Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  “Do you suppose that such a place can in truth exist?” Guy breathed in a solemn half-whisper.

  “Vraiment,” said Omar, “as do Xanadu and Oz and Paradise itself.” He tapped Guy playfully on the head. “In here!”

  He gazed uneasily to the west, where the disc of the sun had already touched the horizon. “It will soon be dark,” he said. “Let us not tarry here further discussing the ineffable.” And he bounded off in the direction of the sea.

  “We must delve deeper into this,” Guy said sharply. “Much deeper.”

  “It’s only a legend, Guy.”

  “Bloomenkinder and Perfumed Gardens mayhap,” Guy said with a dreamy yet all-too-determined look in his eyes. “But the tribes of the interior may be real enough, and one may therefore consider what hold the Bloomenveldt has upon such humans to cause them to remain…”

  “How might folk who know not of the existence of the worlds of men even be tempted to return thereto?” I scoffed.

  “Ah, but Meade Ariel Kozuma was a mage in the worlds of men and did he not eschew our offer of rescue? What does he find herein more amusing than all the sophisticated pleasures of our Second Starfaring Age?”

  After all my weeks in Great and ersatz Edoku, after the inward-facing reality of the Unicorn Garden, and most particularly on the heels of our sojourn in vile Ciudad Pallas, I was more delighted than I could have imagined to find myself once more in a totally natural realm under an open sky, let alone free to soar like a bird about a venue as exotic and beautiful as the Bloomenveldt. During the next five days, Guy and I, at first in the company of Omar and later à deux, spent our daylight hours gamboling in the treetops, sampling the perfumes of the great flowers, and conducting frequent and for the most part highly enjoyable tantric exercises under the influence thereof.

  But Guy, after sampling the variety of floral psychotropics in the vecino with his usual diligence in such matters, soon became jaded by the immediate amusements at hand, and began to toy with the notion of penetrating the deeper mysteries of the interior.

  The first symptom of this obsession appeared as a quite uncharacteristic scholarly interest in the genetic ecology of the Bloomenveldt and the lore of the human tribes thereof, and endless interrogation of the scientists of the research domes on these subjects under the guise of the sincere amateur student.

  When it came to the question of the tribes of the interior, these worthies were either ignorant or deliberately unforthcoming or both, as if there was something they were attempting to hide, mayhap even from themselves.

  It was readily enough conceded that the Bloomenveldt abounded with fruits, nectars, and pollens quite sufficient to allow members of our species to live off the land, and not even Marlene Kona Mendes attempted to deny that over the centuries any number of fools had wandered off into the interior never to be seen by civilized eyes again. Nor was it denied that what might have been the descendants of same had been fleetingly sighted by suited research teams foraging into the deeper Bloomenveldt in search of biochemical specimens. But these reverted savages uniformly fled at civilized approach, and, like the fauna of the tree-tops with whom they no doubt by now had more in common than with civilized folk, they were quite adept at eluding capture on their own terrain.

  “In short,” the director declared brusquely in what was clearly designed to be her final word on the subject, “there can be no more than a scattered handful of such creatures, they are of minimal scientific interest and even more useless in terms of possible profit, and the effort and risk of scientific study of these curiosities entirely outweighs any benefits that might accrue therefrom.”

  When it came to the subjects of their own immediate research, however, the scientists were more than willing to offer up their wisdom at interminable length to eager young persons expressing a respectful interest or a guileful simulacrum of same.

  It was a matter of some dispute among them as to whether the flowers were actual organs of the trees upon which they grew or whether they were in fact symbiotes of different species, though at length it began to seem to me that this question was a mere verbal nicety, for functionally speaking, they were neither and both.

  The great trees of the Bloomenveldt were so long-lived as to be all but immortal from a human perspective, and the Bloomenwald entirely covered the continent upon which it was found; therefore arboreal reproduction was necessary, indeed possible, only on those rare occasions when disease or disaster created a gap in the seamless canopy. Experiments had shown that upon such occasions the flowers of neighboring trees in fact dropped seeds onto the forest floor which grew into saplings. True too that the flowers grew directly from the boughs of the trees and were nourished by their sap. Furthermore, trees and flowers were as genotypically identical as Guy and myself, which is to say they shared identical chromosome numbers and genetic hardware.

  But each tree’s flowers were as genetically varied in the software expression thereof as the citizens of a human city, and they crossbred with each other to produce a rapid profusion of variations, generation by generation, as if they were independent organisms. Indeed, floral evolution on the Bloomenveldt proceeded by leaps and bounds, and that was why the forest remained a bottomless cornucopia of new psychotropics, for these evolved in response to the flowers’ intimate relationship to their mammalian pollinators. Thus did the trees, who themselves reproduced rarely, nevertheless contrive to maintain a richly varied gene pool.

  Of what real interest was such genetic arcana to Guy Vlad Boca, who had never in my presence evinced a scholarly interest in anything save the varieties of human amusement?

  “You do not comprehend, Sunshine?” he said when I interrogated him on the subject of his sudden development of a passion for genetic botany en boudoir. “Either these people are forthrightly lying to us, or mayhap there is a truth which their crabbed spirits fear to consciously encompass.”

  “How so?” I demanded.

  “The whole object of their research is to derive new psychotropics from the forest, is it not? And these, they readily admit, are produced by the flowers thereof in response to the evolution of their pollinators, nē?”

  “This much is obvious, but—”

  “Yet they profess complete indifference to the study of the human tribes of the interior! Who live generation after generation in unmasked intimacy with the flowers! Noble flowers…higher forms…Did not the wanderer babble of such wonders to be found in the interior?”

  “Vraiment,” I said dubiously, “but considering the source, must one not grant a certain discount for hyperbole?”

  “No doubt,” agreed Guy, “but considering the source and style of the tales’ denial, which is to say sour spirits who dare not venture even to the edge of the Bloomenveldt without sealing their perceptions away in atmosphere suits, one must also grant a certain discount for spiritual constipation.”

  “Like the mages of the mental retreats and laboratories of Ciudad Pallas…” I muttered. “Vraiment, on this planet, science would seem to have devolved from its courageous spiritual quest for truth and technological enhancement in favor of a single-minded search for profit.”

  “Be that as it may, it is also quite clear that even the greatest opportunity for pecuniary profit lies with sedulous study of the tribes of the interior. Since there would seem to be no baneful force restraining these Bloomenkinder from returning to the civilized realm, they must choose to remain in the depths of the forest because—”

  “Because they find the Bloomenveldt more amusing than the worlds of men?”

  “I could not have phrased it better myself,” Guy said dryly. “And what do you imagine they find more amusing? Surely it is neither haute cuisine nor theatrical performances nor elevated discourse…”

  “More puissant psychotropics!”

  Guy beamed at me idiotically. “Go to the head of the class, ma chère,” he said with unholy gleefulness.

  “But if this is so, then why do the mages of the research domes refra
in from study of the flowers and tribes of the interior?”

  “Why the sealed suits?” Guy said contemptuously. “Why defoliate the entire continent of Pallas? Because they are like eunuchs studying tantra! Because, as Omar so justly put it, they lack the spiritual courage of the mystic libertine! Do not all men fear confrontation with states of being which their spirits lack sufficient grandeur to encompass? Leaving a golden opportunity for true Children of Fortune such as ourselves who fear not unknown realms of the spirit but pursue the same with an open heart!”

  “Guy, you are not suggesting that we—”

  “I suggest nothing, I only follow your noble lead, liebchen,” Guy insinuated. “For was it not you, cher Sunshine, who so rightly declared that in the Bloomenveldt we might have the grand destiny to achieve states of consciousness never known before to human brains? And enrich ourselves by marketing the substances which produce them!”

  “But no one has ever returned from the depths of the Bloomenveldt, or so it is said.”

  “Indeed. Imagine therefore what is to be gained by mounting the first successful expedition to the heart of the matter and returning with the fruits thereof.”

  “Imagine what would be lost by failure!”

  “Have you not told me often enough of your mastery of forest survival lore?” Guy said. And indeed, if truth be told, I may have styled myself as more of a Diana of the jungle than a few weekends in the quotidian forests of Glade warranted.

  “When all is said and done are we not mystic libertines, you and I,” Guy persisted. “True Children of Fortune, adventurers of the spirit, more than willing to risk all to gain all.”

  What was I to say to such a challenge? On the one hand, I could hardly deny the spirit within me which had insisted on braving Great Edoku, all my parents’ sage and pragmatic advice to the contrary, which had sent me in pursuit of the Gypsy Jokers against all the wisdom of the Public Service Stations, which had won the heart of Pater Pan with blarney, and which had brought me hither with this brave and foolhardy lover to the edge of the very adventure he proposed.

  On the other hand, there was the part of me that knew with the coolness of intellect divorced from passion that what he proposed was dangerous to the point of insanity.

  “Vraiment, my spirit is willing, but my reason whispers that such a spirit is quite mad,” I declared in all honesty.

  But such dualistic ambiguity had certainly never been Guy’s style, nor was he fazed by my indecision. “In such a pass, one must await a sign to synergize reason and spirit,” he proclaimed grandly. “And from my present perspective I am cavalierly confident that the same will be forthcoming.”

  And so it was, two days later, of a late afternoon. We were lying on a leaf close by a great carnelian circle of petals surrounding a bright green pistil which branched at its pinnacle into an overhanging canopy of fine windblown filaments dripping a sticky resinous pollen, which is to say far enough from the flower to avoided being dusted, but close enough to lie within its perfumed aura.

  The state of being induced by the heavy, languorous scent of this perfume seemed perfectly suited to our mood. The still-bright westering sun bathed our limbs with warmth as it cast ever-shifting and slowly lengthening dappled patterns of shadow over the wind-tossed crowns of the great trees. Our leafy pallet rocked us into hypnagogic somnolence like a great green cradle in the hands of some forest spirit, whose breath we could hear in the susurrus of the breeze passing through the boughs and leaves. Empty of mind and full of spirit, drifting on the edge of sleep where vagrant thoughts transformed themselves into the surreal images of dreams, I gazed up into a clear blue sky which mirrored perfectly the blissful cerulean void of my spirit.

  Vraiment, at length I surmised that I had in fact drifted off the exquisite edge of this hypnagogic state into the realm of sleep, for out of the languorous fog there coalesced a visage out of dreams…

  A human face such as is not often seen in our Second Starfaring Age: an old man’s face, seamed, and lined, and crowned by a mantle of long, thin white hair. The face of a man in the last year or so of his life, when all at once the Healer’s arts which have preserved life’s vigor for three hundred years and more suddenly fail, and the mask of mortality appears to herald the imminence of death.

  Yet strange to say it was the clear tranquility of the spirit and peace of the heart written in the calm set of the withered lips and the limpid brown eyes which convinced me I had left the waking realm.

  Then the visage spoke and thereby shattered the illusion of dreamy sleep, though not the languorous drifting mood thereof.

  “May I share your leaf a while, mes amis?”

  An old man crouched on the leaf beside us, naked not merely of clothing, but of floatbelt and filter mask as well.

  “Are you a Bloomenkind of the forest?” Guy asked in a voice wherein avid curiosity was bizarrely softened by the reasonless tranquility of the flower’s perfume.

  The old man laughed, a happy musical sound, or so it seemed. “Not yet,” he said.

  “You are not a naked tribesman recently emerged from the depths of the forest?” I said in a similar dreamy state.

  “Au contraire,” said the old man, “naked do I go to merge my spirit with the Bloomenveldt before it leaves this moribund corpus.”

  “You are a pilgrim come to the Bloomenveldt to die?”

  Once more, the old man laughed sweetly without a trace of irony or angst. “Dying one may accomplish in any venue,” he said, “it is only the style of one’s passage from the mortal realm and the state of one’s spirit in the moment thereof that one may choose. As for me, I choose to die in the Bloomenveldt, for here one may expire not in a state of dread, but in a state of enlightenment, into the loving arms of this great forest.”

  “You know the Bloomenveldt well?” Guy said sharply, willing up the effort to free himself from his torpor. “You are versed in the secrets of its inner heart?”

  “A century ago, I came here to study the forest as a mage in the research domes. But something moved my spirit to doff my atmosphere suit, don filter mask and floatbelt, and trek deep enough into the interior to know that here I would come when my time came to die. As for the secrets of the Bloomenveldt’s heart, these will forever remain a mystery to those who fear to become breath of its breath. And in those days, such a one was I.”

  “You traveled to the interior and survived to tell the tale?” I asked just as sharply as Guy, for if this was so, what clearer sign could destiny have given us?

  The old one dismissed the grandeur of this feat with an errant wave of his hand. “If one never truly leaves the worlds of men behind, how can one help but return thereto?” he said. “Which is to say there is nothing to hinder the masked traveler from passing through the wonders and glories of the Bloomenveldt untrammeled thereby. The well-equipped turista will encounter neither physical danger nor spiritual enhancement. To brave either, you must doff the filter mask of civilization, and give yourself over to the flowers.”

  “But even masked you learned enough to know that your spirit wished to make its final journey here…” said Guy.

  “Indeed, my young friend,” the old man said. “For while there may be much for a young spirit to lose by surrendering itself to the forest, for an old spirit about to be forced to vacate its quotidian premises there is only an enlightened ending to be gained.”

  “And what was it that you learned all those long decades ago that convinced you to essay such a final journey?” I asked softly.

  “The Bloomenveldt is alive!”

  “Hardly a revelation of astounding proportions,” I could not quite refrain from pointing out dryly.

  “Alive as you or I, mein kind,” the old man said. “Possessed of a genetic intelligence, a sapient spirit which it has received as a gift of man. For millions of years did the forest slumber as mindless trees produced substances to manipulate the mindless pollinators thereof. But then our species came to Belshazaar, and sapients over the
centuries wandered off into the forest, and so since that time the forest has been evolving in symbiosis with man. Deeper within the Bloomenveldt in the land of the Bloomenkinder, the flowers have evolved pheromones and alkaloids designed not to attract insensate mammals but our own sapient spirit. As we have gifted the forest with the template of consciousness, so does the Bloomenveldt offer us psychotropics crafted by that very chemical sentience to reward us with the highest realms of consciousness it currently knows how to grant. True symbiosis, a just and profitable bargain between our two species.”

  “The Perfumed Garden…” breathed Guy. “Where humans and flowers have achieved symbiotic perfection. Where floral and human evolution have contrived to merge. Where nirvanic transcendence arises from the very chemistry of the brain.”

  “So it is said,” declared the ancient one. “And so do I seek this realm of the spirit as the physical matrix thereof expires.”

  “May you find what you seek,” I told him with an open heart.

  “Y tú también.”

  And with that, he arose, and with a somewhat feeble though long-legged gait, departed into the depths of the Bloomenveldt, into the rosy mists of dusk, into the deeper mysteries thereof from which no man had returned to tell the tale.

  When he had disappeared like a wraith, Guy and I left the flower of his apparition to discuss on a neutral leaf what we had learned within the realm of its perfume.

  “Was that not a sign that spoke to both your mind and your spirit, Sunshine?” Guy asked me. “Is there now anything to hold us back from the journey within to the heart of the matter? Will you now not join me in the quest to gain all now that you have been reassured that we do not really risk all? And now that you have spoken with the spirit of all there is to gain?”

  And indeed it was. And indeed there wasn’t. And indeed I would.

  “Let us be gone in the morning,” I said gamely, “lest my resolve vanish in the cold clear light of day.”