Child of Fortune (23 page)

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Pater ..."

"Moussa ..."

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

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

"I made not my meaning plain?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"To wit ...?"

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

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

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

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

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

"The Arkies?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Porque no? I was there!'

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

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

"Impossible!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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