Star of Gypsies (43 page)

"He's had one."

"Not good enough. He's going to go right on thinking it's safe to do whatever he damned pleases. He'll just try harder not to get caught again, that's all."

"Isn't that what everyone does?"

"You shock me, cousin."

"Do I? Do I really, cousin?"

Damiano had to yield, of course. I was king, as I reminded him two or three times, and he went away grumbling. Later on he and Valerian made peace with each other and Damiano even invested in some of Valerian's ventures, which is so perfectly in character for Damiano that I could have hugged him for it. Of course Damiano was right that Valerian would go on believing he could do whatever he felt like, so long as he took care not to get caught. And so he has.

I've held the ashes of Romany Star in my hands, Yakoub
.

Did I dare believe him? Did I dare not to?

THEN SHANDOR CAME STORMING IN, HIS FIRST VISIT to me in a very long time, and distracted me. He was so lit up I would almost have thought it was Shandor's ghost coming in, all sparks and crackles and hums. But both his feet were on the floor and the sparks were metaphorical, not electrical.

He was enraged and practically incoherent. He paced up and down, back and forth, sputtering and twitching. Despite his recent remake he looked like an old man, this firstborn son of mine. I took real malicious pleasure in seeing how gray his skin was, how sharp his nose was getting, how rounded his shoulders. This babe that I had bounced on my knee only a hundred years ago, give or take ten or twenty.

He was burning up. He was consuming himself. He was the candle that was all flame from tip to tip.

That is a thing the Lowara Rom like to say: "A candle is all flame from tip to tip." In other words a candle is supposed to burn, and the thing to do is to let it burn, to let the tallow be translated into the flame that is the candle's true destiny. It is an argument against thrift. Polarca lives that way: he sets nothing by for the future, but burns and blazes all the time. He is lavish and generous to the point of craziness; but he does burn brightly.

Among us Kalderash the same saying has a different shade of meaning. Which is that when you merrily let your candle burn from end to end it gives you much warmth and light, but eventually it is consumed and then you are left in darkness. Therefore burn what you need, but nothing more. Especially when the candle that you burn is yourself. Shandor, it seemed, was wasting himself in the fervor of his rage.

It was quite a performance. I watched in amazement. I doubt that I could have done better. Finally he got himself enough under control to speak words that made sense, but even so they came out in a thick-tongued frantic way. "One last chance, God damn you!" he thundered. "I can be merciful if that's what I have to be. I'll give you goddamned mercy, you cagy old bastard. But you have to cooperate. You have to cooperate! Or I'll finish you."

"Finish me how?"

"Finish you! Don't ask me. Just don't ask!"

"You don't look good, Shandor. Are you sleeping well these days?"

"I'm going to hold a coronation."

"Are you, now?"

"Stop talking to me in that patronizing tone of voice!"

"I'm trying to hold up my end of the conversation, that's all. I was inquiring about your health. There are things you could take. Water from nine places, you know that one? You'll need a drabarni to throw charcoal embers in it first. Maybe Bibi Savina would do it for you. And then there's bear's grease-you could send to Marajo for some, I think Damiano keeps bears there-eye of crayfish, powdered cantharis beetle-"

"I'll cut your tongue out if you don't shut up."

"The merciful Shandor, yes."

"There will be a coronation," he said, forcing the words out as though they were teeth bursting through his lips. "A nine-world ceremony, first here on Galgala, then Xamur, Iriarte, Nabomba Zom, Clard Msat-"

"You may have trouble with part of that. I understand that for some reason the starships aren't landing on Iriarte or Clard Msat these days."

"-and after the rite has been sanctified on all nine of the kingly planets, you and I will go to the Capital and present ourselves before the emperor to receive confirmation."

"Confirmation of what?"

"My title to the throne. The legality of my succession."

"You still want to be king, Shandor? Give it up. It's a dreadful job."

"On each of the nine kingly planets you will stand beside me as the phuri dai puts the seal of office over me-"

"I will?"

"The passing of the mantle. The transfer of authority. You will do it freely and joyfully."

"I would freely and joyfully spend ten years in the tunnels of Alta Hannalanna first."

"It wouldn't be a big problem for me to send you there."

"You'd do it, too."

"I could. Maybe you'd prefer Gran Chingada? Megalo Kastro, in the mines? Trinigalee Chase?"

"That's the best you can do? Trinigalee Chase?"

"I can send you anywhere. How about Mentiroso again? I can really make you suffer, Yakoub."

"And make yourself even more beloved throughout the Rom worlds than you are already."

"Damn you, Yakoub-"

"Threaten me some more, my son. This is the best exercise I've had in months."

"There's war out there, do you know that? Rom turning against Rom. Whole kumpanias splitting in two over the issue of the kingship. And you are responsible."

"
I
am?"

"By trying to reclaim the throne. By trying to displace a king legitimately chosen and anointed."

"Pot calls kettle black."

He was looking more apoplectic by the moment. I had a quick satisfying fantasy of goading him into a stroke right here in my cell. But no, Shandor would never be so obliging. He went ranting on about this coronation he was going to stage, in which I would stand by beaming benignly while he put my crown on his head. Pig's eye, I would. Preposterous notion. But give me full credit: I didn't for a moment get angry. Here stood my own firstborn son going straight for the Freudian jugular and I listened to him amiably, interjecting a bit of easy banter whenever he paused for breath. I even told him about Freud. He hadn't heard of him, obviously. Ancient Gaje philosopher, said I. I reached into my anthropological storehouse and pulled out Uranus and Cronos, Cronos and Zeus, David and Absalom, and one or two other famous father-and-son goodies. I threw in Lear and his daughters, too, though that story wasn't entirely appropriate to the situation. Close enough, though. "Is that what you want?" I asked. "To reduce me to a mere archetype? How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!"

"What are you talking about?" said Shandor. "You crazy old bastard!"

I smiled sweetly. In the end the stalemate still stood; I remained his prisoner, he remained in questionable possession of a shaky throne. He got red in the face and went back to muttering threats. Mentiroso, he said again. Alta Hannalanna. He waved Trinigalee Chase before my nose again too. He might have gotten me to give in, if he really had tried to ship me off to Trinigalee Chase. A good thing I had never told anyone how much I loathed that place, or why, a policy that I intend to continue to honor until the end of my days.

In the face of Shandor's threats I kept calm and cool. He was furious. I grew wary of pushing him any harder. There comes a point with any enemy where you can get him angry enough to act against his own self-interest, and then you're really in trouble. If Shandor did away with me in a fit of rage, it would really foul up his position among the Rom; but even so, I'd be dead. As I had pointed out on Xamur to Valerian, I could be useful even as a martyr. Still and all, that wasn't my first choice. It wasn't even high on my list.

He went away, eventually, muttering and cursing. Something was going to happen now, of that I was certain. Sticking me in that damp rat-infested oubliette hadn't accomplished anything for him and nothing better had come of letting me sit here in this gilded cage. I had done a lot of waiting in my life and Shandor was beginning to see that I was capable of doing a great deal more. He had expected me simply to come around after a time and put my blessing on his kingship, but it hadn't happened, and now, I suspected, he was reaching the limits of his patience. He might very well start in on me now with some more active form of persuasion. Torture? Brainburning? Little softening-up trips to some of the uglier worlds of the galaxy?

Be prepared for the worst, I told myself. Something is going to happen.

Something happened, all right. The very next day when the robots brought me my dinner I found a grilled fish on my plate, swimming in a delicate creamy sauce. After months of mush and gruel, a grilled fish in a fancy sauce? This is Shandor's idea of torture? With it came elegant little potato puffs, thin brown crusts enclosing globes of air, and some kind of long bluish beans in a pungent and subtle gravy. A beaker of wine on the side, nicely chilled, and a crisp little loaf of bread.

There had to be a catch. Maybe this stuff is poisoned, and he figures I'll fall upon it with such greed that I won't even notice the faint trace of cyanide that it's laced with, right? For perhaps five minutes I sat there staring miserably at that beautiful food, afraid to touch it. Then I realized that I was very hungry and that I could die of starvation just as easily as I could from cyanide poisoning. If I passed up this lovely meal I might be passing up the cyanide, if there was any cyanide, but I'd also be passing up this lovely meal, and either way I'd be dead before too long. So I took a gingerly nibble. Ecstasy! If Shandor had had my meal poisoned, it was at least a delicious poison. I waited and nothing sinister happened. Another nibble. Another. What the hell, I thought, this food is too good to be lethal. And I went at it with gusto.

I had lived on Shandor's prison garbage so long that my stomach nearly rebelled at cuisine of such extraordinary caliber. It was all I could do to keep the first few mouthfuls down. But I gave it a good fight, and I won. The bread and the wine helped. And after a while it became a lot easier. When I went to sleep that night-still wondering vaguely whether I'd been poisoned-I spent my last few moments of wakefulness brooding over the significance of Shandor's strange gesture. It made no sense. I hate things that make no sense. If he wasn't trying to poison me in some crazy roundabout way, did he seriously think he could bribe me into cooperating by feeding me fancy dinners?

Of course not. I decided that it must have been somebody else's dinner, delivered to me by mistake. A malfunction of the serving robots. Off I went to sleep.

And woke, unpoisoned, to find that the robots had brought me breakfast. Two crisp crescent-shaped rolls of surpassingly fine texture, a flask of coffee that was close to ambrosia, and a little plate of mild white cheese and assorted local fruits glittering with tiny flecks of gold. I was baffled.

To my shame it was another day and a half before I stopped eating long enough to figure things out.
Help is on the way
. Polarca had told me, early in my imprisonment.
When it gets here, you'll know it. The clue will be right on the plate in front of you
.

What kind of food was it that these demented robots had suddenly begun to bring me? Why, it was French food. And who did I know whose great passion it was to cook in the classic French manner? Why, Julien de Gramont, pretender to the throne of France and special adjunct to his lordship Periandros of the imperial court. Yes. Of course.

Somehow Julien had infiltrated this place and he was preparing superb meals for me that were actually intended as messages. What all these cassoulets and ragouts and terrines and sautes were meant to tell me, these mousses and aspics and souffles, was that I had friends on the premises. And help would shortly be on the way.

We start out stupid. All we have at the beginning is the built-in wisdom of the body, which tells us which end to eat with and which end to shit with and not much more. But we are put here to do battle with entropy, and entropy equals stupidity. Therefore we are obliged to learn. Our job is to process information and gain control of it: that is to say, to grow wiser as we go along.

If I am just as stupid when I am twenty as I was when I was two, if I am just as stupid when I am a hundred as I was when I was fifty, then I am not doing my job. I am occupying space and time to no purpose, and I might just as well have been a lump of rock.

Of course, a time comes when even the wisest of men stops growing wise and starts getting stupid again. It may take two hundred years for that to happen to him, but it will happen. I am reconciled to the inevitability of that, I think. All that means is that entropy wins in the end, which we knew all along. No matter. The fact that we're fighting a losing battle does not excuse us from fighting it. The great human achievement is to postpone the moment of defeat as long as possible.

WHAT I DIDN'T KNOW WAS THAT THE IMPERIUM HAD undergone some major changes. The old emperor had finally died-without naming his successor-and the three high lords were making their moves. So there was chaos now among the Gaje as well as the Rom.

Tucked away in my cozy cell I didn't hear anything about any of this. My only visitors now were the silent robots that continued to bring me ever more elaborate meals. I didn't even get any ghosts. Instead of news from the outside, what I got was supremes de volaille, noisettes d'agneau, grenadins de boeuf. My waistline was spreading wildly. Meanwhile, beyond the walls of my prison, the whole precariously balanced structure that had held the human race together during the thousand years of expansion into the galaxy was falling apart in one great triumphant burst of greed and stupidity.