Child of Fortune (55 page)

"So keep telling the tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt, muchacha," he said as he concluded his farewell to the Gypsy Jokers reclining on bonsaied mountains.

At last I found my own voice in the Dreamtime. "What is the tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt?" I heard myself say.

And at the sound of my own words, I was transported to the most arcane Dreamtime of all. I was walking across the Bloomenveldt now even in my dream, and I was following Belshazaar's sun toward the coast, and the only disjunction between the observable reality and the Dreamtime of my spirit was that in the Dreamtime Pater Pan walked beside me.

"The only tale there is to tell," he said with a strange smile.

"How does this tale end?" I demanded.

"This tale never ends, ruespieler."

As I heard myself discoursing with this animus within a Dreamtime landscape identical to that of the waking realm, the spell of the Walkabout began to unravel, as within any dream, one may upon occasion talk oneself awake, or as an event of sufficient import transmogrifying itself into Dreamtime imagery may rouse the sleepwalker back into the dream of life.

"When will I awake from it?" I said as Pater Pan's image began to fade like a Bloomenveldt mist burning off into the rising sun.

"When the Pied Piper leads the Bloomenkinder of Hamelin back to the far-flung worlds of men," said the face of the sun as I trudged across the foliage.

"Then don't leave me out here without your song!" I shouted as the vision began to fade.

"Pas problem, lady fair," said a disembodied voice. "For now you know who the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt is, do you not, ruespieler ...?"

"Anyone who tells the tale!"

And I emerged from the Dreamtime with the words ringing from my lips across the Bloomenveldt. I was now once more confronted with a sea of wind-tossed green under a hot yellow sun, and there was no Pater Pan at my side, nor the sound of any voice save my own and that of the breezes murmuring through the branches. I was faint and lightheaded from a hunger pushed deep down beneath stomach pains into cellular famishment, indeed 1 was a teetering crouched figure whose very metabolism was about to collapse.

But I was not alone.

For whether the Piper who had brought me thither was a figment out of the tale I was telling myself in the Dreamtime or whether some quantum vapor of a lover's spirit had somehow succored me therein, or whether these are indeed the same in a manner which no waking consciousness may comprehend, my Walkabout through the Dreamtime with that spirit guide had in any event brought me to this single purple flower .

Four human figures sat on its velvety petals avidly devouring round yellow fruit. The corpulence of their frames and the tattered bits of cloth still clinging to them gave unmistakable evidence that these had once been sapient citizens of the worlds of men.

During my passage through the Dreamtime, I had put the land of the Bloomenkinder behind me. Only the borderland region of lost civilized souls lay between me and the coast.

CHILD OF FORTUNE

Chapter 23

I had emerged from the land of the true Bloomenkinder with the peroration of the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt upon my lips and I emerged from the Dreamtime with the tale I had learned, or been given, or had told myself therein springing forth from them still, nor did I give over my spieling as I staggered forward toward the purple flower.

"Once you and I were Bloomenkinder in the Perfumed Garden of Eden," I quite redundantly informed the two men and two women who continued to focus their perfect attention on their fruit even as this bizarre apparition approached. "Now the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt bids us follow our Arkie Sparkie hearts from our ancestral flowers to the farflung worlds of men ..."

Mayhap in a certain sense I was in the Dreamtime still, for while a part of me was there advancing slowly on the purple flower and its devotees, another part of me stood before the Luzplatz volcano seeking to persuade the bustling throngs of Edojin therein to hearken to my ruespiel. For indeed, to the consciousness then paused at the edge of the flower's pheromonic aura, they were much the same thing.

I could taste a faint perfume of sweet and sour succulence, and the very cells of my body gibbered their demand for me to fall upon the yellow fruit. On the Bloomenveldt, I knew that here on the coastal fringes of the forest, floral evolution and human devolution had not yet progressed to produce the perfect symbiosis between flowers and Bloomenkinder. These corpulent fressing creatures were not Bloomenkinder but once-sapient beings who had chanced to fall under the sway of far cruder pheromones crafted not to snare men but to control the more primitive brains of the native mammals of the forest. Here a strong enough will might prevail against these less puissant molecules.

In the Edoku of my Dreamtime, I knew that I must earn the ruegelt of survival by the power of the Word alone, though now my tale need please no other ears than my own. For as long as I continued to tell my tale, as long as I could hear my own voice singing my song, as long as I remained Sunshine the ruespieler, so long would I remain on the Yellow Brick Road, for there was only one camino real of sapience through the forest of unreality, the way of the Word, and I was on it now.

"Remember when you were Children of Fortune ... Remember when you were free and sapient creatures living by your wits in the streets of Great Edoku ..."

As I spieled, I slowly resumed my approach to the purple flower, deeper into its sphere of olfactory influence, testing the puissance of the Word against the pouvoir of the perfume, as for so long I had pitted my naked will against far more powerful versions of same in the combat of the fast.

"Remember how the Pied Piper of Pan led you out of the Perfumed Garden and into the Gold Mountain across the long slow centuries between the stars ..."

My trepidation began to lessen as I remembered my passage via the Dreamtime from the Perfumed Garden to this borderland of the sapient spirit, as my sovereign will kept me moving forward in a deliberately measured pace against all the blandishments of the perfume and all the outraged impatience of my body.

Mayhap the shorter and darker of the two male creatures, mayhap the man hunkered there on the flower remembered a time when he was a free creature or the Word too, for his eyes raised themselves from his meal in a certain blinking and pathetic befuddlement, even as he continued to bite chunks of firm green pulp out of his yellow fruit.

"And where has the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt gone now that you sit there like a bestial wage slave of the Pentagon eating the fruit of forgetfulness with your spirits Gone Before?"

I was within reaching distance of the fruit now, still spieling, my spirit still in sovereign command of the tropisms and hunger of my body.

"Nowhere, everywhere, here in the teller of the tale, vraiment within the last Arkie Spark of your own human heart!" I shouted the last into the face of the man who squatted before me, who, having now given over his fressing entirely, met my eyes with what I imagined might be the struggling ghost of a sapient glimmer.

"There!" I cried, pointing at the late morning sun. "Follow that Arkie Spark within you, follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow once more the Yellow Brick Road ..."

And as the rag-clad fellow fixed his gaze upon the golden-maned face of the Pied Piper rising in glory above the maya of the Bloomenveldt, I snatched up a fruit with my other hand, tucked it under my arm, and, obeying the moral of my own tale, turned my back to the flower and my face to the sun, and retreated to the east with as much flank speed as my weakened body could muster. Nor did it even occur to me to cease my spiel now that the fruit thereof was mine.

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt who has led us from apes into men ..."

I did not eat of the fruit until I had stopped loping, and I did not stop till I was far beyond the pheromonic aura of the flower. Even as I tore open the yellow fruit with my overgrown nails, even as I gobbled down great chunks and felt the cells of my body cry out in orgasmic release from their nutritive celibacy, I continued to babble ever-mutating versions of the only tale I had to tell where there was no ear to hear it but my own, or so I believed. For only the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt could keep this Child of Fortune on her Yellow Brick Road, and the Piper would be with me only so long as anyone told his tale.

Upon finishing my meal, I rose up at once, turned toward the sunrise, and set forth, spieling still. I must not have chanced to look back for several hours.

But when I did, I saw, staggering and sweating with the protests of long unused muscles not fifty meters behind me, the man whose eyes had risen for a moment from their nonbeing to meet mine at the purple flower.

He must have been soaking up the words of my tale for hours, aroused from the perfect thrall of his flower by the sheer enchantment of the novel sound of a human voice, mesmerized thereby to follow the music, or mayhap, in some dim manner, hearkening as well to the words of the song.

***

All during that day he followed me at some distance, struggling to keep up with the sound of my voice, for as far as I was concerned, the tale I was telling was a song I sang only for myself, and I had neither ambition to attain guruhood nor the patience to slow my pace for his benefit. That night we slumbered on leaves a good twenty meters apart. For I had no desire for discourse with someone sunk so deep in the pit of nonsentience out of which I had thusfar so painfully crawled, and he was content to listen to my tale from a distance, as if somehow mindful himself of the gulf that separated our spirits.

Mayhap the foregoing is merely the post facto dissembling of self-justification, for I can make no claim that I had then attained that sublime level of enlightenment wherein the bodhi is content to shine without grasping at worldly consequences. Suffice it to say that while he may have chosen to follow, I chose not to lead, for if I had then addressed him it would have been only to tell him that a true Child of Fortune has no chairmen of the board or kings. If this be judged callous indifference by the moral philosophers, I can only declare that moral responsibility or its converse were concepts my spirit did not contain at the time, and throw myself on the mercy of the court.

***

On the following morning when my spirit rose to the sun, feeling all the stronger for the previous day's triumph, I straightaway sought out another flower without a thought for the creature my words had placed in my charge, nor, on the other hand, did 1 eschew enticing him further with the declaiming of my endless tale to myself.

Soon enough I came upon an orange bloom where three gaunt women were munching on fibrous blue fruit of a tuberous shape. I strode boldly up to them this time, in the full verbal tide of my spiel, and one of the women seemed to listen out of the corner of her ears with a certain indifferent attention, which had me stand there and reach a proper conclusion like a true ruespieler of the Gypsy Jokers rather than immediately grab for the fruit like the same forced to snatch fressen incognito from under the noses of denizens of the Publics.

"And who is the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt who will lead you back into the Spark of the Ark?", I declaimed as I approached the end of the cycle. "The Child of Fortune, within us all who is the teller of the tale, and in the honor of whose spirit within yourself you will now shower this ruespieler with ruegelt!"

The exiled Edojin in rags blinked at me strangely for a moment, and the logic of the Dreamtime and the logic of the quotidian moment came to coincide. "Fruit, bitte," I told my audience. "Give ... me ... fruit ..."

Then, as if a key had been turned in the lock of some long-forgotten reflex of etiquette, she handed me one of the blue tubers with a grotesquely patronly flourish, as long ago she might have tossed a coin to a busker on a civilized street.

To the extent that I was able to be moved to such complex emotion, this was no doubt the crowning achievement of a ruespieler's career, but to the extent that I could still be said to retain a sense of revulsion, I was quite horrified by this engramatic ghost of a human response.

***

On the next morning, still trailed by my disregarded acolyte, I repaired directly to a flower to spiel for my breakfast again, and so my feeding cycle evolved. No longer famished, no longer fearing the power of the floral perfumes, I must on some level have known that now I could easily enough have marched up to any flower and snatched up a surfeit of fruit with my own hands.

Yet in the Dreamtime, I was a Gypsy Joker ruespieler earning her survival by the power of the Word, and so, striding boldly into the pheromonic winds behind my verbal shield, I stalked like the very Princess of ruespielers straight up to a yellow flower where three Bloomenkinder sat devouring purple fruit and forthwith brought my continuous tale around to the hat-passing phase with the cavalier mendicancy of a Gypsy Joker Queen.