Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  Finally, there was the formal grand dining salon, large enough to accommodate the entire company of Honored Passengers for banquets presided over by our Domo, our Void Captain, or both. Here the walls were paneled in some rough-grained greenish-brown wood framed and embellished by rococo golden metalwork in floral designs, the floor was of black marble, as was the great fireplace, and each of the tables was illumined by a crystal chandelier depending from a ceiling painted to resemble a cerulean sky replete with a few fluffy white clouds. Each of the ten round tables could seat ten diners, and each consisted of a disc of bronze mirror glass supported by a heavy ebon pillar which matched the wood of the leather-upholstered chairs.

  It was here that Guy and I chanced to draw seats at the Domo’s table at the banquet marking the occasion of our first Jump. The Void Captain, naturellement, was occupied at the moment on the bridge, though he would join the fete later, and as for the Pilot circuited into the Jump Drive, she, of course, would never be seen throughout the voyage.

  The other seven diners at our table represented a fair cross section of what I had already learned were the four main species of Honored Passengers making up the floating cultura, though of course they hardly eschewed interbreeding.

  Kuklai Smith Veronika and Don Terri Wu were men of mature years, and even more mature fortunes, who were more or less retired from pecuniary activities and who spent their lives constantly voyaging among the worlds of men, typical haut turistas seeking nothing but their own pleasure. Then there were those who gained access to the floating cultura by serving the pleasures of such patrons, whether as high courtesans such as the breathtakingly beautiful Cleopatra Kay Jone, or by the fascination of their discourse, such as the mage of astrophysic, Einstein Sergei Chu, or as thespic or musical artists. Thirdly there were those, of whom Mary Menda Hassan, on her leisurely way to serve a stint as professor of Terran prehistory on Dumbala, was a prime example, who traveled, either at their own expense or via the patronage of employers or institutes of learning, for serious purposes of commerce, science, or scholarship.

  Last, and in terms of the esteem in which they were held by their fellow Honored Passengers, least, were richly endowed Children of Fortune like Guy, who passed their wanderjahrs in the floating cultura simply because their parents could afford it.

  In addition to Guy, this social and intellectual proletariat was represented at our table by Imre Chanda Sumi and Raul Bella Pecava, two young men whom Guy had already judged “amusing,” at least in terms of the pharmacopoeia of exotic toxicants they had brought aboard.

  As for my station in this hierarchy, it seemed at best problematic, for I was not even an independently subsidized Child of Fortune, and while I never failed to wear my Cloth of Many Colors, the ensign of the Gypsy Jokers carried absolutely no cachet in this society.

  Indeed the very discourse thereof did little to draw me into the stream of conversation until the occasion of the first Jump brought forth my grand gaffe.

  Over the entré of terrine de fruits de mer, Kuklai Smith Veronika and Cleopatra Kay Jone wittily debated, at least by their own lights, the virtues or lack thereof of composers of whose work I was entirely ignorant. Einstein Sergei Chu held forth on the future stellar evolution of our galaxy over the saffroned fruit soup in terms far too mathematically arcane for me to follow even if the subject had held my interest.

  While we dissected the Fire Crab in Black Pepper Aspic, our Domo led a discussion of the relative merits of Grand Palais presided over by a number of her colleagues, and since I was the only one present who had never traveled as an Honored Passenger before, any contribution of mine would hardly have been relevant.

  Mary Menda Hassan’s discourse on our hominid ancestors over the Goreng de Charcuterie might as well have been in the sprach of same for all I could make of it, and as for the discussion of psychotropics which Guy, Imre, and Raul insisted on inflicting on our enjoyment of the sashimi salad, this was a subject of which I was already beginning to have a surfeit.

  The Tornedos de Vaco with Smoked Black Mushrooms in Madeira Sauce had just been served when a loud chime sounded. All present paused in midbite for a moment and then went on with the meal. This minor mystery was enough to call forth my first conversational gambit.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  I was treated to strange looks of distaste from all at the table. “The ship just Jumped,” Guy told me matter-of-factly. “Now as I was—”

  “Quelle chose!” I exclaimed. “We have just leapt several light-years through the Void and the moment is marked with no more ceremony than that?”

  There was an uncomfortable silence during which my tablemates exchanged peculiar glances with everyone but myself. Entirely misreading the moment, or mayhap simply determined to press on now that I had raised a subject upon which I felt that I could at last discourse, I persisted.

  “Indeed, why has it not been arranged for us to view this spectacle en holo? Vraiment, nowhere in the Grand Palais are we afforded a vision of the starry grandeur through which we voyage. Furthermore, have none of you noticed the bizarre absence of even motifs relating to same in the works of art and decor with which the Grand Palais is embellished? It puts me in mind of the esthetic of Edoku, wherein…”

  I stopped in midsentence, for I had now become the object of that general air of distaste suitable to a miscreant who boorishly mentions fecal matters at table to which I have already alluded.

  “I have said something untoward?” I inquired uneasily. “Would someone be so kind as to enlighten me as to the nature of my faux pas?”

  Guy said nothing, and indeed seemed to be doing his best to pretend I was a stranger, a useless stratagem, for as my traveling companion, the sphere of opprobrium around me clearly extended to encompass him, and even Raul and Imre, as fellow Children of Fortune, squirmed in their seats under the disdainful regard of our lordly tablemates.

  “This is your first voyage, kinde?” the Domo finally said.

  “My first as an Honored Passenger,” I told her. “Though I have previously traveled between Glade and Edoku in electrocoma.”

  The latter amendation hardly seemed to enhance my social status, eliciting instead a further curling of lips and nostrils.

  “Je comprends,” said Maria Magda Chan. “One may hardly expect punctilious observation of the niceties from such a novice…Honored Passenger.”

  “What niceties?” I demanded crossly. “If I have said something nikulturni, perhaps one of you worthies would inform me of the nature of my transgression so that I may avoid further injury to your delicate sensibilities?”

  “Well spoken!” declared Imre, and was immediately subject to a round of scowls for his chivalry.

  “Since you profess the admirable desire to avoid further offense, ma petite, as Domo it is indeed my duty to instruct you in the social graces,” Maria Magda Chan said. “Which is to say it is indeed nikulturni to refer to such matters as the Jump or that through which we are constrained to travel at table or in other polite discourse.”

  “Which is also why starscape motifs, let alone tele views of the…ah, Void itself, are not quite in favor among the floating cultura,” Kuklai Smith Veronika added in a somewhat kinder paternal tone.

  “I stand corrected, and will endeavor to refrain from such offense in future,” I said dryly. “But since I am admittedly such a naif in these matters, perhaps someone will explain why those who choose to voyage through the mighty grandeur of the firmament eschew the esthetic appreciation of same, vraiment, why is it nikulturni to wish to experience through the senses the marvel of the Jump upon which our entire civilization depends?”

  “Merde!” muttered Cleopatra Kay Jone. Guy fetched me a kick in the shins under the table. Quite crossly, I replied in kind. “Have we not heard enough of this?” Don Terri Wu snapped angrily.

  But our mage of astrophysic, Einstein Sergei Chu, seemed to warm to the broaching of his own subject of expertise. “Well and courageously spoken, child,” h
e declared. “Certainement a subject worthy of more consideration in these circles than it receives. As for the aversion of our floating cultura to visual confrontation with the medium through which our ship travels, consider, bitte, the true nature of the physical reality in question. For beyond this thin hull is a deadly vacuum of nearly absolute cold which, though mathematically bounded, is for all practical human purposes remorselessly infinite. Vraiment, we are all but microbes in a bubble of air, protected from instant death only by our own fragile machineries. Should our life support systems malfunction, should the Jump Drive—”

  “Enough!” cried Don Terri Wu.

  “Vraiment, more than enough!” agreed Maria Magda Hassan.

  “Must we be subject to this vileness merely to satisfy the morbid curiosity of this…this unwashed urchin?” demanded Cleopatra Kay Jone.

  Einstein Sergei Chu, however, seemed to take a certain malicious pleasure in the general discomfort. “And as for the Jump, meine kleine,” he persisted, “though we have long since elucidated the physical nature of our universe and the laws thereof from the finest structures of the microcosm to the grandest productions of the macrocosm, of the true nature of the single most important phenomenon therein in terms of utility of which we know, we remain in abysmal ignorance. We are like primitives who know how to strike fire from flint but have not the foggiest notion of the chemistry or physics of flame. Like such primitives, we have learned enough of the lost lore of We Who Have Gone Before to build Jump Drives to serve the most essential purpose of our culture, but as to the mass-energy nature of the Jump itself, we are precisely like those savages who fear and worship the unknowable fire which serves them, and surround therefore both the subject and the High Priestess thereof with ignorant taboos of mystification.”

  “Outrageous!” exclaimed the Domo.

  “Grossity!” declared Don Terri Wu.

  “Amusing,” owned Guy, referring no doubt as much to the resulting contumely as to the sagacity of Einstein’s discourse, and favoring me with a grin. Raul and Imre broke into callow giggles which even I found somewhat boorish.

  At this strategic moment, Void Captain Dennis Yassir Coleen entered the dining salon. “I will have no more of this at my table in the presence of our Void Captain!” Maria Magda Chan hissed angrily. And, so saying, she rose to greet that worthy with a great show of affection and indeed lascivious attentions.

  Such matters were discussed no more at the banquet, nor, indeed, were they to be touched on again for the duration of the voyage. Nor did the innocent instigator of the brouhaha summon up the courage to join in the table talk again for fear of igniting I knew not what.

  Nor did any of those present ever again deign to engage myself or my fellow Children of Fortune in civilized discourse for as long as we were aboard. Indeed, whether by dint of the spreading of the tale of this contumely, or whether by long-established general custom, we were seldom included in the social pavane of the floating cultura at all.

  “A somewhat subdued collection of Edojin,” I had styled the floating cultura to Guy. “Possessed of the charming self-assurance that only bottomless wealth can confer,” he had told me.

  As for the bottomless wealth of the Honored Passengers, this was everywhere in evidence. But as to the charm of their self-assurance, this was a virtue I was hard-pressed to detect. Certainement, these maestros of manner and artifice chose not to honor us with the blessings thereof, and at least for my part, the feeling was mutual.

  At the merciful conclusion of the banquet, Guy, Raul, Imre, and I repaired to our stateroom for another session of what was becoming something of a regular ritual, to wit the sampling of the impressive variety of psychochemicals with which Raul and Imre had provisioned themselves for the journey.

  While I had fancied myself something of an adept of the lore of psychopharmacology courtesy of my séances with Cort, the sophistication of his smorgasbord thereof compared to what these well-subsidized Children of Fortune had accumulated in their travels as what I had imagined the sophistication of Nouvelle Orlean to be compared to that of Great Edoku.

  Vraiment, memory will not serve to recall which toxicant, or indeed which mélange of toxicants, we imbibed on any particular occasion, for these sessions blur into a pixilated generality in hindsight, so that the memory of one outré psychic state can hardly be distinguished from that of another, nor, even at the time, did my indulgence therein exactly serve to sharpen my perception of linear temporality or grave particularly clear images upon the cells of my brain.

  Suffice it to say that for the first half of the voyage I sampled several dozen substances gathered from any number of worlds, and productive of an impressive range of conscious, semiconscious, and entirely torpid states, though in truth all of them might easily enough have been classified under a limited number of taxonomic phyla.

  Certain of these psychochemicals produced states of hilarity in which the most asinine japes were good for prolonged fits of raucous giggling. Others would have us staring mindlessly at the walls or each other for hours at a time. Some of them loosened our tongues and fortified our wit to the point where we were capable of endless elegant discourse, or at least what seemed like same at the time.

  But a few were well-crafted psychic enhancers, under the influence of which we would wander the Grand Palais in a state of innocent wonder like haut turistas in Oz, delight to an overwhelming degree in the cuisinary art of Mako Carlo Belisandra, take in musical or thespic performances, or simply stroll about the vivarium enjoying the bizarre ambiance thereof with childlike glee.

  Then too, some of these psychochemicals were aphrodisiacs, though congruence of effect upon the male and female of the species was by no means assured.

  I might be consumed by the most torrid lust, whereas Guy wished only to discourse endlessly or contemplate the ineffable, or Guy would become a priapic hero, only to be confronted by a lover to whom tantric performance existed only as an abstract and entirely outré concept. But on those occasions when our chemically augmented desires coincided, vraiment, we would become two organisms with but a single tropism, and blissful indeed was the indulgence thereof! And when the spirit moved us, we would repair to the dream chambers and enhance our already chemically augmented pleasures with congress in these fantasy realms expressly designed for the enjoyment of same.

  Finally there were those rarest and choicest of substances capable of producing a state of being wherein the realm of the senses was synergized with the realm of the mind to the point where maya’s veil seemed to dissolve into a clarity of perception within which all truth seemed revealed. Paradoxically enough, it was within the thrall of one of these true psychedelics that I experienced the satori which caused me to eschew further experiments with same for the rest of the voyage of our bubble of ersatz reality through the Void between the worlds.

  Soon after we all swallowed the little brown tablets, we began to feel the initial effects, namely a brightening of the senses, and a desire to be in motion. Raul suggested that we visit the vivarium, and we all readily agreed, for thusfar the psychic enhancer seemed to have produced a mutually congruent effect on the four of us that verged on the telepathic.

  But this did not persist for very long. When we had reached the vivarium, Raul rather strenuously suggested that we repose together on the grass and attempt by silent meditation to achieve a satori which he felt lay within the reach of our collective grasp but whose ineffable nature was entirely beyond his powers of description.

  As for me, it would have been difficult to conceive of an activity more productive of discomfort under the circumstances, for the vivarium, with its fanciful ersatz trees, even more ersatz sky full of contradictory meteorological and astronomical elements, and its pathetic collection of miniature mythical creatures, far from elevating the state of my spirit as its art intended, soon began to achieve the aspect of a willful veil of maya whose illusion grew more and more transparent with every passing moment, threatening to dissolve entirely t
o reveal a void of ennui the continued contemplation of which produced only a growing formless dread the full revelation of whose nature was the last satori in the universe I would have wished to attain.

  Nor were Guy or Imre much interested in a contemplative inward journey in these environs.

  “I wish to wander,” Imre told Raul. “Rather than waste this experience on singular contemplation, I would surfeit my senses to the point of overload.”

  “Perhaps the dream chambers would be the most interesting venue,” Guy suggested.

  I exchanged telepathic glances with him. The last thing I wanted was a ménage à trois with him and Imre, whom I found not the least bit attractive, nor was I in much of a mood for tantric exercises in general. Such was the puissance of the psychedelic that all this was conveyed in a twitch of the eyebrow and a curl of the lip as was Guy’s confirmation of his understanding of same, or so at least it seemed.

  “For there we may overload our perceptions with a rapid tour of any number of arcane realities,” he said, to make the nonerotic nature of his proposal plain.

  Not without a certain grumbling from Raul, we left him in the vivarium to seek nirvana, and repaired to the dream chamber deck, where, as far as I was concerned, Guy and Imre behaved in a manner entirely unsuitable to this concourse of private boudoirs, this venue designed for romance. Fortunately, the individual dream chambers sealed themselves against intrusion when they were occupied, so at least no erotic exercises were interrupted by their boisterous laughter and silly jabberings, but we were the object of more than enough outraged and offended glances on the part of loverly couples strolling hand in hand through the corridors to do considerable damage to the already low repute in which Children of Fortune were held by our fellow Honored Passengers.