Child of Fortune (64 page)

"In order to secure funds, naturellement!" I told her. "Why else? So that I may purchase my escape from what you have so justly styled this wretched place!"

Wendi regarded me with astonishment. "You are in fact declaring your indigence, child?"

"I do possess some two hundred and sixty units of credit on my chip ..." I said in a somewhat pitiful voice.

"Two hundred and sixty!" Wendi exclaimed. "With that you might purchase two nights lodging in this despicable hotel! I do not at all comprehend."

"I do not comprehend what it is you do not comprehend."

"Caga!" Wendi fairly exploded. "Nom de merde! The Clear Light Mental Retreat has licensed the publication of any number of learned and fatuous monographs dissecting your exploits, and while admittedly these are certainly less than popular fare, several thousand copies of each must surely have been purchased by institutes of learning. What wretched rate of royalty have they cozened you into accepting? One colleague to another, how mingy was the advance?"

"Royalty? Advance?" The more she spoke, the less I seemed to understand. "I am supplied with a decent enough room, three dull meals daily, and several changes of clothing, and that is the long and short of it," I told her. "You are saying I should receive something more?"

"WHAT?" Wendi shouted, bolting from the couch. She began pacing in small circles before me, fairly bellowing her outrage. "Chingada, what a naif! And to think I once had the temerity to style myself a proper thief! Child, while you have been spending all these weeks answering their stupid questions and begging alms in the street, the mages of the Clear Light Mental Retreat have been churning out monographs by the roomful on the data you have been so naively donating gratuit, at considerable profit to themselves!"

"They have ...?"

"Of course they have!" Wendi exclaimed. "Unlike you, my little ingenue, they were not exactly born the day before yesterday!"

Slowly, she subsided from her wrath, sat down beside me, and laid a friendly hand on my knee. "Fear not, Sunshine," she said in a much calmer voice, but one that was nevertheless edged with burnished steel. "I will aid you in dealing with these mountebanks forthwith. Healers they style themselves even as they rob innocent children!"

So saying, she grabbed me by the hand and fairly yanked me to my feet. "Andale!" she said. "We will have it out with this Urso fellow at once!"

"But ... the Matrix ...your commission ... what is happening ...? You haven't told me anything ..." I stammered as she dragged me toward the door.

"In the floatcab, liebchen, I will elucidate as best I can, though, hola, it would seem you have more to learn than even I can teach!"

***

Night had fully fallen by now, and as the floatcab followed its guiderail through the largely empty streets of Ciudad Pallas toward the Clear Light Mental Retreat, Wendi Sha Rumi told me of things that were at length to open up worlds,

"Consider, Sunshine," she said, "that since the Gyptians started carving graffiti on the walls of their tombs, or at any rate since Gutenberg printed his first book, our species has been churning out mountains of paper, tapes, cines, holos, word crystals, und so weiter on every conceivable subject and then some. And since some centuries before the Age of Space, these have all been replicated thousandsfold, to the point that to our Second Starfaring Age almost none of this knowledge and art has been lost. We now number hundreds of billions on nearly three hundred worlds, and still this process continues apace."

She shook her head in wonder and amazement. "The imagination boggles, ne. Paradoxically enough, there is so much knowledge that if some sense were not made of it, it might as well be lost. Thus the Matrix, wherein the sum total of human knowledge is stored in subatomic coding that makes word crystal seem as crude and coarse as tablets of baked clay. Or rather the Matrices, for each Void Ship contains a copy to be continually updated as their paths cross."

"Each Void Ship contains all of human knowledge?" I exclaimed in utter wonderment.

"Nein, nein, nein!" Wendi said. "What an impossible useless mess that would be! The sum total of all human knowledge, child, the edited sum total. For example, Omar's ode is in the Matrix, but most of the learned babble churned out by the mages of the Clear Light on the subject of your adventure is merely noted in the bibliographical index. And even with stringent editing, it requires years of study to learn how to properly extract what one desires from the chaos of the Matrix."

She turned to me and smiled. "Which brings us to our business at hand," she said. "It has been decided by those who decide such things, which is to say the inner circle of the floating cultura, as it were, that your sojourn upon the Bloomenveldt is of sufficient interest to posterity so that a short and definitive version is deemed worthy of storage in the Matrix. Thus I have been commissioned to journey to Belshazaar on the Mistral Falcon, which waits in orbit even now, to assist you in the preparation of same, along with certain mages who have come along for the ride. Your fee will be two thousand units, admittedly a mere token sum, but I assure you that inclusion of a summary in the Matrix will in no way reduce the sale of the full and glorious romance you will no doubt some day publish, indeed the cachet thereof will no doubt enhance --"

She cut herself off in midsentence, for our floatcab had now pulled up outside the Clear Light. "Speaking of credit units," she said, "I see we have reached our destination. So let us conclude this tawdry business as expeditiously as possible, so that we may swiftly flee this loathsome planet and begin our collaboration aboard the Mistral Falcon, ne!"

***

Thus, with my head reeling from this rapid-fire round of wonders and revelations to the point where I could scarcely think, I found myself being drawn down the hallways of the Clear Light by Wendi Sha Rumi, who shouted out to all and sundry for Urso Moldavia Rashid to be summoned to his office at once, and who refused to give over her strident demands until the whole mental retreat was in an uproar, and Urso at last appeared therein where we awaited him, scowling darkly, and muttering imprecations under his breath.

"What outrage is this?" he demanded angrily. "How dare you throw this mental retreat into a tumult and summon me from table like --"

"Like a thief caught in the act?" Wendi suggested in a cold, hard voice. "As for the nature of the outrage, that is for me to inquire and you to reply, Urso Moldavia Rashid! To wit, have you robbed this child of her droit of authorship out of mere pig-thick ignorance or deliberate guileful malice?"

"Who is this woman?" Urso shouted at me. "Speak at once, lest I expel you out upon the streets forthwith!"

"How dare you hector this innocent thusly?" Wendi bellowed. "As for expelling her from this establishment, I assure you that soon enough she will be gone. Which is to say as soon as you have rendered up some five thousand credit units, a modest enough estimate of the amount you have embezzled."

"Embezzled? Moi?" Urso said, shifting over at once from bellicose outrage to a tone of wounded innocence which would have seemed utterly sincere had not the transformation occurred with such rapidity. He sank down into the chair behind his desk and demurred not when I seated myself before him. Wendi, for her part, remained standing with one hand on her hip and the other pointing a finger of admonishment.

"Embezzled, you!" she declared. "For many long weeks has Sunshine been the subject of your learned interrogations, and many have been the monographs published thereon, to the great benefit of this institution's scholarly repute and to the pecuniary enrichment of all concerned save the font thereof herself."

"For those selfsame many weeks, she has enjoyed the benefits of our therapeutic ministrations," Urso pointed out defensively. "You know only the Sunshine Shasta Leonardo whom we have returned to full sapient sanity. Had you met the babbling creature who first emerged from the Bloomenveldt, you would not value our services to her so lightly."

"Well spoken!" I was moved to declare, for I could not deny the justice in his words.

Wendi, however, fetched my ankle a kick and shot me a look which further served to admonish me to silence.

"I do not undervalue the worth of your therapeutic efforts at all," she told Urso. "This I have already credited to your karmic and financial accounts. Otherwise, I would surely have demanded three times as much for the droits."

"The arrangement between us was freely entered into," Urso said in a rather whining tone, turning to me for support. "Will you deny this, Sunshine?"

Before I could begin to answer, Wendi held up her hand for silence. "Freely entered into?" she fairly snorted. "First you declare that your craft is entirely responsible for her present sanity, which is to say that she was quite barbled when you grabbed hold of her, and then you declare that the poor demented creature was capable of entering a business arrangement freely, and while in a state of perfect indigence to boot?"

Urso drummed his fingers on the surface of his desk. He shrugged. He sighed. His face took on an almost obsequious mien. "I am a Healer, not an author or an advocate," he said quite meekly. "I know nothing of these matters. Mayhap I have unknowingly violated some nicety thereof, but I am innocent of all guile or willful wrongdoing ..."

"Well spoken," Wendi said in a tone of poisonous sweetness. "Then you will no doubt be more than willing to rectify the innocent results of your ignorant actions, ne?"

Urso studied her narrowly. "In the interests of harmony and justice, I suppose I might bring myself to part with two thousand credit units ..." he said speculatively.

"Four thousand," said Wendi, "Seeing as how we have now established what you are, would it not be unseemly to haggle over the price?"

"Three thousand," Urso countered immediately.

"Three thousand five hundred. After all, just as the Clear Light Mental Retreat has gained a certain scholarly renown among the worlds of men courtesy of my young friend, so might it gain a certain odor of ill repute should the content of this conversation penetrate beyond these walls ..."

"Done," moaned Urso. "You drive a hard bargain, certainement."

"Au contraire," drawled Wendi Sha Rumi. "I am known throughout the worlds of men as a high- minded esthete hardly able to properly attend to the grubby details of commerce."

Urso fairly choked.

Wendi laughed.

***

After Urso had transferred the funds in question, Wendi accompanied me to my erstwhile room, where I began to stuff the meager wardrobe with which I had been provided into my pack. She fingered one of the tunics distastefully.

"It is hardly worth the effort to pack this rubbish, liebchen," she said. "Hardly suitable for the society you are about to enter." She eyed me speculatively. "We are not that different in general measurement," she said. "It will be simple enough to alter some of my attire so that you may be properly dressed. Obviously there is no point in attempting to seek out haute couture in this nikulturni burg!"

With enough credit on my chip to purchase three or four electrocoma passages, I at last began to catch my psychic breath, which is to say I determined to seize control of my own destiny from the admittedly beneficent hands of my friend and would-be mentor, who had scarcely even given me time to ponder my own desires since we had met.

"I cannot thank you enough for your aid, Wendi," I told her. "But I have my own road to follow, and, thanks to you, I now have the funds to embark thereon."

"Your own road to follow?" Wendi said slowly, as if she had been presented with something of a novel notion. "Vraiment, we must all follow our own star, ma chere," she agreed forthrightly. "The fact that I have come all this distance to meet you should in no way be taken into account. But what, may I ask, is this destiny which in your heart supersedes telling your tale to the posterity of the Matrix? Never have I heard anyone eschew this honor before ..."

"To follow the path of the wandering ruespieler and see the worlds of men," I told her.

"If that were all, why do you object to traveling at least the first leg of your journey in proper style?" she said, eyeing me narrowly.

"The worlds of men are many, and lifespan's duration is limited," I told her. "I care not to waste weeks of mine voyaging as an Honored Passenger, for I wish to make the attempt to see them all, to trip through the centuries in the sleep of electrocoma in the process and experience thereby as much of our species' tale as I can manage before I must die."

Wendi smiled a strange little smile. "It seems to me," she said, "that I have heard these words before ..."