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made the sign of kingship at me again until I was bowed down under the ninefold weight of their force, which was the collective will of all my people since the beginning of time, and I nodded and knelt to them, and then they knelt to me, and I was king. As the old woman had said I would be, the withered and wrinkled phuri dai who had come to me with magical words when I was hardly out of my cradle.
    And now, still caught in visions, I was at my estate by the shore of the gentlest of the oceans of Xamur, which I think is the most beautiful of the nine kingly planets. But this must have been earlier, before I was king, because my son Shandor stood before me, the first of my sons and the one I loved best, and he was only a little child. There was defiance in Shandor's eyes. He had done something forbidden, and I had spoken with him, and now they had brought him to me and they said that he had done it again. I hit him and the mark of my hand sprang up on his cheek and still he defied me, and I hit him again. He looked to be eight, nine, maybe ten years old. I loved him terribly then, God only knows why. I raised my hand to him a third time. "Stop," someone said, and I said, "No, not yet." And they said, "He's only a child, Yakoub," and I said, hitting him again, "I have two things to teach him. One is to respect the Law, and the other is to feel no fear. So I hit him to prevent him from being lawless, and I hit him to keep him from becoming a coward." And I saw anger and love in Shandor's eyes, which was what I felt for him. So I hit him again and this time blood ran from his lip.
    And the blood was the color of the hot sea that bathes the shores of Nabomba Zom. The palace of Loiza la Vakako was there, who was more than a father to me, though he never once lifted his hand against me. We stood side by side in the red surf under the stupefying thunder of the great blue sun of Nabomba Zom and Loiza la Vakako said to me, "You know, Yakoub, that every Rom is given two lives, one in which you live as you please and make as many mistakes as you care to make, and then a second in which it is your task to atone for the errors of your first life." And I laughed and said, "I'll try to remember that, father, when I enter my second life." But the sly face of Loiza la Vakako turned solemn and dark and he said to me, "This is your second life, Yakoub." That was just before I was taken by force from Nabomba Zom and sold into slavery the second time, to suffer like a miserable frog in the terrible tunnels of Alta Hannalanna. It was on Alta Hannalanna that I first felt the sting of the sensory-whip lash my forebrain, which nearly ended me before I had fairly begun. I saw the overmaster again raise the whip now, and swirls of yellow force blared in the heavens, and I rushed toward him and took the whip from him, saying, "Now the blood of your soul will flow." For there are many kinds of blood and I have seen them all.
    There was no end to it. All my wives marched in a vision before me, the ones that I loved and the ones I did not, Esmeralda and Mimi and Isabella and Micaela and also some others that I have pretty well forgotten, and some women that were never my wives but through no fault of my own. I embraced my lost Malilini again, my first true sweet love. And Mona Elena, my forbidden Gaje woman. And golden faithless Syluise. Friends came and I threw my arms around them, Polarca, Valerian, Biznaga. A hundred alien landscapes danced in my brain. Worlds with rings in the sky, worlds with many suns, worlds with none. My God, what a vision it was! I had a hundred seventy-two years of ghosts in me and they were all on a rampage at once. Like a good Rom I have been everywhere and seen everything and it all lives in me, and it all is happening at the same instant, for such words as "past" and "present" and "future" are mere Gaje foolishness, really. All there is is now. Now I stare at the auroras sizzling in the sky over Mulano and now I walk the