Free Star of Gypsies by Robert Silverberg Page A

enough starships, for the Empire to be able to run standard tourist service to places like Mulano. I had come here by relay-sweep myself; and when the time came for me to leave here, that was how I would go.
    Chorian stood straight and tall like a good soldier in the light of the two suns for what seemed to me like an eternity and a half without moving. After a time I began to think that perhaps by watching him I was somehow hindering the coming of his sweep-strand, for things sometimes work that way. So I went inside and I conjured up the bahtalo drom for him, the spell of safe voyage. I wasn't sure that it would have any effect, since Chorian was enclosed in his protective sphere where possibly even the spell of safe voyage couldn't reach. But it was worth trying. The spell of safe voyage is one of the true spells, one of the ones that reliably does the job. It isn't simply witch-nonsense, something that some old drabarni of the Middle Ages might have put together out of bathwater and scythe-blades and the wombs of frogs; it is grounded in the great lines of force that run across the curving axes of the universe from shore to shore.
    At any rate I wove the spell for him; and then I think I must have fallen into a light sleep; and when I went outside again to look for him, he was gone.
    The suns were setting. I said a little prayer and waited for the moment of Romany Star.

TWO
    The One Word

I was with Loiza la Vakako when a messenger came to him and told him that a certain wild Rom of his family, while drunk, had challenged five Gaje to follow him across a mountain pass that was not much wider than the blade of a sword. All six of them had fallen to their deaths, but the Rom had been the last to fall, and those who had watched this event had praised him extravagantly for his courage.
    Loiza la Vakako laughed. "Sometimes courage about dying is cowardice about living," he said. And he never mentioned the man again.

1.
    A DAY OR TWO AFTER CHORIAN LEFT, I DECIDED TO PICK myself up and move to some other part of the territory. It wasn't that I was trying to hide from further visitors, now that I knew I could be found. I was never lost-to those who know how to see. But I had lived in this place long enough. There is something in the Rom soul that will not let us live in the same place for very long.
    In the old days when Earth existed, most of us were nomads. Wanderers. We lived in caravans and roamed wherever we pleased. At night we slept under the stars unless the weather was foul. In winter we might pull the wagons together and hole up for the season; but as soon as spring arrived, off we went again. In at least a dozen of the languages of Earth the word "Gypsy" came to mean "wanderer." Poets would say things like, "I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life." Which is bullshit, of course, I have to point out, with all due respect to the literary folk. A real Gypsy would no more go to sea than he would grind his horse up into sausages. The sea, the sea, the stinking fishy sea-it's never been a place where any Gypsy cares to find himself. Live by the seashore, yes, that's fine. Nice breezes, good eating. But go and toss about on the waves? No, never. Better the broader seas of space, calm and-well, you get the general idea of what those old misguided but well-meaning poets were trying to say. At least they were thinking about us.
    For some reason our wandering ways were tremendously bothersome to the Gaje. Whatever they can't control gives them an itch on the inside of their skulls. Sometimes they tried to pass laws requiring us to settle down. Hah! What good could that do? We used to say that making a Gypsy live in one place was like harnessing a lion to a plow. To be tied all your life to the same four walls and a roof, the same little plot of ground, the same dusty street-why, that was torment, that was slavery. We were meant to wander.
    Well, things change, more or less; but the more things change the more