Be that as it may, all things pass, and even our days of Golden Summer must one day end as our minds do tell us, though the fact that the universe would seem to have imposed this stricture upon us will no doubt remain forever beyond the praise of the human heart.
10
Well do I remember the true moment when the carnival ended and the morning after began, though, in point of quotidian fact, the Gypsy Jokers dissolved into legend slowly and piecemeal, even as Pater Pan had intended. For the only truly thespic moment in this otherwise gently entropic process was the very first, the moment in which in more ways than one, the spirit left us and moved on. And that was a satori that none of us who were put through it are ever likely to forget.
The event began as a joyous extravaganza, indeed the peak experience of my time as a Gypsy Joker. Pater Pan arbitrarily declared the revival of the ancient Terrestrial festtag of Mardi Gras, in which the Children of Fortune of Woodstock had smoked their pipe of peace with the Great God Mammon in the form of a parade through the city during which all they sold during the rest of the year for profit was showered gratuit as a love offering on the populace. Pater had decided to revive this noble tradition to thank our friends, the Edojin, for their beneficence, and also because he needed a festive spectacle to celebrate the mysterious event he promised for a climax.
Who does not love a parade, nē, and most particularly, who would refrain from dancing in a joyous crowd through the streets and parklands, toxicated, celebrating, and in general encouraged to behave as extravagantly as possible, when given the license to do so, indeed when you are among those hosting this bacchanalia for the public good?
Who would be so mean-spirited as to drag her feet in the hedonic pursuit of such an enterprise, and who would expect the mystery promised for the esthetic cusp of same to be anything but lighthearted?
Not I, not anyone in the parade, and as for the Edojin, certainement they were at least amused by the spectacle of the Gypsy Jokers parading through their streets and parklands, around their public platzes, past their very dwellings, snaking through the vecino like an ancient Han Dragon Dance, its Captain and Pilot the King of the Gypsy Jokers in his Traje de Luces, and its random recomplicated course steered by the Jump of his whim.
We all marched behind our Piper in the Mardi Gras parade, for our encampment was empty, and all that was portable therein in the way of entertainment and cuisine perambulated through Edoku, offering itself to, indeed thrusting itself upon, the populace thereof. The length of our dragon was measured in terms of the intervals required to keep half a dozen musical troops from overlapping into total cacophony. Jugglers juggled, acrobats tumbled, dancers made their way dancing, singers ran up and down the parade to form ever-changing impromptu choruses. Most of the ruespielers remained mute, but a few were mad or toxicated enough to attempt to bellow tales, or at any rate disjointed fragments of same, over the general din.
Those of us who had no entertainments of our own to donate were given our entrée into the spirit of the Mardi Gras in the form of bulging sacks filled with finger food, packets of toxicants, little flasks of wine, and even some simple cheap jewelry, which we tossed to the Edojin along the route at our whim and pleasure. I myself had both a sack of Dani’s dim sum spiced with a double dose of toxicants and a bag of Ali’s jewelry to dispense. The latter, naturellement, was not painstakingly crafted in his usual mode, but consisted of simplified versions of his true art cast in their ersatz scores from molds.
The parade wound from our encampment up through the previously quiet lanes between the residences of the hills, out across the river and along its bank, then back in a course like the body’s intestines through the vecino of strogats at the feet of the glass towers, emerging therefrom in clear sight of our empty camp once more, and then across the noonday desert to the great waterfall, along the line of buttes from which it descended, to a shallowly-sunken bowl of a meadow surrounded on three sides by miniature mountain peaks over which a sun was forever in the process of setting, casting a brilliant early-sunset glow over the final proceedings.
As we paraded through the various venues of the vecino, singing, making music and circus, and tossing little treats from our bags to passersby, we collected a certain number of amused Edojin who followed in train alongside, though since no parade route had been announced, indeed since the Pied Piper seemed not to know what turn he would take from one moment to the next, we never marched formally past static throngs. We were a random bolide of a parade, and fortune rather than planning was required to place anyone along our way.
So in truth, by the time we had all reached the parade’s terminus in the amphitheater of bright sunset, there were more of our tribe present than Edojin auslanders, though we retained the curious interest of a goodly number of the latter.
For the span of perhaps two hours, the meadow became the venue of a general fete into which the parade devolved, indeed gathered there in that compass were all the Gypsy Jokers of the streets as well as all those who plied their trades in the caravanserei, and here in the meadow of sunset, one could view our tribe entire and all its divertissements, stripped down to its essence, shorn of its tents and concealments, and of any strictures of pecuniary cunning.
Food and toxicants were passed from hand to hand with no thought of recompense. Musicians played, singers sang, buskers entertained, ruespielers told their tales, and all refrained from accepting the donations that many of the Edojin present persisted in tossing. As for artists of the tantra, these performed al fresco tableaus in which all were invited to join, and in which none need pay a price for pleasure.
As for me, once I had emptied my cornucopia of dim sum and bijoux, I merged myself into the generality of the fete, partaking of food and toxicants thrust into my hand, wandering from entertainment to entertainment, ruespiel to ruespiel, unmotivated, for some reason, to join in the tantric performances or seek out a lone lover for a ménage à deux.
Vraiment, the only lover I would have sought out at the very midsummer’s eve of the Gypsy Jokers was Pater Pan himself, and the domo of the fete was a quicksilver target whom only fortune could place in my arms. Over there, peeking up above the crowd around a ruespieler, disappearing from my sight for tens of minutes, then visible again in the distance in the act of draining a wine flagon, vanishing from view once more, Pater Pan was a mountain that must come to Mohammed, and I was a particle of random motion across a crowded stube.
And then, with the precision of a domo of the floating cultura who senses when the revelry is balanced on the razor-edge of fatigue, Pater Pan appeared as if by thespic magic, indeed in a cloud of sparks and smoke and thunderclaps, atop the rim of the natural amphitheater.
The effect was so preternaturally perfect as to verge precipitously on the comic. Pater had set off a fireworks display of some duration and complexity to attract the attention of all, and when the donner and blitzen ended and the smoke cleared, there he stood, radiant in his Suit of Many Colors, his golden mane of hair and beard transfigured into a boddhi’s aura by the flaming actinic disc of the setting sun against which his noble visage was so exactly centered.
Standing there in a range of bonsai mountains and backlit by a sunset that sublimed his material corpus with the photosphere corona of legend, Pater Pan appeared a Titan, a haut turista from Olympus, even to eyes entirely cognizant of the art that went into the effect. You couldn’t help but be awed, if only by the transcendental chutzpah.
“Hear me, oh my Children of Fortune!” he shouted with immense pomposity into the hush of his entrance. “Attend, all ye Gypsy Jokers! Behold the King of the Gypsies and the Prince of the Jokers in all his magnificent glory standing before you! See how the puissance of his grandeur dwarfs the very mountains and towers triumphant against the firmament!”
At this truly excessive braggadocio, many present, myself included, found heckling japes forming upon our lips. But none of them quite came forth. For the transcendent image etched upon our retinas gave suffici
ent pause to create a moment of stasis into which Pater Pan stepped with the timing of a perfect master.
Abruptly, he sat down, leaning his back up against one mountain and draping his arm over the peak of another, converting the cordillera into his somewhat lumpy chaise.
“Of course they’re very small mountains,” he said in a very different voice, to general laughter. “As for my magnificent glory, it owes a good deal to thespic lighting, and the firmament against which I tower triumphant is no more than the usual Edojin ersatz of the real thing. Sometimes I forget that. You forget it too.”
He stood up again, but now the magic of light and perspective was permanently shattered, and he paced in little ellipses as he spoke, as if to prevent his image of glory from reforming.
“Lest we forget, the King of the Gypsies is only a Child of Fortune, and the Prince of the Jokers is a natural man,” he declared with entirely uncharacteristic modesty. “The Child of Fortune remembers that no one should follow leaders, and the natural man knows that the only guru worthy of his students is he who knows when enough is enough.” He adopted a somewhat hectoring stance as he declaimed the last, as if to chide us for succumbing to his own excessively puissant charms.
“Sure, and I hope you can still all remember that,” he said more conversationally. “I hope I will leave behind Children of Fortune who hear the songs of their own spirits, rather than a ragged band of acolytes who hear only the blarney of mine. For Great Edoku is but a single patch of cloth on the fabric of our Second Starfaring Age, and our time here is but a single swatch of time in the millennial story of our kind. And this natural man who stands before you swore a mighty oath to see all and be all on all the worlds of men before his race was run. So swore I, and so should you all swear, for Pater Pan would be no true Child of Fortune if he abandoned his own Yellow Brick Road for the bothersome role of your perpetual patriarch.”
He paused, and then, so it seemed, looked directly in my eyes and broke my heart, though others, I was to learn, also shared this privately poignant perception.
“I have sung the song and passed on the lore, I have known you as friends and lovers and named your tribe, and now I hand on the torch. Enough is enough. Ask no more of the King of the Gypsies. His day as domo of this fete is done. On the morrow, the Prince of the Jokers departs to continue his wandering ministry to the Children of Fortune of the far-flung worlds of men. The Gypsy King of Edoku is dead, long live the Joker Prince of the Yellow Brick Road!”
Naturellement, I need not describe the descent into general pandemonium generated by this announcement, nor the transformation of our fete into a ragtag babbling rabble filtering in small troops back through the arrondissement of towers to the Gypsy Joker encampment like a high tide receding from a rocky coast back into the sea.
But mayhap the general mood of our retreat bears some elucidation, for while the mal d’esprit that one would have expected was certainly in evidence, there was a complex overtone to it, for none could deny in her heart of hearts that Pater Pan had spoken truth.
Had we not elected his artfully self-graven image as the leader not merely of our tribe but of each of our spirits? And had we all not learned from Pater Pan himself at least enough to know that this was a violation of the very spirit which he had taught us? For is not the true Child of Fortune anyone who follows the lead of his own spirit and no other? Could we therefore deny that the King of the Gypsy Jokers must die lest we forget that Children of Fortune have no chairmen of the board or kings?
And as for me, who knew the natural man better than most, how could I deny the right of the man who had opened up a world for me and more to seek whatever delights he could find on whatever planets he chose?
Thus speaks the suddenly enlightened noble being in the immediate afterglow of a powerful satori, but the natural woman and soon-to-be-abandoned lover within had long since resurfaced by the time I returned to the encampment, and that Moussa was more than capable of quotidian jealousy, though the identity of the rival remained confusingly elusive.
The area in front of Pater’s tent was a chaos of supplicants by the time I arrived, in no mood to meekly await my turn for an audience with the pontiff. Dozens of Gypsy Jokers of both genders were speaking to Pater and each other all at once, though most of them who had insinuated themselves closest to Pater were female and clearly had more on their minds than verbal discourse.
This observation did little to cool the ire of my impending abandonment and without thinking, I found myself activating the Touch, as if marshaling the only of my powers on which I believed I could rely in such extremis. A moment later, I found myself putting it to use that it shames me to recount, goosing my way through the crush in a series of yelps of astonishment and moans of mysterious ecstasy, until I stood before Pater in the full flush of my wrath.
But Pater Pan stepped into the moment with that preternatural timing of his, and turned away wrath with a brilliant smile at my appearance, and a gesture towards the open flap of his tent. “Moussa!” he cried. “Vamanos! We must talk!” And, taking me by the hand, he led me inside as his chosen favorite on his last night in Edoku before the eyes of the tribe and the outrage of my rivals.
On the one hand, I was filled with joy at this openhearted confirmation that I had been at least his first among many, but on the other hand, was this not to be a sad good-bye?
“Pater…”
“Moussa…”
We stood there beside the bed, which was the only piece of practical furniture, I not knowing whether to be touched or enraged, and he, from the look of him, for once caught without words.
“Why are you doing this, Pater?” I finally demanded.
“I made not my meaning plain?”
Snorting, I changed the configuration by flopping down on the bed. “Thus spake the King of the Gypsies and the Prince of Blarney spinning koans for the general enlightenment. I believe I have a right to know what’s really in the heart of my departing lover,”
“You demand to share the secrets of my soul?”
“I must at least assure myself that you have one.”
Pater laughed, he shrugged, he sat down on the bed beside me, and regarded me with a fey expression. “The King of the Gypsies may be gone, but the Prince of the Jokers remains,” he said. “So if I am required to jive you not, you must give proper value for value received.”
“Have I ever even had the power to dissemble with you, Pater?”
“Have you not?” he accused. “Have you not jived me as to the true secret of your tantric powers? Have you not put me off with displays of wounded outrage at my failure to believe that it derives full-blown from the innocent essence of your spirit?”
“Bien, if you will speak now from the heart, my poor one and only secret will then be revealed,” I said impulsively, for what did I have to lose by revealing all to a lover who was about to become lost? “The reasons of the perfect master who acts for the good of the body politic I believe I already comprehend, but I must know the personal selfish reasons of the natural man.”
“You do see deeply, Moussa,” he owned. “For while the altruistic role of guru and public benefactor has its own selfish rewards, he who imagines he has transcended the ego’s desires in the service thereof is but a hollow shell. Vraiment, this natural man does indeed have his own arcane lust, his mad personal passion, beyond even playing the Pied Piper of Pan to the Children of Fortune of the worlds of men.”
“And you do not speak of that passion inherent in our genital architecture…”
He laughed. “That is neither arcane nor mad,” he said, “Whereas the passion of which I speak for sure is both!”
“To wit…?”
“Do you not wish to be immortal, Moussa?” he said.
“Who does not? But it is hardly a passion anyone save perhaps a mage of the healing arts has the means to even insanely pursue…”
“Wrong!” Pater declared in deadly earnest. “After all, one may pursue and even achieve immort
ality of the spirit in the memory of posterity by doing great deeds or crafting deathless art…”
“Or by becoming your own deathless work of art as some have done…” I suggested dryly.
“For sure, as I have long since done,” he owned. “But I pursue immortality of a more hedonic and entirely less selfless kind, the kind the Arkies knew…”
“The Arkies?”
He nodded, and the strangest look came over him, a look which all but forced me to credit his tales of a birth beyond the dawn of the ancient Age of Space, for in that moment his eyes appeared preternaturally old, as if brimming to overflowing with a million years of sights no mortal man could have lived to see.
“The Arkies passed their generations aboard the great slow arkologies that first brought men to the stars as all do know,” he said. “But slow as they were by the standards of the Jump, on their longest voyages they approached within sufficient hailing distance of the speed of light to contract the timestream within. Thus, in a voyage that consumed mere decades of lifespan, might hundreds of light-years be crossed, and far more marvelously, centuries of time.
“Why would the Arkies choose to remain in perpetual motion between the stars? For sure not because the arkologies offered more adventures and delights within their hulls than a planet entire! No, the true dream, the inner heart of the Arkie Spark, was to be there for the whole tale! To weasel a consciousness which spanned millennia of the saga of our species out of the poor three hundred years of our bodies’ time! Vraiment, to pursue the impossible goal of knowing the tale of our species’ history entire before expiring into the unknowing void! To be, at any rate, as immortal as our kind itself, not as a legend, but in the flesh as a witness, and a natural man!”
“Madness!” I exclaimed. “Impossible! And at any rate, all that, like the Arkies themselves, passed with the First Starfaring Age…”
Child of Fortune Page 17