You would quiver in your boots if you ever saw a salizonga snail bearing down on you in its inexorable way, snorting and snuffling and dropping tons of vivid excreta in its wake. The salizonga snail is the biggest gastropod in the known universe, a ponderous creature eight meters long and three or four meters high, encased in a domed shell of overlapping glossy yellow plates thick as armor. Terrifying as it looks -the great waving eye-stalks, the tremendous rubbery pedestal of a foot-the worst it can do to you is trample you to death, which it certainly will do if you don't get out of its way. It won't eat you, though. It won't eat anything except a certain red-leafed moss that will grow only in the interior of Nabomba Zom, which by not much of a coincidence is the only place in the universe where the salizonga snail is to be found.
No one would give a shit-so to speak-about this bulky monstrosity, if not for the fecal matter which it deposits with irrepressible zeal and in astonishing quantity as it thunders through its favorite pastures. This brightly colored stuff contains an alkaloid from which a perfume is distilled that is desperately coveted by the women of five thousand worlds. Only the male salizonga secretes the valuable alkaloid, and unless the manure is collected and refrigerated within a few minutes of excretion the alkaloid will break down and become worthless. Therefore it is necessary for human workers to follow the snails around robots don't seem capable of distinguishing between male and female salizongas, the distinction being an extremely subtle one-and hastily shovel the newly dumped male-snail dung into refrigeration tanks before it loses its commercial value. This was the job that I was given on my second day on Nabomba Zom. It did not strike me as an enormous improvement over panhandling in the fleshpits of Megalo Kastro.
Well, it is the decree of God that man born of woman shall work for his daily bread, and woman born of woman likewise; but nowhere did God specify that anybody was entitled to pretty work. At that moment of my life shit-shoveling seemed to be my assignment, and at that moment of my life I saw no immediate alternative at hand. I will not pretend that I came to enjoy the work, but in truth it was less unpleasant than you might imagine, and without any effort at all I can think of eight or ten far less delightful professions, though I would rather not. In astonishingly short order I stopped thinking entirely about the nature of the commodity I was handling and simply kept my mind focused on staying alive out there in the manure-fields. (There was some risk involved because the huffing and puffing of the snail you were following would drown out the sound of any other one in the vicinity, and it was all too easy to be crushed under one of those massive whopping ambulatory mountains if it came up behind you while you were concentrating intently on the snail just ahead.)
Nabomba Zom is one of those worlds that has no seasons. Night and day are of precisely equal lengths and the climate is nothing but delightful all the year round. So I am me rely guessing when I say that six months went by while I was on that plantation. During that time my voice grew deeper and my beard began to sprout. And one day there was much excitement at the far end of the plantation-cars, shouts, people running back and forth. I wondered if some careless soul had been fatally flattened by a snail. Then the foreman buzzed me on my ear-phone and told me to head for the plantation-house that minute.
As it happened I had suffered a little accident just a few moments earlier. The snail I was following had suddenly gone into high gear, and in my effort to keep up with him I had slipped on a patch of the red-leafed moss and gone skidding belly-down into a mound of dung the size of a small asteroid.
"I need to wash first," I told the foreman. "I'm all covered with-" "Now," he said.
"But I'M-', "Now.
They brought me before a man of astounding presence and power, who might have been fifty years old, or eighty, or a hundred fifty. I never knew, and he never seemed to grow a day older in all the years I was with him. He was slender for a Rom, almost slight, with narrow sloping shoulders and a shallow chest, and he wore no mustache. In his left ear were two silver rings, an ancient style just coming back into favor among us then. There was wondrous shrewdness in his face: a quick sly smile, just a wry twitch of his cheek, really, that warned potential adversaries to beware. He was no one you would want to try to best in a bargain. To say he looked shrewd was like saying that water looks wet. His eyes were ferociously penetrating. I felt transparent before those eyes: he was seeing my guts and my bones. As I stood before this formidable regal man all splattered and plastered and encrusted with snail-slops, he reached out his hand toward me.
"Closer." "Sir, I-"
"Closer, boy. What's your name?"
"Yakoub. My father is Romano Nirano of Vietoris."
"Romano Nirano, eh?" He seemed impressed, or so I imagined. "How old are you?"'
"Going to be thirteen, I think."'
"You think. Runaway slave, are you?" "A traveler, sir."
"Ah. A traveler. Of course. The grand tour of the universe, beginning with the celebrated snail-honey farms of Nabomba Zom. What are you, Kalderash Rom?"'
"Yes, sir."
"Are you good with machines, as all the Kalderash are supposed to be?"
"My father is the greatest mechanic in the staryard of Vietorion."', "Your father is, yes." He nodded and pondered a moment. Then he turned and beckoned into another room. "Malilini? Is this the one you meant?"
A woman came out, or a girl; I was never sure. She might have been sixteen, or twenty-six, or thirty-six. Her age would always be her secret. She was unusually beautiful, and beautifully unusual. Her hair was an azure cloud, her eyes were warm and dark and set very far apart, her lips were full and inviting. I had seen that face before, but where? One of the whores in the mining town? No, none of them had been as beautiful as this. Some passenger on the starship? No. No, I remembered now: it was the face of the lovely ghost who had come to me several times on Megalo Kastro, both at the beggars' lodge and when I lay drifting on the living sea. She had never spoken to me, only stared and smiled. We looked at each other now as though we had known each other a long while.
"Yakoub," she said. "At last."
I was bitterly ashamed, standing before such beauty in my dungstained work-clothes.
V "My daughter Malilini," said the kingly man. "I am Loiza la akako." He gestured to his robots. "Clean him. Dress him." They stripped me naked in an instant. I felt less ashamed being naked before her, before him, than I had been in my dreadful filth. They sprayed me and dried me and trimmed my hair and to my amazement they even ran a shaving-beam over my downy cheeks, and then they wrapped me in a pearly gray robe with a red sash and a high collar of deep rich blue. One of the robots spun a mirror out of air molecules in front of me to let me inspect myself. I was lovely. I was lost in admiration of myself. All this had taken only minutes. Malilini was glowing with pleasure at my transformation. Loiza la Vakako came close and examined me. He was scarcely any taller than I was. He studied me, nodding, obviously satisfied.
Then he took my elegant collar in both his hands and with one quick yank he ripped it halfway loose on the left side. I was stunned and appalled.
Loiza la Vakako laughed, a great whooping Rom laugh.
"May all your clothes rip and wear out like that! But may you live in health to a great old age!"
I realized that he was speaking to me in Romany. It was one of his Lowara customs, this ceremonial tearing of my new finery. He clapped me on the back and led me outside. By this time I understood that he was the Rom baro here, the great man of this planet, and I was going to live with him. I was not allowed to go to my hut for my things; but when we arrived at his palace after a three-hour flight across the shimmering wonder of that magnificent continent, my few pitiful little possessions were waiting for me in my suite of rooms, along with a host of lavish new belongings whose uses I was barely able to comprehend.