Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  Thus did we proceed eastward toward the worlds of men, and thus did I sow all unbeknownst the seed of the Word in this long-fallow ground.

  The same was to sprout at a carmine flower at which we had been feeding in the company of two nearly terminally torpid human creatures who had long since gorged themselves to impressive obesity on the strangely meatlike pulp of the sweet blue fruit.

  Rollo, it seemed, had encountered a flower whose fruit chanced to contain molecules too puissantly congruent with the ideals of his metabolism. With unwholesome and unsettling avidity did he rip chunks of the tough chewy pulp out of the fruit and gobble them down, and when it came time to depart, he was entirely deaf to my entreaties.

  “Arise, Rollo, to follow the yellow, for the sun calls you down from your ancestral trees to follow the Yellow Brick Road!” I fairly shouted in his face at length, and when this too he ignored, I shook him by the shoulders, and then turned his vision sunward by main force.

  “Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the sun, follow the yellow…” I began to chant over and over again, for this indeed was the most primal version of the tale, the synergetic mantra which had roused me from just this condition, vraiment, from worse.

  I continued to chant, pointing to the sun with one hand, and keeping his face turned toward it with the other. When all at once, I noticed a bizarre change in my own voice, for on certain syllables the single note of my vocal cords seemed to be accompanied by a harmonic chord on another instrument.

  Some moments later it dawned on me that this was more or less the case.

  While my efforts to fix Rollo’s attention on our song of the road and the rising sun thereof had thusfar been ineffective, Dome and Goldenrod had out of traditional tribal custom fixed their gaze thereon as soon as they had heard a few turns of the traveling mantra.

  So too had Moussa.

  But, ah, Moussa, Moussa my appointed namesake, raggedly, atonally, blinking with the effort, had begun to chant.

  “Yellow…follow…yellow…follow…”

  A moronic sprach mayhap, but certainement a sprach in the Lingo of man.

  Seizing upon this amazing event, I fitted my own voice to this simple drone, waving my arms like an orchestral conductor at Dome and Goldenrod, up and down with the beat.

  “Follow…yellow…follow…yellow…”

  At length, Dome joined in, and once there were three of us, Goldenrod soon enough followed. And finally, roused at last by the communal efforts of his tribal siblings, Rollo gave over his eating, rose to his feet, set his eyes upon the sun, and began forming flaccid and silent simulacra of the syllables with his own pulp-smeared lips.

  While the utility of applying this monotonous two-note chant whenever one of my charges began to fall behind or threatened to be captured by a flower proved admirably efficacious, the esthetic excruciation of it from the point of view of the ruespieler hardly rendered it suitable for a permanent song of the road, and so I continued to spiel the tale to them whenever I could, rather than make the sacrificial effort to keep them chanting.

  For this I was to be chided more than once by certain mages in the Clear Light who informed me that I should have been much more diligent in my efforts to restore their powers of speech. I would counter now as I did then, which is to say that in spite of my laxity and indifference to the approved therapeutic methods, they began to speak anyway.

  If true speech it may be styled, a point of some dispute in scientific circles even today. Certainement, the sounds that Rollo, Dome, Goldenrod, and Moussa began to make as I spieled them through those last days on the Bloomenveldt were undeniably in the form of words, and at the end, the tribal vocabulary contained nearly a dozen of these, though only Moussa was master of them all.

  “Follow…yellow…sun…road…Piper…fortune…Bloomenkinder…children…far-flung-words-of-men…”

  That was about the extent of it, and certain authorities were to claim that this vocabulary consisted of precisely those sounds which the teller of the tale repeated most frequently and with rhythmic emphasis, which is to say that much the same effect could be achieved with a tribe of parrots. Indeed I was once told that one of these worthies actually produced a cageful of aviary babel with just the same vocabulary to prove his point.

  But when at length we finally reached the coastline, unlike parrots, my Children of Fortune were quite able to use their few poor words to make their feelings plain, or so in my heart did it seem to me.

  Sunset had come the night before upon a Bloomenveldt lying under a thin cloak of fog, so that the sharp line of the horizon had disappeared into vague green mists for several hours before darkness. Morning awoke me with the wan yellow light of dawn, just as the rim of the sun was beginning to peer over the line of the eastern horizon. The fog had long since gone, the pale sky was brilliantly clear, and one by one my fellow creatures were beginning to arise from the perfumed sleep of the Bloomenveldt.

  Then, as the true blaze of sunrise arose above the last vestiges of night, a brilliant mirrored sheen fairly exploded into existence as the sun emerged from it in a visual paean to glory. For halfway to the horizon, the leafy green plain abruptly ended, and a sea of rippling silvered flashes began.

  “Yellow…sun…Piper…fortune…”

  Rollo, Dome, Goldenrod, and Moussa stood beside me as we watched the sun of our fortune arise at last over the eastern ocean.

  Did they truly perceive it as I did? Did their minds contain some dim memory that the line between the Bloomenveldt and the sea was the visual dividing line between the forest of the flowers and the sapient worlds of men? Je ne sais pas, but tell me not that they could not entirely perceive that the tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt had led them to a vantage from whence they could see the promised land where the Bloomenveldt of the spirit ended.

  “Follow fortune, follow yellow!”

  “Piper of the Bloomenkinder!”

  “Far-flung-worlds-of-men!”

  “Fortune Children follow yellow!”

  Was it in truth only my sapient imagination overlaying random parroting with the exultation of my own spirit that spoke to me as I watched them babble their excitement at the sight of the ocean? In truth, as some would say, might a cock have also greeted the sunrise thusly, and with the same degree of sincere enthusiasm?

  My spirit tells me not, nor did my eyes fail to see mouths rippling in what might have been attempts at smiles, nor was I deaf to gurgling sounds which might have been their happy laughter.

  Certainement there was more than the spiritual vacuum behind the speech of a parrot in their eyes as one by one they came to look directly into my own.

  “Piper!”

  “Yellow!”

  “Fortune!”

  “Follow!”

  “Vraiment, follow the yellow, my Children of Fortune,” I told them, “for we lost children of the forest have now found ourselves.”

  “Follow the sun, follow the yellow!”

  “Children found!”

  “Follow Yellow Brick Road!”

  They were more than human parrots; at the very least they were eager puppies, yipping and dancing to reach the end of the trail. And so did we set out for the last time into the Bloomenveldt sunrise toward the worlds of men.

  Within a few hours, the interlocking foliage of the Bloomenveldt thinned out into a treacherous webwork of branches and long falls to the forest floor which we dared not approach. This was as far eastward as we could go. From this vantage, there was no seacliff plunge of perspective, nor any beach in view to mark the melding of land into sea. Some thousand meters before us, the irregular green sameness of the flower-speckled Bloomenveldt gave way to the shimmering clarity of an ocean under a cloudless sky with the clean sharpness of Occam’s razor-edge.

  And along this razor-sharp interface, all roads led to Rome.

  For a few moments, my tribe milled about in confusion, for they knew not where next to go.

  “Fear not, for you are no lon
ger lost children of the forest, my Gypsy Jokers,” I told them as I turned to the south and began the final march. “Follow the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt!”

  “Follow yellow, follow Piper!” Moussa began to chant as she fell in step beside me, as if acknowledging to the both of us that the Word of the Piper superseded the mute vector of the sun.

  “Follow yellow, follow Piper!” the others chimed in, tentatively at first, and then, as if achieving a level of abstraction sufficient unto resolving the conflict of tropisms by bestowing the yellowness of the sun and all that it implied upon the voice that they followed, with more certain enthusiasm.

  “Follow yellow, follow Piper, follow yellow, follow Piper!”

  Thus did our Mardi Gras parade begin, thus did the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt lead her Children of Fortune, thus did a raving, grimy, rag-clad girl lead four chanting creatures struggling to be human out of the forest of flowers to dance triumphant through the streets of the worlds of men.

  24

  But little did I know that, long before the sun had begun to slide down the sky, the gnomes of the research domes would suddenly bring the worlds of men to us.

  Vraiment, though such a perception would never have occurred to me at the time, no doubt the research team that suddenly dropped in on us out of the sky were no more prepared for the bizarre sight we presented than our little tribe was for them!

  It happened with just such mutually discombobulating unexpectedness. Four silvery human figures came floating down from the sky to land on a cluster of leaves not ten meters away.

  They stood there gesticulating and making incomprehensible sounds to each other, and while it might be safely assumed that they were staring as intently at us as we were at them, this was impossible to verify, for they were sealed in full atmosphere suits—form-fitting coveralls and hoods of silvery fabric, filter masks, and impenetrable mirrored visors above them.

  Moussa, Rollo, Goldenrod, and Dome had fallen silent. They stood there gaping vacantly, incapable of terror, mayhap rediscovering the emotion of surprise.

  I myself, naturellement, had seen scientists in atmosphere suits often enough during my sojourn in the research dome to decode the import of these silver beings after a few moments of pure thoughtless shock. I too had once bounded in great weightless leaps across the Bloomenveldt, and while I had never sheathed my body in such alienating armor, certainement, I retained memories of what the Bloomenveldt was like from the other side of a filter mask.

  But long before I could formulate any course of action, the research team went into purposeful motion. Two of them skipped with light gingerly steps to the leaf upon which we stood while the other two remained in place and aimed the lenses and antennae of various devices in our direction.

  “Sprechen sie Lingo? Are you verbal?”

  “In the beginning was the Word, and before the singer was the song,” I replied, “which has carried us from our ancestral flowers to the far-flung worlds of men.”

  “Carramba!” exclaimed a voice from behind the left-hand mirrored visor. “She speaks, she declaims poetry no less, and you will observe no filter mask in evidence, nicht wahr! Ah, many theories will now be in need of revision! Certainement, this is a major find!”

  “Who are you, kind, do you remember your name, how long have you been out here on the Bloomenveldt?”

  “The Pied Piper of the Bloomenkinder has taken many millennia of diligent study to create that ultimate triumph of the ruespieler’s art, our own magnificent sapient selves,” I told him.

  “What? Qué? Was ist los?”

  “Bloomenkinder! Wahrlich! Observe these creatures, see their vacant expressions! It’s true, we have found ourselves a tribe of the mythical Bloomenkinder!”

  Now the two scientists gave over their attempts at discourse with me to peer and prod at my Gypsy Jokers. These, possessed of no sapient mode of reaction to such scientific scrutiny, stood indifferently motionless and mute throughout.

  “Indeed! These folk are possessed of neither filter masks, floatbelts, nor full human consciousness. Bloomenkinder! What a treasure house their metabolisms must be! Our fortunes are made!”

  “Once we were Bloomenkinder in the Perfumed Garden, but now we are sapient spirits of the Arkie Spark,” I told them, for while the full sapience of my charges might be arguable, certainement they were no flower-suckled Bloomenkinder of the Bloomenveldt depths, nor, after all we had gone through to reach this place, was I about to let us be so styled.

  “Now you declare these are not Bloomenkinder?” one of the abstract silvery figures said to me quite pettishly. “When a moment ago you declared yourself the Pied Piper thereof?”

  “This is hardly a scientific question of such triviality that we can expect to decide it on the basis of anecdotal interrogation in the field!” said the other. “We must forthwith remove these specimens to our facilities for proper study.”

  “Ja,” said his colleague, and then addressed himself to the recording team. “Summon a hover. Have them prepare quarters suitable to feral humans. And apply for a droit of custodianship forthwith.”

  A scant half hour later, during which the scientists engaged in wild theorizing and even more enthusiastic financial speculation with little apparent regard for the objects thereof, a dull-steel-colored and vaguely ovoid craft came skimming in over the ocean, level with the canopy of the Bloomenveldt.

  The ungainly cargo hover slowed to walking speed as it reached the edge of the Bloomenveldt and slowly inched its way toward us about half a meter above the foliage, until it had reached a more or less stationary position above the wind-tossed treetops no more than a few meters from where we all stood. Bivalve doors in the prow of the hover then opened like the maw of some great cetacean inviting entry.

  As for me, I regarded this proposition with a good deal less trepidation than had Jonah or Pinocchio, and started forth across the intervening leaves with as much dispatch as the two recording scientists, who were now disappearing inside with their equipment.

  When it came to what the scientists styled “Bloomenkinder,” however, these remained entirely unresponsive to their urgings and proddings, and the other two were constrained, with something a bit less than good humor, to draw me back and enlist my aid.

  “You will be so good as to herd your Bloomenkinder aboard so that we may depart, bitte,” said the one.

  “Wait!” cried the other. “The method thereof must be recorded, for it may be of some scientific value.” Via a transceiver behind his filter mask, he summoned the others to the lip of the entrance to the hover’s cargo bay, where they once more set up a variety of instruments and aimed their lenses and antennae in my direction.

  “Sehr gut!” said the fellow who seemed to be in charge, when he had gotten the word from the recording team. “Commence, bitte!”

  While under more ordinary conditions I would have remonstrated with a good deal of pettishness at being ordered about in this cavalier manner, and indeed, as my career as a subject of scientific inquiry progressed, was to dig in my heels more than once at such rude behavior, at the time I wanted nothing more than to be gone from the Bloomenveldt, and was many weeks away from such consideration of the social niceties.

  I therefore did as I was bade, which is to say I confronted Moussa, Rollo, Goldenrod, and Dome, and began to chant. “Follow Piper, follow yellow, follow Piper, follow yellow…”

  In a minute or two, I had them all chanting along with me again, and once this was achieved, the Pied Piper had little trouble leading her Children of Fortune across the last few leafy meters of the Bloomenveldt, if not exactly into the Gold Mountain, then certainement into the eager mouth of scientific scrutiny.

  “Follow Piper! Follow yellow! Follow Piper! Follow yellow!”

  “Fantastic! Wunderbar!”

  “Nothing like it in the literature!”

  The two mages brought up the rear, shaking their heads and muttering to each other. Then we were all inside the stark and bare
gray-walled cargo bay, the doors snapped shut on this rich meal of unique specimens, and the Bloomenveldt disappeared from my sight forever.

  The next two days were a disorienting mélange of periods of boredom and periods of frenetic activity of which I was an entirely passive object.

  Upon reaching the research dome, we were all forthwith stripped of our rags, unceremoniously hosed down outside like so many domestic animals, and reclothed in plain and ill-fitting white smocks, though I adamantly refused to give over my sash of Cloth of Many Colors, which I belted around my waist.

  We were then ushered into a large storeroom where crates and canisters had been piled high against the walls to make room for rude cots. We were fed an indifferent meal of overbroiled and unidentifiable cutlets with a soggy assortment of steamed vegetables and then left alone to our own devices.

  While my former charges were content to lie on their cots and stare placidly at the harsh lighting fixtures set in the ceiling, I straightaway went to the door and discovered, with little surprise though not without a certain consternation, that it had been locked behind me.

  I spent the next several hours alternately pacing about the storeroom and fidgeting on my cot, attempting all the while to marshal my psychic resources to meet the new reality.

  Certainement, confinement within this grim bare chamber was a far cry from either the open expanses of the Bloomenveldt or the vision of triumphant return to the far-flung worlds of men that had kept me trekking onward thereon for what seemed like the better part of my young lifetime. I was avid to travel onward, though to where, and how, I no longer quite knew.

  Indeed though I soon enough resolved to demand my freedom at the earliest opportunity, when at length a party of scientists entered the storeroom laden with a bewildering profusion of instruments, equipment, and recording devices, I found that I had no form within which to frame such a demand.