2. The One Word
I was with Loizala Vakako when a messenger came to him and told him that a certain wild Rom of his family, while drunk, had challenged five Gaje to follow him across a mountain pass that was not much wider than the blade of a sword. All six of them had fallen to their deaths, but the Rom had been the last to fall, and those who had watched this event had praised him extravagantly for his courage.
Loiza la Vakako laughed. "Sometimes courage about dying is cowardice about living," he said. And he never mentioned the man again.
A DAY OR TWO AFTER CHORIAN LEFT, I DECIDED TO PICK myself up and move to some other part of the territory. It wasn't that I was trying to hide from further visitors, now that I knew I could be found. I was never lost-to those who know how to see. But I had lived in this place long enough. There is something in the Rom soul that will not let us live in the same place for very long.
In the old days when Earth existed, most of us were nomads. Wanderers. We lived in caravans and roamed wherever we pleased. At night we slept under the stars unless the weather was foul. In winter we might pull the wagons together and hole up for the season; but as soon as spring arrived, off we went again. In at least a dozen of the languages of Earth the word "Gypsy" came to mean "wanderer." Poets would say things like, "I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life." Which is bullshit, of course, I have to point out, with all due respect to the literary folk. A real Gypsy would no more go to sea than he would grind his horse up into sausages. The sea, the sea, the stinking fishy sea-it's never been a place where any Gypsy cares to find himself. Live by the seashore, yes, that's fine. Nice breezes, good eating. But go and toss about on the waves? No, never. Better the broader seas of space, calm and-well, you get the general idea of what those old misguided but well-meaning poets were trying to say. At least they were thinking about us.
For some reason our wandering ways were tremendously bothersome to the Gaje. Whatever they can't control gives them an itch on the inside of their skulls. Sometimes they tried to pass laws requiring us to settle down. Hah! What good could that do? We used to say that making a Gypsy live in one place was like harnessing a lion to a plow. To be tied all your life to the same four walls and a roof, the same little plot of ground, the same dusty street-why, that was torment, that was slavery. We were meant to wander.
Well, things change, more or less; but the more things change the more they remain the same. (I can't take credit for that line. It's Gaje wisdom, spoken by one of their wise men a thousand years ago. Don't look so surprised. Even the Gaje have their moments of wisdom.) There aren't any lions any more and there are no more plows and Gypsies stopped living in caravans a long time back. But we still have trouble with the idea of being tied down. We may live in houses for a while, but only for a while. Sooner or later we move on. And when we move on it isn't from one little country to another on the same continent of the same small planet. It is by great leaps across thousands of lightyears.
(There wouldn't be an Empire today, but for us. The Gaje can't deny that. They may have built the starships, but we were the ones who piloted them to the far reaches of the sky. And all because we are a restless people; and all because we can never call any place home, except our true home that was cruelly taken from us ten thousand years ago. Other places aren't home. Just shelter. Places to wait.)
So. Moving day. Blue-green clouds scudding across a lemon sky. The air crisp and triple-cold. Not even any ghosts hovering around. A good day for taking to the road, Yakoub Rom. Take yourself onward, before the old Devil hangs his weights on your heart and pulls you down. The old Devil, that sly one, o Beng, yes. He may be my cousin too but I won't ask him to dinner.
I emptied out the ice-bubble where I had lived for the past year or so and gathered all my things together and packed them into my elegant little hundred-cubic-meter overpocket, and when I drew the drawstring I sent ninety-nine point ninety-five cubic meters' worth of the overpocket's contents into a handy storage dimension in a nearby continuum. What was left had negligible mass and no weight at all. I tied it to my sleeve with a string and let it bob along beside me as I went on to my new home base.
It was on the other side of the Gombo glacier and about a hundred kilometers to the north. That was a good little walk. I sang to myself in Rom the whole way, not bothering always to make sense, for who was listening? And when my toes began to grumble I stopped and put my head back and yelled my name into the wind and grabbed my crotch and flung out my arms and lifted my knees to my chin and stomped them down again and capered around like a lunatic, doing one of the old dances. Hoy! Hootchka pootchka hoya zim! And then I went forward, laughing, with the sweat running around and down and through the tangled black jungle on my chest and belly. Hoy! Yakoub of the Rom is on the road again!
It started to snow an hour after I set out. The sky turned white and the horizon disappeared and there were no longer any landmarks to guide me. From then on there was snow flying in my face all the way. I drank it in and spit it back out. Even in the whiteness and the blankness I kept to my course. Long ago on a planet called Trinigalee Chase that I would otherwise rather not talk about I was taught a trick for keeping on course with no instrument other than the one between my ears, and it stood me in good stead now. It's the one thing I remember from Trinigalee Chase that I'm glad not to have forgotten.
Wherever you go on Mulano the scenery is the same: ice, snow, ice, snow. The place has no tilt to the plane of the ecliptic, so it has nothing much by way of a change of seasons, and even though it has two fancy suns that give it plenty of lively light it's too far from them to enjoy any real warmth from them. So both hemispheres of Mulano are winterbound all the time. I hadn't had a day without snow since I had arrived.
But that was all right. I'd spent enough of my life on tropical worlds. Generally speaking the planets where humanity has chosen to settle are ones where the climate is easy; maybe a little wintry around the poles on some, but usually balmy everywhere else all the year round. Soft translucent surf, powdery beaches, green fronds waving in the gentle breeze: that's your basic Gaje world. If they colonize any nastier ones - Megalo Kastro, say, or Alta Hannalanna-it's because there are raw materials on it that are too valuable to pass up. Otherwise, considering how many millions of planets there are just in our one galaxy, the Gaje don't see much reason to settle on the uncomfortable ones. Can't say I blame them, either.
The one exception to that is the world they all started from, Earth. Of course they didn't colonize Earth, they simply evolved there. And got away from it as quickly as they could. As any sensible being would have done. Ah, the climate of Earth! A hellish cantankerous thing, that climate. I know that from my studies and my occasional little ghosting trips. Aside from a few really sweet places not very well suited for large blocs of population it was all either too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry, too barren or too lush. Where you had a decent climate you usually got earthquakes or volcanic eruptions or hurricanes as part of the package.
(The Gaje like to argue that natural adversity of that sort is what makes a race great, and maybe so. But I have to point out that according to the account in the Swatura the climate on Romany Star was absolutely perfect, and we nevertheless managed to create a pretty impressive civilization there, thank you.)
(On the other hand, Romany Star got hit by two lethal solar flares within six thousand years of each other. You win some and you lose some, I guess.)
Anyway, a little chilly weather has never bothered me much. And Mulano, being outside Empire control and not totally unlivable even at its most blustery, was just the sort of planet where I could take a quiet little sabbatical from the cares of government. I wasn't likely to be bothered by tourists or slave-traders or synapse-peddlers or body-farmers or agony-mongers or census-agents or stockbrokers or encyclopedia salesmen or prospectors or tax-collectors or any of the million other piffling distractions of 32nd-century life. The snow was piled so deep that even the archaeologists stayed away. Maybe the occasional ghost would turn up, but those were my own people, so no problem. And I knew I could live comfortably enough in an ice-bubble, because I had spent a couple of years once on Zimbalou, which is one of the Rom nomad worlds. Ice-bubbles are standard lodging there for anybody living at surface level. Zimbalou as it wanders here and there around the galaxy is never allowed to get within thawing range of any sun, because its major cities are nestled way down deep in tunnels far below the ice, and anything approaching warmth would mean total disaster. It's a dark and dismal place but its people love it. I almost came to love it myself. At any rate I learned the art of constructing ice-bubbles there.