Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  This simple song did I chant endlessly and softly to myself as I bounded across the Bloomenveldt. And far from distracting my higher thoughts from pragmatic considerations, the perpetual chanting of this mantra served to calm and focus them, for now I was all too cognizant of the true nature of my predicament, and conscious as well of the only possible escape therefrom of which I could conceive.

  For the brute fact was that I could not reach the coast without food, and the pit of nonbeing from whence I had barely managed to rouse myself to follow the rising sun was the only source thereof for hundreds of kilometers.

  Which is to say I had no choice but to risk this death of the spirit not once more, but again, and again, and again, or die an even more final death of the body through starvation. Indeed, as I had already learned far too well, given a sufficient level of fatigue and famishment, I would sooner or later no longer retain the biologic energy to support a conscious will, and be drawn by the perfumes to the fruit like a moth to the flame.

  Therefore, since I could count on no continuity of sapient will to carry me through, indeed since all that was certain was that I must suffer repeated loss of same in order to maintain my body’s vitality, my only course was to accomplish with what I hoped was the greater puissance of conscious craft what I had already once barely managed to achieve by accident of fate.

  Which was to use these periods of conscious lucidity to engrave a mantric tropism upon the presentient levels of my mind with perpetual chanting repetition and diligent meditation, so that even when reason and conscious will had once more fled, my Bloomenkind self would, during periods of enforced floral nirvana, be programmed to follow the yellow, to follow the sun that sooner or later must rise during a cycle of such meditations into its percept sphere.

  “Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road…”

  Of the days, or mayhap weeks, that I spent trekking eastward across the Bloomenveldt in this manner from one meal of fruit to the next, there is little to be said that is not entirely contained within the endless repetition of the mantra I had given myself.

  “Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road…”

  For this became the sole content of my periods of sapient consciousness as well as the faint background music of the timeless intervals I was constrained to pass as a Bloomenkind.

  “Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road…”

  Though at the time I knew no more of the science of mantric imprinting or the art of autohypnosis than the simple techniques we are all taught in the early years of schooling, some years later, upon delving deeper into the subject, I was to learn just how puissant the mantric technique I had naively cobbled together out of bits and pieces of knowledge and coincidence really was.

  “Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road…”

  For what I had in fact done was crafted what the masters of the art call a synergetic mantra, wherein a conventional mantric rhythm keyed to the biorhythms of the consciousness in question is linked to a simple verbal metaphor of deep meaning thereto. A visual mandala is then provided which is the imagistic cognate thereof, so that the two most sovereign senses are merged into receptors for a single synergetic image of sight and sound, which, by becoming the content of the sensorium entire, focuses consciousness down to a single imperative.

  Under proper conditions and the direction of a true perfect master of the art, an appropriate incense is also provided, as well as a psychotropic selected to induce the desired kinesthetic percept-state, so that no sensory data not linked to the synergetic mantra may intrude. Though I knew it not at the time, I had happened upon a technique oft times applied by adepts of the martial arts, Healers, and perfect masters of the meditative sciences.

  And while I was constrained to serve as my own perfect master as best I could, chance, necessity, the perfume of the lavender bells, and what little art I possessed had conspired to create a synergetic mantra of which the greatest of such mages could be proud.

  “Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road…”

  The visual component thereof had been pared to the simplest possible mandalic formulation: a yellow circle, archetype of a life-giving sun. Nor could a perfect master have done much better with the drone of similar syllables contained within the mantra.

  So no matter how often hunger drove me to the fruits and perfumes of a Bloomenkinder garden, and no matter how many cycles I passed in utter thrall thereto, the inevitable precessing of these selfsame cycles of eating, copulation, and hypnogogic repose must sooner or later place me beneath a meditative flower in an early morning hour beneath the rising sun.

  Whereupon that visual mandala would inevitably call forth the chanting of the mantra synesthetically linked thereto…“Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road…”

  And this in turn would generate the stylized motion of my hand turning the control knob of my floatbelt, and I would rise slowly up into the air high above the Bloomenveldt until some semblance of sapience returned, like a mystic bodhi levitating out of maya by sheer force of will.

  “Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road…”

  Only by virtue of my possession of this single nonfloral tropism might I have been said to in any way distinguish myself as a self-motivated creature from the Bloomenkinder of the forest.

  For just as the mantra had become the sole content of my being when I was constrained to sojourn among the Bloomenkinder, so was my mind incapable of encompassing any other thought as I bounded eastward across the Bloomenveldt. So if the foregoing description of this stage of my journey across the Bloomenveldt may seem to lack something in terms of its recounting of the linear skein of events, the truth of the matter is that the human personality of the teller of this tale was for all practical purposes absent as a memory-binding witness from the corpus moving through them.

  Just as the voice and speech patterns of a person long dead may be encoded into an electronic matrix and cunningly manipulated to produce an artificial personality with which one may even discourse, my body followed a program impressed upon it by a vacated spirit, but in truth no one was at home.

  Nor would anything that might fairly be called true sapience return until the mantric cycle was perforce broken by a decided turn for the worse, and even then the teller of the tale would have been hard-put to recognize the same in the babbling apparition resulting therefrom had I chanced to encounter her on some civilized street.

  “Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road…”

  Guided by the shadows cast before me by a sun sinking well past its zenith, I was drifting gently downward toward the next in an endless succession of leafy springboards when—

  —All at once, the rhythm of chanting, soaring, landing, and kicking off again was abruptly shattered by a sudden plunge from about ten meters up that had me slamming into a leaf with such unexpected force that my knees buckled, and I staggered forward into a half-roll, and then fell on my chest skidding across the surface toward the brink of a five hundred meter fall to the forest floor.

  Sheer animal reflex reached out with both hands to grip the edge of the leaf as the front half of my body slid out into vertiginous space, and I hung there supported by my arms and the suddenly considerable weight of my lower torso in a state of absolute adrenal terror before summoning up sufficient awareness to haul myself back to safety.

  No doubt nothing less could have shocked back a return to even such sapient consciousness as I now enjoyed. Which is to say that in the backflush of adrenal arousal, an ego reappeared to the extent that I was aware of just how close I had come to sudden and horrible death. As well, with the breath knocked out of my body, I had for the moment given over my chanting.

  But that was about the extent of it. By now my throat and lips were no longer needed to keep the mantra vibrating in my brain, and as for the sun, as for the
yellow, as for the Yellow Brick Road, the tropism to press onward to the east had in no way diminished.

  I scrambled to my feet and bent my legs to kick off into the next leap, and then it was that something even more primal than the imperative of tropism, some kinesthetic animal instinct, intervened. Rather than leap with all my power in the direction of the eastern horizon, which under the circumstances might very well have meant my death, I essayed a tentative jump straight upward, with no more intelligence behind it than that of a wounded animal testing its strength.

  Instead of soaring on high, I went up about a meter and came down hard.

  Then it was that some semblance of true consciousness returned to inform my cerebral centers of what my body’s instincts had already known.

  My weight had returned to Belshazaar normal.

  The power core of my floatbelt had expired.

  Although I was incapable of such technological appraisal at the time, the obvious truth of the matter was that I had overtaxed the energy reserves of my floatbelt by employing it in a manner for which it had never been intended, to wit, repeated and overly prolonged use at full upward thrust.

  But the import of the catastrophe was all too clear even to the dim creature who stood there on a leaf, dwarfed now to an even greater degree by the green immensity of the Bloomenveldt, and who now tremulously resumed her mantric chant in a new minor note of despair.

  “Follow the sun…follow the yellow…follow the Yellow Brick Road…”

  Vraiment, the yellow sun still shone in the sky behind me casting lengthening shadows toward the eastern horizon, and the Yellow Brick Road still lay before me, nor was the compulsion to follow it in any way diminished. But now I could only inch along it by the frail power of my unaided feet.

  “Follow the sun…follow the yellow…follow the Yellow Brick Road…”

  Chanting my poor mantra, following my distant star, mercifully unmindful of the full hopelessness of my task, I set one foot before the other and began my long march across the Bloomenveldt, an insect reduced to crawling across an endless hostile savannah under the pitiless gaze of indifferent gods.

  22

  Traversing the Bloomenveldt as a groundling was a far cry from bounding across it in great soaring leaps as a relatively blithe creature of the air. Not only did it take half a day and more to cover the same distance that I had previously traversed in a few long leaps, now I could rely only on my own care and agility to save me from a terminal fall to the forest floor.

  Thus the transitional step from one leaf to another had become a matter of some significance and forethought, and what had once seemed the minor rises and dips of the surface now assumed strategic significance, for without a usable floatbelt, I could only spy out the lay of the land before me by ascending the relative heights of the taller tree crowns.

  And while the passage of the sun across the sky and the direction of the shadows it cast were sufficient to keep me following the yellow, the lay of the land ahead assumed dire significance when it came to keeping my spirit on the Yellow Brick Road. For now if I stumbled unaware into the pheromonic influence of a grove of flowers, or even of a single sufficiently cunning bloom, there would be little hope that I would ever set foot on that road to sapience again.

  As for the consciousness animating the creature gingerly picking her way from leaf to leaf and pausing three or four times an hour to scout ahead and plan out a safe path between the flowers, this began to evolve further toward sapience under the evolutionary pressure of the more complex behavior that brute survival now required, just as our species had long ago evolved out of presentience when it began its long march from the mindless Eden of the trees.

  For I was forced to consider every footfall, I was forced to scout ahead, I was forced to memorize a safe path through the future landscape and achieve a level of cognitive abstraction sufficient to follow this mental map of the landscape through the moment-to-moment existence of the realtime present.

  Indeed, such a sophisticated perception of the relationship between space and time might very well be said to be the minimal definition of sapience itself.

  So by the time the sun had begun to sink behind the western horizon, it might be fairly said that some semblance of the “I” who tells the tale had returned to inhabit the brain of the protagonist thereof.

  I knew that soon I must select a leaf of relative safety upon which to spend the night, for it would not be long before every flower of the Bloomenveldt would begin to exude the irresistible perfume of sleep. And upon selecting same and settling down on it, I had achieved a level of consciousness all-too-able to reflect upon its plight.

  I had no concept of how long I had been traveling, how far I had come, or how much more Bloomenveldt lay between me and the succor of the coast. I had only the dimmest notion of how long the human body might continue to function without food, mayhap a matter of weeks for a perfect master of the yogic arts, but certainement a matter of mere days for such as myself. But I knew with only too much certainty that, without my floatbelt to extract me toward the sunrise, to eat of the fruit of the Bloomenveldt, or even approach within smelling distance of the flowers thereof, would mean my sapient doom.

  I, who to say the least had never been a devotee of the ascetic disciplines, would have to essay a fast of heroic proportions. Moreover, in order to do so, I must never for a moment allow my conscious will to once more lose sovereignty over the imperatives of the flesh, for the time would inevitably come when my very cells would cry out for nourishment, and if no “I” was present to provide restraint, no “I” would ever return from the mindless realm of the Bloomenkinder.

  And while the mantra continued to vibrate in my brain even when my lips were sealed, and the golden face of the sun continued to shine in my mind’s eye even as the first stars of night began to appear in the blackening sky, I knew full well that mere tropism would not be sufficient to maintain the conscious awareness which now swore an oath to itself that the body in which it arose would expire before the human spirit therein gave up the ghost.

  “Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road…”

  As I sat there on my leaf, determined that if I must die in this uncaring vastness it would at least be as a sapient being who deserved to call herself human even to the end, the mantra ringing in my brain and the golden mandala filling my mind’s eye began to take on new complexities of meaning, or rather the message I had left for myself in the simple tropism which had brought a mindless creature through hundreds of kilometers of Bloomenveldt began to exfoliate its layers of meaning in the re-emergent mind of the human spirit who had coded it into her backbrain in the first place.

  “Before the singer was the song, which has carried our kind from the trees to the stars,” Pater Pan had often enough declaimed, and vraiment, where was I now but cast back into the treetops of presentience from whence long ago our species had begun its gallant march to sapience and the stars?

  And what was the Yellow Brick Road I now sought to travel but the recapitulation of our species’ phylogeny via my own personal ontogeny? Vraiment, as the most ancient lore of our species has it, in the beginning was the Word, the tale we told ourselves as we wandered from apes into men, the tale the Piper told still.

  Tattered, begrimed and besmeared with the juices and pulps of the fruits of forgetfulness and the sweats and stains of literally unspeakable acts, the Cloth of Many Colors still tied about my waist seemed the banner of all that remained of who I had been and who I must now struggle to once more become—Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, Child of Fortune, Gypsy Joker, ruespieler.

  For was it not the Word which had created our humanity in the first place? Might it therefore not carry me back from the forest of unreason once more along the Yellow Brick Road that led homeward to the sapient worlds of men? Out here on the Bloomenveldt there might be no one to hear my tales but myself, but there was something far more precious than ruegelt to be won or lost.

  And so
there in the treetops, I summoned up my courage as once I had in the Luzplatz in Great Edoku, and into the darkness, into the loneliness, into an utter insensate indifference far deeper and more terrible than that of any audience of Edojin, I raised up my voice and began to spiel for the survival of my soul.

  “The Spark of the Ark!” I declared to myself, and launched into a bizarre version indeed of Lance Della Imre’s favorite tale, in which my clouded memory and my present concerns combined to rewrite it into a song of myself.

  “Say not that the Arkies of the First Starfaring Age meekly gave up the ghost to the flowers when a way of life that had existed since the first Child of Fortune dared climb down from the trees was lost on the Bloomenveldt! For the Spark of the Ark which led us along the Yellow Brick Road out of the forest of unreason when we were wage slaves of the Pentagon is with us today in the Arkie Sparkie heart of the teller of this tale…”

  Short on art, mayhap, and certainement shorter on verbal coherence, it all rolled out in a glorious hebephrenia, as after aeons of naught but the same mantric drone, I reveled in the sound of a sapient human voice spieling the story of my own soul. Never has any ruespieler had a less critical or more appreciative audience than I was for myself!

  Nor did the audience jade or the ruespieler tire until the nighttime perfumes of the Bloomenveldt rang down the curtain of sleep on the performance.

  In the morning, I arose spieling still, declaiming mélanges of every tale I knew to myself, and transmogrifying them into my own singular song of the Yellow Brick Road.

  “Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Piper of the Yellow Brick Road, who was born when first I climbed down from our ancestral flowers, and who from that day unto this has taken us leaf by leaf along our Mardi Gras parade to the dawn of the Second Starfaring Age in the long slow centuries between here and the coast…”