Nevertheless, I chose to do neither. Young I might have been, but never jejune enough to fantasize a return to the society of the Publics in which I had been a commoner as a petty little queen. Disbanded though the Gypsy Jokers might be, I was still too infused with the spirit thereof to wear the Cloth of Many Colors and eat fressen in Publics at the same time.
I therefore chose for a time the vie of the solitary, venturing into the Publics in anonymity when necessary but eschewing, for the most part, the social life, such as it was, to be had by lingering therein. For I had sworn an oath to myself that I would go forward along the Yellow Brick Road as a ruespieler, never backward into the society out of which I had evolved, and indeed, I knew on some inner level that by keeping to my own company, I would be forced to screw up my courage to declaim, if only to escape from ennui.
I spent my first few days in the vecino of the Luzplatz haunting the strogat surrounding the volcano, assessing the ambiance, familiarizing myself with the ebb and flow of street traffic, sizing up the crowds, und so weiter, or so I told myself. In truth, of course, I was accomplishing nothing at all save procrastination, for the Luzplatz was thronged at all hours, the ebb and flow of the bustle resembled nothing so much as the randomness of brownian motion, and as for the ambiance, it was the very same mélange of purposeful commerce and hedonic extravagance to be found in any similar venue on Edoku, if energized to a somewhat higher pitch by the blazing displays of light and the perpetual eruption of the bonsaied volcano.
At length, this cowardly dissembling became all too evident as such even to the most superficial levels of my self-awareness, and there was nothing for it but to proceed into the heart of my fear.
There was a ring of stone benches circling the moat around the volcano, and, forcing any further thoughts from my mind, I took off my pack, jumped up on the nearest bench, spread my arms wide as I had watched many ruespielers do, and announced the title of my spiel in as loud a shout as I could muster, if in a voice not exactly without a tremulo: “The—the Tale of the Spark of the Ark!”
While I could see that I had caught the momentary attention of most of the passersby within range of my voice by the simple expedient of leaping into prominent visibility and assaulting their eardrums, the same effect could as easily have been produced by setting off an explosion, which is to say that heads turned at the sound of the noise, but as soon as the source thereof had been verified, all those whose attention had been attracted went on about their previous business and pleasures.
Far from undaunted, but by now thoroughly committed, I focused my eyes on the arabesque patterns of light swirling across the wall of a nearby building to shield myself from knowledge of the size of my audience or the utter lack thereof, and launched into my own recomplicated declamation of the version of the tale that Shane Kol Barka had told at the ruespielers’ farewell fete, for this had been spontaneously declaimed in such rude style, yet with such effect, at least upon my own spirit, that I felt that even such as I might retell it with some improvement.
“Think not that the Second Starfaring Age sprang full-blown from the brow of We Who Have Gone Before when the Jump Drive was invented, nor that the Arkies of the First Starfaring Age meekly gave over a noble way of life that had endured for millennia when the Void Ships began to knit together the isolated island worlds of men! For the Spark of the Ark is with us today, attend my tale and learn how…”
While I was attempting to avoid gazing upon the passing throng as I continued to declaim for fear of being entirely tongue-tied by what I might see, I could not avoid counting the house, as it were, out of the corner of my eye, and perceiving to my dismay that it was nil. Nowhere in all that bustle and movement could I detect a stationary person or a look of rapt attention.
“…some Arkies were able to purchase the arkologies in which they had been…in which they had been willing coolies…”
What a fool I felt! Standing there shouting into an entirely indifferent whirlwind! Yet strangely, the more foolish and futile I felt, the more I felt my courage grow, for as I grew to lose all hope of attracting an attentive audience, the acceptance of certain defeat by this measure caused me to redefine victory into something attainable, which is to say that I was seized by the angry determination that, come what may, I would not be silenced by indifference, I would tell my tale to the end, even if the only audience was my own spirit.
“…for it pleased Fortune that the Piper of Pan followed the Arkies he had led on a long slow voyage of exploration beyond the furthest known limits of the worlds of men…”
With hindsight’s vision, and not without a certain affection for that foolishly brave girl tremulously declaiming her tale into a vacuum, do I now perceive what a strange, noble, and pathetic figure I cut, an urchin with a pack at her feet standing on a bench before the dwarfing spectacle of an erupting volcano, shouting at the indifferent milling throngs, first in hope, then in embarrassed terror, and finally with the full-throated voice of wounded outrage.
Yet, to my own inner credit, I persisted, and when I finally came to the end of the ordeal, my voice was firm, my body was trembling, my spirit was addressing persons unknown or at least unseen, and I fairly shouted my defiance, switching to Lance Della Imre’s florid version of the peroration at the end of the tale.
“And where in our Second Starfaring Age is the Spark of the Ark to be found? Everywhere! Nowhere! On Great Edoku itself! In the very Children of Fortune that you scorn! Vraiment, in the teller of this tale! Even within the Arkie Sparkie hearts of all you poor quotidian Edojin who still retain within yourselves the nobility of spirit to honor at least the memory thereof within you by showering me with ruegelt!”
Alas, of course, nothing of the sort happened. Instead I stood there trembling, sweaty, sore of voice and empty of spirit, while throngs of Edojin went their lordly ways with no more than a shrug here, a moue of distaste there, a few passing heads nodding ironically to each other.
A single soul deigned, or mayhap merely chanced, to meet my eyes: a green-haired woman with space-black skin dressed in a flowing gown of golden cloth. She looked at me for a moment en passant, shook her head ruefully, smirked, shrugged, then airily tossed a single coin in my direction.
I know not what was in her heart, or rather I choose not to dwell upon my surmise, for whatever mélange of contempt, pity, or rueful admiration caused what to her was no doubt a casual gesture immediately forgotten, of all the coin I was to earn at the ruespieler’s trade, none ever meant more to me in the moment of donation thereof than that very first.
Nor was I to earn very much more ruegelt in the Luzplatz until Fortune chose to smile on me in the unlikely person of Guy Vlad Boca.
Each day for a week I repaired to the Luzplatz, mounted my bench, and declaimed one tale or another of the repertoire I had learned from the ruespielers of the Gypsy Jokers. I found to my considerable satisfaction that once I had dared this for the first time and survived the indifference of the throngs who refused to become my audience, once I had conquered both the initial fear and subsequent embarrassment of failure, the act of spieling my tales in public held little further terror.
Alas, I also found to my considerable consternation that while repetition might work to ease my trepidation and improve my delivery, the results remained all too negligible. Now and again a few people might pause to listen to a portion of my tale before moving on, upon occasion a few isolated Edojin might even stay for a full performance, but sad to say, the number of coins I accumulated in a week was exceeded by the number of days therein.
As to what part my rudeness in the performance of my art played in this paucity of donations, I am both too proud and too modest to attempt to assay, but certainement the mythos I was extolling seemed as much currently out of favor here in the Luzplatz as it had become in the vecino of the Gypsy Joker encampment. Shorn of the aura of charm in the eyes of the Edojin which seemed to have departed with Pater Pan, the figure of a Child of Fortune ruespieler celebratin
g the mythos of her kind had little power to hold an audience in the person of a somewhat bedraggled young girl seeking to draw approving attention to her own spectacle from that of an erupting volcano!
Vraiment, it was impossible to hide this perception from myself for very long, yet what else was I to do but persist? True, I might have used my handful of coins to take the Rapide to greener pastures, but I had no notion of where such a venue might be found, and it somehow seemed better to squander them on a single modest meal in a taverna to prove to myself that I had at least earned one day’s respite from fressen.
The truth of the matter was that while I longed for escape from my current karma, indeed while I came to decide that I had had more than my fill of Edoku, no such avenue of escape was open, unless I was willing to surrender the life of a Child of Fortune and return to Glade. And having been the lover of Pater Pan, gained access to the Gypsy Jokers, learned the rudiments of the ruespieler’s art, and even begun to practice it, if not exactly remuneratively, I was not about to slink home as a failure in my own eyes.
From this static karma, I was to be rescued by Guy Vlad Boca, my self-styled Merchant Prince, though when I first set eyes on him, he seemed anything but my savior.
Once again, I was standing on my bench before the ludicrously mighty backdrop of the Luzplatz’s volcano, declaiming into a void with little hope of monetary reward. On this occasion, I was attempting for the first time Nuri John Barbrera’s truly bizarre and historically highly inaccurate The Name Tale of We Who Have Gone Before, for while this might be one of the most difficult of all the tales I knew to tell, it had the twin virtues of enlivening the mythic panoply of the Child of Fortune cycle with the inclusion of both We Who Have Gone Before and the Void Pilot as additional elements.
In this tale, the Arkies of the arkology which first discovered the planet of the vanished sapients are the Child of Fortune figures, but rather than have the historical Alia Haste Moguchi and her mages toil for years to wrest the secret of the Jump Drive from the arcane artifacts thereon, she is transmogrified into the ur-scientist Faust, who straightaway scribes a pentagon of confinement around his computer, and summons up the departed spirit of We Who Have Gone Before with arcane incantations and puissant personality-modeling programs.
By the mating of this alien dybbuk’s mythic phallus with the willing yoni of his own lover, she who will therefore become known to the dark fascination of our Second Starfaring Age as the Void Pilot, will he therefore be enabled to Jump in an augenblick of their cusp through long light years of the void between the stars.
Since the unknown nature and fate of We Who Have Gone Before is the central mystery of the Second Starfaring Age, and since the Void Pilot is our high priestess thereof, mayhap this at least would have more timeless appeal to the Edojin than further unvarnished celebrations of the Child of Fortune mystique, which, if truth be told, were beginning to wear a little thin even to my own ears.
Be such hopes as they may, matters went pretty much as before until I reached the point in the tale where Faust first peers within the pentagram to behold in dismay what his arcane powers have conjured.
“Faust’s gorge rose and his disgust equaled his outrage as he beheld his Mephisto, for rather than appearing in the avatar of a lofty alien sage, the demon spirit of the vanished race of starfarers had incarnated itself in human archetype as the horny billy-goat Pan, chortling lubriciously and stroking his mighty phallus—”
“And so are We Who Have Come Before!” I heard a loud and entirely boorish male voice shout to a sprinkling shower of laughter.
“But not even this could sway Faust’s purpose,” I persisted, imagining in that moment that I knew quite well how he must have felt. “With cooing words and iron determination did he lead his reluctant Beauty to the mystic boudoir of the anything but reluctant Beast.”
“Quelle chose! Let Beauty speak for feminine reluctance, but let the Faust of the species speak for our own priapic beast, bitte!”
My ears burned with another round of laughter, and my ire rose against this buffoon. It could hardly be said that I was such an object of public favor that the sanity of my spirit required a heckler to deflate my overweening confidence.
“Let such professions of masculine swinishness await their own good time,” I snapped back, “for soon enough the fruits thereof shall certainement be revealed, männlein, as the lingam of We Who Have Gone Before penetrates the yoni of the Pilot to the priapic piping of Pan!”
That, at least, was an image of sufficient outrageous crudity to command at least an interval of silence from any audience, and vraiment, it could now be said that something in the way of an audience was indeed in evidence, for a small but definitely interested crowd had now formed before my bench.
“For voilà, as the unnatural lovers attain their Great and Only cusp, it is the Pilot and the Arkies who Go Before to carry the Arkie Spark forth from the transient world of history into the legendary now of our Second Starfaring Age, while Faust, poor Faust, is left behind to lust forever after tantric mysteries beyond his poor constipated ken.”
“Alors, first you style Faust a fellow willing to procure his own inamorata to a goat, and then you accuse the very same unprincipled rogue of an excess of righteous anality!” said the voice from the crowd.
“It would not be the last time Circe transformed a perfect master of the masculine gender into a barnyard maquereau,” I rejoined to modest titters. “And lest anyone doubt the ability of the femme fatale of our species to truly transform men into swine, voilà, observe the living example!”
At this there was quite a more satisfying round of laughter, for the source of all this disturbance was now striding boldly forward to this introduction, through the small knot of Edojin, who only too willingly parted to allow what by now they no doubt considered my foil to approach my rude stage.
In truth, he was quite a handsome young man, somewhat thespically accoutred all in black velvet to match his long flowing black hair, and somehow also appropriate to his pouting lips and languid carriage. He wore his skin au naturel, rather than tinted in the Edojin mode. All in all, even I in my anger had to own that this Prince of Swine presented a visual aspect entirely more pleasing than the boorishness of his manners.
“Hola, what a—mythmash!” the fellow exclaimed, giving me a conspiratorial wink whose meaning was then entirely beyond my comprehension, and then turning to face the little crowd with his arms folded across each other in a gesture of hauteur.
“Is it not enough that you have gifted Alia Haste Moguchi with a phallus and renamed her Faust? And proceeded to outfit him or her or it with the Goddess of Swine as consort? Vraiment, and styled the arcane spirit of We Who Have Gone Before as a slavering goat-creature with an enormous throbbing wong? Now would you have these good folk believe that the Jump Drive which propels our Void Ships from star to star consists of a goat copulating with the queen of the pig people? Who would have thought that such a fair young visage could mask a foul mind of such perversity!”
At this there was a bout of laughter at my expense which fairly singed my ears. “It takes one to know one, n’est-ce pas?” I said. “Vraiment, who but a low-minded maestro of perversity could hear the tale of the birth of our great age rendered in lofty metaphor and on the spot immediately translate it into the bestial imagery of his own poor excuse for a mind?”
“Was I the one who styled Alia Haste Moguchi a maquereau named Faust, We Who Have Gone Before a priapic billy-goat, and the figure of the Pilot the queen of the pig people?”
“Vraiment, for like all who lack the art to tell a tale but conceive themselves gifted with the intellect to serve as critics of same, your snout is rooted in the quotidian muck of literality and your ears are deaf to the metaphorical music of the spheres. You are therefore a true brother-spirit to the Faust of my tale.”
“Moi? Good folk, I swear a solemn oath that never have I served as matchmaker to the mating of a goat and a pig for my own amusement!”
“I stand corrected,” I said, “for quite obviously rather than being the matchmaker, you are the progeny thereof!”
At this, I was rewarded by the cresting of the continuous undercurrent that had begun to serve as counterpoint to our exchange into a fine breaker of laughter. Indeed, by now I had begun to perceive what had degenerated into a contest of insults as a sporting event devoid of all real malice. Moreover, the coherence and thrust of my tale having been entirely destroyed thereby to the amusement of the first audience that had ever paid me heed, I decided to give over any further attempts to continue in an earnest vein and ride with the current flow of karma.
“And you, I surmise, fancy yourself the Pilot of the tale?” he rejoined when the laughter had subsided. “Or may hap the horny goat-god? I confess to a certain confusion in these matters of gender, for as the teller thereof, you seem to have enough difficulty keeping the species of the participants in your orgy straight!”
“Whereas you when participating in your orgies no doubt have difficulty keeping…other matters straight!”
To the roar of ribald laughter which greeted this jape, he leapt onto the bench beside me, declaring: “Au contraire, I now must stand revealed as the great billy-goat Pan himself, for I cannot fail to…rise to such a challenge!” And he rolled both his eyes and hips lubriciously.
“Well spoken!” I said. “In truth, we were all growing somewhat jaded with the…limpness of your responses! I much prefer the self-proclaimed libidinal billy-goat to the impotent creature of the intellect.”
Child of Fortune Page 20