Child of Fortune (37 page)

Without further thought, 1 entered the libraire and purchased a copy of the holo so that I might display it for Guy at once, utterly indifferent to the fact that this purchase consumed nearly all of the meager credit on my chip, leaving me with only enough to take a floatcab back to the hotel. This final expenditure I also freely made, unwilling to trade time for credits by returning afoot.

A small pamphlet concerning the Bloomenwald was included in the price of the holo, and this 1 avidly perused while the floatcab carried me through the streets of Ciudad Pallas, all too eager to ignore the tawdry reality through which I need pass in favor of immersion in the lore of the Enchanted Forest.

On Belshazaar, I learned, wormlike forms had evolved directly into vertebrates and thence into higher fauna, and insects had never arisen. The flowers of the Bloomenveldt being of such enormous size, the ecological niches occupied on other worlds by insectile forms were here taken over by mammalians of considerable size and cerebral development. As in the more common mode where insects filled these niches, the flowers exuded molecules in their perfumes, pollens, nectars, and fruits designed to effect the motivational metabolisms of their pollinators.

But since on Belshazaar these pollinators were mammalian forms with developed cerebral cortices, the molecules the flowers evolved to modulate their behaviors also had their effects on man.

Thus was the economy of Belshazaar based upon the chance evolution of an ecosystem in which higher forms had been adapted to serve as the pollinators of the Enchanted Forest.

The pamphlet went on to elucidate a few of the finer details of the ecosystem of the treetops, but by the time I had reached this section of the simple dissertation, the floatcab had reached the Hotel Pallas, and I gave over my studies of same in favor of rushing to our suite to confront Guy with the holo.

I burst into the suite in the full flush of my enthusiasm, and, seeing that Guy reposed on a chaise in the sitting room gazing out over the dismal cityscape provided by the great window, I went directly to the viewer circuited thereto and inserted the holo. The wretched view of the vile city was forthwith replaced by the glorious vision of the Bloomenveldt, as if we were perched in a treehouse above the aerial meadow, looking out on what would soon become our garden of delights.

"Look, Guy, isn't it marvelous?" I burbled. "Ah, how --"

"... So close, vraiment, beyond the dance, rising within me, it is as they say, as Jesu Christo had it, behold, psychonauts of the spirit, you too can walk on water, you must surrender all else to do it, but you can walk on water ..."

Only when he utterly failed to react to this glorious vision did I perceive the metal band around his head, and the wire leads depending therefrom, and the little console to which they were connected. Only then did I realize that he had been addressing himself in an eerie hollow voice at the moment of my arrival. Only then did comprehending rage replace my ignorant joy. For while I had discovered Xochimilco in the treetops, Guy had discovered the Charge.

I knew little about the Charge in those days save the general lore, and I would have expected Guy Vlad Boca to be far better versed in such matters than I, but what I did know was more than enough to outrage my spirit and send an adrenal tide boiling through my blood which balled my hands into fists.

The Charge is in essence the electronic amplification of the electrohologram of human consciousness without topological distortion, so that the Charge Addict seems to remain the same personality only more so, an enhanced version of himself, if only in his own eyes. Of course, if as is all too likely, the Charge Addict is a skewed personality to begin with, amplification produces something a good deal less savory than a bodhisattva.

Worse still, while each increment of Charge achieves an increment of amplification of the electrohologram of consciousness, each increment of Charge also creates an increment of instability in the overall pattern, so that as higher and higher states of consciousness are supposedly achieved, the personality that reaches them grows vaguer and vaguer, until, at least in theory, perfect Enlightenment is reached by a perfect human cipher.

Without even pausing at the time to think these thoughts, I ripped the wires from the console, and flung the vile thing against the wall with all my strength, smashing it to pieces.

Guy Vlad Boca at last acknowledged my existence to the point of turning his face in my direction, his eyes blinking in perplexity in the sudden light of relative reason. "How could you do such a thing to yourself, Guy?" I screamed. "Is mental seppuku in slow motion your concept of the perfect amusement?"

"Mayhap not ... perfect ..." Guy babbled, staring off into inner space once more, "but mayhap as close as we can approach to the edge ..."

"Merde, this is more than I can countenance," I exclaimed, and without further rational consideration, I tore the electrode band from his head, and employed the ring of Touch in a manner which I had never before attempted, applying my hand to the base of his skull, and sending a jolt of energy to the centers of his backbrain which should have been sufficient to have a corpse up and turning cartwheels.

This at least was enough to return him to some semblance of natural awareness.

"By what right did you do that, who are you to judge another spirit's quest, I merely toyed with the edge ..." he said, regarding me first in righteous anger, and then like a little boy whose mother has caught him with his hand in the pastry bin.

"What would you have had me do, sit patiently by and watch you slowly erase your consciousness?"

"I am no sordid Charge Addict, I would never have proceeded to the Up and Out," he said with a great false show of indignation belied by the queasy expression around the corners of his eyes. "I merely wished to taste the nirvanic joys which the Charge Addicts celebrate, never would such a master psychonaut as Guy Vlad Boca have had the weakness of will to fall victim to terminal addiction."

"Indeed? As you have not had the weakness of will to give yourself over to the far less puissant temptations of the mental retreats?"

"How can it be less than a noble calling to pursue profit and enhance consciousness while serving the cause of medical science at the same time?"

"Vraiment?" I said, hunkering down beside his chaise. "If your consciousness has become so puissantly enhanced, then why are you entirely oblivious to the glory before your very eyes!"

He regarded me with a befuddled expression.

Groaning with exasperation, I seized his jaw in my hand and directed his gaze by main force toward the holo image of the Bloomenveldt which had replaced the unwholesome vista of Ciudad Pallas beyond the window. His eyes widened in surprise and seemed to regain some modicum of their quotidian vitality.

"Yes, Guy," I cooed in as seductive a voice as I could muster under the circumstances, "not this wretched city of unnatural experiments and even more unnatural denizens, but the Bloomenveldt of which all herein is but a pale and tortured shadow. Vraiment, and this is but a holo. Ah, can you not imagine us standing there hand in hand in the Enchanted Forest of the treetops, with the warm sun on our skins, and a thousand rich perfumes intoxicating our senses, borne on the same breeze that ruffles our hair and whispers through the branches, and rocks the very ground we stroll upon like transcendent beings along the rolling surface of an arboreal sea ..."

Guy's reaction to this romantic extravagance was to shrug, and own: "Tres simpatico for the devotee of bucolic pleasures, but as for urbane and sophisticated spirits like ourselves, surely you jest?"

"How can you not be possessed of the passion to hie yourself there at once?" I said as evenly as I could, choking back my consternation at his obtuseness by pragmatic act of will.

"For what purpose? For all its grandeur, it is only a forest ..."

"Only a forest!"

"Surely the cities of man abound in more artful amusements and adventures of the spirit than anything that mere brute nature can provide."

"Including the present loathsome venue?" I said in a sneering tone.

"Most particularly Ciudad Pallas, here in the most advanced laboratories of the psychesomic sciences," said Guy, "for where else in the worlds of men are the most arcane states of consciousness to be experienced, and at a profit in the bargain?"

I choked back my disgust and anger in favor of guile, for at this point it was quite clear that there was no hope of persuading Guy to quit Ciudad Pallas for the Bloomenveldt by an honest appeal to esthetics.

"There, mon cher dumkopf, there!" I declared, pointing at the holo of the Bloomenveldt.

"There?"

"Naturellement, Guy," I purred in his ear. "Where else do you suppose all the psychotropics you have already sampled originate? If profit is what you seek based on a droit of monopoly on the latest substances to emerge from the research domes, how better to steal a march on all competition than by seeking them out at their very source'? If what you seek is the attainment of a state of consciousness which has never before existed in a human brain, why piddle about with synthesized derivatives rather than experience directly the full organic complexity? Is anything the mental retreats have to offer, is foolish flirtation with the Charge, any more amusing than that?"

"Je ne sais pas ..." Guy muttered reflectively. "To be the first, to boldly go where no human spirit has gone before, and mayhap to enrich ourselves beyond measure in the process ..."

And all at once, he was positively beaming at me. "Well spoken, ruespieler, well spoken, ma chere Gypsy Joker," he declaimed floridly. "you shall have your heart's desire, y yo tambien, for vraiment, what higher adventure for we two free spirits of the upper air than that which you propose!"

Even then I do believe that I realized that I had ceased to be an ingenue when I applied this forthrightly self-serving strategem. For by no stretch of the imagination could I delude myself that I had appealed to the best that lay in Guy Vlad Boca. But contrawise, did not the vie of Ciudad Pallas appeal to his worst weakness with deadly perfection?

No longer the innocent naif I, I had learned my first lesson in quantitative moral calculus, though at the time I had no concept of how bitter that lesson was to become.

Chapter 16

There were no hotels on the continent of Bloomenwald, not even the rudest of inns; indeed the only human constructs were the research domes scattered up and down the eastern coast on the margin of beach between the great forest and the sea. As for accommodations within the Bloomenwald itself or atop the canopy thereof, these of course were nonexistent, for in the first instance the forest floor was a gloomy land of perpetual night choked with unwholesome saphrophytic fungi and infested with an assortment of ill-tempered poisonous reptiles, and the Bloomenveldt, while certainly a solid enough terrain to stroll upon, was hardly suitable as a base for architectural constructs.

Fortunately, auslander turistas did visit the Bloomenwald from time to time, though the natives of Belshazaar, aside from the workers in the research domes, entirely shunned the continent thereof, so a limited number of rooms were available in the domes, provided one was willing to pay the outrageous rent demanded.

As for equipping our little expedition, this we were advised to do before our departure. Since the climate of the Bloomenveldt was perpetually balmy, tents or heavy clothing were redundant, and should we be so foolishly venturesome as to stay away from the dome long enough to require nourishment, we would have to content ourselves with cold concentrates, for the notion of building a fire on the treetops would be, to say the least, ill-advised. Thus, aside from cold concentrates and canteens, our kits contained only three items of equipment: simple beacon receivers in the event we lost our way, filter masks which we were assured were an absolute necessity, and floatbelts to nullify gravity so that we could flit from branch to branch and not fall to the deadly forest floor in the event of a botched landing.

Guy, who had certainly never fancied himself a woodsman, expressed the usual trepidations of the confirmed urbanite during these preparations, but I, who had gone on many an expedition deep into the Bittersweet Jungle of Glade, assured him in all sincerity that I was a maestra of forest lore well versed in the skills of survival therein. So I truly believed, for was one forest not very much like another, even though the Bloomenwald was a forest writ large? Only the question of predators would have given me pause, and these, we were told, were nonexistent.

Within forty-eight hours, we had completed our preparations and boarded the suborbital shuttle, for once I had succeeded in altering the vector of Guy's enthusiasm, he threw his energies and argent into the project as totally as he had pursued his previous obsessions. There were no more sojourns at the mental retreats, the. Charge was never mentioned again, and once more our passages d'amour had achieved a frequency and duration, not to say piquancy, appropriate to a natural man and a natural woman about to share a grand adventure.