Child of Fortune (68 page)

"Rubbish!" scoffed Imro. "If that were so, then how could you account for the cross-cultural and trans temporal universality of same?"

"Oh so? Then how would you account for its absence in the Bloomenkinder if it is inscribed in the genes of our species?"

"If one grants the Bloomenwald some sort of vegetative sentience, then the genes wherein the collective unconsciousness is encoded may have been deliberately extinguished by selective breeding even as we have altered the genetically determined behaviors of domestic animals."

"Anthropocentric projection!"

Und so weiter.

By the time we were into a green salad dressed with peppered oil and sweet and sour vinegar, the discourse had proceeded into esoteric realms of biology, genetics, psychesomics, esthetics, and evolutionary ecology whose general outlines I could only struggle to dimly comprehend, and to which I could hardly coherently contribute. Over yet another dessert, of chocolate pastry filled with rose-flavored custard, I sat there quietly listening to intense and occasionally acrimonious debates on the psychopharmacology of the Bloomenveldt, the theoretical parameters of vegetative sentience, the essential definition of the elan humain, the ethics of continental sterilization, et cetera, in terms whose firm meanings I strained my brain to comprehend, for I understood enough to know that my own simple tale was the central subject of all this commentary.

It was exhilarating to have my adventures taken so seriously by such manifestly serious intellects, but it was also daunting to realize how much wider and deeper knowledge and insight went on any conceivable subject than I had ever imagined, particularly when the callowness of my own intellect was being so amply demonstrated using the subject matter of my own personal experience.

"I never dreamed there was so much to learn even about the events of my own existence," I moaned to Wendi when we departed at the banquet's end, with my mind as torpid with elusive discourse as my stomach was with haute cuisine. "How are we ever going to incorporate it all in my simple tale?"

Wendi laughed. "One thing at a time, liebchen, one thing at a time," she assured me blithely. "Now you must sleep well, Sunshine, for tomorrow our work begins in earnest."

***

And so it did. For three days, I declaimed my tale in numerous versions onto word crystal to the point where I began to loathe the sound of my own voice, and then for three more days we worked to combine them into a version suitable for submission to our panel of mages. By the time this process was completed to Wendi's satisfaction, my brain was reeling with intellectual fatigue, and I wanted nothing more than to be finished with the whole task. The truth of it is that never in my young life had I ever engaged in such strenuous intellectual labors; indeed, if truth be told, prior to that time, I had been a virgin when it came to any real work at all.

Throughout all human history, the young of our species have been subject to endless rubrics on the joys of labor, the ennui that is the inevitable result of indolence, and the psychic satisfaction to be gained by absorption in some mighty work, the more demanding the better. Be such homilies as they may, the pleasures thereof remained beyond my comprehension until the next stage of the process began.

"One thing at a time," Wendi had promised, and so it was done, which is to say rather than being subject to whole batteries of learned interrogators at once, the mages were given word crystals of the draft version of the Matrix entry to peruse, and then I went at it with them one at a time, over lunch or dinner, in the vivarium, or in their staterooms, more often than not with Wendi at my side.

Now the situation was in a certain sense reversed, for while my teachers certainement never lost interest in what they might extract in the course of such discourse for their own intellectual use, teachers they indeed were, resources placed at my disposal, and what puissant teachers they were!

In the stateroom of Lazaro Melinda Kuhn, I learned the dark and ambiguous answer to a question that had never trammeled my mind until, at length, after a surfeit of his gentle but rueful complaints at my less than scientifically lucid descriptions of the flora and fauna of the Bloomenveldt, it suddenly intruded into my awareness.

"Why then depend on the anecdotes of such as myself?" I demanded. "Why in all the centuries that men have dwelt on Belshazaar has not a proper scientific expedition been mounted to the interior of the Bloomenveldt ...?"

I was suddenly brought up short by my own words, which is to say by the shameful mortification induced thereby. For had I not once promised to myself that if I escaped to the worlds of men I would one day return with just such an expedition to rescue Guy Vlad Boca? And what had I done to accomplish same? Precisely nothing!

"Vraiment, why is one not mounted now?" I demanded with guilt-driven stridency. "Indeed, why does not a fleet of hovers descend upon the depths of the forest canopy to rescue our human comrades from such vile floral fascism?"

Lazaro's demeanor darkened. "I wondered when you would ask that," he said with a sigh. "I had hoped it would not fall to me to be confronted with the question, for the answer, I fear, does not exactly reflect honor on our species."

"What do you mean by that?" I said defensively, for, thinking as I was of my abandonment of Guy, I assumed that the lack of honor he alluded to was my own.

"The psychotropics derived from the Bloomenveldt are a source of great profit, ne," Lazaro said. "Indeed they are the entire economic base of that unwholesome planet. The fact is, that if you inspect the literature, you will find quite a few cryptic mentions of the apocryphal Bloomenkinder. The unpleasant truth is that the existence of same has been suspected for centuries."

"Then why --"

"Think, my innocent young friend, and with greed in your heart! If proof of such a state of affairs was secured and laid before the worlds of men, what would be the result?"

"What else but a hue and cry and a demand on the part of men and women of good will for the rescue of --" I cut myself short. I stared at Lazaro. He gave me a strange little shrug. "You don't mean ...?"

"But alas I do, my young friend," Lazaro said uncomfortably. "Not only would the citizens of Belshazaar find themselves morally required to rescue the Bloomenkinder, there would no doubt be many who would demand the extermination of the Bloomenwald as a proper vengeance for the outrage. And even if the voice of science could prevent such floral genocide, it would appear that the presence of Bloomenkinder is necessary to induce the flowers to evolve the very psychotropics which enrich the planet. An unwholesome sym-biosis mayhap, but a true one, which is to say one which indeed benefits both species -- the one with more efficient pollinators, and the other with huge pecuniary profit."

"They know?" I exclaimed in horror and outrage. "They know and still they do nothing?"

Lazaro shrugged. "They know, they don't know, certainement they have no wish to know that they know."

"Merde, I always sensed a vileness of spirit throughout Ciudad Pallas, but I put it down to lack of esthetics!" I muttered. "Never did I imagine creatures that styled themselves human could thusly abandon the spirits of their fellows in such a cowardly manner for mere profit!"

***

Nor could I think of anything else when I departed to keep my luncheon appointment with Linda Yee Lech. "Something must be done!" I declared angrily, after hectoring her on the subject at considerable length. "We must force these mercenary miscreants to rescue the Bloomenkinder!"

"Are you so certain of your moral rectitude in this regard?" she asked me evenly. "Remove the Bloomenkinder from the forest and what have you accomplished? At the cost of wrecking a planetary economy and impeding the progress of psychopharmacology, you will have rescued them from the ecological niche in which they evolved in favor of incarceration as an exhibit in a zoological garden. Even feral humans raised by other mammals do not develop sentient consciousness, still less will the symbiotes of the Bloomenvelt ever be anything but mammals in human form sans the elan humain, ne."

"But their progeny --"

"You would breed them in captivity?"

"No, certainly not, but --"

"Then you would commit genocide against the Bloomenkinder as well as against the Bloomenveldt?"

"Genocide? I am not the monster!"

Linda Yee Lech smiled and softened her expression. "Thus speak all humans, and truly so," she said. "Vraiment, this is a question which must trouble the spirit. For who is the monster here? Those who merely profit by a pre-existing condition while carefully avoiding conscious recognition of the same? The innocent Bloomenkinder? Those who, like your Guy, have willingly surrendered their spirits to the flowers? The flowers of the Bloomenveldt, who merely follow their own natural evolutionary vector, mayhap to sentience?"

"Be questions of guilt or monsterhood as they may, I am talking about pragmatic action, not the niceties of moral calculus!" I declared pettishly.

"La meme chose, in this case," Linda said flatly. "For here on the one hand we have a species in human form whose consciousness has long since diverged from our own and which will expire into extinction if it is removed from its floral symbiote, and on the other hand, a floral symbiote which may be evolving toward a sentience it can only achieve courtesy of its human pollinators. We may expunge either or both from the universe, but we will never restore the Bloomenkinder to sapient citizenship in the human race. Do we therefore have the moral right to commit double genocide when there would not even be a beneficiary of such a scientific and karmic outrage? Are you really willing to take such matters into your own hands?"

"Put thusly, je ne sais pas ..." I was forced to admit. "But what of those sapient humans who wandered into the thrall of the flowers? What about such as Guy? What about those who quite rationally chose to die in the arms of floral nirvana?" Linda Yee Lech pointed out relentlessly. "Would they wish to be rescued? Vraiment, would your Guy thank you if you rescued him from his perfect flower to spend the rest of his days in a mental retreat? If we were to impose our will upon such spirits according to our own concepts of righteousness, how would we be any less fascist than the flowers, who at least would seem to eschew the practice of continental sterilization?"

"Once more, what once seemed clear is now occluded by an excess of wisdom," I could only declare.

Linda Yee Lech smiled. "Unfortunately there are all too many instances when all that wisdom teaches us is that the ability to act is only the power to make things worse," she said.

***

Other enlightenments, fortunately, were a good deal less grim, and more relevant to my evolution as a tale-teller than to the jaundicing of my opinion of the moral stature of my own species. In particular, Dalta Evan Evangeline, the literary archeologist, did much to both open up my awareness to the abundance of nuance attached to most every image and figure I employed by several thousand years of human history and art, and lead me to a far deeper understanding of certain aspects of my own tale and those I had learned from the Gypsy Joker ruespielers as well.

This odyssey began innocently enough when she presented me with a copy of the tale of Peter Pan and suggested that perusal thereof might be of some relevant interest to the task at hand. Since I had been meaning to delve into this matter ever since I had been apprised of this work's existence, I readily enough agreed.

But after I finished the tale, I knew only confusion. Surely the freenom Pater Pan must be a somewhat less than perfectly erudite homage to the Peter Pan of the tale, and just as surely I could see a good deal of Pater in the domo of the tribe of lost boys. Yet the ending of the tale contradicted the spirit of the Yellow Brick Road entirely, which is to say I could hardly imagine my Pater approving of the moral imposed by fiat when the lost children forsake their vie for the quotidian realm of adults, nor did the Wendy of the tale have more than a passing resemblance to the Wendi that I knew who had chosen this freenom.

When I broached these matters at a lunch of pasta with sauteed vegetables and grated cheeses with Wendi and Dalta, the latter's interest seemed piqued as if I had presented her with new food for thought, and the former shook her head in ironic amusement.

"These matters of names, images, and their millennial transmogrifications are even deeper and more arcane than you are beginning to suppose, Sunshine," Dalta said. "The name 'Pater Pan' alone might be the subject of a lengthy monograph ..." She paused, fingering her chin. "Indeed, I do believe that I will compose it!"

"Mayhap you would care to elucidate at less than exhaustive length?" Wendi inquired dryly. "For I too once knew the gallant in question ..."

"Well, if you are content with a mere skimming of the surface," Dalta said in a similar vein. 'Pater,' for example, has the meaning of 'father' in a long-disused sprach of Lingo. 'Pan' was the priapic goat-god of libido in a certain ancient mythos, and also refers to 'Pan-theism,' the concept that the Atman is equally distributed throughout the world of maya. The reference to 'Peter Pan' you have already mentioned, and 'Peter,' paradoxically enough, refers to both the first pontifex of a religion opposed to the doctrine of Pan-theism, and the phallus. Moreover, in yet another ancient image-system, the 'Peter Pan Complex' denotes, as in the tale, a personality which eschews maturity in favor of permanent neoteny ..."