"Dinosaur dung," I said, and I said it with vigor, and I said it in Romany, which was not easy, for although there are many words for "dung" in Romany there is not precisely one that means "dinosaur." Nevertheless I said it and he understood what I had said.
"You've been very kind, Yakoub."
"Enough preamble, boy. We are Rom. Tell me what's in your heart." He looked down and scuffed the tip of his boot against the fresh snow. He was very young and getting younger every minute. Watching him, I tried to understand what it was like to be so young, tried to remember how it had been. My God, it was so long ago! To exist in the moment, not yet wound in layer upon opaque layer of experience. To be transparent, bones visible through the skin, every motivation lying in clear view just below the surface. I hadn't felt that way for a hundred fifty years. Perhaps not ever.
"These past few days-" he began, and faltered again. "Yes?"
"I never knew my father, Yakoub. I was sold away from my kumpania when I was seven."
"I know, boy. And I know what that's like. I was sold at seven myself, the first time."
"The Lord Sunteil's been something like a father to me, in his way. He's not evil, you know. He's a Gajo and he's the emperor's right hand but he's not evil, and as close as anyone's been a father to me, it's been Lord Sunteil. But it isn't the same. He isn't of the blood."
"I know what you're saying."
"And these past few days-these past few days, Yakoub-"
He turned away and stared off to his left, far across the snow-field, as though thinking that he had to hide from me the tears that were threatening to break through and burst past his eyelids. He pretended to be searching for the sweep aura, but I knew what he was really doing, and I felt sad for him for thinking that he had to conceal his soul from me. This is what comes of growing up among the Gaje, I thought. "Listening to you as you told me the stories from the Swaturahearing from your own lips about Romany Star, the Tale of the Swelling Sun-" He took a deep breath and swung around, looking down at me, and, yes, his eyes were moist, and sell me again into slavery if mine weren't getting the same way, just a bit. Then he said, all in a rush, "For a little while these last few days I understood what it must be like to have had a real father, Yakoub."
So he had managed to get it out at last.
There was nothing I needed to say in return. I smiled at him and embraced him and kissed him on the mouth in the old Rom fashion, and gave his shoulders one good hard final squeeze and lifted my hands from him, and we stood there together in silence. Double Day was dawning now. The orange sun was coming into the sky opposite the yellow one and the ice was ablaze with warring colors.
After a time he said, "I fear that I'll never see you again." "Because you think our paths will never cross, or that you think my time is nearly over?"
"Oh, Yakoub-"
"The first day you were here you told me that I'd live forever. I don't think that's true and I don't think I want it to be true. But I have to last long enough to set foot on Romany Star. You know that. And you know that I will."
"Yes. You will, Yakoub."
"And we'll meet again long before that day. I don't know how or where or why it will be, but we will. Somewhere. Somewhen. And meanwhile there are tasks waiting for you, boy, which you ought to be off and doing. Go now. Take care. May you remain with God."
"May you remain with God, Yakoub."
He grinned at me. I think he was relieved to have all this weepy business of farewell behind him, and I have to confess that I was too. The sweep aura now was rising. A surging fountain of brilliant green light came from the antenna that he had mounted out on the ice-field a few hundred meters away.
"You'd better go out there," I said.
He slipped the journey-helmet over his head and the flimsy folds of coppery mesh tumbled down about him almost to the ground.
Just before he touched the switch at his shoulder that would make any communication between us impossible, he looked down into my eyes and said, "You are still king, Yakoub. You will always be king."
Then he touched the switch and the frail web lit up and bellied out like a balloon, sealing him in a protective sphere of chilly Mulano air that no force could breach. So long as the helmet's field remained activated he would be shielded in that sphere against anything. Even the awful darkness and cold of the void that lies between one space and another.
For a long time I watched him from my doorway as he stood out there on the ice, bathed in the green glow of the sweep aura and the blended orange and yellow of the double suns. He was waiting for some roving scanning-strand of a relay sweep to find him and carry him away, back to the worlds of the Imperium.
I felt sorry for him. Relay-sweep travel is not at all jolly nor is it exhilarating. In fact, it's a great pain in the buliasa. Believe me. I have had plenty of opportunity to find that out at first hand over the years. You stand and wait; you stand and wait. At a thousand different nexuses around the inner universe the sweep-stations sit like giant spiders, stroking the nether regions of space with their far-ranging arms. Sooner or later one will find you, if you are patient enough and have set up the right coordinates on your beacon. And then it will seize you and lift you and carry you away, and shunt you through this auxiliary space and that, not following any route that particularly serves your needs, but simply one that suits the pattern of openings in the space-time lattice that it happens to find. And sooner or later, but usually later, it will deposit you-no more ceremoniously than it would a bundle of laundry-at a relay drop on one of the Empire worlds. It's a slow and cumbersome and basically humiliating process, in which you surrender all control of your destiny to an inanimate force that is not only unresponsive to any of your wishes but also completely beyond your comprehension. For hours, days, months, sometimes years, you drift like a child's toy lost in an infinite sea, floating along inside your protective sphere with no way of amusing yourself and no company but your own remorselessly ticking thoughts; for although your metabolic processes are suspended while you are held outside the ordinary spacetime continuum, your mind goes right on working, business as usual. A tiresome way to travel. Not that I mean to whine. There are too many worlds, not enough starships, for the Empire to be able to run standard tourist service to places like Mulano. I had come here by relay-sweep myself; and when the time came for me to leave here, that was how I would go.
Chorian stood straight and tall like a good soldier in the light of the two suns for what seemed to me like an eternity and a half without moving. After a time I began to think that perhaps by watching him I was somehow hindering the coming of his sweep-strand, for things sometimes work that way. So I went inside and I conjured up the bahtalo drom for him, the spell of safe voyage. I wasn't sure that it would have any effect, since Chorian was enclosed in his protective sphere where possibly even the spell of safe voyage couldn't reach. But it was worth trying. The spell of safe voyage is one of the true spells, one of the ones that reliably does the job. It isn't simply witch-nonsense, something that some old drabarni of the Middle Ages might have put together out of bathwater and scythe-blades and the wombs of frogs; it is grounded in the great lines of force that run across the curving axes of the universe from shore to shore.
At any rate I wove the spell for him; and then I think I must have fallen into a light sleep; and when I went outside again to look for him, he was gone.
The suns were setting. I said a little prayer and waited for the moment of Romany Star.