CHILD OF FORTUNE

Chapter 11

Our immediate general response as Gypsy Jokers on the morrow of Pater Pan's departure was to make a valiant effort to carry on in the spirit of the tribe, both in homage to his legend, and out of a certain twisted quest for exoneration in his eyes that was not without its aspect of psychic vengeance. Which is to say we developed the retrospective perception that our missing protector and patron had never really worked at any of the enterprises we had established save as founder and inspirational dilettante. Were we ourselves not true Children of Fortune, vraiment were we not Gypsy Jokers? Surely we could maintain the spirit and commerce of the carnival on our own!

Naturellement, in moments of reflection even at the time, I understood all too well that the wound which Pater's departure had inflicted on our spirits was designed to produce precisely this response. Nor could I deny the justice in the challenge. If we were unable to be Gypsy Jokers without Pater Pan, how could we have counted ourselves worthy of being Gypsy Jokers with him?

And indeed for a time, to our credit, we succeeded in maintaining our enterprises by our own efforts. Ruespielers, hawkers, and buskers ventured forth as before, the tents of our caravanserei continued to draw customers for tantric performances, games of chance, and entertainments, and craftsmen continued to produce their wares.

Vraiment, it appeared that Pater's departure had truly served to teach the lesson he had intended. Whether what happened next was another koan prepared for our rough-hewn edification by Pater Pan or whether it was a malfunction of his scenario is difficult to clarify even in retrospect, for it hinged upon the peculiarly Edojin creative ambiguity towards matters of legal philosophy.

As I have said, the erection of Child of Fortune favelas was supposedly proscribed on Edoku, or at least as proscribed as anything short of violence or outright rapine could get. Indeed as far as anyone knew, the encampment of the Gypsy Jokers was the sole exception to this mandate, and as to how Pater Pan had cozened the Edojin into granting it, this was as great a mystery among us as the means whereby the Edojin enforced their displeasure against potential encampments of other tribes.

For if I have failed in the course of this narrative to adequately describe or even mention the governing councils and law enforcement officials of Great Edoku, it is not out of oversight or sloth. From the perspective of the Child of Fortune, such councils and officials were entirely non- existent, since one never perceived such personages or their policies in evidence. Enforcement of the civilized niceties simply occurred; the apprehension and punishment of thieves and pickpockets by impromptu posses which Pater had turned into a remunerative enterprise seemed to be the general model of how the body politic of Edoku dealt with miscreants.

As to how the encampment of the Gypsy Jokers had become selfed to the social immune system of the body politic of Edoku, the subtlety of Pater Pan's politicking only began to emerge into view as matters began to deteriorate in its absence.

Within a week of the Mardi Gras parade, the custom of the encampment, far from being augmented by the mythos of this event, began to measurably decline. This was most pronounced when it came to the products of the craftsmen, which all at once seemed to be out of favor. Even the jewelry of Ali went begging for customers at reduced prices at his stand in the encampment, and it soon began to seem pointless for me to try to peddle it in the streets and parks.

The quality and artistry of our crafts had not declined, but alas, they had never found favor on the basis of same in the first place. Rather they had been emblematic artifacts of the treasured quaintness and romantic spirit of the Child of Fortune, to whom one gave ruegelt as an act of fond remembrance to one's own wanderjahr.

Perhaps Pater had been too cunning for our own good, for his own mythos had been such a selling point of our mystique that when it abandoned that mystique in public, our quaintness lost its wu, we were once more perceived as scruffy urchins, and trinkets that had once been votive items in the cult of our spirit were now regarded by the Edojin as tawdry junk.

It was not long thereafter that our tantric tableaus began to play to empty tents, and even those inviting participation began to lose their trade. For once the spirit of the Child of Fortune lost its currency as a stylistic mode, the Child of Fortune was no longer a popular fantasy of the erotic imagination. And on Edoku, where every fantasy of the imagination was made manifest, we could hardly compete with the thousand-and-one delights on the basis of our artistry alone.

As for solo tantric performance, which when all was said and done had been my only reliable source of ruegelt, a night in a tent pretending you were once more a Child of Fortune or an al fresco adventure with same upon momentary whim in the nearest garden, once they were no longer considered wu, became acts of esthetic barbarity.

Well did I come during this devolution to understand the reticence of lordly tribesmen to be observed by denizens of the Public Service Stations partaking of fressen bars! The only of our enterprises that retained some vitality was the vending of finger food from trays, for even the Edojin developed instant cravings for a snack, and would weigh not heavily esthetic judgments if the smell of same reached a hungry palate.

Soon, therefore, our cooks were importuned by hordes of their indigent comrades and lovers, for there was hardly anyone in the encampment who did not have a claim of friendship with one cook or another as I did with Dani. How could he stand idly by and gain profit by peddling his dim sum to the Edojin while I was reduced to choking down fressen? How could he refuse similar alms to anyone else with the same moral claim? How could any true Gypsy Joker see another, and by extension his whole tribe, humiliated in the Public Service Stations when he had the means and the art to prevent his fellow tribesmen from descending to fressen?

And indeed, at first our noble artistes de cuisine could not. Instead of devoting their attentions to selling their fare for ruegelt, they volunteered their efforts to the feeding of their fellows without thought of gain.  But alas, without the infusion of ruegelt into this closed economic ecology, there was no way to purchase the ingredients to produce free meals.

At length Dani and his fellow guildsmen saw that further such altruism would in any event be self-extinguishing in the form of bringing their ruin, and, rather than tell their friends and lovers that henceforth ye shall eat fressen and face their outrage, they slunk off in a body without the agonies of more formal farewells.

Now all that we Gypsy Jokers had to distinguish ourselves from the commonality of the Publics were our emblematic Cloth of Many Colors and a desolate village of empty tents. The fressen we were forced to eat was spiced as well with the bile of shame, for in order to secure supplies of the loathsome substance without suffering the jibes of the masses of the Publics, we removed our tribal colors and came and went incognito.

While in truth I for one certainly felt unjustly punished by fate for a shortcoming whose nature I could not fathom, indeed after eating enough fressen could even style myself the victim of Pater Pan's malice, I for one also sensed that there was a satori in all this that transcended such niceties of moral expectation. For while it was easy enough to rail at the malignity of fate, to what agent of injustice could the outraged finger point? To Pater Pan, who had done nothing more evil than impart his spirit and lore and then leave it to us to carry the torch thereof forward? To the Edojin, whose greatest offense was that they no longer seemed to find us charming?

Vraiment, once the moving finger began seeking out targets, only great feats of willful ignorance could prevent it from pointing within.

Certainement, we had all come to rely far too much on Pater Pan and far too little on ourselves for our initiative, and by the time the cooks had left the encampment, all of us who found ourselves forced to subsist on fressen when left to our own independent devices had quite absorbed this lesson.

For myself, this was not so much a lesson in humility as a lesson in my own lack of necessary hubris, which is to say chutzpah, for Pater had left me the name of Sunshine for my career as a ruespieler, and had told me aspects of his tale that were not at all current in the repertoires of others. Moreover, I had fairly well memorized the gists of a dozen or so tales, and one would have thought that someone reduced to fressen would have been a good deal less punctilious about originality.

Yet somehow I never summoned up the courage to stand on a crowded street and begin to declaim. I, who had blarneyed the King of the Gypsy Jokers out of one hundred coins of ruegelt, could not bring myself to address the Edojin in search of far pettier sums!

In truth I do now believe we were all somewhat overharsh in our self-judgments and became more so the longer we lingered in our spiritless encampment, for though at the time we could not quite perceive it, the true lesson that we were being taught was not so much that we were incompetent sloths as that we were still very new to the vie of the Child of Fortune. We had known nothing but the perfect befuddlement of the rube in a strange land, and then the first Golden Summer of our lives on the Yellow Brick Road, and what we were learning now was ultimately nothing more sinister than the final forced perception that all such Golden Summers eventually come to an end.

I finally achieved this satori the night the ruespielers decided to quit the camp. I say we were all overharsh in our self-judgments, and the truth of it is that I was perhaps overharsh in chiding myself for lacking the courage to begin spieling, for certainement in those days it took great chutzpah for even the most artful and experienced of our ruespielers to address their tales to the Edojin. Indeed, more and more of them had given up trying.

For if our crafts no longer had wu in their eyes, and our buskers no longer charmed, and even our tantric services were now considered nikulturni, how much less would the Edojin be inclined to donate ruegelt or even pause to listen to tales extolling a mythos whose trend had come and gone?

As an intimate of many of the ruespielers, and moreover, one known to diligently admire and aspire to practice their art, I was invited to the convocation that was eventually held in one of the now vacant tents -- or at least my attendance was not discouraged once I got wind of it.

It was obvious at once that the generality of the meeting had been resolved before it began to quit the encampment and scatter to the winds while they still had a coin or two for the Rapide. Indeed, by this time, the cooks were not the only Gypsy Jokers who had departed. One by one, craftsmen, tantric artists, and street performers had drifted away to try their tuck in other parts of Edoku where any Gypsy Joker was a legendary creature, so that by the time the ruespielers held their meeting, the tribe was down to half its number, and of these, the majority, like myself, were Children of Fortune without the marketable skills to believe that their prospects might be better elsewhere.

One by one, ruespielers arose to announce their intention to seek fortune elsewhere. After no more than a half hour of this testimony, further reiteration of the obvious was clearly redundant, and the meeting broke up into a farewell party full of toxicated conversations.

I bade farewell to Shane and Lance and other onetime lovers in something of a daze, yet a daze heightened and amplified by something more than social toxication. For I was bidding farewell to more than friends, lovers, and artists whose tales I admired; like it or not, I was also bidding farewell to all possibility of continuing the life which had so perfectly satisfied my spirit during the Golden Summer. Pater was gone, and the central magic of that time with him. I was no longer able to earn ruegelt as a tantric performer, and now, once the ruespielers were gone, I could no longer share that life of the intellect to which I had become fondly accustomed by dallying in their company.

Yet, strange to tell, as the evening progressed I felt less and less desolated by this loss and more and more possessed by a peculiar elation, an elation whose source, under the circumstances, was impossible to find.

Until, after several hours of aimless farewell fete, Shane Kol Barka became sufficiently inflamed by the moment and his own toxication to offer up as a valedictory yet another time-warped transmogrification of the tale of The Spark of the Ark, which it would seem, he extemporized on the spot for the occasion.

"As all do know, when the First Starfaring Age ended, the way of life which had sparked the Arkies time out of mind went whirling down the onrushing black hole of the Second Starfaring Age as Void Ships began to speed between the worlds of men like the Rapide, ending the isolation of one planet from another and ending too any sane raison d'etre for the great slow arkologies which were the Yellow Brick Road caravans of the Arkie generations ..."

He paused, inhaled more toxicant, and went on in an even more florid and hectoring tone. "Yet, think ye not that the Second Starfaring Age sprung full-blown from the brow of Jove nor that the Arkies folded their tents of an evening and gave up the ghost sans a certain rage against the dying of their light! For the great and now useless arkologies still existed, and with the scrap heap as the only other bidder, some Arkies were able to purchase for a song the arkologies in which they had once been happy coolies.

"Alas for the most part theirs were pitiful and maudlin tales which hardly bear repeating, tales of the pathetic and indigent curators of a once noble spirit futilely attempting to keep alive a way of life whose time was long since past, and for the first few centuries of the Second Starfaring Age, deteriorated hulks of arkologies would drift into solar systems like ancient rusted ghosts, with their denizens long since expired from cryogenic failure or starvation, or worse, bearing a generation of babblers whose very humanity had been sapped by the slow depletion of the oxygen supply to their brains.

"Yet as all here do know, the Spark of the Ark was not extinguished by the Second Starfaring Age. For it pleased Fortune that the King of the Gypsies was then an Arkie embarked on a slow voyage of exploration far beyond what was the furthest limits of the worlds of men when it began. For long centuries, he and a few comrades slumbered in cryogenic sleep while the arkology crept with its cargo of colonists towards the far virgin star that had been set as its goal by generations long dead, while unbeknowst and unseen all around them, the great Second Starfaring Age blossomed into full flower.

"So when at last the arkology reached its preordained destination, voila, it found itself not in orbit about a virgin world far from the homes of men, but orbiting Novi Mir itself, a bustling hub of the Second Starfaring Age which had been well-settled for centuries and which now lay well within the sphere of our species' domestication.

"Thus all aboard had been translated via space through time into a far future in which the Way they thought they would follow forever had long since passed into legend. Those Arkies who had been born and lived out their lives as the last generation of the arkology's timestream became but one more tribe of fossils living out the shell of a dead dream, the very last Arkies, wandering from world to world in their Fliegende Hollander until their line expired.

"But the King of the Gypsies, upon awakening like Barbarossa from what in his timestream was but a single night's sleep, saw with the eyes of the true spirit and spoke thusly unto those who had slumbered through the centuries with him. ..."

Shane paused, and stared out across our company as if we were those ancient Arkies, and when he declaimed again, it was as that Gypsy King of old, and mayhap another.

"The days of our tribe are ended. Doomed are those fools who seek to live out a lost Golden Age, for by so doing they lose the very spirit which makes any age golden. Let us therefore not rail against the destiny that has flung us by our stiff necks beyond all hope of remaining what we once were. Rather let us embrace the unknown future with the spirit we embody, for the true Child of Fortune of whom our past personas were but one time-bound avatar knows that the Yellow Brick Road is a journey with no final destination."

Shane Kol Barka quaffed a draught of wine, and when he continued, he was the teller of the tale again, delivering his peroration.

"Thus spoke the Gypsy King of the Arkies, and by so saying became the Pied Piper of the new breed of Children of Fortune of our Second Starfaring Age. Thus spoke the King of the Gypsies and by so saying became the Prince of Jokers to our very own tribe, never truer to the spirit thereof than when he freed it from the maya we had clung to!"

Somewhat shakily, he finished in a much more conversational mode, leaning up against the chair from which he had risen and speaking not so much as a ruespieler but as a fellow Gypsy Joker.

'Thus speaks Shane Kol Barka, thus should we all speak now, and by so saying, free ourselves from our Golden Age as Gypsy Jokers and go forth into the streets of Great Edoku as naked beings in homage not to the maya but to the true spirit thereof."

While a bit short on plot and a bit long on toxicated didacticism, Shane Kol Barka's tale spoke nonetheless to the mystery which had been confounding my heart. Why had my mourning for a perfect bliss now lost been slowly replaced by an excited expectation for the nameless? Why had this occurred upon learning that my days as a consort of the ruespielers were now perforce ended?

Naturellement, because now the difficult and arduous decision to venture forth from the camp of the Gypsy Jokers as a lone traveler on the Yellow Brick Road had been removed from the realm of my own efforts. All that I might have wished to cling to had been yanked out from under me. I was now a free spirit, for I could choose no other course.

Vraiment, like all satoris, this one in retrospect seems like a recitation of the obvious, for like all satoris, it only brought to full awareness in the moment of enlightenment those unfaced truths which were inherent in what one already knew.

And like all true satoris, it sent the spirit forward into its corollaries. For by observing how an impromptu tale somewhat toxicatedly declaimed had chanced to crystallize a moment of clarity out of my own foggy occlusions, I had a glimpse of the highest achievement to which a ruespieler might aspire.

It was enough to finally make me resolve that I would not linger in the nostalgia-haunted encampment of the Gypsy Jokers on the morrow when the ruespielers would be gone. Rather would I go forth into the streets of Edoku as a naked being and, come what may, summon up the courage to emulate my noble mentors.

* * *

And indeed I did so. Or at least I stuffed my few belongings into my pack, made my farewells, and sweet-talked Ali out of sufficient ruegelt as a bon voyage gesture to finance a single Rapide trip to nowhere in particular.

Indeed, rather than return to any venue on Edoku I had previously frequented, nowhere in particular was where I decided to go. Which is to say I simply ordered up the lengthy list of "Public Squares" on the screen of my Bubble, closed my eyes as the choices scrolled by, and chose the first destination to meet my eyes when I opened them. "Luzplatz," I told the Rapide, and was forthwith carried thither.

Immediately upon emerging from the Rapide station, which was hidden in plain sight as a strobing cube of blue brilliance, I was given cause to wonder what jape the trickster of random chance enjoyed at my expense, and given cause as well to realize to what extent I had forgotten that the vecino around the Gypsy Joker encampment was in no way any more typical of Great Edoku than any venue therein was typical of any other.

All unknowing, I had chosen to expend my funds on a one-way Rapide translation to perhaps the most outre and daunting vecino I had yet seen on the planet.

I was surrounded by tall buildings as stark in their rectilinearity and as pristine in their neutral surface texture as a forest of monoliths. Which is not to say that the buildings surrounding the Luzplatz were paragons of unadorned functionality, for every surface thereof was ablaze with a chaos of color to the point where at first glance they all appeared to be constructed not of matter but of energy, Some walls were simple glowing expanses of red or blue or hot yellow, others were covered with arabesque patterns, serpents, rivers of multicolored luminosity. Some displayed portraits of landscapes, or cities, or even people, done up in highly stylized modes with a palette of light. Some of these patterns and pictures remained static, some of them evolved slowly over time, and still others moved in real time like a holocine. No building seemed illumined in a style designed to blend harmoniously with that of any other, and even one wall of a single building might display lighting effects of three or four different modes.

It was quite literally a dazzling spectacle, for the eye was hard-pressed to resolve this chaotic brilliance into coherent architectural modules; rather did it seem to me that I was surrounded by huge jagged curtains of light patched together out of assorted swatches of multicolored energy, not unlike the Cloth of Many Colors which I wore as a sash about my waist.

The Luzplatz itself was a wide circular strogat formed by the convergence of half a dozen radial avenues. The outer perimeter thereof was girdled round with boutiques, tavernas, restaurants, and the entrances to hotels, all illumined in the same riotous melange of styles. In the center of this circular platz thronged with people was a piece de resistance of a bonsaied landscape suitable to the extravagance of the vecino of which it formed the axis.

A moat of foaming water completely surrounded a heavily wooded island which rose to a mountain peak perhaps seventy meters tall. Everything was in perfect scale -- tiny breakers lapping a fringe of white beach less than a meter wide, miniature trees as tall as my finger was long, barely visible rivulets of water tumbling down little canyons -- yet the whole was dwarfed by the brazenly brilliant ersatz works of men surrounding it.

But the effect of the bonsaied island was in no way diminished by this reversal of scale between the urban and natural realms, for the central peak thereof was a mighty miniature volcano in the permanent full glory of eruption. Red hot lava flowed down its sides to send clouds of hissing steam billowing into the air where it touched the water of the moat. The crater glowed like a cauldron of starstuff, and at regular intervals blasted fusillades of brilliant bolides high in the air. Above it towered a boiling pillar of smoke which rose beyond the tops of the buildings into the black, star-speckled sky and which glowed an evil deep orange cast by the furnace of magma seething beneath it.

Moreover, after my senses had to some extent adjusted to all this perpetual light and fire, I saw that, shrunken with distance, was another spectacle curiously congruent with the endless volcanic display of the Luzplatz.

The entire vecino lay under perpetually clear black starry night, all the better to set off its mad chaos of aggressively artificial illumination, and the surrounding geography was therefore veiled in darkness. The single exception was a full-scale snow-capped cone of a mountain shining in its own private blaze of noon in the far distance. The eye could tell at once that it was far off and huge rather than another nearby miniature, for on its somewhat flattened peak, suborbital rocket shuttles could be seen to take off and land on thin trails of fire, and so too did less flamboyant shuttles arrive and depart thereon to service Void Ships in orbit.

The tame bonsaied volcano, the brilliantly lit buildings towering over it, the gateway to the stars in turn dwarfed by the perspective of distance, it all seemed designed to make some elusive philosophical statement, whose inner esthetic, alas, seemed entirely ambiguous to any but the Edojin.

Suffice it to say that all at once I found myself a rube in Xanadu once more, a Child of Fortune ordinaire among many, a stranger once more in Great and unfathomable Edoku.

***

There were several Publics in the immediate vecino of the Luzplatz, and despite initial appearances, a short walk in any direction was sufficient to take me to any one of several different styles of parkland and garden in which to sleep. In this arrondissement, as elsewhere on Edoku, my simple animal needs presented no practical problems.

Indeed, had I wished, no doubt I could have satisfied less basic needs in the Publics of the Luzplatz, for during my brief forays therein, I soon enough learned that the organized tribes in this vecino were few and mainly devoted to the pickpocket's and pilferer's trades, while the mystique of the Gypsy Jokers was far from unknown. I had only to wear my Cloth of Many Colors to be immediately accounted an aristocrat in these circles, albeit a somewhat fallen one. On the other hand, knowledgeable as I had become in the various enterprises of the streets in comparison with these greeners, I could have concealed my tribal identity and no doubt speedily organized my own little tribe with myself as domo.

Nevertheless, I chose to do neither. Young I might have been, but never jejune enough to fantasize a return to the society of the Publics in which I had been a commoner as a petty little queen. Disbanded though the Gypsy Jokers might be, I was still too infused with the spirit thereof to wear the Cloth of Many Colors and eat fressen in Publics at the same time.

I therefore chose for a time the vie of the solitary, venturing into the Publics in anonymity when necessary but eschewing, for the most part, the social life, such as it was, to be had by lingering therein. For I had sworn an oath to myself that I would go forward along the Yellow Brick Road as a ruespieler, never backward into the society out of which I had evolved, and indeed, I knew on some inner level that by keeping to my own company, I would be forced to screw up my courage to declaim, if only to escape from ennui.

I spent my first few days in the vecino of the Luzplatz haunting the stroget surrounding the volcano, assessing the ambiance, familiarizing myself with the ebb and flow of street traffic, sizing up the crowds, und so weiter, or so I told myself. In truth, of course, I was accomplishing nothing at all save procrastination, for the Luzplatz was thronged at all hours, the ebb and flow of the bustle resembled nothing so much as the randomness of brownian motion, and as for the ambiance, it was the very same melange of purposeful commerce and hedonic extravagance to be found in any similar venue on Edoku, if energized to a somewhat higher pitch by the blazing displays of light and the perpetual eruption of the bonsaied volcano.

At length, this cowardly dissembling became all too evident as such even to the most superficial levels of my self-awareness, and there was nothing for it but to proceed into the heart of my fear.

There was a ring of stone benches circling the moat around the volcano, and, forcing any further thoughts from my mind, I took off my pack, jumped up on the nearest bench, spread my arms wide as I had watched many ruespielers do, and announced the title of my spiel in as loud a shout as I could muster, if in a voice not exactly without a tremulo: "The -- the Tale of the Spark of the Ark!"

While I could see that I had caught the momentary attention of most of the passersby within range of my voice by the simple expedient of leaping into prominent visibility and assaulting their eardrums, the same effect could as easily have been produced by setting off an explosion, which is to say that heads turned at the sound of the noise, but as soon as the source thereof had been verified, all those whose attention had been attracted went on about their previous business and pleasures.

Far from undaunted, but by now thoroughly committed, I focused my eyes on the arabesque patterns of light swirling across the wall of a nearby building to shield myself from knowledge of the size of my audience or the utter lack thereof, and launched into my own recomplicated declamation of the version of the tale that Shane Kol Barka had told at the ruespielers' farewell fete, for this had been spontaneously declaimed in such rude style, yet with such effect, at least upon my own spirit, that I felt that even such as I might retell it with some improvement,

"Think not that the Second Starfaring Age sprang full-blown from the brow of We Who Have Gone Before when the Jump Drive was invented, nor that the Arkies of the First Starfaring Age meekly gave over a noble way of life that had endured for millennia when the Void Ships began to knit together the isolated island worlds of men! For the Spark of the Ark is with us today, attend my tale and learn how ..."

While I was attempting to avoid gazing upon the passing throng as I continued to declaim for fear of being entirely tongue-tied by what I might see, I could not avoid counting the house, as it were, out of the corner of my eye, and perceiving to my dismay that it was nil. Nowhere in all that bustle and movement could I detect a stationary person or a look of rapt attention.

"... some Arkies were able to purchase the arkologies in which they had been ... in which they had been willing coolies ..."

What a fool I felt! Standing there shouting into an entirely indifferent whirlwind! Yet strangely, the more foolish and futile I felt, the more I felt my courage grow, for as I grew to lose all hope of attracting an attentive audience, the acceptance of certain defeat by this measure caused me to redefine victory into something attainable, which is to say that I was seized by the angry determination that, come what may, I would not be silenced by indifference, I would tell my tale to the end, even if the only audience was my own spirit.

"... for it pleased Fortune that the Piper of Pan followed the Arkies he had led on a long slow voyage of exploration beyond the furthest known limits of the worlds of men ..."

With hindsight's vision, and not without a certain affection for that foolishly brave girl tremulously declaiming her tale into a vacuum, do I now perceive what a strange, noble, and pathetic figure I cut, an urchin with a pack at her feet standing on a bench before the dwarfing spectacle of an erupting volcano, shouting at the indifferent milling throngs, first in hope, then in embarrassed terror, and finally with the full-throated voice of wounded outrage.

Yet, to my own inner credit, I persisted, and when I finally came to the end of the ordeal, my voice was firm, my body was trembling, my spirit was addressing persons unknown or at least unseen, and I fairly shouted my defiance, switching to Lance Della Imre's florid version of the peroration at the end of the tale.

"And where in our Second Starfaring Age is the Spark of the Ark to be found? Everywhere! Nowhere! On Great Edoku itself in the very Children of Fortune that you scorn! Vraiment, in the teller of this tale! Even within the Arkie Sparkie hearts of all you poor quotidian Edojin who still retain within yourselves the nobility of spirit to honor at least the memory thereof within you by showering me with ruegelt!"

Alas, of course, nothing of the sort happened. Instead I stood there trembling, sweaty, sore of voice and empty of spirit, while throngs of Edojin went their lordly ways with no more than a shrug here, a moue of distaste there, a few passing heads nodding ironically to each other.

A single soul deigned, or mayhap merely chanced, to meet my eyes: a green-haired woman with space-black skin dressed in a flowing gown of golden cloth. She looked at me for a moment en passant, shook her head ruefully, smirked, shrugged, then airily tossed a single coin in my direction.

I know not what was in her heart, or rather I choose not to dwell upon my surmise, for whatever melange of contempt, pity, or rueful admiration caused what to her was no doubt a casual gesture immediately forgotten, of all the coin I was to earn at the ruespieler's trade, none ever meant more to me in the moment of donation thereof than that very first.

***

Nor was I to earn very much more ruegelt in the Luzplatz until Fortune chose to smile on me in the unlikely person of Guy Vlad Boca.

Each day for a week I repaired to the Luzplatz, mounted my bench, and declaimed one tale or another of the repertoire I had learned from the ruespielers of the Gypsy Jokers. I found to my considerable satisfaction that once I had dared this for the first time and survived the indifference of the throngs who refused to become my audience, once I had conquered both the initial fear and subsequent embarrassment of failure, the act of spieling my tales in public held little further terror.

Alas, I also found to my considerable consternation that while repetition might work to ease my trepidation and improve my delivery, the results remained all too negligible. Now and again a few people might pause to listen to a portion of my tale before moving on, upon occasion a few isolated Edojin might even stay for a full performance, but sad to say, the number of coins I accumulated in a week was exceeded by the number of days therein.

As to what part my rudeness in the performance of my art played in this paucity of donations, I am both too proud and too modest to attempt to assay, but certainement the mythos I was extolling seemed as much currently out of favor here in the Luzplatz as it had become in the vecino of the Gypsy Joker encampment. Shorn of the aura of charm in the eyes of the Edojin which seemed to have departed with Pater Pan, the figure of a Child of Fortune ruespieler celebrating the mythos of her kind had little power to hold an audience in the person of a somewhat bedraggled young girl seeking to draw approving attention to her own spectacle from that of an erupting volcano!

Vraiment, it was impossible to hide this perception from myself for very long, yet what else was I to do but persist? True, I might have used my handful of coins to take the Rapide to greener pastures, but I had no notion of where such' a venue might be found, and it somehow seemed better to squander them on a single modest meal in a taverna to prove to myself that I had at least earned one day's respite from fressen.

The truth of the matter was that while I longed for escape from my current karma, indeed while I came to decide that I had had more than my fill of Edoku, no such avenue of escape was open, unless I was willing to surrender the life of a Child of Fortune and return to Glade. And having been the lover of Pater Pan, gained access to the Gypsy Jokers, learned the rudiments of the ruespieler's art, and even begun to practice it, if not exactly remuneratively, I was not about to slink home as a failure in my own eyes.

From this static karma, I was to be rescued by Guy Vlad Boca, my self-styled Merchant Prince, though when I first set eyes on him, he seemed anything but my savior.

Once again, I was standing on my bench before the ludicrously mighty backdrop of the Luzplatz's volcano, declaiming into a void with little hope of monetary reward. On this occasion, I was attempting for the first time Nuri John Barbrera's truly bizarre and historically highly inaccurate The Name Tale of We Who Have Gone Before, for while this might be one of the most difficult of all the tales I knew to tell, it had the twin virtues of enlivening the mythic panoply of the Child of Fortune cycle with the inclusion of both We Who Have Gone Before and the Void Pilot as additional elements.

In this tale, the Arkies of the arkology which first discovered the planet of the vanished sapients are the Child of Fortune figures, but rather than have the historical Alia Haste Moguchi and her mages toil for years to wrest the secret of the Jump Drive from the arcane artifacts thereon, she is transmogrified into the ur-scientist Faust, who straightaway scribes a pentagon of confinement around his computer, and summons up the departed spirit of We Who Have Gone Before with arcane incantations and puissant personality-modeling programs.

By the mating of this alien dybbuk's mythic phallus with the willing yoni of his own lover, she who will therefore become known to the dark fascination of our Second Starfaring Age as the Void Pilot, will he therefore be enabled to Jump in an augenblick of their cusp through long light years of the void between the stars.

Since the unknown nature and fate of We Who Have Gone Before is the central mystery of the Second Starfaring Age, and since the Void Pilot is our high priestess thereof, mayhap this at least would have more timeless appeal to the Edojin than further unvarnished celebrations of the Child of Fortune mystique, which, if truth be told, were beginning to wear a little thin even to my own ears.

Be such hopes as they may, matters went pretty much as before until I reached the point in the tale where Faust first peers within the pentagram to behold in dismay what his arcane powers have conjured.

"Faust's gorge rose and his disgust equaled his outrage as he beheld his Mephisto, for rather than appearing in the avatar of a lofty alien sage, the demon spirit of the vanished race of starfarers had incarnated itself in human archetype as the horny billy goat Pan, chortling lubriciously and stroking his mighty phallus --"

"And so are We Who Have Come Before!" I heard a loud and entirely boorish male voice shout to a sprinkling shower of laughter.

"But not even this could sway Faust's purpose," I persisted, imagining in that moment that I knew quite well how he must have felt. "With cooing words and iron determination did he lead his reluctant Beauty to the mystic boudoir of the anything but reluctant Beast."

"Quelle chose! Let Beauty speak for feminine reluctance, but let the Faust of the species speak for our own priapic beast, bitte!"

My ears burned with another round of laughter, and my ire rose against this buffoon. It could hardly be said that I was such an object of public favor that the sanity of my spirit required a heckler to deflate my overweening confidence.

"Let such professions of masculine swinishness await their own good time," I snapped back, "for soon enough the fruits thereof shall certainement be revealed, minnlein, as the lingam of We Who Have Gone Before penetrates the yoni of the Pilot to the priapic piping of Pan!"

That, at least, was an image of sufficient outrageous crudity to command at least an interval of silence from any audience, and vraiment, it could now be said that something in the way of an audience was indeed in evidence, for a small but definitely interested crowd had now formed before my bench.

"For voila, as the unnatural lovers attain their Great and Only cusp, it is the Pilot and the Arkies who Go Before to carry the Arkie Spark forth from the transient world of history into the legendary now of our Second Starfaring Age, while Faust, poor Faust, is left behind to lust forever after tantric mysteries beyond his poor constipated ken."

"Alors, first you style Faust a fellow willing to procure his own inamorata to a goat, and then you accuse the very same unprincipled rogue of an excess of righteous anality!" said the voice from the crowd.

"It would not be the last time Circe transformed a perfect master of the masculine gender into a barnyard maquereau," I rejoined to modest titters. "And lest anyone doubt the ability of the femme fatale of our species to truly transform men into swine, voila, observe the living example!"

At this there was quite a more satisfying round of laughter, for the source of all this disturbance was now striding boldly forward to this introduction, through the small knot of Edojin, who only too willingly parted to allow what by now they no doubt considered my foil to approach my rude stage.

In truth, he was quite a handsome young man, somewhat thespically accoutred all in black velvet to match his long flowing black hair, and somehow also appropriate to his pouting lips and languid carriage. He wore his skin au naturel, rather than tinted in the Edojin mode. All in all, even I in my anger had to own that this Prince of Swine presented a visual aspect entirely more pleasing than the boorishness of his manners.

"Hola, what a -- mythmash!" the fellow exclaimed, giving me a conspiratorial wink whose meaning was then entirely beyond my comprehension, and then turning to face the little crowd with his arms folded across each other in a gesture of hauteur.

"Is it not enough that you have gifted Alia Haste Moguchi with a phallus and renamed her Faust? And proceeded to outfit him or her or it with the Goddess of Swine as consort? Vraiment, and styled the arcane spirit of We Who Have Gone Before as a slavering goat-creature with an enormous throbbing wong? Now would you have these good folk believe that the Jump Drive which propels our Void Ships from star to star consists of a goat copulating with the queen of the pig people? Who would have thought that such a fair young visage could mask a foul mind of such perversity!"

At this there was a bout of laughter at my expense which fairly singed my ears. "It takes one to know one, n'est-ce pas?" I said. "Vraiment, who but a low-minded maestro of perversity could hear the tale of the birth of our great age rendered in lofty metaphor and on the spot immediately translate it into the bestial imagery of his own poor excuse for a mind?"

"Was I the one who styled Alia Haste Moguchi a maquereau named Faust, We Who Have Gone Before a priapic billy goat, and the figure of the Pilot the queen of the pig people?"

"Vraiment, for like all who lack the art to tell a tale but conceive themselves gifted with the intellect to serve as critics of same, your snout is rooted in the quotidian muck of literality and your ears are deaf to the metaphorical music of the spheres. You are therefore a true brother-spirit to the Faust of my tale."

"Moi? Good folk, I swear a solemn oath that never have I served as matchmaker to the mating of a goat and a pig for my own amusement!"

"I stand corrected," I said, "for quite obviously rather than being the matchmaker, you are the progeny thereof!"

At this, I was rewarded by the cresting of the continuous undercurrent that had begun to serve as counterpoint to our exchange into a fine breaker of laughter. Indeed, by now I had begun to perceive what had degenerated into a contest of insults as a sporting event devoid of all real malice. Moreover, the coherence and thrust of my tale having been entirely destroyed thereby to the amusement of the first audience that had ever paid me heed, I decided to give over any further attempts to continue in an earnest vein and ride with the current flow of karma.

"And you, I surmise, fancy yourself the Pilot of the tale?" he rejoined when the laughter had subsided. "Or may hap the horny goat-god? I confess to a certain confusion in these matters of gender, for as the teller thereof, you seem to have enough difficulty keeping the species of the participants in your orgy straight!"

"Whereas you when participating in your orgies no doubt have difficulty keeping .. other matters straight!"

To the roar of ribald laughter which greeted this jape, he leapt onto the bench beside me, declaring: "Au contraire, I now must stand revealed as the great billy goat Pan himself, for I cannot fail to ... rise to such a challenge." And he rolled both his eyes and hips lubriciously.

"Well spoken!" I said. "In truth, we were all growing somewhat jaded with the ... limpness of your responses! I much prefer the self-proclaimed libidinal billy goat to the impotent creature of the intellect."

"No doubt! For I surmised all along that your desire was to play Circe to my Pan!"

"Au contraire," I proclaimed, "for while I may lay claim to the tantric puissance to turn a man such as yourself into a swine, reversing the procedure is clearly an act of prestidigitation beyond the scope of any woman's art!"

So saying, I thumbed on my ring of Touch, and, out of sight of the laughing crowd, thrust my hand deep into the crack of his buttocks. What happened next seemed to owe as much to the quickness of his thespic instincts as to the sudden kundalinic shock which must have taken him completely by surprise, for he screwed up his face into an outrageous caricature of swinish rut, sank to his knees grunting and making to plant slobbering kisses at my feet, leaving his derriere high in the air with my hand planted therein for all the world to see.

Having achieved this apex, or rather nadir, of obscene comedy, there was nothing for it but to maintain this grotesque figure for a long moment, while the audience, which by the time of this climax had reached some several score, roared and groaned, and began to toss coins.

Upon being showered with the first few droplets of what became a substantial rain of ruegelt, as if by prearranged choreography, we disengaged from our ribald tableau, glanced back and forth at each other, and, holding hands, assumed bowing postures until coin no longer rained upon us and the impromptu audience dispersed.

"Allow me to make a somewhat more formal introduction, " he said, as he aided me in scooping up the booty. "Guy Vlad Boca, servidor de usted."

Vraiment, in his outre manner, he had served me well, for there were some three score pieces of ruegelt by my immediate rude estimation. A few weeks of the same success at various venues and we might gain sufficient ruegelt to quit Edoku for other planets of our respective choosing.

"I somehow sense that you are no Edojin ...?" I asked hopefully.

"Moi?" he said with a little laugh. "Far from it, I am a simple Child of Fortune like yourself."

"Bon!" I declared, for this was precisely as I wished. "May I suggest we dine together at our mutual expense, for together we have certainly garnered enough funds to escape from the vileness of fressen, and together I believe we have affairs of mutual profit to discuss."

"I would be delighted to dine with you and I am sure I would find our discourse amusing at the very least," Guy said somewhat superciliously, or so it seemed. "May I in turn suggest the Crystal Palace, an emporium whose cuisine I have ... ah, heard, is of high repute?"

"Porque no?" I agreed, for I had no counterproposal to make.

"And whom shall I have the honor of dining with?" Guy asked.

"I am Moussa Shasta --" I paused, hefting the weight of the ruegelt I had just earned by my own wits, if at the cost of my unremunerative dignity. "I am Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, Gypsy Joker and ruespieler extraordinaire," I told him. For had I not at long last also earned the right to style myself thusly?

Chapter 12

Guy conducted me via Rapide to a narrow range of small mountains whose crestline formed a sharp divide between a sunrise savannah stocked with all manner of gene-crafted ungulates and a steamy swampland glowing in a perpetual sunset and done up in thick woodland not unreminiscent of the Bittersweet Jungle of Glade. The mountains themselves were entirely two- faced: rugged rock walls confronting sunset, gentle wooded slopes greeting the dawn.

The Crystal Palace was situated squarely athwart the divide, so that with a slight twist of the neck one might traverse in an augenblick the temporal distance between sunrise and sunset without being troubled by the quotidian daylight hours between, and it truly was a palace of crystal. Not only were walls and ceiling of a perfect colorless transparency, the very tables and chaises were of the same clear substance, and the floor was a mirror reflecting the sky. Even the cushions on our chaises were of some soft transparent substance, indeed the very plates, chopsticks, and even serviettes were transparent.

The esthetic effect of all this transparency, far from being one of colorless asceticism, was precisely the reverse: walls, ceiling, floors, furniture, tableware, the very air within the salon itself, seemed magically conjured out of the very fires of sunrise and sunset themselves, a venue of gorgeous oranges, mauves and purples, in which the only decor was the essences of the colors themselves.

As for the cuisine, which I gracefully allowed Guy to order up, we dined on a feast of some twenty tiny dishes presented in the rijsttafel mode, though in place of the traditional pot of steamed rice as the ground for the multiplicity of cuisinary miniatures, we were served a great mound of thin and highly saffroned pasta gently fried almost to the point of crispness in some pungent oil. With this repast, we drank a powerful clear wine, like an aromatic sake, which seemed to be laced with mildly psychotropic herbs.

Reposing there in a palace of romantic light liberally sprinkled with richly clad Edojin, daintily picking at artfully prepared dishes representing a good dozen different cuisinary modes, sipping at a wine which warmed my body with a fine sensual glow, I felt several light-years removed from the quotidian vie ordinaire I had so long endured on Edoku. Once more I had returned to the pampered haut monde which I had enjoyed as a favored daughter of the elite of Nouvelle Orlean, as a haut turista on Edoku itself who had airily gone through two months' worth of funds in the same number of weeks. While my time as a Gypsy Joker and lover of the great Pater Pan still shone in memory's afterglow, here I felt that I had returned to my proper station. And it was a grace from which I was determined not to fall again.

And Guy Vlad Boca, so it seemed to me, was the chip of credit, as it were, whereby such a style of life might be indefinitely sustained, if only I could bend his services to my purpose.

In the service of which, I therefore kept my ring of Touch activated, and continually contrived to chance to brush my hand against various portions of his anatomy as we ate, drank, and spoke -- touching his hand or arm to emphasize points of my discourse, patting his thigh in innocent friendly appreciation, snuggling close to him, and in general exercising the usual seductive feminine wiles, greatly augmented by my secret electronic power.

Nor, if truth be told, was I myself entirely immune to the erotic aura which I spun around our intimate tete-a-tete, for certainement he was a handsome enough fellow, with a languid and loose-limbed air that bespoke an attractively sensual spirit, he had proven himself quick and clever enough, and the rosy atmospheric glow of the Crystal Palace, not to say that of the toxicants in the wine, suffused my own body with a pleasantly lustful warmth.

"I sense that our fortunes were intended by destiny to pleasantly intertwine, Guy," I told him, leaning quite close and regarding him coyly over the lip of my wineglass while smoothing his leg with my hand.

"Indeed," he said, his eyes warmed by a smoky sunset glow, "I would have little objection to some pleasant intertwining once our gustatory appetites have been properly sated."

"All in its own good time," I promised. "But I have in mind an enterprise even more intimate than a passage d'amour, indeed one which would spice the same with the piquancy of a deeper sharing, much as the psychotropics in this wine enhance its toxicating pleasures ..."

"Mmmmm ...?" he purred dreamily.

"Our very presence here bespeaks our combined ability to profit together at the ruespieler's trade, ne ..."

"Ruespieler? Moi?" he said with a certain lack of focus, for my hand had slid further inward along his thigh.

"You have never been a ruespieler?" I said in some surprise. "I would have thought ..."

He beamed at me and moved his face closer to mine. "I have never told a tale in my life," he said. "Though I own to a quick wit verbal ..."

"Well then fear not, and leave matters of repertoire to me," I assured him somewhat hyperbolically. "In fact what I have in mind requires no learning in the ruespieler's art."

"What I have in mind requires no verbal skill at all, " he cooed, clasping his hand upon mine as it held my glass. I withdrew my other hand from his thigh, the better to focus his flagging intellect on my words. He pursed his lips in a moue of minor pique.

"Be serious, Guy!" I chided him. "Attend! What I propose is that you and I repeat what we have to our profit so recently performed until we have secured enough funds to purchase electrocoma passage to some other world, and in the meantime to purchase pleasures such as this which Edoku affords. Within a month, we should be on our way."

"Hmmm ..." he said. "Would not such an entertainment soon jade the Edojin, whose fickleness is all too legendary?"

"We need not perform in the same venue twice," I told him. "Moreover, while continuing to play the same bantering duet, we might contrive to vary our japes from time to time for variety's sake." I replaced my stroking hand upon his thigh, moved it even closer to the kundalinic quick of him, and gazed romantically into his eyes.  "Well what do you say, Guy? Partners and lovers in the grand adventure of the Yellow Brick Road to our mutual pleasure and enrichment ...?"

"Wandering troubadours of erotic comedy together?" he mused somewhat superciliously. "Guy Vlad Boca, Child of Fortune and ruespieler extraordinaire, with his lady by his side ...?"

"Vraiment! What do you think?"

"Je ne sais pas ..." he said in a bantering tone. "It might be drole ... I can see some possibilities for amusement ..."

"Merde"' I exclaimed. "Drole? Amusement? I offer you a partnership of love and profit and that is the best you have to say for yourself?"

Guy leaned even closer and leered at me slyly. "Guy Vlad Boca has never been one to pursue an enterprise for mere pecuniary gain," he said loftily. "As for love, such might convince me to agree, though it would take some art. At the very least, a demonstration thereof is in order, ne ..."

I tugged briefly and none too gently at the handle of his manhood as if to yank him thereby out of his supercilious mood and watched his eyes go wide and his full lips tremble. "If it is a demonstration you require, " I said forcefully, staring deep into his eyes, "I shall provide one that will leave you shaking like jelly and panting to serve my yoni ..."

"Indeed?" he replied throatily. "In point of fact, that end, at any rate, you have achieved already ..."

***

In some haste, we guzzled down the last of our wine, and settled up the tab, which, alas, consumed most of the ruegelt we had earned together. But this minor catastrophe barely impinged upon my mood, for certainement there would be no lack of funds once I had worked my tantric puissance on Guy and won him to our enterprise.

The choice of cuisinary venue having been Guy's, the choice of boudoir was left to me, both to serve the balance of reciprocation, and for the reason that Guy, by now consumed by priapic lust, seemed entirely unequipped to give that nicety or any other serious and judicious consideration. Lacking sufficient funds to rent a chamber in a hotel, and not wishing to perform our nuptials in the nearest secluded woodland or garden, I conducted us via Rapide to the garden atop the butte, where, what now seemed like half a lifetime's karma ago, Pater Pan had conducted me for our first passage d'amour.

Upon emerging from the lift tube which carried us from the base of the waterfall to the shallow bowl of gardens sunk into the cliff top, a not unpleasant feeling of sweet tristesse for that lover in this venue at that temporal nexus spiced my anticipation of what was to come, as hand in hand with Guy I beheld the little rolling green hills and dells, the crystal pools and burbling brooks, the blooming stands of trees planted along the hilltops as hedges of seclusion. I inhaled the warm perfumed breezes, bounced gaily in the low gravity gradient, removed my shoes and luxuriated in the strange turflike feel of the lawn beneath my bare feet, as I led Guy to a dell by a pool, not unlike the one in which I had first shared love with Pater.

At length, when we reposed on the velvety lawn beneath the cerulean sky, I looked inquiringly at Guy, seeking his approval of the wu of the venue I had chosen.

Guy slowly ran his gaze about the flowering trees on the hillcrest above us, the clear pool on whose shore we lay, the forest rimming the horizon, then regarded me as if sizing up my relation to this bucolic paradise.

"Well?" I finally demanded.

"Quaint," he said in that supercilious tone with which I was becoming quite familiar. "In fact, all in all, rather charming." Then, seeing that consternation upon my face which had been his jocular intent to evoke all along, he broke into goodnatured, albeit raucous, laughter.

"What a beast you are, Guy Vlad Boca!" I exclaimed in much the same spirit. "How in need you are of proper taming!"

So saying, I rolled over upon him, clasping my lips to his, and running my hands, both natural and electronically augmented, freely over the most intimate parts of his body.

How unlike the response of Pater Pan in this very venue upon a similar occasion Guy's was, indeed how unlike the response of any male within my experience! Far from returning my challenge to the pouvoir of his manhood with attempts at overmastery of his own, far from entering into a loverly contest of erotic wills aimed at contesting my mastery of him through pleasure with his own skill at the evoking of same, he immediately gave himself over to unbridled and entirely unconstrained enjoyment of my ministrations. He embraced me tenderly but with little force, he rained little soft kisses on the nape of my neck as I seized his lingam, he moaned and sighed, he fairly purred as I enveloped his body, his head rolling back and forth, eyes half closed, as he flowed softly beneath me like the waves of a tropical sea.

Strange to tell, this entirely frank self-absorption in his own pleasure, far from vexing me with its openly languid passivity, inflamed my lust to a fever pitch in some arcane manner. When we broke our embrace to disrobe, it was I who stripped off my tunic in graceless haste, and he who slowly and teasingly shed his clothing as if for my delectation, smiling slyly at me all the while.

When our nude bodies came together, vraiment, he assumed the superior position and thrust his manly lingam home with a rhythm that left nothing to be desired in terms of vigor, but there was nothing of the rutting animal or egoistic cocksman about it.

Instead, as I spurred him on with my Touch deep in the root of him, he gave himself over to a slow and smoky ecstasy, as if experiencing my pleasure as his own, and somehow turning back his own wanton enjoyment of my preternatural powers upon myself, so that the more I perceived his thoughtless and mindless appreciation of the moment-to-moment pleasure, the more I became inflamed with the lust to drive him to ever more wild heights of abandon.

Our passage d'amour went on and on in this vein for an endless, or at any rate measureless, time, and though we essayed tantric figures of some variety, the inner figure never changed. Vraiment, though I had had lovers of greater artistry and certainement of more sheer tantric power, never had I experienced such a total egoless surrender to ecstasy at my touch as that of Guy Vlad Boca, and never had a man therefore made me feel more potent as a mistress of the tantric arts. Mayhap this is what spurs a man on to feats of tantric heroism in the arms of a woman; je ne sais pas. Suffice it to say that when at length, verdad at what seemed like tantalizingly languid leisure, we eased seamlessly into one single mutual cusp, I felt entirely content, indeed overweeningly pleased with what I had wrought.

Guy, for his part, lay on his back with his hands clasped behind his head, his full lips parted in a sensuous smile of pleasure, his breath deep and slow, and his eyes shut to the world for a long while before he summoned up the composure to speak.

"Now that," he finally said, "was amusing."

"Amusing!" I shrieked. "Is that all anything is to you, Guy, amusing?"

Guy propped himself up against the slope of the dell and softened my anger with a little laugh. "Au contraire," he said. "It takes a great deal to truly amuse me. If you knew me better, you would know to what lengths I am willing to go to be amused, and that I have in fact paid you the highest compliment of which I am capable."

"Well, then," I said, somewhat mollified, "have I sufficiently amused you to convince you that my proposition that we ruespiel together as partners and lovers until we have accumulated sufficient funds to leave Edoku offers enough hope of further amusement for you to consent to give it a try?"

Guy laughed. He regarded me with the strangest unreadable expression. "Oh verdad!" he said. "I can think of no one else I would rather have as a traveling companion. However ... I must confess that thusfar I have been traveling with you under somewhat false pretenses."

"False pretenses?"

"Hai! I fear I have thusfar withheld complete revelation of the full grandeur of my being."

At this modest confession, I was quite literally rendered speechless.

Guy, naturellement, suffered no such aphasia. "All we have told each other is our status as Children of Fortune and our names," he said. "Let us now therefore exchange the tales thereof and I promise you all will be gloriously revealed to your delight. Please begin, Sunshine, for I would not wish your name tale to come as a great anticlimax."

So bemused was I at all this mystery that I scarcely reacted to the implied insult in my haste to get to the bottom of it, which is to say I did as he asked, relating the tales of my maternom and paternom without of course mentioning the Touch, and telling the tale of my nom de rue, Sunshine, and my career as a Gypsy Joker, without needlessly over-emphasizing the degree and depth of my intimacy with Pater Pan.

"Drole," Guy said when I had finished. "A true Child of Fortune of the spirit!" He rose to his feet and tied the arms of his black velvet blouson about his neck so as to accoutre himself with a swirling cloak, more for thespic effect than out of any modest impulse to clothe his nakedness.

"I am Guy Vlad Boca," he declaimed grandly, "and while I too am a true Child of Fortune of the spirit, I hardly need reduce myself to begging in the streets in order to travel from planet to planet as insensate cargo in electrocoma, danke, nor need anyone upon whom I choose to bestow my favor.

"My mother, Boca Morgana Khan, was born to parents of rather formidable wealth on Melloria, her father being Khan Norman Margo, magnate of fabriks on several worlds, and her mother Morgana Desiree Colin, a Void Ship domo of no little repute before meeting her father. Her freenom, Boca, she chose after a wanderjahr amusing herself in the floating cultura homage a La Boca Felicita, a legendary singer and thespian of the First Starfaring Age, for while she never followed that trade, or truth be told any other, she fancied that her great beauty, wit, and sweet voice would surely have served to gain her fortune thereat had not her patrimony felicitously removed the necessity.

"My father, Vlad Dominik Ella, was born into more modest circumstances on Novi Mir. His father, Dominik Ivan Dona, was the proprietor of a palace of pleasure, and his mother, Ella Dane Krasnaya, labored therein as an artiste ordinaire. His freenom, Vlad, he chose after a wanderjahr begun as a freeservant on Void Ships and concluded as an established gambler and tantric performer on same, homage a one Vlad the Impaler, a legendary monster of prehistory, famed, naturellement, for his numerous acts of impalement, though apparently not of the sort of which my father was boasting.

"My parents met aboard the Celestial City, and it was pheromonic congruence at first sight, or at any rate upon first impalement. Boca's parents, naturellement, were somewhat less than enthused when she returned to Melloria with such a swain, marking Vlad as a fortune hunter, which, in a certain sense, he was. In return for his acceptance of a probationary year, Khan Norman Margo gifted him with a substantial sum of credit, with the understanding that only if he returned with this wealth doubled would he be welcomed as a kinsman, expecting, no doubt, that that would be the last he would see of this rake.

"However, to the delight of all concerned, Vlad's instincts as a gambler, and perhaps his penchant for impalement as well, when combined with working capital, served him in good stead as a traveling merchant, trading among the worlds of men in whatever commodities might be bought cheap and sold dear, and when he returned to Melloria, his wealth had in fact quadrupled.

"Today, my father, Vlad Dominik Ella, is the owner and maestro of Interstellar Master Traders, and his wealth exceeds that of my mother's parents by an order of magnitude."

Having concluded his declamation of this extravagant name tale, Guy sat down beside me as if to reestablish our less formal relationship. "And so here you see before you Guy Vlad Boca, Child of Fortune on his wanderjahr vraiment, but no wandering minstrel I!" he said. "Rather I am the scion of Interstellar Master Traders, a Merchant Prince, as it were, traveling at leisure from world to world for my own amusement to be sure, but also absorbing the lore of my future trade."

He reached into a pocket of his blouson and withdrew a chip of credit which he held beneath my nose as if it were a priceless gem, "This little bauble draws without limit upon the coffers of Interstellar Master Traders, a well of plenty without bottom for all practical purposes," he declared. "I am commissioned to do as I will for a period of my own choosing, the only proviso being that I, like my father before me, may never return to Melloria to claim my full patrimony until I have achieved a balance of profit over expenditure in the ratio of two to one. At the rate things are going, this may take some time. But then I am in no particular hurry."

Entirely ignoble emotions coursed through me at the conclusion of all these revelations. Anger at Guy for not having used his magic chip at the Crystal Palace. Anger too at the minginess of my own parents in comparison to the bountiful largesse of Vlad Dominik Ella, which is also to say mean-spirited envy of Guy for his good fortune. Finally, and most painful, despair that my plan to earn ruegelt with his aid had now apparently come to naught.

"You were just ... amusing yourself with me," I finally said in a tone of angry dejection. "You never had any intention of joining me in the ruespieler's trade."

"Indeed," said Guy, with an entirely incongruous grin. "And I must say I still find you most amusing, ma chere. Though of course I must reject your proposal."

But before I could vent my wrath, Guy stayed my words with a finger to my lips. "However, as a Merchant Prince in training, I am constrained to give fair value for value received," he said. "Since the commodity in question is amusement, let me counter with a proposal that I hope you will find amusing, Shortly I will be leaving Edoku for Belshazaar, a planet which I expect will be far more amusing and certainly more remunerative than this one.  If you find the notion amusing, why not accompany me thither in the Unicorn Garden, at my expense, of course, or to be more precise, courtesy of Interstellar Master Traders?"

I could scarcely credit my ears. I could hardly believe in such good fortune. Indeed, considering the source, at first blush I was not quite certain that I could trust it. "Belshazaar," I said guardedly. "I've never heard of Belshazaar. What is there to draw us thither?"

"On Belshazaar there is a forest known as the Bloomenwald," Guy told me. "It is reputed to be a veritable cornucopia of psychotropic perfumes, essences, saps, pheromones, und so weiter. While hundreds of them are already on the market, scores more are discovered each year, and a merchant who secures a droit of monopoly for a period in a few of the latest stands to gain a tidy fortune. At the very least, it should be the height of amusement to sample the full panoply of what is available."

My enthusiasm for quitting Great Edoku for such a venue was considerably less total than Guy's, but on the other hand, what were my prospects on Edoku without him save continued indigency and an endless banquet of fressen?

"Gratuit ...?" I asked carefully. "Why should you do such a thing for me?"

"Porque no?" Guy said airily. "From each according to his ability, to each according to her need, as the ancient communards had it, ne. And when it comes to credit, my ability is bottomless, and your need is total. Besides, as I have declared, I find your company amusing."

"We would not travel in electrocoma ...?"

"Quelle chose!" Guy exclaimed in somewhat supercilious outrage. "Do you imagine Guy Vlad Boca would find it amusing to sleep through a voyage when the divertissements of the floating cultura lie readily at hand? Do you account me such a boor that I would offer such passage to a lover? Come, Sunshine, join me as an Honored Passenger in the Grand Palais of the Unicorn Garden!"

"I might be convinced to agree ..." I owned in a tone of mock reluctance. Naturellement, in truth no further inducements were necessary, for it was precisely such access to the haut monde of the floating cultura for which I had so strenuously albeit unsuccessfully campaigned against my parents' refusal. And while Sunshine might have evolved beyond Moussa, she was hardly less determined to live the true vie of the Child of Fortune, which is to say she followed the Yellow Brick Road for sake of the adventure of the journey not the goal of the destination, and in this respect was not Guy Vlad Boca a kindred spirit and the Grand Palais of the floating cultura the true camino real?

"If love is that which would convince you to agree, a demonstration thereof would seem to be once more in order," Guy said. "And I do believe I am once more ready to rise to the occasion."

So he was. So it did.

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