Star of Gypsies

by Robert Silverberg

  And the voice from the million loudspeakers. "Yakoub Nirano Rom, Rom baro, Rex Romaniorum!" They had the name and the titles right, yes. But there was no conviction there, no force. I remember once when I had been ghosting back to the old imperial Roman days on Earth- and this Gaje empire enjoys some pretension of a link to that one, at least in certain of its borrowed ways and terminology-and it was the final days, just before the barbarians came hammering at the gates. Ordinarily one does not know that one lives in the final days of a great empire; one is aware only that things are not as good as they were reputed once to be. Knowledge of finality comes only after the fact, when the historians have come mincing in to provide some perspective. But those Romans in the final days knew that it was not just a bad time but the end of time, and you could see it in their eyes, in the gray look of their faces, in the slant of their shoulders. Everything about them cried out that the apocalypse was just around the corner. It was a little like that now. Decline and fall was in the air of the Capital. The old order was ending and God alone knew what was coming next; and even the trumpets and loudspeakers were faint and mildewed over with doubts.

  "The Sixteenth Emperor of the Grand Imperium summons the Rex Romaniorum before the throne," called out the major domo. And up those stairs I went. Again. Slowly. Not so much bounce in my stride as before. The gloom and depression here was contagious. I resolved to get myself away from this place as fast as I could, once I had completed my business with Periandros.

  Within his fine robes he looked drawn, shrunken, haggard. The Periandros I remembered was a plump man, soft-skinned, with the look of a pleasure-lover about him, ripe or even overripe. Completely misleading, because he was no more pleasure-loving than your basic lump of stone.

  Probably some rocks of the igneous persuasion were even his superior in that department. Within that soft pampered body was a mean pinched hard soul, like a crab lurking within a tender melon. God knows why they are all like that on Sidri Akrak: an entire planet of miserable ghastly dour people suffering from constipation of the heart. Now the ripeness was gone from Periandros and only the sour withered Akraki core of him was left. Beside him, in the seats where the emperor's high lords sit, were three more Akrakikan. I had to admire the totality of the takeover, and the total foolishness of it. Usually the emperor has sense enough to give the high lordships to citizens of assorted major planets, by way of building a little political support for himself. But not this one, who was in more need of support from other worlds than any emperor who had ever ruled. Oh, no, not this one: he had surrounded himself entirely with his own kind. Three of his own brothers, for all I knew. If they had brothers on Sidri Akrak. It seemed more appropriate for people like him to be born from tubes, like androids. It was a disheartening sight, seeing those four glum passionless faces staring back at me from the summit of the throne-platform.

  "This is a joyous day, Yakoub Rom," Periandros said in a voice lacking the merest molecule of joy. Flat monotone, an inhuman drone. "You are welcome before us."

  Us, no less. He had reinvented the royal we!

  He had the wine ready for me. I took the cup. That stuff too had lost its savor: thin and acrid, a bad year. I felt like telling him that the wine of welcome is supposed to be sweet.

  Instead I made the formal gesture that the Rom baro makes when he stands before the emperor. Maybe Periandros thought it was in his honor but all I was doing was reinforcing my own. Affirming my state of kingship, rather than affirming his emperorship. He didn't have to know that.

  He did manage a quick pale flickering smile. Real emotion, Periandros style. The Periandros equivalent of a great roaring hug, I suppose.

  "There has been much confusion, has there not?" he said. "How I detest confusion!" (Forgetting his we already?) "But the time of chaos is ending. The crown imperial has descended to us." (No, just not consistent in its use.) "-and we will do our utmost to restore order in the Imperium." A self-satisfied smirk. "Already we have done much. For example we have aided our Romany brothers in their time of difficulty."

  Butting in, killing my son. Yes, wonderful aid.

  I said, "You really think the confusion is over, Periandros?"

  Hisses and gasps of shock among the high lords. A fierce look of black loathing from Periandros. I realized my mistake too late. Calling him by name, and not even Lord Periandros at that. But no one could call him anything but "Your Majesty" now, not even me. The former Lord Periandros had vanished within the royal greatness, what Julien would call the gloire, of the Sixteenth Emperor.

  I hadn't meant any insult. It had just slipped out. I remembered, after all, the day Periandros first had taken his seat among the high lords. Not all that long ago. The apologetic look in the eyes of the Fifteenth, as if to say, He's a peculiar little creature, I know, but I find him useful. Hard for me to take the peculiar little creature seriously. Sitting in my old friend's throne. But he was the Emperor now. At least I had decided to regard him as the Emperor. For expediency's sake. I covered my gaffe with a quick apology. Old habits die hard, et cetera, et cetera. Periandros looked mollified.

  "We are not yet fully accustomed to our high position ourself," he confided.

  I admired the grammatical elegance of that confession. I might have said ourselves, which would have been silly. But then I haven't given as much thought to the niceties of the royal we as Periandros undoubtedly had.

  Piously I said, "It must be a great burden, Majesty."

  "We have prepared for it all our life. There is a long tradition of imperial service, you know, on my world of Sidri Akrak." (Still not getting it straight, his we.) "The Seventh Emperor, and again the Eleventh-and now once more our world has been honored by the summons of the Imperium-" He leaned in close, staring hard as if trying to read my mind. God help me if he could: he'd see the contempt for his small soul bristling all over my cerebral contours and five minutes later I might find myself wishing I was back safe and snug in Shandor's oubliette. He moistened his lips. "This abdication business of yours-how am I supposed to interpret that?"

  "A purely internal Rom matter, Majesty. A political ploy, perhaps not too wisely conceived."

  "Ah."

  "It's been withdrawn. Nullified. So far as I and my people are concerned, there's been no break in my reign."

  "And the claims of your son Shandor?"

  "An aberration, Your Majesty. A desperate insurgency that has now been brought under control. And with the death of Shandor the whole issue becomes moot. There are no other claimants for the Rom throne."

  Periandros looked genuinely bewildered.

  "Shandor is dead?"

  "Killed during the invasion of Galgala by imperial troops," I said, perhaps too sharply.

  He consulted with his high lords. There was much rapid muttering in the opaque Akraki dialect of Imperial. From what little I could follow I saw that Julien had been telling me the truth when he said that Shandor's death was none of Periandros' doing, that it had been a freelance contribution by an overzealous general. Which at least would make it a little easier for me to do business with Periandros. When he turned back to me there was a look almost of compassion in his eyes. Or discomfort of the bowel, but I took it as compassion. Give him credit. Human emotion ran against his natural grain but he was trying. He expressed condolences, and I thanked him. Told him that Shandor had been a great trial to me but nevertheless he was blood of my blood, et cetera, et cetera. The Sixteenth nodded solemnly. Probably he was immensely fascinated by our quaint old Rom custom of giving a damn about the members of our own families.

  After a time, to his obvious relief and in fact mine also, we got off the subject of Shandor and back to the subject of power, where we were both more comfortable.

  In his ponderously purse-mouthed way he allowed as how we were both in highly precarious situations. I thought my situation was considerably less precarious than his, but I allowed as how I agreed with his assessment. I was wise enough to know that it didn't take a monster like
Shandor to topple a king. Someone as loyal and dedicated as Damiano could do it, if he began to think I was getting too old and unpredictable to entrust with the job. Maybe even with Polarca's connivance. There was plenty of precedent in human history for kings being removed by their own most trusted kinsmen and associates for the general good and welfare. Yes, the more I thought about it, the more risky my whole position looked.

  "We need each other, yes, you and I," I told Periandros.

  Politics, the old Gaje philosopher said-Shakespeare, Socrates, one of those-does indeed make strange bedfellows. I never imagined I would find myself angling for the embrace of Periandros. But, then, I had never imagined to find Periandros sitting on the imperial throne, either.

  Very quickly we came to an understanding. There would be a showy public ceremony, the complete works, a grand pyrotechnikon and all, by way of reconfirming me as King of the Rom. The laying on of the wand of recognition, the whole business. The entire nobility would be invited, both Gaje and Rom, from all the worlds. The biggest spectacle in centuries, in fact.

  "With light-spikes for everyone?" I said.

  "Of course, with light-spikes," Periandros said, irritated. "How can we do without light-spikes, if we are to have the nobility gathered here?"

  "I was just wondering," I said.

  But no, he was planning to pull out all the stops, and devil take the cost. I could see how serious he was about this, considering what he would have to spend. Though it did cross my mind that he might well ask us to contribute too. That would be all right. The reconsecration ceremony would be of enormous symbolic benefit to both of us. For me it would wipe out the little ambiguity that had been brought into being when Lord Naria, acting as regent, had laid the wand on Shandor's shoulders. For Periandros it would serve similarly to expunge what Naria had done, thereby retroactively expunging Naria's one brave display of imperial authority. All the worlds would know that Yakoub Nirano was now and forevermore Rom baro, Rex Romaniorum; and implicit in Periandros' recognizing me as king was my recognizing him as emperor.

  There was one other little part of the package. But even Periandros the shameless was too abashed to ask for it outright. What he wanted was for me to spy for him: to have my Rom star-captains keep me provided with reports on the movements of the Lords Naria and Sunteil, and for me to turn those reports over to him. The way he managed to phrase it, though, Sunteil and Naria weren't explicitly mentioned, and it was possible for me to interpret what he was saying as simply a request for detailed statistical analyses of the flow of commerce between the worlds. That was how I chose to interpret it, anyway.

  "Certainly," I said. "I see no problem with that at all."

  "Then we understand one another?"

  "Perfectly," I said.

  He rose and poured the wine of farewell for me. I came forward to accept it, and took a close look at him as I did. I had been noticing something odd about him, the last few minutes, and I wanted to check it out at close range.

  It had seemed to me that he was flickering about the edges, so to speak. Losing definition, a little. I wasn't sure of it; but as well as I was able to tell from the distance where I was required to sit, the Sixteenth was having some trouble keeping the boundaries of his corpus firm. That is of course a characteristic of doppelgangers: they are always plausible duplicates of the human beings from whom they are generated, but they are in a steady state of degeneration from the moment they are struck off the mold, and the keen eye can spot it sometimes, very subtle though the effect will be in the early stages.

  Had I been talking to a doppelganger of the emperor all this time? Sitting there sipping his wine and staring into his eyes and playing little political fencing-matches with him, and the whole while I had been dealing with a mere simulacrum, while the authentic Sixteenth-scared out of his wits by the fear of assassination, even an unthinkable assassination at the hands of the Rom king himself-was hiding somewhere out of sight, monitoring the whole thing by cortex wire, maybe even running a relay that told the doppelganger what to say? Jesu Cretchuno Moischel and Abraham! What an absurdity! What an insult!

  If it was true. I peered close, but I couldn't tell. Maybe I had imagined the whole thing. Maybe the flicker had been in my eyes and not in the emperor's edges. At any rate I didn't have any way of poking and prodding to find out; I had to take my little sip of wine and get myself down from the platform.

  "Well?" Polarca asked. "How did it go?"

  "About as I expected. The pompous little shit: he really thinks he's emperor. The funny thing is, so do I think he is. But there was one damned strange thing."

  "What was that?"

  I told him that I thought I might have been having an audience with a doppelganger-emperor the whole time. Polarca clapped his hands and laughed.

  "If that isn't just like Periandros!" he cried. "Did he think you had a bomb in your mustache? He really wants to live forever, doesn't he?"

  "I think he wants to live long enough to get Sunteil and Naria to agree that he's really the emperor," I said.

  "I don't think anybody's going to live that long," Polarca said. He shook his head. "A doppelganger! Can you beat that!"

  "I'm not totally sure, you understand."

  "But it's just like him. It absolutely is. What do you think, will he send a doppelganger to this big grand reconsecration ceremony of yours too? If anyone's going to try to assassinate him, that would be a fine place to do it."

  "And take out everybody within ten meters of him too," I said.

  Polarca scowled. "Maybe you'd better send a doppelganger to the ceremony too, eh, Yakoub?"

  8.

  BUT THE GREAT RECONSECRATION CEREMONY NEVER did take place. And Periandros learned that no matter how many doppelgangers he tried to hide behind, a really determined and creative assassin would somehow be able to find him. It happened just three days after my audience with him: a homing wasp, in his bath, a diabolical little artificial insect that flew straight for its goal and killed him so fast that he died with the soap still in his hand. You can use doppelgangers for lots of things, but not to take your baths for you.

  A few hours later, before I had heard anything about the tragic event in the imperial bath-chamber, the starship Jewel of the Imperium landed at the Capital bearing a most distinguished passenger: no less than Lord Sunteil, who was returning with remarkably fine timing after having spent the past few months in exile, or, if you prefer, in hiding. (Yes, that same Supernova-class Jewel of the Imperium that had taken me from Xamur to Galgala when I went to have things out with Shandor. The pilot of which was Petsha le Stevo of Zimbalou and whose captain, by a remarkable coincidence, was the dapper Therione, a native of Sunteil's very own world of Fenix.)

  The first thing that Lord Sunteil did upon his arrival at the Capital was to proclaim himself emperor, news having reached him with surprising swiftness that Periandros was no longer among the living. In measured words Sunteil expressed his grief over the passing of the late Lord Periandros, whom he did not refer to as the Sixteenth Emperor. He himself, he declared, was the Sixteenth Emperor. And he had held that title, he said, ever since the instant of the Fifteenth's death, although he had been unfortunately detained all this while on urgent imperial business in the Haj Qaldun system and had been unable until now to give his personal attention to the problems of the central government.

  The second thing that Lord Sunteil did upon his arrival at the Capital was to run desperately for cover.

  He had just finished proclaiming his imperial authority when a detachment of imperial troops arrived to arrest him. Sunteil managed to clear out of the starport barely ahead of them and vanished back into hiding somewhere south of the city. Somehow, though he had been able to ascertain with such surprising swiftness that Lord Periandros had perished that day in a lamentable accident in the privacy of his palace, Sunteil had failed to discover one other significant datum, which was that his rival Lord Naria had been secretly on hand at the Capital for quite some t
ime and that Naria-or the Sixteenth Emperor, as Naria preferred us all to call him-had quietly succeeded in winning the support of a substantial portion of the imperial military forces. While Sunteil was still making self-congratulatory speeches at the starport, Naria had taken possession of the imperial palace and was accepting the homage of the peers of the Imperium, who were nothing if not obliging, though I imagine they were becoming a trifle confused.

  A little later on that remarkable day, which I'm certain will provide stimulating challenges to historians for centuries to come, the late Lord Periandros made an unexpected reappearance on the imperial communications channel. The reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated, he informed us. He was even now as heretofore the Sixteenth Emperor and he called upon all loyal citizens to denounce the lies of the criminal Lord Sunteil and the vile intrusion upon the imperial palace of the criminal Lord Naria.

  In short, the fat was in the fire, the shit had hit the fan, and there were altogether too many cooks in the kitchen, which was sure to spoil the broth. Periandros' simple little coup d'etat had given way to a three-cornered civil war.

  Fragmentary reports on all this began to reach my palace at the Capital about midday. The first thing we heard was Sunteil's starport speech, telling us that Periandros was dead and he was in charge. Polarca, Damiano, Jacinto and I sat transfixed in front of the screen, trying to comprehend what was going on. Abruptly Sunteil's speech was interrupted and the camera cut to the imperial palace, to the great council-chamber of the emperor. We were treated to a close-up shot of the defunct Lord Periandros lying in state. He was wrapped from throat to toes in glittering brocaded robes, but the camera lingered a long while on his face, and it was unmistakably the face of Periandros. He appeared to be quite authentically dead.