Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  Babbling thusly, I set first one halting step on the Yellow Brick Road eastward, and then another and another, following the command of my own tale.

  No doubt any Healer in attendance at this stage of my journey would have judged me mad, for it cannot be denied that what he would have observed was a gaunt and starveling creature exhibiting clear symptoms of hebephrenic cafard.

  For hour by hour, day by day, the longer I walked, the more famished I became, and the more I filled my ears with bits and pieces of half-remembered ruespielers’ tales, the more the parts of the many became an infinitely recomplicated mantra of the one, of the only tale there presently was to tell.

  Indeed if psychosis, as the Healers do claim, is a disjunction between the events of the external realm and the images thereof presented by the sensorium to the brain, if a dissolution of the interface between the journey across the wilderness of the treetops and my spirit’s journey via my tale was mere psychic dysfunction, then by such an objective definition, vraiment, I was quite insane.

  But those same Healers could not deny that such a malaise may only arise in a sapient brain. Which is to say I was at least still capable of human sanity or its equally human converse. Whereas those whom science could only judge perfectly adapted to the external reality of the Bloomenveldt were the mindless Bloomenkinder thereof.

  From the point of view of objective scientific reportage, there would be nothing of concrete substance to relate but an endless repetition of the round of any given day.

  I arise already spieling. My stomach screams its starvation, and the hollow throbbing of my head sends sparkles of static confetti across my visual sphere. I fill my belly with water collected from the hollow of a leaf.

  I turn my face to the golden visage of the rising sun, and I walk, babbling to myself. I walk until the sun has passed its zenith, and I walk until it has set in the west. I walk through the gathering darkness until I am inching along by feel alone. I walk until the perfumes of night slide me into dreamless sleep.

  Time, the mages have long told us against the evidence of the senses, is not a regularly spaced absolute along which events are strung linearly like beads. Rather it is a relationship among points in a four-dimensional space-time matrix, so that when events vary we perceive an interval of time between them. But within a crystal lattice of space-time wherein events are identical, we perceive them as a simultaneous one.

  As without, so within, for the mages tell us too that dreams that seem to last for eternities in the consciousness of the dreamer occur within literal augenblicks when the duration of their electrical discharge is measured by instruments.

  So too have gurus, shamans, mystics, sufis, and masters perfect or otherwise, alluded time out of mind, if with less scientific precision, to a state of being in which events are perceived with the transtemporal logic of dreams and quantum cosmology, called variously the Tao, the Ein-Sof, the Einsteinian universe, the Great and Only, the Dreamtime.

  The ancient tribe who sought by just such famishment and mantric declaiming as I now employed to take their willed Walkabouts through the Dreamtime named it best for this teller of the tale attempting to recall her passage through it.

  For any ordinary Healer will tell you that the consciousness arising in the brain of a starving body will sooner or later begin to blur across the line separating waking awareness from sleep, so that as the flesh begins to expire, the spirit begins its Walkabout through its final time of dreams.

  As to when I could have been said to have passed over into the Dreamtime, je ne sais pas, for we never remember the crossing over from the waking realm into dream, still less so when we continue to set one foot down after the other long afterward, dreaming our Walkabout on our feet.

  Certainement, the golden face of the sun in the blue sky above the Bloomenveldt that I perceived would have registered on any astronomical instrument. Certainement, I was not dreaming that I began to direct my spiel toward this solar audience.

  But when the corona of light haloing the sun began to coalesce into a nimbus of golden hair, when it seemed to me that there was a pattern of human features on the face thereof, vraiment, when it started to speak, then surely had I long since passed over into the Dreamtime.

  Was this hallucination, dream, or true translation into the Great and Only Tao? Who is to say which? Indeed, how is one to even make such distinctions? For are not hallucinations, dreams, and arcane mystic visions all the tales that the spirit somehow contrives to tell to itself?

  So if the Pater Pan who spoke to me out of the face of the sun was a conjuration of my dreaming brain, and the words that he spoke were only part of my own tale, had not the song that I sang to myself been learned from the very man who now spoke in the dream? Thus might I have been dreaming it all, but thus too did the true spirit of a lover contrive to frustrate the constraints of space and time to be with me in my hour of need on the Bloomenveldt.

  “Follow the Piper of the Yellow Brick Road, follow the Pied Piper of the Bloomenkinder back from our ancestral flowers, muchacha,” Pater Pan said as we sat together naked by a crystal pool in a pleasure garden high on a plateau in Great Edoku, even as I was walking across the surface of one more leaf.

  For the landscape through which I journeyed had now taken on a nondualistic logic precisely like that of a lucid dream. For while I could perceive a yellow sun shining above an endless green plain with sufficient awareness to maintain an eastward vector, like a lucid dream, the tale I was telling myself had the power to at the same time conjure up an overlay of visions in the Dreamtime.

  “Once we were all Bloomenkinder in the Perfumed Garden of Eden, Sunshine,” Pater told me as he swirled his Cloth of Many Colors around his shoulders and declaimed his name tale. “Now I will lead you to the Gold Mountain even as I led you out of the city of the Pentagon to the long slow centuries between the stars.”

  And now, even as some part of me knew that my body was still trudging across the Bloomenveldt in a state rapidly approaching total famishment, in the Dreamtime I was wandering the streets of Great Edoku, alone, out of funds, with my bladder demanding protoplasmic relief exactly as my stomach cried out for food in the treetops.

  “Remember?” said Pater’s voice in my ear. “Remember when you became a free creature living by your wits in the streets of Great Edoku?”

  While I threaded my way among the great leaves of the treetops, I was tracking two Gypsy Jokers through the streets and parklands in search of their carnival, and when I stared at the golden face of Belshazaar’s sun, it was my first eye to eye meeting with Pater Pan outside our shower stalls.

  “It has taken us millennia of diligent tale-telling to create the ultimate triumph of the ruespieler’s art, our own magnificent sapient selves,” Pater said as we stood there admiring each other. “Have you not noticed your gift of gab?” he said as we lay on the bed in his tent.

  “So keep telling the tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt, muchacha,” he said as he concluded his farewell to the Gypsy Jokers reclining on bonsaied mountains.

  At last I found my own voice in the Dreamtime. “What is the tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt?” I heard myself say.

  And at the sound of my own words, I was transported to the most arcane Dreamtime of all. I was walking across the Bloomenveldt now even in my dream, and I was following Belshazaar’s sun toward the coast, and the only disjunction between the observable reality and the Dreamtime of my spirit was that in the Dreamtime Pater Pan walked beside me.

  “The only tale there is to tell,” he said with a strange smile.

  “How does this tale end?” I demanded.

  “This tale never ends, ruespieler.”

  As I heard myself discoursing with this animus within a Dreamtime landscape identical to that of the waking realm, the spell of the Walkabout began to unravel, as within any dream, one may upon occasion talk oneself awake, or as an event of sufficient import transmogrifying itself into Dreamtime imagery may rouse th
e sleepwalker back into the dream of life.

  “When will I awake from it?” I said as Pater Pan’s image began to fade like a Bloomenveldt mist burning off into the rising sun.

  “When the Pied Piper leads the Bloomenkinder of Hamelin back to the far-flung worlds of men,” said the face of the sun as I trudged across the foliage.

  “Then don’t leave me out here without your song!” I shouted as the vision began to fade.

  “Pas problem, lady fair,” said a disembodied voice. “For now you know who the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt is, do you not, ruespieler…?”

  “Anyone who tells the tale!”

  And I emerged from the Dreamtime with the words ringing from my lips across the Bloomenveldt. I was now once more confronted with a sea of wind-tossed green under a hot yellow sun, and there was no Pater Pan at my side, nor the sound of any voice save my own and that of the breezes murmuring through the branches. I was faint and light-headed from a hunger pushed deep down beneath stomach pains into cellular famishment, indeed I was a teetering crouched figure whose very metabolism was about to collapse.

  But I was not alone.

  For whether the Piper who had brought me thither was a figment out of the tale I was telling myself in the Dreamtime or whether some quantum vapor of a lover’s spirit had somehow succored me therein, or whether these are indeed the same in a manner which no waking consciousness may comprehend, my Walkabout through the Dreamtime with that spirit guide had in any event brought me to this single purple flower.

  Four human figures sat on its velvety petals avidly devouring round yellow fruit. The corpulence of their frames and the tattered bits of cloth still clinging to them gave unmistakable evidence that these had once been sapient citizens of the worlds of men.

  During my passage through the Dreamtime, I had put the land of the Bloomenkinder behind me. Only the borderland region of lost civilized souls lay between me and the coast.

  23

  I had emerged from the land of the true Bloomenkinder with the peroration of the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt upon my lips and I emerged from the Dreamtime with the tale I had learned, or been given, or had told myself therein springing forth from them still, nor did I give over my spieling as I staggered forward toward the purple flower.

  “Once you and I were Bloomenkinder in the Perfumed Garden of Eden,” I quite redundantly informed the two men and two women who continued to focus their perfect attention on their fruit even as this bizarre apparition approached. “Now the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt bids us follow our Arkie Sparkie hearts from our ancestral flowers to the far-flung worlds of men…”

  Mayhap in a certain sense I was in the Dreamtime still, for while a part of me was there advancing slowly on the purple flower and its devotees, another part of me stood before the Luzplatz volcano seeking to persuade the bustling throngs of Edojin therein to hearken to my ruespiel. For indeed, to the consciousness then paused at the edge of the flower’s pheromonic aura, they were much the same thing.

  I could taste a faint perfume of sweet and sour succulence, and the very cells of my body gibbered their demand for me to fall upon the yellow fruit. On the Bloomenveldt, I knew that here on the coastal fringes of the forest, floral evolution and human devolution had not yet progressed to produce the perfect symbiosis between flowers and Bloomenkinder. These corpulent fressing creatures were not Bloomenkinder but once-sapient beings who had chanced to fall under the sway of far cruder pheromones crafted not to snare men but to control the more primitive brains of the native mammals of the forest. Here a strong enough will might prevail against these less puissant molecules.

  In the Edoku of my Dreamtime, I knew that I must earn the ruegelt of survival by the power of the Word alone, though now my tale need please no other ears than my own. For as long as I continued to tell my tale, as long as I could hear my own voice singing my song, as long as I remained Sunshine the ruespieler, so long would I remain on the Yellow Brick Road, for there was only one camino real of sapience through the forest of unreality, the way of the Word, and I was on it now.

  “Remember when you were Children of Fortune…Remember when you were free and sapient creatures living by your wits in the streets of Great Edoku…”

  As I spieled, I slowly resumed my approach to the purple flower, deeper into its sphere of olfactory influence, testing the puissance of the Word against the pouvoir of the perfume, as for so long I had pitted my naked will against far more powerful versions of same in the combat of the fast.

  “Remember how the Pied Piper of Pan led you out of the Perfumed Garden and into the Gold Mountain across the long slow centuries between the stars…”

  My trepidation began to lessen as I remembered my passage via the Dreamtime from the Perfumed Garden to this borderland of the sapient spirit, as my sovereign will kept me moving forward in a deliberately measured pace against all the blandishments of the perfume and all the outraged impatience of my body.

  Mayhap the shorter and darker of the two male creatures, mayhap the man hunkered there on the flower remembered a time when he was a free creature of the Word too, for his eyes raised themselves from his meal in a certain blinking and pathetic befuddlement, even as he continued to bite chunks of firm green pulp out of his yellow fruit.

  “And where has the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt gone now that you sit there like a bestial wage slave of the Pentagon eating the fruit of forgetfulness with your spirits Gone Before?”

  I was within reaching distance of the fruit now, still spieling, my spirit still in sovereign command of the tropisms and hunger of my body.

  “Nowhere, everywhere, here in the teller of the tale, vraiment within the last Arkie Spark of your own human heart!” I shouted the last into the face of the man who squatted before me, who, having now given over his fressing entirely, met my eyes with what I imagined might be the struggling ghost of a sapient glimmer.

  “There!” I cried, pointing at the late morning sun. “Follow that Arkie Spark within you, follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow once more the Yellow Brick Road…”

  And as the rag-clad fellow fixed his gaze upon the golden-maned face of the Pied Piper rising in glory above the maya of the Bloomenveldt, I snatched up a fruit with my other hand, tucked it under my arm, and, obeying the moral of my own tale, turned my back to the flower and my face to the sun, and retreated to the east with as much flank speed as my weakened body could muster. Nor did it even occur to me to cease my spiel now that the fruit thereof was mine.

  “Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt who has led us from apes into men…”

  I did not eat of the fruit until I had stopped loping, and I did not stop till I was far beyond the pheromonic aura of the flower. Even as I tore open the yellow fruit with my overgrown nails, even as I gobbled down great chunks and felt the cells of my body cry out in orgasmic release from their nutritive celibacy, I continued to babble ever-mutating versions of the only tale I had to tell where there was no ear to hear it but my own, or so I believed. For only the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt could keep this Child of Fortune on her Yellow Brick Road, and the Piper would be with me only so long as anyone told his tale.

  Upon finishing my meal, I rose up at once, turned toward the sunrise, and set forth, spieling still. I must not have chanced to look back for several hours.

  But when I did, I saw, staggering and sweating with the protests of long unused muscles not fifty meters behind me, the man whose eyes had risen for a moment from their nonbeing to meet mine at the purple flower.

  He must have been soaking up the words of my tale for hours, aroused from the perfect thrall of his flower by the sheer enchantment of the novel sound of a human voice, mesmerized thereby to follow the music, or mayhap, in some dim manner, hearkening as well to the words of the song.

  All during that day he followed me at some distance, struggling to keep up with the sound of my voice, for as far as I was concerned, the tale I wa
s telling was a song I sang only for myself, and I had neither ambition to attain guruhood nor the patience to slow my pace for his benefit. That night we slumbered on leaves a good twenty meters apart. For I had no desire for discourse with someone sunk so deep in the pit of nonsentience out of which I had thusfar so painfully crawled, and he was content to listen to my tale from a distance, as if somehow mindful himself of the gulf that separated our spirits.

  Mayhap the foregoing is merely the post facto dissembling of self-justification, for I can make no claim that I had then attained that sublime level of enlightenment wherein the bodhi is content to shine without grasping at worldly consequences. Suffice it to say that while he may have chosen to follow, I chose not to lead, for if I had then addressed him it would have been only to tell him that a true Child of Fortune has no chairmen of the board or kings. If this be judged callous indifference by the moral philosophers, I can only declare that moral responsibility or its converse were concepts my spirit did not contain at the time, and throw myself on the mercy of the court.

  On the following morning when my spirit rose to the sun, feeling all the stronger for the previous day’s triumph, I straightaway sought out another flower without a thought for the creature my words had placed in my charge, nor, on the other hand, did I eschew enticing him further with the declaiming of my endless tale to myself.

  Soon enough I came upon an orange bloom where three gaunt women were munching on fibrous blue fruit of a tuberous shape. I strode boldly up to them this time, in the full verbal tide of my spiel, and one of the women seemed to listen out of the corner of her ears with a certain indifferent attention, which had me stand there and reach a proper conclusion like a true ruespieler of the Gypsy Jokers rather than immediately grab for the fruit like the same forced to snatch fressen incognito from under the noses of denizens of the Publics.

  “And who is the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt who will lead you back into the Spark of the Ark?” I declaimed as I approached the end of the cycle. “The Child of Fortune within us all who is the teller of the tale, and in the honor of whose spirit within yourself you will now shower this ruespieler with ruegelt!”