Star of Gypsies
- Автор: Силверберг Роберт
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Star of Gypsies». Краткое содержание книги:
Then came the day when I was on Iriarte for reassignment and the company dispatcher, a clever bright-eyed young GaJo, said to me out of the blue, "Yakoub, have you ever thought of getting married?"
He was very young, that dispatcher, not much more than a boy. But his manner was slick and amazingly self-assured and he carried himself like a born aristocrat. Which he was. His name was Julien de Gramont, and when you asked him where he came from he didn't say Copperfield or Olympus or the Capital or any place like that: he said France. I didn't have any idea then where France might be, but in the ninety-odd years of my subsequent acquaintance with Julien de Gramont, some of which you know about, I certainly have heard a great deal about it from him.
It was Julien who let me know that the lovely and voluptuous Esmeralda was of marriageable age, that the family was looking for an appropriate Rom husband for her, and that I would not be treated with disdain if I were to go courting her. The notion had never even crossed my mind. She seemed far beyond me, a rich prize for some interstellar tycoon: why would they want to marry her off to an obscure space pilot with no family background at all, someone who had been born into slavery and who had managed to get himself sold three more times in his first seventy years? I didn't know and maybe they didn't know themselves; but what I came to see after a little while was that it was a done deal, that my fate had been sealed somewhere in the mysterious coils of time, that I was going to marry Esmeralda because somewhere down the line I had married her, and that was that.
I went to Polarca and asked him what he thought I ought to do. He just laughed. "Is she a good lay?"
"How would I know?"'
"And you don't stand much chance of finding out, do you?" "After the wedding patshiv, I do. Not before."'
"Well, let's say she isn't. She's still rich. And if she's rich and she's a good lay, you've got yourself a bonus. If not, well, you travel a lot. And you'll still be rich."
"Oh, you Polarca," I said. "You bastard." "You asked me, didn't you?"
It wasn't so bad. Esmeralda was sweet and kind and although I have trouble remembering the shape of her nose I do remember what she was like that first night, when the endless patshiv finally had ended and she and I staggered off to our marital bed. That says a great deal in her favor, that I can still remember that night, after something like a hundred years. Of course, there's more to being married than a terrific wedding night. Still, Polarca's advice was wise, as it usually was. I could have done a lot worse than marrying Esmeralda. I liked being with her. I can't say she ever really excited me in any way, but she was a warm and good person, very solid and stable, what you might call an old-fashioned kind of woman. I continued to scout for the family; I was away from home something like three quarters of the time; being married to Esmeralda was in some ways pretty much like not being married to Esmeralda, except that I was rich now. When I came home she was always glad to see me and, truth to tell, I was glad to see her. I would sink down gratefully into that big strong body of hers and she would enfold me like a sea.
I bought more land on Xamur. Between my voyages Esmeralda and I went there often. We talked of living there all the time, on my estate, when I gave up the exploration business. As if I could ever live in one place all the time. But I thought I could, then. One time we spent close to a year there. That was when Shandor was born. I don't even have the excuse, with Shandor, of trying to pretend that he wasn't my true son, because I was with Esmeralda all during that year. Not that I think she ever fooled around while I was away, but there have been times when I would have been glad to declare myself cuckolded for the sake of not having to take the blame for Shandor's existence. Alas, alas. Gene of my genes is what that little bastard truly was and there's simply no getting away from it, I loved him inordinately. That's true too. See how he repaid me; but I loved him.
He was wild from the start. A small fidgety child, always screaming and kicking and biting. I don't know where it came from, that nervousness of his. I certainly don't have it and God knows Esmeralda never did. But Shandor was always a bundle of wires.
I didn't notice that, at first. I thought he was just like me, my absolute duplicate. That was because he had my eyes, my mouth, my face exactly, that classic Rom face that rides like an invincible surfer on all the wild tides of evolutionary change. I expected him to have my big mustache too by the time he was six months old. I loved him for that look of me that he had about him, I suppose. My father and all my father's fathers. Looking at my firstborn son, I came to see myself in a new way: as a link in the great chain of Rom existence that stretched across the eons from the time of Romany Star. How had I dared wait so long to forge that next link in the chain? What if I had died without playing my part in joining the past and the future? Well, now I had done it, and I was proud; and I felt grateful to Shandor for having made it possible for me to fulfill my responsibilities to the race. That was before I discovered what a louse he was.
How did he turn out that way? Was it because I was away from home too much and Esmeralda, bless her, was too gentle, too indulgent, to discipline him in the way that any boy must be disciplined? I don't know. I think it must not have had anything to do with the way that he was raised, that there had simply been some curse on the seed that spawned him. These things happen. Whenever I was home-we lived mainly on Xamur now-he always had my fullest attention. I taught him the things my father had taught me and when it seemed necessary for me to bring him into line I brought him into line the way a father must. When I was away there were other men in the family, his uncles and cousins, to show him the right way. From Esmeralda came love and kindness, constantly. Could there have been a better mother? And yet I began to hear Shandor stories, each time I came home from the stars. I suspect the worst of them were withheld from me, but what I did hear was bad enough. The pets that he mistreated and even mutilated. His haughtiness with the servants. The damage he did to our household robots, who were not, after all, completely without feelings. His callous abuse of his playmates and, eventually, of his younger brothers and sisters. "Shandor is a problem," is the way people put it to me. Nobody seemed to have the courage to say, "Shandor is a monster."
I never would have accepted that word for him. I was still blinded by my love for him. I knew he was bad, but I told myself it was just boyish mischief. He would change. He laughed at me to my face, and I told myself he would change. I struck him, because I had to, and still he laughed. I actually admired him for that. How strong he is, I thought, how unafraid even of his own father. But he will be a good boy one of these days. I would not see the rottenness that ran through him from front to back. By the time I understood what he was like, it was too late for me even to try to do much about it. And then I lost all further opportunity to do anything about Shandor; for history repeated itself, as it seems to try to do whenever you look the other way for a moment. Bankruptcy, family breakup, exile, the loss of the woman I loved, the separation of a father and his children: I got all those things all over again, as if I hadn't managed to learn the full lesson from them the first time around. None of what happened was particularly my fault. So what? When the time comes for you to bear the brunt, fate doesn't give a crap who is at fault.