Star of Gypsies (23 page)

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 Imperium 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 Marajo, or even wandering Zimbalou. If I could have picked one, though, Xamur is the one I would have picked. And now I had it. And it had me.