Child of Fortune (21 page)

"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.