Star of Gypsies (10 page)

THEN SYLUISE TURNED UP AFTER ALL. OR HER GHOST, rather. I can't say she came just when I had given up hope, because I had never had any real hope of seeing her, just wistful softheaded fantasies that I knew were foredoomed. And then there she was, Syluise the golden, Syluise the glorious, hovering in the air right in front of me.

"You haven't missed me at all, have you?" she said.

Dear Syluise. Always opening with a jab.

"I've thought of no one else the whole time," I told her. Sounding romantic and sarcastic both at once. Which was it? How would I know?

Billowing waves of electromagnetic splendor surrounded her like an aurora, shooting off a halo of emerald, scarlet, violet, gold. She looked gorgeous within it. I have never seen her looking anything but gorgeous, no matter the season, the time of day, the geophysical or emotional weather. That's her specialty: beauty so intense that it's unreal. She is like her own statue.

"It's been a long time, hasn't it, Syluise?"

"I've been traveling."

"Polarca tells me he saw you in Atlantis."

"Did he? What keen eyes he has. I looked for you there, but you weren't around."

"I'm not ghosting these days," I said.

"No. You're burrowing down in the snow and holding your breath until your face turns blue. Isn't that what you're doing, Yakoub?"

I could hardly bear to look at her, she was so beautiful. An alien beauty, not Rom at all, cascades of shining golden hair, intense blue eyes, long slender legs. She
is
Rom, that I know, but long ago she had herself changed into this Gaje form. Which never alters: I have known her eighty years and she has not aged by a day. She is her own statue, yes.

But there is more to her than her glittering beauty. She poses as a woman for men, a grand courtesan; and God knows she plays the role magnificently. But it's all a game to her, these tempestuous passions. Something else burns inside her, unknowable, untouchable, some deeper ambition than making men kneel to her beauty. The beauty is synthetic, after all. She might have been squat and coarse and bestial, dull-eyed and thick-waisted and mud-faced, before she had herself remade as a goddess. For all I knew she might even have been a man, before the remake.

"I've given up the kingship," I said.

"Yes. I know. You've abdicated. But why spend your retirement in a place like this?"

"Because there were things I needed to think about. This is a good place for thinking."

"Is it?"

"My mind works well in cold weather. And stark scenery like this helps me get down to essentials."

Essentials. I wanted to reach for her and pull her down against me. Those breasts, those lips.
Those
were essentials. Her perfume filling the air. Mulano ghosts were clustered around her, dazzled by the energy coming from her. My throat was dry and there was an ache in my balls. Maybe it would have been better if she had never come here. You can't make love to a ghost but you can certainly lust after one.

"Which essentials do you mean, Yakoub?"

I have outlived all my wives. Syluise will not have me. I want no others. There's something hard and contrary about her that mesmerizes me. But perhaps I have had enough wives for one life. Probably I would not take Syluise if she ever were to accept me. But still I ask her, from time to time. And always she refuses.

I said, "The future of the Kingdom is the only essential, Syluise."

"But what concern is that of yours now?"

"I still am king."

"Are you? Make up your mind. You say that you've abdicated. You can't be king and not be king at the same time."

"I'm taking a holiday from the kingship, is all."

"Ah, is that what it is? A holiday?"

"A time for revaluation. For thinking things over. A tactical move. I could have the throne back in a minute if I asked for it." She smiled: a flicker of the flawless lips; a faint gleaming of the matchless eyes. "You doubt that?" I asked.

"I don't doubt that you believe it."

"But you don't believe it."

"You
do
think you can be king and not be king at the same time. I should have realized that from the start. If anybody knows how your mind works, I do."

"What are you trying to say, Syluise?"

"I knew you in Cesaro o Nano's time, before you were king. I remember how you used to insist that you would never accept the throne in a million years, that the whole idea disgusted you, that you'd fling it in their faces if they ever tried to offer it to you. You said that again and again, and then when they did come to you you grabbed it as fast as you could and you didn't let go for fifty years. You think I take anything you say at face value, Yakoub? You're the only man I know who can hold six contradictory ideas at once and feel perfectly comfortable about it."

"I didn't want to be king. I did refuse the throne. Again and again, until I saw that I had to be king, that there was no option about it. And then I let them give it to me."

"And the abdication? Why did you do that?"

There was a sudden astonishing softening in her tone. For an instant she wasn't just dueling with me. She seemed actually to care. I felt myself melting with love. Like a boy, like a Chorian. Like a ninny.

"Do you really want to know?" I asked.

She came closer. The aurora around her died away and she descended until she was almost at ground level and almost within my reach. Just one kiss, I thought. Those rosy nipples hardening against my palms.

"I want to know, yes." Still soft, her voice.

"A tactical move," I told her.

Hot in my mind burned the memory of those last days before I had gone before the great kris to resign. That time of despair and turmoil in my soul, when wherever I looked I saw chaos and decay. The prancing young men and women decking themselves out to look like Gaje, the intermarriages, the star-pilots taking their little detours to do their little smuggling operations, and all the rest: the final decadence of an ancient great race, so it had seemed to me. I had tried to tell myself I was exaggerating, that I was growing crochety and conservative with age. But at last it had all exploded within me, suddenly, uncontrollably: a sense that everything was falling apart and that some desperate measure had to be taken. That was when I called the krisatora together and told them I was abdicating; and if I live ten thousand years I will never forget the looks of utter astonishment on their faces as I gave them the news.

She frowned. Like a cloud crossing the face of the sun.

"A tactical move?" she said. "I don't understand."

I took a deep breath. I had never spoken explicitly about this before, not with Polarca, not with anyone. But I had never been able to withhold anything from Syluise. "It seemed to me that things were going wrong in the Kingdom, that we had lost our direction, that we had forgotten our purpose. I needed to upset people. To shake people up. In order to get the Kingdom back on its course."

"Its course?"

"I'm speaking of Romany Star," I said.

"Oh, Yakoub!"

She sounded sad and loving and patronizing all at once. But more patronizing than anything else.

"Where are the Rom of Romany Star?" I demanded. "Do we want our true world again, or are we willing to live in exile forever? Do we even think of such things any more? The One True Place, Syluise: does that mean anything to you?"

Her aurora flared up again. I could no longer see her face.

"A fat, complacent people, rich and settled: is that who we are, Syluise? Piloting our ships, serving the Gaje, snuggling up to the Imperium? No. No. Once we lose sight of what really matters, we lose sight of our own selves. We become no better than Gaje. Is that what you want, Syluise? Maybe it is. Your beautiful Gaje hair. Your narrow Gaje waist." I felt anger mounting suddenly, rising and rising. "Do you understand? I saw my own people losing their way. And I their king, presiding over the whole catastrophe."

A sharp gust of wind cut across the ice-plain, lifting drifts of snow and hurling them at us. The hard white swirls went through her without her seeming to notice.

"And abdicating, Yakoub?" she said gently. "How is that going to make things better?"

"They need me," I said. "They've already sent one messenger out to urge me to come back. There'll be more. They'll beg me. They'll ask to know my terms. I'll tell them, then. And they'll have no choice. I'll be king again, Syluise. But this time they'll have to follow me wherever I lead them. And where I lead them will be Romany Star."

"Oh, Yakoub," she said again. Her aurora grew dense as the heart of a sun. I could no longer see her, but I heard her. Was she weeping, within that searing blaze of energy?

No. That was laughter, that sound.

Syluise! That heartless bitch. The force of the hatred I felt for her just then could have driven a fleet of starships from one end of the galaxy to the other.

SOMETIMES WHEN I WAS ALONE I COULD FEEL the presence of the Gypsy kings of centuries gone by, crowding close within my soul. I felt Chavula close by, that little hard-edged man who had forced the Gaje to let us aboard their ships. And Ilika, with the flaming red beard, the one who showed how the leap was made, the quick conversion of Rom mind-force into the power of spanning the light-years. Claude Varna the great explorer, the finder of worlds. Tavelara, Markko, Mateo, Pavlo Gitano, all jostling within me, sharing their spirit with me, urging me onward. And there were other kings too, dark figures without names or faces, the kings of time immemorial, kings of the old world, the rough kings of the roads of Earth; and even older kings, kings of Gypsy Atlantis, kings even of Romany Star. On the day I became the high Rom baro they all had entered me and still they rode with me and I felt them within. And was grateful.

And who were these, these others lurking in the mists? I was unable to see them but I could feel them, mysterious, unknown. I had an idea who they were. Kings yet to come is who they were, Yakoub's successors, the kings of the unborn future, stirring in my soul. I knew that I would have to die in order to set them free to live out their destinies, and I felt some pain, knowing that; but it would have to be. That was all right. Give me a chance to live out my destiny, all you kings to come, and then you can have your own!

Syluise had laughed at me. Well, let her laugh. I knew why I had been given the kingship and I meant to accomplish what I had been chosen to bring about. They had chosen me because the vision was stronger in me than in anyone else; and even if all the others had lost sight of the vision now, I had not. I asked only one thing, that I would be allowed to live long enough. That was all I asked. One thing that I feared was that I would die without having given Romany Star back to my people. But what of it, you ask, if I did die too soon? I would be dead: what would anything matter to me then?

If you ask that, you understand nothing.

The power was within me, to achieve what must be achieved. If I had the power and I failed to make use of it, that was contemptible. My people would curse me forever. If there is a life after this life, I would blister and blacken there forever in their scorn. And if not-well, no matter. I must live as though all the Rom yet to be born are watching me. As though I dwell each day in the beacon glare of their scrutiny.

YOU MIGHT THINK I'D HAVE HAD A CHANCE TO ENJOY a reprieve from all this socializing. But it wasn't long before I had company again.

This next visitor was confusing, because he was the Due de Gramont. Or his doppelganger. I wasn't sure which, and that was what was confusing. And disturbing.

Julien de Gramont is an old friend who has managed to tread a very neat line between the overlapping spheres of authority of the Rom Kingdom and the Empire. That's a measure of Julien's cleverness. By way of a profession Julien has set himself up in business as the pretender to the throne of ancient France, France having been one of the important countries of Earth around the year 1600 or so. France got rid of its kings a long time back, but that's all right; I can't see any real harm in claiming a lapsed throne. What I don't exactly understand, even though Julien has tried to explain it to me seven or eight times, is the point of claiming the throne of a country on a planet that doesn't even exist any more. It has something to do with grandeur, he said. And gloire. That word is pronounced
glwahr
, approximately. French is a very strange language.

(Just in passing I want to point out, since the notion is not likely to occur to you on your own, that the Due de Gramont's beloved France was a place no bigger than a medium-big plantation would be on an average-size world such as Galgala or Xamur. Nevertheless France had kings of its own, and its own language and laws and literature and history and all the rest. And in fact was a very considerable place, in its time. I know that because I was there once-right around the time they were getting rid of their kings, as a matter of fact. It's an odd and somehow endearing thing about the Gaje of Earth that they found it necessary to divide up their one little planet into a hundred little separate countries. Of course that arrangement was a great pain in the buliasa for us when we lived among them. But all that came to an end a long time ago.)

The first couple of years I lived on Mulano I had had a doppelganger of the Due de Gramont living here with me. Julien had had it made up for me as a going-away gift when he heard of my abdication, because he knows I am fond of French cuisine, a field in which he has great expertise; so he thought I might like to have my own private French chef while I was living in my self-imposed exile.

But doppelgangers generally last only a year or two, or maybe a little longer in a cold climate like Mulano's. Then they fade away. They don't come back to life, either. My Julien doppelganger had vanished in the usual way at the usual time, several years back. When I saw what I took to be the doppelganger of the Due de Gramont picking his way toward me between the wiggling arms of my forest-pausing once or twice to pull off a leaf and pop it into his mouth, as if tasting it to see if it was worth using in some sauce-I couldn't make sense of it at all.