"I came on my own, Yakoub. To help you get yourself free."
"By giving Shandor what he wants. My formal blessing."
"Is that so much?"
"Getting out that way isn't freedom. It's slavery, Syluise. I've already been a slave four times in my life, you know? I was born into it and then
I was sold into it twice and the last time I sold myself into it. I'm not going to be a slave again. Particularly not to my own son."
"He's the king, Yakoub."
"Bullshit. I'm the king."
"You keep saying that. But here you sit in custody."
"What's happening outside? Do people know where I am?"
"They're starting to find out, yes."
"And?"
"There's a lot of trouble."
"Good," I said. "That's what I want."
"How can you want that? People are suffering. Your own people. Commerce is breaking down. The starships aren't going to the right places. If they're flying at all. Nobody is sure who is king, and there isn't really any emperor either. The whole system may be falling apart."
"That's fine with me."
"I can't believe I heard you say that."
"Why are you mixed up in this, Syluise?"
Letting my question pass, she moved closer to me. Prelude to some-thing-or-other. Gave me the full treatment, heaving breasts, flaring nostrils, sultry glares from under half-closed eyelids. She was wriggling. Thighs rubbing together. Hot breath on my cheeks. Her insatiable lips an inch from mine. The works. Her irresistible weapons, her heavy artillery. It was almost comical. Had she ever seemed comical to me before? Had I really found her so irresistible before? Something definitely must be changing in me. Maybe her working on Shandor's behalf had shattered the spell. She had betrayed me. I had never been able to defend myself against her until now but that went beyond the limits, her blatant maneuvering on Shandor's behalf. Silently I offered the Rom prayer for the dead. We were finished, this golden viper and I. Truly.
"Do you know how much I've missed you, Yakoub?"
"Tell me."
"Let Shandor be king. You've had a hundred years of it."
"Not quite that much."
"Whatever it is, you've had enough. More than enough. Let him have his turn. Do you want to be king forever? What for?"
"Not forever. Just long enough to finish the work I still need to do."
"Let Shandor finish it. You and I, we'll go away somewhere. Someplace beautiful. Fulero. Estrilidis. Tranganuthuka. Wouldn't you like to spend a year or two on Fulero with me?"
"How much is he paying you?"
"Yakoub!"
"I have a better idea. Instead of us going off to Fulero, you live here with me. Right here in this cell, the two of us. You won't love the food but otherwise it isn't so bad. We'll wait Shandor out. Sooner or later he'll crack, or someone will overthrow him, and we'll come forth. In triumph. I'll put the worlds to rights again. We'll spend half our time on Galgala and the other half on Xamur. You could call yourself the queen, if you liked."
"What?"
"I know, we don't have queens. But we can make an exception just once. You'd like that, wouldn't you?"
"You aren't serious. You'd make me a queen?"
"Why not?"
I was just playing with her. As she had been playing with me.
"No," she said. "There'd be a tremendous uproar. You can't foist a queen off on the Rom after all this time. And I don't want to be queen. Or you to be king any more. What do you need it for? So much nasty work. Such stupid ugly nonsense. Come away with me and let's just enjoy ourselves and leave all of that to someone else."
"To Shandor?"
"Who cares?"
A wondrous feeling of freedom flooded my soul.
"I care," I said.
"Don't. Give it all up."
I ran my hands over her shoulders. Her skin was fiery hot but nevertheless it was like stroking a statue. I felt nothing. In her little coquettish way she danced back, out of my grasp.
"Come here."
"Come to Fulero with me."
"Some other time." I reached for her again.
"No."
"No?"
"Not here. Not in this awful little place."
"You said you missed me. Not very much, I'd say."
"I'll show you how much when we get to Fulero."
She gave me another round of the hips and the thighs and the wriggles and I smiled and shrugged.
"I think I'll pass on Fulero," I said amiably. "
You
go. With Shandor."
I thought she would explode. Her eyes were supernovas of rage. Something ugly came glinting through all that unbelievable perfection. She wasn't accustomed to seeing me withstand her. I never had before.
Fifty years and I never had. It didn't matter that I was king. There aren't any kings in the bedroom. We're all slaves there, not to other people but to ourselves, helpless against the commands that come from within. Every man has a fatal woman. It may be the same for women as well; I suppose it is. But even fatal attractions can shrivel and fade. And die. This time for once I had stood up against her. Maybe I had even freed myself from her for good.
6.
SYLUISE WENT SLINKING AWAY, SMOLDERING WITH anger and souring female juices. Next thing I knew, Valerian was with me. Valerian's ghost, that is. As usual. Bounding around the cell like a berserk rhinoceros. A rhinoceros is an animal they used to have on Earth, weird as hell, very large, not good to eat. Horn on its nose. When a rhinoceros headed in your direction you got politely out of its way. The same with Valerian.
"Look at this place," he roared. "Gold floors! Gold walls! This crazy planet. I never can get used to your Galgala, you know? All this fucking gold."
"You want some? Help yourself."
"What good is it? Who needs it? You ever been on Earth, Yakoub?"
"You're asking me that?"
He kept rampaging right on. "Of course you have. A thousand times, I bet. You know how they love gold there? The women with ten kilos of gold dangling around their necks? A roll of solid heavy coins in your pocket? It meant something, on Earth, gold. You felt like a giant when you had a little gold. Like a fucking king. Now look. The love of gold is gone from the universe. All that good greed, gone. A whole perfectly fine deadly sin shot to hell. You know what they've done to gold? They've turned it into shit, these Galgala people."
"It's a lot prettier than shit," I pointed out.
"But just as worthless. That's a crying shame, what they did to gold. I wish they never had found this planet. Gold was so good, Yakoub.
And now it's crap. You know what did it in? Supply and demand, that's what! Supply and demand, supply and demand! The inexorable law of the cosmos." Valerian paused, sending out blue and yellow ghost-flickers and ghost-crackles like a demented electrical appliance. What an exhausting son of a bitch! He looked very pleased with his own profundity. "That sounds nice, don't you think? The inexorable law of the cosmos. I always did have a way with words, hey, Yakoub?" Then he was off again, bounding from wall to wall. "Nice cell. Shandor keeps you in style."
"You should have seen the first place he put me in."
"Well, this is comfortable, yes? And all this gold. Maybe it's worthless but by damn it
is
pretty. You need some jewels, though. A little color contrast, too much yellow here." He pulled a red leather pouch from under his cloak. Ghost-leather. "Give me a good jewel any day. Emeralds, rubies, sapphires. Not diamonds. Diamonds have good fire in them but I miss the color. I like my jewels to have color." Pouring the contents of the pouch into his huge hand as he spoke. A mountain of jewels. He thrust them in my face. "You could string them right across the room from wall to wall, hey? Light the place up a little."
"Ghost-jewels, Valerian. What good are they? I can't even touch them. All they are is colored air to me, you know?"
"Oh, shit, yes," he said morosely. "That's right."
"I think I'd rather have real gold than ghost-jewels. But thanks all the same."
"Damn," he said. He was crestfallen. "I completely forgot about that. They look pretty fucking real to me."
"You're a ghost, Valerian."
"Right. Right. Ah, too goddamned bad. You need some color in here. But look, I tell you, Yakoub: when you're king again I'll come to you real, okay? And bring you some real rubies, some real emeralds."
"When I'm king again? When will that be?"
He wasn't paying attention. "I have jewels galore, you know. Beaucoup jewels, that's what Julien would say, right? I took one hell of a cargo, last year. Out by Jerusalem Spill, somewhere between Caliban and Puerto Peligroso, big transport ship belonging to-well, who cares who it belonged to. Enough rubies on board to dam up a river with. A big river." Valerian laughed. "I could break the market, you know? Dump them all at once, make rubies as worthless as gold. Just like I did that time with the drugs, when they brought me up on charges before the kris. You remember? That time when you adjusted the verdict for me. Not that I see any sense in busting the ruby market. Not with the inventory I've got. But somebody's bound to do it sooner or later, some damned fool, you watch and see. It's inevitable. They've got a planet out that way somewhere that's as full of rubies as Galgala is of gold."
That was news to me.
"You sure of that?"
"You should see what was on that ship I took. Ten enormous overpockets loaded with them. A ton of rubies here, a ton there, sticking out into all kinds of storage dimensions, dimensions nobody ever heard of before. You know what I had to do to get them to unlock those pockets for me? No, you don't want to know. I don't even want to think about it. I'm really a very gentle man. You know that, don't you, Yakoub? But sometimes-sometimes-"
"Tell me about when I'll be king again."
"You want me to tell you that?"
"You just heard me say it."
"But that's the future!"
"So?"
"It is the future, isn't it? For you, I mean? Yes. Yes, sure it is. You want me to tell you the future?"
"Why not? You can tell me. Nobody will know but you and me."
"I can tell you, yes. Why shouldn't I tell you?"
"That's right."
"I can tell you if I feel like it. Whatever you want, I can tell you."
"Absolutely."
"There's nothing stopping me from telling you."
"Right," I said. "So tell me."
But he
wasn't
telling me. Just talking about telling me. And flying around the room like a berserk parakeet. The manic son of a bitch! I wanted to clobber him. Clobber a ghost, sure.
"It's the future," he said. "We aren't supposed to tell people their futures."
"Since when did you ever do what you were supposed to do?"
"Maybe it makes sense, the rule."
"Oh, come on, Valerian."
"But maybe it makes sense."
"At least tell me what's happening out there right now, then. There's no rule about that."
"You mean, in the Empire? The Kingdom?"
"Yes. Since Shandor arrested me. What's been happening."
"Plenty's been happening," he said. He floated across the room and came to rest in mid-air right in front of my nose, hanging sideways with his feet just grazing the golden wall. In a much quieter voice he said, "I never thought you were going to get away with this thing, this lunacy, handing yourself over to Shandor. I thought it was the most cockeyed thing you had ever done in your life. I owe you a big apology, I guess, Yakoub."
"So I got away with it, did I? It worked out all right?"
"Don't you know?"
Maddening. Still playing question and answer games with me.
He was worse than Polarca. Polarca didn't even
offer
to tell me anything when he came ghosting. Valerian has no scruples at all. Rules mean nothing to him. The only rule that has ever seriously mattered to him is the one that says,
Whatever you do, don't get caught at it
. Despite all the prohibitions Valerian would certainly be capable of revealing the future to me if he felt like it. And if he could manage to understand how important it was to me to know. But getting him to stay on the subject was more work than shoveling salizonga dung.
Exasperated, I said, "How would I know? It's still the future to me. I'm still here, remember? Still a prisoner. And nobody's been telling me a thing."
Valerian drifted down until he was standing practically upright and gave me a close look, and drifted back up at right angles to the floor again. "I forget," he said after a while. "That was dumb. Being a ghost all the time like this, I get mixed up. I lose track of what comes before which, you know. Of course if you're still here you probably don't know anything."
"Come on, Valerian."
"You want to know? All right. I'll tell you."
"You keep on saying that."
"I'm trying to tell you." He took a big breath, which lit him up in sixteen ghostly up-spectrum colors. The moment of revelation at last. He said, "Everything's going to be fine. It'll turn out just like you said it would."
Great. Polarca had said that too. But he had refused to give me any details. Just vaguenesses, same as Valerian. They were both in a conspiracy to drive me crazy.
I worked at keeping my temper, though. No sense yelling at ghosts: they just go away.
"How so? What's this
it
that turns out right?"
"I'm not supposed to tell you stuff like this. But you know me, Yakoub."
"Come on."
"Just between you and me, you have Shandor on the run."
"Tell me."
"You don't know
anything
?"
"Not much. Syluise was here and she said things are pretty bad. Breakdown of interstellar commerce. Starships going to the wrong destinations. Things like that. But I don't trust Syluise to give me straight news. Tell me."