Star of Gypsies (7 page)

I rounded on him angrily. "What are you saying? I can't go until the call comes, don't you see? But the call will be coming soon. I know that, Chorian. I have absolutely certain knowledge of that. And when it does -the moment it does-"

"You'll be the first one there."

"The first, yes. Showing the way for the rest of us. Now do you understand?"

He nodded. He stared at the black bowl of the sky. Mulano's air is cold and clear and there are no city lights to blur the skyward vision. I have never known another world from which Romany Star can be viewed as readily.

"If it's so beautiful there, Yakoub, why did we ever leave?"

"We had to," I said. "A wise mother casts her children forth to make their own way in the universe; and Romany Star was a wise mother to us."

Was that so? Suddenly, for a moment there, I wondered. To drive us forth from our home with a flaming sword and force us into thousands of years of dismal wandering-this is wisdom? This is motherhood?

I listened to what I was saying, that glib line about the wise mother who had cast us forth, and for one weird instant my whole sense of the architecture of our destiny wavered and wobbled and shook. Sometimes all this mouthing off of proverbs is just one way of sweeping anguish and pain and even resentment under the rug. But what you sweep under the rug has a way of crawling out again to bite you, and that isn't just a proverb. It's an observation.

Cast forth by our wise mother. Well, yes. Or our father. Romany Star was our mother and God was our father, and God had noticed us, smug and happy on Romany Star, and He had said to Himself, These fat and sassy Rom are getting complacent. They're getting arrogant. They're starting to forget that this universe is really a vale of tears, a chancy risky place where it's only by great good luck that you get through any given day without some monstrous catastrophe. They've had it good for too long, those Rom. All right. I'll throw them out on their asses. Let them learn what life is really like. And so had He done. And we have been suffering for our ancient good fortune ever since.

There was a Gaje people on Earth once called the Jews, who thought they were God's special people. He tossed
them
out on their asses too, just to teach them that He doesn't have any favorites, or, that if He does, He can give His favorites an even rougher time than He does His enemies. It's a very similar story, in its way: suffering, persecution, poverty, exile. But He wasn't as hard on them as He was on us.
Them
He made into lawyers, doctors, professors.
We
had to be knife-sharpeners and fortune-tellers. What kind of a lesson was He trying to teach us, anyway? At least He relented a little later on, and gave us some classier occupations. There are still some Jews around but I don't think many of them pilot starships. I'm pretty sure that none of them are kings, either.

Well, maybe it
had
all been worthwhile, I told myself. The casting forth into exile, the wandering, the suffering. So I answered my own question with a resounding Yes. Of course it had. Who was I to complain? There was Chorian, looking at me with rapture, me the wise man, me the old king, the embodiment of our race, and he was saying with his eyes, Tell me, Tell me, Tell me, Yakoub. Tell me all our great and wonderful story. How it all happened, how it began. I felt ashamed that I had wavered even for an instant, that I had begun to resent, to question.

And as we stood there in the darkness and the cold, I told him the old tale, the oldest of all our tales, the Tale of the Swelling Sun, just as my father had told it to me while we were standing together on that steep slope of Mount Salvat one night on Vietoris long ago, and just as I had told it to my many sons over many years on many different worlds.

I SPOKE OF OUR ANCIENT DAYS OF GREATNESS, the wondrous cities of Romany Star, the shining palaces and splendid towers, the vast concourses and broad highways, the gleaming columns and plazas. I told him how the sky over Romany Star was forever ablaze with the light of all the heavens. I told him of the eleven moons that were strung like brilliant jewels from horizon to horizon. I told him of rivers that sparkled like new wine, of mountains that challenged the stars, of golden meadows and dazzling lakes. Of the handsome, happy people.

Then I told him of how we came to learn that the splendor would all be snatched from us. First Mulesko Chiriklo, the bird of the dead, making her nest on the highest battlement of the Great Temple. Then the woman's voice crying the mourning-song in the night, which we heard in every city at once; and then the wind that blew from the south, where the dead souls go to live, and would not stop for fourteen months. And other omens after that: a year when there was no summer, and a day when the sun did not rise, and a night when no stars could be seen anywhere in the world.

We had no way of understanding these omens, for we had known nothing but happiness on Romany Star. There had never been a drought, nor an earthquake, nor a flood, nor a plague. The seasons came round in their time and the earth was fertile. There was no sickness among us, and when death came to us it was sudden and clean, in great old age. So when the omens began the call went forth for wise ones who could interpret them for us; and from every part of the world the wise ones came, gathering in the great plaza of the capital city. For ninety-nine months they conferred and studied and asked the gods for guidance. Then in the hundredth month the king locked them all in the Long Chamber of the Great Temple, and let them know that they would have neither food nor drink until they told us what was about to befall us and how we should deal with it; and there was no word from them for ninety-nine hours, but in the hundredth hour they signalled that they had been granted a revelation, and then they were allowed to come forth.

Our sweet Romany Star, they declared, has resolved to cast us forth into the universe to make our own way, and there is no use weeping or wailing or praying, for the time is short and swift action must be taken.

A change, they said, will soon come upon the sun who is our mother. She will swell and grow huge, and in place of her warm life-giving red glow there will come a savage blaze of blue light bearing terrible heat that no living thing can withstand. In one monstrous murderous noontime, the wise ones told us, deadly fire will march across the fields and meadows, the mountains and valleys, the cities and the plains. The world will turn black and the seas will boil and all life will end on Romany Star. And then the sun will subside as swiftly as she had erupted, and her gentle red light will return, but now it will fall on the charred and shattered ruin of our dear world.

At once there was weeping and there was wailing and there was praying, and the people cried out to the king to save them; and the king said, "This is something that is fated to come upon us, and we can do nothing to prevent it. But there is one way to save ourselves." And the king proposed that we build as many spacegoing ships as we could, and fill them with people and animals and plants and all the treasures of our world, and go forth into the Great Dark with them and wait out there until the cataclysm had run its course; and then we could return to Romany Star and rebuild our life there. So the weeping ceased, and the wailing and the praying; and the building of the ships commenced. But very soon it became clear that we could not possibly build enough of them. For the time of the cataclysm was almost upon us, and we had hardly enough ships to bear one person in a thousand into space. And then came news that was even worse: that there would be not one swelling of the sun but three, during the course of the next ten thousand years, so there was no point in trying to return to Romany Star; whatever we might rebuild would only be destroyed once more in the next swelling, and again in the one after that.

So we knew that most of us would die and the rest of us were to be driven forth from our home to dwell a long time in exile. We could not understand why God had chosen to do this to us, but we knew that it was not our place to find reasons for the doings of God.

"But only one in a thousand could go?" Chorian asked, horrified.

"Not even as many as that," I said. "One in five thousand, perhaps. One in ten thousand. We had only sixteen ships. There was a lottery, and names were chosen, and the sixteen ships went off into the Great Dark. And one day they looked behind them and saw a new star in the sky that was blazing a brilliant blue-white, and Romany Star's red glow was nowhere to be seen; and that day they wept and they wailed and prayed, and afterward they turned their faces forward, for they knew there was nothing behind them that they would want to see."

"And these were the Rom who settled on Earth?"

"Yes," I said. "Though we went to a few other places first; but Earth was most like Romany Star, and that was where we chose to live."

"Even though the Gaje were already there?"

"
Because
the Gaje were already there. The Gaje were shaped very much like the Rom, you see, so much so that one race could even interbreed with the other; and that was the proof that the Rom would be able to live and thrive on Earth. So there we settled, on a large uninhabited island of our own where the Gaje would not be able to trouble us; for the Gaje were a crude and stupid and backward people and we knew that they would harass us and bother us and make war on us if we tried to dwell in their midst. We took that island-they were helpless to stop us-and in time we built a great city on it and came to live almost as splendidly as we had on Romany Star; but when night fell we would look toward the heavens and we could see the red light of Romany Star shining there, and we dreamed of all that had once been ours, and we told ourselves that some day we would go back to our own world and make it what had been in the time before we had been cast forth."

"Romany Star had turned red again?" Chorian asked.

"Yes. Exactly as the wise men had predicted, so did it come to pass: it had turned brighter, all of a sudden, and had flailed out with a quick lethal flare, and then it had subsided and all was as it had been before."

"But we didn't go back, even so."

"That had been only the first swelling of the sun. We knew there would be two more."

"And have there been?"

"One," I said. "Almost six thousand years after we left. We saw it in the sky, a great blue-white blaze. That was at the time when Jesu Cretchuno was born, the Christ-child who some say is the son of God; and perhaps you know the tale of the three kings who came to worship him in his cradle. One of those kings was Rom; and he knew that the star that had announced the child's birth was the star that had given us birth also, and that it was blazing up for the second time, just as our wise ones had foretold."

Chorian stared at the sky for a long while. Then he said, "And the third swelling?"

"Soon," I said. "Another thousand years. Or five hundred, or maybe tomorrow. That's the sign we're all waiting for, the call, that third swelling. And then at last it will be safe for the Rom to return to their true home. If your precious emperor will let us have it, of course. Which is our chief task in the universe, to work toward regaining possession of our star; and I tell you, boy, I'll be there to see that day."

A sudden shadow darkened the darkness, cutting a black swath across the stars. For an instant Romany Star vanished from sight; and I heard the deep hooting voice of the bird of the dead, who had just passed overhead and was roosting now in a nearby tree. Her enormous black wings enfolded her like a shroud, and her sapphire eyes glinted in the night.

"Mulesko Chiriklo," I said. "A bird of good omen. She follows the Rom from world to world."

I waved to her, making a Rom salute; and Mulesko Chiriklo hooted her greeting to me in turn. I knew what she was saying. It was what she always said to me. She was offering the King of the Gypsies the blessing of the night, and the hope of a swift return to the ancient motherland. I looked at Chorian. He seemed terrified. His teeth were chattering and he was standing in a peculiar hunched way not at all proper to one so young and strong.

I slapped him on the shoulder.

"Come, boy. Let's go inside and see if there's some decent wine left."

As we headed for my ice-bubble I heard the laughter of Rom ghosts on the night wind.

BY THE FOURTH DAY CHORIAN HAD HIS SWEEP ANTENNA tuned to its farthest vector and it was time for him to go. He packed the few belongings he had brought with him into the smallest possible space, and unfurled his journey-helmet, that soft webwork of coppery mesh, no larger than a handkerchief when it is folded for storage, that would protect him during his lonely flight through the interstellar spaces.

Just before he put his helmet on he turned to me and I saw him struggling to say something, but the words wouldn't come for him. That troubled me. One Rom should never be afraid of saying the true things of the heart to another.

I went close to him and put my hands on his shoulders. I had to reach far up, though I am not small.

"What is it, cousin? What do you want to tell me?"

"That… that I'm going to leave now…"

"I know that, cousin," I said, very gently.

"And I wanted to say… just to say…"

He faltered. I let my hands continue to rest on his shoulders and I waited.

"I was trouble for you, wasn't I, Yakoub?"

"Trouble?"

"I came here where you had come to live by yourself, and I bothered you when you had no wish to be bothered. And you put up with me because it is Rom law that guests must not be turned away, but you were angry within that I was here."

"Dinosaur dung," I said, and I said it with vigor, and I said it in Romany, which was not easy, for although there are many words for "dung" in Romany there is not precisely one that means "dinosaur." Nevertheless I said it and he understood what I had said.