Child of Fortune (51 page)

I rose up. I adjusted my floatbelt to .1 g. I turned my back to the west in defiance of the way of the Bloomenkinder, vraiment, in defiance of the very Bloomenveldt itself, and fixed my eyes on that point on the eastern horizon from which the light of a new dawn must inevitably arise after even the darkest of nights.

No one, it was said, had ever returned to the worlds of men from the land of the Bloomenkinder.

I sprang off my leaf in a mighty bound toward whatever lay between me and the coastline. No one, I told myself grandly, has ever returned to the worlds of men from the land of the Bloomenkinder before.

***

I gave no thought to rest until the sun's disc sinking past the horizon had painted the sky with the gauzy rose and purple banners of oncoming night, and the first faint stars had begun to shine in the blackening blue above the rim of the eastern horizon.

Vraiment, my spirit had risen up from despair to the outskirts of hope as the golden afternoon wore on, for I had naturally fallen into the pattern I had adopted as a psychonaut in less perilous precincts to the east, or rather my will had succeeded in enforcing its mirror image.

There I had allowed the subtle currents of diluted psychotropic wine wafting through my nostrils to freely move my spirit and my body like a kite upon a gentle breeze. Here, where the pheromonic weather was a good deal stronger, did I apply the compass of the ascetic's code: tacking against any perfume which aroused my desire. When the promise of gustatory delight without measure drew me to the left, I made a wide swing to the right, and I fled from any lustful impulses like the perfect celibate monk. Thus did I avoid landing in precincts from which I might find myself lacking the will to depart.

So did sapience triumph over the biochemical imperatives of the Bloomenveldt, or so I told myself, for had I not turned the very power of the enemy into the servant of my own pathfinding?

Now, however, it was becoming night, and in the lonely blindness of the dark, with things unseen scrabbling and scurrying through the leaves and branches, and all the breezes reeking of sleep, I had a good deal less confidence in the power of the light of reason over the shadowy phantoms of the presentient cortex.

Certainement, I should have felt hunger with some keenness as I huddled on a leaf in the blackness watching the stars come out. Certainement, considering my peril and the night sounds of this most alien of forests whispering around me, fear should have robbed me of any rest. At the very least, my brain should have been aswirl with the memories of the day's events, and trepidations concerning the events of the morrow.

But in these environs, or so it would seem, the Bloomenveldt, after its own self-interested fashion, took care to assure that none of its charges stumbled to the forest floor in the middle of the night or failed to receive the measure of sleep that their metabolisms required. Uncounted thousands of flowers altered their daytime profusion of pheromonic imperatives to fill the entire Bloomenveldt with the peacefully leaden perfume of a single purpose.

Not hunger, not fear, mayhap not even outright terror, could have long kept any mammal awake in this overwhelming perfumed fog of sleep. Not even this sapient Child of Fortune alone with her thoughts could deprive herself of the Bloomenveldt's gift of deep and uninterrupted slumber.

***

When I awoke in the bleak early moments of sunrise, however, it was an entirely different matter. The sun peeked up through a cool gray mist dimming the greens and floral hues of the Bloomenveldt to ghostly pastels. Certainement, I had not been awoken by either the bright light of dawn or the natural clock of my own metabolism at this repulsive hour. No, it was a ravenous hunger which had been sufficiently powerful to break my sleep; my stomach seemed plastered like an aching membrane against my backbone, my head ached with hollow emptiness, and my consciousness could contain naught but the thought of luscious fruits.

The faint odors of which seemed as pervasive as the mist slowly beginning to bum off the Bloomenveldt. The trace aromas of fruits I had never seen evoked sharp memories of wonderful savors I had never tasted.

Since it had been nearly a day since I had last eaten, my hunger of the morning seemed far less unnatural than the absence of same last night. Yet the phantom flavors teasing across my palate on the breeze alerted me to the fact that there were external agencies at work. No doubt, just as the nighttime perfumes masked all hunger behind an impenetrable urge to sleep, so had the conclusion of these secretions with the dawn abruptly allowed it to surface redoubled by time.

But while it may have been the flowers that were filling my nostrils and caressing my tastebuds with promises of gustatory delight, my ringing head and aching stomach were clear evidence of true famishment on a metabolic level. Which is to say that no matter what powerful psychotropics the food behind such pheromonic blandishments was likely to contain, not even the mightiest ascetic heroism was going to prevent me from having to eat sooner or later.

Still, mayhap I could apply the same contrarian strategy which had served me well thusfar and avoid eating any fruits to which I was drawn by the perfumes and consume only those which the Bloomenveldt appeared to have laid out for other species. By so doing, I might at least avoid ingesting psychotropics evolved by the cunning of the flowers as specific snares for our own.

Thus resolved, I drank water from the abundant supplies thereof condensed in the hollows of nearby leaves, and then set off to the east in a series of short, high, hanging hops, ignoring all blandishments of aromas by act of will, and seeking to spy out an untenanted flower by vision alone.

As chance would have it, I had not proceeded in this manner for very long when I spotted a small grove of flowers of several different species not two hundred meters to the north. Not only were no human figures in evidence, there seemed to be no aromas leading my backbrain by the nose toward it.

What 1 saw when I arrived at this grove's margin, however, was a good deal less than an appetizing spectacle. Half a dozen species of flowers had arranged themselves in widely separated stands of two or three blooms, and with the exception of those of one species with which I was all too familiar, these all seemed to be somewhat immature specimens, nor was any fruit in evidence, as if the Perfumed Garden had recently sent out a colonial expedition which had not yet matured to the point of attracting its own Bloomenkinder.

But when I approached one of the stands of rainbow puffballs which seemed to be the only fully mature flowers in the garden, I saw that this surmise was both florally correct and humanly wrong in a peculiarly horrifying manner.

For here in the deep Bloomenveldt with no adult humans anywhere in evidence, clusters of human infants were nevertheless hanging from the vegetative teats of the flowers. Somehow, the flowers had either chemically commanded the mothers thereof to deposit their offspring in this venue, or worse still, exuded pheromones which drew hundreds of toddlers wriggling across the Bloomenveldt to improve the species by utterly ruthless natural selection.

Either way, this juvenile offspring of the Perfumed Garden was growing its own first generation of human pollinators.

While the gorge and outrage that such a sight called forth would be difficult to exaggerate, some logical circuits in my mind remained capable of making a cold calculation. No doubt the reason that this grove did not exude perfumes attractive to adult humans was that it had not matured to the point where it was ready to serve as a proper host to same. Since the sap secreted by the teats was clearly sufficient to sustain these infant Bloomenkinder in robust health, might it not do the same for me? And since the perfumes of the grove lacked molecules with puissant effect upon the adult human metabolism, might not the milk thereof be equally lacking in danger?

Putting aside all esthetic considerations, gustatory or social, I sought out a stem as free from babes as possible, lay down on the leaf before it, applied my mouth to one of the pinkly rounded breasts thereof, and gave suck to the hard red teat.

A thick, tepid, somewhat sweet syrup oozed into my mouth, its simple savor not designed to appeal to mature tastebuds, so that the esthetic experience was like drinking liquified and sweetened fressen. But as the syrup slowly poured down my throat, my stomach welcomed it as the plants of a desert welcome rain after a long parching drought, and the very cells of my body seemed to sigh in relief. Avidly, I sucked at the floral teat with unrestrained enthusiasm, until I had established a steady flow with much unseemly smacking and gurgling.

I could not have been at it for more than a few minutes when, in almost less time than it takes to tell, a bubble of nausea suddenly exploded in my gut, a spasm of utter rejection that had my whole body trembling, and a series of retches wracked me down to the limbs.

I spat out the teat and managed to roll up onto my haunches clutching my stomach as I vomited charge after charge of thick green liquid over the edge of the leaf.

Fortunately, rather than expiring in a series of dry heaves, the episode ended as soon as the last of the sap had been expelled, and aside from a certain soreness of the ribs and a painful sharpening of the demanding emptiness in my stomach, I was no more the worse for wear, as if the flower had merely sought to provide a harmless lesson.

Vraiment, that lesson had been well taught! What the Bloomenveldt provided for the young of our species was crafted to be intolerable to the adult metabolism thereof.

Having no further business to conduct in this noxious nursery, I fled the vecino thereof in a random series of short leaps, thinking for the moment of nothing more than putting it well behind me. It did not take long, however, for my ravenous hunger to reassert its demands, and for the perfumed promises of succulence to clutch at my backbrain with ever greater strength.

I knew full well that if I did not find safer fare soon, I would reach a state where I could no longer resist these siren calls to ease my famishment at the first Bloomenkinder larder my nose could find. With my remaining will, I resolved therefore to seek out lone flowers whose perfumes promised nothing and sample the fruits thereof, even though my confidence in this strategy was now severely eroded.

Nor, alas, did my pessimism prove unfounded. Discovering flowers indifferent to the attendance of my species was easy enough, but none of the fare offered up thereby was at all palatable.

Some of these fruits repelled by the perfect loathsomeness of their flavors: there were fruits whose taste filled the backbrain with a rank fecal odor, fruits that tasted like ancient overripe cheese, fruits which to my palate seemed redolent of urine. But the greater part of the fruits I forced myself to sample caused such powerful retching the moment their pulp touched my mouth that I was spared the full horror of the flavors thereof.

The message could not have been clearer had it been graven in monumental letters of stone. In these deep precincts, at any rate, humans could eat only the fruits to which the perfumes drew them, and these, no doubt, were therefore liberally laced with molecules designed to perfect their behavior as pollinators. It was a closed circle which seemed to allow no space whatsoever for sapient will.

***

In utter despair leavened only by an equally powerful outrage, with my stomach pounding in agony, my ears ringing with faintness, my legs beginning to go wobbly, and my nostrils constantly assailed by promises of swift and delicious surcease from this entirely self-inflicted torture, I set off for want of any other course of action into the warming blaze of the rising sun which had long since burned away the mist of morning.

Even then I must have known that I was only postponing the inevitable. For as the day wore on past noon, the pains in my stomach grew stronger, I was becoming too weak with hunger to even completely control the trajectories of my evermore feeble leaps, I was becoming increasingly dizzy to the point where consciousness was beginning to wink on and off, and, contrawise, the smells of delicious fruits mine for the taking had come to dominate my sensorium to the point where there was room in my mind for no other thought save the by-now-equally-tropistic self- command to follow the direction of sunrise which I had programmed what was left of my sapient spirit to follow.

But inevitably my body weakened to the point where it could no longer maintain a sapient spirit to follow its own song, and the perfumed breath of the flowers seized the remnants of my consciousness, which is to say that, with a great sigh of animal relief, I finally allowed myself to follow the summons to the nearest floral banquet.

There were some score flowers in this garden: lavender bells, yellow cups filled with nectar, pink flowers of passion, crumbly black cones of pollen circled by small white aprons of petals, mayhap other types as well, for my sensorium was skewed entirely away from sight and sound into a sphere where smell and taste merged to dominate my perceptions and within which hunger and the glorious satisfaction of same had become the sum total of my being.