Child of Fortune (50 page)

The flowers of the vast central grove were the rosy pink color of a lover's naked body by firelight, and their fat velvety petals lolled out on the surrounding leaves like a carpet of tongues.

Upon these fleshy cushions a vast seraglio of copulations was taking place, hundreds of interlocked bodies coupled and recoupled in tantric figures of such lithe sinuosity and perfect ecstatic abandon as to have put a temple frieze of fabled Hind to shame. It was almost more than the eye could credit or the ear comprehend. Yonis, lingams, indeed every conceivable erotic orifice and protuberance, united and recombined in a vast and sinuous collective motion, spurred on in their extravagant copulations by continuous sighing breakers of orgasm cresting and rising on the surface of the fleshly sea.

But rather than stirring my passions, such a spectacle doused my kundalinic fires with an icy hand round my heart.

Certainement, as a tantric tableau, there was nothing lacking in the way of artistic perfection. Each and every performer was a paragon of the human body's form, and the recomplicated figures were done with a flawless grace and egoless sincerity beyond that which even after years of study perfect masters of the art attain,

But I would have been more aroused by the sight of the breeding season in a primate preserve. For at least at a primate preserve I would have been observing creatures copulating in the style appropriate to their kind. Here, au contraire, I beheld the intimate communion of the tantra reduced to mindless tropism. Here were my ears filled with the buzz of the human hive melded in solipsistic harmony with the moans and sighs of an eternal tantric cusp.

Thus might it have been in our ancestral Eden, but so too will it become should sapience expire from our far-flung worlds, leaving only the indifferent nothingness from whence we came behind to sing its empty and triumphant song.

But Guy Vlad Boca had long since become incapable of such distinctions between form and spirit, between pheromonic imperatives and the human heart. He was flinging off his pack and tearing off his clothing, ripping the straps of his filter mask from around his neck and tossing his last sapient hope aside, and then he was upon me, thrusting his insistent lingam against my yoni, attempting to breach my citadel and prod me with it toward the venue of pheromonic rut at the same time.

I pushed him away with a mighty shove, he stumbled a few steps backward, and then righted himself, at which point he paid me no further heed, dashing around me as if I were a natural obstacle, and flinging himself into the midst of the breeding ground.

Whereupon he forthwith seized up the nearest female in his embrace, who avidly impaled herself on his throbbing phallus, even as another impaled her from the rear, and then he was tumbling and rolling away from me into the vile melee, lending his own voice to the moans and the cries, enveloped in an arabesque sinuosity of torsos and limbs.

Needless to say, this was more than any fear or rational consideration could constrain me to condone! Snarling with outrage, I reached out for Guy with my hand of Touch, and succeeded in grabbing the nether root of his lingam, seeking to remove it from the Bloomenkinde's yoni and Guy from his madness.

But instead of yanking Guy back into human reality by his manhood as I had intended, I only succeeded in sending a shockwave of tantric amplification heterodyning across the cross- connected erotic figure. Ecstatic cries rose into a shrill and insistent chorus, and bodies writhed and spasmed in spreading chain-reactions of orgasm. And dozens of hands were dragging me deeper into the fray. I stumbled and fell, and Guy was torn from my grasp, and I was battered and pulled this way and that, while phalluses prodded at every part of my body, and it took all of my strength just to keep from being drawn under by a riptide of flesh.

I lost sight of Guy entirely, indeed all thought of him left my mind as, in the midst of this rape most foul, I struck out in rage and terror, attempting for the first time if without much skill in the martial art thereof to use the Touch as a weapon.

I had never before been in a physical conflict in my life, and now I found myself fighting off a riotous obscenity of mass sexual overload which I myself had unknowingly triggered. But for every blow that I managed to land in the region of a painful plexus, another always seemed to strike a tantric chakra, so that all my efforts to defend myself further exacerbated the endless legions of my attackers.

Then I felt my pack being torn from my back, and hands at my floatbelt, and fearing that this would go next, I did the only thing I could, turned it up to .19 lift, and attempted to free myself from my tormenters long enough to leap clear.

I succeeded in jumping clear of the ground, but my upward progress was impeded in midair by the press of bodies and the scrabblings of hands.

Then I felt myself being drawn back, down into the mire of bodies, and fingers were tearing randomly at my filter mask, and suddenly it was ripped away, and phalluses thrust forward from every direction toward every orifice, and I felt myself reaching for them with my hands and my yoni and my mouth as a knee-shaking tsunami of blind animal lust surged through my body --

As I felt my consciousness subliming into a blood-red mist of egoless libido, I had the last combat- torn and adrenaline-charged presence of mind to perform two valedictory acts of sapience before I passed over to the flowers.

I exhaled from the bottom of my lungs, and then stopped my breathing.

I struck out with vicious and electronically augmented karate blows, and kicked off some unknown portion of some unseen body with both of my feet.

As I soared free of the melee, something hit me in the stomach with wind-killing force, and I was constrained to suck in a great charge of pheromone-saturated air, and then something else smashed into my temple as I broke clear -- and I had one last moment of roaring red consciousness, scrabbling to reach the lingams and bodies receding beneath my ravenous grasp before even that lapsed into darkness.

Chapter 20

I awoke to the gentlest of thumps as I floated down supinely onto a leaf, nudged back the last increment into consciousness by this most tender breaking of a most languid fall. The Perfumed Garden was nowhere in evidence, which is to say that my eyes opened and focused on naught but the endless flower-strewn green plain of the Bloomenveldt, nor had I chanced to descend near a Bloomenkinder village or even within the overpowering chemical aura of any flower.

Bonne chance indeed! Now I remembered leaping upward with my floatbelt turned up to .1 g, thrust out of a vile unspeakability whose details I was not ready to call up from beyond the veil of my present dreamy vagueness. There had been a wonderful surge of roaring lust, and a blow on the head ...

Slowly, my consciousness firmed up to the point where I began to understand what must have happened.

I had been rendered unconscious as the gentle lift of the floatbelt bore me aloft, and I must have drifted up higher and higher until the floatbelt's safety mechanism had automatically turned down the lift to prevent me from drifting up beyond the life-sustaining level of Belshazaar's atmosphere and then deposited me randomly on this leaf.

I must therefore have risen quite far, through several atmospheric streams, which must have blown me this way and that for unknowable distances, which is to say I had been thoroughly shaken by the cupped hands of fate and then tossed like a die back onto the gaming board of life.

And then I began to perceive that while the Perfumed Garden was nowhere in sight, it could not be said that its influence was completely absent from my sensorium. For as my memory regained the clarity of my restored vision, I remembered the frenzied tangle of naked limbs and torsos, the forest of clutching and groping hands, the thrusting clusters of phalluses, with a sad and longing nostalgia, knowing I had been an utter fool to abandon such an eternal ecstasy of perfect sexual delight.

Yet at the same time, higher portions of my mind remembered all too well that the real-time emotions encoded with these experiences had been those of outraged disgust and terrified anger.

Out of this disjunction between the true memory of the event and my present perception of same through a rosy haze of diffuse sexual arousal, arose yet a third aspect of my immediate consciousness, namely a detached observer who could readily comprehend that the difference must be the result of something borne on the wind.

Vraiment, as I sat up and began to size up the full extent of my dilemma, I knew that I could easily enough find my way back to paradise by surrendering my spirit to the rosy waves of this lustful tide, which, though fainter than the night breeze wafting the aroma of the Bittersweet Jungle down to the porch of my parents' manse in Nouvelle Orlean, would surely nevertheless carry a soul cast into its gentle undertow back home to floral nirvana.

As I fought against this dreamy desire, my awareness was sharpened by the adrenal surge of the struggle, and I began to fully comprehend the peril, not to say hopelessness, of my position.

My filter mask was gone and so was my pack. I had supplies of neither food nor water. I had lost my homing beacon. I was at an unknown locus deep in the interior of the Bloomenveldt, hundreds, or for all I knew, thousands of kilometers from the coast, at any rate a journey of weeks even at maximum speed along an unerringly perfect vector.

But in comparison to the peril that faced my spirit, the physical magnitude of such a trek faded into insignificance, for in order to survive, let alone escape from the land of the Bloomenkinder, I had no choice but to eat of the fruits and nectars and pollens of the Bloomenveldt, for no other sustenance was available. I would have sold my soul for a sack of fressen bars, for that might very well be the price extracted for the gustatory largesse of the flowers.

Worse still, unimaginably worse, I would have to journey for weeks across the Bloomenveldt with my lungs and my spirit naked to every pheromonic tropism wafted my way on its perfumed breezes.

Nor did my moral senses provide an unambiguous direction, for did not love and honor demand that I make all possible efforts to rescue Guy? Could I fairly call myself human if I fled to save my own spirit and left a fellow sapient being in mindless thrall to floral fascism?

Besides, would it not be easier and infinitely more pleasant, since surrender to the Bloomenveldt was in any case inevitable, to do so by returning to the Perfumed Garden and at least live in mindless bliss with my lover rather than as a lone lost Bloomenkind of the forest ...?

But I knew full well from whence this thought arose, and not even the perfumed whispers of the Bloomenveldt could persuade me that I had any hope of extracting Guy from its bosom unaided.

I had only two real choices, both of them bleak. I could make for the coast by myself or I could return to the Perfumed Garden and attempt to rescue Guy. In the latter case, I would expend my last moments of sapient consciousness in a futile attempt to do the impossible; and the last thing I would know would be my joyous surrender to the enemy of my spirit. In the former case, on the other hand, would I not meet the same end? For no one had ever returned to the worlds of men from the land of the true Bloomenkinder, and no one was in a better position to appreciate why than myself.

As I pondered this perfect synergy of pragmatic impasse and moral dilemma, the sun had sunk far past the zenith, and the light was subtly deepening to golden, and the shadows of nearby flowers and distant hillocks of foliage were definitely pointing the way to the west, to the sunset to which the beautiful and empty faces of unknown thousands of Bloomenkinder would soon be turning in vegetative homage.

Somehow vision perceived in this clearly polarized afternoon landscape what logic and morality could not. I could, like the Bloomenkinder, turn my face to the sunset of the spirit, or I could, like the true Child of Fortune, follow the rising sun into the sapient perils of the unknown future.

The choice was as clear as the difference between karma and destiny. Guy had surrendered to the inevitability of the former, but a true Child of Fortune could only seek to be the master of the latter and follow that Yellow Brick Road toward self-made dawn which had thusfar taken our species from the trees to the stars.

I found myself in that moment fingering my sash of Cloth of Many Colors. I found myself remembering the Moussa who had won it, and the Sunshine who had worn it proudly when she finally dared to stand up and spiel in the Luzplatz. I remembered he who had given it to me and named me a true Gypsy Joker, and how I had successfully pursued him against all odds. I remembered the girl who had been expelled from the Yggdrasil without even the wit to find a toilet. I remembered how I had arrived in Great and incomprehensible Edoku to wander its chaotic reality in a befuddled daze.

There was only one thing for it. Only a massive expedition could hope to rescue Guy, and only I might lead it to the Perfumed Garden. If I surrendered to karma now, the Perfumed Garden would remain an invidious legend of nirvana.