Star of Gypsies Page 12

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

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

  "Then why-"

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "You know there once was a place called Earth, Yakoub?"

  "Earth, yes."

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

  "Stolen?" I said, shocked.

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

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

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

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

  As he spoke I began to cry.

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

  "The One Word?" I said. "What is that?"

  "The One Word is: Survive!"

  2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  3.

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

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

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

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

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

  "Lot ninety-seven," I heard a hoarse bored voice say. "A boy."

  "Move on inside, ninety-seven," said someone else. "That line over there."

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

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