Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  “Any brilliant bon mots, Guy? I confess that I am at a loss for a suitable conversational entrée into these social circles.”

  Guy shrugged. “Manners, at any rate, would seem to be redundant.” So saying, he fairly thrust his face upon one of the fat fellows and spoke loudly, insistently, and slowly, as one might address a very young child or a rather recalcitrant parrot. “The…Perfumed…Garden…We…seek…the…Perfumed Garden…Do…you…know…the…Perfumed…Garden?”

  The man went so far as to raise his gaze from the fruit to meet Guy’s, though this did not at all disturb the gulping rhythm of his feeding.

  “The Perfumed Garden! The Perfumed Garden!” Guy chanted, hand-signaling me to join his efforts. “The Perfumed Garden! The Perfumed Garden!”

  At length, indeed at considerable length, our chanting drew forth a tenuous echo, much as the same procedure might eventually provoke mimicry from a talking bird or enhance the vocabulary of an infant. “Perfumed Garden…Perfumed Garden…” But rather than seeming to acquire a new sound, the man, blinking rapidly and giving over his chewing for a moment, seemed to be struggling to regain the sound of a distant memory.

  “The Perfumed Garden,” I said syncopatedly, and then added two more beats to the rhythm. “We seek the Perfumed Garden…”

  “We…seek…the Perfumed Garden…Seek…the…Perfumed Garden…Seek…the…Perfumed…Garden…Seek…the…Perfumed…Garden…”

  Meaning seemed to slowly leach into his parroting of the syllables and a certain dim sapience seemed to return to his eyes. He had stopped eating now, and the dripping fruit lay limply in his hands. “Seek the Perfumed Garden,” he seemed to say more decisively, nodding his head almost imperceptibly as if agreeing with the wisdom of this proposition.

  Having given our venture this blessing, it would seem that he had dealt with the matter to his own satisfaction, for he forthwith returned to his single-minded devouring of the purple fruit.

  “The Perfumed Garden!” Guy cried, shaking the fellow back into attention by the shoulders. “Where is it?”

  The obese fellow seemed to exhibit no ill temper at this admittedly boorish behavior, nor did any of his table mates pay the matter any more heed than they had our verbal hectoring. Indeed, the tribesman almost seemed to manage a sort of smile.

  “Bloomenkinder…Bloomenkinder…” he chanted, directing our attention via a glance of his eyes to the nearby examples of same.

  “Ask the Bloomenkinder?” Guy demanded. “Ask the Bloomenkinder? Is that your meaning, ask the Bloomenkinder?”

  “Ask the Bloomenkinder! Ask the Bloomenkinder!” the tribesman chanted, and then, having delivered up this advice, if such it was, he returned to his fruit and could not be roused to speak again even by shouting and shaking.

  Shrugging, I addressed the nearest of the Bloomenkinder, a lovely female creature with taut bronzed flesh, long streaming blonde hair, a beatific smile, and lambently vacant blue eyes. “We seek the Perfumed Garden,” I said, feeling rather foolish. “Is it true that you know where it lies?”

  The sound of my voice caused her to look up at me for a moment, but for all the sapient response I saw in that transcendently tranquil face, I might have been addressing one of the equally beautiful and equally vapid flowers.

  Nor did the male of the species prove any more responsive, though no doubt had the petals of the flower at that moment opened and the perfume d’amour blown forth, it would have been an entirely different matter. And despite my intellectual repugnance for sexual congress with insensate creatures, I almost wished they would, for seldom had I seen such a specimen of obvious animal virility.

  Be that as it may, the injunction to ask the Bloomenkinder seemed some kind of dim Bloomenveldt irony, for the true Bloomenkinder seemed totally beyond responding to any verbal interrogation.

  By this time the sun was beginning to sink toward the horizon, and the deepening shadows of impending twilight were beginning to spread across the foliage, casting a definite waning westering perspective over the endless veldt, in which all the dappled shadowy paths led toward sunset.

  “Ask the Bloomenkinder!” I declared. “One might as well ask a marble statue!”

  But even as I spoke, even as the leafy glade and its three flowers were bathed in the slanting amber light of late afternoon, the petals of the flower of copulation began to slowly fold upwards as all tantric exercises ceased. The humans left their floral boudoir to stand before it in motionless silence. So too did those among whom we stood cease their masticating, let fall the remains of their fruit, and rise slowly to their feet.

  A few moments later, all those who had come to the Enchanted Forest from the worlds of men moved measuredly toward the flower where five such folk were already sleeping and joined them in the land of nod in less time than it takes to tell.

  But the Bloomenkinder! Ah, the Bloomenkinder!

  Wherever they had been when the floral clock had rung down day’s end, so did they stand there now, and so would they stand until the sun’s disc had bisected the horizon. And all of them stood there like sunflowers, staring due west along precisely the same vector, transfixed by the sunset, or mayhap turning toward that Mecca whose direction we had indeed been told only the Bloomenkinder knew.

  And when we too had found our own leafy nest for the Bloomenveldt night, Guy proclaimed his unshakable conviction that the Bloomenkinder had indeed answered our question.

  “Certainement, these Bloomenkinder must be in spiritual rapport with some lost Eden of theirs to the west,” he insisted.

  “Mayhap their genes are merely coded with some kind of tropic memory…” I suggested dubiously.

  “La même chose, for the further into the Bloomenveldt we penetrate, the more highly evolved the floral forms in terms of their intimate involvement with the psyches of their humans, and since these Bloomenkinder are clearly more perfectly attuned to the spirit of the forest than any other folk we have yet encountered, they must therefore derive from lands to the west. At any rate, we must certainly proceed in the direction they commend to our attention, for if such as the Perfumed Garden exists, who but the Bloomenkinder can possibly show us the way?”

  “No doubt,” I said, “but the way to what?”

  “To what?” exclaimed Guy. “To the most puissant psychotropics the Bloomenveldt has evolved from contact with our species! To the Perfumed Garden!”

  “If such in fact exists,” I replied, not by now sure whether I wished to attain this ultima Thule of his or feared that we would.

  “Well then at least to the heart of the matter,” Guy said, finally seeing that my enthusiasm in no way matched his own, though in no way giving it over for an instant. “In any event, it is my turn to be the psychonaut when we travel on tomorrow.”

  Thus did we indeed journey onward in the morning, with myself masked and following Guy, and Guy following whatever it was that came to him on the wind.

  Until some time past noon, he bounded from leaf to leaf with long, high, straight leaps calculated to cover as much distance as rapidly as possible, and we proceeded in this manner due west with no tacking at all, as if by act of will he had determined to steer this steady course through the vapors.

  Then, in the early afternoon, his leaps began to shorten, and the path we followed became more erratic. Several times he would leap directly upward, hang inhaling deeply at the top of his arc, and come down not a dozen meters from his point of departure. At length, his leaps became shorter but surer, and now we were running over the leaves like explorers loping over the low-gravity surface of an asteroid, zigging and zagging this way and that without any logical consideration, as if Guy were following some invisible trail like a hound on a scent.

  Then all at once he slowed, and then stopped, and then stood there on a leaf peering motionlessly at something obscured from my vision by a dip in the terrain as I came up beside him.

  And beheld the village, if so such a thing may be styled, of the Bloomenkinder.

>   Within the shallow dell of great branches immediately below us, an entire subbranch supporting as many as a hundred leaves had burst into bloom. There were at least a dozen flowers growing within meters of each other, so that the effect was almost that of a flower bed planted in an overgrown lawn. And there were several species of flower intermingling in this Bloomenveldt garden. There were brilliant pink cups like enormous open mouths whose petals were streaked with black, and flowers which were the inverse color image of same. There were flowers that consisted mostly of conelike mounds of yellow pollen, and flowers that were mostly tall white petals. There were hanging clusters of lavender bells, and puffballs bursting with a profusion of rainbow hues.

  And there were Bloomenkinder moving amongst the flowers, perhaps two score of them, engaged in what at least from a distance seemed almost like the varied quotidian tasks of typical village life.

  Guy stood there with an utterly tranquil bliss painted across his face. “Beautiful…” he sighed. “Perfect…” I caught him by the hand as he began to drift forward.

  “Guy! Guy! What’s happening to you?”

  Guy seemed to struggle with his words, even as he struggled against my restraint.

  “Can’t you feel it, Sunshine?” he burbled ecstatically. “The rightness of all creation…The great wheel slowly turning in harmony with the music of the spheres…”

  He paused, blinking. He turned to favor me with the most radiant smile. “Fear not, ma chère,” he said softly and with utterly tranquil certainty, “no harm can come to us in this Garden of Perfection.”

  Never had I seen Guy Vlad Boca so seemingly at peace with his own spirit, vraiment such was the calm clarity he fairly exuded, and such was the undeniable visual beauty of the village of the Bloomenkinder, that I allowed him to lead me forward among the flowers, among the perfect Bloomenkinder, with their clear and empty eyes, their magnificent unveiled physiques, and their innocent animal grace.

  The Bloomenkinder moved about from flower to flower slowly and gracefully, never seeming to impede each other’s movements, yet never seeming to need to step aside to avoid doing so, as if moving as parts of a single organism, or more aptly perhaps as if following a carefully crafted choreography in their waltz among the flowers.

  Their eyes betrayed awareness of us just as they betrayed a certain positional awareness of each other. They seemed to regard us as natural obstacles, to be adroitly avoided with calm adjustments of their dance, but paid us no further heed. Vraiment, I too believed now that no harm could come to us here, for it was as if I were walking down a street in a dream, wrapped in a voyeuristic cloak of invisibility, incapable of being harmed on the one hand, and incapable of social intercourse with the citizens of this land of nod on the other.

  But certainement, never in my dreams had I ever wandered through such a venue as this.

  Here, as in our previous experience, there were flowers where tantric exercises were taking place, flowers serving as refectories and floral dream chambers, and a pheromonic clockwork could easily enough be perceived circulating the Bloomenkinder between the phases of the cycle.

  But here the flowers were so many and the species thereof so varied, and the resultant complexity they evoked in the behavior of their humans so recomplicated that one could not be entirely certain that the dance of the Bloomenkinder was not informed by sapience.

  Three different fruits and at least two nectars were offered up by the flowers of this garden. Clusters of head-sized black berries grew at the base of the lavender bells. Both the pink cups and their black negative images grew amidst shaggy white melons, and both were filled with syrupy fluid. Long tubular fruit grew from the base of the tall white flowers. Some of these same flowers were exuding perfumes of lazy repose, so that Bloomenkinder dozed amidst the fruit, and some of them were the venues of abandoned yet somehow stately tantric tableaus, figures of considerable complexity being enacted without crushing so much as a single berry.

  Moreover, the floral sequences seemed to cycle with balanced regularity, as if, like conscientious parents, the flowers sought to discourage bouts of obsessive excess. Rather than gorge themselves to torpor on a single fruit or nectar, the Bloomenkinder would wander from that flower to this, sampling the various courses and sipping at the vintages, like diners at a buffet.

  Even in the sexual realm, variations were in evidence which at least raised the question of sapient style. There were short, intense, recomplicated figures involving any number of participants in frenetic multiplex interpenetrations, which sustained themselves for only a few minutes. There were smaller and more stable groupings which might go on at some length, and even dyads of conventional lovers.

  “One might almost believe that these are revelers at some abandoned fete circulating between the smorgasbord and the boudoir,” I whispered to Guy as we wandered wonderingly through this Bloomenkinder garden.

  “Well spoken!” Guy declared grandly. “For do we not behold that very paradise of which the bodhis speak, where perfect innocents enjoy an endless soirée of tantric and sensual delights and strife and toil are forever banished?”

  “The bodhis speak of a spiritual parameter to nirvana as well,” I reminded him. “For surely there is more to it than endless toxicated carnival.”

  “Vraiment,” Guy said. “Can you not smell the state of perfect spiritual harmony in which these fortunate people exist, the animal grace of every move, their beatific visages. Is this not the ultimate state all men seek?”

  “Je ne sais pas…” I said. “I see harmony and grace, vraiment, but I have no wish to become a member of this perfected company.”

  “Nor I, alas,” Guy said quite regretfully, “for since we can never be innocently perfect Bloomenkinder, these cannot be our perfect flowers.” His visage brightened. “But does it not promise a Garden of more sapient Perfection for such as we further on in the psychic interior? Ah, Sunshine, I can smell it on the wind…”

  Vraiment even I could at least dimly perceive the allure of this promise, for who could deny that I indeed beheld the possibility of a certain sort of human perfection?

  For the Bloomenkinder, if one granted them awareness at all, must indeed exist in a state of perpetual bliss. Had not their desires been reduced to sex, food, drink, and repose, were these not met with immediate gratification as soon as they were aroused by the perfumes of the proprietors? Did they not sleep and eat and make love with the perfect wu of zen archers?

  Which is to say that even masked I could feel the beneficence of the Bloomenveldt, the care it seemed to take for the animal happiness of its charges. Who was to say that somewhere deeper in its heart that puissant concern did not extend to the sapient spirit, for had we not already encountered flowers which would seem to have gifted the dying babas with the vision of enlightenment to illumine their final hours?

  So did I slide into a dreamy state myself, so was I almost tempted to remove my filter mask and breathe the perfume of this fairyland garden, so did I consider asking now for my own turn as psychonaut, so was I all but seduced by the forest spirit.

  Until at length we happened to pass close by one of the great rainbow-hued puffballs.

  Upon close inspection, this flower proved to be compounded of thousands of tiny blooms of red, blue, green, yellow, or mixed tints thereof, gathered together to form a round fluffy hedge atop a short thick stalk surrounded by an apron of thick, mossy, yellow pollen.

  Upon this floral blanket crawled two chubby, torpid, naked human infants, entirely unattended, which struck me as the height of parental irresponsibility and hardly indicative of enlightened beings.

  But when I examined the stalk of the puffball more closely, I saw the ultimate extent to which the Bloomenkinder had surrendered their spirits to the flowers.

  Around the circumference of the stalk grew a ring of bright pink mounded protuberances which dimpled out at their centers into tiny tubular carmine teats. And teats they were in more than metaphor, for suckling on three of t
hem, eyes closed in gurgling pleasure and squirming slowly in delighted contentment, were three more human infants.

  Upon confronting this ghastly example of vegetative motherhood, I fairly dragged Guy away from the flower. “Put on your mask!” I hissed. “We must talk at once in the cold clear light of day.”

  “I have no wish to put on my mask,” Guy said airily.

  “That is exactly the problem,” I snapped, in no mood to take no for an answer, and I reinforced my words with tugs and kicks and frowns and gesticulations, as I shepherded Guy out of the village of the Bloomenkinder, and if he had not been persuaded by the agitated determination of my will, I might very well have essayed a resort to brute force.

  “Mask yourself!” I demanded when I had gotten him to a leaf well clear of floral influences. “I do believe this has gone more than far enough!”

  “Certainly not!” Guy replied in a tone of infuriating tranquility. “Indeed, why do you not toss aside your own forthwith, for upon so doing, you will never wish to filter out the perfumes of paradise again…”

  “Merde, Guy, just listen to yourself!” I fairly snarled. “Proof enough that it’s time we gave over this mad quest and returned eastward to the coast!”

  “Quelle chose!” he exclaimed. “Return to the coast? Give over our quest? When we are this close to attaining the ultimate object thereof!”

  “To attaining what?” I snapped. “Surely not even you wish to become an empty Bloomenkind of the forest, blissfully content to mindlessly copulate, eat fruit, and sleep, while your sentience is given over to the pheromonic massage of your backbrain, and your offspring suckle at vegetative teats!”

  “Of course not,” Guy said airily. “Here I smell only perfect flowers for perfect Bloomenkinder. The Perfumed Garden of our perfection must surely lie deeper within.”

  “Phagh!” I snorted. “How much more such perfection do you require? Do not these Bloomenkinder satisfy your criteria of perfect symbiotic union with their flowers? They eat, sleep, and copulate at the behest of their floral overseers in a state of blissful surrender thereto, and rather than drink the milk of imperfect human sentience, they are weaned on the sap of the lotus!”