Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  I laughed. I sighed. I shrugged. I entered the floatcab. “By now I should know better than to attempt to argue with Wendi Sha Rumi,” I said as it bore us away.

  “So say you now,” said Wendi Sha Rumi. “But by the time our voyage together is over, we shall no doubt have disabused you of such unseemly humility. Then we will truly be sisters of the spirit, you and I!”

  27

  And so, I found myself once more entering the grand salon of a Grand Palais module to attend a departure fete, as Belshazaar’s Flinger accelerated the Mistral Falcon toward the moment of its first Jump.

  While the Mistral Falcon differed not from the Unicorn Garden when it came to configuration and function, when it came to the style of the Grand Palais module, which is to say the ambiance within which the experience of the voyage was to take place, this, naturellement, was as different from my previous experience as one might expect from any two works by maestras of the same art.

  The dream chambers of the nethermost deck did not vary greatly from those which I had experienced on the Unicorn Garden, nor did the range of divertissements offered up on the entertainment deck, but when it came to the cuisinary deck, here the personal style of Su Jon Donova, Domo of the Mistral Falcon, had scope for proper assertation.

  The walls, ceiling, and floor of the formal dining room were transparent screens upon which slowly evolving patterns of color and shape were projected which altered from course to course like the accompanying wines. More often than not, these were abstractions, but upon occasion representational landscapes, faces, famous paintings, und so weiter, would emerge from the sinuous and stately dance of color and light only to melt away once more. In keeping with this style, the tables and chairs were airy filigrees of golden wire, appearing for all the worlds as if they had been woven to order by enchanted spiders.

  The refectory, in contrast, was paneled in bluish rough-hewn wood, and the long tables and benches thereof were carved out of the same substance with rude adze marks left deliberately in evidence, the floor was carpeted with dust of the selfsame wood, and the ceiling was hidden by a veritable Bloomenveldt of hanging greenery.

  The third salon was done up in what to my untutored eyes seemed a perfect replica of the classical Eihonjin mode—plain walls and ceiling of white paper framed by tawny wood, a floor covered by straw matting, black- and red-lacquered low tables, upholstered cushions with backrests, and an abundance of free-standing screens that could be arranged and rearranged to produce any desired dining configuration.

  Su Jon Donova’s concept for her vivarium was in stark contrast to the baroque hodgepodge with which Maria Magda Chan had provided the Unicorn Garden, and much more to my liking.

  Under the dome atop the Grand Palais, a sere silvery sea of low desert dunes seem to extend to the horizon in all directions, melding into a circle of pure shimmering mirage where the sand met the sky. Above, a surreally brilliant starscape such as might be seen from the surface of a planet at the galactic center lit up what otherwise would have been the blackest of nights, mightily aided in this luminescent endeavor by a huge golden three-quarter moon perpetually at the zenith, so that the uncanny effect was that of a midnight brighter than the day.

  The floor of the vivarium itself was ringed by small dunes of actual sand emerging seamlessly from the holoed landscape to enclose the oasis of the garden, a wide expanse of lawn overtopped with green palms, gnarled succulents, and enormous cacti. In the center of the oasis, naturellement, was a clear pool, about which were pitched tented awnings, replete with cushions and campfires in brass braziers.

  All in all, this vivarium seemed somehow both a cunning statement of the reality through which the Void Ship moved and a fair escape therefrom. For indeed was not the Mistral Falcon truly bearing our caravan across just such a starry desert night, and on the other hand, was not the ship, vraiment the very vivarium itself, our little oasis of life in the vast and dead immensity thereof?

  As for the grand salon, here the predominant motif, in piquant contrast to the vivarium above, was water.

  Sheets of the same lit from behind in subtle aqua, rose, umber, and royal blue foamed down walls of black rock, white marble, rough-cut quartz, to enclose the grand salon in quietly rushing waterfalls. From the ceiling depended an immense chandelier of water blazing golden from within, an arcane inverted fountain whose sprays and plumes, gravity-controlled against all quotidian physics and visual expectation, spumed downward from the center and rose upward at the circumference to create a magical arabesqued canopy of watery delight.

  As Su Jon Donova had so rightly, at least to my taste, surmised, such an envelope of liquid magic quite sufficed for wonderment, and so the grand salon was done up in rather homey furnishings, albeit furnishings suitable to the home of a pasha or magnate: a profusion of couches, chaises, and chairs, all substantial and cozy items of abstractly carved woods, upholstered in velvets, leathers, and the furry hides of animals, or at least the ersatzes of same. Freestanding fireplaces of brass standing before each wall of waterfall, carved in mythic representations of the avatars of the wind’s four quarters, were the only real notes of baroque extravagance.

  I had been decked out for my debut by Wendi in a simply cut formfitting black gown brilliantly embellished with floral designs done in multicolored jewels lit from within by pinlights. “Fitting raiment for Our Lady of the Bloomenkinder!” she had declared when she saw me in it, and she herself wore a gauzy creation of multilayered veils of dozens of pastel hues which drifted and tumbled with every movement, so that she seemed enrobed in a sunset cloud. All her entreaties to the contrary notwithstanding, I had wrapped my Cloth of Many Colors about my head in a turban, for I was determined to retain some grace note of identity that was entirely my own.

  Thusly accoutred, and fortified by the knowledge that I was no less extravagantly clad than the generality of the Honored Passengers who already thronged the grand salon when we arrived, I embarked on a round of introductions under the guidance and patronage of my mentor, who seemed to be on terms of easy intimacy with every lordly creature in the room.

  “Ah Kort, ça va, and this is Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, she who traversed the Bloomenveldt armed with no more than a tale. Kort Jaime Mustapha, liebchen, is a poet even as our Omar, indeed some say better, including yourself Kort, nicht wahr?”

  “Our Lady of the Bloomenkinder, is it then? Enchanté, muchacha, one does not often meet the mythical protagonist of an ode, except of course of the autobiographical variety, to which many of us are alas addicted.”

  “Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, meet the Domo of our fete,” Wendi declared, seizing upon a short dark woman wearing an arcane articulated suit which seemed to be fashioned out of the iridescent red carapaces of thousands of insects.

  “I am given to understand that you have been honored by an invitation to enshrine yourself in the Matrix,” Su Jon Donova said. “Bitte, how does such an august personage regard my own poor art, if I may make so bold?”

  “Without demur or hesitation, I can truthfully declare that never in my entire experience of same have I encountered a Grand Palais which pleased me more,” I drawled.

  Wendi hid her face with her hand to conceal a grin which she revealed to me as soon as we made to go on. “Well spoken, ruespieler,” she whispered in my ear. “Certainement, you have the proper instincts to swim in these waters, liebchen!”

  Mayhap this was so, or at any rate, viewed from within by one with a proper entrée to the dance, the pavane of the floating cultura seemed genteel enough to lose its power to daunt, and the rules thereof simple enough to comprehend in comparison, for example, with the vie of the Edojin, the niceties and complexities of which I have never been able to truly fathom even to this day.

  Such as Wendi might freely banter with mild jests at her interlocutor’s expense but must good-naturedly accept the same in return and leaven her discourse from time to time with equally trivial self-deprecations. Younger and less mature fish such as I, howe
ver, should keep to the more respectful manners appropriate to somewhat junior status, flatter a bit but not to fawning excess, and in return could expect a certain more formal politesse toward their tenderer persons from their seniors.

  “Here is my protégée, Sunshine Shasta Leonardo. Sunshine, this is Dalta Evan Evangeline, a literary archeologist who will aid us in the imagistic formulation of your Matrix entry, for there are few such in the worlds of men more adept at rummaging through the dustheap of old mythic bones than she!”

  “Indeed? I am avid to discuss such matters with you at length, for I am but a ruespieler with, I would hope, some talent, but little learning when it comes to the age-old lore of the craft…”

  “Au contraire, to be frank, it is I who seek enlightenment from you, for while I may be knowledgeable in the lore of the tale-teller’s art, it is the true creators thereof who are the masters, perfect or not, of the same, whereas I, alas, can only analyze as a learned eunuch might seek to encompass the mysteries of the tantric arts…”

  Und so weiter.

  The truth of it was, as in my maturity I was to learn was the truth of such matters generally, is that one’s regard for any given social realm is quite strongly the product of one’s perception of the regard in which oneself is held therein. When I traveled in the Unicorn Garden as a parvenu whose only entrée into the society thereof was a physical presence purchased by the largesse of Guy Vlad Boca, I held the floating cultura in a lofty disdain which nicely mirrored the position of grudging sufferance I unhappily occupied. But now, as the protégée of Wendi Sha Rumi, and as a personage whose deeds and mythos were held in some respectful regard, naturellement I found that the Honored Passengers were not quite as empty and obnoxiously arrogant as I had once supposed.

  Which is to say that when, exhausted and gently toxicated by the refreshments and the company, I was ready to quit the fete for my bed, I was closer to considering myself a princess of the floating cultura than an intruder into a realm beyond her proper station.

  Naturellement, as is true for all save the highest and lowest of our species, the reality lay in the vast ambiguous region between.

  If I have thusfar failed to mention the Mistral Falcon’s sequence of destinations, I gave such matters even less regard at the time, for the fact that the ship would journey to Winthrope, Novi Mir, Flor del Cielo, Lebenswelt, und so weiter, was of absolutely no consequence to me, for I had no plans to sojourn on any of these worlds, nor did I even have an ultimate destination in mind save that presently unknown world upon which Pater Pan at length might be found.

  Thus, in contrast to my voyage from Edoku to Belshazaar, I had in fact, all unknowingly, boarded the Mistral Falcon as a psychic citizen of the floating cultura already, which is to say as a voyager for whom the journey itself, rather than any immediate destination, was the goal.

  Indeed, via this karmically induced fusion with the weltanshauung of the floating cultura, I too found myself paying little attention to matters outside the universe of the Grand Palais, and vraiment, the first Jump occurred, as it turned out, entirely outside my sphere of apprehension, for at the time I was in the process of making my first acquaintance with the Matrix, the raison d’être of my presence aboard the Mistral Falcon in more ways than one.

  For such a puissant artifact, the appearance of the Matrix was quotidian enough, indeed deceptively archaic. One corner of the ship’s library was given over to a rather bulky oblong console a good three meters long and two meters high, decked out with telescreen, holo projector, word crystal transcriber, flimsy printer, microphone, speaker, and even a large keyboard whereby letters and numbers might be inputted by hand, so that the whole thing gave the appearance of some ancient computer out of a holocine drama set in the Age of Space. Or as if some sculptor had set out to recapitulate the entire history of our species’ data storage technology in a single composite piece of artwork.

  Small wonder I had never noticed such a device aboard the Unicorn Garden, for I had not exactly haunted the library in the first place, and without knowing what wonders of knowledge were in fact contained therein, I no doubt would have taken it for just such a piece of sculpture, nothing more than a quaint object of decor.

  Willa Embri Janos had already arrived when Wendi and I made our entry. A fair-haired, somewhat squat woman, she had been introduced at the departure fete as a data retriever of some renown, which is to say an adept of the not inconsiderable art of inducing the Matrix to cough up what was desired, a matter of no little complexity, as I was about to learn.

  “As I have told you, we are seeking the most recent locus of a fellow known as Pater Pan,” Wendi told her.

  Willa nodded, and spoke the name to the Matrix. At once, an endless procession of words and numbers began to scroll across the tele. “Cancel,” Willa ordered, and the tele went blank. “As one would have expected, there is no main entry, but there is a superabundance of minor cross-references under all manner of headings and bibliographical notations referring to quite a few obscure monographs not in the Matrix. We will need as many correlatives as possible in order for me to construct an algorithm to extract what we need from secondary and tertiary sources.”

  She turned to regard me. “Bitte, muchacha, begin…”

  “Begin what?” I asked in some befuddlement. “Alas, I fear that I have hardly understood a word you have said…”

  At this, Willa Embri Janos’ eyes widened, and she shook her head in a minor gesture of reproof. “We must have a list of other possible cross-references to this Pater Pan—places, names, activities, und so weiter. Proper nouns only, por favor, or I will be fairly buried in random data. Into the microphone, if you please…”

  “Gypsy Jokers…Child of Fortune…Piper of Pan…?” I began uncertainly. “Is this what you require?”

  Willa nodded. “Just so,” she said. “But please to avoid such massive generalities as ‘Child of Fortune’ or we will be drowned in a tsunami of references…”

  Shrugging, I went on with this bizarre babble. “King of the Gypsies…Spark of the Ark…Yellow Brick Road…Hippies…Arkies…Ronin…” Und so weiter, ad infinitum, or so it seemed, though in truth I could not have gone on for more than five minutes before my string of words wore out. There was something rather distasteful to me about this attempt to reduce the essence of Pater Pan to a finite list of proper nouns, for I could not help but realize that the same reductionist process could as easily be applied to my own identity, and with a list of words not one half as long.

  “I believe I am finished,” I said at last. “What occurs next?”

  “It would take you some months of diligent study to comprehend the mathematics of the processes I must now apply, though certainement well worth the effort,” Willa told me. “First I must construct a program to induce the Matrix to winnow through all these reference points so that all data bearing upon the central subject are released, then I must induce it to establish a sequence along a temporal axis, then trajectories must be hypothesized and compared to the data field…”

  She shrugged. “Suffice it to say that all this will take days if we are fortunate and weeks if we are not…”

  I found the whole arcane and lengthy process quite daunting to contemplate, especially in light of the fact that I myself was now expected to contribute to this massive chaos of data. “Am I going to have to learn all that in order to record my own entry?” I asked in no little dismay.

  Willa laughed. “Anyone can add knowledge to the Matrix by the simple expedient of playing an ordinary word crystal into it,” she said. “It is extracting specific knowledge which requires learning and art!”

  She regarded Wendi somewhat owlishly. “There is a lesson in this for you, Wendi Sha Rumi,” she said. “Which is that promiscuous babble does not necessarily contribute to wisdom as it adds to the total store of data. Therefore have a care that you aid our young friend in producing a suitable entry, which is to say one that is short, concise, shorn of excess generalities and verbi
age, and as objectively accurate as possible.”

  “I have prepared entries for the Matrix before, Willa,” Wendi pointed out dryly.

  “Indeed. In profusion. But do remember that as a guardian of the Matrix’s coherence, I must pass upon the suitability of what you present.”

  “Has my work ever failed to pass your muster?”

  “Not in a long while,” Willa admitted. “But you do tend to prolixity, so have a care you do not infect our young friend’s style with your own vice.”

  Wendi laughed. “In addition to her skill as a data retriever, Willa fancies herself a literary critique manqué,” she told me. “When it comes to the former, I bow to her expertise, but as for the latter, she is an amateur at best.”

  “Be that as it may,” Willa rejoined, “it is the taste of we amateurs that you authors of romances must please in order to earn your wage, nē?”

  At Wendi’s suggestion, vraiment at her insistence, we took a light lunch of sushi and sake together in the refectory, for, she declared, the evening meal was to be a formal banquet at which many courses would be consumed, and at which I would be required to have my wits about me, for she had arranged for us to be seated at table with those who were to aid in the refinement of my Matrix entry, and Void Captain Dana Gluck Sara as well, who had expressed some interest in hearing the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt from the lips of the heroine thereof.

  After lunch we repaired to her stateroom, where she explained the procedure we would follow in our collaboration.

  First, I would freely record my tale onto word crystal in my own style, indeed before we were done, I would no doubt record several versions, for the point at this stage was to exhaust the possibilities of my own spontaneous declamation thereof.

  Then we would vet this raw material together with various mages so that the imagistic vagaries of my descriptions of events, flora, psychic effects, und so weiter, might be sharpened and when necessary replaced by terms of scientific precision and accuracy, so that the entry would be comprehensible and informative to any hypothetical person who might call it up from the Matrix several centuries from now.