CHILD OF FORTUNE

Chapter 3

That evening, my mother, my father, and I dined en famille out on the second-story porch overlooking Rioville, and the river, and the mirrored towers of the western bank, and the Hightown looming high above the shore. Of the viands and vegetables and pastas, of the wines and sauces and desserts, I remember nothing, for I was full of myself, engorged with sudden resolve, trepidatious at the thought of leaving all I had known behind, and, if truth be told, not quite so certain of the lavishness of my parents' largesse as to Davi I had pretended. So I spent the opening courses contemplating various strategies for the maximization of same and silently rehearsing the declaration that must come before the sweets were served, which put me sufficiently off my feed to be the object of some bemused regard.

Sin embargo, I do remember the sight of the sun setting into a nest of purple clouds behind the lights of the Hightown, the stars peeping in and out of the half-overcast sky as it deepened to black, the tongue of seafog enrobing the flash and dazzle of Rioville in the softening mists of legend, the bobbing boats plowing upstream through the foaming little crests of the river, the twice-reflected flame of the sunset on the waters, all as if a holo of the setting for my pronouncement of my intent were lased into the cells of my brain.

So too, even now, will the smell of jungle musk, or the overrich fragrance of a river bank, or the perfume of any great city arising at night to some peripheral venue upon a bank of fog recall to my sensorium the internal climate, the precise sensual memory of what it felt to be inside the body of that girl on that very night, the languor in my sated loins, the tension in my viscera, the adrenal storms roiling within my being as I finally found the courage to give my new spirit voice.

"I have a matter of some import which I  .. that is, I think it is time ... something is on my mind ..."

"So much we have gathered from the way you've been picking at your food," my mother said, exchanging somewhat arch glances with my father.

"Come, out with it, Moussa," my father demanded. "Such reticence has hardly been your usual style."

"I am already in my eighteenth year ..."

"We too can mark the passage of time," Leonardo said in an ironic tone belied by the amusement in his eyes.

"Many of my friends have already begun their wanderjahrs. ..."

"And Davi leaves on the Ardent Eagle next week," my mother said to my wide-eyed astonishment.

Leonardo laughed. "We dine at his parents' table often enough," he pointed out. "At the very least, such a matter of cosmic import is suitable table talk among us, ne."

"Davi is three months younger than I am ..."

"Quite so. "

"So ..."

"So ...?"

All at once I found my ire at this foolish game overriding any further reticence between my unease at the import of what I was about to announce and the desire to make my meaning plain. "So it's time I began my wanderjahr too!" I exclaimed with no little pique. "Both of you knew what I wanted to say all along!"

Shasta laughed. "We had a certain inkling surmise," she owned. "But naturellement such a declaration is one we must all make on our own. It's hardly a confession to be prised from uncertain lips like an admission from the guilty conscience of a child."

"I'm not a child!"

"Indeed, kleine Moussa?" my father said, smiling paternally, or so it seemed, to mask a certain sense of loss.

"I'm not your kleine Moussa anymore!" I declared, all at once coming to detest this innocent term of endearment which I had always accepted in the loving spirit with which it was intended. "I've completed my schooling. I've had many lovers. I can power-ski with the best. I can fly an Eagle. I'm conversant with cuisinary styles and vintages. I have survived many a night in the Bittersweet Jungle. I can compose word crystals and play chess. What more is there for me to learn in Nouvelle Orlean before I'm ready to become a Child of Fortune?"

At this my parents burst into such laughter that even I was constrained to hear the foolishness of my own words.

"Voila, our kleine Moussa has become a woman of the worlds, skilled in all the means whereby one may survive as an independent human among indifferent strangers," Leonardo ironically declared.

"So now that you have mastered the rudiments of the tantric arts and hedonic sciences, you consider yourself a sophisticated daughter of Nouvelle Orlean, more than ready to conquer the wider worlds of men?" my mother asked, and though this was said with no little reflexive jocularity, still I could not but perceive its serious intent, nor could I fail to wonder whether in truth I might not be entirely unequipped to survive without parental largesse.

But on the other hand, I told myself as this unpleasant thought passed like a cloud across the bright blue sky of my young spirit, the absence of parental largesse was hardly what I had in mind.

Thus did it finally dawn upon me that the leave to travel as a Child of Fortune was already a foregone grant in my parents' hearts and that without exactly knowing when the transition had occurred, we had now entered into negotiations vis-a-vis the financial arrangements.

In which case it would be better to remain their kleine Moussa a while longer, the little girl whom mother and father would fear to loose upon the seas of fate without the protective might of beau coup d'argent.

"Certainly not to conquer, mama," I said in quite a more childish tone." And no doubt you are right, papa, I've not yet learned the skills required to earn my way as a full independent adult among strangers. But how am I to learn to make my own way among the worlds unless I try? Surely you would not contend that Davi is better equipped for the vie of a Child of Fortune than I?"

Leonardo laughed. "You have me there, Moussa," he said. "But on the other hand, Davi's parents have weighed the freedom of his spirit down with a chip of credit sufficient to finance a life of indolent ease in the floating cultura and the grand hotels of even the most extravagant of worlds for several years."

I liked not the drift of my father's words, I liked them not at all. "Naturellement, papa," I said in a daddy's darling voice I hadn't used in years. "As you yourself have said and I in all humility must agree, I've yet to learn the skills required to earn my own way on distant worlds far away from home. Fear not, papa, though I must often seem a creature of foolish and overweening pride, I am not such a monster of ego that I will out of any exaggerated sense of my own economic puissance refuse funds sufficient to travel in a safe and proper style and ease thereby your fears for my survival."

Mother giggled. Father frowned. "Nobly spoken, my kleine Moussa," he said dryly. "But rest assured, we will not allow any foolish fears of ours to rob you of the wanderjahr's true essence, as Davi's tremulous parents have robbed him. Not for our daughter the empty ersatz wanderjahr of a haut turista playing at being a Child of Fortune!"

"The wanderjahr's true essence ...?"

"Indeed," Shasta said. "We will grant you the vrai wanderjahr, the vie of the true Child of Fortune that we ourselves have known, without selfish regard for our own misgivings."

"'The vrai wanderjahr? The vie of the true Child of Fortune?" Somehow I was beginning to suspect that the magnanimity of these professions was something other than what it seemed.

"Just so!" Leonardo enthused. "We cannot allow you to throw away your wanderjahr as a subsidized haut turista out of your tender regard for us. For what is there for the spirit to learn indolently voyaging in the floating cultura, and flitting weightlessly from world to world insulated and pampered inside a voidbubble of parental gelt except sloth and ennui?"

"Verdad!" Shasta agreed. "Instead we grant you the freedom to live the life of the true Child of Fortune, which is to say, surviving by your wits and your own travail, earning your own passage from planet to planet by sweat or guile, entering intimately thereby into the life of every planet you touch, rather than skimming along the gelt-paved surface. For you, mi Moussa, the true adventure of the spirit, the wanderjahr as it was meant to be, the vie of the Child of Fortune, with all its dangers, hardships, and fairly won delights!"

My mouth fell open. My stomach dropped in gross dismay. My gorge, not to say my ire, began to rise. "you ... you would have me starve? You would have me wander the streets of some far-off city on an entirely hostile world without the chip to rent a room in which to sleep? You would leave me to wear the same clothes for years? You would allow me to expire of hunger or exposure scores of light-years from home? You would see your own daughter reduced to begging in alien streets for scraps of bread?"

"Fear not, kleine Moussa," my father said. "Our hearts are not quite so hard as that. Before you rage, hear the traveling gifts we propose. First, we will purchase your passage in electrocoma to any world you choose. Second, we will give you a chip of credit good for similar passage back to Glade from any world of men, so that if hunger or privation pushes you to the brink, you can always return safely home. Finally, we will give you a second chip sufficient to subsidize two standard months' sojourn in decent ease if not luxury on a planet of mean galactic cost of living."

I sprang to my feet shouting, overturning a wineglass in the process. "Merde! Caga! What minge! Electrocoma passage! A mere two months' funds! What have I done to deserve this outrage? How can you do this to your own daughter?"

"With wisdom and a higher regard for the development of your spirit than for your indolent ease," my mother said loftily.

"Pah!" I spat. "With a higher regard for hoarding your treasure than for your own flesh and blood, you mean!" I spread my arms as if to enfold their luxurious manse, their lucrative boutiques, all the fine furnishings and works of art within, the boats moored at our dock, the fulsome hoard of credit behind the chips they carried. "Is this house any less grand than Davi's? Are your chips backed by any less credit than his parents possess? Yet they have given him a chip backed by sufficient credit to voyage as an Honored Passenger to as many worlds as suits his fancy, there to dwell in a style suitable to a true child of Nouvelle Orlean!"

Neither my foul-mouthed rage, which should have earned me the severest of reprimands, nor my accusations of selfish minge, which should at least have wounded their pride, swayed my mother and my father from their calm, measured certitude.

"You have said it yourself, Moussa, in a style suitable to a true child of Nouvelle Orlean, not to a true Child of Fortune," my father said, taking no little amusement in pouncing on my words and turning them back on me.

"If you simply wish to continue a never-ending round of divertissements with never the need to face hardship, true danger, or responsibility for your own destiny, we will continue to subsidize you in a style suitable to a true child of Nouvelle Orlean, cher Moussa, until you have had your fill," my mother chimed in, as if all this had long since been rehearsed between them. "But here, on Glade."

"Contrawise, if it is the life of a true Child of Fortune that you seek, this you shall have on the terms we offer," Leonardo said. "We would rather now have a young daughter think us cheap and cruel than be chided later by a more mature avatar for ruining her wanderjahr with an excess of indulgence."

I sank back into my seat, my anger simmering down from a boil into a sullen silent pout, for I had to own, at least to myself, that my accusation of mean-spirited miserliness was probably unjust, for even the disappointed child that I in that moment was could dimly comprehend the philosophy behind what seemed like minge, though I liked it not. I was reduced to silent attempts to project my state of wounded funk with twist of lips, hunch of shoulders, and frown of brow, and when, after consuming the salad course without extracting another word from their kleine Moussa's lips, my parents fell to discussing the subtle merits of the dessert between them, I gave it up for the night, retiring to my room to plot and scheme and brood, the rejection of the sweet my final, futile, parting shot.

***

Of my efforts to extract a greater largesse over the next few days, there is little of significance to relate, except to say that they were entirely futile until the very end, when my father relented to the extent of granting a further boon unlike any of my requests.

I alternately pouted behind a sullen wounded mask and minced about attempting to play the role of daddy's little girl. Could I not at least travel as an Honored Passenger, or failing that, be granted a chip good for electrocoma passage to a succession of worlds instead of only one? No, I could not.

I stayed out all night and reeled home at noon of the next day in a state of toxicated dishabille. Surely my subsidy could at least be extended to a full year without damaging the philosophic purity of their wise intent? Nein.

In short, over these several days, the single firm result of my campaign of wheedling, pouting, arguing, and thespic fits of pique was to convince me, increment by increment, that their terms were set in stone.

As this slow and unpleasant satori forced its way upon my spirit against my hope and will, so too did I begin at length to accept the fact that I was going to have to select a single planet out of nearly three hundred on which to begin my wanderjahr, which is to say that by the time I began my listless and alas somewhat perfunctory study of the catalog of worlds, I knew in my heart of hearts that they had won.

Only when I studied the entry for Edoku did my spirit rise and some spring return to my step and my soul resolve that I would now give up my futile and sullen quest and accept electrocoma passage thereto on the next Void Ship that would take me there.

Edoku, from one perspective, was the largest city in all the worlds of men, from another it was a small planet, and from both, it was certainly the ultimate example of the planetmolder's art. This much, naturellement, was common lore, which is to say that even as indifferent a scholar as I knew Edoku as a Xanadu among the worlds of men, but upon delving deeper, I soon enough became quite entranced.

In the middle of the First Starfaring Age, a terminally damaged arkology had managed to transfer its citizens to the surface of a fairly large satellite of a gas giant. Rich in mineral resources but devoid of atmosphere or biosphere, this moon was a tabula rasa upon which generations of planetmolders, landscape architects, genetic designers, und so weiter, had created a totally ersatz geography, ecosphere, and cityscape, a planetary metropolis and garden, in which every hill and stream, every plant and creature, indeed clime, gravity, and the quality of light itself, was a conscious work of human craft, and Edoku entire, so some said, our species' highest work of art.

Naturellement, over the centuries, such a celestial city became one of the cultural, artistic, scientific, and commercial centers of the worlds of men -- an El Dorado of riches and extravagance, a Rome to which all roads led.

Including, I determined, my own, for it is not in the nature of the naive and inexperienced to wish to begin their adventures in a venue any less exalted than the brightest jewel to catch their eye, and if I was to be limited to the choice of free passage to a single world, where better to go than such a world of wonder and opportunity, where certain streets, it was said, were quite literally paved with gold, and where, therefore, a girl of spirit, resource, and wit might best and most easily win a fortune with which to travel on.

***

While my parents were openly cheered at the transformation in my spirit when at breakfast I informed them of my decision to accept the terms for my wanderjahr that they had laid down and commence to make my preparations for departure at once, my choice of worlds was greeted with something less than unbridled joy.

"Edoku?" my mother fairly moaned. "Could you not choose some less exalted world to conquer?"

"With ease," I drawled. "For is it not the general lore that Edoku is a jewel among the worlds of men, a planet rich in knowledge, beauty, wisdom, and art, and dripping, moreover, with wealth?"

"All that and more, or so I have heard," Leonardo agreed sourly. "And as such, a magnet for Children of Fortune seeking a portion of same, as well as merchants, mountebanks, and thieves from all the worlds of men far better equipped than my kleine Moussa to survive, let alone prosper, in such a realm."

"I think it best you choose a more modest venue in which to begin your journey far from home," my mother said. "Some world where a young girl on her own would have a better chance to earn credits toward --"

"Where better to accumulate gelt than on a world where it is as common as dirt on Glade?" I demanded. "Is it not yourselves, dear parents, who have limited your largesse to passage to a single world? And passage to any world I choose, by your own words! Have you not commended to me the true vie of the Child of Fortune, with, as I remember the quote, 'all its dangers, hardships, and fairly-won delights'?"

I could scarcely contain my glee as they glanced at each other in bemused and discomforted silence, for now, at last, it was I who had turned their words back on them, it was my turn to rest easy on the very philosophic ground upon which they had so adamantly stood, and their turn to be reduced to impotent silence in a logical cul-de-sac.

"Perusing the Void Ship schedules, I have learned that the Bird of Night departs Glade ten days from now on a course which will eventually take it to Edoku," I informed them. "It is my intention to be on it, unless ..."

"Unless?" they said in unison, grasping at the straw I could not forbear from offering in a teasing spirit.

"Unless, of course, you choose instead to modify your terms for my wanderjahr to include, mayhap, passage to five planets of my own choosing as an Honored Passenger, and a living subsidy which, with reasonable prudence, will last me for a full year. In which case, in loving deference to your trepidations, I will reluctantly forgo the Edoku of my heart's desire ..."

At this suggestion, naturellement, their discomfort took on a certain glowering tone. "We will speak of this again shortly," my father said unhappily, rising from the breakfast table. "I have clients to attend to at the moment."

Before he could entirely depart, my mother, with a worried look, touched his arm. "You and I must speak of this, Leonardo," she said firmly.

So, in the succeeding days they did, and so too did they apply their own versions of the charm, and wheedling, and pouting with which I had so unsuccessfully attempted to sway their wills when the shoe, as it were, had been on the other foot, though unlike me, they were above resorting to fits of pique or thespic appearances in a toxicated state.

The gist of their campaign was to convince me that a naif such as myself from a planet such as Glade -- which they now attempted to portray as little more than a frontier world inhabited entirely by bumpkins -- would have little chance of amassing credits against the sophisticated competition I would encounter for same on a world like Edoku. To which I inevitably replied that I was a sophisticated child of mighty Nouvelle Orlean, which was hardly to be likened to the society of a peasantry living in rude log huts, and that I was merely determined to follow their own sage advice and brave the vie of the true Child of Fortune to the utmost.

To their credit, honor forbade them to either deny me the passage to the single planet of my choice that they had promised or bribe me away from my chosen path by relenting on their financial terms for my wanderjahr. Indeed mayhap to my credit, by the time it became necessary to purchase my passage on the Bird of Night three days before departure, I doubt whether such a bribe would have any longer swayed my resolve to brave the golden streets of Great Edoku, for necessity had proven the mother of desire, and by then I was all but convinced that I had chosen this course entirely of my own free will.

And so the die of my fortune was finally cast, passage booked, and my parents, so the events of the next morning were to prove, reconciled to the inevitable, at least to the point of providing, in perhaps somewhat desperate aid of my survival on Edoku, and inspired by my father's protective desires, the latest miracle of Leonardo's art.

After breakfast, and before opening his boutique to the public, Leonardo, with Shasta in train, ushered me into the workshop area and extracted from a cubby a simple and in fact tawdry-looking ring such as might be purchased in the most modest of street bazaars on the poorest of planets. A simple golden band -- in fact upon second glance a not-very-cunning job of gold plating over synthetic -- adorned, if that is the word, by a single over-large glob of ersatz which might conceivably have convinced a three-year-old that it was a sapphire.

This ugly and patently worthless bijou my father slipped upon my right ringfinger as portentously and proudly as if it were the priceless relic of some ancient emperor's crown jewels, while I curled my lip in open distaste.

"After much discussion, your mother and I have decided that since you cannot be swayed from your desire, you should at least have some means of survival on Edoku beyond mere wit or sweat," he said.

I glanced from him to the ring on my finger, to my mother, and back again, thinking they had both gone mad. "This ring might secure me a glass of wine and a piece of bread in some low taverna, I suppose ..."

Leonardo laughed. "I have crafted the casing to create just this illusion so as to discourage the attention of thieves," he told me. "In point of fact, it is the latest and some might say most puissant product of my art, designed, moreover, with the aid of your mother's science as well ..."

The Touch, he called it, invented just for me, and not to be duplicated for his trade until I gave my leave. Within the stone was a power-pil and the band itself contained circuitries which, activated by a press of my thumb, could send a pulse therefrom directly into my nervous system, amplifying my kundalinic energies so as to greatly enhance my abilities to manipulate chakras and nerve plexes, said power to be directed by the fingers of my right hand.

When I professed continued incomprehension as to how the ring could aid in my practical survival, Shasta donned the device herself, activated it with her thumb, and, with a wry grin, barely touched the tip of her finger to the nipple of my breast beneath my blouse's cloth.

Instantly, such a flash of kundalinic fire seared through my breast and straight down into my loins at my own mother's touch that I flushed what must have been a brilliant scarlet and nearly fainted from mortification. Unrelenting, Shasta put a finger to the chakra where the spine emerges from the derriere's pelvic crown and I was fairly rocked off my feet by an orgasmic blast.

Laughing uproariously, Shasta dropped the ring into my quivering palm. "Naturellement, the effect upon a lingam itself will be dramatic indeed, while more subtle effects may be obtained in the natural act by playing the spine as if it were a flute," she said. "Minimal, the Touch will give you the possibility of emergency employment as a tantric performer of supernormal power, if not of the true artistry to be gained only by diligent study. Moreover, in conjunction with the serious study of the inner lore in which you have alas thusfar shown little interest, the Touch can amplify the healing aspects of the tantric sciences as well."

"Finally," Leonardo said, "there is the inverse effect, which prudence dictates not be demonstrated unless the necessity arises, for the opposite of pleasure is an equally exquisite paralytic pain." From another cubby, he withdrew a simple schematic chart of the corpus humain, of the sort given to students of the martial arts, veined with a nervous diagram, and spotted with plexes marked in red.

"A simple Touch to any of the standard plexes will render the most powerful attacker entirely helpless," he said, "adept of the martial arts or not."

Thus was I provided on the eve of my wanderjahr, if not with pecuniary largesse, at least with a practical token of the most puissant yin and yang arising from the true marriage of my parents' arts.

***

And so, having bidden farewell to parents and friends, with a pack of clothing, two modest chips of credit, and a ring upon my finger, I found myself at last in the sky ferry rising into orbit to rendezvous with the Void Ship that would bear me away from all I had known and been on the first leg of the journey to whom the teller of this tale has become.

Beyond the port and below the ferry, Nouvelle Orlean quickly dwindled to a splash of tiny buildings flung across the mouth of the mighty Rio Royale, and just as quickly the river itself became a twisting vein of blue meandering down the center of the piebald greens and browns of the Great Vale, and then the great valley itself became merely an addendum to the Grand Massif, in turn reduced to a pile of dull rocks at the base of a gleaming shield of white ice. Then even this lost its grandeur of scale as the horizon curved, and the sky became black, and I beheld the continent of Arbolique entire, an island feathered by clouds in the brilliant green sea.

At which point, certain conventions literaires would have me wax nostalgic, would require a soliloquy in a tone of sweet tristesse, would have the young Moussa cast a last, loving regretful look backwards, would portray her deep philosophic musings engendered by the sight of the planet that gave her birth and the only world she had ever known dwindling away to a beautiful abstraction in the endless void of the interstellar night.

Indeed such emotions may have flickered for an augenblick across my mind's sky like a wisp of cloud punctuating a brilliant blue summer's day, but I would be untrue to the essence of the moment if I herein paid them significant heed, for as soon as the future became visible in the form of myriad bright stars displayed like jewels for my consideration across the black velvet cloth of space, I became a true Child of Fortune, gazing forward into my wanderjahr among those unknown star-flung worlds with scarcely a thought in my mind or a place in my spirit for looking philosophically back.

And then, as the ferry curved into orbit a quarter way around the circumference of the planet below, I caught sight of what from this vantage seemed a tube of silver filigree set off against the blackness in which it floated like a webmoth's nest reflecting starlight on the edge of visibility against a jungle night.

A frisson of excitement went through me as knowledge supplied a sense of scale that vision could not, for I knew that this must be Glade's Flinger, and far from being a little webmoth's nest seen close at hand, it was a huge framework of cryowire half a kilometer in diameter, a hundred kilometers long, and orbiting, therefore, very far away.

I was impressed by far more than the overwhelming grandeur of its scale, for a planet's Flinger is its gateway to the wider worlds of men. While the Jump Drive enables a Void Ship to traverse light-years in an augenblick, it must make its final approach to orbit via more conventional means. To achieve the needed relativistic velocity from a dead rest in space would require either immense onboard reaction mass or many weeks, or both. Fortunately, a Void Ship emerges from its Jumps with the velocity with which it entered, and thus the construction of its Flinger marks a frontier world's mature emergence into easy commerce with the worlds of men.

The cryowire gridwork is electrified, the Void Ship, resting at the bottom of the tube like a seed in a blowpipe, is encapsulated in a magnetic bubble of opposite charge, at which moment, voila, it is accelerated electromagnetically by the Flinger field, flung down the hundred-kilometer tunnel and into the void at near-light speed.

My excitement at first beholding this device, which would soon propel the Bird of Night out of Glade's solar system on its way to distant stars, was darkened only by the knowledge that the experience of this magic moment would be one which I would be denied. While the Honored Passengers celebrated and toasted the beginning of the voyage at the departure fete in the grand salon, I would be lying insensate as one more item of human cargo in a dormodule.

But even this resentment, which had been simmering inside of me ever since I had been told that the experience of traveling as an Honored Passenger in the floating cultura would not be mine, faded away into no more than a faint regret as the sky ferry rounded the limb of the planet and I at last beheld the Bird of Night herself, silvery and magnificent against the star-flecked dark.

She hung there, a vision of baroque complexity, glowing and glittering in the light of our sun as it peeked around the edge of Glade. The Bird of Night, like all Void Ships, was a modular construct assembled around a long central spine depending from the ellipsoid capsule of the bow, which contained the bridge and Jump Drive machineries, so that its essential core appeared like an enormous flagellate microbe, or, I thought with some bemusement at the workings of my own mind, like a giant silvery sperm. Slung along this rigid spermatozoon's tail, like literary clutter designed to obscure the metaphor, were assorted cylinders of various sizes seemingly affixed there at asymmetrical random like so many silvery sausages and salamis.

Yet somehow the whole retained a grandeur and even beauty not entirely implicit in the seemingly haphazard assembly of its parts. Indeed even the imagery which the artifact evoked seemed appropriate to its true essence if not without a certain obscene humor. For was not the Void Ship the vrai ubersperm of our species, and were not the dormodules for the human cargo, fastened as they were to this ultimate symbol of the fertilizing propulsive principle of the all-penetrating yang, the containers of the varied genes of our kind, cross-fertilizing the worlds of men that were and the worlds of men that were to come?

***

Be such florid musings as they may, once the sky ferry had docked with the Bird of Night, I found myself in a far more prosaic venue, to wit, the long, plainly-functional spinal corridor down which I was hustled by the Med Crew Maestro without so much as a glimpse of the country of the Honored Passengers, though I was allowed to be tantalized by the sight of several of these lordly and extravagantly accoutred birds of paradise making their ways between their staterooms and the entrance to the Grand Palais, a simple door like all the others which lined the corridor from my plebian vantage, but one from within which drifted the sounds of music, discourse, and laughter, and the odors of haute cuisine, exotic incenses, and intoxicating vapors which once more made me long to gain entrance to the endless fete.

And so yet again was a somewhat sullen and pouting mood thrust upon me as, with singular lack of ceremony, I was escorted not into the gay milieu of the floating cultura but into a grim and cheerless chamber indeed, entirely suitable to my state of spirit, though hardly calculated to ease my sense of deprived outrage.

Vraiment, my spirit sank even further as I beheld the dismaying venue in which I was to travel from world to world. Long tiers of coffin-sized glass cubicles were stacked on either side of the dormodule's central corridor from floor to ceiling, those above floor level to be reached by metal ladders set at regular intervals. Perhaps half of these chambers lay idle, but the others displayed human figures lying fully clothed and entirely inert like the corpses of ancient commissars displayed in state, or like the fare offered up in automatic refectories.

A chill entered my bones, as if this were in fact one of the ancient cryogenic facilities of the First Starfaring Age, in which the life processes were slowed by the bitter cold of space itself rather than, in the modern mode, by the far safer means of electronic control, I knew the theory well enough in the higher cerebral centers of my mind, but the ancient reptilian backbrain was gibbering its endocrine dread of an impending state that could be distinguished from death only by instruments of considerable sophistication.

The Med Crew Maestro touched a stud and a cubicle door slid open three rows up the lefthand tier. I stood there transfixed with terror, gaping at this invitation to brave a sleep beyond sleep, a coma but a hairsbreadth away from death, a dreamless nothingness that would endure for the seven weeks it would take the Bird of Night to voyage from Glade to Edoku, a leap of faith, a trusting to the machineries of --

"Well what are you waiting for, child?" the Med Crew Maestro demanded. "Do you imagine that I have no other tasks to perform? Schnell, schnell!"

I looked into his indifferent gray eyes, seeking some human contact, some warm assurance against the metaphorical cold. What I perceived was nothing more than the owlish expression of a harried functionary to whom this was nothing more than another quantum of an endless routine.

"I've never ... this is my first ..."

"Ah," he sighed, and in that moment, a human spirit seemed to emerge from behind the mask. "Fear not," he said more softly. "No harm comes. Never have I lost a passenger yet. You sleep, and then you awake, c'est tout, and this you have braved every night of your life, ne. Up, up, up meine kleine! In a moment, your fears will all dissolve in sleep."

I shuddered. I smiled wanly. I took a long deep breath and within my mind chanted a silent mantra against my fear. Then, step by step, each footfall as portentous as the ringing of some solemn chime of doom, each metal rung sounding a note in a symphony of courage that only I could hear, I ascended the ladder and eased myself into the cubicle as if I were entering my grave.

I lay upon a padded pallet with a spiderwork helmet behind my head. "Sleep well," a voice called out from what seemed like far below.

Then with an all-but-inaudible whine, the cubicle door slid shut and I was alone with a claustrophobic dread that brought a silent scream of terror to my throat which I choked back by a last heroic act of will.

Another hum of hidden machineries, and then a cold metallic caress as if the icy hand of death had been laid upon my skull, and then --

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