Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  The exiled Edojin in rags blinked at me strangely for a moment, and the logic of the Dreamtime and the logic of the quotidian moment came to coincide. “Fruit, bitte,” I told my audience. “Give…me…fruit…”

  Then, as if a key had been turned in the lock of some long-forgotten reflex of etiquette, she handed me one of the blue tubers with a grotesquely patronly flourish, as long ago she might have tossed a coin to a busker on a civilized street.

  To the extent that I was able to be moved to such complex emotion, this was no doubt the crowning achievement of a ruespieler’s career, but to the extent that I could still be said to retain a sense of revulsion, I was quite horrified by this engrammatic ghost of a human response.

  On the next morning, still trailed by my disregarded acolyte, I repaired directly to a flower to spiel for my breakfast again, and so my feeding cycle evolved. No longer famished, no longer fearing the power of the floral perfumes, I must on some level have known that now I could easily enough have marched up to any flower and snatched up a surfeit of fruit with my own hands.

  Yet in the Dreamtime, I was a Gypsy Joker ruespieler earning her survival by the power of the Word, and so, striding boldly into the pheromonic winds behind my verbal shield, I stalked like the very Princess of ruespielers straight up to a yellow flower where three Bloomenkinder sat devouring purple fruit and forthwith brought my continuous tale around to the hat-passing phase with the cavalier mendicancy of a Gypsy Joker Queen.

  “Long has the tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt been told along the primrose path of our long march from the trees to the Luzplatz, and now the Piper must be paid, which is to say the teller thereof must be honored with fruit! Fruit! Fruit! Give me fruit!”

  Since the verbality of these revertees was to say the least limited, and since the actual tale I retold endlessly was a mythmash of personal imagery no doubt all but incomprehensible to an audience other than myself, no doubt the two fat men and the even fatter woman responded more to the sheer presence of a volcano of gushing verbality in their midst than to any apprehension of the content of the tale. Yet in another sense, every syllable of human lingo I declaimed was the essential haiku version of the tale, for sapient speech itself was the protagonist thereof.

  Thus I moved the grotesquely fat woman to forthwith hand me her fruit by the mere act of demanding same in the manner of a ruespieler, even though I could hardly have been said to have fairly earned this ruegelt by a proper and complete telling of my tale. Nor, having once achieved my aim in the manner I had chosen, did I have any intention of regaling these three lost Children of the yellow flower with an extended version consciously designed to rouse their spirits.

  Nevertheless, as I turned to leave with my booty, the refugee who had been following me for two cycles now caught up with me at the yellow flower. Rather than attempt to emulate my impossible example, he simply snatched up a fruit and trailed after me as I retreated, blathering still, to resume my journey toward the Pied Piper of the sun.

  Mayhap it was the sight of my first follower marching off behind his Piper into the sunrise, mayhap it was indeed the power of the Word itself to rouse some dormant spirit within; certainement it was no act of will of mine or power which I consciously sought to wield.

  Be that as it may, there were now two lost children of the forest following the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt toward the dawning light. She who had paid me my ruegelt in fruit had now joined the Gypsy Jokers’ Mardi Gras Parade.

  And there would be others.

  Some would follow for a day and then be ensnared by the flower of the next morning’s breakfast, others would join the tribe for a few days and then revert, but none of the lost children of the forest who first began the journey were to emerge once more in the worlds of men.

  For while the tribe of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt was to maintain a permanent population of some half dozen, more or less, as the collectivity thereof marched eastward across the Bloomenveldt, children of the forest came, tarried awhile, departed into the darkness from whence they came, and were replaced by others, even as the immortal spirit of our species itself has been carried forth from the trees to the stars via billions of transient mortal avatars.

  From hindsight’s pristine moral stance, even I must own that my callous indifference to the karmic responsibilities I had acquired when I cast my net of words into the sea of what once were men was a good deal less than proof of my complete return to the true spirit of humanity. Which is to say that to my own retrospective shame, I no more sought heroically to regain the allegiance of followers who strayed back into the forest of unreason than I had braved a futile return to the Perfumed Garden to seek to rescue Guy. And if the latter had been forgone at the expense of much pain to my spirit, the former was a matter of perfect innocent oblivion. For in the tale of the Dreamtime I was living, I was no chairman of the board or king, no guru avid for followers, no Pied Piper of Pan, but just Sunshine the Gypsy Joker ruespieler, alone and singing for her sustenance, the anyone who told the tale.

  At length however, I wandered into precincts where dyadic couples were sometimes to be encountered, engaged in tantric unions of such terminal intensity, and at any rate about flowers totally lacking in edibles, that any attempt at approaching them would be pragmatically futile, gauche from any minimally civilized perspective, and, moreover, as events quickly proved, it would have been perilous indeed to assume that the power of the Word could retain sovereignty over the garden perfume of the kundalinic serpent.

  For upon the very first such occasion, as I myself gave the passion flower the widest of berths and continued onward, I chanced to look back and see that the two nethermost of my followers, a spindly scrawny fellow who had joined the parade only a cycle ago, and a grossly fat woman who had been waddling distantly in my wake for some days now, had paired off and were making for the flower, groping each other grotesquely as they shambled toward it in their unseemly libidinal haste.

  Then it was, I do believe, that the awareness of the possibility of karmic debt and human caritas intruded into the perfect moral void of my spirit, for now at any rate, upon losing two of same to the flowers in this starkly graphic manner, I began to perceive that there were indeed human beings in my van whom I had somehow managed, without consciousness of trying, to lead a certain distance along the road from darkness to sapient light.

  And while from the viewpoint of cosmic equity, it was they who owed me a debt of gratitude for what I had so freely given, from the point of view of evolutionary responsibility, it was I who had cast my net of words into the sea of the Bloomenveldt without regard for the plight of those lungfish brought up out of the floral deeps struggling and gasping to breathe sapient air.

  Which is to say that while extinguishing my own consciousness in a futile attempt to rescue Guy might have been a useless act of suttee, that consciousness was in no current danger of imminent extinction, and mayhap I owed it to whatever spirit that had saved me to have a like regard for the lost sapient spirits that fate and my own unknowing efforts had chanced to place in my charge.

  Vraiment, in practical terms there was not much more for me to do but continue my endless spieling trek eastward, avoiding even distant approach to the flowers of lust as best as I was able, make some minimal concessions to not letting my charges fall too far behind, and hector those who began to stray off the Yellow Brick Road with imprecations they could not understand and kicks and shoves which were somewhat more efficacious.

  Which is not to say I achieved any perfection as a shepherd then, moral or otherwise, for when it came to approaching a passion flower after two of my lost children had stolen away thereto, there I drew the line, for I would not endanger my own survival to attempt to save such doomed spirits, nor would I allow any event to long delay the march to the coast. In this was self-preservation of this individual in harmony with the preservation of the collectivity of the tribe, for if there was no longer anyone to tell the tale, the days of our trib
e would be forthwith ended.

  Indeed, if truth be told, I was no shepherd diligently herding sheep, for I was primarily conscious of my charges as an imposition, like a hiker who finds herself adopted by a pride of lost kittens and cannot fail to accept a certain tender regard for their safety or consign them to the wilderness without regret, but who would just as soon not have to assume a position of guardianship over them.

  So, vraiment, I proceeded more slowly and cautiously now, reluctantly mindful that I was somehow responsible for a collectivity of other spirits as well as my own. And now, trailed by some four acolytes emphatically not of my choosing, a new level of consciousness reappeared, a being I would contend had at last earned the right to once more be called fully human.

  For while the subject of my sanity at any stage of the tale and the sequence in which my consciousness reevolved was to be a matter of endless learned debate by Healers and mages far better versed in the scientific lore than I, in the entirely amateur opinion of the subject in question, my full humanity was restored when I accepted responsibility, however reluctantly, for preserving the humanity of others.

  At the time that I encountered the bodhi in the wood, there were four members in the Pied Piper’s tribe, the four final members as it would turn out, for we attracted no new Children of Fortune this close to the coast, nor was I to brook the loss of another of my charges to the forest again, not now with my moral awareness renascent, and the flowers of lust behind us.

  Three of them were men: a thin blond fellow whom I inventoried under Goldenrod, an obese man who became Rollo, and a balding man I thought of as Dome. For while it could hardly be said that these lost creatures of the forest exhibited what could be styled a human personality, it seemed both just and convenient to grant them the nominal dignity I certainly would have given to the aforementioned lost kittens.

  The woman was the most human-looking specimen of the lot, which is to say her physique was neither gaunt nor obese, and her eyes upon occasion seemed to assume a questioning look. She I dubbed Moussa, for in her I dared hope I saw a spark of myself, a kindred though mute spirit, whose life I now held in the cupped palms of my hand.

  Of the four that I was to lead out of the Bloomenveldt, she was the only one who after arduous efforts was to reclaim her full sapient citizenship in the worlds of men. And Moussa did she take for her freenom years later upon her release from mental retreat in homage to she who named and told her wanderjahr’s tale.

  These were my companions when I happened upon the bodhi in the wood, as I came to style him in the nomenclature of memory. We came upon him suddenly. I rounded a hillock of tree crown and emerged right into a bowered dell on the other side, where a man sat in the posture of the lotus before a flower whose petals fanned out behind him to enhalo his existence in a lambent blue aura.

  This was no moribund sage in his final years of life meditating into eternity by the look of him. He was a taut and golden-skinned man whose naked body gave every evidence of excellent health. Sleek black hair hung down to his shoulders. He seemed almost fit enough to pass for a Bloomenkind.

  But his clear green eyes seemed not to be the vacant orbs of a Bloomenkind gazing mindlessly into a blue void, rather did I somehow sense the presence of a fully sapient spirit contemplating limpid inner depths. Or at any rate a visage of sufficient novelty under the circumstances to give my ceaseless babble the first moment of pause it could remember.

  As if tuned to the very frequency of my thoughts, the bodhi’s attention seemed to rise up from those inner depths to regard me with a sudden keenness, though, in hindsight’s vision, my little tribe and I must have presented a vision of even more striking novelty to him than he had to me.

  “Who are you?” he said in a strong tranquil voice. “Where have you come from?”

  Simple and logical enough questions one might suppose, but ones which at the time I was not exactly psychically equipped to answer succinctly. “We are the Children of Fortune of the Bloomenveldt following the song that draws us thither as apes from our ancestral flowers to the far-flung worlds of men,” I declaimed, in the only mode of discourse of which I was presently capable.

  “You are the mystical Bloomenkinder of the forest?” the bodhi exclaimed, maintaining the immobile perfection of his yogic posture, but verbally allowing a rather unsagelike astonishment to betray its presence in his voice. “Vraiment, it would seem you have indeed come a long march from your ancestral flowers!”

  “It has taken millions of years of diligent study to produce the ultimate triumph of the ruespieler’s art, our own magnificent sapient selves,” I readily enough agreed.

  At this his eyes widened, becoming somehow more humanly focused and more inwardly distant at the same time, as if I were a creature of some Dreamtime to him. “From how far into the forest have you come, Bloomenkind?” he asked me expectantly, as if hanging on some hoped-for answer. “You speak as one who has found her perfect flower.”

  “I speak as one who was a perfect Bloomenkind of the Perfumed Garden before there was anyone to tell the tale,” I told him rather crossly, for such unwholesome obtuseness was enough to rouse a certain ire, and ire reevolved my consciousness to yet a more recomplicated level. “You speak as one who seeks a Perfumed Garden of perfection for your spirit.”

  At this a positively fawning expression came onto his face which cloyed my palate like treacle. “Can it be that my exercises are now at last to be rewarded?” he said breathlessly. “Are you a vision sent to me by destiny? Are you to be my guide to the Perfumed Garden?”

  “Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt, to which we have marched for the long slow centuries from the trees to the stars,” I told him, struggling to regain the power to craft the stream of my logorrhea into a more precise verbal instrument. “Follow not the flowers of the Bloomenveldt into the dim mists before the singer became the song. Seek not to become a perfect Bloomenkind in your Perfumed Garden, but follow the Yellow Brick Road.”

  “You have truly seen the Perfumed Garden?” the bodhi persisted, as if I had not at all succeeded in conveying even the vaporous spirit of my meaning, or as if his spirit simply refused to hear.

  “Vraiment, once I was a Bloomenkind in the Perfumed Garden of our ancestral Eden, before I heard the Piper’s song,” I said, since this seemed to be the only thing he was willing to hear.

  He stared at me in wonder. “And like a bodhisattva you then chose to return to the worlds of men?” he exclaimed. “Enlighten me, spirit of the forest, show me the way to your Perfumed Garden of perfection.”

  My aforementioned ire had been rising throughout the latter part of this discourse, and while the logical rationale for it was beyond my comprehension at the time, and the inner psychic dynamics were only to be elucidated later in the Clear Light Mental Retreat, at that moment, it seemed to me that I was once more hectoring the spirit of Guy Vlad Boca, wearing the vile crown of the Charge in the Hotel Pallas, seated in just such a lotus position under his flower smiling just such a smile of vapid bliss.

  “In the Perfumed Garden, there is no one there to tell the tale, and the Pied Piper of Pan never plays his song,” I told him, my eyes misting with outrage, or sadness, or mayhap somehow both. “Join the Mardi Gras Parade and follow the only tale there is to tell to the encampment of the Gypsy Jokers in the Gold Mountain, for true Children of Fortune have no chairmen of the board or Perfumed Gardens of perfect flowers.”

  “You have been to the Perfumed Garden and of your own free will returned to the worlds of men?” the bodhi said incredulously. “You are this Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt and these Bloomenkinder of the forest follow the song of your voice?”

  “I am a simple ruespieler on the streets of Great Edoku,” I told him. “I am anyone who tells the tale.”

  The bodhi of the wood began to draw back into the depths of himself at this, as if retreating from a surfeit of unwelcome satori, or mayhap in order to avoid suffering s
ame. “Mayhap you are the sister of the Prince of Liars, storyteller, for you cannot be speaking truth,” he said as he seemed to will his gaze inward. “No one has ever returned to the worlds of men from the land of the Bloomenkinder.”

  Thus had a terrified and lonely girl spoken to her own heart when she awoke on a leaf in the very darkest heart of the land of the Bloomenkinder with neither filter mask nor food. This doom of the spirit had that girl sworn an oath to overcome or die in the attempt.

  I regarded the bodhi of the woods who now had completely resumed his gaze into the featureless emptiness of his self-chosen void, and I regarded Goldenrod, Rollo, Dome, and Moussa, my four dim creatures who had patiently stood there all the while, mesmerized by the sound of human discourse, struggling however unsuccessfully to escape from the very nullity he sought to embrace. Somehow, it seemed to me that in some strange Dreamtime of the human heart, their poor little spirits were more truly human than he.

  And it was the Sunshine Shasta Leonardo who had sworn that oath who now looked on her charges with a more tender regard, and addressed them, not the immobile icon of spiritual perfection, with the very words that had begun the tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt and which now served admirably as the summation thereof.

  “No one,” I said, “has ever returned to the worlds of men from the land of the Bloomenkinder before.”

  After this confrontation with the bodhi of the wood, I no longer stalked impatiently ahead of my lost children of the forest, but walked among them, addressing my spiel to an audience other than myself. And while nothing could yet quite emerge from my lips that was not cobbled together out of swatches of the only tale I had to tell, I grew self-conscious of the fact that I was practicing the ruespieler’s art, if for a commodity of far more absolute importance than ruegelt. And when one of my charges threatened to stray, or showed reluctance to leave a flower of our feeding, I hectored the same as harshly and insistently as was needful in tones and cadences one would apply to an unruly toddler who had yet to learn the lyric of the human song.