Child of Fortune (65 page)

I stared back at her. "You really did know Pater Pan," I said.

"Indeed," Wendi said. "And it would seem he told us both the same story of his millennial heart's desire." She regarded me sharply. "Do you seek to emulate his example or are you still smitten by his charms?"

"Je ne sais pas," I told her in all honesty. "Mayhap they are one and the same. I seek to travel the road of the spirit that we share certainement ..."

"And at the end of it, if fortune is kind, to find the natural man?"

"Mayhap ..." I muttered. "Indeed, since I left Guy Vlad Boca in the Perfumed Garden I have been moved to seek the embrace of no other natural man ..."

"This is a confession of prolonged celibacy?" Wendi exclaimed.

"I suppose it is ..." I muttered. "Though somehow I have never thought of it that way before."

"De nada, liebchen, de nada!" Wendi exclaimed, perceiving my discomfort at this admission. "Men being what they are, it happens to us all from time to time, let me tell you. It will pass, it will happen again, it will pass once more."

"You do not think me a silly naif for being so smitten that I suffer sexual dysfunction, for seeking to live out a Gypsy Joker's tale ...?"

"As for the former, I may be no Healer, ma chere, but the natural woman's wisdom tells me that one whose most recent rounds of tantric exercise consisted of mass ravishment by spiritless male animals is presently not withdrawn from the arena out of mooning longings for a lover light-years gone," Wendi assured me. "As for seeking to live out the tale, this does impinge upon my area of professional expertise, for whether you know it or not, what you are truly seeking is a fitting ending to your wanderjahr's story."

"I am?"

"Vraiment, and justly so! For we must always end one tale truly before another can be fairly begun with a clear spirit, in life, as in the literary arts."

She shook her head and smiled to herself in a self-congratulatory manner. "I knew that I must hear your tale from your own lips or miss its essence!" she declared. "But I knew not why."

"And now you do?"

"Vraiment," Wendi said. "Omar's ode ended with your escape from the Bloomenveldt and the scientific literature considers your return to sapient sanity the proper climax, but while the tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt is history, the tale of the wanderjahr of Sunshine Shasta Leonardo has not yet reached its proper esthetically satisfying conclusion, for you have not yet lived through its telling yet. Whether for reasons of the heart or by puissant unconscious literary instinct, you seek the right conclusion, liebchen, which is to say a proper conclusion to this romance requires a moment of triumphant reunion with your long-lost lover. Bon! Let us be gone! This must be accomplished in the interests of both kismet and art!"

I had finished packing while we spoke, and Wendi now grabbed up my pack and fairly shooed me out the sliding glass door into the garden. "Wait!" I found myself crying to her yet again. "Where are we going?"

Wendi paused in the doorway. "To the Mistral Falcon, where else?" she said.

"But you yourself have just agreed that I should seek out Pater Pan among the stars ...?"

"And how do you intend to do that, my dear?" she asked indulgently.

I shrugged. "By traveling among the worlds of men as rapidly as possible so as to maximize the probability of random encounter," I said. "Beyond that it is in the hands of fortune, is it not?"

Wendi shook her head ruefully. "I can see that your knowledge of mathematics is even more deficient than my own," she said, leading me by the hand out into the garden, where thousands of stars shone in the clear dark night. "Look up there, and see how the worlds of men are scattered among the stars," she told me. "I am not sure of the equations, but the approximate odds against such a random encounter occurring may be imagined by multiplying the count of the worlds of men by the mean distance between them."

"But ... but my path need not be entirely random ... I would of course seek out information along the way ..."

"Nevertheless, such a quest would consume your entire lifetime without reaching its proper climax."

"I don't understand you, Wendi," I complained pettishly. "First you tell me it is artistically right and proper that I seek out a reunion with Pater Pan, and then you tell me that success is all but impossible!"

"Impossible?" Wendi exclaimed. "When have you ever heard me declare that anything is impossible? Via the Matrix on the Mistral Falcon we shall winkle the fellow out soon enough."

"Via the Matrix?"

"Naturellement, how else do you imagine one keeps track of people in our Second Starfaring Age? While Pater Pan is hardly a figure of sufficient historical interest to have a running account of his wanderings recorded in the Matrix, certainement he has left a strong enough spoor of tales, legends, and little tribes in the process thereof for a maestra of the Matrix to construct a tracking program that will locate a recent locus in the data banks."

"How is such a thing possible?" I exclaimed.

Wendi shrugged. "Such mathematical legerdemain is entirely beyond my comprehension," she said. "But one need not trouble one's head with the same in order to employ it any more than one need be a mage of cosmological physics to travel by Void Ship."

Wendi began striding across the silent and empty garden to the main exit of the mental retreat, but I still hung back.

"What is it now, child?" she demanded impatiently.

"I cannot go with you," I told her. "For surely the three thousand five hundred credit units I possess, plus the two thousand unit fee you allude to, will at best cover the expense of a journey as an Honored Passenger to one nearby planet. And where will I be then? An immobile indigent cursing my own extravagance again!"

Wendi's irritation evaporated. "I see you have exchanged a quantum of innocence for a packet of practicality!" she said approvingly. "No longer the high-minded artiste incapable of attending to the grubby details of commerce!"

She stood there in the garden for a moment, pondering, then she rubbed her hands together in glee. "Bien!" she said. "Now I will instruct you in a bit of the lore of same. As she who has a commission to oversee the preparation of your Matrix entry, I do declare that the same cannot be properly finished without an esthetically satisfying conclusion, who can deny this, ne? And in my expert literary opinion, this requires a climactic confrontation with Pater Pan. So much for the art of it, ma chere."

She waved a finger in my face and assumed an owlish air. "Now attend to the means whereby we artists gain our pecuniary vengeance for the depredations of the merchants, who are forever seeking to take advantage of our high-minded innocence," she chortled, obviously enjoying herself immensely. "Since we are both agreed that a reunion scene with Pater Pan is essential to a properly crafted Matrix entry, expenses incurred to achieve the same may legitimately be charged to the cost of scholarly research."

"Are you suggesting what I believe you are suggesting?" I said, slightly aghast in a moral sense mayhap, but taking a certain delighted amusement in a ploy that would certainly do any Gypsy Joker proud.

Wendi hugged me proudly. "Indeed I am!" she declared. "By this accounting, we will travel in proper style until our quarry is found, and if this may take some time, why that is fortune's gift to circumstance, for we travel gratuit, liebchen, as is only our right as free spirits of the arts!"

Yet still something held me back.

"Merde, what ails you now, child?" Wendi said, for no doubt my final trepidation was writ clearly upon my face.

"In truth, the floating cultura pleases me not," I blurted rather sullenly. "I have passed that way before, and I have no wish to have such idle empty folk look down their excessively elegant noses at me again!"

"Am I an idle, empty person?" Wendi said gently. "Have you observed me peering down at you from heights of aristocratic haughtiness?"

"Of course not ... I didn't mean ..."

She took my hand and squeezed it as she led me inside the Clear Light and through the corridor to the streetside egress.

"Je comprend, liebchen, truly I do," she said. "The truth of it is that while you voyaged within a Grand Palais, you never voyaged within the floating cultura, you were never an Honored Passenger therein. You were treated as a mere fortunate urchin, and so you felt like a ragamuffin intruding into the fete, ne ..."

"One might I suppose style it thusly ..." I admitted grudgingly.

"Ah, but this will be another matter, Sunshine." Wendi said as we reached the street. "For you are that urchin no longer! For now you will travel by the invitation, hola, by the largesse of the floating cultura, not by purchasing intrusion therein."

With a little bow, she bade me enter a waiting floatcab. "For now you are no longer a ragged little Child of Fortune, but the heroine of an ode, a personage whose words are deemed worthy of the Matrix, with none other than Wendi Sha Rumi as your collaborator, friend, and patron! Surely she who trekked unaided across the Bloomenveldt lacks not the courage to brave as a darling daughter thereof the haut monde of our Second Starfaring Age?"

I laughed. I sighed. I shrugged. I entered the floatcab. "By now I should know better than to attempt to argue with Wendi Sha Rumi," I said as it bore us away.

"So say you now," said Wendi Sha Rumi. "But by the time our voyage together is over, we shall no doubt have disabused you of such unseemly humility. Then we will truly be sisters of the spirit, you and I!"

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Chapter 27

And so. I found myself once more entering the grand salon of a Grand Palais module to attend a departure fete, as Belshazaar's Flinger accelerated the Mistral Falcon toward the moment of its first Jump.

While the Mistral Falcon differed not from the Unicorn Garden when it came to configuration and function. when it came to the style of the Grand Palais module. which is to say the ambiance within which the experience of the voyage was to take place. this, naturellement, was as different from my previous experience as one might expect from any two works by maestras of the same art.

The dream chambers of the nethermost deck did not vary greatly from those which I had experienced on the Unicorn Garden, nor did the range of divertissements offered up on the entertainment deck, but when it came to the cuisinary deck here the personal style of Su Jon Donova, Domo of the Mistral Falcon, had scope for proper assertation.

The walls. ceiling, and floor of the formal dining room were transparent screens upon which slowly evolving patterns of color and shape were projected which altered from course to course like the accompanying wines. More often than not, these were abstractions, but upon occasion representational landscapes, faces, famous paintings, und so weiter, would emerge from the sinuous and stately dance of color and light only to melt away once more. In keeping with this style, the tables and chairs were airy filigrees of golden wire, appearing for all the worlds as if they had been woven to order by enchanted spiders.

The refectory, in contrast, was paneled in bluish rough-hewn wood, and the long tables and benches thereof were carved out of the same substance with rude adze marks left deliberately in evidence, the floor was carpeted with dust of the selfsame wood, and the ceiling was hidden by a veritable Bloomenveldt of hanging greenery.

The third salon was done up in what to my untutored eyes seemed a perfect replica of the classical Eihonjin mode -- plain walls and ceiling of white paper framed by tawny wood, a floor covered by straw matting, black- and red-lacquered low tables, upholstered cushions with backrests, and an abundance of free-standing screens that could be arranged and rearranged to produce any desired dining configuration.

Su Jon Donova's concept for her vivarium was in stark contrast to the baroque hodgepodge with which Maria Magda Chan had provided the Unicorn Garden, and much more to my liking.

Under the dome atop the Grand Palais, a sere silvery sea of low desert dunes seem to extend to the horizon in all directions, melding into a circle of pure shimmering mirage where the sand met the sky. Above, a surreally brilliant starscape such as might be seen from the surface of a planet at the galactic center lit up what otherwise would have been the blackest of nights, mightily aided in this luminescent endeavor by a huge golden three-quarter moon perpetually at the zenith, so that the uncanny effect was that of a midnight brighter than the day.

The floor of the vivarium itself was ringed by small dunes of actual sand emerging seamlessly from the holoed landscape to enclose the oasis of the garden, a wide expanse of lawn overtopped with green palms, gnarled succulents. and enormous cacti. In the center of the oasis, naturellement. was a clear pool, about which were pitched tented awnings. replete with cushions and campfires in brass braziers.