Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  Nor could I think of anything else when I departed to keep my luncheon appointment with Linda Yee Lech. “Something must be done!” I declared angrily, after hectoring her on the subject at considerable length. “We must force these mercenary miscreants to rescue the Bloomenkinder!”

  “Are you so certain of your moral rectitude in this regard?” she asked me evenly. “Remove the Bloomenkinder from the forest and what have you accomplished? At the cost of wrecking a planetary economy and impeding the progress of psychopharmacology, you will have rescued them from the ecological niche in which they evolved in favor of incarceration as an exhibit in a zoological garden. Even feral humans raised by other mammals do not develop sentient consciousness, still less will the symbiotes of the Bloomenveldt ever be anything but mammals in human form sans the élan humain, nē.”

  “But their progeny—”

  “You would breed them in captivity?”

  “No, certainly not, but—”

  “Then you would commit genocide against the Bloomenkinder as well as against the Bloomenveldt?”

  “Genocide? I am not the monster!”

  Linda Yee Lech smiled and softened her expression. “Thus speak all humans, and truly so,” she said. “Vraiment, this is a question which must trouble the spirit. For who is the monster here? Those who merely profit by a pre-existing condition while careful avoiding conscious recognition of the same? The innocent Bloomenkinder? Those who, like your Guy, have willingly surrendered their spirits to the flowers? The flowers of the Bloomenveldt, who merely follow their own natural evolutionary vector, mayhap to sentience?”

  “Be questions of guilt or monsterhood as they may, I am talking about pragmatic action, not the niceties of moral calculus!” I declared pettishly.

  “La même chose, in this case,” Linda said flatly. “For here on the one hand we have a species in human form whose consciousness has long since diverged from our own and which will expire into extinction if it is removed from its floral symbiote, and on the other hand, a floral symbiote which may be evolving toward a sentience it can only achieve courtesy of its human pollinators. We may expunge either or both from the universe, but we will never restore the Bloomenkinder to sapient citizenship in the human race. Do we therefore have the moral right to commit double genocide when there would not even be a beneficiary of such a scientific and karmic outrage? Are you really willing to take such matters into your own hands?”

  “Put thusly, je ne sais pas…” I was forced to admit. “But what of those sapient humans who wandered into the thrall of the flowers? What about such as Guy?”

  “What about those who quite rationally chose to die in the arms of floral nirvana?” Linda Yee Lech pointed out relentlessly. “Would they wish to be rescued? Vraiment, would your Guy thank you if you rescued him from his perfect flower to spend the rest of his days in a mental retreat? If we were to impose our will upon such spirits according to our own concepts of righteousness, how would we be any less fascist than the flowers, who at least would seem to eschew the practice of continental sterilization?”

  “Once more, what once seemed clear is now occluded by an excess of wisdom,” I could only declare.

  Linda Yee Lech smiled. “Unfortunately there are all too many instances when all that wisdom teaches us is that the ability to act is only the power to make things worse,” she said.

  Other enlightenments, fortunately, were a good deal less grim, and more relevant to my evolution as a tale-teller than to the jaundicing of my opinion of the moral stature of my own species. In particular, Dalta Evan Evangeline, the literary archeologist, did much to both open up my awareness to the abundance of nuance attached to most every image and figure I employed by several thousand years of human history and art, and lead me to a far deeper understanding of certain aspects of my own tale and those I had learned from the Gypsy Joker ruespielers as well.

  This odyssey began innocently enough when she presented me with a copy of the tale of Peter Pan and suggested that perusal thereof might be of some relevant interest to the task at hand. Since I had been meaning to delve into this matter ever since I had been apprised of this work’s existence, I readily enough agreed.

  But after I finished the tale, I knew only confusion. Surely the freenom Pater Pan must be a somewhat less than perfectly erudite homage to the Peter Pan of the tale, and just as surely I could see a good deal of Pater in the domo of the tribe of lost boys. Yet the ending of the tale contradicted the spirit of the Yellow Brick Road entirely, which is to say I could hardly imagine my Pater approving of the moral imposed by fiat when the lost children forsake their vie for the quotidian realm of adults, nor did the Wendy of the tale have more than a passing resemblance to the Wendi that I knew who had chosen this freenom.

  When I broached these matters at a lunch of pasta with sautéed vegetables and grated cheeses with Wendi and Dalta, the latter’s interest seemed piqued as if I had presented her with new food for thought, and the former shook her head in ironic amusement.

  “These matters of names, images, and their millennial transmogrifications are even deeper and more arcane than you are beginning to suppose, Sunshine,” Dalta said. “The name ‘Pater Pan’ alone might be the subject of a lengthy monograph…” She paused, fingering her chin. “Indeed, I do believe that I will compose it!”

  “Mayhap you would care to elucidate at less than exhaustive length?” Wendi inquired dryly. “For I too once knew the gallant in question…”

  “Well, if you are content with a mere skimming of the surface,” Dalta said in a similar vein. “‘Pater,’ for example, has the meaning of ‘father’ in a long-disused sprach of Lingo. ‘Pan’ was the priapic goat-god of libido in a certain ancient mythos, and also refers to ‘Pan-theism,’ the concept that the Atman is equally distributed throughout the world of maya. The reference to ‘Peter Pan’ you have already mentioned, and ‘Peter,’ paradoxically enough, refers to both the first pontifex of a religion opposed to the doctrine of Pan-theism, and the phallus. Moreover, in yet another ancient image-system, the ‘Peter Pan Complex’ denotes, as in the tale, a personality which eschews maturity in favor of permanent neoteny…”

  “Hola!” exclaimed Wendi. “Then the full translation of the name would be…Pope Lingam of the Libidinal Atman Goat, a fine epithet for the master cocksman we both knew indeed!”

  Wendi and I both burst into laughter. “Do you suppose the tales the fellow we both knew told were informed by such scholarly erudition?” she asked me.

  “Somehow I doubt it,” I said. “Yet who can deny that he nevertheless chose a literarily puissant freenom?”

  “As did you when you wove the same nuances into your tale and then some,” Dalta said quite solemnly, for she had not joined in our mirth any more than she had shared our intimate knowledge of the object thereof.

  “Indeed…?” I said, out of politesse more than avid interest.

  “Oh, vraiment,” Dalta said. “The god Pan played seductive music on his pipes, which is to say he was the Piper of the libido. But when he becomes the Pied Piper we are also in another mythos. The Gypsies were an early avatar of the Children of Fortune, and the Joker refers to a transmutational card of the Tarot, the court jester of the ancient kings, and the god of holy mischief in more than once cycle. The Gypsy Jokers, however, were a tribe of wandering motorized barbarians like the Angels of Hell, the Slaves of Satan, and the Golden Horde. The rising sun is the ensign of the ancient Emperors of Nippon, hence of the virtues of bushido, but is also a punning reference to the Risen Christ, as well as to Prometheus, who brought the light of knowledge to our species, and who is also known as Lucifer the Light Bringer, who somehow also contrives to metamorphose into Satan, Prince of Darkness…”

  “Quelle chose!” I japed. “I am overwhelmed to learn of the depths of my own unsuspected erudition! Alas, it would seem impossible in our Second Starfaring Age to tell a simple tale without summoning up all unawares a whole pantheon of hidden spirits! How then am I to b
ecome a maestra of the Word when each mot of my Lingo has a secret sprach all its own?”

  “It will take years of diligent study naturellement,” Dalta said enthusiastically. “If you wish, I will have the Matrix prepare a bibliographical sequence for you to follow…”

  “Study the bones if you like, I suppose that can do no harm,” Wendi said archly. “Just do not take such learning too seriously. It is magic of a sort we work with our spells of words and it is better that we do not feel we must pin down every last nuance of reference thereof lest we find ourselves suffering from creative constipation!”

  At that even Dalta was constrained to join in the laughter at her expense.

  Nevertheless, as the Mistral Falcon reached Winthrope and then Novi Mir, and as the work progressed toward the stage when there was nothing left to do save wait for Willa Embri Janos to locate Pater Pan and put what we had into final form via the ‘mortal combat over each word of my own deathless prose’ that Wendi had promised, I found myself digging ever deeper into such lore utilizing both Dalta’s personal expertise and monographs that she suggested, and hola, by the time this editing process had begun, I did indeed find myself haggling over each subtraction or alteration of a word that Wendi suggested.

  Strange to say, or mayhap under the circumstances, not so strange, I had no interest in erotic intrigues, or in the numerous arts and entertainments offered up by the Grand Palais, and my palate began to grow indifferent to the splendors of the haute cuisine and noble vintages I consumed as so much functional fressen. For all of those pleasures at the time seemed but pale shadows of that mighty passion which all unawares had seduced me into the innermost vie and raison d’être of the floating cultura, the lust for knowledge.

  Not so much for any particular item of knowledge—though certainement there was much I wished I had known earlier—but the growing glorious perception of how much knowledge truly existed in the worlds of men after all these thousands of years of science, art, and history. And not only did I marvel at how extensive and inexhaustible all this knowledge was, but how much true wisdom had been encoded with the mere data, how much of an interconnected whole it all was, what puissant intellectual forces our Second Starfaring Age could muster even on a subject as ultimately trivial in the cosmic scheme of things as the tale of my own wanderjahr as a Child of Fortune.

  And yet, refracted and focused through the events of my own life, knowledge seemed to become something even more vital than itself, just as the events of my own life amplified by knowledge became something much more than a simple tale.

  Thus, without a clear perception of ever having crossed the karmic threshold, I found myself perceiving my karmic position not as that of a Child of Fortune approaching the climax of her life’s tale, but as that of a woman yet unknown confronting the immensity of her future becoming.

  In short, I had my first precognitive perception of myself in my own version of the adult of the species, and the first inkling that this was a beginning, not an end. In some dim way, I knew that at some point in my voyage aboard the Mistral Falcon, I had met the me I wanted to grow up to be.

  28

  Thus I was somewhat psychically unprepared when, five days out of Flor del Cielo, Wendi and I were summoned from our all-but-completed labors to the library, where Willa Embri Janos announced: “I have at last found our quarry. Pater Pan is on Alpa, or at least he was there two months ago.”

  She handed me a flimsy upon which was transcribed a formidable list of planets, several score at least, dated in chronological order from top to bottom, with the earliest entry some seven centuries old.

  “As to his hyperbolic claims of being a relic of the First Starfaring Age or even beyond, je ne sais pas,” she said. “But certainement, he has gotten around quite well and for a mighty span indeed in our own era!”

  “Well done!” exclaimed Wendi. “How did you manage such a feat?”

  “Not without difficulty,” Willa told her. “For the legends the fellow pretends to embody generalize into greater and greater vagueness the further back you go, to the point where it sometimes seemed that whole armies had their turns in playing the part, At length, however, I hit upon the notion of sifting this mass of confusion through a net constructed out of verified records of Child of Fortune tribes fitting the general parameters of the Gypsy Jokers as described. Thus, by cross-referencing these tribal histories with the legends, I was able to compile the list you now have, in raw form. Then it was merely a matter of establishing the sequence, extrapolating the trajectory, and verifying that such a phenomenon indeed has recently come into being on the planet to which the arrow thereof pointed, to wit Alpa, to a probability of at least seventy percent.”

  “Formidable!” I exclaimed, with an enthusiasm that seemed somewhat strained even to my own ears. “Someday I must learn this most puissant craft!”

  But in truth, my spirit had been thrown into some turmoil, for it had been days, or even weeks, since I had given any thought to what had once seemed to be the raison d’être of my presence on the Mistral Falcon in the first place. For in a sense, the girl who had followed her Pied Piper across the Bloomenveldt, into the streets of Ciudad Pallas, and thence out among the starways in this very ship, was no more. For in the process thereof, believing all the while that I had been seeking to regain a Golden Summer out of my past, I had instead found a vector toward my unknown but enticing future. Vraiment, I still sought to follow the spirit of my Yellow Brick Road, but the nature thereof had changed, for now the Yellow Brick Road I sought to travel was a version appropriate to the adult of my kind, the path of knowledge, and vraiment, frank artistic ambition, a road upon which I had not known my feet were so firmly planted until this very moment.

  Thus, rather than greeting Willa’s announcement with the unbridled joy I would have thought it should have brought, I felt instead a certain ill-defined sense of loss. For now the end of this voyage was in sight, and truth be told, I found to my own surprise that I liked it not.

  Wendi Sha Rumi seemed to have some inkling of what was passing through my soul. “Alpa…” she said to Willa Embri Janos. “How many transfers will it require to get there from our next planet of call?”

  “We shall soon see,” Willa said. She addressed the Matrix console. “Flor del Cielo to Alpa. Void Ship connection between.”

  A moment later words and numbers appeared on the telescreen.

  “Buena suerte indeed!” she exclaimed, pointing to the tele. “Observe! The Arrow of Time even now approaches Flor del Cielo. From there to Heimat is its course, and thence to Alpa itself.”

  My spirit sank, nor, despite my protests against its meanness to the contrary, would it rise. Now my feelings must surely be written plain upon my face, for Wendi eyed me with a certain knowing concern.

  “It pleases you not, liebchen, nē?” she said. “Je comprend.” She took my hand. “Con su permiso, Willa. Come, Sunshine, we must talk.”

  We repaired forthwith to the vivarium, where, strolling around the oasis pool under the brilliant ersatz sky of the desert night, I searched out the words to render up my feelings to my mentor and friend, and thus to clarify them to myself.

  “Je ne sais pas…It is as if I had begun another tale…and all at once I find myself thrust back in time into the previous one…or rather…The truth of it is, I suppose, that I have found a new path toward what I wish to become, and mayhap should continue thereon rather than…” I threw up my hands in frustration.

  Wendi laughed. “Mayhap the matter is not quite so arcane as you suppose,” she said. “Simply that having found your future calling as a teller of tales for an audience of the worlds at large rather than as an itinerant ruespieler, you are avid to embark on your new career without digression or delay…?”

  I nodded. “Just so,” I said. “Or rather, all at once, I have now learned that I have already embarked thereon.”

  “Well spoken!” Wendi declared. “Only do not suppose you have already learned all the necessary
lore.”

  “Oh indeed not!” I exclaimed. “Vraiment, I have learned more on this voyage than in all of my previous life, yet what I have learned best is how much there is to learn before I may truly style myself a maestra of the literary art! Scientific knowledge sufficient to accurately describe arcane events and venues, the annals of the art itself, lest I find myself repeating the stories of others innocently unaware, the millennial history of our species in order to sift truth from hyperbole, the inner meanings of words and images, the ability to use the Matrix as Willa does to properly apprise myself of the foregoing…”

  We sat down beneath one of the tented awnings beside the pool, and I gazed off at the ersatz horizon where the illusory sands merged in a shimmering zone of mirage with the equally illusory sky. And found to my satoric astonishment that it pleased me now—the vivarium, the Grand Palais, the company I had found, the vie of the floating cultura itself, all that had once seemed arrogant vanity and empty illusion to the Gypsy Joker ruespieler.

  “Hola, Wendi, you spoke truly at the time, but I could not credit it!” I exclaimed. “For never would I have thought to hear myself say these words. I do believe I love the true inner vie of the floating cultura that you have shown me! Certainement, I have no wish to leave it now!”

  Wendi laughed. “How much you remind me of myself!” she said. “But you too must learn, as I did, that there is more to learn of the tale-teller’s art than is contained in all the Matrix’s annals and philosophies, Sunshine. You must learn the hard truths of the inner lore.”

  “The inner lore?”

  “Vraiment. First you must learn that if you wish to be a teller of the spirit’s true tales, ma petite, you must seek knowledge of the worlds of men, naturellement, but beyond that you must seek the inner knowledge of your own spirit. Patience is required, hola, a commodity always in short supply, but the courage of ruthless honesty as well.”