CHILD OF FORTUNE

Chapter 4

-- I awoke.

That was the extent of the subjective experience of my first voyage from world to world: I lost consciousness in a state of terror in a sealed cubicle and then awoke from a dreamless sleep into an enormous sense of relief, for the first sight that greeted my eyes was that of the cubicle door already sliding open to release me from my tomb.

Needless to say, I scrambled out of the cubicle and down the ladder without delay, and only when my feet were firmly planted on the deck did my spirit come fully awake and perceive, somehow, that I had truly crossed the void.

There were no physical symptoms to tell me that my life processes had been suspended for some seven weeks, nor did so much as a molecule of the dormodule seem altered, but there was an electricity in the air, an alteration of the music of the spheres, that somehow convinced my skeptical instincts that the Bird of Night now orbited another world. Sleepers were clambering down from the cubicles, floaters appeared bearing our luggage, and a ship's annunciator was chanting a marvelous mantra of anticipation: "Passengers departing for Edoku please proceed to the sky ferry dock ... Passengers departing for Edoku please proceed to the sky ferry dock ..."

There was no need for more detailed instructions, for a stream of passengers was already bustling up the ship's spinal corridor, ordinary folk such as myself carrying packs or accompanied by a floater or two, and what were obviously Honored Passengers surrounded by whole convoys of floaters, and all one had to do was find a clear place in the melee and be borne along by the current.

Soon I found myself seated in one of the sky ferries into which we were all unceremoniously ushered without apparent regard for our previous statuses, and a moment later I was gazing out of the port at my first sight of Edoku.

My mouth fell open. I gasped. It must have taken several minutes for my mind to even begin to form a coherent set of images out of the data impinging upon my retinas, for the sky ferry was already underway before I could even vaguely comprehend what it was moving toward, and even then --

Rather than the starry blackness of space, I beheld an endless curtain of gaseous turmoil, swirls within swirls, whorls within whorls, magenta, orange, brown, red, purple, these seething eddies and whirlpools in turn organized into bandlike higher patterns, and the whole seeming to be frozen in midmotion like a still image abstracted from a holocine.

As the attitude of the sky ferry shifted, the curve of a planet drifted into view from below, and sprinkled liberally above it, hundreds, indeed thousands, of brilliant discs of light from which beams descended, moving, shifting, changing colors, as if a cast of thousands were performing a pavane on an immense stage below, each performer tracked and illumined by a private spotlight.

Then the sky ferry, still descending, performed a slight roll, and a slice of black space appeared at the periphery of my visual sphere, forming a subtly curved edge to the chaotic maelstrom of colors, and at last I began to make sense out of what I saw, finally relating the raw sensory data to my prior astronomical knowledge.

Edoku was not a true planet but a satellite of a large gas giant, and it was the surface of that huge world, or rather the roil of its atmosphere, seen from so close on that the eye could not encompass it as a whole, which was the backdrop against which Edoku appeared. The discs of light, then, must be the orbiting luz redefusers, each illumining a small portion of Edoku's surface.

And indeed the onrushing surface of the planet was faceted like the jeweled eye of an insect or a mosaic window of colored bits of glass; each facet, each glass tile, each domain, illumined from on high by its own chosen quality, tint, and even hour of "daylight" -- noon, twilight, sunrise, pale lunar glow, und so weiter, and the whole shimmering and rippling as the luz redefusers slowly cycled through their changes like a forest floor dappled in a thousand colors beneath a windblown jungle canopy.

As the sky ferry descended swiftly from orbit, the view became more dazzling and disorienting still, as we flew through sunrises, sunsets, blazes of noon, islands of night, with the speed of a stroboscopic flicker. Mountains, plazas, buildings great and small, rivers, deserts, all blurred into each other to form a pointillistic landscape where the organic tints of the natural realm and the starker and more varied hues of the obvious works of men so intermingled, overlapped, and underlaid, that the whole appeared en passant as a single formless and colorless sprawl, within which were contained, nevertheless, all conceivable permutations of color and form, all conceivable transmutations of the organic and the crafted.

Thus I first beheld Great Edoku, gaping out the port in an overload of the visual senses and a rapture of the spirit, like a toxicate beholding the universe entire within the formless chaos of a single flame!

***

Moreover, my first vision of Edoku's surface proved to be more of the same, and if my description of it herein should lack a certain coherence and form, vraiment, the rendering thereof through hindsight's cooler and more mature eye still achieves more in the telling than the young girl I then was could encompass in the moment of quite literally overwhelming confrontation with the spectacle of the reality itself.

Our sky ferry landed and debarked its passengers on a noonday meadow nestled near the summit of a small wooded mountain, or so at least at the moment it seemed, and half a dozen similar craft also rested on this alpine lawn, three of them also disgorging travelers. From this vantage, Edoku lay spread before me, stretching away to dissolve into the horizon along an arc of nearly three hundred degrees.

What I beheld from this tranquil meadow was a chaos that not only took my psychic breath away but failed to resolve its baroque piling of detail upon detail into any coherent overall reality no matter how long I gaped and blinked.

For what I saw seemed not so much a vista on any planet I could have imagined but an immense holo crafted by an artist dedicated to the surreal or to the inner vision of the subconscious mind.

Half the sky and more was filled with the mighty sphere of Edoku's gas giant primary, and the rest was the star-studded black of deepest space.

Yet the illuminated air above the landscape below me seemed entirely disconnected from the sky above, as if what I was seeing was a diorama highlighted and brightened by beams of filtered light shining down through holes in a painted ceiling. From horizon to horizon, the landscape glowed and shimmered, brightened and darkened, beneath a complexly interwoven tapestry of light; noonday, sunset, darkness, sunrise, winter, spring, summer, and fall lay in slowly shifting patterns upon the land as if dancing to the unheard music of thoroughly toxicated gods.

Further, to speak of what lay illumined beneath this kaleidoscope of the hours and the seasons as a landscape in any quotidian sense is to play the reality false, for mountains, buildings, lakes, pavilions, streams, flora, statuary, deserts, und so weiter, were all jumbled and tossed together in a manner which destroyed any sense of the natural and the urban, indeed even any sense of scale.

Picture if you will an entire planet manicured, formed, bonsaied, and tended like a formal abstract garden in the nihonjin mode, replete with snowcapped mountains, roaring rivers, desert wastes, green forests, mirror lakes, massifs of naked stone, but with no single detail of the geography forced into the pattern of any overall scale, and no geologic sense imposed on the succession of the terrain. Thus here might be a forest whose canopy overtops a nearby mountain peak, there a river circling an island of desert dunes, in another place a jungle marsh atop a sere butte from which falls a great cataract entirely dwarfed by the tranquil lily pool at its base.

Now superimpose upon this whimsically crafted garden an endless city built in a melange of every conceivable architectural style and in a scale completely indifferent to that of any part of the garden from which its buildings grow like so many bizarre fungal blooms. Thus a mountain peak may serve as the centerpiece of a public square, trees may grow taller than a neighboring pagoda tower, while in another arrondissement a forest seemingly of the same species serves as the hedge of a lakeside promenade. A waterfall in one venue roars and foams behind a street of wooden houses, while somewhere else a cascade that seems no less grand is a mere trickle off the side of a low building.

Neither a planetwide city liberally landscaped nor a worldwide garden dotted with buildings, the surface of Edoku combined elements of both sans any separation of realm or any overall concept of scale, save that the geological elements which should have dwarfed the works of man -- mountains and rivers, deserts and lakes -- tended to rather be dwarfed thereby, and contrawise, such floral features as trees or even single blooms might like as not be huger than towers of silver or glass. To further meld the urban and the bucolic and surrealize the nonexistent interface between, great trees might display the windows of a dwelling, spiral stairways rise circling to a snowcapped peak, or forests grow atop a pavilion's roof.

And all spread out before me not under the light of a single foreign sun but illumined in a crazy quilt of day and night, sunrise and noon, wan winter light and blazing summer, the whole beneath an incongruous sky of star-spangled black dominated by the immensity of the mighty gas giant's slow surface boil.

What is more, or mayhap less, this vertiginous vista, alas, is more of an overview of Edoku than one may achieve from most any other vantage, for, as I was to learn, the debarkation site is crafted to afford a relatively easy psychic access to the auslander, whereas the esthetic of the planet as a whole is designed entirely to please the Edojin themselves, and these are of the firm philosophic opinion that any overview is both false and hopelessly jejune, that "reality" itself is no more than a local artistic style, that perpetual immersion in the ever-changing fine detail of chaos is the only proper mode of civilized existence, and that to apprehend Edoku entire would be to achieve both a boredom terminal and an existentially daunting vision of the entirely unnatural and artificial nature of their vie and their world, which the best minds of the species humaine, to wit their own exalted selves, have spent a thousand years and more of history and craft in an effort to transcend.

Naturellement, such an appreciation of the weltanschauung and esprit de vie of the Edojin was entirely foreign to the girl who stood there gaping and entirely overwhelmed by her very first sight of their venue. Nor was her composure exactly enhanced when the ground fell away beneath her feet.

In truth, not quite literally beneath my feet, though the psychic import was not at all dissimilar as a large round hole suddenly appeared in what I had supposed was the solid ground of a mountaintop meadow, and my fellow travelers from the Bird of Night, followed by their luggage-bearing floaters, began to quite blithely step over the edge and disappear into the bowels of the mountain.

"Quelle chose!" I exclaimed, as one by one the people around me leapt off into the abyss as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as indeed, as I was to learn, on this world, it was.

A tall dark man dressed all in red velvet took a moment's pity on me as I stood there afraid to even peer over the lip. "C'est nada," he said, grasping my hand. "Droptube des'. Null-g, like a feather to float. Geronimo!"

So saying, he leapt over the edge, dragging me screaming by the hand.

I found myself not plummeting like a stone down a dark tunnel into the depths of the earth, but floating nearly weightlessly downward through a great light and airy atrium inside this mountain which was not a mountain.

What a profusion of sound and color and people! The great hollow space, through which I and countless others drifted like motes of dust through a golden sunbeam shaft that seemed to rise from the distant floor, was circled round by tier after tier of balconies. Some were garden promenades dripping greenery, others strogats lined with restaurants, tavernas, and boutiques, still others the venues of what might have been impromptu carnivals, thespic displays, concerts, and other entertainments which seemed entirely incomprehensible. A dozen modes of music merged in a not unpleasant discord, the air hummed with the babble of countless voices, and my mouth began to water as I slowly drifted downward through various zones of cuisinary aromas.

As for the Edojin who thronged this inverted tower, a generalization as to their modes of dress, accoutrement, or genetic style can hardly be attempted, for they seemed as dedicated to the outre, idiosyncratic, and surreal in their personal adornment and cosmetic stylizations as in their planet- molding arts. While none seemed to vary significantly from the general range of size and mass of our species, and they all possessed the number and arrangements of limbs and external sense organs appropriate thereto, any finer details seemed entirely a matter of personal whim. Skin hues encompassed the entire visual spectrum, hair colors tambien, coiffures both male and female might be anything from close-cropped fuzz to huge bouffants trimmed and shaped into abstract or even representational topiary hedges of hair, clothing might be no more than body paint or all- encompassing recomplicated robes of a dozen colors and anything and everything between, and ears, noses, limbs, and torsos might be richly bejeweled in any conceivable mode, or just as likely be left entirely unadorned.

I drifted slowly down through this wonderland in the state of ecstatic befuddlement that seemed to have become the basic mode of my consciousness since first I set eyes on Edoku, scarcely aware that my knight in red velvet armor had long since let go my hand and alighted birdlike on one of the intervening balconies, and only became aware that the giddy ride was over when at length I felt the true surface of Edoku gently kiss the soles of my feet.

***

That is, if anything that lay beneath the soles of one's feet on Edoku could be said to be vrai terra firma, for the floor I alighted upon appeared to the eyes as golden, shining, transparent sand, to the kinesthetic senses as thick-pile carpeting, and the gravity gradient thereof as that of a minor asteroid.

What had appeared to be a solid mountain from its meadowed crest and a substantial building as I  drifted down its hollow core now seemed to be a floating confection from my present vantage, for the building ended a good twenty meters from the floor, held aloft by the same sort of gravitic machineries which had enabled me to drift down like a speck of dust and which now informed my motor senses that I weighed no more than the moussas which as a babe I had held in the palm of my hand.

I stood there with the enormous mountain of a building floating above my head like an immense parasol while a three hundred sixty-degree panorama of the immediate environs surrounded me, each few points of the compass, moreover, offering their own hour and season, tempting me with the illusion that I stood at the fulcrum of space and time, though in my present psychic circumstances I knew full well that, here in Edoku, nothing could be further from the truth.

On my right hand, I was offered what might have been an arrondissement of small residences piled up the sides of low hills with only a few folk to be seen abroad to welcome the dawn. Some degrees further, an afternoon parkland with a lakeful of small boats, sunbathers on the lawn, more athletic Edojin engaged in arcane sport and al fresco amour. Or I could venture down the narrow midnight streets of some sort of pleasure district, thronged with revelers crowding between tall and garishly lit emporiums. I might wander among the enormous succulents and little gazebos set in sunset desert sands or ascend to the ridgeline of a miniature range of mountains circled by what might have been manses or just as easily fabriks.

In truth, I knew not where to begin, nor what to begin, nor did I have guide or knowledge or the foggiest notion of how to orient myself in this chaotic terrain. Giddy and toxicated already, and growing discomforted by both my indecision and the psychic weight of the mountain floating above my head, I resolved to let fortune decide, and so, closing my eyes, I spun around until I was truly dizzy, then ceased whirling and bounced airily off towards the pleasure streets of midnight, which were the next sight to greet my eyes.

***

How long did I wander through Edoku in a toxicated fog? How may duration be measured where midnight is a few steps from dawn and one may stroll in a minute or two from spring into fall? Naturellement, one may consult one's timepiece, but what sort of spirit resorts to such digital measurement in elf hill? Certainement not the spirit of the virgin Child of Fortune that I was, enraptured by an endless succession of marvelous, chaotic, and upon occasion daunting realities, such as Cort and I had never succeeded in conjuring from quotidian Nouvelle Orlean or our own psyches even during our most prolonged and eclectic seances with the psychoactive pharmacopoeia.

Though in truth, of all the knowledge, skills, and lore that I had acquired in my previous incarnation on Glade, it was precisely my experiences with a plethora of psychochemically altered reality states which stood me in best stead on my initial wanderings in Edoku. While with Cort the perception of an entirely fragmented and disconnected succession of bizarre and unpredictable realities was entirely the result of alteration in the biochemical matrix of the consciousness perceiving them, and on Edoku it was the environment itself which rang the changes, the psychic state induced thereby was subjectively the same, to wit an entirely fractured consciousness wandering through them totally immersed in the immediate moment-to-moment flow of the fine details of chaos sans any overview integrated over space and time.

There were cafe tables of living wood arising from the gilded pavement of midnight streets, mighty towers of glass and stone set in avenues among miniature mountain ranges bustling with urban commerce in the earnest early morning light, a twilit dance pavilion beside a cooling waterfall where naked figures performed an erotic pavane weightlessly in the air, a desert garden under the blaze of noon and the gravity of a massive world, promenades lined with tavernas and cuisinary emporiums on arching bridgeways spanning wild rapids, cafes set high in the boughs of trees, al fresco carnivals on emerald meadows in the centers of public platzes, buildings in the form of mountains, on rocky islands in clear blue lakes, incised into canyon cliffs, and all manner and scale of trees, rivers, waterfalls, und so weiter, festooning towers and pavilions ...

Through all this I wandered like a random animalcule in brownian movement, and vraiment, there was randomness in more than the geographical realm, for noon and midnight, sunrise and sunset, the round of the seasons, were as much a matter of neighborhood caprice as the weight of my body, which, from moment to moment, venue to venue, might be dragged down by heavy mass, light as a moussa in the treetops of home, entirely weightless, or any gradient in between. So too the odors, perfumes, scents and, vraiment, stenches, which alternately tempted, tantalized, seduced, and befouled my nostrils seemed to bear no causal connection to their apparent sources. A floral bouquet might drift from a refectory, blooms might give off the aroma of roasting meat, a beautiful garden might reek of rot, or buildings of glass and steel smell of a mountain dell.

As for the activities, civilized or otherwise, which played themselves out in this chaotic matrix, they were so recomplicated and arcane as to remain largely incomprehensible to a onetime sophisticate from Nouvelle Orlean. I could hardly tell a restaurant from a palace of pleasure, for all manner of emporiums in every sort of architectural mode seemed to purvey both cuisine and tantric performances, as well, for that matter, as vestments, bijoux, machineries and objets d'art. Was the extravagantly gesticulating crowd inside that glass dome engaged in a theatrical performance, was it a mental retreat, or did the tote board signify a commercial bourse?

Each and every Edojin composing en masse the roiling and colorful throngs of the planetary city seemed determined to outdo every other in outrageousness of clothing, artificiality of skin tint and coiffure, floridity of gesticulation, and general aura of breathtaking and self-important sophistication, the Lingo of the Edojin seemed to be a melange of the most exotic and nearly incomprehensible sprachs I had ever encountered, and everyone save myself, or so it appeared to me, seemed to be intently engaged in affairs of cosmic import or baroque decadence or both, far beyond my auslander comprehension.

Vraiment was the state of consciousness in which I wandered in those first few hours all but indistinguishable from that induced by the ingestion of a smorgasbord of psychoactive chemicals. So too, at last, the dissolving of sequential expectation and linear logic as the organizing principle of my psyche's passage through space and time to release that higher yet tambien more primitive being which egolessly merges with the flow of that which is, becoming no more and no less than the moment-to-moment passage of its spirit through realities, as the perfect singer becomes the song.

From this perspective, or rather in truth from this annihilation of separate perspective, I began to dimly apprehend, if not the individual import of the chaotic sights, sounds, smells, and feelings of Edoku, then at least, in a vague and ill-formed manner, the essential spirit of the place, the esthetic weltanschauung of the Edojin, the higher logic behind the random chaos in which they chose to live.

Consider the history of this planet. Millennia ago, after a voyage of generations in the simple, bounded, and entirely artificial reality of their arkology, the original settlers of Edoku found themselves stranded not on a planet teeming with the open-ended complexity of an evolved ecosphere, but on a bleak and lifeless tabula rasa of dead stone and perfect vacuum, Thus they were faced with the esthetic challenge and spiritual necessity of crafting a world, indeed for all practical purposes a total reality, out of nothing more than mass, energy, and their own inner landscapes, which is to say devoid of any surprise, chaos, or animating spirit not created by their own conscious hand.

So, over the centuries, did they create a world in which ersatz recomplicated upon ersatz, in which artificial order recomplicated upon artificial order, in which the parts were deliberately crafted to bear no unified relationship to any whole, in which the "natural" and the "man-made" were terms without meaning, in which day and night, winter, summer, spring, and fall, gravity and terrain, flora and fauna, being of necessity arbitrary human creations to begin with, were allowed to follow the random dictates of human caprice and the surreal esthetic of the imagination unbounded by the natural laws of geography, meteorology, biology, or time. Thus, as if by magic, did human craft itself rescue their spirits from the dead and soulless determinism of a reality crafted entirely by the rational mind, thus by a transcendent act of will was chaos reconjured out of order.

In essence, then, Edoku was a quicksilver environment created to induce and perpetually maintain in the spirits of its inhabitants precisely that state of permanent surprise, that eternal flow of one unpredictable into another, that ongoing illusion of an organically complex and unencompassable chaos which I found so disorienting and daunting.

Naturellement, the foregoing is informed by hindsight's more mature wisdom as well as a perusal of the relevant texts; at the time, all that I began to finally perceive was that an orienting overview might very well be something that Edoku was in fact designed to avoid, certainement at the least it was something no amount of random wanderings were likely to allow me to attain, and therefore, rather than continue my intellectual attempts to crystallize order out of this chaos, my only course was to embrace it, and seek to impose upon it only the structure of my own desires.

Upon achieving this satoric state, a certain clarity of perception and purpose began to coalesce out of the mists. While I had no clue to or concept of the absolute passage of time, I knew with certainty that the soles of my feet were growing sore, that the muscles of my legs had long since lost their spring, that the weight of the pack on my back was bowing my shoulders, that my stomach was beginning to demand nourishment, and that my bladder was filling to the point of some urgency.

In short, biological imperatives and ultimate surrender to the knowledge that further aimless wanderings would be productive of nothing more than further confusion had finally combined to produce a motivational vector, which is to say that I realized that it was time to find what in this strange land at least served the practical purpose of a hotel.

***

In Nouvelle Orlean I knew the repute of every hotel in the city and in any other human habitation that I had previously heard of or imagined, one simply located the typical sort of arrondissement where hotels were to be found, and selected one on the basis of general ambiance. But here on Edoku, I had not the faintest notion of where such an arrondissement might be found, might not have recognized same were I standing at its center, and could hardly have distinguished a hotel from a palace of pleasure or a hospital on the basis of architectural style.

I was therefore reduced to screwing up my courage and accosting total strangers.

"Pardon, good sir, but I've just arrived on Edoku, and I'm looking for a good hotel --"

"Good hotel, jai nai ici by my lights, and I agree it is a disgrace to our ciudad grande, but there you have it, bonne chance and buena suerte!"

"Excuse me, but would you --"

"Certainly not! Ruegelt for Children of Fortune arimasen!"

"Pardon me, but I'm new on Edoku --"

"Y yo, I appear old ne? Vraiment, I knew this skin tint suited me not, but to hear it from a rank auslander!"

"Would you know the location of a good hotel?"

"Would I know the location of a good hotel? C'est possible. Aber primero, define good and location kudasai, since these are locutions subjective, whereas hotel is a noun objective in most sprachs of Lingo --"

Et cetera, et cetera, und so weiter.

Finally, near tears with frustration, and shaking with fatigue and no little outrage at what seemed to pass for street manners in Edoku, I cornered three Edojin lying on a lawn close by a waterfall in a garden strewn with cafe tables, who seemed sufficiently toxicated from the contents of a flagon of wine they were passing around to be incapable of flight, and essayed what I fancied was my own version of the local conversational style.

"Merde! Caga! Why do you imagine that Edoku has totally disgraced itself?"

The three of them -- a silver-skinned woman in a chemise of black and white harlequinade, an orange fellow wearing only tight green breeches, and an entirely nude man with rainbow body paint and a crest of hair in the same style -- exchanged arch glances of amusement.

"Porque Edoku hast keine acceptable restaurant in the Magyar mode?" the woman ventured.

"Weil Edoku nikulturi des'?" said the nude man.

"I imagine Edoku disgraces itself because no one has a clever answer to your koan, babaji!" the orange fellow declared triumphantly. "Ken sie the one about Diogenes and the Honest Man?"

"Wrong, wrong, wrong!" I told them. "Edoku has disgraced itself because nowhere in its precincts is a good hotel to be found!"

At this there was general consternation. Then the clever orange one clapped his hands and laughed." Ach, I comprend!" he cried. "Nowhere within Edoku is a good hotel to be found because everywhere good hotels abound!"

"Indeed? Then why can you not direct me to one nearby?"

"Tres facile! We cannot direct you to one nearby because there are several close at hand!

"Then which of them is the best hotel?"

"Mit more precision, kudasai," the woman said. "Best a subjective adjective of comparison desu, ne, signifying maximization of an adjective of quality. Best extravagant? Best outre? Best bucolic? Best large? Best small?"

"How about the cheapest?" I asked. "Or to be more precise, the best value?" "So," said the orange man, "du bist no wandering guru of the zen koan after all. Merely green auslander with a chip of credit of modest amount seeking a bargain hotel?"

"I am overwhelmed by your perceptivity," I admitted.

"Then why didn't you simply say so?"

"Because I surmised that such a straightforward request on Great Edoku might mark me as a bumpkin and a bore ...?" I suggested.

At this, the three of them broke into delighted laughter. "Well spoken! the orange man exclaimed. "Bienvenidos a Edoku! Such regard for the niceties of civilized discourse deserves its reward. I commend therefore the Yggdrasil. Direct through midnight, links at the cliffs of sunset, circle round the noonday fountain, and there in the petit wald, voila!"

"You cannot miss it," the woman said. "It's the only building in the vecino fashioned in the likeness of a tree."

***

I could not. It was.

Rather pleased with myself for having successfully negotiated my first more or less coherent conversation on Edoku, I followed the directions I had been given with little difficulty. Indeed I began to appreciate the manner in which Edoku's bizarre melange of architecture and landscaping provided starkly unmistakable landmarks at every hand. Vraiment, every conceivable vista consisted of little else but an endless succession of unmistakable images!

The hotel Yggdrasil was hardly an exception to this rule.

In the center of the small forest to which I had been directed was a clear blue lake which was little more than a decorative moat surrounding a central island, which indeed may have existed solely to esthetically justify the rainbow bridge which soared airily above it. Rising from the island, indeed all but overgrowing it with the enormous maze of shaded porchways formed by its system of unburied "roots," was a gigantic silver tree.

A good two hundred meters tall at its leafy crown and perhaps forty meters thick through its trunk, to this day I cannot say precisely to what extent the Yggdrasil was a building and to what extent a gene-tailored floral artifact. Vraiment, the trunk and the overarching branches were unmistakably metallic, though their surfaces were worked in the most cunning simulation of natural bark, but the profusion of greenery festooning the whole and growing directly therefrom was just as unmistakably organic. The upper surfaces of the main branches were shaded walkways equipped with railings, along which I could see hotel guests gamboling as lightly as the moussas of Glade. Depending from the branches were several score "fruits" of various colors and generally ovoid shapes, the least of them the size of a small bungalow.

Enchanted, overawed, I danced across the rainbow bridge, which had scarcely any gravity gradient at all, through the maze of porches formed by the roots, where people sat sipping drinks at table or lounging in garden bowers, and into the main lobby. Here the gravity gradient was set to give the kinesthetic senses a heavy, almost oppressive, sense of solidity and weight, in keeping with the decor, for the lobby gave the appearance of a vast subterranean grotto beneath the tree; earthen walls veined with the traceries of great gnarled wooden roots, blazing torches set high in brazen sconces, seats in the form of brightly colored giant mushrooms, cool, somewhat dank air redolent with the smell of wet loam.

Against the far wall, behind a counter of rough-hewn gray stone, sat a prim-looking man whose skin had been painted, or may hap actually bioformed, to simulate the color and texture of rich old wood, dressed in the somewhat ludicrous green garb of an elf of ancient lore.

I approached this worthy and somewhat tremulously announced my desire to secure a room. He seemed to eye me dubiously, as if "auslander" and "indigent" were blazoned on my brow.

"Indeed," he said rather haughtily for someone dressed as if for a masquerade. "Weil the Yggdrasil a hotel desu, and you bearing luggage are, I had little difficulty deducing your intent, ne, aber the operative questions sind, primero, what class of chambre might suit your fancy, segundo, for how long, tercero, can you afford it?"

Such lofty churlishness, far from intimidating me further, only served to remind me that I was a child of Nouvelle Orlean, entirely unaccustomed to such boorish manners from one whose establishment I was favoring with my custom.

"First, I require a chambre ordinaire in your median price range, second, the duration of my stay will depend upon the extent to which your hotel meets with my approval, and third, voila!" I said in a tone to match his hauteur, handing over my chip, which I knew full well was backed by enough credit to finance two full months of all my expenses at mean galactic living standard.

The domo of the Yggdrasil fingered the plastic wafer thoughtfully for a moment, as if he fancied he could read the current balance stored in its circuitry by touch alone. Then he relented, popped it into his credit slot, scanned the readout, raised an eyebrow, shrugged, deducted a sum, and returned it to me.

"First day's rent debited ist," he said in what seemed a somewhat more respectful tone. "Since you plan a stay of indefinite duration, crediting in advance on a day-to-day basis mandates itself." He came close to favoring me with a smile. "Unless, naturellement, you prefer to give over a week or two's rent in advance at this time ..?"

"Quelle chose! Since I have not yet inspected your accommodations, I hardly think it prudent to commit myself to a week's stay in advance."

"As you will," he said with a diffident shrug. "A hopper now to your room conveys yourself, which in order I'm sure you will find. Gravity control knob on right bedstand desu, transparency control on the left."

A chime sounded. From somewhere behind the counter, may hap from a hidden access hole, the most outre little creature appeared. About a meter tall, and the best part of that devoted to an enormous derriere and a pair of haunchy legs, the hopper sported a coat of bright scarlet fur bibbed with white, two enormous stylized humanoid eyes, and a mouth which the gene-crafters had fashioned in the bizarre simulacrum of a permanent human grin.

Loading my pack onto a floater with its long springy arms and executing a little bow, the hopper bounded across the lobby, and led me through a cavelike opening into a brightly illumined shaft whose negative gravity gradient carried us high up the trunk of the hotel to a landing stage which debouched directly onto a branch high in the boughs of the Yggdrasil. Although the height should have been dizzying, the light gravity gradient, the sturdy railings, and the profusion of overgrowing foliage which screened and softened the direct sight of the drop to the ground, all cunningly combined to set me at my ease as I followed the hopper along the treetop walkways.

The creature came to a halt where a bright yellow "fruit" hung from the branch directly beneath us. Taking my comparatively gross paw in its delicate little hands, it pressed my palm against a yellow spot on the silver bough, and a hole opened up directly before me.

I descended a ladderlike stair of dark wood -- or rather drifted down it, since the gravity gradient was set at near zero -- into a marvelous bower of a chamber. Brightly dappled sunlight poured into the room through the lacy network of green vines which covered its transparent walls and ceiling. The floor was a deep bed of some brown mosslike material, the bed was a gel-filled affair formed in the shape of an enormous all-embracing lavender flower, the twin bedstands. the chests, the tables, the armoire, were of a whitish wood painted and carved in floral motifs, there were three soft chairs and a couch also done up as enormous flowers, and through an open connecting door I saw a toilette done in rough-grained gray stone polished to the sheen of marble and richly appointed with golden fixtures.

The vines papering the wall were judiciously speckled with simple little white blossoms, and among these flitted perhaps a dozen brightly hued and softly singing little birds, each no bigger than my thumb.

As I stood there utterly enchanted, the hopper bounded down the stairs and over to the right-hand bedstand, where it demonstrated the full range of gravity control at some small discomfort to my stomach, and then, twirling the knob on the other bedstand, treated me to the piece de resistance.

This knob controlled the light level, but the illumination varied not merely in quantity but quality. A full turn of the control put the room through a full day's cycle, from the brightness of vine-shaded noon, through subtly muted afternoon light, on into rich orange sunset, thence to pale moonlight, utter blackness, dawn's early light, and straight on into morning. To perfect the wonder, by some .arcane means which to this day I still cannot fathom, the birds fell instantly silent as soon as the knob was set to late evening, and burst into song to greet the ersatz dawn.

The hopper cocked an inquisitive glance at me as if to inquire whether the accommodations met with my approval. I nodded my assent and added a little salute to express my true pleasure, and the creature departed, leaving me to enjoy the end of my first day on Edoku in solitude.

After relieving and refreshing myself in the toilette, I realized that I was far too exhausted to seek nourishment, too exhausted in fact to even contemplate leaving the tranquility of my cozy magical nest for the daunting chaos that teemed without.

So, setting the gravity gradient a shade above zero to keep my body from drifting, and opting for early evening, I luxuriated on my flower and in my sense of accomplishment at having secured this safe harbor, and drifted quickly off to sleep to the lullaby of birdsong.

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