If you ask that, you understand nothing.
The power was within me, to achieve what must be achieved. If I had the power and I failed to make use of it, that was contemptible. My people would curse me forever. If there is a life after this life, I would blister and blacken there forever in their scorn. And if not-well, no matter. I must live as though all the Rom yet to be born are watching me. As though I dwell each day in the beacon glare of their scrutiny.
YOU MIGHT THINK ID HA VE HAD A CHANCE TO ENJOY A reprieve from all this socializing. But it wasn't long before I had company again.
This next visitor was confusing, because he was the Duc de Gramont.
Or his doppelganger. I wasn't sure which, and that was what was confusing. And disturbing.
Julien de Gramont is an old friend who has managed to tread a very neat line between the overlapping spheres of authority of the Rom Kingdom and the Empire. That's a measure of Julien's cleverness. By way of a profession Julien has set himself up in business as the pretender to the throne of ancient France, France having been one of the important countries of Earth around the year 1600 or so. France got rid of its kings a long time back, but that's all right; I can't see any real harm in claiming a lapsed throne. What I don't exactly understand, even though Julien has tried to explain it to me seven or eight times, is the point of claiming the throne of a country on a planet that doesn't even exist any more. It has something to do with grandeur, he said. And gloire. That word is pronounced glwahr, approximately. French is a very strange language.
(Just in passing I want to point out, since the notion is not likely to occur to you on your own, that the Duc de Gramont's beloved France was a place no bigger than a medium-big plantation would be on an average-size world such as Galgala or Xamur. Nevertheless France had kings of its own, and its own language and laws and literature and history and all the rest. And in fact was a very considerable place, in its time. I know that because I was there once-right around the time they were getting rid of their kings, as a matter of fact. It's an odd and somehow endearing thing about the Gaje of Earth that they found it necessary to divide up their one little planet into a hundred little separate countries. Of course that arrangement was a great pain in the buliasa for us when we lived among them. But all that came to an end a long time ago.)
The first couple of years I lived on Mulano I had had a doppelganger of the Duc de Gramont living here with me. Julien had had it made up for me as a going-away gift when he heard of my abdication, because he knows I am fond of French cuisine, a field in which he has great expertise; so he thought I might like to have my own private French chef while I was living in my self-imposed exile.
But doppelgangers generally last only a year or two, or maybe a little longer in a cold climate like Mulano's. Then they fade away. They don't come back to life, either. My Julien doppelganger had vanished in the usual way at the usual time, several years back. When I saw what I took to be the doppelganger of the Duc de Gramont picking his way toward me between the wiggling arms of my forest-pausing once or twice to pull off a leaf and pop it into his mouth, as if tasting it to see if it was worth using in some sauce-I couldn't make sense of it at all. "Alors, mon vieux!" he cried. "Mes hommages! Comment ca va? Sacre bleu, how cold it is here!"
I gave him a blank look and backed away a little. Ghosts I understand, doppelgangers I understand, but the ghost of a doppelganger?- No.
In a ragged shred of a voice I said, "Where did you come from?" "Ah, is this the best greeting you can manage, mon ami?" Speaking to me coolly, from on high, ultra-French, miffed, deeply wounded. "I spend half a dreary interminability in the capsule of relay to get to this dreadful place, and you show no jubilation upon the sight of me, you evince no delight, you merely ask me, brusquely, without the littlest shred of courtesy, Where did I come from? Quel type! Where is the embrace? Where is the kiss on the cheeks?" He threw up his hands and burst into a crazy flurry of random French, like a robot translator gone berserk. "Joyeux Noel! Bonne Annee! A quelle heure part le prochain bateau? Fai mal de mer! Faites venir le garcon! Par ici! Le voici! 11 faut payer!" And went capering around like a madman.
After a little while he subsided, as though his gears were winding down, and stood there sadly watching his own breath congeal in front of him.
"So you are not in any way glad to see me?" he said very quietly. I studied him. Doppelgangers sometimes look a little transparent around the edges. This one didn't. This one didn't really seem like a doppelganger at all. It had Julien's quick darting piercing eyes, Julien's elegant movements. Its little dark mustache and small pointed beard were trimmed precisely in the right way, not a fraction of a hair askew, just as Julien's always were. Doppelgangers lose those small fine touches quickly. Entropic creep sets in and their definition starts to blur.
"You really are you, then?" "Oui," he said. "I really are I." "Truly Julien?"
"Sacre bleu! Norn d'un chien! Truly, truly, truly! What is the matter with you, cher ami? Where has your brain gone? Is it that this terrible cold-"
"The doppelganger you gave me," I said. "I couldn't figure out how a doppelganger could come back."
"Ah, the doppelganger! The doppelganger, mon vieux-"
"It faded away long ago, you know. So when I saw it again-when I thought I saw it-"
"Oui. Bien sur."
"How could I know? A doppelganger returning after it had faded? That isn't supposed to be possible. Some kind of trick? Some way of slipping an assassin past my guard? The devil's hairy hole, man! What was I supposed to think?"
"And what do you think now?"
I gave him another long close look.
He grew upset again when I didn't say anything. Waving his hands around, tossing his head in that stylishly frantic way of his. "Cordieu, cher ami! Mon petit Romanichel. Gitan bien-aime. Dear Mirlifiche, esteemed Cascarrot. It is only me! The true Julien! Vraiment, I am not a doppelganger. Nor an assassin. I am merely your own Julien de Gramont. N'est-ce pas? Can you believe that? What do you say, Gypsy king?"
Yes. Of course. How could I doubt it? He was the genuine item. No doppelganger could possibly generate so much heat, so much frenzy, so much exasperated passion.
I felt embarrassed. I felt contrite.
I felt like a damned fool.
To mistake a man for his own doppelganger may not be a dueling offense, but it certainly isn't much of a compliment. And to do it to poor Julien de Gramont, with his royal pretensions and his excitable Gallic temperament. Well, I apologized most profusely and he insisted that it was a harmless mistake and I invited him into my bubble and brewed up a batch of steaming coffee for him, the ancient Rom coffee, black as sin, hot as hell, sweet as love, and in five minutes it was all a forgotten matter, no offense intended, none taken. Julien had brought presents for me, two overpockets' worth of them, and he proceeded now to conjure them out of the storage dimension and stack them up in heaps on my floor. Sweet old Julien, still worrying about my gastronomic comfort! "Homard en civet de vieux Bourgogne," he announced, pulling out one of those cunning flasks that will prepare and heat your meal just so if you merely touch your finger to the go-button. "Carre d'agneu roti au poivre vert. Fricassee de poulet au vinaigre de vin. Pommes purees. Les filets mignons de veau au citron. Everything is labeled, mon ami. Everything is true French, no grotesque dishes of the Galgala herdsmen, no foul porridges of Kalimaka, no quivering monstrosities from the swamps of Megalo Kastro. Here. Here. You like kidney? You like sweetbreads? Fricassee de rognons et de ris de veau aux feuilles d'epinards. Eh, mon frere? Coquilles Saint-Jacques? Pate de fruits de mer en croute? Bouillabaisse Marseillaise? I have brought you everything." "You're much too good to me, Julien."