Star of Gypsies (19 page)

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

That stung. "Coward? Me?"

"You heard me."

"Why coward?"

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

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

"What death is, father?"

"I am not your father."

"What is it you want me to do?"

"Swim."

"How?"

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

The wriggling fingers of the sea danced about me like worms standing on their tails. Sea-stuff was in my mouth, my eyes, my ears. A strand of it held me around my throat. Another stroked my genitals, and I grew stiff there, and thrust with my hips, driving against the resilient warm mud. Now and again I opened my eyes. Colors flashed everywhere. The shore was far away, a black line against the sky. The ghost still hovered over me, eyes bright with encouragement. He said nothing. But I could hear his booming laughter every time I swam another stroke. I saw other ghosts now, too, five, six, a dozen of them. The beautiful woman again. Beckoning to me, urging me on. Images flickered in the air, throngs of people, grand robes, glittering headdresses, strange planets, awesome ceremonies. Was it the sea that was throwing up these scenes, or my guardian ghosts? Swim, Yakoub. Swim. Swim! What a struggle it was! I yearned to let go, to relax, to give myself to the sea, to allow myself to slip down into that vast warm caressing body. That great mother. But the ghosts were unrelenting. Swim, they insisted. Swim. Swim. Swim!

And I swam.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A smiling Rom face looked down at me.

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

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

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

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

But they had never heard of Romano Nirano, and they had never heard of Vietoris. Because they liked me, they opened their big 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.

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 head for the plantation-house that minute.