Child of Fortune (40 page)

"Indeed," said Omar, "I have observed the same myself. But from whence do you come and whither do you go?"

"The great wheel turns ... the spirit follows its karma along the trail of the wind ..."

"No doubt," said Guy. "But might you be so good as to point out from where the trail of the wind has brought you ..?"

The wanderer seemed to make a great effort at inward contemplation. At length, he pointed to the west, then hesitantly swung his finger in an arc from west, to northwest, to more or less due north up the coast.

"If I may essay a translation ...?" offered Omar. "You have come from a research dome somewhere up the coast, and you have swung inland on your journey?"

The fellow nodded with some enthusiasm and then spoke as if through veils of mental fog which had at least begun to clear somewhat. "Research dome ... oui ... several weeks ago ... psychoanthropologist yo ... Meade Ariel Kozuma ... is that not my name ..?"

"You are a psychoanthropologist named Meade Ariel Kozuma," I said firmly, getting the hang of the technique. "You left a research dome up the coast a few weeks ago ... on a field trip? To study ... those who wander the Bloomenveldt?"

He shook his head. "Nein ... not wanderers ... tribes ..." He pointed westward with some excitement.

"There are tribes of humans living in the interior of the Bloomenveldt?" I exclaimed.

He nodded. "Noble flowers ... higher forms ... tribes ... go unmasked ... one with the flowers ... principle of subjective research ..."

"Alors!" exclaimed Omar. "Just how far west did you go, man?"

Meade Ariel Kozuma managed a quite human shrug. "Where flowers are one with man ... evolutionary symbiosis ... not like here ..."

"Merde!" exclaimed Omar. "Next will you claim to have visited the Perfumed Garden of the Bloomenkinder?"

The former psychoanthropologist summoned up the ghost of what had once no doubt been a characteristic moue of professional skepticism. "Legend," he said. "Entirely anecdotal."

The sun was beginning to set in earnest now, the shadows were deepening, and a cool offshore wind had begun to rock the crowns of the great trees. "We had best be getting back to the dome now," Omar told us. He turned to regard Meade Ariel Kozuma. "Will you not let us escort you back to the worlds of men?" he offered.

The psychoanthropologist shook his head with some vigor. "The great wheel turns ..." he chanted. "The summons of the flowers ... the sun sets ..." Then with a sudden bound, he sprang off the leaf, and disappeared in great long slow leaps across the Bloomenveldt toward the sunset like a stone thrown by a skilled giant skipping across the surface of some unthinkably immense pond.

"Most of them are like that," Omar said conversationally. "Some a bit more coherent, some less."

"There are many such wandering the Bloomenveldt?" I asked.

Omar shrugged. "One encounters them from time to time."

Guy was staring westward at the sunset with a rather peculiar abstracted air. "Tribes in the interior ... " he muttered softly. "Higher forms ...? Bloomenkinder ...? The Perfumed Garden ...?" He turned to Omar and spoke more sharply ... "Do such things truly exist?"

"Some of it no doubt may be true, the rest volkchose," Omar replied. "Humans have been visiting the Bloomenveldt for centuries, ne, and some, no doubt, like our bemused friend, wander off never to be seen again. Given sufficient chance and time, one can credit that some survive to produce progeny, tribes of ersatz natives, as it were, Bloomenveldt born. One hears such reports from time to time, but you have observed how unreliable the bearers thereof become."

"These tribes, then, are the so-called Bloomenkinder?"

Omar laughed. "Nein," he said. "The Bloomenkinder are creatures of legend, and the legend thereof is related by the hypothetical tribes to bemused wanderers, who in turn babble to such as we. Mythical beings thrice removed, as it were. Denizens of the Perfumed Garden, a Xanadu deep in the interior where Enlightened Ones dwell in nirvanic perfection with the flowers."

"Do you suppose that such a place can in truth exist?" Guy breathed in a solemn half-whisper.

"Vraiment," said Omar, ''as do Xanadu and Oz and Paradise itself." He tapped Guy playfully on the head. "In here!"

He gazed uneasily to the west, where the disc of the sun had already touched the horizon. "It will soon be dark," he said. "Let us not tarry here further discussing the ineffable." And he bounded off in the direction of the sea.

"We must delve deeper into this," Guy said sharply. "Much deeper."

"It's only a legend, Guy."

"Bloomenkinder and Perfumed Gardens mayhap," Guy said with a dreamy yet all-too-determined look in his eyes. "But the tribes of the interior may be real enough, and one may therefore consider what hold the Bloomenveldt has upon such humans to cause them to remain ..."

"How might folk who know not of the existence of the worlds of men even be tempted to return thereto?" I scoffed.

"Ah, but Meade Ariel Kozuma was a mage in the worlds of men and did he not eschew our offer of rescue? What does he find herein more amusing than all the sophisticated pleasures of our Second Starfaring Age?"

***

After all my weeks in Great and ersatz Edoku, after the inward-facing reality of the Unicorn Garden, and most particularly on the heels of our sojourn in vile Ciudad Pallas, I was more delighted than I could have imagined to find myself once more in a totally natural realm under an open sky, let alone free to soar like a bird about a venue as exotic and beautiful as the Bloomenveldt. During the next five days, Guy and I, at first in the company of Omar and later a deux, spent our daylight hours gamboling in the treetops, sampling the perfumes of the great flowers, and conducting frequent and for the most part highly enjoyable tantric exercises under the influence thereof.

But Guy, after sampling the variety of floral psychotropics in the vecino with his usual diligence in such matters, soon became jaded by the immediate amusements at hand, and began to toy with the notion of penetrating the deeper mysteries of the interior .

The first symptom of this obsession appeared as a quite uncharacteristic scholarly interest in the genetic ecology of the Bloomenveldt and the lore of the human tribes thereof. and endless interrogation of the scientists of the research domes on these subjects under the guise of the sincere amateur student.

When it came to the question of the tribes of the interior, there worthies were either ignorant or deliberately unforthcoming or both, as if there was something they were attempting to hide, mayhap even from themselves.

It was readily enough conceded that the Bloomenveldt abounded with fruits, nectars, and pollens quite sufficient to allow members of our species to live off the land, and not even Marlene Kona Mendes attempted to deny that over the centuries any number of fools had wandered off into the interior never to be seen by civilized eyes again. Nor was it denied that what might have been the descendants of same had been fleetingly sighted by suited research teams foraging into the deeper Bloomenveldt in search of biochemical specimens. But these reverted savages uniformly fled at civilized approach, and, like the fauna of the treetops with whom they no doubt by now had more in common than with civilized folk, they were quite adept at eluding capture on their own terrain.

"In short," the director declared brusquely in what was clearly designed to be her final word on the subject, "there can be no more than a scattered handful of such creatures, they are of minimal scientific interest and even more useless in terms of possible profit, and the effort and risk of scientific study of these curiosities entirely outweighs any benefits that might accrue therefrom."

When it came to the subjects of their own immediate research, however, the scientists were more than willing to offer up their wisdom at interminable length to eager young persons expressing a respectful interest or a guileful simulacrum of same.

It was a matter of some dispute among them as to whether the flowers were actual organs of the trees upon which they grew or whether they were in fact symbiotes of different species, though at length it began to seem to me that this question was a mere verbal nicety, for functionally speaking, they were neither and both.

The great trees of the Bloomenveldt were so long-lived as to be all but immortal from a human perspective, and the Bloomenwald entirely covered the continent upon which it was found; therefore arboreal reproduction was necessary, indeed possible, only on those rare occasions when disease or disaster created a gap in the seamless canopy. Experiments had shown that upon such occasions the flowers of neighboring trees in fact dropped seeds onto the forest floor which grew into saplings. True too that the flowers grew directly from the boughs of the trees and were nourished by their sap. Furthermore, trees and flowers were as genotypically identical as Guy and myself, which is to say they shared identical chromosome numbers and genetic hardware.

But each tree's flowers were as genetically varied in the software expression thereof as the citizens of a human city, and they crossbred with each other to produce a rapid profusion of variations, generation by generation, as if they were independent organisms. Indeed, floral evolution on the Bloomenveldt proceeded by leaps and bounds, and that was why the forest remained a bottomless cornucopia of new psychotropics, for these evolved in response to the flowers' intimate relationship to their mammalian pollinators. Thus did the trees, who themselves reproduced rarely, nevertheless contrive to maintain a richly varied gene pool.

Of what real interest was such genetic arcana to Guy Vlad Boca, who had never in my presence evinced a scholarly interest in anything save the varieties of human amusement?

"You do not comprehend, Sunshine?" he said when I interrogated him on the subject of his sudden development of a passion for genetic botany en boudoir. "Either these people are forthrightly lying to us, or mayhap there is a truth which their crabbed spirits fear to consciously encompass "

"How so?" I demanded.

"The whole object of their research is to derive new psychotropics from the forest, is it not? And these, they readily admit, are produced by the flowers thereof in response to the evolution of their pollinators, ne?"

"This much is obvious, but --"

"Yet they profess complete indifference to the study of the human tribes of the interior! Who live generation after generation in unmasked intimacy with the flowers! Noble flowers ...higher forms ... Did not the wanderer babble of such wonders to be found in the interior?"

"Vraiment," I said dubiously, "but considering the source, must one not grant a certain discount for hyperbole?"

"No doubt," agreed Guy, "but considering the source and style of the tales' denial, which is to say sour spirits who dare not venture even to the edge of the Bloomenveldt without sealing their perceptions away in atmosphere suits, one must also grant a certain discount for spiritual constipation."

"Like the mages of the mental retreats and laboratories of Ciudad Pallas ..." I muttered. "Vraiment, on this planet, science would seem to have devolved from its courageous spiritual quest for truth and technological enhancement in favor of a single-minded search for profit."

"Be that as it may, it is also quite clear that even the greatest opportunity for pecuniary profit lies with sedulous study of the tribes of the interior. Since there would seem to be no baneful force restraining these Bloomenkinder from returning to the civilized realm, they must choose to remain in the depths of the forest because --"

"Because they find the Bloomenveldt more amusing than the worlds of men?"

"I could not have phrased it better myself," Guy said dryly. "And what do you imagine they find more amusing? Surely it is neither haute cuisine nor theatrical performances nor elevated discourse ..."

"More puissant psychotropics!"

Guy beamed at me idiotically. "Go to the head of the class, ma chere," he said with unholy gleefulness.

"But if this is so, then why do the mages of the research domes refrain from study of the flowers and tribes of the interior?"

"Why the sealed suits?" Guy said contemptuously. "Why defoliate the entire continent of Pallas? Because they are like eunuchs studying tantra! Because, as Omar so justly put it, they lack the spiritual courage of the mystic libertine! Do not all men fear confrontation with states of being which their spirits lack sufficient grandeur to encompass? Leaving a golden opportunity for true Children of Fortune such as ourselves who fear not unknown realms of the spirit but pursue the same with an open heart!"

"Guy, you are not suggesting that we --"