In the few days he stayed with me I tried to help him. Just before the moment when Double Day was ending, I took him out on the glittering ice-fields and showed him where to find Romany Star. "There," I said. "The great red one. O Tchalai, the Star of Wonder. O Netchaphoro, the Luminous Crown, the Carrier of Light, the Halo of God. You see it up there? Do you see it, you Chorian?"
"How could I not see it, Yakoub?"
And he went to his knees before it on the ice.
"There are sixteen streams of light radiating from it," I told him. "One for each of the sixteen original tribes. You can see that on the banner of the Kingdom, the star of sixteen points. That star has one world, Chorian, and it is the most beautiful world in all the billion galaxies. "
"Have you been there, Yakoub?" "In my dreams, yes."
"But you've never seen it with your own eyes?"
"How could I? It's holy ground. It's absolutely forbidden for any of us to go there-the worst kind of sacrilege. No Rom has set foot on that world in ten thousand years."
He had trouble understanding that: why we didn't simply jump into our ships and go zooming off to reclaim our ancient home world. It would be so easy. Who could stop us? We can go wherever we like, can't we? The young are so impetuous. And they have no real comprehension of the nature of the invisible world, of the unseen ties that bind and constrict us. I explained to him that it was a matter of the fulfilling of our long-range destiny, of a plan that was beyond our ability to grasp. I told him that we could not go back to Romany Star until we had received a sign, a call, that the time had come.
And then I said, "But I mean to get there before I die, boy. Why do you think I've lived so long? I've taken an oath. No death for me, boy, until I've touched the soil of Romany Star with both my heels."
He gave me a peculiar look. "Even though it would be sacrilege?" I rounded on him angrily. "What are you saying? I can't go until the call comes, don't you see? But the call will be coming soon. I know that, Chorian. I have absolutely certain knowledge of that. And when it does -the moment it does"You'll be the first one there."
"The first, yes. Showing the way for the rest of us. Now do you understand?"
He nodded. He stared at the black bowl of the sky. Mulano's air is cold and clear and there are no city lights to blur the skyward vision. I have never known another world from which Romany Star can be viewed as readily.
"If it's so beautiful there, Yakoub, why did we ever leave?"'
"We had to," I said. "A wise mother casts her children forth to make their own way in the universe; and Romany Star was a wise mother to US."
Was that so? Suddenly, for a moment there, I wondered. To drive us forth from our home with a flaming sword and force us into thousands of years of dismal wandering-this is wisdom? This is motherhood?
I listened to what I was saying, that glib line about the wise mother who had cast us forth, and for one weird instant my whole sense of the architecture of our destiny wavered and wobbled and shook. Sometimes all this mouthing off of proverbs is just one way of sweeping anguish and pain and even resentment under the rug. But what you sweep under the rug has a way of crawling out again to bite you, and that isn't just a proverb. It's an observation.
Cast forth by our wise mother. Well, yes. Or our father. Romany Star was our mother and God was our father, and God had noticed us, smug and happy on Romany Star, and He had said to Himself, These fat and sassy Rom are getting complacent. They're getting arrogant. They're starting to forget that this universe is really a vale of tears, a chancy risky place where it's only by great good luck that you get through any given day without some monstrous catastrophe. They've had it good for too long, those Rom. All right. I'll throw them out on their asses. Let them learn what life is really like. And so had He done. And we have been suffering for our ancient good fortune ever since.
There was a Gaje people on Earth once called the Jews, who thought they were God's special people. He tossed them out on their asses too, just to teach them that He doesn't have any favorites, or, that if He does, He can give His favorites an even rougher time than He does His enemies. It's a very similar story, in its way: suffering, persecution, poverty, exile. But He wasn't as hard on them as He was on us. Them He made into lawyers, doctors, professors. We had to be knife-sharpeners and fortune-tellers. What kind of a lesson was He trying to teach us, anyway? At least He relented a little later on, and gave us some classier occupations. There are still some Jews around but I don't think many of them pilot starships. I'm pretty sure that none of them are kings, either.
Well, maybe it had all been worthwhile, I told myself. The casting forth into exile, the wandering, the suffering. So I answered my own question with a resounding Yes. Of course it had. Who was I to complain? There was Chorian, looking at me with rapture, me the wise man, me the old king, the embodiment of our race, and he was saying with his eyes, Tell me, Tell me, Tell me, Yakoub. Tell me all our great and wonderful story. How it all happened, how it began. I felt ashamed that I had wavered even for an instant, that I had begun to resent, to question.
And as we stood there in the darkness and the cold, I told him the old tale, the oldest of all our tales, the Tale of the Swelling Sun, just as my father had told it to me while we were standing together on that steep slope of Mount Salvat one night on Vietoris long ago, and just as I had told it to my many sons over many years on many different worlds.
I SPOKE OF OUR ANCIENT DAYS OF GREATNESS, THE WONDROUS cities of Romany Star, the shining palaces and splendid towers, the vast concourses and broad highways, the gleaming columns and plazas. I told him how the sky over Romany Star was forever ablaze with the light of all the heavens. I told him of the eleven moons that were strung like brilliant jewels from horizon to horizon. I told him of rivers that sparkled like new wine, of mountains that challenged the stars, of golden meadows and dazzling lakes. Of the handsome, happy people.
Then I told him of how we came to learn that the splendor would all be snatched from us. First Mulesko Chiriklo, the bird of the dead, making her nest on the highest battlement of the Great Temple. Then the woman's voice crying the mourning-song in the night, which we heard in every city at once; and then the wind that blew from the south, where the dead souls go to live, and would not stop for fourteen months. And other omens after that: a year when there was no summer, and a day when the sun did not rise, and a night when no stars could be seen anywhere in the world.
We had no way of understanding these omens, for we had known nothing but happiness on Romany Star. There had never been a drought, nor an earthquake, nor a flood, nor a plague. The seasons came round in their time and the earth was fertile. There was no sickness among us, and when death came to us it was sudden and clean, in great old age. So when the omens began the call went forth for wise ones who could interpret them for us; and from every part of the world the wise ones came, gathering in the great plaza of the capital city. For ninety-nine months they conferred and studied and asked the gods for guidance. Then in the hundredth month the king locked them all in the Long Chamber of the Great Temple, and let them know that they would have neither food nor drink until they told us what was about to befall us and how we should deal with it; and there was no word from them for ninety-nine hours, but in the hundredth hour they signalled that they had been granted a revelation, and then they were allowed to come forth.