Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  “Mayhap this is mine…” Guy said breathlessly, and made to remove it.

  But before I could move to stop him, the old man stayed him with a sudden instant upraising of his hand, a puissant gesture indeed in light of his previous utter immobility. And when he then spoke, the tranquil certitude of the bodhi was married to the authority of the teacher.

  “Seek first your own full blossoming, young spirit, before you contemplate this final flower!”

  “Well spoken, well spoken indeed!” I was moved to enthusiastically declare.

  And at this, by signs so subtle as to be perceivable only en gestalt, the spirit animating the withering body evinced a preparation to withdraw from further worldly discourse.

  “Wait!” said Guy. “At least tell me then how I am to know the flower of my own perfection!”

  “Let the Perfume of Paradise come unto thee, Mohammed.”

  “Vraiment, of course, we can only find our way by losing it, nē?” Guy exclaimed. “We must breathe in the spirit of this enchanted forest, we must seek our destiny bravely unmasked, that is what he is telling us, Sunshine!”

  “This koan affords me no such unequivocal satori,” I told him sourly.

  “Merde, tell this groundling in words she may comprehend, bitte!” he demanded quite boorishly of the silent bodhi.

  But the old man quite ignored this unseemly cajolement. His spirit had long since departed to the untrammeled contemplation of regions within. No effort of ours could conjure it to speak again.

  18

  Guy, on the other hand, was far from being at a loss for words.

  “Look at the Bloomenveldt, Sunshine!” he proclaimed after we had withdrawn a decent distance, and I humored him to the extent of staring out across the endless rolling vista of foliage and flowers. “Can your eyes tell one part of it from another? Regard the sounds of the Bloomenveldt! Can you discern anything more informative than the whispering of the wind through the treetops or the chittering of unseen fauna?”

  “Bien, the cogency of your discourse has convinced me that it all looks and sounds the same…” I said sourly.

  “But we know it is not all the same, do we not? Is it not quite obvious?”

  “Isn’t what quite obvious?”

  “Merde, that you cannot use your eyes and ears to track down the inner mysteries of the Bloomenveldt, of course!” Guy exclaimed as if addressing a dimwit. “You must use your nose to follow that which rides upon the wind! Surely you can see that?”

  “I am not an imbecile, Guy!” I snapped back pettishly. “But can’t you see that we would like as not lose our way therein if we attempted to doff our masks and follow a floral piper?”

  “But you yourself have said we can always find the coast by following the sunrise,” Guy pointed out slyly. “There will be little danger if we adhere to the terms of our traveling treaty. One of us to be the psychonaut, and the other the ground control. Remember! It was your idea, nē?”

  “My idea? It was never my notion to travel unmasked, only to insure that one of us always retain reason if we paused now and again to sample the perfume of a flower!”

  Guy stared angrily at me.

  “What do you suggest then, that we give over our quest just when we have finally caught the scent of our quarry?”

  I regarded him with no less pique, but when it came to formulating a cogent rejoinder, my wits failed me.

  “Does the silence of the sphinx signal assent?” he persisted sarcastically. “Vraiment, enough, I take your silence for assent, whether that is your intent or not!” And so saying, before I could protest, he doffed his filter mask, took a deep breath, and regarded me triumphantly. “Voilà, the intrepid psychonaut!” he declared. “Come, Sunshine, surely by your own lights, you cannot allow me to proceed without a ground control?”

  And with that, he bounded off to the west, leaving me no choice but to follow him, muttering futile imprecations under my breath.

  For the rest of the afternoon, Guy never paused long enough for me to hector him, but led us on a ragged zig-zag course generally westward, which is to say the direction logic had been taking us in the first place, before he decided to allow the backbrain to follow where the nose might lead it. And while I found his puissance as a tracker less than overwhelming, and his cavalier unilateralism boorish in the extreme, at length I was forced to admit that I could discern no obvious sign of danger.

  Guy would drift down onto a leaf and kick off in his next leap apparently without conscious thought, though the direction of our vector would almost always alter slightly. In this manner, with Guy at the helm, did we proceed westward, like a sailboat tacking across unfelt breezes.

  As the afternoon wore on, my anger attenuated as my curiosity began to come to the fore. What arcane scent was my foolhardy psychonaut following? What visions were wafting through his brain on the pheromonic wind? Or were we tacking this way and that to no coherent purpose?

  Vraiment, if truth be told, by the time night began to fall, and prudence constrained even Guy to seek out a leaf well clear of any floral influences, my curiosity had taken on a certain envious tinge, for while I was not an imbecile, had I not readily enough owned to being a mystic libertine? Which is to say that I had never been one to stop short of orgasm in the throes of tantric bliss, nor, even in Nouvelle Orlean, had I been much for allowing even the most venturesome of swains to boast that they could go where I dare not follow.

  As soon as we had broken out our concentrates, therefore, I quite forgot the ireful tirade I had been rehearsing to myself during the hot-blooded afternoon’s journey, in favor of satisfying the curiosity which had come on with the glorious soul-stirring colors of the Bloomenveldt sunset.

  But Guy, alas, from this vantage beyond the olfactory visions of the flowers, was hard put to render the memories thereof in the sprach of the poor quotidian ground control.

  “It was as if…It seemed as though…” He shrugged, bit off a mouthful of concentrate, and chewed it down slowly before he tried again, as if trying to masticate some coherent verbal juices out of it. “Dilute residues of numerous faint far-off psychotropics in a liter or two of fine white wine and sip steadily at it as you gambol freely in the gardens of paradise…” he declared extravagantly.

  “While that may serve as an excellent recipe for achieving a simulation of the experience, it leaves something to be desired in the way of descriptive imagery,” I complained.

  Guy gave me a strange look then, a sad look, the look of someone struggling to regain the fading memory of a moment of satoric enlightenment.

  “It cannot be described in imagery, no matter how puissant,” he told me. “Vraiment, it would appear that the memory of what it was like cannot even attempt to express itself in the realm of maya, for now does it all seem like a wonderful dream, existing on a plane of consciousness one cannot even quite remember down here with the groundlings…”

  “With the groundlings?” I exclaimed. “Who are these groundlings to whom you are referring? There are only Guy Vlad Boca and Sunshine Shasta Leonardo alone here in the forest.”

  If truth be told, I was doubly vexed, first at his arrogant proclamations of visionary superiority, and worse, at the extent to which his characterization of my role as ground control cut at the truth.

  “Is this the mystic libertine who now speaks?” Guy taunted challengingly. “Is this the true Child of Fortune’s spirit? Will you now take your rightful turn as psychonaut on the morrow?”

  “Certainement!” I declared without thinking, though not without wondering as soon as the words passed my lips whether I spoke with the true Spark or whether I was merely foolishly but inevitably rising to the bait of reckless masculine challenge.

  Be that as it may, in the morning, after we breakfasted quickly and abluted ourselves with morning mist condensed in the cup of a nearby leaf, Guy donned the mask of ground control, and with a gallant little bow, invited me to assume the lead, and I took up the gauntlet.

  As
always, we had chosen our leaf for the night to be well clear of any strong floral effluvia, so that when I inhaled deeply in search of a sign, I sensed little more than the rich odor of abundant greenery, the dawning savor of mist evaporating in warm sunlight, and vague undertones of hidden complexity to the vintage well below the sphere of conscious apprehension.

  For lack of any more promising course of action, I put the rising sun at my back, adjusted my floatbelt to .1 g, and took off in a soaring leap to the due west.

  As I rose upward, the heavy background odor of the greenery fell away like the thick shielding layers of a planet’s lower atmosphere, and I found myself sniffing the rarefied ions of the psychostratosphere. In truth the molecules thereof were so dispersed up here at the apogee of my leap as to make the air seem almost odorless in contrast to the leafy aroma of the Bloomenveldt’s surface.

  But on the other hand, up here every flower seemed to have contributed a bit of its perfume to an incredibly complex but attenuated brew in which no single tropism could dominate. This mélange of phantom odors seemed to go directly to the brain centers themselves, where it manifested itself as a faint psychic scent, the breath of the Bloomenveldt entire, like the whisperings of a million distant voices.

  Vraiment, it was like a sip of well-diluted psychotropic wine, for there were exhilaration and unvoiced promises in the savor of the breath of the Enchanted Forest entire, though no pheromonic imperative stood out far enough to reach the conscious level of the mind, and none held sway long enough to be coherent even to the backbrain. Thus the spirit that chose to ride this most ethereal of breezes might be deflected this way and that by the molecule of the moment, like a monomer film riding the solar wind.

  Which is to say that when I came down on a leaf, I twisted my body in a movement that would seem to have been derived from the ballistic inevitability of the moment, but which I nevertheless found to be deflecting my previous vector when in the same motion I pushed off.

  The movement felt right, is all that I can really say about it, it seemed an inevitable step in the dance of faint floral essences in my mind, and in the dance of my spirit through the forest of flowers.

  As the day wore on, I felt more at ease following the perfumed wind streaming through the unbound hair of my mind, more in harmony with Guy as well, indeed thankful to him for daring me to follow his brave example, for now I found myself trusting the caring spirit of the Bloomenveldt.

  What reason was there to mistrust the spirit of a vegetative sapience whose own self-interest led it to design essences contrived to entice our delight? Why would such a symbiote do its partners harm?

  For in the complex perfume high above the Bloomenveldt one could sense the moral neutrality of the flowers. If, as the baba said, the Bloomenveldt eventually offered each spirit its perfect flower, then did it not also follow that one could not succumb to other than the bloom of one’s own perfected destiny?

  Thus did I flitter vaporously for untold golden summer hours through the treetops of the Bloomenveldt like a blithe butterfly dancing joyously among the great and noble flowers.

  But as the sun began to slide down from its zenith, I came down from the apogee of my latest porpoise leap through the psychotropic clouds, suddenly seized by a compulsion that had me twisting my body in an attempt to alter my ballistic trajectory in midair, which is to say a powerful odor had all at once emerged from the background, a wonderful aroma that beckoned insistently to the back reaches of my brain with extravagant promises of both perfect peace and sexual ecstasy, as if this perfume were compounded of both lotus and forthrightly erotic musk.

  I came down on the next leaf somewhat clumsily, for my attempt at midair course correction was less than totally successful, just as my awareness of what I was doing had not quite yet caught up with the act itself. I bounded off again, not for maximum distance, but on a shallow arc which I now comprehended would take me to the source of the perfume, though as to why I would want to do such a thing, this was a motivational nicety which at that moment I could not quite conceptualize.

  I landed on an apron of leaves upon which grew three flowers of the same species, separated each from the other by some dozen meters. Each was a towering tubular bloom whose tall and partially folded petals were colored a vibrant rose streaked with markings of an equally vibrant royal blue. The pollen-heavy blue heads of stamens peered up through the pursed floral lips at the apexes of the flowers like buds in the mouths of tall elegant vases.

  This botanic detail by way of considered hindsight, for I noticed hardly anything at the time save an overwhelming bouquet of belonging and the humans clustered around each flower.

  There were more of them than we had yet seen together on the Bloomenveldt before, a least a dozen, four or five to a flower. More of them than not were still adorned by scraps of civilized rags and had the overstuffed look we had so frequently seen.

  But there was a far more splendid breed of human among them, nude and lithely perfect examples of both genders of our species, who stood with a proud erectness and moved with an animal grace which made it quite clear that they had never known the clothes or malaises of civilization. Vraiment, they were like a brood of avid athletes innocently chiding a congress of sybaritic gourmands with their noble bodily perfection.

  All this I perceived in a gestalted instant, along with the overwhelming longing to be one of their company. Fortunately, however, Guy had caught up with me, and before I could lope forward, he had me in an embrace as much of triumphant joy as of restraint.

  “You’ve done it, Sunshine!” he exulted. “You’ve found the Bloomenkinder!”

  So it would appear I had. As I stood there struggling against Guy’s embrace which was preventing me from achieving my joyous floral destiny on the one hand, and grateful for same in the higher centers of my mind on the other, I was enabled thereby to both sense the reality with nostrils entirely under its pheromonic thrall, and view it from another perspective as a forcibly detached observer.

  Two of the Bloomenkinder, if such they were, and two of the civilized revertees, sat around the base of one of the flowers gorging on clusters of large, purple, ovoid fruit, and my mouth watered its demand to gobble its succulence. A similarly integrated group seemed to be waiting at the base of the furthest flower for some unimaginable event. More of both styles of humans dozed hypnogogically around the base of the third flower, whose perfume spoke to me of the pleasures of dreamless slumber. Then all at once, or rather with a rapid but stately vegetative grace, the furthest flower peeled open to lay itself out into a luxurious carpeted mat before those humans who had apparently been awaiting just this occurrence. Forthwith, they laid themselves down on the floral carpet, and began copulating in varying figures with gay abandon, and while what reason remained found this performance a less than artful spectacle, my loins were possessed of an entirely more avid opinion.

  Vraiment, my nostrils were assailed and enticed by a roil of conflicting imperatives, and mayhap it was only the concern now evident in Guy’s eyes, or the power of his embrace, or some inner reservoir of resource which both gave me the moral will to possess, that enabled me to make my hands put on my mask.

  I stood there hyperventilating for several moments as the perfumes cleared like a dense fog bank under a hot rising sun from the hollows and copses of my brain.

  Then I saw that Guy, perhaps taking this as a sign that I merely wished to exchange functions, was about to remove his own filter mask.

  “No!” I shouted, clawing his fingers away from the straps. “Under no circumstances! I was only barely able…I was about to…”

  Confronted with the force and anguish of my determination, Guy for once relented. “Are these not the fabled Bloomenkinder?” he said in a poutish puzzled voice. “Is this not the Perfumed Garden?”

  “These may be the fabled Bloomenkinder,” I told him with all the firmness I could muster, “but certainement this is not the Perfumed Garden! Far from being exalted or subtle, these flow
ers exude overwhelming perfumes which induce crude and basic desires no more enlightened than the fulfillment thereof which you now observe. Only if your notion of perfection is to spend the rest of your life cycling between gorging on the same fruit, torpid unconsciousness, and brute mindless copulation, should you breathe this unfiltered air!”

  “But at least these may indeed be true Bloomenkinder!” Guy insisted. “At the very least, we must attempt to question them!”

  This I could hardly deny, though I was a good deal less than sanguine about our ability to entice these tribespeople of the Bloomenveldt into coherent discourse.

  At first, we took the path of least resistance, and attempted to rouse the sleepers from their torpor with halloos, and then shouts. But the most we could induce by these methods was the heavy peeling of an eyeball for a brief indifferent moment.

  Since intruding upon an abandoned orgy for the purpose of prying away participants to willingly submit to interrogation seemed hardly practical, we repaired to the banquet of purple fruit in hopes of inducing some idle table talk.

  Four tribespeople squatted on their haunches devouring great mouthfuls of fruit by the less than elegant procedure of holding the juicy ovoids up to their mouths with both hands, chomping off bites of the dripping fruit as large as their jaws could encompass, and wolfing them down with an energetic series of gobbles. Two of these were obese men still festooned with raggy tatters, whose manner of dining seemed slobbery and distasteful. Yet the other two, male and female Bloomenkinder, who by any ergonomic measure were performing precisely the same movements to precisely the same practical effect, seemed no more ill-bred in the act thereof than moussas methodically dealing with berries.

  None of them reacted to our approach with startlement or flight or territorial outrage, nor, on the other hand, did any of them offer food or greeting. The long and short of it was that, despite the appearance of these bizarre auslanders in their midst, they all continued to eat in the same tranquilly obsessive manner.