Star of Gypsies (28 page)

"I think so, yes," he said. And said it in Romany.

"All right. So be it."

I walked back around the crater to the others. They had fallen silent by this time, and they were all staring at me.

"You aren't going to do it, are you?" Polarca said.

"My mind is made up."

"Put it to the phuri dai, at least!" Valerian cried. "For God's sake, Yakoub, let her decide!"

"The phuri dai!" Polarca chimed in. "The phuri dai."

Once again they turned to Bibi Savina, crowding around her. They were still all against me, all but Thivt. They really did think I had lost my mind.

"All right," I said, beginning to feel fury rising. "Let's listen to the phuri dai. Tell us, Bibi Savina. What should I do?"

There was an eerie light in Bibi Savina's eyes and her withered and shrunken body seemed to blaze with an inner flame. For a moment she appeared to stand straight again, and from her there emanated a kind of beauty that far outshone that of the magnificent Syluise.

"You must go to Galgala, Yakoub," she said in a strange voice like that of one who is in a trance. An oracle's voice. "Stand before Shandor and tell him he is not king. It is the only way. It is what you must do."

What had this prophet done? What did he tell us, above all to do? He told us to deny all consolations-gods, fatherlands, moralities, truths-and, remaining apart and companionless, using nothing but our own strength, to begin to fashion a world which would not shame our hearts. Which is the most dangerous way? That is the one I want! Where is the abyss? That is where I am headed. What is the most valiant joy? To assume complete responsibility!

DESPITE BIBI SAVINA'S DECREE THERE WAS STILL plenty of uproar. By twos and threes they came to me and worked at changing my mind. Think of the risks, they said. Think of the danger. Think of the loss to our people if Shandor harms you, Yakoub. Think of this, think of that. You are indispensable, they told me. How can you simply hand yourself over to Shandor like this?

He is my son, I said. He will do me no harm.

Polarca told me flat out that I was crazy. I had never seen him so exasperated. He ranted, he stormed, he threatened to resign his office. I pointed out that he had no office to resign from, just now. He wasn't amused. He started ghosting around almost uncontrollably, leaping back across space and time in an altogether hysterical way. He was in a frenzy. I thought he would begin frothing at the mouth.

The person of the king is sacrosanct, I insisted. Even Shandor will recognize that, when I come to him on Galgala.

Valerian wanted to go to Galgala in my place and end Shandor's usurpation by force. He would gather up his entire pirate fleet and descend on him and march to the house of power and evict him from the throne. Biznaga remarked on the improbability of that, asking if Valerian seriously thought Shandor would let him get within a light-year of Galgala with his ships. At the first sign of his approach, Biznaga suggested, Shandor would simply let the imperial government know that the notorious pirate Valerian was in the vicinity, and an armada of the Imperium would be waiting for him when he arrived.

Biznaga too urged me not to go: calmly, quietly, in his best diplomatic manner. Jacinto, Ammagante, the same. Damiano was more volatile, and ranted and stormed almost as fiercely as Polarca. There was talk of finding one or two of my other sons, wherever they might be-my children are scattered all over the universe, God knows where-and bringing them to Xamur to plead with me. Or sending them to their brother Shandor as my ambassadors. Small mercy they would have had from him, too. Someone, I forget who (and just as well that I did) suggested appealing to the aged emperor for help in deposing Shandor, the most laughable thing I have ever heard. And so on for several days. The only allies I had were Thivt and Bibi Savina. And possibly Syluise, though she held herself aloof as usual from most of the discussions and it wasn't easy to know where she stood. But I looked into her cool blue eyes and seemed to find support in them. In her remote and unfathomable way she appeared to be telling me to do as I pleased, accept the risks, reap the reward.

So I simply lied to them. Be calm, I told them, I know what I'm doing. Everything is written in the book of the future, and all will be for the best.

Somehow that settled them down. I let them think that I had received some sort of privileged information out of the future: an obliging ghost, possibly my own, coming to me and letting me know in the customary oblique ghostly way that my gamble had paid off somewhere down the line, that Shandor indeed had backed off when faced with the live and legitimate King of the Rom, that I would be restored to the throne and we would once more be traveling the path toward Romany Star. And they bought it.

But the truth is my ghosts were keeping away. Sometimes I saw a little flicker out of the corner of my eye that might have been some ghost hovering near, but I never was sure. That could have bothered me, if I had allowed it to. I told myself that the reason I was getting no ghosts was that I was being tested, my resolve, my courage: those who might have ghosted me, even my own self, were making me go through this thing unaided. I was on my own in this thing. Well, that was all right. I would simply proceed into the future at a rate of one second per second, with no hints of what was to come, the same as everyone else. Shandor was a wild man but there was logic to my strategy and I felt that no harm ultimately would come to me. Still and all, it would have been pleasant to get a little visit from some future self of mine, just a quick little reassuring flash, a wink, during those days when I was getting myself ready to walk into the mouth of the lion.

SO IT WAS AGREED, IN THE END. YOU CAN'T REALLY argue with a king once he's made up his mind. I would go to Galgala, I would confront Shandor, and then, well, we would all see what happened after that. I made only one concession to my friends' fears. My plan had been to go to Galgala alone, but Damiano talked me into taking Chorian along as an escort. Chorian was, after all, a servant of the Imperium, and Shandor might just think twice about laying violent hands on him, regardless of what he might feel like doing to me.

I could see a little logic in that. Chorian could come to Galgala with me. But I let it be known that even so I was going to enter into the presence of Shandor alone, unescorted, not cowering behind the shield of the Imperium and some boy still wet with mother's milk. And I dared them to give me any further argument.

I am, basically, a very cautious man. You don't get to live as long as I have by being reckless. My father drilled the Three Laws and the One Word into me when I was very young, and the fact that I have survived as well as I have for as long as I have ought to be sufficient proof that I was a careful student at least of that much. Those who live by common sense, my father taught me, are righteous in the eyes of God. So they are. I would live no other way. Still and all, there is common sense and common sense, and some kinds of common sense make more sense than others. Time and again I've discovered that the conventional "safe" ways of doing things are often wildly risky. And that what looks impossibly crazy to conventional people is really the only reasonable course to take.

For example, that time when I was living in slavery on Alta Hannalanna. Do you think common sense has any value in a place like Alta Hannalanna? Common sense would have gotten me killed there, that's what common sense would have done.

What a foul brute of a world that was! How I detested it, how I suffered, how I toiled in misery! A thousand times a day did I curse the soul of Pulika Boshengro, he who had sent me there in slavery to get rid of me after overthrowing his brother, my beloved mentor and foster father, Loiza la Vakako. That planet could well have been the end of me, if I hadn't been willing to take a crazy chance.

They shipped me there, as you know, by relay-sweep. It was my first taste of that dismal mode of travel and it was like a nightmare for me, those hours and weeks and perhaps even months-who could tell?-a prisoner in my little sphere of force as I hurtled across the galaxy. I raged and screamed until my throat felt like rags, and still the journey went on and on. Still I hung, suspended between life and death. For the second time in my life there was a slave-mark on my forehead and there was no way I could rip it off, not even by tearing at the skin. I was helpless. I was, I think, twenty years old, twenty-five, something like that. It all seems the same from this distance. I was very young, anyway. My life had hardly even begun and now it seemed all over. When I had been a babe in my cradle the wise old crone had come to me and whispered great prophecies of kingship and glory, and where had they gone? The little Gypsy boy on Vietoris, the beggar-slave on Megalo Kastro, the shoveler of snail-shit on Nabomba Zom: this was glory? This was kingship? Indeed for a time only a little while before I had lived the life of high privilege, when I was the heir to kingly Loiza la Vakako. I was the future husband of his lovely daughter. The gentle world of Nabomba Zom would one day be my domain. And then suddenly it all had been torn away from me and I was a slave again, stuffed into a relay-sphere and flung into nowhere, heading for a world so dreadful that Loiza la Vakako had not been able to bring himself to describe it to me-

I don't remember my landing on Alta Hannalanna. It must have been a bad one, though. I had lived in my relay-sphere for so long that it had become like a womb to me, and when I was dumped out onto the surface of that sickening planet I think the shock of it separated me from my sanity for a while. The first thing I can recall is crouching on my knees with my head down, sweating and puking and trembling, while a tall man in a gray uniform jabbed me again and again in the kidneys with a truncheon. I didn't know where I was. I didn't even know who I was.

"Get up," he said. "Slave."

The air was hot and dank and the world was quivering like a trampoline beneath me. I wasn't imagining it. There was no solid surface, only a bewildering grotesque lacework of interwoven rubbery yellow vines thick as a man's thigh that stretched from horizon to horizon. The texture of the vines was rough and sticky, with warts and humps rising everywhere. They quivered like the strings of a fiddle. I thought I could feel the planet breathing below them, heavy groaning exhalations that set the vines in motion, and then long slow sighing inward draughts. A dense clammy rain was falling. The gravity was very light, but there was nothing exhilarating about that; it simply made everything seem even more unstable. I was dizzy and sick.

"Up," the guard said again, and prodded me without mercy.

He shoved me aboard a weird kind of vehicle that had no wheels, only peculiar spiderleg-like limbs that ended in huge hand-shaped clamps. It made its way across the face of Alta Hannalanna like some sort of giant bug, grasping and then releasing the strands of the planetary vines as it pulled itself forward. In time it came to a place where the vines parted to create a vast dark hole, and it plunged down into it, and down and down and down, until I was somewhere deep within the heart of the planet.

I was not to see the surface of Alta Hannalanna again for many months. Not that there was much virtue in being up there, for the whole place is an impassable maze of those evil sticky vines; a veil of thick gray clouds perpetually hides the sun; and the rain never ceases, not even for a moment. But down below is even worse. It is all one great solid spongy mass, hundreds of kilometers thick. Wide low-roofed tunnels run through it, crossing and crossing again. The walls of those tunnels are moist and pink, like intestines, and a sort of sickly phosphorescent illumination comes from them, a feeble glow that breaks the darkness without giving comfort to the eyes. The whole planet is like that, from pole to pole. Afterward I learned that the spongy underground of Alta Hannalanna is the substructure of the vines, their mother-substance, a gigantic mass of vegetable matter that completely engulfs the entire globe. The vines that spring from it are its organs of nourishment. They bring moisture to it, and by exposing themselves to the foggy light of the surface they allow some sort of photosynthetic processes to take place below. Apparently the whole thing is one vast organism of planetary size, the vegetable equivalent of the living sea of Megalo Kastro. The real surface of Alta Hannalanna lies buried somewhere beneath it, far down. It shows up on sonar probes, an underlying layer of solid rock, but no one has ever seen any reason to penetrate deep enough to find it.

By God, it is an awful place! I blush to think that it was a Rom who discovered it, that great Gypsy spacefarer Claude Varna, five hundred years ago. To his credit Varna thought it was a horror not worth further examination; but something in the report he filed aroused the curiosity of a biologist in the employ of one of the huge Gaje trading companies a century later, and a second expedition went forth. Alas that it did.

The tunnels are inhabited. Indeed the tunnels were created by their own inhabitants. For they are nothing more than colossal worm-holes, excavated by enormous sluggish flat-topped creatures whose bodies are three times the width of a man's and extend to unbelievable lengths. Slowly, patiently, these things have been gnawing their way through the underground world of Alta Hannalanna since the beginning of time. They are mere eating-machines, mindless, implacable. What they devour they digest and excrete as thin slime that runs in rivers behind them, gradually to be reabsorbed by the tunnel walls.

There are other life-forms in those tunnels, comparatively insignificant in size, that live as parasites on the great worms or on the surrounding vegetable matter. One of them is a kind of insect, a creature the size of a large dog with a savage beak and huge glittering golden-green eyes, repellent to behold. It is because of these creatures that I spent two years of my life in terrible torment in the tunnels of Alta Hannalanna.