Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  Finally, I began to perceive that the endlessly recurring motifs of the Piper, the sun, the Yellow Brick Road, ancestral trees, und so weiter, far from being venues, personages, or objects in an actual skein of events, were in fact images encapsulating complex gestalts of meaning beyond my entirely conscious apprehension strung together in a sequence that was somehow both literally false and spiritually true.

  To those who would declare that the independent rediscovery of the hoary concept of literary metaphor was not exactly overwhelming evidence of intellectual puissance, I would point out that from the point of view of a singer who had long been entirely subsumed within the song, this satori, if no great and original contribution to the evolution of the literary art, was a powerful enlightenment indeed when it came to my therapeutic rediscovery of my own true self.

  Indeed, if she who had roused herself from floral nonbeing to follow the synergetic mantra of the sun, the yellow, the Yellow Brick Road, across the forest canopy and into the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt might have been said to have been in a state of schizoid cafard, then this reemergence of a self-conscious teller as a being distinct from the metaphorical creature of the tale might be said to mark sanity’s full return.

  Which is to say that upon gaining such insight, I had indeed finally followed the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt all the way back from the ancestral flowers of mindless tropism to full sapient citizenship in the self-crafted worlds of men.

  Nor were the mages and Healers unmindful of the success of this therapy, for not long after my discourse had attained the coherence of a ruespieler self-consciously crafting her tale, the nature of our séances together changed.

  Having allowed a quotidian personality capable of rational discourse to reconstruct herself out of this babble of metaphor, having cozened the teller to prise herself a sufficient distance from the protagonist of her tale, they gave over any further interest in the metaphorical version thereof and began to question me quite sharply on the objective events in question from the points of view of their various disciplines. Which is to say they became openly eager, indeed often owlishly impatient, to pin down with scientific precision the phenomenological realities behind the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt.

  Urso Moldavia Rashid for the most part presided over, not to say refereed, these interrogations, for interrogations rather than therapy sessions they had certainly become, and ofttimes it became necessary for Urso to mediate among the mages present to prevent the proceedings from turning into an unseemly learned brawl.

  If I neglect to properly transcribe herein their endless questions, my perpetually inadequate replies to same, their sometimes acrimonious disputations among themselves, and what at length seemed to become their fruitless reframing of the same interrogatories, the truth of the matter is that I remember precious little of the details, save that most of their efforts seemed aimed not so much at advancing theoretical knowledge as at extracting data which might aid them in advancing the pecuniary fortunes of Belshazaar’s main industry, the development and marketing of psychotropics derived from the Bloomenveldt, an enterprise which had a good deal less than my enthusiastic support.

  As far as I was concerned, the whole process was disjointed, mendacious, productive first of mental fatigue generated by my sincere if inadequate efforts to answer fully, then of indifferent boredom as I felt myself reduced to the role of a repetitious parrot, and finally of a sullen irked pettishness verging on rebellion. No doubt a full account of these sessions would be of genuine interest to those equally obsessed with the same subjects, and these I refer to the scientific annals thereof which they may peruse for decades without exhaustion, for it would be only slightly hyperbolic to declare that whole rooms full of word crystals on these sessions were dutifully recorded.

  After a good many weeks of this, I was quite convinced that there were no more therapeutic benefits to be had by remaining in the Clear Light Mental Retreat as far as I was concerned, which is to say I had now come to view the establishment not as a place of succor but as a venue of confinement from which I must summon up the courage and resource to escape.

  Once I had been a daughter of Nouvelle Orlean, once I had been an indigent naif on the streets of Edoku, once I had been a mindless creature reposing on the petals of a flower, once I had been the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt, and while certainement I was none of these things now, I knew just as surely that if my tale was not to end as tragicomic farce, the terminus of my Yellow Brick Road could not be my room in a mental retreat.

  Vraiment, had not Pater Pan himself long ago declared that my road must be of my own choosing, and that if the destiny thereof should bring me to his side, he would greet me as an equal spirit? Certainement, as a patient in a mental retreat, as a scientific specimen, as a prisoner of penury once again, I could hardly style myself the equal of such a free spirit who tripped the life fantastic out among the stars. Mayhap Pater Pan was the Piper of my spirit’s journey still, for whether or not destiny would ever place me once more at his side, I heard the song he had sung to that spirit calling me forth to resume my wanderjahr on the Yellow Brick Road as clearly now as ever I had upon the Bloomenveldt. I yearned to be the true ruespieler I had never really yet become, telling my tale not for room and board in a mental retreat, but in the streets of great cities for electrocoma passage among the far-flung worlds of men.

  But how?

  In terms of the financial realities, my situation was precisely what it had been when I had been forced to accept Urso’s offer. Vraiment, I could quit the Clear Light whenever I chose, but I had neither funds to assure my survival, means of earning same in Ciudad Pallas, nor any way that I could see of removing myself to a more promising planet where I might at least have some real chance of surviving by the practice of my art.

  I was caught, or so it seemed, in an economic trap whose confinement, though no more readily visible than the walls of the Clear Light hidden behind their screen of trees, were also no less concrete.

  Before the desperate determination to escape this velvet prison had taken hold of my spirit, my vie in the mental retreat had been both ritualized and solitary, a recapitulation in some psychic sense of my days on the Bloomenveldt, for, truth be told, if I could fairly be said to have regained my own full interior sapient sanity, I had yet to gain true re-entry into the social complexities of the exterior realm.

  I slept, I ate, I took occasional strolls about the garden, but now that the interrogatory sessions had reached the stage where their profitability was strictly one-sided, they kept me at it for most of my waking hours, as if to deliver up the botanical and psychotropic details I was incapable of revealing by a torture of ennui.

  Nor had I even regained sufficient social consciousness to feel keenly the lack of tantric exercise, for when the natural kundalinic energies intruded into the centers in which erotic imagery arises, what arose unbidden was my last sexual experience on the Bloomenveldt, to wit a combat for my very spirit against a vile floral version of eros.

  And if this was not enough to keep my kundalinic serpent torpidly cold and coiled, the only social circle whose possibilities lay open to me was that of my fellow inmates, and when at length I began to feel the lack of congress with kindred spirits to the point where I attempted to engage them in discourse, I only learned what my instincts had already known.

  This dispirited and pathetic lot were no spirits I would care to claim as kindred. The Children of Fortune of Ciudad Pallas, as I had long since known, eschewed the arts, crafts, entertainments, and shady enterprises whereby the tribes of Edoku had traded pleasure for ruegelt in favor of earning their way as psychonauts in the mental retreats and laboratories, where funds were to be acquired by indulging in what they otherwise would have paid to enjoy when they could afford it.

  Which is to say that even the generality of this single-minded tribe had little to discourse upon but the psychic effects of arcane chemicals and which laboratories and me
ntal retreats were presently paying the highest wage.

  The inmates of the Clear Light were drawn from these unwholesome ranks to begin with, and most of them had been deposited here as the result of the inevitable unfortunate experiment that must be suffered by anyone who followed the psychonaut’s trade long enough in Ciudad Pallas. Which is to say when at length they dutifully quaffed a potion which translated their psyche into a schizoid realm of sufficient extremity to prevent even the mighty and puissant sciences of the mind from extracting it.

  Thus the garden of the mental retreat was frequented by two species of inmates: hebephrenic babblers whose mutterings and sputterings were entirely incomprehensible to anyone but themselves though of manifest cosmic import thereto, and those who had lapsed into stony catatonia and sat on the lawn or on benches gaping into some private void.

  As for me, at the moment I could happily count myself among neither, but the more I attempted to converse with creatures who were no more verbal than so many Bloomenkinder on the one hand, or who responded to any conversational gambit with a stream of hebephrenic gabble in their own secret sprach on the other, the more fearful I became that I must sooner or later end my days as one or the other unless I contrived to escape from the mental retreat.

  Finally, early one afternoon when I had been given a brief respite from my service to science, as I was walking aimlessly in the garden with the yellow sun shining out of a cerulean sky down upon me, I was put in mind of my days as the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt, and resolved out of ennui, pique, or desperation to strike back at the ambiance of the mental retreat with sheer devilment.

  I decided upon a quixotic gesture which was not only to throw the place into the desired uproar, but which in the end was to lead to my escape from the situation. Mayhap my prescient spirit in the act thereof was wiser than my intellect knew, or mayhap the final movement of my therapy at the Clear Light Mental Retreat was designed to accomplish my voluntary egress. Mayhap both Urso and I had our own way in the end.

  Be such retrospective speculations as they may, I selected a venue within easy earshot of some dozen or more inmates sitting on the lawn in various states of torpor or babblement, much as I had once sought out promising platzes or corners when I was a street peddler in Great Edoku. Here a wooden bench had been conveniently set out under the shade of a large oak. This I mounted even as I had once stood upon a similar bench before the ersatz Luzplatz volcano, summoned up sufficient courage to overcome my sense of the ludicrous, took a deep breath, and began to declaim in as loud a stentorian roar as I could muster.

  “Merde! Caga! Chingada! Once you were Children of Fortune following the Yellow Brick Road of your wanderjahrs out among the stars to seek bright destiny and your own true names! See what in this Bloomenveldt of the spirit you have become! Dispirited wretches! Human legumes! Bloomenkinder!”

  The sheer volume and shock of this novel verbal assault was sufficient to cause several of the babblers to lapse into momentary silence and gaze woodenly in my direction. Even two or three of the catatonics managed to focus their eyes more or less upon me, or so at least it seemed. Pathetic though this response might be by any objective standards, it served well enough to goad me on, for even this was more rapt attention than I could be said to have achieved when first I dared to essay the ruespieler’s art in the Luzplatz.

  “I too left the planet of my birth to follow the camino real that has led us from our ancestral trees to the far-flung worlds of men!” I screamed as loudly as I was able, for when it came to attracting and holding the attention of this audience, volume was no doubt a good deal more critical than a well-crafted tale told with erudition.

  “Vraiment, I too fell into the nethermost psychotropic bowels of this loathsome planet! Indeed I found myself besotted with perfumes and pheromones which make the psychotropics of the laboratories of Ciudad Pallas seem like the cold crystal air of a mountain!”

  Whether I had touched at last upon the only subject sufficient to rouse the interest of these zombies, or whether it was only the volume, the rapid rolling cadence, the sheer passion with which I sought to imbue every shouted syllable, every eye now paid me rapt attention. Some of the inmates even rose slowly to their feet and shambled closer to my bench.

  “You have become inmates of a mental retreat, but I became a perfectly mindless Bloomenkind, without so much as a spirit to call my own,” I shouted most abusively in their faces. “Yet my spirit roused itself to follow once more the song of the Piper that we all once followed from apes into men and so must you all rouse your spirits now!” I bellowed at them, quite enjoying my own tirade by now. But what I craved now was some response.

  “Behold the sun which forever arises above the Bloomenveldt of your spirits, my pauvres Bloomenkinder!” I shouted more craftily now. “Behold the face of the Pied Piper which we have followed from the depths of the forest of unreason!”

  Vraiment, I was raving with the best of the teppichfressers now, and yet another part of me observed the proceedings with calculating clarity and no little wry satisfaction and knew quite well what I was going to do next.

  “Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Piper, follow the Yellow Brick Road!”

  I began to chant.

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

  Most of the inmates in my vecino were on their feet now, and in the middle distance I could see more of them shambling across the lawn to the hubbub.

  They began to sway to the rhythm of my words. Like a musical maestra, I began to move my arms to the beat, palms upward, enticing them to join in.

  As for the erstwhile catatonics, these were never roused to more than a bobbing of their heads, but those who a few minutes before had been locked into their own hebephrenic sprachs of babble were easily enough cozened by my efforts and the communal reinforcement thereof to take up the chant.

  “Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Piper, follow the Yellow Brick Road!”

  At length, when I had whipped up a veritable frenzy of chanting, there seemed nothing for it but to lead my Gypsy Jokers on a Mardi Gras parade about the garden. As to what in truth had moved me to carry this unholy prank to such an extreme, or indeed how far I was prepared to take it, je ne sais pas, for I had no sooner leapt from the bench and danced forward a few steps still chanting, when Urso, with at least half a dozen other functionaries of the mental retreat in train, came puffing and running across the lawn toward me.

  “Cease this outrage at once!” he shouted at me, as red-faced with ire as with exertion. “Schnell, schnell, schnell, remove them all to their rooms!” he ordered his minions, gesticulating wildly with one hand, and dragging me away toward the main building with the other. Nor did he address me again until he had succeeded in removing my person well away from the tumult where my baneful influence could no longer make itself felt.

  “And who do you suppose you are?” he demanded angrily. “What do you suppose you are doing?”

  I pulled away somewhat haughtily from his grasp. I smiled a superior smile at him, filled with self-satisfied contentment, for the answer to his question was wonderfully clear and plain.

  “I am Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, ruespieler,” I told him with the voice of sweet reason. “Naturellement, I must practice my art.”

  A most peculiar change came over Urso Moldavia Rashid, for while on the surface his anger appeared unabated, beneath it I sensed some unknown satisfaction which sapped it of a certain credibility. “The Clear Light no public platz ist!” he snapped back with somewhat unconvincing spontaneity. “As perhaps you will notice, bitte, this is a mental retreat! We can hardly permit you to agitate our unfortunate patients in such an unseemly manner!”

  “What do you suggest?” I demanded. “That I continue along as I have as an object of endless futile interrogation until I am indistinguishable from the poor wretches you seek to prevent me from addressing?”

  “You are free to leave
the Clear Light at any time,” Urso pointed out fatuously. “And indeed if such an event occurs again, you will be expelled!”

  “You would have me expire of starvation?”

  We had reached the entrance to the building now, and Urso’s demeanor abruptly altered. “You mistake my meaning and my spirit,” he said in an almost apologetic tone. “I have only your best interests at heart.”

  “Well then what are you suggesting, Urso?” I demanded.

  “That certainement your therapy has reached a stage where you must direct some thought and effort to your future life, for as you yourself have just so nobly declared, you certainly have no wish to remain an inmate in a mental retreat forever.”

  I looked at him with new eyes. Mayhap I had mistaken his spirit, for whatever else Urso Moldavia Rashid may have been before or after, in that moment he was a true psychic Healer, for he had spoken the truth that was in my own heart.

  “I could not agree more wholeheartedly, Urso,” I told him with unconstrained sincerity. “But what am I to do?”

  “I may have some wisdom to offer in the practical realm as well,” Urso said. “Let us make ourselves comfortable in my office and I will donate the time to elucidate at proper length.”

  To this I could find no reason to demur, and so what had begun as the hectoring and physical removal of a miscreant became a friendly tête-à-tête, or so at least it seemed.

  “Neither of us wishes our arrangement to continue indefinitely, nicht wahr,” Urso said when he had made ourselves comfortable in his cushioned lair of an office. “So while I am willing to grant you shelter and sustenance in exchange for your continued cooperation in our inquiries for a transitional period, I suggest that you avail yourself of your freedom to come and go and seek out means of gainful employment.”