Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  My mood, au contraire, was anything but jocular as I trailed after these callow creatures while they capered through the corridors, bounced about in zero-gravity dream chambers, engaged in mock combat in the chamber filled with azure fluff, pulled faces within the spherical mirror, performed obscene pantomimes in the chamber of ersatz human flesh, and in general treated the venues in which Guy and I had made love in a manner which cast little credit on the romantic spirit of the male of our species, at least in the eyes of this observer of the opposite gender.

  Moreover, once the romantic ambiance of the dream chambers had been destroyed by this adolescent male desecration, I began to perceive what, at least under the influence of the psychotropic, seemed the less wholesome aspect of the very concept of the dream chamber itself. For just as elaborate tantric tableaus that would ordinarily arouse the erotic imagination may come to seem mechanical and even disgustingly perverse to a viewer whose libidinal energies have for one reason or another been forced into dormancy, so did these dream chambers come to seem like the pathetic stratagems whereby jades might seek to arouse memories of the natural man or natural woman they had long since lost. Which is to say that once the chemical and the actions of my jejune companions had contrived to rob me of all possibility of enjoying the effects of the dream chambers, I could perceive nothing but the empty artifice of the means of their production.

  In short, I fell into a cafard of spiritual angst which did little to enhance my present appreciation of Guy Vlad Boca. Under the influence of comrades such as Raul and Imre, and the chemical kiss of a surfeit of toxicants, my prince seemed to be turning into a frog.

  For the first time since he had rescued me from penury and dashingly swept me up and away into the floating cultura, I began to make invidious comparisons between Pater Pan and his noble vision of the Yellow Brick Road and Guy Vlad Boca, whose self-declared highest vision was amusement, between the paucity of funds and wealth of spirit I had known as a Gypsy Joker and what I had begun to perceive as the wealth of funds and paucity of spirit of the floating cultura, my Merchant Prince lover, vraiment by this time myself for finding myself here.

  But to his credit, and mayhap to the credit of the puissance of the psychedelic as well, Guy sensed my growing discomfort of spirit. As Imre wandered aimlessly up the corridor a few paces ahead of us, he caught my eye, read what was written therein, or at any rate scanned the general gist of it, favored me with one of those gay smiles of his, and nodded in conspiratorial agreement.

  “Vraiment, these jejune frolics are no longer amusing,” he said. “Come, let us repair to the grand salon and join the fete.”

  I nodded my agreement, then nodded once more in the direction of Imre, nuancing the gesture with but the slightest flare of my nostrils. This too Guy read quite fluently, shrugging with only the corners of his mouth.

  And so, leaving Imre to his own devices, we departed the dream chamber deck and made our way to the grand salon, at last shed of what to me had become our unwelcome entourage, and for the moment at least, if with his luster slightly tarnished, Guy Vlad Boca had once more proven himself my prince.

  In the grand salon, the fete was in full flower, which is to say this venue was, as it seemed to be at every hour, well-stocked with Honored Passengers; sipping elegantly at wines, nibbling at dainties, judiciously inhaling toxicants far less powerful than what we had become accustomed to in our private séances, and discoursing in little groups on subjects which, as always, seemed abstruse beyond either my ready comprehension or real interest, empty of any real passion, and possessed, therefore, of a level of civilized sophistication which I paradoxically envied, though of course I could not then admit it to myself.

  As usual, none of these elder elegances were particularly eager to include jejune Children of Fortune such as ourselves in their conversations, and so Guy and I seated ourselves on a chaise in the midst of the fete yet also psychically distanced from it, all the more so on this occasion courtesy of our chemically enhanced perception thereof, which, at least for my part, was not exactly conducive to an empathetic appreciation of same.

  So we secured tall fluted glasses of wine from a passing floater and sat there sipping languidly at them with our noses in the air in what at least to us was drôle parody of the manners of the Honored Passengers, though no doubt the humor thereof was lost on everyone but ourselves.

  “In all veracity, Guy,” I inquired in a supercilious tone not untinged with a certain envious contempt, “as a mage of the subject famed throughout the far-flung worlds of men, do you truly find our present company as perfectly amusing as they seem to find themselves?”

  “In as much veracity as I am presently capable of mustering, ma chère liebchen,” Guy replied more or less in kind, “I have never found anything as perfectly amusing as the floating cultura seems to find itself.”

  “Not even me?” I purred coyly.

  “Vraiment,” he said in a most peculiar tone, “not even myself!”

  “An admission I never thought to hear from the lips of Guy Vlad Boca!” I declared lightly.

  But Guy had suddenly become more somberly passionate than I had ever seen him. “Do you imagine that one whose spirit had already attained the nirvanic perfection of total amusement would so avidly pursue the same in the imperfectly amusing realm of maya as do I?” he said quite solemnly. “As do Imre and Raul? As do this noble company of Honored Passengers? Vraiment, as do we all, yourself not excluded, if truth be told.”

  Perhaps it was the psychedelic acting upon my own perceptions, perhaps it was the same speaking through Guy, or more likely the single spirit induced thereby moving through the two of us; at any rate, his entire countenance seemed to alter before my very eyes, and what I now beheld seemed to be his naked spirit unveiled, a spirit whose surface gaiety masked some darker passion of the soul, a deeper Guy than I had previously known, and therefore suddenly a creature of some mystery.

  “Who can deny that all human tales begin and end alike?” he said. “Beyond our birth is a nullity and beyond our death is a void, therefore all that we possess are the augenblicks between. Which in turn either amuse or do not. And so some seek wealth because it is more amusing than poverty, fame because it is more amusing than anonymity, power because it is more amusing than impotence, love because it is more amusing than loneliness, knowledge because it is more amusing than ignorance, sensual pleasure because it is more amusing than ennui, und so weiter. As for me, it is the moment of perfect amusement itself I seek no matter the means or consequence, for would not a single instant thereof transcend three quotidian centuries of anything less?”

  “Surely,” I said, “there must be more to life than that!”

  “Vraiment? Then tell me what…”

  “The perfection of the spirit…? The attainment of total clarity of consciousness…?”

  “La même chose!” Guy exclaimed. “Precisely the state of which I speak! Let destiny grant me only one eternal augenblick of such total clarity of consciousness! For would not such a nirvanic moment render all that follows and precedes entirely superfluous? For this single instant of perfect amusement, would I trade all and risk all, for to a being who has reached this ultima Thule, are not all other lesser amusements merely the snares of timebound maya?”

  But far from firing my spirit with his own murky and elusive passion, the confluence of Guy’s words with the peaking of the psychotropic and the venue in which I found myself had all combined to tear away the illusions of intellect and emotion, artifice and spirit, vraiment of matter and energy themselves, to reveal not that nirvanic union with the atman of which the gurus of all schools do speak, but that which is revealed when the last layer of an onion is finally peeled away, to wit, absolute nothing, the cruel perfection of the Void. In that horrendous moment of entirely useless satori, I could perceive my own body as nothing more than a concatenation of cellular modules, and the cells as replications of molecular patterns, and the molecules as assemblages of atoms, and the
atoms as clouds of particles, and the particles as mere waves of unlikely probability, and the probability as no more than momentary perturbations of a singular inevitability, and that inevitability was—was—was a nothingness whose concept the spirit dared not grasp.

  From this perspective of unwholesome clarity, in which the grand salon and all within stood revealed as naught but illusion down to the finest subatomic particles, vraiment in which our very spirits seemed to conjure themselves improbably out of the Void, I suddenly understood all too well the nature of my faux pas at the Domo’s table.

  “Je comprends…” I whispered.

  “Vraiment,” said Guy. “We must seek out that perfect moment when time stands still…”

  But I was hardly cognizant of even the music of his voice, let alone the import of his words, lost as I was in my own baleful vision, and the babblement thereof. “No wonder the floating cultura eschews all discourse, art, or vision which confronts…which confronts…”

  “…that which the ancient sages called the Tao, and the Flower Children the Ego’s Glorious Death…”

  “…all the artifice, all the ersatz firmament and bonsaied mythical creatures of the vivarium…”

  “…the mutual tantric cusp, the moment of mortal danger, the ultimate amplification of the biochemistry of consciousness…”

  It was all so horribly obvious. Just as the Void within that was now gobbling up my spirit was held back only by our usual heroic act of willful ignorance, so was the Great and Lonely Void beyond the hull of this ship held back only by the willful ignorance of the entirely artificial reality within.

  Vraiment, was not the very vertiginous nausea which now gripped my spirit precisely what the entire floating cultura was designed to avoid?

  “Vanity, vanity, it is as Einstein Sergei Chu declared, we are all benighted savages, without the courage to face the mystery at the dark heart of all our philosophies, whimpering and puling before the countenance of the Void!”

  “And all the rest is useless boredom and maya’s lies!”

  “Quelle horror!”

  “Must we be subjected to this display?”

  “Return these addled creatures to the mental retreat from whence they came!”

  All at once my consciousness was quite abruptly returned to the quotidian realm, where I perceived to my abashed chagrin that Guy and I had been sitting there hunched forward on our chaise, staring not at each other so much as through each other, babbling our mutually incomprehensible toxicated philosophies louder and louder, until we were fairly shouting, until, indeed, our unseemly public exhibition had at last provoked an equally strident public outcry against us.

  Now we sat there like vile specimens, gazed upon by every disdainful and haughty eye, the objects of scores of curling lips and wrinkled noses, and subject to the lordly chastisement of a long loud silence.

  I looked at Guy. Guy looked at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I stole a sidelong glance about the grand salon, where now, having stilled the unseemly tumult with their opprobrium, the Honored Passengers had once again turned their backs on the source thereof and resumed their rounds of assignations, imbibements, and rarefied discourse.

  Vraiment, the horrid satori had passed. But not the memory trace thereof entire.

  Guy shrugged. “Once more we would seem to have played the buffoons,” he said with a fey little smile. “But alas, for this performance no ruegelt would seem to be forthcoming.”

  “We both seem prone, each in our way, to a tendency to declaim from on high when the spirit moves us without regard to social seemliness,” I owned.

  Guy peered into my eyes intently for a moment, rolled his own about as if regarding the precincts in which we found ourselves, favored me with a little wink, and then became the old gay Guy once more. “Yet as the ancient wit had it, in vino veritas, nicht wahr!” he declared. “For who is social seemliness to say that seers and psychonauts such as ourselves babble not the truth?”

  “Je ne sais pas, Guy,” I admitted. “For who is to even say if we were proclaiming the same vision?”

  Guy took my hand in his, lifted my chin with his hand, and kissed me lightly as he brought me to my feet. “Only you and I, nē?” he said. “Do we not in this very moment agree that this soirée has lost its power to amuse? Do not our two hearts now beat as one?”

  I regarded once more the fete proceeding all around us, the great and glorious company of the floating cultura, the crème de la crème of our Second Starfaring Age, the haut monde to which a young daughter of Nouvelle Orlean had not so long ago avidly aspired and which regarded me and mine as callow and jejune.

  “Vraiment it has,” I said, making myself smile as I looked back at Guy, whose amorous interest was made quite frankly plain. “Mayhap they do.”

  Yet even as I clasped his hand and readily enough allowed him to lead me to our boudoir, I found myself fingering the sash I wore about my waist, and somehow the patchwork cloth thereof seemed nearer and dearer than it ever had before.

  While the subsequent passage d’amour with Guy and a good ten hours of untrammeled sleep served to purge both the chemical from my metabolism and the metaphysical angst induced thereby from my spirit, in truth the divertissements of the voyage chez Grand Palais and those which Guy, Raul, and Imre continued to pursue together, cloyed from that moment on.

  For while the chemically induced perception of the universe as a spiritually daunting void of nullity and ourselves as but illusory perturbations therein passed with the figurative dawn, the memory of the experience did not entirely fade.

  In truth, as I knew even then, the weltanschauung which had so consumed my soul with dread under the influence of the psychotropic had been little more than the heightened subjective apprehension of the rudiments of quantum cosmology which we are all taught as children. Vraiment, our cells are composed of molecules, the molecules of atoms, the atoms of particles, and the particles of subparticles which diminish in mass, duration, and probability under dissection until one indeed discovers that the mass-energy cosmos is conjured into being out of theoretical ultimate particles of zero mass, zero duration, and zero probability.

  But in the cold clear light of dawn, what of it? If all creation is but a cosmic ruespieler’s tale whereby the characters conjure themselves out of their own imagination, then all that should concern the spirit is the art of the story or the lack thereof, nē.

  Which is to say that it was the style of the tale the floating cultura chose to live out for itself which now cloyed in the light of my memory of the satoric revelation of the obvious. For had not I stared full-face into the countenance of what all this artifice was meant to deny, and escaped with nothing worse than a certain period of angst and terror? How could I therefore regard these Honored Passengers, who viewed me as callow, as the crown of creation they so obviously considered themselves? How could I regard the pavane from which I was barred by my lack of adult sophistication and urbanity as a vie to which I should aspire?

  Or, as Guy would no doubt have put it, where was the amusement to be found therein for a true Child of the spirit’s Fortune?

  As for the amusements that Guy, Raul, and Imre continued to pursue for the rest of the voyage to Belshazaar, as far as I was concerned, this was more of the same.

  The Honored Passengers surrounded themselves with an external environment of illusions crafted of matter and energy, while Guy, Raul, and Imre subsumed the reality of the Void beyond the hull and the Void within the spirit behind a series of illusions crafted of psychotropic alteration of the biochemical matrix containing the consciousness perceiving it. And woe unto that spirit should illusion misfire and reveal the very truth it was meant to deny!

  No doubt much of the metaphysical cogency of the foregoing derives from the more mature perceptions of the teller of the tale, rather than from those of the young girl who eschewed further ingestion of psychotropic substances of any puissance for the duration of the voyage through the Void and who spent her time wande
ring aimlessly through the divertissements of the Grand Palais in a state of ennui.

  I was surfeited with haute cuisine, bored with the passive consumption of art and performance, and certainement, I had had my fill of idle discourse, whether that of the elegant Honored Passengers or that of my so frequently toxicated companions. Only my desire for erotic dalliance with Guy was perforce enhanced, for of all the diversions offered up to pass the idle hours chez Grand Palais, this was the only one in which I might participate as an active agent.

  In short, what life aboard the Unicorn Garden, what the vie of the floating cultura, lacked, as far as I was then concerned, was adventure. I did not want to be entertained, I wanted to act. I did not want to perceive, I wanted to do.

  As to the nature of the adventure that I sought, as to what acts I imagined I wanted to perform, as to just what it was that I was consumed by the passion to do, this I knew not.

  I only knew that I was more than ready to debark from the Unicorn Garden and stand on the real surface of an unknown world once more. And so I spent the remainder of the voyage looking forward to our arrival on Belshazaar, whatever the nature of that planet might be. Having arrived as an ignorant ingenue on Great Edoku, having gained access to the Gypsy Jokers by my own wit, having survived as a Child of Fortune on this most sophisticated of the worlds of men, having at last experienced the floating cultura itself and found it wanting, naturellement I assumed that experience had prepared me for anything.

  Alas, once more I was to be proven a naif.

  14

  It may seem strange that I had given so little thought to what might await me on Belshazaar before I embarked on the journey thereto, and stranger still that I did not choose to fill my surfeit of idle hours aboard the Unicorn Garden with more diligent study of the planet which represented the light at the end of my tunnel of ennui.

  In the first case, I had cared little about the goal of the journey because my goal was the journey itself, which is to say escape from the penury of Edoku into what I had always imagined to be the fascinating vie of the floating cultura. In a curious way, this state of mind was not unlike that of the instance of the second part, wherein my main passion was to escape the Grand Palais as I had escaped poverty, and that to which I was escaping seemed to matter a good deal less than the change of scene itself.