When I protested that such a procedure seemed to me to insure the death of art, she only laughed.
“Indeed, as an author of romances, no one is more in sympathy with such a plaint than I, liebchen,” she told me. “But we are charged to produce a Matrix entry, not the romance which you may create when the spirit moves you and which will no doubt earn you fame and fortune. As for the pain of reducing art to dry didacticism, the final stage of our work will be more painful still, for then we must go over every word and syllable with a cold and ruthless heart. For while Willa Embri Janos may be something of a philistine when it comes to literary style, she knows whereof she speaks when it comes to the utter concision required to produce what the Matrix must have.”
She patted my knee. “I hope we will still be friends at the conclusion of this unpleasant task,” she said.
“We will always be friends, Wendi, come what may!” I declared with an open heart.
Wendi laughed again. “Say that when we have engaged in mortal combat over every word of your own precious prose, liebchen!” she said.
“You will find that those of us who honor the floating cultura with our presence and not the other way around will be interested in your unique adventure,” Wendi told me sotto voce as we entered the formal dining room. “It is fair entrée into serious circles, ma petite, just do not assume that it will yet make you the center of the universe.”
The inner wisdom of this caveat eluded me at the time, but by the time the banquet was over I was to be taught this lesson quite well.
There were six other diners at the table Wendi had put together: Void Captain Dana Gluck Sara; Willa Embri Janos, Lazaro Melinda Kuhn, and Dalta Evan Evangeline, all of whom I had already been introduced to; Timothy Ben Bella, psychopharmacologist and yogic adept; and Linda Yee Lech, who was styled one of the foremost mages of evolutionary psychesomics in all the worlds of men.
Which is to say a heady and learned company indeed, and one which Wendi had quite obviously assembled around the subject of my young self. This knowledge was something less than reassuring to the same, for on the one hand it put me in mind of the endless interrogation sessions at the Clear Light, and on the other it made me trepidatious concerning my ability to hold my own at this exalted level of discourse.
Fortunately, as I was soon to learn, the manners of these worthies were a far cry from what I had experienced from the mages at the mental retreat. The first course served was a crepe of fruits de mer enrobed in a thick saffron sauce and accompanied by a rather sweet white wine, after which came a fiery curried vegetable consommé with tiny bits of pickled fish and a powerful anise-flavored vodka. Then came smoked black mushrooms stuffed with pungent forcemeat and served with a bone-dry red vintage.
During these preliminaries, Wendi favored me with an introduction to the Honored Passengers whom I had not yet met, and the table talk concerned the art of our chef maestro, Escoffier Tai Bondi. For my part, I took the opportunity to say little and imbibe a respectful amount, so that by the time we were served Vaco Filets Bordelais, garnished with fried maize noodles and accompanied by a wine so deeply red that it appeared almost black, my trepidations had been entirely dissolved, my tongue was lubricated to a fine loquacity, and I was more than ready to render up my spiel at Wendi’s request.
For the next twenty minutes or so, I held this audience of mages and puissant intellects spellbound with a rather extravagant telling of the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt, a version not unlike that which I had developed on the streets of Ciudad Pallas, if somewhat augmented by the noble vintages I had consumed.
I seem to remember that during this spiel we were served a barbecue of assorted vegetables accompanied by a cunningly spiced white wine as well as a goreng embellished with several varieties of charcuterie washed down with a dark-brown beer, though my memory of this stage of the meal was somewhat clouded by both beverages and the exhilarating sight of seven pairs of keenly bright eyes approvingly turned upon my person and seven pairs of intellectually avid ears hanging on my every word, or so it seemed to me.
Suffice it to say that by the time I had concluded over a salad of fruits steeped in a crème of smoked nuts, I felt like the queen of all the worlds.
But just as this sweet course did not prove to be the conclusion to the banquet that I had supposed, so did the conclusion of my declamation lead to two more intellectual courses of which I was to prove something less than the chef maestra. Out came a cold red fruit soup liberally laced with kirschwasser and garnished with tiny croutons of nut flour stuffed with cinnamon jam, and with it the questioning commenced.
“You are quite certain that these true Bloomenkinder were entirely devoid of sapience?” demanded Linda Yee Lech. “Which set of parameters did you apply, the Menzies-Rademacher criteria, which have been around for centuries, or ahem, my own more recent construct?”
“I’m afraid that the differences between the two are presently rather vague in my mind,” I bluffed, for of course I had no idea what she was talking about. “S’il vous plaît, if you would be so good as to refresh my memory…”
“The Menzies-Rademacher criteria hinge on the question of whether meaning is carried in a grammatical sequence or whether each cry is an isolate,” Linda Yee Lech reminded me. “Whereas my construct, which relies upon a systems analysis of the absence or presence of social interactions, is far less of a blunt instrument.”
“As I have said, the Bloomenkinder are perfectly mute,” I told her. “As for social interactions, these may have appeared complexly patterned, but no more so than the doings of a beehive.”
“You were able to inventory a sufficient number of interactions so that this was confirmed by analysis to a probability of better than fifty percent?” Linda Yee Lech asked sharply.
“I’m afraid not,” I admitted. “But if you had seen, as I did, human infants suckling at floral teats, there would have been no—”
“Con su permiso,” Timothy Ben Bella interrupted politely. “If I may, I believe the question Linda is trying to approach is whether we are dealing with innocent animals in which sentience never arises or sapient humans whose higher centers are severed from volitional expression by the exudations of the flowers…”
“Or indeed whether the Bloomenwald itself may not be deemed sentient,” Lazaro Melinda Kuhn declared. “And if so, did such sentience evolve in symbiosis with the devolution of its human pollinators, or was this Perfumed Garden phenomenon preexistent? Did you observe a progression of intermediate floral forms? Did any of the native mammals exhibit such florally coordinated behaviors on a somewhat less complex level?”
“As for a progression of intermediate floral organization from isolated flowers to the complexity of the Perfumed Garden, vraiment, one would have had to have been blind not to observe this,” I said. “But as for observing the intimate behaviors of the native mammals, it was entirely impossible to approach them even closely enough to see them very clearly. But surely the suckling of human infants at vegetative teats indicates that the latter must have evolved to service the former, nē?”
“A probable deduction…” Lazaro admitted. “But did you observe the young of any native species engaged in the same behavior? The presence of same would obviate your puissant logic, kind…”
“Je ne sais pas,” I admitted lamely. “I never thought to inquire at the time…”
“And what of the vapors you have styled ‘pheromones’ and ‘perfumes’?” asked Timothy Ben Bella. “Is this mere literary license or did you obtain samples for analysis?”
“Vraiment, we obtained samples, but alas they were lost with our packs.”
“Merde! Quelle catastrophe!”
“Mayhap all is not lost, Timothy,” Lazaro said. “For certainement we know enough of the general botany of Belshazaar to deduce the general biochemical class of its exudates by the morphology of the specific organs secreting same. Describe for us then, bitte, Sunshine, the various floral structures responsible for the
vapors producing the several specific psychotropic effects you encountered…”
“I’m afraid that in my psychic state I was hardly capable of noticing…”
“But surely you were at least able to differentiate among the substances exuded by stamens, pistils, and perhaps specialized scent organs?”
I could only shrug my admission of perfect ignorance.
“Give over hectoring the poor child on these matters, Lazaro,” said Linda Yee Lech. “It is hardly a moral flaw not to be a trained botanical observer! However when it comes to psychic experiences, these at least we all observe with ultimate intimacy. So tell us, Sunshine, in less anecdotal terms than you have thusfar employed, when you were in your deepest thrall to the flowers, was your sapience entirely absent, or merely suppressed by a biochemical overlay? Which is to say, did your higher centers bear witness to their own volitional impotence or was, as it were, no one at home?”
“There appears to be no temporal discontinuity in my memory-track, if that is what you mean…”
“Hmmm…” mused Dalta Evan Evangeline. “To come at it from a possibly more fruitful angle, would you say that the stimulus of the rising sun which first roused you from this state had sapient mythic meaning to you from the outset, or was it a phylogenically primitive tropism upon which the later more complex structure was retrospectively erected?”
“Qué?”
“Ho, ho, sehr gut, Dalta!” exclaimed Linda Yee Lech in forthright admiration. “Indeed it must have been the former, for the revertees who once possessed human consciousness responded to her verbal cues, whereas the Bloomenkinder never did!”
“True,” said Lazaro, “but on the other hand if she was responding to a mere visual tropism, then they could just as easily have been responding to a mere auditory tropism.”
“But if so, then why did the Bloomenkinder not respond to it?”
“Because it is exactly this lack of response which proves that they lack sapient human consciousness!”
“Phah! What a tautology!”
“Round and round you go,” Wendi finally broke in after her long and quite uncharacteristic silence. “Yet you miss the true point entirely!”
“Which is, if I may make so bold?” drawled Lazaro.
“That there were three entirely different responses by members of our own species to the very same chemicals, naturellement!” Wendi declared.
“Well taken!” exclaimed Linda Yee Lech. “Vraiment it is clearly the imprinting of the collective unconscious that the Bloomenkinder lack! Hola, this may indeed settle one of the hoariest disputes of psychesomics!”
“How so?” inquired Dalta Evan Evangeline.
“It would seem to prove quite conclusively that what we style the collective unconscious is culturally and verbally transmitted, rather than being species genetic coding!”
“Rubbish!” scoffed Lazaro. “If that were so, then how could you account for the cross-cultural and trans temporal universality of same?”
“Oh so? Then how would you account for its absence in the Bloomenkinder if it is inscribed in the genes of our species?”
“If one grants the Bloomenwald some sort of vegetative sentience, then the genes wherein the collective unconsciousness is encoded may have been deliberately extinguished by selective breeding even as we have altered the genetically determined behaviors of domestic animals.”
“Anthropocentric projection!”
Und so weiter.
By the time we were into a green salad dressed with peppered oil and sweet and sour vinegar, the discourse had proceeded into esoteric realms of biology, genetics, psychesomics, esthetics, and evolutionary ecology whose general outlines I could only struggle to dimly comprehend, and to which I could hardly coherently contribute. Over yet another dessert, of chocolate pastry filled with rose-flavored custard, I sat there quietly listening to intense and occasionally acrimonious debates on the psychopharmacology of the Bloomenveldt, the theoretical parameters of vegetative sentience, the essential definition of the élan humain, the ethics of continental sterilization, et cetera, in terms whose firm meanings I strained my brain to comprehend, for I understood enough to know that my own simple tale was the central subject of all this commentary.
It was exhilarating to have my adventures taken so seriously by such manifestly serious intellects, but it was also daunting to realize how much wider and deeper knowledge and insight went on any conceivable subject than I had ever imagined, particularly when the callowness of my own intellect was being so amply demonstrated using the subject matter of my own personal experience.
“I never dreamed there was so much to learn even about the events of my own existence,” I moaned to Wendi when we departed at the banquet’s end, with my mind as torpid with elusive discourse as my stomach was with haute cuisine. “How are we ever going to incorporate it all in my simple tale?”
Wendi laughed. “One thing at a time, liebchen, one thing at a time,” she assured me blithely. “Now you must sleep well, Sunshine, for tomorrow our work begins in earnest.”
And so it did. For three days, I declaimed my tale in numerous versions onto word crystal to the point where I began to loathe the sound of my own voice, and then for three more days we worked to combine them into a version suitable for submission to our panel of mages. By the time this process was completed to Wendi’s satisfaction, my brain was reeling with intellectual fatigue, and I wanted nothing more than to be finished with the whole task. The truth of it is that never in my young life had I ever engaged in such strenuous intellectual labors; indeed, if truth be told, prior to that time, I had been a virgin when it came to any real work at all.
Throughout all human history, the young of our species have been subject to endless rubrics on the joys of labor, the ennui that is the inevitable result of indolence, and the psychic satisfaction to be gained by absorption in some mighty work, the more demanding the better. Be such homilies as they may, the pleasures thereof remained beyond my comprehension until the next stage of the process began.
“One thing at a time,” Wendi had promised, and so it was done, which is to say rather than being subject to whole batteries of learned interrogators at once, the mages were given word crystals of the draft version of the Matrix entry to peruse, and then I went at it with them one at a time, over lunch or dinner, in the vivarium, or in their staterooms, more often than not with Wendi at my side.
Now the situation was in a certain sense reversed, for while my teachers certainement never lost interest in what they might extract in the course of such discourse for their own intellectual use, teachers they indeed were, resources placed at my disposal, and what puissant teachers they were!
In the stateroom of Lazaro Melinda Kuhn, I learned the dark and ambiguous answer to a question that had never trammeled my mind until, at length, after a surfeit of his gentle but rueful complaints at my less than scientifically lucid descriptions of the flora and fauna of the Bloomenveldt, it suddenly intruded into my awareness.
“Why then depend on the anecdotes of such as myself?” I demanded. “Why in all the centuries that men have dwelt on Belshazaar has not a proper scientific expedition been mounted to the interior of the Bloomenveldt…?”
I was suddenly brought up short by my own words, which is to say by the shameful mortification induced thereby. For had I not once promised to myself that if I escaped to the worlds of men I would one day return with just such an expedition to rescue Guy Vlad Boca? And what had I done to accomplish same? Precisely nothing!
“Vraiment, why is one not mounted now?” I demanded with guilt-driven stridency. “Indeed, why does not a fleet of hovers descend upon the depths of the forest canopy to rescue our human comrades from such vile floral fascism?”
Lazaro’s demeanor darkened. “I wondered when you would ask that,” he said with a sigh. “I had hoped it would not fall to me to be confronted with the question, for the answer, I fear, does not exactly reflect honor on our species.”
“What do you mean by that?” I said defensively, for, thinking as I was of my abandonment of Guy, I assumed that the lack of honor he alluded to was my own.
“The psychotropics derived from the Bloomenveldt are a source of great profit, nē,” Lazaro said. “Indeed they are the entire economic base of that unwholesome planet. The fact is, that if you inspect the literature, you will find quite a few cryptic mentions of the apocryphal Bloomenkinder. The unpleasant truth is that the existence of same has been suspected for centuries.”
“Then why—”
“Think, my innocent young friend, and with greed in your heart! If proof of such a state of affairs was secured and laid before the worlds of men, what would be the result?”
“What else but a hue and cry and a demand on the part of men and women of good will for the rescue of—” I cut myself short. I stared at Lazaro. He gave me a strange little shrug. “You don’t mean…?”
“But alas I do, my young friend,” Lazaro said uncomfortably. “Not only would the citizens of Belshazaar find themselves morally required to rescue the Bloomenkinder, there would no doubt be many who would demand the extermination of the Bloomenwald as a proper vengeance for the outrage. And even if the voice of science could prevent such floral genocide, it would appear that the presence of Bloomenkinder is necessary to induce the flowers to evolve the very psychotropics which enrich the planet. An unwholesome symbiosis mayhap, but a true one, which is to say one which indeed benefits both species—the one with more efficient pollinators, and the other with huge pecuniary profit.”
“They know?” I exclaimed in horror and outrage. “They know and still they do nothing?”
Lazaro shrugged. “They know, they don’t know, certainement they have no wish to know that they know.”
“Merde, I always sensed a vileness of spirit throughout Ciudad Pallas, but I put it down to lack of esthetics!” I muttered. “Never did I imagine creatures that styled themselves human could thusly abandon the spirits of their fellows in such a cowardly manner for mere profit!”
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