Star of Gypsies

Esmeralda was all right. I didn't love her at first-how could I? I didn't even know her-but I think I came to. Or at least to feel fond of her. So long ago I have trouble remembering. Certain things I remember in absolute detail down to the last syllable, others get a little blurry.

The way she looked, for instance. A fine-looking woman, that's what I remember, but I have some difficulty about the details. A big woman, yes, long strong legs and powerful hips, child-bearing hips. Dark sparkling eyes, lustrous hair. About her other features, the nose and lips and chin, I'm not so sure. I think she was pretty. She gained weight after a time, mostly from the waist down: it anchored her, it was a kind of ballast. Didn't have to put it on, could have taken the treatment, but she didn't care. I think she liked being heavy. Might have been a tradition in her family, the women being heavy.

She was an Iriarte woman. That's a good world, Iriarte. I have always liked spending time there. It has a small yellow sun very much like the one that Earth used to circle, and broad blue seas. A lot of Iriarte is dry and mountainous and cool, but there are splendid vineyards that produce some of the finest wine in the galaxy, and its cities have the rich, throbbing feel of life and power about them. The population is mostly Rom, and in the main a tough brawling kind of Rom, a mercantile sort of people, entrepreneurs, traders, shippers. The Rom of Iriarte are the craziest gamblers I know: they'll bet any amount on any kind of deal, and usually they don't have cause to regret it.

Esmeralda came from a wealthy family. Not wealthy in the Loiza la Vakako sense, owning whole worlds, but wealthy enough. And in a sense they did own whole worlds, though they were uninhabited ones.

They were dealers in reconditioned planets. That was a fine Rom thing to be. In the old days on Earth a lot of us were dealers in reconditioned livestock, of course. This was the same thing on a larger scale. Take an old horse with worn-out teeth and fill the crowns with tar so they look like a young horse's teeth with black centers, yes. Touch up the gray hair with ink or permanganate of potash. Make a cut above the eye and use a straw to blow air in, so the horse seems healthier. Prick him with a hedgehog just before he goes to market to make him look livelier, or put a piece of ginger in his ass so he struts like a cavalry charger. Yes, yes, good old tricks, a grand tradition, deceive the Gaje every time. What choice did we have? We had to eat. And the Gaje made it so hard for us.

Esmeralda's people were in a similar line of work. They sent out explorers-I was one-looking for planets with reasonably habitable specs, an oxygen atmosphere, a manageable gravitational pull. A reliable water supply was desirable but not always necessary. A decent climate helped. There are plenty of such worlds around, waiting to be found. Of course some of them need a little retouching before they can be sold off to developers and colony-promoters. Unfriendly native lifeforms? Chase them far out of sight. Problems of chemical incompatibilities? It isn't that big a deal to make local adjustments before showing a world to potential buyers. Amazing what a few tons of nitrogen or ammonium sulphate can accomplish. Dismal scenery? Do some quick landscaping. Every planet can use some handsome new native shrubs and ground covers. Shortages of raw materials? Plant some trees, salt the ground here and there with useful minerals, set up fish hatcheries to improve the quality of the rivers and lakes. It sounds complicated but they had it all down to a science and they could polish a scruffy planet to a high gloss in an astonishingly short time. They didn't believe in carrying a big inventory: fast turnover, that was their secret. Fix it up, put it on the market, move it quickly. And start all over somewhere else.

They offered me a job while I was visiting Iriarte. It sounded good to me and I became one of their scouts, remained one for years. My home base was on Xamur-I had already begun to buy the land that would eventually become my Kamaviben estate-but I didn't mind commuting to Iriarte to pick up my assignments. I led a number of expeditions to the outer regions and among my discoveries were such worlds as Cambaluc, Sandunga, Mengave, La Chunga, and Fulero, all of which were sold eventually by Esmeralda's family for pleasant profits. You probably haven't heard of most of them. For some reason nearly all the worlds I found turned out to be much less congenial to human colonization than they had seemed to be at the time the original explorers' reports and brokers' analyses were filed. The great exception is, of course, Fulero, which you certainly have heard of and where you probably have spent some highly pleasurable holidays. Frankly, we thought Fulero was worthless and we were happy to sell it for the pittance we got for it, but that was one case where the buyers had the last laugh, since it took only the most minor of planetary refurbishments by its new owners to transform it into the lush garden spot and delightful resort world it has become today. Well, even a Gypsy gets fooled now and then, as the saying goes. And in the long run it was very helpful to Esmeralda's people in other transactions to be able to say, "This is the most promising world we've handled since Fulero. And you know what a bargain that was."

I'm not sure how long the family was scouting me while I was scouting for them. It may have been quite a while, since they were methodical people in their way, and they weren't going to marry off their prize daughter to any scamp. It isn't clear to me what good it would have done them to disapprove of me, since in the book of the future it was written that I had married Esmeralda, but they checked me out in great detail all the same. I was pretty slow in realizing this. Esmeralda had a great many brothers and cousins, and one of them, Jacko Bakht, looked so familiar to me at first meeting that I asked him if he had ever done time in the tunnels on Alta Hannalanna or belonged to the Guild of Beggars on Megalo Kastro. He gave me a peculiar look and said, No, no, never. Of course it was impossible: he was a lot younger than me, and not just from remakes. There was no way I could have met him before. A couple of years later I suddenly clicked on who he was. He was one of the two ghosts who had lurked around silently watching me on Megalo Kastro so often when I was a boy. The other had been Malilini. I decided it had been some kind of employment review, checking back along my time-line. It began to seem to me that I had been ghosted now and then by various other members of the family on other occasions, but I wasn't sure; of Jacko Bakht I was positive. I ghosted back to Megalo Kastro myself, one day, and saw him there with my own eyes, haunting my childish self.