I could not have been at it for more than a few minutes when, in almost less time than it takes to tell, a bubble of nausea suddenly exploded in my gut, a spasm of utter rejection that had my whole body trembling, and a series of retches wracked me down to the limbs.
I spat out the teat and managed to roll up onto my haunches clutching my stomach as I vomited charge after charge of thick green liquid over the edge of the leaf.
Fortunately, rather than expiring in a series of dry heaves, the episode ended as soon as the last of the sap had been expelled, and aside from a certain soreness of the ribs and a painful sharpening of the demanding emptiness in my stomach, I was no more the worse for wear, as if the flower had merely sought to provide a harmless lesson.
Vraiment, that lesson had been well taught! What the Bloomenveldt provided for the young of our species was crafted to be intolerable to the adult metabolism thereof.
Having no further business to conduct in this noxious nursery, I fled the vecino thereof in a random series of short leaps, thinking for the moment of nothing more than putting it well behind me. It did not take long, however, for my ravenous hunger to reassert its demands, and for the perfumed promises of succulence to clutch at my backbrain with ever greater strength.
I knew full well that if I did not find safer fare soon, I would reach a state where I could no longer resist these siren calls to ease my famishment at the first Bloomenkinder larder my nose could find. With my remaining will, I resolved therefore to seek out lone flowers whose perfumes promised nothing and sample the fruits thereof, even though my confidence in this strategy was now severely eroded.
Nor, alas, did my pessimism prove unfounded. Discovering flowers indifferent to the attendance of my species was easy enough, but none of the fare offered up thereby was at all palatable.
Some of these fruits repelled by the perfect loathsomeness of their flavors: there were fruits whose taste filled the backbrain with a rank fecal odor, fruits that tasted like ancient overripe cheese, fruits which to my palate seemed redolent of urine. But the greater part of the fruits I forced myself to sample caused such powerful retching the moment their pulp touched my mouth that I was spared the full horror of the flavors thereof.
The message could not have been clearer had it been graven in monumental letters of stone. In these deep precincts, at any rate, humans could eat only the fruits to which the perfumes drew them, and these, no doubt, were therefore liberally laced with molecules designed to perfect their behavior as pollinators. It was a closed circle which seemed to allow no space whatsoever for sapient will.
In utter despair leavened only by an equally powerful outrage, with my stomach pounding in agony, my ears ringing with faintness, my legs beginning to go wobbly, and my nostrils constantly assailed by promises of swift and delicious surcease from this entirely self-inflicted torture, I set off for want of any other course of action into the warming blaze of the rising sun which had long since burned away the mist of morning.
Even then I must have known that I was only postponing the inevitable. For as the day wore on past noon, the pains in my stomach grew stronger, I was becoming too weak with hunger to even completely control the trajectories of my ever-more-feeble leaps, I was becoming increasingly dizzy to the point where consciousness was beginning to wink on and off, and, contrawise, the smells of delicious fruits mine for the taking had come to dominate my sensorium to the point where there was room in my mind for no other thought save the by-now-equally-tropistic self-command to follow the direction of sunrise which I had programmed what was left of my sapient spirit to follow.
But inevitably my body weakened to the point where it could no longer maintain a sapient spirit to follow its own song, and the perfumed breath of the flowers seized the remnants of my consciousness, which is to say that, with a great sigh of animal relief, I finally allowed myself to follow the summons to the nearest floral banquet.
There were some score flowers in this garden: lavender bells, yellow cups filled with nectar, pink flowers of passion, crumbly black cones of pollen circled by small white aprons of petals, mayhap other types as well, for my sensorium was skewed entirely away from sight and sound into a sphere where smell and taste merged to dominate my perceptions and within which hunger and the glorious satisfaction of same had become the sum total of my being.
I buried my face in the thick clear nectar pooling in the nearest of the yellow cups, unmindful of the two Bloomenkinder doing likewise beside me, and slobbered mouthful after mouthful down my throat, all but groaning in ecstasy.
For the smoky-sweet savor thereof was the perfect fulfillment of that which was promised by the aroma of sugar-glazed and crisply roasted meat which filled the nether reaches of my brain. As for the effect upon the famished cells of my body, this can only be likened to a million sparkling pinpoints of gustatory orgasm.
When I had sucked up my fill, or rather, no doubt, when the pheromonic winds changed to fill my being with something like the odor of steaming chocolated cinnamon pastries fresh and redolent from the oven, I abandoned the nectar cup forthwith and quite literally without a conscious thought repaired straightaway to one of the great black mounds surrounded by white petals, where I immediately proceeded to stuff great handfuls of crumbly black pollen into my mouth, trembling with delight as I chewed the sticky and crunchy grains which savored of spiced nutmeats enrobed in velvety chocolate creme.
As well do I remember huge black berries that drew me with the aroma of fine brandy and tasted like minted wine, long red fruit redolent of jasmine and black mushrooms and savoring of fruits baked in meaty caramel.
I existed in a state of perfect bliss, for the sum total of my consciousness consisted of the tantalizing aromas of gustatory lust and the all-but-immediate orgasmic satisfaction thereof. As to how long this cycle of feasting endured, je ne sais pas, for certainement there was no sapience of a sufficient level of intellect present to count the minutes or hours, or even to encompass the very concept of time.
Nor did I pay the least heed to the Bloomenkinder in whose midst I dined, any more than they found an apparition such as myself sufficient to arouse table talk or eye contact or the slightest momentary diversion from the single-minded task of fressing. We walked from flower to flower and we ate. That was the sum total of our blissful existence.
Until, that is, a flower decreed otherwise.
I was hunkered on the soft fat petals of a great open pink blossom devouring large blue ovoids with several other mindless Bloomenkinder, when the winds of desire changed and with them the very nature of my being.
A blood-warm rosy perfume seemed to pour straight through me, dissolving my gustatory obsession the moment the first molecules thereof had soaked into the volitional cells of my backbrain, and all at once, smell, taste, and the pleasures of gluttony faded away to faint abstractions which could scarcely be said to exist.
For now it was touch and feeling that had become the sensory crowns of my creation. My skin had become an interface of palpitating nerve-ends crying out to be caressed, my mouth ached to fill itself with warm velvety flesh, and my loins burned with a lustful fire that had the immediacy and urgent impact of completely dehydrated thirst.
Nor was I alone in my sudden transmutation into a fiery creature of polymorphous lust. In less time than it would have taken to consider had sapient consideration entered into the matter at all, I had thrown myself on the nearest male body, ripped the necessary entrée in the fabric of my trousers, and impaled the circle of fire of my yoni upon a lingam.
Nor did this at all suffice. Sucking and grasping, I wrapped my lips around the first phallic fruit I could seize up and drew it in to the root. Vraiment, my nether orifice was forthwith breached as well to my avid satisfaction, and I felt mouths at my nipples, hands and tongues at the small of my back and thighs, and then naught existed but a carmine fog of all my senses, and an endless series of multiplex cusps that went on and on and on.
Vraiment, more than propriet
y or shame prevents me from detailing the variety, scope, and duration of the ever-changing interlocked tantric figures in which I took an actively enthusiastic part, for the truth of it is that I was lost in a timeless and mindless realm wherein even the distinction between the flesh and the gratification thereof had been completely annihilated.
Suffice it to say that this state endured and then ended with the same suddenness with which it had begun. A cool pheromonic wind blew through me, like the cold, crystalline clarity of the void between the stars, and all at once sensation evaporated from the surface of my skin and the kundalinic crannies of my erotic spaces, and all that existed was a disembodied spirit that sought the complete and blissful nothingness thereof.
This spirit found itself being transported atop a numb fleshly automaton and deposited supinely on a leaf beneath a lavender bell, where four other Bloomenkinder already lay staring motionlessly up into the clear cloudless sky.
Time stopped. Sound ceased. Smell, taste, and kinesthetic awareness of the contours of my own body faded away. I was naught but an empty volume of space-time gazing up fixedly into an equally perfect and featureless cerulean mandala of tranquil nullity. I was one with the Bloomenveldt. I had achieved the mindless perfection of the clear blue void.
21
Blue, blue, blue, blue…An endless, measureless, timeless perfection of blue…
And yet, at length, if duration could be said to exist in such a state at all, something became aware of a perturbation in the clear blue nothingness of its being.
Yellow…Was there not a yellowness moving all but imperceptibly across the blue…?
It began to assume a substance and a form…A fiery circle of yellow, haloed by streamers of the same hue…like a face surrounded by a corona of glowing golden hair…like the circular entrance to a long tunnel of light…at the end of which…at the end of which…
A spirit seemed to slowly come into being, which is to say that, just as the clear blue emptiness had been disturbed by the golden circle of light, so was the perfection of nonbeing now trammeled by a desire, a tropism, a formless urge to follow the yellow out of the blue to…to…
But then the golden circle began to deepen toward orange as it drifted downward through the blue void, and the cerulean hue thereof began to darken toward purple, and I found myself rising slowly to my feet, dimly aware of others like myself, standing motionless and staring into the sunset as the orange disc cracked the geometric precision of the horizon and fractured the purple perfection of the vaulted sky with rays of umber and somber red.
Yet as the sun was swallowed up into the black lake of oncoming night, some dying ember of independent intellect seemed to struggle up painfully from the depths of perfect mindless bliss to blink torpidly at the tiny pinpoints of silver that had begun to pierce the blackness of the sky.
For a few moments, as one by one the stars began to come out, mayhap there was a spirit that recognized those silvery speckles as such, for if fragmented memory plays me not false, that spirit viewed them through a veil of liquid gauze, as if weeping for the loss of something it could no longer fathom, as if someone still knew that each of them was a mighty sun, that up there in the heavens high above the Bloomenveldt, circling round the stars, were the far-flung worlds of men.
Just as memory marks not the divided hours of that first seamless perfect day as a Bloomenkind, so too in the track of my memory does it seem but one long day that I passed before the chance coincidence of sunrise and the turn of the floral cycle came together to rouse me from the reasonless creature of the forest that I had become.
The time came round at last when I awoke at dawn, was moved to breakfast on nectar, and was then transported by what blew me on the wind not to eat of fruit or engage in copulations, but to repose under a lavender bell in empty-minded meditation upon the cerulean void.
But chance, or mayhap what we style fortune, placed my venue of repose so that, rather than fixing my gaze upon the featureless perfection of the clear blue sky, I laid myself down with my face to the east, to the rising sun, which at this hour lay just above the eastern horizon bathing the Bloomenveldt in golden brilliance.
And as I lay there staring at the rising sun as it slowly began its ascent to the zenith, so did the angle of my gaze imperceptibly rise with it, for my vision had been totally captured by this single slow event in the timeless and featureless void of blue.
Mayhap the power of the flower was less total over one who had once enjoyed sapience and then lost it than over born and bred Bloomenkinder suckled at the very teats of the forest in whom sapience had never arisen. Mayhap my previous conscious determination to follow the rising sun to the east had so percolated down to the nether reaches of my brain that it had attained, or from another viewpoint degenerated, to a simple tropism to rise up to follow the yellow, even as many plants will keep their leaves and flowers turned to a sun as it travels across the sky of day.
Be that as it may, some dim sort of vegetative awareness began to slowly seep into the percept sphere of the creature who lay on that leaf staring mindlessly at the golden sun rising toward its apogee, painting the greenery of the Bloomenveldt with a bright gloss of light that, rather than emanating from the yellow face of glory, seemed to be ascending eastward and skyward toward it.
Which is not to say that anything resembling human sapience had returned, for this faint urge to rise up to the golden face of the sunrise was no doubt no less a visual tropism than those of the senses of smell and taste which had come to command my hours.
Yet, dim and mindless though it be, this tropism was not a command of the Bloomenveldt. Rather, I do now believe, had the remnant of my sapient spirit succeeded in condensing all that had once been me into this single simple tropism to follow the yellow face of the sun upward into the sky, for it was a puissant compendium indeed from the point of view of the consciousness trapped beneath the surface of my presently mindless brain.
For was that consciousness not named Sunshine, and had that name not been given by a spirit whose face was haloed by golden hair? Vraiment, had not I once consciously chosen that selfsame golden rising sun as the ensign and guidepost of my determination to attain once more the worlds of men?
Destiny had therefore chosen to place within my sphere of vision in a state of florally induced hypnogogia an object of precisely that color most likely to rouse my spirit from its cerulean trance.
Slowly and without conscious thought, my right hand freed itself from the nirvanic catatonia in which my body lay, and like the heroine of a romance struggling under the crushing gravity of a cruelly massive planet, it crawled agonizingly across my waist and turned the knob of my floatbelt as far clockwise as it would go. Then, as if exhausted by this effort, it fell limply to the surface of the leaf by my side.
Which slowly fell away.
For, supine, still gazing fixedly at the object of my tropic desire, propelled by the .1 g upward thrust of my floatbelt, I had indeed begun to rise to meet the sun.
As my body slowly rose up through the levels and breezes of the atmosphere, so too did my awareness rise slowly up out of the depths of its nonbeing toward the golden light of sapient consciousness. I can no more sharply define the moment when my spirit could fairly have been said to have returned to full sovereignty than one may the morning after remember the precise moment the night before when the same passed over the line into sleep.
Suffice it to say that after some time I quite literally found myself drifting slowly on the ever-changing breezes above the Bloomenveldt, with my clothing in tatters, my face caked and smeared with a vile crust of dried fruit pulps and saps, and the vague but horrifying memories of what I had been forced to become.
My first act of will, taken even before my consciousness had fully cohered, was to turn down my floatbelt to .1 g positive, and spy out a leaf as I came drifting down from which I might establish a firm trajectory for my next leap to the east.
Indeed, I hardly knew what I was doing or w
hy until I had kicked off that leaf on a mighty bound toward that single smiling golden face in all this endless world of hostile green. Then I shouted for the sheer need to hear a sapient human voice. “Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the sun, follow the yellow!”
For several more leaps, I continued to shout thusly until the repetition fell into the rhythm of a chant, not really aware then of what I was doing or why. But at length this mantric return to verbality of a sort also served to restore the coherence of same to the stream of my thoughts, which is to say I became more shrewdly cognizant of the method of what no doubt would have appeared to an observing ear as my madness.
For in truth only then did I come to dimly comprehend the means whereby some buried level of my mind had rescued my sapient spirit from its dreamless slumber. Which is to say I had recovered the wit necessary to realize that I had in fact been following a self-imprinted visual tropism, which I had now instinctively augmented with a verbal mantra acting upon somewhat higher centers of my brain.
And rather than give over this mantra in the bright yellow light of relative reason, I instead reduced its volume to a less shrill level designed to preserve my voice for the long haul, and crafted the words into a monotonous singsong rhythm designed to drone it as deeply into the biologic levels of my being as I could manage without being a perfect master of the meditative arts. “Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the sun, follow the yellow…”
So too did I then expand modestly upon the lyric with a final phrase which spoke of and to the higher purpose thereof. “Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road…”
Child of Fortune Page 38