When the fear goes and the atoms lose their grip on one another, then at last you find your footing. You are floating freely in utter void. There is no way for you to fall because nothing exists. And in that emptiness you are able to make any choice you desire.
Here, you say. I will go here. You get there just like that. No one can see you unless you want to be seen. You don't collide with anything that's already there because you're surrounded by a thing called an interpolation zone that pushes everything out of the way. So you want to go to Megalo Kastro. Sure: there you are, Megalo Kastro. And you hover in the air over a steaming bowl of warm pink mud that spans half a world. A naked boy lies bobbing on the breast of that quivering fluid mass. He seems asleep. Dreaming. You smile at him.
"Yakoub?" you say. Your aura crackles. He opens his eyes. They shine with strength and fearlessness. Your ringing laughter enfolds him. "Swim, Yakoub. Swim. Swim."
How easy this is, now that you know the way!
HER HAND WAS STILL RESTING ON MINE. WHEN SHE MADE a small movement as though to draw it away, I held it, and she did not resist. tro in the I said, "Why did you want to go ghosting on Megalo Kas first place?"
"To look at you."
"But you couldn't have any idea I existed!"
"Oh, yes," she said. "Of course I knew you existed." "How could you?"
"Because you were going to come here."
"And how could you have known that?" I asked.
"Because you are here now," she said. And then she laughed. "Don't you understand? There is never any in the first place.
4. People, Places, Worlds
Consider, for example, the times of Vespasian. Thou wilt see all these things, people marrying, bringing up children, sick, dying, warring, feasting, trafficking, cultivating the ground, flattering, obstinately arrogant, suspecting, plotting, wishing for some to die, grumbling about the present, loving, heaping up treasure, desiring consulship, kingly power. Well, then, the life of these people no longer exists at all. Again, remove to the times of Trajan. Again, all is the same. Their life too is gone. In like manner view all the other epochs of time and of whole nations, and see how many after great efforts soon fell and were resolved into the elements. But chiefly thou shouldst think of those whom thou hast thyself known distracting themselves about idle things, neglecting to do what was in accordance with their proper constitution, and to hold firmly to this and to be content with it…
What then is that about which we ought to employ our serious pains? This one thing: thoughts just, and acts social, and words which never lie, and a disposition which gladly accepts all that happens, as necessary, as usual.
- Marcus Aurelius
I THOUGHT OF MALILINI NOW AS I STOOD IN A BROAD GLITTERING field of Mulano's crusted ice, waiting for the relay-sweep to carry me into space. How she had brought magic and mystery into my life; how I had loved her; how she had been swept away from me down the river of time. What if she had lived, and I had been able to take her to be my wife? An idle thought. Meaningless. Useless. Like asking myself, What if rain were to fall upward, What if gold grew on trees, What if I had been born a Gajo instead of a Rom? On Galgala gold does grow on trees. But I am Rom and the rain falls as it has always fallen and Malilini is long dead and will be dead forever more.
I was alone. Damiano had already gone on ahead to make his own plans and preparations. We would meet again later. It was nearly the last moment of Double Day. The two suns of Mulano hovered on the horizon, about to plummet from view. The sky was dark green, quickly deepening into the gray of the momentary twilight. I narrowed my eyes and searched the heavens for Romany Star, as I had always done at that moment of the day.
And in that moment the dazzling radiance of the relay-sweep aura burst high into the air and a roving tendril of the sweep found me and caught me up and flung me far out into the Great Dark. Goodbye, goodbye, a long goodbye to my quiet life on Mulano! Yakoub's on his way again.
Only a madman could enjoy traveling by relay-sweep. And if you aren't a madman when you set out, there's a fair chance that you will be by the time the sweep turns you loose.
For some people it's the sheer peril of the process that sends them around the bend, or the absurd implausibility of the whole thing. What you are doing, after all, is going out by yourself into space without a starship around you or anything else except an invisible sphere of force, and dropping in free fall through hundreds or even thousands of lightyears, which is one hell of a drop. The sweep picks you up and flicks you out into nowhere, and there you stand, neatly cocooned in the little sphere of safety that your journey-helmet has woven about you, plum meting across the universe with nothing but empty space at your elbow. It's vertigo to the fiftieth power for anyone who allows himself to buy into the notion that he's actually falling from one end of the galaxy to the other.
That part of it has never bothered me at all. When you have held the jump-handles in your hands as often as I have, when you have lifted starships through wink-out and hurled them across the sky, a little bit of relay-sweep travel doesn't seem like much of a challenge.
Gypsies were born for traveling, anyway, and any means of transportation that takes you from one place to another is all right with us. It isn't as though you see stars and planets flashing by all the time: you aren't in realspace at all, but in this or that adjacent auxiliary space, taking zigzag shortcuts through wormholes in the continuum. Which is why the journey doesn't take you thousands of years and why you aren't in any danger of getting tossed into some star or crashing into a planet that happens to lie in your path. So there's no serious risk in it. Oh, maybe one traveler in a hundred thousand gets caught in a shunt malfunction and spends the rest of his life out there in his sweep-sphere, hanging suspended in the middle of nowhere for ten or twenty thousand realtime years. That's a miserable kind of fate but the odds against its happening to you are pretty favorable ones. Practically every relay sweep traveler gets where he wants to go. Eventually.
No, what troubled me wasn't the risk: as I've already said, it was the boredom. The stasis. The utter inexorable inescapable solitude. The mind going clickety-clack while the body rests in metabolic slowdown. The clamor of your thoughts. No one to talk to but yourself as the random search of the space-time lattice goes on and on and you wait for the shunt that will bring you out on an inhabited world reasonably close to the one you intended to reach. A starship's wink-jump is fast. Relay isn't. You dangle out there and you wait. And you wait.
I am, God knows, enormously fond of my own company. I can amuse myself thoroughly and consistently. All the same, enough can sometimes be enough, and maybe even a little more than that.
What the hell. Nobody had forced me to go creeping around in remote worlds that didn't have regular starship service. Of my own free will had I chosen to go to Mulano. Now, of my own free will-more or less-did I choose to return, and the only way to get back was by relay-sweep, and so be it. I would simply be patient until my patience was exhausted, and then I would find some more patience somewhere. As it happened, I was lucky this time.
I braced myself for the long haul and muttered a bahtalo drom for myself, and off I went. I took a deep breath as the stars winked out all around me and I dropped into auxiliary space. And in that gray dreary nowhereness I sang and told myself jokes and laughed loud enough to bend the walls of my sphere. I recited the whole Rom Swatura from beginning to end, the entire ancient chronicle starting with the departure from Romany Star and running through all that had followed it; and when I ran out of that I dreamed up a fanciful continuation of it that stretched over the next ten thousand years that are to come. I made a poem out of the names of all the Kings of the Rom spelled backwards. I drew up lists of all the other kings and emperors I could think of out of Earth history. I made a list of every woman whose breasts had ever felt the touch of my hands. Oh, yes, I passed the time.