Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  “What a farrago of self-serving merde!” I exclaimed in wounded anger. “What high-sounding rhetoric to justify what low-minded lust!”

  Pater only smiled at me warmly in a superior manner that further inflamed my rage against him. “Would not such a low-minded swine of selfish lust play a lower-minded game? Would he not encourage the delusion that, given time and patience and a casual enough disregard for his peccadilloes, you could make him your own?”

  “You believe that I would watch you play the stud to the entire barnyard and loyally await my turn at your favors in hope thereby of cozening you into mending your ways?” I snapped.

  Pater Pan seemed to stare right into my soul. He placed a gentle hand upon my knee. “Can you look me in the eye and honestly declare that if I had never spoken this truth you would not?” he said all-too-knowingly.

  I could not reply. Indeed, I could no longer even meet his gaze.

  “How long before such a love turned to hate?” Pater persisted. “Vraiment, even if you caponized the cock, would you not lose as much as I?”

  “May I not at least be permitted to be the judge of that?” I muttered bleakly.

  Pater cupped my chin in his hands and raised my eyes to meet his own. “So be it, girl,” he said. “Suffer one more long-winded koan, after which you have only to say so, and I will be forever yours.”

  Once more that preternatural spirit seemed to emerge from manly flesh to speak to its own avatar within my heart, but now my lover spoke as well, or so it seemed, with a human warmth even I in such a moment could not deny.

  “I have known thousands of women on hundreds of worlds and you may hap a few score fellows on a world or two. Yet tell me true if you can that you in your short span have been any more addicted to pacts of eternal monogamy than I!”

  At this, I was constrained to merely curl my lips, for of course no such vows had ever passed through them, nor indeed had such thoughts previously even trammeled my admittedly somewhat fickle heart.

  “We are Children of the same spirit, nē, you and I,” Pater went on relentlessly. “What sort of man, what a false Child of Fortune, would I be to allow a lover to tie herself to me and lose thereby that very spirit which she loves in me, which has made me what I am? Vraiment, to turn her back on the Yellow Brick Road after her first few steps thereon?”

  He smiled. He took my hand in his. “Instead, why not a treaty of equal spirits, one Gypsy Joker to another? Take from a lover’s hand this carnival, and Edoku, and all the worlds of men beyond. Let me be your lover, and you be mine, but live the life that I have lived, be true to the spirit that we share. Eat, drink, toxicate yourself, wander, learn, adventure, dare all, have ten lovers, a hundred, a thousand, vie with the great Pater Pan in running up the score, and become thereby not my spouse but a true consort of my heart! For what do I lose thereby? What substance is depleted? And you have worlds to gain that I already know. So allow me to give a greater gift than what you seek, chère Moussa, the gift of freedom as my lover and an equal spirit. And in return, only seek not to diminish mine.”

  I trembled at the touch of his hand, I knew not how to reply, for the greater part of me wished to gather up this wise and noble creature in my arms, while the worm of intellect whispered in my ear that I was somehow only the latest victim of this perfect master of the truthful lie.

  “Well?” said Pater. “Which do you choose? Sister and brother of the same free spirit? Or dour misers of the heart?”

  Put thusly, was not the question its own answer? Even now, with hindsight’s wisdom long years and many lovers after the fact, still I cannot find the flaw in his irrefutable logic d’amour. Nor, on the other hand, can I escape from the entirely illogical conviction that it was there.

  I shook my head ruefully, acknowledging that I was in the presence of a perfect master, though of what I was not quite sure. “You have the tongue of an angel and the guile of a Serpent,” I told him. “Why then, knowing this, do I now trust such a monster with my heart?”

  Pater laughed. He hugged me to him and kissed me on the lips. With a great relenting sigh, I snuggled into his embrace. “Because,” he said, “beneath the mythos and blarney of the great Pater Pan, there is nothing more sinister than the soul of a little boy.”

  I slept that night in the arms of Pater Pan, or rather he allowed himself to innocently repose in mine after a somewhat briefer passage d’amour than our first mighty duet, which served, nevertheless, to reaffirm my arcane tantric mastery over his flesh and to reaffirm his primacy, despite all, in my heart, and thus to fairly seal our bizarre “treaty of equal spirits.”

  Vraiment, in the days and weeks to come we slept together thusly often enough, and if I had given up all hope of becoming the exclusive consort of the cock of the walk, I could content myself with the admission, wrested from his panting lips by the magic of the Touch, that I could, whenever the spirit moved me, not merely please him like no other lover, but overmaster, outlast, and outpleasure this most puissant of cocksmen, and leave him gasping limply and crying “Enough!”

  Indeed having established myself in my own mind and his as the secret mistress of the ultimate object of feminine desire in open competition, I began to appreciate the wisdom of the pact he had forced upon me. Though at first I sulked and pouted when I spied Pater engaged in intimacies with others, soon enough I began to take a certain satisfaction in this erotic competition, in which, courtesy of the art of Leonardo, I was assured of certain, if not exactly sporting, victory.

  Moreover, once my full confidence in my own erotic puissance had thereby been restored, I regained once more the spirit of that Moussa Shasta Leonardo who had been in her own small way no mean femme fatale of Nouvelle Orlean. I took to denying my favors to Pater from time to time for my own amusement. I dallied with lesser males of the tribe and soon developed a reputation as a tantric performer of preternatural power and some artistry.

  Soon enough I was invited to take minor parts in tantric group performances in which the audience participated actively and met with the general approval of same via the raw power of the Touch, though the featured performers would often chide me for upstaging their more demanding roles.

  When it came to performing in tantric tableaus in which the audience remained passive spectators, however, I was a good deal less successful, since the employment of the Touch therein did nothing for the audience and tended to disrupt the concentration of the ensemble with ill-timed orgasms, and when I therefore confined myself to ordinary performance of my modest roles, my relative lack of studied artistry was all too apparent.

  Nevertheless, the cachet derived from being even a minor and occasional public performer, combined with the electronically enhanced certainty of providing fair value, allowed me to earn some ruegelt as solo tantric artist, though I never summoned up the hubris or courage to demand more than twenty pieces of ruegelt from a customer.

  True to his word in letter and spirit, Pater never displayed a moment of jealousy, or indeed anything less than openhearted enthusiasm for my enterprises and amours, though truth be told my initial motivation had been the eliciting of same. And once I had quite convinced myself that his dedication to the spirit of our mutual freedom was quite genuine and unconstrained, I had to admit to myself that I would have been a fool to have had it any other way.

  For it was a grand and glorious time. Having known nothing of life but an existence based on parental largesse and then a period of utter penury resulting from the exhaustion of same, the vie of the Gypsy Jokers was more to me than a garden of delights, it was my very first experience of a world in which I was neither the darling daughter nor the helpless waif but a free, equal, and independent agent. The strip of Cloth of Many Colors that I wore sometimes as scarf, sometimes as sash, sometimes as headband, was purchased with ruegelt earned by my own efforts, as were the simple meals I bought in the camp in lieu of fressen bars. While the former was hardly an item of haute couture and the latter could not pretend to haute cuisine, I
was adorned with the ensign of my own enterprise and dined on the fruits thereof.

  I was Moussa Shasta Leonardo, Gypsy Joker, true avatar of the spirit of the Child of Fortune, a free and equal lover of Pater Pan, and indeed he had seen my future self truly, for having attained this station, never would I have then willingly traded it for being the mere consort of even the noblest of men.

  9

  While at first I was more than content to find myself earning my way as a Gypsy Joker via the various modes available to a tantric performer of modest artistry and secret power, after a time I became gradually seized by the somewhat incoherent desire to expand my sphere of interest and enhance my possibilities, for I could not forever deny that my sole means of earning ruegelt consisted of a smattering of my mother’s noble art and the electronic enhancement of my modest attainments in the disciplines of same which was mine courtesy of my father’s craft.

  Moreover, the more I took minor parts in tantric tableaus whose feature players displayed a diligent and indeed obsessive dedication to the true mastery of the high art of which I was no more than a feckless dilettante, the more I realized that I lacked the inner drive to endure the long hours of study and exercise required to achieve the status of a tantric maestra.

  Indeed, the atmosphere of the carnival was not exactly conducive to dedicated diligence in the pursuit of any single craft or art, at least not for a youthful spirit new to the life of a true Child of Fortune, for every waking hour offered up a smorgasbord of possible pursuits, not to say a plethora of diversions to distract me from any thought of gainful employ whatever. There were jugglers, sleight of hand artistes, singers, musicians, und so weiter wandering the grounds, and to a Gypsy Joker, admission to the shows and performances taking place within tented walls was gratuit. Not to mention endless possibilities for idle hours of amorous dalliance, though this began to lose a certain piquancy for a laborer in the vineyards of the tantric trades.

  Then too I had the example of the polymathic Pater Pan, by the definition of our tribe the ideal Child of Fortune incarnate, far more interested in playing jack-of-all-trades than in becoming a true maestro of any of them, whom, naturellement, I desired to please with the ultimate homage of successful emulation.

  Moreover, the Gypsy Jokers did not confine their trades to the environs of the camp; the buskers who thronged our caravanserei also roamed the nearby vecinos giving impromptu performances on the streets thereof for contributions. So too did other members of the tribe hawk finger food, geegaws, and our simple crafts beyond the confines of our bidonville of tents. The street trade served to spread the repute of our carnival; contrawise, the mythos of the permanent fete enhanced the street trade.

  Indeed, as Pater Pan would often enough declare, the true venue of the Child of Fortune was out in the streets among the bustling throngs of the quotidian worlds of men, for here we had performed our highest public roles when we were Troubadours and Tinkers, Romany and Hippies, for by playing the part of the Free Spirits of the worlds, we did our part to keep the spirit of the people free. In this, he told us, pecuniary profit was happily at one with a sense of noblesse oblige.

  Be such grandiosity as it may, it began to seem to me that it was time to venture forth from the cozy confines of the encampment I had come to call home into the streets of Edoku where once I had been a helpless waif but where I now might carry the piebald banner of the Gypsy Jokers forth as a soldier of a Children’s Crusade whose Holy Grail was the ruegelt to be gained therein.

  While the spirit was willing, my skills were, to say the least, somewhat circumscribed. I could not sing, dance, juggle, do sleight of hand, or play a musical instrument, and the opportunities for tantric performances on crowded thoroughfares were few and far between. Yet such was my desire to venture forth as a true Child of Fortune of the streets that at length I swallowed my pride and deigned to try my hand at the street hawkers’ trade.

  Exerting my erotic charms to gain the good graces of Dani Ben Bama, a youth who, while he could in no way be mistaken for a chef maestro, was generally regarded as our premiere artiste of finger food, I spent several days wandering the vecino of glass towers with trays of his dainties. These were a cunning assortment of steamed dim sum of variously flavored doughs filled with all sorts of viands, legumes, sweet curries, and flavored creams, liberally spiced with assorted mild intoxicants, and I knew full well that I could find no more promising fare to hawk than this.

  But truth be told, though I sallied forth each day with high hopes, more often than not I would return with but a few coins and a great heap of stale buns. For once on the street, I lacked the chutzpah and enthusiasm to continually proclaim the virtues of my wares at the top of my voice or to accost strangers; instead, my technique consisted of wandering aimlessly about in a daze with the haughty expression of one performing a task she clearly considered below her natural station.

  At length even Dani, avid though he was for my continued tantric ministrations, was reluctantly moved to suggest that I favor another enterprise with my services.

  I met with little more success hawking such items of adornment as embroidered sashes, netsuke of wood and metal, belts woven of silver wire, mirror-berets, und so weiter, though at least the craftsmen of same could afford to be more tolerant of my failures, since these items were not perishable and could be sent back to market with a peddler of more puissant skills.

  Finally, I did somewhat better with jewelry crafted by Ali Kazan Bella. Ali was a lusty young man whose good humor and considerable tantric skills I quite enjoyed, and his jewelry, while crude by Edojin standards, manifested a skill and somewhat demented energy for which I could generate a sincere enthusiasm. With cunning little knives he had fashioned himself and under the influence of central nervous system enhancers, Ali carved necklaces, bracelets, earrings, and brooches out of single blocks of wood; filigree bijoux of such intricate fineness that at first glance they appeared to be twisted together out of wire.

  This jewelry epitomized precisely those qualities which charmed the Edojin when it came to quaint Child of Fortune crafts: rude materials mimicking those of a higher technological level, clear evidence of long hours of tedious hand labor, and what they called “the wu of blood, sweat, and tears.”

  Adorned, indeed bedecked, with several rings on every finger, bracelets up and down each arm, a dozen or more necklaces, several pairs of earrings, and brooches pinned all over my tunic to the point where I was fairly armored in wooden filigree, I cut a figure of sufficient bizarrité to attract considerable attention even on the streets of Edoku, and even I, the least forward of street hawkers, was able to do a reasonable trade.

  Still, even this modest success as a peddler left me discontent with my place in the life of the streets, or rather, perhaps, such success at the expense of my own dignity after a series of failures resulting at least in part from the disdainful husbanding of same, forced upon me the perception that I was really quite indifferent to success or failure as a mere merchant of the wares of others. Indeed, if I had desired such a vie, I would have been much better advised to remain on Glade and become an agent for the wares of my own father in the haut monde of the wealthy rather than a peddler of snacks and trinkets in the streets.

  No, though I continued to hawk his jewelry upon occasion out of affection for Ali, and though I continued to supplement my modest share of this trade with tantric performances in the camp, at length I admitted to myself that I had developed a genuine personal ambition that went beyond mere membership in the Gypsy Joker tribe or even becoming a free spirit of the streets.

  It seemed to me, then as now, that it was the Gypsy Joker buskers who wandered Great Edoku performing for what fortune and the impromptu audiences tossed their way who were the true Children of Fortune, the spiritual raison d’être of our very existence in the wider scheme of things. For it was they who were in truth both living out and extolling the ancient and noble legends of the Gypsies and Hippies, the Troubadours and the Arkies, and
, by serving as avatars incarnate of the spirit of the Child of Fortune’s millennial romance, keeping it alive in the Second Starfaring Age.

  With hindsight’s vision, I perceive that this was my first dim inkling of my own future calling, the formless desire to live a life where the spirit meets the mind, to share the vie of the tale-teller or performer, to immerse myself in some higher enterprise for the ding an sich, to present the product of my own inner being for the titillation and edification of an audience of kindred spirits.

  Vraiment, at the time I desired nothing more than the egoistic pleasure of the vie itself, for I had no tale to tell or song to sing, nor the craft to do so if I had. Indeed, that was the precise nature of my dilemma: I had fixed my heart’s desire upon the life of a street performer, yet I lacked even a passing acquaintance with any entertainer’s art.

  Naturellement, it was to Pater Pan that I turned for wisdom in the sated afterglow of an evening’s erotic exercises in his tent.

  “Pas problem, girl!” he told me airily after a less than cogent recitation of my desires. “For sure you will have little difficulty extracting free instruction from some male maestro of your chosen art!”

  Curled in his sheltering arms, I nodded my assent. “But what art may that be?” I said.

  “You know not?” he said in some perplexity.

  I shrugged. “I am less than pleased by the sound of my own voice in song, when it comes to musical instruments, I seem to have several thumbs, I have no interest in sleight of hand, juggling, or dance…”

  Pater laughed. “Apprentice yourself to a street theater group then,” he told me. “You can hardly converse for ten minutes without betraying thespic talent!”

  I rolled this conceit around the palate of my mind; while it seemed to me that my life on Glade and my small successes on Edoku gave a certain evidence of my talent for playing roles, these had always been of my own crafting, and something about a life of mouthing other people’s words left a taste for which I did not entirely care.