Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  Guy’s reaction to this romantic extravagance was to shrug, and own: “Très simpatico for the devotee of bucolic pleasures, but as for urbane and sophisticated spirits like ourselves, surely you jest?”

  “How can you not be possessed of the passion to hie yourself there at once?” I said as evenly as I could, choking back my consternation at his obtuseness by pragmatic act of will.

  “For what purpose? For all its grandeur, it is only a forest…”

  “Only a forest!”

  “Surely the cities of man abound in more artful amusements and adventures of the spirit than anything that mere brute nature can provide.”

  “Including the present loathsome venue?” I said in a sneering tone.

  “Most particularly Ciudad Pallas, here in the most advanced laboratories of the psychesomic sciences,” said Guy, “for where else in the worlds of men are the most arcane states of consciousness to be experienced, and at a profit in the bargain?”

  I choked back my disgust and anger in favor of guile, for at this point it was quite clear that there was no hope of persuading Guy to quit Ciudad Pallas for the Bloomenveldt by an honest appeal to esthetics.

  “There, mon cher dumkopf, there!” I declared, pointing at the holo of the Bloomenveldt.

  “There?”

  “Naturellement, Guy,” I purred in his ear. “Where else do you suppose all the psychotropics you have already sampled originate? If profit is what you seek based on a droit of monopoly on the latest substances to emerge from the research domes, how better to steal a march on all competition than by seeking them out at their very source? If what you seek is the attainment of a state of consciousness which has never before existed in a human brain, why piddle about with synthesized derivatives rather than experience directly the full organic complexity? Is anything the mental retreats have to offer, is foolish flirtation with the Charge, any more amusing than that?”

  “Je ne sais pas…” Guy muttered reflectively. “To be the first, to boldly go where no human spirit has gone before, and mayhap to enrich ourselves beyond measure in the process…”

  And all at once, he was positively beaming at me. “Well spoken, ruespieler, well spoken, ma chère Gypsy Joker,” he declaimed floridly. “You shall have your heart’s desire, y yo también, for vraiment, what higher adventure for we two free spirits of the upper air than that which you propose!”

  Even then I do believe that I realized that I had ceased to be an ingenue when I applied this forthrightly self-serving stratagem. For by no stretch of the imagination could I delude myself that I had appealed to the best that lay in Guy Vlad Boca. But contrawise, did not the vie of Ciudad Pallas appeal to his worst weakness with deadly perfection?

  No longer the innocent naif I, I had learned my first lesson in quantitative moral calculus, though at the time I had no concept of how bitter that lesson was to become.

  16

  There were no hotels on the continent of Bloomenwald, not even the rudest of inns; indeed the only human constructs were the research domes scattered up and down the eastern coast on the margin of beach between the great forest and the sea. As for accommodations within the Bloomenwald itself or atop the canopy thereof, these of course were nonexistent, for in the first instance the forest floor was a gloomy land of perpetual night choked with unwholesome saphrophytic fungi and infested with an assortment of ill-tempered poisonous reptiles, and the Bloomenveldt, while certainly a solid enough terrain to stroll upon, was hardly suitable as a base for architectural constructs.

  Fortunately, auslander turistas did visit the Bloomenwald from time to time, though the natives of Belshazaar, aside from the workers in the research domes, entirely shunned the continent thereof, so a limited number of rooms were available in the domes, provided one was willing to pay the outrageous rent demanded.

  As for equipping our little expedition, this we were advised to do before our departure. Since the climate of the Bloomenveldt was perpetually balmy, tents or heavy clothing were redundant, and should we be so foolishly venturesome as to stay away from the dome long enough to require nourishment, we would have to content ourselves with cold concentrates, for the notion of building a fire on the treetops would be, to say the least, ill-advised. Thus, aside from cold concentrates and canteens, our kits contained only three items of equipment: simple beacon receivers in the event we lost our way, filter masks which we were assured were an absolute necessity, and floatbelts to nullify gravity so that we could flit from branch to branch and not fall to the deadly forest floor in the event of a botched landing.

  Guy, who had certainly never fancied himself a woodsman, expressed the usual trepidations of the confirmed urbanite during these preparations, but I, who had gone on many an expedition deep into the Bittersweet Jungle of Glade, assured him in all sincerity that I was a maestra of forest lore well versed in the skills of survival therein. So I truly believed, for was one forest not very much like another, even though the Bloomenwald was a forest writ large? Only the question of predators would have given me pause, and these, we were told, were nonexistent.

  Within forty-eight hours, we had completed our preparations and boarded the suborbital shuttle, for once I had succeeded in altering the vector of Guy’s enthusiasm, he threw his energies and argent into the project as totally as he had pursued his previous obsessions. There were no more sojourns at the mental retreats, the Charge was never mentioned again, and once more our passages d’amour had achieved a frequency and duration, not to say piquancy, appropriate to a natural man and a natural woman about to share a grand adventure.

  Of the shuttle flight to the continent of Bloomenwald, there is little to tell. We arose from Ciudad Pallas’ shuttleport as if emerging from a dream of ennui, arced up through a featureless blue sky above an equally featureless ocean, winked through a starry blackness on the edge of space, then descended through a fleecy cloud deck to land on a sandy promontory jutting out into the sea.

  Of our first moment on the continent of Bloomenwald, au contraire, much might be said, for this seemed another world entire.

  On the tip of the peninsula where we had landed perched a large geodesic dome, whose facets flashed and shimmered in the bright sunlight like the eye of an insect. Landward of our debarkation point, the peninsula joined a narrow strip of beach, and beyond the beach towered the Bloomenwald.

  To the naive eye, the edge of the Bloomenwald, seen from the beach, would no doubt have seemed a seacliff palisade, and even I, knowing what I saw, had difficulty crediting the fact that this five-hundred-meter-high wall of brown and black and deep gray crowned with green was in fact the margin of a forest. As far as the eye could see in either direction, this cliff towered over the beach. As a geological formation it would have been impressive enough, but as an endless thicket of living trees, it was so out of scale with the comprehensible that even the educated eye took a good while to unravel the optical illusion.

  For what appeared to be a solid cliff of loamy brown earth streaked with formations of gray and black rock was in fact nothing so substantial. The vertical columns of brown upon long second glance revealed themselves as the mighty trunks of enormous trees, and the formations of black and gray rock were nothing more than the deeply gloomed aisles of shadow between them.

  “Amusing enough for you, Guy?” I finally managed to whisper.

  “Daunting…” he muttered. “I can certainly see why no one would be mad enough to venture within.”

  I shuddered at the very thought. For beneath the canopy of the Bloomenwald was an equally vast shadow land somehow deeper in the darkness than any true night could have been, and merely viewing the gigantic edge thereof was enough to set the spirit shivering. As for the unpleasant fauna reputed to lurk therein, one could only be struck with the certainty that whatever chose to dwell in such a place must be of a disposition inimical to the human spirit.

  But then we were here to explore the bright sun drenched meadowland of the Bloomenveldt high above, and as to th
e metaphysics of this image of a land of light crowning the realm of darkness, I was more than content to leave this to the poets, as we turned our backs to the land and our faces to the sea and made our way to the research dome.

  Domed though it was, the research station sported no central garden, nor did it offer any grand overlook on the edge of the forest. Rather was the interior entirely divided up into three floors of modular rooms given over to laboratories, office spaces, dormitories, und so weiter, and most of the windows looked out on the sea.

  Our room, for all the outrageous rent, was no less spartan than the rest of the establishment. There was a bed, an armoire, two night tables, two uncomfortable chairs, toilet facilities, and that was the end of it. As for decor, this tended to unadorned walls in muted pastel colors, thin carpeting in the same pallid hues, and no interior plantings whatever. This was a scientific station given over to serious pursuits, not a resort, and despite the fact that we were paying through the nose, we were here on sufferance.

  While the ambiance, or total lack thereof, of the research dome made this all too apparent, the director of the station, a tall silver-haired woman named Marlene Kona Mendes, was good enough to spell this out in words of one syllable on the occasion of a rather grim welcoming lunch in the refectory staged for our benefit.

  “This is a research station engaged in serious studies, and you will therefore trouble not scientists on duty or intrude your presence into the laboratories, bitte,” she said over a meal of bland cuisine little better than the concentrates we had purchased in Ciudad Pallas. “Further, if you are so foolish as to become lost on the Bloomenveldt, do not expect us to mount any rescue expeditions. We have a complement of only some two dozen, and none of us have any time to waste tracking down errant turistas. We assume no responsibility, legal or moral, for your safety, comprend?”

  “The clarity of your exposition is quite admirable,” Guy replied dryly.

  Also present at this luncheon were two other turistas who had rented rooms at the station. Omar Ki Benjamin was an elegantly dressed fellow of perpetually ironic mien from Calabiria who styled himself a sufic poet and had been here a week gathering inspiration, or so he said. Sori Smit Jana was a taciturn woman with disconcertingly intense gray eyes who chose to cloak her planet of origin and mission on the Bloomenveldt in mystery.

  “I will however give you the same advice I give all such dilettantes, though no doubt you too will ignore it,” Marlene Kona Mendes continued with an expression of prim disapproval. “Firstly, I would advise you not to wander more than an hour or two’s journey into the Bloomenveldt. Secondly, and even more advisable, never, at any time, remove your filter masks. Thirdly, if you are truly prudent, which I somehow surmise you are not, you will rent, at an additional daily fee, sealed atmosphere suits which will entirely protect you from the floral effluvia.”

  Guy and I glanced at each other in some bemusement. Sori remained enigmatic as always. Omar laughed.

  “Vraiment,” he said, “and when enjoying sexual congress, take care to avoid orgasm. When imbibing wine, stop short of intoxication.”

  Marlene Kona Mendes shot him a black look, but something about her expression told me that this was a ritual gesture oft repeated.

  “It may amuse you to learn that the mages who so earnestly study the psychochemistry of the Bloomenveldt eschew all subjective experience of the object of their obsession,” Omar said, “When constrained by practical need to venture forth into the treetops, they do so entirely encased in armor. As to whether they conducted their passages d’amour similarly accoutred, je ne sais pas, but certainement, it would be prudent, for as all do know, the human body is rife with microorganisms.”

  “This is so?” I asked the director in some amazement.

  “That we are less than natural men and women?”

  “That you never venture forth naked to the natural elements, of course,” I said.

  “Indeed. We are scientists, not mystical libertines such as some present whom I might mention.”

  “Mea culpa!” declared Omar. “Mea maxima culpa! Insofar as I seek to experience the most extreme states of consciousness that the universe offers our species, I am a mystic. Insofar as I fear no risk in the pursuit thereof, I proudly unfurl the libertine’s banner!”

  “Well spoken!” Guy exclaimed. Naturellement.

  “Vraiment?” said Marlene Kona Mendes dryly. “Then why do you return each night to our mean-spirited company? Why do you not join those who wander the Bloomenveldt in a fog? Why do you not apply for admission into the society of the Bloomenkinder?”

  “I am a mystical libertine, not an imbecile!”

  “You mean to say there are humans living on the Bloomenveldt?” I said.

  “Indeed,” said Sori, exhibiting loquacity for the first time, “there are those who wander up and down the coastal fringes between the domes for weeks at a time. As long as they keep the sea in sight, they can always find their way to the next, even unmasked. As for food and drink, the Bloomenveldt provides these in profusion.”

  “As to how many of the denizens of the Bloomenveldt may still be entitled to style themselves human, that is another matter,” Marlene Kona Mendes said.

  “She seeks to frighten you with the legend of the Bloomenkinder,” said Omar.

  “I speak of anyone foolish enough to go unmasked!”

  “It would appear that we have much to learn,” I said, growing somewhat discomfited in the role of ignorant audience to a debate that had been apparently going on for some time.

  “The permanent human condition, nicht wahr?” declared Omar. “One would assume the two of you will be eager to begin on the morrow. I would be honored to be your guide.”

  And so, once the sun had risen the next morning, Guy and I set forth on our first visit to the Bloomenveldt in the company of Omar Ki Benjamin. “Despite my japes at the expense of our good director,” he said as we made our way down the promontory toward the beach, “I would advise that you don your masks at least for the present. The initial impression is disorienting enough as it is.”

  Upon reaching the beach, we did so, strapping on the half-masks, which covered nose and mouth while leaving vision unobstructed. We already wore our floatbelts, and Omar instructed us in their use, which seemed simple enough. Indeed the only control was a knob whereby the range of gravity nullification might be adjusted along a continuous range between the Belshazaar-normal value of .4 standard g and the highest setting, which would provide a negative gravity of .1 standard, which is to say a gentle lift of the same value. For safety’s sake, this would cut off after ten minutes so as to prevent a wearer who for some reason had lost consciousness from drifting upward beyond the life-sustaining envelope of the atmosphere.

  Omar led us inward across the beach for a few score meters, “for best dramatic effect,” or so he told us. From this vantage, the edge of the Bloomenwald no longer appeared as a solid palisade; rather did perspective reduce me to the size of an insect peering upward at a vegetal vastness which rose before it to blot out the sky. Indeed, I could gaze within the deeply shadowed aisles of monstrous tree trunks and dimly perceive the pale white shapes of unwholesome fungi festooning the loamy forest floor, and even hear, or so at least it seemed, the scrabblings and chitterings of unseen creatures within.

  “Up, up, meine kinder!” Omar cried. “From the maya of the groundlings to the sublimity on high!”

  So saying, he twisted the control knob of his floatbelt and began to rise, and a moment later Guy and I followed.

  We drifted slowly upward along the shadowy facade of the forest edge like mites ascending to the sky before the mouth of a cave too enormous for their modest perceptive powers to grasp, or like birds spiraling upward before an onrushing front of evil black thunderheads. Then, none too soon for me, we reached the level where the treetop canopy began, and the dark and gloomy immensity of the nether reaches at last gave way to billows of green foliage brilliantly dappled throughout by the bright
morning sunlight.

  And then, all at once, we had finally overtopped the roof of the forest and rose like the sun in the east, like homeward bound angels, over Eden.

  It had been one thing to view the Bloomenveldt en holo but quite another to experience it for the first time in its own true scale. Vraiment, it was immense, in toto and in detail, and yet it was an immensity that, far from daunting the spirit, filled it with delight.

  The morning sun behind us illumined in sharp chiaroscuro the wrinkles and folds and hillocks of a green veldt as endless as the blue sky above it. From this perspective hovering scant meters above the surface, the huge flowers which grew in a riotous profusion of bright colors appeared as isolated blooms on the green backdrop in the foreground, but seemed to fairly cover the land as the eye moved toward the horizon. Each ellipsoid leaf was about the size of three or four beds, and they grew in thick bunches along gigantic twigs, which in turn sprouted from unthinkably huge branches which appeared only as suggestive shapes beneath the almost seamless carpet of foliage.

  And the whole rolling and undulating subtly in the gentle breeze with a sighing, rushing sound not unlike that of a mildly-tossing sea. This selfsame wind, caressing my sun-warmed skin and tousling my hair, seemed to serve as an organic connection between my body and the living, breathing landscape of the treetops, a breath I seemed to share in common with the Bloomenveldt, uniting its spirit with my own.

  Naturellement, it was Omar who first broke the silence of that rapt moment. “Set your floatbelts to a tenth gravity and follow me, meine kinder!” he called out, and so saying, drifted downward to touch foot on a giant leaf. No sooner had his feet touched the surface, than, with a great whooping laugh, he bounded high into the air again in a fat lazy arc which carried him a good fifty meters away from us before he touched down once more, at which point, with an agile twisting spring, he propelled himself back in our direction in like manner, to alight like a hopping insect directly below us.