Star of Gypsies

"We need each other, yes, you and I," I told Periandros.

Politics, the old Gaje philosopher said-Shakespeare, Socrates, one of those-does indeed make strange bedfellows. I never imagined I would find myself angling for the embrace of Periandros. But, then, I had never imagined to find Periandros sitting on the imperial throne, either.

Very quickly we came to an understanding. There would be a showy public ceremony, the complete works, a grand pyrotechnikon and all, by way of reconfirming me as King of the Rom. The laying on of the wand of recognition, the whole business. The entire nobility would be invited, both GaJe and Rom, from all the worlds. The biggest spectacle in centuries, in fact.

"With light-spikes for everyone?" I said.

"Of course, with light-spikes," Periandros said, irritated. "How can we do without light-spikes, if we are to have the nobility gathered here?"

"I was just wondering," I said.

But no, he was planning to pull out all the stops, and devil take the cost. I could see how serious he was about this, considering what he would have to spend. Though it did cross my mind that he might well ask us to contribute too. That would be all right. The reconsecration ceremony would be of enormous symbolic benefit to both of us. For me it would wipe out the little ambiguity that had been brought into being when Lord Naria, acting as regent, had laid the wand on Shandor's shoulders. For Periandros it would serve similarly to expunge what Naria had done, thereby retroactively expunging Naria's one brave display of imperial authority. All the worlds would know that Yakoub Nirano was now and forevermore Rom baro, Rex Romaniorum; and implicit in Periandros' recognizing me as king was my recognizing him as emperor.

There was one other little part of the package. But even Periandros the shameless was too abashed to ask for it outright. What he wanted was for me to spy for him: to have my Rom star-captains keep me provided with reports on the movements of the Lords Naria and Sunteil, and for me to turn those reports over to him. The way he managed to phrase it, though, Sunteil and Naria weren't explicitly mentioned, and it was possible for me to interpret what he was saying as simply a request for detailed statistical analyses of the flow of commerce between the worlds. That was how I chose to interpret it, anyway.

"Certainly," I said. "I see no problem with that at all." "Then we understand one another?"

"Perfectly," I said.

He rose and poured the wine of farewell for me. I came forward to accept it, and took a close look at him as I did. I had been noticing something odd about him, the last few minutes, and I wanted to check it out at close range.

It had seemed to me that he was flickering about the edges, so to speak. Losing definition, a little. I wasn't sure of it; but as well as I was able to tell from the distance where I was required to sit, the Sixteenth was having some trouble keeping the boundaries of his corpus firm. That is of course a characteristic of doppelgangers: they are always plausible duplicates of the human beings from whom they are generated, but they are in a steady state of degeneration from the moment they are struck off the mold, and the keen eye can spot it sometimes, very subtle though the effect will be in the early stages.

Had I been talking to a doppelganger of the emperor all this time? Sitting there sipping his wine and staring into his eyes and playing little political fencing-matches with him, and the whole while I had been dealing with a mere simulacrum, while the authentic Sixteenth-scared out of his wits by the fear of assassination, even an unthinkable assassination at the hands of the Rom king himself-was hiding somewhere out of sight, monitoring the whole thing by cortex wire, maybe even running a relay that told the doppelganger what to say? Jesu Cretchuno Moischel and Abraham! What an absurdity! What an insult!

If it was true. I peered close, but I couldn't tell. Maybe I had imagined the whole thing. Maybe the flicker had been in my eyes and not in the emperor's edges. At any rate I didn't have any way of poking and prodding to find out; I had to take my little sip of wine and get myself down from the platform.

"Well?" Polarca asked. "How did it go?"

"About as I expected. The pompous little shit: he really thinks he's emperor. The funny thing is, so do I think he is. But there was one damned strange thing."

"What was that?"

I told him that I thought I might have been having an audience with a doppelganger-emperor the whole time. Polarca clapped his hands and laughed.

"If that isn't just like Periandros!" he cried. "Did he think you had a bomb in your mustache? He really wants to live forever, doesn't he?" "I think he wants to live long enough to get Sunteil and Naria to agree that he's really the emperor," I said.

"I don't think anybody's going to live that long," Polarca said. He shook his head. "A doppelganger! Can you beat that!"