“Thank you, sir, but I must go up to my home,” Smith sang out. “It was kind of you to give me a ride along the way.”
“I’m leaving you, Smith. One crazy man is better than two.”
“Ashava, Sarishan,” Smith called a parting.
“Smith, unriddle me one last thing,” Rockwell called, trying to find a piece of sanity to hold to. “What is the name of the seventh sister?”
“Deep Romany,” Smith sang, and he was gone up into the high plateau that had always been a mirage.
In an upper room on Olive Street in St. Louis, Missouri, a half-and-half couple were talking half-and-half.
“The rez has riser’d,” the man said. “I can sung it like brishindo. Let’s jal.”
“All right,” the wife said, “if you’re awa.”
“Hell, I bet I can riker plenty bano on the beda we got here. I’ll have kakko come kinna it aro.”
“With a little bachi we can be jal’d by areat,” said the wife.
“Nashiva, woman, nashiva!”
“All right,” the wife said, and she began to pack their suitcases.
In Camargo in the Chihuahua State of Mexico, a shade-tree mechanic sold his business for a hundred pesos and told his wife to pack up—they were leaving.
“To leave now when business is so good?” she asked.
“I only got one car to fix and I can’t fix that,” the man said.
“But if you keep it long enough, he will pay you to put it together again even if it isn’t fixed. That’s what he did last time. And you’ve a horse to shoe.”
“I’m afraid of that horse. It has come back, though. Let’s go.”
“Are you sure we will be able to find it?”
“Of course I’m not sure. We will go in our wagon and our sick horse will pull it.”
“Why will we go in the wagon, when we have a car, of sorts?”
“I don’t know why. But we will go in the wagon, and we will nail the old giant horseshoe up on the lintel board.”
A carny in Nebraska lifted his head and smelled the air.
“It’s come back,” he said. “I always knew we’d know. Any other Romanies here?”
“I got a little rart in me,” said one of his fellows. “This narvelengero dives is only a two-bit carnival anyhow. We’ll tell the boss to shove it up his chev and we’ll be gone.”
In Tulsa, a used-car dealer named Gypsy Red announced the hottest sale on the row:
“Everything for nothing! I’m leaving. Pick up the papers and drive them off. Nine new heaps and thirty good ones. All free.”
“You think we’re crazy?” the people asked. “There’s a catch.”
Red put the papers for all the cars on the ground and put a brick on top of them. He got in the worst car on the lot and drove it off forever.
“All free,” he sang out as he drove off. “Pick up the papers and drive the cars away.”
They’re still there. You think people are crazy to fall for something like that that probably has a catch to it?
In Galveston a barmaid named Margaret was asking merchant seamen how best to get passage to Karachi.
“Why Karachi?” one of them asked her.
“I thought it would be the nearest big port,” she said. “It’s come back, you know.”
“I kind of felt this morning it had come back,” he said. “I’m a chal myself. Sure, we’ll find something going that way.”
In thousands of places fawney-men and dukkerin-women, kakki-baskros and hegedusies, clowns and commission men, Counts of Condom and Dukes of Little Egypt parvel’d in their chips and got ready to roll.
Men and families made sudden decisions in every country. Athinganoi gathered in the hills above Salonika in Greece and were joined by brothers from Serbia and Albania and the Rhodope Hills of Bulgaria. Zingari of north Italy gathered around Pavia and began to roll toward Genoa to take ship. Boêmios of Portugal came down to Porto and Lisbon. Gitanos of Andalusia and all southern Spain came to Sanlúcar and Málaga. Zigeuner from Thuringia and Hanover thronged to Hamburg to find ocean passage. Gioboga and their mixed-blood Shelta cousins from every cnoc and coill of Ireland found boats at Dublin and Limerick and Bantry.
From deeper Europe, Tsigani began to travel overland eastward. The people were going from two hundred ports of every continent and over a thousand highroads—many of them long forgotten.
Balauros, Kalo, Manusch, Melelo, Tsigani, Moro, Romani, Flamenco, Sinto, Cicara, the many-named people was traveling in its thousands. The Romani Rai was moving.
Two million Gypsies of the world were going home.
At the institute, Gregory Smirnov was talking to his friends and associates.
“You remember the thesis I presented several years ago,” he said, “that, a little over a thousand years ago, Outer Visitors came down to Earth and took a sliver of our Earth away with them. All of you found the proposition comical, but I arrived at my conclusion by isostatic and eustatic analysis carried out minutely. There is no doubt that it happened.”
“One of our slivers is missing,” said Aloysius Shiplap. “You guessed the sliver taken at about ten thousand square miles in area and no more than a mile thick at its greatest. You said you thought they wanted to run this sliver from our Earth through their laboratories as a sample. Do you have something new on our missing sliver?”
“I’m closing the inquiry,” Gregory said. “They’ve brought it back.”
It was simple really, jekvasteskero, Gypsy-simple. It is the gadjo, the non-Gypsies of the world, who give complicated answers to simple things.
“They came and took our country away from us,” the Gypsies had always said, and that is what had happened.
The Outer Visitors had run a slip under it, rocked it gently to rid it of nervous fauna, and then taken it away for study. For a marker, they left an immaterial simulacrum of that high country as we ourselves sometimes set name or picture tags to show where an object will be set later. This simulacrum was often seen by humans as a mirage.
The Outer Visitors also set simulacra in the minds of the superior fauna that fled from the moving land. This would be a homing instinct, inhibiting permanent settlement anywhere until the time should come for the resettlement; entwined with this instinct were certain premonitions, fortune-showings, and understandings.
Now the Visitors brought the slice of land back, and its old fauna homed in on it.
“What will the—ah—patronizing smile on my part—Outer Visitors do now, Gregory?” Aloysius Shiplap asked back at the Institute.
“Why, take another sliver of our Earth to study, I suppose, Aloysius,” Gregory Smirnov said.
Low-intensity earthquakes rocked the Los Angeles area for three days. The entire area was evacuated of people. Then there was a great whistle blast from the sky as if to say, “All ashore that’s going ashore.”