Star of Gypsies
- Автор: Силверберг Роберт
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Star of Gypsies». Краткое содержание книги:
He was calm to the last. "Think of it as part of your education, Yakoub," he advised me. "Think of everything as part of your education."
And he smiled and blew a kiss to me, and they closed him into his sphere of force. I never saw that great man again, except once, long afterward. My turn came next. I stood there alone in midday sun, half blinded by the glare, not knowing in any way what was about to befall me and trying to tell myself that it was all for the best, that all of this was, as Loiza la Vakako said, simply part of my education. But I was frightened. I would be lying most wickedly if I tried to tell you I was not frightened. I had my whole life still ahead of me and I knew that if I didn't die in this abominable jaunt through space I would surely perish young on Alta Hannalanna, which made me angry but which also filled me with dread. It wasn't being dead that frightened me, but the moments just before dying, when I would lie there knowing that my life was being taken away from me before it had really begun. I did manage to keep my bowels under control, at least; not everyone would have managed that. I waited a long while in terrible fear and then I was yanked aloft and the world vanished about me. I muttered a spell of protection for myself, though I didn't place much faith in its power just then. And I went whirling away into God knows where on my way toward slavery on Alta Hannalanna.
Now, something like a hundred fifty years later, I found myself again and again thinking back to that first relay-sweep journey. How miserable I had been, how terrified, how altogether absurd. But I was very young then and I hadn't yet come to see the world the way a wise man like Loiza la Vakako did. Indeed it is all part of your education, everything. You are never taught anything by hiding in the dark and sucking on your thumb. It is in the water, and only in the water, that you learn how to swim.
Once more now was I flying across the void toward unknown adventures and an unknown fate. But by this time I had already had my education, and I was prepared for whatever would come. And so I sang and laughed and let the time glide by, in my journey back to the Empire from frosty Mulano, until I heard the whistling in my ears that told me that final shunt had been achieved and I was about to make my re-entry into the universe of men.
XAMUR. I knew at once that that must be where I had landed.
There's a moment of serious disorientation when you come out of relay, when your mind feels like it's been turned inside out like a hungry starfish's stomach and you can't tell your fingers from your ears. It lasts anywhere from fifteen seconds to fifteen minutes, depending on the resilience of your nervous system, and while it's going on it feels not tremendously different from the sensations you sometimes feel at the beginning of a ghosting. I went through all that now. This time it lasted about half a minute, for me. But that half minute was enough to tell me that I was on Xamur. More than enough. I knew right away, by the fragrance of the air. By one sweet wondrous whiff of it.
Xamur is listed among the nine kingly planets, but it really deserves some sort of higher designation, though I can't immediately think of one. Godly is a little too strong, maybe. But you get my drift. The place is simply paradise. It is a land of milk and honey and even better things.
The air is perfume-I don't mean the air is like perfume, it is perfume-and the sea might just as well be wine, because a sip of it will make you smile and five sips make you euphoric and a dozen good gulps will lay you out with a case of terminal giggles. The sky is a deep rich blue-green boldly streaked with red and yellow, a fantastic array of colors, and the atmosphere has some electric property that gives everything a shimmering halo, a dreamlike aurora. Under that dazzling sky the landscape is serene and orderly and perfect, almost maddeningly restful, every tree placed just so, every brook, every hill. It's all so beautiful you could cry: you stare at it and you feel that beauty in your heart, your belly, your balls. I can't tell you who made the worlds of this universe, but I do know this: that He must have made Xamur last, because all the other planets were the rough drafts and Xamur was plainly His final revised and edited statement on the subject.
Landing there was a delicious stroke of luck. You can't expect seven-decimal accuracy when you travel by relay-sweep, and in dialing up my destination coordinates when I left Mulano I had specified that any of the nine kingly planets would do. Except Galgala, that is. Galgala was in my son Shandor's control, I assumed, and it didn't seem wise for me to walk right into his headquarters alone and undefended before I knew what was going on. Later on I would do exactly that, of course; but that was later on. Right now any of the other kingly planets would have been an acceptable base of operations for me: Iriarte, say, or my cousin Damiano's Mara' wandering Zimbalou. If I could have picked Jo, or even one, though, Xamur is the one I would have picked. And now I had it.
And it had me.
I stood there in that first dizzy moment breathing in the perfume and staring at the swirling colors of the sky and looking across the way at the green and glorious towers of the city of Ashen Devlesa, whose name means "May you remain with God" in Romany. And I felt myself being grabbed by an invisible force and swept into the air. I went soaring across the countryside in a wild swooping ride that ended when I was dumped down like a sack of onions in an open-roofed courtyard.
I picked myself up, blinking and grumbling, and looked around. Towering columns of speckled blue stone walled me in on all sides. "All right, where the hell am I?' I asked the sky.
And the sky answered me. The sound of my voice activated some sort of responder device and out of mid-air came pleasant synthetic female tones telling me, first in Imperial and then in Romany, "You are in the Ashen Devlesa holding tank of the Imperial Xamur Department of Immigration."
"You mean I'm a prisoner?"
A long itchy silence. What were they doing, looking up "prisoner" in the dictionary?
I breathed perfumed air, in-out, in-out, making little hormonal adjustments to keep myself calm. Vague hissing and buzzing sounds came from overhead.
Then, finally: "You are not a prisoner. You are in detention. You are awaiting normal clearance procedures."
Oh. That was annoying, sure. But not really surprising. Or very threatening, really. This was just bureaucratic bullshit: I knew how to deal with that. I felt myself easing.
When you land on a non-imperial world like Mulano you are of course completely on your own from the moment you drop from your force-field. But if the sweep puts you down anywhere in the Imperium, your arrival is a matter of record once the immigration scanner of the planet where you are arriving detects your signal, which is usually six to twelve hours before your landing. So there had been plenty of time for Xamur Immigration to get a fix on me and grab me with a tractor beam the instant my sweep-tendril released me. A routine pickup of an unscheduled arrivee from God knew where.
"So?" I said. "Let's get on with it, then. Bring on your normal procedures. You think I came to Xamur to stand around in here and admire the architecture of your holding tank?"
Almost at once someone official-looking poked his nose between two of the stone columns. He looked at me and made a little gleeping sound and went away, and came back with another of his kind. They gleeped and gobbled and honked at each other some more and went back outside for further reinforcements. In a matter of moments half a dozen people in the uniforms of the Imperial Xamur Department of Immigration were staring at me in total wonder and disbelief.
They couldn't have been much more flabbergasted, I guess, if they had reeled in the Emperor Napoleon, or Mohammed, or the Queen of the Betelgeuse Confederacy.