Child of Fortune (27 page)

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?