CHILD OF FORTUNE

Chapter 9

While at first I was more than content to find myself earning my way as a Gypsy Joker via the various modes available to a tantric performer of modest artistry and secret power, after a time I became gradually seized by the somewhat incoherent desire to expand my sphere of interest and enhance my possibilities, for I could not forever deny that my sole means of earning ruegelt consisted of a smattering of my mother's noble art and the electronic enhancement of my modest attainments in the disciplines of same which was mine courtesy of my father's craft.

Moreover, the more I took minor parts in tantric tableaus whose feature players displayed a diligent and indeed obsessive dedication to the true mastery of the high art of which I was no more than a feckless dilettante, the more I realized that I lacked the inner drive to endure the long hours of study and exercise required to achieve the status of a tantric maestra.

Indeed, the atmosphere of the carnival was not exactly conducive to dedicated diligence in the pursuit of any single craft or art, at least not for a youthful spirit new to the life of a true Child of Fortune, for every waking hour offered up a smorgasbord of possible pursuits, not to say a plethora of diversions to distract me from any thought of gainful employ whatever. There were jugglers, sleight of hand artistes, singers, musicians, und so weiter wandering the grounds, and to a Gypsy Joker, admission to the shows and performances taking place within tented walls was gratuit. Not to mention endless possibilities for idle hours of amorous dalliance, though this began to lose a certain piquancy for a laborer in the vineyards of the tantric trades.

Then too I had the example of the polymathic Pater Pan, by the definition of our tribe the ideal Child of Fortune incarnate, far more interested in playing jack-of-all-trades than in becoming a true maestro of any of them, whom, naturellement, I desired to please with the ultimate homage of successful emulation.

Moreover, the Gypsy Jokers did not confine their trades to the environs of the camp; the buskers who thronged our caravanserei also roamed the nearby vecinos giving impromptu performances on the streets thereof for contributions. So too did other members of the tribe hawk finger food, geegaws, and our simple crafts beyond the confines of our bidonville of tents. The street trade served to spread the repute of our carnival; contrawise, the mythos of the permanent fete enhanced the street trade.

Indeed, as Pater Pan would often enough declare, the true venue of the Child of Fortune was out in the streets among the bustling throngs of the quotidian worlds of men, for here we had performed our highest public roles when we were Troubadours and Tinkers, Romany and Hippies, for by playing the part of the Free Spirits of the worlds, we did our part to keep the spirit of the people free. In this, he told us, pecuniary profit was happily at one with a sense of noblesse oblige.

Be such grandiosity as it may, it began to seem to me that it was time to venture forth from the cozy confines of the encampment I had come to call home into the streets of Edoku where once I had been a helpless waif but where I now might carry the piebald banner of the Gypsy Jokers forth as a soldier of a Children's Crusade whose Holy Grail was the ruegelt to be gained therein.

While the spirit was willing, my skills were, to say the least, somewhat circumscribed. I could not sing, dance, juggle, do sleight of hand, or play a musical instrument, and the opportunities for tantric performances on crowded thoroughfares were few and far between. Yet such was my desire to venture forth as a true Child of Fortune of the streets that at length 1 swallowed my pride and deigned to try my hand at the street hawkers' trade.

Exerting my erotic charms to gain the good graces of Dani Ben Bama, a youth who, while he could in no way be mistaken for a chef maestro, was generally regarded as our premiere artiste of finger food, I spent several days wandering the vecino of glass towers with trays of his dainties. These were a cunning assortment of steamed dim sum of variously flavored doughs filled with all sorts of viands, legumes, sweet curries, and flavored creams, liberally spiced with assorted mild intoxicants, and I knew full well that I could find no more promising fare to hawk than this.

But truth be told, though I sallied forth each day with high hopes, more often than not I would return with but a few coins and a great heap of stale buns. For once on the street, I lacked the chutzpah and enthusiasm to continually proclaim the virtues of my wares at the top of my voice or to accost strangers; instead, my technique consisted of wandering aimlessly about in a daze with the haughty expression of one performing a task she clearly considered below her natural station.

At length even Dani, avid though he was for my continued tantric ministrations, was reluctantly moved to suggest that I favor another enterprise with my services.

I met with little more success hawking such items of adornment as embroidered sashes, netsuke of wood and metal, belts woven of silver wire, mirror-berets, und so weiter, though at least the craftsmen of same could afford to be more tolerant of my failures, since these items were not perishable and could be sent back to market with a peddler of more puissant skills.

Finally, I did somewhat better with jewelry crafted by Ali Kazan Bella. Ali was a lusty young man whose good humor and considerable tantric skills I quite enjoyed, and his jewelry , while crude by Edojin standards, manifested a skill and somewhat demented energy for which I could generate a sincere enthusiasm. With cunning little knives he had fashioned himself and under the influence of central nervous system enhancers, Ali carved necklaces, bracelets, earrings, and brooches out of single blocks of wood; filigree bijoux of such intricate fineness that at first glance they appeared to be twisted together out of wire.

This jewelry epitomized precisely those qualities which charmed the Edojin when it came to quaint Child of Fortune crafts: rude materials mimicking those of a higher technological level, clear evidence of long hours of tedious hand labor, and what they called "the wu of blood, sweat, and tears."

Adorned, indeed bedecked, with several rings on every finger, bracelets up and down each arm, a dozen or more necklaces, several pairs of earrings, and brooches pinned all over my tunic to the point where I was fairly armored in wooden filigree, I cut a figure of sufficient bizarrite to attract considerable attention even on the streets of Edoku, and even I, the least forward of street hawkers, was able to do a reasonable trade.

Still, even this modest success as a peddler left me discontent with my place in the life of the streets, or rather, perhaps, such success at the expense of my own dignity after a series of failures resulting at least in part from the disdainful husbanding of same, forced upon me the perception that I was really quite indifferent to success or failure as a mere merchant of the wares of others. Indeed, if I had desired such a vie, I would have been much better advised to remain on Glade and become an agent for the wares of my own father in the haut monde of the wealthy rather than a peddler of snacks and trinkets in the streets.

No, though I continued to hawk his jewelry upon occasion out of affection for Ali, and though I continued to supplement my modest share of this trade with tantric performances in the camp, at length I admitted to myself that I had developed a genuine personal ambition that went beyond mere membership in the Gypsy Joker tribe or even becoming a free spirit of the streets.

It seemed to me, then as now, that it was the Gypsy Joker buskers who wandered Great Edoku performing for what fortune and the impromptu audiences tossed their way who were the true Children of Fortune, the spiritual raison d'etre of our very existence in the wider scheme of things. For it was they who were in truth both living out and extolling the ancient and noble legends of the Gypsies and Hippies, the Troubadours and the Arkies, and, by serving as avatars incarnate of the spirit of the Child of Fortune's millennial romance, keeping it alive in the Second Starfaring Age.

With hindsight's vision, I perceive that this was my first dim inkling of my own future calling, the formless desire to live a life where the spirit meets the mind, to share the vie of the tale-teller or performer, to immerse myself in some higher enterprise for the ding an sich, to present the product of my own inner being for the titillation and edification of an audience of kindred spirits.

Vraiment, at the time I desired nothing more than the egoistic pleasure of the vie itself, for I had no tale to tell or song to sing, nor the craft to do so if I had. Indeed, that was the precise nature of my dilemma: I had fixed my heart's desire upon the life of a street performer, yet I lacked even a passing acquaintance with any entertainer's art.

Naturellement, it was to Pater Pan that I turned for wisdom in the sated afterglow of an evening's erotic exercises in his tent.

"Pas problem, girl!" he told me airily after a less than cogent recitation of my desires. "For sure you will have little difficulty extracting free instruction from some male maestro of your chosen art!"

Curled in his sheltering arms, I nodded my assent. "But what art may that be?" I said.

"You know not?" he said in some perplexity.

I shrugged. "I am less than pleased by the sound of my own voice in song, when it comes to musical instruments, I seem to have several thumbs, I have no interest in sleight of hand, juggling, or dance ..."

Pater laughed. "Apprentice yourself to a street theater group then," he told me. "You can hardly converse for ten minutes without betraying thespic talent!"

I rolled this conceit around the palate of my mind; while it seemed to me that my life on Glade and my small successes on Edoku gave a certain evidence of my talent for playing roles, these had always been of my own crafting, and something about a life of mouthing other people's words left a taste for which I did not entirely care.

I shook my head. "Something about it pleases me not ..."

"Q'ue?"

'Je ne sais pas ..."

"If not you, then who?" Pater demanded. "Speak, girl, I command you, the free sprach of your heart of hearts!"

Something in the tone of his voice, some arcane magic of personal puissance, did indeed impel me to give free verbal rein to the glossolaia of my unformed thoughts.

"I wish to do what you do, Pater, which is to say, I wish to be like you, or rather my own version of the spirit you say we share, which is to say, I wish to live the life of that which I speak, or speak the life of what I am. I mean, you speak, vraiment to become, as you say, both the singer and the song, metaphorically of course, since even I lack the hubris to attempt to subject an audience to my cracked warblings, I mean, that is ... Merde!"

I threw up my hands and snorted in frustration, unable to encompass with any precision that mystery for whose clear image I was searching.

But Pater Pan understood more than what I was saying, or perhaps was able to see the unoccluded vision behind my fog of words. "Aha!" he cried. "It is a ruespieler you wish to become, though perhaps you know it not."

"Ruespieler? Me?"

On the one hand, his declaration rang a chime in my spirit which immediately harmonized with its vibration, but on the other hand, the notion was one which I had never consciously considered. Certainement, ruespieling required not the least bit of musical ability or physical dexterity. Nor was one constrained to play out a role crafted by another or mouth someone else's words. Au contraire, a ruespieler needed only stories to tell, the loquacity to tell them, and the chutzpah to stand in the street and begin spieling in the confident hope that passersby would be moved by her art to listen and then be moved by her tale to contribute to the cause.

"Ruespieler ...?" I repeated much more thoughtfully. "Me ...?"

"Surely you have noticed your own gift of gab?" Pater said dryly. "It was your tantric powers which gained you access to my arms, but for sure it was the power of your blarney which made you a Gypsy Joker without having to pay the fee!"

I was not burdened with false modesty to the point where I need deny this obvious truth. Having accepted this satori from my guru, I could then easily enough perceive that I had always used words and the twists I could put on their meanings to achieve certain practical ends. While my career as a femme fatale of Nouvelle Orlean could not have flourished in the face of tantric ineptitude, surely I had known full well as far back as my initiation with Robi that words were a necessary part of the armamentarium d'amour. Indeed, had I not fought my parents to a standstill by artfully turning their own words to my devices? Had I not at length enticed the incomprehensible Edojin to direct me to a hotel by besting them at their own verbal sport?

As for chutzpah, while I had to admit that I fell short of the necessary amount when it came to hawking the wares of cooks or craftsmen, I was not entirely unforthcoming when it came to peddling my own goods.

But alas, it was precisely this in which I found myself lacking, for while my mystique was what I was hawking in Nouvelle Orlean and my electronically enhanced tantric services thusfar in Edoku, the goods of the ruespieler were stories, and of these I had none.

"I do believe you are right when it comes to ambition," I told Pater, "and I perceive that I may have both the talent to play with words and mayhap the courage to stand naked on the street and declaim, but what story can I tell?"

"There is only one story to tell, and we all tell it," Pater said. "Like the Cloth of Many Colors, each patch has its own tale, but the true story is the whole."

"And what story is that?" I demanded dubiously.

"The story you must learn to tell, of course. What else?"

"Merde! And how do you expect me to learn it if you won't tell it to me?"

"But I've been telling it to you since the first ape climbed down from the trees!"

"May we descend from the lofty heights of the zen koan to the realm of quotidian knowledge?" I suggested dryly. "Just how am I to trap this mythical unicorn of a story?"

"Fortunately, virginity is not required," Pater said archly. "In the realm of maya, it is simply a matter of listening to enough versions until you are sufficiently moved to sew your own patch into the fabric. In even grittier terms, ruespieling, like any art, is a matter of applying the will of the spirit to the diligent study of the craft."

"Quelle chose!" I said with less than enthusiasm. "Do my ears deceive me, or have I truly heard an endorsement of diligent study from the lips of Pater Pan?"

"For sure!" Pater exclaimed grandly. "It has taken me several millennia of diligent study to create that ultimate triumph of the ruespieler's art, my own magnificent legendary self!"

***

I was only to perceive the inner truth of this extravagance much karma later in the depths of the Bloomenveldt, when it was to lead me out of the forest of flowers and back into the worlds of men, but even then, as soon as I began to take practical steps to learn the ruespieler's art, I started to see a certain bizarre veracity behind Pater Pan's modest and outrageous boast.

Having no story to tell to earn myself ruegelt, I continued to vend both my own tantric services and Ali's jewelry in order to maintain a small supply of same while I spent more and more of my time listening to the ruespielers who worked the carnival and following them forth when they took their tales into the street.

Indeed it was the very self-created legend of which Pater Pan had boasted which was the cloak of mythos onto which the tales of the Gypsy Joker ruespielers were sewn. Or mayhap, just as likely, it was Pater Pan who had sewn his own mythic persona together out of swatches of tales snipped from cycles of stories that may indeed have begun as odes sung by bards of the preliterate primeval past, or at any rate certainly seemed to have antecedents that predated the Age of Space. Whether the ruespielers of the Gypsy Jokers unraveled the fabric of the legend of Pater Pan to craft their own tales, or whether Pater had assembled his cloak of personal mythos out of tales told by generations of ruespielers, or whether indeed the truth of the matter was both, the eternal Child of Fortune was the hero of all the most popular tales, and the domo of the Gypsy Jokers was clearly enough the main avatar thereof in the lore of the tribe.

Indeed, each ruespieler had a rather limited repertoire of tales, or so it seemed to me, many of them shared in common, though the more successful ruespielers all had a tale or two that they had made entirely their own, and all would style the tales they held communally somewhat differently, turning what in one version might be romance into another version's farce.

Lance Della Imre told the best version of the most oft-told tale, Spark of the Ark, the story of the Eternal Arkie, who chose to span the entire history of the First Starfaring Age by the expedient, outre even to the Arkies, of passing all but the peak moments thereof in cryogenic slumber.

"And where did he go when the Jump Drive rang down the final curtain on the great slow centuries of the First Starfaring Age?" Lance would demand in his peroration, the most perfect segue from a tale into a plea for donations that any of the ruespielers had contrived.

"Everywhere! Nowhere! Into the space between which lies within our human hearts! There, in that urchin in a Public Service Station smock, here, within this simple teller of the tale, and best of all within the Arkie Sparkie hearts of all you poor quotidian creatures who still retain the nobility of spirit to honor the Arkie Spark within yourselves by showering the teller of the tale with ruegelt!"

Sheila Jin Omar's favorite tale, The Pied Piper of Pan, was perhaps closest to the immediate personal inspiration of the source, since, like myself, she enjoyed certain intimacies with same, and well do I remember her artful declamation thereof, if not without a certain jealous pique.

"Hola, was the Age of Space the wondrous time when our species first pecked its way free of the natal egg of Earth and ventured forth into the starry realms beyond. Mighty for those bygone days in argent and spacefaring science was the land called from afar the Gold Mountain, and all-powerful was its board of directors, the Pentagon, who dreamed of building a new Gold Mountain, an arkology, in which generations of their minions might travel to conquer worlds circling distant stars.

"But alas, the Pentagon was utterly mean-spirited and ruthless in the service of this mighty and noble task, and so those who should have had their wanderjahrs as Children of Fortune were constrained thereby to expend their youth as wage slaves in durance vile.

"Cependant, energy, as the mages even then declared, can be neither created nor destroyed, only channeled or transformed, and no more certainly than when it comes to the kundalinic fires of youth, for to seek to destroy them in the name of obedient servitude is only to arouse and inflame the Serpent's ire.

"Thus did the Serpent Kundalini arise in outrage, and smite the land of the Gold Mountain as Circe had the minions of Odysseus, for behold, the army of young wage slaves was now nowhere to be found, and the fabriks and streets were overrun with a plague of rutting, savage, evil-smelling, hairy, ordure-smeared pigs.

"The pigs were everywhere, soiling the cities, spreading loathsome diseases, smearing the very name of their land with excrement, so that the land of the Gold Mountain came also to be known as the Belly of the Beast. Desperately did the Pentagon strive to complete the arkology Gold Mountain so that they might flee themselves in a simulacrum of their lost golden age from the swinishness and chaos they had themselves unwittingly released.

"Ah, but then did the Pied Piper of Pan appear in the city of the Pentagon, playing that eternal priapic music which has power over both man and beast, and lo, in his passage, the pigs gave over their rootings and ruttings and danced along gaily in his train.

"I will aid you in the nobility of your enterprise," the Pied Piper told the Pentagon, and he declared that he would pipe all the swine out of the Belly of the Beast and into the Gold Mountain, after which it would be a simple matter to let in the void.

"To this the Pentagon readily enough agreed, with scarcely an honest thought as to how the Piper would be paid.

"And so did the Pied Piper of Pan lead the pig people from the Belly of the Beast, but so too did he lead the wage slaves of the Pentagon into the Gold Mountain, for naturellement, the former were only the manifestation in the realm of maya of the thwarted youthful spirits of the latter.

"True to his word, once all were aboard the arkology, the Piper let in the void, but true to his spirit, the void to which his charges were exposed was the one which only the song of the Yellow Brick Road can fill.

"Vraiment, as the tune was changed from the music of unreason to the song that our species had long ago followed from apes into men, so did the wage slaves of the Pentagon follow it out of the Belly of the Beast and into their true selves as Children of Fortune, as the first spacefaring generation of our tribe, as wanderkinder on the first arkology to brave the long light years between the stars, as the first bright flickering of the Arkie Spark. Thus at the very dawning of the First Starfaring Age was the Child of Fortune in glory from the Belly of the Beast reborn."

Thus was the conclusion of one ruespiel the beginning of another, thus did the ruespielers ring changes on each other's interpretations of the tribal mythos, thus did the same familiar figure in various incarnations play the perfect master hero, thus was Pater Pan both the inspiration and creature thereof.

Naturellement, the ruespielers also had access to the vast store of word crystals, books, tapes, computer chips, scrolls, und so weiter that our species has accumulated over several millennia of creating fictions, to which they resorted when all else failed, and even I could have had an instant repertoire by the simple expedient of plagiarizing the perfect masters of the past.

But this was an expedient which somehow never crossed my mind even before I saw how audiences would melt away when they recognized an oft-told tale, or rather, as I was to learn, when the Child of Fortune ruespieler wandered too far from his own mythos.

For on Great Edoku, where the most sophisticated maestros of every art and the greatest of mages gathered to do commerce, the only charm of the ruespieler was that her stories, like the mildly intoxicating dim sum of Dani or the wooden filigree jewelry of Ali, were volkchoses of our demimonde, expressions of the spirit which moved through us.

Whether this was a form of condescension or whether, as Pater and the ruespielers would contend, Children of Fortune, or at any rate Gypsy Jokers, were justly treasured by the Edojin for the wu of their true essence, je ne sais pas, for the inner beings of the citizens of Great Edoku remain unfathomable to me to this very day.

Be that as it may, if one wanted to secure ruegelt from the Edojin, one played the avatar of the Child of Fortune, and extolled the virtues of the tribe, which by his own admission had its highest expression in the living legend who walked among us.

While I was entirely innocent at the time of the art of literary criticism or the lore of human psychoethology, I did sense that Pater was right when he said that all of the stories were patches of the cloth of some whole, vraiment, that in keeping with his identity as the Gypsy King of the Jokers, his boldest lies were also a kind of truth, for from the point of view of the Edojin, at any rate, the Pater Pan who walked among us, the legend whose mantle he had assumed, had in some ultimate sense indeed ridden the long light years with the Arkies, liberated the wage slaves of the Pentagon, been an ancient Gypsy King, no matter whether the flesh in which the same was now contained had passed through all that history or not.

As to the ur-tale itself, the Void at the Axis of the Great Wheel about which all the specific stories revolved, this, alas, remained a central mystery, at least to my perceptions. Which is to say that while the shedding of my intellectual virginity was no less exhilarating than the shedding of my erotic virginity had been, I entered the boudoir of the former with far less craft and self- reparation than the latter, and as a consequence I was far more reluctant to be more than a voyeur.

Each day I resolved to essay my first ruespiel in the form of one of the tales I had heard, and each day I put off my debut to the next, until finally I perceived that I should be content to learn and listen until the spirit was ready to speak through me.

As to when and how my own song would finally be called forth, I had the volktales of our tribe to guide me and the embodiment thereof for a sometime lover, and what I had learned from both was that the Spirit of Fortune spoke through the vie of its Children, that one need first dance to the music before learning to sing the song.

And so there was a time for me that was Golden, a long summer's day of youthful awakening and carefree adventure of the spirit that need never end, or so at the time I thought.

Everything that I did was alive with meaning, for was I not a Child of Fortune in my heart of hearts, leading the life that the spirit thereof commanded, thereby contributing my small part to the mythos of the whole, and enhancing my own enjoyment thereof with the intoxicant of a noble raison d'etre for same thereby?

While I spent more and more of my time trailing after ruespielers and absorbing their tales, I neglected not, or at least not entirely, the more pragmatic aspects of the vie of the Child of Fortune, which is to say that though my deepest attention was to the entirely nouvelle monde of the imagination and intellect which had opened up before me for the first time, I certainly retained a healthy enough loathing for fressen bars to continue to perform as a tantric artist and to hawk Ali's jewelry at least with enough diligence to keep such stuff from passing through my lips.

Nor did my dedication to my newfound role as student impel me to or require a life of monkish celibacy. Indeed there was a certain enzyme of aphrodisia produced in a young brain whose cortices of imagination and intellect were aroused to the levels of excitation of the adolescent erotic backbrain.

Far more ruespielers than one were to benefit amorously from the kundalinic circuit established between my avidity for their tales and my pheromonic receptors. Upon listening to a reasonably attractive ruespieler declaim a tale to my liking, I would often develop a lusty desire to plumb its deeper meanings en boudoir, and indeed, after all his available erotic energies had been depleted, the fellow was then persuaded to discourse on his craft, if only to dissuade further challenges to his sated manhood. Moreover, once both my tantric puissance and sincere desire became general lore among the ruespielers, I was not without volunteers willing to trade instruction in their craft for demonstrations of mine.

Throughout this long golden summer's day, Pater Pan remained my friend and lover in equal measure, displaying naught but approving amusement at my self-appointed role as courtesan of the ruespielers, while demonstrating often enough that the embodiment of their collective oeuvre was also a natural man.

It seemed to me that my life had attained a plane of perfection, that I inhabited a golden dreamland designed for my own delectation, and if this was a street of dreams, I saw nothing beyond into which I ever need awake.

All that was required to raise this perfection to transcendence was the moment when I was finally moved to perform my own tale. Vraiment, there was a certain sweet tension in the contemplation of my debut as a ruespieler, not unlike the joys of contemplating one's first passage d'amour with a new object of desire, and as with such kundalinic energies, the pleasure of the charge lasts longer than the pleasure of release.

Mayhap the foregoing was the rationalization of a sluggardly soul content to drift along in a bliss without risk or change, and indeed I regarded standing alone in the street and declaiming with a certain trepidation. But in truth, since I had no tale to tell, I could hardly be faulted for lack of spiritual courage for failing to make a fool of myself by blathering in public for the sake of hearing my own empty words. Did not the true Child of Fortune wait for the spirit thereof to speak through her?

Be that as it may, all things pass, and even our days of Golden Summer must one day end as our minds do tell us, though the fact that the universe would seem to have imposed this stricture upon us will no doubt remain forever beyond the praise of the human heart.

Chapter 10

Well do I remember the true moment when the carnival ended and the morning after began, though, in point of quotidian fact, the Gypsy Jokers dissolved into legend slowly and piecemeal, even as Pater Pan had intended. For the only truly thespic moment in this otherwise gently en tropic process was the very first, the moment in which in more ways than one, the spirit left us and moved on.  And that was a satori that none of us who were put through it are ever likely to forget.

The event began as a joyous extravaganza, indeed the peak experience of my time as a Gypsy Joker. Pater Pan arbitrarily declared the revival of the ancient Terrestrial festtag of Mardi Gras, in which the Children of Fortune of Woodstock had smoked their pipe of peace with the Great God Mammon in the form of a parade through the city during which all they sold during the rest of the year for profit was showered gratuit as a love offering on the populace. Pater had decided to revive this noble tradition to thank our friends, the Edojin, for their beneficence, and also because he needed a festive spectacle to celebrate the mysterious event he promised for a climax.

Who does not love a parade, ne, and most particularly, who would refrain from dancing in a joyous crowd through the streets and parklands, toxicated, celebrating, and in general encouraged to behave as extravagantly as possible, when given the license to do so, indeed when you are among those hosting this bacchanalia for the public good?

Who would be so mean-spirited as to drag her feet in the hedonic pursuit of such an enterprise, and who would expect the mystery promised for the esthetic cusp of same to be anything but lighthearted?

Not I, not anyone in the parade, and as for the Edojin, certainement they were at least amused by the spectacle of the Gypsy Jokers parading through their streets and parklands, around their public platzes, past their very dwellings, snaking through the vecino like an ancient Han Dragon Dance, its Captain and Pilot the King of the Gypsy Jokers in his Traje de Luces, and its random recomplicated course steered by the Jump of his whim.

We all marched behind our Piper in the Mardi Gras parade, for our encampment was empty, and all that was portable therein in the way of entertainment and cuisine perambulated through Edoku, offering itself to, indeed thrusting itself upon, the populace thereof. The length of our dragon was measured in terms of the intervals required to keep half a dozen musical troops from overlapping into total cacophony. Jugglers juggled, acrobats tumbled, dancers made their way dancing, singers ran up and down the parade to form ever-changing impromptu choruses. Most of the ruespielers remained mute, but a few were mad or toxicated enough to attempt to bellow tales, or at any rate disjointed fragments of same, over the general din.

Those of us who had no entertainments of our own to donate were given our entree into the spirit of the Mardi Gras in the form of bulging sacks filled with finger food, packets of toxicants, little flasks of wine, and even some simple cheap jewelry, which we tossed to the Edojin along the route at our whim and pleasure. I myself had both a sack of Dani's dim sum spiced with a double dose of toxicants and a bag of Ali's jewelry to dispense. The latter, naturellement, was not painstakingly crafted in his usual mode, but consisted of simplified versions of his true art cast in their ersatz scores from molds.

The parade wound from our encampment up through the previously quiet lanes between the residences of the hills, out across the river and along its bank, then back in a course like the body's intestines through the vecino of strogats at the feet of the glass towers, emerging therefrom in clear sight of our empty camp once more, and then across the noonday desert to the great waterfall, along the line of buttes from which it descended, to a shallowly-sunken bowl of a meadow surrounded on three sides by miniature mountain peaks over which a sun was forever in the process of setting, casting a brilliant early-sunset glow over the final proceedings.

As we paraded through the various venues of the vecino, singing, making music and circus, and tossing little treats from our bags to passersby, we collected a certain number of amused Edojin who followed in train alongside, though since no parade route had been announced, indeed since the Pied Piper seemed not to know what turn he would take from one moment to the next, we never marched formally past static throngs. We were a random bolide of a parade, and fortune rather than planning was required to place anyone along our way.

So in truth, by the time we had all reached the parade's terminus in the amphitheater of bright sunset, there were more of our tribe present than Edojin auslanders, though we retained the curious interest of a goodly number of the latter.

For the span of perhaps two hours, the meadow became the venue of a general fete into which the parade devolved, indeed gathered there in that compass were all the Gypsy Jokers of the streets as well as all those who plied their trades in the caravanserei, and here in the meadow of sunset, one could view our tribe entire and all its divertissements, stripped down to its essence, shorn of its tents and concealments, and of any strictures of pecuniary cunning.

Food and toxicants were passed from hand to hand with no thought of recompense. Musicians played, singers sang, buskers entertained, ruespielers told their tales, and all refrained from accepting the donations that many of the Edojin present persisted in tossing. As for artists of the tantra, these performed al fresco tableaus in which all were invited to join, and in which none need pay a price for pleasure.

As for me, once I had emptied my cornucopia of dim sum and bijoux, I merged myself into the generality of the fete, partaking of food and toxicants thrust into my hand, wandering from entertainment to entertainment, ruespiel to ruespiel, unmotivated, for some reason, to join in the tantric performances or seek out a lone lover for a menage a deux.

Vraiment, the only lover I would have sought out at the very midsummer's eve of the Gypsy Jokers was Pater Pan himself, and the domo of the fete was a quicksilver target whom only fortune could place in my arms. Over there, peeking up above the crowd around a ruespieler, disappearing from my sight for tens of minutes, then visible again in the distance in the act of draining a wine flagon, vanishing from view once more, Pater Pan was a mountain that must come to Mohammed, and I was a particle of random motion across a crowded stube.

And then, with the precision of a domo of the floating cultura who senses when the revelry is balanced on the razor-edge of fatigue, Pater Pan appeared as if by thespic magic, indeed in a cloud of sparks and smoke and thunderclaps, atop the rim of the natural amphitheater.

The effect was so preternaturally perfect as to verge precipitously on the comic. Pater had set off a fireworks display of some duration and complexity to attract the attention of all, and when the donner and blitzen ended and the smoke cleared, there he stood, radiant in his Suit of Many Colors, his golden mane of hair and beard transfigured into a boddhi's aura by the flaming actinic disc of the setting sun against which his noble visage was so exactly centered.

Standing there in a range of bonsai mountains and backlit by a sunset that sublimed his material corpus with the photosphere corona of legend, Pater Pan appeared a Titan, a haut turista from Olympus, even to eyes entirely cognizant of the art that went into the effect. You couldn't help but be awed, if only by the transcendental chutzpah.

"Hear me, oh my Children of Fortune!" he shouted with immense pomposity into the hush of his entrance. "Attend, all ye Gypsy Jokers! Behold the King of the Gypsies and the Prince of the Jokers in all his magnificent glory standing before you! See how the puissance of his grandeur dwarfs the very mountains and towers triumphant against the firmament!"

At this truly excessive braggadocio, many present, myself included, found heckling japes forming upon our lips. But none of them quite came forth. For the transcendent image etched upon our retinas gave sufficient pause to create a moment of stasis into which Pater Pan stepped with the timing of a perfect master.

Abruptly, he sat down, leaning his back up against one mountain and draping his arm over the peak of another, converting the cordillera into his somewhat lumpy chaise.

"Of course they're very small mountains," he said in a very different voice, to general laughter. "As for my magnificent glory, it owes a good deal to thespic lighting, and the firmament against which I tower triumphant is no more than the usual Edojin ersatz of the real thing. Sometimes I forget that. You forget it too."

He stood up again, but now the magic of light and perspective was permanently shattered, and he paced in little ellipses as he spoke, as if to prevent his image of glory from reforming.

"Lest we forget, the King of the Gypsies is only a Child of Fortune, and the Prince of the Jokers is a natural man," he declared with entirely uncharacteristic modesty. "The Child of Fortune remembers that no one should follow leaders, and the natural man knows that the only guru worthy of his students is he who knows when enough is enough." He adopted a somewhat hectoring stance as he declaimed the last, as if to chide us for succumbing to his own excessively puissant charms.

"Sure, and I hope you can still all remember that," he said more conversationally. "I hope I will leave behind Children of Fortune who hear the songs of their own spirits, rather than a ragged band of acolytes who hear only the blarney of mine. For Great Edoku is but a single patch of cloth on the fabric of our Second Starfaring Age, and our time here is but a single swatch of time in the millennial story of our kind. And this natural man who stands before you swore a mighty oath to see all and be all on all the worlds of men before his race was run. So swore I, and so should you all swear, for Pater Pan would be no true Child of Fortune if he abandoned his own Yellow Brick Road for the bothersome role of your perpetual patriarch."

He paused, and then, so it seemed, looked directly in my eyes and broke my heart, though others, I was to learn, also shared this privately poignant perception.

"I have sung the song and passed on the lore, I have known you as friends and lovers and named your tribe, and now I hand on the torch. Enough is enough. Ask no more of the King of the Gypsies. His day as domo of this fete is done. On the morrow, the Prince of the Jokers departs to continue his wandering ministry to the Children of Fortune of the far-flung worlds of men. The Gypsy King of Edoku is dead, long live the Joker Prince of the Yellow Brick Road!"

***

Naturellement, I need not describe the descent into general pandemonium generated by this announcement, nor the transformation of our fete into a ragtag babbling rabble filtering in small troops back through the arrondissement of towers to the Gypsy Joker encampment like a high tide receding from a rocky coast back into the sea.

But mayhap the general mood of our retreat bears some elucidation, for while the mal d'esprit that one would have expected was certainly in evidence, there was a complex overtone to it, for none could deny in her heart of hearts that Pater Pan had spoken truth.

Had we not elected his artfully self-graven image as the leader not merely of our tribe but of each of our spirits? And had we all not learned from Pater Pan himself at least enough to know that this was a violation of the very spirit which he had taught us? For is not the true Child of Fortune anyone who follows the lead of his own spirit and no other? Could we therefore deny that the King of the Gypsy Jokers must die lest we forget that Children of Fortune have no chairmen of the board or kings?

And as for me, who knew the natural man better than most, how could I deny the right of the man who had opened up a world for me and more to seek whatever delights he could find on whatever planets he chose?

Thus speaks the suddenly enlightened noble being in the immediate afterglow of a powerful satori, but the natural woman and soon-to-be-abandoned lover within had long since resurfaced by the time I returned to the encampment, and that Moussa was more than capable of quotidian jealousy, though the identity of the rival remained confusingly elusive.

The area in front of Pater's tent was a chaos of supplicants by the time I arrived, in no mood to meekly await my turn for an audience with the pontiff. Dozens of Gypsy Jokers of both genders were speaking to Pater and each other all at once, though most of them who had insinuated themselves closest to Pater were female and clearly had more on their minds than verbal discourse.

This observation did little to cool the ire of my impending abandonment and without thinking, I found myself activating the Touch, as if marshaling the only of my powers on which I believed I could rely in such extremis. A moment later, I found myself putting it to use that it shames me to recount, goosing my way through the crush in a series of yelps of astonishment and moans of mysterious ecstasy, until I stood before Pater in the full flush of my wrath.

But Pater Pan stepped into the moment with that preternatural timing of his, and turned away wrath with a brilliant smile at my appearance, and a gesture towards the open flap of his tent. "Moussa!" he cried. "Vamanos! We must talk!" And, taking me by the hand, he led me inside as his chosen favorite on his last night in Edoku before the eyes of the tribe and the outrage of my riyals.

On the one hand, I was filled with joy at this openhearted confirmation that I had been at least his first among many, but on the other hand, was this not to be a sad good-bye?

"Pater ..."

"Moussa ..."

We stood there beside the bed, which was the only piece of practical furniture, I not knowing whether to be touched or enraged, and he, from the look of him, for once caught without words.

"Why are you doing this, Pater?" I finally demanded.

"I made not my meaning plain?"

Snorting, I changed the configuration by flopping down on the bed. "Thus spake the King of the Gypsies and the Prince of Blarney spinning koans for the general enlightenment. I believe I have a right to know what's really in the heart of my departing lover,"

"You demand to share the secrets of my soul?"

"I must at least assure myself that you have one."

Pater laughed, he shrugged, he sat down on the bed beside me, and regarded me with a fey expression. "The King of the Gypsies may be gone, but the Prince of the Jokers remains," he said. "So if I am required to jive you not, you must give proper value for value received."

"Have I ever even had the power to dissemble with you, Pater?"

"Have you not?" he accused. "Have you not jived me as to the true secret of your tantric powers? Have you not put me off with displays of wounded outrage at my failure to believe that it derives full-blown from the innocent essence of your spirit?"

"Bien, if you will speak now from the heart, my poor one and only secret will then be revealed," I said impulsively, for what did I have to lose by revealing all to a lover who was about to become lost? "The reasons of the perfect master who acts for the good of the body politic I believe I already comprehend, but I must know the personal selfish reasons of the natural man."

"You do see deeply, Moussa," he owned. "For while the altruistic role of guru and public benefactor has its own selfish rewards, he who imagines he has transcended the ego's desires in the service thereof is but a hollow shell. Vraiment, this natural man does indeed have his own arcane lust, his mad personal passion, beyond even playing the Pied Piper of Pan to the Children of Fortune of the worlds of men."

"And you do not speak of that passion inherent in our genital architecture ..."

He laughed. "That is neither arcane nor mad," he said, "Whereas the passion of which I speak for sure is both!"

"To wit ...?"

"Do you not wish to be immortal, Moussa?" he said.

"Who does not? But it is hardly a passion anyone save perhaps a mage of the healing arts has the means to even insanely pursue ..."

"Wrong!" Pater declared in deadly earnest. "After all, one may pursue and even achieve immortality of the spirit in the memory of posterity by doing great deeds or crafting deathless art ..."

"Or by becoming your own deathless work of art as some have done ..." I suggested dryly.

"For sure, as I have long since done," he owned. "But I pursue immortality of a more hedonic and entirely less selfless kind, the kind the Arkies knew  ..."

"The Arkies?"

He nodded, and the strangest look came over him, a look which all but forced me to credit his tales of a birth beyond the dawn of the ancient Age of Space, for in that moment his eyes appeared preternaturally old, as if brimming to overflowing with a million years of sights no mortal man could have lived to see.

"The Arkies passed their generations aboard the great slow arkologies that first brought men to the stars as all do know," he said. "But slow as they were by the standards of the Jump, on their longest voyages they approached within sufficient hailing distance of the speed of light to contract the timestream within. Thus, in a voyage that consumed mere decades of lifespan, might hundreds of light-years be crossed, and far more marvelously, centuries of time.

"Why would the Arkies choose to remain in perpetual motion between the stars? For sure not because the arkologies offered more adventures and delights within their hulls than a planet entire! No, the true dream, the inner heart of the Arkie Spark, was to be there for the whole tale! To weasel a consciousness which spanned millennia of the saga of our species out of the poor three hundred years of our bodies' time! Vraiment, to pursue the impossible goal of knowing the tale of our species' history entire before expiring into the unknowing void! To be, at any rate, as immortal as our kind itself, not as a legend, but in the flesh as a witness, and a natural man!"

"Madness!" I exclaimed. "Impossible! And at any rate, all that, like the Arkies themselves, passed with the First Starfaring Age ..."

"So say those who call themselves mages of history!" Pater declared. "Towards the middle of the First Starfaring Age did it not become common for colonists to pass the long light-years in cryonic sleep, and was not lifespan thereby preserved from time and boredom? Arkies possessed of sufficient funds and daring took to freezing themselves for centuries, awakening for a few months to live another chapter of the long story and replenish their funds, and then jumping through time in the cold of sleep once more. Some were said to have done this scores of times and lived to see the Second Starfaring Age unfold!"

"You display an amazing erudition in the inner lore of the Arkies," I said dryly.

"Porque no? I was there!'

"Is this all in the service of telling me that the man beside me is a fossil Arkie thawed from the glacier of time?"

"Have I not told you that before? Did you believe it then? Do you believe it now? Believe that I saw the First Starfaring Age or not, believe at least that I mean to see the undreamed of wonders of the Third unfold, or nobly perish in the attempt!"

"Impossible!"

"For sure?" said Pater Pan, with the strangest haunted look stealing into his eyes. "Consider. No lifespan at all is lost in electrocoma passage on Void ships, and compared to the cryonics of the First Starfaring Age, successful awakening is so assured that we think nothing of risking it for the sake of mere economic convenience, ne."

"But ... but Void Ships take mere days or weeks to voyage among the worlds of men, not centuries ..."

"Vraiment!" Pater exclaimed. "Therefore, the more you see of the worlds of men, the more you see of time! Moussa, Moussa, have you never yearned to walk the streets of future cities, to meet the citizens of a far future age, to be there when our species at long last greets fellow sapients from across the sea of suns? Have you never railed in your heart against the knowledge that the greatest chapters in our species' tale will surely unfold after you are dead and gone? The Arkies sought to cheat the hand of unjust mortality with a few long slow dangerous leaps, but in the Second Starfaring Age, I seek to do it as it must be done now ..."

Snap! Snap! Snap! went his fingers. "Like that! As the Edojin use the Rapide!"

"Just how many worlds have you seen ..." I whispered in wondering awe, for certainement while the goal he pursued must surely remain forever beyond the reach of mortal man, the millennial quest therefor seemed not entirely beyond the realm of universal law, though the mind both reeled and soared at its contemplation.

"Quien sabe?" said Pater Pan in a voice much less grand. "At least a hundred, if memory serves. And I seek to see the rest before my body's time runs out."

He shrugged. He sighed. And for the first time since I had known him I glimpsed a dark and wistful sadness lurking in the blue depths of my Pied Piper's bright eyes. "In truth, I know that in the end, I must fail, vraiment, what a monster I would be if I truly hoped to succeed, for not even I have the ego to truly wish to see our species vanish from the stars. But if in the end I cannot sanely or justly hope to experience all of human time, then by the spirit which brought me down from the trees and by the Yellow Brick Road which goes forever on, I mean to attempt to experience at any rate all the worlds of men in the pursuit thereof, to die as I have lived, and declare my life a limited victory in the final moment thereof!"

Pater touched my hand. He cocked his head and regarded me with eyes which in that moment seemed both gay and sad, heroic and futile, and in them I saw both the noblest and bravest spirit in all the worlds of men and the smallest of boys terrified of the greatest of darks. "Now do you understand why the natural man, no less than the King of the Gypsies and the Prince of the Jokers cannot stand in place too long?" he said softly.

"Vraiment!" I declared. How mad and sad and doomed and marvelous it all was! What a tale to live as the adventure of your life! "Take me with you!" I said. "I am more than ready to trip the life fantastic through the planets and down the centuries with you forever!"

"I could not do that, even if I wanted to," Pater said, regarding me with a warm and wistful tenderness in which, nevertheless, I could read no regret. "We may be two souls of the same spirit, you and I, but this path that I have chosen is for my steps alone. The natural man who loves you would not let your young soul tag along as consort of such a Fliegende Hollander for the same reason that the Pied Piper must move on when the Children of Fortune have learned the music of his song. Your Yellow Brick Road must be of your own choosing. If the destiny thereof should one day bring you once more to my side, then I will welcome you as an equal spirit. But only as an equal spirit, never a consort. Never as the girl that is, only as the woman you will become. Comprend?"

"Yes," I said in the tiniest of voices. "I like it not, but I do believe I do."

And then, as if to dull the edge of the knife, the spirit of the Joker emerged once more, and spoke in a tone of the most loving cynicism. "Besides, spiritual imperatives and financial considerations coincide. Since the funds I need to travel are paid for with time, I can't afford a free rider, now can I?" Somehow this entirely false mingyness, under the circumstances, was the tenderest mercy of all.

We stared into each other's eyes for a long silent moment, saying good-bye, or, I dared hope, auf wiedersehen, hugging each other's spirits; he long since centered on the acceptance of this as his self-chosen destiny, I not having the least notion as to what my future destiny might be.

Then, as the silent communion began to stretch into a poignant agony, Pater, with his perfect mastery of timing, laughed, shrugged, and screwed his face into the comic rendition of a mean- spirited little boy. "And speaking of value given for value received," he said in an ironic tone, "now that I have shared the deepest secret of my soul, you must reveal the secret of the magic in your touch."

"Well spoken!" I giggled, amazed to find such laughter bubbling up in my spirit as if at the Piper's bidding. "Indeed, far more well spoken for once than the speaker himself believes."

I removed the ring of Touch from my finger and ceremoniously placed it on the little finger of Pater's right hand.

"This?" he exclaimed. "This common piece of bazaar jewelry is the source of your power?"

"Designed without esthetic appeal or apparent economic value to discourage the attention of thieves," I told him ... Attends." So saying, I reached out, took his hand, thumbed on the ring, and before he knew what I was about, had draped his hand squarely upon his own lingam.

The look that came onto his face at once should have been captured in halo or oils by a master craftsman, for I have never, before or since, seen such a melange of amazement, pleasure, befuddlement, and embarrassment appear in such a simultaneous manner on a human visage. He pawed at himself experimentally and stilled a moan. He stroked the inside of his own thigh. He stared at the ring in befuddled delight.

"Merde!" he exclaimed. "I would be the last to deny the esteem in which I hold my own person, but even I would never have believed I could so love myself!"

"My father made it," I told him. "He calls it the Touch."

"Your father? Cuanto cuesta? Surely you can prevail upon him to grant a discount to an amigo? With this and the already puissant prowess of the great Pater Pan, I could plow a course through the women of the worlds that would make Don Juan and Casanova seem like dour celibates!"

"No doubt," I said dryly. "But it is unobtainable at any price. In all the worlds of men, mine is the only one there is, and my father has sworn an oath that no more will be made until I give my leave."

"Pas problem! Only direct him to make a single exception ..."

"And loose what priapic demon on the innocent women of the worlds?"

"Vraiment," Pater said quite seriously, removing the ring and placing it in my hands. "If every lover in all the worlds of men wore such a ring, what would become of the tantric art? If all of us were perfect masters of pleasure, would we still recognize those moments when via the flesh two true spirits meet?"

"I have noticed no lack of such a communion of the spirit between us ..." I pointed out.

"I am not utterly convinced that such a device may not corrode the courage of love's spirit ..."

"I feel no corrosion of my lover's courage!" I insisted.

"Bien. Then you will not object to my suggestion that our last passage d'amour on Edoku be au naturel. Is it not now just that the natural woman now emerge from her magic fortress to bid a true lover bon voyage?"

"Well spoken," I impulsively declared, for the trepidation I felt at his words, bizarrely akin to that of a young virgin about to disrobe for the first time before her lover, only served to spur me on. For what is courage except in the face of fear, and what is love if not the baring of one's own naked and imperfect truth?

So saying, I unwound my Gypsy Joker's sash from about my waist, and began to undress. In truth did I experience something of the trepidatious joy of a virgin's premiere performance, though fortunately not the useless ignorance of same.

Then we were in each other's arms and the truth of it was that while the duration and sensual intensity of the artistic performance might have been less preternaturally sustained, the essence of the experience, stripped down to the essentials of lingam and yoni, was quite the same.

At first each of us strove to overmaster the other with pleasure, and if this loverly contest was now more equal, indeed if for once Pater did obtain the upper hand, the outcome of this almost jocular overture was as before -- we proceeded on to the next movement, in which the duality of giving and receiving pleasure was annihilated in the experience of pleasure itself, and two spirits reached a single cusp.

Vraiment, for once it was but a single cusp, and for once, neither of us felt the need to essay or offer more. Which is not so much to say that we were sated as to say that in tantra, as in any other art, we both realized with the wisdom of our flesh, one does not mar a perfect miniature by attempting to blow it up into a work of epic proportions.

"It would appear that yours is a lover's spirit capable of surviving such power," Pater said at length when we had covered ourselves and snuggled together in the dark. "Myself, I would not trust who, I wonder, is the real Gypsy, and who the real Joker?"

"The two of us," I said, strangely content now to lie in the arms of this man who would be leaving on the morrow.

"I will be gone when you awake," Pater said, as if reading my thoughts. "Better to say auf wiedersehen now than in a tearful morning, ne. I will cut a patch from your tunic before I go and leave you a patch of mine to sew into your sash, so that we will each wear a patch of the other's karma in the fabric of our destinies."

Touched, I kissed him lightly on the cheek. "Leave me with one thing more," I asked him. "Moussa is a kindernom given me by my parents in homage to the patron creature of an innocent childhood long since past. Give me then a true name for the Child of Fortune of the road, and I in turn will promise not to assume it until I am worthy, which is to say until I have earned my first coin as a ruespieler. Thereafter, it will be the name you have given me until we meet again or forever, whichever comes first."

"A name for the ruespieler you will one day be ...?" Pater said thoughtfully. "Bien, I dub thee Sunshine, light of the world and Lucifer's daughter, a star among many but equal to all, and the sacramental wafer of the Children of Fortune of the Age of Space."

"Sunshine ..." I muttered sleepily. ''It seems rather an extravagant name."

"Would I name you for anything less than glory? Sunshine you will be when you are ready to shine forth in the dark."

Those are the last words I remember him speaking that night, though no doubt there were less coherent endearments muttered in that hypnagogic limbo of lost memory occluded by the impending onset of sleep.

True to his word, when I awoke, the King of the Gypsies and the Prince of the Jokers had vanished from my world.

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