Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  Exhilarating, erotic, joyous, poignant, this extraordinary new novel by award-winning author Norman Spinrad is a remarkable literary achievement. Blending the magical wonder of A WINTER’S TALE with the vivid realism of ON THE ROAD and the mystical transcendence of SIDDHARTHA, Spinrad’s CHILD OF FORTUNE is a masterwork of imaginative fiction by one of the most dazzling talents of our time.

  In every age, the tale is told of the youthful wanderer who sets out on the road from innocence to experience seeking all the joy and pain life has to offer. Other times and places have called them vagabonds or pilgrims, tinkers or ronin, beats or bohemians, hippies or gypsies. In the exotic, interstellar civilization of the Second Starfaring Age, they were known as Children of Fortune. This is the tale of one such wanderer, Wendi Shasta Leonardo, who sought her destiny on an odyssey of self-discovery amid the many worlds of man.

  Once she was Moussa, a spoiled, sheltered, carefree girl from the small planet of Glade, who set out on her wanderjahr to the decadent world of Edoku with only her passage home and a ring that enhanced her budding erotic talents. Penniless on the streets of a strange new world, she encountered the man who would forever change her life—the legendary leader of an itinerant band of artisans and streetpeople called the Gypsy Jokers. Styling himself Pater Pan, and claiming to be centuries old, he became, for a time, both her lover and her teacher, giving her the name of Sunshine as she mastered the art of ruespieler, the teller of tall tales.

  But every summer of love must end, and at last the King of Jokers left her to continue his eternal journey. Then, with the dashing Merchant Prince Guy Vlad Boca, she undertook a reckless journey through the seductive, mind-altering blossoms of the fabled Bloomenveldt forest, finding, at last, the end of her odyssey and the beginning of her tale.

  In his outrageous, visionary novel, Norman Spinrad, author of BUG JACK BARRON and THE VOID CAPTAIN’S TALE, has captured a timeless moment in the passage from youth to wisdom. With a keen-eyed style as zesty as Tom Wolfe, a spunky, sassy heroine worthy of Tom Robbins, and a wry wit reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut, CHILD OF FORTUNE stands beside the finest fiction being crafted today.

  OTHER WORKS BY NORMAN SPINRAD

  Novels

  The Solarians

  The Men in the Jungle

  Agent of Chaos

  Bug Jack Barron

  The Iron Dream

  Riding the Torch

  Passing Through the Flame

  The Mind Game

  A World Between

  Songs From the Stars

  The Void Captain’s Tale

  Child of Fortune

  Short Story Collections

  The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde

  No Direction Home

  The Star Spangled Future

  Non-fiction

  Fragments of America

  Staying Alive: A Writers’ Guide

  Anthologies (editor)

  The New Tomorrows

  Modern Science Fiction

  CHILD OF FORTUNE

  A Bantam Book / August 1985

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 7955 by Norman Spinrad.

  Book Design by Nicola Mazzella

  Cover illustration copyright © 7955 by Yee Chea Lin.

  Cover typography copyright © 1985 by Mark Watts.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by

  mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

  For information address: Bantam Books, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Spinrad, Norman.

  Child of fortune.

  I. Title.

  PS3569.P55C47 1985 813'.54 84-91728

  ISBN 0-553-05089-3

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books. Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books. Inc., 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10103.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  MV 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For

  PHILIP K. DICK

  Some stand on the shoulders of giants

  Some peer through the heart of a friend

  Some lives have stories

  Whose spirit never ends

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  CHILD OF FORTUNE

  A Histoire of the Second Starfaring Age

  by Wendi Shasta Leonardo

  INTRODUCTION

  And so, after half a lifetime and some score histoires telling the eternal tale in all its timebound incarnations, I venture herein at last to speak my own wanderjahr’s story from the memories of the heart.

  Wandering tinker and masterless samurai, troubadour and hippie, Rom and Arkie, Zen hermit and cowboy—uncounted avatars of the archetypal wanderkind have followed the Yellow Brick Road which wanders eternally through space and time from the villages and forests of prehistoric Earth to the San Franciscos and Samarkands of myth and history, via the first arkologies to brave the starry seas at a sublight crawl, and thence to the celestial cities of the far-flung worlds of men.

  The singers and the avatars pass, but the song goes on, for the story is always the same: that of the wanderjahr, the eternal journey from childhood to maturity through the wondrous and terrible chaos of the region between.

  This too is a histoire of that archetype as it is incarnated in our own era: the Child of Fortune whom we have all been or will become. But herein will the detached observer shed all pretense of objectivity, for this is my name tale’s story, this is my wanderjahr’s song.

  So in this modern version of the timeless histoire, our ingenue begins the tale as the little Moussa on Glade, and the Yellow Brick Road she follows leads from planet to planet, and she travels not by horse or motorad but by Void Ship. In this histoire as in all my others, you will meet the avatars of the great and eternal journey of youth into maturity, of spirit into culture, of the comrades of the passage from what we dream into what we are destined to become.

  But here you will meet them as did this Child of our Second Starfaring Age: as friends and lovers, freeservants and ruespielers, Charge Addicts, Honored Passengers, domos and mages, and the wandering children of all the worlds of men who were ourselves.

  So this, my own wanderjahr’s story, is also the tale of that journey which goes on above and below the historical annals. In the Second Starfaring Age we call that journey, as in another era deep in the past, the wanderjahr, though for some it is measured in weeks and for others in lifetimes. By whatever name that passage has been called—wanderjahr, summer of love, grailquest, voyage d’ark—until I took the freenom Wendi and began writing my histoires, it was a tale that what we have called “history” had ignored.

  For “history” is the story of deeds done by those w
ho have shaped the evolution of the species humaine, from the nameless hominid who crafted the first tool to the inventors of fire and the wheel, to the organizations that put the first humans into orbit and onto Earth’s moon, to the builders of the arkologies that first brought men to the stars, to those who developed the Jump Drive out of the mysterious artifacts left by We Who Have Gone Before and thereby inaugurated our Second Starfaring Age. Those whose names are known to “history” have been scientists and explorers and politicians and generals and creative artists. They have elucidated the laws of nature, invented wondrous devices, established nations, waged wars, found new habitable worlds, created lasting works of art, and indeed have been those who recorded “history” itself. For “history” is the timebound story of the evolution of specific human societies.

  But outside of history there is another story just as ancient, the story of that which has always existed outside, within, and as often as not in opposition to “society,” yet which in another and deeper sense has carried the true esprit humaine forward to this day.

  It has been called many things by many cultures. The Romany Road. Bohemia. Counterculture. The Floating World. The Underground. Arkie Sparkie. Demimonde. Its denizens too have been known by many names, most of them pejorative. Ronin. Gypsies. Freaks. Wayfarers. Tinkers. Arkies.

  Until the Second Starfaring Age, this eternal demimonde could be defined only by what it was not. A “culture” in essence consisted of the social, political, economic, cuisinary, linguistic, technological, and esthetic patterns shared in common by its citizens; on a deeper level, it was the consensus reality, the consciousness style which defined a “people.” The demimonde, then, was the psychic heimat of those, who, through choice or fortune, existed within the spacial bounds of a culture but outside its consensus reality. Hence outside both “the law” and “history.”

  Here were to be found the criminals and social pariahs, the madmen and ethnic outcasts, the devotees of socially proscribed vices and the followers of gods other than those of the local tribe. But here too were the visionaries born outside their proper time, the artists who created new styles of consciousness, the seekers and the dreamers—in essence all those whose spirits could not be contained by the parameters of the consensus reality of their given social realm. Here was the heimat of Chaos in its eternal dialectic with Order, the Chaos out of which all new culture, hence history itself, has always evolved. Here, in other words, was the psychic heimat of the adventurous spirit of youth.

  To the demimonde was drawn both the best and the worst of a culture’s youth—the dreamers and the rebels, the idealists and the psychopaths, the artistic and the indolent, the seekers after vice and the seekers after Enlightenment.

  Some sojourned a while in the realm of Chaos and emerged once more as history’s movers and shapers. Some passed through their wanderjahr and grew only old. Some were lost forever. A few remained young forever until the day they died.

  But all too many adolescents in all too many cultures never passed through Chaos at all. They were born, they were acculturated, they were schooled, they took up their adult stations in life, passed through an ill-defined period of mid-life angst, resigned themselves to old age, and died, without ever walking the Yellow Brick Road, indeed without ever understanding what it was that they had missed in their lives.

  Unwritten though it was until I began creating my histoires, this too is now a kind of history, in the sense that it is a story of humanity past.

  Today, in our Second Starfaring Age, that ancient concept of “culture” as the prison of individual consciousness is happily gone. As each of us speaks our own sprach of Lingo, so is each human consciousness its own self-created style of reality, unique to itself, yet part of the infinitely complex vie humaine.

  For each of us passes through our wanderjahr as a Child of Fortune; rare indeed is the child of our age who becomes a man or woman without having passed through the region between.

  What is the greatest glory and proudest achievement of the Second Starfaring Age? The Jump Drive which enables our Void Ships to traverse the great and empty distances between the stars and enables us thereby to spread our species to hundreds of worlds? That humanity has finally put war and chauvinism far behind it? Our total knowledge of mass-energy phenomena?

  I say that the greatest achievement of the Second Starfaring Age, that which sets us above and apart from all previous human civilizations in spirit and not merely in artifact, is that our civilization alone has had the wisdom to decree the wanderjahr for all. For while some of us create histoires and some of us are Void Captains or mages or political leaders, und so weiter, all of us have been Children of Fortune.

  Indeed, is not the choosing of one’s freenom the declaration of the lifeswork to come, and is the freenom not chosen at the end of the wanderjahr, and is not the wanderjahr the very process by which we, as Children of Fortune, find our destiny and ourselves?

  Moreover, since each of us has tasted the freedom and the peril of the Child of Fortune, indeed since each of us remains a Child of Fortune until we have surfeited ourselves with the vie, unlike parents of previous ages, we seek not to chain the child to the cradle, the eaglet to the nest, we envy not our children the Golden Summer we ourselves have known and relinquished only voluntarily when we have found our own true names. And here is the story of mine, of how the little Moussa became the very Wendi Shasta Leonardo who now tells this, her wanderjahr’s tale.

  Once within out time, on a planet not so very far away…

  1

  I was born on Glade, a planet, like most of the far-flung worlds of men, of no particular fame in starfaring lore, and no economic significance in the transstellar scheme of things. Like most of the worlds of men, Glade is an almost entirely self-contained economic unit, which is to say that its plains, rivers and seas provide sufficient nutriment to support a healthy human population of about 300 million without the need to import significant amounts of trace elements from other stellar systems, and its mineral wealth, supplemented by the occasional asteroid, provides a sufficient raw materials base for its industrial economy.

  Verdad, through hindsight’s eye I can thus dryly state that I was born and grew up on a world ordinaire, not unlike hundreds of such worlds warmed by G-type suns. But my girlhood perception of my heimat’s centrality to the larger scheme of things was quite a grander matter, for I was also born and raised as a child of Nouvelle Orlean, considered by all on Glade to be the jewel of our planet, and no more so than by the citizens of the city itself.

  Like its legendary Terrestrial namesake, Nouvelle Orlean was built upon the ocean-mouth delta of a great continent-draining river system, but naturellement, in an age of primarily aerial transport, the original settlers had not chosen the site for its geographic significance as an ideal nexus of river and ocean commerce. Rather had the settlers of Glade chosen the venue for our planet’s metropole along esthetic—and indeed perhaps spiritual—parameters from the outset.

  Glade, by the standards of human genetic parameters, is a somewhat cool world, capped by mountains of glacial ice at either pole, and dominated by less than simpatico semitundra in its middle latitudes, so that the most favorable zone of human habitation is the tropics, where the bulk of the populace is therefore to be found. Portions of three continents lie within this optimal climatic zone. Of these lands, southern Arbolique is clearly the geographic heimat of the human spirit on the planet.

  Arbolique is the mightiest continent of Glade in more ways than one. It extends from the northern ice cap to just short of the equator at its southernmost point at the tip of the Culebra Peninsula, and the Grand Massif begins beneath the polar ice, rises into a towering longitudinal cordillera of snow-capped and moss-crusted rock, then splits into eastern and western chains as it marches down the continent nearly to the shores of the tropical sea.

  Between these two mountain chains lies the Great Vale, a broad and fertile central valley veined and subdivided by chains of l
esser mountains and hills, the whole more of an enormous mountain meadow than a peneplain, beginning in the north at an elevation of some three thousand meters and reaching sea level only at the delta mouth of the Rio Royale, the mighty central river whose headwaters begin as myriad lesser streams draining the ice cap runoff, and which foams and roars over great falls and wild rapids through the passes of the high cordillera, finally debouching into the sea via its delta as a broad stream of clear blue fresh water visible from the air against the contrasting greener ocean waters many miles from the shoreline.

  Nouvelle Orlean lies somewhat upstream from the lowland marshes of the true alluvial delta of the Rio Royale, at a point where the wide and placid river flows through a mild canyon cut through the low coastal mountains. Here there are narrow river flats on both sides of the Royale, and immediately behind them loom hills and river cliffs crusted with the gnarly and intergrown trees of the Bittersweet Jungle and dripping with lianafungi, crawlervines, and saphroflors, like brilliant and varicolored molds festooning huge green mounds of ancient bread. Here, too, there are islands in the stream, most mere sand and mud bars held together by their crowns of jungle growth, but some large enough to hold whole arrondissements of the city.

  Nouvelle Orlean spreads itself on both banks of the river, on the islands, both natural and crafted, inbetween, and some folk have chosen to build manses on the jungled heights above. Beneath the palisades on both banks of the river, tall buildings rise, sheathed for the most part in numerous subtle tints of mirror-glass, and between them and the river on either side are tree-shrouded esplanades lined with kiosks, restaurants, and pavilions. Above and behind the east and west bas-corniches, haute-corniches wind among the jungle-shaded manses of the Hightowns.

  But the heart, and indeed the soul, of the city, for all who style themselves true Orleaners, is Rioville, the magical archipelago spreading across the Royale and uniting what would otherwise be twin cities into one. Here the buildings have been kept low and rambling, in harmony with the jungle and wooded parklands which have been allowed to occupy most of the terrain, both for esthetic effect, and in order to bind the islands together so that the river will not sweep them away. Rioville architecture relies upon wood, brick, and stone, or at least on excellent ersatzes of natural materials, though not to the point of excluding wide expanses of windowglass overlooking every vista. Porches, breezeways, gazebos, open pavilions, and interior rooms that fling open whole walls to the natural realm while inviting vegetation inside are also very much in the Rioville mode. As are the hundreds of footbridges which span the smaller channels and the thousands of small boats of every type and fancy which give the city the ambiance of fabled Venice of ancient lore, and not without deliberate homage to the spirit of the Doges.