As he spoke I began to cry.
"No," he said, and he shook me, hard. "There's nothing to sniffle about. They made us suffer but they never broke our spirit. We had our life and the Ga e had theirs, and perhaps theirs was more comfortable, but ours was truer. Ours was the right life. We were kings of the road, Yakoub! We soared on the high winds. We tasted joys that were altogether unknown to them. And we still do. Look what has become of us, Yakoub: the former thieves, the former beggars, the raggle-taggle Gypsies! Kings of the road, yes, and now it is the road between the stars! Down through the years we have kept to our ways. Maybe some of us slipping away from them now and then, sure, but always coming back, always bringing the Rom way back to life. And that way has brought us great comfort and goodness, with even greater things yet to come. We speak the Great Tongue. We live the Great Life. We travel the Great Road. And always the One Word guides us."
"The One Word?" I said. "What is that?" "The One Word is: Survive!"
OF COURSE I STILL UNDERSTOOD VERY LITTLE OF THE full tale. He had told me nothing of how the Rom had led the way into the stars, of how the Imperium had come into being, or how we founded a Rom kingdom and wove it betwixt and between the fabric of the Imperium to become the true force that governed mankind. Pointless to try to explain all that to a child of six, even a Rom child. Nor did he tell me then of Romany Star and why it was that the Rom were a people apart from the Gaje; for it would have been cruelty to have me know so soon that we were set apart from the Gaje in a secret way that could admit of no compromise, that there was no kinship at all, that we were of a wholly alien blood. Not just different by customs and languages, but by the blood itself. There would be time for that dark knowledge later on.
All this took place in the city of Vietorion on the world Vietoris. I have not set eyes on that planet since I was taken from it by my second owners, more than a hundred sixty years ago, but it is forever bright in my memory: the first home, the starting point. The dazzling sky streaked with gold and green. The great sprawl of the city like a black shawl across the crumpled ridges of the vast plain. The astounding jagged red spear of Mount Salvat rising with the force of a trumpet-blast in an overwhelming steep thrust above us. Perhaps nothing was as immense as I remember it but I prefer to remember it that way. Even our house seems palatial to me: white tiles flashing in the sunlight, rooms beyond rooms, soft music far away, heavy musky-scented yellow flowers everywhere in the courtyard. Was it truly like that? On Vietoris we were slaves.
There is slavery and slavery. My father had sold us to Volstead Factors but not so that we would be chained and whipped and left to make a dinner out of crusts. Our slavery was, as he so often said, a business arrangement. We lived the way other people, ordinary free people, lived. Each day my father went to the staryard where the great bronze-nosed ships of the company lay in their hangars and he worked on them like any other mechanic, and at night he came home. My mother taught in the company school. My brothers and sisters and I went to school, a different one. When we were older we would work for the company, too, in whatever jobs were chosen for us. We ate well and dressed well. Because we were slaves we were bound to the company, and could never work for anyone else, or leave Vietoris to seek a new life for ourselves; that way the company was certain to recover its investment in our educations. But we were not mistreated. Of course the company could choose to sell us if it felt it had no need for us. And in time it did.
I would watch the starships sailing across the night, lighting up the northern sky like flaring comets as they raced up toward wink-out speed and the interstellar leap across the light-years, and I would tell myself, "That ship flies because my father's hands were on it in the staryard. My father knows the magic of starships. My father could fly a starship himself, if they would let him."
Was that true? I suppose not. Even then I knew that all the starship pilots were Rom: I often saw them swaggering through the city, big black-haired men with Rom eyes, in the puff-shouldered silken blue uniforms that pilots of the Imperium affected in those days. But that didn't mean that all Rom were starship pilots. And I suspect that I didn't comprehend, at that time, the distinction between a starship mechanic and a starship pilot. Pilots were Rom; my father was Rom and worked with starships; therefore my father knew how to pilot a starship as well as any of the men in blue silk. In truth my father had great skill with tools of all sorts-the old Rom gift, coursing through our blood since the days when we had been wandering coppersmiths and tinsmiths and workers in iron and repairers of locks-he could do anything with his hands, fix anything, fashion miracles out of a scrap of wire and a bit of wood-but even he probably would have found it a challenge, I think, to take the controls of a starship in his grasp. And then again perhaps he would have known what to do: intuitively, automatically. He had great skills. He was a great man.
He taught me the names of the tribes of the Rom. We were Kalderash, and then there were the Lowara, the Sinti, the Luri, the Tchurari, the Manush, the Gitanos. And many more. I suspect I have come to forget some. Old names, names springing out of our wandering-time on Earth. Later, when I learned about Romany Star and the sixteen original tribes, I decided that the names my father had taught me were names that went back to the time of Romany Star. Now I know that that is wrong, that those are names we took when we were scattered among the Gaje of Earth only a few thousand years ago, in that time when we roamed in wagons, living as outcasts. Those names have lost meaning now, for we are spread very thin over a great many worlds and the only tribe that can matter to us is the tribe of tribes, the grand kumpania, the tribe of all Rom. But yet the names are a part of the tradition that we maintain and must maintain. And so Kalderash parents tell their children that they are Kalderash, and Lowara Lowara, and Sinti Sinti, even if it is a distinction without distinction.
My father taught me, also, the Rom way as it had been handed down from generation to generation over the centuries and through all the migrations. Not just the special customs of our people, the folkways, the rites and festivals and rituals and ceremonies. Those things are important. They are the instruments of survival. They unite and preserve us: the knowledge of what is clean and unclean, of how birth and marriage and death must be celebrated, of how authority is apportioned within a tribe, of how the invisible powers are to be dealt with, all those things which we know to be true beliefs. We must be tenacious of such things, or we will be lost; and so I was instructed in them as all Rom children are. But the rites and rituals are not the essence of the Rom way; they are only the devices by which that way is sustained and nurtured. My father took care to teach me what lay underneath them, that which is far more significant, that is, a sense of what it is to be Rom. To know that one is part of a tiny band of people, driven by misfortune from its homeland, that has clung together against a swarm of enemies in many strange lands over thousands of years. To remember that all Rom are cousins and that in one another is our only safety. To consider at all times that one must live with grace and courage but that the primary thing is to survive and endure until we can bring our long pilgrimage to its end and return to our home again. To realize that the universe is our enemy and that we must do whatever we can to protect ourselves.