“My mother, Boca Morgana Khan, was born to parents of rather formidable wealth on Melloria, her father being Khan Norman Margo, magnate of fabriks on several worlds, and her mother Morgana Desirée Colin, a Void Ship domo of no little repute before meeting her father. Her freenom, Boca, she chose after a wanderjahr amusing herself in the floating cultura homage à La Boca Felicita, a legendary singer and thespian of the First Starfaring Age, for while she never followed that trade, or truth be told any other, she fancied that her great beauty, wit, and sweet voice would surely have served to gain her fortune thereat had not her patrimony felicitously removed the necessity.
“My father, Vlad Dominik Ella, was born into more modest circumstances on Novi Mir. His father, Dominik Ivan Dona, was the proprietor of a palace of pleasure, and his mother, Ella Dane Krasnaya, labored therein as an artiste ordinaire. His freenom, Vlad, he chose after a wanderjahr begun as a freeservant on Void Ships and concluded as an established gambler and tantric performer on same, homage a one Vlad the Impaler, a legendary monster of prehistory, famed, naturellement, for his numerous acts of impalement, though apparently not of the sort of which my father was boasting.
“My parents met aboard the Celestial City, and it was pheromonic congruence at first sight, or at any rate upon first impalement. Boca’s parents, naturellement, were somewhat less than enthused when she returned to Melloria with such a swain, marking Vlad as a fortune hunter, which, in a certain sense, he was. In return for his acceptance of a probationary year, Khan Norman Margo gifted him with a substantial sum of credit, with the understanding that only if he returned with this wealth doubled would he be welcomed as a kinsman, expecting, no doubt, that that would be the last he would see of this rake.
“However, to the delight of all concerned, Vlad’s instincts as a gambler, and perhaps his penchant for impalement as well, when combined with working capital, served him in good stead as a traveling merchant, trading among the worlds of men in whatever commodities might be bought cheap and sold dear, and when he returned to Melloria, his wealth had in fact quadrupled.
“Today, my father, Vlad Dominik Ella, is the owner and maestro of Interstellar Master Traders, and his wealth exceeds that of my mother’s parents by an order of magnitude.”
Having concluded his declamation of this extravagant name tale, Guy sat down beside me as if to reestablish our less formal relationship. “And so here you see before you Guy Vlad Boca, Child of Fortune on his wanderjahr vraiment, but no wandering minstrel I!” he said. “Rather I am the scion of Interstellar Master Traders, a Merchant Prince, as it were, traveling at leisure from world to world for my own amusement to be sure, but also absorbing the lore of my future trade.”
He reached into a pocket of his blouson and withdrew a chip of credit which he held beneath my nose as if it were a priceless gem, “This little bauble draws without limit upon the coffers of Interstellar Master Traders, a well of plenty without bottom for all practical purposes,” he declared. “I am commissioned to do as I will for a period of my own choosing, the only proviso being that I, like my father before me, may never return to Melloria to claim my full patrimony until I have achieved a balance of profit over expenditure in the ratio of two to one. At the rate things are going, this may take some time. But then I am in no particular hurry.”
Entirely ignoble emotions coursed through me at the conclusion of all these revelations. Anger at Guy for not having used his magic chip at the Crystal Palace. Anger too at the minginess of my own parents in comparison to the bountiful largesse of Vlad Dominik Ella, which is also to say mean-spirited envy of Guy for his good fortune. Finally, and most painful, despair that my plan to earn ruegelt with his aid had now apparently come to naught.
“You were just…amusing yourself with me,” I finally said in a tone of angry dejection. “You never had any intention of joining me in the ruespieler’s trade…”
“Indeed,” said Guy, with an entirely incongruous grin. “And I must say I still find you most amusing, ma chère. Though of course I must reject your proposal.”
But before I could vent my wrath, Guy stayed my words with a finger to my lips. “However, as a Merchant Prince in training, I am constrained to give fair value for value received,” he said. “Since the commodity in question is amusement, let me counter with a proposal that I hope you will find amusing, Shortly I will be leaving Edoku for Belshazaar, a planet which I expect will be far more amusing and certainly more remunerative than this one. If you find the notion amusing, why not accompany me thither in the Unicorn Garden, at my expense, of course, or to be more precise, courtesy of Interstellar Master Traders?”
I could scarcely credit my ears. I could hardly believe in such good fortune. Indeed, considering the source, at first blush I was not quite certain that I could trust it. “Belshazaar…?” I said guardedly. “I’ve never heard of Belshazaar. What is there to draw us thither?”
“On Belshazaar there is a forest known as the Bloomenwald,” Guy told me. “It is reputed to be a veritable cornucopia of psychotropic perfumes, essences, saps, pheromones, und so weiter. While hundreds of them are already on the market, scores more are discovered each year, and a merchant who secures a droit of monopoly for a period in a few of the latest stands to gain a tidy fortune. At the very least, it should be the height of amusement to sample the full panoply of what is available.”
My enthusiasm for quitting Great Edoku for such a venue was considerably less total than Guy’s, but on the other hand, what were my prospects on Edoku without him save continued indigency and an endless banquet of fressen?
“Gratuit…?” I asked carefully. “Why should you do such a thing for me?”
“Porqué no?” Guy said airily. “From each according to his ability, to each according to her need, as the ancient communards had it, nē. And when it comes to credit, my ability is bottomless, and your need is total. Besides, as I have declared, I find your company amusing.”
“We would not travel in electrocoma…?”
“Quelle chose!” Guy exclaimed in somewhat supercilious outrage. “Do you imagine Guy Vlad Boca would find it amusing to sleep through a voyage when the divertissements of the floating cultura lie readily at hand? Do you account me such a boor that I would offer such passage to a lover? Come, Sunshine, join me as an Honored Passenger in the Grand Palais of the Unicorn Garden!”
“I might be convinced to agree…” I owned in a tone of mock reluctance. Naturellement, in truth no further inducements were necessary, for it was precisely such access to the haut monde of the floating cultura for which I had so strenuously albeit unsuccessfully campaigned against my parents’ refusal. And while Sunshine might have evolved beyond Moussa, she was hardly less determined to live the true vie of the Child of Fortune, which is to say she followed the Yellow Brick Road for sake of the adventure of the journey not the goal of the destination, and in this respect was not Guy Vlad Boca a kindred spirit and the Grand Palais of the floating cultura the true camino real?
“If love is that which would convince you to agree, a demonstration thereof would seem to be once more in order,” Guy said. “And I do believe I am once more ready to rise to the occasion.”
So he was. So it did.
13
And so, in the company of my Merchant Prince, I bade farewell to Great Edoku, my days with Pater Pan, my comrades in the Gypsy Jokers, and my burning ambition to pursue the career of a ruespieler with scarcely a look back once I had gained access to the Grand Palais module of the Unicorn Garden.
Call me fickle mayhap, but consider also that had my parents followed the entirely admirable example of Dominik Vlad Ella and provided me with sufficient largesse to begin my wanderjahr in the style to which I had wished to become accustomed, I would never have chosen Edoku, never suffered the indigency and fressen of the Publics, never met Pater, never become a Gypsy Joker or a would-be ruespieler, and therefore never have met Guy Vlad Boca, who would therefore never have needed to rescue me from penury in the
first place.
Which is to say that once we were ushered aboard the Unicorn Garden and conducted to a sumptuous if not quite spacious stateroom by suitably deferential freeservants, once I beheld the departure fete taking place in the grand salon, I was immediately possessed of sufficient sophistic logic to convince myself that one way or the other it had always been my proper destiny to voyage between the worlds in this style.
For what a different style it was from my previous experience at starfaring!
No sooner had our belongings been properly ensconced in our stateroom than the ship’s annunciators invited our presence at the departure fete now taking place in the grand salon. The Grand Palais module of the Unicorn Garden was divided into five decks; counting downward from the bow to the stern, which was how the gravity gradient was arranged, these were the vivarium, the grand salon, the cuisinary deck, the entertainment deck, and the deck of dream chambers. Of these, the grand salon was the chief venue of the fetes, or rather the continuous fete that went on throughout the nine-day voyage under one nom de jour or another.
Maria Magda Chan, Domo of the Unicorn Garden, had commissioned a grand salon done up in a style which I can only call organiform, which is not to say that any flora or fauna were in evidence. Upon entering from the spinal passageway of the ship, one stood upon a landing stage from which a semicircle of stairs descended, and from which vantage one could therefore view the grand salon as a work of art entire.
I was first struck by the fact that not a single hard surface, flat plane, angle, or indeed even any simple geometric form, was in evidence. Chaises, banquets, tables, vraiment even the lighting fixtures, were all done up as items of upholstery, stuffed with foam, or fluff, or water, or air, and covered with velvety, furry, or indeed skinlike fabrics. All forms flowed, bulged, and curved, reminiscent in an entirely abstract manner of breasts, derrieres, thighs, phalluses, und so weiter, though none of it descended to the crassly representational. Similarly were the hues thereof derived from the organic realm—subtle browns and greens, soft floral tints, human skin tones—though nowhere were colors matched to form in an obvious manner. Even the walls, floor, and ceiling were upholstered in patterns of the same style, and the lighting tended to pinks, roses, and ambers. The total effect was of an abstract sensuosity balanced precariously but successfully on the edge of obscenity.
“Fantastic!” I exclaimed in delight.
“Amusing,” owned Guy. “Naturellement, I have seen better.”
The occasion of this fete, or rather the initial excuse for the opening of the endless round of such festivities, was the celebration of our departure from the solar system of Edoku via Flinger. While we Honored Passengers sipped at wines, inhaled toxicants, and nibbled at dainties offered by circulating floaters, a holo of our Void Captain, Dennis Yassir Coleen, appeared in the center of the grand salon to offer his salutations from the bridge. After this formality was concluded, his image was replaced by that of the great cryowire filigree tube of the Flinger outlined against the stars, and then by the gaping mouth of the hundred-kilometer spiderweb cylinder, seen from the stern of the Unicorn Garden as our Void Ship was drawn backward down it.
When we had achieved Go position at the bottom of the Flinger, we were treated to a final fond farewell image of Great Edoku itself, floating like a brilliant multifaceted and multicolored jewel against the black velvet of space in its orbiting nebula of luz redefusers.
At this moment, I reflected upon the manner in which the style of the grand salon resembled that of an arrondissement on Edoku writ small, and how the Honored Passengers therein resembled and yet did not resemble a similar gathering of Edojin, for while the dress of the Honored Passengers was no less rich and flamboyant than that of the Edojin, there was something somehow less frantic in its general effect, less given over to pushing high style over the edge into the bizarre for the sake of outrage.
“Do not our fellow Honored Passengers resemble a somewhat subdued collection of Edojin?” I remarked idly to Guy.
“Au contraire,” he sniffed. “It seems to me that Edoku is something of an attempt to ape the floating cultura by folk who do not quite possess the charming self-assurance that only bottomless wealth can confer. A Grand Palais for the masses, as it were.”
Be such lordly judgments as they may, Great Edoku now disappeared into memory, replaced by a holo of my future’s image, to wit the starry blackness of the void as seen from the prow of our ship. A moment later, we heard the Void Captain chant the word “Go!” and all at once this starscape dopplered into a smear of blue as the Flinger accelerated the Unicorn Garden to relativistic speed in a sudden surge of mighty energies. Then the ship’s visual compensators cut in and we beheld the pointillist starscape of the deep void hurtling toward us.
Our journey had begun. Soon our Pilot would be circuited into her module in the Jump Circuit and then platform orgasm and the arcane machineries derived from the science of We Who Have Gone Before would propel us several light-years toward Belshazaar in an augenblick.
There was a smattering of polite applause and a considerably more enthusiastic round of bon voyage toasting.
“Come,” said Guy, “now that the formalities are concluded, let us peruse the amusements that the Unicorn Garden has to offer.”
Naturellement, the Unicorn Garden, or rather the Grand Palais module thereof, had a profusion of amusements to offer, all of them designed, as I was to learn, to focus the attention of the Honored Passengers inward toward our ersatz little bubble of hedonic reality, rather than outward to confront the vast cold emptiness of the void through which we traveled.
The entertainment deck offered up holocines, games of chance, and a vast library of word crystals, as well as all manner of musical, thespic, and dance performances put on by artists hired expressly for the purpose, or by freeservants doing double duty. Many of the latter were also available at a fee for private tantric performances.
The vivarium of the Unicorn Garden I found reminiscent of some similar venue of Edoku, though of course the scale of this domed parkland was greatly reduced from even that of the bonsaied landscapes which abounded on the planet of the Edojin.
Here, under an impossible holoed sky crammed with rainbows, moons, ringed planets, comets, auroras, tornado clouds, and a plethora of other such fancies rendered in miniature, was a living garden which made no pretense whatever to mimicking the surface of any world trod by man. The vivarium, no more than an acre or two in area, was done up as a forest clearing, so that the walls of the ship, which would otherwise have formed a confining horizon, could disappear behind a thick screen of trees. No two trees in this “forest” appeared to be of the same species, and no species seemed to have escaped the gene-crafter’s art. There were trees whose barks were red, silver, furred, even feathered. Golden apples, huge roses, immense flowers of every sort, indeed even giant jewels and glowing tapers sprouted surrealistically in their boughs. As for the clearing, while green grass indeed formed the quotidian background for the tapestry, more of the ground than not was overgrown with brilliantly hued mushrooms and fungi.
The centerpiece of this vivarium was the pond in the center of the forest clearing, around whose shore benches were scattered, upon whose surface blooming water plants of various sorts and colors floated, and in the middle of which, reachable by footbridge, was a tiny desert island with shining sapphire sands shaded by a single immense palm.
But it was in the design of the fauna that the gene-crafters seemed to have done their work in a toxicated state, for the vivarium abounded in living creatures of legend, all done up in miniature. Pterodactyls the size of my hand skittered through the treetops. Knee-high griffins gamboled in the wood. Tiny tyrannosaurs and winged dragons begged morsels from Honored Passengers. The pond was stocked with little sea monsters—serpents, cachalots, squid, ichthyosaurs, und so weiter.
And of course the vivarium of the Unicorn Garden could hardly be complete without half a dozen of its namesakes, each of the pu
rest white, each with a golden spiral horn, and each no more than half a meter high. As for virgins in whose laps they might lay their little heads, these were the only mythical beasts not in evidence.
When it came to the dream chambers of the nethermost deck, the serpentine corridors thereof contained at least a score of these exotic private boudoirs, hardly any of them owing even inspiration to the natural realm.
One might engage in erotic exercises floating upon viscous rainbow-hued and jasmine-scented oil, or drifting weightless within a spherical mirror, or sightless in perfect velvet blackness, or brachiating in zero gravity in a construction of golden rods, or reposing in a nest of azure fluff, or indeed in a chamber padded in what at least gave the illusion of being living human flesh.
Nowhere in the country of the Honored Passengers, however, was there a single port or tele whereby one might experience the vast star-speckled blackness just beyond the hull of the ship, and indeed not even artistic representations of same were in evidence.
And when I chanced to comment on this at table, it was almost as if I had attempted to turn the discourse toward the fecal in terms of the general response I received.
Of the decks of the Grand Palais, the cuisinary deck was the most quotidian in terms of its decors, though this is not to say that the productions of the Unicorn Garden’s chef maestro, Mako Carlo Belisandra, were anything less than superb examples of the art.
There were three different salons de cuisine, each appropriate to a different gustatory mood. For those desiring merely a casual meal, there was a simple refectory, with plushly upholstered thronelike stools set in rows along tables of polished black stone, the whole set beneath a trellised canopy of vines. For small private soirées or intimate dining à deux, there was a chamber entirely divided up into secluded tented booths of various appropriate sizes, each richly embroidered, painted, or quilted in a different style, each romantically illumined by braziers, and each containing a low bronze table surrounded by nests of cushions.
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