Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  Or contrawise, may not a new electrohologram at length cohere out of the electronically amplified fragments of memories fused together by scientific pouvoir in the vacated brain? For while two long starfaring ages in the Void have long since given the lie to the hoary notion that nature abhors a vacuum of matter and energy, the quantum forces would certainly seem to abhor a vacuum of structure, so that it might be inevitable that whatever psychic fragments remain in a Charge Addict’s brain must under sufficient increment of Charge relate to each other once more in a hologrammic pattern of the whole.

  Was it in some sense Pater Pan that at length I succeeded in summoning forth? Was it the collective unconscious coded into the genes of his body, at last permitted to speak through the verbal centers of his brain by the power of the Charge? Was it only fragmented memories cohering in a new pattern about a void? A spirit, or only an ersatz electronic simulacrum of same?

  Vraiment, it may be justly said that science has banished the deities and demons, the ghosties and ghoulies, of our primeval superstitious past into the realm of metaphor where all such mythical creatures belong, but hola, in our Second Starfaring Age, only to create new and even more arcane ghosts in the civilized machineries, whereby doppelgangers of the spirit arise out of matter and energy themselves!

  I sat there for the better part of an hour in silence, feeling entirely the fool. And yet the more the fool I felt myself, the more it seemed to me that the way of the Fool was my only course of action. To wit, I must play the pythoness, and simply say what was in my heart.

  “Speak to me as you did in the Dreamtime on the Bloomenveldt, Pater Pan,” I said at last. “For if you were a figment out of my Dreamtime then, then I must be a figment of your Dreamtime now.”

  There was a susurrus of murmurs at this breaking of the hushed silence behind me, but the figure on the pillow throne remained perfectly still and mute.

  “Sing me the song of Yellow Brick Road, tell me a tale that will let my spirit leave this place in peace, even as I let go of your own rather than hold it to me in torment.”

  For what must have been hours, I babbled on thusly, without the mediation of intellect between feeling and words, and for what must have been hours, I might as well have been addressing my increasingly bathetic entreaties to a statue of stone.

  “Merde, why have you chosen to end the tale of your noble life as a vegetative hulk in thrall to the Charge, and why have you cursed me with the telling thereof, and why should I not give over attendance at this lugubrious epilogue and flee as far from here as my fortune will take me?” I fairly raged at last. “If there is any geist present in your poor corpus, speak now, or you must forever hold your peace!”

  I rose, and made to depart, moving with a thespic slowness, quite unsure, if truth be told, whether or not I would indeed carry through with this bluff.

  Be the sincerity thereof what it may, Pater Pan’s lips began to move as if something within him were struggling up toward speech, and then a voice spoke with the apparatus of his throat.

  “Remember me,” it said quite plain.

  I froze there in my tracks, and an absolute silence fell in the tent.

  “Vraiment, I am here for no other purpose,” I whispered at the apparition before me, speaking through an old man’s flesh with the voice of he who had departed, and yet, somehow not with the voice of Pater Pan, for though the tones and the rhythms of the music were the same, another spirit was singing the song.

  “Remember exploding from nothingness into a trillion fragmentary motes,” this voice, whatever it was, began to declaim, even as the eyes of Pater Pan’s withered face remained as lifeless as two blue marbles. “Remember coalescing into numberless suns out of less than mists. Remember spheres of rock in the everlasting night…”

  Who or what spoke? Je ne sais pas. The Atman that had witnessed the universe’s explosion into existence from a point of nonbeing? A tale the natural man had once told or heard? The genetic memory of the species?

  But be that as it may, whatever spoke now could not be taken for what had spoken in random babblement before, for this dybbuk of the Up and Out compelled my attention as fully as the previous oracular avatar had mesmerized its feckless acolytes.

  Vraiment, I was hardly aware of sinking back down on my cushion before it, taking my place at its feet with the rest.

  “Remember drifting in the sea in long helices of life…Remember crawling out gasping on the land…Remember descending from our ancestral trees to gaze at the sunrise above the plain…Remember your first footsteps on Luna…Remember your long slow centuries between the stars…Remember the mysteries of the Jump that has spread your kind among the far-flung worlds of men…Remember you…Remember me.”

  “I am here to remember,” I seem to recall myself saying, but I seemed to have been transported once more into the Dreamtime, for once more a spirit that in quotidian terms could not be said to be present had nevertheless contrived to appear before me, even as the Pied Piper of my Golden Summer had been with me in my hour of need on the Bloomenveldt, even as we may readily enough discourse with departed spirits and archetypal images in the realms of quotidian sleep.

  “Remember this moment of remembering,” Pater Pan said, and now it almost seemed as if it were truly he, for his eyes were turned upon me, and I could not deny that it was a Sunshine that he remembered to whom he now spoke.

  “Remember Moussa…Remember Sunshine…Remember that you came to tell the tale…”

  “Vraiment, I cannot deny that this task would seem to have fallen on me,” I admitted. “But tell me then how I am supposed to make this story sing? Shall I be constrained to declare that I could honor your spirit with nothing better than a denouement of tragic farce? How can I honorably end this tale thusly?”

  But the answer was silence, and whatever had spoken would speak to me no more that day.

  Nor for the next three days could I summon forth so much as a syllable. I allowed Kim to tend to the animal requirements of my existence, and I spent my waking hours speaking to the silent sphinx within the tent.

  What did I say to Pater Pan during all these endless hours of one-sided babblement? Vraiment everything that was in my heart and spirit and more and in every conceivable mode of address, from rage to cajolement, from tearful sobbings to dark gravehouse jests, from the tale of my travels across the Bloomenveldt to the tale of The Spark of the Ark and everything and anything between.

  All of which availed me nothing. Pater Pan had given up taking nourishment days before my arrival, and now even my attempts to force-feed him nutritive liquids were rejected by his body, as if what remained of the protoplasmic will of the same had determined upon a terminal fast unto death. Day by day, indeed hour by hour, I found myself constrained to watch his body grown gaunter, the webwork seaming his skin withering it to dusty parchment, his golden hair thinning out to a mange of gray straw no longer quite covering the pallid skin of his pate.

  This nascent corpse did I find myself hectoring futilely, until at length I had come to loathe the sound of my own foolish voice.

  As Kim ushered me into the Tent of Many Colors on the morning of the fourth day, I found I could bear to question the sphinx no longer, nor could I bear any longer the sight of the King of the Gypsies and the Prince of the Jokers expiring thusly, enclosed from the worlds he had so joyfully wandered, and surrounded by this feckless and indolent travesty of the Gypsy Jokers which gave the lie to the true song of both the natural man and the Pied Piper whose spirit was now passing from the worlds.

  And if no words of mine could cause the sphinx to speak, then at least let it not be said that I allowed his mortal remains to decay into death in this malodorous tent suffocating with heat and thanatotic vapors.

  “Enough of this!” I cried. “Roll up these walls of Cloth of Many Colors and let in the light of morning. Schnell, schnell, schnell, let us breathe more natural air!”

  “Come, come,” Kim cajoled, “let us break down the walls and let t
he sunshine in!” So saying, he straightaway began undoing one of the flaps from its stakes, and within a few minutes, enough of the tribe had followed his example to transform the spiritually and odorously stifling tent into an open-roofed pavilion looking out through the encampment on the golden sun rising high above the brilliant mirror of the azure sea.

  Upon the newfound breeze wafted the subtle sweetness of the wooded hillsides, and the more insistent tang of the sea, and the organic overripeness of the untidy encampment, and subtle pheromones of holiday essences from the streets of the town far below, and the effluvia of human bodies borne away by the breeze and sublimated by the heat of the tropical sun.

  Mayhap all of these random molecules combined to form a new perfume as puissant to the biochemical perception of Pater Pan’s corpus as it was to the nostrils of my own spirit, for certainement both the mages of science and my own experience in the depths of the Bloomenveldt would tell us that it is the olfactory senses which most directly connect the stimuli of the exterior realm to the tropic responses of the deep backbrain.

  For his nostrils seemed to widen almost imperceptibly upon his first few breaths of this new atmosphere, and it seemed that his eyes looked out over the ocean, and with determination, I could imagine the faintest of smiles on his lips, when he once again, after his long silence, spoke.

  “I remember…” said that preternatural voice which had so captured my attention when last it spoke. “I remember a day like this long ago with the sun shining over San Francisco Bay…I remember hills in Great Edoku where it was always morning when I was the King of the Gypsies and the Prince of the Jokers…I remember awakening from a century’s sleep to see the sun rise on a new world and breathe once more the living atmosphere of another planet…”

  Quelle chose, what new arcana of the Charge was this? For while the first words were spoken in that strangely impersonal voice which alluded in its identity to the genetic spirit of our species’ collective genes, the following remembrances were uttered in three successively different voices, that of the Pater Pan I had known and loved and two unknown personas. Yet while each of these voices seemed as humanly specific as the memory-images they rendered up, the total effect was of some singularity of spirit attempting to speak through a multitude.

  “I remember the arkology Gold Mountain and the day we pooled our fortunes to purchase our destiny…I remember Fat Tuesday on the sun-drenched levee…I remember a Mardi Gras parade…”

  Images continued to pour from the mouth of the old man staring out over the hills at the sunrise above the bay of Florida, each one with the voice of a different fleshly avatar, or so it seemed, each one singing sweetly of a fond memory of the eternal Yellow Brick Road.

  Yet somehow all these fragments of different sprachs seemed avatars as well of a single Lingo, as if some spirit deep below the crown of the cortex were firing off far-from-randomly-chosen quanta of memory in an attempt to semaphore its meaning into the realm of conscious speech.

  Vraiment, it might just as well be said, as the mages would no doubt contend, that far from being the collective urgeist of the genes speaking through patterns of memory release, what we all in fact perceived was the order our subjectivities persisted in imposing upon the voice of random chaos babbling through a sapiently vacated brain.

  Indeed who is to say that these are not one and the same, for certainement, we observe such order arising full-blown from the quantum chaos at the deepest level of existence, and so too was the macrocosm created by the spontaneous explosion of being and order into the perfect nothingness of a dimensionless void. Who is to say that chaos itself is not the ultimate principle upon which all order is recomplicated?

  In the absence of scientific certitude along this interface between the quantum reality and such metaphysic, let me then simply say that I perceived that something, call it what you will, was attempting to speak through the selection of images gushing forth from the amplified and dissociated memory banks of Pater Pan’s dying brain.

  As to whether the Children of Fortune gathered there under the awning of the pavilion were of the same perception, or whether any utterance at all from their silent oracle would have been equally sufficient to command their awe and attention, je ne sais pas. Be that as it may, while those already at the scene of this advent forthwith lapsed into marveling silence, some sort of entirely nonverbal semaphore seemed to communicate the tidings thereof to the rest of the encampment. Mayhap the opening up of the tent of oracular secrets to the clear gratuit view of all would at any rate have been sufficient to assemble a crowd. At any rate, within short minutes, several score of this pathetic tribe were lying about the area, fortifying their perceptions with wine and toxicants as they hung on every word.

  As for me, I sat there silently too for a time, listening to that profusion of voices sing a paean of nostalgic glory to a succession of golden moments of summer along an endless Yellow Brick Road. How sweetly they sang of the ancient remembered youth of our species, where all of them and all of us are forever wandering the free path of our spirits, where all summer’s days are golden, and love and laughter rule the stars. Personas rose to remember Edoku and Novi Mir, Hind and Elysium, arkologies and gypsy caravans, places and times Pater Pan could have lived through, and those which might exist only in the Dreamtime extravaganzas with which he had embellished his name tale.

  Were the verses of this song merely the memories of tales? Or were they truly sung by a chorus of onetime fleshly avatars of some deeper spirit?

  An end to such futile speculations, for the singer matters not when the song touches the heart as this one touched mine.

  And as soon as I truly penetrated to the simple truth of this self-evident perception, the same found its voice, for whether I was addressing a random crackle of neurons or not, I must make it hear me, for if this was indeed once more the Dreamtime, I must once more conjure survival wisdom from its spirits.

  “O I hear your song of remembrance, Pater Pan, if it is indeed you who are the singer thereof,” I told him. “I hear the Piper of Pan calling us down from our ancestral trees, and I hear the tale that I followed from the depths of the Bloomenveldt back to the far-flung worlds of men. I hear a noble lover’s laughter, and the blarney of a Gypsy King, I hear the Pied Piper of the Yellow Brick Road telling his tale truly even from beyond its ending…

  “Now hear me, whoever or whatever you are, or even if you are nothing,” I all but bellowed as I rose to my feet. “It is Moussa the waif and Sunshine your Gypsy Joker and the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt who bids you answer in the very spirit of which you sing! How can I hear that spirit singing its own true song to the end with a sweet puissance which breaks my heart and yet see with uncomprehending eyes that now it draws naught but the indolent and the lame?”

  Indeed so just was my characterization of Pater Pan’s final tribe that the indolent and the lame in question, who lolled about in various states and degrees of toxication marveling at this very discourse, lacked even the collective spirit to raise so much as a single voice of protest when I styled them to their object of worship thusly.

  But as for he who sat on the pillow throne, something in my words must have vibrated to the frequency of an appropriate cerebral center, or mayhap all current scientific theory to the contrary, some true spirit is implied in any verbal sequence.

  Certainement, it was not my subjective imposition of order on random chaos when he turned his eyes from the sun to gaze into mine. As to whether anything but a doppelganger was there to regard me through them, je ne sais pas, but cerebral echo or no, it knew me well enough to speak my name.

  “Sunshine…Sing your own song, ruespieler, tell your own tale…”

  “This is the only tale I have to tell, and I am doing my best,” I told this apparition plaintively, quite as if he were my old lover and friend, for if this was the Dreamtime, then the logic thereof allowed such intimacies. “But I cannot end it thusly!”

  “This tale never ends, muchacha,”
Pater Pan reminded me in the Dreamtime. “Before the singer was the song, so when the singer is gone, will the song remain. As long as there is anyone to tell the true tale.”

  “How can I relate in the true spirit of the Yellow Brick Road that the Pied Piper thereof, after calling us down from the forest of unreason and leading our Mardi Gras parade out among the stars, expired pitifully at last, leaving behind only these poor lost Bloomenkinder of Alpa, this unwholesome travesty of the spirit we shared as Gypsy Jokers?”

  “Were we not all Bloomenkinder of the forest of unreason before we heard the song that we followed from the trees to the stars?” Pater Pan said, and while the voice was his, the words he threw back at me, if memory serves, were my own. “Wherever in the worlds of men that there are Bloomenkinder of the spirit, there you will find lost Children of Fortune awaiting their own Piper.”

  “And you were mine before I even met you!” I cried. “You saved my spirit from destruction on the Bloomenveldt in a Dreamtime such as this!”

  “And who will be mine now save she who tells our tale?”

  “Me? Yo?”

  “Who is the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt?” Pater Pan said, speaking so plainly now in my own oft-repeated sprach that I could all but see my own ironic self mocking me from within his eyes.

  “Merde,” I sighed in this moment of dizzying satori, “anyone who tells the tale!”

  “Will you not let this torch pass to you, ruespieler?” Pater Pan said. “For who else is there to take it up from the failing hands of this loving ghost who only stayed behind to pass it on? Auf wiedersehen, mi vida, hail and farewell.”

  I could feel a spirit’s passage then, another standing wave of Pater Pan’s consciousness propelled by the Charge Up through his speech centers and Out into the void. I need not question the body now staring out blindly to sea again further to know of a certainty that this avatar would not speak through it again.