Star of Gypsies

Poor Valerian.

He had made one big mistake. Valerian in all his grand magnanimity had unfortunately overlooked the fact that the belisoogra cartel happens to be a Rom operation from top to bottom-one of our greatest mercantile triumphs, in fact. We own the market and that gives us a death-grip on the whole remake industry, though the Gaje don't fully comprehend how important we really are to their continued good health and youthful vigor. In some subliminal way I think they know that we have them by the balls, but we don't go out of our way to call it to their attention. Apparently it had escaped Valerian's attention too.

By shattering the price structure of the belisoogra market that way he had skunked a few thousand of his cousins, bankrupting a surprising number of them who had rashly gone too far out on that particular limb, not expecting one of their own people to cut it off behind them. He had also cost us a lot of good political leverage vis-a-vis the Gaje. It would be years before all the cheap belisoogra he had dumped could be absorbed by demand. I have always been fond of Valerian but this time he had been really dumb, and, as Damiano so eloquently had told the kris, dumbness in a Rom has to be punished. The universe will punish dumbness in anyone, sooner or later, of course. But our position in the universe has always been pretty precarious and we can't afford the luxury of waiting for natural corrective processes to do our work for us.

"I call upon the victims of this man's foolish greed to stand forth and tell the kris of the injuries they have suffered through his unthinking action-"

We had gone through the whole formal traditional procedure. Bayura were brought in against him, the bills of complaint. Then we waited for Valerian to turn up on Galgala-he came for a feast in his honor, all unawares-and he was duly taken into custody and brought up on trial, actually for the first time in his life. The Gaje had never been able to hang anything on him in all his years as a pirate. But we did. Damiano himself was the krisatori o baro, the chief judge, and Damiano was out for blood. He could easily have been an injured member of the belisoogra cartel himself, he was so fierce and angry. Not that anyone seriously accused him of that. We are a civilized people, after all. Still, Damiano has a real dislike of losing money and he probably wouldn't have seen any particular conflict of interest in sitting as judge over the man who had done it to him.

I drifted through the judgement hall, keeping myself invisible. Once I saw myself look up at the place where I hovered, and I wondered if I was seeing me. I couldn't remember.

What I did remember was that the trial had started badly for Valerian and gone downhill all the way. He swore mighty oaths that his intent had been purely humanitarian, which in this instance may actually have been true.

But he had a cost a lot of Rom a lot of money, all the same. He offered to pay it back. Well, that sounded good. But Damiano kept hammering away. What about the weakening of our position among the Gaje by the breaking of our belisoogra monopoly? How did the defendant plan to reimburse for that? The krisatora nodded and murmured. Everyone loved Valerian but he had plenty of enemies too, and many of them were the same ones who loved him. In the course of piracies past he had done more than a little injury to various Rom merchants, all in the same casual and almost accidental way. The krisatora very clearly were out to get him. He knew it and so did everyone else.

Now came the solakh, the final interrogations and the sentencing. Valerian was somber and subdued. He knew what was coming. And what was coming was terrible. We were going to cast him from our midst. To proclaim him marhime, unclean. To call down the wrath of all Rom past and present, alive and dead, upon anyone who had any further dealings with him. Which would not only have deprived him of the comforts of his family, of the whole grand kumpania of the Rom, but would also have stripped him of his crew and his livelihood, and left him exposed to the vengeance of the Gaje, who had been trying to get their hands on him for a very long time indeed. And then for Valerian there would never be any voyages to Romany Star.

Like a wraith I floated over the heads of the krisatora as they moved toward their verdict. I paused above Yakoub the king. The king looked bored. The king was bored. Trials like this had always wearied me; it was a part of the job I would gladly have handed off to someone else. The endless medieval taking of oaths and crying out of curses upon would-be perjurers, the interminable trotting forth of evidence, the vast outpourings of woe and sweat and anguish and complaining-I saw the virtue and importance of it all. And I hated it. But nevertheless I did my duty. I have a great sense of duty. But that doesn't mean I have to enjoy it.

I made myself visible for only a moment, and only to my earlier self. "Be merciful," I whispered. And winked. And went skittering off again in a ghost-ricochet to God knows where at the far end of time and the far end of the galaxy. When I knew where I was again I was back in my cell, sitting quietly on my couch hearing Valerian's voice in my mind for the eighty thousandth time, saying, I've seen the burned hills. I've seen the melted valleys.