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strong handsome fellow of the tribe with more vanity than brains and we would jump him up to be King of the Gypsies and he would stride around waving and nodding and smiling, and the Gaje would be tremendously impressed. They paid good money to watch the coronation feast, and paid money again to take pictures of us dancing and singing in our quaint tribal costumes, and while all that was going on we moved among them and picked their pockets besides, not because we were criminals at heart but simply to punish them for their silliness. And the Gaje went away feeling pleased with themselves because they had seen the coronation of the new Gypsy king. And then we also went on our way and nobody among us gave another thought to King Karbaro again. But the Gaje continued to believe that we were the subjects of a supreme ruler whose powers were absolute and whose commands traveled mysteriously across the world by secret couriers.
    Eventually came a time when they stopped believing it. This was in the twentieth or perhaps the twenty-first century, when all knowledge became available at the push of a button and every jackass began to think that he knew everything.
    This is the modern world, all the jackasses told each other solemnly. And they all felt very proud of themselves for living in the modern world. Nobody was ignorant any more, nobody was superstitious, nobody could be fooled by glib mumbo-jumbo. Among the things that everybody knew now was that there never had been such a thing as a Gypsy king, that the whole notion was nothing but a hoax, one of the innumerable frauds that those wandering rogues the Gypsies had dreamed up to confuse and delude the poor credulous yokels on whom they preyed.
    Not only did those well-informed people who lived in the modern world stop believing in the King of the Gypsies, I think they stopped believing in Gypsies altogether. There was no room in that shiny modern world of theirs for Gypsies. Gypsies were ragged and unkempt and untamable; Gypsies were unpredictable; Gypsies were simply an untidy concept.
    So they began to think we were extinct. That we were mere antiquarian folklore, the raggle-taggle Gypsies, O! Oh, yes, there had been Gypsies once upon a time, yes, the way there had been smallpox and public hangings and bitter wars over religion; but all that was done with now. This was the modern world, after all. The Gypsies, they said, have all settled down in ordinary houses and married ordinary people and live ordinary lives. They vote and pay taxes and go to church and speak nothing but the language of the land. The Gypsies of old are all gone, swallowed up in modern civilization, they said. What a pity, they said, that the quaint old picturesque Gypsies are no more.
    And right about that time, when we had become all but invisible to the whole Gaje society because we had come to seem to belong to it, when we had vanished clear out of sight-that was the time when we understood that we needed to organize ourselves properly and come forth as a true nation. That was when we really did begin to form our Gypsy government-no fantasy, this time, but the genuine item-and elect our first real Gypsy kings.
    We had to. Invisibility has its advantages, but sometimes it can be a drawback. The world was changing very fast. Those were the years when the Gaje first were starting to leave their little Earth and go off to nearby planets. Before long, we knew, they would be voyaging to the stars. If we stayed invisible we would be left behind. So we had to emerge from our Gaje camouflage. In that lay our only hope of getting home again. Earth was not our home, though we had never dared tell the Gaje that; our true home was far away, and the one thing we longed for was to return to it and give up our wandering life at last.
    So it came to pass that we began to have kings. That was a thousand years ago, on Earth, in the earliest days of star travel, before anyone knew that we would be the ones to lead mankind