Star of Gypsies Read Online Free Page B

you'll eat will be royal fare. And in a day or two you go back to wherever you came, is that understood? And you tell them that Yakoub meant it when he said he was tired of being king. Yakoub has abdicated. Permanently. Absolutely. Retroactively. You tell that to Sunteil. You tell that to Damiano. You can tell it to the emperor himself. It would be a mistake to doubt me."
    I heard laughter in the distance. I knew, without looking around, that it was the laughter of ghosts. Mulano is a place of many ghosts. There are the native ghosts and then there are the visiting ghosts, and the two are not at all the same sort of thing. The native ghosts are life-forms that happen not to be flesh-life; there are billions of them and they are everywhere, glowing at you in mid-air like little lanterns, a friendly presence but not much for conversation. Those are the ghosts that gave this world its name. Mulo, ghost, a fine Romany word. Mulano, place of ghosts. It was a Rom who named this world, for all the ghosts that live there. But since I came to Mulano a good many ghosts of the more familiar kind had taken to visiting it, my cousins, drifting across the void of space and the gulfs of time to this icy place to keep me company: Polarca, Valerian, sometimes Thivt, who is also my cousin even if he is not Rom, and various others now and then. You don't need to know who they are, just yet. Old friends, coming to visit: that's enough for now. A dozen times a day I felt the electric crackling of their auras on the air and the lilting of their laughter drifted towards me, and I knew that someone close and dear to me was hovering nearby. I could feel their presence now. They were laughing now. These were cousin-ghosts. The other kind don't laugh.
    I knew why they were laughing.
    "Don't any of you doubt me either," I told them.
    5.
    I HUNG MY FISH UP TO STEW IN A GRAVITY-GLOBE, where the juices would circle round and round and baste all sides equally. Some Mulano ghosts attracted by the electromagnetic stresses of the cooking process came nosing around to see if there was anything for them to eat. They weren't after my fish, only the fish-flavored infrared waves that were emanating from it. It's possible to impart flavor to energy anywhere along the spectrum, you know, simply by cooking something interesting in it. Maybe you aren't able to detect it, but just ask any Mulano ghost.
    While the fish was cooking the yellow sun began to crawl into the western sky and Double Day began. The usual auroras of Double Daybreak started to jump around behind the mountains, and the ghosts immediately lost interest in my fish: there were much better things for them to eat outside. Chorian stared at the amazing lighting effects in disbelief.
    "What's going on?" he asked.
    "Happens every day about this time. Go and watch."
    "Can't I help you do anything in here?"
    "Go and watch," I said. "You don't see stuff like this on Empire worlds."
    He went out. I love cooking but I hate having an audience. For other things, yes, but not when I'm trying to put a meal together. Cooking, like lovemaking, needs to be done in private. I went on bustling around inside the ice-bubble, calling up items for dinner, a flask of chilled Marajo wine and a bunch of gleaming black Iriarte grapes and a platter of Galgala oysterines, out of the various dimensional pockets where I stored such things. When everything was organized I stuck my head out of the bubble to call the boy. Gaudy winding-sheets of sinuous color were flapping like tremendous electric banners overhead and the broad ice-fields were ablaze with a million subtle shifting shades of aquamarine and emerald and jade, ruby and burgundy and scarlet, citron, cobalt, amethyst, magenta, gold.
    The lights hit me all at once and I felt a torrent of ghost-force come rushing toward me out of the past, tumbling over me like an avalanche.
    I hadn't done any ghosting around since I had come to Mulano. It wasn't that I was too old or had lost