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interest; it was simply that it seemed more important for me to remain rooted in present time here than it did to cut myself loose and go floating through other epochs. But that didn't mean that other epochs wouldn't go floating through me. There's no escaping the past. Either you ghost it or it ghosts you; and that night in the sudden dazzle of the aurora the walls of time swung back and a million yesterdays engulfed me in a wild crimson surge.
    "Are you all right, Yakoub?" I heard the boy saying, far away. "Yakoub? Yakoub?"
    The blue pearl of old Earth hung suddenly in the midst of a deafening hush of pure silence between one sun and the other. It was the only quiet thing in that noisy sky but once it appeared I wasn't able to look at anything else. Even when it existed Earth must have been far from the most beautiful planet in the universe, but seeing it appearing now out of nowhere in all its ancient cool blueness was so wonderful that the sight of it held me in an unbreakable grip.
    "What do you see, Yakoub? What's there?"
    It wasn't really Earth, of course. It was just Earth's ghost. You think it's only the ghosts of people that go wandering around the continuum? Planets have ghosts too. The difference is that people-ghosts can go only one way in time, from front to back, but planet-ghosts can move either way. Earth lay a thousand years away, but here it was reaching out for me across half the galaxy. It was like a special gift. For me, only for me.
    "Hey," I said. "Hey, Earth! Earth, look here! It's me, Yakoub! Here I am! I'm who you came here to visit, you Earth!"
    This was magic. I forgot all about Chorian. I laughed and waved to that dazzling blue planet up there, and put my arms high overhead and shook my fists into the blazing sky, and burst out onto the ice-field and began to dance and caper. And sang Rom songs of love to the Earth at the top of my lungs with my head thrown back and my shoulders high.
    Maybe that seems strange to you. Why should I give even half a damn for Earth? I wasn't born there and I had never lived there and in fact I had never even really seen the place. How could I have? It perished long before my time. I had ghosted it often enough but there was no way I could have visited it in the flesh.
    Yet I loved it, in a peculiar way.
    Consider that Earth was our second mother, and don't ever forget that: a harsh mother but one who shaped us well. Romany Star may have given us birth but it was Earth that was our shaping-place, the forge in which we were tempered. For us Earth was a miserable place of exile, and maybe we should have hated it for that; but how could we hate the place that had made us strong? On Earth we were made fit for the life we now lead as we voyage among the stars. So I sang to it and danced to it and cried out my love to it, to that ghostly blue world, separated from me by centuries, hanging there in silence between those two alien suns. "Here I am," I yelled. "Me, Yakoub. You remember me?"
    "You can see Earth !" Chorian whispered. I could barely see him, he seemed so far away. But I saw his eyes. They were shining. "Where is it? Show it to me, Yakoub!"
    I saw Earth and I saw much more. It was all flooding upon me at once. I was a boy-slave again, swimming for my life through the warm living mud of Megalo Kastro and feeling an entire planet pulse and throb against my bare legs and belly. And then I was at the controls of my starship, feeling the energy of the cosmos shuddering through me and taking it and focusing it and hurling it back, and sending the great shining vessel leaping across the light-years. And then I was standing at the kinging-session of the great kris on Galgala, the high hall of judgment where destinies are decreed, looking down at the nine solemn krisatora of the Rom, the judges who hold the reins of the universe in their hands. They were offering me the kingship, for Cesaro o Nano who had been king had died; and I was refusing it. And then one by one they