I almost didn't recognize him. He must have had a remake not long before and he looked no more than thirty or forty years old. Smooth olive skin, black hair, even a nose job. But underneath all the changes that his vanity had dictated I could still see Shandor's hard bright eyes, his broad cheekbones, his full lips. The Rom features. Like mine. Like my father's. Ineradicable. The tyranny of the genes.
"What the hell are
you
doing here?" he snapped. Then he shook his head. "But you aren't here, are you? You're just his doppelganger."
He was trying to look fierce, and by and large he was succeeding at it. Shandor was a fierce man, all right, and a dangerous one. The blood of innocents was on his hands. Don't forget that The Butcher of Djebel Abdullah is what people used to call him, before he got himself absolved of that revolting atrocity. But he was fidgety also. He has always had fidgety moves. He was different from me in that respect, and from all my other sons. We know how to keep calm, at least on the outside. There was something wrong about Shandor right from the start.
"No doppelganger," I said. "The real thing. The genuine item. I thought I'd pay you a little visit."
"Don't try to play games with me. We've known each other too long. What gives you the right to barge in here like this?"
"The right? The
right
! I have to ask permission to greet my own son?"
"The king," he said.
I stared at him. "You little bastard," I said. "You snot. How do you come off setting yourself up to be king? You know who the king is, Shandor."
I thought his eyes would pop from his head. Nobody had spoken to him like this in ninety years, probably.
His face twitched. He did twitchy things with his fingers too. He moved his lips but nothing came out except little hoarse croakings. I wanted to think that it was fear that was clamping down on his voice, and maybe it was, a little. But mainly it was anger. It took him a moment to regain control and when he did manage to speak it was a ragged squeaking blurt, almost pathetic:
"You abdicated!"
"So? You believed me?"
"You stormed around telling everyone on fifty worlds that you had had it with being king. You disappeared and no one heard a peep out of you for years. You hid yourself away on God knows what uninhabited planet somewhere outside the Imperium, walking out flat on your responsibilities, letting your own beloved people shift for themselves, ignoring the-"
"Shandor."
"Don't interrupt me."
"What? Who the hell do you think you are?" I almost went up the wall in a wild fit of wrath. Telling me to shut up? Me.
ME
. "You viper. You miserable shit."
His face was white. "I won't hear crap like that. I'm your legally anointed king-"
"My king?
My
king?" I started to rant and rave. I wanted to throttle him. He saw it in my eyes and I think this time he really was afraid of me. And if he was, it was probably for the first time in his life.
I looked back across the years, across what seemed like geological eons, and I saw him at his mother's breast. My sweet and comforting Esmeralda, first of my wives, holding little red-faced sniveling Shandor, first of all my sons, and he was biting her breast. Really sinking his fangs in.
King? Him? I wanted to swat his behind.
"The abdication was conditional," I said. "It's invalid."
"Conditional? Conditional on what?"
"On my continuing to stay abdicated. I voluntarily gave up the kingship and now I voluntarily take it back. The throne was never vacant. The alleged election that allegedly put you where you think you are was illegal."
"You're out of your mind-"
"You need your mouth washed out," I told him.
You have to bear in mind that this Shandor I was berating was no kid. I figure he must have been something close to a hundred years old, which once upon a time was considered a ripe old age. Even now it's a little past the prime of life, though the easy availability of remakes makes it hard to say when the prime of life really is.
But to me Shandor had always been a snot, a shit, and a worthless treacherous villain. That's a hell of a thing to have to say about your own first-born son, I know.
I gave him some three non-stop minutes on the subject of laws and customs and the kingship and filial obligation, and he was so stunned that for once he listened to me without saying a word. He was frightened and angry at first, and then troubled and angry, and then annoyed and angry, and then the anger disappeared and I saw him starting to look crafty. I could read every emotion as though he was sending up beacons. Shandor might be dangerous but he wasn't really smart. He just thought he was. Now that everyone lives so long, you see false wisdom all over the place. Just because someone has lived a long time doesn't make him a sage. You accumulate smarts up to a point, and then you stop, and often you start to slide backward.
(Except me, that is. I'm always the exception. Does that sound to you like I'm kidding myself? All right, then I'm kidding myself. Go ahead and fuck around with me because you think I'm senile. You'll find out.)
I paused for breath finally and he said, "Are you finished?"
"More or less. I'm calling a session of the krisatora to have you deposed and me reinstated. I just wanted to give you the courtesy of knowing that ahead of time."
He didn't react. He didn't even seem mildly irritated. Now he
was
being crafty.
"You have nothing to say to that?" I asked.
"I have plenty to say."
"Go on."
He sat there looking at me. I saw my own face staring back at me, except his was dark and bleak and joyless, my face with all the true essence of my soul burned out of it.
After a time he said, very quietly but with a really ugly, menacing undertone in his voice, "I say that you're a crazy old fool. I say that if I have to listen to any more of your garbage it's likely to start seriously bothering me. I say that if you bother me in any serious way you're likely to make me do something that you'll regret. I may even regret it too. Now get your ass out of here or I'll have you thrown out."
"You say that to me?"
"I say that to you. If I didn't think you were insane I'd have you locked up. And maybe brainburned to keep you harmless. But you
are
harmless."
"You know who I am, Shandor?"
"I know who you were, yes. But that was a long time ago. I feel sorry for you. Now get out of here. Shoo, old man. Shoo. Beat it."
I took a deep breath. It was time to make a real move, I saw. Things were starting to slide off in the wrong direction. It wouldn't do anybody any good for me to go slinking away from Shandor like a whipped dog. Getting thrown out of the house of power like some grubby panhandler might be marginally more useful, but it still wasn't what I had had in mind.
Glowering, fuming, I took a couple of steps toward him.
"You pig, Shandor. You unmentionable stench. You loathsome offense in the eyes of God."
He looked really troubled. He didn't have any idea what I was likely to do.
"Keep back-"
"You need a lesson."
"I warn you-"
"Discipline, that's what you need." I brought my arm swooping up on a sharp curve and slapped him hard in the face. My hand left red marks on his cheek. He stared at me, amazed. Utterly astounded.
"I don't believe this. Laying hands on God's anointed-"
"You wish," I said. I slapped him again. This time his lower lip, the fat one, started to bleed.
"Guards!" he yelled.
Alarms were going off all over the room. Just like Shandor to have filled the room with all these alarm systems, too. In his own house of power, cowering with fear, hiding behind electronic nonsense.
"Guards.
Guards
."
They came running, and paused, panting, baffled, looking at us. Shandor waved his arms wildly. He was crazy with rage. Suddenly he was six years old again and Daddy was beating the shit out of him, and he couldn't stand it.
"Grab him! Take him out of here! Lock him up! Put him in chains! Throw him in the bottom dungeon! The one with the snakes! With the riptoads!"
"I am your anointed king," I said calmly.
They were paralyzed. They didn't know what to do. Afraid to touch me, afraid to disobey Shandor. They gaped like fools. There was a long ugly moment of absolute stillness. I felt a certain sympathy for them. In the end Shandor had to call for his robots, and they had no compunction at all about dragging me out of the room. Down to the bottom dungeon, yes, the foulest and smelliest hole on the entire planet. I was in for it now. I was really going to suffer, that was absolutely certain. At my age. After all that I had achieved. Well, I was pretty sure I could take it. I wouldn't be the first wise and venerable old relic to get himself locked up and tormented in the name of some high cause. And in fact that was precisely what I had come here to accomplish. All I hoped was that I hadn't underestimated Shandor's ferocity and overestimated his political savvy. I had really pushed his buttons just now; he might really make me suffer for it, regardless of the cost to himself. He might even have me killed.
Ah, well. Even that would be worth it, in the long run. Or so I told myself.
The last thing I heard as they took me away was Shandor, starting to sound as though he was getting control of himself again, saying in a venomous voice, "I'll fix you, old man! I'll have you brainburned! I'll have you disconnected! When I get through with you you'll be too stupid to drool! Be sure you put him in chains.
Tight
ones."
In chains, no less.
You might think that your own first-born son might show more respect for you. But then again, this was Shandor. He was always a bastard, my son Shandor.
8.
BY THE TIME SHANDOR WAS BORN I WAS ALREADY seventy, eighty years old or even more, what used to be considered a full long life. And he was my first son, remember. But of course people live a lot longer than they used to and it's considered a little gauche to start your family too young, even if you like kids, which I suppose I do.
Even for the modern era I was late in getting married, though. That wasn't my fault. I would gladly have settled down on Nabomba Zom with Malilini when I was only in my twenties, but as you know marrying Malilini wasn't in my cards. After that came the small detour of Alta Hannalanna, and when I had made my escape from that particular holiday camp I needed a few years to relax and enjoy life a little, which I did, though I'm damned if I can tell you where I spent those years, or who with. Anyone is entitled to lose a few years in simple amusements after he's had an experience like Alta Hannalanna. Somewhere along the way I realized I needed to earn a living, and, since knife-grinding and horse-trading no longer hold much glamor for a promising Gypsy lad, I took up the trade of starship-piloting instead. I knew I had the gift; I had never had any doubt of that.
But a pilot, being even more of a traveling man than your usual Gypsy, generally doesn't tend to establish really sound marital arrangements. He-or she, if that is what she happens to be-simply moves around too much. In my case I went into the service of one of the exploration companies, which meant I was out there on the remote reaches most of the time, finding planets that no one had ever visited before. Doing that gives you a good sense of the diversity of geography in our universe but you don't meet a lot of nice girls in those places. Then, too, my career as a jump-room jockey was interrupted for a while by the minor matter of my third tour in slavery, the unfortunate Mentiroso episode, out of which came my enduring friendship with Polarca but which was not otherwise a real joy. So it was a considerable time before I finally took a wife and set about the task of replicating my invaluable genetic heritage.
Her name was Esmeralda, a fine old Gypsy name if there ever was one. I didn't pick her. She picked me, or to be more precise her family did, her brothers and cousins. The reason why they picked me apparently was that they knew I was the one who was going to marry Esmeralda, so they had to find me and make sure that I did it. It was one of those typical upside-down inside-out deals that ghosting brings about, where causes and effects get all tangled up, past and future all come out of the same stew-pot in the same dip of the ladle, and there never really is any clear sense of the beginnings of things. You go along and you go along and suddenly you realize that you're already hip deep in a complicated situation that you didn't even know existed.
Esmeralda was all right. I didn't love her at first-how could I? I didn't even know her-but I think I came to. Or at least to feel fond of her. So long ago I have trouble remembering. Certain things I remember in absolute detail down to the last syllable, others get a little blurry.
The way she looked, for instance. A fine-looking woman, that's what I remember, but I have some difficulty about the details. A big woman, yes, long strong legs and powerful hips, child-bearing hips. Dark sparkling eyes, lustrous hair. About her other features, the nose and lips and chin, I'm not so sure. I think she was pretty. She gained weight after a time, mostly from the waist down: it anchored her, it was a kind of ballast. Didn't have to put it on, could have taken the treatment, but she didn't care. I think she liked being heavy. Might have been a tradition in her family, the women being heavy.
She was an Iriarte woman. That's a good world, Iriarte. I have always liked spending time there. It has a small yellow sun very much like the one that Earth used to circle, and broad blue seas. A lot of Iriarte is dry and mountainous and cool, but there are splendid vineyards that produce some of the finest wine in the galaxy, and its cities have the rich, throbbing feel of life and power about them. The population is mostly Rom, and in the main a tough brawling kind of Rom, a mercantile sort of people, entrepreneurs, traders, shippers. The Rom of Iriarte are the craziest gamblers I know: they'll bet any amount on any kind of deal, and usually they don't have cause to regret it.