Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  Needless to say, this was more than any fear or rational consideration could constrain me to condone! Snarling with outrage, I reached out for Guy with my hand of Touch, and succeeded in grabbing the nether root of his lingam, seeking to remove it from the Bloomenkinde’s yoni and Guy from his madness.

  But instead of yanking Guy back into human reality by his manhood as I had intended, I only succeeded in sending a shockwave of tantric amplification heterodyning across the cross-connected erotic figure. Ecstatic cries rose into a shrill and insistent chorus, and bodies writhed and spasmed in spreading chain-reactions of orgasm. And dozens of hands were dragging me deeper into the fray. I stumbled and fell, and Guy was torn from my grasp, and I was battered and pulled this way and that, while phalluses prodded at every part of my body, and it took all of my strength just to keep from being drawn under by a riptide of flesh.

  I lost sight of Guy entirely, indeed all thought of him left my mind as, in the midst of this rape most foul, I struck out in rage and terror, attempting for the first time if without much skill in the martial art thereof to use the Touch as a weapon.

  I had never before been in a physical conflict in my life, and now I found myself fighting off a riotous obscenity of mass sexual overload which I myself had unknowingly triggered. But for every blow that I managed to land in the region of a painful plexus, another always seemed to strike a tantric chakra, so that all my efforts to defend myself further exacerbated the endless legions of my attackers.

  Then I felt my pack being torn from my back, and hands at my floatbelt, and fearing that this would go next, I did the only thing I could, turned it up to .1 g lift, and attempted to free myself from my tormenters long enough to leap clear.

  I succeeded in jumping clear of the ground, but my upward progress was impeded in midair by the press of bodies and the scrabblings of hands.

  Then I felt myself being drawn back down into the mire of bodies, and fingers were tearing randomly at my filter mask, and suddenly it was ripped away, and phalluses thrust forward from every direction toward every orifice, and I felt myself reaching for them with my hands and my yoni and my mouth as a knee-shaking tsunami of blind animal lust surged through my body—

  As I felt my consciousness subliming into a blood-red mist of egoless libido, I had the last combat-born and adrenaline-charged presence of mind to perform two valedictory acts of sapience before I passed over to the flowers.

  I exhaled from the bottom of my lungs, and then stopped my breathing.

  I struck out with vicious and electronically augmented karate blows, and kicked off some unknown portion of some unseen body with both of my feet.

  As I soared free of the melee, something hit me in the stomach with wind-killing force, and I was constrained to suck in a great charge of pheromone-saturated air, and then something else smashed into my temple as I broke clear—

  —and I had one last moment of roaring red consciousness, scrabbling to reach the lingams and bodies receding beneath my ravenous grasp before even that lapsed into darkness.

  20

  I awoke to the gentlest of thumps as I floated down supinely onto a leaf, nudged back the last increment into consciousness by this most tender breaking of a most languid fall.

  The Perfumed Garden was nowhere in evidence, which is to say that my eyes opened and focused on naught but the endless flower-strewn green plain of the Bloomenveldt, nor had I chanced to descend near a Bloomenkinder village or even within the overpowering chemical aura of any flower.

  Bonne chance indeed! Now I remembered leaping upward with my floatbelt turned up to .1 g, thrust out of a vile unspeakability whose details I was not ready to call up from beyond the veil of my present dreamy vagueness. There had been a wonderful surge of roaring lust, and a blow on the head…

  Slowly, my consciousness firmed up to the point where I began to understand what must have happened.

  I had been rendered unconscious as the gentle lift of the floatbelt bore me aloft, and I must have drifted up higher and higher until the floatbelt’s safety mechanism had automatically turned down the lift to prevent me from drifting up beyond the life-sustaining level of Belshazaar’s atmosphere and then deposited me randomly on this leaf.

  I must therefore have risen quite far, through several atmospheric streams, which must have blown me this way and that for unknowable distances, which is to say I had been thoroughly shaken by the cupped hands of fate and then tossed like a die back onto the gaming board of life.

  And then I began to perceive that while the Perfumed Garden was nowhere in sight, it could not be said that its influence was completely absent from my sensorium. For as my memory regained the clarity of my restored vision, I remembered the frenzied tangle of naked limbs and torsos, the forest of clutching and groping hands, the thrusting clusters of phalluses, with a sad and longing nostalgia, knowing I had been an utter fool to abandon such an eternal ecstasy of perfect sexual delight.

  Yet at the same time, higher portions of my mind remembered all too well that the real-time emotions encoded with these experiences had been those of outraged disgust and terrified anger.

  Out of this disjunction between the true memory of the event and my present perception of same through a rosy haze of diffuse sexual arousal, arose yet a third aspect of my immediate consciousness, namely a detached observer who could readily comprehend that the difference must be the result of something borne on the wind.

  Vraiment, as I sat up and began to size up the full extent of my dilemma, I knew that I could easily enough find my way back to paradise by surrendering my spirit to the rosy waves of this lustful tide, which, though fainter than the night breeze wafting the aroma of the Bittersweet Jungle down to the porch of my parents’ manse in Nouvelle Orlean, would surely nevertheless carry a soul cast into its gentle undertow back home to floral nirvana.

  As I fought against this dreamy desire, my awareness was sharpened by the adrenal surge of the struggle, and I began to fully comprehend the peril, not to say hopelessness, of my position.

  My filter mask was gone and so was my pack. I had supplies of neither food nor water. I had lost my homing beacon. I was at an unknown locus deep in the interior of the Bloomenveldt, hundreds, or for all I knew, thousands of kilometers from the coast, at any rate a journey of weeks even at maximum speed along an unerringly perfect vector.

  But in comparison to the peril that faced my spirit, the physical magnitude of such a trek faded into insignificance, for in order to survive, let alone escape from the land of the Bloomenkinder, I had no choice but to eat of the fruits and nectars and pollens of the Bloomenveldt, for no other sustenance was available. I would have sold my soul for a sack of fressen bars, for that might very well be the price extracted for the gustatory largesse of the flowers.

  Worse still, unimaginably worse, I would have to journey for weeks across the Bloomenveldt with my lungs and my spirit naked to every pheromonic tropism wafted my way on its perfumed breezes.

  Nor did my moral senses provide an unambiguous direction, for did not love and honor demand that I make all possible efforts to rescue Guy? Could I fairly call myself human if I fled to save my own spirit and left a fellow sapient being in mindless thrall to floral fascism?

  Besides, would it not be easier and infinitely more pleasant, since surrender to the Bloomenveldt was in any case inevitable, to do so by returning to the Perfumed Garden and at least live in mindless bliss with my lover rather than as a lone lost Bloomenkind of the forest…?

  But I knew full well from whence this thought arose, and not even the perfumed whispers of the Bloomenveldt could persuade me that I had any hope of extracting Guy from its bosom unaided.

  I had only two real choices, both of them bleak. I could make for the coast by myself or I could return to the Perfumed Garden and attempt to rescue Guy. In the latter case, I would expend my last moments of sapient consciousness in a futile attempt to do the impossible, and the last thing I would know would be my joyous surrender to
the enemy of my spirit. In the former case, on the other hand, would I not meet the same end? For no one had ever returned to the worlds of men from the land of the true Bloomenkinder, and no one was in a better position to appreciate why than myself.

  As I pondered this perfect synergy of pragmatic impasse and moral dilemma, the sun had sunk far past the zenith, and the light was subtly deepening to golden, and the shadows of nearby flowers and distant hillocks of foliage were definitely pointing the way to the west, to the sunset to which the beautiful and empty faces of unknown thousands of Bloomenkinder would soon be turning in vegetative homage.

  Somehow vision perceived in this clearly polarized afternoon landscape what logic and morality could not. I could, like the Bloomenkinder, turn my face to the sunset of the spirit, or I could, like the true Child of Fortune, follow the rising sun into the sapient perils of the unknown future.

  The choice was as clear as the difference between karma and destiny. Guy had surrendered to the inevitability of the former, but a true Child of Fortune could only seek to be the master of the latter and follow that Yellow Brick Road toward self-made dawn which had thusfar taken our species from the trees to the stars.

  I found myself in that moment fingering my sash of Cloth of Many Colors. I found myself remembering the Moussa who had won it, and the Sunshine who had worn it proudly when she finally dared to stand up and spiel in the Luzplatz. I remembered he who had given it to me and named me a true Gypsy Joker, and how I had successfully pursued him against all odds. I remembered the girl who had been expelled from the Yggdrasil without even the wit to find a toilet. I remembered how I had arrived in Great and incomprehensible Edoku to wander its chaotic reality in a befuddled daze.

  There was only one thing for it. Only a massive expedition could hope to rescue Guy, and only I might lead it to the Perfumed Garden. If I surrendered to karma now, the Perfumed Garden would remain an invidious legend of nirvana.

  I rose up. I adjusted my floatbelt to .1 g. I turned my back to the west in defiance of the way of the Bloomenkinder, vraiment, in defiance of the very Bloomenveldt itself, and fixed my eyes on that point on the eastern horizon from which the light of a new dawn must inevitably arise after even the darkest of nights.

  No one, it was said, had ever returned to the worlds of men from the land of the Bloomenkinder.

  I sprang off my leaf in a mighty bound toward whatever lay between me and the coastline. No one, I told myself grandly, has ever returned to the worlds of men from the land of the Bloomenkinder before.

  I gave no thought to rest until the sun’s disc sinking past the horizon had painted the sky with the gauzy rose and purple banners of oncoming night, and the first faint stars had begun to shine in the blackening blue above the rim of the eastern horizon.

  Vraiment, my spirit had risen up from despair to the outskirts of hope as the golden afternoon wore on, for I had naturally fallen into the pattern I had adopted as a psychonaut in less perilous precincts to the east, or rather my will had succeeded in enforcing its mirror image.

  There I had allowed the subtle currents of diluted psychotropic wine wafting through my nostrils to freely move my spirit and my body like a kite upon a gentle breeze. Here, where the pheromonic weather was a good deal stronger, did I apply the compass of the ascetic’s code: tacking against any perfume which aroused my desire. When the promise of gustatory delight without measure drew me to the left, I made a wide swing to the right, and I fled from any lustful impulses like the perfect celibate monk. Thus did I avoid landing in precincts from which I might find myself lacking the will to depart.

  So did sapience triumph over the biochemical imperatives of the Bloomenveldt, or so I told myself, for had I not turned the very power of the enemy into the servant of my own pathfinding?

  Now, however, it was becoming night, and in the lonely blindness of the dark, with things unseen scrabbling and scurrying through the leaves and branches, and all the breezes reeking of sleep, I had a good deal less confidence in the power of the light of reason over the shadowy phantoms of the presentient cortex.

  Certainement, I should have felt hunger with some keenness as I huddled on a leaf in the blackness watching the stars come out. Certainement, considering my peril and the night sounds of this most alien of forests whispering around me, fear should have robbed me of any rest. At the very least, my brain should have been aswirl with the memories of the day’s events, and trepidations concerning the events of the morrow.

  But in these environs, or so it would seem, the Bloomenveldt, after its own self-interested fashion, took care to assure that none of its charges stumbled to the forest floor in the middle of the night or failed to receive the measure of sleep that their metabolisms required. Uncounted thousands of flowers altered their daytime profusion of pheromonic imperatives to fill the entire Bloomenveldt with the peacefully leaden perfume of a single purpose.

  Not hunger, not fear, mayhap not even outright terror, could have long kept any mammal awake in this overwhelming perfumed fog of sleep. Not even this sapient Child of Fortune alone with her thoughts could deprive herself of the Bloomenveldt’s gift of deep and uninterrupted slumber.

  When I awoke in the bleak early moments of sunrise, however, it was an entirely different matter. The sun peeked up through a cool gray mist dimming the greens and floral hues of the Bloomenveldt to ghostly pastels. Certainement, I had not been awoken by either the bright light of dawn or the natural clock of my own metabolism at this repulsive hour. No, it was a ravenous hunger which had been sufficiently powerful to break my sleep; my stomach seemed plastered like an aching membrane against my backbone, my head ached with hollow emptiness, and my consciousness could contain naught but the thought of luscious fruits.

  The faint odors of which seemed as pervasive as the mist slowly beginning to burn off the Bloomenveldt. The trace aromas of fruits I had never seen evoked sharp memories of wonderful savors I had never tasted.

  Since it had been nearly a day since I had last eaten, my hunger of the morning seemed far less unnatural than the absence of same last night. Yet the phantom flavors teasing across my palate on the breeze alerted me to the fact that there were external agencies at work. No doubt, just as the nighttime perfumes masked all hunger behind an impenetrable urge to sleep, so had the conclusion of these secretions with the dawn abruptly allowed it to surface redoubled by time.

  But while it may have been the flowers that were filling my nostrils and caressing my tastebuds with promises of gustatory delight, my ringing head and aching stomach were clear evidence of true famishment on a metabolic level. Which is to say that no matter what powerful psychotropics the food behind such pheromonic blandishments was likely to contain, not even the mightiest ascetic heroism was going to prevent me from having to eat sooner or later.

  Still, mayhap I could apply the same contrarian strategy which had served me well thusfar and avoid eating any fruits to which I was drawn by the perfumes and consume only those which the Bloomenveldt appeared to have laid out for other species. By so doing, I might at least avoid ingesting psychotropics evolved by the cunning of the flowers as specific snares for our own.

  Thus resolved, I drank water from the abundant supplies thereof condensed in the hollows of nearby leaves, and then set off to the east in a series of short, high, hanging hops, ignoring all blandishments of aromas by act of will, and seeking to spy out an untenanted flower by vision alone.

  As chance would have it, I had not proceeded in this manner for very long when I spotted a small grove of flowers of several different species not two hundred meters to the north. Not only were no human figures in evidence, there seemed to be no aromas leading my backbrain by the nose toward it.

  What I saw when I arrived at this grove’s margin, however, was a good deal less than an appetizing spectacle. Half a dozen species of flowers had arranged themselves in widely separated stands of two or three blooms, and with the exception of those of one species with which I was all too familiar, t
hese all seemed to be somewhat immature specimens, nor was any fruit in evidence, as if the Perfumed Garden had recently sent out a colonial expedition which had not yet matured to the point of attracting its own Bloomenkinder.

  But when I approached one of the stands of rainbow puffballs which seemed to be the only fully mature flowers in the garden, I saw that this surmise was both florally correct and humanly wrong in a peculiarly horrifying manner.

  For here in the deep Bloomenveldt with no adult humans anywhere in evidence, clusters of human infants were nevertheless hanging from the vegetative teats of the flowers. Somehow, the flowers had either chemically commanded the mothers thereof to deposit their offspring in this venue, or worse still, exuded pheromones which drew hundreds of toddlers wriggling across the Bloomenveldt to improve the species by utterly ruthless natural selection.

  Either way, this juvenile offspring of the Perfumed Garden was growing its own first generation of human pollinators.

  While the gorge and outrage that such a sight called forth would be difficult to exaggerate, some logical circuits in my mind remained capable of making a cold calculation. No doubt the reason that this grove did not exude perfumes attractive to adult humans was that it had not matured to the point where it was ready to serve as a proper host to same. Since the sap secreted by the teats was clearly sufficient to sustain these infant Bloomenkinder in robust health, might it not do the same for me? And since the perfumes of the grove lacked molecules with puissant effect upon the adult human metabolism, might not the milk thereof be equally lacking in danger?

  Putting aside all esthetic considerations, gustatory or social, I sought out a stem as free from babes as possible, lay down on the leaf before it, applied my mouth to one of the pinkly rounded breasts thereof, and gave suck to the hard red teat.

  A thick, tepid, somewhat sweet syrup oozed into my mouth, its simple savor not designed to appeal to mature tastebuds, so that the esthetic experience was like drinking liquified and sweetened fressen. But as the syrup slowly poured down my throat, my stomach welcomed it as the plants of a desert welcome rain after a long parching drought, and the very cells of my body seemed to sigh in relief. Avidly, I sucked at the floral teat with unrestrained enthusiasm, until I had established a steady flow with much unseemly smacking and gurgling.