Star of Gypsies
- Автор: Силверберг Роберт
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Star of Gypsies». Краткое содержание книги:
From Kamaviben I sent word to those who mattered most to me, telling them I was back. And then I waited.
POLARCA WAS THE FIRST TO SHOW UP NOT HIS GHOST this time, but the true and authentic item. My grand vizier, my good right hand, my companero, my cousin of cousins, my blood brother.
This man Polarca is more dear to me than either of my kidneys. You can get new kidneys if you need them-I have done it-but where would I get another Polarca? I saved his life once, as he never tires of reminding me. I think he regards me as being in his debt because I saved him. That was long ago, on Mentiroso, when we suffered side by side in Nikos Hasgard's foul clutches, which is a story I mean to tell you sooner or later. Since that time we have been brothers. Polarca is small and quick and jittery, a hedgehog sort of man. Like the hedgehog he is very prickly but sweet inside.
He came rollicking in from Darma Barma, where he keeps a grand and glorious floating villa out in the lightning country. He calls it his vardo, his Gypsy wagon, and sometimes he speaks of it as a roamhome, which is a bit like calling a bludgeon a toothpick. But Polarca has always been fond of exaggeration.
He had had a remake since I had last seen him and that took some getting used to. He was wearing his eyes a deep piercing blue now with bright red rims, and his ears were higher and thicker than before, with black fur on them. He looked strange but he looked healthy and full of fire.
"Yakoub!" he cried. "Oh, there, you Yakoub!" "Polarca. Is it really you?"
"No, you antiquated piss-in-bed, it's my other ghost."
I grinned. "Don't you call me names, you slippery mirage."
He radiated love and warmth. "I'll call you what I like, you old ball of grease."
"Pig-poisoner!" "GaJo-licker!" "Chicken-stealer! Pocket-picker!"
"Hah! Oh, you Yakoub!" "You Polarca, you!"
We laughed and hugged and slapped each other's cheeks. We grabbed each other, wrist by wrist, and cavorted up and down the hallways in a wild crazed dance, singing at the top of our lungs. Two roaring bellowing old fossils is what we were, with more life in us than any fifty snotnosed boys. We made so much noise that the robots came to see what the matter was. They looked alarmed and dismayed. Maybe they thought an assassin was in the house. But they are Rom robots at heart; as soon as they saw that this was all friendly, that this was my phral here, my brother, my Polarca, they relaxed.
I told them to fetch us a flagon of my rarest and best brandy, a loaf of palm-tree bread, a cluster of Iriarte grapes. We sat down to table and he opened his overpocket and pulled out the gifts he had brought me. Polarca always brings plenty of gifts and they are always things you might have wanted a year ago or perhaps will want next year, but rarely anything you would want at the moment. This time he came out with an ornate pair of double-vented air-shoes, a magnifying pen, half a dozen ceramic ear-spools, and the complete text of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius inscribed on the eye-tooth of a sanguinosaur. I thanked him most solemnly, as I always did when Polarca loaded me down with oddities and superfluities of that sort. He had also brought with him something that was actually worth bringing: a slab of the wind-dried beef from Clard Msat, which is a delicacy I had longed for with a keen ultraviolet longing during my years on Mulano. Splendid Polarca! How had he known I was yearning for that?
We drank and ate in silence for a time. The brandy was from Ragnarok, a hundred years old, eighty cerces the flagon. You could buy a good slave for less. We talked then of his travels. Incurable wander-itch has afflicted him all his life. Lately he had been to Estrilidis, to Tranganuthuka, to Sidri Akrak. He had ghosted to Earth five times in the last six months, and Mulano on and off maybe a dozen times to check up on me, and some other places besides, an itinerary that would have brought an ox down with apoplexy. There is restlessness in any Gypsy's soul, but Polarca carries it to a lunatic extreme. When he had run through all his travel tales he fell silent again, and we ate and drank some more.
Then he said, "So you came back after all." "So it would seem."
"What day did you return?" "What day?"
"The day of the month." Patiently, as though to a child. "I think it was the fifth of Phosphorus," I said.
"The fifth! Good! Good!" His eyes gleamed wildly. "I win a thousand cerces from Valerian, then!"
"How so?"
"A bet," Polarca said casually. "That you'd be back in the Empire within five years. It was a very close thing, Yakoub. You skipped out originally on the ninth of Phosphorus, you know."
"Did I?' I shrugged. "You two had a bet, did you? Did he think I wasn't coming back at all?"
"He said ten years. I said five. There wasn't anybody who felt you'd never come back."
"You yourself said I wouldn't come back. That time on Mulano, when you were giving me all that bullshit about Achilles in his tent. You said that I was going to stay on Mulano, that that was the wisest thing for me to do."
"So I lied," Polarca said. "Sometimes you need to be pulled around a little by the ears, Yakoub. For your own good." He reached into his tunic and pulled out a deck of cards. They sparkled and hummed on the table between us. "A little klabyasch?" he suggested.
"For money?"
"What else? For the exercise? Five tetradrachms a point."
"Make it a cerce," I said. "I'll relieve you of the pile you've won from Valerian."
He smiled sadly. "Poor Yakoub. You never learn, do you?" He put the cards on autoshuffle and they jumped around like frogs on the table. Then he clapped his hands and they formed themselves into a deck in front of me.
"Your deal," Polarca said.
He hunched forward, eyes gleaming crazily. Polarca plays cards like Attila the Hun. I put the deck on manual and dealt them out, and he pulled them in as if each one was the passport to heaven. And of course the game was a rout. Though he is a small man his hands are huge, and those cards came flying out of them like angry mosquitos. He slapped them down with furious zeal, shouting, "Shtoch! Yasch! Menel! Klabyasch!" and I was done for before I knew it. He took me for a fortune. Well, it makes him happy to murder me at klabyasch, and it makes me happy to make Polarca happy.
As the echoes of the game died away I said, "And tell me how it is, in the Imperium."
"Pah. The usual Gaje lunacy. The Emperor will hang on forever. He's only a shadow. The high lords are behaving like fools and villains. You can see them circling each other, waiting to pounce, and meanwhile the administration goes to hell. The Empire is running on autopilot. Taxes are down. Corruption is up. Whole solar systems are dropping out of the communications and transportation nets and nobody seems to notice. This is an ugly time, Yakoub."
"And Shandor?" I asked, and held my breath.
Polarca looked up at me. His burning red-rimmed eyes held firm on mine a long moment. Then he laughed softly and shook his head and waved his hand, brushing aside my concern the way you might brush aside a mosquito. "Shandor!" he said, chuckling as if he found the name itself amusing. For him, he seemed to be saying, Shandor was a topic hardly worth discussing, a trifle, an absurdity. "He is nothing, Yakoub. Nothing!" Polarca reached for the brandy. The flagon was empty. He tapped its side. "This stuff isn't half bad, you know?"
OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS THE REST OF THEM SHOWED up. My dear ones, those who had been my rod and my staff in the days when I was king. One by one they arrived on the starships that came to Xamur from every part of the galaxy. My cabinet, the inner circle of my court in the days when I had a court. And two others besides, two unexpected guests.