Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  “Verdad, you’re the finest lover I’ve ever had,” he muttered fatuously.

  “Verdad,” I agreed dryly, for given the modesty of his mystique in this regard among our peers and his no more than ordinary skill in the tantric arts, this was a pleasantry that left my girlish heart less than overwhelmed.

  “Don’t make what I have to say more difficult…” he fairly whined, meeting my gaze with a pout, obviously all too relieved to exchange his shy discomfort for a facade of pique with me.

  “Relax, klein Davi,” I said with quite the opposite intent, “if you’re afraid to wound me with a confession of some other amour, rest assured, my pauvre petit, that I myself have a surfeit of lovers, past, present, and future, and will therefore hardly be crushed to learn of any peccadilloes of yours.”

  But instead of flinching at the planting of this barb, he smiled at me most foolishly, or so it seemed. “Ah, Moussa, I knew you’d understand…” he fairly moaned in relief.

  “Who is it then—Andrea, Flor, Belinda?” I inquired, with a nonchalance that was both feigned and sincere. For while the undying loyalty of this lover whom I was already regarding in the past tense would in fact have been a tiresome burden to my indifferent heart, the outré notion that this lout could possibly prefer the favors of some other to my own, while the ultimate proof of his callow unsuitability as a swain, was still an outrage of lèse majesté, which, nevertheless, I could hardly acknowledge with less than lofty amusement, even to myself. Especially to myself.

  Once again, however, my perception of the situation proved to be at variance with the reality. “There isn’t anyone else, Moussa,” he said. “How could there be? Of all the women that I know, you’re the only one who tempts me to stay.”

  “Tempts you to stay?”

  “Verdad, you do tempt me to stay, but…”

  “But what, cher dumkopf? What are you blathering and babbling about?”

  He regarded me as if I were the one who could not find the sprach to make the Lingo of my meaning plain. “But I leave to begin my wanderjahr next week,” he blurted. “Next week, the Ardent Eagle leaves for Nova Roma, and I’ll be aboard. My parents have already bought my passage.”

  He beamed at me. He fairly glowed. “Fantastique, nē?” he exclaimed. “The Grand Palais of the Ardent Eagle is presided over by Domo Athene Weng Sharon! My mother once voyaged with her, and she says that the decor is marvelous, the entertainments superb, the ambiance exhilarating, and the chef maestro, Tai Don Angelica, one of the half-dozen finest in the entire floating cultural.”

  “You’re…you’re off on your wanderjahr next week…?” I stammered. “As an Honored Passenger?” Why did this entirely unexpected revelation cut me to the quick as no confession of human rival could have done? From whence this sudden pang of loss? What was Davi to me but a casual lover whose season had already passed? Why the desire to hold him here with me which I could not deny but which I could still less understand?

  “Naturellement,” he said gaily, answering my words with total obliviousness of the import of their tone. “My parents, as you are certainly well aware, can afford to pay my way from world to world in proper style with ease. Why would they have me stacked like so much meat in electrocoma when they can afford to buy me access to the floating cultura without even noticing the debit in their accounts? Surely your own mother and father will do no less for you?”

  “Of course!” I told him, though the subject had never been broached between us. “But why such haste? Has life on Glade become such a bore? Will you not be sad to leave Nouvelle Orlean behind?”

  “Haste? But soon I will be eighteen standards. Many are our friends who became Children of Fortune long before reaching such an advanced age…”

  Such an advanced age? But this silly boy was younger than I! All my young life I had wished to be, or at least wished to appear to be, older and more mature than my years, and now, all at once, this…this imbecile was making me feel like some sort of eighteen-year-old crone! For the first time in my life, I wished, at least for the moment, to be younger than my years; there are those who would contend, nicht wahr, that that is precisely the moment when a woman ceases to be a girl.

  “And as for Nouvelle Orlean…” Davi blathered on, entirely oblivious to my mood, entirely blind to the havoc his prattle was working on my spirit.

  “And as for Nouvelle Orlean?” I demanded sharply.

  Al fin, Davi began to dimly perceive that his discourse was being met with something other than avid enthusiasm, though the concept that he was being the cause of no little dolor d’esprit never seemed to penetrate his primitive masculine brain. He touched his palm to my cheek as one would console a child.

  “As for Nouvelle Orlean,” he said, “I’ll miss you, Moussa, most of all. Indeed for nearly a year, I dreamed of nothing but being your lover. If not for that, I probably would long since have gone. Verdad, if we had not yet had our time together, I might tarry still. But as for the rest…”

  He smiled, he shrugged, he cupped my cheeks and kissed me like a proper man, and for that moment at least, I saw once more the sincere and naive charm that once had won some small portion of my heart.

  “Have we not tasted what there is to taste, seen what there is to see, been what there is to be, as children of Nouvelle Orlean, Moussa, you and I?” he said. “Nouvelle Orlean is the most marvelous city on our entire world, and we both know and love it well. But having tasted it to the full and come to know it as well as we know our parents’ gardens or each other’s spirits, is it not therefore time to travel on?”

  I regarded him in silence, glimpsing for the first time the sweet and noble man that this lightly regarded lover of mine might one day grow to become, and in this moment of farewell I do believe I was touched to depths that never before had been stirred within my heart.

  “Next week I depart for my wanderjahr, and soon enough you’ll be a Child of Fortune too, mi Moussa, nē. Could I have remained here with you forever and never lived to learn my true name tale? Would you have stayed here with me until we both grew old and never walked the lands of another world?”

  “No,” I said softly.

  “Then may we part as friends? For truly of all that Glade has meant to me, the finest of it all has been my time with you. Should not the best memory of home be the last?”

  “Truly and nobly spoken, cher Davi,” I told him, with more sincere affection than had ever before filled my callow young heart. “Friends forever, Davi. May your road rise up to meet you. Bon voyage.”

  And I kissed him one last time, as much to hide my tears as to bid him good-bye. Verdad, my best memory of all the lovers that I had on the planet of my birth was my final sight of the very last.

  After Davi left, I went out into the garden and sat for a time under the overhanging trees, deep in formless thought. The sky was cloudless, the air was still, and the sun was warm, and soon I became aware of the piping whistles of the little moussas in the treetops.

  For a long time I sat there, staring up into the trees, catching quick glimpses of little golden shapes frolicking high in the branches. Now and again, or so it seemed, tiny bright emerald eyes looked down as if through the billowing green mists of the innocent past. Foolishly, I hoped that the playmates of my young girlhood would descend one final time to nestle in my hands, if only to bid a final farewell to the Moussa that had been.

  Naturellement, they never came, not even after I took some crumbs of cake from the playhouse and sat there offering them on my open palms as I had not done for many years.

  And as the sky began to deepen towards sunset over my parents’ garden and still my little lost friends deigned not to call, I tried to remember when last it had been that the little Moussa had held one of her namesakes in her childish hands. Verdad, when last I had even spared the moussas of the garden a passing loving thought.

  And failed. And in that failing understood that it had not been the moussas who had forsaken me but I who had forsaken them, as
that little girl grew into the creature who short hours before had bidden the final lover of her childhood a fond and tender bon voyage.

  At the moment of this wistful satori, a golden shape chanced to pause in a small bare spot among the branches; tail wrapped around a twig for balance, the moussa stood half erect, as if dubiously testing the posture of a little man.

  Or was it chance? For a long moment, the moussa’s wide green eyes seemed to lock on my own as if remembering back across time to my childhood years. As if to say, bon voyage, old friend, may your road rise up to meet you, As if to say, mourn not what has been but greet what is to come with a happy heart, and know that we of your childhood’s garden wish you no less than your heart’s desire. No blame, little Moussa that was, remember us sometimes out there among the stars, and hold our memory in the palm of a child’s hand.

  Then, with a little chirp of farewell, he was gone, and with him the little girl that longed to stay in her parents’ garden, for in that moment, that wanderjahr of my spirit had begun.

  3

  That evening, my mother, my father, and I dined en famille out on the second-story porch overlooking Rioville, and the river, and the mirrored towers of the western bank, and the Hightown looming high above the shore. Of the viands and vegetables and pastas, of the wines and sauces and desserts, I remember nothing, for I was full of myself, engorged with sudden resolve, trepidatious at the thought of leaving all I had known behind, and, if truth be told, not quite so certain of the lavishness of my parents’ largesse as to Davi I had pretended. So I spent the opening courses contemplating various strategies for the maximization of same and silently rehearsing the declaration that must come before the sweets were served, which put me sufficiently off my feed to be the object of some bemused regard.

  Sin embargo, I do remember the sight of the sun setting into a nest of purple clouds behind the lights of the Hightown, the stars peeping in and out of the half-overcast sky as it deepened to black, the tongue of seafog enrobing the flash and dazzle of Rioville in the softening mists of legend, the bobbing boats plowing upstream through the foaming little crests of the river, the twice-reflected flame of the sunset on the waters, all as if a holo of the setting for my pronouncement of my intent were lased into the cells of my brain.

  So too, even now, will the smell of jungle musk, or the overrich fragrance of a river bank, or the perfume of any great city arising at night to some peripheral venue upon a bank of fog recall to my sensorium the internal climate, the precise sensual memory of what it felt to be inside the body of that girl on that very night, the languor in my sated loins, the tension in my viscera, the adrenal storms roiling within my being as I finally found the courage to give my new spirit voice.

  “I have a matter of some import which I…that is, I think it is time…something is on my mind…”

  “So much we have gathered from the way you’ve been picking at your food,” my mother said, exchanging somewhat arch glances with my father.

  “Come, out with it, Moussa,” my father demanded. “Such reticence has hardly been your usual style.”

  “I am already in my eighteenth year…”

  “We too can mark the passage of time,” Leonardo said in an ironic tone belied by the amusement in his eyes.

  “Many of my friends have already begun their wanderjahrs…”

  “And Davi leaves on the Ardent Eagle next week,” my mother said to my wide-eyed astonishment.

  Leonardo laughed. “We dine at his parents’ table often enough,” he pointed out. “At the very least, such a matter of cosmic import is suitable table talk among us, nē.”

  “Davi is three months younger than I am…”

  “Quite so.”

  “So…”

  “So…?”

  All at once I found my ire at this foolish game overriding any further reticence between my unease at the import of what I was about to announce and the desire to make my meaning plain. “So it’s time I began my wanderjahr too!” I exclaimed with no little pique. “Both of you knew what I wanted to say all along!”

  Shasta laughed. “We had a certain inkling surmise,” she owned. “But naturellement such a declaration is one we must all make on our own. It’s hardly a confession to be prised from uncertain lips like an admission from the guilty conscience of a child.”

  “I’m not a child!”

  “Indeed, kleine Moussa?” my father said, smiling paternally, or so it seemed, to mask a certain sense of loss.

  “I’m not your kleine Moussa anymore!” I declared, all at once coming to detest this innocent term of endearment which I had always accepted in the loving spirit with which it was intended. “I’ve completed my schooling. I’ve had many lovers. I can power-ski with the best. I can fly an Eagle. I’m conversant with cuisinary styles and vintages. I have survived many a night in the Bittersweet Jungle. I can compose word crystals and play chess. What more is there for me to learn in Nouvelle Orlean before I’m ready to become a Child of Fortune?”

  At this my parents burst into such laughter that even I was constrained to hear the foolishness of my own words.

  “Voilà, our kleine Moussa has become a woman of the worlds, skilled in all the means whereby one may survive as an independent human among indifferent strangers,” Leonardo ironically declared.

  “So now that you have mastered the rudiments of the tantric arts and hedonic sciences, you consider yourself a sophisticated daughter of Nouvelle Orlean, more than ready to conquer the wider worlds of men?” my mother asked, and though this was said with no little reflexive jocularity, still I could not but perceive its serious intent, nor could I fail to wonder whether in truth I might not be entirely unequipped to survive without parental largesse.

  But on the other hand, I told myself as this unpleasant thought passed like a cloud across the bright blue sky of my young spirit, the absence of parental largesse was hardly what I had in mind.

  Thus did it finally dawn upon me that the leave to travel as a Child of Fortune was already a foregone grant in my parents’ hearts and that without exactly knowing when the transition had occurred, we had now entered into negotiations vis-à-vis the financial arrangements.

  In which case it would be better to remain their kleine Moussa a while longer, the little girl whom mother and father would fear to loose upon the seas of fate without the protective might of beaucoup d’argent.

  “Certainly not to conquer, mama,” I said in quite a more childish tone. “And no doubt you are right, papa, I’ve not yet learned the skills required to earn my way as a full independent adult among strangers. But how am I to learn to make my own way among the worlds unless I try? Surely you would not contend that Davi is better equipped for the vie of a Child of Fortune than I?”

  Leonardo laughed. “You have me there, Moussa,” he said. “But on the other hand, Davi’s parents have weighed the freedom of his spirit down with a chip of credit sufficient to finance a life of indolent ease in the floating cultura and the grand hotels of even the most extravagant of worlds for several years.”

  I liked not the drift of my father’s words, I liked them not at all. “Naturellement, papa,” I said in a daddy’s darling voice I hadn’t used in years. “As you yourself have said and I in all humility must agree, I’ve yet to learn the skills required to earn my own way on distant worlds far away from home. Fear not, papa, though I must often seem a creature of foolish and overweening pride, I am not such a monster of ego that I will out of any exaggerated sense of my own economic puissance refuse funds sufficient to travel in a safe and proper style and ease thereby your fears for my survival.”

  Mother giggled. Father frowned. “Nobly spoken, my kleine Moussa,” he said dryly. “But rest assured, we will not allow any foolish fears of ours to rob you of the wanderjahr’s true essence, as Davi’s tremulous parents have robbed him. Not for our daughter the empty ersatz wanderjahr of a haut turista playing at being a Child of Fortune!”

  “The wanderjahr’s true essence�
��?”

  “Indeed,” Shasta said. “We will grant you the vrai wanderjahr, the vie of the true Child of Fortune that we ourselves have known, without selfish regard for our own misgivings.”

  “The vrai wanderjahr? The vie of the true Child of Fortune?” Somehow I was beginning to suspect that the magnanimity of these professions was something other than what it seemed.

  “Just so!” Leonardo enthused. “We cannot allow you to throw away your wanderjahr as a subsidized haut turista out of your tender regard for us. For what is there for the spirit to learn indolently voyaging in the floating cultura and flitting weightlessly from world to world insulated and pampered inside a voidbubble of parental gelt except sloth and ennui?”

  “Verdad!” Shasta agreed. “Instead we grant you the freedom to live the life of the true Child of Fortune, which is to say, surviving by your wits and your own travail, earning your own passage from planet to planet by sweat or guile, entering intimately thereby into the life of every planet you touch, rather than skimming along the gelt-paved surface. For you, mi Moussa, the true adventure of the spirit, the wanderjahr as it was meant to be, the vie of the Child of Fortune, with all its dangers, hardships, and fairly won delights!”

  My mouth fell open. My stomach dropped in gross dismay. My gorge, not to say my ire, began to rise. “You…you would have me starve? You would have me wander the streets of some far-off city on an entirely hostile world without the chip to rent a room in which to sleep? You would leave me to wear the same clothes for years? You would allow me to expire of hunger or exposure scores of light-years from home? You would see your own daughter reduced to begging in alien streets for scraps of bread?”

  “Fear not, kleine Moussa,” my father said. “Our hearts are not quite so hard as that. Before you rage, hear the traveling gifts we propose. First, we will purchase your passage in electrocoma to any world you choose. Second, we will give you a chip of credit good for similar passage back to Glade from any world of men, so that if hunger or privation pushes you to the brink, you can always return safely home. Finally, we will give you a second chip sufficient to subsidize two standard months’ sojourn in decent ease if not luxury on a planet of mean galactic cost of living.”