That tree was life to me. It throbbed and surged with the vigor of constant transformation that is life. I swam toward it. I knew it was my sanctuary. I could hear it singing to me, and as I neared it I sang also.
I saw the gnarled roots rising above the sea-surface, and I seized one and clung to it and pulled myself hand over hand across its smooth slippery sides until I was up out of the sea entirely. I lay there for a time, gasping. Then I rose and walked down the narrow ridge of the root's upper face until I came to the trunk itself, and I embraced it, stretching out my arms as wide as they would go, which was scarcely enough to reach a fiftieth of the way around that trunk.
And then I was ashore. I was naked and my skin was glowing with the warmth of the sea. Nothing could frighten me now. It was like a birth, coming forth from that sea. Under a glowering sky I began to walk eastward, not caring if I had to walk across half a world. I would make it.
I walked for days. No creature molested me. A bird-like thing with rubbery wings the width of a house flew above me much of the way, enfolding me in its purple shadow. Sometimes I saw familiar ghosts. At last I came to a place where the belly of the earth had been split open and the pistoning arms of huge dark machines rose and fell, rose and fell, sending up clouds of white steam and black geysers of mud. Some men standing beside one of the machines pointed at me. I went to them. A smiling Rom face looked down at me.
"Sarishan, cousin," I said in Romany. "I am a runaway slave and I cry sanctuary, for my masters have treated me wrongly." I felt calm and strong. I had come into my manhood in that sea.
THE OUTPOST I HAD REACHED WAS THE ONE WHERE ROM miners were at work excavating for rare earths. They fed me and clothed me and kept me with them for a month or two. Then they put me aboard a starship that was heading into the arm of the galaxy known as Jerusalem Spill, where the worlds are packed thick and close. I would have gone home to Vietoris if I could, but no one at the mining camp had so much as heard of Vietoris, and when I tried one night to show them, in what was probably a completely wrongheaded and incorrect way, where in the sky Vietoris was located, they said that there never were any ships out of Megalo Kastro that headed in that direction. Perhaps that was so. In any case it was probably best for me that I ultimately went where I did, for that was where I was meant to go. The gods had decreed that the Vietoris part of my life was over.
The ship I did take was a third-class freighter with a Gaje captain but a Rom pilot and crew. They found out quickly that I was Rom too and I spent most of my time in the jump-room, watching them gear the ship up to wink-out. They even let me stay there for the leap itself, when the pilot grasped the jump-handles and poured his soul into the soul of the starship and sent it across the light-years. I watched the pilot's face in the moment of leap, when he did that special thing that only the Rom of all mankind are capable of doing properly. I saw the ecstasy in it, the sudden beauty that came over him-and he was not a beautiful man-and in that moment the yearning awoke and burned in me to grasp jump-handles myself, to give my soul to a starship's soul, to be one of those who pilots the great ships in the enormous void.
"My father works on starships," I said. "You probably know him. His name is Romano Nirano. He fixes the ships that come to Vietoris." But they had never heard of Romano Nirano, and they had never heard of Vietoris. Because they liked me, they opened their big startank for me, a black sphere in whose swirling opal-hued depths all the stars of the galaxy were shown, and they tried to look up Vietoris. But they had trouble finding it because I was unable to tell them the name of Vietoris' sun; it had always been just "the sun" to me, and that wasn't good enough. Finally someone keyed into a planetary atlas and located Vietoris for me and they showed it to me in the star-tank. It was off in an unimportant corner of the galaxy and we were getting farther and farther from it with every leap. So I would not get to go home.
It saddened me that none of these Rom starmen knew of my father. I had thought he was famous from one end of the universe to the other. "Here's where you'll get off, boy," the pilot said. He picked up the pointer and showed me a star-system midway across Jerusalem Spill, where five worlds whirled around a mighty blue sun. "The end of the line. There are Rom aplenty there, but beyond these worlds you won't have a chance of finding your own kind."
That was how I came to live on the kingly planet of Nabomba Zom, in the palace of Loiza la Vakako, who would be like a second father to me, and more than a father. I was twelve years old, or perhaps thirteen. On Nabomba Zom I grew and blossomed. On Nabomba Zom I became who I was meant to become.
LOIZA LA VAKAKO WAS LOWARA ROM, OF FABULOUS wealth and legendary shrewdness. Lowara are always good at amassing money and shrewdness is their second nature. The entire planet of Nabomba Zom belonged to him, and fourteen of its twenty moons. He ruled this great domain and its kumpania of many thousands of Rom like a Gypsy king of old, without cheap pomp or foolish pretension but with complete strength and assurance. Much later, when I was king, I patterned my style more than a little after that of Loiza la Vakako. At least in superficials. Of course he and I were really very different sorts. He was a natural aristocrat, cool and self-contained, and 1-well, I am not like that. Kingly, yes. Cool, no.
I was covered from head to toe with the bright crimson manure of salizonga snails on the day he and I first met.
My friends the starmen had dropped me off at Port Nabomba as part of a cargo of agricultural implements: the cargo manifest listed so many tractor drives, so many rotary aerators, so many ground-effect harvesters, and "one Yakoub-class agricultural robot, humanoid model, one half standard size, expandable, self-maintaining." I stood in the midst of all the crates with a yellow cargo tag dangling from my ear. The customs inspector stared at me a long while and said finally, "What the hell are you?"
"The Yakoub-class agricultural robot, humanoid model." I grinned at him. "Sarishan, cousin."
He was Rom, but he gave me no greeting in return nor did he seem amused. Scowling, he checked through the cargo manifest, and his scowl grew deeper and blacker when he found the entry in question. "You're a robot?"
"Humanoid model."
"Very funny. Expandable, it says." "That means I'll grow."
"Expendable is more like it. How old are you?" "Almost twelve."
"That's pretty old for a robot. What the hell are they doing dumping obsolete machinery on us?"
"I'm not really a-"
"Stand over there and keep quiet," he said, checking me off. "Item twenty-nine, one crate tractor drives-"
So I entered the kingly planet of Nabomba Zom as a unit of agricultural machinery and that was almost exactly how they treated me at first. Still wearing my tag and clutching the little overpocket containing the gifts from the starmen that were my only possessions, I was unceremoniously loaded on a truck a few hours later, along with a crate or two of the other newly arrived farm gear, and taken out to a plantation in the heart of a wide, lush valley somewhere in the interior of the continent. I spent the next six months there, shoveling the precious manure of the salizonga snails.