Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  At length Dani and his fellow guildsmen saw that further such altruism would in any event be self-extinguishing in the form of bringing their ruin, and, rather than tell their friends and lovers that henceforth ye shall eat fressen and face their outrage, they slunk off in a body without the agonies of more formal farewells.

  Now all that we Gypsy Jokers had to distinguish ourselves from the commonality of the Publics were our emblematic Cloth of Many Colors and a desolate village of empty tents. The fressen we were forced to eat was spiced as well with the bile of shame, for in order to secure supplies of the loathsome substance without suffering the jibes of the masses of the Publics, we removed our tribal colors and came and went incognito.

  While in truth I for one certainly felt unjustly punished by fate for a shortcoming whose nature I could not fathom, indeed after eating enough fressen could even style myself the victim of Pater Pan’s malice, I for one also sensed that there was a satori in all this that transcended such niceties of moral expectation. For while it was easy enough to rail at the malignity of fate, to what agent of injustice could the outraged finger point? To Pater Pan, who had done nothing more evil than impart his spirit and lore and then leave it to us to carry the torch thereof forward? To the Edojin, whose greatest offense was that they no longer seemed to find us charming?

  Vraiment, once the moving finger began seeking out targets, only great feats of willful ignorance could prevent it from pointing within.

  Certainement, we had all come to rely far too much on Pater Pan and far too little on ourselves for our initiative, and by the time the cooks had left the encampment, all of us who found ourselves forced to subsist on fressen when left to our own independent devices had quite absorbed this lesson.

  For myself, this was not so much a lesson in humility as a lesson in my own lack of necessary hubris, which is to say chutzpah, for Pater had left me the name of Sunshine for my career as a ruespieler, and had told me aspects of his tale that were not at all current in the repertoires of others. Moreover, I had fairly well memorized the gists of a dozen or so tales, and one would have thought that someone reduced to fressen would have been a good deal less punctilious about originality.

  Yet somehow I never summoned up the courage to stand on a crowded street and begin to declaim. I, who had blarneyed the King of the Gypsy Jokers out of one hundred coins of ruegelt, could not bring myself to address the Edojin in search of far pettier sums!

  In truth I do now believe we were all somewhat overharsh in our self-judgments and became more so the longer we lingered in our spiritless encampment, for though at the time we could not quite perceive it, the true lesson that we were being taught was not so much that we were incompetent sloths as that we were still very new to the vie of the Child of Fortune. We had known nothing but the perfect befuddlement of the rube in a strange land, and then the first Golden Summer of our lives on the Yellow Brick Road, and what we were learning now was ultimately nothing more sinister than the final forced perception that all such Golden Summers eventually come to an end.

  I finally achieved this satori the night the ruespielers decided to quit the camp. I say we were all overharsh in our self-judgments, and the truth of it is that I was perhaps overharsh in chiding myself for lacking the courage to begin spieling, for certainement in those days it took great chutzpah for even the most artful and experienced of our ruespielers to address their tales to the Edojin. Indeed, more and more of them had given up trying.

  For if our crafts no longer had wu in their eyes, and our buskers no longer charmed, and even our tantric services were now considered nikulturni, how much less would the Edojin be inclined to donate ruegelt or even pause to listen to tales extolling a mythos whose trend had come and gone?

  As an intimate of many of the ruespielers, and moreover, one known to diligently admire and aspire to practice their art, I was invited to the convocation that was eventually held in one of the now vacant tents—or at least my attendance was not discouraged once I got wind of it.

  It was obvious at once that the generality of the meeting had been resolved before it began to quit the encampment and scatter to the winds while they still had a coin or two for the Rapide. Indeed, by this time, the cooks were not the only Gypsy Jokers who had departed. One by one, craftsmen, tantric artists, and street performers had drifted away to try their luck in other parts of Edoku where any Gypsy Joker was a legendary creature, so that by the time the ruespielers held their meeting, the tribe was down to half its number, and of these, the majority, like myself, were Children of Fortune without the marketable skills to believe that their prospects might be better elsewhere.

  One by one, ruespielers arose to announce their intention to seek fortune elsewhere. After no more than a half hour of this testimony, further reiteration of the obvious was clearly redundant, and the meeting broke up into a farewell party full of toxicated conversations.

  I bade farewell to Shane and Lance and other onetime lovers in something of a daze, yet a daze heightened and amplified by something more than social toxication. For I was bidding farewell to more than friends, lovers, and artists whose tales I admired; like it or not, I was also bidding farewell to all possibility of continuing the life which had so perfectly satisfied my spirit during the Golden Summer. Pater was gone, and the central magic of that time with him, I was no longer able to earn ruegelt as a tantric performer, and now, once the ruespielers were gone, I could no longer share that life of the intellect to which I had become fondly accustomed by dallying in their company.

  Yet, strange to tell, as the evening progressed I felt less and less desolated by this loss and more and more possessed by a peculiar elation, an elation whose source, under the circumstances, was impossible to find.

  Until, after several hours of aimless farewell fete, Shane Kol Barka became sufficiently inflamed by the moment and his own toxication to offer up as a valedictory yet another time-warped transmogrification of the tale of The Spark of the Ark, which it would seem, he extemporized on the spot for the occasion.

  “As all do know, when the First Starfaring Age ended, the way of life which had sparked the Arkies time out of mind went whirling down the onrushing black hole of the Second Starfaring Age as Void Ships began to speed between the worlds of men like the Rapide, ending the isolation of one planet from another and ending too any sane raison d’être for the great slow arkologies which were the Yellow Brick Road caravans of the Arkie generations…”

  He paused, inhaled more toxicant, and went on in an even more florid and hectoring tone. “Yet, think ye not that the Second Starfaring Age sprung full-blown from the brow of Jove nor that the Arkies folded their tents of an evening and gave up the ghost sans a certain rage against the dying of their light! For the great and now useless arkologies still existed, and with the scrap heap as the only other bidder, some Arkies were able to purchase for a song the arkologies in which they had once been happy coolies.

  “Alas for the most part theirs were pitiful and maudlin tales which hardly bear repeating, tales of the pathetic and indigent curators of a once noble spirit futilely attempting to keep alive a way of life whose time was long since past, and for the first few centuries of the Second Starfaring Age, deteriorated hulks of arkologies would drift into solar systems like ancient rusted ghosts, with their denizens long since expired from cryogenic failure or starvation, or worse, bearing a generation of babblers whose very humanity had been sapped by the slow depletion of the oxygen supply to their brains.

  “Yet as all here do know, the Spark of the Ark was not extinguished by the Second Starfaring Age. For it pleased Fortune that the King of the Gypsies was then an Arkie embarked on a slow voyage of exploration far beyond what was the furthest limits of the worlds of men when it began. For long centuries, he and a few comrades slumbered in cryogenic sleep while the arkology crept with its cargo of colonists towards the far virgin star that had been set as its goal by generations long dead, while unbeknownst and unseen all around them, th
e great Second Starfaring Age blossomed into full flower.

  “So when at last the arkology reached its preordained destination, voilà, it found itself not in orbit about a virgin world far from the homes of men, but orbiting Novi Mir itself, a bustling hub of the Second Starfaring Age which had been well-settled for centuries and which now lay well within the sphere of our species’ domestication.

  “Thus all aboard had been translated via space through time into a far future in which the Way they thought they would follow forever had long since passed into legend. Those Arkies who had been born and lived out their lives as the last generation of the arkology’s timestream became but one more tribe of fossils living out the shell of a dead dream, the very last Arkies, wandering from world to world in their Fliegende Hollander until their line expired.

  “But the King of the Gypsies, upon awakening like Barbarossa from what in his timestream was but a single night’s sleep, saw with the eyes of the true spirit and spoke thusly unto those who had slumbered through the centuries with him…”

  Shane paused, and stared out across our company as if we were those ancient Arkies, and when he declaimed again, it was as that Gypsy King of old, and mayhap another.

  “The days of our tribe are ended. Doomed are those fools who seek to live out a lost Golden Age, for by so doing they lose the very spirit which makes any age golden. Let us therefore not rail against the destiny that has flung us by our stiff necks beyond all hope of remaining what we once were. Rather let us embrace the unknown future with the spirit we embody, for the true Child of Fortune of whom our past personas were but one timebound avatar knows that the Yellow Brick Road is a journey with no final destination.”

  Shane Kol Barka quaffed a draught of wine, and when he continued, he was the teller of the tale again, delivering his peroration.

  “Thus spoke the Gypsy King of the Arkies, and by so saying became the Pied Piper of the new breed of Children of Fortune of our Second Starfaring Age. Thus spoke the King of the Gypsies and by so saying became the Prince of Jokers to our very own tribe, never truer to the spirit thereof than when he freed it from the maya we had clung to!”

  Somewhat shakily, he finished in a much more conversational mode, leaning up against the chair from which he had risen and speaking not so much as a ruespieler but as a fellow Gypsy Joker.

  “Thus speaks Shane Kol Barka, thus should we all speak now, and by so saying, free ourselves from our Golden Age as Gypsy Jokers and go forth into the streets of Great Edoku as naked beings in homage not to the maya but to the true spirit thereof.”

  While a bit short on plot and a bit long on toxicated didacticism, Shane Kol Barka’s tale spoke nonetheless to the mystery which had been confounding my heart. Why had my mourning for a perfect bliss now lost been slowly replaced by an excited expectation for the nameless? Why had this occurred upon learning that my days as a consort of the ruespielers were now perforce ended?

  Naturellement, because now the difficult and arduous decision to venture forth from the camp of the Gypsy Jokers as a lone traveler on the Yellow Brick Road had been removed from the realm of my own efforts. All that I might have wished to cling to had been yanked out from under me. I was now a free spirit, for I could choose no other course.

  Vraiment, like all satoris, this one in retrospect seems like a recitation of the obvious, for like all satoris, it only brought to full awareness in the moment of enlightenment those unfaced truths which were inherent in what one already knew.

  And like all true satoris, it sent the spirit forward into its corollaries. For by observing how an impromptu tale somewhat toxicatedly declaimed had chanced to crystallize a moment of clarity out of my own foggy occlusions, I had a glimpse of the highest achievement to which a ruespieler might aspire.

  It was enough to finally make me resolve that I would not linger in the nostalgia-haunted encampment of the Gypsy Jokers on the morrow when the ruespielers would be gone. Rather would I go forth into the streets of Edoku as a naked being and, come what may, summon up the courage to emulate my noble mentors.

  And indeed I did so. Or at least I stuffed my few belongings into my pack, made my farewells, and sweet-talked Ali out of sufficient ruegelt as a bon voyage gesture to finance a single Rapide trip to nowhere in particular.

  Indeed, rather than return to any venue on Edoku I had previously frequented, nowhere in particular was where I decided to go. Which is to say I simply ordered up the lengthy list of “Public Squares” on the screen of my Bubble, closed my eyes as the choices scrolled by, and chose the first destination to meet my eyes when I opened them. “Luzplatz,” I told the Rapide, and was forthwith carried thither.

  Immediately upon emerging from the Rapide station, which was hidden in plain sight as a strobing cube of blue brilliance, I was given cause to wonder what jape the trickster of random chance enjoyed at my expense, and given cause as well to realize to what extent I had forgotten that the vecino around the Gypsy Joker encampment was in no way any more typical of Great Edoku than any venue therein was typical of any other.

  All unknowing, I had chosen to expend my funds on a one-way Rapide translation to perhaps the most outré and daunting vecino I had yet seen on the planet.

  I was surrounded by tall buildings as stark in their recti-linearity and as pristine in their neutral surface texture as a forest of monoliths. Which is not to say that the buildings surrounding the Luzplatz were paragons of unadorned functionality, for every surface thereof was ablaze with a chaos of color to the point where at first glance they all appeared to be constructed not of matter but of energy, Some walls were simple glowing expanses of red or blue or hot yellow, others were covered with arabesque patterns, serpents, rivers of multicolored luminosity. Some displayed portraits of landscapes, or cities, or even people, done up in highly stylized modes with a palette of light. Some of these patterns and pictures remained static, some of them evolved slowly over time, and still others moved in real time like a holocine. No building seemed illumined in a style designed to blend harmoniously with that of any other, and even one wall of a single building might display lighting effects of three or four different modes.

  It was quite literally a dazzling spectacle, for the eye was hard-pressed to resolve this chaotic brilliance into coherent architectural modules; rather did it seem to me that I was surrounded by huge jagged curtains of light patched together out of assorted swatches of multicolored energy, not unlike the Cloth of Many Colors which I wore as a sash about my waist.

  The Luzplatz itself was a wide circular strogat formed by the convergence of half a dozen radial avenues. The outer perimeter thereof was girdled round with boutiques, tavernas, restaurants, and the entrances to hotels, all illumined in the same riotous mélange of styles. In the center of this circular platz thronged with people was a pièce de résistance of a bonsaied landscape suitable to the extravagance of the vecino of which it formed the axis.

  A moat of foaming water completely surrounded a heavily wooded island which rose to a mountain peak perhaps seventy meters tall. Everything was in perfect scale—tiny breakers lapping a fringe of white beach less than a meter wide, miniature trees as tall as my finger was long, barely visible rivulets of water tumbling down little canyons—yet the whole was dwarfed by the brazenly brilliant ersatz works of men surrounding it.

  But the effect of the bonsaied island was in no way diminished by this reversal of scale between the urban and natural realms, for the central peak thereof was a mighty miniature volcano in the permanent full glory of eruption. Red-hot lava flowed down its sides to send clouds of hissing steam billowing into the air where it touched the water of the moat. The crater glowed like a cauldron of starstuff, and at regular intervals blasted fusillades of brilliant bolides high in the air. Above it towered a boiling pillar of smoke which rose beyond the tops of the buildings into the black, star-speckled sky and which glowed an evil deep orange cast by the furnace of magma seething beneath it.

  Moreover, after my senses h
ad to some extent adjusted to all this perpetual light and fire, I saw that, shrunken with distance, was another spectacle curiously congruent with the endless volcanic display of the Luzplatz.

  The entire vecino lay under perpetually clear black starry night, all the better to set off its mad chaos of aggressively artificial illumination, and the surrounding geography was therefore veiled in darkness. The single exception was a full-scale snow-capped cone of a mountain shining in its own private blaze of noon in the far distance. The eye could tell at once that it was far off and huge rather than another nearby miniature, for on its somewhat flattened peak, suborbital rocket shuttles could be seen to take off and land on thin trails of fire, and so too did less flamboyant shuttles arrive and depart thereon to service Void Ships in orbit.

  The tame bonsaied volcano, the brilliantly lit buildings towering over it, the gateway to the stars in turn dwarfed by the perspective of distance, it all seemed designed to make some elusive philosophical statement, whose inner esthetic, alas, seemed entirely ambiguous to any but the Edojin.

  Suffice it to say that all at once I found myself a rube in Xanadu once more, a Child of Fortune ordinaire among many, a stranger once more in Great and unfathomable Edoku.

  There were several Publics in the immediate vecino of the Luzplatz, and despite initial appearances, a short walk in any direction was sufficient to take me to any one of several different styles of parkland and garden in which to sleep. In this arrondissement, as elsewhere on Edoku, my simple animal needs presented no practical problems.

  Indeed, had I wished, no doubt I could have satisfied less basic needs in the Publics of the Luzplatz, for during my brief forays therein, I soon enough learned that the organized tribes in this vecino were few and mainly devoted to the pickpocket’s and pilferer’s trades, while the mystique of the Gypsy Jokers was far from unknown. I had only to wear my Cloth of Many Colors to be immediately accounted an aristocrat in these circles, albeit a somewhat fallen one. On the other hand, knowledgeable as I had become in the various enterprises of the streets in comparison with these greeners, I could have concealed my tribal identity and no doubt speedily organized my own little tribe with myself as domo.