Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  “So say those who call themselves mages of history!” Pater declared. “Towards the middle of the First Starfaring Age did it not become common for colonists to pass the long light-years in cryonic sleep, and was not lifespan thereby preserved from time and boredom? Arkies possessed of sufficient funds and daring took to freezing themselves for centuries, awakening for a few months to live another chapter of the long story and replenish their funds, and then jumping through time in the cold of sleep once more. Some were said to have done this scores of times and lived to see the Second Starfaring Age unfold!”

  “You display an amazing erudition in the inner lore of the Arkies,” I said dryly.

  “Porqué no? I was there!”

  “Is this all in the service of telling me that the man beside me is a fossil Arkie thawed from the glacier of time?”

  “Have I not told you that before? Did you believe it then? Do you believe it now? Believe that I saw the First Starfaring Age or not, believe at least that I mean to see the undreamed of wonders of the Third unfold, or nobly perish in the attempt!”

  “Impossible!”

  “For sure?” said Pater Pan, with the strangest haunted look stealing into his eyes. “Consider. No lifespan at all is lost in electrocoma passage on Void ships, and compared to the cryonics of the First Starfaring Age, successful awakening is so assured that we think nothing of risking it for the sake of mere economic convenience, nē.”

  “But…but Void Ships take mere days or weeks to voyage among the worlds of men, not centuries…”

  “Vraiment!” Pater exclaimed. “Therefore, the more you see of the worlds of men, the more you see of time! Moussa, Moussa, have you never yearned to walk the streets of future cities, to meet the citizens of a far future age, to be there when our species at long last greets fellow sapients from across the sea of suns? Have you never railed in your heart against the knowledge that the greatest chapters in our species’ tale will surely unfold after you are dead and gone? The Arkies sought to cheat the hand of unjust mortality with a few long slow dangerous leaps, but in the Second Starfaring Age, I seek to do it as it must be done now…”

  Snap! Snap! Snap! went his fingers. “Like that! As the Edojin use the Rapide!”

  “Just how many worlds have you seen…” I whispered in wondering awe, for certainement while the goal he pursued must surely remain forever beyond the reach of mortal man, the millennial quest therefor seemed not entirely beyond the realm of universal law, though the mind both reeled and soared at its contemplation.

  “Quién sabe?” said Pater Pan in a voice much less grand. “At least a hundred, if memory serves. And I seek to see the rest before my body’s time runs out.”

  He shrugged. He sighed. And for the first time since I had known him I glimpsed a dark and wistful sadness lurking in the blue depths of my Pied Piper’s bright eyes. “In truth, I know that in the end, I must fail, vraiment, what a monster I would be if I truly hoped to succeed, for not even I have the ego to truly wish to see our species vanish from the stars. But if in the end I cannot sanely or justly hope to experience all of human time, then by the spirit which brought me down from the trees and by the Yellow Brick Road which goes forever on, I mean to attempt to experience at any rate all the worlds of men in the pursuit thereof, to die as I have lived, and declare my life a limited victory in the final moment thereof!”

  Pater touched my hand. He cocked his head and regarded me with eyes which in that moment seemed both gay and sad, heroic and futile, and in them I saw both the noblest and bravest spirit in all the worlds of men and the smallest of boys terrified of the greatest of darks. “Now do you understand why the natural man, no less than the King of the Gypsies and the Prince of the Jokers cannot stand in place too long?” he said softly.

  “Vraiment!” I declared. How mad and sad and doomed and marvelous it all was! What a tale to live as the adventure of your life! “Take me with you!” I said. “I am more than ready to trip the life fantastic through the planets and down the centuries with you forever!”

  “I could not do that, even if I wanted to,” Pater said, regarding me with a warm and wistful tenderness in which, nevertheless, I could read no regret. “We may be two souls of the same spirit, you and I, but this path that I have chosen is for my steps alone. The natural man who loves you would not let your young soul tag along as consort of such a Fliegende Hollander for the same reason that the Pied Piper must move on when the Children of Fortune have learned the music of his song. Your Yellow Brick Road must be of your own choosing. If the destiny thereof should one day bring you once more to my side, then I will welcome you as an equal spirit. But only as an equal spirit, never a consort. Never as the girl that is, only as the woman you will become. Comprend?”

  “Yes,” I said in the tiniest of voices. “I like it not, but I do believe I do.”

  And then, as if to dull the edge of the knife, the spirit of the Joker emerged once more, and spoke in a tone of the most loving cynicism. “Besides, spiritual imperatives and financial considerations coincide. Since the funds I need to travel are paid for with time, I can’t afford a free rider, now can I?” Somehow this entirely false mingyness, under the circumstances, was the tenderest mercy of all.

  We stared into each other’s eyes for a long silent moment, saying good-bye, or, I dared hope, auf wiedersehen, hugging each other’s spirits; he long since centered on the acceptance of this as his self-chosen destiny, I not having the least notion as to what my future destiny might be.

  Then, as the silent communion began to stretch into a poignant agony, Pater, with his perfect mastery of timing, laughed, shrugged, and screwed his face into the comic rendition of a mean-spirited little boy. “And speaking of value given for value received,” he said in an ironic tone, “now that I have shared the deepest secret of my soul, you must reveal the secret of the magic in your touch.”

  “Well spoken!” I giggled, amazed to find such laughter bubbling up in my spirit as if at the Piper’s bidding. “Indeed, far more well spoken for once than the speaker himself believes.”

  I removed the ring of Touch from my finger and ceremoniously placed it on the little finger of Pater’s right hand.

  “This?” he exclaimed. “This common piece of bazaar jewelry is the source of your power?”

  “Designed without esthetic appeal or apparent economic value to discourage the attention of thieves,” I told him. “Attends.” So saying, I reached out, took his hand, thumbed on the ring, and before he knew what I was about, had draped his hand squarely upon his own lingam.

  The look that came onto his face at once should have been captured in halo or oils by a master craftsman, for I have never, before or since, seen such a mélange of amazement, pleasure, befuddlement, and embarrassment appear in such a simultaneous manner on a human visage. He pawed at himself experimentally and stifled a moan. He stroked the inside of his own thigh. He stared at the ring in befuddled delight.

  “Merde!” he exclaimed. “I would be the last to deny the esteem in which I hold my own person, but even I would never have believed I could so love myself!”

  “My father made it,” I told him. “He calls it the Touch.”

  “Your father? Cuanto cuesta? Surely you can prevail upon him to grant a discount to an amigo? With this and the already puissant prowess of the great Pater Pan, I could plow a course through the women of the worlds that would make Don Juan and Casanova seem like dour celibates!”

  “No doubt,” I said dryly. “But it is unobtainable at any price. In all the worlds of men, mine is the only one there is, and my father has sworn an oath that no more will be made until I give my leave.”

  “Pas problem! Only direct him to make a single exception…”

  “And loose what priapic demon on the innocent women of the worlds?”

  “Vraiment,” Pater said quite seriously, removing the ring and placing it in my hands. “If every lover in all the worlds of men wore such a ring, what would become of the tantric a
rt? If all of us were perfect masters of pleasure, would we still recognize those moments when via the flesh two true spirits meet?”

  “I have noticed no lack of such a communion of the spirit between us…” I pointed out.

  “I am not utterly convinced that such a device may not corrode the courage of love’s spirit…”

  “I feel no corrosion of my lover’s courage!” I insisted.

  “Bien. Then you will not object to my suggestion that our last passage d’amour on Edoku be au naturel. Is it not now just that the natural woman now emerge from her magic fortress to bid a true lover bon voyage?”

  “Well spoken,” I impulsively declared, for the trepidation I felt at his words, bizarrely akin to that of a young virgin about to disrobe for the first time before her lover, only served to spur me on. For what is courage except in the face of fear, and what is love if not the baring of one’s own naked and imperfect truth?

  So saying, I unwound my Gypsy Joker’s sash from about my waist, and began to undress. In truth did I experience something of the trepidatious joy of a virgin’s premiere performance, though fortunately not the useless ignorance of same.

  Then we were in each other’s arms and the truth of it was that while the duration and sensual intensity of the artistic performance might have been less preternaturally sustained, the essence of the experience, stripped down to the essentials of lingam and yoni, was quite the same.

  At first each of us strove to overmaster the other with pleasure, and if this loverly contest was now more equal, indeed if for once Pater did obtain the upper hand, the outcome of this almost jocular overture was as before—we proceeded on to the next movement, in which the duality of giving and receiving pleasure was annihilated in the experience of pleasure itself, and two spirits reached a single cusp.

  Vraiment, for once it was but a single cusp, and for once, neither of us felt the need to essay or offer more. Which is not so much to say that we were sated as to say that in tantra, as in any other art, we both realized with the wisdom of our flesh, one does not mar a perfect miniature by attempting to blow it up into a work of epic proportions.

  “It would appear that yours is a lover’s spirit capable of surviving such power,” Pater said at length when we had covered ourselves and snuggled together in the dark. “Myself, I would not trust. Who, I wonder, is the real Gypsy, and who the real Joker?”

  “The two of us,” I said, strangely content now to lie in the arms of this man who would be leaving on the morrow.

  “I will be gone when you awake,” Pater said, as if reading my thoughts. “Better to say auf wiedersehen now than in a tearful morning, nē. I will cut a patch from your tunic before I go and leave you a patch of mine to sew into your sash, so that we will each wear a patch of the other’s karma in the fabric of our destinies.”

  Touched, I kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Leave me with one thing more,” I asked him. “Moussa is a kindernom given me by my parents in homage to the patron creature of an innocent childhood long since past. Give me then a true name for the Child of Fortune of the road, and I in turn will promise not to assume it until I am worthy, which is to say until I have earned my first coin as a ruespieler. Thereafter, I will be the name you have given me until we meet again or forever, whichever comes first.”

  “A name for the ruespieler you will one day be…?” Pater said thoughtfully. “Bien, I dub thee Sunshine, light of the world and Lucifer’s daughter, a star among many but equal to all, and the sacramental wafer of the Children of Fortune of the Age of Space.”

  “Sunshine…” I muttered sleepily. “It seems rather an extravagant name.”

  “Would I name you for anything less than glory? Sunshine you will be when you are ready to shine forth in the dark.”

  Those are the last words I remember him speaking that night, though no doubt there were less coherent endearments muttered in that hypnagogic limbo of lost memory occluded by the impending onset of sleep.

  True to his word, when I awoke, the King of the Gypsies and the Prince of the Jokers had vanished from my world.

  11

  Our immediate general response as Gypsy Jokers on the morrow of Pater Pan’s departure was to make a valiant effort to carry on in the spirit of the tribe, both in homage to his legend, and out of a certain twisted quest for exoneration in his eyes that was not without its aspect of psychic vengeance. Which is to say we developed the retrospective perception that our missing protector and patron had never really worked at any of the enterprises we had established save as founder and inspirational dilettante. Were we ourselves not true Children of Fortune, vraiment were we not Gypsy Jokers? Surely we could maintain the spirit and commerce of the carnival on our own!

  Naturellement, in moments of reflection even at the time, I understood all too well that the wound which Pater’s departure had inflicted on our spirits was designed to produce precisely this response. Nor could I deny the justice in the challenge. If we were unable to be Gypsy Jokers without Pater Pan, how could we have counted ourselves worthy of being Gypsy Jokers with him?

  And indeed for a time, to our credit, we succeeded in maintaining our enterprises by our own efforts. Ruespielers, hawkers, and buskers ventured forth as before, the tents of our caravanserei continued to draw customers for tantric performances, games of chance, and entertainments, and craftsmen continued to produce their wares.

  Vraiment, it appeared that Pater’s departure had truly served to teach the lesson he had intended. Whether what happened next was another koan prepared for our rough-hewn edification by Pater Pan or whether it was a malfunction of his scenario is difficult to clarify even in retrospect, for it hinged upon the peculiarly Edojin creative ambiguity towards matters of legal philosophy.

  As I have said, the erection of Child of Fortune favelas was supposedly proscribed on Edoku, or at least as proscribed as anything short of violence or outright rapine could get. Indeed as far as anyone knew, the encampment of the Gypsy Jokers was the sole exception to this mandate, and as to how Pater Pan had cozened the Edojin into granting it, this was as great a mystery among us as the means whereby the Edojin enforced their displeasure against potential encampments of other tribes.

  For if I have failed in the course of this narrative to adequately describe or even mention the governing councils and law enforcement officials of Great Edoku, it is not out of oversight or sloth. From the perspective of the Child of Fortune, such councils and officials were entirely nonexistent, since one never perceived such personages or their policies in evidence. Enforcement of the civilized niceties simply occurred; the apprehension and punishment of thieves and pickpockets by impromptu posses which Pater had turned into a remunerative enterprise seemed to be the general model of how the body politic of Edoku dealt with miscreants.

  As to how the encampment of the Gypsy Jokers had become selfed to the social immune system of the body politic of Edoku, the subtlety of Pater Pan’s politicking only began to emerge into view as matters began to deteriorate in its absence.

  Within a week of the Mardi Gras parade, the custom of the encampment, far from being augmented by the mythos of this event, began to measurably decline. This was most pronounced when it came to the products of the craftsmen, which all at once seemed to be out of favor. Even the jewelry of Ali went begging for customers at reduced prices at his stand in the encampment, and it soon began to seem pointless for me to try to peddle it in the streets and parks.

  The quality and artistry of our crafts had not declined, but alas, they had never found favor on the basis of same in the first place. Rather they had been emblematic artifacts of the treasured quaintness and romantic spirit of the Child of Fortune, to whom one gave ruegelt as an act of fond remembrance to one’s own wanderjahr.

  Perhaps Pater had been too cunning for our own good, for his own mythos had been such a selling point of our mystique that when it abandoned that mystique in public, our quaintness lost its wu, we were once more perceived as scruffy urchins, and
trinkets that had once been votive items in the cult of our spirit were now regarded by the Edojin as tawdry junk.

  It was not long thereafter that our tantric tableaus began to play to empty tents, and even those inviting participation began to lose their trade. For once the spirit of the Child of Fortune lost its currency as a stylistic mode, the Child of Fortune was no longer a popular fantasy of the erotic imagination. And on Edoku, where every fantasy of the imagination was made manifest, we could hardly compete with the thousand-and-one delights on the basis of our artistry alone.

  As for solo tantric performance, which when all was said and done had been my only reliable source of ruegelt, a night in a tent pretending you were once more a Child of Fortune or an al fresco adventure with same upon momentary whim in the nearest garden, once they were no longer considered wu, became acts of esthetic barbarity.

  Well did I come during this devolution to understand the reticence of lordly tribesmen to be observed by denizens of the Public Service Stations partaking of fressen bars! The only of our enterprises that retained some vitality was the vending of finger food from trays, for even the Edojin developed instant cravings for a snack, and would weigh not heavily esthetic judgments if the smell of same reached a hungry palate.

  Soon, therefore, our cooks were importuned by hordes of their indigent comrades and lovers, for there was hardly anyone in the encampment who did not have a claim of friendship with one cook or another as I did with Dani. How could he stand idly by and gain profit by peddling his dim sum to the Edojin while I was reduced to choking down fressen? How could he refuse similar alms to anyone else with the same moral claim? How could any true Gypsy Joker see another, and by extension his whole tribe, humiliated in the Public Service Stations when he had the means and the art to prevent his fellow tribesmen from descending to fressen?

  And indeed, at first our noble artistes de cuisine could not. Instead of devoting their attentions to selling their fare for ruegelt, they volunteered their efforts to the feeding of their fellows without thought of gain. But alas, without the infusion of ruegelt into this closed economic ecology, there was no way to purchase the ingredients to produce free meals.