Star of Gypsies (31 page)

"This is a jump-room?" I said.

"New. Everything new. You like it, huh?"

"I hate it. I can't understand any of it."

He grinned. "Very simple. Even a Gajo could jump here. Of course we do it better. For them, always, sweating, struggling. For us, as easy as taking a shit. You want to see?"

"See you taking a shit?"

"See me make a jump, king."

"We've already jumped."

"No problem, king. We jump again." He laughed and went lumbering forward. Held his enormous deep-seamed hands high like Moses announcing the Ten Commandments. Suddenly there was blue light dancing from his fingertips. He made a gesture. I saw stars suspended in mid-air, as though he had a star-tank in front of him, but there was no tank, only blue light and flecks of brighter light gleaming within it. He wiggled his left index finger. "There," he said. "You feel it?" Yes, I had: the sense of slipping a leash, of sliding free down the secret alleyways of space-time, that was wink-out. Nothing else in the universe feels like that. "No longer heading for Galgala," Petsha le Stevo said gleefully. "Iriarte, now. You see, how easy?" He held up his hands again and again he summoned the blue light. A movement of his right thumb. "Sidri Akrak, now! No problem! Just like that! Here, you try. You stand here, on the foot-plate-"

A chime went off. The face of Therione appeared on the viewscreen. The captain's finely groomed Fenixi features were livid and his voice sounded oddly strangled as he demanded to know what the hell was going on. Petsha le Stevo urged him not to worry. "Course correction, is all," he said, telling me with frantic waves of his hand to step back out of viewscreen range. "A little routine stuff, boss. We got to do the triangulum, is all."

I thought Therione would have a stroke.

"The
triangulum
! What triangulum? I don't know what the fuck you're talking about."

"Five seconds more, boss. Everything's all right." Petsha le Stevo grinned and held up his hands once more. Blue light; wink-slide; we were heading for Galgala once more. Therione started to say something; Petsha le Stevo pointed to some indicator I couldn't even find; Therione muttered and the viewscreen went blank. Turning to me he said, "You see? Nothing to it. You make any jump you like, and you don't like it, you just jump right over it. Even a Gajo could do it, maybe. Easier than before. Though still not very easy, for a Gajo."

Of course it has always been possible for Gaje to operate starships. They invented them; they would not have built something they were totally incapable of using. But up till now it has been real toil for them to carry a ship through wink-out. They needed fifty different computers operating at once to tell them what to do, and even at that they would tremble and quail at the difficulty of the task, and six times out of a dozen they had to abort the jump at the last instant and start it all over. And those were the gifted ones, those few who could touch the handles and have something happen, maybe one out of a million. They burned out fast, those Gaje pilots. Three jumps, five, ten, and they were through forever. They would go cross-eyed with shock if they went near a jump-room after that. It was hardly worth bothering to learn how, was it? Just to make three jumps? For us it has always been much easier. Those of us who have the gift, which for us is about one out of ten, we walk up to the handles and we grasp them and we feel the force flowing through us, and we add our power to the power of the ship and give it the force that carries it up over the brink into wink-out, and away we go. I tell you, I did it fifty, sixty years, and I never grew weary. It is in our blood, by which I really mean in our nervous systems, in our brains. We are different: but of course we are of different birth. Which is why, after the first years of star travel, the Gaje stopped trying to drive the ships and left all that to us. They figure we have the gift, something passed down in our genes, like a natural sense of rhythm; and they are right. Not that they understand the real reason why we have these skills that they don't have. If they only knew. Our true birth, our nativity on Romany Star. There is so much they don't know about us. Even our ghosting is something we have kept hidden from them.

I wondered, though, about these changes in the technology of star-ship piloting. If the Gaje were designing new ships that made it reasonably possible for them to operate them themselves, there were going to be consequences for the Rom. If not now, then in ten years, twenty, fifty. It was something the Rom king ought to be giving some thought to. But the Rom king was Shandor, and all that Shandor had ever given thought to was Shandor.

As I stood there trying to figure out this strange new jump-room, Petsha le Stevo said, "Maybe I shouldn't have put the course back the right way, huh, king? Maybe we should keep going to Iriarte instead? Sidri Akrak?"

"What do you mean?"

Gloomily he said, "You go to Galgala, there'll be big trouble for you there. I hate to see it, it isn't my business, but I don't like what's been going on. And you going to Galgala, you walking right in on Shandor-"

So even he knew. And was wondering what was going to happen. And was worrying about me. Good.

I knew what was going to happen too, and it didn't worry me at all. It was what would happen
after
what was going to happen that I wasn't so sure about. But all I could do was wait and see, just the same as anyone else.

IT WAS GOOD TO SEE GALGALA AGAIN. ALL THAT wonderful gleaming gold everywhere, all the throbbing yellowness of the place.

Considering our ancient love for the yellow stuff, it's not amazing that we chose Galgala to be our capital world when we went out into space. Gold may be meaningless nowadays, but it continues to gleam just as brightly as it did in the days when whole nations went to war over it. So the headquarters of the Rom monarchy lies smack in the middle of Aureus Highlands on Galgala the golden. And the house of power of the King of the Gypsies is bedecked with enough gold to choke an army of Renaissance popes. Golden walls, golden banners, gold dust suspended in clouds to give the air that glittering, glimmering look of richness and warmth.

I thought Shandor's first moves when I landed on Galgala would give me some clue to the pattern of things, but Shandor didn't make any first moves. I was traveling on a diplomatic passport, and I half expected to find that he had had the gall to revoke it-for of course he knew I was heading his way; the whole universe probably knew it-but no, I got the full V.I.P. treatment when I arrived. On Xamur the immigration officials hadn't had any protocol for dealing with former Gypsy kings, but by now the word had gotten around that I was back in circulation, and I was waved right through the customs barriers, and three limousines were waiting for me and my entourage, and there was a suite set aside for me at the Hotel Galgala. Not the royal suite, because there is no royal suite at the Hotel Galgala; when the King of the Rom is on Galgala he stays in his own house of power, naturally. But it was good enough. I didn't need the three limousines, since my entourage consisted entirely of Chorian, but I accepted them anyway. And spent a week living it up in the hotel, hot baths and masseurs, glorious feasts, much bowing and scraping from the staff. Everyone stared at me as though I were some kind of sacred monster. Hardly anyone spoke to me except in tones of greatest reverence. They even backed in and out of my presence, which was bullshit. Such abject obeisance to a Rom king? What did they think I was, some Gaje lord who required that sort of pomp?

I waited for Shandor to acknowledge my arrival in some way, but I didn't hear from him. The little turd. Nor were there any ceremonial visits from the great Rom nobles of Galgala, which I might reasonably have expected. After all, I was the one who had raised most of them to the nobility, wasn't I? But nobody came to see me. Evidently Shandor had them all cowed. Well, it must have been tough for them, choosing between the king and the ex-king. Especially when the king was someone with Shandor's lethal reputation. I wondered what I would have done if I had been in their position.

But I wasn't in their position. I was in my position, and the time had come to set things in motion. At the end of the first week I told Chorian to stay there and wait for me and by no means to follow me inland, which was an order that he accepted with very ill grace indeed; and then I sent for one of those limousines and I had myself taken from the city of Grand Galgala out into Aureus Highlands to the royal house of power. And went the last stretch of the distance on foot, up the golden steps, to beard Shandor in his lair, to tell him that I wanted him to get his tail off my throne this very instant.

I didn't expect him to react positively to that. I figured, in truth, that he would hesitate only slightly before clapping me in one of his dungeons.

Good old Shandor. He so rarely disappoints.

I STOOD ON THE STEPS OF THE HOUSE OF POWER AND the light of Galgala's sun, reverberating off all that gold leaf and gold chain and gold plate, hammered me like a gong. I came close to flinging my arm across my face to shield my eyes when I turned the corner and that fantastic radiance started banging away at me. But I didn't. I stood tall and met the glare and glitter with a glare of my own. You can't show up at a king's house of power and start things off by cringing on the front steps. Not if it's your intention to knock that king off his throne, and that was what I had come here to do. In a manner of speaking, that is.

There were armed guards out front, wearing fancy tunics of cloth-of-gold. I had to laugh at that. Guards! At the house of power of the King of the Rom! Since when did the King of the Rom need to cower behind a bunch of guards? God knows it hadn't been like that when I was king.

But I wasn't king now. Shandor was. And Shandor did things differently.

The guards faced me down. They looked swaggering and arrogant and mean, but I could see them sweating behind their arrogance, because they knew who I was and I frightened them. I
terrified
them.

"Identify yourself," said the guard in front, flat-faced and beady-eyed.

"You damned well know my name," I told him.

"Nobody gets up these steps without identification."

"My face is my identification."

His face went green. He was starting to look sort of sick.

I put my nose close to his. "You see these eyes? Hey? You see this mustache?"

The guards exchanged troubled glances. A second one, tall and swarthy with a classic Rom face-he could have been one of my grandsons, or maybe great-grandsons-stepped forward and said, "Sir, the rules require-"

"Screw the rules. I'm here to see Shandor."

"There are formalities-"

"For
me
? You ought to be down on the ground kissing my boots, and here you are telling me about formalities!"

The second guard sighed. "Put it down in the records. His Former Majesty Yakoub-"

"His Excellence and Beneficence," I added.

"His Excellence and Beneficence His Former Majesty Yakoub… ah… seeks audience with King Shandor, is that it?"

"Seeks audience with Shandor, yes."

"Put it down. Seeks audience with King Shandor at the house of power on Galgala, the fourteenth day of Beryllium, 3162-"

And on and on with their precious formalities. I barely paid attention. My mind was a million parsecs away. Leaping from world to world, remembering old glories, hatching new plans. A bad habit of mine. I'm too old to break bad habits, I think. I don't even want to. But after a minute I got hold of myself and tuned in on the palace guards again and discovered that they were on the intercom to some functionary in the interior of the building, setting up an appointment for me for a time two or three weeks hence. I don't make appointments. I reached out and broke the contact and said, "Tell Shandor that Yakoub will see him right now."

"But-"

I was already in motion. They would have had to stop me forcibly to keep me out. For a moment they actually considered that, I think; but they didn't quite dare. Instead the two who had been speaking with me came up beside me, one on each side and clinging close like busy fluttering wings, and the others ran on ahead to spread the word that something unusual was happening. I went up the steps at a hard stride, steaming past the banners of kingship, past the clouds of gold dust in their magnetic pinch-containers, past the emblems of all the worlds that Rom voyagers have discovered, past the rest of the host of regalia and memorabilia that I knew so well from my own fifty years or so of residence in this building when I had been King of All Gypsies. And then I was inside.

It isn't much of a palace, really. Nobody ever meant it to be. It's all flash and gleam on the outside, but that's because of the gold. Inside it is a very humble sort of building. That's intentional. We want to honor our humble origins, when we lived in little rickety horse-drawn wagons and went roaming around old Earth sharpening knives and telling fortunes and picking pockets. So we deck our house of power out with a lot of superficial glitz-a king has to be at least a
little
kingly-but the building itself basically isn't much of an advance on those old wagons. We leave the grand and imposing edifices for our colleague the emperor, far away at the Capital, as the Gaje call that exceedingly grand and imposing world of theirs at the heart of the Imperium.

They need that sort of stuff, those people. It makes them feel important, and God knows they need that. A house of power doesn't need grandeur. It
is
grandeur, just by being.

Our own royal throne room, to give it a name it doesn't deserve, is hung with dark carpets and lit with ancient smoky lamps. Shandor was sitting practically in the dark, scowling at me, when I walked in. I think one of his Gaje women was lurking somewhere in there too, but she vanished when I entered. The unmistakable whiff of her remained behind in the air.