Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  My excitement at first beholding this device, which would soon propel the Bird of Night out of Glade’s solar system on its way to distant stars, was darkened only by the knowledge that the experience of this magic moment would be one which I would be denied. While the Honored Passengers celebrated and toasted the beginning of the voyage at the departure fete in the grand salon, I would be lying insensate as one more item of human cargo in a dormodule.

  But even this resentment, which had been simmering inside of me ever since I had been told that the experience of traveling as an Honored Passenger in the floating cultura would not be mine, faded away into no more than a faint regret as the sky ferry rounded the limb of the planet and I at last beheld the Bird of Night herself, silvery and magnificent against the star-flecked dark.

  She hung there, a vision of baroque complexity, glowing and glittering in the light of our sun as it peeked around the edge of Glade. The Bird of Night, like all Void Ships, was a modular construct assembled around a long central spine depending from the ellipsoid capsule of the bow, which contained the bridge and Jump Drive machineries, so that its essential core appeared like an enormous flagellate microbe, or, I thought with some bemusement at the workings of my own mind, like a giant silvery sperm. Slung along this rigid spermatozoon’s tail, like literary clutter designed to obscure the metaphor, were assorted cylinders of various sizes seemingly affixed there at asymmetrical random like so many silvery sausages and salamis.

  Yet somehow the whole retained a grandeur and even beauty not entirely implicit in the seemingly haphazard assembly of its parts. Indeed even the imagery which the artifact evoked seemed appropriate to its true essence if not without a certain obscene humor. For was not the Void Ship the vrai ubersperm of our species, and were not the dormodules for the human cargo, fastened as they were to this ultimate symbol of the fertilizing propulsive principle of the all-penetrating yang, the containers of the varied genes of our kind, cross-fertilizing the worlds of men that were and the worlds of men that were to come?

  Be such florid musings as they may, once the sky ferry had docked with the Bird of Night, I found myself in a far more prosaic venue, to wit, the long, plainly-functional spinal corridor down which I was hustled by the Med Crew Maestro without so much as a glimpse of the country of the Honored Passengers, though I was allowed to be tantalized by the sight of several of these lordly and extravagantly accoutred birds of paradise making their ways between their staterooms and the entrance to the Grand Palais, a simple door like all the others which lined the corridor from my plebian vantage, but one from within which drifted the sounds of music, discourse, and laughter, and the odors of haute cuisine, exotic incenses, and intoxicating vapors which once more made me long to gain entrance to the endless fete.

  And so yet again was a somewhat sullen and pouting mood thrust upon me as, with singular lack of ceremony, I was escorted not into the gay milieu of the floating cultura but into a grim and cheerless chamber indeed, entirely suitable to my state of spirit, though hardly calculated to ease my sense of deprived outrage.

  Vraiment, my spirit sank even further as I beheld the dismaying venue in which I was to travel from world to world. Long tiers of coffin-sized glass cubicles were stacked on either side of the dormodule’s central corridor from floor to ceiling, those above floor level to be reached by metal ladders set at regular intervals. Perhaps half of these chambers lay idle, but the others displayed human figures lying fully clothed and entirely inert like the corpses of ancient commissars displayed in state, or like the fare offered up in automatic refectories.

  A chill entered my bones, as if this were in fact one of the ancient cryogenic facilities of the First Starfaring Age, in which the life processes were slowed by the bitter cold of space itself rather than, in the modern mode, by the far safer means of electrobionic control, I knew the theory well enough in the higher cerebral centers of my mind, but the ancient reptilian backbrain was gibbering its endocrine dread of an impending state that could be distinguished from death only by instruments of considerable sophistication.

  The Med Crew Maestro touched a stud and a cubicle door slid open three rows up the left-hand tier. I stood there transfixed with terror, gaping at this invitation to brave a sleep beyond sleep, a coma but a hairsbreadth away from death, a dreamless nothingness that would endure for the seven weeks it would take the Bird of Night to voyage from Glade to Edoku, a leap of faith, a trusting to the machineries of—

  “Well what are you waiting for, child?” the Med Crew Maestro demanded. “Do you imagine that I have no other tasks to perform? Schnell, schnell!”

  I looked into his indifferent gray eyes, seeking some human contact, some warm assurance against the metaphorical cold. What I perceived was nothing more than the owlish expression of a harried functionary to whom this was nothing more than another quantum of an endless routine.

  “I’ve never…this is my first…”

  “Ah,” he sighed, and in that moment, a human spirit seemed to emerge from behind the mask. “Fear not,” he said more softly. “No harm comes. Never have I lost a passenger yet. You sleep, and then you awake, c’est tout, and this you have braved every night of your life, nē. Up, up, up meine kleine! In a moment, your fears will all dissolve in sleep.”

  I shuddered. I smiled wanly. I took a long deep breath and within my mind chanted a silent mantra against my fear. Then, step by step, each footfall as portentous as the ringing of some solemn chime of doom, each metal rung sounding a note in a symphony of courage that only I could hear, I ascended the ladder and eased myself into the cubicle as if I were entering my grave.

  I lay upon a padded pallet with a spiderwork helmet behind my head. “Sleep well,” a voice called out from what seemed like far below.

  Then with an all-but-inaudible whine, the cubicle door slid shut and I was alone with a claustrophobic dread that brought a silent scream of terror to my throat which I choked back by a last heroic act of will.

  Another hum of hidden machineries, and then a cold metallic caress as if the icy hand of death had been laid upon my skull, and then—

  4

  —I awoke.

  That was the extent of the subjective experience of my first voyage from world to world: I lost consciousness in a state of terror in a sealed cubicle and then awoke from a dreamless sleep into an enormous sense of relief, for the first sight that greeted my eyes was that of the cubicle door already sliding open to release me from my tomb.

  Needless to say, I scrambled out of the cubicle and down the ladder without delay, and only when my feet were firmly planted on the deck did my spirit come fully awake and perceive, somehow, that I had truly crossed the void.

  There were no physical symptoms to tell me that my life processes had been suspended for some seven weeks, nor did so much as a molecule of the dormodule seem altered, but there was an electricity in the air, an alteration of the music of the spheres, that somehow convinced my skeptical instincts that the Bird of Night now orbited another world. Sleepers were clambering down from the cubicles, floaters appeared bearing our luggage, and a ship’s annunciator was chanting a marvelous mantra of anticipation: “Passengers departing for Edoku please proceed to the sky ferry dock…Passengers departing for Edoku please proceed to the sky ferry dock…”

  There was no need for more detailed instructions, for a stream of passengers was already bustling up the ship’s spinal corridor, ordinary folk such as myself carrying packs or accompanied by a floater or two, and what were obviously Honored Passengers surrounded by whole convoys of floaters, and all one had to do was find a clear place in the melee and be borne along by the current.

  Soon I found myself seated in one of the sky ferries into which we were all unceremoniously ushered without apparent regard for our previous statuses, and a moment later I was gazing out of the port at my first sight of Edoku.

  My mouth fell open. I gasped. It must have taken several minutes for my mind to even begin to form a coherent set of im
ages out of the data impinging upon my retinas, for the sky ferry was already underway before I could even vaguely comprehend what it was moving toward, and even then—

  Rather than the starry blackness of space, I beheld an endless curtain of gaseous turmoil, swirls within swirls, whorls within whorls, magenta, orange, brown, red, purple, these seething eddies and whirlpools in turn organized into bandlike higher patterns, and the whole seeming to be frozen in midmotion like a still image abstracted from a holocine.

  As the attitude of the sky ferry shifted, the curve of a planet drifted into view from below, and sprinkled liberally above it, hundreds, indeed thousands, of brilliant discs of light from which beams descended, moving, shifting, changing colors, as if a cast of thousands were performing a pavane on an immense stage below, each performer tracked and illumined by a private spotlight.

  Then the sky ferry, still descending, performed a slight roll, and a slice of black space appeared at the periphery of my visual sphere, forming a subtly curved edge to the chaotic maelstrom of colors, and at last I began to make sense out of what I saw, finally relating the raw sensory data to my prior astronomical knowledge.

  Edoku was not a true planet but a satellite of a large gas giant, and it was the surface of that huge world, or rather the roil of its atmosphere, seen from so close on that the eye could not encompass it as a whole, which was the backdrop against which Edoku appeared. The discs of light, then, must be the orbiting luz redefusers, each illumining a small portion of Edoku’s surface.

  And indeed the onrushing surface of the planet was faceted like the jeweled eye of an insect or a mosaic window of colored bits of glass; each facet, each glass tile, each domain, illumined from on high by its own chosen quality, tint, and even hour of “daylight”—noon, twilight, sunrise, pale lunar glow, und so weiter—and the whole shimmering and rippling as the luz redefusers slowly cycled through their changes like a forest floor dappled in a thousand colors beneath a windblown jungle canopy.

  As the sky ferry descended swiftly from orbit, the view became more dazzling and disorienting still, as we flew through sunrises, sunsets, blazes of noon, islands of night, with the speed of a stroboscopic flicker. Mountains, plazas, buildings great and small, rivers, deserts, all blurred into each other to form a pointillistic landscape where the organic tints of the natural realm and the starker and more varied hues of the obvious works of men so intermingled, overlapped, and underlaid, that the whole appeared en passant as a single formless and colorless sprawl, within which were contained, nevertheless, all conceivable permutations of color and form, all conceivable transmutations of the organic and the crafted.

  Thus I first beheld Great Edoku, gaping out the port in an overload of the visual senses and a rapture of the spirit, like a toxicate beholding the universe entire within the formless chaos of a single flame!

  Moreover, my first vision of Edoku’s surface proved to be more of the same, and if my description of it herein should lack a certain coherence and form, vraiment, the rendering thereof through hindsight’s cooler and more mature eye still achieves more in the telling than the young girl I then was could encompass in the moment of quite literally overwhelming confrontation with the spectacle of the reality itself.

  Our sky ferry landed and debarked its passengers on a noonday meadow nestled near the summit of a small wooded mountain, or so at least at the moment it seemed, and half a dozen similar craft also rested on this alpine lawn, three of them also disgorging travelers. From this vantage, Edoku lay spread before me, stretching away to dissolve into the horizon along an arc of nearly three hundred degrees.

  What I beheld from this tranquil meadow was a chaos that not only took my psychic breath away but failed to resolve its baroque piling of detail upon detail into any coherent overall reality no matter how long I gaped and blinked.

  For what I saw seemed not so much a vista on any planet I could have imagined but an immense holo crafted by an artist dedicated to the surreal or to the inner vision of the subconscious mind.

  Half the sky and more was filled with the mighty sphere of Edoku’s gas giant primary, and the rest was the star-studded black of deepest space. Yet the illuminated air above the landscape below me seemed entirely disconnected from the sky above, as if what I was seeing was a diorama highlighted and brightened by beams of filtered light shining down through holes in a painted ceiling. From horizon to horizon, the landscape glowed and shimmered, brightened and darkened, beneath a complexly interwoven tapestry of light; noonday, sunset, darkness, sunrise, winter, spring, summer, and fall lay in slowly shifting patterns upon the land as if dancing to the unheard music of thoroughly toxicated gods.

  Further, to speak of what lay illumined beneath this kaleidoscope of the hours and the seasons as a landscape in any quotidian sense is to play the reality false, for mountains, buildings, lakes, pavilions, streams, flora, statuary, deserts, und so weiter, were all jumbled and tossed together in a manner which destroyed any sense of the natural and the urban, indeed even any sense of scale.

  Picture if you will an entire planet manicured, formed, bonsaied, and tended like a formal abstract garden in the nihonjin mode, replete with snowcapped mountains, roaring rivers, desert wastes, green forests, mirror lakes, massifs of naked stone, but with no single detail of the geography forced into the pattern of any overall scale, and no geologic sense imposed on the succession of the terrain. Thus here might be a forest whose canopy overtops a nearby mountain peak, there a river circling an island of desert dunes, in another place a jungle marsh atop a sere butte from which falls a great cataract entirely dwarfed by the tranquil lily pool at its base.

  Now superimpose upon this whimsically crafted garden an endless city built in a mélange of every conceivable architectural style and in a scale completely indifferent to that of any part of the garden from which its buildings grow like so many bizarre fungal blooms. Thus a mountain peak may serve as the centerpiece of a public square, trees may grow taller than a neighboring pagoda tower, while in another arrondissement a forest seemingly of the same species serves as the hedge of a lakeside promenade. A waterfall in one venue roars and foams behind a street of wooden houses, while somewhere else a cascade that seems no less grand is a mere trickle off the side of a low building.

  Neither a planetwide city liberally landscaped nor a worldwide garden dotted with buildings, the surface of Edoku combined elements of both sans any separation of realm or any overall concept of scale, save that the geological elements which should have dwarfed the works of man—mountains and rivers, deserts and lakes—tended to rather be dwarfed thereby, and contrawise, such floral features as trees or even single blooms might like as not be huger than towers of silver or glass. To further meld the urban and the bucolic and surrealize the nonexistent interface between, great trees might display the windows of a dwelling, spiral stairways rise circling to a snowcapped peak, or forests grow atop a pavilion’s roof.

  And all spread out before me not under the light of a single foreign sun but illumined in a crazy quilt of day and night, sunrise and noon, wan winter light and blazing summer, the whole beneath an incongruous sky of star-spangled black dominated by the immensity of the mighty gas giant’s slow surface boil.

  What is more, or mayhap less, this vertiginous vista, alas, is more of an overview of Edoku than one may achieve from most any other vantage, for, as I was to learn, the debarkation site is crafted to afford a relatively easy psychic access to the auslander, whereas the esthetic of the planet as a whole is designed entirely to please the Edojin themselves, and these are of the firm philosophic opinion that any overview is both false and hopelessly jejune, that “reality” itself is no more than a local artistic style, that perpetual immersion in the ever-changing fine detail of chaos is the only proper mode of civilized existence, and that to apprehend Edoku entire would be to achieve both a boredom terminal and an existentially daunting vision of the entirely unnatural and artificial nature of their vie and their world, which the best
minds of the species humaine, to wit their own exalted selves, have spent a thousand years and more of history and craft in an effort to transcend.

  Naturellement, such an appreciation of the weltanschauung and esprit de vie of the Edojin was entirely foreign to the girl who stood there gaping and entirely overwhelmed by her very first sight of their venue. Nor was her composure exactly enhanced when the ground fell away beneath her feet.

  In truth, not quite literally beneath my feet, though the psychic import was not at all dissimilar as a large round hole suddenly appeared in what I had supposed was the solid ground of a mountaintop meadow, and my fellow travelers from the Bird of Night, followed by their luggage-bearing floaters, began to quite blithely step over the edge and disappear into the bowels of the mountain.

  “Quelle chose!” I exclaimed, as one by one the people around me leapt off into the abyss as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as indeed, as I was to learn, on this world, it was.

  A tall dark man dressed all in red velvet took a moment’s pity on me as I stood there afraid to even peer over the lip. “C’est nada,” he said, grasping my hand. “Droptube des’. Null-g, like a feather to float. Geronimo!”

  So saying, he leapt over the edge, dragging me screaming by the hand.

  I found myself not plummeting like a stone down a dark tunnel into the depths of the earth, but floating nearly weightlessly downward through a great light and airy atrium inside this mountain which was not a mountain.

  What a profusion of sound and color and people! The great hollow space, through which I and countless others drifted like motes of dust through a golden sunbeam shaft that seemed to rise from the distant floor, was circled round by tier after tier of balconies. Some were garden promenades dripping greenery, others strogats lined with restaurants, tavernas, and boutiques, still others the venues of what might have been impromptu carnivals, thespic displays, concerts, and other entertainments which seemed entirely incomprehensible. A dozen modes of music merged in a not unpleasant discord, the air hummed with the babble of countless voices, and my mouth began to water as I slowly drifted downward through various zones of cuisinary aromas.