"Are you all right, Yakoub?" I heard the boy saying, far away. "Yakoub? Yakoub?"
The blue pearl of old Earth hung suddenly in the midst of a deafening hush of pure silence between one sun and the other. It was the only quiet thing in that noisy sky but once it appeared I wasn't able to look at anything else. Even when it existed Earth must have been far from the most beautiful planet in the universe, but seeing it appearing now out of nowhere in all its ancient cool blueness was so wonderful that the sight of it held me in an unbreakable grip.
"What do you see, Yakoub? What's there?"
It wasn't really Earth, of course. It was just Earth's ghost. You think it's only the ghosts of people that go wandering around the continuum? Planets have ghosts too. The difference is that people-ghosts can go only one way in time, from front to back, but planet-ghosts can move either way. Earth lay a thousand years away, but here it was reaching out for me across half the galaxy. It was like a special gift. For me, only for me.
"Hey," I said. "Hey, Earth! Earth, look here! It's me, Yakoub! Here I am! I'm who you came here to visit, you Earth!"
This was magic. I forgot all about Chorian. I laughed and waved to that dazzling blue planet up there, and put my arms high overhead and shook my fists into the blazing sky, and burst out onto the ice-field and began to dance and caper. And sang Rom songs of love to the Earth at the top of my lungs with my head thrown back and my shoulders high.
Maybe that seems strange to you. Why should I give even half a damn for Earth? I wasn't born there and I had never lived there and in fact I had never even really seen the place. How could I have? It perished long before my time. I had ghosted it often enough but there was no way I could have visited it in the flesh.
Yet I loved it, in a peculiar way.
Consider that Earth was our second mother, and don't ever forget that: a harsh mother but one who shaped us well. Romany Star may have given us birth but it was Earth that was our shaping-place, the forge in which we were tempered. For us Earth was a miserable place of exile, and maybe we should have hated it for that; but how could we hate the place that had made us strong? On Earth we were made fit for the life we now lead as we voyage among the stars. So I sang to it and danced to it and cried out my love to it, to that ghostly blue world, separated from me by centuries, hanging there in silence between those two alien suns. "Here I am," I yelled. "Me, Yakoub. You remember me?"
"You can see Earth?" Chorian whispered. I could barely see him, he seemed so far away. But I saw his eyes. They were shining. "Where is it? Show it to me, Yakoub!"
I saw Earth and I saw much more. It was all flooding upon me at once. I was a boy-slave again, swimming for my life through the warm living mud of Megalo Kastro and feeling an entire planet pulse and throb against my bare legs and belly. And then I was at the controls of my starship, feeling the energy of the cosmos shuddering through me and taking it and focusing it and hurling it back, and sending the great shining vessel leaping across the light-years. And then I was standing at the kinging-session of the great kris on Galgala, the high hall of judgment where destinies are decreed, looking down at the nine solemn krisatora, of the Rom, the judges who hold the reins of the universe in their hands. They were offering me the kingship, for Cesaro o Nano who had been king had died; and I was refusing it. And then one by one they made the sign of kingship at me again until I was bowed down under the ninefold weight of their force, which was the collective will of all my people since the beginning of time, and I nodded and knelt to them, and then they knelt to me, and I was king. As the old woman had said I would be, the withered and wrinkled phuri dai who had come to me with magical words when I was hardly out of my cradle.
And now, still caught in visions, I was at my estate by the shore of the gentlest of the oceans of Xamur, which I think is the most beautiful of the nine kingly planets. But this must have been earlier, before I was king, because my son Shandor stood before me, the first of my sons and the one I loved best, and he was only a little child. There was defiance in Shandor's eyes. He had done something forbidden, and I had spoken with him, and now they had brought him to me and they said that he had done it again. I hit him and the mark of my hand sprang up on his cheek and still he defied me, and I hit him again. He looked to be eight, nine, maybe ten years old. I loved him terribly then, God only knows why. I raised my hand to him a third time. "Stop," someone said, and I said, "No, not yet." And they said, "He's only a child, Yakoub," and I said, hitting him again, "I have two things to teach him. One is to respect the Law, and the other is to feel no fear. So I hit him to prevent him from being lawless, and I hit him to keep him from becoming a coward." And I saw anger and love in Shandor's eyes, which was what I felt for him. So I hit him again and this time blood ran from his lip.
And the blood was the color of the hot sea that bathes the shores of Nabomba Zom. The palace of Loiza la Vakako was there, who was more than a father to me, though he never once lifted his hand against me. We stood side by side in the red surf under the stupefying thunder of the great blue sun of Nabomba Zom and Loiza la Vakako said to me, "You know, Yakoub, that every Rom is given two lives, one in which you live as you please and make as many mistakes as you care to make, and then a second in which it is your task to atone for the errors of your first life." And I laughed and said, "I'll try to remember that, father, when I enter my second life." But the sly face of Loiza la Vakako turned solemn and dark and he said to me, "This is your second life, Yakoub." That was just before I was taken by force from Nabomba Zom and sold into slavery the second time, to suffer like a miserable frog in the terrible tunnels of Alta Hannalanna. It was on Alta Hannalanna that I first felt the sting of the sensory-whip lash my forebrain, which nearly ended me before I had fairly begun. I saw the overmaster again raise the whip now, and swirls of yellow force blared in the heavens, and I rushed toward him and took the whip from him, saying, "Now the blood of Your soul will flow." For there are many kinds of blood and I have seen them all.
There was no end to it. All my wives marched in a vision before me, the ones that I loved and the ones I did not, Esmeralda and Mimi and Isabella and Micaela and also some others that I have pretty well forgotten, and some women that were never my wives but through no fault of my own. I embraced my lost Malilini again, my first true sweet love. And Mona Elena, my forbidden Gaje woman. And golden faith less Syluise. Friends came and I threw my arms around them, Polarca, Valerian, Biznaga. A hundred alien landscapes danced in my brain. Worlds with rings in the sky, worlds with many suns, worlds with none. My God, what a vision it was! I had a hundred seventy-two years of ghosts in me and they were all on a rampage at once. Like a good Rom I have been everywhere and seen everything and it all lives in me, and it all is happening at the same instant, for such words as "past" and
64 present" and "future" are mere GaJe foolishness, really. All there is is now. Now I stare at the auroras sizzling in the sky over Mulano and now I walk the flowered meadows of Romany Star and now I stand in the Plaza of the Thousand Columns in Atlantis and now I advance toward the throne of the Fifteenth Emperor, and now I sharpen the blades of the Frankish swordsmen who will take Jerusalem from the Saracens in the morning, and now I sit in the royal council of the Rom on golden Galgala with old Bibi Savina the phuri dai beside me, and now I am with my father in the city of Vietorion as he points toward a red star in the sky. Sometimes my lady Syluise is by my side, and sometimes it is someone else, and sometimes I am alone. I see crystal temples and bridges that span the skies. The visions will not end. A thousand thousand souls crowd in on me, Rom souls, Gaje souls, the souls of creatures that are not at all human; and they are all my own. There is an infinity of worlds and I am everywhere. I writhe in the mud and I soar between the stars. And wondrous laughter rings out, filling the heavens so that there is scarcely room for anything else. The laughter is mine.