Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  “Sniff,” she commanded, opening a vial of clear fluid and thrusting it under my nostrils. I sniffed.

  “Spiel.”

  This was easier said than done. A smoky-sweet odor went directly to the back of my brain, where it ignited a ravenous hunger for some specific food I had never encountered. “Total hunger,” I said. “For something quite specific that I’ve never encountered, it’s quite difficult to try to explain…”

  “Superfluous also…Inhale…Spiel…”

  The next vial seemed to have no odor at all, but I was abruptly consumed by a raging lust, or more precisely a genital demand for sexual relief completely divorced from my psychic state, which could not have been less interested in such matters at the time.

  And so it went. In order to have six units credited to my chip, I was required to sniff, inhale, quaff, or touch something like a dozen substances, and report as laconically as possible on the psychesomic effects thereof. These ranged from narcoleptic torpor to a state of nervous excitation that had me fairly vibrating in my seat, from a sudden loss of color vision to a state of visual perception in which everything glowed with its own inner light, from ravenous hunger, cellular thirst, and sexual lust to the absolute conviction that I had become a disembodied spirit.

  At the conclusion of this first job of work as a psychonaut, I reeled out into the bleak streets of Ciudad Pallas in a state of some discombobulation, for though these outré psychic states had all been quite transitory, the memory traces of this dizzying succession of narrowly focused psychic states had loosened my moorings to quotidian consciousness to the point where it took some time to return to reality ordinaire.

  Guy, however, assumed a critical air. “Trivial substances,” he said loftily. “I found none of it more than passingly amusing, did you?”

  “Not even that,” I admitted quite truthfully.

  He withdrew a sheet of paper from a pocket and studied whatever it was he had scrawled thereon. “While they were crediting your chip, I learned of several other laboratories seeking psychonauts today,” he said. “Let us see if the next one offers better fare…”

  So saying, he fairly dragged me into the next unoccupied floatcab and we were off to another laboratory, if not exactly against my will, then certainement not with my avid approval either, for if truth be told, I was still in no condition to strongly approve or strongly protest anything.

  To Guy’s growing consternation, we were rejected as subjects by the other four laboratories we visited on that first day in Ciudad Pallas, for apparently the rapid succession of substances we had tested at the first had left sufficient aftereffects in our metabolisms to render us unfit as biochemical tabulae rasas at least until the next morning.

  As far as Guy was concerned though, the time was not entirely wasted, for while we waited in the anterooms of the various laboratories with our fellow would-be psychonauts, he questioned the more experienced members of this profession, or at any rate those capable of coherent discourse, on the inner lore of the trade.

  Apparently the laboratories were not considered the prime venues of employment. For one thing, most of them were given over to the initial screening of the latest psychotropics to emerge from the research domes, so that more often than not one’s time was wasted on psychotropics of trivial effect. For another, they were rather mingy when it came to pay scales. Furthermore, for the modest wage they offered, one was usually subjected to a whole battery of substances, which wreaked sufficient confusion to the fine detail of the metabolism to make it rather unlikely that one would be accepted as a fit subject by more than one laboratory in the same day.

  “The mental retreats are much to be preferred,” Guy was told by one of the more experienced—which is to say gaunter, older, and more hollow-eyed—psychonauts. “Primero, they offer only one psychotropic per diem. Segundo, they perform molecular adjustments on the extracts, so that the experience is likely to be enhanced. Tercero, the pay is much better, due to the enhanced risk. Al fin, should…unexpected difficulties arise, they have the facilities and commitment to restore one’s base consciousness to the extent possible, or at worst to care for those who are no longer fit to continue to follow the trade.”

  Naturellement, the competition for these choicest and most remunerative positions was somewhat severe, but, we were assured, the fact that we were relatively naive subjects would count heavily in our favor for several weeks, which is to say until that advantageous situation no longer obtained.

  His mood considerably buoyed by this knowledge, Guy picked diffidently at the undistinguished dinner we consumed in our suite before retiring, nor was his tantric performance anything more than perfunctory, for his attention was on the morrow throughout, and he kept up a nearly continuous babble on the subject of mental retreats and psychotropics even as we lay in each other’s arms.

  For my part, I had already had more than enough of Ciudad Pallas before I had even set foot on its unappetizing streets, my initial experience as a psychonaut had done little to convince me that I had found my true calling, and the society of the laboratory waiting rooms had not exactly impressed me with its sparkle and wit.

  As for the effect this venue seemed to have on my lover, this seemed to resemble that of the company of Raul and Imre writ large, with the added disadvantage that Ciudad Pallas lacked even the esthetic divertissements of the Grand Palais of the Unicorn Garden.

  And alas, my lover was also my benefactor, which is to say my sole source of funds save what I might earn at the psychonaut’s trade, for the possibility of picking up my nascent career as a ruespieler seemed entirely out of the question here, nor did I imagine I could earn much ruegelt as a tantric performer in Ciudad Pallas either. The unpleasant truth of the matter was that I was trapped in this wretched city until Guy no longer found it amusing or until I could secure enough funds of my own to become an economic free agent. And in Ciudad Pallas, there seemed to be only one way to accomplish that.

  So I saw no alternative to accompanying Guy the next morning to one of the mental retreats in which the city abounded. And indeed my initial impression of this establishment did much to raise my spirits, for, of course, that was precisely what the design and decor thereof were artfully crafted to do.

  The mental retreat was a dome atop a plain gray cube, and from without, it presented no more a pleasing aspect than any other building in Ciudad Pallas. Within, however, it was an entirely different matter. The dome was of transparent glass and it enclosed a large central courtyard around which the dormitories, offices, and laboratories of the mental retreat were constructed. This central atrium put me in mind of the vivarium of the Unicorn Garden, save that the natural sky was visible through the dome, and the style of the garden it contained was quite simple, consisting merely of some ordinary trees of several terrestrial species, an expanse of lawn, beds of flowers, a modest fountain, and a sprinkling of wooden benches.

  The interior hallways, the room in which we were interviewed, and the chamber in which the psychotropics were administered, were all paneled in rough-grained wood, ceilings were painted a deep blue, and forest-green carpeting abounded.

  All in all, an ambiance of ease and tranquility had been successfully created within these cloistered walls, and, moreover, the functionaries of the mental retreat seemed to take care to dress in a congruent style, in flowing garments of either natural browns and greens or gay primary colors. As for those who, by their abstracted airs and lack of attention to personal grooming, appeared to be long-term habitués of the mental retreat, these were dressed in a similar style, and were permitted to roam the corridors and garden at leisure.

  The only sour note was struck by the usual denizens of the waiting room, who appeared no different from their compatriots of the same venues in the laboratories.

  After the usual metabolic screening process, Guy and I were accepted as subjects and offered twenty-five credit units apiece to test what was described as a single promising substance. This was indeed a far cry
from the rates that seemed to prevail in the laboratories, and even I therefore agreed with some enthusiasm, tempered only by the fact that, as usual, we were kept in the dark about the experience we were about to undergo in order not to skew our reactions with expectations.

  My trepidation increased however when Guy, myself, and the four other psychonauts who had been selected for the day’s labor, were led away into separate private cubicles by our own individual functionaries.

  Mine was good enough to ask my name and introduce himself as Doctor-Professor Sigisimund Farben Bruna, a nicety absent from the commerce of the laboratories, though the courtesies did not extend to an exchange of name tales. Electrodes were affixed to my temples, a probe inserted into a vein, and another into my vaginal cavity, but rather than leading to cumbersome stationary machineries, the wires therefrom lead to a cunning little portable unit fastened to my waist by a belt.

  “You will be free to wander the grounds, Sunshine,” the Doctor-Professor told me in a warm, somewhat syrupy voice, as if he were a thespian playing the part of himself. “I will accompany you, and we will converse freely.”

  “That is the entire process?” I asked somewhat dubiously.

  He favored me with a friendly smile that also seemed to owe something to conscious craft, though perhaps it was merely his ice-blue eyes and somewhat overdignified visage combined with my own natural unease which created the impression of a kind of professional sincerity. “But of course changes in your physiology will also be monitored,” he said, “so that your anecdotal reportage may be temporally correlated therewith. Thus, given enough subjects, do we develop a more or less precise profile of the psychic states generated by stepwise biochemical alterations caused by the substance in question.”

  “Which is?”

  “A floral extract of some molecular complexity in which certain speculative modifications have been made,” he said vaguely, producing a small vial of clear blue fluid. “We commence, ja?”

  I shrugged somewhat fatalistically and quaffed the potion, which had a not unpleasant smoky-sweet savor, if somewhat contaminated by a tooth-tingling metallic aftertaste.

  “And now…?” I inquired.

  “A stroll in the garden, ja?” suggested the Doctor-Professor. “We have reason to believe that perambulation expedites metabolic absorption.”

  And so we repaired to the garden, where other such functionaries, be they Doctor-Professors or not, were shepherding other psychonauts, Guy among them, taking pains, or so it seemed, to keep us all at a considerable distance from each other.

  While awaiting I knew not what, I sought to engage the Doctor-Professor in discourse upon the subject of his professional interests, seeking thereby to gain some further knowledge of the true nature of the peculiar establishment in which I now found myself. “This place styles itself a mental retreat; are you therefore a Healer of malfunctioning psyches?”

  He shrugged somewhat owlishly. “An obsolete concept, nicht wahr,” he declared. “Here we delude ourselves not that there exists a singular gestalt of healthy human consciousness toward which all variant states need be bent by our art. Au contraire, our aim is to develop a broad enough palette of psychotropics so that any given psychic state may be produced to order.”

  “Je ne sais pas…”

  “One client enters a mental retreat in a cafard of egoless fragmentation, ja, and we are commissioned to reattach his psyche to a unified perception of the quotidian realm. Aber ein anderer may enter with an excessive ego-grounding in the wheel of maya and commission us to produce a psychic state wherein that ego is dissolved into nirvanic union with the atman. Or indeed we may be commissioned to increase the availability of certain arcane psychic gestalts to serve economic and social necessities…”

  “Such as?”

  “Most lucrative of all is the obvious need for a psychotropic which would reliably induce in neutral female subjects the rare psychic gestalt of the Void Pilot personality, for vraiment, that would usher in a golden era which might fairly be called the Third Starfaring Age,” he enthused. “As things stand now, we must search the mental retreats and demimondes for naturally occurring anorexic addictive personalities of the required extremity, and so unfortunately rare is this syndrome that we never have more than two hundred or so in active service, ja, and this process is to the reliable scientific production of Void Pilots as ancient alchemy is to quantum chemistry, nicht wahr…”

  He brought himself up short and stared at me narrowly, as if suddenly realizing that he had wandered into regions of discourse best not broached to experimental subjects such as myself. And indeed such frankness did little to enhance his moral stature or that of the mental retreats of Ciudad Pallas in my eyes, nor did it exactly increase my confidence in his concern for the personal well-being of experimental subjects or patients.

  There was something odious, or so it seemed to me, about the notion of producing any given state of consciousness to order, for the question then arose as to whose specifications were to be followed. And judging from his unwholesome enthusiasm for the ghastly conceit of artificially creating the miserable state of psychic dysfunction necessary to the calling of Void Pilot in order to facilitate interstellar commerce, not to say enhance his own, these specifications need not be at all conducive to the personal happiness of the subject…or victim.

  Which is to say that the style of consciousness induced by his words in my own being was that of a certain dread. For what was about to happen to me?

  Vraiment, this thought had no sooner taken form in my brain than I became aware that something was happening.

  A strange hollow tingling sensation was slowly spreading up my back and then along my limbs from a point of focus which seemed to be located in the chakra at the base of my spine. Not so much a loss of sensation as a shift in my perception of the kinesthetic image of my own body, as if my spine, and then the bones of my limbs, and then the flesh encasing them, were effervescing into some clear ectoplasmic substance, transparent not so much to sight as to my body’s internal kinesthetic senses…

  “The effects begin, ja?” the Doctor-Professor said, studying me intently. “Speak, schnell bitte, before the next stage commences!”

  “Je ne sais pas…” I stammered in no little trepidation. “I…I seem to be evaporating…my flesh is turning into air…into liquid crystal…into…into…”

  “Ach gut! Nominal thusfar!”

  Nominal? The effect was spreading more rapidly every moment. My arms and legs, then my hands and feet, became ethereal unreality, as transparent to kinesthetic perception as clear glass is to light. Vraiment, I could stand, I could flex my feet, move my fingers, yet somehow, to some sense that was neither feeling nor sight, nor even volitional control, they were not there…

  “Spiel! Recite! Speak, bitte, we must have data!”

  “I’m dissolving!” I cried in no little terror. “I’m fading away!” For now my entire body seemed to have ectoplasmated into nothingness from the point of view of the kinesthetic centers of my brain. Though I could see it, and move it, and even feel the pressure of the ground beneath the soles of my feet, in some elusive fashion, my consciousness had retreated up the column of my spine to the citadel of my brain, as if my spirit were dissociating itself from the corporeal matrix in which it arose…

  “More data! More data!” the Doctor-Professor demanded. “This is excellent thusfar!”

  “The light! The light!” I cried in panic, and then in panic not unalloyed with a certain tremulous wonder, for as the dissolving of kinesthetic awareness began to engulf my head like some amoeboid creature spreading its protoplasm from the base of my neck, through my jaw, up my cheekbones, the green of the trees, the brown of their trunks, the reds and blues and yellows of the beds of flowers, the cerulean tint of the sky, vraiment even the sallow skin-tones of the Doctor-Professor, began to take on a luminous glow, seemed to pulse and shimmer, then to take on an independent substance, as I became little more than the impalpable sen
sorium against which they impinged…

  “Speak! Speak! Attempt coherence, bitte!”

  “Oh! Oh! Oh! I can feel them!” I moaned. For indeed I—insofar as an “I” still remained—no longer sensed the brilliant colors as hues pertaining to the surfaces of trees, faces, flowers, or sky, but as independent entities of light magically transmuted into matter, as living organisms engulfing my nonexistent body, as a garment of Cloth of Many Colors, or rather Cloth of Many Touches, for somehow sight had transmuted itself into feeling, and feeling to caresses, and caresses to…to…

  “Speak! Speak! Schiess, why must it always be thusly at the most critical stage!”

  But I could not speak. For there was no longer any “I.” There was only a perfect clear emptiness where that “I” had been and a skin of exquisite multicolored flame surrounding it. Vraiment, a skin of kundalinic fire, for as light had become touch, so touch had become tantric ecstasy. All that now existed in the space where I had been was a living mantle of orgasmic substance, a transcendent being that was naught but an interface of orgasm, a flaming aura of static ecstasy burning through the very fabric of space and time.

  How long did I remain in this egoless ecstatic state? While I was later to learn that the duration of the experiment was several hours, such measurements had no meaning whatsoever in the subjective realm thereof. For there was neither a timebound ego to measure the hours nor any interface between objective reality and the subjective perception thereof.

  Suffice it to say that after some interval quotidian awareness returned to a Sunshine Shasta Leonardo who found herself supine upon a lawn under a blue domed sky, inhaling the effluvia of her own sweat as she breathed in ragged gasps and gazing with unfocused vision into the face of Doctor-Professor Sigisimund Farben Bruna shaking his head in rueful dissatisfaction and appraising her with a coldly professional eye.

  “I suppose you have earned your twenty-five credit units,” this worthy owned grudgingly. “Though I would pay twice that amount for a subject capable of ingesting this substance and remaining coherent enough to tell the whole tale.”