Star of Gypsies (29 page)

The insects live within the worms. They use their beaks to inject the worms with their gastric juices and actually tunnel into their bodies, where they feed on their tissues and in time lay their eggs. Huge as the worms are, I suppose they would eventually be completely consumed by these little monsters within their bodies if they were not capable of defending themselves. The worm's defense is a chemical one: when it becomes aware that it has been entered-and it may be years before that news penetrates to its dim brain-it secretes a substance that trickles toward the zone of irritation and causes its own tissues to harden into a stony mass. Thus it forms a cyst around the invader, which is trapped within it until it starves. The stony material that forms these cysts is a rich lustrous yellow in color, smooth to the touch, and can be polished to a high gloss. In the commerce of the starways it is sold as Alta Hannalanna jade, although in truth it is more akin to amber. And it fetches a very high price indeed.

The filthy trick of collecting this jade was taught to me by one of my fellow slaves, a gaunt white-haired man named Vabrikant. He was a native of one of the Sempitern worlds; he said he had been on Alta Hannalanna five years; and he looked at me with such appalling pity when I was handed over to him for instruction that I felt my soul beginning to curdle.

In silence he handed me tools: a sort of curving scimitar, a pick, a two-pronged thing with a spring attachment. "All right," he said. "Come on with me."

Together we set out from the slave dormitory, an oval antechamber where several of the tunnels met. Quickly the path narrowed and the ceiling grew lower, until we had to walk with knees bent. Though there was barely light enough to see by, Vabrikant moved from intersection to intersection with the ease of long familiarity. The atmosphere was damp and close and the air had a nauseating sweetness.

We went forward for hours. I couldn't begin to see how we would ever find our way back. Now and then Vabrikant halted and hacked a chunk from the tunnel wall to eat. The first time he offered some to me I refused, and he shrugged; but later he said, "You might as well. It's all you're going to get today."

I nibbled it warily. It was like eating a sponge; but there was a faint residue of musty flavor in my mouth afterward, and the hunger-gripings that I had been feeling were allayed at least for a little while.

Vabrikant smiled. "Better than starving, eh?"

"Not by much."

"You get used to it. Gypsy, are you?"

"Rom, yes."

"I knew a Gypsy once. A woman. Sweet, she was. The most beautiful little thing, dark eyes, the darkest hair you ever saw. I wanted to marry her, that's how I felt about her. I chased after her across six worlds. She was always kind to me. Married one of her own sort, though."

"We seldom marry outside," I said.

"So I discovered. Well, makes no difference now, I guess. I'm in this fucking place for life." He straightened up, sniffed, nodded. "Come on. We're almost there." He shook his head. "You poor bastard. Shipped here so young. You sure must have done something really shitty to have been sent to Alta Hannalanna."

"I-"

"No. Don't tell me what it was. We don't ever talk about what it was that got us sent up." He pointed ahead. "Look there, Gypsy-lad. There's worm-waste. We've got our worm."

Indeed I saw a stream of pale fluid spreading toward us on the tunnel floor, the worm excretion that I was to get to know all too well. Soon we were moving thigh-deep through it, sliding and slipping with every step. Vabrikant shined his helmet-light ahead. A worm was in the corridor.

We came up behind it. It filled the tunnel nearly from wall to wall, so that we had to walk sideways, our backs to the wall; and even so we could barely get through. We crept on and on for what seemed like miles, stooping so low that I thought my back would crack. The reek of the worm's fluid made me gag at first, but I began to get used to it. Its body was soft, almost buttery. It would have been easy to put my hand right through the yielding skin, deep into its flesh. Vabrikant said nothing for perhaps half an hour. Then he halted and tapped my shoulder.

"You see? Jade-light."

"I don't-"

"There. The yellow fire."

Yes. The worm's skin seemed to be blazing just ahead over a patch bigger than I was. When we were closer I saw the strange transformation of the giant creature's flesh within that patch: something dark and hard was visible deep within, and all about it was the fiery glow of inflammation that Vabrikant called jade-light. He went to work unhesitatingly, hacking open the side of the worm with the pick, then using the scimitar to widen the incision. He inserted the two-pronged device as a clamp. With steady even strokes he cut his way inward. The worm showed no reaction to what he was doing.

"That's the critter in there," he said. "This is the jade, growing around it. Reach in and touch it with your hand."

"In there?"

"Reach in, boy."

I crawled forward, shuddering, and thrust my arm deep within the quivering incision until I touched something hard and smooth as glass. It was the wall of the cyst that surrounded the trapped parasitical insect.

"I feel it," I said. "What do we do now?"

"We cut it out. The danger is that the critter won't be dead. If it isn't, it's going to be awful hungry and not in a real good mood. When we open the wall it's likely to jump out at us. It's got one hell of a beak."

"How can we tell if it's dead?"

"By opening the wall," Vabrikant said. "If it don't jump at us, then it's dead. If it do, we're in trouble. We lose a devil of a lot of jade miners every year."

I stared at him. But he simply shrugged and set to work.

It took half an hour, working with a drilling-bit and chisel, to cut the jade cyst from its matrix in the worm's soft flesh. When I pointed out that a laser knife would have done the job a lot faster he looked at me in sorrow, as though I were mentally defective. "Give us lasers, sure. The overmasters would really go for that idea." I felt worse than foolish. We were not merely slaves but prisoners.

Luck was with us this time. The worm had done its job of self-defense; when we lifted the jade slab that Vabrikant had cut free we saw the husk of the insect dead within, dry and empty. "There are days I almost hope one of them will pop out and kill me," he said. "But I guess I don't really want that or I'd go looking for it, I guess. Here. Take hold with me." He caught the inner face of the jade cyst and pulled it free, dumping the shell of the dead insect back into the depths of the worm's flesh. As we stepped away, the wound was already beginning to close; we got our tools out just in time. And the worm moved on.

That was how jade was mined on Alta Hannalanna. You'd trek endlessly for hours down the clammy tunnels searching for a worm, scan up and down the length of its immense body for the jade-light that marked an entrapped parasite, start cutting and hope for the best. Hours of numbing boredom relieved only by a few minutes of terror, followed by hours of boredom again. With that revolting sickly-sweet stench in your nostrils all the time. And then try to find your way back to the dormitory. Vabrikant always knew the way, but I wasn't always paired with Vabrikant; sometimes I went out with younger men who didn't have much more of a sense of the tunnels than I did, and we got lost, and then after a while I was often the senior member of the mining team, for new slaves arrived all the time, and it became my job to try to find the way. Sometimes we wandered for days trying to return, and there was nothing to eat but the stuff we carved from the walls of the tunnel.

About one worm out of three carried an encysted parasite. Maybe one parasite out of three was still alive when we cut into the jade. You had to be ready to bash it with your pick if it came charging out; that was why we traveled in pairs, one to cut, one to stand guard. Even so slaves died all the time. Sometimes you met a free parasite that was wandering the tunnels looking for a worm. That was always bad. They came charging at you like demons. When we did manage to find our way back to the dormitory after filling our quota of jade it was cold comfort indeed. All we did was rest and brood until it was time to go out again. It was a bleak, hopeless existence. Life at the dorm was so grim that after a little while we started looking forward to our next tour out in the tunnels. We talked constantly about escaping, of somehow getting on board one of the relay-sweep capsules that periodically took the jade away to be sold. To do that we'd have to mount an attack on the overmasters who guarded us when we were at the base. The overmasters were slaves themselves; no one would work for pay alone on a planet like this; but they set themselves up as our enemies and there was no hope of conspiring with them. They were armed with truncheons and with sensory-whips and they went swaggering about glowering at us as though we were troublesome dogs. Usually the truncheons were enough to keep us in line, but once in a while some miner went seriously berserk and then the sensory-whip would come into play. Those who had felt its lash never risked it a second time. But I did.

TO KEEP FROM GOING OUT OF MY MIND I GHOSTED obsessively, compulsively, all over space and time, taking the big jump fifty times a day. Sometimes I even did it when I was crawling down a tunnel toward a worm, although you aren't supposed to ghost in dangerous circumstances because it diverts your attention for a fraction of a moment, and sometimes that can be fatal. Maybe I didn't give a damn; maybe I was feeling a little suicidal, or just reckless. Or maybe I thought that if I jumped often enough, one time I just wouldn't return to Alta Hannalanna at the end of the trip. But of course it doesn't work that way. You always come back.

My present was a nightmare and my future promised nothing but more of the same. So I went ghosting back into my own past most of the time, a special torment, sweet and prickly. I ghosted Nabomba Zom and I saw myself out riding with Malilini, and it broke my heart. But as I hovered invisible above that young happy pair I didn't dare make myself known to them; I remembered Loiza la Vakako's admonitions about interfering with the past, and I feared making the attempt, much as I longed to. I told myself that one ghostly word from me on the eve of Loiza la Vakako's fatal banquet could save Malilini's life and spare me from this hell of Alta Hannalanna, and yet I held my tongue. Crazy? Maybe. But my fear was even greater than my pain.

I ghosted Megalo Kastro and watched myself begging among the gentle kindly whores. I saw myself swimming for my life in that strange ocean. I went back even farther, to my life on Vietoris. I had never ghosted that far back before. I looked down at myself standing beside my father on the slopes of Mount Salvat, with Romany Star blazing in the sky.

Then I wanted to see my father again, to find out how things had gone for him after the company had sold me away into slavery. But I couldn't find him, though I roamed Vietoris from end to end. My whole family had disappeared. I thought perhaps there was something missing from my ghosting skills, that I didn't yet know all there was to know about locating particular people in space and time. That was the easy thing to believe, that it was my own fault if I couldn't find my father anywhere.

I grew bolder. I went to worlds I had never seen, Duud Shabeel, Kalimaka, Fenix, Clard Msat. They became real to me and Alta Hannalanna was only a dream. I would be right inside a worm, hacking away at its flesh, and between one second and the next I would disappear for hours on Estrilidis, Iriarte, Xamur. When I came back nothing had changed: I was still in mid-stroke, the scimitar descending. Sometimes I went away again in that very moment. It was as easy to go back a hundred years as it was to travel back a month. I swung in wider and wider loops, hurling myself backward without giving a damn about the consequences.

One day I summoned the ghosting force and sent myself out without pausing to think about where I might be going. What did it matter? Any place would be better than Alta Hannalanna. There was the familiar disorientation and dizziness and then I was looking at blue sky, heavy fleecy white clouds, a yellow sun. What place was this? Short wide-crowned trees with brown trunks and green leaves, and a meadow of thick green grass, and tents in the meadow, and men and women gathered around a huge cauldron. The men wore plush waistcoasts, velvet riding-breeches, long black coats, gleaming boots that came up to mid-calf. The women had satin dresses loose and open on top to show their breasts, colorful shawls, plumed turbans. Three or four of the younger ones were singing and beating on tambourines. The men were clapping and stamping their feet. A great shaggy brown animal tethered to a pole was dancing too, comically, lurching from side to side on its powerful heavy legs. I knew at once where I was and the knowledge stunned me. Where else but lost dead Earth? Who else could these people be but a band of traveling Gypsies? How handsome they were, how vital and strong! I floated through their encampment, listening to them shouting to one another in a language that I could only understand in snatches but which beyond any doubt was some ancient form of Romany, and I felt a joy and a wonder that lifted me entirely out of my misery and swept me off into exaltation.

Now that I knew I could ghost as far back in time as Earth, I went there often, hoping to find my people again. And very often I did; but it was a long time before I saw them in such merriment again. Instead I saw them huddling in leaking lean-tos under a cold rain, wearing nothing but ragged scraps of old clothing. I saw them cooped up in prisons, living a filthy life in squalid wooden huts while grunting bailiffs strode among them with whips. I saw them living on roots and leaves in the forest. I saw them marching on dry dusty roads, looking fearfully back over their shoulders. I saw their dark eyes peering out through barbed wire fences. Again and again and again I went to Earth and sought out my people and whenever I found them I found them suffering and hungry. That was when I knew that for the Rom old Earth had been Alta Hannalanna all the time, when they lived as homeless strangers, despised and hungry among the uncaring Gaje. It was then that the resolution was born in me to devote the rest of my life to setting right that ancient wrong, to end the years of wandering at last. I would bring my people home to Romany Star.