Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  What a roil of emotion arose in me at these words! For while I wanted nothing so much as to regain my liberty, when it came to the economic means of securing same, my mind was utterly vacant. Which is to say that while I could hardly deny the wisdom and veracity of Urso’s injunction, the emotions that they summoned up, alas, were frustration, anger, and dread.

  “Gainful employment…?” I muttered unhappily. “I am versed in no marketable skill or lore, and as for earning a wage as a subject for psychotropic experiments, my experiences on the Bloomenveldt have left me entirely unemployable as a psychonaut, even were I mad enough to resort to same.”

  “Indeed,” purred Urso, and now the insinuating tone of his voice became quite evident, “but you are, as you have declared, Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, ruespieler, nicht wahr. Who has also righteously announced the necessity of practicing her art…”

  “In Ciudad Pallas?” I exclaimed. “You may indeed be a maestro of your own art, Urso, but it is evident you know nothing of that of the ruespieler! This wretched city is entirely devoid of the life of the streets! There are no suitable venues, the citizens thereof—”

  “—however unpromising, are certainly more promising in terms of both artistic appreciation and financial largesse than the indigent inmates of a mental retreat, nicht wahr?”

  Once more Urso seemed to have earned his keep as a true psychic Healer, for I could hardly deny that it would take little more courage to declaim to the denizens of Ciudad Pallas than it had to stand up for myself in the Luzplatz and seek to entice the lordly attention of the indifferent Edojin.

  Urso smiled at me. “What have you to lose by trying?” he said.

  “Well spoken, Urso, well spoken indeed!” I declared, smiling back at him for the first time since this discussion had begun.

  Would not the old spiels which had worn out their welcome in Edoku nevertheless be novel tales from a greater metropole to the bumpkins of this most culturally provincial of planetary capitals? Indeed did I not now have a grand tale to tell which was entirely my own and mayhap one of piquant local relevance to the inhabitants of this planet? Vraiment, had I not now prevailed by the power of the Word in the very Bloomenveldt itself? Had I not been willing to hector the very dregs of psychic disaster swept up from those selfsame unpromising streets as they vegetated in a mental retreat? Did I have anything further to fear in the way of stage fright? Did I have any better alternative?

  I shrugged. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained, n’est-ce pas?” I said almost gaily.

  “Gut!” exclaimed Urso heartily. “And if you will forgive my anticipation of the decision I knew you would come to in the end, I make practical recompense in the form of this necessary gift.”

  From his desk he withdrew a portable chip transcriber such as are employed in private games of chance.

  “Having researched the subject but scantily, I nevertheless believe I am correct in believing ruespielers, so-called, are traditionally paid in so-called ruegelt, actual physical tokens each representing a unit of credit…”

  My spirits suddenly sank. “I had forgotten that the very concept of ruegelt is unknown in Ciudad Pallas,” I groaned. “How may I therefore command the citizens thereof to shower me with coin when none such exists?”

  “With this device I have taken the liberty of providing for your use,” Urso said. “The donor inserts a chip in one slot, the recipient in another, the amount of the transfer is selected, and the transaction is accomplished.”

  “It seems a rather unwieldy procedure in comparison to the simple tossing of some coins,” I said uncertainly, though of course this was the normal mode of commerce throughout the worlds of men, and ruegelt only a concession to the demimonde on the more sophisticated planets thereof.

  “Come, come, this is mere grumbling, is it not?” Urso chided in an avuncular tone. “To those whose spirits hold back from every venture, a less than perfect universe provides abundant excuses for sloth, nicht wahr?”

  Once more I could not escape entirely from the feeling that he was serving his own self-interest no less than he was justly advising mine.

  “Touché,” I agreed nevertheless, for whatever else Urso might be, however I might have been manipulated to get me here, and at whatever profit to whom, Urso Moldavia Rashid, by means fair or foul, had guided me back to my Yellow Brick Road.

  And so, the next afternoon, under an overcast sky, with my Cloth of Many Colors tied about my neck as a scarf and the chip transcriber in my pocket, I set forth.

  Not having set foot on urban streets for months, I found those of Ciudad Pallas both daunting and strangely reassuring. For while I now found myself moving among more people than I had seen in one place for many weeks, and while the regular gridwork of streets, the geometrically rigid forms and unadorned facades of the palisades of buildings, indeed the very gray substance of the concrete beneath my feet, seemed grim, lifeless, and ersatz, wandering in this venue was a far cry from the psychic perils of the Bloomenveldt, and Ciudad Pallas certainly seemed modest and quotidian enough in comparison to my memories of Great Edoku.

  And while I might have been tempted to regard myself as a bumpkin fresh from the wilderness, or worse, as an inmate of a mental retreat taking her first tremulous steps out into the worlds at large, my perception of the citizens of Ciudad Pallas soon enough disabused me of any excessive humility.

  For I saw no throngs of extravagantly clad and tinted Edojin promenading with the lordly and languid grace of folk who considered themselves the sophisticated crown of creation, nor even such haughty urchins as the Gypsy Jokers who had once seemed so daunting when I was a naif of the Public Service Stations.

  Rather was I in the midst of modestly clad folk scurrying through the streets with, for the most part, the blank expressions that befitted this pallid venue. The majority of them seemed sober and industrious-minded citizens intent on affairs of business, while others, by the unlaundered look of their clothing and the dishevelment of their persons, could readily enough be identified as what passed in Ciudad Pallas for Children of Fortune, to wit the denizens of the waiting rooms of the laboratories and mental retreats with whom I had become all too familiar on my previous sojourn in the city.

  Vraiment, I felt myself to be more connected to the spirit of Belshazaar, such as it was, than any of these natives and longtime residents thereof. For did not the life of its chief city revolve entirely about the psychotropics derived from the flowers of a continent upon whose treetop canopy most of these folk had never dared venture? Indeed was it not true that even the most adventurous natives of Belshazaar, the mages of the research domes, experienced the true reality of their own planet only within the alienating carapaces of their atmosphere suits? Was it not true that even the Children of Fortune of Ciudad Pallas, who imagined themselves psychonauts of the spirit, imbibed the essences thereof only second-or third-hand in ampoules and vials?

  Of all the humans who clung to the surface of this benighted orb, there was only one who had penetrated the central mystery of the dark soul thereof and returned with the tale to tell, and that was I, Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, true Child of Fortune, ruespieler, erstwhile Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt.

  What a tale I had to tell to the denizens of this city! For though they might have by unconscious act of will actively eschewed knowledge of the true nature of that upon which their world was founded, the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt was their own true story, if only they had the courage to listen, if only I could summon up the art to touch their cramped spirits!

  As for a proper venue within which to tell the tale, this, alas, was another matter, for one street was very much like the next, one indifferent knot of citizens much like every other. As far as I could tell, Ciudad Pallas was quite devoid of parks or civic centers or platzes where streets converged to provide a proper public forum.

  At length, I gave over my futile search for such a venue, ceased my wanderings at the intersection of two streets much like a hundred o
thers, stood before a towering building of glass and steel of no particular distinction, took in a deep breath, screwed up my courage, and began to spiel.

  “The Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt!” I announced at the top of my lungs, and as I began the spiel itself, I found some inner craft modifying it away from the cryptic haiku form in which it had evolved as I lived it, away from the coherently crafted summation thereof which had emerged from the endless repetitions under interrogation, and toward an extreme condensation of the full version which years later I was to encode onto word crystal in this very histoire.

  “Vraiment, all present here do surely know that the spirit of Belshazaar, the raison d’être for your own presence on this planet, resides not in this grim gray city of lifeless glass and stone, but across the sea atop the mighty Bloomenwald where the great flowers exude the psychotropic substances upon which your economic vie depends and which is the sole fame of Belshazaar among the far-flung worlds of men!”

  A few passersby had paused for a moment, if only to peruse this novel event, for never before had the streets of this city seen a ruespieler explode from anonymous silence into full-blown declamation. Half a dozen or so of these had remained when they heard me begin to speak of that subject surely dearest to any audience’s heart, to wit the spirit and economic welfare of their very own selves. This in turn created a small eddy in the stream of street traffic, so that all must slow down a bit as they passed the spiel.

  “I stand before you as one who has wandered deeper into the Bloomenveldt than any human spirit may safely go, who has walked among the fabled Bloomenkinder, seen the legendary Perfumed Garden of floral perfection, lost my élan humain to the puissant flowers, been rescued therefrom by the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt, and returned to this very corner upon which I now stand to regale you, good citizens of Ciudad Pallas, with this mighty tale!”

  My audience had grown to more than a dozen now, and even some of those who had paused out of curiosity and then moved on seemed to do so with a certain reluctance, as if they indeed wished to hear more but were unfortunately required elsewhere.

  “Hearken therefore to the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt! Learn of the wonders and terrors and the true nature of the forest of unreason upon which the very life of this city depends! Hear of the bodhis of the Bloomenveldt! Cringe at the depths to which the human spirit may descend! Glory at the power of the Word to bring that selfsame spirit back from the ancestral flowers to full sapient awareness! Listen to the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt, which is my own, and yours as well, the only true tale there is to tell, the one which we all have followed from apes of the trees to lordly citizens of the far-flung worlds of men, and in the process thereof become once more true Children of our species’ Fortune on the Yellow Brick Road from tropism and determinism to sovereign captaincy of the great arkologies and gallant Void Ships which have made us the masters of the stars!”

  I had attracted almost two score expectant listeners by the time I had finished this florid and extravagant preamble to my tale, a good many of them sober burghers of Ciudad Pallas, but more of them than not lost Children of Fortune of the laboratories and mental retreats, who no doubt heard more keenly in my words the song that had once been in their own hearts.

  As for me, I was toxicated with my own spiel myself, though it was that state of clear and lucid toxication of which such as the sufis do speak, wherein the fiery passion of the spirit and the cool clarity of the intellect are revealed as one.

  Which is to say that as I began to recount the story of my trek with Guy Vlad Boca into the floral heart of darkness, as I observed my descriptions thereof emerging spontaneously from the mysterious center of my own inner void, vraiment even as my body trembled with an arcane energy I had never felt before, there was a cool calm part of me that stood outside both the teller and the tale and knew with certainty that this was the very first time I had truly practiced the ruespieler’s art.

  This, all unknowing, was what I had sought to become when first I had listened to the ruespielers of the Gypsy Jokers and longed in my unformed ignorance to walk the path of their vie. This was what had been missing from my poor efforts in the Luzplatz as I parroted the oft-told tales of others before I knew a tale to tell that was my spirit’s own.

  And while the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt with which I had heroically babbled my way across the forest canopy had certainly arisen from the depths of my own heart, when it came to the coherent craft which must carry even the most puissant of stories from the spirit of the teller to those of the audience, I had never been the master thereof until now.

  And so, as I launched into the story of my escape from the Perfumed Garden, the beginning of my unmasked journey across the Bloomenveldt, even my description of how my insensate spirit had roused itself from the lotus of forgetfulness to follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road, I found myself able, for the first time, to tell my own true tale with a coherence and accessibility to ears other than my own of which I had never before been capable.

  For now it could justly be said that I was at last what I had so grandly to Urso Moldavia Rashid proclaimed: Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, ruespieler, in the act of truly practicing her art.

  And now in the living process thereof, at least while the telling of the tale continued, I cared not that I was an indigent forced to survive by dwelling in a mental retreat, nor that I addressed a bare handful of people on the unpromising streets of an unwholesome city on a world which I wanted nothing more than to leave.

  For as I spoke of the Pied Piper of the Children of Fortune whom we had all followed along the camino real from the ancestral trees to the stars, as I spoke of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt leading her charges out of the forest, as I spoke of Pater Pan, and Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, and all the true Children of Fortune who carried forth the Spark of the Ark, like all true tellers of all true tales, my own spirit was the most avid audience, to whom I addressed my spiel in my heart of hearts.

  Be that as it may, when at length I came to the conclusion of my tale, I remained true to the quotidian necessities of the calling which I had now found, which is to say that while my spirit may have been filled with amour propre for the ding an sich, this did not prevent my more pragmatic side from seeking remuneration therefor.

  At least a score of people remained attentively before me as I reached the finale, drawing forth my chip transcriber and waving it invitingly under their noses with a proper mendicant’s flourish.

  “And so this is my story, and this is our song, and if the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt has touched your spirits, if you too style yourself a true Child of Fortune, then cast aside all mean-spirited minginess, bitte, insert your chips herein, and give what magnanimity requires so that the teller thereof may carry it forth among the far-flung worlds of men!”

  Alas, while the telling of the tale had pleased these worthies’ fancies as evidenced by the rapt attention which they had remained throughout to bestow, when the Piper sought her pay, their enthusiasm was a good deal more restrained.

  Which is to say that one by one they turned up their noses at my entreaties and swiftly began to melt away.

  Only one fellow remained, a disheveled young man, or more properly put, mayhap, an aging boy, quite obviously one whose funds were secured as a subject in the laboratories, who stood there uncertainly, blinking rheumy and clearly worshipful eyes in my direction, and fingering something concealed in the pocket of his trousers.

  “Come, come,” I wheedled, “are we not true Children of Fortune, you and I, kindred spirits of the Yellow Brick Road? Will you not show the miserly folk of this city that we care for our own? Together, let us put these Bloomenkinder of the spirit to shame! A single unit of credit will do the deed if that is all your fortune can spare…”

  Strange to say it was a quite uncharacteristic modesty rather than a certain guilty shame which I felt as I observed this poor urchi
n mooning at me as once I must have gazed at the Gypsy Joker ruespielers when I was a waif such as he. How much older I felt as he smiled shyly at me, withdrew his chip of credit, and inserted it into my transcriber.

  “Two credits for the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt,” he said. “Someday I too would wish for such a tale to tell!”

  I was moved to plant a kiss on his cheek when this transaction was concluded. “May the Yellow Brick Road rise up to greet you,” I told him. “And may you summon up the means to follow it to a far better world than this!”

  “Tú también…” he muttered, blushing, and then he was gone.

  26

  Thus in this most unlikely of venues did I at last become the true ruespieler I had never succeeded in being in the far more lucrative streets of Great Edoku.

  Which is far from saying that I was ever able to earn sufficient funds at the trade in Ciudad Pallas to quit my room and board at the Clear Light Mental Retreat. Indeed, even had the slim proceeds of my efforts been enough to secure a room in some modest hotel and enough nourishment to insure my survival, still I would not have given over Urso Moldavia Rashid’s gratuit provision thereof, for when it came to the retention of my modest funds, I became a miser with the best of them.

  Nor was this the result of a newfound meanness of spirit; au contraire, having fairly discovered my own true calling, having set my spirit if not quite my feet back on the Yellow Brick Road, all my efforts, energies, and funds were husbanded toward the purpose of escaping from Belshazaar and resuming my wanderjahr’s journey on better worlds than this.

  For even though my earnings as Ciudad Pallas’s sole ruespieler were paltry indeed—twenty-one credits in the best week I enjoyed—I was confident that this was more the fault of the city’s karma than my own. There were no proper platzes or parks where I might draw a decent crowd, what small audiences I did address were largely unacquainted with the traditions of my trade, the burghers of the city had little enthusiasm for street performance, and the dispirited children of Fortune of the laboratories and mental retreats who were the most generous of spirit were alas only slightly less indigent than myself.