Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  On the afternoon of the third day, however, we happened upon a new variety of flower which tempted us sorely indeed.

  Making our way via a series of short shallow leaps, we rounded a hillock of a tree crown to find ourselves directly confronted with an overhanging bell-shaped bloom whose pale and translucent violet petals cast an all-but-ultraviolet glow over the mossy green pollen bed beneath it. Upon which two human figures were languorously copulating side by side in a slow, steady rhythm.

  Indeed, to call this copulation would seem to be unjust, for the gaunt rag-clad man and the equally gaunt woman, while anything but appetizing in our eyes, were manifestly perfect each to the other in their own. For in the face of their beatific smiles, their tender gazes, and the very rhythms they offered up to each other’s delight, one would have had to have been an utter churl to deny that, beneath the violet canopy and under the pheromonic influence thereof, they were truly making love.

  Vraiment, Guy and I found ourselves holding hands and speaking in hushed whispers as we stood before this somehow charming, not to say arousing, tantric figure.

  “We can hardly intrude upon such dyadic bliss…”

  “Indeed, let us wait until they have reached their final cusps, nē…”

  As it turned out, the latter stratagem proved as fruitless as the former politesse proved superfluous, for their passage d’amour went on interminably, which is to say that the rhythm thereof seemed designed to prolong the tantric exercise into infinity by the eschewing of any climactic cusp.

  At length, Guy’s mounting impatience overcame his gallantry. “This could go on forever,” he whispered, securing a vacuum vial from his pack. “I must have a sample of this psychotropic!”

  So saying, and against my hushed protestations to the contrary, he stole close upon them, vial in hand.

  Hola, it was as if he did not exist! Their passage d’amour continued unabated and untrammeled as he crawled around the flower gathering vapors, nor did they pay him any heed when, seeing this, he experimentally exposed himself to their full vision. Indeed, not even when I strode boldly up to Guy and tugged him away by the sleeve did our presence have any discernible effect.

  Vraiment, not even when we forgot to hush our speech in our excitement did our existence intrude upon the perfect dyadic consciousness of the lovers on the flower.

  “We must try this, you and I, nē!” Guy exclaimed.

  “I long to experience such bliss as well,” I agreed tremulously. “But if we do, will we not be lost?”

  “To all save each other, mayhap…” he said dreamily.

  “We must think on this before we lose all capacity for same,” I told him sharply. “Though certainement it would appear we have found a hint of floral paradise out of which poetry and romantic legend might justly arise…”

  Eschewing other objects of exploration, we discovered three more of the violet blooms d’amour during that afternoon and the next morning, and on each we found dyadic figures similarly enraptured in perfect tantric bliss, indeed a bliss which seemed quite indefatigable, for we had yet to encounter such lovers engaged in eating, repose, or any other activity save endless love.

  Guy, for his part, grew more and more displeased with my refusal to unmask with him and share such preternatural pleasures, while I demurred under the guise of unwillingness to eject lovers from their flower by main force. In truth, however, while like any natural woman my spirit, not to say my flesh, grew more and more desirous of knowing such erotic ecstasies, my mind rang bells of warning, for if such was the puissance of this flower’s pheromone of passion that in its thrall lovers eschewed all nutriment or rest, how long before such tantric demons expired in blissful famishment in each other’s arms?

  Inevitably, we finally discovered such a bloom unoccupied, a vacant boudoir bathed in violet light, awaiting only two wandering creatures such as we.

  “A sign, nicht wahr?” Guy insisted. “A clear signal from destiny, nē?”

  “Mayhap from fate…”

  “Pah! When imbibing wine, do you stop short of intoxication? When engaged in sexual congress, do you take care to avoid orgasm?”

  “To quote the same source, I am a mystic libertine, not an imbecile.”

  Guy regarded me with an expression somewhere between contemptuous anger and a sullen thwarted pout.

  “Very well then,” I declared. “I invoke our pact. Which is to say that one of us must at all times play ground control to the psychonaut. Therefore, let us repair to the flower of your desires, one of us unmasked, and when that personage has fully experienced the naked joys thereof, the functions shall be reversed.”

  “This is the meanness of spirit in which you propose to conduct a passage of transcendent amour?”

  “No meanness of spirit is intended,” I told him crossly, “in token of which, and in the absence of any masculine gallantry to the contrary, you may have the honor of removing your mask first.”

  To this open-hearted gesture, Guy could hardly make any further demur, and so he nodded in silent agreement and began to doff his clothes. I did likewise, and in not much more time than it takes to tell, we stood naked before each other, or rather adorned only by the filter masks covering our noses and mouths, a spectacle inducive of a good deal more mirth than lust.

  But no sooner had Guy removed his mask than the ironic grin which this bizarre vision had smeared across his face vanished, to be replaced by a beatific smile of priapic though not untender lust, unmistakably counterpointed, as it were, by the all-but-instant erection of his insistent lingam.

  In truth more bemused than aroused, I allowed him to seize my hand and lead me forthwith into the shaft of violet light beneath the translucent canopy of the flower. In this venue I thought not to activate my ring of Touch, for while Guy had never voiced wonder at my preternatural erotic puissance, putting it down, no doubt, to his own preternatural capacity for the enjoyment of pleasure, it seemed to me that chemical enhancement would be more than sufficient without resorting to the electronic.

  From my point of view, there is little to report of this opening movement of our two-part duet save the seeming endlessness thereof, the mighty duration of Guy’s phallic prowess, and the ironic fact that it was Sunshine, the ground control, who experienced cusp after cusp via the ministrations of her pheromonically-enhanced psychonaut. For once, it was Guy who was given over to the granting of pleasure without thought or rhythm designed to bring about his own orgasmic completion, and I who surrendered sweetly to the abundance of my own ecstasies.

  Vraiment, to the superabundance thereof, for Guy went on and on and on in the same even rhythm, long after sweet ecstasies had given way to a surfeit of pleasure and delight had given way to fatigue, and even fatigue had given way to a boredom of orgasms, if such can be imagined.

  When I could tolerate this tender and loving selfless performance no longer, I at last activated the Touch and, seizing him by the very root of his lingam, brought him to a moaning, shuddering, piercing conclusion, which I felt sure would leave the mightiest of lovers incapable of proceeding further.

  But no, quelle chose, no sooner had he brought his ragged panting under some semblance of control, than his still triumphant phallus was at it again, determined to fill me with yet more unwanted pleasure.

  There seemed to be only one thing for it, even though I was certain that no power in the worlds of men or elsewhere could now provoke me to further desire. I tore the filter mask from my face and affixed it over Guy’s by main force.

  How wrong I was!

  No sooner had I taken my first unmasked breath than a pungent, sweet, musky aroma went straight from my nostrils to the very back reaches of my brain, from which it flowed like a living serpent of fire down my spine to ignite a veritable kundalinic explosion in my lower chakras. Vraiment, a rosy, languid explosion which billowed upward, outward, and inward from the base of my spine to fill my loins, and my limbs, and indeed my cerebrum, with roiling clouds of sensuous pink smoke, which
in less time than it takes to tell had completely consumed all other aspects of my being.

  It seemed to me, or at any rate to the extent that there remained a “me,” that my body had become an ecstatic outline of passionate fire, like the fabled burning bush, aflame yet unconsumed.

  I seized Guy in my arms, rolled over upon him, and impaled the quick of him in the rosy translucence of my flesh. Ah, oh, he was beautiful! The flesh of his body had the warm sleekness of silk before a bonfire. Each ecstatic tremor of his flesh sent crystal fragments of achingly tender joy down my nerve trunks, the sounds of his pleasures ignited sparkles in my heart, and his face was that of a veritable deity, a mask of tantric perfection auraed by the glow of his marvelous spirit.

  There was nothing in the universe but the exquisite texture of satiny flesh and silken sighs, naught existed but the rose-colored breath of his flesh against mine.

  How long this persisted, memory would not bind. There were cries, and moans, and tremors, and wordless shouts, and then a thin and agonized voice crying “Stop! Stop! Stop!”

  Then the mindless creature of fire that I had become found itself being borne through the air like a weightless cloud, something vile and rubbery was forced onto my face…

  And…

  And the sentient human that I had been found herself seated on a leaf gazing wildly at Guy. Both of us were masked, both of us were panting with exhaustion, and both of us were redolent with passionate effluvia and sweat.

  We stared at each other, blinking, for a long while before either of us managed to speak.

  “Vraiment, you were right, unmasked together, we would have been lost forever,” Guy finally breathed.

  “It would almost have been worth it…” I sighed.

  But not even Guy Vlad Boca was ready to suggest that we repeat this experiment mutually unmasked, nor did the notion of enjoying such dangerous ecstasies again as alternating psychonauts and ground controls much appeal to either of us. For while in a certain sense it could be said that the ground control drew as much erotic benefit from the psychonaut’s chemically augmented tantric puissance as he did, the sexual disjunction cut both ways as well. For under the influence of the flower, the masked lover would always be pleasured to the point of boredom or pain, while the lover in thrall to the flower quite literally could never be sated.

  Clearly this flower was only for lovers to whom mutual erotic seppuku was an acceptable ultimate consummation, and expiration via terminal fatigue or famishment was an acceptable price to pay. For such samurai romantics, the perfume of the violet flower might be a great boon, and indeed, under controlled conditions it might be a sovereign remedy for impotence, libidinal ennui, and even conjugal fecklessness, or so Guy believed.

  Certainement, here was a product that Interstellar Master Traders should have no trouble marketing at a considerable profit. As for the morality of such an enterprise, Guy declared, the nature of the psychotropic’s effect should be forthrightly delineated to the purchaser, whose destiny thereby would be placed entirely in his own hands.

  Be that as it may, what we had experienced had demonstrated that there could be more to the Bloomenveldt’s blandishments than crude appeal to simple mammalian tropisms, for the violet flower, certainement, produced an intense state of erotic arousal in which the spiritual dimension was not absent, as if somehow there was indeed a floral intelligence at work on the Bloomenveldt whose biochemical sapience was capable of the subtlety necessary to touch the human heart.

  Mayhap we would have been able to put it all down to chance conjunction between Belshazaar’s floral biochemistry and a randomly evolved human congruence therewith in certain isolated cerebral centers had we not soon thereafter encountered another mode of human and floral chemical convergence which affected what one would have thought were entirely spiritual levels of human sapience.

  Consciously or not, whether simply carrying forth our original plan or being drawn deeper into the Bloomenveldt by the natural order of things, we drifted slowly westward during the next two days. Here we continued to find small groups of humans in thrall to what we had bizarrely enough begun to dismiss as quotidian blooms, and here too dyads blissfully bewitched by the flower of violet passion were also in evidence.

  But now for the first time we encountered solitary humans in psychotropic communion with their own flower.

  The upright petals of the flower in question were always blue, though the tint thereof might vary, and the stamen consisted of a large flat mound covered with fist-sized grains of soft white pollen. Upon this pallet the human devotee sat motionless with nourishment ready at hand gazing wide-eyed not at the glories and wonders of the Bloomenveldt but at entirely subjective vistas within.

  Male and female, they were all in those terminal years of their lifespan when the hair grays and thins, and the skin dries into parchment, and the vital energies may no longer be reignited by the Healers’ arts. But if their bodies were dismaying reminders of ultimate mortality, the spirits which peered inward in their limpid empty eyes, were, if the same are truly mirrors of the soul as the poets contend, in blissful transcendence of the limits of temporal linearity, at least from their own point of view.

  Even such callow mystic libertines as we could not summon up the crudeness to attempt to rouse such living buddhas to discourse by insistent hectorings, nor would such a stratagem likely have succeeded, for all such hermits that we were to encounter in the next two days moved only their hands to convey the occasional pollen grain to their mouths, and otherwise might have been temple icons of stone for all the awareness of or interest in the external realm they betrayed.

  Whether such buddhas were drawn to the lotus, or whether the flowers were capable of granting ultimate enlightenment to ordinary human dross, or whether for that matter, these living icons in fact contained the spirits of which they spoke at all, we could in truth know not, for total vegetative nonsentience for all I knew could produce the same visual effect as transcendence of maya’s veil. And indeed certain cynical wits have been known to contend that the mental states themselves are much the same.

  “It would seem there is only one method of discerning whether these ancients are enlightened beings whose spirits soar in realms of grandeur beyond maya’s tawdry veils or whether their sapience has been extinguished leaving only vacuous protoplasmic shells behind,” Guy opined the night of the second day among the babas of the Bloomenveldt.

  “Namely?”

  “Namely to inhale the lotus breath ourselves and learn whether we become bodhis or zombies…”

  “Guy! Surely not even you would lay such a wager!”

  “Of course I spoke in jest,” he said, laughing rather unconvincingly and hugging me to him. “Still, if one knew matters were what they seem, what reason would there be to dally with lesser amusements endlessly if the ultimate were truly available for a mere breath of perfume?”

  “This for one!” I declared pettishly, thumbing on the Touch and pulling on his lingam, for while Guy’s mood was hardly one which aroused me to erotic passion, I knew no other more immediately puissant means of changing this unwholesome subject.

  But as it turned out, on the afternoon of the next day we came upon a baba of the Bloomenveldt who at last deigned to address us.

  Bathed in a golden beam of sunlight streaming through a break in the foliage behind as if the whole scene had been deliberately lit with thespic intent, was a great fan of petals whose hue was a blue that was almost black, the hue of that region of a planetary atmosphere where sky becomes space, or of that celestial moment between sunset and night. Upon the flat stamen covered with white pollen sat a naked man with hair and beard of the same color, his legs folded under him in the classic lotus posture, his back to the floral halo like a figure out of primeval temple art, and his lips creased in a beatific smile.

  But, far from being lost in internal vistas, his great brown eyes tracked us as we approached with a clarity and sentience impossible to deny.

  Nor
, it seemed, could our eyes break their lock on his, as, without consultation, Guy and I strode hand in hand toward this baba and seated ourselves before him like dutiful acolytes before their guru. Mayhap it was the ambiance which so compelled us, mayhap there was true power in this ancient’s eyes, or mayhap we both had the same thought, namely that since this hermit so manifestly acknowledged our existence, such an approach might at last induce one of these sphinxes to speak.

  “Speak to us, bitte, baba,” I said in a firm but respectful voice, “and show us that someone at least is at home beyond that sage facade.”

  The smile broadened into something more like a grin. “I have never been more at home behind my eyes,” said a calm, clear voice.

  “You speak!”

  “Why then do the other hermits remain silent?”

  “Only they may tell you, kind, and they choose silence.”

  “But you do speak to us,” I said. “Why are you different?”

  “Are not all humans different, each from the other?” the baba said. “In the worlds of men, I was a dedicated pedagog, so mayhap before my final flower do I choose to speak to young spirits in the manner of a loquacious bodhisattva.”

  “If this is so, why do you sit passively awaiting death, rather than return to the worlds of men and go up and out doing noble deeds like a true bodhisattva?”

  The old man’s eyes widened, and his permanent smile strayed for a moment from beatitude to the mundanely specific, to wit that of his former pedagogical self happening suddenly on an unexpectedly sharp student.

  “In the worlds of men, I would expire raging against the dying of the light,” he said. “Only within the celestial sphere of my perfect flower may I know my final moment in the Tao.”

  “Hola! Then this is indeed the perfect lotus of ultimate enlightenment!” Guy exclaimed, fingering his filter mask in a most unsettling manner.

  “Many flowers grow on the Bloomenveldt. Here each of us may find the flower of their perfection.”