Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  Which is not to say that this totally experiential state of consciousness was unpleasant, even during those moments when the surreal landscape through which it wandered appeared disorienting, distasteful, or even daunting. Au contraire, to the spirit of that young child of Nouvelle Orlean who had spent the last two years in the pursuit of precisely the ecstatic state of consciousness induced by satoric moments of the transcendently novel, this state of perpetual and all-but-permanent intimacy with wonder was the blissful perfection of all that I in my wildest imaginings had hoped the vie of a Child of Fortune would be.

  It is therefore, upon reflection, not so surprising, nē, that my mind had no place for thoughts of exploring means of securing ongoing wherewithal, nor that a young girl in such a state of ecstatic intoxication with wonder itself, and a girl, moreover, who had never had to pay much attention to value given for value received in the bargain, was hardly in a frame of mind to give much thought to the price of wine in Xanadu.

  Out of this trance I was at last inevitably awoken by a rude karmic satori.

  One day upon awakening and completing my toilette, I paused by the counter in the lobby of the Yggdrasil as had become routine to have the next day’s rent debited from my chip, As always, the domo of the hotel inserted it into his credit slot.

  But now a garish sound issued forth, something like a loud mechanical buzz, and something like a lip-vibrating brak of chastisement.

  I leaped backward at this boorish and insulting noise, but the domo, far from being startled by this event, assumed an air of prim and knowing disapproval, directed not at his obviously malfunctioning equipment but at my own person.

  “Quelle chose?” I demanded.

  “Quelle chose? Voilà, meine kleine urchin, your credit balance the mathematical perfection of absolute zero has now achieved.”

  “Impossible!” I cried. “My father assured me that chip was good for two months’ living expenses on a planet of mean galactic cost of living!”

  “Indeed?” said the domo, presenting me with a printed readout of all my debits, a scroll of daunting length, “And you imagine Edoku a planet dedicated to providing bargains ist? Mayhap largesse chez papa did not calculate ninety-seven trips via Rapide, four dozen meals of the hautest cuisine, not please to mention this truly impressive plethora of palaces of pleasure, theatrical performances, holocines, concerts, and assorted spectacles and entertainments? Moreover, the Yggdrasil be not some rude country inn on a frontier planet. You may verify the figures by your own calculation, naturellement, though this might consume several hours…”

  I ran a quick scan of the horrendous and lengthy document, This was more than enough to fill me with a dreadful dismay, a certain sense of outrage and no little chagrin at my own profligacy, as well as to convince me that verifying the mathematics of several hundred deductions would avail me nothing, It was all there, and no doubt I had taken all these Rapide trips, eaten all these meals, attended all these entertainments, und so weiter. The galling truth was that I had never inquired as to the cost of any of these items at the time, and as I now retrospectively learned just how extravagantly expensive everything on Edoku truly was, I had no doubt that I had managed to squander two months’ worth of ordinary living expenses in two short weeks.

  “But…but what am I to do now?” I stammered.

  “Vacate forthwith,” I was told. “A hopper now fetches your baggage.”

  “But…but I’m entirely without funds! Where will I sleep? How will I eat?”

  “By your wits, nē, assuming you possess them. Any venue of commerce will credit your chip in return for ruegelt.”

  “Ruegelt?”

  “Ruegelt,” the domo affirmed, displaying for my enlightenment three small discs of silvery metal. “Each ‘coin,’ so-called, represents a unit of credit.”

  “But how do I secure this ruegelt?”

  The domo shrugged. “Usual means,” he said.

  “The usual means?”

  “Hai,” he said more crossly. “Gainful employment, mendicancy, or theft. I am aware of no others.”

  As I stood there shaking in a state of absolute despair and terror, a hopper arrived and presented me with my pack. Such was my state of chagrin and helplessness that I imagined that this little creature too was regarding me with contemptuous amusement.

  Desperately, and without regard for the folly of the attempt, I presented my other chip to the domo. “I can pay with this,” I told him.

  “So?” he inserted the chip into his slot, perused the readout, and returned it to me with a moue of contempt. “Valid only for passage to Glade for one Moussa Shasta Leonardo. Sans value on the surface of any planet.” His expression softened somewhat. “Naturellement, you can use it now to return home forthwith without having to brave the vie of the indigent Child of Fortune, nē…” he suggested.

  At this, my spirit was sufficiently roused from the timidity induced by its state of helpless despair to vow “Never!”

  “Never?”

  “Well at least not without trying…” I said in a much tinier voice.

  “Well spoken, child,” the domo replied. “Bonne chance, buena suerte, vaya con glück, und so weiter. But now you must leave the premises tout suite.”

  And so I was constrained to shoulder my pack and slink out of the lobby of the Yggdrasil, through the porchways where guests more fortunate than I were taking their ease, and across the rainbow bridge which led, as it were, from the safety and security of lost Eden into the harsh and unknown world of trial and toil, and while there were no angels with flaming swords to bar my return, I knew that from here on in it would be a road of my own making that I must travel.

  6

  I know not how long I wandered in a state of numb dread and formless sullen anger, nor even whether I traversed any great distance from the Yggdrasil or staggered in rough circles, for this was Edoku, where the hour of the day in any given locus gave no clue to time’s passage, and the random landscape gave no clue as to vector. Moreover, if Edoku had daunted my spirit entirely before I had found the Yggdrasil, and had seemed impossible to encompass in any coherent fashion before I had discovered the Rapide, now I was reduced to an even more discombobulated state than that of the naif who had first set foot on the planet, for I was cursed with the knowledge of what I had lost, and while the little girl I had been might rail against the outrageous prices which had been her downfall, the nascent Child of Fortune could not entirely escape the perception that she really had no one to blame for this disaster but herself.

  Vraiment, what a catastrophe it was! Immediately upon being expelled from the Yggdrasil, the fact that I no longer had funds to secure food and shelter, horrendous though it was to a girl who had never been forced to miss a meal in her life, had seemed to be the full extent of the dilemma. But when I reflexively started for the nearest familiar Rapide station and then suddenly realized that I had no funds even for transport, I began to perceive that the vie of a total pauper in a venue such as Edoku was likely to present difficulties beyond even starvation and exposure.

  For one thing, my sphere of operations was now limited to the range of my feet, and what was worse, I had no idea of how to reach any familiar locus by the tedious process of laying one down after the other, for all my explorations of the city had been conducted via Rapide, and I had therefore learned exactly nothing of the quotidian topology.

  My only consolation from this perception was that a mental map of the territory would in any case have been useless knowledge, for I had no means of securing food from any of the emporiums I had previously patronized even if I could find them.

  Nor would even the magical power to transport myself to anywhere I wished by act of will have enabled me to even begin to seek remunerative employment. For when it came to the ebb and flow of credit, I had been entirely occupied with exploring the manifold possibilities of expenditure, and had not given so much as a passing thought to the process of accumulation.

  Indeed, as I wa
ndered aimlessly through the streets and parklands, the public squares and arrondissements of what seemed like commercial activity in a slowly escalating state of agitated depression sharpened by the apprehension of the empty space in my stomach where breakfast should have been, as I regarded the extravagantly dressed Edojin sipping wine, inhaling intoxicants, and languidly picking at haute cuisine, I realized that while everyone in the city seemed lavishly wealthy, I had never given the slightest thought as to how all these riches were acquired.

  Or rather how I might insinuate myself into the economic bourse. I knew that Edoku was a center of the arts and sciences and commerce, and that this, no doubt, was the foundation of the general wealth of the populace, but in these areas of endeavor my only skill, at best, was that of the appreciative connoisseur. Vraiment, I could perceive within my own repertoire not even some skill that might earn me credits in some humbler occupation; I could not prepare even rude cuisine, I knew nothing of the art of waiting on table, and my lack of knowledge of the rudiments of commerce had been more than amply demonstrated. Humbling myself to the point of begging for alms I might eventually consider if only I had some notion of the graces and techniques of the mendicant’s trade, and theft, if not precluded by moral niceties, seemed entirely beyond my powers, for I could hardly imagine myself overpowering a victim and absconding with what ruegelt his purse might contain.

  Naturellement, I was still in possession of the ring of Touch which my father had given me, and in some venue far less sophisticated than Edoku, its amplification of my tantric puissance combined with what I had once regarded as my considerable amatory skills might very well have allowed me to secure funds as a tantric performer according to parental plan. But here, where creatures were gene-crafted for performances in palaces of pleasure and the sensual arts were refined to levels beyond my comprehension for the delectation of the most jaded connoisseurs of same, even augmented by my father’s art, it seemed to me that I had about as much chance of succeeding as a tantric performer as a tantrically unschooled rube from a frontier world would have had in Nouvelle Orlean.

  At length, these weighty considerations of economic survival, and even the gnawing hunger in my belly, were superseded by an even more overwhelming matter of immediate urgency which I had thusfar not even considered but which nevertheless had proceeded stealthily beneath my conscious attention to the point where it now intruded into my awareness to a level of entirely alarming dominance. Which is to say that after many hours of wandering, my bladder had finally filled to the point of bursting, and I would now have to rouse myself from my funk and take my first practical survival step. I had to find a toilet at once.

  Far easier said than done. Toilets, I knew, were to be found in every hotel, restaurant, taverna, and entertainment emporium in Edoku, and naturellement I had used them often enough. Alas, all of these establishments required the presentation of valid chip of credit as a bona fide in order to even gain admittance, and it was made clear to me in terms of considerable outrage that their sanitary facilities were not available gratuit to other than paying customers.

  By the time I had screwed up my courage for a sixth attempt to gain access to toilet facilities after five curt and altogether belligerent rebuffs, this time in a modest taverna carved into a miniature desert butte, I was fairly squirming in agony, to the point where the upholding of dignity was no longer even a passing consideration, and I accosted the domo of the taverna in a forthright whine.

  “Please! Bitte! Por favor! Your toilet, kudasai! I have no funds, but I am bursting with need! I beg of you-”

  “The grossity!” exclaimed this worthy, a thin green man in a saffron robe. “Taverna desu! Public jai nai!”

  “What?”

  “The Public Service Station over the stream and in the woods desu! Ici, nein! The insult!”

  “What are you talking about?” I cried.

  “What do I talk about? What do you talk about? Surely even Children of Fortune comprend the difference subtle between a taverna and a Public!”

  “Kudasai, bitte, mercy upon my ignorance, good sir,” I begged. “I’m entirely new at this. I have no idea what you mean by a Public Service Station!”

  The domo’s expression softened somewhat, at least to the point of regarding me as an ignorant bumpkin in some distress rather than a deliberately insulting churl. “Nouvelle Child of Fortune desu, auslander, nē? Wakaru. Attends, kind: Edoku a magnet for indigent Children of Fortune desu, nē, therefore wir wollen nicht a great display of public munificence to render to same, nē, lest what is already a flood become a tsunami. But Edoku a civilized planet desu, and we cannot therefore allow even such as yourself to starve or suffer disease, and certainly not to be forced to relieve yourself al fresco, nē. Voilà, the Public Service Stations, where you will find the necessities of survival and no more, pared to the edge of physical discomfort, but not beyond.”

  Thanking him far more profusely than his modest aid justly required, I hastened, indeed fairly ran, to the venue he had suggested, and there in the little wood, screened from casual sight by tall hedges, was the first truly unesthetic construct I had seen on Edoku. Vraiment, as if in contrast to every other building in the city, the Public Service Station—or rather Stations, for, as I was to learn only too well, the hundreds of them secreted all over the city were entirely identical—seemed designed to negate all concepts of esthetics. It was a single-story windowless cube constructed of some textureless gray material, the perfect nullity of its design marred only by an oblong doorless portal.

  Inside, the Public was only marginally less unappetizing. All of the interior surfaces were of the same gray substance, entirely unadorned, and the lighting was an unwholesome bluish-white harshness emanating from naked overhead fixtures. The central area of the single room was given over to benches and tables seamlessly extruded from the gray material of the floor; at these sat about a dozen people more or less the same age as myself. The far end of the room was given over to shower stalls, for the doors supplied only a modicum of privacy, and I could see the shanks of bathers abluting themselves within. To the right as I entered was a counter with a bored-looking elder functionary lounging behind it, a long rack holding several dozen gray garments, a series of water fountains, and then a long narrow table piled with strange rubbery-looking gray blocks.

  All these accoutrements I perceived, as it were, en pissant, for the left-hand wall was given over entirely to toilet stalls, and to the nearest unoccupied stall I scurried, with only the briefest nod of my head to a young boy in a singularly unappealing gray smock who had lifted his arm and pointed his finger thereto in an entirely superfluous gesture of friendly, if jocular direction.

  After relieving myself of both catabolic waste products and the chagrin of my not exactly graceful entry, I emerged from the toilet stall to essay my debut into the society of the Public Service Stations and apprise myself of the nature of the facilities and services which Edoku in its magnanimity provided gratuit to indigent Children of Fortune such as myself.

  Now that I had dealt with the most pressing matter, I could more exquisitely appreciate the extent of my thirst and hunger, and so I first repaired to one of the fountains, where I surfeited myself on water so perfectly tepid and tasteless as to be remarkable for the very perfection of its blandness.

  Food, however, seemed nowhere in evidence, and so I next introduced myself to a group of two young boys and a young girl lounging at the nearest table. “Hello, I am Moussa Shasta Leonardo. My mother, Shasta Suki Davide—”

  The younger of the two boys, dressed, like the girl, in a singularly unappealing gray smock, held up his hand to stay the telling of my name tale. “Greener, nē?” he said. “We don’t exchange name tales, since we’ve just started to live the tales of our own freenoms, right, so all we have is the kindernoms someone else gave us, and paternoms and maternoms mean nothing to the vrai Child of Fortune, nē. So in the Publics, you’re just Moussa, I’m just Dan, she’s just Jooni, and he’
s just Mart.”

  While this bizarre mode of introduction seemed entirely uncivilized to me, I felt in no position to deliver a lecture on manners; they seemed friendly enough, and, moreover, I had more pressing needs than the desire to hear their name tales. “Bien,” I said amiably, “as you surmised, I’m entirely innocent of the ways of the Public Service Stations. I was given to understand that food was available gratuit, but I see no refectory, nor even a cold buffet…”

  For reasons which I was about to learn, the three of them seemed to regard this as high comedy, breaking into raucous and ironic laughter. There were half a dozen gray oblong blocks on the table before them; Dan handed me one of them with an exaggerated courtly flourish.

  “Voilà, your very first fressen bar, Moussa,” he said. “You are about to enjoy a unique culinary experience.”

  I fingered the unappetizing-looking gray thing dubiously. It felt like soap. I sniffed at it. It was almost odorless, save for a subtle odor of something chemical, perhaps formaldehyde. It seemed to me that I was being set up as the victim of some juvenile prank…

  Seeing my reluctance, Jooni took up another fressen bar, bit off a large chunk, and rapidly chewed it down with an entirely neutral expression. “Mangia, Moussa,” she said. “Not only perfectly safe, but each fressen bar is perfectly compounded to provide optimum nutriment for one human for one standard day.”

  “But we may eat as many as we want,” Mart added.

  “Though we may not want as many as we eat,” Dan muttered enigmatically.

  Properly famished, and at least assured that I wasn’t about to poison myself, I bit off a sizable chunk of my fressen bar and masticated it appraisingly.

  It had the nontexture of a bland fromage made of cellulose dust. It had no taste at all, or rather, perhaps, the perfectly neutral savor of a wad of wet paper. I chewed it down swiftly and mechanically, if only to clear my palate of this wretched substance, while my companions, seeing my expression, burst once more into laughter.