And then I thought of our own little corner of it all, that speck, our few hundreds of worlds within our one galaxy-the galaxy that seems so vast when we are out traveling in it, but which is only one small stitch in the whole colossal tapestry. The worlds of men, of Gaje, of Rom. Kingdom and Empire. All our intricate struggles and maneuverings: they were so tiny against that great sky. Tiny, yes, but not trivial, for what was the universe, after all, except one atom and another and another and another, each one as important as any other in the structure of the whole thing? No, not trivial. Nothing is trivial. Subtract one atom from the universe and all is lost.
So they would need a new emperor soon, in this little corner of the universe that is everything to us? Well, I knew what that situation was like. I was around when the Fourteenth Emperor was dying and I am even old enough to remember the last days of the Thirteenth. To be close to a dying emperor has its perils, as it is perilous to be close to a star about to burn out. The star has been blazing away for nine billion years and now its course is just about run: in a little while the wild dance of the hot little nuclei will be stilled forever and there will be only a sphere of cold blackness where there had been ferocious light. Then it happens and in that moment of the birth of void a great whistling inrush of air comes bellowing in from every corner of the cosmos at once. You can get swept willy-nilly to the ends of the universe if you happen to be in the way when that wind goes rushing by.
(Of course I know that there's no air in the space between the stars. Don't be a literal-minded fool. Just try to understand the sense of what I'm telling you.)
The Fifteenth was dying and mighty tornados would spawn in his wake. And afterward, when the roaring had stopped and a deathly stillness was setting in, they would have to anoint someone as the Sixteenth and give the universe into his hand. Sunteil, Periandros, Naria, those were the choices. The three lords of the Imperium. Well, no surprises there. I knew them all. I had seen them come up and I had watched them move themselves into position. Year after year of subtle jostling and maneuvering until power came within reach; and just one more maneuver left to go. And everybody's nerves cranked to the breaking point until the outcome was settled.
(How much easier for everyone it would have been, I suppose, if we had set the Empire up as a hereditary monarchy in the first place. The heir apparent known to all, well in advance. None of this nasty fear of a chaotic interregnum. Plenty of time for the bureaucrats on whose shoulders the whole system really rests to scope out the new man and get some sense of how to keep him under control, so that everything would go purring along the right way after the shift in power.)
(Easier all around, yes. But very stupid, too, and in the long run catastrophic. The history of hereditary monarchies tells us that it's just like rolling dice-you can get hot and have five or eight good throws in a row, but you can't do it forever, and sooner or later you're absolutely certain to crap out. History is littered with the rusting wreckage of dynastic monarchies. Gaje history, that is. Since the beginning of time we Rom have had sense enough to rely on elected leaders only.)
Among the contenders in the struggle coming up in the Imperium, Sunteil was most to my liking. There was the old devil in that man. You could see the wickedness in his eyes, the shine, the sparkle. Sunteil was a man of Fenix in Haj Qaldun, Chorian's home world, a place of tawny desert sands and steady unremitting heat. If the heat of Fenix doesn't drive you crazy, it makes you sharp and glistening. Among the Rom of the Kingdom there is a saying, Count your teeth three times when it's a Fenixi that you kiss. Sunteil was of that sort. Dark and devious. My kind of man. He could almost have been Rom, that one.
Julien had chosen to throw in his lot with Periandros. I couldn't see it. That drab little bookkeeper! Not Julien's sort of person at all. What had Periandros done to buy him-promise Julien that he would construct a new France for him somewhere, and set him up as its king?
Sidri Akrak was Periandros' native planet, a world where shaggy monsters with nightmare faces run screaming down the streets of the cities, things with black fangs and red wattles, with bulging fiery eyes the size of saucers, with horns that branch a thousand times and turn into devilish stinging tentacles at their tips. Visitors to Sidri Akrak, if they aren't warned, sometimes have total nervous breakdowns in the first fifteen minutes. And yet the Akrakikan take their monstrosities utterly casually, as though they were nothing more than dogs or cats. That's how they are: souls of bookkeepers. Nothing reaches them. They have no blood and no balls and nothing in their heads but some kind of clicking chattering arrangement of gears, or so it seems to me. How I despise them! And Periandros was an Akraki of the Akrakikan, the pure item. I have known robots with greater passion in a single swivel-joint than he had in his entire body. Yet he had been favored by the Fifteenth Emperor and lifted up out of obscurity within reach of the throne. Now it seemed he might actually attain it. I don't know: maybe something like Periandros is the sort of creature best suited to reign in the Gaje Imperium. There have been Akraki emperors before and they were not the worst. I suppose the Gaje get the kind of emperors they deserve.
And Naria. The youngest; I knew him least well of the three. A man native to Vietoris who wore his skin in the deepest of purple hues and his hair a flaming scarlet, cascading to his shoulders. He appeared too cold and calculating for my taste. Don't misunderstand me-a little calculation is all right; we are all calculating; but coldness is another matter. Perhaps I was prejudiced against him because of his Vietoris origins, my own home world, in a manner of speaking, except that it was never "home" to me, simply the place where I happened to be born -into slavery-and where I was taken from my father and sold again before I knew anything of anything. It's hard for me to think of Vietoris or any of its Gaje folk without shuddering, though they tell me it's a gentle lovely world. Lord Naria of Vietoris might have many kindly traits glinting like buried treasure somewhere deep within his soul, but I had never seen evidence of them, and I wished him chilly luck in the contest that lay ahead.
Sunteil, Periandros, Naria. If I returned to the Empire, could I influence the choice? Should I? Would I? Julien de Gramont was right that I should care about the coming struggle. Who rules the Imperium is a matter that concerns Rom as much as it concerns Gaje: we share one galaxy, after all. And only a fool would think that it is possible to separate the interests of the Rom in any real way from the interests of the Gaje; the two races are interdependent, and we know that all too well. Which is why we Rom set up the Empire in the first place.
(Try to get a Gajo to believe that! But why would we want to try?)
"Well, and in the end will you return?" Julien asked.
We had eaten and eaten and we had eaten some more, and now he had drawn a flask of fine old gold-flecked cognac of Galgala from the overpocket and it was sliding into us with no difficulty at all. But I had learned when I was not much more than a boy, living in the elegant palace of Loiza la Vakako, how to keep my brains from flowing out as the alcohol flows in.
"Votre sante," I cried, lifting my glass to him.
He lifted his. "Horses and wealth," he said in good Romany.
We drank. I signalled that he should fill the glasses again.
"Splendor and grace," he said.
"Joy and mischief," I responded.
"Delights and delicacies!"
"Deviltry and debauchery!"
"At your age," he said. "You are a rogue, Yakoub!"
"Ah, no. I am a very prosaic person, within myself. I am as dull as your Lord Periandros, my friend. Shall we drink one more and say that the feast is over?"
"Why won't you go back to the Empire?" he asked one more time. "You've been away five years. Is that not enough?"
"It doesn't seem that way to me."
"Chaos will descend when the emperor dies. Can you allow that to happen?"
"How can I prevent it? Anyway, sometimes chaos is a thing to be desired."
"Not by me, Yakoub."
"You are a swee
t man, Julien, but you are a Gajo. There are many things you don't understand. I will stay here, I think."
"How much longer?"
"Until it is time to go."
"The time is now, Yakoub."
I shrugged. "Let the chaos come. It's not my affair."
"How can you say that, Yakoub? You, a man of honor, of responsibility, a king-"
"Former king, Julien." I rose and stretched and yawned. "We've been eating and drinking half the night. The stars come and go in the sky. Shall we say this is enough, and say goodnight?" It was not like me ever to say that anything was enough; but perhaps I was changing. Perhaps I was starting to grow old. Could that be? No. No, I didn't think so. Perhaps it was simply that I had grown weary of defending myself against Julien's persistence.
He stared at me for a long while without answering.
Then he said in a soft voice, and in Romany without flaw, "I forgive you and may God forgive you."
I was stunned by that. Those are words that are spoken among us at the time when consciences are settled, words that are said to a dying man or by a dying man by way of clearing all accounts. Did Julien know that? He must. He had been close to Rom much of his life. Surely he knew what we meant when we said those words. Te aves yertime mandar! I forgive you! He frightened and troubled me with those words as I had rarely been frightened or troubled in my long life.
"One last drink?" he said, after a time.
"I think we have had enough for one night," I replied.
7.
JULIEN STAYED WITH ME ANOTHER THREE DAYS, FIVE, ten, something like that. He could have stayed a month, or forever, if he had wanted to. We were very careful about what we talked about. Mostly we talked about food, which was always a safe subject. We went out hunting or fishing every day and came back with sleds laden with the creatures of Mulano, and in the evenings Julien prepared whatever we had caught in the classic French manner, explaining every step to me as he worked.
He was a chef of miracles. I caught a spice-fish for him and instinctively he knew it needed nothing more than poaching in its own broth; but with the other things he worked wonders using only the little collection of herbs and spices I had brought with me from the Empire. It was astonishing, the effects he achieved. On a wintry world like Mulano where there isn't much in the way of vegetation the animal life is pretty sparse also. Except for the ghosts, of course, which feed on electromagnetic energy and don't give a damn whether there's any grass. Such creatures as there are to be had had never seemed to have much flavor to me. The spice-fishes are splendid, certainly. But the other things were bland at best. Even so, Julien made something spectacular out of a netful of ice-runners. Flat little beastly things, with half a dozen bright blue eyes on the top of their round bodies and an infinity of scuttling legs underneath. He made a ragout of them; and it was awesome. He turned a basket of leopard-snails into something fit for the gods. And what he was able to do with cloud-eels defied belief. I think he might have been seriously thinking of trying his hand at cooking snow-serpents, too. Until I told him that I wouldn't countenance the hunting of scavengers. Julien probably would have cooked up a batch of ghosts if he could have figured out some way of catching them. Once when I was busy elsewhere he went out and snipped some young tender tendrils from the trees near my bubble to use in a salad. That bothered me. I imagined the wounded trees whipping about in pain beneath the snow. But the salad was amazing.
Now and then we spoke of the old times we had spent together on this world or that, Xamur, Galgala, Iriarte. We talked of women, Syluise, Esmeralda, Mona Elena. And women of his. That was pleasant enough. Julien made all his women sound like goddesses. I imagine he made them feel like goddesses, too: there are men with that skill, though there should be more. He talked of feasts of years gone by, sweet friends also gone by, the changes that time brings. But never again did Julien mention the imperial succession or the problems that my abdication had caused. I loved him for that, his willingness to relent. He had relented too late, though. That first night he had put something under my skin with his Romany prayer of forgiveness, and it was burrowing through my flesh without mercy.
I thought he was going to make one last effort to get me to end my exile on the day he left Mulano. The words were there, just behind his teeth, I could tell; but he kept them caged and would not release them.
For a long time we looked at one another without saying anything. And I felt a great rush of pity for him. I saw in his burning eyes the piercing desperate loneliness of the man whose race is gone, whose nation is a fantasy. For Julien it was all la cuisine, la belle langue Francaise, la gloire, la gloire; but France was no more likely to come again than a river is to flow backward to its source, and what a secret crucifixion that knowledge must have been to him! So he busied himself in the affairs of realms that were, and perhaps it seemed to him that by his diplomatic shuttling about he was somehow maintaining the memory of the realm that had been. Poor Julien!
We embraced in silence and in silence he went away, trudging off due east through the forest of tentacles toward the rendezvous point where he would wait for his relay-sweep. The last I saw of him he had paused by one of the trees and was patting its rubbery trunk, as though commending it for the sweet flavor of its succulent tips.
8.
I WAS ALONE A LONG WHILE AFTER THAT. I WENT quietly through my days and my evenings, thinking more of the past than of the future. Death was on my mind much of the time. That was strange. I had never given much thought to death. What use is that, to ponder death? Death is something to defy, not something to think about. I had been close to death many times but never once had I believed that it would take me, not even that time when the mud of Megalo Kastro, which is alive and loves to eat life, was sucking at my skin. Perhaps that is because there have always been ghosts about me, telling me my own future, though telling it in their tricky ghostly way. Not in the way we used to use fool the Gaje, no cards, no crystal balls. When a ghost tells you your future, you taste the certainty that you will have one. Through much of my early life one of those protective ghosts that sometimes visited me was my own. He never said so, but I came to recognize myself in him, for he was booming and uproarious with a laugh that could shatter worlds. That is me; that is how I have always been, even when I was young, constantly unfolding toward that kind of overwhelming vigor. How I relished seeing him, that big barrel-chested wide-shouldered man with the thick black mustache and the fiery eyes, drifting toward me out of the fog and mist of time! As long as he was with me what did I have to fear?
But there were no Yakoub-ghosts visiting me now, nor had I seen any for a great long while. I began to wonder why. Was my time almost up? The devil it was! Still, I let myself imagine it. It is a dirty pleasure, imagining your own death. I saw myself coming in from a day on the ice, sweating and struggling under the burden of some animal I had caught. And lying down just a moment, and feeling something within my body seeking suddenly to get out. They teach us the One Word when we are young, and the One Word is: Survive! But to everyone and everything there comes a time when that word no longer applies and the striving no longer is proper, and when that time comes it is folly to oppose it. Even for me, that time must come, try as I do to deny it. It maddens me, knowing that it must come even for me. Yet here in my imaginings I felt calm as it arrived. What is this, the death of Yakoub? Here on this bleak snowy world? Ah. I see. I see. Well, then, this is the time. No more struggling against it. What a philosopher a man can become, suddenly, when he knows at long last that he has no choice! So then I rose and went outside, and dug a grave for myself in the snow, and lay down under the light of Romany Star. And buried myself, and said the words over myself, and wept for myself, and danced and got drunk for myself, and spilled my drink out on the white breast of the ice-field as a libation, and at the very last I sang the lament for the dead over my own grave, the mulengi djili, the tale of my long life and magnificent deeds. And as I played all this out in my head I heard t
he voice of Yakoub the Rom asking me, What is this nonsense, Yakoub? Why are you playing with yourself this way? But I could give him no answer, and again and again I found myself letting such thoughts as these invade my mind, and I confess I took pleasure in it, a dirty pleasure, pretending that I no longer cared, that I no longer held life by the balls in a grip that could not be broken, that I was ready to lie down, that I had had enough at last.
Then I had the third of my visitors. This one came at noon, which for all Rom is the strange time, the dark time, the most mysterious moment of the day.
This was noon of Double Day, you understand, and so a doubly strange moment, when both the suns of Mulano are at their highest at once and the light of one erases the shadows of the other. A shadowless instant, a dead moment in time. When that moment comes I halt wherever I am and seal my nostrils against the air, for who knows what spirits travel freely in that instant?
On the day of the third visitor the air was curiously warm-warm for Mulano, I mean-as though a springtime might actually be on its way. There was a faint glaze on the surface of the ice, a sort of millimeter-thick melting, and indigenous ghosts by the thousand clustered overhead, crackling and buzzing with peculiar excitement.
I had been out for a long walk that Double Day morning, to the edge of the glacier and halfway up its slow fluid side, carving my way with an ice-axe like some prehistoric huntsman. There was a cave I liked on the glacier's slope. It was deep and low-roofed, with glassy walls that glowed with vermilion fire when the light of both suns came striking down through its ceiling, and far in the back was a spiraling tongue of ice that ramped up from the cave floor as though it were some sort of ancient altar, though I doubted that it was anything more than an accidental formation. I would often go to it, lay my gloved hands on its sleek curves, and close my eyes and feel all the stars in their courses go spinning through my brain.
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