Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  Enchanted, overawed, I danced across the rainbow bridge, which had scarcely any gravity gradient at all, through the maze of porches formed by the roots, where people sat sipping drinks at table or lounging in garden bowers, and into the main lobby. Here the gravity gradient was set to give the kinesthetic senses a heavy, almost oppressive, sense of solidity and weight, in keeping with the decor, for the lobby gave the appearance of a vast subterranean grotto beneath the tree; earthen walls veined with the traceries of great gnarled wooden roots, blazing torches set high in brazen sconces, seats in the form of brightly colored giant mushrooms, cool, somewhat dank air redolent with the smell of wet loam.

  Against the far wall, behind a counter of rough-hewn gray stone, sat a prim-looking man whose skin had been painted, or may hap actually bioformed, to simulate the color and texture of rich old wood, dressed in the somewhat ludicrous green garb of an elf of ancient lore.

  I approached this worthy and somewhat tremulously announced my desire to secure a room. He seemed to eye me dubiously, as if “auslander” and “indigent” were blazoned on my brow.

  “Indeed,” he said rather haughtily for someone dressed as if for a masquerade. “Weil the Yggdrasil a hotel desu, and you bearing luggage are, I had little difficulty deducing your intent, nē, aber the operative questions sind, primero, what class of chambre might suit your fancy, segundo, for how long, tercero, can you afford it?”

  Such lofty churlishness, far from intimidating me further, only served to remind me that I was a child of Nouvelle Orlean, entirely unaccustomed to such boorish manners from one whose establishment I was favoring with my custom.

  “First, I require a chambre ordinaire in your median price range, second, the duration of my stay will depend upon the extent to which your hotel meets with my approval, and third, voilà!” I said in a tone to match his hauteur, handing over my chip, which I knew full well was backed by enough credit to finance two full months of all my expenses at mean galactic living standard.

  The domo of the Yggdrasil fingered the plastic wafer thoughtfully for a moment, as if he fancied he could read the current balance stored in its circuitry by touch alone. Then he relented, popped it into his credit slot, scanned the readout, raised an eyebrow, shrugged, deducted a sum, and returned it to me.

  “First day’s rent debited ist,” he said in what seemed a somewhat more respectful tone. “Since you plan a stay of indefinite duration, crediting in advance on a day-to-day basis mandates itself.” He came close to favoring me with a smile. “Unless, naturellement, you prefer to give over a week or two’s rent in advance at this time…?”

  “Quelle chose! Since I have not yet inspected your accommodations, I hardly think it prudent to commit myself to a week’s stay in advance.”

  “As you will,” he said with a diffident shrug. “A hopper now to your room conveys yourself, which in order I’m sure you will find. Gravity control knob on right bedstand desu, transparency control on the left.”

  A chime sounded. From somewhere behind the counter, may hap from a hidden access hole, the most outré little creature appeared. About a meter tall, and the best part of that devoted to an enormous derriere and a pair of haunchy legs, the hopper sported a coat of bright scarlet fur bibbed with white, two enormous stylized humanoid eyes, and a mouth which the gene-crafters had fashioned in the bizarre simulacrum of a permanent human grin.

  Loading my pack onto a floater with its long springy arms and executing a little bow, the hopper bounded across the lobby, and led me through a cavelike opening into a brightly illumined shaft whose negative gravity gradient carried us high up the trunk of the hotel to a landing stage which debouched directly onto a branch high in the boughs of the Yggdrasil. Although the height should have been dizzying, the light gravity gradient, the sturdy railings, and the profusion of overgrowing foliage which screened and softened the direct sight of the drop to the ground, all cunningly combined to set me at my ease as I followed the hopper along the treetop walkways.

  The creature came to a halt where a bright yellow “fruit” hung from the branch directly beneath us. Taking my comparatively gross paw in its delicate little hands, it pressed my palm against a yellow spot on the silver bough, and a hole opened up directly before me.

  I descended a ladderlike stair of dark wood—or rather drifted down it, since the gravity gradient was set at near zero—into a marvelous bower of a chamber. Brightly dappled sunlight poured into the room through the lacy network of green vines which covered its transparent walls and ceiling. The floor was a deep bed of some brown mosslike material, the bed was a gel-filled affair formed in the shape of an enormous all-embracing lavender flower, the twin bedstands, the chests, the tables, the armoire, were of a whitish wood painted and carved in floral motifs, there were three soft chairs and a couch also done up as enormous flowers, and through an open connecting door I saw a toilette done in rough-grained gray stone polished to the sheen of marble and richly appointed with golden fixtures.

  The vines papering the wall were judiciously speckled with simple little white blossoms, and among these flitted perhaps a dozen brightly hued and softly singing little birds, each no bigger than my thumb.

  As I stood there utterly enchanted, the hopper bounded down the stairs and over to the right-hand bedstand, where it demonstrated the full range of gravity control at some small discomfort to my stomach, and then, twirling the knob on the other bedstand, treated me to the pièce de résistance.

  This knob controlled the light level, but the illumination varied not merely in quantity but quality. A full turn of the control put the room through a full day’s cycle, from the brightness of vine-shaded noon, through subtly muted afternoon light, on into rich orange sunset, thence to pale moonlight, utter blackness, dawn’s early light, and straight on into morning. To perfect the wonder, by some arcane means which to this day I still cannot fathom, the birds fell instantly silent as soon as the knob was set to late evening, and burst into song to greet the ersatz dawn.

  The hopper cocked an inquisitive glance at me as if to inquire whether the accommodations met with my approval. I nodded my assent and added a little salute to express my true pleasure, and the creature departed, leaving me to enjoy the end of my first day on Edoku in solitude.

  After relieving and refreshing myself in the toilette, I realized that I was far too exhausted to seek nourishment, too exhausted in fact to even contemplate leaving the tranquility of my cozy magical nest for the daunting chaos that teemed without.

  So, setting the gravity gradient a shade above zero to keep my body from drifting, and opting for early evening, I luxuriated on my flower and in my sense of accomplishment at having secured this safe harbor, and drifted quickly off to sleep to the lullaby of birdsong.

  5

  For the next two weeks, the Yggdrasil served as a secure and comforting home base for my still tentative explorations of Edoku; here I had shelter and toilet facilities at hand, and cuisine could be ordered up in the hotel refectory or even for delivery to my room without requiring knowledge of the locations or menus of the city’s numerous but outré and more often than not well-camouflaged restaurants.

  I say the city’s restaurants rather than the planet’s, for after only a few days’ sojourn, even a jejune auslander such as I began to adopt the perceptual mode of the Edojin and regard Edoku as an enormous city rather than a small planet.

  For the fact was that Edoku had few of the attributes of a planet. There were no continents, no seas, no characteristic gravity gradient, no coherent weather systems, no regular procession of night and day, and no real sense of geographical distance. Within a day or two, I began to realize that the horizon was always much closer at hand than it seemed, for the ersatz geographical features, while betraying no overall relationship of scale taken one to another, were as a generality crafted as miniatures so as to create the illusion of a far larger planetary surface. The totally arbitrary crazy quilt of gravity gradients was also a necessary part of this
legerdemain of perspective, for in point of astronomical fact, Edoku was a modest-sized moon whose natural gravity would have been only about .2 standard g, a kinesthetic clue which would have immediately destroyed the visual illusion of a far distant horizon on a much larger world.

  Somehow, my penetration of this trick of scale made Edoku slightly less daunting—at least in terms of locomotion if not location—and once I began to learn something of the arcana of the public transportation system, the perceptual transformation was complete.

  On a planet where gravity varied abruptly and dramatically every kilometer or so, low-level aerial transport was far too risky to life and limb for even the Edojin to contemplate, and so this mode was confined to suborbital ballistic shuttles, and these horrendous craft, perversely propelled as they were by primeval rockets belching flame, smoke, and earsplitting thunder, seemed to exist more for thespic effect than any semblance of practicality. So too the boats, punts, barques, canoes, und so weiter, available for hire on every body of even marginally navigable water.

  The occasional small vehicles-wheeled, legged, or gravity floated—which were to be seen in arrondissements where a system of streets was in evidence might be practical for locomotion within their precincts, but were useless for travel of any real distance. As for those Edojin who rode about on a bewildering assortment of steeds, no two of which seemed to betray a genetic commonality, these folk, as far as I was concerned, were prime candidates for a mental retreat.

  Indeed, for the first few days my modest wanderings were constrained, first by the distance I could cover afoot, and second by the necessity of keeping the hotel Yggdrasil either constantly within my visual sphere or, at most, no further from my sight than a short trail of memorizable landmarks away.

  Only when I screwed up my courage and inquired of the domo of the hotel as to how an auslander entirely unfamiliar with the city might explore beyond walking distance from the hotel without becoming hopelessly lost, was I somewhat patronizingly informed of the existence of the Rapide.

  Unbeknownst to me, there was a network of tunnels under the entire surface of Edoku, with stations in almost every building of significance as well as cunningly concealed in a plethora of geographic features, though for esthetic reasons, these were unmarked and had to be either memorized or inquired after locally.

  Once access to the Rapide was achieved, however, the system was such that it could be utilized with relative ease even by a naif such as myself. In each Rapide station was a goodly supply of Bubbles. These were simple seats mounted on floaters and enclosed in the same sort of voidbubble field used for inspecting the exteriors of Void Ships. Each Bubble was equipped with a chip slot and a display screen.

  There were two modes of command. If the cognomen of a specific destination was spoken, the Rapide would forthwith deduct the proper debit from your chip and convey you thither. If one requested a class of destination such as “hotels,” “restaurants,” “mountains,” “palaces of pleasure,” und so weiter, a complete alphabetized list of same would scroll across the display screen until a choice was announced.

  Distance was not a relevant parameter, for the tunnels of the Rapide were maintained in hard vacuum within an inertial nullifier field, permitting enormous accelerations without discomfort, and so once the destination was announced, you were whisked down the mercifully featureless tunnel at tremendous if entirely imperceptible velocity; via the Rapide, no point on Edoku was more than twenty minutes from any other.

  Thus, once I became conversant with the Rapide, Edoku became, in practical effect as well as psychic perspective, an endless and randomly accessible succession of possible venues discontinuously distributed by name or category and bearing no geographical or temporal relationship one to the other. The restaurant in which I chose to dine might be a few minutes’ walk from the mountain on which I took a postprandial stroll or it might be halfway around the planet. Moreover, no matter where I chanced to find myself when fatigue set in, I had only to insert my chip, speak its name, and be safely returned to the hotel Yggdrasil in a matter of minutes.

  While the Rapide gave me random access on a hit or miss basis, and while it reduced the Edoku of my perception from a chaotic planetary vastness to an infinite succession of wonders and bizarrities, each in effect a close neighbor of every other, it can hardly be said that such a mode of transport served to enhance my sense of psychic orientation.

  Au contraire, while I was now at liberty to wander Edoku entire, my perception of its realities was now, if anything, more fragmented, and so too, therefore, the consciousness informed by same, which went through the rounds of the arbitrary hours and days not merely disconnected from any sequence of time save that of hunger, fatigue, and sleep, but disconnected as well from any topographical map of the territory.

  Moreover, my selections of restaurants, palaces of pleasure, entertainments, scenic vistas, and the like, were determined entirely by arbitrary choices from the categorical lists offered up by the data bank of the Rapide, and these listings, or so it seemed, were compiled with no little arbitrary caprice themselves.

  Vraiment, I could rest assured that any establishment filed under “restaurants” would supply me with nourishment, but the cuisinary style and venue of same might be anything and everything.

  I was delighted at a banquet in the Ran mode consumed on a barge floating down a river in a twilit canyon, bemused to find myself supping entirely on pastries circulating on platters affixed to the heads of birdlike creatures high in a treetop, appalled to be offered a breakfast consisting entirely of tidbits of raw meats and fishes in the midst of an extravagant tantric performance, disgusted to find myself in a firelit cave where the diners, required to doff their clothing for the occasion, were constrained to rip small roasted animals and fowl apart with their fingers, entirely outraged by the establishment in which the cuisine consisted of bizarre living gene-crafted birds and beasts which burbled and chittered as they were consumed, and nauseated by the pungent and acrid savors of abstract cubes of many colors served up in an emporium constructed entirely of gleaming white tile.

  Similarly, a random selection of “palaces of pleasure” might present me with emporiums offering more or less quotidian assortments of sexual scenarios, if often conducted in venues of bizarre decor.

  But as often as not, I would find myself presented with a selection of gross and mindless creatures whose phallic, oral, digital, and tentacular endowments and sexual tropisms had been gene-crafted for the performance of tantric figures that would have astounded even my mother. And while I essayed a few of these grotesque figures with creatures who were all lingam or indeed were equipped with multiple phalluses of superhuman puissance, and while I had certainly never considered myself an arch reactionary in matters of sexual esthetics, I nevertheless found these experiences universally appalling in a psychic sense even while enjoying, if that is the word, a multiplicity of orgasms.

  “Theaters” and “holocines” could be relied upon to offer up more or less what the categories implied throughout the worlds of men, namely live performances of dramas on the one hand and hologramic renderings of same on the other, but on Edoku, “entertainments” covered a broad spectrum of the sublime, bizarre, boring, incomprehensible, and vile indeed! Even now, my memories remain a kaleidoscopic blur of images, sounds, odors, experiences, and feelings whose fragmentation owes far more to the nature of the realities themselves than to the intoxicants I consumed to enhance, or in some cases mitigate, my perception thereof.

  There were soaring dances in zero-gravity in which the groundlings of the audience were invited to join clumsily with the performers, and slow-motion dances performed by mixed troupes of humans and gene-crafted saurian behemoths under crushing gravity in a setting which simulated the imagined surface of some gas giant planet.

  There were displays of hopefully ersatz tortures and executions performed in grim stone dungeons and public squares, and a plethora of mock battles between human warriors of var
ious historical periods and creatures gene-crafted to simulate nonhuman sapients of fanciful imagining as well as monsters out of literature and myth.

  In a vast amphitheater under pale moonlight several hours’ worth of assorted colorful and earsplitting explosions were set off for the delectation of the audience. Another “symphony” consisted entirely of fugal sequences of odors-sublime, outré, and disgusting—experienced in perfect, soundless, weightless blackness.

  And of course more quotidian music of every conceivable style, mode, and period, intermixed and interwoven with much of the foregoing, but also performed in solemn isolation on mountaintops, amidst desert dunes, on floating barges, even in simulacra of ancient Terrestrial concert halls, where the audience was outfitted with stiff and uncomfortable vestments of white and black and constrained to endure a stifling humidity.

  If I give the impression that I passed these first two weeks on Edoku as little more in a psychic sense than a wide-eyed indiscriminate viewpoint, soaking up and recording sensory images with no more self-awareness or analytical attempt at integrating same into the timestream of my spirit than a word crystal mindlessly storing everything spoken into the scriber, vraiment the state of my consciousness was, if anything, even more trancelike than that might imply.

  Strange to say, or may hap not so strange at all, I made no friends, or indeed acquaintances, during this period, for I had no psychic energy left over for even quotidian human interaction, let alone attempts to touch the spirits of the arcane and enigmatic Edojin. Not with every waking moment, every quantum of my attention, given over to coping with the overloading of all my senses and perceptions by a veritable torrent of fragmented, novel, and entirely disorienting experiences.