Child of Fortune (34 page)

And so he did, if entirely to my dismay.

Intracity transport in Ciudad Pallas was accomplished mainly by floatcabs which followed guideways in the center of the streets. Like the Rapide, their data screens did double duty as municipal directories, but unlike the Rapide, prices were often quoted for various entries. Guy, therefore, chose the Hotel Pallas by the simple expedient of finding the most expensive hotel in the city, and in like manner rented the most expensive suite it had to offer.

Having said that the Hotel Pallas was the most expensive in the city and that our accommodations were among the most expensive therein, I am hard-pressed to sing its further praises. The building itself was a stark tower crafted mainly of glass and with no particular architectural distinction. Our suite consisted of a large bedchamber, a cuisinary salon connected by pneumo to the hotel kitchen, a toilet, a bath, and a huge sitting room. As for the decor, there was a great deal of thick carpeting, plush upholstery, wooden paneling, polished brasswork, black marble, and an equally great paucity of artful employment thereof. The piece de resistance was an immense expanse of sitting-room window that offered a magnificent view of the full awfulness of Ciudad Pallas.

If a certain churlish ingratitude on my part toward Guy's admittedly unstinting largesse may be detected in the foregoing, vraiment I must confess that the tour through the city from the shuttleport to the hotel had only served to reinforce my initial distaste for this venue.

From ground level, Ciudad Pallas afforded a no less dismal ambiance than it did when viewed from the shuttleport. The arrondissements of the city were not without streets given over to restaurants, boutiques, markets, and the usual civilized necessities, but grand public squares, gardens, or parklands were nowhere in evidence, and indeed the sight of a few pathetic trees scattered here and there was rare enough so that each modest specimen became an event of esthetic significance. For the most part, the streets seemed designed as efficient conduits for floatcabs, private vehicles, and foot traffic, and that was the end of it.

As for the modest foot traffic visible from the floatcab, this seemed divided into two subspecies. On the one hand, there were purposeful and for the most part plainly dressed men and women perambulating rapidly from one building to another, and on the other hand there were any number of individuals in rather tacky garments and lacking something in the way of personal grooming who seemed to be drifting around in a befuddled daze.

What was totally lacking was the brightness and gaiety, the extravagance and ease, the very spirit of the life of the streets, which reached an apogee in Great Edoku and which was also always quite in evidence in Nouvelle Orlean. While my first-hand experience in municipal ambiance was admittedly limited, holos of other cities and word crystals describing the vie thereof led me to believe that few other cities in the worlds of men were as bereft of the joie de vivre of the streets as this one.

"Quelle horror!" I muttered sourly as I stood in our sitting room looking out over the cityscape I had already come to loathe. "What are we doing here, Guy?" I pouted. "What secret charms can this ghastly place contain to persuade you to dally here another hour?"

"Have I not told you that the main industry of Belshazaar is psychotropics?" he said. "Ciudad Pallas is admittedly somewhat indifferent to the esthetics of the external landscape precisely because attention to same is largely superfluous in a city where the full glories of the internal landscape are available to all in such extravagant measure."

I liked not the sound of it, I liked it not at all. "If the sole attraction of Ciudad Pallas is the ready availability of a wide variety of psychotropics, why subject one's enhanced perceptions to such dismal surroundings? Surely, with your chip of unlimited credit, you can purchase whatever psychic enhancers your heart desires and consume the same in some venue far more conducive to spiritual elevation ..."

"Ah, but here whatever psychotropics the heart desires are available gratuit!"

"Gratuit?"

"Indeed better than free!" Guy enthused. "Here in Ciudad Pallas, one may be paid to consume psychotropics! In this noble city, serving as a subject for psychochemical experimentation is an honored profession!"

"What?" I exclaimed and collapsed into the nearest chaise, for such a notion was not something I felt I could contemplate in an upright position.

"Vraiment!" Guy went on in the same grandly enthusiastic vein. "New substances are constantly discovered in the research domes, ne, and these must then be evaluated here under controlled conditions before the viable ones can be offered up on the market. Naturellement, each potential new product must be tested upon scores of human subjects, therefore many psychonauts, as it were, must be employed in the service of the advancement of scientific knowledge and pecuniary profit. Can you think of any career for which I am better suited? Do you know of anyone more likely to achieve success in this noble calling than Guy Vlad Boca?"

"Merde!" I snapped. "What need have you of further funds? You hardly need to serve as an experimental subject in order to earn your keep!"

"True," Guy admitted. "I have no need of further funds. But I always have need of further amusement."

Even knowing Guy as I did, the logic of all this still seemed elusive. "But I thought you had already chosen a career as a traveling merchant, as heir apparent and scion of Interstellar Master Traders," I pointed out.

"Indeed I have."

"Well then, if you must soak your brain in an ocean of assorted psychotropics, why not simply purchase them? Or if you have suddenly developed scruples against expending your father's fortune on your own amusement -- which have never before been in evidence -- why not simply announce your identity to the local purveyors of psychotropics and request free samples of their goods for marketing evaluation?"

"Not a bad notion ..." Guy mused. "But neither as amusing nor as potentially profitable as my own. True enough, as an announced agent of Interstellar Master Traders, I would be showered with free samples of whatever was already on the market. But the opportunity for greatest profit lies in learning of the best of the newest psychotropics before they are offered up to general commerce. Thus, by posing as a mere indigent Child of Fortune, as one of the thousands of paid experimental subjects in which the city abounds, I may learn of the best new products before any other merchants do. And by approaching the manufacturers thereof before they begin to solicit importers and offering a modest premium for exclusivity, I can score a series of commercial coups such as will do my father proud."

"Pfagh!" I snorted. "The truth of the matter is that you find the notion of being paid to sot yourself on arcane chemicals incognito more amusing than the idea of simply purchasing them or securing samples as a merchant!"

"Well spoken!" Guy exclaimed with an idiot grin. "In this matter, the maximization of amusement and the maximization of profit happily coincide. Moreover, I might point out that you too may enhance your consciousness at a pecuniary profit."

He took hold of my hand and fairly dragged me to my feet. "Come, " he said, "let us begin our enterprise. A moment unamused is a moment lost forever, as a wise man once said."

***

And so our endless round of the laboratories and mental retreats of Ciudad Pallas began. Our first visit was to a modest laboratory occupying a single floor of a large tower, and the first sight to greet us therein, and one that would become all too commonplace in the days ahead, was that of an anteroom crowded with about a score applicants for the position of experimental subject.

A more unsavory collection of human specimens would be hard to imagine. Most of our fellow applicants of both genders were of the same general age as ourselves, the males frequently bearded with stubble, the females in a state of dishabille, and both sexes exuding an odor of stale perspiration contaminated with peculiar aromas of acetone and other acrid byproducts of dysfunctional metabolisms. A few of these folk were of a more advanced age and had clearly been pursuing the "profession" of psychonaut longer than was prudent, for these were gaunt of frame, hollow of cheek, deeply shadowed around the eyes, and had a disconcerting tendency to stare fixedly at the walls or ceiling, muttering to themselves.

At length, a woman in a plain gray smock appeared through the doorway to the inner sanctum and announced that the fee offered for the day's experiment would be six units of credit. At this, three or four of the applicants departed with their noses in the air. The rest of us were subjected to a perfunctory examination with a metabolic monitor to weed out those whose bloodstreams or protoplasm might be contaminated with lingering byproducts from other such sessions which might skew the results of today's seance.

Only half a dozen passed this muster, among them, naturellement, Guy and I, who had yet to contaminate our metabolic purity as experimental subjects. We were ushered into a plain gray- walled room containing a series of tables. Before each table was a padded chair. Behind each table sat a gray-clad and bored-looking functionary. Upon each table was a rack of glass vials filled with fluids, powders, and gaseous essences, a word crystal recorder, and a metabolic monitor.

Guy and I were seated at adjacent workbenches. The sallow-skinned, blonde-haired woman seated across the table from me affixed electrodes to my temples, placed a probe under my tongue, inserted another into the pit of my right aim, and did not deign to speak until I was properly attached to her monitoring machineries.

"Bitte, you will spiel your subjective experiences as they occur, trying as best you are able to confine yourself to style of feeling, sparing us any flights of loquacity or philosophical musings, which in any case will be edited out of the transcript," she recited in a flat bored voice after these amenities had been concluded.

"Sniff," she commanded, opening a vial of clear fluid and thrusting it under my nostrils. I sniffed.

"Spiel."

This was easier said than done. A smoky-sweet odor went directly to the back of my brain, where it ignited a ravenous hunger for some specific food I had never encountered. "Total hunger," I said. "For something quite specific that I've never encountered, it's quite difficult to try to explain. ..."

"Superfluous also ... Inhale ... Spiel ..."

The next vial seemed to have no odor at all, but I was abruptly consumed by a raging lust, or more precisely a genital demand for sexual relief completely divorced from my psychic state, which could not have been less interested in such matters at the time.

And so it went. In order to have six units credited to my chip, I was required to sniff, inhale, quaff, or touch something like a dozen substances, and report as laconically as possible on the psychesomic effects thereof. These ranged from narcoleptic torpor to a state of nervous excitation that had me fairly vibrating in my seat, from a sudden loss of color vision to a state of visual perception in which everything glowed with its own inner light, from ravenous hunger, cellular thirst, and sexual lust to the absolute conviction that I had become a disembodied spirit.

At the conclusion of this first job of work as a psychonaut, I reeled out into the bleak streets of Ciudad Pallas in a state of some discombobulation; for though these outre psychic states had all been quite transitory, the memory traces of this dizzying succession of narrowly focused psychic states had loosened my moorings to quotidian consciousness to the point where it took some time to return to reality ordinaire.

Guy, however, assumed a critical air. "Trivial substances," he said loftily. "I found none of it more than passingly amusing, did you?"

"Not even that," I admitted quite truthfully.

He withdrew a sheet of paper from a pocket and studied whatever it was he had scrawled thereon. "While they were crediting your chip, I learned of several other laboratories seeking psychonauts today, " he said. "Let us see if the next one offers better fare ..."

So saying, he fairly dragged me into the next unoccupied floatcab and we were off to another laboratory, if not exactly against my will, then certainement not with my avid approval either, for if truth be told, I was still in no condition to strongly approve or strongly protest anything.

***

To Guy's growing consternation, we were rejected as subjects by the other four laboratories we visited on that first day in Ciudad Pallas, for apparently the rapid succession of substances we had tested at the first had left sufficient aftereffects in our metabolisms to render us unfit as biochemical tabulae rasas at least until the next morning.

As far as Guy was concerned though, the time was not entirely wasted, for while we waited in the anterooms of the various laboratories with our fellow would-be psychonauts, he questioned the more experienced members of this profession, or at any rate those capable of coherent discourse, on the inner lore of the trade.