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For
PHILIP K. DICK
Some
stand on the shoulders of giants
Some peer through the heart of a friend
Some lives have stories
Whose spirit never ends.
CHILD
OF FORTUNE
A Histoire of the Second Starfaring Age
by Wendi Shasta Leonardo
"I
think this is the finest philosophical novel writen in the last 50 years
in America ....It concerns our future, in which we have solved the
problems of competition, war, greed, and so on, and the real problems are
psychological and spiritual. This is a monumental book."
Timothy Leary
INTRODUCTION
And
so, after half a lifetime and some score histoires telling the eternal
tale in all its timebound incarnations, I venture herein at last to speak
my own wanderjahr's story from the memories of the heart.
Wandering tinker and masterless samurai, troubadour and hippie, Rom and
Arkie, Zen hermit and cowboy--uncounted avatars of the archetypal
wanderkind have followed the Yellow Brick Road which wanders eternally
through space and time from the villages and forests of prehistoric Earth
to the San Franciscos and Samarkands of myth and history, via the first
arkologies to brave the starry seas at a sublight crawl, and thence to the
celestial cities of the far-flung worlds of men.
The
singers and the avatars pass, but the song goes on, for the story is
always the same: that of the wanderjahr, the eternal journey from
childhood to maturity through the wondrous and terrible chaos of the
region between.
This
too is a histoire of that archetype as it is incarnated in our own era:
The Child of Fortune whom we have all been or will become. But herein will
the detached observer shed all pretense of objectivity, for this is my
name tale's story, this is my wanderjahr's song.
So in
this modern version of the timeless histoire, our ingenue begins the tale
as the little Moussa on Glade, and the Yellow Brick Road she follows leads
from planet to planet, and she travels not by horse or motorad but by Void
Ship. In this histoire as in all my others, you will meet the avatars of
the great and eternal journey of youth into maturity, of spirit into
culture, of the comrades of the passage from what we dream into what we
are destined to become.
But
here you will meet them as did this Child of our Second Starfaring Age: as
friends and lovers, freeservants and ruespielers, Charge Addicts, Honored
Passengers, domos and mages, and the wandering children of all the worlds
of men who were ourselves.
So
this, my own wanderjahr's story, is also the tale of that journey which
goes on above and below the historical annals. In the Second Starfaring
Age we call that journey, as in another era deep in the past, the
wanderjahr, though for some it is measured in weeks and for others in
lifetimes. By whatever name that passage has been called--wanderjahr,
summer of love, grailquest, voyage d'ark--until I took the freenom Wendi
and began writing my histoires, it was a tale that what we have called
"history" had ignored.
For
"history" is the story of deeds done by those who have shaped the
evolution of the species humaine, from the nameless hominid who crafted
the first tool to the inventors of fire and the wheel, to the
organizations that put the first humans into orbit and onto Earth's moon,
to the builders of the arkologies that first brought men to the stars, to
those who developed the Jump Drive out of the mysterious artifacts left by
We Who Have Gone Before and thereby inaugurated our Second Starfaring Age.
Those whose names are known to "history" have been scientists and
explorers and politicians and generals and creative artists. They have
elucidated the laws of nature, invented wondrous devices, established
nations, waged wars, found new habitable worlds, created lasting works of
art, and indeed have been those who recorded "history" itself. For
"history" is the timebound story of the evolution of specific human
societies.
But
outside of history there is another story just as ancient, the story of
that which has always existed outside, within, and as often as not in
opposition to "society," yet which in another and deeper sense has carried
the true esprit humaine forward to this day.
It
has been called many things by many cultures. The Romany Road. Bohemia.
Counterculture. The Floating World. The Underground. Arkie Sparkie.
Demimonde. Its denizens too have been known by many names, most of them
pejorative. Ronin. Gypsies. Freaks. Wayfarers. Tinkers. Arkies.
Until
the Second Starfaring Age, this eternal demimonde could be defined only by
what it was not. A "culture" in essence consisted of the social,
political, economic, cuisinary, linguistic, technological, and esthetic
patterns shared in common by its citizens; on a deeper level, it was the
consensus reality, the consciousness style which defined a "people." The
demimonde, then, was the psychic heimat of those, who, through choice or
fortune, existed within the spacial bounds of a culture but outside its
consensus reality. Hence outside both "the law" and "history."
Here
were to be found the criminals and social pariahs, the madmen and ethnic
outcasts, the devotees of socially proscribed vices and the followers of
gods other than those of the local tribe. But here too were the
visionaries born outside their proper time, the artists who created new
styles of consciousness, the seekers and the dreamers--in essence all
those whose spirits could not be contained by the parameters of the
consensus reality of their given social realm. Here was the heimat of
Chaos in its eternal dialectic with Order, the Chaos out of which all new
culture, hence history itself, has always evolved. Here, in other words,
was the psychic heimat of the adventurous spirit of youth.
To
the demimonde was drawn both the best and the worst of a culture's
youth--the dreamers and the rebels, the idealists and the psychopaths, the
artistic and the indolent, the seekers after vice and the seekers after
Enlightenment.
Some
sojourned a while in the realm of Chaos and emerged once more as history's
movers and shapers. Some passed through their wanderjahr and grew only
old. Some were lost forever. A few remained young forever until the day
they died.
But
all too many adolescents in all too many cultures never passed through
Chaos at all. They were born, they were acculturated, they were schooled,
they took up their adult stations in life, passed through an ill-defined
period of mid-life angst, resigned themselves to old age, and died,
without ever walking the Yellow Brick Road, indeed without ever
understanding what it was that they had missed in their lives.
Unwritten though it was until I began creating my histoires, this too is
now a kind of history, in the sense that it is a story of humanity past.
Today, in our Second Starfaring Age, that ancient concept of "culture" as
the prison of individual consciousness is happily gone. As each of us
speaks our own sprach of Lingo, so is each human consciousness its own
self-created style of reality, unique to itself, yet part of the
infinitely complex vie humaine.
For
each of us passes through our wanderjahr as a Child of Fortune; rare
indeed is the child of our age who becomes a man or woman without having
passed through the region between.
What
is the greatest glory and proudest achievement of the Second Starfaring
Age? The Jump Drive which enables our Void Ships to traverse the great and
empty distances between the stars and enables us thereby to spread our
species to hundreds of worlds? That humanity has finally put war and
chauvinism far behind it? Our total knowledge of mass-energy phenomena?
I say
that the greatest achievement of the Second Starfaring Age, that which
sets us above and apart from all previous human civilizations in spirit
and not merely in artifact, is that our civilization alone has had the
wisdom to decree the wanderjahr for all. For while some of us create
histoires and some of us are Void Captains or mages or political leaders,
und so weiter, all of us have been Children of Fortune.
Indeed, is not the choosing of one's freenom the declaration of the
lifeswork to come, and is the freenom not chosen at the end of the
wanderjahr, and is not the wanderjahr the very process by which we, as
Children of Fortune, find our destiny and ourselves?
Moreover, since each of us has tasted the freedom and the peril of the
Child of Fortune, indeed since each of us remains a Child of Fortune until
we have surfeited ourselves with the vie, unlike parents of previous ages,
we seek not to chain the child to the cradle, the eaglet to the nest, we
envy not our children the Golden Summer we ourselves have known and
relinquished only voluntarily when we have found our own true names. And
here is the story of mine, of how the little Moussa became the very Wendi
Shasta Leonardo who now tells this, her wanderjahr's tale.
Once
within our time, on a planet not so very far away ...
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