Child of Fortune (48 page)

"I remember what the Bloomenkinder know," he said in that same strange basso profundo as he clumsily scrabbled to his feet, still gazing fixedly to the west like a Bloomenkind at sunset.

Entirely distractedly, he began cramming his effects into his pack, not for a moment giving up his visionary fixation.

In a panic, I stuffed my own pack as best I was able, for Guy was already hoisting his in less time than it takes to tell, and poising for a great leap westward.

Then off he went without so much as another word, and I was reduced to catching up as best I could, bounding along in Guy's train once more as he sniffed and snuffled across the Bloomenveldt. Vraiment, and in the canine manner, he seemed to grow ever more excited as he bayed along the trails of scent.

By midafternoon, he began to veer off to the southwest in a jerky series of tacks. And then, two or three hours later, his behavior grew even more frenetic, like that of a hound brought the first full whiff of the scent of his quarry on a change in the wind.

He came down from one of his leaps with a rigid, narrow-eyed alertness, and stood quite frozen like that on a leaf, as if to await my arrival. But as it turned out, a sudden return of his lost gallantry had nothing to do with it, for when I arrived at his side he entirely ignored my presence and continued to stare fixedly along the vector of his own nose. No doubt had he been equipped with a tail, it would have pointed out straight behind him.

"What is it, Guy?" I demanded. "I see nought but the usual endless leaves and flowers." For indeed that was all there was to be seen, not even a Bloomenkinder garden was in evidence.

"A grand and mighty spirit summoning its true children home," said that dybbuk voice through Guy Vlad Boca's lips. "The spirit of once and future flowers."

"Quelle chose, Guy, before you succumb to such a puissant tropism as you describe, put your mask on at --"

But without another word, he was off in a great leap directly along the point of his fixed vision, and I was constrained to follow at once or risk losing sight of him entirely.

Nor did I have much space for thought for the next hour, for all my efforts were of necessity dedicated to negotiating leaps of sufficient force and rapidity to keep Guy in sight as he bounded across the Bloomenveldt at the greatest speed of which his efforts were capable. Nor did he seem to have any further doubts as to the precise vector of his destiny, for his course now had the geometric inevitability of a ballistic trajectory .

And then, at the apogee of one of my own leaps, I thought I spied an anomaly on the horizon exactly on the compass point toward which Guy was heading, no more than the first hint of land that one perceives after a voyage on an open ocean.

I made my next leap shorter and higher, trying to gain as lofty a vantage as possible without being left behind. Vraiment, there was something there, just on the line of the horizon, a splash of colors and shapes.

But I had no time to pause for thought when I alighted from this crow's nest in the air, for Guy was pulling away from me already, and I had had to maximize my speed to catch up to him, indeed to merely keep him in sight. So I paused not for another clear view of whatever it was we were approaching by leaps and bounds until after quite a chase across the treetops, and indeed I only managed to catch up with him at all when he was brought up short by a sight that transfixed us both.

We stood together on a tall hillock of foliage looking out over a long shallow dip in the Bloomenveldt. The center of this plain in the treetops rose gently into another highland formed by the elevated crown of a single great tree.

In an overwhelming display of floral exuberance, the entire great treecrown had burst into flower, like a proud peacock displaying his full brilliant glory among the quotidian arboreal fowl.

"Behold, oh ye true children of the Enchanted Forest," said a voice that in that moment seemed to speak for both my by-now-long-lost lover and that which had claimed him. "Behold the Perfumed Garden."

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Chapter 19

We both stood there for a long silent moment, beholding the celestial city on the hill, for the dense profusion of great flowers seemed to grow in organized groves, color by color, form by form, so that the huge garden seemed for all the world to be divided up into arrondissements, like a true city of men.

Indeed, I was put in mind of my first sight of Great Edoku seen from space, for while the Perfumed Garden was bathed all over by the same bright afternoon sunlight, the districts thereof were a mosaic of brilliantly contrasting facets of color, so that the whole took on the aspect of an impossible gem shimmering in all the hues of the rainbow, a vision of breathtakingly chaotic color, in which, nevertheless, an elusive order seemed to be implied. just below the level of conscious apprehension.

As for Bloomenkinder, while these could hardly have been individually visible from this far vantage, their presence seemed to reveal itself in a seething motion overlaid on the vision, a wavering of the whole image like that of an overcomplicated mandala one has stared at in a toxicated state for too long.

So too could I hear the collective human mantra of the unseen and yet seen denizens thereof, for the air hummed with a faint celestial vibration, an ethereal wordless song emanating from unknown hundreds of distant human voices all harmonizing on the same single note, a note which sent my spirit soaring, a siren Om of paradise, which had my feet inching forward, and my hands beginning to move toward my mask.

Guy stood there beside me with his head bent back, and his nose in the air, and a beatific smile beaming from his face, and his eyes squeezed shut to better savor the perfumes, like a small boy inhaling the aroma of the most wonderful bakery .

Alors, if my spirit had all but been captured from afar by sight and sound alone, what must he be feeling now?

"Guy ...? Guy ...? Talk to me, Guy, tell me what it is that you smell on the wind!"

His eyelids peeled open, and he half-turned his head to face me. But his eyes seemed as clear and vacant as those of a Bloomenkind, and his nostrils continued to flare around long, deep draughts of perfumed air.

"The Perfumed Garden ..." said that eerie dybbuk voice. "My Perfumed Garden," said Guy Vlad Boca, albeit in a voice that seemed to speak as an echo, as a memory he had already let go, dopplering away to extinction down the corridors of time. Logic should have filled me with terror, but Guy had taken my hand in his, and his voice, in perfect tonal harmony with the distant hum of the Perfumed Garden's mantra, insisted that there was nothing here for us to fear, that we were only going home.

"Come ... come ... come home ..." Guy chanted, as if he, or some forest spirit, or vraiment both, had read my thoughts, or indeed as if his thoughts, and mine, and the voice of that spirit, were but notes of the same transcendent mantric chord.

And then without further rational thought, I found myself bounding hand in hand with Guy in great leaps toward the Perfumed Garden, like moths to a flame, like motes of dust rising up a great shaft of golden light to greet the sun.

***

Nor did we pause for a moment until we stood as groundling insects at the base of that mighty floral metropolis.

Groves and hedges of brilliantly colored flowers rose up the gentle slope of the great treecrown before me to fill the world. And I beheld multitudes of my own kind buzzing and dancing about them like an ecstatic swarm of bees on a midsummer's mother lode of floral beneficence.

A vast multitude of Bloomenkinder, a golden citizenry of naked and physically splendid humans, enlivened the avenues and groves of this city of the flowers with their recomplicated and utterly graceful pavane. They dined at great floral banquets, they slumbered in municipal parks, they engaged in arcane civic activity impossible to fathom at this remove, they sauntered in streams along the avenues between the flowers like gay boulevardiers, and all with a choreographed perfection of motion and timing which would have done any maestro of the dance proud.

But while the resemblance to the buzzings and scurryings of bees was given the lie by the way the Bloomenkinder made art of every motion with all the style and grace appropriate to our mammalian species and then some, when it came to the collective mantra of a beehive, the metaphor was far closer to the sensual and spiritual reality.

For the mighty wordless human song that filled the world, like the buzzing of a million bees, was indeed a collective mantric chorus that vibrated to the spiritual and genetic wavelength of its own species. Mayhap this soul-stirring thrum of human joy might have been a mere drone of monotony to an apiary ear, just as in the buzz of the bees we hear nothing but the dead hiss of insectoid static. But just as the buzzing bees must hear the song of their spirit in the voices of their fellows, so did this mighty mantra of the collective human spirit draw my singularity toward union with the chorus of the whole.

Indeed I found myself humming that mantra under my breath from somewhere deep in the depths of my throat, and it seemed as if my very bones were vibrating to its harmony, and I became aware that Guy was singing it as well, his mouth wide open in a radiant smile, the sound pouring up through him in a single mighty tone, that selfsame tone which had resonated in the voice which had first spoken through him the day before, and which now seemed to speak to my own soul.

"Ah ... ah ... ah ... om ... ah ... ah ... ah ... home ..."

I turned to Guy with my own blissful smile. Slowly, his face turned itself toward me, so that I could see upon it the mirror of my own joy. I squeezed his hand. "Oh Guy, " I said softly, "I just didn't know ..."

Guy seemed to look into my eyes for a long moment, and it seemed as if several spirits were regarding me from the endless depths of his. The gay Child of Fortune whose wit had won me on the streets of Great Edoku, the Merchant Prince who had lavishly rescued me from penury, the deeper and darker Guy who had emerged psychotropically on the Unicorn Garden, the nascent Charge Addict, the obsessed and intrepid psychonaut of the Bloomenveldt, the creature who had made love to me last night in the forest, they were all there behind his eyes, they were all at peace with each other, they were all one, and in that moment, vraiment, did I find it in my heart to love them all.

And so hand in hand, two hearts beating as one, two spirits humming the same glorious mantra, or so at the time it seemed, did two no longer lost children of man enter their Perfumed Garden.

**

We walked in dazzlement down the aisles of great flowers, through a living kaleidoscope of brilliant colors and achingly lovely pastel shadows, for the very air within the Perfumed Garden was suffused and romanced by the bright sunlight streaming through thousands upon thousands of translucent petals, and at first I could only bathe myself in the rainbow radiance and laugh in delight.

But soon enough I perceived that we promenaded among throngs of stately Bloomenkinder like grimy ducklings among serene and impassive snow-white swans gliding in a recomplicated pavane about the surface of an untrammeled pond. Everywhere I looked, I saw perfected exemplars of my own species moving with the balletic fluidity of creatures whose movements are governed entirely by the natural imperatives of the laws of motion, following their destined trajectories with innocently perfect grace.

Was not Guy the wiser spirit after all? For was not my every sense filled with overwhelming beauty save that which tasted the air? And if I dared doff my mask and partake of that deepest communion, might I not too learn that here I had found my perfect flower? Of what use were struggle and travail and sapient dissatisfaction when with but a sigh of surrender one might transcend the maya thereof to a garden of perfect bliss?

Vraiment, mayhap I would have torn off my mask to inhale the timeless perfume of floral paradise without further moral struggle in the throes of this blissful satori, had I not then felt the insistent tug of Guy's hand in mine, and come out of my reverie to realize that he was already leading me toward a grove of blue and green speckled flowers.

Here a veritable horde of Bloomenkinder was consuming the yellow fruit, half again as large as a human head, which grew in profusion about the stalks. This they accomplished by deftly splitting the soft spheres in half with the sides of their hands and scooping the purple gelatinous pulp into their mouths with their cupped fingers. Without a word or a sign, Guy let go my hand and marched straight to the banquet of huge messy fruit.

He sank to his haunches forthwith and set to work in the manner of the surrounding swarm, with all their avidity for the luscious purple slime, but with little of their genetically perfected precision. When he struck the huge fruit to cleave it open, he mashed it into a disaster. The gelatinous pulp dribbled and spurted from his fingers as he then sought to shovel the remains into his mouth with both hands, and he seemed utterly indifferent to the fact that he was plastering the vile-looking purple goo all over his face and into the crown of his hair in the process. From both the esthetic and psychic viewpoints. it was truly a jolting and revolting spectacle.