Child of Fortune (49 page)

Certainement it was more than enough to dissuade me from any temptation to breathe the seductive aroma of this vile succulence and be constrained to emulate the same thereby!

I hunkered down beside him and fairly shouted in his ear. "Guy! Guy! You're fressing like a swine! You're gobbling goo like a demented animal!"

He did not so much as raise his eyes from his fruit to acknowledge my existence and continued to scoop dripping handfuls of pulp into his slobbering mouth without even breaking rhythm, spattering me with gobbets of same in the process.

"Merde!" I snarled. "This is more than I can countenance!" I kicked the dripping mess of fruit from his hands. This at last penetrated the sphere of his attention. He slowly turned his head to peruse the source of this disturbance with vacantly blissful eyes, then turned away again, smashed open the nearest yellow fruit, and returned to his feeding ritual.

"Guy! Guy!" I shouted. "It's Sunshine! Don't you know me? Don't you even know I'm here?"

At this, he paused in his devouring devotions, and for a moment it seemed as if he were indeed aware of my presence, for as his head slowly looked upward from his meal, and he let the fruit fall from his fingers, it seemed for an augenblick that he was responding to my words. But no, alas, his eyes looked straight past me, and his nose went high in the air, and he arose to follow it without looking back.

***

Only now, unwilling as I yet was to essay the use of force, and constrained thereby to trail after a Guy who utterly ignored me on his grand tour of the Perfumed Garden, did the generality of perfection begin to resolve itself into some inspection of detail which hinted at the unseen Serpent therein.

Dozens of different species of flowers offered up a bewildering variety of fruits, pollens and nectars, not at isolated kiosks, but in whole groves thronged with avid Bloomenkinder gobbling up the produce like flocks of birds descending upon orchards.

Whole precincts of flowers were given over to slumber. Great naked shoals of Bloomenkinder lay sprawled all over the acres of velveteen petals provided, dreaming I knew not what in the bright clear light of day, and appearing for all the world like the exhausted yet tranquil morning after some mighty communal orgy.

And then Guy's trajectory chanced to bring us past the nursery.

Here clusters of human infants hung from the vegetal teats of a huge stand of rainbow-hued puffballs like so many berries, and others crawled about their leafy playpen within a ring of silent female Bloomenkinder who moved only when necessary to keep the toddlers from straying.

While a single Bloomenkind lay supine and utterly silent on a leaf near the edge of the grove in the act of giving birth.

She seemed entranced into a semiconscious state of dreamy ecstasy, wherein her protoplasmic mechanisms were nevertheless performing their functions in an exemplary manner that would have done the best of Healers proud. Her breaths were deep and regular in the approved rhythm and every muscle in her body was perfectly attuned to maximize the efficacy of her contractions. When after a short and entirely silent labor, the infant emerged, the mother started its breath with her own, bit off the umbilical cord at the navel, methodically licked the baby clean, and then straightway affixed its tiny mouth to the nearest free floral nipple. She then began to devour the afterbirth, a process which at last forced me to avert my eyes.

Now I truly beheld the Serpent lurking in the Garden, the price one paid for hearkening to its sweet promises of symbiotic perfection.

For if this was a paradise designed for man by the flowers, it was a version crafted by the indifferent, cold hand of the Bloomenveldt, not the warm-blooded mammalian spirit, which is to say it was a floral vision of the perfected pollinator known elsewhere to himself as man.

Not even the love of a mother for her newborn babe was permitted to mar this floral vision of paradise, for from the point of view of the flowers, the highest form of pollinator society, naturellement, was not a perfect commonwealth of sapiently enlightened human hearts, but the pheromonically predictable perfection of a human hive.

"Merde, Guy, we must quit this place forthwith!" I shouted, and once more I was tantalized by the illusion that I had reached what was left of the natural man, for, without demur, he took a deep breath, smiled at me in blissful harmony, and straightaway seemed to march off on a purposeful new vector.

But rather than the nearest egress from this vile venue, he made straight for an extensive orchard of tall blue flowers, where whole congregations of Bloomenkinder sat, each to their own flower, like a great swarm of buddhas in a forest of bo trees. There they sat like idols, staring fixedly up into the cerulean void, and chanting the booming mantra that was both the incarnated voice of the Bloomenveldt manifested in human throats and the Bloomenkinder's paean of homage to the perfect and mindless spirit thereof.

Certainement this song which called to the very protoplasm from which my psyche arose was the most horrid floral simulacrum of all, for this noble mantra of the human spirit was now revealed as no more than the chorus of the genes, no more than the empty-minded buzzing of mammalian bees.

And Guy Vlad Boca let fall my hand, in thrall to that Bloomenkinder chorus, gracefully seating himself in the lotus position under the nearest unoccupied flower and proceeding to gaze into the clear blue nothingness of the Bloomenveldt sky as he merged his lonely and precious singularity into the nirvanic voice of the All.

At the time, I could imagine no more terminal straits than this, I had no further belief that any unaided words of mine could summon his sapience forth. I had no further recourse but to main force, and certainement this was no time to eschew the most puissant power at my command.

Which is to say the only possible path to the spirit within this beatified corpus was via the route of the natural man. I therefore activated the Touch and applied it where it was likely to do the most good.

When it came to the flesh, the art of Leonardo produced the limpest of results, for no doubt the hormonal matrix of erotic interest must exist before the kundalinic serpent can be aroused to uncoil via electronic stimulation of the software of manhood.

But if pheromonic imperatives controlled the biochemistry of his brain to the point where tantric arousal was out of the question, the nerve trunk that led from the phallus to the centers of most primal awareness was at least still connected to what was left of the elan humain of Guy Vlad Boca.

Which is to say that, while that which I grasped remained flaccid, Guy's face began to surface the evidence of some ambiguity between chemical and electronic stimuli as he regarded me now. His eyes struggled toward recognition. His lips began to move tentatively around the single mantric syllable they were mouthing.

"Yes, Guy, yes, say something, say something," I fairly begged, tugging imploringly at his phallus, "tell me at least that you are still there."

And then as he sat there motionless among all those Bloomenkinder bodhis. his head turned almost imperceptibly, and he seemed to be smiling straight at me, and his eyes met mine, and his mouth fashioned that continuous stream of monotone arising through it into the single word that could allow in that moment the singular sprach of Guy Vlad Boca to speak from within the mantric Lingo of the eternal empty All.

"Ah ... ah ... ah ... amused."

I all but burst into tears to hear this, tears of both sorrow and fond remembrance, for here I beheld both my lover and my lost comrade, the gay spirit I had met on the streets of Edoku and the psychotropically-obsessed creature of Ciudad Pallas, the mystic libertine and the Bloomenkind he had become, at the end point of the vector all those avatars had been so avidly pursuing, speaking to me in the voice of the forest of the final joy that now filled his heart --

Yet the tears came not, for at least I had roused some poor semblance of the natural man, mayhap all was not yet lost.

"What amuses you, Guy?" I said, cooing softly in his ear, kneading his flaccid lingam in a pulsing rhythm, as if to pump cleansing kundalinic energies up from the deepest root of his manhood to do battle with the chemical minions of the Bloomenveldt spirit investing his brain.

His eyes gazed directly into mine now, and there was no mistaking that someone or something knew that I was there. Vraiment I could feel some vague stirrings in his phallus now, as if the manly serpent were beginning to uncoil in its sleep.

"I ... we ... amused ..." he said in a quavering voice, as if more than one animating spirit were attempting to use the same lips.

"Speak to me, Guy Vlad Boca," I demanded softly, redoubling my electronically-enhanced ministrations. "Let the natural man once more arise."

"Sunshine ..." he said quite clearly. "My mystic libertine ... sip steadily at it as you gambol through your perfect flower ..."

"Guy, Guy, it is you!" I cried.

"Never before or since have I known such perfect bliss ... Seek the Perfumed Garden ... Let the mountain come to thee Mohammed ..."

Was it indeed no more than fragmented memory speaking? Certainement, his phallus began to slowly fill with the life juices of manhood, certainement, he had given over his mantric chanting, certainement, our eyes were locked in unwavering rapport, which is to say that whatever now spoke through those random syllables, be it a true lover waving his last goodbye or a dybbuk of the Enchanted Forest, tell me not that it did not speak for me.

"Guy, listen to me, Guy, come with me," I said as seductively as I could under the circumstances, drawing him slowly and gently to his feet by the handle of his manhood. Vraiment, I met with anything but resistance, for his eyes gazed into mine with a meaning whose frank intent would seem to be made quite firmly plain by his now quite thoroughly aroused lingam.

Mayhap I could lead him from the Perfumed Garden by this lever, for certainly it would not be the first time masculine obstinacy had been overcome in this manner. And once I had gotten him to a leafy venue well away from floral influences, mayhap the natural union of lingam and yoni would bring the natural man to his senses.

"Ah ... ah ... ah ... amuse ..." he moaned in a deep hollow voice, at once the Bloomenveldt's floral mantra and the frankest profession of entirely mammalian joy, for his eyes closed in ecstasy, and his lungs inhaled in long priapic pants, and he moved his throbbing phallus back and forth in an unmistakable rhythm within the embrace of my hand.

"Oh yes, Guy," I babbled rapidly, "let us quit this place for a secluded venue and we will show each other the amusements proper to a natural man and woman and then some, this I promise you ..."

Und so weiter, just to keep his ears filled constantly with the sound of human Lingo, as I managed to lead him in this obscene manner from the greater obscenity of the mantric grove.

But once we had cleared the immediate pheromonic influences thereof and entered the dance of the Bloomenkinder down the floral avenue, Guy, or that to which his spirit moved, sought out his own vector, breathing in great silent draughts of perfumed air now, rolling his eyes in ecstasy, and now it was I who was constrained to follow the course set by his lingam, which all but threatened to writhe like an impatient serpent out of my hand.

Since in truth I had no idea where I was at the time, one direction would be as efficacious as any other, so if Guy wished to lead me to a boudoir of his own choosing, I could see nothing for it but to follow the path of least resistance. Vraiment, when I let Guy proceed along his chosen path, he readily enough allowed me to clasp an arm around his waist in proper loverly style the better to keep hold of his lingam, and my female sensibility did not exactly have to be tuned to a fever pitch to know it had hold of the natural man.

"Where are we going, Guy? And what do you intend to do when we get there?" I asked him, summoning up an incongruous air of erotic playfulness with a mighty act of will.

He paused, he turned to me, he favored me with a smile of blindingly radiant lust. And then his hand found my yoni, fondling it with a frank avidity that set my heart and hopes soaring, and I let go of his lingam so that I might throw both arms around his neck and plant a joyous kiss on his lips.

But Guy, forcefully eschewing this attempt at loverly embrace, brushed my arms aside, and, gazing fixedly over my shoulder, pulled me to him, and attempted to thrust his lingam into my yoni through the intervening cloth.

I whirled myself out of this animalistic embrace, and then it was that I saw that without my knowing it, we had reached the venue of his intent.

The Perfumed Garden path which we had been following had debouched into a grotesque floral amphitheater where low mounded Bloomenveldt hillsides almost entirely surrounded a vast central grove. And around the hillsides grew bed after bed of tan blue flowers. Under the flowers, swarm after swarm of Bloomenkinder bodhis sat, humming the eternal booming mantra of the Enchanted Forest, hundreds upon hundreds of mammalian bees in a nirvanic paean of glory to the blissful nothingness of the hive.