Star of Gypsies
- Автор: Силверберг Роберт
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Star of Gypsies». Краткое содержание книги:
The person of the king is sacrosanct, I insisted. Even Shandor will recognize that, when I come to him on Galgala.
Valerian wanted to go to Galgala in my place and end Shandor's usurpation by force. He would gather up his entire pirate fleet and descend on him and march to the house of power and evict him from the throne. Biznaga remarked on the improbability of that, asking if Valerian seriously thought Shandor would let him get within a lightyear of Galgala with his ships. At the first sign of his approach, Biznaga suggested, Shandor would simply let the imperial government know that the notorious pirate Valerian was in the vicinity, and an armada of the Imperium would be waiting for him when he arrived.
Biznaga too urged me not to go: calmly, quietly, in his best diplomatic manner. Jacinto, Ammagante, the same. Damiano was more volatile, and ranted and stormed almost as fiercely as Polarca. There was talk of finding one or two of my other sons, wherever they might be-my children are scattered all over the universe, God knows where - and bringing them to Xamur to plead with me. Or sending them to their brother Shandor as my ambassadors. Small mercy they would have had from him, too. Someone, I forget who (and just as well that I did) suggested appealing to the aged emperor for help in deposing Shandor, the most laughable thing I have ever heard. And so on for several days. The only allies I had were Thivt and Bibi Savina. And possibly Syluise, though she held herself aloof as usual from most of the discussions and it wasn't easy to know where she stood. But I looked into her cool blue eyes and seemed to find support in them. In her remote and unfathomable way she appeared to be telling me to do as I pleased, accept the risks, reap the reward.
So I simply lied to them. Be calm, I told them, I know what I'm doing. Everything is written in the book of the future, and all will be for the best.
Somehow that settled them down. I let them think that I had received some sort of privileged information out of the future: an obliging ghost, possibly my own, coming to me and letting me know in the customary oblique ghostly way that my gamble had paid off somewhere down the line, that Shandor indeed had backed off when faced with the live and legitimate King of the Rom, that I would be restored to the throne and we would once more be traveling the path toward Romany Star. And they bought it.
But the truth is my ghosts were keeping away. Sometimes I saw a little flicker out of the corner of my eye that might have been some ghost hovering near, but I never was sure. That could have bothered me, if I had allowed it to. I told myself that the reason I was getting no ghosts was that I was being tested, my resolve, my courage: those who might have ghosted me, even my own self, were making me go through this thing unaided. I was on my own in this thing. Well, that was all right. I would simply proceed into the future at a rate of one second per second, with no hints of what was to come, the same as everyone else. Shandor was a wild man but there was logic to my strategy and I felt that no harm ultimately would come to me. Still and all, it would have been pleasant to get a little visit from some future self of mine, just a quick little reassuring flash, a wink, during those days when I was getting myself ready to walk into the mouth of the lion.
SO IT WAS AGREED, IN THE END. YOU CAN'T REALLY ARGUE with a king once he's made up his mind. I would go to Galgala, I would confront Shandor, and then, well, we would all see what happened after that. I made only one concession to my friends' fears. My plan had been to go to Galgala alone, but Damiano talked me into taking Chorian along as an escort. Chorian was, after all, a servant of the Imperium, and Shandor might just think twice about laying violent hands on him, regardless of what he might feel like doing to me.
I could see a little logic in that. Chorian could come to Galgala with me. But I let it be known that even so I was going to enter into the presence of Shandor alone, unescorted, not cowering behind the shield of the Imperium and some boy still wet with mother's milk. And I dared them to give me any further argument.
I am, basically, a very cautious man. You don't get to live as long as I have by being reckless. My father drilled the Three Laws and the One Word into me when I was very young, and the fact that I have survived as well as I have for as long as I have ought to be sufficient proof that I was a careful student at least of that much. Those who live by common sense, my father taught me, are righteous in the eyes of God. So they are. I would live no other way. Still and all, there is common sense and common sense, and some kinds of common sense make more sense than others. Time and again I've discovered that the conventional "safe" ways of doing things are often wildly risky. And that what looks impossibly crazy to conventional people is really the only reasonable course to take.
For example, that time when I was living in slavery on Alta Hannalanna. Do you think common sense has any value in a place like Alta Hannalanna? Common sense would have gotten me killed there, that's what common sense would have done.
What a foul brute of a world that was! How I detested it, how I suffered, how I toiled in misery! A thousand times a day did I curse the soul of Pulika Boshengro, he who had sent me there in slavery to get rid of me after overthrowing his brother, my beloved mentor and foster father, Loiza la Vakako. That planet could well have been the end of me, if I hadn't been willing to take a crazy chance.
They shipped me there, as you know, by relay-sweep. It was my first taste of that dismal mode of travel and it was like a nightmare for me, those hours and weeks and perhaps even months-who could tell?- a prisoner in my little sphere of force as I hurtled across the galaxy. I raged and screamed until my throat felt like rags, and still the journey went on and on. Still I hung, suspended between life and death. For the second time in my life there was a slave-mark on my forehead and there was no way I could rip it off, not even by tearing at the skin. I was helpless. I was, I think, twenty years old, twenty-five, something like that. It all seems the same from this distance. I was very young, anyway. My life had hardly even begun and now it seemed all over. When I had been a babe in my cradle the wise old crone had come to me and whispered great prophecies of kingship and glory, and where had they gone? The little Gypsy boy on Vietoris, the beggar-slave on Megalo Kastro, the shoveler of snail-shit on Nabomba Zom: this was glory? This was kingship? Indeed for a time only a little while before I had lived the life of high privilege, when I was the heir to kingly Loiza la Vakako. I was the future husband of his lovely daughter. The gentle world of Nabomba Zom would one day be my domain. And then suddenly it all had been torn away from me and I was a slave again, stuffed into a relay-sphere and flung into nowhere, heading for a world so dreadful that Loiza la Vakako had not been able to bring himself to describe it to me. I don't remember my landing on Alta Hannalanna. It must have been a bad one, though. I had lived in my relay-sphere for so long that it had become like a womb to me, and when I was dumped out onto the surface of that sickening planet I think the shock of it separated me from my sanity for a while. The first thing I can recall is crouching on my knees with my head down, sweating and puking and trembling, while a tall man in a gray uniform jabbed me again and again in the kidneys with a truncheon. I didn't know where I was. I didn't even know who I was.
"Get up," he said. "Slave."
The air was hot and dank and the world was quivering like a trampoline beneath me. I wasn't imagining it. There was no solid surface, only a bewildering grotesque lacework of interwoven rubbery yellow vines thick as a man's thigh that stretched from horizon to horizon. The texture of the vines was rough and sticky, with warts and humps rising everywhere. They quivered like the strings of a fiddle. I thought I could feel the planet breathing below them, heavy groaning exhalations that set the vines in motion, and then long slow sighing inward draughts. A dense clammy rain was falling. The gravity was very light, but there was nothing exhilarating about that; it simply made everything seem even more unstable. I was dizzy and sick.