Star of Gypsies

The second guard sighed. "Put it down in the records. His Former Majesty Yakoub-"

"His Excellence and Beneficence," I added.

"His Excellence and Beneficence His Former Majesty Yakoub-ah -seeks audience with King Shandor, is that it?"

"Seeks audience with Shandor, yes."

"Put it down. Seeks audience with King Shandor at the house of power on Galgala, the fourteenth day of Beryllium, 3162. And on and on with their precious formalities. I barely paid attention. My mind was a million parsecs away. Leaping from world to world, remembering old glories, hatching new plans. A bad habit of mine. I'm too old to break bad habits, I think. I don't even want to. But after a minute I got hold of myself and tuned in on the palace guards again and discovered that they were on the intercom to some functionary in the interior of the building, setting up an appointment for me for a time two or three weeks hence. I don't make appointments. I reached out and broke the contact and said, "Tell Shandor that Yakoub will see him right now."

"But-" I was already in motion. They would have had to stop me forcibly to keep me out. For a moment they actually considered that, I think; but they didn't quite dare. Instead the two who had been speaking with me came up beside me, one on each side and clinging close like busy fluttering wings, and the others ran on ahead to spread the word that something unusual was happening. I went up the steps at a hard stride, steaming past the banners of kingship, past the clouds of gold dust in their magnetic pinch-containers, past the emblems of all the worlds that Rom voyagers have discovered, past the rest of the host of regalia and memorabilia that I knew so well from my own fifty years or so of residence in this building when I had been King of All Gypsies. And then I was inside.

It isn't much of a palace, really. Nobody ever meant it to be. It's all flash and gleam on the outside, but that's because of the gold. Inside it is a very humble sort of building. That's intentional. We want to honor our humble origins, when we lived in little rickety horse-drawn wagons and went roaming around old Earth sharpening knives and telling fortunes and picking pockets. So we deck our house of power out with a lot of superficial glitz-a king has to be at least a little kingly-but the building itself basically isn't much of an advance on those old wagons. We leave the grand and imposing edifices for our colleague the emperor, far away at the Capital, as the Gaje call that exceedingly grand and imposing world of theirs at the heart of the Imperium.

They need that sort of stuff, those people. It makes them feel important, and God knows they need that. A house of power doesn't need grandeur. It is grandeur, just by being.

Our own royal throne room, to give it a name it doesn't deserve, is hung with dark carpets and lit with ancient smoky lamps. Shandor was sitting practically in the dark, scowling at me, when I walked in. I think one of his Gaje women was lurking somewhere in there too, but she vanished when I entered. The unmistakable whiff of her remained behind in the air.

I almost didn't recognize him. He must have had a remake not long before and he looked no more than thirty or forty years old. Smooth olive skin, black hair, even a nose job. But underneath all the changes that his vanity had dictated I could still see Shandor's hard bright eyes, his broad cheekbones, his full lips. The Rom features. Like mine. Like my father's. Ineradicable. The tyranny of the genes.

"What the hell are you doing here?" he snapped. Then he shook his head. "But you aren't here, are you? You're just his doppelganger." He was trying to look fierce, and by and large he was succeeding at it. Shandor was a fierce man, all right, and a dangerous one. The blood of innocents was on his hands. Don't forget that The Butcher of Djebel Abdullah is what people used to call him, before he got himself absolved of that revolting atrocity. But he was fidgety also. He has always had fidgety moves. He was different from me in that respect, and from all my other sons. We know how to keep calm, at least on the outside. There was something wrong about Shandor right from the start.

"No doppelganger," I said. "The real thing. The genuine item. I thought I'd pay you a little visit."

"Don't try to play games with me. We've known each other too long. What gives you the right to barge in here like this?"

"The right? The right? I have to ask permission to greet my own son?"

"The king," he said.

I stared at him. "You little bastard," I said. "You snot. How do you come off setting yourself up to be king? You know who the king is, Shandor."

I thought his eyes would pop from his head. Nobody had spoken to him like this in ninety years, probably.

His face twitched. He did twitchy things with his fingers too. He moved his lips but nothing came out except little hoarse croakings. I wanted to think that it was fear that was clamping down on his voice, and maybe it was, a little. But mainly it was anger. It took him a moment to regain control and when he did manage to speak it was a ragged squeaking blurt, almost pathetic: