Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

  For with this spirit’s passage passed the Dreamtime too, and I came tumbling back out of it into the quotidian realm, knowing not with whom or what my spirit had communed therein, but knowing full well what I had to do.

  I rounded on the great gathering of scruffy and toxicated urchins who fairly surrounded the pavilion now, and what a sorry audience they were to bear witness to such a spirit’s passage!

  “You have heard, have you not?” I declaimed at them. “From the very lips of he upon whose dying words you so fatuously and uncomprehendingly hang! For want of the proper spirit on your part, the torch thereof devolves on me. Nor when the time comes will I let you leave it in the muck!”

  For all my eloquent invective, I might as well have been addressing my lost children of the forest, for they looked upon me like the deity of all lost children, wanting only to be saved from the adventure of their own devices, and waiting for me to tell them whatever it was they imagined they wanted to hear. Even Kim seemed not to have understood a word of my true meaning.

  “Who here can sing a tune?” I demanded. “Who here can play a pipe or strum a string? Who can carve in wood or work wire into bijoux? Who knows how to steam dim sum or juggle balls or practice some semblance of the acrobatic arts?”

  They gaped at me uncomprehendingly as if I too had now started speaking in parable.

  “Merde!” I cried. “Is there none among you who knows a single tale? Hola, is there not even one among you who would boast of adeption in the tantric arts?”

  “Ah, mi maestra, I knew you would come to the question of my own natural talent sooner or later!” Kim declared to a cleansing burst of laughter. “Let me proudly be the first volunteer in whatever enterprise you care to have me serve!”

  Once this obscene levity had loosened their mood, other voices began to pipe up.

  “It might be said I play the pipes, if none too well…”

  “When I was a child, I fashioned animals out of clay…”

  “I think I know how to bake tarts of meat or fruit…”

  “I know a tale called The Wandering Dutchman that I used to tell in school…”

  “All these things and more you shall begin doing now as true Children of Fortune,” I told them. “While I am something less than a maestra of cuisine, or a musician, or an adept of any craft, and would starve to death if I had to sing for my ruegelt, I have many a tale which I will readily donate, nor am I exactly a naif when it comes to commerce in the tantric arts. So then, let us learn to become Gypsy Jokers once more together, and gather our ruegelt where we may.”

  “Who would purchase our primitive goods?”

  “Why would anyone pay to hear our songs?”

  “Florida abounds with entertainers far more amusing than we…”

  “We must compete with palaces of haute cuisine…”

  “…and tantric artists all the way from Lorienne.”

  “Thus be it ever!” Kim exclaimed with quite another energy. “I would rather forage my fortune in the streets than say I never tried!”

  “Well spoken, indeed, Gypsy Joker!” I declared pridefully. “Speak not of the daunting haut monde of this little resort village to one who was an indigent Child of Fortune without even your bountiful parental largesse in Great Edoku! Surely it has always been thus on every world. Yet on every world, if Children of Fortune do not exactly wax wealthy, still do we prevail. For the true patron of our custom is never the jaded connoisseur, but the memory of one’s own wanderjahr in every human heart. Fear not, my Gypsy Jokers, that is a largesse the true spirit may always obtain.”

  I pointed down the shoulder of our little mountain at the tiny blue and white and rose buildings of the town below, at the minuscule figures on the beach, and the bright sails of boats flitting across the bay.

  “Below us lies Florida, a town given over entirely to holiday and frolic,” I told them. “I swear to you on my honor as a Gypsy Joker, meine kinder, that no true Child of Fortune could hope for an easier field to gather ruegelt from than such a seaside resort!”

  And so did my wanderjahr come full circle round as, with tears in my eyes but not without the true song in my heart, I found myself constrained to become the Pied Piper thereof, the Wendi Shasta Leonardo who transcribes these words, but certainement not the Wendy whose spirit I found so cloying in the Tale of Peter Pan.

  For far from seeking to shepherd these lost children back into the parental embrace of the quotidian realm of maya and earnest toil, the spirit of this Wendi sought rather to set their feet upon that Yellow Brick Road which goes ever on, in final homage to the Golden Summer of my own life that once the truest of friends and noblest of lovers had given unto me.

  30

  Florida was no Great Edoku, the urchins of our encampment were far from being Gypsy Jokers, and certainement I possessed not a tenth part of the survival lore of the Yellow Brick Road of such as Pater Pan.

  Still, while skill, craft, and artistry might be severely lacking, the spirit was now there, and as I had learned on Edoku, it was tribute to this spirit of one’s own fondly remembered days as a Child of Fortune which provoked largesse, rather than informed critical admiration for the crudely manifested artifacts thereof.

  So, under my direction and prodding, amusement tents arose, offering tantric tableaus and private performances, as well as rude musical entertainments, and even certain rather brief and clumsy theatrical events. Several craftsmen’s stalls were erected, offering naive sculptures, wooden jewelry, wire bijoux, and most lucratively, various pouches on thongs, belts, or even headbands, which soon proved quite popular in such a seaside resort given over to nudity or minimal clothing.

  Finger foods of several sorts were prepared in the encampment: baked tarts, steamed dim sum, cuchifritos, and most novel of all, a kind of vegetable lo mein stuffed into a savory baked tuber, which could be eaten without fork or chopsticks as one strolled along. So too did nascent musicians and jongleurs gambol about the encampment, greatly enhancing the carnival ambiance, if not exactly elevating the artistic atmosphere.

  And, as I had learned from Pater Pan, hawkers and buskers were sent forth into the town below to peddle trinkets, finger food, beverages, and pouches, and to perform on the streets and beaches, thus garnering ruegelt while attracting patronage to the camp.

  In particular, the beaches proved to be a lucrative venue, for while the streets of the town abounded with restaurants and tavernas, swimmers and sunbathers were naturally pleased to be offered drinks and tidbits on the spot, and their critical faculties were necessarily loosened by having unsought entertainments brought to them.

  The guileful and enterprising Kim even somehow scraped together enough capital to rent a canoe, from which he peddled food and drink prepared by others directly to the pleasure craft sailing about the bay.

  As for ruespielers, at first there were none with the courage and brass required to ply this trade in the streets, or even in the encampment. But Kim soon enough began hectoring me to teach him some tales, at first, so it seemed, so as to retain my company for as many hours as possible, for the purpose of continuing his frankly amorous advances which had long since become the butt of good-natured banter between us, but later as a more or less serious student of same, whose manifest gift of gab needed only some proper material to find itself rewarded with ruegelt.

  Indeed, when I secretly overlooked his premiere performance, a telling of The Spark of the Ark to an audience of loungers at beachside, I found myself warmed by something more than pedagogical pride, and vraiment, had it not been for the presence of my dying lover’s corpus in the center of the encampment and the unseemliness of even such thoughts under the circumstances, I do believe I would have been happily ready to reward his pluck at the conclusion thereof with the fulfillment of his so avidly expressed priapic desires.

  In short, within ten days the enterprises and spirit of the Children of Fortune had come to Florida. Vacationers wandered around our caravanserei sampling this and that
, if not exactly amounting to a great throng or inundating us with funds, and our hawkers and buskers became quaint and familiar figures on the streets and beaches of the town.

  As for Pater Pan, no spirit spoke through him again, nor did I seek to summon forth same, and indeed, once our young tribes people had found proper enterprising focus for their youthful energies, few of them even tarried long before the skeletal figure in the open pavilion.

  During the daytime, we kept the Tent of Many Colors open to the warmth and the shaded sun and the breezes, rolling the flaps down only at night when the air grew cooler. But while Pater Pan remained in free and easy sight of the inner vie of the encampment, by unspoken agreement, we communally contrived, by one subtle means or another, to keep the turistas well clear of our central mystery.

  And despite the continued silence of the figure on the pillow throne as it proceeded to ride the Charge Up and Out into its final hours, a mystery indeed remained. For even as the flesh melted away from Pater Pan’s gaunter and gaunter figure to the point where I marveled that he could yet sit upright, even as the hair fell from his skull like deep autumn’s leaves in some less benign clime, even as his visage sharpened to the bony icon of mortality, his eyes seemed to grow larger and more brilliant in their deepening sockets, one could almost perceive them glowing from within with the blue light of a brain that would now seem to be burning itself out in ecstasy.

  What a strange deathwatch it was, in the midst of a new-born carnival, with the eyes of the object thereof all but glowing like wan blue suns, and a smile that came to be fixed on his lips of such beatific contentment as must have graced the visage of Buddha under his bo tree!

  Only his flesh gave the lie to this aura of bliss that he fairly exuded, and yet the weaker and frailer the body became, the broader grew his smile, and the stronger grew the inner light that seemed to be burning behind those eyes that grew larger and larger the deeper they receded into their sockets.

  Vraiment, this was a sight not even I could bear for long, for on the one hand the manifest presence of imminent death dragging out the body’s terminal agonies to amazing extremis is no fit object for youthful contemplation, and on the other hand what would seem to be manifesting itself within whispered in my ear that upon witnessing the passage into the Up and Out, I too could do no less than seek the same manner of my inevitable final journey.

  But as fate or cosmic justice would have it, while I never tarried long in Pater Pan’s presence, I was there in the final moments.

  It was the luncheon hour of high noon, and I was passing close by the Tent of Many Colors on my way from teaching Kim a new tale to a kiosk purveying dim sum. It was a warm bright day in the Child of Fortune encampment, and the flaps of the tent were open, and to naive eyes, it no doubt would have seemed that the skeletal figure on the pillow throne with its beaming smile of contentment was looking out in well-earned contentment on the fruits of his endeavors.

  My eyes filled with tears as I stopped for a moment to regard him, and yet I do not believe that what I felt was sorrow. There my Pater Pan sat, looking out over the brow of the hill at the tiny buildings of the town below, where even now the Children of his spirit plied the trades he had taught us, and beyond which he could contemplate, if he so chose, the clear crystal sea, and the bright golden sun above it.

  Vraiment, if such a spirit must pass from the worlds, how better than this, in a Gypsy Joker encampment, alive with noise and laughter, redolent with the smells of cooking foods, embraced by the eternal carnival that had been his spirit’s song, with a warm sea breeze ruffling the remnants of his hair?

  And then, as if the final quanta of spirit which yet remained in that skull case had waited for only this moment to arrive, the moment when the teller thereof at last knew that she could make his tale sing sweetly, the final arcana of the Up and Out began.

  On this much at least do the mages and the devotees of the Charge agree: that in the terminal moments of the Up and Out, a phenomenon occurs which can occur in no other, when a sufficient number of neurons have been burned away by electronic amplification, the next increment of Charge triggers a kind of psychesomic chain reaction. Every remaining memory trace is simultaneously activated, every cerebral center still functioning is flashed into electronically amplified excitation at once, and the remaining energy left in the corpus is sucked up through the brain as it is burned away entirely by the overload.

  Be the extravagances of the Charge Addicts as they may, the mages of psychesomics readily enough own that this is the theoretical limit of human consciousness, a state of total cerebral activation that can be attained only in the few moments before the brain expires as the inevitable price of its existence.

  Could ironic fate have prepared a darker jape for us than this? Only in the moment of death itself may the psychonaut of our spirit attain its perfect flower.

  Vraiment, to have studied the scientific annals, even to have come to peace with this inevitable ending of the tale, is one thing, but to observe the Up and Out itself was quite another.

  Tremors all at once began to ripple randomly through the stringy musculature of Pater Pan’s body. His arms and then his legs began to twitch and jerk as if some volitional force within him were reaching for control. And his face…

  His facial muscles too began to dance, but here at far from random, for somehow they began to rearrange themselves into a series of coherent yet sequentially different visages, as if wavefronts of personality patterns were flashing through them. Yet the eyes that looked out on the worlds for the last time through all of these masks of humanity seemed to be windows into a singular spirit, quite at home in each momentary avatar, yet preternaturally bright and unchanging just the same.

  For indeed while the last mask of the King of the Gypsies and the Prince of the Jokers wore the faces of all the natural men he had been or boasted of being, each one his own vision of unutterable bliss, the eyes of the inner being that shone through them bespoke a singular ecstasy.

  It all transpired too rapidly for a crowd to form, for there were less than a dozen folk within eyeshot at the time, and when Pater Pan suddenly stood up, it was with the vigor and force of his full manly flower.

  Vraiment, the Healers will tell you, there is nothing arcane about such sudden appearance of hysterical strength in terminal patients, and there were ancient warrior cults capable of summoning these powers forth by primitive psychesomic rituals. The spirit can command otherwise impossible feats of strength from the body when the further survival thereof is no longer an issue.

  Be that as it may, the actual sight of such a triumph of vital energy over terminal fleshly decrepitude was something neither I nor anyone present had ever witnessed, and none of us were capable of movement as Pater Pan strode boldly past us, out from under the tented awning, and into the brilliant golden warmth of noon.

  He moved with apparent volitional purpose through the encampment, walking with long but measured strides, beaming at the manifold enterprises thereof with the ecstatic smiles of all his successive memories of all such carnivals that he had walked through, and as he made his way through the aisles of tents toward the edge of the camp overlooking the town and the sea, there he was one final time, leading a Mardi Gras parade of Children of Fortune along the Yellow Brick Road.

  Tell me not that this was a foul travesty of that gay parade in Great Edoku, as some cramped souls might own, do not tell me that we did not dance to the inner music thereof as we said our final farewell to all that was left of Pater Pan.

  He walked to the lip of a steep canyon cliff, and then he turned to face us. The musculature of his body sagged into slumped immobility as if it had nobly completed its final worldly task and had given up the ghost. Nor did any more avatars pass through the mask of his face.

  That face, withered though it was, seemed ageless now, for the musculature thereof had ceased all its exertions, so that all that remained was a tabula rasa of perfect relaxation, upon which a radiant bliss was ins
cribed by those burning inner eyes.

  I looked into those eyes for the last time, though in another sense, I will always see them still, I gazed at his face for a final good-bye, and saw not the skull all but bursting from beneath the flesh, but the face of the spirit that would always be with me favoring me with a final Gypsy Joker smile. Nor did it matter that all there present were later to declare that he smiled his last smile just for them.

  Then a final contraction tightened the muscles of his body, and he coiled into himself as if to spring. He spread his arms wide as if for the last time to embrace the eternal carnival, as if to spread his spirit’s wings and soar into flight.

  Then indeed he began a mighty leap upward, but rather than his body leaving the earth, his spirit seemed to soar Up and Out of his body at the apogee with a final ecstatic sigh, and before his body could collapse behind him, he was gone, onto the wind, into the lambent sunshine, into the arms of that spirit which would never die as long as there were Children of Fortune to pass through it on the far-flung worlds of men.

  How long I stood there before I became aware of time’s movement once more, je ne sais pas, for my vision was not transfixed by the pathetic and timebound sight of Pater Pan’s fallen corpus but rather by the timeless mandala of an eternal sun in a brilliant blue sky.

  As once I had seen his face blazoned upon Belshazaar’s sun via pheromones and famishment in the Dreamtime of the Bloomenveldt, so did I seek by fully conscious act of will to see him smiling down upon me with the golden face of Alpa’s sun now.

  Vraiment, and if in this Dreamtime, I knew full well that what I saw was no more than the mirror of the spirit that lived on only within my own heart, neither could that spirit be said to have vanished from our mortal realm while I honored it therein.

  At length, I found myself drawn back into the stream of time, not by any sound which shattered the crystalline eternity of the moment, but by the pressure of the unnatural perfect absence of same which seemed to have draped itself around my shoulders like a leaden cloak.