Read Online Star of Gypsies by Robert Silverberg - Free Book Online

making her nest on the highest battlement of the Great Temple. Then the woman's voice crying the mourning-song in the night, which we heard in every city at once; and then the wind that blew from the south, where the dead souls go to live, and would not stop for fourteen months. And other omens after that: a year when there was no summer, and a day when the sun did not rise, and a night when no stars could be seen anywhere in the world.
    We had no way of understanding these omens, for we had known nothing but happiness on Romany Star. There had never been a drought, nor an earthquake, nor a flood, nor a plague. The seasons came round in their time and the earth was fertile. There was no sickness among us, and when death came to us it was sudden and clean, in great old age. So when the omens began the call went forth for wise ones who could interpret them for us; and from every part of the world the wise ones came, gathering in the great plaza of the capital city. For ninety-nine months they conferred and studied and asked the gods for guidance. Then in the hundredth month the king locked them all in the Long Chamber of the Great Temple, and let them know that they would have neither food nor drink until they told us what was about to befall us and how we should deal with it; and there was no word from them for ninety-nine hours, but in the hundredth hour they signalled that they had been granted a revelation, and then they were allowed to come forth.
    Our sweet Romany Star, they declared, has resolved to cast us forth into the universe to make our own way, and there is no use weeping or wailing or praying, for the time is short and swift action must be taken.
    A change, they said, will soon come upon the sun who is our mother. She will swell and grow huge, and in place of her warm life-giving red glow there will come a savage blaze of blue light bearing terrible heat that no living thing can withstand. In one monstrous murderous noontime, the wise ones told us, deadly fire will march across the fields and meadows, the mountains and valleys, the cities and the plains. The world will turn black and the seas will boil and all life will end on Romany Star. And then the sun will subside as swiftly as she had erupted, and her gentle red light will return, but now it will fall on the charred and shattered ruin of our dear world.
    At once there was weeping and there was wailing and there was praying, and the people cried out to the king to save them; and the king said, "This is something that is fated to come upon us, and we can do nothing to prevent it. But there is one way to save ourselves." And the king proposed that we build as many spacegoing ships as we could, and fill them with people and animals and plants and all the treasures of our world, and go forth into the Great Dark with them and wait out there until the cataclysm had run its course; and then we could return to Romany Star and rebuild our life there. So the weeping ceased, and the wailing and the praying; and the building of the ships commenced. But very soon it became clear that we could not possibly build enough of them. For the time of the cataclysm was almost upon us, and we had hardly enough ships to bear one person in a thousand into space. And then came news that was even worse: that there would be not one swelling of the sun but three, during the course of the next ten thousand years, so there was no point in trying to return to Romany Star; whatever we might rebuild would only be destroyed once more in the next swelling, and again in the one after that.
    So we knew that most of us would die and the rest of us were to be driven forth from our home to dwell a long time in exile. We could not understand why God had chosen to do this to us, but we knew that it was not our place to find reasons for the doings of God.
    "But only one in a thousand could go?" Chorian asked, horrified.
    "Not even as many as that," I said. "One in five thousand, perhaps. One in ten