"The King of the Gypsies does me great honor by such lavish praise, Yakoub."
"
Former
King of the Gypsies, Julien."
"You hold the title until your death, or until the judges of the great kris formally depose you. Your abdication is not binding on the Rom government. As you well know."
"Are you a lawyer now as well as a chef?" I asked.
"You also know that matters of succession are of deep importance to me, Yakoub. It is my great passion, my overwhelming obsession."
"I thought your great passion was for food," I said, maybe too sharply. "And your overwhelming obsession was something to do with women."
"Don't mock me, Yakoub."
I had stung him that time. I was sorry, and I said so. Perhaps he did have his little pretensions. But he was an old friend, and a dear one.
He said, after a while, "No one understands your abdication. They see it as a betrayal of all that you have worked for during a long and honorable life."
I could have explained myself then, I suppose. Did he think, did any of them think, that there had been no reason for my going away, that I had simply tossed my crown away for the sheer spiteful fun of it? I will admit to you here and now that there had been times on Mulano when I woke up in the night in a sweat, convinced of my own utter idiocy. But generally I didn't think that was the situation and I certainly didn't want them to, neither the high lords of the Imperium nor those who were now the big Gypsies. Did they believe I was that flighty, that capricious, that irresponsible?
Me
? Speak, Yakoub, explain yourself, defend yourself. Here's your moment.
But Syluise's laughter rang in my ears. And also I reminded myself yet again that this old and dear friend of mine was a Gajo, and a confidante of the emperor and in the direct pay of the Lord Periandros besides, and all I said was, "Power kept too long goes flat, Julien. You know, when you leave a bottle of champagne open too long, what happens to it?"
"I cannot believe that any such thing has happened to you, mon ami."
"How long was I king? Forty years? Fifty years? Enough."
"So this is what you will do? Will you sit here in all this ice and snow-forgive me, I truly cannot like this place, my friend-will you watch these unpleasant green tentacles writhe and quiver at you for the rest of your days, and do nothing else?"
"For the rest of my days? I don't know that. This is what I have been doing. It pleases me to do it. This is what I intend to continue doing, Julien, until it stops pleasing me, if it does. If."
"This I do not understand. A moment of boredom, a fit of mere pique, Yakoub, and you allow yourself to throw away everything that you-"
"Let me be, Julien. I know what I'm doing."
"Do you?"
"I know that I'm done with being king. Isn't that sufficient for you? Damn it, Julien, let me be!"
I pushed my plate aside and walked to the door of the bubble and stared out at the gently undulating arms of the forest. I listened to my breath go in and out, in and out. I sent little messages of greetings to my liver, my pancreas, my alimentary canal. Hello there, old friends. And my bodily organs sent friendly little messages back. Hello there, you. We know each other so well, my organs and I. I basked in their admiration. The high regard in which they held me pleased me very much. We had a good thing going. If we played our cards right we could stick together another two hundred years. Maybe even more. I thought about that and it felt good. I thought about tonight's dinner. I thought about the wine. I thought about the snow that was starting to fall in counterclockwise swirls. The one thing I didn't want to think about was being king again. I wanted to think about not being king. The presence of the absence of my power was what gave me life and vigor these days.
Into my mind came lovely lascivious thoughts that had nothing to do with anything Julien had been saying. Watching the forest's green limbs writhing voluptuously about, I felt strange stirrings within myself. I could go out there, I thought, and lie down naked in their midst, and then they would embrace me like a lover. I imagined all those myriad tentacles caressing my body, slithering here and there in all the sensitive places, knowing just what I liked best. Sucking, stroking, tickling, poking. Ooh. Ah. Oh, yes, good! Very good! Gently I drifted into profound eroto-botanical fantasies, odd but pleasing floral delights. There was fine food in my belly and good red wine in my brain and now my loins were coming alive with these delectable new yearnings. At my age, still capable of responding to something strange and new! Pay heed to that, all of you. Hearken and learn. You might think the old fires die down, but they don't. No. Not even on this chilly world. Not at all. Ever.
Julien came up behind me. His voice drilled cruelly into my reverie.
"And your people, Yakoub? You will leave them kingless forever? You will allow the guild of pilots to disintegrate?"
The vision of tentacular delight shattered and popped like a punctured balloon. I was furious with him for breaking in on me. He should have known. A moment of solitary reflection, a sacred interlude. Private and sacrosanct. And he had smashed it without a thought. And him claiming to be French, too.
But I held my wrath in check. For ancient friendship's sake.
Sourly I said, "The krisatora know what to do. If they want another king, they can declare the office vacant and elect someone. Otherwise the Rom can manage well enough without a king for five years, for fifty, for five hundred if necessary. The French have managed without one, haven't they, for something like
thirteen
hundred years."
"And there are no more French," said Julien bleakly.
"What do you mean?"
"We are nowhere. We are nothing. We are a memory, a book of recipes, and a difficult language that scarcely anyone understands. Is that what you want for your people, Yakoub?"
"We are Rom. We have been since before there were French or English or Germans or any of the million tribes of Earth. We will go on being Rom whether we have a king at this moment or not." I found my wine and took a deep draught of it. That calmed me a little. It was splendid stuff, and when my temper had cooled I told him so. The French might be an extinct culture, but
someone
still understood how to make a decent Bordeaux. After a moment I said, "Why am I in the thoughts of the Lord Periandros?"
"The emperor is old and feeble."
"That is hardly news, Julien."
"But now the end seems to be in sight. A year or two, perhaps, but he can't last much longer than that."
"So? The Rom won't be the only ones with a succession problem, then. What else is new?"
"This is serious, Yakoub. There are three high lords and the emperor has shown no strong inclination toward any of them."
"I know that. Let them draw straws to see who gets it, then."
"They are very strong men, and very determined. If the emperor dies without indicating a preference, there could be a war for the throne."
"No," I said, with a fierce shake of my head. "That's completely inconceivable. What do you think this is, the Middle Ages?"
"I think this is the year 3159 a.d., Yakoub, and there is an Empire of many hundreds of worlds at stake, and nothing essential has changed in the human soul since the time of Rome and Byzantium. Periandros won't sit idly by and see Sunteil have the throne, nor will Naria step aside gracefully for Periandros, nor-"
"There won't be any more wars, Julien. Humanity
has
changed. Going to the stars is what did it."
"You think?"
"War is an outmoded notion," I told him grandly. "Like the appendix, like the little toe. Another five hundred years and nobody's going to be born with an appendix any more, and good riddance to it. A thousand years beyond that and there'll be no more little toes either. And war is already gone. You know that as well as I do. It's an obsolete concept in this age of galactic empire." I was getting heated up by my own rhetoric. That's always a danger sign. But I went steaming right on. "There hasn't been a real war since… since I don't know when. Hundreds of years. A thousand, maybe. Not since Earth went down the drain and all its petty little garbage went with it." I was wondrously worked up now. "Wars are unthinkable in today's galactic society! Not just unthinkable but logistically impossible!"
"Don't be so sure of that."
"Why are you such a pessimist, Julien?"
"Only a realist, mon ami." There was a sudden wintry bleakness in his eyes that I could hardly bear to see. He had given much thought to all this. Not that I hadn't; but I had been away from it for five years. Had I let myself get too far out of touch with reality? No. No. No. He said, "I think the idea of war might be all too easy to revive. Perhaps some entirely new kind of war, a war between stars, but bloody and horrible all the same."
Yes? No. This is all nonsense, I thought. I laughed in his face. Poor gloomy Julien, lost in these morbid apocalyptic fantasies. Scared shitless by phantoms. War? Between stars? If wine did this to him, maybe he ought to stick to water. He was starting to annoy me now.
"Come off it," I told him. "I'm too old to be frightened by this sort of stuff."
"Then I envy you. For I myself am greatly frightened."
"Of
what
?" I shouted.
He kept calm. Calm as death. "It is too great a vacuum, this absence of a clear line of succession. A vacuum can engender disruptive forces, my friend, and the greater the vacuum the greater the disruptions."
I couldn't argue with that. It was verging across the line from politics into physics. I never argue with physics.
"They'll work it out," I said, more quietly and without much confidence. I think I was beginning to experience a slow confidence leak. "An agreement among themselves. A rational division of authority. Maybe even a partition of the Empire, who knows? Would that be such a bad idea?"
"There is not one vacuum but two," he went on, as if I had not spoken at all. "For what also is absent is the King of the Rom."
"Don't start with me again on that, Julien."
"Just tell me this, Yakoub: putting aside the question of your resuming authority again, what if you were to return to the Imperium and request a meeting with the emperor-he'll see you, whether you're king or not-and make the nature of the crisis clear to him?"
Now I saw his real game. I didn't like it.
I said, "And advocate the naming of the Lord Periandros, perhaps, as his successor?"
Julien reddened. "Do you think I am so clumsy as to ask that of you?"
"You do favor Periandros, don't you?"
"I favor stability. I am close to Periandros. But I would rather see Sunteil wear the crown, or Naria, than have the Imperium shattered by civil war. What matters is that there be
some
succession. You might be able to bring that about. No one else would dare to speak of such things with the emperor."
"I've abdicated, Julien."
"The system is out of balance with you gone."
"Polarca said the same thing in virtually as many words. Polarca's ghost. Let it be out of balance, then. A rat's ass for the balance of the system, Julien."
"Yakoub-"
"A rat's ass!"
"The possibility of war-"
I waved my hands around impatiently as though his words were farts and I was trying to clear the air.
"If you would only consider, Yakoub, the risk of allowing such instability to-"
Again I cut him off. "No," I said. "Enough of this." And then I said, "What did you say this thing we were eating is called, Julien?"
With a sigh he answered, "Cassoulet, mon ami."
"And how is it made?"
You can always distract a Frenchman by asking him for a recipe. "It is the garlic sausage, and the breast of lamb, and the filet of pork, to which one adds the white beans, and-"
"It's superb," I said. "Absolutely superb. I must have some more."
6.
NIGHT CAME. WE SAT QUIETLY. OLD FRIENDS HAVE the privilege of being silent with one another. Sleet beat furiously against my window for a time. Then the storm moved on and the sky began to clear. Stars cut their way through the thinning storm-clouds, sparkling with fierce intensity against that deep backdrop of blackness that is seen only on a world where no one dwells.
I sat quietly, yes. Feeling the fullness of my belly, feeling also a certain pressure on my shoulders that I knew was the weight of all the universe moving above me. That immense inconceivable clockwork mechanism, the billion billion soundless stars gliding on their tracks in the heavens, whipping their billion billion billion worlds along as they turned on the unknown axis that was at the center of it all somewhere. Everything interwoven, everything connected by invisible rods and struts that we imagine we understand.
And then I thought of our own little corner of it all, that speck, our few hundreds of worlds within our one galaxy-the galaxy that seems so vast when we are out traveling in it, but which is only one small stitch in the whole colossal tapestry. The worlds of men, of Gaje, of Rom. Kingdom and Empire. All our intricate struggles and maneuverings: they were so tiny against that great sky. Tiny, yes, but not trivial, for what was the universe, after all, except one atom and another and another and another, each one as important as any other in the structure of the whole thing? No, not trivial. Nothing is trivial. Subtract one atom from the universe and all is lost.
So they would need a new emperor soon, in this little corner of the universe that is everything to us? Well, I knew what that situation was like. I was around when the Fourteenth Emperor was dying and I am even old enough to remember the last days of the Thirteenth. To be close to a dying emperor has its perils, as it is perilous to be close to a star about to burn out. The star has been blazing away for nine billion years and now its course is just about run: in a little while the wild dance of the hot little nuclei will be stilled forever and there will be only a sphere of cold blackness where there had been ferocious light. Then it happens and in that moment of the birth of void a great whistling inrush of air comes bellowing in from every corner of the cosmos at once. You can get swept willy-nilly to the ends of the universe if you happen to be in the way when that wind goes rushing by.