Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  As for the Edojin who thronged this inverted tower, a generalization as to their modes of dress, accoutrement, or genetic style can hardly be attempted, for they seemed as dedicated to the outré, idiosyncratic, and surreal in their personal adornment and cosmetic stylizations as in their planet-molding arts. While none seemed to vary significantly from the general range of size and mass of our species, and they all possessed the number and arrangements of limbs and external sense organs appropriate thereto, any finer details seemed entirely a matter of personal whim. Skin hues encompassed the entire visual spectrum, hair colors también, coiffures both male and female might be anything from close-cropped fuzz to huge bouffants trimmed and shaped into abstract or even representational topiary hedges of hair, clothing might be no more than body paint or all-encompassing recomplicated robes of a dozen colors and anything and everything between, and ears, noses, limbs, and torsos might be richly bejeweled in any conceivable mode, or just as likely be left entirely unadorned.

  I drifted slowly down through this wonderland in the state of ecstatic befuddlement that seemed to have become the basic mode of my consciousness since first I set eyes on Edoku, scarcely aware that my knight in red velvet armor had long since let go my hand and alighted birdlike on one of the intervening balconies, and only became aware that the giddy ride was over when at length I felt the true surface of Edoku gently kiss the soles of my feet.

  That is, if anything that lay beneath the soles of one’s feet on Edoku could be said to be vrai terra firma, for the floor I alighted upon appeared to the eyes as golden, shining, transparent sand, to the kinesthetic senses as thick-pile carpeting, and the gravity gradient thereof as that of a minor asteroid.

  What had appeared to be a solid mountain from its meadowed crest and a substantial building as I drifted down its hollow core now seemed to be a floating confection from my present vantage, for the building ended a good twenty meters from the floor, held aloft by the same sort of gravitic machineries which had enabled me to drift down like a speck of dust and which now informed my motor senses that I weighed no more than the moussas which as a babe I had held in the palm of my hand.

  I stood there with the enormous mountain of a building floating above my head like an immense parasol while a three hundred sixty-degree panorama of the immediate environs surrounded me, each few points of the compass, moreover, offering their own hour and season, tempting me with the illusion that I stood at the fulcrum of space and time, though in my present psychic circumstances I knew full well that, here in Edoku, nothing could be further from the truth.

  On my right hand, I was offered what might have been an arrondissement of small residences piled up the sides of low hills with only a few folk to be seen abroad to welcome the dawn. Some degrees further, an afternoon parkland with a lakeful of small boats, sunbathers on the lawn, more athletic Edojin engaged in arcane sport and al fresco amour. Or I could venture down the narrow midnight streets of some sort of pleasure district, thronged with revelers crowding between tall and garishly lit emporiums. I might wander among the enormous succulents and little gazebos set in sunset desert sands or ascend to the ridgeline of a miniature range of mountains circled by what might have been manses or just as easily fabriks.

  In truth, I knew not where to begin, nor what to begin, nor did I have guide or knowledge or the foggiest notion of how to orient myself in this chaotic terrain. Giddy and toxicated already, and growing discomforted by both my indecision and the psychic weight of the mountain floating above my head, I resolved to let fortune decide, and so, closing my eyes, I spun around until I was truly dizzy, then ceased whirling and bounced airily off towards the pleasure streets of midnight, which were the next sight to greet my eyes.

  How long did I wander through Edoku in a toxicated fog? How may duration be measured where midnight is a few steps from dawn and one may stroll in a minute or two from spring into fall? Naturellement, one may consult one’s timepiece, but what sort of spirit resorts to such digital measurement in elf hill? Certainement not the spirit of the virgin Child of Fortune that I was, enraptured by an endless succession of marvelous, chaotic, and upon occasion daunting realities, such as Cort and I had never succeeded in conjuring from quotidian Nouvelle Orlean or our own psyches even during our most prolonged and eclectic séances with the psychoactive pharmacopoeia.

  Though in truth, of all the knowledge, skills, and lore that I had acquired in my previous incarnation on Glade, it was precisely my experiences with a plethora of psychochemically altered reality states which stood me in best stead on my initial wanderings in Edoku. While with Cort the perception of an entirely fragmented and disconnected succession of bizarre and unpredictable realities was entirely the result of alteration in the biochemical matrix of the consciousness perceiving them, and on Edoku it was the environment itself which rang the changes, the psychic state induced thereby was subjectively the same, to wit an entirely fractured consciousness wandering through them totally immersed in the immediate moment-to-moment flow of the fine details of chaos sans any overview integrated over space and time.

  There were cafe tables of living wood arising from the gilded pavement of midnight streets, mighty towers of glass and stone set in avenues among miniature mountain ranges bustling with urban commerce in the earnest early morning light, a twilit dance pavilion beside a cooling waterfall where naked figures performed an erotic pavane weightlessly in the air, a desert garden under the blaze of noon and the gravity of a massive world, promenades lined with tavernas and cuisinary emporiums on arching bridgeways spanning wild rapids, cafes set high in the boughs of trees, al fresco carnivals on emerald meadows in the centers of public platzes, buildings in the form of mountains, on rocky islands in clear blue lakes, incised into canyon cliffs, and all manner and scale of trees, rivers, waterfalls, und so weiter, festooning towers and pavilions…

  Through all this I wandered like a random animalcule in brownian movement, and vraiment, there was randomness in more than the geographical realm, for noon and midnight, sunrise and sunset, the round of the seasons, were as much a matter of neighborhood caprice as the weight of my body, which, from moment to moment, venue to venue, might be dragged down by heavy mass, light as a moussa in the treetops of home, entirely weightless, or any gradient in between. So too the odors, perfumes, scents and, vraiment, stenches, which alternately tempted, tantalized, seduced, and befouled my nostrils seemed to bear no causal connection to their apparent sources. A floral bouquet might drift from a refectory, blooms might give off the aroma of roasting meat, a beautiful garden might reek of rot, or buildings of glass and steel smell of a mountain dell.

  As for the activities, civilized or otherwise, which played themselves out in this chaotic matrix, they were so recomplicated and arcane as to remain largely incomprehensible to a onetime sophisticate from Nouvelle Orlean. I could hardly tell a restaurant from a palace of pleasure, for all manner of emporiums in every sort of architectural mode seemed to purvey both cuisine and tantric performances, as well, for that matter, as vestments, bijoux, machineries and objets d’art. Was the extravagantly gesticulating crowd inside that glass dome engaged in a theatrical performance, was it a mental retreat, or did the tote board signify a commercial bourse?

  Each and every Edojin composing en masse the roiling and colorful throngs of the planetary city seemed determined to outdo every other in outrageousness of clothing, artificiality of skin tint and coiffure, floridity of gesticulation, and general aura of breathtaking and self-important sophistication, the Lingo of the Edojin seemed to be a mélange of the most exotic and nearly incomprehensible sprachs I had ever encountered, and everyone save myself, or so it appeared to me, seemed to be intently engaged in affairs of cosmic import or baroque decadence or both, far beyond my auslander comprehension.

  Vraiment was the state of consciousness in which I wandered in those first few hours all but indistinguishable from that induced by the ingestion of a smorgasbord of psychoactive chemicals. So too, at last,
the dissolving of sequential expectation and linear logic as the organizing principle of my psyche’s passage through space and time to release that higher yet también more primitive being which egolessly merges with the flow of that which is, becoming no more and no less than the moment-to-moment passage of its spirit through realities, as the perfect singer becomes the song.

  From this perspective, or rather in truth from this annihilation of separate perspective, I began to dimly apprehend, if not the individual import of the chaotic sights, sounds, smells, and feelings of Edoku, then at least, in a vague and ill-formed manner, the essential spirit of the place, the esthetic weltanschauung of the Edojin, the higher logic behind the random chaos in which they chose to live.

  Consider the history of this planet. Millennia ago, after a voyage of generations in the simple, bounded, and entirely artificial reality of their arkology, the original settlers of Edoku found themselves stranded not on a planet teeming with the open-ended complexity of an evolved ecosphere, but on a bleak and lifeless tabula rasa of dead stone and perfect vacuum, Thus they were faced with the esthetic challenge and spiritual necessity of crafting a world, indeed for all practical purposes a total reality, out of nothing more than mass, energy, and their own inner landscapes, which is to say devoid of any surprise, chaos, or animating spirit not created by their own conscious hand.

  So, over the centuries, did they create a world in which ersatz recomplicated upon ersatz, in which artificial order recomplicated upon artificial order, in which the parts were deliberately crafted to bear no unified relationship to any whole, in which the “natural” and the “man-made” were terms without meaning, in which day and night, winter, summer, spring, and fall, gravity and terrain, flora and fauna, being of necessity arbitrary human creations to begin with, were allowed to follow the random dictates of human caprice and the surreal esthetic of the imagination unbounded by the natural laws of geography, meteorology, biology, or time. Thus, as if by magic, did human craft itself rescue their spirits from the dead and soulless determinism of a reality crafted entirely by the rational mind, thus by a transcendent act of will was chaos reconjured out of order.

  In essence, then, Edoku was a quicksilver environment created to induce and perpetually maintain in the spirits of its inhabitants precisely that state of permanent surprise, that eternal flow of one unpredictable into another, that ongoing illusion of an organically complex and unencompassable chaos which I found so disorienting and daunting.

  Naturellement, the foregoing is informed by hindsight’s more mature wisdom as well as a perusal of the relevant texts; at the time, all that I began to finally perceive was that an orienting overview might very well be something that Edoku was in fact designed to avoid, certainement at the least it was something no amount of random wanderings were likely to allow me to attain, and therefore, rather than continue my intellectual attempts to crystallize order out of this chaos, my only course was to embrace it, and seek to impose upon it only the structure of my own desires.

  Upon achieving this satoric state, a certain clarity of perception and purpose began to coalesce out of the mists. While I had no clue to or concept of the absolute passage of time, I knew with certainty that the soles of my feet were growing sore, that the muscles of my legs had long since lost their spring, that the weight of the pack on my back was bowing my shoulders, that my stomach was beginning to demand nourishment, and that my bladder was filling to the point of some urgency.

  In short, biological imperatives and ultimate surrender to the knowledge that further aimless wanderings would be productive of nothing more than further confusion had finally combined to produce a motivational vector, which is to say that I realized that it was time to find what in this strange land at least served the practical purpose of a hotel.

  In Nouvelle Orlean I knew the repute of every hotel in the city and in any other human habitation that I had previously heard of or imagined, one simply located the typical sort of arrondissement where hotels were to be found, and selected one on the basis of general ambiance. But here on Edoku, I had not the faintest notion of where such an arrondissement might be found, might not have recognized same were I standing at its center, and could hardly have distinguished a hotel from a palace of pleasure or a hospital on the basis of architectural style.

  I was therefore reduced to screwing up my courage and accosting total strangers.

  “Pardon, good sir, but I’ve just arrived on Edoku, and I’m looking for a good hotel—”

  “Good hotel, jai nai ici by my lights, and I agree it is a disgrace to our ciudad grande, but there you have it, bonne chance and buena suerte!”

  “Excuse me, but would you—”

  “Certainly not! Ruegelt for Children of Fortune arimasen!”

  “Pardon me, but I’m new on Edoku—”

  “Y yo, I appear old, nē? Vraiment, I knew this skin tint suited me not, but to hear it from a rank auslander!”

  “Would you know the location of a good hotel?”

  “Would I know the location of a good hotel? C’est possible. Aber primero, define good and location kudasai, since these are locutions subjective, whereas hotel is a noun objective in most sprachs of Lingo—”

  Et cetera, et cetera, und so weiter.

  Finally, near tears with frustration, and shaking with fatigue and no little outrage at what seemed to pass for street manners in Edoku, I cornered three Edojin lying on a lawn close by a waterfall in a garden strewn with cafe tables, who seemed sufficiently toxicated from the contents of a flagon of wine they were passing around to be incapable of flight, and essayed what I fancied was my own version of the local conversational style.

  “Merde! Caga! Why do you imagine that Edoku has totally disgraced itself?”

  The three of them—a silver-skinned woman in a chemise of black and white harlequinade, an orange fellow wearing only tight green breeches, and an entirely nude man with rainbow body paint and a crest of hair in the same style—exchanged arch glances of amusement.

  “Porqué Edoku hast keine acceptable restaurant in the Magyar mode?” the woman ventured.

  “Weil Edoku nikulturi des’?” said the nude man.

  “I imagine Edoku disgraces itself because no one has a clever answer to your koan, babaji!” the orange fellow declared triumphantly. “Ken sie the one about Diogenes and the Honest Man?”

  “Wrong, wrong, wrong!” I told them. “Edoku has disgraced itself because nowhere in its precincts is a good hotel to be found!”

  At this there was general consternation. Then the clever orange one clapped his hands and laughed. “Ach, I comprend!” he cried. “Nowhere within Edoku is a good hotel to be found because everywhere good hotels abound!”

  “Indeed? Then why can you not direct me to one nearby?”

  “Très facile! We cannot direct you to one nearby because there are several close at hand!”

  “Then which of them is the best hotel?”

  “Mit more precision, kudasai,” the woman said. “Best a subjective adjective of comparison desu, nē, signifying maximization of an adjective of quality. Best extravagant? Best outré? Best bucolic? Best large? Best small?”

  “How about the cheapest?” I asked. “Or to be more precise, the best value?”

  “So,” said the orange man, “du bist no wandering guru of the zen koan after all. Merely green auslander with a chip of credit of modest amount seeking a bargain hotel?”

  “I am overwhelmed by your perceptivity,” I admitted.

  “Then why didn’t you simply say so?”

  “Because I surmised that such a straightforward request on Great Edoku might mark me as a bumpkin and a bore…?” I suggested.

  At this, the three of them broke into delighted laughter. “Well spoken!” the orange man exclaimed. “Bienvenidos a Edoku! Such regard for the niceties of civilized discourse deserves its reward. I commend therefore the Yggdrasil. Direct through midnight, links at the cliffs of sunset, circle round the noonday fountain,
and there in the petit wald, voilà!”

  “You cannot miss it,” the woman said. “It’s the only building in the vecino fashioned in the likeness of a tree.”

  I could not. It was.

  Rather pleased with myself for having successfully negotiated my first more or less coherent conversation on Edoku, I followed the directions I had been given with little difficulty. Indeed I began to appreciate the manner in which Edoku’s bizarre mélange of architecture and landscaping provided starkly unmistakable landmarks at every hand. Vraiment, every conceivable vista consisted of little else but an endless succession of unmistakable images!

  The hotel Yggdrasil was hardly an exception to this rule.

  In the center of the small forest to which I had been directed was a clear blue lake which was little more than a decorative moat surrounding a central island, which indeed may have existed solely to esthetically justify the rainbow bridge which soared airily above it. Rising from the island, indeed all but overgrowing it with the enormous maze of shaded porchways formed by its system of unburied “roots,” was a gigantic silver tree.

  A good two hundred meters tall at its leafy crown and perhaps forty meters thick through its trunk, to this day I cannot say precisely to what extent the Yggdrasil was a building and to what extent a gene-tailored floral artifact. Vraiment, the trunk and the overarching branches were unmistakably metallic, though their surfaces were worked in the most cunning simulation of natural bark, but the profusion of greenery festooning the whole and growing directly therefrom was just as unmistakably organic. The upper surfaces of the main branches were shaded walkways equipped with railings, along which I could see hotel guests gamboling as lightly as the moussas of Glade. Depending from the branches were several score “fruits” of various colors and generally ovoid shapes, the least of them the size of a small bungalow.