Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  Soon I could make out tiny figures thronging the impromptu streets of the tent city, hear the faint strains of music, catch the aromas of cuisine and incense and intoxicants drifting invitingly towards me on the breeze.

  “So, Moussa,” Pater Pan said, “what do you see?”

  “Xanadu…?” I suggested breathlessly.

  Pater laughed. “So should it appear to the rubes,” he said, “and so it does. But now that you are a Gypsy Joker, you must learn to see through streetwise eyes.”

  I cocked an inquisitive eyebrow at him.

  “First, you will notice that the location of the carnival is straight athwart the natural route between this busy commercial district and the houses of the hills. So that those Edojin who stroll between the two rather than use the Rapide must pass within its spell. Conversely, the existence of our carnival along the route between bourse and home encourages such a lazy stroll. One must always grant the rubes the maximum opportunity to discover their whim to part with ruegelt. Now why did I choose noon rather than evening or night?”

  I shrugged and held out my hands in a confession of ignorance.

  “Because on Edoku, as on most of the worlds of men, evening is the chosen hour for dining on haute cuisine in grand restaurants, and night is the chosen hour of elaborate and expensive spectacles and entertainments, and our quaint shows and simple fare can go mano a mano with neither,” he told me. “The clever Child of Fortune caters to immediate whim and caprice, tidbits of food, not haute cuisine, impromptu music, ruespiels, and busking, not formal theater or spectacle, trinkets and geegaws, not noble craft or high art—all thrust under the noses of the rubes before they even recognize the desire for same, and all available at prices which prevent the decision to part with ruegelt from causing significant reflection.”

  “You make us sound little more than mendicants…”

  “Right on!” Pater exclaimed approvingly. “Sure, and we are little more than mendicants. The mendicant plays upon the pity and empathy of his mark to secure alms but offers nothing of value in return save a certain pompous sense of self-satisfaction, nē. The Child of Fortune offers a little more. We amuse. A laugh, a smile, a savor, a few moments of pleasure, a nostalgic remembrance of a youth when the customer was free and weightless as the breeze, a Child of Fortune even as you and I.”

  “But that is no little difference at all!” I declared. “For the mendicant plays upon a confrontation with misfortune and makes the donor feel smugly superior, whereas we play upon a confrontation with lost freedom and return a memory of joy, nē. To me, that is all the difference in the worlds.” And why, I realized, that come what may, I could never reduce myself to begging for alms.

  Pater gave me a strange and narrow look, compounded, or so it seemed, of amazement, approval, satori, perhaps even a certain sense of awe. “Well spoken indeed, my little guru,” he said. “The spirit moves through your words, and in retrospect, I now congratulate myself for having the wisdom to know it all along.”

  And so, basking in the approval of the domo of the tribe, in thrall, in love, pledging my spirit to him and his enterprise in the depths of my loyal young heart, and quite erroneously convinced that I had captured his soul and made him my own as surely as he had made me his, I entered the carnival of the Gypsy Jokers hand in hand with the noble Pater Pan, quite confident that I would be its queen as surely as my man was king.

  While the former supposition was one of which I was soon to be disabused, the latter was reconfirmed as soon as we entered the camp, for Pater Pan could go nowhere within its precincts without being the center of attention of Gypsy Jokers and Edojin alike, though the mode of homage differed in tone between the two.

  As Pater made the rounds of the carnival with myself in train, ostensibly for the benefit of my orientation, but in truth, as I was to learn in the next few days, as part of his regular preening ritual, the Edojin patronizing the divertissements honored the presence of the living legend with sidelong glances, whispered comments to each other, the occasional frank stare, though these burghers of Great Edoku never seemed to favor the Gypsy King with a word or gesture of direct salutation. Nor, for his part, did Pater stoop to acknowledge the groundlings with banter or even direct eye contact, any more than an actor upon a stage would betray cognizance of their existence to the audience.

  Vis-à-vis our fellow Gypsy Jokers, it was entirely another matter.

  The caravanserei of the Gypsy Jokers encompassed a bewildering profusion of enterprises, and as Pater commended each of them to my attention, he held impromptu court with the maestros and journeymen thereof, questioning and advising, bantering and suggesting, collecting a portion of the take for the common purse or may hap his own, and contriving to introduce the latest member of the tribe casually en passant.

  That Pater was in truth the ultimate maestro of each and every art as he pretended was difficult for even the smitten Moussa to credit, but certainement he was deferred to, or at least humored, as such by the practitioners thereof. At food kiosks, he nibbled at tidbits and suggested alterations in the recipes. The wares of jewelers, potters, sculptors, leatherworkers, und so weiter, were eyed, fingered, even sniffed at; many were praised, but certain items were ordered removed from the market for lack of sufficient craft, and the subject of the proper price for everything was discussed in some detail.

  Pater would try his hand against his own minions at the varied games of chance and skill to be found within the camp, and more often than not would win a small pile of ruegelt which he would pocket with wry admonitions and homilies of gambling lore, praising extravagantly those few who managed to wrest coin from him.

  The grounds were also full of buskers of every sort—musicians, singers, ruespielers, dancers, jugglers, artistes of sleight of hand, und so weiter—performing gratis or for whatever coins passing Edojin might be moved to toss their way. Pater would take in their performances, and then during an intermission in same, take them aside and offer his advice. Jugglers had roughnesses in their performances pointed out, musicians and singers were referred to colleagues for the enhancement of their repertoires, sleight of hand artistes were shown new tricks, ruespielers were given new variations on old tales.

  There were many tents within which tantric tableaus were enacted before audiences, and many more within which the clientele took part in the erotic choreography or enjoyed solo performances in a mode of their own choosing.

  Pater not only was quite free with his critiques, not only advised male tantric performers in the niceties of their art (a subject in which I would be the last to declare him less than a master), but saw fit not only to advise tantric artists of my own gender in the means of pleasing his own, but offered to supply private lessons in same more than once under my very nose!

  In truth—which is to say sans self-serving dissembling—if I have conveyed a certain less than enthusiastic attitude on the part of the young Moussa towards Pater Pan’s performance of his royal rounds, if I have portrayed him as intruding into every art and enterprise with the self-importance of the kibbitzing dilettante and withheld my wholehearted appreciation of his puissance as a maestro of them all, verisimilitude would also have me own that it was neither the tone of his discourse nor the generality of its reception which soured the edges of my delight at this grand tour of Xanadu, or to be even more painfully forthright about the source of my discomfort, I could find little fault with his conversational congress with the males of our tribe.

  These were all younger than my great lover, indisputably callow in my eyes by comparison, and I could only approve of the open-spirited manner in which they all deferred to him in matters great and small, sought his favor, desired to emulate his noble model, and accepted his advice and teachings even in the subtleties of their own arts with the intellectual avidity of the sincere student.

  His behavior vis-à-vis the female of the species and their frank and mooning attentions to him, however, were entirely beyond the scope of my selfless admiration an
d approval. Vraiment, in my brief career as a femme fatale of Nouvelle Orlean, I had never been subject to such treatment by a swain, and would have eschewed the further company of any such boor the first time I caught him exchanging fey glances with a lesser female being, though admittedly the techniques of covert theft of amatory attention with which these creatures constantly sought to poach on my preserve were not exactly foreign to my own repertoire.

  All the more reason to resent the cooing words with which he was constantly laved, the light chance touches of numerous feminine hands to various portions of his anatomy, the inquiring glances, the intrusion of their corpuses into the intimate aura of his body space, all as if I were not present, or worse, was too much the fool to comprehend the import of this sub rosa mating dance. Pater, moreover, played his part to the hilt, returning amatory banter, playing quite free and easy with his little intimate touches of hand upon flesh, eschewing not the contact of eye with eye, and in short, openly reveling in his status as cock of the walk.

  Most galling, not to say most amazing, of all, the fact that I was forthrightly introduced to one and all as both the newest member of the tribe and a lover fresh from his embrace did absolutely nothing to dissuade his legion of feminine admirers from paying him court in my presence, indeed my rivals for his attentions welcomed me with what even I in my outraged state could not distinguish from sincere friendliness, even while they were clearly offering themselves up to my man!

  At length, vraiment at what seemed like interminable length, this disjunctive combination of delightful introduction to the wonders of the carnival and torturous display of universal flirtation, or worse, concluded and Pater ushered me into the sanctuary of his own tent.

  Without, this pavilion could not have been mistaken for the dwelling of any other, for the entire tent was constructed of the same Cloth of Many Colors which cloaked the much-sought-after body of Pater Pan, but within, it was a venue of humble simplicity entirely out of keeping with what seemed to me to be his elevated opinion of his own grandeur. Indeed, there was nothing inside the small tent save a large bed constructed of a red velvet cloth flung over a deep nest of branches, a few plain wooden chests, some low tables, and a varied assortment of lighting fixtures which were capable of casting whatever hue and intensity of illumination might suit his mood.

  While it was a definite improvement over the parklands and gardens which had been my most recent habitations, it was a far cry from the luxury and charm of my chamber at the Yggdrasil, and I immediately resolved to utilize my own more refined tastes and the plentiful resources so obviously at his command to improve matters at once, for such spartan bachelor quarters were hardly suitable to the conjugal arrangements I so erroneously assumed we would now share.

  Pater, flopping on his bed with his hands clasped behind his head in the self-satisfied manner of a sated pasha, nevertheless had the wit to read from my demeanor that something was amiss. “Qué pasa, Moussa?” he asked appraisingly.

  “I expected a domicile of somewhat higher style from a man who professes to be the perfect master of so many arts…”

  “Au contraire,” he said, “possessions are anchors to the spirit, and simplicity is the highest style of all. In the encampment of the Gypsy Jokers I am surrounded by all manner of communal delights. Why hoard treasures like a miser of the spirit? All I really require is this pallet on the floor and light to meet my fancy.” He laughed. “Besides, I sleep elsewhere more often than not.”

  The latter I could well imagine. “All very well for the wandering cocksman,” I told him, “but now that we are a ménage à deux, we shall require furnishings more appropriate to genteel domesticity, nē. You can hardly expect me to share a bed of branches in an empty tent.”

  At this, Pater sat upright and regarded me first with surprise, then with consternation, and finally with a certain knowing ruefulness. “Whoa, lady, you seem to be laboring under a whole series of misapprehensions,” he said not unkindly. He patted the bed beside him. “Setzen sie sich, girl, and receive enlightenment.”

  I liked the sound of it not at all; nevertheless I did as he asked, though not without a tremor of trepidation, and not without the maintenance of a certain physical distance congruent with my sudden unease.

  “You cannot be more than twenty standard years old, nē?” he said. “Whereas I have traveled the worlds of men for millennia…”

  “Such hyperbole is all very well for poetic boastings for the mystification of rubes,” I snapped, “but hardly suitable to a serious discussion of matters of the heart en boudoir! No human may attain the age of four hundred, and the scientific reasons therefor have been known for centuries.”

  “Ah, but I speak of time, not age, Moussa, and in our Second Starfaring Age, these are not bound so tightly together, nē. Greater mysteries aside, we do not slowly decay into dotage as men once did, but all at once, when our nervous systems wear out. So, for all you know, in span of my body’s years, I could be three hundred as easily as thirty…”

  “Thirty, three hundred, three thousand, je ne sais pas!” I declared. “What has all this talk of age and time to do with us?”

  “All,” he said flatly. “Believe it or not, believe at least that I believe that I’ve been around the worlds of men longer than even I can remember. Knowing me as you already do, for sure you can believe that the last several thousands of years were not quite passed in monkish celibacy, which is to say I am far more experienced in affairs of the heart than you, or at least I have known as many women as you have days.”

  “Now at least I surmise that you speak sans hyperbole,” I admitted dryly.

  “Bien. And I tell you true, their spirits were as precious to me in their time as yours is now.”

  “Spirits?” I sniffed. “You would have me believe you have cherished several thousand lovers for their spirits?”

  Pater shrugged. “Am I not a man of great charisma?” he said. “Am I not the cocksman supreme? Do you imagine I am anything less than a perfect master of seduction? Is it not the fact that I am a universal object of feminine desire precisely the cause of your present pique?”

  “And modest to a fault as well,” I said, hardly able to believe that I had in fact heard such incredible boasting from the lips of mortal man. But unable to deny the obnoxious truth either.

  But Pater Pan did not laugh. Instead, his face became a visage of such intense sincerity, he regarded me with a look of such caritas and tenderness, that somehow he managed to make himself seem like a hero for having the spiritual courage to utter the very words which the previous moment had marked him as a boor and a braggart. Never had a man looked at me thusly. Never had a spirit touched mine so deeply or inspired such totally irrational trust. Never had I felt such love.

  “Do you imagine that such a man need grant his favors to any who has not touched his heart?” he said.

  “It was not precisely your heart that I touched in the shower stall…” I reminded him.

  Once again, Pater did not so much as smile at my jape, indeed he came as close as I had ever seen to an impatient frown. “Merde, muchacha, be real!” he said. “Do you imagine that I have not been the object of more such ploys than I could count? Do you imagine that my lingam rules my heart? Do you really believe I knew not your true intention, namely to achieve exactly what you have?”

  My ears burned. My eyes began to tear. “What a silly little fool you must have thought I was…” I whispered forlornly. Yet still I could not avert my gaze from the depths of his bright blue eyes.

  Nor his from mine, “Fool?” he exclaimed. “Your courage and your guile won my heart!”

  “They did?”

  Now Pater broke into a boyish grin that made me want to laugh, though I knew not why. “It takes one to know one, n’est-ce pas?” he said. “Have I not lived by just such courage and guile for all these centuries? How could an ego as massive as that of the great Pater Pan fail to love a spirit in which he sees to his delight the mirror of his own?”


  Now I did laugh as I felt a great weight lifted from my spirit by his words. Pater sprang from the bed and began pacing as he spoke, or rather declaimed in the thespic style of his name tale, and now as then, a mighty spirit seemed to be speaking through him, but now, via his bright blue eyes which never broke contact with my own, I felt it moving through me as well, as if we were two singers who had become the music of a single song.

  “Ah, Moussa, we are two avatars of a single spirit, you and I, sister and brother, and equal lovers, no matter that you have hardly begun to walk the Yellow Brick Road, and I have been the Piper of the dance time out of mind on a hundred worlds and more. Are we not true Gypsies and true Jokers, Children of the same Fortune? That is why you are now in this encampment, not because you knotted my lingam around your finger, but because you out-Joked the Joker, and out-Gypsied the Gypsy, and proved thereby that you belonged to the tribe by droit d’esprit, a Gypsy Joker of the true spirit before you even knew the name!”

  Then all at once he collapsed back onto the bed and became the mere man and trickster once more. “And that is why I am not about to let you live with me in this tent or delude yourself that you or any other woman can be my one and only, girl,” he said. “Could I be so heartless as to deprive the women of the worlds of the full glory of my being? Could I be such a jealous churl as to deprive the men of the worlds of the full glory of yours?”