CHILD OF FORTUNE

Chapter 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, ca 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? Enchante, 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 entree 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 goodnaturedly 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, however, 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 protegee, 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 entree 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 protegee 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'etre 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 sortie 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 verbiage, 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 manque," 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, ne?"

***

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.

When I protested that such a procedure seemed to me to insure the death of art, she only laughed.

"Indeed, as an author of romances, no one is more in sympathy with such a plaint than I, liebchen," she told me. "But we are charged to produce a Matrix entry, not the romance which you may create when the spirit moves you and which will no doubt earn you fame and fortune. As for the pain of reducing art to dry didacticism, the final stage of our work will be more painful still, for then we must go over every word and syllable with a cold and ruthless heart. For while Willa Embri Janos may be something of a philistine when it comes to literary style, she knows whereof she speaks when it comes to the utter concision required to produce what the Matrix must have."

She patted my knee. "I hope we will still be friends at the conclusion of this unpleasant task," she said.

"We will always be friends, Wendi, come what may!" I declared with an open heart.

Wendi laughed again. "Say that when we have engaged in mortal combat over every word of your own precious prose, liebchen!" she said.

***

"You will find that those of us who honor the floating cultura with our presence and not the other way around will be interested in your unique adventure," Wendi told me sotto voce as we entered the formal dining room. "It is fair entree into serious circles, ma petite, just do not assume that it will yet make you the center of the universe."

The inner wisdom of this caveat eluded me at the time, but by the time the banquet was over I was to be taught this lesson quite well.

There were six other diners at the table Wendi had put together: Void Captain Dana Gluck Sara; Willa Embri Janos, Lazaro Melinda Kuhn, and Dalta Evan Evangeline, all of whom I had already been introduced to; Timothy Ben Bella, psychopharmacologist and yogic adept; and Linda Yee Lech, who was styled one of the foremost mages of evolutionary psychesomics in all the worlds of men.

Which is to say a heady and learned company indeed, and one which Wendi had quite obviously assembled around the subject of my young self. This knowledge was something less than reassuring to the same, for on the one hand it put me in mind of the endless interrogation sessions at the Clear Light, and on the other it made me trepidatious concerning my ability to hold my own at this exalted level of discourse.

Fortunately, as I was soon to learn, the manners of these worthies were a far cry from what I had experienced from the mages at the mental retreat. The first course served was a crepe of fruits de mer enrobed in a thick saffron sauce and accompanied by a rather sweet white wine, after which came a fiery curried vegetable consomme with tiny bits of pickled fish and a powerful anise- flavored vodka. Then came smoked black mushrooms stuffed with pungent forcemeat and served with a bone-dry red vintage.

During these preliminaries, Wendi favored me with an introduction to the Honored Passengers whom I had not yet met, and the table talk concerned the art of our chef maestro, Escoffier Tai Bondi. For my part, I took the opportunity to say little and imbibe a respectful amount, so that by the time we were served Vaco Filets Bordelais, garnished with fried maize noodles and accompanied by a wine so deeply red that it appeared almost black, my trepidations had been entirely dissolved, my tongue was lubricated to a fine loquacity, and I was more than ready to render up my spiel at Wendi's request.

For the next twenty minutes or so, I held this audience of mages and puissant intellects spellbound with a rather extravagant telling of the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt, a version not unlike that which I had developed on the streets of Ciudad Pallas, if somewhat augmented by the noble vintages I had consumed.

I seem to remember that during this spiel we were served a barbecue of assorted vegetables accompanied by a cunningly spiced white wine as well as a goreng embellished with several varieties of charcuterie washed down with a dark-brown beer, though my memory of this stage of the meal was somewhat clouded by both beverages and the exhilarating sight of seven pairs of keenly bright eyes approvingly turned upon my person and seven pairs of intellectually avid ears hanging on my every word, or so it seemed to me.

Suffice it to say that by the time I had concluded over a salad of fruits steeped in a creme of smoked nuts, I felt like the queen of all the worlds.

But just as this sweet course did not prove to be the conclusion to the banquet that I had supposed, so did the conclusion of my declamation lead to two more intellectual courses of which I was to prove something less than the chef maestra. Out came a cold red fruit soup liberally laced with kirschwasser and garnished with tiny croutons of nut flour stuffed with cinnamon jam, and with it the questioning commenced.

"You are quite certain that these true Bloomenkinder were entirely devoid of sapience?" demanded Linda Yee Lech. "Which set of parameters did you apply, the Menzies-Rademacher criteria, which have been around for centuries, or ahem, my own more recent construct?"

"I'm afraid that the differences between the two are presently rather vague in my mind," I bluffed, for of course I had no idea what she was talking about. "S'il vous plait, if you would be so good as to refresh my memory ..."

"The Menzies-Rademacher criteria hinge on the question of whether meaning is carried in a grammatical sequence or whether each cry is an isolate," Linda Yee Lech reminded me. "Whereas my construct, which relies upon a systems analysis of the absence or presence of social interactions, is far less of a blunt instrument."

"As I have said, the Bloomenkinder are perfectly mute," I told her. "As for social interactions, these may have appeared complexly patterned, but no more so than the doings of a beehive."

"You were able to inventory a sufficient number of interactions so that this was confirmed by analysis to a probability of better than fifty percent?" Linda Yee Lech asked sharply.

"I'm afraid not," I admitted. "But if you had seen, as I did, human infants suckling at floral teats, there would have been no --" .

"Con su permiso," Timothy Ben Bella interrupted politely. "If I may, I believe the question Linda is trying to approach is whether we are dealing with innocent animals in which sentience never arises or sapient humans whose higher centers are severed from volitional expression by the exudations of the flowers ..."

"Or indeed whether the Bloomenwald itself may not be deemed sentient," Lazaro Melinda Kuhn declared. "And if so, did such sentience evolve in symbiosis with the devolution of its human pollinators, or was this Perfumed Garden phenomenon preexistent? Did you observe a progression of intermediate floral forms? Did any of the native mammals exhibit such florally coordinated behaviors on a somewhat less complex level?"

"As for a progression of intermediate floral organization from isolated flowers to the complexity of the Perfumed Garden, vraiment, one would have had to have been blind not to observe this," I said. "But as for observing the intimate behaviors of the native mammals, it was entirely impossible to approach them even closely enough to see them very clearly. But surely the suckling of human infants at vegetative teats indicates that the latter must have evolved to service the former, ne?"

"A probable deduction ..." Lazaro admitted. "But did you observe the young of any native species engaged in the same behavior? The presence of same would obviate your puissant logic, kind ..."

"Je ne sais pas," I admitted lamely. "I never thought to inquire at the time ..."

"And what of the vapors you have styled 'pheromones' and 'perfumes'?" asked Timothy Ben Bella. "Is this mere literary license or did you obtain samples for analysis?"

"Vraiment, we obtained samples, but alas they were lost with our packs."

"Merde! Quelle catastrophe!"

"Mayhap all is not lost, Timothy," Lazaro said. "For certainement we know enough of the general botany of Belshazaar to deduce the general biochemical class of its exudates by the morphology of the specific organs secreting same. Describe for us then, bitte, Sunshine, the various floral structure responsible for the vapors producing the several specific psychotropic effects you encountered ..."

"I'm afraid that in my psychic state I was hardly capable of noticing ..."

"But surely you were at least able to differentiate among the substances exuded by stamens, pistils, and perhaps specialized scent organs?"

I could only shrug my admission of perfect ignorance.

"Give over hectoring the poor child on these matters, Lazaro," said Linda Yee Lech. "It is hardly a moral flaw not to be a trained botanical observer! However when it comes to psychic experiences, these at least we all observe with ultimate intimacy. So tell us, Sunshine, in less anecdotal terms than you have thusfar employed, when you were in your deepest thrall to the flowers, was your sapience entirely absent, or merely suppressed by a biochemical overlay? Which is to say, did your higher centers bear witness to their own volitional impotence or was, as it were, no one at home?"

"There appears to be no temporal discontinuity in my memory-track, if that is what you mean ..."

"Hmmm ..." mused Dalta Evan Evangeline.  To come at it from a possibly more fruitful angle, would you say that the stimulus of the rising sun which first roused you from this state had sapient mythic meaning to you from the outset, or was it a phylogenically primitive tropism upon which the later more complex structure was retrospectively erected?"

"Que?"

"Ho, ho, sehr gut, Dalta!" exclaimed Linda Yee Lech in forthright admiration. "Indeed it must have been the former, for the revertees who once possessed human consciousness responded to her verbal cues, whereas the Bloomenkinder never did!"

"True," said Lazaro, "but on the other hand if she was responding to a mere visual tropism, then they could just as easily have been responding to a mere auditory tropism."

"But if so, then why did the Bloomenkinder not respond to it?"

"Because it is exactly this lack of response which proves that they lack sapient human consciousness!"

"Phah! What a tautology!"

"Round and round you go," Wendi finally broke in after her long and quite uncharacteristic silence. "Yet you miss the true point entirely!"

"Which is, if I may make so bold?" drawled Lazaro.

"That there were three entirely different responses by members of our own species to the very same chemicals, naturellement!" Wendi declared.

"Well taken"' exclaimed Linda Yee Lech. "Vraiment it is clearly the imprinting of the collective unconscious that the Bloomenkinder lack! Hola, this may indeed settle one of the hoariest disputes of psychesomics!"

"How so?" inquired Dalta Evan Evangeline.

"It would seem to prove quite conclusively that what we style the collective unconscious is culturally and verbally transmitted, rather than being species genetic coding!"

"Rubbish!" scoffed Imro. "If that were so, then how could you account for the cross-cultural and trans temporal universality of same?"

"Oh so? Then how would you account for its absence in the Bloomenkinder if it is inscribed in the genes of our species?"

"If one grants the Bloomenwald some sort of vegetative sentience, then the genes wherein the collective unconsciousness is encoded may have been deliberately extinguished by selective breeding even as we have altered the genetically determined behaviors of domestic animals."

"Anthropocentric projection!"

Und so weiter.

By the time we were into a green salad dressed with peppered oil and sweet and sour vinegar, the discourse had proceeded into esoteric realms of biology, genetics, psychesomics, esthetics, and evolutionary ecology whose general outlines I could only struggle to dimly comprehend, and to which I could hardly coherently contribute. Over yet another dessert, of chocolate pastry filled with rose-flavored custard, I sat there quietly listening to intense and occasionally acrimonious debates on the psychopharmacology of the Bloomenveldt, the theoretical parameters of vegetative sentience, the essential definition of the elan humain, the ethics of continental sterilization, et cetera, in terms whose firm meanings I strained my brain to comprehend, for I understood enough to know that my own simple tale was the central subject of all this commentary.

It was exhilarating to have my adventures taken so seriously by such manifestly serious intellects, but it was also daunting to realize how much wider and deeper knowledge and insight went on any conceivable subject than I had ever imagined, particularly when the callowness of my own intellect was being so amply demonstrated using the subject matter of my own personal experience.

"I never dreamed there was so much to learn even about the events of my own existence," I moaned to Wendi when we departed at the banquet's end, with my mind as torpid with elusive discourse as my stomach was with haute cuisine. "How are we ever going to incorporate it all in my simple tale?"

Wendi laughed. "One thing at a time, liebchen, one thing at a time," she assured me blithely. "Now you must sleep well, Sunshine, for tomorrow our work begins in earnest."

***

And so it did. For three days, I declaimed my tale in numerous versions onto word crystal to the point where I began to loathe the sound of my own voice, and then for three more days we worked to combine them into a version suitable for submission to our panel of mages. By the time this process was completed to Wendi's satisfaction, my brain was reeling with intellectual fatigue, and I wanted nothing more than to be finished with the whole task. The truth of it is that never in my young life had I ever engaged in such strenuous intellectual labors; indeed, if truth be told, prior to that time, I had been a virgin when it came to any real work at all.

Throughout all human history, the young of our species have been subject to endless rubrics on the joys of labor, the ennui that is the inevitable result of indolence, and the psychic satisfaction to be gained by absorption in some mighty work, the more demanding the better. Be such homilies as they may, the pleasures thereof remained beyond my comprehension until the next stage of the process began.

"One thing at a time," Wendi had promised, and so it was done, which is to say rather than being subject to whole batteries of learned interrogators at once, the mages were given word crystals of the draft version of the Matrix entry to peruse, and then I went at it with them one at a time, over lunch or dinner, in the vivarium, or in their staterooms, more often than not with Wendi at my side.

Now the situation was in a certain sense reversed, for while my teachers certainement never lost interest in what they might extract in the course of such discourse for their own intellectual use, teachers they indeed were, resources placed at my disposal, and what puissant teachers they were!

In the stateroom of Lazaro Melinda Kuhn, I learned the dark and ambiguous answer to a question that had never trammeled my mind until, at length, after a surfeit of his gentle but rueful complaints at my less than scientifically lucid descriptions of the flora and fauna of the Bloomenveldt, it suddenly intruded into my awareness.

"Why then depend on the anecdotes of such as myself?" I demanded. "Why in all the centuries that men have dwelt on Belshazaar has not a proper scientific expedition been mounted to the interior of the Bloomenveldt ...?"

I was suddenly brought up short by my own words, which is to say by the shameful mortification induced thereby. For had I not once promised to myself that if I escaped to the worlds of men I would one day return with just such an expedition to rescue Guy Vlad Boca? And what had I done to accomplish same? Precisely nothing!

"Vraiment, why is one not mounted now?" I demanded with guilt-driven stridency. "Indeed, why does not a fleet of hovers descend upon the depths of the forest canopy to rescue our human comrades from such vile floral fascism?"

Lazaro's demeanor darkened. "I wondered when you would ask that," he said with a sigh. "I had hoped it would not fall to me to be confronted with the question, for the answer, I fear, does not exactly reflect honor on our species."

"What do you mean by that?" I said defensively, for, thinking as I was of my abandonment of Guy, I assumed that the lack of honor he alluded to was my own.

"The psychotropics derived from the Bloomenveldt are a source of great profit, ne," Lazaro said. "Indeed they are the entire economic base of that unwholesome planet. The fact is, that if you inspect the literature, you will find quite a few cryptic mentions of the apocryphal Bloomenkinder. The unpleasant truth is that the existence of same has been suspected for centuries."

"Then why --"

"Think, my innocent young friend, and with greed in your heart! If proof of such a state of affairs was secured and laid before the worlds of men, what would be the result?"

"What else but a hue and cry and a demand on the part of men and women of good will for the rescue of --" I cut myself short. I stared at Lazaro. He gave me a strange little shrug. "You don't mean ...?"

"But alas I do, my young friend," Lazaro said uncomfortably. "Not only would the citizens of Belshazaar find themselves morally required to rescue the Bloomenkinder, there would no doubt be many who would demand the extermination of the Bloomenwald as a proper vengeance for the outrage. And even if the voice of science could prevent such floral genocide, it would appear that the presence of Bloomenkinder is necessary to induce the flowers to evolve the very psychotropics which enrich the planet. An unwholesome sym-biosis mayhap, but a true one, which is to say one which indeed benefits both species -- the one with more efficient pollinators, and the other with huge pecuniary profit."

"They know?" I exclaimed in horror and outrage. "They know and still they do nothing?"

Lazaro shrugged. "They know, they don't know, certainement they have no wish to know that they know."

"Merde, I always sensed a vileness of spirit throughout Ciudad Pallas, but I put it down to lack of esthetics!" I muttered. "Never did I imagine creatures that styled themselves human could thusly abandon the spirits of their fellows in such a cowardly manner for mere profit!"

***

Nor could I think of anything else when I departed to keep my luncheon appointment with Linda Yee Lech. "Something must be done!" I declared angrily, after hectoring her on the subject at considerable length. "We must force these mercenary miscreants to rescue the Bloomenkinder!"

"Are you so certain of your moral rectitude in this regard?" she asked me evenly. "Remove the Bloomenkinder from the forest and what have you accomplished? At the cost of wrecking a planetary economy and impeding the progress of psychopharmacology, you will have rescued them from the ecological niche in which they evolved in favor of incarceration as an exhibit in a zoological garden. Even feral humans raised by other mammals do not develop sentient consciousness, still less will the symbiotes of the Bloomenvelt ever be anything but mammals in human form sans the elan humain, ne."

"But their progeny --"

"You would breed them in captivity?"

"No, certainly not, but --"

"Then you would commit genocide against the Bloomenkinder as well as against the Bloomenveldt?"

"Genocide? I am not the monster!"

Linda Yee Lech smiled and softened her expression. "Thus speak all humans, and truly so," she said. "Vraiment, this is a question which must trouble the spirit. For who is the monster here? Those who merely profit by a pre-existing condition while carefully avoiding conscious recognition of the same? The innocent Bloomenkinder? Those who, like your Guy, have willingly surrendered their spirits to the flowers? The flowers of the Bloomenveldt, who merely follow their own natural evolutionary vector, mayhap to sentience?"

"Be questions of guilt or monsterhood as they may, I am talking about pragmatic action, not the niceties of moral calculus!" I declared pettishly.

"La meme chose, in this case," Linda said flatly. "For here on the one hand we have a species in human form whose consciousness has long since diverged from our own and which will expire into extinction if it is removed from its floral symbiote, and on the other hand, a floral symbiote which may be evolving toward a sentience it can only achieve courtesy of its human pollinators. We may expunge either or both from the universe, but we will never restore the Bloomenkinder to sapient citizenship in the human race. Do we therefore have the moral right to commit double genocide when there would not even be a beneficiary of such a scientific and karmic outrage? Are you really willing to take such matters into your own hands?"

"Put thusly, je ne sais pas ..." I was forced to admit. "But what of those sapient humans who wandered into the thrall of the flowers? What about such as Guy?  What about those who quite rationally chose to die in the arms of floral nirvana?" Linda Yee Lech pointed out relentlessly. "Would they wish to be rescued? Vraiment, would your Guy thank you if you rescued him from his perfect flower to spend the rest of his days in a mental retreat? If we were to impose our will upon such spirits according to our own concepts of righteousness, how would we be any less fascist than the flowers, who at least would seem to eschew the practice of continental sterilization?"

"Once more, what once seemed clear is now occluded by an excess of wisdom," I could only declare.

Linda Yee Lech smiled. "Unfortunately there are all too many instances when all that wisdom teaches us is that the ability to act is only the power to make things worse," she said.

***

Other enlightenments, fortunately, were a good deal less grim, and more relevant to my evolution as a tale-teller than to the jaundicing of my opinion of the moral stature of my own species. In particular, Dalta Evan Evangeline, the literary archeologist, did much to both open up my awareness to the abundance of nuance attached to most every image and figure I employed by several thousand years of human history and art, and lead me to a far deeper understanding of certain aspects of my own tale and those I had learned from the Gypsy Joker ruespielers as well.

This odyssey began innocently enough when she presented me with a copy of the tale of Peter Pan and suggested that perusal thereof might be of some relevant interest to the task at hand. Since I had been meaning to delve into this matter ever since I had been apprised of this work's existence, I readily enough agreed.

But after I finished the tale, I knew only confusion. Surely the freenom Pater Pan must be a somewhat less than perfectly erudite homage to the Peter Pan of the tale, and just as surely I could see a good deal of Pater in the domo of the tribe of lost boys. Yet the ending of the tale contradicted the spirit of the Yellow Brick Road entirely, which is to say I could hardly imagine my Pater approving of the moral imposed by fiat when the lost children forsake their vie for the quotidian realm of adults, nor did the Wendy of the tale have more than a passing resemblance to the Wendi that I knew who had chosen this freenom.

When I broached these matters at a lunch of pasta with sauteed vegetables and grated cheeses with Wendi and Dalta, the latter's interest seemed piqued as if I had presented her with new food for thought, and the former shook her head in ironic amusement.

"These matters of names, images, and their millennial transmogrifications are even deeper and more arcane than you are beginning to suppose, Sunshine," Dalta said. "The name 'Pater Pan' alone might be the subject of a lengthy monograph ..." She paused, fingering her chin. "Indeed, I do believe that I will compose it!"

"Mayhap you would care to elucidate at less than exhaustive length?" Wendi inquired dryly. "For I too once knew the gallant in question ..."

"Well, if you are content with a mere skimming of the surface," Dalta said in a similar vein. 'Pater,' for example, has the meaning of 'father' in a long-disused sprach of Lingo. 'Pan' was the priapic goat-god of libido in a certain ancient mythos, and also refers to 'Pan-theism,' the concept that the Atman is equally distributed throughout the world of maya. The reference to 'Peter Pan' you have already mentioned, and 'Peter,' paradoxically enough, refers to both the first pontifex of a religion opposed to the doctrine of Pan-theism, and the phallus. Moreover, in yet another ancient image-system, the 'Peter Pan Complex' denotes, as in the tale, a personality which eschews maturity in favor of permanent neoteny ..."

"Hola!" exclaimed Wendi. "Then the full translation of the name would be ... Pope Lingam of the Libidinal Atman Goat, a fine epithet for the master cocksman we both knew indeed!"

Wendi and I both burst into laughter. "Do you suppose the tales the fellow we both knew told were informed by such scholarly erudition?" she asked me.

"Somehow I doubt it," I said. "Yet who can deny that he nevertheless chose a literarily puissant freenom?"

"As did you when you wove the same nuances into your tale and then some," Dalta said quite solemnly, for she had not joined in our mirth any more than she had shared our intimate knowledge of the object thereof.

"Indeed ...?" I said, out of politesse more than avid interest.

"Oh, vraiment ... Dalta said. "The god Pan played seductive music on his pipes, which is to say he was the Piper of the libido. But when he becomes the Pied Piper we are also in another mythos. The Gypsies were an early avatar of the Children of Fortune, and the Joker refers to a transmutational card of the Tarot, the court jester of the ancient kings, and the god of holy mischief in more than one cycle. The Gypsy jokers, however, were a tribe of wandering motorized barbarians like the Angels of Hell, the Slaves of Satan, and the Golden Horde. The rising sun is the ensign of the ancient Emperors of Nippon, hence of the virtues of bushido, but is also a punning reference to the Risen Christ, as well as to Prometheus, who brought the light of knowledge to our species, and who is also known as Lucifer the Light Bringer, who somehow also contrives to metamorphose into Satan, Prince of Darkness ..."

"Quelle chose!" I japed. "I am overwhelmed to learn of the depths of my own unsuspected erudition! Alas, it would seem impossible in our Second Starfaring Age to tell a simple tale without summoning up all unawares a whole pantheon of hidden spirits! How then am I to become a maestra of the Word when each mot of my Lingo has a secret sprach all its own?"

"It will take years of diligent study naturellement," Dalta said enthusiastically. "If you wish, I will have the Matrix prepare a bibliographical sequence for you to follow ..."

"Study the bones if you like, I suppose that can do no harm," Wendi said archly. "Just do not take such learning too seriously. It is magic of a sort we work with our spells of words and it is better that we do not feel we must pin down every last nuance of reference thereof lest we find ourselves suffering from creative constipation!"

At that even Dalta was constrained to join in the laughter at her expense.

***

Nevertheless, as the Mistral Falcon reached Winthrope and then Novi Mir, and as the work progressed toward the stage when there was nothing left to do save wait for Willa Embri Janos to locate Pater Pan and put what we had into final form via the mortal combat over each word of my own deathless prose that Wendi had promised, I found myself digging ever deeper into such lore utilizing both Dalta's personal expertise and monographs that she suggested, and hola, by the time this editing process had begun, I did indeed find myself haggling over each subtraction or alteration of a word that Wendi suggested.

Strange to say, or mayhap under the circumstances, not so strange, I had no interest in erotic intrigues, or in the numerous arts and entertainments offered up by the Grand Palais, and my palate began to grow indifferent to the splendors of the haute cuisine and noble vintages I consumed as so much functional fressen. For all of those pleasures at the time seemed but pale shadows of that mighty passion which all unawares had seduced me into the innermost vie and raison d'etre of the floating cultura, the lust for knowledge.

Not so much for any particular item of knowledge -- though certainement there was much I wished I had known earlier -- but the growing glorious perception of how much knowledge truly existed in the worlds of men after all these thousands of years of science, art, and history. And not only did I marvel at how extensive and inexhaustible all this knowledge was, but how much true wisdom had been encoded with the mere data, how much of an interconnected whole it all was, what puissant intellectual forces our Second Starfaring Age could muster even on a subject as ultimately trivial in the cosmic scheme of things as the tale of my own wanderjahr as a Child of Fortune.

And yet, refracted and focused through the events of my own life, knowledge seemed to become something even more vital than itself, just as the events of my own life amplified by knowledge became something much more than a simple tale.

Thus, without a clear perception of ever having crossed the karmic threshold, I found myself perceiving my karmic position not as that of a Child of Fortune approaching the climax of her life's tale, but as that of a woman yet unknown confronting the immensity of her future becoming.

In short, I had my first precognitive perception of myself in my own version of the adult of the species, and the first inkling that this was a beginning, not an end. In some dim way, I knew that at some point in my voyage aboard the Mistral Falcon, I had met the me I wanted to grow up to be.

Chapter 28

Thus I was somewhat psychically unprepared when, five days out of Flor del Cielo, Wendi and I were summoned from our all-but-completed labors to the library, where Willa Embri Janos announced: "I have at last found our quarry.  Pater Pan is on Alpa, or at least he was there two months ago."

She handed me a flimsy upon which was transcribed a formidable list of planets, several score at least, dated in chronological order from top to bottom, with the earliest entry some seven centuries old.

"As to his hyperbolic claims of being a relic of the First Starfaring Age or even beyond, je ne sais pas," she said. "But certainement, he has gotten around quite well and for a mighty span indeed in our own era!"

"Well done!" exclaimed Wendi. "How did you manage such a feat?"

"Not without difficulty," Willa told her. "For the legends the fellow pretends to embody generalize into greater and greater vagueness the further back you go, to the point where it sometimes seemed that whole armies had their turns in playing the part, At length, however, I hit upon the notion of sifting this mass of confusion through a net constructed out of verified records of Child of Fortune tribes fitting the general parameters of the Gypsy Jokers as described. Thus, by cross- referencing these tribal histories with the legends, I was able to compile the list you now have, in raw form. Then it was merely a matter of establishing the sequence, extrapolating the trajectory, and verifying that such a phenomenon indeed has recently come into being on the planet to which the arrow thereof pointed, to wit Alpa, to a probability of at least seventy percent."

"Formidable!" I exclaimed, with an enthusiasm that seemed somewhat strained even to my own ears. "Someday I must learn this most puissant craft!"

But in truth, my spirit had been thrown into some turmoil, for it had been days, or even weeks, since I had given any thought to what had once seemed to be the raison d' etre of my presence on the Mistral Falcon in the first place. For in a sense, the girl who had followed her Pied Piper across the Bloomenveldt, into the streets of Ciudad Pallas, and thence out among the starways in this very ship, was no more. For in the process thereof, believing all the while that I had been seeking to regain a Golden Summer out of my past, I had instead found a vector toward my unknown but enticing future. Vraiment, I still sought to follow the spirit of my Yellow Brick Road, but the nature thereof had changed, for now the Yellow Brick Road I sought to travel was a version appropriate to the adult of my kind, the path of knowledge, and vraiment, frank artistic ambition, a road upon which I had not known my feet were so firmly planted until this very moment.

Thus, rather than greeting Willa's announcement with the unbridled joy I would have thought it should have brought, I felt instead a certain ill-defined sense of loss. For now the end of this voyage was in sight, and truth be told, I found to my own surprise that I liked it not.

Wendi Sha Rumi seemed to have some inkling of what was passing through my soul. "Alpa ..." she said to Willa Embri Janos. "How many transfers will it require to get there from our next planet of call?"

"We shall soon see," Willa said. She addressed the Matrix console. "Flor del Cielo to Alpa. Void Ship connection between."

A moment later words and numbers appeared on the telescreen.

"Buena suerte indeed!" she exclaimed, pointing to the tele. "Observe! The Arrow of Time even now approaches Flor del Cielo. From there to Heimat is its course, and thence to Alpa itself."

My spirit sank, nor, despite my protests against its meanness to the contrary, would it rise. Now my feelings must surely be written plain upon my face, for Wendi eyed me with a certain knowing concern.

"It pleases you not, liebchen, ne?" she said. "Je comprend." She took my hand. "Con su permiso, Willa. Come, Sunshine, we must talk."

***

We repaired forthwith to the vivarium, where, strolling around the oasis pool under the brilliant ersatz sky of the desert night, I searched out the words to render up my feelings to my mentor and friend, and thus to clarify them to myself.

"Je ne sais pas ... It is as if I had begun another tale ... and all at once I find myself thrust back in time into the previous one ... or rather ... The truth of it is, I suppose, that I have found a new path toward what I wish to become, and mayhap should continue thereon rather than ..." I threw up my hands in frustration.

Wendi laughed. "Mayhap the matter is not quite so arcane as you suppose," she said. "Simply that having found your future calling as a teller of tales for an audience of the worlds at large rather than as an itinerant ruespieler, you are avid to embark on your new career without digression or delay ...?"

I nodded. "Just so," I said. "Or rather, all at once, I have now learned that I have already embarked thereon."

"Well spoken!" Wendi declared. "Only do not suppose you have already learned all the necessary lore."

"Oh indeed not!" I exclaimed. "Vraiment, I have learned more on this voyage than in all of my previous life, yet what I have learned best is how much there is to learn before I may truly style myself a maestra of the literary art! Scientific knowledge sufficient to accurately describe arcane events and venues, the annals of the art itself, lest I find myself repeating the stories of others innocently unaware, the millennial history of our species in order to sift truth from hyperbole, the inner meanings of words and images, the ability to use the Matrix as Willa does to properly apprise myself of the foregoing ..."

We sat down beneath one of the tented awnings beside the pool, and I gazed off at the ersatz horizon where the illusory sands merged in a shimmering zone of mirage with the equally illusory sky. And found to my satoric astonishment that it pleased me now -- the vivarium, the Grand Palais, the company I had found, the vie of the floating cultura itself, all that had once seemed arrogant vanity and empty illusion to the Gypsy Joker ruespieler.

"Hola, Wendi, you spoke truly at the time, but I could not credit it!" I exclaimed. "For never would I have thought to hear myself say these words. I do believe I love the true inner vie of the floating cultura that you have shown me! Certainement, I have no wish to leave it now!"

Wendi laughed. "How much you remind me of myself!" she said. "But you too must learn, as I did, that there is more to learn of the tale-teller's art than is contained in all the Matrix's annals and philosophies, Sunshine. You must learn the hard truths of the inner lore."

"The inner lore?"

"Vraiment. First you must learn that if you wish to be a teller of the spirit's true tales, ma petite, you must seek knowledge of the worlds of men, naturellement, but beyond that you must seek the inner knowledge of your own spirit. Patience is required, hola, a commodity always in short supply, but the courage of ruthless honesty as well."

"In this you find me lacking?" I said pettishly.

"Certainly not thusfar, ruespieler!" Wendi declared. "But the author of true lies must be willing to swear the oath of the lodge, which is that come what may, at any cost to the natural woman or even to the spirit itself, the first allegiance of the teller must be to the tale."

"Je ne comprend pas ..."

"Take the tale in question, liebchen, for this is the lesson you must learn before our work is done," Wendi said. "Is not the Matrix entry we are commissioned to finish your own name tale, my dear, at the proper conclusion of which, the Child of Fortune that was chooses a freenom for the woman she has become? And were what we have transcribed thusfar a romance rather than the story of your own life, would you not fling the word crystal across the room in outrage if it ended without the proper note of closure? Does not the story, to which you must swear total allegiance, require a closing chapter on Alpa with Pater Pan?"

"Perhaps you are right ..." I was forced to own.

"Perhaps I am right?" Wendi exclaimed rather archly. "Child, have you not known me long enough now to know that I am always right, and no perhaps about it?"

" nd modest to a fault as well.

We both laughed, but Wendi soon enough became even more earnest. "On the one hand, you wish not to delay your pursuit of career and muse for a moment, and on the other hand, you fear that the first sight of this most puissant of your lovers will forthwith subsume your newfound intellectual passions under a tsunami of amour and cause you to give it all over in favor of clinging as a consort to his side, ne."

"Quelle chose!" I protested. "Do you take me for a mooning romantic ready to throw my life away for love?"

Wendi cocked her head, shrugged, and regarded me more as an equal sister now, or so it seemed. "Quien sabe?" she said almost gaily. "Who of us knows the answer to that until the moment of truth comes? But certainement, the tale of your wanderjahr is not over until it does, nor is The Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt going to be concluded in a manner suitable to inclusion in the Matrix without its climactic scene."

Wendi patted me on the knee and spoke gently. "The former I tell you as woman to woman, my dear. Come what may, you can never be content until you learn what is in your own heart. What is there to fear, after all? Either you will enjoy a romantic reunion for a sweet interlude, free yourself of your erotic indifference thereby, and then resume your own path, or you will find the eternal mate of your soul and alter your vector through life in freely given joy."

Wendi sat back at a greater distance and spoke somewhat more distantly. "But the latter I tell you in my editorial capacity, and it is she who was commissioned to assure that your story is put into proper form for the Matrix who speaks now. We must end our account with your reunion on Alpa with Pater Pan, even should it mean that you run off with him forever, are jilted within a year, never tell a tale again, and end up as a tantric performer on some rude frontier world. That is what it means to swear the oath of our lodge, ma chere. Your life and happiness come second, ruespieler; your first allegiance must be to the tale."

I looked away from her for a moment to gaze up at the ersatz stars of the vivarium sky, beyond which lay the true reality, the deep Void through which all our lives journeyed, and scattered among all that daunting firmament, the oases of our spirit in the desert of the night, the far-flung worlds of men. Was it not a tale which we had followed out across the stars from our ancestral trees? Were we not both the teller and protagonist thereof? Was not the Yellow Brick Road the same as the tale-teller's path? Had not both Pater Pan and Wendi Sha Rumi justly declared that before the singer comes the song?

"Vraiment, Wendi, you are right," I told her at length. "We must find the true ending of one tale before we can properly begin another, ne. In the spirit of our calling, there is no other choice."

"In this case even more well spoken than you comprehend, Sunshine," Wendi said somewhat owlishly. "For speaking now finally as one colleague to another, we have enjoyed a long voyage at the expense of public benefaction on the grounds that reuniting you with Pater Pan was a legitimate requirement of our collaboration, and as even the most extreme of ivory tower artistes must sooner or later discover, we Pipers are not the only ones capable of demanding our pay."

***

Strange to say, once having resolved thusly to following the Pied Piper of my wanderjahr to the conclusion of this tale, my spirits lifted, and indeed it soon enough seemed to me that I had been foolishly jousting with shadows.

For what was there to fear? Did I really believe that upon seeing Pater Pan again the Child of Fortune that I had been would fling herself into his arms and give over entirely the new path that the woman I sought to become had found? Or that that woman could not countenance perceiving the domo of her Golden Summer as a Child of Fortune as just another natural man?

Mayhap that had been the source of my trepidations, for I could conceive no other. The floating cultura would await my return from Alpa, as would the vie of the teller of tales, which had existed as long as sapient speech and would persist as long as humankind. The only things I had to fear, certainement, were within my heart, and neither ruespieler nor author of word crystals could remain on the Yellow Brick Road by refusing to learn the secrets of her own soul.

And so I threw myself into completing our work as best I presently could and brooded not over the missing climactic scene until even Wendi finally declared that every word and syllable of what we had on word crystal was as perfect as it could become.

"Indeed," she declared as we ate a late supper of barbecued fruits de mer in the refectory after what was to be the last of these lapidary sessions, "there is a point beyond which further revisions only cause one's prose to devolve. Hola, in my editorial capacity, I do declare we have certainly reached that point now. C'est fini! There is no more useful work to be done until we reach Alpa. Avail yourself of the divertissements the Grand Palais has to offer, take a lover, have several, besot yourself with toxicants, celebrate a justly earned holiday in the best traditions of our craft."

I shook my head. "Now that I have resolved to properly end the tale, and now that there is nothing to be done but await its conclusion, I fear I will be able to do nothing but rattle fecklessly about this Grand Palais and then that of the Arrow of Time, wanting only for the endless days to pass ..."

"Well then, why bother?" Wendi said airily.

"Why bother?"

"Were this a romance I was creating, I would simply make a time-jump to the next meaningful scene rather than bore my audience with a detailed description of a period of prolonged ennui," Wendi said. "Why not grant yourself the same mercy? We will reach Flor del Cielo in a day or two, and when we do, why do you not simply proceed to Alpa in the dormodule of the Arrow of Time? While you sleep the dreamless sleep, I will voyage in the Grand Palais thereof and do some work of my own that I have been neglecting, and by the time you awake, I should have found Pater Pan's encampment thereon for you."

I snapped my fingers, once, twice, thrice. "Like the Rapide!"

* * *

And so once more I found myself climbing a metal ladder in the long central corridor of a dormodule stacked from floor to ceiling with glass cubicles and taking my place among the less- than-Honored Passengers sleeplessly dreaming around me.

But now I felt no fear as I laid myself down on the padded pallet with the spiderwork helmet behind my head. Nor claustrophobic dread when the cubicle door slid shut behind me. So much had come to pass since I had trepidatiously essayed my first such journey from Glade to Edoku. I had left the world of my birth, braved Great Edoku itself, survived the perils of the Bloomenveldt, voyaged as a true Honored Passenger, found my life's calling, and soon, vraiment in the next augenblick of my waking existence, I would reach the planet where the tale of my wanderjahr was to end. And had not Pater Pan's own words, confirmed by the Matrix itself, told me that he had survived this selfsame process scores or mayhap even hundreds of times?

Vraiment, did not esthetic justice require that I journey to him thusly?

And so I felt only peace as hidden machineries began to hum, and my head was touched by a cool, calm, mechanical caress that promised an instant translation to the triumphant conclusion of my wanderjahr's tale. Snap! Snap! Snap! Like the --

***

-- Rapide!

The door to my cubicle slid open as I awoke, and, rubbing sleep from my eyes with a casual gesture as if arising from a short nap, I rolled off the pallet, and climbed down the ladder, expecting to find myself in the midst of the sort of debarkation bustle and excitement which had greeted me when I had similarly awoken in the dormodule of the Bird of Night upon my arrival at Edoku.

Instead I found myself alone in the dormodule corridor save for Wendi Sha Rumi and the Med Crew Maestro of the Arrow of Time. There were no fellow passengers climbing down from their cubicles, no floaters bearing luggage, no announcements by the ship's annunciator, no electricity in the air -- only Wendi, the Med Crew Maestro, and myself amidst stacks and rows of silent sleepers.

And if this was not a rude enough awakening, there was Wendi's demeanor to contend with. Never had I seen her so somber, so trepidatious. Indeed, she seemed to be avoiding direct contact with my eyes.

"What's wrong?" I demanded.

"There have been no anomalies in the revival procedure, I assure you," the Med Crew Maestro burbled. "I am merely present in the ordinary line of --"

"Why have none of the other passengers been awakened? Has there been some dreadful malfunction in --"

"Certainly not!" the Med Crew Maestro snapped indignantly. "Rather ask this personage here why proper procedure has been interfered with to awake you a day earlier by special dispensation, for we are yet a good twenty-four hours or more out of Alpa!"

"This is so?" I asked Wendi. She only nodded. "Why?"

"Because you have a difficult choice to make, Sunshine," she said with uncharacteristic lack of energy. "We must have time to discuss ..." She cast nervous sidelong glances at the rows of sleeping voyagers which walled us in, at the sour demeanor of the Med Crew Maestro. "But certainement, not in here!"

To this I could readily enough agree despite my anxious curiosity, for the ambiance of the dormodule was one to impose hushed silence, the Med Crew Maestro was quite impatient for us to be gone, Wendi's mood was more than enough to fill me with dread, and I could hardly imagine a venue less suited to the absorption of dark tidings. I therefore held my tongue and allowed her to lead me out of the dormodule, along the ship's spinal corridor, and into her stateroom, all in silence.

Once the door was closed behind us and we were seated side by side on the bed, Wendi laid a hand on my knee, and, still not quite meeting my gaze squarely, she spoke.

"True to my word, I have located Pater Pan," she said. "He resides in the resort town of Florida on the Cote Grande of the equatorial continent of Solaria, where he is the domo of a Child of Fortune tribe of sorts."

"But that's marvelous!" I exclaimed. "But why then the long face? Why --"

Wendi held up her hand for silence, and at last she met my gaze directly, albeit with troubled eyes. "I must now make what I know all too well will be a futile gesture ... she said. "In my editorial capacity, I am ready to declare that your entry is suitable for the Matrix in its present form, and that a trip to Florida would be worse than superfluous now."

"What? But you were the one who insisted --"

"Woman to woman, friend to friend, I must attempt to advise you to accept this boon at face value, and quit Alpa as soon as we arrive in orbit, on the first Void Ship to anywhere else," Wendi said without any real conviction, or so it seemed to me.

"What are you talking about, Wendi?" I demanded. "Such crypticism has hardly been your style!"

"In both my editorial capacity and as the friend of your heart, I must tell you that what you would find in Florida would be anything but an esthetically satisfying denouement for your wanderjahr's tale."

"Merde, Wendi, spit this unwholesome morsel out no matter how vile it may be," I told her angrily. "Do you imagine that either the teller of tales or the natural woman could allow you to prevent her from seeking the true ending to her wanderjahr's tale? Was it not you who made me swear our tribal oath that our first allegiance must be to the tale?"

"Vraiment," Wendi said with a little shrug, "but I can find no way to construe what you wish now to learn as anything but a violation of the spirit thereof."

"Cease this mystification!" I fairly shouted. "Do you expect me to contain my curiosity on a matter so dear to both my spirit and my art on the grounds that ignorance would be relative bliss?"

Wendi's demeanor altered entirely. "I said that a futile gesture was required, liebchen," she said in quite a harder tone of voice, "for what a beast you would have thought me if I had not at least made it, after you hear what you must hear now. So think me not a beast also when I say that, colleague to colleague, I would have thought the less of you if I had succeeded."

"Wendi --"

" -- Pater Pan has become a Charge Addict, that is the long and short of it, my pauvre petite, he follows the path of the Up and Out."

I must have shouted wordlessly, but all I remember of that moment is slumping there on the bed in a sudden daze as if my psyche had been rung by a mallet.

Images out of memory, rather than words, poured in a foaming tide through my brain. Pater Pan's gaily smiling face haloed by his golden mane of sunshine. The brilliant orb of the rising sun above the Bloomenveldt. The sight of the ocean on my triumphant return to the worlds of men. Guy Vlad Boca smiling at me lustfully across our rijsttafel in the Crystal Palace as we happily played at guile and assignation. Guy's slack and vacant visage beneath the band of the Charge console in the Hotel Pallas. Guy beaming at me beatifically on his lotus in perfect Bloomenkind bliss. But of the visage of that against which all my white-hot anger and darkest despair might seek its proper vengeance, as to whatever adversary now sought to claim the spirit of Pater Pan as in the Perfumed Garden it had finally claimed Guy, here there was only the featureless face of the Void.

"Sunshine! Sunshine!" Wendi was shaking me by the shoulders. "Are you all right?"

I blinked. I shuddered. Something grew coldly determined inside of me. At length I made to answer this most foolish of questions. "I have my senses about me if that is what you mean," I found myself saying. "Of course we both realize that I must go to Florida the moment this ship reaches Alpa."

Emotions recomplicated in the backwash of the shock into a complexity I could scarcely comprehend. Once had I rescued Guy from the Charge's vile embrace by force of will and arms, and yet all my efforts failed to rescue him from his perfect flower, and I was forced to abandon the spirit of a true friend and lover in order to save my own. Now he whose spirit had warped space and time to be at my side in the Dreamtime in my hour of need on the Bloomenveldt stood in the same peril from which I had once rescued Guy. Surely the survival of my own spirit was hardly in question this time! Surely I could not once more abandon a friend and lover to pitiless fate, to whatever demon of his own spirit had impelled him to this seppuku of the soul!

All this came out through my lips in that statement of cold unshakable determination, and all of it Wendi seemed to apprehend therein. "Of course you must, my poor liebchen," she said with sympathetic softness. "Were I you, I would shame myself if I did less than the same ..."

She hugged me for a moment and then released me. "I would accompany you to Florida if you wish," she said, "but this offer is only another futile gesture in the interests of friendship, ne."

"Indeed, Wendi," I told her softly. "But understand that I refuse it in the same tender spirit with which it was extended."

"Well spoken, friend and colleague," she said. "I will tarry in Lorienne, which passes for Alpa's main metropole, and await your arrival, for now my previous offer in my editorial capacity is canceled, and we must end the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt with whatever happens in Florida."

"I can promise you nothing, Wendi," I told her in all honesty, "not even that we will ever see each other again."

"Hola, but I can promise you two things in compensation, liebchen," Wendi Sha Rumi told me. "First, that the tale will end as they all do and another begin, though there is no way your heart can believe it now, and second that if you can find a way to make this ending of your tale sing sweetly to the spirit, I will freely acknowledge you as a more perfect master of our mutual art than I."

***

I passed the hours between my awakening to this bitter news and the arrival of the Arrow of Time at Alpa learning all I could about the Charge, for I was no longer the naive young girl who had ventured out upon the perils of the Bloomenveldt foolishly and blissfully unprepared by study of the dangers of the psychic terrain. But what I learned in the perusal of this lore, alas, did little but daunt my spirit.

The Charge, as I had already known, amplified the electro-hologram of human consciousness without distorting the topology thereof, so that what Charge Addicts claimed to experience was an enhancement of subjective consciousness without relative distortion of the pre-existing personality.

But since each increment of Charge achieves an increment of amplification at the expense of the stability of the overall pattern, the "personality" of the Charge Addict grows less and less defined, much as the resolution of a visual holo image, while not distorted by the destruction of areas of the recording medium, becomes vaguer and vaguer, until the terminal phase is reached in the Up and Out.

While all the monographs I perused remained in accord up to this point, like the personality of the Charge Addict itself, that which was said to be known about the nature of what emerges in the Up and Out grew vaguer, more fragmented, and more nebulous the further the mages sought to delve into this arcane realm.

Some called it a series of "pseudopersonalities" generated by the random firing of neurons in cerebral memory banks from which the individuality of the previous occupant had been erased. Others contended that species genetic coding kicked up into the vacated electrohologramic level, and that it was the archetypes supposedly stored as the collective unconscious in our gene pool which manifested themselves.

As for what spoke toward the very end, upon this subject, only the devotees of the Charge themselves would speculate, and as one might expect, they were uniformly of the opinion that the Atman itself merged with their spirits in the actual moment of the Up and Out.

Small wonder then that there were those who still sought Delphic pronouncements from the lips of such oracles, for alors, were not all the religions of primitive man but the willed belief that by following their precepts, practices, and esoteric rituals, such a living nirvana might be achieved this side of death? Vraiment, have not such psychonauts of thanatopsis always been our shamans?

And are such shamans, or at any rate pretenders to their throne, really absent in our sophisticated and enlightened Second Starfaring Age? Was not Cort, my psychonaut lover in Nouvelle Orlean, such a one? And Raul? And Imre? And the dying babas of the Bloomenveldt? And most of all, Guy Vlad Boca, who had found the perfect amusement of his short lifelong quest in the Perfumed Garden of his perfect flower.

But Pater Pan? No amount of exhaustive research could cause me to even imagine how the King of the Gypsies and the Prince of the Jokers could fall victim to the thanatotic seduction of the Charge. Not the Pied Piper of Pan, for whom the goal had always been a journey with no final destination, not he who had sworn to see all the worlds of men and the whole of our species tale or nobly expire in the futile attempt. How could such a man have chosen to end his tale in vicious farce, as a Charge Addict expiring in a small city on a planet of no particular renown?

I knew not. I understood it not. Yet soon enough I would confront the inescapable reality thereof. Nor would all the powers of my spirit or the desires of my heart in the end prevail against it.

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