At first I felt very little connection with the wandering Rom in their caravans, those ragged old mountebanks and jugglers who wandered the roads of medieval Earth. To me we seemed nothing much like those ancients, we of the far-flung Imperium who live in cities and fly between the stars. They were curiosities; they were folklore; they were quaint.
Then came the night when my father took me up the side of mighty Mount Salvat to the lookout point five thousand meters above the city, and there, in the air that was so thin and piercing that it stung my nostrils, he showed me Romany Star in the sky and told me the last piece of the story. And then everything came together, and I knew that I was one with those far-off Kalderash and Sinti and Gitanos and Lowara of vanished Earth, that we were truly of a single blood and a single soul, that they were part of me and I was part of them.
Now at last I understood the stealing of chickens and apples in the wandering-time long ago: hunger kills, and we must go on living if we are to reach our goal, and if the Gaje will not let us eat then we must help ourselves. Now I understood the contempt for Gaje law: what was Gaje law to us, except a weapon held at our throats? I understood the lies and casual deceptions, the six conflicting answers to any prying Gaje question, the refusal to be swallowed UP in the Gaje world in any way. The Gajo is the enemy. We could not let ourselves be deceived in that. They are the ancient foe; and all our striving must be aimed toward leaving them behind us, not toward entering into any union with them. For as surely as a river of fresh water is lost in the sea we would be lost forever if we let the Gaje once engulf us. So my father taught me when I was very young.
ONE AFTERNOON WHEN I WAS SEVEN A PRETTY WOMAN in a yellow robe came into the classroom where we were learning about the emperor, how he labored night and day to make life better for every boy and girl in the Imperium. She glanced quickly around the room and pointed to half a dozen of us, saying, -you, you, you, you, come with me." I was one of the ones chosen.
We went outside. It was a mild misty day and rain had fallen a little while before: the leaves of the trees were gleaming as if they had been polished. A car was waiting in the street, long and low and sleek, a silvery metallic color with the red comet-tail emblem of Volstead Factors on its hood. I remember all this as if it happened the day before yesterday.
I didn't mind leaving school. To tell you the truth I had never cared much for it anyway. Me, a schoolteacher's son. And that day's lesson had seemed foolish to me: the poor silly emperor, working night and day! If he was so powerful, why didn't he have people doing his work for him? And they had showed his picture on the screen in the classroom, a small frail man, very old and thin, who looked as though he might die at any minute. This was the Thirteenth Emperor, and actually he lived a surprisingly long time after that, but I doubted that anyone so wizened and feeble could manage even to take care of himself, let alone look after the needs of every boy and girl in the Imperium. School seemed nothing but Gaje nonsense to me: already I was dismissing anything I didn't like as Gaje nonsense, you see. In this case I was probably right, although I have learned over the years that not everything that is Gaje is nonsense, and now and then that not everything that is nonsense is Gaje.
I was the only Rom boy in the car. There was a Rom girl, too, one of my sisters' friends. The other four were Gaje. The Rom girl was a slave like me, and so was at least one of the Gaje boys. I wasn't sure about the rest. It wasn't easy to tell who was a slave and who wasn't. But in fact all six of us had been picked from the classroom because we were slaves. The company was undergoing an economy drive. A certain percentage of its slave-holdings was to be sold off, particularly young slaves still in school, who would not begin to provide a return on investment for many years. We were being taken to the marketplace to be sold, right then and there. I would never see my home again, my father, my mother, my brothers, my sisters. I would lose my little collection of music cubes, my storybooks and my playthings. I would never have my share of the old Rom treasures from Earth in our house. None of this was explained to me as they drove us to the marketplace. There are some ways in which even modern slavery is very much like the ancient kind.
In the vestibule of the marketplace they looked me over, tapped me here and there, ran me in front of some kind of scanner. No one wanted to know my age or name or any other information about me. A robot stamped my arm; it stung a moment and left a circular purple mark.
"Lot ninety-seven," I heard a hoarse bored voice say. "A boy." "Move on inside, ninety-seven," said someone else. "That line over there. "
It was a short bit of business to dispose of us, there in the slavemarket of Vietorion. There was something dreamlike about it for me. When I think now of that afternoon I feel the roaring in my ears that I sometimes feel in dreams, and everything moves very slowly, hardly moving at all, and there are fierce shadows everywhere.
We stood on a circular dais beneath a glaring globe of hot bright light in the center of an immense drafty bare room that looked like a warehouse. There were hundreds of us up for sale at once, most of us children but not all. Some were quite old and I felt sorry for them. We were all naked. I had no trouble with being naked but some of the others huddled miserably with their hands over their middles or their arms folded across their breasts, trying to hide themselves. Much later, when I understood more about the way slave-markets worked, I realized that the ones who try to hide themselves usually are bought last, for the lowest prices, by the stingiest masters. The theory is that a slave concerned with such matters as privacy and shame is bound to be troublesome in other ways too.
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 scanning beams 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."