturally. But they were plainly taken aback, and they stood there gaping, goggling, twitching, and yawping.

I knew what they were thinking, too. They were thinking, This sly old bastard has turned up without warning, without bothering to trouble himself about using diplomatic channels at all. We can't send him away without touching off a terrific uprising among his followers, but we can't admit him without dragging Xamur into whatever enormous Rom power-struggle the old bastard's return is probably going to touch off, and no matter which way we go we are very likely to lose our jobs over this. Or thoughts to that effect.

I switched off my seal of office. It was blinding everybody in the holding tank. To the Rom who were groveling at my feet I said in Romany, "Get up, you idiots. I'm only your king, not God Almighty." To the others, those miserable terrified Gaje civil servants, I said in a more kindly way, "I'm not here on a visit of state or on any sort of political mission. I've come here purely as a private citizen who owns property on this world."

"But you are King Yakoub?" one of them stammered. "Certainly I am."

"I don't think we have a protocol on former kings," said one of the others nervously, and brought up something on a screen that was just out of my direct line of sight. "Officials to notify, appropriate municipal response, parades, light-spikes, sky-banners, display of regalia, pyrotechnic celebrations-no, there's nothing here that covers any such-" "I'm not a former king," I said quietly.

The Gaje officials looked at me in bewilderment and the Rom officials looked at me in horror.

One of the Rom said, "Sir, the covenant of abdication-"

"Don't worry yourself about it, child. Whatever stories about me that you may have heard coming out of Galgala were highly inaccurate." One of the Gaje -he seemed to be the highest ranking of the bunch made a frantic gesture and something else came sliding up on the screen. This time I moved around and got a squint at it. It was the table of reception protocol for a royal visit.

"You are still king, then?"

"When did I say that?"

They looked more baffled than ever.

But I wasn't ready to take up the issue of whether I was or was not still king just now. Especially not in a holding tank in front of a bunch of Immigration Department flunkeys. Let them puzzle over it, I thought. He denies being a former king-but he doesn't directly assert that he's the present king-but on the other hand-and furthermorenevertheless- con trariwise- Yes, let them stew.

"The question of the kingship is neither here nor there," I said airily. "I just told you: this is a private visit for me. I'm here to inspect my estates at Kamaviben and nothing more. I don't want there to be any fuss made over me." And gave them my most regal glare. "Is that understood?"

BUT I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER OF COURSE THERE was fuss, and plenty of it.

Bureaucrats! Accursed paper-shuffling functionaries! Pettifogging little tenth-echelon panjandrums! I'd sooner have the honest refreshing company of a herd of salizonga snails any day.

In general I am not the sort of person whom anyone is likely to call naive. Not at my age. But I would have to agree that I was being naive, and then some, to have entertained the fantasy that they might have just let me walk out of that holding tank without any sort of complication. There was no way that the King of the Gypsies whether incumbent or retired was going to enter Xamur or any other kingly world in secrecy and privacy, no matter how much blustering and storming he did. That I understood. But I did imagine that they would admit me with a minimum of pomp and circumstance, if that was what I seemed to want.

I was wrong.

Kings and even ex-kings may have vast power over this and that, but when it comes to matters of protocol the bureaucrats always get the last word. In this case I had the Rom immigration people to blame as much as the Gaje, or more so. The Rom saw their king-or their ex-king, whichever I was-coming to town unexpectedly and they felt it absolutely incumbent upon themselves to cry hallelujah over me so that I would be properly covered with the appropriate glory.

Therefore they passed the news of my arrival up to the highest levels of the Xamur imperial administration and inevitably from that point on there was no halting the avalanche-like force of the bureaucracy as it swung eagerly into full action. You can't expect governmental functionaries to carry out any sort of useful activities, naturally-the whole concept is practically a contradiction in terms-but give them something meaningless like an official welcome to organize and it's their finest hour. It was all that I could do to head off a full-scale parade along the shining ramparts of Ashen Devlesa. But I did have to go through an interminable reception at the capital, a grand pyrotechnikon that lit up the skies over four continents, a noisy and crashingly boring concert by the Xamur Symphony, and a banquet so ridiculously inept in its overelaboration that it would have sent Julien de Gramont off weeping to light a candle to the memory of Escoffier.

All of this was a nuisance but in one way it also served a worthwhile purpose for me. It served notice on Galgala and to the Empire at large that I had reappeared. But since I had declined to claim the full royal treatment, had turned down the usual parade and the awarding of the usual decorations, my appearance in Ashen Devlesa created more than a little ambiguity surrounding the matter of my intentions in coming back from retirement. Which was fine. Keep them all guessing: that's always a useful strategy. I didn't say a thing. I smiled a lot and waved a lot and looked sublimely radiant while the speeches were going on around me, and when it was all done with I thanked them politely and went on out to Kamaviben, to my grand estate far off in the countryside by the shores of the Sea of Pleasure.

(Actually Kamaviben isn't all that grand a grand estate, as grand estates go. The grounds are of decent size and the location is sublime, but the house itself, while of some architectural interest, wouldn't raise the pulse rate of a small-town magistrate. At no point in my life have I ever been a particularly wealthy man, you know. And perhaps there is just enough of the old wandering Rom spirit in me to make it superfluous for me to live in a really overwhelming place. I am just as content in an ice-bubble or a roamhome or a simple log shanty as I have ever been in the various palaces that I have occupied in my time. Yet I think Kamaviben is marvelously grand in its way, and I would never want to live in any dwelling more splendid. Or even in any other dwelling at all, unless it be on Romany Star.)

In the years of my absence they had maintained it for me in perfect shape, as though I might show up there unannounced on any given afternoon. The stables were swept, the lawns of quivergrass were impeccable, the double rows of blackleaf pseudo-palms down the main drive had been pruned only a week before. A staff of ten took care of Kamaviben for me, the most loyal and devoted robots on any world of the galaxy. They were sweet machines, my Kamaviben robots: they even spoke Romany. (With a Xamur accent, that faint little lisp.) Of course a Rom craftsman had made them for me, the Kalderash wizard Matti Costorari. I have known Rom that were less Rom than those robots.

From Kamaviben I sent word to those who mattered most to me, telling them I was back. And then I waited.

POLARCA WAS THE FIRST TO SHOW UP NOT HIS GHOST this time, but the true and authentic item. My grand vizier, my good right hand, my companero, my cousin of cousins, my blood brother.

This man Polarca is more dear to me than either of my kidneys. You can get new kidneys if you need them-I have done it-but where would I get another Polarca? I saved his life once, as he never tires of reminding me. I think he regards me as being in his debt because I saved him. That was long ago, on Mentiroso, when we suffered side by side in Nikos Hasgard's foul clutches, which is a story I mean to tell you sooner or later. Since that time we have been brothers. Polarca is small and quick and jittery, a hedgehog sort of man. Like the hedgehog he is very prickly but sweet inside.

He came rollicking in from Darma Barma, where he keeps a grand and glorious floating villa out in the lightning country. He calls it his vardo, his Gypsy wagon, and sometimes he speaks of it as a roamhome, which is a bit like calling a bludgeon a toothpick. But Polarca has always been fond of exaggeration.

He had had a remake since I had last seen him and that took some getting used to. He was wearing his eyes a deep piercing blue now with bright red rims, and his ears were higher and thicker than before, with black fur on them. He looked strange but he looked healthy and full of fire.

"Yakoub!" he cried. "Oh, there, you Yakoub!" "Polarca. Is it really you?"

"No, you antiquated piss-in-bed, it's my other ghost."

I grinned. "Don't you call me names, you slippery mirage."

He radiated love and warmth. "I'll call you what I like, you old ball of grease."

"Pig-poisoner!" "GaJo-licker!" "Chicken-stealer! Pocket-picker!"

"Hah! Oh, you Yakoub!" "You Polarca, you!"

We laughed and hugged and slapped each other's cheeks. We grabbed each other, wrist by wrist, and cavorted up and down the hallways in a wild crazed dance, singing at the top of our lungs. Two roaring bellowing old fossils is what we were, with more life in us than any fifty snotnosed boys. We made so much noise that the robots came to see what the matter was. They looked alarmed and dismayed. Maybe they thought an assassin was in the house. But they are Rom robots at heart; as soon as they saw that this was all friendly, that this was my phral here, my brother, my Polarca, they relaxed.

I told them to fetch us a flagon of my rarest and best brandy, a loaf of palm-tree bread, a cluster of Iriarte grapes. We sat down to table and he opened his overpocket and pulled out the gifts he had brought me. Polarca always brings plenty of gifts and they are always things you might have wanted a year ago or perhaps will want next year, but rarely anything you would want at the moment. This time he came out with an ornate pair of double-vented air-shoes, a magnifying pen, half a dozen ceramic ear-spools, and the complete text of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius inscribed on the eye-tooth of a sanguinosaur. I thanked him most solemnly, as I always did when Polarca loaded me down with oddities and superfluities of that sort. He had also brought with him something that was actually worth bringing: a slab of the wind-dried beef from Clard Msat, which is a delicacy I had longed for with a keen ultraviolet longing during my years on Mulano. Splendid Polarca! How had he known I was yearning for that?

We drank and ate in silence for a time. The brandy was from Ragnarok, a hundred years old, eighty cerces the flagon. You could buy a good slave for less. We talked then of his travels. Incurable wander-itch has afflicted him all his life. Lately he had been to Estrilidis, to Tranganuthuka, to Sidri Akrak. He had ghosted to Earth five times in the last six months, and Mulano on and off maybe a dozen times to check up on me, and some other places besides, an itinerary that would have brought an ox down with apoplexy. There is restlessness in any Gypsy's soul, but Polarca carries it to a lunatic extreme. When he had run through all his travel tales he fell silent again, and we ate and drank some more.

Then he said, "So you came back after all." "So it would seem."

"What day did you return?" "What day?"

"The day of the month." Patiently, as though to a child. "I think it was the fifth of Phosphorus," I said.

"The fifth! Good! Good!" His eyes gleamed wildly. "I win a thousand cerces from Valerian, then!"

"How so?"

"A bet," Polarca said casually. "That you'd be back in the Empire within five years. It was a very close thing, Yakoub. You skipped out originally on the ninth of Phosphorus, you know."

"Did I?' I shrugged. "You two had a bet, did you? Did he think I wasn't coming back at all?"

"He said ten years. I said five. There wasn't anybody who felt you'd never come back."

"You yourself said I wouldn't come back. That time on Mulano, when you were giving me all that bullshit about Achilles in his tent. You said that I was going to stay on Mulano, that that was the wisest thing for me to do."

"So I lied," Polarca said. "Sometimes you need to be pulled around a little by the ears, Yakoub. For your own good." He reached into his tunic and pulled out a deck of cards. They sparkled and hummed on the table between us. "A little klabyasch?" he suggested.

"For money?"

"What else? For the exercise? Five tetradrachms a point."

"Make it a cerce," I said. "I'll relieve you of the pile you've won from Valerian."

He smiled sadly. "Poor Yakoub. You never learn, do you?" He put the cards on autoshuffle and they jumped around like frogs on the table. Then he clapped his hands and they formed themselves into a deck in front of me.

"Your deal," Polarca said.

He hunched forward, eyes gleaming crazily. Polarca plays cards like Attila the Hun. I put the deck on manual and dealt them out, and he pulled them in as if each one was the passport to heaven. And of course the game was a rout. Though he is a small man his hands are huge, and those cards came flying out of them like angry mosquitos. He slapped them down with furious zeal, shouting, "Shtoch! Yasch! Menel! Klabyasch!" and I was done for before I knew it. He took me for a fortune. Well, it makes him happy to murder me at klabyasch, and it makes me happy to make Polarca happy.

As the echoes of the game died away I said, "And tell me how it is, in the Imperium."

"Pah. The usual Gaje lunacy. The Emperor will hang on forever. He's only a shadow. The high lords are behaving like fools and villains. You can see them circling each other, waiting to pounce, and meanwhile the administration goes to hell. The Empire is running on autopilot. Taxes are down. Corruption is up. Whole solar systems are dropping out of the communications and transportation nets and nobody seems to notice. This is an ugly time, Yakoub."

"And Shandor?" I asked, and held my breath.

Polarca looked up at me. His burning red-rimmed eyes held firm on mine a long moment. Then he laughed softly and shook his head and waved his hand, brushing aside my concern the way you might brush aside a mosquito. "Shandor!" he said, chuckling as if he found the name itself amusing. For him, he seemed to be saying, Shandor was a topic hardly worth discussing, a trifle, an absurdity. "He is nothing, Yakoub. Nothing!" Polarca reached for the brandy. The flagon was empty. He tapped its side. "This stuff isn't half bad, you know?"

OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS THE REST OF THEM SHOWED up. My dear ones, those who had been my rod and my staff in the days when I was king. One by one they arrived on the starships that came to Xamur from every part of the galaxy. My cabinet, the inner circle of my court in the days when I had a court. And two others besides, two unexpected guests.

Jacinto and Ammagante came in together, from Galgala. Those two always traveled together, though they could scarcely have been more unalike: Jacinto small and wizened, like some dark hard nut that could not possibly be cracked, and Ammagante tall, big-boned, with the easy open face of a sunny-souled child. In my reign Jacinto had been the money-man, the studier of trends and the manipulator of forces, the one who guided our investments, patiently spinning the web of Rom holdings that stretches from world to world to world. Ammagante was his wizard of communications, through whose long arms flowed the instantaneous impulses that brought Jacinto the information he had to have. There is strange power in that woman. She speaks in tongues. In his infinite wisdom my son Shandor had dismissed them both, and-so Polarca gave me to understand-Jacinto and Ammagante were scraping along now in private scams of their own, earning the odd cerce here and there, managing to eke out some sort of pittance. I could imagine what sort of pittance it was, knowing them as I did.

The same ship that brought them from Galgala brought that cunning old woman Bibi Savina. Our phuri dai, the mother of the tribe. Who would surely have been a king among us, if things had been otherwise. (We can't have women as kings-it isn't done, it has never been done -but in her way the phuri dai is as important as the king. And sometimes more so. Woe betide the Rom king who ignores her advice or denies her her high place. There have been some who have tried, and they have regretted it.)

I think of Bibi Savina as being incredibly old, ancient beyond measure. That is because of the visits she made to me when I was a trousers-pissing babe and she a ghost, ages and ages ago. But in fact she is younger than I am by thirty years or so, though she elects to look like a crone. I greeted her with deep respect, even a little awe: me, awe! But she deserves it. She is a fount of power and sagacity. Of course the change in government on Galgala had had no effect on her authority: the phuri dai is chosen not by the king but by the will of the tribe itself, and once she is in office no king can remove her. Even rash Shandor had enough sense not to try to butt horns with Bibi Savina. But the fact that she had come to Xamur at my beckoning told me where her loyalties must lie.

Biznaga arrived next: my envoy to the imperial court, my link to the galactic government. Elegant and supple, he was, with a diplomat's grace and poise, and a diplomat's fine wardrobe: I never knew anyone who dressed himself as finely as Biznaga. He came in from the Capital, where he had been living in retirement. Shandor had pensioned him off too. He must not have trusted any of my people. I wonder why.

From Marajo, where he had gone to look after his own business interests after his journey to my snowy world of exile, came my cousin Damiano. With him, to my surprise, was young Chorian-the first of the two uninvited guests.

Polarca didn't like that at all. He drew Damiano and me aside and said, "What in the name of Mohammed is he doing here?"

"I thought he would be useful," Damiano said. "He sees things with clear eyes and he has the true Rom fire. And he has served me well on more than one occasion."

Polarca was unimpressed by that fine speech. "He's Sunteil's man, isn't he? Do you want the things we say here to get back to Sunteil?" "The same sun will rise twice in a single day before that happens," Damiano replied, giving Polarca that coiled-spring look of his. "Maybe he draws his pay from Sunteil, but his heart is with us. May all my sons die in this hour if I have told you anything but the truth."

Damiano will bury you under his Rom dignity and his Rom rhetoric when he wants to win an argument. Polarca threw up his hands in despair. But I was with Damiano, this time. I touched Polarca's shoulder lightly. From a distance, Chorian was staring at me with that puppyish adoration and utter awe that I detested and that I understood so well. I think Polarca was jealous of that. He's human too, as much as any of us can be called human; he didn't want anyone to be here who worshipped me more intensely than he did himself But of course Polarca shows his adoration in peculiar ways.

"I don't see any risk in having Chorian here," I told him quietly. "The boy is one of us. I came to know him very well when he was on Mulano with me."

"But Sunteil's own private Rom-"

"He isn't Sunteil's. He just lets Sunteil think he is." "Maybe he just lets you and Damiano think he isn't."

"Polarca," I said, smiling easily, massaging his arm. "Ah, you Polarca. This is nothing but paranoid shit and you know it." "Yakoub, I tell you-"

"Polarca," I said, a little less gently.

Even then there was another round or two of grumbling out of him. But in the end he had to yield, and he did. Chorian was beside himself with relief and gratitude: he knew that a debate had been going on over allowing him to remain. And he was practically frothing with joy at seeing me again. Yet for all his callow ways he seemed less naive, somehow more seasoned, than he had on Mulano. He was beginning to take on a little swagger. Some of that naivete had probably been just camouflage, anyway; but beyond question he was gaining swiftly in confidence these days and must have felt less of a need to hide behind his boyishness. He was going to be useful. Damiano had done well to bring him. Now and then during the conferences of the next few days I saw Polarca still brooding as though he was still absolutely certain we had invited a spy of the Imperium into our midst; but even he stopped worrying about Chorian after a time.

In due course Valerian appeared. Or rather Valerian's ghost, I should say: Valerian didn't dare set foot himself on any world of the Empire, not with that bounty of ten thousand cerces posted on him. Even a Rom might have gone for that. Valerian has plenty of enemies among us, after all: the Gaje aren't the only victims of his piracies. But Valerian or Valerian's ghost, it made no great difference, for Valerian's ghost has such vigor that it isn't easy to distinguish it from Valerian. Except that the ghost, like most ghosts, has a way of drifting a little above the ground, and of emitting a bit of electrical crackle now and then.

Valerian is an extremely theatrical man. There's an aura of high drama about him that precedes him by a hundred meters wherever he goes. He preens, he roars, he gesticulates, he flashes his eyes and strikes poses. He has tremendous style and presence, but it's a style and presence that come out of some grand opera fifteen hundred years old.

Valerian sees himself as the direct ideological heir of Blackbeard and Sir Francis Drake and Captain Kidd and Robin Hood and any other buccaneer who ever lifted a penny from someone else, and like most of them he has the same fine lofty resounding justifications for his depredations. Of course he's really just a criminal. Get one layer down inside him beneath the idealism and you'll find that what he loves is danger and the thrill of living outside the law. Get below that and you discover that secretly he sees himself as nothing but a businessman, an entrepreneur of the star-lanes concerned mainly with risk-to-reward ratios. If you could get below that I think you'd find pure chaos at the heart of his soul.

He is a completely unscrupulous man. But I've never had reason to doubt his loyalty to me. I saved his ass, or at the very least his neck, when he was brought up on serious charges before the great kris of Galgala, and he will always be grateful to me for that.

After him came Thivt, who is the great anomaly in my life and possibly the great anomaly of the galaxy. I regard Thivt as my cousin and at times, like Polarca, a blood brother. He is deeply versed in Rom ways and Rom lore, and I accept him unhesitatingly as Rom. But he isn't Rom, not really. I don't mean that he's a Gajo, either. I'm not sure he's human at all.

He is a changeling, who actually was taken by Rom in childhood and raised by them, just as Gaje folklore would have you believe was our regular custom all during medieval times. An exploration party found him wandering around by himself on a planet in the Thanda Banadareen system. He looked to be five or six years old. The only word he could speak was the one that was assumed to be his name. No parents in sight, no crashed spaceship, no trace of relay-sweep gear to be found, no nothing. Somehow the notion took hold, nevertheless, that he was the only survivor of an unrecorded free-lance expedition. When the explorers left Thanda Banadareen they took him along, back to Iriarte, which is where I encountered him a hundred years or so later. By then he was high in Rom councils and he spoke Romany like a true phral of the blood. He even had learned how to ghost: so far as I know, the only non-Rom who has ever mastered that. Thivt had achieved the rare trick, almost unique in history, of becoming Rom by adoption. There are those who think that he must really be Rom by birth, because he can ghost. I don't know about that. Thivt looks Rom and he sounds Rom and he lives Rom, and Rom trust him like one of themselves; but I sense an aura about him, a vibration, that is something else entirely, something very strange. I'm not the only one who has felt it, either. Can it be that there are alien beings hiding in the still uncharted wilderness of Thanda Banadareen, and that they sent Thivt to us in human guise as some sort of observer, or even an emissary? No one, so far as I know, has ever returned to the world where Thivt was found to take a second look. It doesn't seem to have been a particularly inviting or useful sort of world. The galaxy is very large and we are very few; the course of exploration has moved elsewhere, to places that are considered more promising. I wonder about that world sometimes. I wonder about Thivt.

Now that Thivt was on hand, the group I had summoned was complete. But then at the last minute Syluise came waltzing in, the second of the two uninvited guests.

Polarca broke in on me while I was in my bath to tell me that she had arrived. The moment he entered the room I knew that something unusual was up, because his blue-and-red eyes seemed to have shifted halfway up the spectrum with anger or surprise, and those weird furry ears of his were twitching like a beast's. It was the fight-or-flight syndrome taking him over. Polarca regards Syluise as nothing more or less than a snake-a snake of the most deadly kind, whose fangs are venomous but who might just opt to strangle you to death for the hell of it. "Guess who's here," he began ominously.

"Shandor?" I said. "Sunteil?" "Worse."

"Do we have to play guessing games, Polarca?" "She's here. The great love of your life."

Polarca wishes fervently that I had never become mixed up with Syluise. Even making allowances for his sometimes overprotective attitude toward me, Polarca may have something there. But he also has a little problem with strong-willed women and that may account for some of his dislike of her.

"Seriously? Syluise?"

He was pacing up and down. "I try to tell myself that you're in your right mind," he said. "But to invite a troublesome and totally self-centered cunt like that to a high-level strategy session, Yakoub-"

"What makes you think I invited her?" "What's she doing here, if you didn't?" "You didn't try to find out?"

"Christ," he muttered. "You think she'll talk to me? She walks right through me as though I'm not there. She comes promenading in here from the spaceport like the Queen of Sheba, with a dozen robots in her train, installs herself in one of the master suites, unloads six overpockets' worth of gowns and robes and tiaras and God knows what else, starts giving orders to everybody in sight as though she's the new owner of the planet-"

"All right," I said. "Hand me that towel."

Polarca had exaggerated a little, but only a little. Syluise had indeed come with a retinue of robots, and she had set herself up in high style in a choice corner of the house. I went to pay a call on her and she received me as if this was her grand estate and I was the recently arrived guest.

One of her robots showed me in.

"I have plenty of robots available for my guests," I said. "It wasn't necessary for you to bring your own."

"I didn't want to be a burden." "On the robots?"

"I like my own robots, Yakoub. They know how to look after me the way I like to be looked after."

"You really are a bitch, aren't you, Syluise?"

"Do you think so?" She made it seem as if I had complimented her. She looked as splendid as ever, the hair gleaming like the golden forests of Galgala, the blue eyes sparkling playfully, the tall slender body glowing within some sort of magical filmy wrap that emitted faint silvery music whenever she moved. "It's so good to see you again, Yakoub."

"You saw me not long ago on Mulano."

"I was ghosting then. Now I'm real. We haven't been this close to each other in the flesh for six or seven years, do you realize that?" The dazzling smile, a trillion electron volts. "Did you miss me?"

"Why are you here, Syluise?"

"Can't you be romantic even for a minute?" "Later. First tell me why you came."

"I was worried about you. You sounded very confused, when I visited you on that icy planet of yours."

"Confused?" "Telling me all that stuff about how you had abdicated so that your people would beg to have you come back. And that you had done it all for their good, so you could lead them on to Romany Star. Did you actually believe that it made sense, what you thought you were doing?" "Yes."

"And now that Shandor is king, what are you going to do?" "That's why I've called this meeting," I said. "But I don't remember asking you to attend it."

"I thought I could be of some help."

Sweet Syluise. "I'm sure you did," I said. "But you still aren't answering my question. How does it happen that you're here?"

"I heard you were back from that other place, that Mulano. The news is all over the Imperium. That you had landed on Xamur, that you had gone to your estate. So I decided to come to you and offer you whatever I could. I didn't know about the rest of it. That you were giving a big patshiv, that you had invited Polarca and Valerian and the phuri dai and all the others."

I found it strange, hearing her use those Romany words. Patshiv, phuri dai. Romany words sounded all wrong, coming out of those flawless imitation-GaJe lips of hers. I had a way of forgetting for years at a time that somewhere within the elegant Gaje package that Syluise had sculpted for herself there lurked a Rom soul. Somewhere.

"Just a coincidence?" I said. "That you came right in time for the meeting?"

She nodded. And held out her hands toward me.

Well, what was I to do? Interrogate her? Had Damiano tipped her off, or Biznaga, or even, God only knew why, Bibi Savina? Maybe so; or maybe it was only a coincidence. What the hell: she was here and I suppose I was glad to see her.

It had been a long time, a very long time, for Syluise and me. I had never been able to resist her anyway. Not since the beginning for her and me, more than fifty years back, before I was the king, that time when Cesaro o Nano had sent me to make a ceremonial visit to the Rom of Estrilidis, and she had come floating up out of the night, young and golden, a vision of Gaje perfection, cutting through all my defenses and beckoning me into shameful obsessions. Come here, she had said that night. I will make you a king. She said it in Romany with those Gaje lips of hers and I was lost. Rising above me, turning me from king to slave with a single glance. Her head thrown back, her lips parted, her breasts swaying wildly. I had been her slave ever since. An old man's foolishness? No. I wasn't old, fifty years ago. I'm not old now. Something like this would have happened to me at any age. Does everything I do have to make sense? Everyone is entitled to be struck once in his life by a fit of irresponsible passion. Or by a thunderbolt of instantaneous love, if that's what you prefer to call it. Call it whatever you like. Call it madness. Syluise was my madness.

"Come here," she said now.

Yes. Oh, how she sparkled, how she gleamed! Oh, yes, yes, yes!

WE HAD THREE DAYS OF FEASTING AND REJOICING BEFORE we got down to anything serious. I didn't want to hurry it. I had been away by myself in the snow for much too long, and it was good just to have them all around me, these old dear friends, Valerian and Polarca and Thivt, Biznaga and Jacinto and Ammagante, Damiano and Syluise. Not ghosts this time-except for Valerian-but sweet warm flesh.

So we had a grand patshiv in the ancient traditional style, with all the food and drink anyone might want and then some, and dancing and singing and clapping of hands. Even the robots joined in, stamping their footpads in rhythm until they had caught the beat and finally leaping out into the middle of the floor to cavort and prance with the rest of us. Of course we loved that. At a patshiv everyone must be happy, everyone must feel like an honored guest, even the robots. God, was it a good time! The great chunks of roast beef, the suckling pigs, the barrels of foaming beer and rich red wine! Each night we sat around a blazing fire of fine aromatic wood, telling old tales of travel and high adventure, the roads we had taken and the joys and mishaps we had had. For a moment out of time we were Rom of the old days, the wanderers, the caravan people, the tinkers and the fortune-tellers, the most serious people in the world and at the same time the most playful, enjoying ourselves in the way that we have always enjoyed ourselves. And in the darkness afterward, by the pale luminous glow of the nightbirds that flitter through the night of Xamur, there was Syluise, smooth and sleek to my touch. For the moment I was able to put aside all thought of what I still must accomplish; for the moment there was only Syluise, and the glowing birds in the darkness, and the silence of the night.

When I was ready to get down to real business I led them all away from the house on the long journey to the far edge of my property, where the Idradin crater throbs and pulses and stews with ferocious passionate energy.

The Idradin is the one blemish on Xamur's fair face. A ghastly pustule, an angry inflammation. There are those who lament the fact that a thing as hideous as the Idradin could exist on beautiful Xamur, but I think otherwise. Without the crater Xamur would seem an intolerably perfect world, unreal, outrageous, almost fraudulent. Xamur is in a way a little like Syluise, masked in a beauty that is too perfect for our flawed universe: it needs some single fault to make it seem genuine, and so does she. I am content that the Idradin is there, and content also that it is on my own land. It serves always as a reminder to me that the dream of perfection is a fool's fantasy, that there is always some loathsome canker in the sweetest bud.

The crater is a great round hole that goes straight down to the boiling magma that lies at the heart of Xamur. Around its jagged rim lie broad concentric rings of old worn black lava, dozens of them, hurled to the surface long ago by the fierce power of ancient eruptions. They form a sort of natural amphitheater, grim and bleak and lifeless. You can walk down to the lowest ring-if you dare-and see wild red shafts of flame spearing through smoky gray clouds, and hear monstrous forces belching and rumbling in the depths. Wisps of sulfuric miasma constantly come drifting up, staining the sky and all the surrounding countryside a bright vomitous yellow.

A hateful ugly place, yes.

But I had lived so close to it for so many years that I no longer could feel any hatred for it. I no longer saw the ugliness. Call it perverse if you like, but the sight of the Idradin had come to be something I found heartening and inspiring. I drew from it a sense of the raw strength of the forces it contained. Which are the forces of creation itself. We live on the surfaces of our planets. There are suns within them.

We gathered on the ninth circle of the crater, far enough away so that the stinking gases would not choke us, close enough to feel the warmth and the deep rumblings. Some-Biznaga, Jacinto, Damiano-seemed repelled and nauseated by the place. Chorian seemed almost frightened. Polarca was tense and taut, and kept glancing back over his shoulder.

As though he expected an eruption any minute. Even Valerian looked a little worried, and he wasn't even actually there. But there was nothing but serenity on the faces of Bibi Savina and Thivt; Ammagante appeared indifferent; and Syluise, to my surprise, looked ecstatic. She stood with her arms flung wide and her head thrown back. She was glowing with a supreme radiance against the somber backdrop of the crater's dark fumes. I felt crazy with love for her, seeing her like that. Like a schoolboy. At my age. I knew it was insane. The crater has that effect on me sometimes. So does Syluise.

I said, scanning their faces one by one, "All right, the business at hand. My son Shandor seems to have set himself up on Galgala as the king. This is absolutely not legitimate and something had goddamned well better be done about it. Will one of you tell me how a miserable thing like this was ever allowed to happen in the first place?"

Silence from all quarters. And some squirming and wiggling. "According to you, Damiano, he called the great kris together and compelled the krisatora to elect him. Is that actually what happened?"

Nods. Shrugs. From Bibi Savina a flat blank stare.

"Jesu Cretchuno Adam and Eve, can't any of you speak? Explain to me how the krisatora can be forced to take such an action. The krisatora when they are in session have power over any Rom, even the king. Not the other way around. Who were they, these krisatora? Nine puppy dogs? Nine robots? Did he threaten them? With what? How can an election under duress be considered valid even for a minute?"

Biznaga said, "There is no record of what took place at the kris, Yakoub. Except that Shandor called the krisatora together and when they emerged from the hall of judgment he was the king."

I looked toward Damiano. "You told me he forced them." "That's what I assume."

"Who were these krisatora?" I asked.

"You know them all," Damiano said. "The same who were in office when you were king. Bidshika, Djordji, Stevo le Yankosko, Milosh-" I cut him off in mid-list. "They should have known better. The son of a king has never been king before. And with the old king still alive, too. Oh, the bastard, the bloody bastard! He walked in there and told them what to do, and they did it, and nobody dared say a word against it. Even you. You all just smiled and nodded and let it happen."

"And you take no responsibility at all?" Valerian said. "Me?"

"You, Yakoub. But for you none of this would have happened. You set the whole thing up, didn't you? Who told you to abdicate in the first place?"

"I had my reasons." "I bet you did."

"You think my abdication was a whim? You think it was just some cockeyed impulse that took hold of me? Do you? Do you? Don't you think that I had a plan, that I was acting in accordance with my long-range strategy, when I walked out of Galgala?"

They were all looking at each other. Suddenly I realized what they must be thinking. The old man has taken leave of his senses, is what they were thinking. I saw now that they might have been thinking that for quite some time.

I glared at them.

"You bastards, have you been humoring me?" "Humoring you how?" asked Polarca.

"You think I'm crazy, don't you?"

"Did I ever say a thing like that, Yakoub?"

"You didn't say it, no," I agreed. "But you've been thinking it. Haven't you, Polarca?"

"Absolutely not. "Valerian?" "Crazy? You?"

"Damiano? Biznaga? Come on, You Pigs, put up your hands! Everyone who thinks Yakoub is somewhere around the far bend into senility, wave your goddamned hand in the air!"

No hands went up. Their faces didn't show a flicker of emotion. Did I have them cowed? Or were they determined to go on hiding what they thought of me, no matter what?

The crater roared and gargled. There was the sound of colossal masses of rock moving about somewhere deep within it. A plume of yellow smoke came burping up to the surface and spread a rank rotten stink everywhere, like the fart of a giant. No one reacted. No one moved. They were staring at me like a bunch of robots and there was no way I could read what was behind their eyes.

After a time I said in a quieter voice, under the tightest control I could manage, "I want to assure you that I'm still very much in my right mind. Just in case any of you happen to doubt that. My abdication may have been a tactical mistake, though I'm not yet convinced of that, but it wasn't the arbitrary and capricious action of a crazy old man."

And I launched into the full explanation: how I had come to feel that we were slipping away from our underlying nature, how we were being drawn more and more deeply into the GaJe Empire when in fact what we needed to do was to begin preparing ourselves for the return to Romany Star that had been our goal for so many thousands of years, and which was now perhaps just a couple of hundred years away. I told them how I had felt the need to do something dramatic in order to shake people up. That I had decided to go away for a few years and leave them leaderless, so they could ponder the error of their ways. And how I had planned to return and resume the throne, stronger than ever, once the full impact of my absence had been felt.

They listened to me soberly, almost grimly. Ammagante seemed to be engaged in some abstruse set of interior calculations. Damiano was scowling, Chorian looked astounded, Biznaga almost in tears. The others seemed puzzled or bothered or dismayed, all but Syluise, who had heard all this before and merely seemed bored. And Bibi Savina, whose invincible serenity remained unbroken. It occurred to me that the old woman might not even be listening to me, might not even be here, might be off ghosting somewhere at the far end of time.

When I was finished Jacinto said, softly, coolly, "And did you imagine that we could run a caretaker government for you forever, Yakoub? That five years or maybe ten would go by with the throne vacant and there'd be no pressure to elect a new king?"

"I thought there would be attempts made to get me to come back, before that happened."

"There were," Damiano said. "Do you know how many men I had out searching for you, starting the year after your disappearance?" "I left my patrin behind me all over the place."

"So you did. We picked your signs up eventually. It still took three years for Chorian to find you. But we were at it constantly all those years."

"As were various lords of the Imperium," I said. "Julien de Gramont was sent after me by Periandros. And of course Chorian was working not only for you but for Sunteil. Well, I expected to be found a little sooner than I was. And I never dreamed that Shandor, of all people, would make a grab for the throne."

"But he did," said Damiano.

"And it serves you right," Valerian said. He is never gentle with me. "You created a vacuum and that son of a bitch moved right into it.

Does it get us any closer to Romany Star to have Shandor as our king?" "Shandor is not the king," said Bibi Savina suddenly, in a voice that seemed to come from another solar system.

Everyone turned toward the phuri dai.

"The election was not an election. The abdication was not an abdication. Yakoub is still the king."

"Of course he is!" Chorian shouted, and instantly looked shamefaced at having dared to speak.

"And the other king on the throne on Galgala?" Biznaga said. "What is he, a figment?"

"Some figment!" Valerian boomed. "He saw his moment and he reached out and grabbed. And now we're stuck with him. Unless you want to set off a civil war, Rom against Rom. While the Gaje sit back and laugh at us."

"That must not happen," Thivt said.

"Are we supposed to accept Shandor as king, then?" Damiano asked. They all began to talk at once. Then Polarca's dry sharp voice came cutting through the babble:

"Bibi Savina is right," he said. "We can simply ignore Shandor. Yakoub's abdication didn't mean a thing. There was never any such custom as abdication among us in the first place. A king is king until he dies, or until the krisatora depose him. I haven't heard anything about an act of deposition. And even if there was, we can claim that it was done under duress, and is therefore invalid. Yakoub is our king."

Biznaga shook his head violently. "But Shandor holds the seat of government. Shandor is recognized by the Imperium as the head of the Rom people. What legal means do we have of displacing him now?"

They started to babble again. This time I held up my hand for silence. "I have a plan," I said. "I brought this whole mess down upon us all by myself when I chose to leave the throne. And now I intend to clean it up. All by myself."'

"How?" Valerian demanded.

"By going to Galgala. Alone, without any sort of escort. In person, not a doppelganger. And walking all by myself into the king's house of power and telling my son Shandor that he has to get his ass out of the place inside of five minutes, or else."

"That's your plan?" Valerian asked, looking amazed. "That is my plan, yes."

"Go to Galgala?" Jacinto said. "Go before Shandor alone and give him an ultimatum?"

"Yes," I said. "Absolutely."

I saw them looking at each other again. Gaping, staring. General disbelief. Their faces saying that they knew now beyond any doubt that I had lost my mind.

"And what happens then?" Valerian wanted to know. "He smiles politely and says, Of course, daddy, right away, daddy, and clears out? Is that what you expect, Yakoub?"

"It won't be that simple."

"I think it'll be very simple," Valerian said. "You'll make your speech, and when he recovers from his amazement he'll take you and toss you in a dungeon nine miles deep. Or do something even worse." "To his own father?" Ammagante asked.

"This is Shandor we're talking about. He's an animal, he's a wild beast. You remember what he did that time on Djebel Abdullah, when the stardrive failed and the food ran out? This is a civilized man? This is a son to be trusted? Authorizing the use of the bodies of his own passengers for food, for God's sake?"

"Valerian-" "No," he said angrily. "You want me to pretend it never happened? This Shandor is our king! This is the man whose sense of tradition, whose mercy, whose benevolence, you plan to appeal to! How do you think those passengers got to be dead in the first place? And what do you think he'll do to you, Yakoub, if you put yourself within reach of him?"

"He will not harm me," I said. "Madness. Absolute madness."

"He may try to imprison me, yes. I don't believe he would dare to harm me. Not even Shandor would do that. But if he does imprison me he'll forfeit whatever support he may have among our people. I can wait out a little time in a dungeon. At my age you learn to play the waiting game."

"But this is crazy, Yakoub!" Valerian said. "Why not send a doppelganger, at least?"

"You think that would fool him? The first thing he'd do is test me to see if I'm real. "'

"And when he finds out that you are-" "I mean to risk it."

"And if he does kill you? Can we do without you?"

"He won't. But if he does, I become a martyr. A symbol. The instrument of his overthrow."

"And who will be king, then?"

"Do you think I'm the only man who can be King of the Rom?" I shouted. "Jesu Cretchuno, am I immortal? Some day you'll need another king. If that day is sooner instead of later, what of it? Shandor has to be cast down. No matter what the cost. I made it possible for him to seize the throne-by the Devil, I made it possible for him to be alive-and I will be the one to pull him down from the place he has grabbed. I will do it by going to Galgala. Alone."

"This is very rash," Jacinto murmured.

"If it will avoid a war between Rom and Rom-" Thivt said. "No. I'm with Valerian," said Polarca. "We can't afford to lose you, Yakoub. There's got to be some less risky way of pushing Shandor aside. Proclaim the abdication null and void, ditto the election of Shandor, set up a legitimate government here on Xamur, remind Rom everywhere of their loyalty to Yakoub-"

"No," I said. "I don't intend to recognize Shandor's usurpation even to the extent of establishing a rival government. Our capital is on Galgala. I will go to Galgala."

"God help us all," muttered Valerian.

Then they all began yelling again at once, and in no time the meeting was reduced to absolute hysteria. I tried to quiet them down and couldn't do it. When a king can't get the attention of his own advisers there's real trouble in the commonwealth. I watched them rant and scream for a while and I did a little ranting and screaming myself and none of it was any use. So I just walked away from them. I went around to the far side of the crater and climbed up a couple of circles and sat with my back to them, listening to the screeching and bellowing of my best and my brightest.

After a long while I heard the sounds of someone climbing up behind me. I didn't look around. I was pretty sure who it was, because even with my back turned I sensed the strangeness of him.

Thivt. I waited, saying nothing. Feeling his alien spirit getting closer and closer to me.

We have never satisfactorily settled, you know, the question of whether there are other intelligent races in the galaxy. Certainly there must have been some, once-the ancient fortress on Megalo Kastro is just one of a number of indications of that. But there aren't any living alien cultures to be found. The only intelligent species we know about are ourselves and the Gaje, the two basically identical human races that evolved on different worlds thousands of light-years apart. As our ever-widening expansion carries us outward into the galaxy we have come across any number of interesting and complex creatures, but none that have the traits we think of as intelligence. You might want to count such things as the living sea of Megalo Kastro as an intelligent lifeform, but that isn't intelligence as we understand it.

(The presence of two separate but identical human races is a different but related puzzle. A lot of heavy thinkers among the Rom say that it's statistically unlikely and probably biologically impossible for any species to have evolved independently in virtually the same form on two different worlds. They suspect that Rom and Gaje must have had a common ancestor on some other world entirely, far away. That we are all the descendants of colonists who were left behind in prehistoric times. As for the differences that do exist between the two races-the Rom ability to ghost, say, and the related ability to propel starships into leap mode-those are explained away as mutations that crept into our branch of humankind during our thousands of years of separate existence on Romany Star. These are Rom speculations, remember. There aren't any Gaje speculations on these topics. The Gaje, of course, don't have any inkling of our alien ancestry. If they did, they probably would have lynched us all long ago, back on Earth in the years of persecution. It was tough enough for them to handle our wandering ways and our disdain for their laws. Knowing that we were spooks from some other planet would certainly have set off some kind of giant pogrom, a holy crusade against the evil witch-things from the stars. Maybe it still could.)

Thivt, at any rate-Thivt, I am convinced, is something else. Neither Rom nor Gaje, I think. But I doubt that I will ever know the truth; for Thivt is my friend and my cousin, and courtesy forbids me to ask him to tell me whether or not he is human.

He stood behind me, giving off waves of strangeness. He let his hand rest lightly on my arm. I felt warmth coming from him, tenderness, sympathy. That is the most alien thing about him: the way he can touch your mind, the way he can make a sort of communion.

"Yakoub," he said.

"Listen to them, Thivt. Screeching like chickens in the barnyard."

"They will be quiet soon."

"They're all against my plan, aren't they?"

"Is that important to you?"

"If they think I've gone crazy it is. I'll need their support if things don't go well for me on Galgala, and I doubt that things will. How can I ask them to come in there and risk their lives for me, if they think I've deliberately put my neck in danger against all their advice?"

"They will do whatever you ask of them, Yakoub."

"I don't know about that." I was wavering. In the face of such concerted opposition I was starting to think I should abandon my idea. Maybe it was crazy. Maybe it was imposing an unnecessary risk not only on me but on everyone. "They aren't fools," I said. "If they think I shouldn't go, then perhaps-"

Thivt's fingers continued to press lightly against my arm. I felt love flowing from him to me, concern, support.

"Follow your own judgment, Yakoub. It never leads you astray. If you think that what must be done is for you to go to Shandor, then you must go to Shandor. You are the king. You will prevail."

I turned toward him. "You think so, Thivt?"

His dark solemn eyes were close to mine. At this moment he seemed more mysterious than ever to me. I wondered what lay behind that bland serene brow, what sort of brain, what alien corrugations and furrows. He was sending comfort to me. He was sending strength. Whatever he might be, offshoot of whatever unknown species that had taken on human form, he was my friend. He was my cousin.

"I think so, yes," he said. And said it in Romany. "All right. So be it."

I walked back around the crater to the others. They had fallen silent by this time, and they were all staring at me.

"You aren't going to do it, are you?" Polarca said. "My mind is made up."

"Put it to the phuri dai, at least!" Valerian cried. "For God's sake, Yakoub, let her decide!"

"The phuri dai!" Polarca chimed in. "The phuri dai."

Once again they turned to Bibi Savina, crowding around her. They were still all against me, all but Thivt. They really did think I had lost my mind.

"All right," I said, beginning to feel fury rising. "Let's listen to the phuri dai. Tell us, Bibi Savina. What should I do?"

There was an eerie light in Bibi Savina's eyes and her withered and shrunken body seemed to blaze with an inner flame. For a moment she appeared to stand straight again, and from her there emanated a kind of beauty that far outshone that of the magnificent Syluise.

"You must go to Galgala, Yakoub," she said in a strange voice like that of one who is in a trance. An oracle's voice. "Stand before Shandor and tell him he is not king. It is the only way. It is what you must do."