CHILD OF FORTUNE

Chapter 29

Florida was a small city built between a wide crescent of beach along a tropical bay and a low range of wooded maritime alps, mere hills if truth be told, which neatly defined its inland boundaries, though as one would expect, many of the most extravagant manses were sited along the haute corniche which ran just below the crestline on the seaside slope. The bay was blue, the sands quite a striking rose, and the foliage of the hillsides tended to pastel tones of reddish-green. The sky was a brilliant azure, and the waters of the bay were sprinkled with a score or more small sandy islands upon which grew no more than sparse clumps of some purplish salt grass.

Amusement piers and covered pavilions jutted out into the bay here and there and the waters themselves sported all manner of pleasure craft, though sails seemed to be favored, and blue, rose, and white were the dominant tints thereof.

Indeed to style Florida a small city might be going too far, for in truth it was more of a large town decorating the bay with a fringe of low and deliberately unobtrusive buildings whose precincts could be covered from end to end on a balmy afternoon's stroll. By unstated agreement, mayhap by legislative fiat, no structure rose more than four stories, and most were done up in white, rose. or blue, so as to harmonize with the color scheme of the landscape. As for fabriks, these were nowhere in evidence, and those edifices given over to commerce were confined to small inns, restaurants, boutiques, tavernas, and the like. Some small open floatcabs were available, but for the most part the populace seemed to favor traveling afoot.

In short, upon debarking at seaside from the hover which had borne me from Lorienne, I found myself in a scene of bucolic tranquility and benign isolation from the hurly-burly of the centers of the civilized worlds, a venue for vacationers and sportsvolk or for those who preferred a vie of mellow retreat from urban complexities. Strange to say, the ambiance thereof put me in mind of Nouvelle Orlean somehow, after so many weeks of treetop wilderness on the one hand, and the flagrantly ersatz environments of Edoku, Ciudad Pallas, and Void Ships on the other, though certainement Florida was Nouvelle Orlean writ quite small and modest.

As for locating the venue where Pater Pan was most likely to be found. this was simplicity itself, for even from the beach I could readily enough spy out a sprinkling of varicolored tents set on a shelf of land about three quarters of the way up the slope of an overlooking hillside.

Eschewing floatcabs, I forthwith set out inland afoot through the streets of the town toward the hillside in question. These were paved, or rather strewn, with a particolored gravel made up of tiny marine shells and the fragments of larger ones which crunched pleasantly enough underfoot as one trod upon them.

The denizens of the town seemed divided up into two distinct species: somewhat pallid urbanites obviously on holiday, and well-bronzed natives who were clearly in the minority. Breechclouts, shorts, halters, und so weiter were the favored attire, nor were nude bodies lacking, though naturellement the esthetic effect of all this bare flesh was a good deal more pleasing when it came to the handsome natives than when it came to the turistas. Peculiarly enough, though there was a plethora of youth in evidence, and though such a resort community would seem to be ideal for such enterprises, there seemed to be no organized troupes of buskers, hawkers, ruespielers, und so weiter on these promising streets.

Nevertheless, the sun shone brightly, the town presented a pleasing aspect, the balmy air was redolent with vegetative sweetness and salty sea-tang. and my spirits soared against all knowledgeable trepidations, for it was difficult indeed to credit such a setting as the venue for such dark and urban horrors as Charge Addiction.

Nor was my mood anything but lightened when, puffing a bit and lightly filmed with sweat, I reached the shelf upon which the caravanserei was situated. While this encampment had nothing of the size and grandeur of that which the Gypsy Jokers had established in Great Edoku, the sight of it filled my heart with a rosy nostalgic glow for the Golden Summer I had enjoyed as a newborn Child of Fortune therein. And though this encampment boasted no more than a score or two tents of various sizes, shapes, and colors, the view therefrom put what I had known in Edoku to shame. From the outskirts of the caravanserei, I looked out over the shaggy shoulders of the hillside, down across the tiny houses of the town and the shining rose-colored beach to a shining azure sea upon which minuscule sails of blue and white and rose drifted in the breezes like a swarm of brightly-colored sea-midges.

Only when I entered the encampment itself did the spell of peaceful and perfect beauty begin to unravel.

For one thing, there was a preponderance of scarcely-pubescent Alpans in evidence, obviously hardly of an age to be Children of Fortune of other worlds embarked upon their wanderjahrs, and while some of these wore the Cloth of Many Colors, their scarves and sashes were patched together out of swatches of new cloth rather than being the fairly-won emblems of a wandering vie.

Moreover, and more disturbing still, there was almost nothing in the way of crafts or finger food or street theater troupes or musicians or even tantric performers to be seen, as if, as I soon found out to be true, this encampment was living primarily on the largesse of not-too-distant parents. The few true Children of Fortune that I spied seemed a rather unwholesome lot, too long in the tooth for the vie, mayhap predators gathered to prey upon the energies, not to say the parental subsidies, of the young Alpans.

As for the activities which were taking place, these were hardly calculated to cast credit on the mythos. Many young folk were lying about in an obvious state of red-eyed stupefaction. Others could be seen gulping down great drafts of wine or imbibing various toxicants, and what commerce I noted was mainly in these commodities. Here and there couples, and groups were engaged in rather feckless tantric exercises of little or no artistry and not much more energy. Scraps of food were scattered everywhere as well as empty flagons attended by small yellow insects, and the general aroma, if not quite overpowering, reeked more of decaying organic matter and unwashed bodies than of perfumed incenses and cuisinary savors.

I loathed the ambiance I experienced as I wandered the camp under the indifferent gazes of its inhabitants, which is to say I dreaded what I would discover at its center, for I knew only too well who and what that would be. Nor was I long in seeking out the locus thereof, for near the center of the encampment was the largest tent of all, a closed pavilion sewn together out of Cloth of Many Colors.

I was accosted at the flap which concealed the interior of the tent by a rather scruffy and bleary- eyed fellow perhaps five years my senior who barred my way and thrust a chip transcriber under my nose. "Four credit units for an audience with the Oracle," he told me.

"What? Quelle chose? What is this outrage?"

"A small price to pay for the true voice of the Up and Out," he said with lofty diffidence. "Try to obtain the same elsewhere on Alpa at more modest cost if you wish, and see how far it will get you."

"Merde!" I muttered angrily, but I handed over my chip rather than haggle over such a pittance with this churl for another moment. After the required credit was transferred, he held open the tent flap and admitted me to the unwholesome inner sanctum.

The interior of the tent was strewn with dusty and threadbare cushions. Upon these some dozen acolytes sat, reclined, or indeed dozed, in varying degrees of stupefaction, swilling wines and beers, sniffing at toxicants, and focusing various states of befuddled attention upon the figure propped up in a large nest of pillows in the center of the tent like some pathetic pasha.

Vraiment, it was Pater Pan.

But alas, not the Pater Pan I had known.

His Traje de Luces hung in loose folds about his gaunt frame. His golden hair and beard were unkempt and scraggly and streaked with gray. His skin was seamed and sallow, and there were hollows in his cheeks and dark baggy wrinkles under his eyes. His eyes ...

His wonderful blue eyes seemed larger and brighter than before, set off now in deep shadowed sockets, yet vague, and fragile somehow, like balls of shattered blue marble. About his brow was the metallic band of the Charge, wired to a console all but hidden within his throne of pillows.

A young girl stood before him intently as if receiving wisdom. And Pater Pan was indeed speaking, albeit with eyes that seemed focused on some middle distance, and in a hollow declamatory tone that seemed addressed to no one or everyone in particular.

"Tarry not in the mean streets of Hamelin town, but follow me into the Magic Mountain ..."

"Does that mean that I should now commence my wanderjahr?"

"Fear not the Gypsy King, gajo, for we must all one day be stolen from our parents' houses, and run away to join the circus ..."

"But now you say I must await a sign?"

"As a ronin, I know no master but honor ..."

"But --"

"Enough!" said an older girl squatting at the feet of Pater Pan. "You have already had fair value for your four credits!"

Eagerly, a boy arose from the front ranks and elbowed her aside, "How am I to gain the affection of Krista, Pater Pan?" he demanded.

"Be not a swinish wage slave of the Pentagon, but embark in the Gold Mountain on the long slow centuries between the stars, and follow the Arkie Spark within you ..."

I stood there in the back of the tent for many minutes, appalled, disgusted, transfixed, and despairing, as one by one paying customers were ushered in and out of the presence to hector Pater Pan with their picayune questions and receive in turn this Delphic babble.

I had sufficiently steeped myself in the scientific lore to know that what I beheld was a man who had long since gone beyond the point of no return on the path to the Up and Out.

"The King of the Gypsies is no more, long live the Prince of the Jokers, though of course they are very small mountains ..."

For while the cadences and music of this flow of words had a certain hypnagogic fascination that drew the mind's ear down into its murky depths, in truth, I knew, these were isolated and fragmented memory-quanta being released in the absence of a sovereign pattern. No Charge Addict who had progressed to this stage had ever returned as a sapient spirit to the worlds of men, for the integrated personality by now was not merely suppressed but erased forever, or so the mages declared, leaving only disconnected cerebral data banks firing off their memories at random.

"Before the singer, I was the song, which we followed along the Yellow Brick Road from the ancestral trees to trip the life fantastic out among the stars ..."

The Pater Pan whom I had known and loved was gone forever, or so science insisted, and were I to now rip the band from his head against all the efforts of these wretched acolytes to the contrary, all that I would succeed in rescuing would be a halfling creature such as I now beheld who would linger a few years thusly in the care of the Healers of some mental retreat.

I was too late. That faceless force which had claimed Guy Vlad Boca had somehow indeed contrived to claim even the noble Pater Pan, as if to avenge itself upon me for my singular triumph over it as the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt in the most ghastly manner at its disposal.

Yet if I could truly do nothing, neither could I let it be, for as Wendi would have had it, and as I now understood in a state of rage that transcended reason, now was the time for a futile gesture.

I strode boldly and forcefully to the front of the tent, superseding those waiting their turn at their oracle before me without demur, for the energy of my passage brooked none such in this company,

"Pater! It's Sunshine!" I cried.

"In the Summer of Love in the city by the bay, we all wore flowers in our hair ...."

His preternaturally bright yet entirely empty eyes seemed to stare right through me, and his babble, for all I could tell, was for the benefit of these callow creatures who hung on every word of it as much as for myself.

"Merde!" I shouted, fairly trembling with fury. "You are Pater Pan, and I am Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, and once we were friends and lovers in Great Edoku! Do you remember nothing of our time together?"

"The caravans of the Gypsies and the Tinkers singing the only tale there is to tell in the black forest of the night ..."

"Merde! Caga! Speak to me, Pater, as a natural man, and not as the voice from a cerebral whirlwind!"

"Cease addressing the master thusly!"

"You've had your four units' worth!"

"Give someone else their turn!"

I whirled on the clamor that had arisen behind me, feeling almost as much true personal puissance in this company as that which I thespically injected into my voice, "Silence, churls!" I commanded, "I am Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt, and I would discourse with my old comrade and lover with no further unseemly interruption from the likes of you!"

While the chance that any of those present had the slightest notion of who or what the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt might be was vanishingly slim, so spiritless were these sorry excuses for Children of Fortune that my words, my demeanor, and the force behind them were quite sufficient to cow them. Far from mitigating my ire, the respectful attitudes of obeisance which they then all assumed, even down to the oracle's timekeeper, only served to arouse my utter contempt, for no true Child of Fortune of my acquaintance would have bowed so meekly to the mere assertion of authority.

"Remember, Pater, please remember," I cajoled Pater Pan, imploringly now, seeking to feel with my words for the smallest purchase with which to pry open this shell and reach the natural man within. "Remember when you were the King of the Gypsies and the Prince of the Jokers? Remember? Do you not remember a time in a garden atop a waterfall? Do you not remember how I seized hold of your lingam in a shower stall? Do you not remember the Sunshine that you named? Do you not remember the night you told me what was in your heart of hearts?"

Pater Pan's face at last slowly turned in my direction like a leaf following the sun, but still his gaze seemed to stare right through me. "Remember ...?" he said. "Remember ...? Remember ...?"

"Yes, Pater, remember! Remember Sunshine, oh please, bitte, kudasai, liebchen, remember me!"

"Remember Sunshine ... I remember Sunshine beneath the towering red trees of the great forest ... I remember a Sunshine in my arms as we made love on the wing in the long slow centuries between the stars ... I remember a Sunshine on Novi Mir ... I remember a Sunshine on Edoku ... I remember a Sunshine on Elysium ... Remember the Sunshine of my life along the Yellow Brick Road ..."

This at last was far more than I could countenance! If the spell that I must counter was that of the electronic mastery of the Charge over the higher centers of his brain, if the power of the Word now failed me, then I must resort to the employment of electronic powers of my own. I must use the ring whose puissance I had not sought to employ for pleasure or gain since it had worse than failed me in the Perfumed Garden. I must resume my erotic career at once, any lack of piquant or quotidian desire to the contrary, for I could see nothing for it but to seize him by that kundalinic root which customarily overrides all cogitative imperatives when gripped by feminine force.

To wit, I thumbed on my ring of Touch, and to the oohs and gasps of the voyeurs in the tent, grabbed hold through the fabric of his trousers of his flaccid phallus. "If you remember nothing else, mon ami, mayhap you will remember this!"

Did his glassy eyes widen? Did some human light return thereto? Certainement, though with unseemly slowness, I felt the sap of manhood rise within my grasp. Strange indeed it was to feel the serpent stirring in a lingam once more after my long celibacy in a venue and a moment such as this! Stranger still, and somehow unwholesome, to feel the kundalinic knots uncoil within my own loins in such a pass, to find my natural woman once more via this most unnatural of tantric acts.

For long moments I stood there holding on for dear life to the handle of his phallus. For long moments did I gaze unwaveringly into his eyes, and for long moments did I imagine his true spirit looking back at me. Was it an extravagant fancy, or did I truly sense the hum and crackle of electronic combat between the dark power of the Charge and the kundalinic force at my command?

Be that as it may, at length his lips began to move again, and when they did, another spirit spoke, or so to me it seemed.

"The Sunshine of the magic touch ... She who out-joked the Joker ... On Edoku somewhere under the rainbow ..."

His voice grew firmer, as did his lingam in my hand, though the former still seemed to speak from very far away, and the latter only pulsed motionlessly in my grasp. "I remember a pool in a garden ... I remember a hand beneath a shower stall ... I remember a sister of the same spirit ..."

"Yes, Pater, yes!" I cried, squeezing the quick of him.

"I remember Great Edoku and I remember the ruins of We Who Have Gone Before and Babylon and Tyre I remember the summer of love and the night of the generals and I remember clambering from the trees to gaze in newborn wonder upon the sapient sunrise above the plain ...."

Merde, he was drifting away again, or mayhap he had never truly been there! Had it been only a chance concatenation of neurons firing in a burning brain which had seemed to speak for a moment as the natural man? Be that as it may, it was that natural man I had come here to hear; not the oracle of these worshipful urchins, but he who had chosen for reasons unknown to give his spirits over to the mercies, tender or otherwise, of the Charge, nor would I be content until I had summoned that Pater Pan forth and demanded why.

"No more of this Delphic babble!" I cried, yanking at his phallus as if I might extract by brute force alone that natural man. "Speak from the heart! How could you of all men have surrendered your spirit to the vileness of the Charge? Speak in the name of the spirit we once shared!"

Did I imagine now that a pale ghost of the old spark had returned to his eyes? Was that a rueful smile upon his lips?

"Moussa ..." he said. "My teller of tales has come to say good-bye ..."

"Why must you say good-bye, Pater? Why must this horrid thing be?"

"Je ne sais pas, muchacha," Pater Pan said, and now I was certain it was in some sense he. "All our Yellow Brick Roads must have an ending, though no one has ever told us why ..."

"Is this the man who once swore to experience all the far-flung worlds of men and bear witness to our species' tale entire?" I demanded behind tear-filled eyes.

"C'est moi, muchacha, he who rode the Arkie Spark through the long slow centuries in dreamless sleep, and who now has lost his race against time, which in the end not even I could win."

With a dreadful new understanding, I regarded his sunken frame, his fraying hair well-streaked with gray, his seamed and leathery skin. Thus had the dying babas of the Bloomenveldt appeared as they sat before their final flowers. The body's time had caught up to the spirit of the eternal Gypsy Joker at last, the hand of death lay on his shoulder.

"I remember all that I've ever been, muchacha, and even more that I haven't, and I remember all I said good-bye to before you summoned me forth," Pater Pan said, in a pained and mournful voice that had me fighting back sobs. "Only now I have to remember what we all spend our lives seeking to forget."

"Oh Pater, why?" I said tearfully. "If all our lives must end, must the noble tale of yours end like this?"

"The Inuit walks tranquilly out upon the ice to sit for one last eternal night under the frozen time of the stars. In Han of old at the end of our days we gave ourselves over to the poppy's lotus breath when the time came to let go our place upon the wheel. The Arkie freezes his Spark in the long slow centuries between the stars. The sage quaffs his psychotropic hemlock. The Prince of the Jokers travels, snap! snap! snap! like the Rapide into the Up and Out."

In my mind's eye, I saw the babas of the Bloomenveldt at peace with themselves beneath their final flowers, a peace quite literally beyond the understanding of one whose spirit and body could look forward to centuries of youth rather than weeks of terminal decay. Yet in my heart, I saw Guy Vlad Boca, a spirit who had chosen this selfsame mode of passage from sapient human consciousness in the full flower of adventurous youth.

"Weep not for me, girl," Pater Pan said. "The me you knew is already gone, and you are speaking with a Joker dybbuk he left behind to say good-bye. But I'm real enough to feel sad to leave the worlds all over again, and if you are still a sister of my spirit, you will let me go."

"I can truly do no other?" I asked from the depths of my spirit. For in that moment I was once more addressing myself to Guy as well as I turned my back on him in the depths of the Bloomenveldt and sought the lonely path of my own salvation. I had told myself then that I could do no other, nor in all the time between had I ever reconstructed a more fruitful course of action, but I had never really believed I had acted honorably in my heart of hearts until this very moment.

"You can only keep a mortal spirit in mortal torment," Pater Pan said, "after he who was at home has long since fled into unknown realms. I was happy when I went, for rather than expire in regretful agony, I chose to take one last journey down the Yellow Brick Road and see whatever there is to see in the final mystery of the Up and Out."

"May that road rise up to meet you, mi amor," I said, bursting into tears as I released my hold on the handle of the kundalinic machineries which had summoned forth this echo of the natural man.

Long had I chided myself for failing to risk the all of my own sapient spirit in a berserker effort to rescue Guy from his ultimate and terminal amusement. There in the depths of the Bloomenveldt I had turned my back and let the spirit of a friend and lover go, informed by no greater wisdom than the moral calculus of survival. Therefore had I secretly owned myself a coward in my heart of hearts.

Now, in this Tent of Many Colors, did the bitterest lesson of all yet grant me self-forgiveness, for now I knew to my dismay that greater love and courage of the spirit could sometimes be required to stand aside with an aching and uncomprehending heart and let be what must be.

Teary-eyed, shaking, not knowing what I felt, or even what I should properly feel, I turned to quit this place for the nearest venue of solitude, to find myself confronted with some dozen pair of mooningly worshipful eyes.

They were all staring at me as once they had stared at Pater Pan, as if I had anointed myself pythoness of their noxious cult, and established myself as the consort of their master. Thus had I ironically achieved what once I had so avidly sought, to preside over a Child of Fortune carnival at the Gypsy King's side! All the more did this perception enhance the distaste which I felt at being the focus of the miasma of fawning subservience which fairly exuded from these lost Children of Fortune like a cloying mist of vaporous treacle. Never had even Rollo, Dome, Goldenrod, and my Moussa regarded their Pied Piper thusly in the depths of the Bloomenveldt.

"What do you imagine you are staring at like that?" I demanded angrily.

"The Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt ..."

"Conjurer of mighty spirits ..."

"Pater Pan's true lady ..."

"Bah!" I snarled. "You call yourselves Children of Fortune? Conjure only with that spirit which moves through your own hearts, and give over your lust for all other gurus and deities, feckless urchins!"

So saying, I brushed aside, at least for the moment, their vapid attentions, and stormed like a whirlwind out of the thanatotic shadows of the tent into the bright clean glare of day.

***

But naturellement, I could not leave the encampment with the final chapter of Pater Pan's tale yet untold, nor for that matter could I snatch many moments of solitude from the entirely unwelcome solicitations of its inhabitants with which I was all-but-constantly surrounded from the moment I left the tent.

No sooner had I emerged into daylight than I found myself the center of a ragged little mob of acolytes who thrust food and wine and toxicants upon me and who trailed after me like pathetic puppies wherever I went. The former I waved away with impatient gestures, but as for my train of would-be followers, even shouts and imprecations would only drive them off a certain distance, a score meters or so, from which vantage they kept me under constant observation, tracking my movements en masse from a respectful distance, even when I was constrained to visit the encampment's foul and reeking latrine.

All that first afternoon this went on, while I wandered aimlessly about the camp, seeing and hearing nothing, only seeking to marshal my psychic resources to see this tale through to its final end. Vraiment, in pragmatic terms, there was nothing to prevent me from turning on my heel, fleeing from this unwholesome and sorrowful venue, leaving Alpa, and taking up my new life as a student of the tale-teller's art with never a backward glance. The natural man who had been, my Pater Pan had said his good-bye and vanished into that final Void from which there is no rescue, and there was nothing I could accomplish by remaining here save bear witness to the final passage of what remained in that Tent of Many Colors into the Up and Out.

But of course in the end this proved quite sufficient to require the teller of tales to endure this story to the bitter end, for I knew all too well that if I abandoned it now my spirit would never know a moment's peace. For while the Child of Fortune that I had been had achieved the sad wisdom to let the spirit of the lover of her Golden Summer go to follow the unknown final path he had chosen, the woman I sought to become, she who had sworn the lodge-oath of the tale-teller, must be true to the first allegiance of the craft, and could not truly begin another tale until this one was completed in a manner that could satisfy the heart.

For was this not my wanderjahr's name tale, and if I ended it now with no spiritually satisfying conclusion, who was I to become, what fitting freenom could I choose, in homage to whom or what could I draw an esthetic moral therefrom? No, if I was to become anyone, it must be the teller who now approaches the end of this tale, and who therefore in that very moment of inevitable decision became the woman who transcribes these words now.

And so, by the time Alpa's sun had begun its slide down the sky, I had resolved to remain in this encampment for as long as the corpus of Pater Pan lived, and if the mages spoke true, if the genes themselves, or the collective unconscious of the species, or vraiment the Atman itself, as the Charge Addicts had it, found voice in the terminus of that brain's amplified passage, then this echo, or urgeist, or mere random discharge pattern, would I hector in search of that peace of the spirit which no mere human wisdom could grant me now.

Having so resolved, I allowed one of the boldest of the Children of Fortune to approach me, a handsome golden-haired and bronze-skinned boy at least two years younger than I, who eyed me with the collective worshipfulness to be sure, but whose eyes were enlivened by a certain speculation that led me to believe that the same had not entirely overridden the more wholesome and individualistic regard of his nascent natural man.

"Since I would seem to have been nominated as pontifex entirely against my will," I told him, "I may as well avail myself of the minimal prerogatives thereof. To wit, a tent where I may enjoy at least enough privacy to sleep without the presence of an audience, and a meal to consume therein."

"Pas problem, o Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt," the boy said. "My tent and my bed are yours."

"Indeed?" I said dryly, both outraged and charmed by his frank and callow boldness.

He seemed to writhe in embarrassment, though there seemed to be something thespically feigned about it. "I will of course seek other temporary lodgings," he said quickly. "If that is what you prefer. I am called Kim, you may rely on me, noble maestra, I will be happy to cater to your every need." Now his feigned embarrassment seemed to be replaced by the genuine article, through which he nevertheless spoke with a certain charmingly boyish manliness. "Even those needs which you may not feel now."

Indifferent to the thrall in which I seemed to hold this boy save for the practical means to which I could put it, but preferring the relative spunk of his company to the cloying worshipfulness of his unwholesome fellows, I allowed Kim to enter my service, which is to say I was grateful to let him lend me his plain little tent, see to my food and drink, and contrive to keep the others well away from his prize.

I ate a wretched meal of heavily fried fruits de mer and vegetables washed down with a large quantity of raw green wine, and, rendered empty of thought by the force of the day's events, drowsy by the wine, and torpid by the leaden and greasy repast, I soon enough lapsed into merciful unconsciousness on Kim's pneumatic pallet.

***

The sun was high in the sky when I awoke the next morning, but Kim appeared in the tent as soon as I had risen with a breakfast of fresh fruits and well-sogged grains in milk which gave evidence that he must have been waiting patiently outside with it for hours.

He sat there watching my movements as I ate in silence, and did not speak until I had gotten it all down, which, despite my lack of real appetite, I felt morally constrained to do.

"Pater Pan has fallen silent, and there is much despair among us," he said. "But I have told them, o mi maestra, that surely the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt who is his consort and sister of his soul will summon his spirit forth to speak."

"You have no right to make such promises for others!" I told him crossly.

"I did wrong?" he exclaimed with guileful innocence. "I spoke not truth? Your plan is to linger here and do nothing? You remain here for some reason other than to discourse with the spirit of your great lover?" He cocked an ironic eyebrow at me. "Can it be that you tarry here only because you have been smitten by the charms of some lesser being?"

"Merde!" I snarled, if only to suppress a laughter that would have been entirely unseemly to these dreadful circumstances. "Very well then, Kim," I told him, "I will attempt to fulfill your public prophecy, if only because there is nothing else for it to escape from your outrageous amorous intentions." Though in truth I had to own to myself that he had seen my inevitable intention quite clearly and could hardly be chided too severely for seeking to enhance his repute among his fellows by grandly predicting the same.

***

A contretemps was taking place in the Tent of Many Colors when I arrived. A good two dozen persons were crowded together within its fabric walls, babbling and contending, and, directly in front of the throne of pillows upon which Pater Pan sat like a tranquil bodhi, three young men and an even younger girl were demanding refunds from the keeper of the oracle's time.

"Four credit units for silence!"

"Return my funds forthwith!"

"Fraud!"

"Nom de merde!"

The odor of too many less than-fastidiously-laved bodies, the raucous din, the image of petty moneychangers in a temple which rose unbidden to my mind, all served to overcome my indifference to the tribal matters of these miscreants with righteous ire.

"Return the funds you have appropriated from these rubes at once," I forthrightly commanded as I strode to the front of the tent. "True Children of Fortune do not pick each other's purses, nor is it seemly to gain profit at all from the passage of a noble spirit from the mortal realm. There will be no more trafficking in such ghoulish enterprises while I remain in this camp!"

There was stunned silence at this. She who had been measuring Pater Pan's time in credit units and her confederate with the chip transcriber at the door were the first who dared raise their voices in protest.

"So says who?"

"What right have you to restrict our freedom of enterprise?"

"My name is Sunshine," I told them and the generality. "I style myself thusly as a Child of Fortune among my fellows. I command no one but myself. And myself I will command to leave this encampment rather than submit my eyes to such a sight again."

I gazed about the tent, and now I was the ruespieler, working the crowd with my eyes and voice. "But if you wish to style me the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt, if you persist in regarding my words as those of your perfect master, that is your affair, urchins, not mine. So hear me as whom you will, I tell you that, neither Sunshine the Child of Fortune, nor whatever arcane personage's mantle you choose to drape around my indifferent shoulders, will remain among you if this vile practice does not cease."

"And at any rate as long as the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt does not by her arcanely puissant powers call forth the voice of the oracle, we can hardly expect to continue a profitable commerce in the wisdom of same," Kim piped up brightly.

"Thus speaks the voice of astute practicality," I said dryly.

"And now that we have agreed to your condition, mi maestra, you will call forth the spirit of the great Pater Pan for us, ne?" Kim announced slyly.

"Thus speaks the voice of a true Gypsy Joker," I muttered under my breath, for while I could not but admire his guileful way with words, I was not about to encourage more of it with praise.

And so I seated myself on a cushion before the pillow throne for the long haul, attempted to erase the perceptions of my unwholesome surroundings from the forefront of my sensorium, gazed into the empty blue eyes of the frail corpus thereon, and attempted to conjure with the ectoplasmic spirits of the Up and Out.

As to the true psychesomic nature of what I sought to summon forth from this burning electronically amplified brain, je ne sais pas even now, nor have any of the manifold theories proposed by mages of many persuasions ever satisfied me entirely.

Certainement, there is abundant evidence that the genes of nonsapient animals store more than structural templates, for we observe the expression of their data in behaviors as complicated as those of a beehive and in natural sprachs as complex as the species songs of birds. Who is therefore to say what genetic messages may be encoded in the gene pool of our species, to be released, mayhap, only when the higher cerebral centers of the individual consciousness surrender up their sapient sovereignty?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Remember me," it said quite plain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Remember Moussa ... Remember Sunshine ... Remember that you came to tell the tale ..."

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Sunshine ... Sing your own song, ruespieler, tell your own tale ..."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Me? Yo?"

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

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

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

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

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.

Chapter 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 thronem 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 inscribed 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.

Slowly, reluctantly, I rounded on those gathered behind me, knowing all too well what I would now confront.

All those who had been in the encampment to witness Pater Pan's final passage now stood there before me between the caravanserei and the edge of the cliff. In all their eyes, I saw what they must have seen in my own, and this warmed my heart.

For were these newborn Children of Fortune not the true progeny of the union of our spirits? If it had been the Pied Piper of Pan who had brought them together, had it not been the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt who had set them dancing down the Yellow Brick Road? Were these true Children of Fortune's spirit not the posterity I had given my lover and were they not as well the sweet ending to my tale that he had left for me?

But in those eyes I saw as well the worshipful obeisance against which I had railed and guarded myself since first I had found it fawningly directed toward my person in that stiflingly thanatotic tent, and this, to say the least, pleased me not, for it would seem that the Gypsy Joker's last laugh was on me.

For had he not in their presence passed the torch of his spirit into my reluctant hands? And had I not wrapped his mantle around me in ire, in order to rouse those lost Children of Fortune from their thanatotic mooning so that I would never again see in their eyes that feckless longing for a perfect master which I saw there now?

Vraiment, I had told them often enough that Children of Fortune have no chairmen of the board or kings! Yet had I not been constrained by karmic justice to lead them back to the Yellow Brick Road even as the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt had been constrained to spiel her unsought charges back to the worlds of men?

Indeed, here I stood like Antony over fallen Caesar, like Liberty holding aloft her torch, and there my huddled masses stood hanging on my first words, which grew ever more pregnant with portent the longer I gazed upon them before I spoke.

Yet how could I chide them for regarding me thusly now? For these were not the feckless urchins I had first found but Gypsy Jokers of the true spirit whom I however reluctantly had led to that becoming, which is to say that I had indeed succeeded in carrying the torch of Pater Pan's spirit from that moment until this.

But now if I was to be true to that spirit, if that spirit was to live on in their hearts, I must find the words to pass that torch along, not to some papal successor, but into the hands of each of them, into the hands of the republic of the spirit, where at least according to this teller of the tale, it has naturellement always belonged.

One last time I sought communion with my Pied Piper, and one last time he contrived to speak to me in the Dreamtime from beyond the temporal veil, as if even the Prince of the Jokers could not lie easy until I had solved his ultimate koan.

For all at once Pater Pan was there before me at the end of my Golden Summer's Mardi Gras Parade, outlined by sunset glory against the bonsaied mountains of Edoku, and saying the necessary good-bye that broke all our hearts, While at the same time, in a strange duality of perspective, I had become that avatar, for it was I who stood before our tribe in that valedictory moment now.

Vraiment, my wanderjahr had come full circle round, for certainement this was indeed the end of my Golden Summer's Mardi Gras Parade.

Then it was that my eyes sought out Kim, or mayhap his eyes in that moment had the puissance to draw me to them. He stood near the front ranks, from which vantage, and having caught my eye, his face could speak to me plainly enough. And upon that visage I seemed to see what I sought, a kindred child of the same spirit, ready to carry forth its torch as his own Piper, though as yet he knew it not.

Vraiment, this was not the end of day, for the sun shone brightly in the clear blue sky, before me the gay tents of our caravanserei still flapped like proud banners above the Yellow Brick Road, and the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt was not the Gypsy Joker King, which is to say that it was I who told the tale, nor was it in my heart to call down the sunset on anyone's Mardi Gras parade.

"What would you have me say to you?" I asked them gently. "Before death, there are none but vapid words of wisdom, and before life, we have only the wisdom of our own hearts."

A low murmuring rumbled through the little throng. "What shall we do now?" someone called out.

"Why ask me?" I demanded without ire. "Who am I but one of you?"

"You're the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt!"

"You're Pater Pan's true love!"

"You're the Gypsy Joker Queen!"

At this last, I felt the words bubbling forth from my lips as they emerged from the void into my brain, and the song which has carried our species to the far-flung worlds of men from our ancestral trees seemed to be singing itself through me even as I spoke from my own heart.

"Children of Fortune have no chairmen of the board or queens!" I fairly shouted at them. "Have I not told you that often enough? Have I not freely imparted my meager knowledge of the lore and craft or our immortal tribe?  When it comes to the spirit thereof, this each of us must find in our own hearts. So the only words I can speak in homage to the spirit of Pater Pan are those which come from mine now, and those I have already spoken. True Children of Fortune have no chairmen of the board or kings. True Children of Fortune seek not after chairmen of the board or kings. Certainement, no true Child of Fortune would wish to be a chairman of the board or king!"

And I turned my back and slowly began to walk away.

For a long moment, I heard only silence, and then the faint far-off music of one of our musical troupes piping its way back to the carnival from the streets of the town far below. And then I heard subdued stirrings and murmurings, as the song of the Yellow Brick Road once more reached their ears. As the music played its way closer, up piped the unmistakable voice of Kim.

"Come, let us remove this sad reminder of a joyful spirit to a more seemly venue, ne, and then what is there for it but to carry on with our enterprises, for while Children of Fortune have no chairmen of the board or kings, when it comes to ruegelt, neither can we expect to be showered with corporate or royal largesse!"

At this, there was laughter, and the scurrying of feet soon thereafter, so that I had no need to look back out of fear that I had let the torch that Pater Pan had entrusted to my care fall through unready hands. Rather did I join his spirit in one last private smile between us, in the knowledge that under the constraints with which our universe confronts us, I had found the true ending to the only tale there is to tell, the one which allows we Gypsy Jokers to have the last laugh.

***

I did not stop walking until I had reached the pinnacle of the hill above the encampment, where I sat alone staring out to sea until twilight began to gather, and Alpa's sun came down in sheets of brilliant purple and umber light painted across the sky and sheening on the tropic ocean. One by one, the stars began to come out as, one by one, the lights of the town below began to enliven the gathering night.

Not far below me, the camp of the Children of Fortune greeted the evening with music and laughter and the sounds of gay young voices, and this was as it should be, for the King of the Gypsies and the Prince of the Jokers should be toasted with his own sacraments, and not lugubriously mourned.

I could not but smile at the music of the carnival as it wafted up toward me on the onshore breeze. Yet, as I sat there, I found myself staring up at the stars beckoning bravely and bright to me up there in the universal night, each a mighty sun, and scattered like a handful of seed among them, the far-flung worlds of men.

And I knew that the tale of the wanderjahr of Sunshine Shasta Leonardo had come to its end.

Once I was the little Mou:ssa, the wide-eyed waif who had wandered into the beginning of her story, once I was Sunshine the ruespieler seeking only her own Yellow Brick Road, once I had been the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt who had learned to care for the spirits of her unwanted charges, and at last had I not become the true teller thereof when I passed along the torch?

As I sat there in the gathering darkness reflecting thusly, Kim came puffing up the hillside to join me, and I found myself welcoming his company, welcoming what I was pleased to see in him of the Child of Fortune that I had been.

"You are looking at the stars, mi maestra?" he said, hunkering down beside me. "Soon you will be out among them, ne?"

I regarded him with some amazement. "I had not realized your varied talents included the reading  of minds!"

Kim beamed his pleasure at my approval, but shrugged off taking credit for this mental feat. "Why would you tarry long on Alpa?" he declared rhetorically. "You have no true lover to keep you here, and he who would gladly have served as same will himself soon enough be gone."

"You plan to leave Alpa, Kim?" I exclaimed in some surprise.

"Did you not leave the planet of your own birth to follow the path of the Child of Fortune on grander worlds? Vraiment, have you not taught me the ruespieler's craft, and have I not a certain skill when it comes to commercial enterprise? Florida is a pleasant enough little town for the enfants of Alpa to play at being Children of Fortune in, but once I have earned my passage therein, I will be off on my true wanderjahr out among the stars!"

"You seek my approval for this venture?" I said; for he smiled at me with hopeful expectation --

"Surely you will not deny me the same!" he declared. "Surely you will not now seek to claim me with a profession -- of undying carnal love?"

I burst out laughing and could not help but hug him to me, nor could I help but feel pleasure at the touch of his frankly delighted flesh, nor could I help but be charmed by the rising of his young manhood against me.

I pulled a distance away from him but kept my arms on his shoulders as I stared into his lustful eyes. "Now, it is you who are rejecting my advances?" I said, toying my lips with my tongue, and grinning at his newfound and entirely becoming shyness.

"Do I take your meaning right, mi maestra?" he asked in quite a smaller voice.

"Seeing as how we are both soon to depart from this planet, mayhap never to meet again, and seeing as how I see in you a brother spirit, you need only summon the courage to give over showering me with honorifics and address me lover to lover as Sunshine like a proper natural man, and you shall forthwith have your heart's desire in this romantic venue, out here above the ocean and beneath the stars," I told him, setting my hands on my hips.

"Sunshine, Sunshine, Sunshine!" he yipped like a happy puppy, and then like puppies indeed, we were tumbling each other in the grass, as he sought to apprise himself of my intimate possibilities with more eager avidity than manly grace and skill.

Indeed even doffing our clothing was a matter of some confusion as Kim sought to undress us both at once while continuing to attempt to fondle me at every moment with both hands.

As for me, while my body was enjoying the sheer lustful avidity of this callow lover, my spirit took pleasure as well in the very charming naivete thereof, which both gave the lie to Kim's boasts of tantric expertise, and made me appreciate the chutzpah thereof with all the more delight.

When after a good deal of this erotic tussle and groping, we had at last revealed our nakedness to each other, Kim hesitated, propped up on his elbows atop me, regarding me with some trepidation, even as the pride of his lingam sought to enter my yoni with a will of its own.

"Quelle problem, mannlein?" I asked him as lightly as I could.

"Ah ... oh ... the truth of it is that I am given to hyperbole!" he stammered. "No doubt you will be entirely appalled to learn that I may not be quite the adept of the tantra that I sometimes pretend ..."

I laughed, and pulled him to me, and rolled myself over onto him. "In this moment, no other declaration could so inflame my passions, liebchen," I told him, and became the director of our tantric figure, taking matters firmly into my own hand until they became firmer still, and proceeding to give him a series of lessons in the art I would hope he would not soon forget.

Yet though I sought to apprise him of the variety of possible tantric figures in some detail and at great length, I eschewed the employment of my ring of Touch, for on the one hand I had no desire to leave him pining away for the memory of an impossible magic moment of ecstasy which the natural favors of no other woman could ever match, and on the other hand, I would have been a villainess to overmaster such manfully admitted innocence with secret electronic powers.

Indeed, it was as we lay in each other's arms there, after he at length had absorbed sufficient schooling to overmaster my natural woman with phallic prowess that brought me to a single soul-satisfying cusp, that in my heart I relegated the Touch to my father's commerce. Let it be used to treat dysfunction or rouse the jaded energies of the erotically feckless, in the service of whom it would no doubt be a great boon. But as for this natural woman, never more would I intrude such unnatural machineries into openhearted intimacy with the natural man.

After a time we dressed, and stood there together for a few last moments, looking out across the nearby lights of the encampment, and the more distant lights of the town, and the lights in the sky above the ocean, brighter and more distant still.

"Mayhap our paths will cross again out there sometime," Kim said. He laughed gaily. "And if they do not, rest assured I will remember this night with you always."

"And indeed you certainly should, my little Gypsy Joker!" I declared. We laughed together, and with that we parted, for certainement there is no better loverly farewell than that.

I watched Kim descending the hillside toward the Gypsy Joker encampment, toward his true wanderjahr, toward the Yellow Brick Road upon which I had first set foot a Child of Fortune's lifetime ago, until he had entirely disappeared from my sight into the carnival where his borning spirit belonged.

Then I began descending the other side of the mountain toward the town below and my future life in the worlds of men beyond. There was a spring in my step and no regret in my heart.

For it was in that moment that I chose to name myself Wendi Shasta Leonardo, in homage to my friend and mentor and to my own new version of the heroine of the ancient mythos, but in homage as well to this very future self who now half a lifetime later looks back on her Golden Summer as a Child of Fortune, and in the spirit thereof, transcribes these, the last words of her tale.

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