"Alors, mon vieux!" he cried. "Mes hommages! Comment ca va? Sacre bleu, how cold it is here!"
I gave him a blank look and backed away a little. Ghosts I understand, doppelgangers I understand, but the ghost of a doppelganger? No.
In a ragged shred of a voice I said, "Where did
you
come from?"
"Ah, is this the best greeting you can manage, mon ami?" Speaking to me coolly, from on high, ultra-French, miffed, deeply wounded. "I spend half a dreary interminability in the capsule of relay to get to this dreadful place, and you show no jubilation upon the sight of me, you evince no delight, you merely ask me, brusquely, without the littlest shred of courtesy, Where did I come from? Quel type! Where is the embrace? Where is the kiss on the cheeks?" He threw up his hands and burst into a crazy flurry of random French, like a robot translator gone berserk. "Joyeux Noel! Bonne Annee! A quelle heure part le prochain bateau? J'ai mal de mer! Faites venir le garcon! Par ici! Le voici! II faut payer!" And went capering around like a madman.
After a little while he subsided, as though his gears were winding down, and stood there sadly watching his own breath congeal in front of him.
"So you are not in any way glad to see me?" he said very quietly.
I studied him. Doppelgangers sometimes look a little transparent around the edges. This one didn't. This one didn't really seem like a doppelganger at all. It had Julien's quick darting piercing eyes, Julien's elegant movements. Its little dark mustache and small pointed beard were trimmed precisely in the right way, not a fraction of a hair askew, just as Julien's always were. Doppelgangers lose those small fine touches quickly. Entropic creep sets in and their definition starts to blur.
"You really are you, then?"
"Oui," he said. "I really are I."
"Truly Julien?"
"Sacre bleu! Nom d'un chien! Truly, truly, truly! What is the matter with you, cher ami? Where has your brain gone? Is it that this terrible cold-"
"The doppelganger you gave me," I said. "I couldn't figure out how a doppelganger could come back."
"Ah, the doppelganger! The doppelganger, mon vieux-"
"It faded away long ago, you know. So when I saw it again-when I thought I saw it-"
"Oui. Bien sur."
"How could I know? A doppelganger returning after it had faded? That isn't supposed to be possible. Some kind of trick? Some way of slipping an assassin past my guard? The devil's hairy hole, man! What was I supposed to think?"
"And what do you think now?"
I gave him another long close look.
He grew upset again when I didn't say anything. Waving his hands around, tossing his head in that stylishly frantic way of his. "Cordieu, cher ami! Mon petit Romanichel. Gitan bien-aime. Dear Mirlifiche, esteemed Cascarrot. It is only me! The true Julien! Vraiment, I am not a doppelganger. Nor an assassin. I am merely your own Julien de Gramont. N'est-ce pas? Can you believe that? What do you say, Gypsy king?"
Yes. Of course. How could I doubt it? He was the genuine item. No doppelganger could possibly generate so much heat, so much frenzy, so much exasperated passion.
I felt embarrassed.
I felt contrite.
I felt like a damned fool.
To mistake a man for his own doppelganger may not be a dueling offense, but it certainly isn't much of a compliment. And to do it to poor Julien de Gramont, with his royal pretensions and his excitable Gallic temperament-
Well, I apologized most profusely and he insisted that it was a harmless mistake and I invited him into my bubble and brewed up a batch of steaming coffee for him, the ancient Rom coffee, black as sin, hot as hell, sweet as love, and in five minutes it was all a forgotten matter, no offense intended, none taken. Julien had brought presents for me, two overpockets' worth of them, and he proceeded now to conjure them out of the storage dimension and stack them up in heaps on my floor. Sweet old Julien, still worrying about my gastronomic comfort! "Homard en civet de vieux Bourgogne," he announced, pulling out one of those cunning flasks that will prepare and heat your meal just so if you merely touch your finger to the go-button. "Carre d'agneu roti au poivre vert. Fricassee de poulet au vinaigre de vin. Pommes purees. Les filets mignons de veau au citron. Everything is labeled, mon ami. Everything is true French, no grotesque dishes of the Galgala herdsmen, no foul porridges of Kalimaka, no quivering monstrosities from the swamps of Megalo Kastro. Here. Here. You like kidney? You like sweetbreads? Fricassee de rognons et de ris de veau aux feuilles d'epinards. Eh, mon frere? Coquilles Saint-Jacques? Pate de fruits de mer en croute? Bouillabaisse Marseillaise? I have brought you everything."
"You're much too good to me, Julien."
"I have brought enough so that you can eat like a human being for two years, perhaps three. It is the least I can do for you, in this terrible savage solitude. Two years of the fine French cuisine." He gave me a sly look. "How long more do you think you stay here, mon cher? Two years, is it? Three, four?"
"Is that what you came here to find out, old friend?"
Color rose to his cheeks.
"It is of concern to me, your long absence from the worlds of civilization. I sorrow for you. Your people sorrow for you. You are a man of importance, Yakoub."
"Among the Rom," I told him, "we say 'important' when we mean 'corpulent.' Did you know that? 'A man of importance' means to us a man with a big belly." I looked at the flasks stacked all over the bubble, dozens of them, with any number of their cousins still tucked away in the storage dimension. I patted my middle, which has become kingly indeed in these my later years. "So that's why you brought all this stuff, Julien? You want me to be even more important than I already am?"
"The worlds call out for you, Yakoub." His stagy French accent suddenly was gone; he spoke in the purest Imperial. "There is great chaos out there, because there is no king. Ships are lost in the star-lanes; piracy increases; quarrels of great men are left unresolved. Your people have a great need for you. Even the Empire has a need for you. Do you realize that, Yakoub?"
"I intend no offense, Julien. But I want to know who told you to come here."
He looked uncomfortable. He toyed with his little pointed beard. He fiddled with his flasks, he fooled with the labels. I left the question lying there in the air between us.
"What do you mean, who told me to come here?" he said finally.
"It's not a very complicated question, is it?"
"I came here because you are missed. You are needed."
"Don't hide behind passive verbs, Julien.
Who
misses me?
Who
needs me? Who paid you to stick yourself in a relay-sweep depot and come out to talk to me?"
Glumly he said, after a bit, "It was Periandros."
"Ah. The grand surprise."
"If you knew, why did you ask?"
"To see what you would say."
"Yakoub!"
"All right. So Periandros sent you. Does that mean Naria's man will be here next?"
He frowned. "What do you mean?"
"The three lords of the Imperium is what I mean. Sunteil's man left here a little while ago. Now you're here on behalf of Periandros. It stands to reason that Number Three will want to touch base with me too, and maybe the archimandrite as well, or even, God forbid, the emperor himself. If the emperor's still alive."
"The emperor is still alive," Julien said. "What's this about Sunteil?"
"He sent a Rom boy named Chorian."
"I know Chorian. Extremely young, but very competent. And very tricky, like all you Rom."
"Is he? Are we?"
"What is Sunteil troubled about?"
"That my abdication is some kind of hoax, and that I'll be coming back to the Empire when I'm least expected, to cause the greatest amount of trouble."
Julien beamed serenely. "Of
course
your abdication is some kind of hoax. The question that should be in Sunteil's mind is why you have perpetrated it, and what can be done to persuade you to give up the game you are playing." To that I made no response, but he didn't seem to have expected any. He watched me for a moment and then, with only the smallest knowing twitch of his exquisite eyebrow, he turned away and began to wander around my bubble, picking up this thing and that, handling my dearest possessions with the practiced touch of a flea-market antiquities dealer, which is one of the professions he has practiced in his time. I let him. He would do no harm. He fondled a bright yellow silken diklo, a Rom scarf that someone had worn in the lost and fabled land of Bulgaria fifteen centuries ago. He caressed the veil of La Chunga. He tapped out a quick rhythm on my ancient tambourine and then he laid his hands reverently on my lavuta, my Gypsy violin, passed down from Rom to Rom like all the rest of this stuff since the time when Earth still was.
"May I?" he said.
"My guest."
He fitted it in place under his chin, strummed its sounding-box a moment with his fingertips, reached for the bow. And made that old fiddle laugh, and then he made it weep, and then he made it sing. All in eight or nine measures. He looked at me, eyes bright, triumphant.
"You play like a Rom," I told him.
A self-deprecating shrug. "You flatter like a Rom."
"Where did you learn?"
He fiddled off another measure or two. "Years ago, on Sidri Akrak, there was an old Rom who called himself the Zigeuner Bicazului. He played in the marketplace outside the Palace of the Trierarch and Periandros sent one of his phalangarii to invite him in; and for a year and a half this Bicazului was court musician. He played the lavuta, the cithera, the pandero, everything. I asked him to teach me a few of the old tunes."
"There are times I have to remind myself you are not Rom, Julien."
"There are times I have to do the same," he said.
"What happened to him, that Bicazului of yours? Where is he now, do you think?"
"It was long ago," Julien said, gesturing vaguely. "He was very old." He put the violin down and walked to the window. For a long while he stared out. The yellow sun was low in the sky and clouds were thickening; a storm was coming on. The tentacles of the trees were moving more slowly than usual. After a time he said, "You like it here, Yakoub?"
"To me it seems very beautiful, Julien. I'm at peace here."
"Vraiment?"
"Yes. Vraiment. I am truly at peace here."
"A strange place for you in the autumn of your life, Yakoub. These fields of ice, this tempestuous snow-"
"The peace. Don't forget the peace. What does a little snow matter, if you have peace?"
"And those repellent green things? What are they?" There was distaste in his voice. "Les tentacules terribles. Les poulpes terrestres, the octopus of the land?" He shuddered, a precise, elegant motion.
"They are trees," I said.
"
Trees
?"
"Trees, yes."
"I see. And these trees, do they seem beautiful to you as well?"
"This place is my home now, Julien."
"Ah. Oui. Oui. Forgive me, mon ami."
We stood together by the window. The sound of his fiddling was still in my ears. And also I heard the last words I had spoken just now, echoing and echoing and echoing,
This place is my home, this place is my home
.
For a moment I thought I would ask him to go outside with me so I could show him the place where on a clear night the red fire of Romany Star glowed in the sky. Julien, I would say, I did not speak the truth.
There
is my home, Julien, I would say. And then I thought, No. No. He is dear to me but he could never understand, and in any case I must not say such things to him, for he is Gaje. Truly, he is Gaje. I thought again of the music he had made with my fiddle; and I told myself, There are times I have to remind myself you are not Rom, Julien.
5.
HE SEEMED ABASHED FOR HAVING SPOKEN SO HARSHLY against Mulano, and after a time he asked if we might go out for a stroll, so that I could show him the beauties of the landscape. I knew that he had already had more than enough of a taste of the beauties of the landscape when he came through the forest from whatever place the relay-sweep capsule had dropped him; this was his way of making amends. But we went out anyway and I showed him the trees at close range, and pointed out the great sweeping flow of the glaciers, and told him the names I had given to the mountains that rose like a jagged wall on the horizon. "You are right," he said finally. "It is very beautiful in its way, Yakoub."
"In its way, yes."
"I meant that truly."
"I know, Julien."
"Dear friend. Come: it is time now for the lunch, do you think?"
We went inside. He peered for a long while at his flasks and selected one finally, and flicked his thumb against its go-button. The inner surface of the flask grew misty as it heated up. Reaching into one of the overpockets, he brought forth a bottle of red wine and popped the cork with his thumbs. "Le dejeuner," he proclaimed. "Cassoulet en la maniere de Languedoc. It has been a long cold afternoon, but this will heal me. Do you wish bread?" He rummaged in the overpocket and drew out a baguette that might have been baked three hours ago in Paris. For a few moments he busied himself with the task of serving our lunch.
Then he said, continuing our earlier conversation as though there had been no break in it at all, "I don't believe Sunteil is afraid of your returning. I think it's your
not
returning that he fears."
"Polarca has the same theory."
"Polarca? Has he been here too?"
"His ghost. Still is. Perhaps hovering right over your shoulder as we eat." I shoveled down the cassoulet in silence for a while, washing it along with splendiferous gulps of the wine, and belched him a belch of great resonance and grandeur to show my appreciation. "This is truly fine, Julien. If I had to come back in my next life as a Gajo, I would want to be a Frenchman of France, and eat like this three times a day."