So I walked up the side of the glacier and over the top and down the other side and headed north until I came to the right place. It was a special place on a planet that doesn't have many special places. I had found it and marked it for myself a few days before Chorian had turned up.
Though Mulano is basically nothing but a huge glittering empty white ice-field, this part of it was different. It had one astonishing feature, something truly strange. God, how I love a good strangeness! And this was a strangeness so strange that even from ten kilometers away I could feel it emanating toward me, and the force of it was like the roaring of a tremendous pipe-organ whose music filled half the heavens.
What it was, you came over a low snubby hill out of the whiteness and suddenly there was green in front of you, stretching ahead as far as you possibly could see, across snow-blinking valleys and hills and up the side of a distant glacier. And what the green was, was thousands upon thousands of fleshy sea-green tentacles as thick as your arm above and as thick as your thigh below, jutting up through the snow every few meters apart to a height of five or ten or twenty meters and ever so slowly waving and twitching about like heavy cables. There was a voluptuous music in their slippery sinuous movements. I imagined those wriggling waving things whispering to me, saying, Come here, Rom baro, come here, come here, come let us stroke your pretty black beard. Let us give you joy, Rom baro.
The first time I saw that scene I thought they might be the exposed limbs of some enormous herd of strange animals trapped and buried by some tremendous blizzard. The ghost of Valerian was with me that day and I said that and he said, "That's a smart guess, Yakoub," which was his usual way of telling me that I was full of shit.
(Valerian's never tactful. He's the black sheep of the Rom, an old space-pirate. Once he was a commander in the Imperial navy until he found that he preferred piracy and now there's a bounty on his head, though it would surprise me extremely if anybody ever manages to collect it. As a nation we Rom deplore piracy, at least publicly, and so we deplore our cousin Valerian, but he practices his trade as if it were poetry and you have to admire him for that.
"Have you ever seen anything like that before?" I asked him. But he was gone. I made a fist and shook it at the place where he had been glowing in the air. "Hey, you Valerian! Hey, this is the place for me, this place! You watch and see!")
That was a week or two ago. Now I was back, and meaning to stay. The tentacles were all waving away as before, wiggly as worms, green as grief. The nearest ones were close enough so that I could have reached out and tickled them. Or they me. They were puckered and pockmarked and they had rows of small darker-green nubbins sprouting all over them.
I unloaded my Riemann projector, so handy for dumping unwanted tangible matter into intangible places, and made ready to carve me a new ice-bubble. But first I had to be sure that I wouldn't be trying to build a nest for myself in the flank of some buried mountain, or some other equally unpromising submerged feature of the local geography. And I wanted to know more about those tentacles anyway. So I switched the projector to scan intensity, which lined up the molecules of the local geography in a convenient way and turned the subsurface more or less transparent for five hundred meters all around me. That was when I discovered that the twitchy rubbery things that were sticking out of the snow were in fact the branches of trees. The little green nubbins were their leaves. I was standing right on top of an enormous forest buried practically to its tips in snow.
Trees, yes. Weird, slender, seductively curved, undulating like lovely many-armed dancers mysteriously rooted to their places on stage. Maybe they were even intelligent. I suppose they didn't mind being buried like that, snow being a fine insulator and the air temperature being disagreeably low at that time of the year. Perhaps they emerged from their snowy tomb only once every fifty or a hundred years, I thought-during what might pass for summer on Mulano, if there was any such thing as summer here. Or-more likely-they lived perpetually under snow like this, the way the spice-fish lived so happily in the ice of the glaciers. You travel around enough, you get to see everything, and then some.
Well, I didn't seem to have anything to fear from them, and they broke the monotony. So I tuned my projector up to compaction level and burrowed a hole in the ice for myself, long and deep, slanting downward just at the place where the forest began. I built this bubble a little bigger than the last one, with shining walls and a lovely luminescent floor and a long window running across one side. I spent half a day fashioning an elegant door out of a slab of ice mounted on a thick dowel of the same useful substance. On its inner surface I hung the little shining Vogon sphere that would maintain light and power and a perpetual globe of sweet warm air between me and the wintry world without.
Then I went inside and closed the door and said the word that activated the Vogon sphere. Everything turned bright and cheerful. Hoy! Yakoub has a roof over his head again!
Now I set about hauling my possessions back from the various adjacent dimensions where I had stowed them.
My treasures. The things which root me to myself and remind me of who I have been and who I must yet become. The deep-piled rug, two Yakoubs long and three Yakoubs wide, woven in wondrous red and green and blue and black on lost Earth itself by a sultan's fifty castrated slaves. The three brass lamps, fat-bellied and squat, with the names of my fathers inscribed on their sides. The necklace strung with Byzantine gold coins that had belonged to that wondrous whore Mona Elena, and which I meant to return to her if ever I saw her again.
The silken scroll of office, spun for me by nine blind eye-beaters of Duud Shabeel, which I should have surrendered upon my abdication but did not because I could not bear to part with anything so ingenious: look at it long enough and you begin to know with complete certainty that you can never die. The starstone, plucked from a sand-dragon's bloody throat on Nabomba Zom, in whose depths the red light of Romany Star shines with wondrous warmth. The wonderwheel. The shadowstick. The Rom scepter, bareshti rovli rupui, the chief s silver wand, with its eight-sided red-tasseled head engraved with the five great symbols, nijako, chJam, shion, netchaphoro, trushuclass="underline" axe, sun, moon, star, cross. The statue of the Black Virgin Sara, our patron saint. The veil that had belonged to La Chunga, the Gitana dancer. The set of tinsmith's tools, worn and bent. The frayed and tattered bearskin, last of its kind in the universe. The golden candlesticks. The Tarot cards. The scythe that was dipped in my bath-water when I was born, to drive the demons away. The amulet of sea-urchin fossils. The dear little prickly niglo, the hedgehog that we brought with us from Earth into half the worlds of the galaxy, carved from the fiery yellow jade of Alta Hannalanna. And more, much more, the treasures of a long life, the gatherings of all my great odyssey.