Child of Fortune, by Norman Spinrad

Re: Child of Fortune, by Norman Spinrad

Postby admin » Sat Mar 19, 2016 6:03 am

Chapter 19

We both stood there for a long silent moment, beholding the celestial city on the hill, for the dense profusion of great flowers seemed to grow in organized groves, color by color, form by form, so that the huge garden seemed for all the world to be divided up into arrondissements, like a true city of men.

Indeed, I was put in mind of my first sight of Great Edoku seen from space, for while the Perfumed Garden was bathed all over by the same bright afternoon sunlight, the districts thereof were a mosaic of brilliantly contrasting facets of color, so that the whole took on the aspect of an impossible gem shimmering in all the hues of the rainbow, a vision of breathtakingly chaotic color, in which, nevertheless, an elusive order seemed to be implied. just below the level of conscious apprehension.

As for Bloomenkinder, while these could hardly have been individually visible from this far vantage, their presence seemed to reveal itself in a seething motion overlaid on the vision, a wavering of the whole image like that of an overcomplicated mandala one has stared at in a toxicated state for too long.

So too could I hear the collective human mantra of the unseen and yet seen denizens thereof, for the air hummed with a faint celestial vibration, an ethereal wordless song emanating from unknown hundreds of distant human voices all harmonizing on the same single note, a note which sent my spirit soaring, a siren Om of paradise, which had my feet inching forward, and my hands beginning to move toward my mask.

Guy stood there beside me with his head bent back, and his nose in the air, and a beatific smile beaming from his face, and his eyes squeezed shut to better savor the perfumes, like a small boy inhaling the aroma of the most wonderful bakery .

Alors, if my spirit had all but been captured from afar by sight and sound alone, what must he be feeling now?

"Guy ...? Guy ...? Talk to me, Guy, tell me what it is that you smell on the wind!"

His eyelids peeled open, and he half-turned his head to face me. But his eyes seemed as clear and vacant as those of a Bloomenkind, and his nostrils continued to flare around long, deep draughts of perfumed air.

"The Perfumed Garden ..." said that eerie dybbuk voice. "My Perfumed Garden," said Guy Vlad Boca, albeit in a voice that seemed to speak as an echo, as a memory he had already let go, dopplering away to extinction down the corridors of time. Logic should have filled me with terror, but Guy had taken my hand in his, and his voice, in perfect tonal harmony with the distant hum of the Perfumed Garden's mantra, insisted that there was nothing here for us to fear, that we were only going home.

"Come ... come ... come home ..." Guy chanted, as if he, or some forest spirit, or vraiment both, had read my thoughts, or indeed as if his thoughts, and mine, and the voice of that spirit, were but notes of the same transcendent mantric chord.

And then without further rational thought, I found myself bounding hand in hand with Guy in great leaps toward the Perfumed Garden, like moths to a flame, like motes of dust rising up a great shaft of golden light to greet the sun.

***

Nor did we pause for a moment until we stood as groundling insects at the base of that mighty floral metropolis.

Groves and hedges of brilliantly colored flowers rose up the gentle slope of the great treecrown before me to fill the world. And I beheld multitudes of my own kind buzzing and dancing about them like an ecstatic swarm of bees on a midsummer's mother lode of floral beneficence.

A vast multitude of Bloomenkinder, a golden citizenry of naked and physically splendid humans, enlivened the avenues and groves of this city of the flowers with their recomplicated and utterly graceful pavane. They dined at great floral banquets, they slumbered in municipal parks, they engaged in arcane civic activity impossible to fathom at this remove, they sauntered in streams along the avenues between the flowers like gay boulevardiers, and all with a choreographed perfection of motion and timing which would have done any maestro of the dance proud.

But while the resemblance to the buzzings and scurryings of bees was given the lie by the way the Bloomenkinder made art of every motion with all the style and grace appropriate to our mammalian species and then some, when it came to the collective mantra of a beehive, the metaphor was far closer to the sensual and spiritual reality.

For the mighty wordless human song that filled the world, like the buzzing of a million bees, was indeed a collective mantric chorus that vibrated to the spiritual and genetic wavelength of its own species. Mayhap this soul-stirring thrum of human joy might have been a mere drone of monotony to an apiary ear, just as in the buzz of the bees we hear nothing but the dead hiss of insectoid static. But just as the buzzing bees must hear the song of their spirit in the voices of their fellows, so did this mighty mantra of the collective human spirit draw my singularity toward union with the chorus of the whole.

Indeed I found myself humming that mantra under my breath from somewhere deep in the depths of my throat, and it seemed as if my very bones were vibrating to its harmony, and I became aware that Guy was singing it as well, his mouth wide open in a radiant smile, the sound pouring up through him in a single mighty tone, that selfsame tone which had resonated in the voice which had first spoken through him the day before, and which now seemed to speak to my own soul.

"Ah ... ah ... ah ... om ... ah ... ah ... ah ... home ..."

I turned to Guy with my own blissful smile. Slowly, his face turned itself toward me, so that I could see upon it the mirror of my own joy. I squeezed his hand. "Oh Guy, " I said softly, "I just didn't know ..."

Guy seemed to look into my eyes for a long moment, and it seemed as if several spirits were regarding me from the endless depths of his. The gay Child of Fortune whose wit had won me on the streets of Great Edoku, the Merchant Prince who had lavishly rescued me from penury, the deeper and darker Guy who had emerged psychotropically on the Unicorn Garden, the nascent Charge Addict, the obsessed and intrepid psychonaut of the Bloomenveldt, the creature who had made love to me last night in the forest, they were all there behind his eyes, they were all at peace with each other, they were all one, and in that moment, vraiment, did I find it in my heart to love them all.

And so hand in hand, two hearts beating as one, two spirits humming the same glorious mantra, or so at the time it seemed, did two no longer lost children of man enter their Perfumed Garden.

**

We walked in dazzlement down the aisles of great flowers, through a living kaleidoscope of brilliant colors and achingly lovely pastel shadows, for the very air within the Perfumed Garden was suffused and romanced by the bright sunlight streaming through thousands upon thousands of translucent petals, and at first I could only bathe myself in the rainbow radiance and laugh in delight.

But soon enough I perceived that we promenaded among throngs of stately Bloomenkinder like grimy ducklings among serene and impassive snow-white swans gliding in a recomplicated pavane about the surface of an untrammeled pond. Everywhere I looked, I saw perfected exemplars of my own species moving with the balletic fluidity of creatures whose movements are governed entirely by the natural imperatives of the laws of motion, following their destined trajectories with innocently perfect grace.

Was not Guy the wiser spirit after all? For was not my every sense filled with overwhelming beauty save that which tasted the air? And if I dared doff my mask and partake of that deepest communion, might I not too learn that here I had found my perfect flower? Of what use were struggle and travail and sapient dissatisfaction when with but a sigh of surrender one might transcend the maya thereof to a garden of perfect bliss?

Vraiment, mayhap I would have torn off my mask to inhale the timeless perfume of floral paradise without further moral struggle in the throes of this blissful satori, had I not then felt the insistent tug of Guy's hand in mine, and come out of my reverie to realize that he was already leading me toward a grove of blue and green speckled flowers.

Here a veritable horde of Bloomenkinder was consuming the yellow fruit, half again as large as a human head, which grew in profusion about the stalks. This they accomplished by deftly splitting the soft spheres in half with the sides of their hands and scooping the purple gelatinous pulp into their mouths with their cupped fingers. Without a word or a sign, Guy let go my hand and marched straight to the banquet of huge messy fruit.

He sank to his haunches forthwith and set to work in the manner of the surrounding swarm, with all their avidity for the luscious purple slime, but with little of their genetically perfected precision. When he struck the huge fruit to cleave it open, he mashed it into a disaster. The gelatinous pulp dribbled and spurted from his fingers as he then sought to shovel the remains into his mouth with both hands, and he seemed utterly indifferent to the fact that he was plastering the vile-looking purple goo all over his face and into the crown of his hair in the process. From both the esthetic and psychic viewpoints. it was truly a jolting and revolting spectacle.

Certainement it was more than enough to dissuade me from any temptation to breathe the seductive aroma of this vile succulence and be constrained to emulate the same thereby!

I hunkered down beside him and fairly shouted in his ear. "Guy! Guy! You're fressing like a swine! You're gobbling goo like a demented animal!"

He did not so much as raise his eyes from his fruit to acknowledge my existence and continued to scoop dripping handfuls of pulp into his slobbering mouth without even breaking rhythm, spattering me with gobbets of same in the process.

"Merde!" I snarled. "This is more than I can countenance!" I kicked the dripping mess of fruit from his hands. This at last penetrated the sphere of his attention. He slowly turned his head to peruse the source of this disturbance with vacantly blissful eyes, then turned away again, smashed open the nearest yellow fruit, and returned to his feeding ritual.

"Guy! Guy!" I shouted. "It's Sunshine! Don't you know me? Don't you even know I'm here?"

At this, he paused in his devouring devotions, and for a moment it seemed as if he were indeed aware of my presence, for as his head slowly looked upward from his meal, and he let the fruit fall from his fingers, it seemed for an augenblick that he was responding to my words. But no, alas, his eyes looked straight past me, and his nose went high in the air, and he arose to follow it without looking back.

***

Only now, unwilling as I yet was to essay the use of force, and constrained thereby to trail after a Guy who utterly ignored me on his grand tour of the Perfumed Garden, did the generality of perfection begin to resolve itself into some inspection of detail which hinted at the unseen Serpent therein.

Dozens of different species of flowers offered up a bewildering variety of fruits, pollens and nectars, not at isolated kiosks, but in whole groves thronged with avid Bloomenkinder gobbling up the produce like flocks of birds descending upon orchards.

Whole precincts of flowers were given over to slumber. Great naked shoals of Bloomenkinder lay sprawled all over the acres of velveteen petals provided, dreaming I knew not what in the bright clear light of day, and appearing for all the world like the exhausted yet tranquil morning after some mighty communal orgy.

And then Guy's trajectory chanced to bring us past the nursery.

Here clusters of human infants hung from the vegetal teats of a huge stand of rainbow-hued puffballs like so many berries, and others crawled about their leafy playpen within a ring of silent female Bloomenkinder who moved only when necessary to keep the toddlers from straying.

While a single Bloomenkind lay supine and utterly silent on a leaf near the edge of the grove in the act of giving birth.

She seemed entranced into a semiconscious state of dreamy ecstasy, wherein her protoplasmic mechanisms were nevertheless performing their functions in an exemplary manner that would have done the best of Healers proud. Her breaths were deep and regular in the approved rhythm and every muscle in her body was perfectly attuned to maximize the efficacy of her contractions. When after a short and entirely silent labor, the infant emerged, the mother started its breath with her own, bit off the umbilical cord at the navel, methodically licked the baby clean, and then straightway affixed its tiny mouth to the nearest free floral nipple. She then began to devour the afterbirth, a process which at last forced me to avert my eyes.

Now I truly beheld the Serpent lurking in the Garden, the price one paid for hearkening to its sweet promises of symbiotic perfection.

For if this was a paradise designed for man by the flowers, it was a version crafted by the indifferent, cold hand of the Bloomenveldt, not the warm-blooded mammalian spirit, which is to say it was a floral vision of the perfected pollinator known elsewhere to himself as man.

Not even the love of a mother for her newborn babe was permitted to mar this floral vision of paradise, for from the point of view of the flowers, the highest form of pollinator society, naturellement, was not a perfect commonwealth of sapiently enlightened human hearts, but the pheromonically predictable perfection of a human hive.

"Merde, Guy, we must quit this place forthwith!" I shouted, and once more I was tantalized by the illusion that I had reached what was left of the natural man, for, without demur, he took a deep breath, smiled at me in blissful harmony, and straightaway seemed to march off on a purposeful new vector.

But rather than the nearest egress from this vile venue, he made straight for an extensive orchard of tall blue flowers, where whole congregations of Bloomenkinder sat, each to their own flower, like a great swarm of buddhas in a forest of bo trees. There they sat like idols, staring fixedly up into the cerulean void, and chanting the booming mantra that was both the incarnated voice of the Bloomenveldt manifested in human throats and the Bloomenkinder's paean of homage to the perfect and mindless spirit thereof.

Certainement this song which called to the very protoplasm from which my psyche arose was the most horrid floral simulacrum of all, for this noble mantra of the human spirit was now revealed as no more than the chorus of the genes, no more than the empty-minded buzzing of mammalian bees.

And Guy Vlad Boca let fall my hand, in thrall to that Bloomenkinder chorus, gracefully seating himself in the lotus position under the nearest unoccupied flower and proceeding to gaze into the clear blue nothingness of the Bloomenveldt sky as he merged his lonely and precious singularity into the nirvanic voice of the All.

At the time, I could imagine no more terminal straits than this, I had no further belief that any unaided words of mine could summon his sapience forth. I had no further recourse but to main force, and certainement this was no time to eschew the most puissant power at my command.

Which is to say the only possible path to the spirit within this beatified corpus was via the route of the natural man. I therefore activated the Touch and applied it where it was likely to do the most good.

When it came to the flesh, the art of Leonardo produced the limpest of results, for no doubt the hormonal matrix of erotic interest must exist before the kundalinic serpent can be aroused to uncoil via electronic stimulation of the software of manhood.

But if pheromonic imperatives controlled the biochemistry of his brain to the point where tantric arousal was out of the question, the nerve trunk that led from the phallus to the centers of most primal awareness was at least still connected to what was left of the elan humain of Guy Vlad Boca.

Which is to say that, while that which I grasped remained flaccid, Guy's face began to surface the evidence of some ambiguity between chemical and electronic stimuli as he regarded me now. His eyes struggled toward recognition. His lips began to move tentatively around the single mantric syllable they were mouthing.

"Yes, Guy, yes, say something, say something," I fairly begged, tugging imploringly at his phallus, "tell me at least that you are still there."

And then as he sat there motionless among all those Bloomenkinder bodhis. his head turned almost imperceptibly, and he seemed to be smiling straight at me, and his eyes met mine, and his mouth fashioned that continuous stream of monotone arising through it into the single word that could allow in that moment the singular sprach of Guy Vlad Boca to speak from within the mantric Lingo of the eternal empty All.

"Ah ... ah ... ah ... amused."

I all but burst into tears to hear this, tears of both sorrow and fond remembrance, for here I beheld both my lover and my lost comrade, the gay spirit I had met on the streets of Edoku and the psychotropically-obsessed creature of Ciudad Pallas, the mystic libertine and the Bloomenkind he had become, at the end point of the vector all those avatars had been so avidly pursuing, speaking to me in the voice of the forest of the final joy that now filled his heart --

Yet the tears came not, for at least I had roused some poor semblance of the natural man, mayhap all was not yet lost.

"What amuses you, Guy?" I said, cooing softly in his ear, kneading his flaccid lingam in a pulsing rhythm, as if to pump cleansing kundalinic energies up from the deepest root of his manhood to do battle with the chemical minions of the Bloomenveldt spirit investing his brain.

His eyes gazed directly into mine now, and there was no mistaking that someone or something knew that I was there. Vraiment I could feel some vague stirrings in his phallus now, as if the manly serpent were beginning to uncoil in its sleep.

"I ... we ... amused ..." he said in a quavering voice, as if more than one animating spirit were attempting to use the same lips.

"Speak to me, Guy Vlad Boca," I demanded softly, redoubling my electronically-enhanced ministrations. "Let the natural man once more arise."

"Sunshine ..." he said quite clearly. "My mystic libertine ... sip steadily at it as you gambol through your perfect flower ..."

"Guy, Guy, it is you!" I cried.

"Never before or since have I known such perfect bliss ... Seek the Perfumed Garden ... Let the mountain come to thee Mohammed ..."

Was it indeed no more than fragmented memory speaking? Certainement, his phallus began to slowly fill with the life juices of manhood, certainement, he had given over his mantric chanting, certainement, our eyes were locked in unwavering rapport, which is to say that whatever now spoke through those random syllables, be it a true lover waving his last goodbye or a dybbuk of the Enchanted Forest, tell me not that it did not speak for me.

"Guy, listen to me, Guy, come with me," I said as seductively as I could under the circumstances, drawing him slowly and gently to his feet by the handle of his manhood. Vraiment, I met with anything but resistance, for his eyes gazed into mine with a meaning whose frank intent would seem to be made quite firmly plain by his now quite thoroughly aroused lingam.

Mayhap I could lead him from the Perfumed Garden by this lever, for certainly it would not be the first time masculine obstinacy had been overcome in this manner. And once I had gotten him to a leafy venue well away from floral influences, mayhap the natural union of lingam and yoni would bring the natural man to his senses.

"Ah ... ah ... ah ... amuse ..." he moaned in a deep hollow voice, at once the Bloomenveldt's floral mantra and the frankest profession of entirely mammalian joy, for his eyes closed in ecstasy, and his lungs inhaled in long priapic pants, and he moved his throbbing phallus back and forth in an unmistakable rhythm within the embrace of my hand.

"Oh yes, Guy," I babbled rapidly, "let us quit this place for a secluded venue and we will show each other the amusements proper to a natural man and woman and then some, this I promise you ..."

Und so weiter, just to keep his ears filled constantly with the sound of human Lingo, as I managed to lead him in this obscene manner from the greater obscenity of the mantric grove.

But once we had cleared the immediate pheromonic influences thereof and entered the dance of the Bloomenkinder down the floral avenue, Guy, or that to which his spirit moved, sought out his own vector, breathing in great silent draughts of perfumed air now, rolling his eyes in ecstasy, and now it was I who was constrained to follow the course set by his lingam, which all but threatened to writhe like an impatient serpent out of my hand.

Since in truth I had no idea where I was at the time, one direction would be as efficacious as any other, so if Guy wished to lead me to a boudoir of his own choosing, I could see nothing for it but to follow the path of least resistance. Vraiment, when I let Guy proceed along his chosen path, he readily enough allowed me to clasp an arm around his waist in proper loverly style the better to keep hold of his lingam, and my female sensibility did not exactly have to be tuned to a fever pitch to know it had hold of the natural man.

"Where are we going, Guy? And what do you intend to do when we get there?" I asked him, summoning up an incongruous air of erotic playfulness with a mighty act of will.

He paused, he turned to me, he favored me with a smile of blindingly radiant lust. And then his hand found my yoni, fondling it with a frank avidity that set my heart and hopes soaring, and I let go of his lingam so that I might throw both arms around his neck and plant a joyous kiss on his lips.

But Guy, forcefully eschewing this attempt at loverly embrace, brushed my arms aside, and, gazing fixedly over my shoulder, pulled me to him, and attempted to thrust his lingam into my yoni through the intervening cloth.

I whirled myself out of this animalistic embrace, and then it was that I saw that without my knowing it, we had reached the venue of his intent.

The Perfumed Garden path which we had been following had debouched into a grotesque floral amphitheater where low mounded Bloomenveldt hillsides almost entirely surrounded a vast central grove. And around the hillsides grew bed after bed of tan blue flowers. Under the flowers, swarm after swarm of Bloomenkinder bodhis sat, humming the eternal booming mantra of the Enchanted Forest, hundreds upon hundreds of mammalian bees in a nirvanic paean of glory to the blissful nothingness of the hive.

The flowers of the vast central grove were the rosy pink color of a lover's naked body by firelight, and their fat velvety petals lolled out on the surrounding leaves like a carpet of tongues.

Upon these fleshy cushions a vast seraglio of copulations was taking place, hundreds of interlocked bodies coupled and recoupled in tantric figures of such lithe sinuosity and perfect ecstatic abandon as to have put a temple frieze of fabled Hind to shame. It was almost more than the eye could credit or the ear comprehend. Yonis, lingams, indeed every conceivable erotic orifice and protuberance, united and recombined in a vast and sinuous collective motion, spurred on in their extravagant copulations by continuous sighing breakers of orgasm cresting and rising on the surface of the fleshly sea.

But rather than stirring my passions, such a spectacle doused my kundalinic fires with an icy hand round my heart.

Certainement, as a tantric tableau, there was nothing lacking in the way of artistic perfection. Each and every performer was a paragon of the human body's form, and the recomplicated figures were done with a flawless grace and egoless sincerity beyond that which even after years of study perfect masters of the art attain,

But I would have been more aroused by the sight of the breeding season in a primate preserve. For at least at a primate preserve I would have been observing creatures copulating in the style appropriate to their kind. Here, au contraire, I beheld the intimate communion of the tantra reduced to mindless tropism. Here were my ears filled with the buzz of the human hive melded in solipsistic harmony with the moans and sighs of an eternal tantric cusp.

Thus might it have been in our ancestral Eden, but so too will it become should sapience expire from our far-flung worlds, leaving only the indifferent nothingness from whence we came behind to sing its empty and triumphant song.

But Guy Vlad Boca had long since become incapable of such distinctions between form and spirit, between pheromonic imperatives and the human heart. He was flinging off his pack and tearing off his clothing, ripping the straps of his filter mask from around his neck and tossing his last sapient hope aside, and then he was upon me, thrusting his insistent lingam against my yoni, attempting to breach my citadel and prod me with it toward the venue of pheromonic rut at the same time.

I pushed him away with a mighty shove, he stumbled a few steps backward, and then righted himself, at which point he paid me no further heed, dashing around me as if I were a natural obstacle, and flinging himself into the midst of the breeding ground.

Whereupon he forthwith seized up the nearest female in his embrace, who avidly impaled herself on his throbbing phallus, even as another impaled her from the rear, and then he was tumbling and rolling away from me into the vile melee, lending his own voice to the moans and the cries, enveloped in an arabesque sinuosity of torsos and limbs.

Needless to say, this was more than any fear or rational consideration could constrain me to condone! Snarling with outrage, I reached out for Guy with my hand of Touch, and succeeded in grabbing the nether root of his lingam, seeking to remove it from the Bloomenkinde's yoni and Guy from his madness.

But instead of yanking Guy back into human reality by his manhood as I had intended, I only succeeded in sending a shockwave of tantric amplification heterodyning across the cross- connected erotic figure. Ecstatic cries rose into a shrill and insistent chorus, and bodies writhed and spasmed in spreading chain-reactions of orgasm. And dozens of hands were dragging me deeper into the fray. I stumbled and fell, and Guy was torn from my grasp, and I was battered and pulled this way and that, while phalluses prodded at every part of my body, and it took all of my strength just to keep from being drawn under by a riptide of flesh.

I lost sight of Guy entirely, indeed all thought of him left my mind as, in the midst of this rape most foul, I struck out in rage and terror, attempting for the first time if without much skill in the martial art thereof to use the Touch as a weapon.

I had never before been in a physical conflict in my life, and now I found myself fighting off a riotous obscenity of mass sexual overload which I myself had unknowingly triggered. But for every blow that I managed to land in the region of a painful plexus, another always seemed to strike a tantric chakra, so that all my efforts to defend myself further exacerbated the endless legions of my attackers.

Then I felt my pack being torn from my back, and hands at my floatbelt, and fearing that this would go next, I did the only thing I could, turned it up to .19 lift, and attempted to free myself from my tormenters long enough to leap clear.

I succeeded in jumping clear of the ground, but my upward progress was impeded in midair by the press of bodies and the scrabblings of hands.

Then I felt myself being drawn back, down into the mire of bodies, and fingers were tearing randomly at my filter mask, and suddenly it was ripped away, and phalluses thrust forward from every direction toward every orifice, and I felt myself reaching for them with my hands and my yoni and my mouth as a knee-shaking tsunami of blind animal lust surged through my body --

As I felt my consciousness subliming into a blood-red mist of egoless libido, I had the last combat- torn and adrenaline-charged presence of mind to perform two valedictory acts of sapience before I passed over to the flowers.

I exhaled from the bottom of my lungs, and then stopped my breathing.

I struck out with vicious and electronically augmented karate blows, and kicked off some unknown portion of some unseen body with both of my feet.

As I soared free of the melee, something hit me in the stomach with wind-killing force, and I was constrained to suck in a great charge of pheromone-saturated air, and then something else smashed into my temple as I broke clear -- and I had one last moment of roaring red consciousness, scrabbling to reach the lingams and bodies receding beneath my ravenous grasp before even that lapsed into darkness.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Child of Fortune, by Norman Spinrad

Postby admin » Sat Mar 19, 2016 6:03 am

Chapter 20

I awoke to the gentlest of thumps as I floated down supinely onto a leaf, nudged back the last increment into consciousness by this most tender breaking of a most languid fall. The Perfumed Garden was nowhere in evidence, which is to say that my eyes opened and focused on naught but the endless flower-strewn green plain of the Bloomenveldt, nor had I chanced to descend near a Bloomenkinder village or even within the overpowering chemical aura of any flower.

Bonne chance indeed! Now I remembered leaping upward with my floatbelt turned up to .1 g, thrust out of a vile unspeakability whose details I was not ready to call up from beyond the veil of my present dreamy vagueness. There had been a wonderful surge of roaring lust, and a blow on the head ...

Slowly, my consciousness firmed up to the point where I began to understand what must have happened.

I had been rendered unconscious as the gentle lift of the floatbelt bore me aloft, and I must have drifted up higher and higher until the floatbelt's safety mechanism had automatically turned down the lift to prevent me from drifting up beyond the life-sustaining level of Belshazaar's atmosphere and then deposited me randomly on this leaf.

I must therefore have risen quite far, through several atmospheric streams, which must have blown me this way and that for unknowable distances, which is to say I had been thoroughly shaken by the cupped hands of fate and then tossed like a die back onto the gaming board of life.

And then I began to perceive that while the Perfumed Garden was nowhere in sight, it could not be said that its influence was completely absent from my sensorium. For as my memory regained the clarity of my restored vision, I remembered the frenzied tangle of naked limbs and torsos, the forest of clutching and groping hands, the thrusting clusters of phalluses, with a sad and longing nostalgia, knowing I had been an utter fool to abandon such an eternal ecstasy of perfect sexual delight.

Yet at the same time, higher portions of my mind remembered all too well that the real-time emotions encoded with these experiences had been those of outraged disgust and terrified anger.

Out of this disjunction between the true memory of the event and my present perception of same through a rosy haze of diffuse sexual arousal, arose yet a third aspect of my immediate consciousness, namely a detached observer who could readily comprehend that the difference must be the result of something borne on the wind.

Vraiment, as I sat up and began to size up the full extent of my dilemma, I knew that I could easily enough find my way back to paradise by surrendering my spirit to the rosy waves of this lustful tide, which, though fainter than the night breeze wafting the aroma of the Bittersweet Jungle down to the porch of my parents' manse in Nouvelle Orlean, would surely nevertheless carry a soul cast into its gentle undertow back home to floral nirvana.

As I fought against this dreamy desire, my awareness was sharpened by the adrenal surge of the struggle, and I began to fully comprehend the peril, not to say hopelessness, of my position.

My filter mask was gone and so was my pack. I had supplies of neither food nor water. I had lost my homing beacon. I was at an unknown locus deep in the interior of the Bloomenveldt, hundreds, or for all I knew, thousands of kilometers from the coast, at any rate a journey of weeks even at maximum speed along an unerringly perfect vector.

But in comparison to the peril that faced my spirit, the physical magnitude of such a trek faded into insignificance, for in order to survive, let alone escape from the land of the Bloomenkinder, I had no choice but to eat of the fruits and nectars and pollens of the Bloomenveldt, for no other sustenance was available. I would have sold my soul for a sack of fressen bars, for that might very well be the price extracted for the gustatory largesse of the flowers.

Worse still, unimaginably worse, I would have to journey for weeks across the Bloomenveldt with my lungs and my spirit naked to every pheromonic tropism wafted my way on its perfumed breezes.

Nor did my moral senses provide an unambiguous direction, for did not love and honor demand that I make all possible efforts to rescue Guy? Could I fairly call myself human if I fled to save my own spirit and left a fellow sapient being in mindless thrall to floral fascism?

Besides, would it not be easier and infinitely more pleasant, since surrender to the Bloomenveldt was in any case inevitable, to do so by returning to the Perfumed Garden and at least live in mindless bliss with my lover rather than as a lone lost Bloomenkind of the forest ...?

But I knew full well from whence this thought arose, and not even the perfumed whispers of the Bloomenveldt could persuade me that I had any hope of extracting Guy from its bosom unaided.

I had only two real choices, both of them bleak. I could make for the coast by myself or I could return to the Perfumed Garden and attempt to rescue Guy. In the latter case, I would expend my last moments of sapient consciousness in a futile attempt to do the impossible; and the last thing I would know would be my joyous surrender to the enemy of my spirit. In the former case, on the other hand, would I not meet the same end? For no one had ever returned to the worlds of men from the land of the true Bloomenkinder, and no one was in a better position to appreciate why than myself.

As I pondered this perfect synergy of pragmatic impasse and moral dilemma, the sun had sunk far past the zenith, and the light was subtly deepening to golden, and the shadows of nearby flowers and distant hillocks of foliage were definitely pointing the way to the west, to the sunset to which the beautiful and empty faces of unknown thousands of Bloomenkinder would soon be turning in vegetative homage.

Somehow vision perceived in this clearly polarized afternoon landscape what logic and morality could not. I could, like the Bloomenkinder, turn my face to the sunset of the spirit, or I could, like the true Child of Fortune, follow the rising sun into the sapient perils of the unknown future.

The choice was as clear as the difference between karma and destiny. Guy had surrendered to the inevitability of the former, but a true Child of Fortune could only seek to be the master of the latter and follow that Yellow Brick Road toward self-made dawn which had thusfar taken our species from the trees to the stars.

I found myself in that moment fingering my sash of Cloth of Many Colors. I found myself remembering the Moussa who had won it, and the Sunshine who had worn it proudly when she finally dared to stand up and spiel in the Luzplatz. I remembered he who had given it to me and named me a true Gypsy Joker, and how I had successfully pursued him against all odds. I remembered the girl who had been expelled from the Yggdrasil without even the wit to find a toilet. I remembered how I had arrived in Great and incomprehensible Edoku to wander its chaotic reality in a befuddled daze.

There was only one thing for it. Only a massive expedition could hope to rescue Guy, and only I might lead it to the Perfumed Garden. If I surrendered to karma now, the Perfumed Garden would remain an invidious legend of nirvana.

I rose up. I adjusted my floatbelt to .1 g. I turned my back to the west in defiance of the way of the Bloomenkinder, vraiment, in defiance of the very Bloomenveldt itself, and fixed my eyes on that point on the eastern horizon from which the light of a new dawn must inevitably arise after even the darkest of nights.

No one, it was said, had ever returned to the worlds of men from the land of the Bloomenkinder.

I sprang off my leaf in a mighty bound toward whatever lay between me and the coastline. No one, I told myself grandly, has ever returned to the worlds of men from the land of the Bloomenkinder before.

***

I gave no thought to rest until the sun's disc sinking past the horizon had painted the sky with the gauzy rose and purple banners of oncoming night, and the first faint stars had begun to shine in the blackening blue above the rim of the eastern horizon.

Vraiment, my spirit had risen up from despair to the outskirts of hope as the golden afternoon wore on, for I had naturally fallen into the pattern I had adopted as a psychonaut in less perilous precincts to the east, or rather my will had succeeded in enforcing its mirror image.

There I had allowed the subtle currents of diluted psychotropic wine wafting through my nostrils to freely move my spirit and my body like a kite upon a gentle breeze. Here, where the pheromonic weather was a good deal stronger, did I apply the compass of the ascetic's code: tacking against any perfume which aroused my desire. When the promise of gustatory delight without measure drew me to the left, I made a wide swing to the right, and I fled from any lustful impulses like the perfect celibate monk. Thus did I avoid landing in precincts from which I might find myself lacking the will to depart.

So did sapience triumph over the biochemical imperatives of the Bloomenveldt, or so I told myself, for had I not turned the very power of the enemy into the servant of my own pathfinding?

Now, however, it was becoming night, and in the lonely blindness of the dark, with things unseen scrabbling and scurrying through the leaves and branches, and all the breezes reeking of sleep, I had a good deal less confidence in the power of the light of reason over the shadowy phantoms of the presentient cortex.

Certainement, I should have felt hunger with some keenness as I huddled on a leaf in the blackness watching the stars come out. Certainement, considering my peril and the night sounds of this most alien of forests whispering around me, fear should have robbed me of any rest. At the very least, my brain should have been aswirl with the memories of the day's events, and trepidations concerning the events of the morrow.

But in these environs, or so it would seem, the Bloomenveldt, after its own self-interested fashion, took care to assure that none of its charges stumbled to the forest floor in the middle of the night or failed to receive the measure of sleep that their metabolisms required. Uncounted thousands of flowers altered their daytime profusion of pheromonic imperatives to fill the entire Bloomenveldt with the peacefully leaden perfume of a single purpose.

Not hunger, not fear, mayhap not even outright terror, could have long kept any mammal awake in this overwhelming perfumed fog of sleep. Not even this sapient Child of Fortune alone with her thoughts could deprive herself of the Bloomenveldt's gift of deep and uninterrupted slumber.

***

When I awoke in the bleak early moments of sunrise, however, it was an entirely different matter. The sun peeked up through a cool gray mist dimming the greens and floral hues of the Bloomenveldt to ghostly pastels. Certainement, I had not been awoken by either the bright light of dawn or the natural clock of my own metabolism at this repulsive hour. No, it was a ravenous hunger which had been sufficiently powerful to break my sleep; my stomach seemed plastered like an aching membrane against my backbone, my head ached with hollow emptiness, and my consciousness could contain naught but the thought of luscious fruits.

The faint odors of which seemed as pervasive as the mist slowly beginning to bum off the Bloomenveldt. The trace aromas of fruits I had never seen evoked sharp memories of wonderful savors I had never tasted.

Since it had been nearly a day since I had last eaten, my hunger of the morning seemed far less unnatural than the absence of same last night. Yet the phantom flavors teasing across my palate on the breeze alerted me to the fact that there were external agencies at work. No doubt, just as the nighttime perfumes masked all hunger behind an impenetrable urge to sleep, so had the conclusion of these secretions with the dawn abruptly allowed it to surface redoubled by time.

But while it may have been the flowers that were filling my nostrils and caressing my tastebuds with promises of gustatory delight, my ringing head and aching stomach were clear evidence of true famishment on a metabolic level. Which is to say that no matter what powerful psychotropics the food behind such pheromonic blandishments was likely to contain, not even the mightiest ascetic heroism was going to prevent me from having to eat sooner or later.

Still, mayhap I could apply the same contrarian strategy which had served me well thusfar and avoid eating any fruits to which I was drawn by the perfumes and consume only those which the Bloomenveldt appeared to have laid out for other species. By so doing, I might at least avoid ingesting psychotropics evolved by the cunning of the flowers as specific snares for our own.

Thus resolved, I drank water from the abundant supplies thereof condensed in the hollows of nearby leaves, and then set off to the east in a series of short, high, hanging hops, ignoring all blandishments of aromas by act of will, and seeking to spy out an untenanted flower by vision alone.

As chance would have it, I had not proceeded in this manner for very long when I spotted a small grove of flowers of several different species not two hundred meters to the north. Not only were no human figures in evidence, there seemed to be no aromas leading my backbrain by the nose toward it.

What 1 saw when I arrived at this grove's margin, however, was a good deal less than an appetizing spectacle. Half a dozen species of flowers had arranged themselves in widely separated stands of two or three blooms, and with the exception of those of one species with which I was all too familiar, these all seemed to be somewhat immature specimens, nor was any fruit in evidence, as if the Perfumed Garden had recently sent out a colonial expedition which had not yet matured to the point of attracting its own Bloomenkinder.

But when I approached one of the stands of rainbow puffballs which seemed to be the only fully mature flowers in the garden, I saw that this surmise was both florally correct and humanly wrong in a peculiarly horrifying manner.

For here in the deep Bloomenveldt with no adult humans anywhere in evidence, clusters of human infants were nevertheless hanging from the vegetative teats of the flowers. Somehow, the flowers had either chemically commanded the mothers thereof to deposit their offspring in this venue, or worse still, exuded pheromones which drew hundreds of toddlers wriggling across the Bloomenveldt to improve the species by utterly ruthless natural selection.

Either way, this juvenile offspring of the Perfumed Garden was growing its own first generation of human pollinators.

While the gorge and outrage that such a sight called forth would be difficult to exaggerate, some logical circuits in my mind remained capable of making a cold calculation. No doubt the reason that this grove did not exude perfumes attractive to adult humans was that it had not matured to the point where it was ready to serve as a proper host to same. Since the sap secreted by the teats was clearly sufficient to sustain these infant Bloomenkinder in robust health, might it not do the same for me? And since the perfumes of the grove lacked molecules with puissant effect upon the adult human metabolism, might not the milk thereof be equally lacking in danger?

Putting aside all esthetic considerations, gustatory or social, I sought out a stem as free from babes as possible, lay down on the leaf before it, applied my mouth to one of the pinkly rounded breasts thereof, and gave suck to the hard red teat.

A thick, tepid, somewhat sweet syrup oozed into my mouth, its simple savor not designed to appeal to mature tastebuds, so that the esthetic experience was like drinking liquified and sweetened fressen. But as the syrup slowly poured down my throat, my stomach welcomed it as the plants of a desert welcome rain after a long parching drought, and the very cells of my body seemed to sigh in relief. Avidly, I sucked at the floral teat with unrestrained enthusiasm, until I had established a steady flow with much unseemly smacking and gurgling.

I could not have been at it for more than a few minutes when, in almost less time than it takes to tell, a bubble of nausea suddenly exploded in my gut, a spasm of utter rejection that had my whole body trembling, and a series of retches wracked me down to the limbs.

I spat out the teat and managed to roll up onto my haunches clutching my stomach as I vomited charge after charge of thick green liquid over the edge of the leaf.

Fortunately, rather than expiring in a series of dry heaves, the episode ended as soon as the last of the sap had been expelled, and aside from a certain soreness of the ribs and a painful sharpening of the demanding emptiness in my stomach, I was no more the worse for wear, as if the flower had merely sought to provide a harmless lesson.

Vraiment, that lesson had been well taught! What the Bloomenveldt provided for the young of our species was crafted to be intolerable to the adult metabolism thereof.

Having no further business to conduct in this noxious nursery, I fled the vecino thereof in a random series of short leaps, thinking for the moment of nothing more than putting it well behind me. It did not take long, however, for my ravenous hunger to reassert its demands, and for the perfumed promises of succulence to clutch at my backbrain with ever greater strength.

I knew full well that if I did not find safer fare soon, I would reach a state where I could no longer resist these siren calls to ease my famishment at the first Bloomenkinder larder my nose could find. With my remaining will, I resolved therefore to seek out lone flowers whose perfumes promised nothing and sample the fruits thereof, even though my confidence in this strategy was now severely eroded.

Nor, alas, did my pessimism prove unfounded. Discovering flowers indifferent to the attendance of my species was easy enough, but none of the fare offered up thereby was at all palatable.

Some of these fruits repelled by the perfect loathsomeness of their flavors: there were fruits whose taste filled the backbrain with a rank fecal odor, fruits that tasted like ancient overripe cheese, fruits which to my palate seemed redolent of urine. But the greater part of the fruits I forced myself to sample caused such powerful retching the moment their pulp touched my mouth that I was spared the full horror of the flavors thereof.

The message could not have been clearer had it been graven in monumental letters of stone. In these deep precincts, at any rate, humans could eat only the fruits to which the perfumes drew them, and these, no doubt, were therefore liberally laced with molecules designed to perfect their behavior as pollinators. It was a closed circle which seemed to allow no space whatsoever for sapient will.

***

In utter despair leavened only by an equally powerful outrage, with my stomach pounding in agony, my ears ringing with faintness, my legs beginning to go wobbly, and my nostrils constantly assailed by promises of swift and delicious surcease from this entirely self-inflicted torture, I set off for want of any other course of action into the warming blaze of the rising sun which had long since burned away the mist of morning.

Even then I must have known that I was only postponing the inevitable. For as the day wore on past noon, the pains in my stomach grew stronger, I was becoming too weak with hunger to even completely control the trajectories of my evermore feeble leaps, I was becoming increasingly dizzy to the point where consciousness was beginning to wink on and off, and, contrawise, the smells of delicious fruits mine for the taking had come to dominate my sensorium to the point where there was room in my mind for no other thought save the by-now-equally-tropistic self- command to follow the direction of sunrise which I had programmed what was left of my sapient spirit to follow.

But inevitably my body weakened to the point where it could no longer maintain a sapient spirit to follow its own song, and the perfumed breath of the flowers seized the remnants of my consciousness, which is to say that, with a great sigh of animal relief, I finally allowed myself to follow the summons to the nearest floral banquet.

There were some score flowers in this garden: lavender bells, yellow cups filled with nectar, pink flowers of passion, crumbly black cones of pollen circled by small white aprons of petals, mayhap other types as well, for my sensorium was skewed entirely away from sight and sound into a sphere where smell and taste merged to dominate my perceptions and within which hunger and the glorious satisfaction of same had become the sum total of my being.

I buried my face in the thick clear nectar pooling in the nearest of the yellow cups, unmindful of the two Bloomenkinder doing likewise beside me, and slobbered mouthful after mouthful down my throat, all but groaning in ecstasy.

For the smoky-sweet savor thereof was the perfect fulfillment of that which was promised by the aroma of sugar-glazed and crisply roasted meat which filled the nether reaches of my brain. As for the effect upon the famished cells of my body, this can only be likened to a minion sparkling pinpoints of gustatory orgasm.

When I had sucked up my fill, or rather, no doubt, when the pheromonic winds changed to fill my being with something like the odor of steaming chocolated cinnamon pastries fresh and redolent from the oven, I abandoned the nectar cup forthwith and quite literally without a conscious thought repaired straightaway to one of the great black mounds surrounded by white petals, where I immediately proceeded to stuff great handfuls of crumbly black pollen into my mouth, trembling with delight as I chewed the sticky and crunchy grains which savored of spiced nutmeats enrobed in velvety chocolate creme.

As well do I remember huge black berries that drew me with the aroma of fine brandy and tasted like minted wine, long red fruit redolent of jasmine and black mushrooms and savoring of fruits baked in meaty caramel.

I existed in a state of perfect bliss, for the sum total of my consciousness consisted of the tantalizing aromas of gustatory lust and the all-but-immediate orgasmic satisfaction thereof. As to how long this cycle of feasting endured, je ne sais pas, for certainement there was no sapience of a sufficient level of intellect present to count the minutes or hours, or even to encompass the very concept of time.

Nor did I pay the least heed to the Bloomenkinder in whose midst I dined, any more than they found an apparition such as myself sufficient to arouse table talk or eye contact or the slightest momentary diversion from the single-minded task of fressing. We walked from flower to flower and we ate. That was the sum total of our blissful existence.

Until, that is, a flower decreed otherwise.

I was hunkered on the soft fat petals of a great open pink blossom devouring large blue ovoids with several other mindless Bloomenkinder, when the winds of desire changed and with them the very nature of my being.

A blood-warm rosy perfume seemed to pour straight through me, dissolving my gustatory obsession the moment the first molecules thereof had soaked into the volitional cells of my backbrain, and all at once, smell, taste, and the pleasures of gluttony faded away to faint abstractions which could scarcely be said to exist.

For now it was touch and feeling that had become the sensory crowns of my creation. My skin had become an interface of palpitating nerve-ends crying out to be caressed, my mouth ached to fill itself with warm velvety flesh, and my loins burned with a lustful fire that had the immediacy and urgent impact of completely dehydrated thirst.

Nor was I alone in my sudden transmutation into a fiery creature of polymorphous lust. In less time than it would have taken to consider had sapient consideration entered into the matter at all, I had thrown myself on the nearest male body, ripped the necessary entree in the fabric of my trousers, and impaled the circle of fire of my yoni upon a lingam.

Nor did this at all suffice. Sucking and grasping, I wrapped my lips around the first phallic fruit I could seize up and drew it in to the root. Vraiment, my nether orifice was forthwith breached as well to my avid satisfaction, and I felt mouths at my nipples, hands and tongues at the small of my back and thighs, and then naught existed but a carmine fog of all my senses, and an endless series of multiplex cusps that went on and on and on.

Vraiment, more than propriety or shame prevents me from detailing the variety, scope, and duration of the ever-changing interlocked tantric figures in which I took an actively enthusiastic part, for the truth of it is that I was lost in a timeless and mindless realm wherein even the distinction between the flesh and the gratification thereof had been completely annihilated.

Suffice it to say that this state endured and then ended with the same suddenness with which it had begun. A cool pheromonic wind blew through me, like the cold, crystalline clarity of the void between the stars, and all at once sensation evaporated from the surface of my skin and the kundalinic crannies of my erotic spaces, and all that existed was a disembodied spirit that sought the complete and blissful nothingness thereof.

This spirit found itself being transported atop a numb fleshly automaton and deposited supinely on a leaf beneath a lavender bell, where four other Bloomenkinder already lay staring motionlessly up into the clear cloudless sky.

Time stopped. Sound ceased. Smell, taste, and kinesthetic awareness of the contours of my own body faded away. I was naught but an empty volume of space-time gazing up fixedly into an equally perfect and featureless cerulean mandala of tranquil nullity. I was one with the Bloomenveldt. I had achieved the mindless perfection of the clear blue void.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Child of Fortune, by Norman Spinrad

Postby admin » Sat Mar 19, 2016 6:04 am

Chapter 21

Blue, blue, blue, blue ... An endless, measureless, timeless perfection of blue ...

And yet, at length, if duration could be said to exist in such a state at all, something became aware of a perturbation in the clear blue nothingness of its being. Yellow ... Was there not a yellowness moving all but imperceptibly across the blue ...?

It began to assume a substance and a form ... A fiery circle of yellow, haloed by streamers of the same hue ... like a face surrounded by a corona of glowing golden hair ... like the circular entrance to a long tunnel of light ... at the end of which ... at the end of which ...

A spirit seemed to slowly come into being, which is to say that, just as the clear blue emptiness had been disturbed by the golden circle of light, so was the perfection of nonbeing now trammeled by a desire, a tropism, a formless urge to follow the yellow out of the blue to ... to ...

But then the golden circle began to deepen toward orange as it drifted downward through the blue void, and the cerulean hue thereof began to darken toward purple, and I found myself rising slowly to my feet, dimly aware of others like myself, standing motionless and staring into the sunset as the orange disc cracked the geometric precision of the horizon and fractured the purple perfection of the vaulted sky with rays of umber and somber red.

Yet as the sun was swallowed up into the black lake of oncoming night, some dying ember of independent intellect seemed to struggle up painfully from the depths of perfect mindless bliss to blink torpidly at the tiny pinpoints of silver that had begun to pierce the blackness of the sky.

For a few moments, as one by one the stars began to come out, mayhap there was a spirit that recognized those silvery speckles as such, for if fragmented memory plays me not false, that spirit viewed them through a veil of liquid gauze, as if weeping for the loss of something it could no longer fathom, as if someone still knew that each of them was a mighty sun, that up there in the heavens high above the Bloomenveldt, circling round the stars, were the far-flung worlds of men.

***

Just as memory marks not the divided hours of that first seamless perfect day as a Bloomenkind, so too in the track of my memory does it seem but one long day that I passed before the chance coincidence of sunrise and the turn of the floral cycle came together to rouse me from the reasonless creature of the forest that I had become.

The time came round at last when I awoke at dawn, was moved to breakfast on nectar, and was then transported by what blew me on the wind not to eat of fruit or engage in copulations, but to repose under a lavender bell in empty-minded meditation upon the cerulean void.

But chance, or mayhap what we style fortune, placed my venue of repose so that, rather than fixing my gaze upon the featureless perfection of the clear blue sky, I laid myself down with my face to the east, to the rising sun, which at this hour lay just above the eastern horizon bathing the Bloomenveldt in golden brilliance.

And as I lay there staring at the rising sun as it slowly began its ascent to the zenith, so did the angle of my gaze imperceptibly rise with it, for my vision had been totally captured by this single slow event in the timeless and featureless void of blue.

Mayhap the power of the flower was less total over one who had once enjoyed sapience and then lost it than over born and bred Bloomenkinder suckled at the very teats of the forest in whom sapience had never arisen. Mayhap my previous conscious determination to follow the rising sun to the east had so percolated down to the nether reaches of my brain that it had attained, or from another viewpoint degenerated, to a simple tropism to rise up to follow the yellow, even as many plants will keep their leaves and flowers turned to a sun as it travels across the sky of day.

Be that as it may, some dim sort of vegetative awareness began to slowly seep into the percept sphere of the creature who lay on that leaf staring mindlessly at the golden sun rising toward its apogee, painting the greenery of the Bloomenveldt with a bright gloss of light that, rather than emanating from the yellow face of glory, seemed to be ascending eastward and skyward toward it.

Which is not to say that anything resembling human sapience had returned, for this faint urge to rise up to the golden face of the sunrise was no doubt no less a visual tropism than those of the senses of smell and taste which had come to command my hours.

Yet, dim and mindless though it be, this tropism was not a command of the Bloomenveldt. Rather, I do now believe, had the remnant of my sapient spirit succeeded in condensing all that had once been me into this single simple tropism to follow the yellow face of the sun upward into the sky, for it was a puissant compendium indeed from the point of view of the consciousness trapped beneath the surface of my presently mindless brain.

For was that consciousness not named Sunshine, and had that name not been given by a spirit whose face was haloed by golden hair? Vraiment, had not I once consciously chosen that selfsame golden rising sun as the ensign and guidepost of my determination to attain once more the worlds of men?

Destiny had therefore chosen to place within my sphere of vision in a state of florally induced hypnogogia an object of precisely that color most likely to rouse my spirit from its cerulean trance.

Slowly and without conscious thought, my right hand freed itself from the nirvanic catatonia in which my body lay, and like the heroine of a romance struggling under the crushing gravity of a cruelly massive planet, it crawled agonizingly across my waist and turned the knob of my floatbelt as far clockwise as it would go. Then, as if exhausted by this effort, it fell limply to the surface of the leaf by my side.

Which slowly fell away.

For, supine, still gazing fixedly at the object of my tropic desire, propelled by the .1 g upward thrust of my floatbelt, I had indeed begun to rise to meet the sun.

***

As my body slowly rose up through the levels and breezes of the atmosphere, so too did my awareness rise slowly up out of the depths of its nonbeing toward the golden light of sapient consciousness. I can no more sharply define the moment when my spirit could fairly have been said to have returned to full sovereignty than one may the morning after remember the precise moment the night before when the same passed over the line into sleep.

Suffice it to say that after some time I quite literally found myself drifting slowly on the ever- changing breezes above the Bloomenveldt, with my clothing in tatters, my face caked and smeared with a vile crust of dried fruit pulps and saps, and the vague but horrifying memories of what I had been forced to become.

My first act of will, taken even before my consciousness had fully cohered, was to turn down my floatbelt to .19 positive, and spy out a leaf as I came drifting down from which I might establish a firm trajectory for my next leap to the east.

Indeed, I hardly knew what I was doing or why until I had kicked off that leaf on a mighty bound toward that single smiling golden face in all this endless world of hostile green. Then I shouted for the sheer need to hear a sapient human voice. "Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the sun, follow the yellow!"

For several more leaps, I continued to shout thusly until the repetition fell into the rhythm of a chant, not really aware then of what I was doing or why. But at length this mantric return to verbality of a sort also served to restore the coherence of same to the stream of my thoughts, which is to say I became more shrewdly cognizant of the method of what no doubt would have appeared to an observing ear as my madness.

For in truth only then did I come to dimly comprehend the means whereby some buried level of my mind had rescued my sapient spirit from its dreamless slumber. Which is to say I had recovered the wit necessary to realize that I had in fact been following a self-imprinted visual tropism, which I had now instinctively augmented with a verbal mantra acting upon somewhat higher centers of my brain.

And rather than give over this mantra in the bright yellow light of relative reason, I instead reduced its volume to a less shrill level designed to preserve my voice for the long haul, and crafted the words into a monotonous singsong rhythm designed to drone it as deeply into the biologic levels of my being as I could manage without being a perfect master of the meditative arts. "Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the sun, follow the yellow ..."

So too did I then expand modestly upon the lyric with a final phrase which spoke of and to the higher purpose thereof. "Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road ..."

This simple song did I chant endlessly and softly to myself as I bounded across the Bloomenveldt. And far from distracting my higher thoughts from pragmatic considerations, the perpetual chanting of this mantra served to calm and focus them, for now I was all too cognizant of the true nature of my predicament, and conscious as well of the only possible escape therefrom of which I could conceive.

For the brute fact was that I could not reach the coast without food, and the pit of nonbeing from whence I had barely managed to rouse myself to follow the rising sun was the only source thereof for hundreds of kilometers.

Which is to say I had no choice but to risk this death of the spirit not once more, but again, and again, and again, or die, an even more final death of the body through starvation. Indeed, as I had already learned far too well, given a sufficient level of fatigue and famishment, I would sooner or later no longer retain the biologic energy to support a conscious will, and be drawn by the perfumes to the fruit like a moth to the flame.

Therefore, since I could count on no continuity of sapient will to carry me through, indeed since all that was certain was that I must suffer repeated loss of same in order to maintain my body's vitality, my only course was to accomplish with what I hoped was the greater puissance of conscious craft what I had already once barely managed to achieve by accident of fate.

Which was to use these periods of conscious lucidity to engrave a mantric tropism upon the presentient levels of my mind with perpetual chanting repetition and diligent meditation, so that even when reason and conscious will had once more fled, my Bloomenkind self would, during periods of enforced floral nirvana, be programmed to follow the yellow, to follow the sun that sooner or later must rise during a cycle of such meditations into its percept sphere.

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road ..."

***

Of the days, or mayhap weeks, that I spent trekking eastward across the Bloomenveldt in this manner from one meal of fruit to the next, there is little to be said that is not entirely contained within the endless repetition of the mantra I had given myself.

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road ..."

For this became the sole content of my periods of sapient consciousness as well as the faint background music of the timeless intervals I was constrained to pass as a Bloomenkind.

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick .Road ..."

Though at the time I knew no more of the science of mantric imprinting or the art of autohypnosis than the simple techniques we are all taught in the early years of schooling, some years later, upon delving deeper into the subject, I was to learn just how puissant the mantric technique I had naively cobbled together out of bits and pieces of knowledge and coincidence really was.

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road ..."

For what I had in fact done was crafted what the masters of the art call a synergetic mantra, wherein a conventional mantric rhythm keyed to the biorhythms of the consciousness in question is linked to a simple verbal metaphor of deep meaning thereto. A visual mandala is then provided which is the imagistic cognate thereof, so that the two most sovereign senses are merged into receptors for a single synergetic image of sight and sound, which, by becoming the content of the sensorium entire, focuses consciousness down to a single imperative.

Under proper conditions and the direction of a true perfect master of the art, an appropriate incense is also provided, as well as a psychotropic selected to induce the desired kinesthetic percept-state, so that no sensory data not linked to the synergetic mantra may intrude. Though I knew it not at the time, I had happened upon a technique oft times applied by adepts of the martial arts, Healers, and perfect masters of the meditative sciences.

And while I was constrained to serve as my own perfect master as best I could, chance, necessity, the perfume of the lavender bells, and what little art I possessed had conspired to create a synergetic mantra of which the greatest of such mages could be proud.

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road ..."

The visual component thereof had been pared to the simplest possible mandalic formulation: a yellow circle, archetype of a life-giving sun. Nor could a perfect master have done much better with the drone of similar syllables contained within the mantra.

So no matter how often hunger drove me to the fruits and perfumes of a Bloomenkinder garden, and no matter how many cycles I passed in utter thrall thereto, the inevitable processing of these selfsame cycles of eating, copulation, and hypnogogic repose must sooner or later place me beneath a meditative flower in an early morning hour beneath the rising sun.

Whereupon that visual mandala would inevitably call forth the chanting of the mantra synesthetically linked thereto ... "Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road ..."

And this in turn would generate the stylized motion of my hand turning the control knob of my floatbelt, and I would rise slowly up into the air high above the Bloomenveldt until some semblance of sapience returned, like a mystic bodhi levitating out of maya by sheer force of will.

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow. follow the Yellow Brick Road ..."

Only by virtue of my possession of this single nonfloral tropism might I have been said to in any way distinguish myself as a self-motivated creature from the Bloomenkinder of the forest.

For just as the mantra had become the sole content of my being when I was constrained to sojourn among the Bloomenkinder, so was my mind incapable of encompassing any other thought as I bounded eastward across the Bloomenveldt. So if the foregoing description of this stage of my journey across the Bloomenveldt may seem to lack something in terms of its recounting of the linear skein of events, the truth of the matter is that the human personality of the teller of this tale was for all practical purposes absent as a memory-binding witness from the corpus moving through them.

Just as the voice and speech patterns of a person long dead may be encoded into an electronic matrix and cunningly manipulated to produce an artificial personality with which one may even discourse, my body followed a program impressed upon it by a vacated spirit, but in truth no one was at home.

***

Nor would anything that might fairly be called true sapience return until the mantric cycle was perforce broken by a decided turn for the worse, and even then the teller of the tale would have been hard-put to recognize the same in the babbling apparition resulting therefrom had I chanced to encounter her on some civilized street.

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road . .."

Guided by the shadows cast before me by a sun sinking well past its zenith, I was drifting gently downward toward the next in an endless succession of leafy springboards when --

-- All at once, the rhythm of chanting, soaring, landing, and kicking off again was abruptly shattered by a sudden plunge from about ten meters up that had me slamming into a leaf with such unexpected force that my knees buckled, and I staggered forward into a half-roll, and then fell on my chest skidding across the surface toward the brink of a five hundred meter fall to the forest floor.

Sheer animal reflex reached out with both hands to grip the edge of the leaf as the front half of my body slid out into vertiginous space, and I hung there supported by my arms and the suddenly considerable weight of my lower torso in a state of absolute adrenal terror before summoning up sufficient awareness to haul myself back to safety.

No doubt nothing less could have shocked back a return to even such sapient consciousness as I now enjoyed. Which is to say that in the backflush of adrenal arousal, an ego reappeared to the extent that I was aware of just how close I had come to sudden and horrible death. As well, with the breath knocked out of my body, I had for the moment given over my chanting.

But that was about the extent of it. By now my throat and lips were no longer needed to keep the mantra vibrating in my brain, and as for the sun, as for the yellow, as for the Yellow Brick Road, the tropism to press onward to the east had in no way diminished.

I scrambled to my feet and bent my legs to kick off into the next leap, and then it was that something even more primal than the imperative of tropism, some kinesthetic animal instinct, intervened. Rather than leap with all my power in the direction of the eastern horizon, which under the circumstances might very well have meant my death, I essayed a tentative jump straight upward, with no more intelligence behind it than that of a wounded animal testing its strength.

Instead of soaring on high, I went up about a meter and came down hard.

Then it was that some semblance of true consciousness returned to inform my cerebral centers of what my body's instincts had already known.

My weight had returned to Belshazaar normal.

The power core of my floatbelt had expired.

Although I was incapable of such technological appraisal at the time, the obvious truth of the matter was that I had overtaxed the energy reserves of my floatbelt by employing it in a manner for which it had never been intended, to wit, repeated and overly prolonged use at full upward thrust.

But the import of the catastrophe was all too clear even to the dim creature who stood there on a leaf, dwarfed now to an even greater degree by the green immensity of the Bloomenveldt, and who now tremulously resumed her mantric chant in a new minor note of despair.

"Follow the sun ... follow the yellow ... follow the Yellow Brick Road ..."

Vraiment, the yellow sun still shone in the sky behind me casting lengthening shadows toward the eastern horizon, and the Yellow Brick Road still lay before me, nor was the compulsion to follow it in any way diminished. But now I could only inch along it by the frail power of my unaided feet.

"Follow the sun ... follow the yellow ... follow the Yellow Brick Road ..."

Chanting my poor mantra, following my distant star, mercifully unmindful of the full hopelessness of my task, I set one foot before the other and began my long march across the Bloomenveldt, an insect reduced to crawling across an endless hostile savannah under the pitiless gaze of indifferent gods.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Child of Fortune, by Norman Spinrad

Postby admin » Sat Mar 19, 2016 6:04 am

Chapter 22

Traversing the Bloomenveldt as a groundling was a far cry from bounding across it in great soaring leaps as a relatively blithe creature of the air. Not only did it take half a day and more to cover the same distance that I had previously traversed in a few long leaps, now I could rely only on my own care and agility to save me from a terminal fall to the forest floor.

Thus the transitional step from one leaf to another had become a matter of some significance and forethought, and what had once seemed the minor rises and dips of the surface now assumed strategic significance, for without a usable floatbelt, I could only spy out the lay of the land before me by ascending the relative heights of the taller tree crowns.

And while the passage of the sun across the sky and the direction of the shadows it cast were sufficient to keep me following the yellow, the lay of the land ahead assumed dire significance when it came to keeping my spirit on the Yellow Brick Road. For now if I stumbled unaware into the pheromonic influence of a grove of flowers, or even of a single sufficiently cunning bloom, there would be little hope that I would ever set foot on that road to sapience again.

As for the consciousness animating the creature gingerly picking her way from leaf to leaf and pausing three or four times an hour to scout ahead and plan out a safe path between the flowers, this began to evolve further toward sapience under the evolutionary pressure of the more complex behavior that brute survival now required, just as our species had long ago evolved out of presentience when it began its long march from the mindless Eden of the trees.

For I was forced to consider every footfall, I was forced to scout ahead, I was forced to memorize a safe path through the future landscape and achieve a level of cognitive abstraction sufficient to follow this mental map of the landscape through the moment-to-moment existence of the realtime present.

Indeed, such a sophisticated perception of the relationship between space and time might very well be said to be the minimal definition of sapience itself.

So by the time the sun had begun to sink behind the western horizon, it might be fairly said that some semblance of the "I" who tells the tale had returned to inhabit the brain of the protagonist thereof.

I knew that soon I must select a leaf of relative safety upon which to spend the night, for it would not be long before every flower of the Bloomenveldt would begin to exude the irresistible perfume of sleep. And upon selecting same and settling down on it, I had achieved a level of consciousness all-too-able to reflect upon its plight.

I had no concept of how long I had been traveling, how far I had come, or how much more Bloomenveldt lay between me and the succor of the coast. I had only the dimmest notion of how long the human body might continue to function without food, mayhap a matter of weeks for a perfect master of the yogic arts, but certainement a matter of mere days for such as myself. But I knew with only too much certainty that, without my floatbelt to extract me toward the sunrise, to eat of the fruit of the Bloomenveldt, or even approach within smelling distance of the flowers thereof, would mean my sapient doom.

I, who to say the least had never been a devotee of the ascetic disciplines, would have to essay a fast of heroic proportions. Moreover, in order to do so, I must never for a moment allow my conscious will to once more lose sovereignty over the imperatives of the flesh, for the time would inevitably come when my very cells would cry out for nourishment, and if no "I" was present to provide restraint, no "I" would ever return from the mindless realm of the Bloomenkinder.

And while the mantra continued to vibrate in my brain even when my lips were sealed, and the golden face of the sun continued to shine in my mind's eye even as the first stars of night began to appear in the blackening sky, I knew full well that mere tropism would not be sufficient to maintain the conscious awareness which now swore an oath to itself that the body in which it arose would expire before the human spirit therein gave up the ghost.

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road ..."

As I sat there on my leaf, determined that if I must die in this uncaring vastness it would at least be as a sapient being who deserved to call herself human even to the end, the mantra ringing in my brain and the golden mandala filling my mind's eye began to take on new complexities of meaning, or rather the message I had left for myself in the simple tropism which had brought a mindless creature through hundreds of kilometers of Bloomenveldt began to exfoliate its layers of meaning in the reemergent mind of the human spirit who had coded it into her backbrain in the first place.

"Before the singer was the song, which has carried our kind from the trees to the stars," Pater Pan had often enough declaimed, and vraiment, where was I now but cast back into the treetops of presentience from whence long ago our species had begun its gallant march to sapience and the stars?

And what was the Yellow Brick Road I now sought to travel but the recapitulation of our species' phylogeny via my own personal ontogeny? Vraiment, as the most ancient lore of our species has it, in the beginning was the Word, the tale we told ourselves as we wandered from apes into men, the tale the Piper told still.

Tattered, begrimed and besmeared with the juices and pulps of the fruits of forgetfulness and the sweats and stains of literally unspeakable acts, the Cloth of Many Colors still tied about my waist seemed the banner of all that remained of who I had been and who I must now struggle to once more become -- Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, Child of Fortune, Gypsy Joker, ruespieler.

For was it not the Word which had created our humanity in the first place? Might it therefore not carry me back from the forest of unreason once more along the Yellow Brick Road that led homeward to the sapient worlds of men? Out here on the Bloomenveldt there might be no one to hear my tales but myself, but there was something far more precious than ruegelt to be won or lost.

And so there in the treetops, I summoned up my courage as once I had in the Luzplatz in Great Edoku, and into the darkness, into the loneliness, into an utter insensate indifference far deeper and more terrible than that of any audience of Edojin, I raised up my voice and began to spiel for the survival of my soul.

"The Spark of the Ark!" I declared to myself, and launched into a bizarre version indeed of Lance Della Imre's favorite tale, in which my clouded memory and my present concerns combined to rewrite it into a song of myself.

"Say not that the Arkies of the First Starfaring Age meekly gave up the ghost to the flowers when a way of life that had existed since the first Child of Fortune dared climb down from the trees was lost on the Bloomenveldt. For the Spark of the Ark which led us along the Yellow Brick Road out of the forest of unreason when we were wage slaves of the Pentagon is with us today in the Arkie Sparkie heart of the teller of this tale ..."

Short on art, mayhap, and certainement shorter on verbal coherence, it all rolled out in a glorious hebephrenia, as after aeons of naught but the same mantric drone, I reveled in the sound of a sapient human voice spieling the story of my own soul. Never has any ruespieler had a less critical or more appreciative audience than I was for myself!

Nor did the audience jade or the ruespieler tire until the nighttime perfumes of the Bloomenveldt rang down the curtain of sleep on the performance.

***

In the morning, I arose spieling still, declaiming melanges of every tale I knew to myself, and transmogrifying them into my own singular song of the Yellow Brick Road.

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Piper of the Yellow Brick Road, who was born when first I climbed down from our ancestral flowers, and who from that day unto this has taken us leaf by leaf along our Mardi Gras parade to the dawn of the Second Starfaring Age in the long slow centuries between here and the coast ..."

Babbling thusly, I set first one halting step on the Yellow Brick Road eastward, and then another and another, following the command of my own tale.

No doubt any Healer in attendance at this stage of my journey would have judged me mad, for it cannot be denied that what he would have observed was a gaunt and starveling creature exhibiting clear symptoms of hebephrenic cafard.

For hour by hour, day by day, the longer I walked, the more famished I became, and the more I filled my ears with bits and pieces of half-remembered ruespielers' tales, the more the parts of the many became an infinitely recomplicated mantra of the one, of the only tale there presently was to tell.

Indeed if psychosis, as the Healers do claim, is a disjunction between the events of the external realm and the images thereof presented by the sensorium to the brain, if a dissolution of the interface between the journey across the wilderness of the treetops and my spirit's journey via my tale was mere psychic dysfunction, then by such an objective definition, vraiment, I was quite insane.

But those same Healers could not deny that such a malaise may only arise in a sapient brain. Which is to say I was at least still capable of human sanity or its equally human converse. Whereas those whom science could only judge perfectly adapted to the external reality of the Bloomenveldt were the mindless Bloomenkinder thereof.

***

From the point of view of objective scientific reportage, there would be nothing of concrete substance to relate but an endless repetition of the round of any given day.

I arise already spieling. My stomach screams its starvation, and the hollow throbbing of my head sends sparkles of static confetti across my visual sphere. I fill my belly with water collected from the hollow of a leaf.

I turn my face to the golden visage of the rising sun, and I walk, babbling to myself. I walk until the sun has passed its zenith, and I walk until it has set in the west. I walk through the gathering darkness until I am inching along by feel alone. I walk until the perfumes of night slide me into dreamless sleep.

***

Time, the mages have long told us against the evidence of the senses, is not a regularly spaced absolute along which events are strung linearly like beads. Rather it is a relationship among points in a four-dimensional space-time matrix, so that when events vary we perceive an interval of time between them. But within a crystal lattice of space-time wherein events are identical, we perceive them as a simultaneous one.

As without, so within, for the mages tell us too that dreams that seem to last for eternities in the consciousness of the dreamer occur within literal augenblicks when the duration of their electrical discharge is measured by instruments.

So too have gurus, shamans, mystics, sufis, and masters perfect or otherwise, alluded time out of mind, if with less scientific precision, to a state of being in which events are perceived with the transtemporal logic of dreams and quantum cosmology, called variously the Tao, the Ein-Sof, the Einsteinian universe, the Great and Only, the Dreamtime.

The ancient tribe who sought by just such famishment and mantric declaiming as I now employed to take their willed Walkabouts through the Dreamtime named it best for this teller of the tale attempting to recall her passage through it.

For any ordinary Healer will tell you that the consciousness arising in the brain of a starving body will sooner or later begin to blur across the line separating waking awareness from sleep, so, that as the flesh begins to expire, the spirit begins its Walkabout through its final time of dreams.

As to when I could have been said to have passed over into the Dreamtime, je ne sais pas, for we never remember the crossing over from the waking realm into dream, still less so when we continue to set one foot down after the other long afterward, dreaming our Walkabout on our feet.

Certainement, the golden face of the sun in the blue sky above the Bloomenveldt that I perceived would have registered on any astronomical instrument. Certainement, I was not dreaming that I began to direct my spiel toward this solar audience.

But when the corona of light haloing the sun began to coalesce into a nimbus of golden hair, when it seemed to me that there was a pattern of human features on the face thereof, vraiment, when it started to speak, then surely had I long since passed over into the Dreamtime.

Was this hallucination, dream, or true translation into the Great and Only Tao? Who is to say which? Indeed, how is one to even make such distinctions? For are not hallucinations, dreams, and arcane mystic visions all the tales that the spirit somehow contrives to tell to itself?

So if the Pater Pan who spoke to me out of the face of the sun was a conjuration of my dreaming brain, and the words that he spoke were only part of my own tale, had not the song that I sang to myself been learned from the very man who now spoke in the dream? Thus might I have been dreaming it all, but thus too did the true spirit of a lover contrive to frustrate the constraints of space and time to be with me in my hour of need on the Bloomenveldt.

"Follow the Piper of the Yellow Brick Road, follow the Pied Piper of the Bloomenkinder back from our ancestral flowers, muchacha," Pater Pan said as we sat together naked by a crystal pool in a pleasure garden high on a plateau in Great Edoku, even as I was walking across the surface of one more leaf.

For the landscape through which I journeyed had now taken on a nondualistic logic precisely like that of a lucid dream. For while I could perceive a yellow sun shining above an endless green plain with sufficient awareness to maintain an eastward vector, like a lucid dream, the tale 1 was telling myself had the power to at the same time conjure up an overlay of visions in the Dreamtime.

"Once we were all Bloomenkinder in the Perfumed Garden of Eden, Sunshine," Pater told me as he swirled his Cloth of Many Colors around his shoulders and declaimed his name tale. "Now I will lead you to the Gold Mountain even as I led you out of the city of the Pentagon to the long slow centuries between the stars."

And now, even as some part of me knew that my body was still trudging across the Bloomenveldt in a state rapidly approaching total famishment, in the Dreamtime I was wandering the streets of Great Edoku, alone, out of funds, with my bladder demanding protoplasmic relief exactly as my stomach cried out for food in the treetops.

"Remember?" said Pater's voice in my ear. "Remember when you became a free creature living by your wits in the streets of Great Edoku?"

While I threaded my way among the great leaves of the treetops, I was tracking two Gypsy Jokers through the streets and parklands in search of their carnival, and when I stared at the golden face of Belshazaar's sun, it was my first eye to eye meeting with Pater Pan outside our shower stalls.

"It has taken us millennia of diligent tale-telling to create the ultimate triumph of the ruespieler's art, our own magnificent sapient selves," Pater said as we stood there admiring each other. "Have you not noticed your gift of gab?" he said as we lay on the bed in his tent.

"So keep telling the tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt, muchacha," he said as he concluded his farewell to the Gypsy Jokers reclining on bonsaied mountains.

At last I found my own voice in the Dreamtime. "What is the tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt?" I heard myself say.

And at the sound of my own words, I was transported to the most arcane Dreamtime of all. I was walking across the Bloomenveldt now even in my dream, and I was following Belshazaar's sun toward the coast, and the only disjunction between the observable reality and the Dreamtime of my spirit was that in the Dreamtime Pater Pan walked beside me.

"The only tale there is to tell," he said with a strange smile.

"How does this tale end?" I demanded.

"This tale never ends, ruespieler."

As I heard myself discoursing with this animus within a Dreamtime landscape identical to that of the waking realm, the spell of the Walkabout began to unravel, as within any dream, one may upon occasion talk oneself awake, or as an event of sufficient import transmogrifying itself into Dreamtime imagery may rouse the sleepwalker back into the dream of life.

"When will I awake from it?" I said as Pater Pan's image began to fade like a Bloomenveldt mist burning off into the rising sun.

"When the Pied Piper leads the Bloomenkinder of Hamelin back to the far-flung worlds of men," said the face of the sun as I trudged across the foliage.

"Then don't leave me out here without your song!" I shouted as the vision began to fade.

"Pas problem, lady fair," said a disembodied voice. "For now you know who the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt is, do you not, ruespieler ...?"

"Anyone who tells the tale!"

And I emerged from the Dreamtime with the words ringing from my lips across the Bloomenveldt. I was now once more confronted with a sea of wind-tossed green under a hot yellow sun, and there was no Pater Pan at my side, nor the sound of any voice save my own and that of the breezes murmuring through the branches. I was faint and lightheaded from a hunger pushed deep down beneath stomach pains into cellular famishment, indeed 1 was a teetering crouched figure whose very metabolism was about to collapse.

But I was not alone.

For whether the Piper who had brought me thither was a figment out of the tale I was telling myself in the Dreamtime or whether some quantum vapor of a lover's spirit had somehow succored me therein, or whether these are indeed the same in a manner which no waking consciousness may comprehend, my Walkabout through the Dreamtime with that spirit guide had in any event brought me to this single purple flower .

Four human figures sat on its velvety petals avidly devouring round yellow fruit. The corpulence of their frames and the tattered bits of cloth still clinging to them gave unmistakable evidence that these had once been sapient citizens of the worlds of men.

During my passage through the Dreamtime, I had put the land of the Bloomenkinder behind me. Only the borderland region of lost civilized souls lay between me and the coast.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Child of Fortune, by Norman Spinrad

Postby admin » Sat Mar 19, 2016 6:05 am

Chapter 23

I had emerged from the land of the true Bloomenkinder with the peroration of the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt upon my lips and I emerged from the Dreamtime with the tale I had learned, or been given, or had told myself therein springing forth from them still, nor did I give over my spieling as I staggered forward toward the purple flower.

"Once you and I were Bloomenkinder in the Perfumed Garden of Eden," I quite redundantly informed the two men and two women who continued to focus their perfect attention on their fruit even as this bizarre apparition approached. "Now the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt bids us follow our Arkie Sparkie hearts from our ancestral flowers to the farflung worlds of men ..."

Mayhap in a certain sense I was in the Dreamtime still, for while a part of me was there advancing slowly on the purple flower and its devotees, another part of me stood before the Luzplatz volcano seeking to persuade the bustling throngs of Edojin therein to hearken to my ruespiel. For indeed, to the consciousness then paused at the edge of the flower's pheromonic aura, they were much the same thing.

I could taste a faint perfume of sweet and sour succulence, and the very cells of my body gibbered their demand for me to fall upon the yellow fruit. On the Bloomenveldt, I knew that here on the coastal fringes of the forest, floral evolution and human devolution had not yet progressed to produce the perfect symbiosis between flowers and Bloomenkinder. These corpulent fressing creatures were not Bloomenkinder but once-sapient beings who had chanced to fall under the sway of far cruder pheromones crafted not to snare men but to control the more primitive brains of the native mammals of the forest. Here a strong enough will might prevail against these less puissant molecules.

In the Edoku of my Dreamtime, I knew that I must earn the ruegelt of survival by the power of the Word alone, though now my tale need please no other ears than my own. For as long as I continued to tell my tale, as long as I could hear my own voice singing my song, as long as I remained Sunshine the ruespieler, so long would I remain on the Yellow Brick Road, for there was only one camino real of sapience through the forest of unreality, the way of the Word, and I was on it now.

"Remember when you were Children of Fortune ... Remember when you were free and sapient creatures living by your wits in the streets of Great Edoku ..."

As I spieled, I slowly resumed my approach to the purple flower, deeper into its sphere of olfactory influence, testing the puissance of the Word against the pouvoir of the perfume, as for so long I had pitted my naked will against far more powerful versions of same in the combat of the fast.

"Remember how the Pied Piper of Pan led you out of the Perfumed Garden and into the Gold Mountain across the long slow centuries between the stars ..."

My trepidation began to lessen as I remembered my passage via the Dreamtime from the Perfumed Garden to this borderland of the sapient spirit, as my sovereign will kept me moving forward in a deliberately measured pace against all the blandishments of the perfume and all the outraged impatience of my body.

Mayhap the shorter and darker of the two male creatures, mayhap the man hunkered there on the flower remembered a time when he was a free creature or the Word too, for his eyes raised themselves from his meal in a certain blinking and pathetic befuddlement, even as he continued to bite chunks of firm green pulp out of his yellow fruit.

"And where has the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt gone now that you sit there like a bestial wage slave of the Pentagon eating the fruit of forgetfulness with your spirits Gone Before?"

I was within reaching distance of the fruit now, still spieling, my spirit still in sovereign command of the tropisms and hunger of my body.

"Nowhere, everywhere, here in the teller of the tale, vraiment within the last Arkie Spark of your own human heart!" I shouted the last into the face of the man who squatted before me, who, having now given over his fressing entirely, met my eyes with what I imagined might be the struggling ghost of a sapient glimmer.

"There!" I cried, pointing at the late morning sun. "Follow that Arkie Spark within you, follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow once more the Yellow Brick Road ..."

And as the rag-clad fellow fixed his gaze upon the golden-maned face of the Pied Piper rising in glory above the maya of the Bloomenveldt, I snatched up a fruit with my other hand, tucked it under my arm, and, obeying the moral of my own tale, turned my back to the flower and my face to the sun, and retreated to the east with as much flank speed as my weakened body could muster. Nor did it even occur to me to cease my spiel now that the fruit thereof was mine.

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt who has led us from apes into men ..."

I did not eat of the fruit until I had stopped loping, and I did not stop till I was far beyond the pheromonic aura of the flower. Even as I tore open the yellow fruit with my overgrown nails, even as I gobbled down great chunks and felt the cells of my body cry out in orgasmic release from their nutritive celibacy, I continued to babble ever-mutating versions of the only tale I had to tell where there was no ear to hear it but my own, or so I believed. For only the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt could keep this Child of Fortune on her Yellow Brick Road, and the Piper would be with me only so long as anyone told his tale.

Upon finishing my meal, I rose up at once, turned toward the sunrise, and set forth, spieling still. I must not have chanced to look back for several hours.

But when I did, I saw, staggering and sweating with the protests of long unused muscles not fifty meters behind me, the man whose eyes had risen for a moment from their nonbeing to meet mine at the purple flower.

He must have been soaking up the words of my tale for hours, aroused from the perfect thrall of his flower by the sheer enchantment of the novel sound of a human voice, mesmerized thereby to follow the music, or mayhap, in some dim manner, hearkening as well to the words of the song.

***

All during that day he followed me at some distance, struggling to keep up with the sound of my voice, for as far as I was concerned, the tale I was telling was a song I sang only for myself, and I had neither ambition to attain guruhood nor the patience to slow my pace for his benefit. That night we slumbered on leaves a good twenty meters apart. For I had no desire for discourse with someone sunk so deep in the pit of nonsentience out of which I had thusfar so painfully crawled, and he was content to listen to my tale from a distance, as if somehow mindful himself of the gulf that separated our spirits.

Mayhap the foregoing is merely the post facto dissembling of self-justification, for I can make no claim that I had then attained that sublime level of enlightenment wherein the bodhi is content to shine without grasping at worldly consequences. Suffice it to say that while he may have chosen to follow, I chose not to lead, for if I had then addressed him it would have been only to tell him that a true Child of Fortune has no chairmen of the board or kings. If this be judged callous indifference by the moral philosophers, I can only declare that moral responsibility or its converse were concepts my spirit did not contain at the time, and throw myself on the mercy of the court.

***

On the following morning when my spirit rose to the sun, feeling all the stronger for the previous day's triumph, I straightaway sought out another flower without a thought for the creature my words had placed in my charge, nor, on the other hand, did 1 eschew enticing him further with the declaiming of my endless tale to myself.

Soon enough I came upon an orange bloom where three gaunt women were munching on fibrous blue fruit of a tuberous shape. I strode boldly up to them this time, in the full verbal tide of my spiel, and one of the women seemed to listen out of the corner of her ears with a certain indifferent attention, which had me stand there and reach a proper conclusion like a true ruespieler of the Gypsy Jokers rather than immediately grab for the fruit like the same forced to snatch fressen incognito from under the noses of denizens of the Publics.

"And who is the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt who will lead you back into the Spark of the Ark?", I declaimed as I approached the end of the cycle. "The Child of Fortune, within us all who is the teller of the tale, and in the honor of whose spirit within yourself you will now shower this ruespieler with ruegelt!"

The exiled Edojin in rags blinked at me strangely for a moment, and the logic of the Dreamtime and the logic of the quotidian moment came to coincide. "Fruit, bitte," I told my audience. "Give ... me ... fruit ..."

Then, as if a key had been turned in the lock of some long-forgotten reflex of etiquette, she handed me one of the blue tubers with a grotesquely patronly flourish, as long ago she might have tossed a coin to a busker on a civilized street.

To the extent that I was able to be moved to such complex emotion, this was no doubt the crowning achievement of a ruespieler's career, but to the extent that I could still be said to retain a sense of revulsion, I was quite horrified by this engramatic ghost of a human response.

***

On the next morning, still trailed by my disregarded acolyte, I repaired directly to a flower to spiel for my breakfast again, and so my feeding cycle evolved. No longer famished, no longer fearing the power of the floral perfumes, I must on some level have known that now I could easily enough have marched up to any flower and snatched up a surfeit of fruit with my own hands.

Yet in the Dreamtime, I was a Gypsy Joker ruespieler earning her survival by the power of the Word, and so, striding boldly into the pheromonic winds behind my verbal shield, I stalked like the very Princess of ruespielers straight up to a yellow flower where three Bloomenkinder sat devouring purple fruit and forthwith brought my continuous tale around to the hat-passing phase with the cavalier mendicancy of a Gypsy Joker Queen.

"Long has the tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt been told along the primrose path of our long march from the trees to the Luzplatz, and now the Piper must be paid, which is to say the teller thereof must be honored with fruit! Fruit! Fruit! Give me fruit!"

Since the verbality of these revertees was to say the least limited, and since the actual tale I retold endlessly was a mythmash of personal imagery no doubt all but incomprehensible to an audience other than myself, no doubt the two fat men and the even fatter woman responded more to the sheer presence of a volcano of gushing verbality in their midst than to any apprehension of the content of the tale. Yet in another sense, every syllable of human lingo I declaimed was the essential haiku version of the tale, for sapient speech itself was the protagonist thereof.

Thus I moved the grotesquely fat woman to forthwith hand me her fruit by the mere act of demanding same in the manner of a ruespieler, even though I could hardly have been said to have fairly earned this ruegelt by a proper and complete telling of my tale. Nor, having once achieved my aim in the manner I had chosen, did I have any intention of regaling these three lost Children of the yellow flower with an extended version consciously designed to rouse their spirits.

Nevertheless, as I turned to leave with my booty, the refugee who had been following me for two cycles now caught up with me at the yellow flower. Rather than attempt to emulate my impossible example, he simply snatched up a fruit and trailed after me as I retreated, blathering still, to resume my journey toward the Pied Piper of the sun.

Mayhap it was the sight of my first follower marching off behind his Piper into the sunrise, mayhap it was indeed the power of the Word itself to rouse some dormant spirit within; certainement it was no act of will of mine or power which I consciously sought to wield.

Be that as it may, there were now two lost children of the forest following the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt toward the dawning light. She who had paid me my ruegelt in fruit had now joined the Gypsy Jokers' Mardi Gras Parade.

***

And there would be others.

Some would follow for a day and then be ensnared by the flower of the next morning's breakfast, others would join the tribe for a few days and then revert, but none of the lost children of the forest who first began the journey were to emerge once more in the worlds of men.

For while the tribe of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt was to maintain a permanent population of some half dozen, more or less, as the collectivity thereof marched eastward across the Bloomenveldt, children of the forest came, tarried awhile, departed into the darkness from whence they came, arid were replaced by others, even as the immortal spirit of our species itself has been carried forth from the trees to the stars via billions of transient mortal avatars.

From hindsight's pristine moral stance, even I must own that my callous indifference to the karmic responsibilities I had acquired when I cast my net of words into the sea of what once were men was a good deal less than proof of my complete return to the true spirit of humanity. Which is to say that to my own retrospective shame, I no more sought heroically to regain the allegiance of followers who strayed back into the forest of unreason than I had braved a futile return to the Perfumed Garden to seek to rescue Guy. And if the latter had been forgone at the expense of much pain to my spirit, the former was a matter of perfect innocent oblivion. For in the tale of the Dreamtime I was living, I was no chairman of the board or king, no guru avid for followers, no Pied Piper of Pan, but just Sunshine the Gypsy Joker ruespieler, alone and singing for her sustenance, the anyone who told the tale.

At length however, Iwandered into precincts where dyadic couples were sometimes to be encountered, engaged in tantric unions of such terminal intensity, and at any rate about flowers totally lacking in edibles, that any attempt at approaching them would be pragmatically futile, gauche from any minimally civilized perspective, and, moreover, as events quickly proved, it would have been perilous indeed to assume that the power of the Word could retain sovereignty over the garden perfume of the kundalinic serpent.

For upon the very first such occasion, as I myself gave the passion flower the widest of berths and continued onward, I chanced to look back and see that the two nethermost of my followers, a spindly scrawny fellow who had joined the parade only a cycle ago, and a grossly fat woman who had been waddling distantly in my wake for some days now, had paired off and were making for the flower, groping each other grotesquely as they shambled toward it in their unseemly libidinal haste.

Then it was, I do believe, that the awareness of the possibility of karmic debt and human caritas intruded into the perfect moral void of my spirit, for now at any rate, upon losing two of same to the flowers in this starkly graphic manner, I began to perceive that there were indeed human beings in my van whom I had somehow managed, without consciousness of trying, to lead a certain distance along the road from darkness to sapient light.

And while from the viewpoint of cosmic equity, it was they who owed me a debt of gratitude for what I had so freely given, from the point of view of evolutionary responsibility, it was I who had cast my net of words into the sea of the Bloomenveldt without regard for the plight of those lungfish brought up out of the floral deeps struggling and gasping to breathe sapient air.

Which is to say that while extinguishing my own consciousness in a futile attempt to rescue Guy might have been a useless act of suttee, that consciousness was in no current danger of imminent extinction, and mayhap owed it to whatever spirit that had saved me to have a like regard for the lost sapient spirits that fate and my own unknowing efforts had chanced to place in my charge.

Vraiment, in practical terms there was not much more for me to do but continue my endless spieling trek eastward, avoiding even distant approach to the flowers of lust as best as I was able, make some minimal concessions to not letting my charges fall too far behind, and hector those who began to stray off the Yellow Brick Road with imprecations they could not understand and kicks and shoves which were somewhat more efficacious.

Which is not to say I achieved any perfection as a shepherd then, moral or otherwise, for when it came to approaching a passion flower after two of my lost children had stolen away thereto, there I drew the line, for I would not endanger my own survival to attempt to save such doomed spirits, nor would I allow any event to long delay the march to the coast. In this was self-preservation of this individual in harmony with the preservation of the collectivity of the tribe, for if there was no longer anyone to tell the tale, the days of our tribe would be forthwith ended.

Indeed, if truth be told, I was no shepherd diligently herding sheep, for I was primarily conscious of my charges as an imposition, like a hiker who finds herself adopted by a pride of lost kittens and cannot fail to accept a certain tender regard for their safety or consign them to the wilderness without regret, but who would just as soon not have to assume a position of guardianship over them.

So, vraiment, I proceeded more slowly and cautiously now, reluctantly mindful that I was somehow responsible for a collectivity of other spirits as well as my own. And now, trailed by some four acolytes emphatically not of my choosing, a new level of consciousness reappeared, a being I would contend had at last earned the right to once more be called fully human.

For while the subject of my sanity at any stage of the tale and the sequence in which my consciousness reevolved was to be a matter of endless learned debate by Healers and mages far better versed in the scientific lore than I, in the entirely amateur opinion of the subject in question, my full humanity was restored when I accepted responsibility, however reluctantly, for preserving the humanity of others.

***

At the time that I encountered the bodhi in the wood, there were four members in the Pied Piper's tribe, the four final members as it would turn out, for we attracted no new Children of Fortune this close to the coast, nor was I to brook the loss of another of my charges to the forest again, not now with my moral awareness renascent, and the flowers of lust behind us.

Three of them were men: a thin blond fellow whom I inventoried under Goldenrod, an obese man who became Rollo, and a balding man I thought of as Dome. For while it could hardly be said that these lost creatures of the forest exhibited what could be styled a human personality, it seemed both just and convenient to grant them the nominal dignity I certainly would have given to the aforementioned lost kittens.

The woman was the most human-looking specimen of the lot, which is to say her physique was neither gaunt nor obese, and her eyes upon occasion seemed to assume a questioning look. She I dubbed Moussa, for in her I dared hope I saw a spark of myself, a kindred though mute spirit, whose life I now held in the cupped palms of my hand.

Of the four that I was to lead out of the Bloomenveldt, she was the only one who after arduous efforts was to reclaim her full sapient citizenship in the worlds of men. And Moussa did she take for her freenom years later upon her release from mental retreat in homage to she who named and told her wanderjahr's tale.

These were my companions when I happened upon the bodhi in the wood, as I came to style him in the nomenclature of memory. We came upon him suddenly. I rounded a hillock of tree crown and emerged right into a bowered dell on the other side, where a man sat in the posture of the lotus before a flower whose petals fanned out behind him to enhalo his existence in a lambent blue aura.

This was no moribund sage in his final years of life meditating into eternity by the look of him. He was a taut and golden-skinned man whose naked body gave every evidence of excellent health. Sleek black hair hung down to his shoulders. He seemed almost fit enough to pass for a Bloomenkind.

But his clear green eyes seemed not to be the vacant orbs of a Bloomenkmd gazing mindlessly into a blue void, rather did I somehow sense the presence of a fully sapient spirit contemplating limpid inner depths. Or at any rate a visage of sufficient novelty under the circumstances to give my ceaseless babble the first moment of pause it could remember.

As if tuned to the very frequency of my thoughts, the bodhi's attention seemed to rise up from those inner depths to regard me with a sudden keenness, though, in hindsight's vision, my little tribe and I must have presented a vision of even more striking novelty to him than he had to me.

"Who are you?" he said in a strong tranquil voice. "Where have you come from?"

Simple and logical enough questions one might suppose, but ones which at the time I was not exactly psychically equipped to answer succinctly. "We are the Children of Fortune of the Bloomenveldt following the song that draws us thither as apes from our ancestral flowers to the far-flung worlds of men," I declaimed, in the only mode of discourse of which I was presently capable.

"You are the mystical Bloomenkinder of the forest?" the bodhi exclaimed, maintaining the immobile perfection of his yogic posture, but verbally allowing a rather unsagelike astonishment to betray its presence in his voice. "Vraiment, it would seem you have indeed come a long march from your ancestral flowers!"

"It has taken millions of years of diligent study to produce the ultimate triumph of the ruespieler's art, our own magnificent sapient selves," I readily enough agreed.

At this his eyes widened, becoming somehow more humanly focused and more inwardly distant at the same time, as if 1 were a creature of some Dreamtime to him. "From how far into the forest have you come, Bloomenkind?" he asked me expectantly, as if hanging on some hoped-for answer . "You speak as one who has found her perfect flower."

"I speak as one who was a perfect Bloomenkind of the Perfumed Garden before there was anyone to tell the tale," I told him rather crossly, for such unwholesome obtuseness was enough to rouse a certain ire, and ire reevolved my consciousness to yet a more recomplicated level. "You speak as one who seeks a Perfumed Garden of perfection for your spirit."

At this a positively fawning expression came onto his face which cloyed my palate like treacle. "Can it be that my exercises are now at last to be rewarded?" he said breathlessly." Are you a vision sent to me by destiny? Are you to be my guide to the Perfumed Garden ?"

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt, to which we have marched for the long slow centuries from the trees to the stars," I told him, struggling to regain the power to craft the stream of my logorrhea into a more precise verbal instrument. "Follow not the flowers of the Bloomenveldt into the dim mists before the singer became the song. Seek not to become a perfect Bloomenkind in your Perfumed Garden, but follow the Yellow Brick Road."

"You have truly seen the Perfumed Garden?" the bodhi persisted, as if I had not at all succeeded in conveying even the vaporous spirit of my meaning, or as if his spirit simply refused to hear.

"Vraiment, once I was a Bloomenkind in the Perfumed Garden of our ancestral Eden, before I heard the Piper's song," I said, since this seemed to be the only thing he was willing to hear.

He stared at me in wonder. "And like a bodhisattva you then chose to return to the worlds of men?" he exclaimed. "Enlighten me, spirit of the forest, show me the way to your Perfumed Garden of perfection."

My aforementioned ire had been rising throughout the latter part of this discourse, and while the logical rationale for it was beyond my comprehension at the time, and the inner psychic dynamics were only to be elucidated later in the Clear Light Mental Retreat, at that moment, it seemed to me that I was once more hectoring the spirit of Guy Vlad Boca, wearing the vile crown of the Charge in the Hotel Pallas, seated in just such a lotus position under his flower smiling just such a smile of vapid bliss.

"In the Perfumed Garden, there is no one there to tell the tale, and the Pied Piper of Pan never plays his song," I told him, my eyes misting with outrage, or sadness, or mayhap somehow both. "Join the Mardi Gras Parade and follow the only tale there is to tell to the encampment of the Gypsy Jokers in the Gold Mountain, for true Children of Fortune have no chairmen of the board or Perfumed Gardens of perfect flowers."

"You have been to the Perfumed Garden and of your own free will returned to the worlds of men?" the bodhi said incredulously. "You are this Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt and these Bloomenkinder of the forest follow the song of your voice?"

"I am a simple ruespieler on the streets of Great Edoku," I told him. "I am anyone who tells the tale."

The bodhi of the wood began to draw back into the depths of himself at this, as if retreating from a surfeit of unwelcome satori, or mayhap in order to avoid suffering same. "Mayhap you are the sister of the Prince of Liars, storyteller, for you cannot be speaking truth," he said as he seemed to will his gaze inward. "No one has ever returned to the worlds of men from the land of the Bloomenkinder."

Thus had a terrified and lonely girl spoken to her own heart when she awoke on a leaf in the very darkest heart of the land of the Bloomenkinder with neither filter mask nor food. This doom of the spirit had that girl sworn an oath to overcome or die in the attempt.

I regarded the bodhi of the woods who now had completely resumed his gaze into the featureless emptiness of his self-chosen void, and I regarded Goldenrod, Rollo, Dome, and Moussa, my four dim creatures who had patiently stood there all the while, mesmerized by the sound of human discourse, struggling however unsuccessfully to escape from the very nullity he sought to embrace. Somehow, it seemed to me that in some strange Dreamtime of the human heart, their poor little spirits were more truly human than he.

And it was the Sunshine Shasta Leonardo who had sworn that oath who now looked on her charges with a more tender regard, and addressed them, not the immobile icon of spiritual perfection, with the very words that had begun the tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt and which now served admirably as the summation thereof.

"No one," I said, "has ever returned to the worlds of men from the land of the Bloomenkinder before."

***

After this confrontation with the bodhi of the wood, I no longer stalked impatiently ahead of my lost children of the forest, but walked among them, addressing my spiel to an audience other than myself. And while nothing could yet quite emerge from my lips that was not cobbled together out of swatches of the only tale I had to tell, I grew self-conscious of the fact that I was practicing the ruespieler's art, if for a commodity of far more absolute importance than ruegelt. And when one of my charges threatened to stray, or showed reluctance to leave a flower of our feeding, I hectored the same as harshly and insistently as was needful in tones and cadences one would apply to an unruly toddler who had yet to learn the lyric of the human song.

Thus did we proceed eastward toward the worlds of men, and thus did I sow all unbeknownst the seed of the Word in this long-fallow ground.

The same was to sprout at a carmine flower at which we had been feeding in the company of two nearly terminally torpid human creatures who had long since gorged themselves to impressive obesity on the strangely meatlike pulp of the sweet blue fruit.

Rollo, it seemed, had encountered a flower whose fruit chanced to contain molecules too puissantly congruent with the ideals of his metabolism. With unwholesome and unsettling avidity did he rip chunks of the tough chewy pulp out of the fruit and gobble them down, and when it came time to depart, he was entirely deaf to my entreaties.

"Arise, Rollo, to follow the yellow, for the sun calls you down from your ancestral trees to follow the Yellow Brick Road!" I fairly shouted in his face at length, and when this too he ignored, I shook him by the shoulders, and then turned his vision sunward by main force.

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the sun, follow the yellow ..." I began to chant over and over again, for this indeed was the most primal version of the tale, the synergetic mantra which had roused me from just this condition, vraiment, from worse.

I continued to chant, pointing to the sun with one hand, and keeping his face turned toward it with the other. When all at once, I noticed a bizarre change in my own voice, for on certain syllables the single note of my vocal cords seemed to be accompanied by a harmonic chord on another instrument.

Some moments later it dawned on me that this was more, or less the case.

While my efforts to fix Rollo's attention on our song of the road and the rising sun thereof had thusfar been ineffective, Dome and Goldenrod had out of traditional tribal custom fixed their gaze thereon as soon as they had heard a few turns of the traveling mantra.

So too had Moussa.

But, ah, Moussa, Moussa my appointed namesake, raggedly, atonally, blinking with the effort, had begun to chant.

"Yellow ... follow ... yellow ... follow ..."

A moronic sprach mayhap, but certainement a sprach in the Lingo of man.

Seizing upon this amazing event, I fitted my own voice to this simple drone, waving my arms like an orchestral conductor at Dome and Goldenrod, up and down with the beat.

"Follow ... yellow ... follow ... yellow ..."

At length, Dome joined in, and once there were three of us, Goldenrod soon enough followed. And finally, roused at last by the communal efforts of his tribal siblings, Rollo gave over his eating, rose to his feet, set his eyes upon the sun, and began forming flaccid and silent simulacra of the syllables with his own pulp-smeared lips.

***

While the utility of applying this monotonous two-note chant whenever one of my charges began to fall behind or threatened to be captured by a flower proved admirably efficacious, the esthetic excruciation of it from the point of view of the ruespieler hardly rendered it suitable for a permanent song of the road, and so I continued to spiel the tale to them whenever I could, rather than make the sacrificial effort to keep them chanting.

For this I was to be chided more than once by certain mages in the Clear Light who informed me that I should have been much more diligent in my efforts to restore their powers of speech. I would counter, now as I did then, which is to say that in spite of my laxity and indifference to the approved therapeutic methods, they began to speak anyway.

If true speech it may be styled, a point of some dispute in scientific circles even today. Certainement, the sounds that Rollo, Dome, Goldenrod, and Moussa began to make as I spieled them through those last days on the Bloomenveldt were undeniably in the form of words, and at the end, the tribal vocabulary contained nearly a dozen of these, though only Moussa was master of them all.

"Follow ... yellow ... sun ... road ... Piper ... fortune ... Bloomenkinder ... children ... far-flung-worlds-of-men ..."

That was about the extent of it, and certain authorities were to claim that this vocabulary consisted of precisely those sounds which the teller of the tale repeated most frequently and with rhythmic emphasis, which is to say that much the same effect could be achieved with a tribe of parrots. Indeed I was once told that one of these worthies actually produced a cageful of aviary babel with just the same vocabulary to prove his point.

But when at length we finally reached the coastline, unlike parrots, my Children of Fortune were quite able to use their few poor words to make their feelings plain, or so in my heart did it seem to me.

Sunset had come the night before upon a Bloomenveldt lying under a thin cloak of fog, so that the sharp line of the horizon had disappeared into vague green mists for several hours before darkness. Morning awoke me with the wan yellow light of dawn, just as the rim of the sun was beginning to peer over the line of the eastern horizon. The fog had long since gone, the pale sky was brilliantly clear, and one by one my fellow creatures were beginning to arise from the perfumed sleep of the Bloomenveldt.

Then, as the true blaze of sunrise arose above the last vestiges of night, a brilliant mirrored sheen fairly exploded into existence as the sun emerged from it in a visual paean to glory. For halfway to the horizon, the leafy green plain abruptly ended, and a sea of rippling silvered flashes began.

"Yellow ... sun ... Piper ... fortune ...

Rollo, Dome, Goldenrod, and Moussa stood beside me as we watched the sun of our fortune arise at last over the eastern ocean.

Did they truly perceive it as I did? Did their minds contain some dim memory that the line between the Bloomenveldt and the sea was the visual dividing line between the forest of the flowers and the sapient worlds of men? Je ne sais pas, but tell me not that they could not entirely perceive that the tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt had led them to a vantage from whence they could see the promised land where the Bloomenveldt of the spirit ended.

"Follow fortune, follow yellow!"

"Piper of the Bloomenkinder!"

"Far-flung-worlds-of-men!"

"Fortune Children follow yellow!"

Was it in truth only my sapient imagination overlaying random parroting with the exultation of my own spirit that spoke to me as I watched them babble their excitement at the sight of the ocean? In truth, as some would say, might a cock have also greeted the sunrise thusly, and with the same degree of sincere enthusiasm?

My spirit tells me not, nor did my eyes fail to see mouths rippling in what might have been attempts at smiles, nor was I deaf to gurgling sounds which might have been their happy laughter.

Certainement there was more than the spiritual vacuum behind the speech of a parrot in their eyes as one by one they came to look directly into my own.

"Piper!"

"Yellow!"

"Fortune!"

"Follow!"

"Vraiment, follow the yellow, my Children of Fortune," I told them, "for we lost children of the forest have now found ourselves."

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow!"

"Children found!"

"Follow Yellow Brick Road!"

They were more than human parrots; at the very least they were eager puppies, yipping and dancing to reach the end of the trail. And so did we set out for the last time into the Bloomenveldt sunrise toward the worlds of men.

Within a few hours, the interlocking foliage of the Bloomnveldt thinned out into a treacherous webwork of branches and long falls to the forest floor which we dared not approach. This was as far eastward as we could go. From this vantage, there was no seacliff plunge of perspective, nor any beach in view to mark the melding of land into sea. Some thousand meters before us, the irregular green sameness of the flower-speckled Bloomenveldt gave way to the shimmering clarity of an ocean under a cloudless sky with the clean sharpness of Occam's razor-edge.

And along this razor-sharp interface, all roads led to Rome. For a few moments, my tribe milled about in confusion, for they knew not where next to go.

"Fear not, for you are no longer lost children of the forest, my Gypsy Jokers," I told them as I turned to the south and began the final march. "Follow the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt!"

"Follow yellow, follow Piper! Moussa began to chant as she fell in step beside me, as if acknowledging to the both of us that the Word of the Piper superseded the mute vector of the sun.

"Follow yellow, follow Piper!" the others chimed in, tentatively at first, and then, as if achieving a level of abstraction sufficient unto resolving the conflict of tropisms by bestowing the yellowness of the sun and all that it implied upon the voice that they followed, with more certain enthusiasm.

"Follow yellow, follow Piper, follow yellow, follow Piper!"

Thus did our Mardi Gras parade begin, thus did the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt lead her Children of Fortune, thus did a raving, grimy, rag-clad girl lead four chanting creatures struggling to be human out of the forest of flowers to dance triumphant through the streets of the worlds of men.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Child of Fortune, by Norman Spinrad

Postby admin » Sat Mar 19, 2016 6:05 am

Chapter 24

But little did I know that, long before the sun had begun to slide down the sky, the gnomes of the research domes would suddenly bring the worlds of men to us.

Vraiment, though such a perception would never have occurred to me at the time, no doubt the research team that suddenly dropped in on us out of the sky were no more prepared for the bizarre sight we presented than our little tribe was for them!

It happened with just such mutually discombobulating unexpectedness. Four silvery human figures came floating down from the sky to land on a cluster of leaves not ten meters away.

They stood there gesticulating and making incomprehensible sounds to each other, and while it might be safely assumed that they were staring as intently at us as we were at them, this was impossible to verify, for they were sealed in full atmosphere suits -- form-fitting coveralls and hoods of silvery fabric, filter masks, and impenetrable mirrored visors above them.

Moussa, Rollo, Goldenrod, and Dome had fallen silent. They stood there gaping vacantly, incapable of terror, mayhap rediscovering the emotion of surprise.

I myself, naturellement, had seen scientists in atmosphere suits often enough during my sojourn in the research dome to decode the import of these silver beings after a few moments of pure thoughtless shock. I too had once bounded in great weightless leaps across the Bloomenveldt, and while I had never sheathed my body in such alienating armor, certainement, I retained memories of what the Bloomenveldt was like from the other side of a filter mask.

But long before I could formulate any course of action, the research team went into purposeful motion. Two of them skipped with light gingerly steps to the leaf upon which we stood while the other two remained in place and aimed the lenses and antennae of various devices in our direction.

"Sprechen sie Lingo? Are you verbal?"

"In the beginning was the Word, and before the singer was the song," I replied, "which has carried us from our ancestral flowers to the far-flung worlds of men."

"Carramba!" exclaimed a voice from behind the left-hand mirrored visor. "She speaks, she declaims poetry no less, and you will observe no filter mask in evidence, nicht wahr! Ah, many theories will now be in need of revision! Certainement, this is a major find!"

"Who are you, kind, do you remember your name, how long have you been out here on the Bloomenveldt?"

"The Pied Piper of the Bloomenkinder has taken many millennia of diligent study to create that ultimate triumph of the ruespieler's art, our own magnificent sapient selves," I told him.

"What? Que? Was ist los?"

"Bloomenkinder! Wahrlich! Observe these creatures, see their vacant expressions! It's true, we have found ourselves a tribe of the mythical Bloomenkinder!"

Now the two scientists gave over their attempts at discourse with me to peer and prod at my Gypsy Jokers. These, possessed of no sapient mode of reaction to such scientific scrutiny, stood indifferently motionless and mute throughout.

"Indeed! These folk are possessed of neither filter masks, floatbelts, nor full human consciousness. Bloomenkinder! What a treasure house their metabolisms must be! Our fortunes are made!"

"Once we were Bloomenkinder in the Perfumed Garden, but now we are sapient spirits of the Arkie Spark," I told them, for while the full sapience of my charges might be arguable, certainement they were no flower-suckled Bloomenkinder of the Bloomenveldt depths, nor, after all we had gone through to reach this place, was I about to let us be so styled.

"Now you declare these are not Bloomenkinder?" one of the abstract silvery figures said to me quite pettishly. "When a moment ago you declared yourself the Pied Piper thereof?"

"This is hardly a scientific question of such triviality that we can expect to decide it on the basis of anecdotal interrogation in the field!" said the other. "We must forthwith remove these specimens to our facilities for proper study."

"Ja," said his colleague, and then addressed himself to the recording team. "Summon a hover. Have them prepare quarters suitable to feral humans. And apply for a droit of custodianship forthwith."

A scant half hour later, during which the scientists engaged in wild theorizing and even more enthusiastic financial speculation with little apparent regard for the objects thereof, a dull-steel- colored and vaguely ovoid craft came skimming in over the ocean, level with the canopy of the Bloomenveldt.

The ungainly cargo hover slowed to walking speed as it reached the edge of the Bloomenveldt and slowly inched its way toward us about half a meter above the foliage, until it had reached a more or less stationary position above the wind-tossed treetops no more than a few meters from where we all stood. Bivalve doors in the prow of the hover then opened like the maw of some great cetacean inviting entry.

As for me, I regarded this proposition with a good deal less trepidation than had Jonah or Pinocchio, and started forth across the intervening leaves with as much dispatch as the two recording scientists, who were now disappearing inside with their equipment.

When it came to what the scientists styled "Bloomenkinder," however, these remained entirely unresponsive to their urgings and proddings, and the other two were constrained, with something a bit less than good humor, to draw me back and enlist my aid.

"You will be so good as to herd your Bloomenkinder aboard so that we may depart, bitte," said the one.

"Wait!" cried the other. "The method thereof must be recorded, for it may be of some scientific value." Via a transceiver behind his filter mask, he summoned the others to the lip of the entrance to the hover's cargo bay, where they once more set up a variety of instruments and aimed their lenses and antennae in my direction.

"Sehr gut!" said the fellow who seemed to be in charge, when he had gotten the word from the recording team. "Commence, bitte!"

While under more ordinary conditions I would have remonstrated with a good deal of pettishness at being ordered about in this cavalier manner, and indeed, as my career as a subject of scientific inquiry progressed, was to dig in my heels more than once at such rude behavior, at the time I wanted nothing more than to be gone from the Bloomenveldt, and was many weeks away from such consideration of the social niceties.

I therefore did as I was bade, which is to say I confronted Moussa, Rollo, Goldenrod, and Dome, and began to chant. "Follow Piper, follow yellow, follow Piper, follow yellow ..."

In a minute or two, I had them all chanting along with me again, and once this was achieved, the Pied Piper had little trouble leading her Children of Fortune across the last few leafy meters of the Bloomenveldt, if not exactly into the Gold Mountain, then certainement into the eager mouth of scientific scrutiny.

"Follow Piper! Follow yellow! Follow Piper! Follow yellow!"

"Fantastic! Wunderbar!"

"Nothing like it in the literature!"

The two mages brought up the rear, shaking their heads and muttering to each other. Then we were all inside the stark and bare gray-walled cargo bay, the doors snapped shut on this rich meal of unique specimens, and the Bloomenveldt disappeared from my sight forever.

***

The next two days were a disorienting melange of periods of boredom and periods of frenetic activity of which I was an entirely passive object.

Upon reaching the research dome, we were all forthwith stripped of our rags, unceremoniously hosed down outside like so many domestic animals, and reclothed in plain and ill-fitting white smocks, though I adamantly refused to give over my sash of Cloth of Many Colors, which I belted around my waist.

We were then ushered into a large storeroom where crates and canisters had been piled high against the walls to make room for rude cots. We were fed an indifferent meal of overbroiled and unidentifiable cutlets with a soggy assortment of steamed vegetables and then left alone to our own devices.

While my former charges were content to lie on their cots and stare placidly at the harsh lighting fixtures set in the ceiling, I straightaway went to the door and discovered, with little surprise though not without a certain consternation, that it had been locked behind me.

I spent the next several hours alternately pacing about the storeroom and fidgeting on my cot, attempting all the while to marshal my psychic resources to meet the new reality.

Certainement, confinement within this grim bare chamber was a far cry from either the open expanses of the Bloomenveldt or the vision of triumphant return to the far-flung worlds of men that had kept me trekking onward thereon for what seemed like the better part of my young lifetime. I was avid to travel onward, though to where, and how, I no longer quite knew.

Indeed though I soon enough resolved to demand my freedom at the earliest opportunity, when at length a party of scientists entered the storeroom laden with a bewildering profusion of instruments, equipment, and recording devices, I found that I had no form within which to frame such a demand.

For while freedom from the present situation was a concept I could readily enough grasp, the question of freedom to do what seemed entirely unanswerable at the time. Freedom to wander aimlessly around the research dome? Freedom to return to a vie of endlessly wandering the Bloomenveldt? When it came to resuming my life's journey, I had no more concept of how to proceed or what to demand than did Moussa, Rollo, Dome, and Goldenrod.

Therefore, for want of any active goal to pursue or coherent demand to present, there seemed to be nothing for it but to passively submit to the samplings, measurements, and poking about of the scientists, who, au contraire, seemed to lack nothing in the way of purposeful motivation. Electrodes were affixed to various portions of my anatomy, instruments prodded and glided over every centimeter of my body, syringes withdrew blood, urine was demanded and delivered up, even samples of my tears, sweat, nasal mucus, saliva, and vaginal juices found their way into vials.

When these exercises were finally concluded, we were fed another indifferent meal, and then left alone once more. For what must have been several more hours, no event of significance occurred save those taking place within my own skull, and even these were of little note, for the inescapable passivity of my position cloaked my consciousness in a pall of ennui. What was I to do? What was I to even wish to do? Indeed, now that the tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt had reached what should have been its triumphant conclusion, who in fact was I?

After some immeasurable period, the storeroom lights were extinguished, and I lay there on the unfamiliar cot in the darkness longing for an escape into sleep that was a long time in coming, for here the irresistible perfume thereof was of course absent, and my metabolism, long-accustomed to the nightly cycle of same, kept me awake and tossing until --

-- I was rudely shocked into full wakefulness by a sudden blaze of light that had me leaping off the cot and halfway across the room to follow the sun, follow the yellow, before the sight of the bare gray walls and ceiling, the piles of crates and canisters, and the three men who had entered with breakfast, brought me back with a psychic thump to this most unpleasantly quotidian of all the worlds of men.

As far as I was concerned. the second day in the storeroom was no different from the first, though no doubt, from the point of view of science, much novel data must have been accumulated by the new rounds of intimate explorations.

Be such valuable research as it may, from the point of view of the subject thereof, nothing of significance could be said to have happened. I ate, I suffered examination. I lay torpidly on my cot, was fed another meal, was subject to further scientific ministrations, and once more was plunged into the darkness of an ersatz night.

But the next morning, shortly after a breakfast of toasted grains and nuts mixed with dried fruits, a new assortment of mages began to parade in and out of the storeroom. Which is to say that though the traffic of the past few days had been perceived as nothing more coherent than a blur of bodies, apparatus, and faces, I perceived that these were new visitors, for, if nothing else, their actions were quite different.

There were no more samplings of body fluids, no more pokings, proddings, and arcane measurements of protoplasmic functions, for these assorted newcomers were laden with no instruments or apparatus at all.

Rather, like a tribe of Wayfaring Strangers divvying up their loot, one by one, and not without a certain haggling among themselves, but entirely without regard for any wishes of the objects thereof, they began making off with my lost children of the forest.

Rollo was the first to go, allowing himself to be dragged off passively by two dour-looking women. "Wait!" I cried, but they quite ignored me, and when I essayed a physical intervention, I was restrained by a veritable wall of mages. In like manner were Dome and Goldenrod removed from the storeroom against my incoherent protestations. Nor would any of the mages deign to enlighten me as to the nature of these occurrences.

Indeed, neither Rollo, Dome, nor Goldenrod themselves either made any move to protest events or so much as bade farewell to their onetime savior. Only Moussa dug in her heels for a moment as two men dragged her off, and seemed to gaze inquiringly into my eyes. "Follow ...?" she seemed almost to ask. "Follow Piper ...? Follow ...? Follow ...?"

This was more than I could bear, and had I had my full wits about me, no doubt I would have activated the Touch and employed it in a manner that would not at all have been to the liking of these mages. "Where are you taking my Gypsy Jokers?" I demanded at the top of my lungs while three of them held me back by main force. "Are you mute Bloomenkinder? Speak --"

At length one of the men bearing off Moussa deigned to pay me verbal heed. "The Bloomenkinder have been assigned to various mental retreats where they will be well treated, kind," he told me. "Mayhap we will succeed in restoring them to full sapience. In any event, rest assured that your friends will have the best of care, and will have abundant opportunity to serve the cause of science."

And with that, Moussa too was gone. I was never to see any of them again, and, upon exhaustive inquiry years later, learned as I have said, that only Moussa was ever returned to full sapient sovereignty. Poor Rollo lived only a few more years, whereas Dome and Goldenrod still dwell in mental retreats on Belshazaar even to this day. Dome has never learned to truly speak, whereas Goldenrod eventually attained the verbal level of a small child.

To those who would now say that, given these results, I might have done better to leave the four of them to their blissful union with the flowers, myself at times, if truth be told, among them, I would say that the return of Moussa to full citizenship in the human species, vraiment, mayhap Goldenrod's eventual transformation into an innocent child at least equipped for some true human congress, justifies my actions when the karmic accounts are debited and credited.

Be all that as it may, I had no prescient foreknowledge of their future fates when they followed me across the Bloomenveldt, nor, once they were removed from my care forever, did I have any alternate course of action to suggest, even if the same would have been heeded. I only knew that I was now quite alone in the storeroom of the research dome wondering what fate 1 was now to suffer in the service of science.

But I was given little opportunity to brood on this, for almost as soon as Moussa had been removed, a tall, somewhat portly man with short iron-gray hair and a kindly if somewhat over-proper demeanor, entered the storeroom alone, ignored all his colleagues, and made straight for me.

"Guten tag," he said quite pleasantly. "Ich bin Urso Moldavia Rashid, servidor de usted. Bitte, I would discuss with you a proposition of mutual benefit." So saying, he executed a little bow, and gestured with perfect politesse for me to follow.

After all those weeks on the Bloomenveldt sans even the sound of coherent discourse and these two days during which I had been treated with less courtesy than that due a household pet, I was utterly charmed by this sudden display of civilized manners toward my person, and went along without even thought of demur. Urso ushered me out of the storeroom, down a hallway, and into a small chamber which might have been someone's office commandeered for the occasion, equipped as it was with desk, terminal, racks of word crystals, arcane charts, and chairs. He seated me on a chair directly before the desk and took his place behind it, for all the worlds as if this were to be some sort of interview for a position of importance.

"You are said to be quite verbal," he began, "so now that I have introduced myself, bitte favor me likewise, though a formal exchange of name tales can await another occasion."

I struggled to marshal my thoughts sufficiently to reply in quotidian kind, for it was the niceties of civilized discourse which then seemed to me arcane, and the spieling of my endless tale the mode ordinaire of my verbality. "I am the only tale there is to tell which has taken us from the ancestral flowers to ..." I blinked. I paused. With a great effort, I made myself go on in a long- unaccustomed vein. "I am Moussa ... I am Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, Gypsy Joker, Child of Fortune, ruespieler," I managed to say, and I was quite pleased with the results of my efforts.

Urso smiled warmly. "Gut," he said approvingly. "And I am Urso Moldavia Rashid, Healer, mage of psychic therapy, domo of the Clear Light Mental Retreat, in which capacity I tender my invitation."

"Invitation?"

"Invitation, proposal d'affaires, offer of succor, la meme chose, nicht wahr, to wit, I offer you residence in the Clear Light on terms to be agreed upon."

"Incarceration in a mental retreat like my fellows?" I exclaimed in alarm and dismay.

"Nein, nein, nein!" Urso declared as if he found this notion as heinous as I did. "While I was forced to purchase droit of guardianship from these scoundrels in order to be allowed to make this offer, and while your mental competence may be a matter of some dispute, I hereby waive, as a token of good faith, any right of involuntary custodianship. The terms that I offer do not include involuntary incarceration. You will be provided with a decent enough private chamber, three meals per diem, a modest though civilized wardrobe, use of our therapeutic services gratuit, and within reasonable limits you may come and go at your own pleasure. All that your end of the bargain requires is your aid in our researches."

"Never will I agree to partake of the psychotropics of the Bloomenveldt and become a Bloomenkind of the mental retreats!" I told him with growing coherence, for I was beginning to remember all too well what sort of researches were carried on therein.

Urso laughed and brushed this objection aside with a wave of his hand. "Fear not," he said, "for in any case your prolonged exposure to the psychotropics of the Bloomenveldt renders you quite unfit as a subject for psychopharmacological research, nicht wahr. But you style yourself a ruespieler so-called, ne? And this, I have been given to understand is one who earns her keep by the telling of tales ...?"

I nodded my assent.

"Well, then consider my offer one of employment in your professional capacity."

"Ruespieler in a mental retreat?" I said in perfect befuddlement.

"As it were," declared Urso. "For if the statements of the scientists of this dome are to be credited, you own to, among other things, having penetrated to the realm of the so-called Perfumed Garden, having been a Bloomenkind of the deep forest, and, as evidenced by my own eyes, to have returned with the tale thereof to tell. Wahrlich? C'est vrai?"

Once more I nodded. "I have followed the tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt from our ancestral flowers back to the far-flung worlds of men," I agreed.

"Well then surely you perceive that such an adventure of the spirit holds considerable interest for the sciences of the mind," Urso said. "So what is required of you is several hours per diem during which you will spiel us your tale thereof and your answers to whatever elucidatory questions we may pose to assist our inquiries into the scientific facts thereof. And while I freely admit that our primary aim may be the advancement of science, in the process thereof you will certainly gain sufficient renewed clarity to once more rejoin the body politic of the worlds of men as an independent agent. You will accept, nicht wahr?"

"And if I do not?"

Urso shrugged. "As a man of honor who has sworn the oath of Hippocrates, I am constrained to eschew all coercion in these matters," he said, not entirely convincingly. "As my bona fides thereof, I offer sufficient alternative largesse to pay your passage back to Ciudad Pallas should you refuse ..."

"And how am I to survive on the streets of Ciudad Pallas?" I asked, for I now remembered all too well the vile bleakness thereof, and the fact that the only employment available to a Child of Fortune therein was as an experimental subject.

Urso threw up his hands in an admission of ignorance and favored me with a smile that was a bit too smugly self-assured for my taste.

Nor did I have any rejoinder to make to this eloquent silent reply. Indeed, now that consideration of the practicalities of survival had been thrust upon me, even in my present state, I knew all too well that I was being offered a good deal less than a free choice.

For I was confronted with an alternative of impotent indigence even more perfect than what I had faced when I had been expelled from the Hotel Yggdrasil. At least Edoku had provided fressen and Public Service Stations for the indigent. As for returning to Glade with my tail between my legs, the chip of credit which would have allowed me to do so was now lost with my pack in the depths of the Bloomenveldt. And while my father would no doubt have supplied me with a duplicate, it would take weeks to apply for same by Void Ship mail and more weeks for it to arrive, during which I would expire of starvation.

Surely Urso Moldavia Rashid was hardly ignorant of this situation, which is to say that while he may have sworn an oath against coercion, fate had paid no heed to such niceties, and as he must have known quite well, I must accept his offer or perish.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Child of Fortune, by Norman Spinrad

Postby admin » Sat Mar 19, 2016 6:05 am

Chapter 25

And so, after a short shuttle flight to Ciudad Pallas and a quick floatcab ride through the unappealing streets thereof in the company of Urso Moldavia Rashid, I took up residence in the Clear Light Mental Retreat.

By the esthetic standards of Ciudad Pallas, this no doubt might have passed as a triumph of the architect's art. A sprawling, single-story, crescent-shaped structure, windowless from the vantage of the street upon which it was sited, its inner curve embraced about two hundred degrees of a large circular garden, the circumferential boundaries of which were completed by a high concrete wall cunningly hidden from the easy perception of those within by a closely planted screen of even taller fir trees. The garden itself was mostly green lawn, dotted randomly with oaks and veined with winding flagstone paths that went nowhere in particular. Here and there small beds of flowers had been planted, wooden benches set out, and little shaded gazebos erected.

My room, like those of all the other residents, faced this interior garden with an entire wall of glass which slid aside to allow egress directly thereto, and which could be opaqued at my pleasure. There was a bed, an armoire, several chests, and a chaise, all crafted of reddish rough-hewn wood, and the usual toilet facilities done up in grainy gray stone. The walls were a cheery yellow, the ceiling cerulean blue, and the carpet a tawny concoction of shaggy ersatz fur.

All in all, an environment crafted to tranquilify the mind and brighten the spirit, though to my eyes the enclosed garden with its cleverly concealed wall soon seemed rather reminiscent of the vivarium of the Unicorn Garden, which had similarly masked the reality of confinement behind a screen of trees.

Nor were the other terms of residency less than as promised. I was supplied with a small wardrobe of tunics, skirts, and trousers, and three meals were indeed provided daily in the refectory. And if these left a good deal to be desired in the way of culinary artistry by the standards of a Grand Palais, a proper Edojin restaurant, or even the finger food of the Gypsy Jokers, at least it could be said that the fare of the Clear Light was an improvement over that of the research dome storeroom, let alone the monotonous raw produce of the Bloomenveldt.

As for the promise of freedom to wander the streets of Ciudad Pallas when my presence was not required by the mages of the mental retreat, this was a privilege of which I sought not to avail myself for quite some time, for on the one hand my rapidly returning memories thereof were entirely depressing and uninviting in comparison to the bucolic ambiance of the Clear Light's garden, and on the other, I hardly felt myself yet ready to sally forth into the long-unfamiliar milieu of urban thoroughfares.

Nor was the vie of the mental retreat one of boredom or ennui, at least at first.

After weeks of spieling my endless tale to no other truly sapient ears than my own, indeed for that matter after perfect lack of avid audiences as a ruespieler in Great Edoku, it was quite exhilarating to find myself encouraged to babble on daily at great length to rapt audiences of Healers and mages, no less, and to observe that my least mutterings were duly recorded on word crystal for posterity.

This is not to say that I was set behind a podium in an auditorium like a learned lecturer. Rather did I spend four hours a day and more in a small windowless room in the bowels of the mental retreat seated across a table from two to half a dozen people at a time, with Urso usually presiding during this stage of the process.

As for my audiences, a different combination seemed to appear daily, apparently drawn from a pool that must have numbered several dozen scientists; how many of these were on the staff of the Clear Light itself I was never to learn.

At first, I was simply encouraged to retell the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt over and over and over again sans interruption or interrogation and was not even properly introduced to the audiences for same, exactly as if I were indeed a ruespieler declaiming before random anonymous throngs, though alas no ruegelt was forthcoming at the conclusion of the performance.

During these first two weeks or so, such recitations seemed to be the sole form of my therapy, and I would be an ingrate if I dismissed the benefits thereof as accidental byproducts of entirely self-interested scientific inquiry. For I was allowed, indeed encouraged, to tell my tale in all its endlessly mutating versions long after the variety thereof must have been thoroughly exhausted from the point of view of my listeners, indeed beyond the point where it began to seem like so much repetitious babblement even to myself.

This, it would seem, was precisely the nature of the therapy.

First the endless retelling of the tale began to converge toward a consistent version, much as the odes of the preliterate bards must have converged toward the memorized consensuses that were to be eventually transcribed into those written versions which have passed down to us today.

Then I began to attain a certain self-consciousness of this very process, at which point craft entered the picture as I struggled to compose my verbal gushings into a coherent spiel capable of being reproduced for the understanding and delectation of the worlds at large. Which is to say I developed during this period the spiel which I was later to declaim for ruegelt in the uninspiring streets of Ciudad Pallas.

Finally, I began to perceive that the endlessly recurring motifs of the Piper, the sun, the Yellow Brick Road, ancestral trees, und so weiter, far from being venues, personages, or objects in an actual skein of events, were in fact images encapsulating complex gestalts of meaning beyond my entirely conscious apprehension strung together in a sequence that was somehow both literally false and spiritually true.

To those who would declare that the independent rediscovery of the hoary concept of literary metaphor was not exactly overwhelming evidence of intellectual puissance, I would point out that from the point of view of a singer who had long been entirely subsumed within the song, this satori, if no great and original contribution to the evolution of the literary art, was a powerful enlightenment indeed when it came to my therapeutic rediscovery of my own true self.

Indeed, if she who had roused herself from floral nonbeing to follow the synergetic mantra of the sun, the yellow, the Yellow Brick Road, across the forest canopy and into the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt might have been said to have been in a state of schizoid cafard, then this reemergence of a self-conscious teller as a being distinct from the metaphorical creature of the tale might be said to mark sanity's full return.

Which is to say that upon gaining such insight, I had indeed finally followed the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt all the way back from the ancestral flowers of mindless tropism to full sapient citizenship in the self-crafted worlds of men.

***

Nor were the mages and. Healers unmindful of the success of this therapy, for not long after my discourse had attained the coherence of a ruespieler self-consciously crafting her tale, the nature of our seances together changed.

Having allowed a quotidian personality capable of rational discourse to reconstruct herself out of this babble of metaphor, having cozened the teller to prise herself a sufficient distance from the protagonist of her tale, they gave over any further interest in the metaphorical version thereof and began to question me quite sharply on the objective events in question from the points of view of their various disciplines. Which is to say they became openly eager, indeed often owlishly impatient, to pin down with scientific precision the phenomenological realities behind the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt.

Urso Moldavia Rashid for the most part presided over, not to say refereed, these interrogations, for interrogations rather than therapy sessions they had certainly become, and oft-times it became necessary for Urso to mediate among the mages present to prevent the proceedings from turning into an unseemly learned brawl.

If I neglect to properly transcribe herein their endless questions, my perpetually inadequate replies to same, their sometimes acrimonious disputations among themselves, and what at length seemed to become their fruitless reframing of the same interrogatories, the truth of the matter is that I remember precious little of the details, save that most of their efforts seemed aimed not so much at advancing theoretical knowledge as at extracting data which might aid them in advancing the pecuniary fortunes of Belshazaar's main industry, the development and marketing of psychotropics derived from the Bloomenveldt, an enterprise which had a good deal less than my enthusiastic support.

As far as I was concerned, the whole process was disjointed, mendacious, productive first of mental fatigue generated by my sincere if inadequate efforts to answer fully, then of indifferent boredom as I felt myself reduced to the role of a repetitious parrot, and finally of a sullen irked pettishness verging on rebellion. No doubt a full account of these sessions would be of genuine interest to those equally obsessed with the same subjects, and these I refer to the scientific annals thereof which they may peruse for decades without exhaustion, for it would be only slightly hyperbolic to declare that whole rooms full of word crystals on these sessions were dutifully recorded.

***

After a good many weeks of this, I was quite convinced that there were no more therapeutic benefits to be had by remaining in the Clear Light Mental Retreat as far as I was concerned, which is to say I had now come to view the establishment not as a place of succor but as a venue of confinement from which I must summon up the courage and resource to escape.

Once I had been a daughter of Nouvelle Orlean, once I had been an indigent naif on the streets of Edoku, once I had been a mindless creature reposing on the petals of a flower, once I had been the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt, and while certainement I was none of these things now, I knew just as surely that if my tale was not to end as tragicomic farce, the terminus of my Yellow Brick Road could not be my room in a mental retreat.

Vraiment, had not Pater Pan himself long ago declared that my road must be of my own choosing, and that if the destiny thereof should bring me to his side, he would greet me as an equal spirit? Certainement, as a patient in a mental retreat, as a scientific specimen, as a prisoner of penury once again, I could hardly style myself the equal of such a free spirit who tripped the life fantastic out among the stars. Mayhap Pater Pan was the Piper of my spirit's journey still, for whether or not destiny would ever place me once more at his side, I heard the song he had sung to that spirit calling me forth to resume my wanderjahr on the Yellow Brick Road as clearly now as ever I had upon the Bloomenveldt. I yearned to be the true ruespieler I had never really yet become, telling my tale not for room and board in a mental retreat, but in the streets of great cities for electrocoma passage among the far-flung worlds of men.

But how?

In terms of the financial realities, my situation was precisely what it had been when I had been forced to accept Urso's offer. Vraiment, I could quit the Clear Light whenever I chose, but I had neither funds to assure my survival, means of earning same in Ciudad Pallas, nor any way that I could see of removing myself to a more promising planet where I might at least have some real chance of surviving by the practice of my art.

I was caught, or so it seemed, in an economic trap whose confinement, though no more readily visible than the walls of the Clear Light hidden behind their screen of trees, were also no less concrete.

***

Before the desperate determination to escape this velvet prison had taken hold of my spirit, my vie in the mental retreat had been both ritualized and solitary, a recapitulation in some psychic sense of my days on the Bloomenveldt, for truth be told, if I could fairly be said to have regained my own full interior sapient sanity, I had yet to gain true re-entry into the social complexities of the exterior realm.

I slept, I ate, I took occasional strolls about the garden, but now that the interrogatory sessions had reached the stage where their profitability was strictly one-sided, they kept me at it for most of my waking hours, as if to deliver up the botanical and psychotropic details I was incapable of revealing by a torture of ennui.

Nor had I even regained sufficient social consciousness to feel keenly the lack of tantric exercise, for when the natural kundalinic energies intruded into the centers in which erotic imagery arises, what arose unbidden was my last sexual experience on the Bloomenveldt, to wit a combat for my very spirit against a vile floral version of eros.

And if this was not enough to keep my kundalinic serpent torpidly cold and coiled, the only social circle whose possibilities lay open to me was that of my fellow inmates, and when at length I began to feel the lack of congress with kindred spirits to the point where I attempted to engage them in discourse, I only learned what my instincts had already known.

This dispirited and pathetic lot were no spirits I would care to claim as kindred. The Children of Fortune of Ciudad Pallas, as I had long since known, eschewed the arts, crafts, entertainments, and shady enterprises whereby the tribes of Edoku had traded pleasure for ruegelt in favor of earning their way as psychonauts in the mental retreats and laboratories, where funds were to be acquired by indulging in what they otherwise would have paid to enjoy when they could afford it.

Which is to say that even the generality of this single-minded tribe had little to discourse upon but the psychic effects of arcane chemicals and which laboratories and mental retreats were presently paying the highest wage.

The inmates of the Clear Light were drawn from these unwholesome ranks to begin with, and most of them had been deposited here as the result of the inevitable unfortunate experiment that must be suffered by anyone who followed the psychonaut's trade long enough in Ciudad Pallas. Which is to say when at length they dutifully quaffed a potion which translated their psyche into a schizoid realm of sufficient extremity to prevent even the mighty and puissant sciences of the mind from extracting it.

Thus the garden of the mental retreat was frequented by two species of inmates: hebephrenic babblers whose mutterings and sputterings were entirely incomprehensible to anyone but themselves though of manifest cosmic import thereto, and those who had lapsed into stony catatonia and sat on the lawn or on benches gaping into some private void.

"As for me, at the moment I could happily count myself among neither, but the more I attempted to converse with creatures who were no more verbal than so many Bloomenkinder on the one hand, or who responded to any conversatiorial gambit with a stream of hebephrenic gabble in their own secret sprach on the other, the more fearful I became that I must sooner or later end my days as one or the other unless I contrived to escape from the mental retreat.

Finally, early one afternoon when I had been given a brief respite from my service to science, as I was walking aimlessly in the garden with the yellow sun shining out of a cerulean sky down upon me, I was put in mind of my days as the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt, and resolved out of ennui, pique, or desperation to strike back at the ambiance of the mental retreat with sheer devilment.

I decided upon a quixotic gesture which was not only to throw the place into the desired uproar, but which in the end was to lead to my escape from the situation. Mayhap my prescient spirit in the act thereof was wiser than my intellect knew, or mayhap the final movement of my therapy at the Clear Light Mental Retreat was designed to accomplish my voluntary egress. Mayhap both Urso and I had our own way in the end.

Be such retrospective speculations as they may, I selected a venue within easy earshot of some dozen or more inmates sitting on the lawn in various states of torpor or babblement, much as I had once sought out promising platzes or corners when I was a street peddler in Great Edoku. Here a wooden bench had been conveniently set out under the shade of a large oak. This I mounted even as I had once stood upon a similar bench before the ersatz Luzplatz volcano, summoned up sufficient courage to overcome my sense of the ludicrous, took a deep breath, and began to declaim in as loud a stentorian roar as I could muster.

"Merde! Caga! Chingada! Once you were Children of Fortune following the Yellow Brick Road of your wanderjahrs out among the stars to seek bright destiny and your own true names! See what in this Bloomenveldt of the spirit you have become! Dispirited wretches! Human legumes! Bloomenkinder!"

The sheer volume and shock of this novel verbal assault was sufficient to cause several of the babblers to lapse into momentary silence and gaze woodenly in my direction. Even two or three of the catatonics managed to focus their eyes more or less upon me, or so at least it seemed. Pathetic though this response might be by any objective standards, it served well enough to goad me on, for even this was more rapt attention than I could be said to have achieved when first I dared to essay the ruespieler's art in the Luzplatz.

"I too left the planet of my birth to follow the camino real that has led us from our ancestral trees to the far-flung worlds of men!" I screamed as loudly as I was able, for when it came to attracting and holding the attention of this audience, volume was no doubt a good deal more critical than a well-crafted tale told with erudition.

"Vraiment, I too fell into the nethermost psychotropic bowels of this loathsome planet! Indeed I found myself besotted, with perfumes and pheromones which make the psychotropics of the laboratories of Ciudad Pallas seem like the cold crystal air of a mountain!"

Whether I had touched at last upon the only subject sufficient to rouse the interest of these zombies, or whether it was only the volume, the rapid rolling cadence, the sheer passion with which I sought to imbue every shouted syllable, every eye now paid me rapt attention. Some of the inmates even rose slowly to their feet and shambled closer to my bench.

"You have become inmates of a mental retreat, but I became a perfectly mindless Bloomenkind, without so much as a spirit to call my own," I shouted most abusively in their faces. "Yet my spirit roused itself to follow once more the song of the Piper that we all once followed from apes into men and so must you all rouse your spirits now!" I bellowed at them, quite enjoying my own tirade by now. But what I craved now was some response.

"Behold the sun which forever arises above the Bloomenveldt of your spirits, my pauvres Bloomenkinder!" I shouted more craftily now. 'Behold the face of the Pied Piper which we have followed from the depths of the forest of unreason!"

Vraiment, I was raving with the best of the teppichfressers now, and yet another part of me observed the proceedings with calculating clarity and no little wry satisfaction and knew quite well what I was going to do next.

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Piper, follow the Yellow Brick Road!"

I began to chant.

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Piper, follow the Yellow Brick Road ..."

Most of the inmates in my vecino were on their feet now, and in the middle distance I could see more of them shambling across the lawn to the hubbub.

They began to sway to the rhythm of my words. Like a musical maestra, I began to move my arms to the beat, palms upward, enticing them to join in.

As for the erstwhile catatonics, these were never roused to more than a bobbing of their heads, but those who a few minutes before had been locked into their own hebephrenic sprachs of babble were easily enough cozened by my efforts and the communal reinforcement thereof to take up the chant.

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Piper, follow the Yellow Brick Road!"

At length, when I had whipped up a veritable frenzy of chanting, there seemed nothing for it but to lead my Gypsy Jokers on a Mardi Gras parade about the garden. As to what in troth had moved me to carry this unholy prank to such an extreme, or indeed how far I was prepared to take it, je ne sais pas, for I had no sooner leapt from the bench and danced forward a few steps still chanting, when Urso, with at least half a dozen other functionaries of the mental retreat in train, came puffing and running across the lawn toward me.

"Cease this outrage at once!" he shouted at me, as red-faced with ire as with exertion. "Schnell, schnell, schnell, remove them all to their rooms!" he ordered his minions, gesticulating wildly with one hand, and dragging me away toward the main building with the other. Nor did he address me again until he had succeeded in removing my person well away from the tumult where my baneful influence could no longer make itself felt.

"And who do you suppose you are?" he demanded angrily. "What do you suppose you are doing?"

I pulled away somewhat haughtily from his grasp. I smiled a superior smile at him, filled with self- satisfied contentment, for the answer to his question was wonderfully clear and plain.

"I am Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, ruespieler," I told him with the voice of sweet reason. "Naturellement, I must practice my art."

A most peculiar change came over Urso Moldavia Rashid, for while on the surface his anger appeared unabated, beneath it I sensed some unknown satisfaction which sapped it of a certain credibility. "The Clear Light no public platz ist!" he snapped back with somewhat unconvincing spontaneity. "As perhaps you will notice, bitte, this is a mental retreat! We can hardly permit you to agitate our unfortunate patients in such an unseemly manner!"

"What do you suggest?" I demanded. "That I continue along as I have as an object of endless futile interrogation until I am indistinguishable from the poor wretches you seek to prevent me from addressing?"

"You are free to leave the Clear Light at any time," Urso pointed out fatuously. "And indeed if such an event occurs again, you will be expelled!"

"You would have me expire of starvation?"

We had reached the entrance to the building now, and Urso's demeanor abruptly altered. "You mistake my meaning and my spirit," he said in an almost apologetic tone. "I have only your best interests at heart."

"Well then what are you suggesting, Urso?" I demanded.

"That certainement your therapy has reached a stage where you must direct some thought and effort to your future life, for as you yourself have just so nobly declared, you certainly have no wish to remain an inmate in a mental retreat forever."

I looked at him with new eyes. Mayhap I had mistaken his spirit, for whatever else Urso Moldavia Rashid may have been before or after, in that moment he was a true psychic Healer, for he had spoken the truth that was in my own heart.

"I could not agree more wholeheartedly, Urso," I told him with unconstrained sincerity. "But what am I to do?"

"I may have some wisdom to offer in the practical realm as well," Urso said. "Let us make ourselves comfortable in my office and I will donate the time to elucidate at proper length."

To this I could find no reason to demur, and so what had begun as the hectoring and physical removal of a miscreant became a friendly tete-a-tete, or so at least it seemed.

***

"Neither of us wishes our arrangement to continue indefinitely, nicht wahr," Urso said when we had made ourselves comfortable in his cushioned lair of an office. "So while I am willing to grant you shelter and sustenance in exchange for your continued cooperation in our inquiries for a transitional period, I suggest that you avail yourself of your freedom to come and go and seek out means of gainful employment."

What a roil of emotion arose in me at these words! For while I wanted nothing so much as to regain my liberty, when it came to the economic means of securing same, my mind was utterly vacant. Which is to say that while I could hardly deny the wisdom and veracity of Urso's injunction, the emotions that they summoned up, alas, were frustration, anger, and dread.

"Gainful employment ...?" I muttered unhappily. "I am versed in no marketable skill or lore, and as for earning a wage as a subject for psychotropic experiments, my experiences on the Bloomenveldt have left me entirely unemployable as a psychonaut, even were I mad enough to resort to same."

"Indeed," purred Urso, and now the insinuating tone of his voice became quite evident, "but you are, as you have declared, Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, ruespieler, nicht wahr. Who has also righteously announced the necessity of practicing her art ..."

"In Ciudad Pallas?" I exclaimed. "You may indeed be a maestro of your own art, Urso, but it is evident you know nothing of that of the ruespieler! This wretched city is entirely devoid of the life of the streets! There are no suitable venues, the citizens thereof --"

"-- however unpromising, are certainly more promising in terms of both artistic appreciation and financial largesse than the indigent inmates of a mental retreat, nicht wahr?"

Once more Urso seemed to have earned his keep as a true psychic Healer, for I could hardly deny that it would take little more courage to declaim to the denizens of Ciudad Pallas than it had to stand up for myself in the Luzplatz and seek to entice the lordly attention of the indifferent Edojin.

Urso smiled at me. "What have you to lose by trying?" he said.

"Well spoken, Urso, well spoken indeed!" I declared, smiling back at him for the first time since this discussion had begun.

Would not the old spiels which had worn out their welcome in Edoku nevertheless be novel tales from a greater metropole to the bumpkins of this most culturally provincial of planetary capitals? Indeed did I not now have a grand tale to tell which was entirely my own and mayhap one of piquant local relevance to the inhabitants of this planet? Vraiment, had I not now prevailed by the power of the Word in the very Bloomenveldt itself? Had I not been willing to hector the very dregs of psychic disaster swept up from those self-same unpromising streets as they vegetated in a mental retreat? Did I have anything further to fear in the way of stage fright? Did I have any better alternative?

I shrugged. "Nothing ventured, nothing gained, n'est-ce pas?" I said almost gaily.

"Gut!" exclaimed Urso heartily. "And if you will forgive my anticipation of the decision I knew you would come to in the end, I make practical recompense in the form of this necessary gift."

From his desk he withdrew a portable chip transcriber such as are employed in private games of chance.

"Having researched the subject but scantily, I nevertheless believe I am correct in believing ruespielers, so-called, are traditionally paid in so-called ruegelt, actual physical tokens each representing a unit of credit ..."

My spirits suddenly sank. "I had forgotten that the very concept of ruegelt is unknown in Ciudad Pallas," I groaned. "How may I therefore command the citizens thereof to shower me with coin when none such exists?"

"With this device I have taken the liberty of providing for your use," Urso said. "The donor inserts a chip in one slot, the recipient in another, the amount of the transfer is selected, and the transaction is accomplished."

"It seems a rather unwieldy procedure in comparison to the simple tossing of some coins," I said uncertainly, though of course this was the normal mode of commerce throughout the worlds of men, and ruegelt only a concession to the demimonde on the more sophisticated planets thereof.

"Come, come, this is mere grumbling, is it not?" Urso chided in an avuncular tone. "To those whose spirits hold back from every venture, a less than perfect universe provides abundant excuses for sloth, nicht wahr?"

Once more I could not escape entirely from the feeling that he was serving his own self-interest no less than he was justly advising mine.

"Touche," I agreed nevertheless, for whatever else Urso might be, however I might have been manipulated to get me here, and at whatever profit to whom, Urso Moldavia Rashid, by means fair or foul, had guided me back to my Yellow Brick Road.

***

And so, the next afternoon, under an overcast sky, with my Cloth of Many Colors tied about my neck as a scarf and the chip transcriber in my pocket, I set forth.

Not having set foot on urban streets for months, I found those of Ciudad Pallas both daunting and strangely reassuring. For while I now found myself moving among more people than I had seen in one place for many weeks, and while the regular gridwork of streets, the geometrically rigid forms and unadorned facades of the palisades of buildings, indeed the very gray substance of the concrete beneath my feet seemed grim, lifeless, and ersatz, wandering in this venue was a far cry from the psychic perils of the Bloomenveldt, and Ciudad Pallas certainly seemed modest and quotidian enough in comparison to my memories of Great Edoku.

And while I might have been tempted to regard myself as a bumpkin fresh from the wilderness, or worse, as an inmate of a mental retreat taking her first tremulous steps out into the worlds at large, my perception of the citizens of Ciudad Pallas soon enough disabused me of any excessive humility.

For I saw no throngs of extravagantly clad and tinted Edojin promenading with the lordly and languid grace of folk who considered themselves the sophisticated crown of creation, nor even such haughty urchins as the Gypsy Jokers who had once seemed so daunting when I was a naif of the Public Service Stations.

Rather was I in the midst of modestly clad folk scurrying through the streets with, for the most part, the blank expressions that befitted this pallid venue. The majority of them seemed sober and industrious-minded citizens intent on affairs of business, while others, by the unlaundered look of their clothing and the dishevelment of their persons, could readily enough be identified as what passed in Ciudad Pallas for Children of Fortune, to wit the denizens of the waiting rooms of the laboratories and mental retreats with whom I had become all too familiar on my previous sojourn in the city.

Vraiment, I felt myself to be more connected to the spirit of Belshazaar, such as it was, than any of these natives and longtime residents thereof. For did not the life of its chief city revolve entirely about the psychotropics derived from the flowers of a continent upon whose treetop canopy most of these folk had never dared venture? Indeed was it not true that even the most adventurous natives of Belshazaar, the mages of the research domes, experienced the true reality of their own planet only within the alienating carapaces of their atmosphere suits? Was it not true that even the Children of Fortune of Ciudad Pallas, who imagined themselves psychonauts of the spirit, imbibed the essences thereof only second-or thirdhand in ampoules and vials?

Of all the humans who clung to the surface of this benighted orb, there was only one who had penetrated the central mystery of the dark soul thereof and returned with the tale to tell, and that was I, Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, true Child of Fortune, ruespieler, erstwhile Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt.

What a tale I had to tell to the denizens of this city! For though they might have by unconscious act of will actively eschewed knowledge of the true nature of that upon which their world was founded, the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt was their own true story, if only they had the courage to listen, if only I could summon up the art to touch their cramped spirits!

As for a proper venue within which to tell the tale, this, alas, was another matter, for one street was very much like the next, one indifferent knot of citizens much like every other. As far as I could tell, Ciudad Pallas was quite devoid of parks or civic centers or platzes where streets converged to provide a proper public forum.

At length, I gave over my futile search for such a venue, ceased my wanderings at the intersection of two streets much like a hundred others, stood before a towering building of glass and steel of no particular distinction, took in a deep breath, screwed up my courage, and began to spiel.

"The Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt!" I announced at the top of my lungs, and as I began the spiel itself, I found some inner craft modifying it away from the cryptic haiku form in which it had evolved as I lived it, away from the coherently crafted summation thereof which had emerged from the endless repetitions under interrogation, and toward an extreme condensation of the full version which years later I was to encode onto word crystal in this very histoire.

"Vraiment, all present here do surely know that the spirit of Belshazaar, the raison d'etre for your own presence on this planet, resides not in this grim gray city of lifeless glass and stone, but across the sea atop the mighty Bloomenwald where the great flowers exude the psychotropic substances upon which your economic vie depends and which is the sole fame of Belshazaar among the far-flung worlds of men!"

A few passersby had paused for a moment, if only to peruse this novel event, for never before had the streets of this city seen a ruespieler explode from anonymous silence into full-blown declamation. Half a dozen or so of these had remained when they heard me begin to speak of that subject surely dearest to any audience's heart, to wit the spirit and economic welfare of their very own selves. This in turn created a small eddy in the stream of street traffic, so that all must slow down a bit as they passed the spiel.

"I stand before you as one who has wandered deeper into the Bloomenveldt than any human spirit may safely go, who has walked among the fabled Bloomenkinder, seen the legendary Perfumed Garden of floral perfection, lost my elan humain to the puissant flowers, been rescued therefrom by the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt, and returned to this very corner upon which I now stand to regale you, good citizens of Ciudad Pallas, with this mighty tale!"

My audience had grown to more than a dozen now, and even some of those who had paused out of curiosity and then moved on seemed to do so with a certain reluctance, as if they indeed wished to hear more but were unfortunately required elsewhere.

"Hearken therefore to the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt! Learn of the wonders and terrors and the true nature of the forest of unreason upon which the very life of this city depends! Hear of the bodhis of the Bloomenveldt! Cringe at the depths to which the human spirit may descend! Glory at the power of the Word to bring that selfsame spirit back from the ancestral flowers to full sapient awareness! Listen to the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt, which is my own, and yours as well, the only true tale there is to tell, the one which we all have followed from apes of the trees to lordly citizens of the far-flung worlds of men, and in the process thereof become once more true Children of our species' Fortune on the Yellow Brick Road from tropism and determinism to sovereign captaincy of the great arkologies and gallant Void Ships which have made us the masters of the stars!"

I had attracted almost two score expectant listeners by the time I had finished this florid and extravagant preamble to my tale, a good many of them sober burghers of Ciudad Pallas, but more of them than not lost Children of Fortune of the laboratories and mental retreats, who no doubt heard more keenly in my words the song that had once been in their own hearts.

As for me, I was toxicated with my own spiel myself, though it was that state of clear and lucid toxication of which such as the sufis do speak, wherein the fiery passion of the spirit and the cool clarity of the intellect are revealed as one.

Which is to say that as I began to recount the story of my trek with Guy Vlad Boca into the floral heart of darkness, as I observed my descriptions thereof emerging spontaneously from the mysterious center of my own inner void, vraiment even as my body trembled with an arcane energy I had never felt before, there was a cool calm part of me that stood outside both the teller and the tale and knew with certainty that this was the very first time I had truly practiced the ruespieler's art.

This, all unknowing, was what I had sought to become when first I had listened to the ruespielers of the Gypsy Jokers and longed in my unformed ignorance to walk the path of their vie. This was what had been missing from my poor efforts in the Luzplatz as I parroted the oft-told tales of others before I knew a tale to tell that was my spirit's own.

And while the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt with which I had heroically babbled my way across the forest canopy had certainly arisen from the depths of my own heart, when it came to the coherent craft which must carry even the most puissant of stories from the spirit of the teller to those of the audience, I had never been the master thereof until now.

And so, as I launched into the story of my escape from the Perfumed Garden, the beginning of my unmasked journey across the Bloomenveldt, even my description of how my insensate spirit had roused itself from the lotus of forgetfulness to follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road, I found myself able, for the first time, to tell my own true tale with a coherence and accessibility to ears other than my own of which I had never before been capable.

For now it could justly be said that I was at last what I had so grandly to Urso Moldavia Rashid proclaimed: Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, ruespieler, in the act of truly practicing her art.

And now in the living process thereof, at least while the telling of the tale continued, I cared not that I was an indigent forced to survive by dwelling in a mental retreat, nor that I addressed a bare handful of people on the unpromising streets of an unwholesome city on a world which I wanted nothing more than to leave.

For as I spoke of the Pied Piper of the Children of Fortune whom we had all followed along the camino real from the ancestral trees to the stars, as I spoke of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt leading her charges out of the forest, as I spoke of Pater Pan, and Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, and all the true Children of Fortune who carried forth the Spark of the Ark, like all true tellers of all true tales, my own spirit was the most avid audience, to whom I addressed my spiel in my heart of hearts.

***

Be that as it may, when at length I came to the conclusion of my tale, I remained true to the quotidian necessities of the calling which I had now found, which is to say that while my spirit may have been filled with amour propre for the ding an sich, this did not prevent my more pragmatic side from seeking remuneration therefor.

At least a score of people remained attentively before me as I reached the finale, drawing forth my chip transcriber and waving it invitingly under their noses with a proper mendicant's flourish.

"And so this is my story, and this is our song, and if the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt has touched your spirits, if you too style yourself a true Child of Fortune, then cast aside all mean-spirited minginess, bitte, insert your chips herein, and give what magnanimity requires so that the teller thereof may carry it forth among the far-flung worlds of men!"

Alas, while the telling of the tale had pleased these worthies fancies as evidenced by the rapt attention which they had remained throughout to bestow, when the Piper sought her pay, their enthusiasm was a good deal more restrained.

Which is to say that one by one they turned up their noses at my entreaties and swiftly began to melt away.

Only one fellow remained, a disheveled young man, or more properly put, mayhap, an aging boy, quite obviously one whose funds were secured as a subject in the laboratories, who stood there uncertainly, blinking rheumy and clearly worshipful eyes in my direction, and fingering something concealed in the pocket of his trousers.

"Come, come," I wheedled, "are we not true Children of Fortune, you and I, kindred spirits of the Yellow Brick Road? Will you not show the miserly folk of this city that we care for our own? Together, let us put these Bloomenkinder of the spirit to shame! A single unit of credit will do the deed if that is all your fortune can spare ..."

Strange to say it was a quite uncharacteristic modesty rather than a certain guilty shame which I felt as I observed this poor urchin mooning at me as once I must have gazed at the Gypsy Joker ruespielers when I was a waif such as he. How much older I felt as he smiled shyly at me, withdrew his chip of credit, and inserted it into my transcriber.

"Two credits for the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt," he said. "Someday I too would wish for such a tale to tell!"

I was moved to plant a kiss on his cheek when this transaction was concluded. "May the Yellow Brick Road rise up to greet you," I told him. "And may you summon up the means to follow it to a far better world than this!"

"Tu tambien ..." he muttered, blushing, and then he was gone.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Child of Fortune, by Norman Spinrad

Postby admin » Sat Mar 19, 2016 6:06 am

Chapter 26

Thus in this most unlikely of venues did I at last become the true ruespieler I had never succeeded in being in the far more lucrative streets of Great Edoku.

Which is far from saying that I was ever able to earn sufficient funds at the trade in Ciudad Pallas to quit my room and board at the Clear Light Mental Retreat. Indeed, even had the slim proceeds of my efforts been enough to secure a room in some modest hotel and enough nourishment to insure my survival, still I would not have given over Urso Moldavia Rashid's gratuit provision thereof, for when it came to the retention of my modest funds, I became a miser with the best of them.

Nor was this the result of a newfound meanness of spirit; au contraire, having fairly discovered my own true calling, having set my spirit if not quite my feet back on the Yellow Brick Road, all my efforts, energies, and funds were husbanded toward the purpose of escaping from Belshazaar and resuming my wanderjahr's journey on better worlds than this.

For even though my earnings as Ciudad Pallas's sole ruespieler were paltry indeed -- twenty-one credits in the best week I enjoyed -- I was confident that this was more the fault of the city's karma than my own. There were no proper platzes or parks where I might draw a decent crowd, what small audiences I did address were largely unacquainted with the traditions of my trade, the burghers of the city had little enthusiasm for street performance, and the dispirited children of Fortune of the laboratories and mental retreats who were the most generous of spirit were alas only slightly less indigent than myself.

Yet by my own lights, I seemed sufficiently advanced in my craft to meet with financial as well as artistic success, if only I could secure the funds to remove myself to some planet where the streets were alive with gay-spirited throngs and the joie de vivre so absent from Ciudad Pallas had reached a reasonably full flower.

For did I not possess not only a considerable repertoire of tales acquired from the Gypsy Joker ruespielers of Edoku but a unique tale as well that was entirely my own? And was not even my modest success against all odds here on Belshazaar proof that I had the wit and craft to properly tell them?

It was only a function of effort over time, or so I told myself during these weeks. Slim though my daily earnings were, every credit thereof was retained against the day when I had accumulated sufficient funds to purchase electrocoma passage in a Void Ship leaving Belshazaar for greener pastures. Sooner or later, though alas more likely the latter than the former, I would have enough credit on my chip to travel on.

And as far as I was concerned, it mattered little as to where, for the journey itself was what I now sought to resume. Once I had enough funds to travel to anywhere else, I would take myself forthwith thither, and on that new planet would I ply the ruespieler's trade until I had earned enough to pay my way to the next, and the next, and the next, worlds without end, tripping the life fantastic like Pater Pan, from star to star, following the Yellow Brick Road of the wandering ruespieler, vraiment star-tripping through the centuries even as he, mayhap even to meet him once more before my body's time ran out.

Was it a man I sought to follow, or the Pied Piper of a tale? Did I truly dream of regaining the companionship of a lost lover or was this merely an ultima Thule my spirit placed like the rising sun above a road that had no ending?

La meme chose, ne, for Pater Pan the natural man was a wandering spirit, and Pater Pan the Pied Piper of the Yellow Brick Road was the spirit of wandering, and to Sunshine the ruespieler, were they not one and the same?

***

Be that as it may, in the end my tale was to take a different turning, indeed as I spieled for pittances in the streets of Ciudad Pallas, the wheel had already turned, though I was to be the last to know. Far sooner than I could have dreamt, I was telling my last tale for the citizens of Ciudad Pallas, though at the time I knew it not, for my chip still held less than half the credit I needed to purchase passage to the nearest world.

The tale I was telling at the time was, appropriately enough, Spark of the Ark, the venue was an undistinguished Ciudad Pallas street like all the others, and the audience consisted of some half-dozen burghers, four Children of Fortune, and a handsome dark-haired woman whose form-fitting suit of iridescent gold and silver feathers seemed to mark her as a turista from some more sophisticated sphere.

"And where did he go when the Jump Drive rang down the final curtain on the great slow centuries of the First Starfaring Age?" I declaimed, segueing into my climactic appeal for funds. "Everywhere! Nowhere! Into the space between which lies within our human hearts! Here within the teller who brings you the tale, vraiment even within the Arkie Sparkie hearts of you, my poor lost Bloomenkinder, which is to say all of you who still retain the nobility of spirit to insert your chips into my transcriber and donate your funds to she whose life is the singing of the song!"

So saying, I waved my transcriber in the customary manner before them, and in their customary manner most of them chose to fade away, though two of the Children of Fortune were good enough to honor my efforts with a single credit apiece before departing.

Now only the dark-haired woman in the suit of feathers remained, neither fleeing at my mendicant's appeal nor making any move to loose the strings of what surely must have been an overflowing purse. Instead she stood there regarding me quite strangely, with a wry yet somehow warm smile on her lips, and a peculiar look of nostalgic merriment in her wide blue eyes.

"Quelle chose!" I demanded, forthrightly confronting her. "From your haute couture it is evident that you are a woman of wealth and grace! Surely you will not be so mean-spirited therefore as to deny the Piper her pay?"

She laughed good-naturedly, withdrew a chip from the folds of her garment, inserted it into my transcriber, and watched my eyes widen in delight and no little astonishment as she transferred a full hundred units of credit to my own.

"I too once practiced the ruespieler's trade long ago and far away," she said. "Hola, in a certain sense it might be said that I follow it still. At any event, I do believe that it is you I have journeyed to this tiresome planet to meet."

"Me?" I exclaimed.

"You are Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, are you not? Of whom the case histories speak? The Lady of the Ode?"

"Ode?"

"Vraiment, Omar's ode, Our Lady of the Bloomenkinder, naturellement."

"Omar Ki Benjamin? He really wrote the ode he promised?"

She laughed. "Of course. The old roue is a man of his word. The problem has always been getting him to give it. "

"You are a friend of Omar's?"

She shrugged. "A subtle question, liebchen. We have been lovers from time to time for decades, yet I am still not quite sure. But then we know how such men are, ne?"

"We do?"

"We had better!" she declared. Then, sensing my complete befuddlement, which no doubt would have been evident to the coarsest oaf, she took me by the hand. "Come, kindelein," she said. "It would seem that I have much to tell you, though of course not half so much as you have to tell me. "

"Where are we going?" I managed to inquire.

She made a moue of distaste ... Alas, my suite at the Hotel Pallas," she said. "One cut above a rude bordello, as far as I'm concerned, but the best Belshazaar has to offer, I was given to understand."

I nodded. "I dwelt there once, " I told her.

"Well, then, you know what I mean!"

***

And so, hardly knowing how I had gotten there or why, I found myself ensconced with this bizarre yet somehow immediately simpatica woman in a suite in the Hotel Pallas much like the one Guy and I had once shared, all thick blue carpeting, brown plush upholstery, tawny wood paneling, polished brasswork, and dominated by a huge window that presented a grandiose and repulsive vista of this city of charmless gray and ugly expanses of glass.

"Feh!" my hostess agreed when she saw me gazing distastefully thereon. "You will be as happy to be quit of this place as I, ne? But come, be seated, have some of this wretched wine that they dare to charge such an outrageous price for, and hear my name tale, for naturellement, I already know yours."

She ushered me to a couch, sat down beside me, uncorked a bottle of wine, filled two goblets, wrinkled her nose, and gulped down a draught. The wine, when I tasted it, was nowhere near as vile as I had been led to expect.

"Bien," my new friend declared, for so I had already begun to consider her, though I did not quite know why.

"My name is Wendi Sha Rumi. My father, Rumi Mitsu Cala, was, or rather still is, a composer and performer of musique et lumiere native to no planet in particular, for he was conceived and raised to manhood aboard a succession of Void Ships, his mother, Cala Abdu Etroy, having been a freeservant thereon, and his father, Mitsu Bryan Chiri, being a Void Captain of same. His freenom, Rumi, he chose for the premiere of his first composition in homage to the legendary sufic poet of old.

"My mother, Sha Smith Gotha, alas deceased, was a Void Ship Domo. Her father, Smith Willa Carlyle, was an artisan of bijoux to the floating cultura, and her mother, Gotha Lee Kotar, was, to be frank, a courtesan thereof, of great beauty and tantric skill, or so it is said. Her freenom, Sha, she chose upon becoming a Domo homage a Sha Lao Hari, one of the earliest to follow that art, and the first to fit out her Grand Palais with a vivarium, or so the legend goes.

"My parents met when the courses of their endless voyages intersected aboard the Pegasus D'or, and one of the results of this union, naturellement, was myself, also raised entirely en passage, as it were. Thus I am a third generation native of the floating cultura, which no doubt does much to explain my distaste for planetary surfaces, let alone for such a pismire world as this.

"Eschewing parental largesse out of some ill-conceived rebellious pride and wishing to wallow in all that the worlds and the men thereof might have to offer, I passed my wanderjahr, and a long and wild one it was, ma petite, as a nouvelle indigent Child of Fortune making her way from world to world by the usual means, which is to say courtesy of wealthy lovers, via tantric performance, as a freeservant, by strategems amounting to little more than theft, and finally as an itinerant ruespieler with a plethora of dark and spicy tales to tell, my dear.

"At length, vraiment at great length, it slowly began to dawn on me that there were far more lucrative markets for same than streets and platzes, which is to say I began to record my romances and stories on word crystal, an alteration of medium which I commend to your attention, liebchen, for the sale thereof now allows me to live in the style to which all civilized folk should wish to become accustomed.

"My freenom, Wendi, I chose as a suitable nom de plume for the publication of my first word crystal, homage a the collector of lost boys in the tale of Peter Pan, for certainement I had collected enough of the same during my wanderjahr, and the gentlemen of the priapic gender were the audience I sought to capture for my libidinal romances --"

"Pater Pan!" I exclaimed. "The tale of Pater Pan?"

"Peter Pan," Wendi corrected. "Though it is arcane indeed that you should hear the other, for in fact long ago I briefly knew a man who styled himself thusly, and what a fellow he was too, liebchen, with a great golden mane of hair, the most outrageous blarney, and a suit you would not believe ..."

She smiled at me broadly as I sat there with my mouth gaping open. "Then again you might," she said archly, "seeing as how it was sewn together of a patchwork of assorted swatches not unlike the very scarf you wear!"

I gaped. I gargled. I gulped down a great swallow of wine. Wendi patted me on the knee and laughed uproariously.

"Pardon, ma pauvre petite, of course I was enjoying a small jest at your expense," she said. "Naturellement, your connection to the fellow, being recorded in the copious annals of your case history, was known to me from the start. Which is not to say that he and I were not lovers too, long ago and far away, verdad. C'est vrai. I tell you true."

At last I found my tongue. "Annals? Case history? Pater Pan?" I stammered. "I know not what to say. I am filled with questions I cannot frame."

Wendi raised an admonitory finger. "All in good time," she said, pouring me another goblet of wine. "But I have been babbling on at endless length and I have not come all this distance to hear the sound of my own voice, pleasing though it may be to my ears. It is your turn to speak, ruespieler. I would hear the tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt from the lips of same, for the dry monographs which the proprietors of the Clear Light Mental Retreat have thusfar licensed for publication obviously omit the most spicy and piquant details. I would learn why Our Lady of the Bloomenkinder is presently reduced to spieling for pittances on these mean streets. Drink up, then speak! I swear a solemn oath that I will seek not to gain profit by stealing your tale. And when you have enlightened my ignorance, then I will surely enlighten yours, at least to the extent that my poor powers command. Drink! Speak! Favor me with the telling of your own true tale!"

And so, my loquacity along the way well lubricated by more goblets of wine than I could count, I related to Wendi Sha Rumi a greatly condensed summary of the events I have thusfar recounted in this very histoire, omitting only those matters which cast less than glory upon my own person, some of the more intimate details, and of course whatever mature retrospective analysis I have attempted herein, which was beyond my intellectual powers at the time.

"Ah, I knew we would be friends when first I perused Omar's ode!" Wendi declared when I had more or less concluded. "For surely you are a sister of the spirit to the girl that I once was, and with good fortune, I am surely a sister of the spirit to the woman you will one day become." She frowned. "But despite your natural talent as a teller of tales, there remain matters I do not entirely comprehend ..."

"That you do not comprehend!" I exclaimed. "Vraiment, there is little of your presence on Belshazaar or my presence in this very room that I comprehend at all!"

"Well, then, let us take turns as interlocutor and respondee, my dear," Wendi said. "The first question may be yours ..."

"What are you doing here, Wendi?" I asked. "What do you want from me?"

"Do you wish me to frame my reply in terms of spirit, art, or commerce, liebchen?"

"Surely," I told her dryly, ''as an author of romances, you are capable of combining all three ...?"

"Well spoken!" Wendi declared with a little laugh. "In terms of spirit, as I have said, I knew you were a time-warped sister of my own heart when first I encountered Omar's ode. In terms of art, when I then perused the dry details of your adventure in the annals, I recognized an incompleted tale of great promise that I wished to hear from the heroine herself in order to enrich my own mastery of the art, for as you will learn, a serious practitioner thereof must never give over studying the work of colleagues. As for commerce, I have secured a modest commission to assist you in preparing a proper version of your adventure on the Bloomenveldt for inclusion in the Matrix."

"Matrix? Commission? Annals? Que pasa?"

"One moment, liebchen!" Wendi chided. "For speaking of commerce, it is your turn to answer me. To wit, why in all the worlds do I find Our Lady of the Bloomenkinder, the heroine and author of the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt, the subject of so much learned if far from artful publication, begging for pittances on these wretched streets?"

"In order to secure funds, naturellement!" I told her. "Why else? So that I may purchase my escape from what you have so justly styled this wretched place!"

Wendi regarded me with astonishment. "You are in fact declaring your indigence, child?"

"I do possess some two hundred and sixty units of credit on my chip ..." I said in a somewhat pitiful voice.

"Two hundred and sixty!" Wendi exclaimed. "With that you might purchase two nights lodging in this despicable hotel! I do not at all comprehend."

"I do not comprehend what it is you do not comprehend."

"Caga!" Wendi fairly exploded. "Nom de merde! The Clear Light Mental Retreat has licensed the publication of any number of learned and fatuous monographs dissecting your exploits, and while admittedly these are certainly less than popular fare, several thousand copies of each must surely have been purchased by institutes of learning. What wretched rate of royalty have they cozened you into accepting? One colleague to another, how mingy was the advance?"

"Royalty? Advance?" The more she spoke, the less I seemed to understand. "I am supplied with a decent enough room, three dull meals daily, and several changes of clothing, and that is the long and short of it," I told her. "You are saying I should receive something more?"

"WHAT?" Wendi shouted, bolting from the couch. She began pacing in small circles before me, fairly bellowing her outrage. "Chingada, what a naif! And to think I once had the temerity to style myself a proper thief! Child, while you have been spending all these weeks answering their stupid questions and begging alms in the street, the mages of the Clear Light Mental Retreat have been churning out monographs by the roomful on the data you have been so naively donating gratuit, at considerable profit to themselves!"

"They have ...?"

"Of course they have!" Wendi exclaimed. "Unlike you, my little ingenue, they were not exactly born the day before yesterday!"

Slowly, she subsided from her wrath, sat down beside me, and laid a friendly hand on my knee. "Fear not, Sunshine," she said in a much calmer voice, but one that was nevertheless edged with burnished steel. "I will aid you in dealing with these mountebanks forthwith. Healers they style themselves even as they rob innocent children!"

So saying, she grabbed me by the hand and fairly yanked me to my feet. "Andale!" she said. "We will have it out with this Urso fellow at once!"

"But ... the Matrix ...your commission ... what is happening ...? You haven't told me anything ..." I stammered as she dragged me toward the door.

"In the floatcab, liebchen, I will elucidate as best I can, though, hola, it would seem you have more to learn than even I can teach!"

***

Night had fully fallen by now, and as the floatcab followed its guiderail through the largely empty streets of Ciudad Pallas toward the Clear Light Mental Retreat, Wendi Sha Rumi told me of things that were at length to open up worlds,

"Consider, Sunshine," she said, "that since the Gyptians started carving graffiti on the walls of their tombs, or at any rate since Gutenberg printed his first book, our species has been churning out mountains of paper, tapes, cines, holos, word crystals, und so weiter on every conceivable subject and then some. And since some centuries before the Age of Space, these have all been replicated thousandsfold, to the point that to our Second Starfaring Age almost none of this knowledge and art has been lost. We now number hundreds of billions on nearly three hundred worlds, and still this process continues apace."

She shook her head in wonder and amazement. "The imagination boggles, ne. Paradoxically enough, there is so much knowledge that if some sense were not made of it, it might as well be lost. Thus the Matrix, wherein the sum total of human knowledge is stored in subatomic coding that makes word crystal seem as crude and coarse as tablets of baked clay. Or rather the Matrices, for each Void Ship contains a copy to be continually updated as their paths cross."

"Each Void Ship contains all of human knowledge?" I exclaimed in utter wonderment.

"Nein, nein, nein!" Wendi said. "What an impossible useless mess that would be! The sum total of all human knowledge, child, the edited sum total. For example, Omar's ode is in the Matrix, but most of the learned babble churned out by the mages of the Clear Light on the subject of your adventure is merely noted in the bibliographical index. And even with stringent editing, it requires years of study to learn how to properly extract what one desires from the chaos of the Matrix."

She turned to me and smiled. "Which brings us to our business at hand," she said. "It has been decided by those who decide such things, which is to say the inner circle of the floating cultura, as it were, that your sojourn upon the Bloomenveldt is of sufficient interest to posterity so that a short and definitive version is deemed worthy of storage in the Matrix. Thus I have been commissioned to journey to Belshazaar on the Mistral Falcon, which waits in orbit even now, to assist you in the preparation of same, along with certain mages who have come along for the ride. Your fee will be two thousand units, admittedly a mere token sum, but I assure you that inclusion of a summary in the Matrix will in no way reduce the sale of the full and glorious romance you will no doubt some day publish, indeed the cachet thereof will no doubt enhance --"

She cut herself off in midsentence, for our floatcab had now pulled up outside the Clear Light. "Speaking of credit units," she said, "I see we have reached our destination. So let us conclude this tawdry business as expeditiously as possible, so that we may swiftly flee this loathsome planet and begin our collaboration aboard the Mistral Falcon, ne!"

***

Thus, with my head reeling from this rapid-fire round of wonders and revelations to the point where I could scarcely think, I found myself being drawn down the hallways of the Clear Light by Wendi Sha Rumi, who shouted out to all and sundry for Urso Moldavia Rashid to be summoned to his office at once, and who refused to give over her strident demands until the whole mental retreat was in an uproar, and Urso at last appeared therein where we awaited him, scowling darkly, and muttering imprecations under his breath.

"What outrage is this?" he demanded angrily. "How dare you throw this mental retreat into a tumult and summon me from table like --"

"Like a thief caught in the act?" Wendi suggested in a cold, hard voice. "As for the nature of the outrage, that is for me to inquire and you to reply, Urso Moldavia Rashid! To wit, have you robbed this child of her droit of authorship out of mere pig-thick ignorance or deliberate guileful malice?"

"Who is this woman?" Urso shouted at me. "Speak at once, lest I expel you out upon the streets forthwith!"

"How dare you hector this innocent thusly?" Wendi bellowed. "As for expelling her from this establishment, I assure you that soon enough she will be gone. Which is to say as soon as you have rendered up some five thousand credit units, a modest enough estimate of the amount you have embezzled."

"Embezzled? Moi?" Urso said, shifting over at once from bellicose outrage to a tone of wounded innocence which would have seemed utterly sincere had not the transformation occurred with such rapidity. He sank down into the chair behind his desk and demurred not when I seated myself before him. Wendi, for her part, remained standing with one hand on her hip and the other pointing a finger of admonishment.

"Embezzled, you!" she declared. "For many long weeks has Sunshine been the subject of your learned interrogations, and many have been the monographs published thereon, to the great benefit of this institution's scholarly repute and to the pecuniary enrichment of all concerned save the font thereof herself."

"For those selfsame many weeks, she has enjoyed the benefits of our therapeutic ministrations," Urso pointed out defensively. "You know only the Sunshine Shasta Leonardo whom we have returned to full sapient sanity. Had you met the babbling creature who first emerged from the Bloomenveldt, you would not value our services to her so lightly."

"Well spoken!" I was moved to declare, for I could not deny the justice in his words.

Wendi, however, fetched my ankle a kick and shot me a look which further served to admonish me to silence.

"I do not undervalue the worth of your therapeutic efforts at all," she told Urso. "This I have already credited to your karmic and financial accounts. Otherwise, I would surely have demanded three times as much for the droits."

"The arrangement between us was freely entered into," Urso said in a rather whining tone, turning to me for support. "Will you deny this, Sunshine?"

Before I could begin to answer, Wendi held up her hand for silence. "Freely entered into?" she fairly snorted. "First you declare that your craft is entirely responsible for her present sanity, which is to say that she was quite barbled when you grabbed hold of her, and then you declare that the poor demented creature was capable of entering a business arrangement freely, and while in a state of perfect indigence to boot?"

Urso drummed his fingers on the surface of his desk. He shrugged. He sighed. His face took on an almost obsequious mien. "I am a Healer, not an author or an advocate," he said quite meekly. "I know nothing of these matters. Mayhap I have unknowingly violated some nicety thereof, but I am innocent of all guile or willful wrongdoing ..."

"Well spoken," Wendi said in a tone of poisonous sweetness. "Then you will no doubt be more than willing to rectify the innocent results of your ignorant actions, ne?"

Urso studied her narrowly. "In the interests of harmony and justice, I suppose I might bring myself to part with two thousand credit units ..." he said speculatively.

"Four thousand," said Wendi, "Seeing as how we have now established what you are, would it not be unseemly to haggle over the price?"

"Three thousand," Urso countered immediately.

"Three thousand five hundred. After all, just as the Clear Light Mental Retreat has gained a certain scholarly renown among the worlds of men courtesy of my young friend, so might it gain a certain odor of ill repute should the content of this conversation penetrate beyond these walls ..."

"Done," moaned Urso. "You drive a hard bargain, certainement."

"Au contraire," drawled Wendi Sha Rumi. "I am known throughout the worlds of men as a high- minded esthete hardly able to properly attend to the grubby details of commerce."

Urso fairly choked.

Wendi laughed.

***

After Urso had transferred the funds in question, Wendi accompanied me to my erstwhile room, where I began to stuff the meager wardrobe with which I had been provided into my pack. She fingered one of the tunics distastefully.

"It is hardly worth the effort to pack this rubbish, liebchen," she said. "Hardly suitable for the society you are about to enter." She eyed me speculatively. "We are not that different in general measurement," she said. "It will be simple enough to alter some of my attire so that you may be properly dressed. Obviously there is no point in attempting to seek out haute couture in this nikulturni burg!"

With enough credit on my chip to purchase three or four electrocoma passages, I at last began to catch my psychic breath, which is to say I determined to seize control of my own destiny from the admittedly beneficent hands of my friend and would-be mentor, who had scarcely even given me time to ponder my own desires since we had met.

"I cannot thank you enough for your aid, Wendi," I told her. "But I have my own road to follow, and, thanks to you, I now have the funds to embark thereon."

"Your own road to follow?" Wendi said slowly, as if she had been presented with something of a novel notion. "Vraiment, we must all follow our own star, ma chere," she agreed forthrightly. "The fact that I have come all this distance to meet you should in no way be taken into account. But what, may I ask, is this destiny which in your heart supersedes telling your tale to the posterity of the Matrix? Never have I heard anyone eschew this honor before ..."

"To follow the path of the wandering ruespieler and see the worlds of men," I told her.

"If that were all, why do you object to traveling at least the first leg of your journey in proper style?" she said, eyeing me narrowly.

"The worlds of men are many, and lifespan's duration is limited," I told her. "I care not to waste weeks of mine voyaging as an Honored Passenger, for I wish to make the attempt to see them all, to trip through the centuries in the sleep of electrocoma in the process and experience thereby as much of our species' tale as I can manage before I must die."

Wendi smiled a strange little smile. "It seems to me," she said, "that I have heard these words before ..."

I stared back at her. "You really did know Pater Pan," I said.

"Indeed," Wendi said. "And it would seem he told us both the same story of his millennial heart's desire." She regarded me sharply. "Do you seek to emulate his example or are you still smitten by his charms?"

"Je ne sais pas," I told her in all honesty. "Mayhap they are one and the same. I seek to travel the road of the spirit that we share certainement ..."

"And at the end of it, if fortune is kind, to find the natural man?"

"Mayhap ..." I muttered. "Indeed, since I left Guy Vlad Boca in the Perfumed Garden I have been moved to seek the embrace of no other natural man ..."

"This is a confession of prolonged celibacy?" Wendi exclaimed.

"I suppose it is ..." I muttered. "Though somehow I have never thought of it that way before."

"De nada, liebchen, de nada!" Wendi exclaimed, perceiving my discomfort at this admission. "Men being what they are, it happens to us all from time to time, let me tell you. It will pass, it will happen again, it will pass once more."

"You do not think me a silly naif for being so smitten that I suffer sexual dysfunction, for seeking to live out a Gypsy Joker's tale ...?"

"As for the former, I may be no Healer, ma chere, but the natural woman's wisdom tells me that one whose most recent rounds of tantric exercise consisted of mass ravishment by spiritless male animals is presently not withdrawn from the arena out of mooning longings for a lover light-years gone," Wendi assured me. "As for seeking to live out the tale, this does impinge upon my area of professional expertise, for whether you know it or not, what you are truly seeking is a fitting ending to your wanderjahr's story."

"I am?"

"Vraiment, and justly so! For we must always end one tale truly before another can be fairly begun with a clear spirit, in life, as in the literary arts."

She shook her head and smiled to herself in a self-congratulatory manner. "I knew that I must hear your tale from your own lips or miss its essence!" she declared. "But I knew not why."

"And now you do?"

"Vraiment," Wendi said. "Omar's ode ended with your escape from the Bloomenveldt and the scientific literature considers your return to sapient sanity the proper climax, but while the tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt is history, the tale of the wanderjahr of Sunshine Shasta Leonardo has not yet reached its proper esthetically satisfying conclusion, for you have not yet lived through its telling yet. Whether for reasons of the heart or by puissant unconscious literary instinct, you seek the right conclusion, liebchen, which is to say a proper conclusion to this romance requires a moment of triumphant reunion with your long-lost lover. Bon! Let us be gone! This must be accomplished in the interests of both kismet and art!"

I had finished packing while we spoke, and Wendi now grabbed up my pack and fairly shooed me out the sliding glass door into the garden. "Wait!" I found myself crying to her yet again. "Where are we going?"

Wendi paused in the doorway. "To the Mistral Falcon, where else?" she said.

"But you yourself have just agreed that I should seek out Pater Pan among the stars ...?"

"And how do you intend to do that, my dear?" she asked indulgently.

I shrugged. "By traveling among the worlds of men as rapidly as possible so as to maximize the probability of random encounter," I said. "Beyond that it is in the hands of fortune, is it not?"

Wendi shook her head ruefully. "I can see that your knowledge of mathematics is even more deficient than my own," she said, leading me by the hand out into the garden, where thousands of stars shone in the clear dark night. "Look up there, and see how the worlds of men are scattered among the stars," she told me. "I am not sure of the equations, but the approximate odds against such a random encounter occurring may be imagined by multiplying the count of the worlds of men by the mean distance between them."

"But ... but my path need not be entirely random ... I would of course seek out information along the way ..."

"Nevertheless, such a quest would consume your entire lifetime without reaching its proper climax."

"I don't understand you, Wendi," I complained pettishly. "First you tell me it is artistically right and proper that I seek out a reunion with Pater Pan, and then you tell me that success is all but impossible!"

"Impossible?" Wendi exclaimed. "When have you ever heard me declare that anything is impossible? Via the Matrix on the Mistral Falcon we shall winkle the fellow out soon enough."

"Via the Matrix?"

"Naturellement, how else do you imagine one keeps track of people in our Second Starfaring Age? While Pater Pan is hardly a figure of sufficient historical interest to have a running account of his wanderings recorded in the Matrix, certainement he has left a strong enough spoor of tales, legends, and little tribes in the process thereof for a maestra of the Matrix to construct a tracking program that will locate a recent locus in the data banks."

"How is such a thing possible?" I exclaimed.

Wendi shrugged. "Such mathematical legerdemain is entirely beyond my comprehension," she said. "But one need not trouble one's head with the same in order to employ it any more than one need be a mage of cosmological physics to travel by Void Ship."

Wendi began striding across the silent and empty garden to the main exit of the mental retreat, but I still hung back.

"What is it now, child?" she demanded impatiently.

"I cannot go with you," I told her. "For surely the three thousand five hundred credit units I possess, plus the two thousand unit fee you allude to, will at best cover the expense of a journey as an Honored Passenger to one nearby planet. And where will I be then? An immobile indigent cursing my own extravagance again!"

Wendi's irritation evaporated. "I see you have exchanged a quantum of innocence for a packet of practicality!" she said approvingly. "No longer the high-minded artiste incapable of attending to the grubby details of commerce!"

She stood there in the garden for a moment, pondering, then she rubbed her hands together in glee. "Bien!" she said. "Now I will instruct you in a bit of the lore of same. As she who has a commission to oversee the preparation of your Matrix entry, I do declare that the same cannot be properly finished without an esthetically satisfying conclusion, who can deny this, ne? And in my expert literary opinion, this requires a climactic confrontation with Pater Pan. So much for the art of it, ma chere."

She waved a finger in my face and assumed an owlish air. "Now attend to the means whereby we artists gain our pecuniary vengeance for the depredations of the merchants, who are forever seeking to take advantage of our high-minded innocence," she chortled, obviously enjoying herself immensely. "Since we are both agreed that a reunion scene with Pater Pan is essential to a properly crafted Matrix entry, expenses incurred to achieve the same may legitimately be charged to the cost of scholarly research."

"Are you suggesting what I believe you are suggesting?" I said, slightly aghast in a moral sense mayhap, but taking a certain delighted amusement in a ploy that would certainly do any Gypsy Joker proud.

Wendi hugged me proudly. "Indeed I am!" she declared. "By this accounting, we will travel in proper style until our quarry is found, and if this may take some time, why that is fortune's gift to circumstance, for we travel gratuit, liebchen, as is only our right as free spirits of the arts!"

Yet still something held me back.

"Merde, what ails you now, child?" Wendi said, for no doubt my final trepidation was writ clearly upon my face.

"In truth, the floating cultura pleases me not," I blurted rather sullenly. "I have passed that way before, and I have no wish to have such idle empty folk look down their excessively elegant noses at me again!"

"Am I an idle, empty person?" Wendi said gently. "Have you observed me peering down at you from heights of aristocratic haughtiness?"

"Of course not ... I didn't mean ..."

She took my hand and squeezed it as she led me inside the Clear Light and through the corridor to the streetside egress.

"Je comprend, liebchen, truly I do," she said. "The truth of it is that while you voyaged within a Grand Palais, you never voyaged within the floating cultura, you were never an Honored Passenger therein. You were treated as a mere fortunate urchin, and so you felt like a ragamuffin intruding into the fete, ne ..."

"One might I suppose style it thusly ..." I admitted grudgingly.

"Ah, but this will be another matter, Sunshine." Wendi said as we reached the street. "For you are that urchin no longer! For now you will travel by the invitation, hola, by the largesse of the floating cultura, not by purchasing intrusion therein."

With a little bow, she bade me enter a waiting floatcab. "For now you are no longer a ragged little Child of Fortune, but the heroine of an ode, a personage whose words are deemed worthy of the Matrix, with none other than Wendi Sha Rumi as your collaborator, friend, and patron! Surely she who trekked unaided across the Bloomenveldt lacks not the courage to brave as a darling daughter thereof the haut monde of our Second Starfaring Age?"

I laughed. I sighed. I shrugged. I entered the floatcab. "By now I should know better than to attempt to argue with Wendi Sha Rumi," I said as it bore us away.

"So say you now," said Wendi Sha Rumi. "But by the time our voyage together is over, we shall no doubt have disabused you of such unseemly humility. Then we will truly be sisters of the spirit, you and I!"
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Child of Fortune, by Norman Spinrad

Postby admin » Sat Mar 19, 2016 6:06 am

Chapter 27

And so. I found myself once more entering the grand salon of a Grand Palais module to attend a departure fete, as Belshazaar's Flinger accelerated the Mistral Falcon toward the moment of its first Jump.

While the Mistral Falcon differed not from the Unicorn Garden when it came to configuration and function. when it came to the style of the Grand Palais module. which is to say the ambiance within which the experience of the voyage was to take place. this, naturellement, was as different from my previous experience as one might expect from any two works by maestras of the same art.

The dream chambers of the nethermost deck did not vary greatly from those which I had experienced on the Unicorn Garden, nor did the range of divertissements offered up on the entertainment deck, but when it came to the cuisinary deck here the personal style of Su Jon Donova, Domo of the Mistral Falcon, had scope for proper assertation.

The walls. ceiling, and floor of the formal dining room were transparent screens upon which slowly evolving patterns of color and shape were projected which altered from course to course like the accompanying wines. More often than not, these were abstractions, but upon occasion representational landscapes, faces, famous paintings, und so weiter, would emerge from the sinuous and stately dance of color and light only to melt away once more. In keeping with this style, the tables and chairs were airy filigrees of golden wire, appearing for all the worlds as if they had been woven to order by enchanted spiders.

The refectory, in contrast, was paneled in bluish rough-hewn wood, and the long tables and benches thereof were carved out of the same substance with rude adze marks left deliberately in evidence, the floor was carpeted with dust of the selfsame wood, and the ceiling was hidden by a veritable Bloomenveldt of hanging greenery.

The third salon was done up in what to my untutored eyes seemed a perfect replica of the classical Eihonjin mode -- plain walls and ceiling of white paper framed by tawny wood, a floor covered by straw matting, black- and red-lacquered low tables, upholstered cushions with backrests, and an abundance of free-standing screens that could be arranged and rearranged to produce any desired dining configuration.

Su Jon Donova's concept for her vivarium was in stark contrast to the baroque hodgepodge with which Maria Magda Chan had provided the Unicorn Garden, and much more to my liking.

Under the dome atop the Grand Palais, a sere silvery sea of low desert dunes seem to extend to the horizon in all directions, melding into a circle of pure shimmering mirage where the sand met the sky. Above, a surreally brilliant starscape such as might be seen from the surface of a planet at the galactic center lit up what otherwise would have been the blackest of nights, mightily aided in this luminescent endeavor by a huge golden three-quarter moon perpetually at the zenith, so that the uncanny effect was that of a midnight brighter than the day.

The floor of the vivarium itself was ringed by small dunes of actual sand emerging seamlessly from the holoed landscape to enclose the oasis of the garden, a wide expanse of lawn overtopped with green palms, gnarled succulents. and enormous cacti. In the center of the oasis, naturellement. was a clear pool, about which were pitched tented awnings. replete with cushions and campfires in brass braziers.

All in all, this vivarium seemed somehow both a cunning statement of the reality through which the Void Ship moved and a fair escape therefrom. For indeed was not the Mistral Falcon truly bearing our caravan across just such a starry desert night, and on the other hand, was not the ship, vraiment the very vivarium itself, our little oasis of life in the vast and dead immensity thereof?

As for the grand salon, here the predominant motif, in piquant contrast to the vivarium above, was water.

Sheets of the same lit from behind in subtle aqua, rose, umber, and royal blue foamed down walls of black rock, white marble, rough-cut quartz, to enclose the grand salon in quietly rushing waterfalls. From the ceiling depended an immense chandelier of water blazing golden from within, an arcane inverted fountain whose sprays and plumes, gravity-controlled against all quotidian physics and visual expectation, spumed downward from the center and rose upward at the circumference to create a magical arabesqued canopy of watery delight.

As Su Jon Donova had so rightly, at least to my taste, surmised, such an envelope of liquid magic quite sufficed for wonderment, and so the grand salon was done up in rather homey furnishings, albeit furnishings suitable to the home of a pasha or magnate: a profusion of couches, chaises, and chairs, all substantial and cozy items of abstractly carved woods, upholstered in velvets, leathers, and the furry hides of animals, or at least the ersatzes of same. Freestanding fireplaces of brass standing before each wall of waterfall, carved in mythic representations of the avatars of the wind's four quarters, were the only real notes of baroque extravagance.

I had been decked out for my debut by Wendi in a simply cut formfitting black gown brilliantly embellished with floral designs done in multicolored jewels lit from within by pinlights. "Fitting raiment for Our Lady of the Bloomenkinder!" she had declared when she saw me in it, and she herself wore a gauzy creation of multilayered veils of dozens of pastel hues which drifted and tumbled with every movement, so that she seemed enrobed in a sunset cloud. All her entreaties to the contrary notwithstanding, I had wrapped my Cloth of Many Colors about my head in a turban, for I was determined to retain some grace note of identity that was entirely my own.

Thusly accoutred, and fortified by the knowledge that I was no less extravagantly clad than the generality of the Honored Passengers who already thronged the grand salon when we arrived, I embarked on a round of introductions under the guidance and patronage of my mentor, who seemed to be on terms of easy intimacy with every lordly creature in the room.

"Ah Kort, ca va, and this is Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, she who traversed the Bloomenveldt armed with no more than a tale. Kort Jaime Mustapha, liebchen, is a poet even as our Omar, indeed some say better, including yourself Kort, nicht wahr?"

"Our Lady of the Bloomenkinder, is it then? Enchante, muchacha, one does not often meet the mythical protagonist of an ode, except of course of the autobiographical variety, to which many of us are alas addicted."

"Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, meet the Domo of our fete," Wendi declared, seizing upon a short dark woman wearing an arcane articulated suit which seemed to be fashioned out of the iridescent red carapaces of thousands of insects.

"I am given to understand that you have been honored by an invitation to enshrine yourself in the Matrix," Su Jon Donova said. "Bitte, how does such an august personage regard my own poor art, if I may make so bold?"

"Without demur or hesitation, I can truthfully declare that never in my entire experience of same have I encountered a Grand Palais which pleased me more," I drawled.

Wendi hid her face with her hand to conceal a grin which she revealed to me as soon as we made to go on. "Well spoken, ruespieler," she whispered in my ear. "Certainement, you have the proper instincts to swim in these waters, liebchen!"

Mayhap this was so, or at any rate, viewed from within by one with a proper entree to the dance, the pavane of the floating cultura seemed genteel enough to lose its power to daunt, and the rules thereof simple enough to comprehend in comparison, for example, with the vie of the Edojin, the niceties and complexities of which I have never been able to truly fathom even to this day.

Such as Wendi might freely banter with mild jests at her interlocutor's expense but must goodnaturedly accept the same in return and leaven her discourse from time to time with equally trivial self-deprecations. Younger and less mature fish such as I, however, should keep to the more respectful manners appropriate to somewhat junior status, flatter a bit but not to fawning excess, and in return could expect a certain more formal politesse toward their tenderer persons from their seniors.

"Here is my protegee, Sunshine Shasta Leonardo. Sunshine, this is Dalta Evan Evangeline, a literary archeologist who will aid us in the imagistic formulation of your Matrix entry, for there are few such in the worlds of men more adept at rummaging through the dustheap of old mythic bones than she!"

"Indeed? I am avid to discuss such matters with you at length, for I am but a ruespieler with, I would hope, some talent, but little learning when it comes to the age-old lore of the craft ..."

"Au contraire, to be frank; it is I who seek enlightenment from you, for while I may be knowledgeable in the lore of the tale-teller's art, it is the true creators thereof who are the masters, perfect or not, of the same, whereas I, alas, can only analyze as a learned eunuch might seek to encompass the mysteries of the tantric arts ..."

Und so weiter.

The truth of it was, as in my maturity I was to learn was the truth of such matters generally, is that one's regard for any given social realm is quite strongly the product of one's perception of the regard in which oneself is held therein. When I traveled in the Unicorn Garden as a parvenu whose only entree into the society thereof was a physical presence purchased by the largesse of Guy Vlad Boca, I held the floating cultura in a lofty disdain which nicely mirrored the position of grudging sufferance I unhappily occupied. But now, as the protegee of Wendi Sha Rumi, and as a personage whose deeds and mythos were held in some respectful regard, naturellement I found that the Honored Passengers were not quite as empty and obnoxiously arrogant as I had once supposed.

Which is to say that when, exhausted and gently toxicated by the refreshments and the company, I was ready to quit the fete for my bed, I was closer to considering myself a princess of the floating cultura than an intruder into a realm beyond her proper station.

Naturellement, as is true for all save the highest and lowest of our species, the reality lay in the vast ambiguous region between.

If I have thusfar failed to mention the Mistral Falcon's sequence of destinations, I gave such matters even less regard at the time, for the fact that the ship would journey to Winthrope, Novi Mir, Flor del Cielo, Lebenswelt, und so weiter, was of absolutely no consequence to me, for I had no plans to sojourn on any of these worlds, nor did I even have an ultimate destination in mind save that presently unknown world upon which Pater Pan at length might be found.

Thus, in contrast to my voyage from Edoku to Belshazaar, I had in fact, all unknowingly, boarded the Mistral Falcon as a psychic citizen of the floating cultura already, which is to say as a voyager for whom the journey itself, rather than any immediate destination, was the goal.

Indeed, via this karmically induced fusion with the weltanshauung of the floating cultura, I, too found myself paying little attention to matters outside the universe of the Grand Palais, and vraiment, the first Jump occurred, as it turned out, entirely outside my sphere of apprehension, for at the time I was in the process of making my first acquaintance with the Matrix, the raison d'etre of my presence aboard the Mistral Falcon in more ways than one.

For such a puissant artifact, the appearance of the Matrix was quotidian enough, indeed deceptively archaic. One corner of the ship's library was given over to a rather bulky oblong console a good three meters long and two meters high, decked out with telescreen, holo projector, word crystal transcriber, flimsy printer, microphone, speaker, and even a large keyboard whereby letters and numbers might be inputted by hand, so that the whole thing gave the appearance of some ancient computer out of a holocine drama set in the Age of Space. Or as if some sculptor had set out to recapitulate the entire history of our species' data storage technology in a single composite piece of artwork.

Small wonder I had never noticed such a device aboard the Unicorn Garden, for I had not exactly haunted the library in the first place, and without knowing what wonders of knowledge were in fact contained therein, I no doubt would have taken it for just such a piece of sculpture, nothing more than a quaint object of decor.

Willa Embri Janos had already arrived when Wendi and I made our entry. A fair-haired, somewhat squat woman, she had been introduced at the departure fete as a data retriever of some renown, which is to say an adept of the not inconsiderable art of inducing the Matrix to cough up what was desired, a matter of no little complexity, as I was about to learn.

"As I have told you, we are seeking the most recent locus of a fellow known as Pater Pan," Wendi told her.

Willa nodded, and spoke the name to the Matrix. At once, an endless procession of words and numbers began to scroll across the tele. "Cancel," Willa ordered, and the tele went blank. "As one would have expected, there is no main entry, but there is a superabundance of minor cross- references under all manner of headings and bibliographical notations referring to quite a few obscure monographs not in the Matrix. We will need as many correlatives as possible in order for me to construct an algorithm to extract what we need from secondary and tertiary sources."

She turned to regard me. "Bitte, muchacha, begin ..."

"Begin what?" I asked in sortie befuddlement. "Alas, I fear that I have hardly understood a word you have said ..."

At this, Willa Embri Janos' eyes widened, and she shook her head in a minor gesture of reproof. "We must have a list of other possible cross-references to this Pater Pan -- places, names, activities, und so weiter. Proper nouns only, por favor, or I will be fairly buried in random data. Into the microphone, if you please ..."

"Gypsy Jokers ... Child of Fortune ... Piper of Pan ...?" I began uncertainly. "Is this what you require?"

Willa nodded. "Just so," she said. "But please to avoid such massive generalities as 'Child of Fortune' or we will be drowned in a tsunami of references ..."

Shrugging, I went on with this bizarre babble. "King of the Gypsies ... Spark of the Ark ... Yellow Brick Road ... Hippies ... Arkies ... Ronin ..." Und so weiter, ad infinitum, or so it seemed, though in truth I could not have gone on for more than five minutes before my string of words wore out. There was something rather distasteful to me about this attempt to reduce the essence of Pater Pan to a finite list of proper nouns, for I could not help but realize that the same reductionist process could as easily be applied to my own identity, and with a list of words not one half as long.

"I believe I am finished," I said at last. "What occurs next?"

"It would take you some months of diligent study to comprehend the mathematics of the processes I must now apply, though certainement well worth the effort," Willa told me. "First I must construct a program to induce the Matrix to winnow through all these reference points so that all data bearing upon the central subject are released, then I must induce it to establish a sequence along a temporal axis, then trajectories must be hypothesized and compared to the data field ..."

She shrugged. "Suffice it to say that all this will take days if we are fortunate and weeks if we are not ..."

I found the whole arcane and lengthy process quite daunting to contemplate, especially in light of the fact that I myself was now expected to contribute to this massive chaos of data. "Am I going to have to learn all that in order to record my own entry?" I asked in no little dismay.

Willa laughed. "Anyone can add knowledge to the Matrix by the simple expedient of playing an ordinary word crystal into it," she said. "It is extracting specific knowledge which requires learning and art!"

She regarded Wendi somewhat owlishly. "There is a lesson in this for you, Wendi Sha Rumi," she said. "Which is that promiscuous babble does not necessarily contribute to wisdom as it adds to the total store of data. Therefore have a care that you aid our young friend in producing a suitable entry, which is to say one that is short, concise, shorn of excess generalities and verbiage, and as objectively accurate as possible."

"I have prepared entries for the Matrix before, Willa," Wendi pointed out dryly.

"Indeed. In profusion. But do remember that as a guardian of the Matrix's coherence, I must pass upon the suitability of what you present."

"Has my work ever failed to pass your muster?"

"Not in a long while," Willa admitted. "But you do tend to prolixity, so have a care you do not infect our young friend's style with your own vice."

Wendi laughed. "In addition to her skill as a data retriever, Willa fancies herself a literary critique manque," she told me. "When it comes to the former, I bow to her expertise, but as for the latter, she is an amateur at best."

"Be that as it may," Willa rejoined, "it is the taste of we amateurs that you authors of romances must please in order to earn your wage, ne?"

***

At Wendi's suggestion, vraiment at her insistence, we took a light lunch of sushi and sake together in the refectory for, she declared, the evening meal was to be a formal banquet at which many courses would be consumed, and at which I would be required to have my wits about me, for she had arranged for us to be seated at table with those who were to aid in the refinement of my Matrix entry, and Void Captain Dana Gluck Sara as well, who had expressed some interest in hearing the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt from the lips of the heroine thereof.

After lunch we repaired to her stateroom, where she explained the procedure we would follow in our collaboration.

First, I would freely record my tale onto word crystal in my own style, indeed before we were done, I would no doubt record several versions, for the point at this stage was to exhaust the possibilities of my own spontaneous declamation thereof.

Then we would vet this raw material together with various mages so that the imagistic vagaries of my descriptions of events, flora, psychic effects, und so weiter, might be sharpened and when necessary replaced by terms of scientific precision and accuracy, so that the entry would be comprehensible and informative to any hypothetical person who might call it up from the Matrix several centuries from now.

When I protested that such a procedure seemed to me to insure the death of art, she only laughed.

"Indeed, as an author of romances, no one is more in sympathy with such a plaint than I, liebchen," she told me. "But we are charged to produce a Matrix entry, not the romance which you may create when the spirit moves you and which will no doubt earn you fame and fortune. As for the pain of reducing art to dry didacticism, the final stage of our work will be more painful still, for then we must go over every word and syllable with a cold and ruthless heart. For while Willa Embri Janos may be something of a philistine when it comes to literary style, she knows whereof she speaks when it comes to the utter concision required to produce what the Matrix must have."

She patted my knee. "I hope we will still be friends at the conclusion of this unpleasant task," she said.

"We will always be friends, Wendi, come what may!" I declared with an open heart.

Wendi laughed again. "Say that when we have engaged in mortal combat over every word of your own precious prose, liebchen!" she said.

***

"You will find that those of us who honor the floating cultura with our presence and not the other way around will be interested in your unique adventure," Wendi told me sotto voce as we entered the formal dining room. "It is fair entree into serious circles, ma petite, just do not assume that it will yet make you the center of the universe."

The inner wisdom of this caveat eluded me at the time, but by the time the banquet was over I was to be taught this lesson quite well.

There were six other diners at the table Wendi had put together: Void Captain Dana Gluck Sara; Willa Embri Janos, Lazaro Melinda Kuhn, and Dalta Evan Evangeline, all of whom I had already been introduced to; Timothy Ben Bella, psychopharmacologist and yogic adept; and Linda Yee Lech, who was styled one of the foremost mages of evolutionary psychesomics in all the worlds of men.

Which is to say a heady and learned company indeed, and one which Wendi had quite obviously assembled around the subject of my young self. This knowledge was something less than reassuring to the same, for on the one hand it put me in mind of the endless interrogation sessions at the Clear Light, and on the other it made me trepidatious concerning my ability to hold my own at this exalted level of discourse.

Fortunately, as I was soon to learn, the manners of these worthies were a far cry from what I had experienced from the mages at the mental retreat. The first course served was a crepe of fruits de mer enrobed in a thick saffron sauce and accompanied by a rather sweet white wine, after which came a fiery curried vegetable consomme with tiny bits of pickled fish and a powerful anise- flavored vodka. Then came smoked black mushrooms stuffed with pungent forcemeat and served with a bone-dry red vintage.

During these preliminaries, Wendi favored me with an introduction to the Honored Passengers whom I had not yet met, and the table talk concerned the art of our chef maestro, Escoffier Tai Bondi. For my part, I took the opportunity to say little and imbibe a respectful amount, so that by the time we were served Vaco Filets Bordelais, garnished with fried maize noodles and accompanied by a wine so deeply red that it appeared almost black, my trepidations had been entirely dissolved, my tongue was lubricated to a fine loquacity, and I was more than ready to render up my spiel at Wendi's request.

For the next twenty minutes or so, I held this audience of mages and puissant intellects spellbound with a rather extravagant telling of the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt, a version not unlike that which I had developed on the streets of Ciudad Pallas, if somewhat augmented by the noble vintages I had consumed.

I seem to remember that during this spiel we were served a barbecue of assorted vegetables accompanied by a cunningly spiced white wine as well as a goreng embellished with several varieties of charcuterie washed down with a dark-brown beer, though my memory of this stage of the meal was somewhat clouded by both beverages and the exhilarating sight of seven pairs of keenly bright eyes approvingly turned upon my person and seven pairs of intellectually avid ears hanging on my every word, or so it seemed to me.

Suffice it to say that by the time I had concluded over a salad of fruits steeped in a creme of smoked nuts, I felt like the queen of all the worlds.

But just as this sweet course did not prove to be the conclusion to the banquet that I had supposed, so did the conclusion of my declamation lead to two more intellectual courses of which I was to prove something less than the chef maestra. Out came a cold red fruit soup liberally laced with kirschwasser and garnished with tiny croutons of nut flour stuffed with cinnamon jam, and with it the questioning commenced.

"You are quite certain that these true Bloomenkinder were entirely devoid of sapience?" demanded Linda Yee Lech. "Which set of parameters did you apply, the Menzies-Rademacher criteria, which have been around for centuries, or ahem, my own more recent construct?"

"I'm afraid that the differences between the two are presently rather vague in my mind," I bluffed, for of course I had no idea what she was talking about. "S'il vous plait, if you would be so good as to refresh my memory ..."

"The Menzies-Rademacher criteria hinge on the question of whether meaning is carried in a grammatical sequence or whether each cry is an isolate," Linda Yee Lech reminded me. "Whereas my construct, which relies upon a systems analysis of the absence or presence of social interactions, is far less of a blunt instrument."

"As I have said, the Bloomenkinder are perfectly mute," I told her. "As for social interactions, these may have appeared complexly patterned, but no more so than the doings of a beehive."

"You were able to inventory a sufficient number of interactions so that this was confirmed by analysis to a probability of better than fifty percent?" Linda Yee Lech asked sharply.

"I'm afraid not," I admitted. "But if you had seen, as I did, human infants suckling at floral teats, there would have been no --" .

"Con su permiso," Timothy Ben Bella interrupted politely. "If I may, I believe the question Linda is trying to approach is whether we are dealing with innocent animals in which sentience never arises or sapient humans whose higher centers are severed from volitional expression by the exudations of the flowers ..."

"Or indeed whether the Bloomenwald itself may not be deemed sentient," Lazaro Melinda Kuhn declared. "And if so, did such sentience evolve in symbiosis with the devolution of its human pollinators, or was this Perfumed Garden phenomenon preexistent? Did you observe a progression of intermediate floral forms? Did any of the native mammals exhibit such florally coordinated behaviors on a somewhat less complex level?"

"As for a progression of intermediate floral organization from isolated flowers to the complexity of the Perfumed Garden, vraiment, one would have had to have been blind not to observe this," I said. "But as for observing the intimate behaviors of the native mammals, it was entirely impossible to approach them even closely enough to see them very clearly. But surely the suckling of human infants at vegetative teats indicates that the latter must have evolved to service the former, ne?"

"A probable deduction ..." Lazaro admitted. "But did you observe the young of any native species engaged in the same behavior? The presence of same would obviate your puissant logic, kind ..."

"Je ne sais pas," I admitted lamely. "I never thought to inquire at the time ..."

"And what of the vapors you have styled 'pheromones' and 'perfumes'?" asked Timothy Ben Bella. "Is this mere literary license or did you obtain samples for analysis?"

"Vraiment, we obtained samples, but alas they were lost with our packs."

"Merde! Quelle catastrophe!"

"Mayhap all is not lost, Timothy," Lazaro said. "For certainement we know enough of the general botany of Belshazaar to deduce the general biochemical class of its exudates by the morphology of the specific organs secreting same. Describe for us then, bitte, Sunshine, the various floral structure responsible for the vapors producing the several specific psychotropic effects you encountered ..."

"I'm afraid that in my psychic state I was hardly capable of noticing ..."

"But surely you were at least able to differentiate among the substances exuded by stamens, pistils, and perhaps specialized scent organs?"

I could only shrug my admission of perfect ignorance.

"Give over hectoring the poor child on these matters, Lazaro," said Linda Yee Lech. "It is hardly a moral flaw not to be a trained botanical observer! However when it comes to psychic experiences, these at least we all observe with ultimate intimacy. So tell us, Sunshine, in less anecdotal terms than you have thusfar employed, when you were in your deepest thrall to the flowers, was your sapience entirely absent, or merely suppressed by a biochemical overlay? Which is to say, did your higher centers bear witness to their own volitional impotence or was, as it were, no one at home?"

"There appears to be no temporal discontinuity in my memory-track, if that is what you mean ..."

"Hmmm ..." mused Dalta Evan Evangeline. To come at it from a possibly more fruitful angle, would you say that the stimulus of the rising sun which first roused you from this state had sapient mythic meaning to you from the outset, or was it a phylogenically primitive tropism upon which the later more complex structure was retrospectively erected?"

"Que?"

"Ho, ho, sehr gut, Dalta!" exclaimed Linda Yee Lech in forthright admiration. "Indeed it must have been the former, for the revertees who once possessed human consciousness responded to her verbal cues, whereas the Bloomenkinder never did!"

"True," said Lazaro, "but on the other hand if she was responding to a mere visual tropism, then they could just as easily have been responding to a mere auditory tropism."

"But if so, then why did the Bloomenkinder not respond to it?"

"Because it is exactly this lack of response which proves that they lack sapient human consciousness!"

"Phah! What a tautology!"

"Round and round you go," Wendi finally broke in after her long and quite uncharacteristic silence. "Yet you miss the true point entirely!"

"Which is, if I may make so bold?" drawled Lazaro.

"That there were three entirely different responses by members of our own species to the very same chemicals, naturellement!" Wendi declared.

"Well taken"' exclaimed Linda Yee Lech. "Vraiment it is clearly the imprinting of the collective unconscious that the Bloomenkinder lack! Hola, this may indeed settle one of the hoariest disputes of psychesomics!"

"How so?" inquired Dalta Evan Evangeline.

"It would seem to prove quite conclusively that what we style the collective unconscious is culturally and verbally transmitted, rather than being species genetic coding!"

"Rubbish!" scoffed Imro. "If that were so, then how could you account for the cross-cultural and trans temporal universality of same?"

"Oh so? Then how would you account for its absence in the Bloomenkinder if it is inscribed in the genes of our species?"

"If one grants the Bloomenwald some sort of vegetative sentience, then the genes wherein the collective unconsciousness is encoded may have been deliberately extinguished by selective breeding even as we have altered the genetically determined behaviors of domestic animals."

"Anthropocentric projection!"

Und so weiter.

By the time we were into a green salad dressed with peppered oil and sweet and sour vinegar, the discourse had proceeded into esoteric realms of biology, genetics, psychesomics, esthetics, and evolutionary ecology whose general outlines I could only struggle to dimly comprehend, and to which I could hardly coherently contribute. Over yet another dessert, of chocolate pastry filled with rose-flavored custard, I sat there quietly listening to intense and occasionally acrimonious debates on the psychopharmacology of the Bloomenveldt, the theoretical parameters of vegetative sentience, the essential definition of the elan humain, the ethics of continental sterilization, et cetera, in terms whose firm meanings I strained my brain to comprehend, for I understood enough to know that my own simple tale was the central subject of all this commentary.

It was exhilarating to have my adventures taken so seriously by such manifestly serious intellects, but it was also daunting to realize how much wider and deeper knowledge and insight went on any conceivable subject than I had ever imagined, particularly when the callowness of my own intellect was being so amply demonstrated using the subject matter of my own personal experience.

"I never dreamed there was so much to learn even about the events of my own existence," I moaned to Wendi when we departed at the banquet's end, with my mind as torpid with elusive discourse as my stomach was with haute cuisine. "How are we ever going to incorporate it all in my simple tale?"

Wendi laughed. "One thing at a time, liebchen, one thing at a time," she assured me blithely. "Now you must sleep well, Sunshine, for tomorrow our work begins in earnest."

***

And so it did. For three days, I declaimed my tale in numerous versions onto word crystal to the point where I began to loathe the sound of my own voice, and then for three more days we worked to combine them into a version suitable for submission to our panel of mages. By the time this process was completed to Wendi's satisfaction, my brain was reeling with intellectual fatigue, and I wanted nothing more than to be finished with the whole task. The truth of it is that never in my young life had I ever engaged in such strenuous intellectual labors; indeed, if truth be told, prior to that time, I had been a virgin when it came to any real work at all.

Throughout all human history, the young of our species have been subject to endless rubrics on the joys of labor, the ennui that is the inevitable result of indolence, and the psychic satisfaction to be gained by absorption in some mighty work, the more demanding the better. Be such homilies as they may, the pleasures thereof remained beyond my comprehension until the next stage of the process began.

"One thing at a time," Wendi had promised, and so it was done, which is to say rather than being subject to whole batteries of learned interrogators at once, the mages were given word crystals of the draft version of the Matrix entry to peruse, and then I went at it with them one at a time, over lunch or dinner, in the vivarium, or in their staterooms, more often than not with Wendi at my side.

Now the situation was in a certain sense reversed, for while my teachers certainement never lost interest in what they might extract in the course of such discourse for their own intellectual use, teachers they indeed were, resources placed at my disposal, and what puissant teachers they were!

In the stateroom of Lazaro Melinda Kuhn, I learned the dark and ambiguous answer to a question that had never trammeled my mind until, at length, after a surfeit of his gentle but rueful complaints at my less than scientifically lucid descriptions of the flora and fauna of the Bloomenveldt, it suddenly intruded into my awareness.

"Why then depend on the anecdotes of such as myself?" I demanded. "Why in all the centuries that men have dwelt on Belshazaar has not a proper scientific expedition been mounted to the interior of the Bloomenveldt ...?"

I was suddenly brought up short by my own words, which is to say by the shameful mortification induced thereby. For had I not once promised to myself that if I escaped to the worlds of men I would one day return with just such an expedition to rescue Guy Vlad Boca? And what had I done to accomplish same? Precisely nothing!

"Vraiment, why is one not mounted now?" I demanded with guilt-driven stridency. "Indeed, why does not a fleet of hovers descend upon the depths of the forest canopy to rescue our human comrades from such vile floral fascism?"

Lazaro's demeanor darkened. "I wondered when you would ask that," he said with a sigh. "I had hoped it would not fall to me to be confronted with the question, for the answer, I fear, does not exactly reflect honor on our species."

"What do you mean by that?" I said defensively, for, thinking as I was of my abandonment of Guy, I assumed that the lack of honor he alluded to was my own.

"The psychotropics derived from the Bloomenveldt are a source of great profit, ne," Lazaro said. "Indeed they are the entire economic base of that unwholesome planet. The fact is, that if you inspect the literature, you will find quite a few cryptic mentions of the apocryphal Bloomenkinder. The unpleasant truth is that the existence of same has been suspected for centuries."

"Then why --"

"Think, my innocent young friend, and with greed in your heart! If proof of such a state of affairs was secured and laid before the worlds of men, what would be the result?"

"What else but a hue and cry and a demand on the part of men and women of good will for the rescue of --" I cut myself short. I stared at Lazaro. He gave me a strange little shrug. "You don't mean ...?"

"But alas I do, my young friend," Lazaro said uncomfortably. "Not only would the citizens of Belshazaar find themselves morally required to rescue the Bloomenkinder, there would no doubt be many who would demand the extermination of the Bloomenwald as a proper vengeance for the outrage. And even if the voice of science could prevent such floral genocide, it would appear that the presence of Bloomenkinder is necessary to induce the flowers to evolve the very psychotropics which enrich the planet. An unwholesome sym-biosis mayhap, but a true one, which is to say one which indeed benefits both species -- the one with more efficient pollinators, and the other with huge pecuniary profit."

"They know?" I exclaimed in horror and outrage. "They know and still they do nothing?"

Lazaro shrugged. "They know, they don't know, certainement they have no wish to know that they know."

"Merde, I always sensed a vileness of spirit throughout Ciudad Pallas, but I put it down to lack of esthetics!" I muttered. "Never did I imagine creatures that styled themselves human could thusly abandon the spirits of their fellows in such a cowardly manner for mere profit!"

***

Nor could I think of anything else when I departed to keep my luncheon appointment with Linda Yee Lech. "Something must be done!" I declared angrily, after hectoring her on the subject at considerable length. "We must force these mercenary miscreants to rescue the Bloomenkinder!"

"Are you so certain of your moral rectitude in this regard?" she asked me evenly. "Remove the Bloomenkinder from the forest and what have you accomplished? At the cost of wrecking a planetary economy and impeding the progress of psychopharmacology, you will have rescued them from the ecological niche in which they evolved in favor of incarceration as an exhibit in a zoological garden. Even feral humans raised by other mammals do not develop sentient consciousness, still less will the symbiotes of the Bloomenvelt ever be anything but mammals in human form sans the elan humain, ne."

"But their progeny --"

"You would breed them in captivity?"

"No, certainly not, but --"

"Then you would commit genocide against the Bloomenkinder as well as against the Bloomenveldt?"

"Genocide? I am not the monster!"

Linda Yee Lech smiled and softened her expression. "Thus speak all humans, and truly so," she said. "Vraiment, this is a question which must trouble the spirit. For who is the monster here? Those who merely profit by a pre-existing condition while carefully avoiding conscious recognition of the same? The innocent Bloomenkinder? Those who, like your Guy, have willingly surrendered their spirits to the flowers? The flowers of the Bloomenveldt, who merely follow their own natural evolutionary vector, mayhap to sentience?"

"Be questions of guilt or monsterhood as they may, I am talking about pragmatic action, not the niceties of moral calculus!" I declared pettishly.

"La meme chose, in this case," Linda said flatly. "For here on the one hand we have a species in human form whose consciousness has long since diverged from our own and which will expire into extinction if it is removed from its floral symbiote, and on the other hand, a floral symbiote which may be evolving toward a sentience it can only achieve courtesy of its human pollinators. We may expunge either or both from the universe, but we will never restore the Bloomenkinder to sapient citizenship in the human race. Do we therefore have the moral right to commit double genocide when there would not even be a beneficiary of such a scientific and karmic outrage? Are you really willing to take such matters into your own hands?"

"Put thusly, je ne sais pas ..." I was forced to admit. "But what of those sapient humans who wandered into the thrall of the flowers? What about such as Guy? What about those who quite rationally chose to die in the arms of floral nirvana?" Linda Yee Lech pointed out relentlessly. "Would they wish to be rescued? Vraiment, would your Guy thank you if you rescued him from his perfect flower to spend the rest of his days in a mental retreat? If we were to impose our will upon such spirits according to our own concepts of righteousness, how would we be any less fascist than the flowers, who at least would seem to eschew the practice of continental sterilization?"

"Once more, what once seemed clear is now occluded by an excess of wisdom," I could only declare.

Linda Yee Lech smiled. "Unfortunately there are all too many instances when all that wisdom teaches us is that the ability to act is only the power to make things worse," she said.

***

Other enlightenments, fortunately, were a good deal less grim, and more relevant to my evolution as a tale-teller than to the jaundicing of my opinion of the moral stature of my own species. In particular, Dalta Evan Evangeline, the literary archeologist, did much to both open up my awareness to the abundance of nuance attached to most every image and figure I employed by several thousand years of human history and art, and lead me to a far deeper understanding of certain aspects of my own tale and those I had learned from the Gypsy Joker ruespielers as well.

This odyssey began innocently enough when she presented me with a copy of the tale of Peter Pan and suggested that perusal thereof might be of some relevant interest to the task at hand. Since I had been meaning to delve into this matter ever since I had been apprised of this work's existence, I readily enough agreed.

But after I finished the tale, I knew only confusion. Surely the freenom Pater Pan must be a somewhat less than perfectly erudite homage to the Peter Pan of the tale, and just as surely I could see a good deal of Pater in the domo of the tribe of lost boys. Yet the ending of the tale contradicted the spirit of the Yellow Brick Road entirely, which is to say I could hardly imagine my Pater approving of the moral imposed by fiat when the lost children forsake their vie for the quotidian realm of adults, nor did the Wendy of the tale have more than a passing resemblance to the Wendi that I knew who had chosen this freenom.

When I broached these matters at a lunch of pasta with sauteed vegetables and grated cheeses with Wendi and Dalta, the latter's interest seemed piqued as if I had presented her with new food for thought, and the former shook her head in ironic amusement.

"These matters of names, images, and their millennial transmogrifications are even deeper and more arcane than you are beginning to suppose, Sunshine," Dalta said. "The name 'Pater Pan' alone might be the subject of a lengthy monograph ..." She paused, fingering her chin. "Indeed, I do believe that I will compose it!"

"Mayhap you would care to elucidate at less than exhaustive length?" Wendi inquired dryly. "For I too once knew the gallant in question ..."

"Well, if you are content with a mere skimming of the surface," Dalta said in a similar vein. 'Pater,' for example, has the meaning of 'father' in a long-disused sprach of Lingo. 'Pan' was the priapic goat-god of libido in a certain ancient mythos, and also refers to 'Pan-theism,' the concept that the Atman is equally distributed throughout the world of maya. The reference to 'Peter Pan' you have already mentioned, and 'Peter,' paradoxically enough, refers to both the first pontifex of a religion opposed to the doctrine of Pan-theism, and the phallus. Moreover, in yet another ancient image-system, the 'Peter Pan Complex' denotes, as in the tale, a personality which eschews maturity in favor of permanent neoteny ..."

"Hola!" exclaimed Wendi. "Then the full translation of the name would be ... Pope Lingam of the Libidinal Atman Goat, a fine epithet for the master cocksman we both knew indeed!"

Wendi and I both burst into laughter. "Do you suppose the tales the fellow we both knew told were informed by such scholarly erudition?" she asked me.

"Somehow I doubt it," I said. "Yet who can deny that he nevertheless chose a literarily puissant freenom?"

"As did you when you wove the same nuances into your tale and then some," Dalta said quite solemnly, for she had not joined in our mirth any more than she had shared our intimate knowledge of the object thereof.

"Indeed ...?" I said, out of politesse more than avid interest.

"Oh, vraiment ... Dalta said. "The god Pan played seductive music on his pipes, which is to say he was the Piper of the libido. But when he becomes the Pied Piper we are also in another mythos. The Gypsies were an early avatar of the Children of Fortune, and the Joker refers to a transmutational card of the Tarot, the court jester of the ancient kings, and the god of holy mischief in more than one cycle. The Gypsy jokers, however, were a tribe of wandering motorized barbarians like the Angels of Hell, the Slaves of Satan, and the Golden Horde. The rising sun is the ensign of the ancient Emperors of Nippon, hence of the virtues of bushido, but is also a punning reference to the Risen Christ, as well as to Prometheus, who brought the light of knowledge to our species, and who is also known as Lucifer the Light Bringer, who somehow also contrives to metamorphose into Satan, Prince of Darkness ..."

"Quelle chose!" I japed. "I am overwhelmed to learn of the depths of my own unsuspected erudition! Alas, it would seem impossible in our Second Starfaring Age to tell a simple tale without summoning up all unawares a whole pantheon of hidden spirits! How then am I to become a maestra of the Word when each mot of my Lingo has a secret sprach all its own?"

"It will take years of diligent study naturellement," Dalta said enthusiastically. "If you wish, I will have the Matrix prepare a bibliographical sequence for you to follow ..."

"Study the bones if you like, I suppose that can do no harm," Wendi said archly. "Just do not take such learning too seriously. It is magic of a sort we work with our spells of words and it is better that we do not feel we must pin down every last nuance of reference thereof lest we find ourselves suffering from creative constipation!"

At that even Dalta was constrained to join in the laughter at her expense.

***

Nevertheless, as the Mistral Falcon reached Winthrope and then Novi Mir, and as the work progressed toward the stage when there was nothing left to do save wait for Willa Embri Janos to locate Pater Pan and put what we had into final form via the mortal combat over each word of my own deathless prose that Wendi had promised, I found myself digging ever deeper into such lore utilizing both Dalta's personal expertise and monographs that she suggested, and hola, by the time this editing process had begun, I did indeed find myself haggling over each subtraction or alteration of a word that Wendi suggested.

Strange to say, or mayhap under the circumstances, not so strange, I had no interest in erotic intrigues, or in the numerous arts and entertainments offered up by the Grand Palais, and my palate began to grow indifferent to the splendors of the haute cuisine and noble vintages I consumed as so much functional fressen. For all of those pleasures at the time seemed but pale shadows of that mighty passion which all unawares had seduced me into the innermost vie and raison d'etre of the floating cultura, the lust for knowledge.

Not so much for any particular item of knowledge -- though certainement there was much I wished I had known earlier -- but the growing glorious perception of how much knowledge truly existed in the worlds of men after all these thousands of years of science, art, and history. And not only did I marvel at how extensive and inexhaustible all this knowledge was, but how much true wisdom had been encoded with the mere data, how much of an interconnected whole it all was, what puissant intellectual forces our Second Starfaring Age could muster even on a subject as ultimately trivial in the cosmic scheme of things as the tale of my own wanderjahr as a Child of Fortune.

And yet, refracted and focused through the events of my own life, knowledge seemed to become something even more vital than itself, just as the events of my own life amplified by knowledge became something much more than a simple tale.

Thus, without a clear perception of ever having crossed the karmic threshold, I found myself perceiving my karmic position not as that of a Child of Fortune approaching the climax of her life's tale, but as that of a woman yet unknown confronting the immensity of her future becoming.

In short, I had my first precognitive perception of myself in my own version of the adult of the species, and the first inkling that this was a beginning, not an end. In some dim way, I knew that at some point in my voyage aboard the Mistral Falcon, I had met the me I wanted to grow up to be.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Child of Fortune, by Norman Spinrad

Postby admin » Sat Mar 19, 2016 6:07 am

Chapter 28

Thus I was somewhat psychically unprepared when, five days out of Flor del Cielo, Wendi and I were summoned from our all-but-completed labors to the library, where Willa Embri Janos announced: "I have at last found our quarry. Pater Pan is on Alpa, or at least he was there two months ago."

She handed me a flimsy upon which was transcribed a formidable list of planets, several score at least, dated in chronological order from top to bottom, with the earliest entry some seven centuries old.

"As to his hyperbolic claims of being a relic of the First Starfaring Age or even beyond, je ne sais pas," she said. "But certainement, he has gotten around quite well and for a mighty span indeed in our own era!"

"Well done!" exclaimed Wendi. "How did you manage such a feat?"

"Not without difficulty," Willa told her. "For the legends the fellow pretends to embody generalize into greater and greater vagueness the further back you go, to the point where it sometimes seemed that whole armies had their turns in playing the part, At length, however, I hit upon the notion of sifting this mass of confusion through a net constructed out of verified records of Child of Fortune tribes fitting the general parameters of the Gypsy Jokers as described. Thus, by cross- referencing these tribal histories with the legends, I was able to compile the list you now have, in raw form. Then it was merely a matter of establishing the sequence, extrapolating the trajectory, and verifying that such a phenomenon indeed has recently come into being on the planet to which the arrow thereof pointed, to wit Alpa, to a probability of at least seventy percent."

"Formidable!" I exclaimed, with an enthusiasm that seemed somewhat strained even to my own ears. "Someday I must learn this most puissant craft!"

But in truth, my spirit had been thrown into some turmoil, for it had been days, or even weeks, since I had given any thought to what had once seemed to be the raison d' etre of my presence on the Mistral Falcon in the first place. For in a sense, the girl who had followed her Pied Piper across the Bloomenveldt, into the streets of Ciudad Pallas, and thence out among the starways in this very ship, was no more. For in the process thereof, believing all the while that I had been seeking to regain a Golden Summer out of my past, I had instead found a vector toward my unknown but enticing future. Vraiment, I still sought to follow the spirit of my Yellow Brick Road, but the nature thereof had changed, for now the Yellow Brick Road I sought to travel was a version appropriate to the adult of my kind, the path of knowledge, and vraiment, frank artistic ambition, a road upon which I had not known my feet were so firmly planted until this very moment.

Thus, rather than greeting Willa's announcement with the unbridled joy I would have thought it should have brought, I felt instead a certain ill-defined sense of loss. For now the end of this voyage was in sight, and truth be told, I found to my own surprise that I liked it not.

Wendi Sha Rumi seemed to have some inkling of what was passing through my soul. "Alpa ..." she said to Willa Embri Janos. "How many transfers will it require to get there from our next planet of call?"

"We shall soon see," Willa said. She addressed the Matrix console. "Flor del Cielo to Alpa. Void Ship connection between."

A moment later words and numbers appeared on the telescreen.

"Buena suerte indeed!" she exclaimed, pointing to the tele. "Observe! The Arrow of Time even now approaches Flor del Cielo. From there to Heimat is its course, and thence to Alpa itself."

My spirit sank, nor, despite my protests against its meanness to the contrary, would it rise. Now my feelings must surely be written plain upon my face, for Wendi eyed me with a certain knowing concern.

"It pleases you not, liebchen, ne?" she said. "Je comprend." She took my hand. "Con su permiso, Willa. Come, Sunshine, we must talk."

***

We repaired forthwith to the vivarium, where, strolling around the oasis pool under the brilliant ersatz sky of the desert night, I searched out the words to render up my feelings to my mentor and friend, and thus to clarify them to myself.

"Je ne sais pas ... It is as if I had begun another tale ... and all at once I find myself thrust back in time into the previous one ... or rather ... The truth of it is, I suppose, that I have found a new path toward what I wish to become, and mayhap should continue thereon rather than ..." I threw up my hands in frustration.

Wendi laughed. "Mayhap the matter is not quite so arcane as you suppose," she said. "Simply that having found your future calling as a teller of tales for an audience of the worlds at large rather than as an itinerant ruespieler, you are avid to embark on your new career without digression or delay ...?"

I nodded. "Just so," I said. "Or rather, all at once, I have now learned that I have already embarked thereon."

"Well spoken!" Wendi declared. "Only do not suppose you have already learned all the necessary lore."

"Oh indeed not!" I exclaimed. "Vraiment, I have learned more on this voyage than in all of my previous life, yet what I have learned best is how much there is to learn before I may truly style myself a maestra of the literary art! Scientific knowledge sufficient to accurately describe arcane events and venues, the annals of the art itself, lest I find myself repeating the stories of others innocently unaware, the millennial history of our species in order to sift truth from hyperbole, the inner meanings of words and images, the ability to use the Matrix as Willa does to properly apprise myself of the foregoing ..."

We sat down beneath one of the tented awnings beside the pool, and I gazed off at the ersatz horizon where the illusory sands merged in a shimmering zone of mirage with the equally illusory sky. And found to my satoric astonishment that it pleased me now -- the vivarium, the Grand Palais, the company I had found, the vie of the floating cultura itself, all that had once seemed arrogant vanity and empty illusion to the Gypsy Joker ruespieler.

"Hola, Wendi, you spoke truly at the time, but I could not credit it!" I exclaimed. "For never would I have thought to hear myself say these words. I do believe I love the true inner vie of the floating cultura that you have shown me! Certainement, I have no wish to leave it now!"

Wendi laughed. "How much you remind me of myself!" she said. "But you too must learn, as I did, that there is more to learn of the tale-teller's art than is contained in all the Matrix's annals and philosophies, Sunshine. You must learn the hard truths of the inner lore."

"The inner lore?"

"Vraiment. First you must learn that if you wish to be a teller of the spirit's true tales, ma petite, you must seek knowledge of the worlds of men, naturellement, but beyond that you must seek the inner knowledge of your own spirit. Patience is required, hola, a commodity always in short supply, but the courage of ruthless honesty as well."

"In this you find me lacking?" I said pettishly.

"Certainly not thusfar, ruespieler!" Wendi declared. "But the author of true lies must be willing to swear the oath of the lodge, which is that come what may, at any cost to the natural woman or even to the spirit itself, the first allegiance of the teller must be to the tale."

"Je ne comprend pas ..."

"Take the tale in question, liebchen, for this is the lesson you must learn before our work is done," Wendi said. "Is not the Matrix entry we are commissioned to finish your own name tale, my dear, at the proper conclusion of which, the Child of Fortune that was chooses a freenom for the woman she has become? And were what we have transcribed thusfar a romance rather than the story of your own life, would you not fling the word crystal across the room in outrage if it ended without the proper note of closure? Does not the story, to which you must swear total allegiance, require a closing chapter on Alpa with Pater Pan?"

"Perhaps you are right ..." I was forced to own.

"Perhaps I am right?" Wendi exclaimed rather archly. "Child, have you not known me long enough now to know that I am always right, and no perhaps about it?"

" nd modest to a fault as well.

We both laughed, but Wendi soon enough became even more earnest. "On the one hand, you wish not to delay your pursuit of career and muse for a moment, and on the other hand, you fear that the first sight of this most puissant of your lovers will forthwith subsume your newfound intellectual passions under a tsunami of amour and cause you to give it all over in favor of clinging as a consort to his side, ne."

"Quelle chose!" I protested. "Do you take me for a mooning romantic ready to throw my life away for love?"

Wendi cocked her head, shrugged, and regarded me more as an equal sister now, or so it seemed. "Quien sabe?" she said almost gaily. "Who of us knows the answer to that until the moment of truth comes? But certainement, the tale of your wanderjahr is not over until it does, nor is The Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt going to be concluded in a manner suitable to inclusion in the Matrix without its climactic scene."

Wendi patted me on the knee and spoke gently. "The former I tell you as woman to woman, my dear. Come what may, you can never be content until you learn what is in your own heart. What is there to fear, after all? Either you will enjoy a romantic reunion for a sweet interlude, free yourself of your erotic indifference thereby, and then resume your own path, or you will find the eternal mate of your soul and alter your vector through life in freely given joy."

Wendi sat back at a greater distance and spoke somewhat more distantly. "But the latter I tell you in my editorial capacity, and it is she who was commissioned to assure that your story is put into proper form for the Matrix who speaks now. We must end our account with your reunion on Alpa with Pater Pan, even should it mean that you run off with him forever, are jilted within a year, never tell a tale again, and end up as a tantric performer on some rude frontier world. That is what it means to swear the oath of our lodge, ma chere. Your life and happiness come second, ruespieler; your first allegiance must be to the tale."

I looked away from her for a moment to gaze up at the ersatz stars of the vivarium sky, beyond which lay the true reality, the deep Void through which all our lives journeyed, and scattered among all that daunting firmament, the oases of our spirit in the desert of the night, the far-flung worlds of men. Was it not a tale which we had followed out across the stars from our ancestral trees? Were we not both the teller and protagonist thereof? Was not the Yellow Brick Road the same as the tale-teller's path? Had not both Pater Pan and Wendi Sha Rumi justly declared that before the singer comes the song?

"Vraiment, Wendi, you are right," I told her at length. "We must find the true ending of one tale before we can properly begin another, ne. In the spirit of our calling, there is no other choice."

"In this case even more well spoken than you comprehend, Sunshine," Wendi said somewhat owlishly. "For speaking now finally as one colleague to another, we have enjoyed a long voyage at the expense of public benefaction on the grounds that reuniting you with Pater Pan was a legitimate requirement of our collaboration, and as even the most extreme of ivory tower artistes must sooner or later discover, we Pipers are not the only ones capable of demanding our pay."

***

Strange to say, once having resolved thusly to following the Pied Piper of my wanderjahr to the conclusion of this tale, my spirits lifted, and indeed it soon enough seemed to me that I had been foolishly jousting with shadows.

For what was there to fear? Did I really believe that upon seeing Pater Pan again the Child of Fortune that I had been would fling herself into his arms and give over entirely the new path that the woman I sought to become had found? Or that that woman could not countenance perceiving the domo of her Golden Summer as a Child of Fortune as just another natural man?

Mayhap that had been the source of my trepidations, for I could conceive no other. The floating cultura would await my return from Alpa, as would the vie of the teller of tales, which had existed as long as sapient speech and would persist as long as humankind. The only things I had to fear, certainement, were within my heart, and neither ruespieler nor author of word crystals could remain on the Yellow Brick Road by refusing to learn the secrets of her own soul.

And so I threw myself into completing our work as best I presently could and brooded not over the missing climactic scene until even Wendi finally declared that every word and syllable of what we had on word crystal was as perfect as it could become.

"Indeed," she declared as we ate a late supper of barbecued fruits de mer in the refectory after what was to be the last of these lapidary sessions, "there is a point beyond which further revisions only cause one's prose to devolve. Hola, in my editorial capacity, I do declare we have certainly reached that point now. C'est fini! There is no more useful work to be done until we reach Alpa. Avail yourself of the divertissements the Grand Palais has to offer, take a lover, have several, besot yourself with toxicants, celebrate a justly earned holiday in the best traditions of our craft."

I shook my head. "Now that I have resolved to properly end the tale, and now that there is nothing to be done but await its conclusion, I fear I will be able to do nothing but rattle fecklessly about this Grand Palais and then that of the Arrow of Time, wanting only for the endless days to pass ..."

"Well then, why bother?" Wendi said airily.

"Why bother?"

"Were this a romance I was creating, I would simply make a time-jump to the next meaningful scene rather than bore my audience with a detailed description of a period of prolonged ennui," Wendi said. "Why not grant yourself the same mercy? We will reach Flor del Cielo in a day or two, and when we do, why do you not simply proceed to Alpa in the dormodule of the Arrow of Time? While you sleep the dreamless sleep, I will voyage in the Grand Palais thereof and do some work of my own that I have been neglecting, and by the time you awake, I should have found Pater Pan's encampment thereon for you."

I snapped my fingers, once, twice, thrice. "Like the Rapide!"

* * *

And so once more I found myself climbing a metal ladder in the long central corridor of a dormodule stacked from floor to ceiling with glass cubicles and taking my place among the less- than-Honored Passengers sleeplessly dreaming around me.

But now I felt no fear as I laid myself down on the padded pallet with the spiderwork helmet behind my head. Nor claustrophobic dread when the cubicle door slid shut behind me. So much had come to pass since I had trepidatiously essayed my first such journey from Glade to Edoku. I had left the world of my birth, braved Great Edoku itself, survived the perils of the Bloomenveldt, voyaged as a true Honored Passenger, found my life's calling, and soon, vraiment in the next augenblick of my waking existence, I would reach the planet where the tale of my wanderjahr was to end. And had not Pater Pan's own words, confirmed by the Matrix itself, told me that he had survived this selfsame process scores or mayhap even hundreds of times?

Vraiment, did not esthetic justice require that I journey to him thusly?

And so I felt only peace as hidden machineries began to hum, and my head was touched by a cool, calm, mechanical caress that promised an instant translation to the triumphant conclusion of my wanderjahr's tale. Snap! Snap! Snap! Like the --

***

-- Rapide!

The door to my cubicle slid open as I awoke, and, rubbing sleep from my eyes with a casual gesture as if arising from a short nap, I rolled off the pallet, and climbed down the ladder, expecting to find myself in the midst of the sort of debarkation bustle and excitement which had greeted me when I had similarly awoken in the dormodule of the Bird of Night upon my arrival at Edoku.

Instead I found myself alone in the dormodule corridor save for Wendi Sha Rumi and the Med Crew Maestro of the Arrow of Time. There were no fellow passengers climbing down from their cubicles, no floaters bearing luggage, no announcements by the ship's annunciator, no electricity in the air -- only Wendi, the Med Crew Maestro, and myself amidst stacks and rows of silent sleepers.

And if this was not a rude enough awakening, there was Wendi's demeanor to contend with. Never had I seen her so somber, so trepidatious. Indeed, she seemed to be avoiding direct contact with my eyes.

"What's wrong?" I demanded.

"There have been no anomalies in the revival procedure, I assure you," the Med Crew Maestro burbled. "I am merely present in the ordinary line of --"

"Why have none of the other passengers been awakened? Has there been some dreadful malfunction in --"

"Certainly not!" the Med Crew Maestro snapped indignantly. "Rather ask this personage here why proper procedure has been interfered with to awake you a day earlier by special dispensation, for we are yet a good twenty-four hours or more out of Alpa!"

"This is so?" I asked Wendi. She only nodded. "Why?"

"Because you have a difficult choice to make, Sunshine," she said with uncharacteristic lack of energy. "We must have time to discuss ..." She cast nervous sidelong glances at the rows of sleeping voyagers which walled us in, at the sour demeanor of the Med Crew Maestro. "But certainement, not in here!"

To this I could readily enough agree despite my anxious curiosity, for the ambiance of the dormodule was one to impose hushed silence, the Med Crew Maestro was quite impatient for us to be gone, Wendi's mood was more than enough to fill me with dread, and I could hardly imagine a venue less suited to the absorption of dark tidings. I therefore held my tongue and allowed her to lead me out of the dormodule, along the ship's spinal corridor, and into her stateroom, all in silence.

Once the door was closed behind us and we were seated side by side on the bed, Wendi laid a hand on my knee, and, still not quite meeting my gaze squarely, she spoke.

"True to my word, I have located Pater Pan," she said. "He resides in the resort town of Florida on the Cote Grande of the equatorial continent of Solaria, where he is the domo of a Child of Fortune tribe of sorts."

"But that's marvelous!" I exclaimed. "But why then the long face? Why --"

Wendi held up her hand for silence, and at last she met my gaze directly, albeit with troubled eyes. "I must now make what I know all too well will be a futile gesture ... she said. "In my editorial capacity, I am ready to declare that your entry is suitable for the Matrix in its present form, and that a trip to Florida would be worse than superfluous now."

"What? But you were the one who insisted --"

"Woman to woman, friend to friend, I must attempt to advise you to accept this boon at face value, and quit Alpa as soon as we arrive in orbit, on the first Void Ship to anywhere else," Wendi said without any real conviction, or so it seemed to me.

"What are you talking about, Wendi?" I demanded. "Such crypticism has hardly been your style!"

"In both my editorial capacity and as the friend of your heart, I must tell you that what you would find in Florida would be anything but an esthetically satisfying denouement for your wanderjahr's tale."

"Merde, Wendi, spit this unwholesome morsel out no matter how vile it may be," I told her angrily. "Do you imagine that either the teller of tales or the natural woman could allow you to prevent her from seeking the true ending to her wanderjahr's tale? Was it not you who made me swear our tribal oath that our first allegiance must be to the tale?"

"Vraiment," Wendi said with a little shrug, "but I can find no way to construe what you wish now to learn as anything but a violation of the spirit thereof."

"Cease this mystification!" I fairly shouted. "Do you expect me to contain my curiosity on a matter so dear to both my spirit and my art on the grounds that ignorance would be relative bliss?"

Wendi's demeanor altered entirely. "I said that a futile gesture was required, liebchen," she said in quite a harder tone of voice, "for what a beast you would have thought me if I had not at least made it, after you hear what you must hear now. So think me not a beast also when I say that, colleague to colleague, I would have thought the less of you if I had succeeded."

"Wendi --"

" -- Pater Pan has become a Charge Addict, that is the long and short of it, my pauvre petite, he follows the path of the Up and Out."

I must have shouted wordlessly, but all I remember of that moment is slumping there on the bed in a sudden daze as if my psyche had been rung by a mallet.

Images out of memory, rather than words, poured in a foaming tide through my brain. Pater Pan's gaily smiling face haloed by his golden mane of sunshine. The brilliant orb of the rising sun above the Bloomenveldt. The sight of the ocean on my triumphant return to the worlds of men. Guy Vlad Boca smiling at me lustfully across our rijsttafel in the Crystal Palace as we happily played at guile and assignation. Guy's slack and vacant visage beneath the band of the Charge console in the Hotel Pallas. Guy beaming at me beatifically on his lotus in perfect Bloomenkind bliss. But of the visage of that against which all my white-hot anger and darkest despair might seek its proper vengeance, as to whatever adversary now sought to claim the spirit of Pater Pan as in the Perfumed Garden it had finally claimed Guy, here there was only the featureless face of the Void.

"Sunshine! Sunshine!" Wendi was shaking me by the shoulders. "Are you all right?"

I blinked. I shuddered. Something grew coldly determined inside of me. At length I made to answer this most foolish of questions. "I have my senses about me if that is what you mean," I found myself saying. "Of course we both realize that I must go to Florida the moment this ship reaches Alpa."

Emotions recomplicated in the backwash of the shock into a complexity I could scarcely comprehend. Once had I rescued Guy from the Charge's vile embrace by force of will and arms, and yet all my efforts failed to rescue him from his perfect flower, and I was forced to abandon the spirit of a true friend and lover in order to save my own. Now he whose spirit had warped space and time to be at my side in the Dreamtime in my hour of need on the Bloomenveldt stood in the same peril from which I had once rescued Guy. Surely the survival of my own spirit was hardly in question this time! Surely I could not once more abandon a friend and lover to pitiless fate, to whatever demon of his own spirit had impelled him to this seppuku of the soul!

All this came out through my lips in that statement of cold unshakable determination, and all of it Wendi seemed to apprehend therein. "Of course you must, my poor liebchen," she said with sympathetic softness. "Were I you, I would shame myself if I did less than the same ..."

She hugged me for a moment and then released me. "I would accompany you to Florida if you wish," she said, "but this offer is only another futile gesture in the interests of friendship, ne."

"Indeed, Wendi," I told her softly. "But understand that I refuse it in the same tender spirit with which it was extended."

"Well spoken, friend and colleague," she said. "I will tarry in Lorienne, which passes for Alpa's main metropole, and await your arrival, for now my previous offer in my editorial capacity is canceled, and we must end the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt with whatever happens in Florida."

"I can promise you nothing, Wendi," I told her in all honesty, "not even that we will ever see each other again."

"Hola, but I can promise you two things in compensation, liebchen," Wendi Sha Rumi told me. "First, that the tale will end as they all do and another begin, though there is no way your heart can believe it now, and second that if you can find a way to make this ending of your tale sing sweetly to the spirit, I will freely acknowledge you as a more perfect master of our mutual art than I."

***

I passed the hours between my awakening to this bitter news and the arrival of the Arrow of Time at Alpa learning all I could about the Charge, for I was no longer the naive young girl who had ventured out upon the perils of the Bloomenveldt foolishly and blissfully unprepared by study of the dangers of the psychic terrain. But what I learned in the perusal of this lore, alas, did little but daunt my spirit.

The Charge, as I had already known, amplified the electro-hologram of human consciousness without distorting the topology thereof, so that what Charge Addicts claimed to experience was an enhancement of subjective consciousness without relative distortion of the pre-existing personality.

But since each increment of Charge achieves an increment of amplification at the expense of the stability of the overall pattern, the "personality" of the Charge Addict grows less and less defined, much as the resolution of a visual holo image, while not distorted by the destruction of areas of the recording medium, becomes vaguer and vaguer, until the terminal phase is reached in the Up and Out.

While all the monographs I perused remained in accord up to this point, like the personality of the Charge Addict itself, that which was said to be known about the nature of what emerges in the Up and Out grew vaguer, more fragmented, and more nebulous the further the mages sought to delve into this arcane realm.

Some called it a series of "pseudopersonalities" generated by the random firing of neurons in cerebral memory banks from which the individuality of the previous occupant had been erased. Others contended that species genetic coding kicked up into the vacated electrohologramic level, and that it was the archetypes supposedly stored as the collective unconscious in our gene pool which manifested themselves.

As for what spoke toward the very end, upon this subject, only the devotees of the Charge themselves would speculate, and as one might expect, they were uniformly of the opinion that the Atman itself merged with their spirits in the actual moment of the Up and Out.

Small wonder then that there were those who still sought Delphic pronouncements from the lips of such oracles, for alors, were not all the religions of primitive man but the willed belief that by following their precepts, practices, and esoteric rituals, such a living nirvana might be achieved this side of death? Vraiment, have not such psychonauts of thanatopsis always been our shamans?

And are such shamans, or at any rate pretenders to their throne, really absent in our sophisticated and enlightened Second Starfaring Age? Was not Cort, my psychonaut lover in Nouvelle Orlean, such a one? And Raul? And Imre? And the dying babas of the Bloomenveldt? And most of all, Guy Vlad Boca, who had found the perfect amusement of his short lifelong quest in the Perfumed Garden of his perfect flower.

But Pater Pan? No amount of exhaustive research could cause me to even imagine how the King of the Gypsies and the Prince of the Jokers could fall victim to the thanatotic seduction of the Charge. Not the Pied Piper of Pan, for whom the goal had always been a journey with no final destination, not he who had sworn to see all the worlds of men and the whole of our species tale or nobly expire in the futile attempt. How could such a man have chosen to end his tale in vicious farce, as a Charge Addict expiring in a small city on a planet of no particular renown?

I knew not. I understood it not. Yet soon enough I would confront the inescapable reality thereof. Nor would all the powers of my spirit or the desires of my heart in the end prevail against it.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

PreviousNext

Return to Science Fiction

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest