A snub-nosed metal housing that looked a little like a neutron cannon descended from the distant ceiling and started to turn. A red warning light on the wall began to glow. Medical scanningbeams now were playing over our bodies. If the beams found any sort of defect, some internal sore or ulcer, a badly healed bone fracture, a weakness of the heart or lungs, it would instantly be picked up and entered on the sales screen where prospective buyers could take note of it.
Meanwhile the bidding was going on, click click click. The buyers had electromyograph terminals fastened to their cheeks and the auction was conducted at the speed of thought. A certain twitch of the facial muscles indicated the choice of a slave, a different kind of twitch registered the offer. A quick voltage spike gave the buyer a yes or no and the next round began until bidding closed. The whole process took no more than three or four minutes.
Of course I understood nothing of this or of anything else that was going on. It all drifted past me in a strange serene way. Like a dream, yes. Sometimes the most frightening dreams are the serene ones.
"Ninety-seven," a little robot said. I turned around and it stamped me on the forehead with the code number of my purchaser, and that was that.
Before night had come I was on board a starship bound for Megalo Kastro.
"What price did you go for?" a tall flat-faced boy asked me.
There were ten of us in the cabin. I was the youngest. I simply blinked at him.
"He's too young," said one with strange limp orange hair. "He can't read."
"I can too!" I cried. "You think I'm a child?"
"I went for sixty-five cerces," the flat-faced boy announced.
"Eighty, me," came from one who had a bright green jewel set in the center of his left cheek.
The flat-faced boy glared at him. I hoped maybe they would fight.
"How can you tell the price?" I asked one of the other boys, a small quiet one.
"It's in your forehead code. You need a mirror to see." He peered close at me. "You went for a hundred."
"My price was a hundred," I told the flat-faced boy. "How do you like that?"
They all swung around to look, crowding in around me. They looked skeptical, and then they looked angry, and then awed. I pulled my shoulders back and clapped my hands and laughed. "A hundred," I said again. "A hundred!"
To this day I'm proud of that. Someone must have seen merit in me even then.
4.
I HAD BEEN BOUGHT BY THE GUILD OF BEGGARS, Megalo Kastro Lodge 63. My lodgemaster's name was Lanista, and I shared my cabin with four boys named Kalasiris, Anxur, Sphinx, and Focale. I put their names down here because all of them have been dead for many years and it is a kindness to mention the names of the forgotten dead, even if they were no members of your clan. Lanista was Rom and my four cabinmates were not. I think I fetched such a high price because anyone could see at a glance that I was Rom. The Guild of Beggars is a Gaje enterprise but they get all the Rom they can for it because they regard us as superior beggars. Begging is in our genes, they believe. Not far from the truth, you know.
Although I can remember names and faces and places and all these other details of my being sold away from my family I can't tell you how long it was before it first dawned on me that I was never going to see my home again. Sometimes the very big patterns escape a child's notice completely while the fine ones stick fast. I don't know what I thought of all that was happening to me. Taken out of school, yes; sold, yes; put aboard a starship, yes; going somewhere far away, yes. But forever?
Never to return? No more mother, father, brothers, sisters? I don't remember being troubled by any of that, then. All I felt was a wonderful strange sense of floating free. Seed on the wind, drifting in the gusts. Go wherever the wind goes.
But I am Rom, of course. When we stay too long in one place we begin to rust. The slavemasters were simply doing me a favor by plucking me away. Setting me free by sending me off into new slavery. They were the ones who put me on the road I was meant to travel.
There's no world anything like Megalo Kastro in the known-that is, the human-inhabited-part of the galaxy. The name means Great Fortress in Greek, one of the ancient languages of Earth, and indeed there is a great stone fortress there, looming like a colossal crouching beast at the top of a rugged cliff overlooking the sea. But it wasn't built by Greeks. It wasn't built by anyone who could claim kinship to either of the two human races.
You don't have to walk more than a dozen paces down the Equinox Hall of the fortress of Megalo Kastro to realize that. The hall gets its name because twice a year the pulsing golden-red light of the sun comes through an archway and strikes the pommel of an altar at its western end, precisely at the equinoctial moment. Nothing extraordinary about that; paleolithic men were setting up altars like that on Earth twenty thousand years ago.
But the geometry of Equinox Hall takes your breath away. I mean that literally. Walk a few paces along that twisting corridor of rough-hewn green stone and you begin gasping a little. It's like walking on the deck of a heaving ship. Everything is disorderly and unstable. You expect the walls to start gliding back and forth. A few paces more and you start to sweat. The vaulted roof twenty meters overhead is undulating, or seems to be. Your eyes are throbbing next, because they can't quite follow the lines of the architecture and keep going in and out of focus. The whole structure is like that: alien, oppressive, fascinating.
No one knows who built it. There it stands, gigantic, terrifying, mysterious, half in ruins, telling us nothing. The archaeologists think it's five or ten million years old. It can't be much older than that, they say, because Megalo Kastro is a young planet and tremendous geotectonic stuff is going on all the time; at the rate continents rise and fall there, the fortress can't be enormously ancient. But it looks a billion years old. In one of the cellar rooms there's the outline of a single large hand in what looks like chalk, but isn't, on the wall, and that hand has seven fingers of equal size and a pair of opposable thumbs, one on each side. Perhaps one of the builders amused himself by sketching it in during his lunch break. Perhaps it was put there as a joke by some member of the exploration team from Earth that first found the place. Who can say? If we could dig up some alien artifacts in the vicinity, that might tell us something, but the only artifact we have is the fortress itself, brooding at the edge of the sea.
And that sea… that nightmare of a sea…
There are many life-forms on Megalo Kastro, nearly all of them large, predatory, and nasty. It's a young world, as I say: this is its Mesozoic that's going on now, and everything has fangs and scales. But the biggest life-form of all is one that is, thank God, unique to Megalo Kastro. The sea itself, I mean. Not a true sea at all, but a horrendous vast pudding of pale pink mud, warm, quivering, sinister, unfathomably deep, that stretches across an uncharted gulf ten thousand kilometers wide.
That sea is alive. I don't mean that it's full of living things. I mean that it is a living thing, a single malign entity with some sort of low-level intelligence. Or, for all anybody knows, intelligence on the genius level. It thinks. It perceives. You can actually observe its mental workings: questing ripples on its surface rising in little interrogative quivers, shortlived protuberances like exclamatory worms, puckered bubbling orifices that come and go. God knows what evolutionary process brought it into being. God knows, but no one else does. Scoop a section out to study it and all you have is a lump of watery mud, rapidly growing cool. And the thing from which it was taken lies there with its feet basking in the warmth of Megalo Kastro's subterranean magma and its arms resting on the shores of the far-flung continents, laughing at you. And it will eat you if you give it the chance.
Believe me. I know.
The crust of Megalo Kastro is loaded with all manner of valuable elements that were consumed long ago on older worlds, and a dozen different mining companies operate there. Most of them are looking for transuranics, which fetch a good price in nearly every solar system, but there was also a Rom outfit
at work hunting for rare earths, especially the scarcest of them, thulium, europium, holmium, lutetium.
(Those who rarely leave their home worlds are forever surprised to learn that all the planets of the galaxy, no matter how far away or how strange they may be, are composed of the same general bunch of elements. I think they believe that alien worlds ought to be made up of alien elements, and that there's something improper-boring, even- about finding such things as oxygen and carbon and nitrogen on them. As though an atom with the atomic number and weight of hydrogen could be something else besides hydrogen on some other world. Only an idiot would think that every planet has its own periodic table. There's only one set of building blocks in this universe: did you think otherwise?)
Mining on Megalo Kastro is an unpretty business, considering the heat, the humidity, the toothy monsters lurking behind every toothy bush, the frequency of devastating volcanic eruptions, and the various other disagreeable qualities of the place. Nevertheless it's a profitable industry, to say the very least, and the whole planet has a wild boom-town atmosphere where money flows freely from pocket to pocket. Which makes it a fertile sphere of operations for the Guild of Beggars.
It was Lanista who taught me how to beg. Our lodgemaster. He was of the Sinti Rom, twenty years old or maybe thirty, with strangely pale skin and cool eyes set very far apart in his head. "You smile at them," he said. "That's the key thing, to smile. You make your eyes shine. You make yourself look pathetic and appealing all at once. You put out your hand and you break their hearts."
I began to see why the guild had paid a premium price for me. I had the shine in my eyes. I had the smile. I was a choice urchin, winsome, irresistible, clever.
"What if they won't give?" I asked.
"When they say no and shake their heads, you look them right in the eyes. You smile your sweetest smile. And you say with a voice like an angel's, 'Your mother sleeps with camels.' And then you move along as though you have given them your greatest blessing."
I liked the idea of being a beggar. It didn't offend my sense of pride. It was a challenge; it required technique. I wanted to be good at it. By o Beng the Devil, I wanted to be the best!
Later when I went ghosting forth on Earth and saw the Rom of the old days I watched them at their begging with the eye of one professional for another. They were good. Very good. I saw the Gypsy mothers in the street whisper to their little ones, four years old, five, "Mong, chavo, mong"-beg, boy, beg!-and send them out among the Gaje. To train them, to develop their skills early. Begging helps to teach you not to know fear. Fear is a useless luxury when it is the Rom life that you live. A little of it gives you the spice of wisdom, any more than that and you are made helpless.
Begging is useful in another way. It makes you invisible. Most people don't want to see a beggar, because the sight of him stirs guilt and anxiety and niggardliness and other negative feelings. So a beggar can move among a crowd practically unnoticed except when he insists on being seen.
(I should make it clear that the prime activity of the Guild of Beggars isn't begging. Begging pays the company's expenses, more or less, but the main work of the guild is espionage. No one spelled that out for me when I came to Megalo Kastro. But it became obvious as time went along.)
When he was finished instructing me Lanista furnished me with the accoutrements and regalia of my profession. My alms bowl, into which money could be dropped but out of which money could not be taken without setting off an alarm. (The bowl would also sound its alarm, loud enough to shake a comet from its orbit, if it ever wandered more than three and a half meters from my body.) My staff of office, signifying that I was a licensed beggar and that all funds I took in would be put to pious uses. My red neckerchief, which all guild beggars wear so that they can recognize each other at a glance and keep a proper distance. And my holy amulet, a small flat plaque of silvery metal chased with intricate coruscating patterns in some scintillating darker substance, which I was to hang about my throat under the neckerchief to protect me from unspecified perils of the soul. The amulet contained a recorder sensitive enough to pick up anything spoken within a five-meter radius of me, but Lanista saw no need to tell me that.
"You are all ready now, Yakoub," he said. A car was waiting outside the lodge to take all the beggars to town for the morning's work. Gently he shoved me toward it. I turned and looked back and he made a secret Rom sign at me and winked. "Go," he said. "Mong, chavo, mong!"
5.
IT WAS A HIDEOUS TOWN, NOTHING MORE THAN SHACKS of corrugated tin splotched with purple mud from the unpaved streets. Light rain fell about six hours out of every ten and the air was so thick with mildew and mold that it had a greenish cast. White furry things sprouted in your lungs every time you drew a breath.
But the begging was good. The miners would come back from their shifts and draw money from their pay accounts for a quick holiday, and they thought it was bad luck to let the money stay in their pockets too long. Mainly they spent it on gambling, drink, drugs, and whores, as men in such towns have done since time began. But there wasn't one of them who wouldn't toss a handful of obols into a little beggar-boy's bowl, and when you happened upon one at just the right moment of exuberance he'd grandly fling you fifty minims, a tetradrachm, even a cerce piece or two, whatever happened to be in his purse. It added up.
Though I was the youngest and cutest and probably the cleverest, I was also the newest and maybe the most innocent. That cost me at first. You had to have a territory; and of course the established boys of the guild already had staked out the most lucrative zones for themselves. As for the other boys who had arrived with me, they were anywhere from two to five years older than I was, and were quick to grab the best of what was left for themselves. The best I could do was lurk around the edges of the town. I was lucky to bring in five obols a day.
That was bad. We were credited with a percentage of our take toward the price of buying our freedom, and if I kept on at that rate I'd still be a slave to the guild when I was a hundred years old. I didn't want that and neither did the guild: a beggar older than about twelve was useless to them and they wanted us to be able to buy our writs and clear out when we were no longer efficient producers. Often they would ask the most capable ex-beggars to sign on as freedmen in the upper hierarchy, though.
Once I realized what was happening I found a niche for myself that the other boys hadn't bothered to notice. Instead of soliciting the miners I solicited the whores.
Their guild had the same buy-out deal that ours did, but they were bound by a minimum ten-year indenture and so they didn't feel the same pressure that we did to earn and save, earn and save. And quickly I found how easy it was to wheedle the coins from them. Just bring out the maternal in them, that was the ticket. Let them mother you. And they'd pay and pay and pay.
Good God, how I wish I'd been older! I spent my working days in this perfumed crib and that, letting them hug me against their shining jiggling breasts or nuzzling up with my cheek to their plump jewel-socketed bellies. Even after all this time I still remember them vividly, even their names: Mermela, Andriole, Salathastra, Shivelle. The fragrance of their bodies. The silken sheen of their thighs. Those rosy nipples, that rippling resilient flesh. Every one of them was beautiful.
(Perhaps it wasn't really so, but that is how I remember them, at any rate, and so be it: they were all beautiful.) They let me touch them everywhere. They giggled, they laughed, they loved it. And they loved me. When the customers showed up I quickly went out the back way, though some would let me stay, hiding behind the curtains and listening to all the panting and groaning. I would watch now and then, too. I learned a great deal very young. And into my begging bowl went the obols and tetradrachms and once in a while a gorgeous five-cerce piece shining with all the colors of the rainbow.
In the whorehouse district I was everybody's mascot, everybody's toy. Some of the younger ones-they weren't more than thirteen or fourteen years old themselves-were even willing to give me a lit
tle first-hand instruction in the mysteries of love. But of course I was only seven and that would have been not only an abomination but a waste of their time and mine besides. I was content to learn by observing, at least for another couple of years.
How the money rolled in! There were days when I could barely carry my bowl back to the lodge, it was so stuffed with coins. (My recorder was stuffed, too, with the intimate chatter of the whorehouses. I still had no idea that the senior members of the guild were miners of sorts themselves, that they spent hours every night processing our tapes, filtering the idle noise and panning for the data that we beggars were being paid to collect, such nuggets of information as whether the men in the mines were cheating their employers by withholding the locations of rich lodes of ore.)
In short order I was the star of the guild. The big producer: the number-one beggar. I knew that because Lanista and the other senior brothers of the lodge treated me with great warmth and respect and also because of the obvious envy and even coldness of my fellow beggars. Well, I could handle that part of it. When my cabin-mate Sphinx tried to cut in on my bordello territory I took him aside and beat him bloody. I was eight and he was eleven; but I had my career to look out for.
Now for the first time ghosts were beginning to visit me with some regularity, too. That was the most exciting thing of all, even more than the games I was beginning to play with the whores in the cribs, even more than the occasional sight of some snarling giant reptile looming outside the force-field that protected the town.
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