Free Star of Gypsies by Robert Silverberg Page B

they remain the same. (I can't take credit for that line. It's Gaje wisdom, spoken by one of their wise men a thousand years ago. Don't look so surprised. Even the Gaje have their moments of wisdom.) There aren't any lions any more and there are no more plows and Gypsies stopped living in caravans a long time back. But we still have trouble with the idea of being tied down. We may live in houses for a while, but only for a while. Sooner or later we move on. And when we move on it isn't from one little country to another on the same continent of the same small planet. It is by great leaps across thousands of light-years.
    (There wouldn't be an Empire today, but for us. The Gaje can't deny that. They may have built the starships, but we were the ones who piloted them to the far reaches of the sky. And all because we are a restless people; and all because we can never call any place home, except our true home that was cruelly taken from us ten thousand years ago. Other places aren't home. Just shelter. Places to wait.)
    So. Moving day. Blue-green clouds scudding across a lemon sky. The air crisp and triple-cold. Not even any ghosts hovering around. A good day for taking to the road, Yakoub Rom. Take yourself onward, before the old Devil hangs his weights on your heart and pulls you down. The old Devil, that sly one, o Beng, yes. He may be my cousin too but I won't ask him to dinner.
    I emptied out the ice-bubble where I had lived for the past year or so and gathered all my things together and packed them into my elegant little hundred-cubic-meter overpocket, and when I drew the drawstring I sent ninety-nine point ninety-five cubic meters' worth of the overpocket's contents into a handy storage dimension in a nearby continuum. What was left had negligible mass and no weight at all. I tied it to my sleeve with a string and let it bob along beside me as I went on to my new home base.
    It was on the other side of the Gombo glacier and about a hundred kilometers to the north. That was a good little walk. I sang to myself in Rom the whole way, not bothering always to make sense, for who was listening? And when my toes began to grumble I stopped and put my head back and yelled my name into the wind and grabbed my crotch and flung out my arms and lifted my knees to my chin and stomped them down again and capered around like a lunatic, doing one of the old dances. Hoy! Hootchka pootchka hoya zim! And then I went forward, laughing, with the sweat running around and down and through the tangled black jungle on my chest and belly. Hoy! Yakoub of the Rom is on the road again!
    It started to snow an hour after I set out. The sky turned white and the horizon disappeared and there were no longer any landmarks to guide me. From then on there was snow flying in my face all the way. I drank it in and spit it back out. Even in the whiteness and the blankness I kept to my course. Long ago on a planet called Trinigalee Chase that I would otherwise rather not talk about I was taught a trick for keeping on course with no instrument other than the one between my ears, and it stood me in good stead now. It's the one thing I remember from Trinigalee Chase that I'm glad not to have forgotten.
    Wherever you go on Mulano the scenery is the same: ice, snow, ice, snow. The place has no tilt to the plane of the ecliptic, so it has nothing much by way of a change of seasons, and even though it has two fancy suns that give it plenty of lively light it's too far from them to enjoy any real warmth from them. So both hemispheres of Mulano are winter-bound all the time. I hadn't had a day without snow since I had arrived.
    But that was all right. I'd spent enough of my life on tropical worlds. Generally speaking the planets where humanity has chosen to settle are ones where the climate is easy; maybe a little wintry around the poles on some, but usually balmy everywhere else all the year round. Soft translucent surf, powdery beaches, green fronds waving in the gentle