Star of Gypsies Read online

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

  "My father works on starships," I said. "You probably know him. His name is Romano Nirano. He fixes the ships that come to Vietoris."

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

  It saddened me that none of these Rom starmen knew of my father. I had thought he was famous from one end of the universe to the other.

  "Here's where you'll get off, boy," the pilot said. He picked up the pointer and showed me a star-system midway across Jerusalem Spill, where five worlds whirled around a mighty blue sun. "The end of the line. There are Rom aplenty there, but beyond these worlds you won't have a chance of finding your own kind."

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

  8.

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

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

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

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

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

  "Humanoid model."

  "Very funny. Expandable, it says."

  "That means I'll grow."

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

  "Almost twelve."

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

  "I'm not really a-"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Now," he said.

  "But I'm-"

  "Now."

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

  "Closer."

  "Sir, I-"

  "Closer, boy. What's your name?"

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

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

  "Going to be thirteen, I think."

  "You think. Runaway slave, are you?"

  "A traveler, sir."

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

  "Yes, sir."

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

  "My father is the greatest mechanic in the staryard of Vietorion."

  "Your father is, yes." He nodded and pondered a moment. Then he turned and beckoned into another room. "Malilini? Is this the one you meant?"

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

  "Yakoub," she said. "At last."

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

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

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

  Loiza la Vakako laughed, a great whooping Rom laugh.

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

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

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

  9.

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

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

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

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

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

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