Child of Fortune (75 page)

Indeed who is to say that these are not one and the same, for certainement, we observe such order arising full-blown from the quantum chaos at the deepest level of existence, and so too was the macrocosm created by the spontaneous explosion of being and order into the perfect nothingness of a dimensionless void. Who is to say that chaos itself is not the ultimate principle upon which all order is recomplicated?

In the absence of scientific certitude along this interface between the quantum reality and such metaphysic, let me then simply say that I perceived that something, call it what you will, was attempting to speak through the selection of images gushing forth from the amplified and dissociated memory banks of Pater Pan's dying brain.

As to whether the Children of Fortune gathered there under the awning of the pavilion were of the same perception, or whether any utterance at all from their silent oracle would have been equally sufficient to command their awe and attention, je ne sais pas. Be that as it may, while those already at the scene of this advent forthwith lapsed into marveling silence, some sort of entirely nonverbal semaphore seemed to communicate the tidings thereof to the rest of the encampment. Mayhap the opening up of the tent of oracular secrets to the clear gratuit view of all would at any rate have been sufficient to assemble a crowd. At any rate, within short minutes, several score of this pathetic tribe were lying about the area, fortifying their perceptions with wine and toxicants as they hung on every word.

As for me, I sat there silently too for a time, listening to that profusion of voices sing a paean of nostalgic glory to a succession of golden moments of summer along an endless Yellow Brick Road. How sweetly they sang of the ancient remembered youth of our species, where all of them and all of us are forever wandering the free path of our spirits, where all summer's days are golden, and love and laughter rule the stars. Personas rose to remember Edoku and Novi Mir, Hind and Elrsium, arkologies and gypsy caravans, places and times Pater Pan could have lived through, and those which might eexist only in the Dreamtime extravaganzas with which he had embellished his name tale.

Were the verses of this song merely the memories of tales? Or were. they truly sung by a chorus of onetime fleshly avatars of some deeper spirit?

An end to such futile speculations for the singer matters not when the song touches the heart as this one touched mine.

And as soon as I truly penetrated to the simple truth of this self-evident perception, the same found its voice, for whether I was addressing a random crackle of neurons or not, I must make it hear me, for if this was indeed once more the Dreamtime, I must once more conjure survival wisdom from its spirits.

"O I hear your song of remembrance, Pater Pan, if it is indeed you who are the singer thereof," I told him. "I hear the Piper of Pan calling us down from our ancestral trees, and I hear the tale that I followed from the depths of the Bloomenveldt back to the far-flung worlds of men. I hear a noble lover's laughter, and the blarney of a Gypsy King, I hear the Pied Piper of the Yellow Brick Road telling his tale truly even from beyond its ending ...

"Now hear me, whoever or whatever you are, or even if you are nothing," I all but bellowed as I rose to my feet. "It is Moussa the waif and Sunshine your Gypsy Joker and the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt who bids you answer in the very spirit of which you sing! How can I hear that spirit singing its own true song to the end with a sweet puissance which breaks my heart and yet see with uncomprehending eyes that now it draws naught but the indolent and the lame?

Indeed so just was my characterization of Pater Pan's final tribe that the indolent and the lame in question, who lolled about in various states and degrees of toxication marveling at this very discourse, lacked even the collective spirit to raise so much as a single voice of protest when I styled them to their object of worship thusly.

But as for he who sat on the pillow throne, something in my words must have vibrated to the frequency of an appropriate cerebral center, or mayhap all current scientific theory to the contrary, some true spirit is implied in any verbal sequence.

Certainement, it was not my subjective imposition of order on random chaos when he turned his eyes from the sun to gaze into mine. As to whether anything but a doppelganger was there to regard me through them, je ne sais pas, but cerebral echo or no, it knew me well enough to speak my name.

"Sunshine ... Sing your own song, ruespieler, tell your own tale ..."

"This is the only tale I have to tell, and I am doing my best," I told this apparition plaintively, quite as if he were my old lover and friend, for if this was the Dreamtime, then the logic thereof allowed such intimacies. "But I cannot end it thusly!"

"This tale never ends, muchacha," Pater Pan reminded me in the Dreamtime. "Before the singer was the song, so when the singer is gone, will the song remain. As long as there is anyone to tell the true tale."

"How can I relate in the true spirit of the Yellow Brick Road that the Pied Piper thereof, after calling us down from the forest of unreason and leading our Mardi Gras parade out among the stars, expired pitifully at last, leaving behind only these poor lost Bloomenkinder of Alpa, this unwholesome travesty of the spirit we shared as Gypsy Jokers?"

"Were we not all Bloomenkinder of the forest of unreason before we heard the song that we followed from the trees to the stars?" Pater Pan said, and while the voice was his, the words he threw back at me, if memory serves, were my own. "Wherever in the worlds of men that there are Bloomenkinder of the spirit, there you will find lost Children of Fortune awaiting their own Piper. "

"And you were mine before I even met you!" I cried. "You saved my spirit from destruction on the Bloomenveldt in a Dreamtime such as this!"

"And who will be mine now save she who tells our tale?"

"Me? Yo?"

"Who is the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt?" Pater Pan said, speaking so plainly now in my own oft-repeated sprach that I could all but see my own ironic self mocking me from within his eyes.

"Merde," I sighed in this moment of dizzying satori, "anyone who tells the tale!"

"Will you not let this torch pass to you, ruespieler?" Pater Pan said. "For who else is there to take it up from the failing hands of this loving ghost who only stayed behind to pass it on? Auf wiedersehen, mi vida, hail and farewell."

I could feel a spirit's passage then, another standing wave of Pater Pan's consciousness propelled by the Charge Up through his speech centers and Out into the void. I need not question the body now staring out blindly to sea again further to know of a certainty that this avatar would not speak through it again.

For with this spirit's passage passed the Dreamtime too, and I came tumbling back out of it into the quotidian realm, knowing not with whom or what my spirit had communed therein, but knowing full well what I had to do.

I rounded on the great gathering of scruffy and toxicated urchins who fairly surrounded the pavilion now, and what a sorry audience they were to bear witness to such a spirit's passage!

"You have heard, have you not?" I declaimed at them. "From the very lips of he upon whose dying words you so fatuously and uncomprehendingly hang! For want of the proper spirit on your part, the torch thereof devolves on me. Nor when the time comes will I let you leave it in the muck!"

For all my eloquent invective, I might as well have been addressing my lost children of the forest, for they looked upon me like the deity of all lost children, wanting only to be saved from the adventure of their own devices, and waiting for me to tell them whatever it was they imagined they wanted to hear. Even Kim seemed not to have understood a word of my true meaning.

"Who here can sing a tune?" I demanded. "Who here can play a pipe or strum a string? Who can carve in wood or work wire into bijoux? Who knows how to steam dim sum or juggle balls or practice some semblance of the acrobatic arts?"

They gaped at me uncomprehendingly as if I too had now started speaking in parable.

"Merde!" I cried. "Is there none among you who knows a single tale? Hola, is there not even one among you who would boast of adeption in the tantric arts?"

"Ah, mi maestra, I knew you would come to the question of my own natural talent sooner or later!" Kim declared to a cleansing burst of laughter ... "Let me proudly be the first volunteer in whatever enterprise you care to have me serve!"

Once this obscene levity had loosened their mood, other voices began to pipe up.

"It might be said I play the pipes, if none too well ..."

"When I was a child, I fashioned animals out of clay ..."

"I think I know how to bake tarts of meat or fruit ..."

"I know a tale called The Wandering Dutchman that I used to tell in school ..."

"All these things and more you shall begin doing now as true Children of Fortune," I told them. "While I am something less than a maestra of cuisine, or a musician, or an adept of any craft, and would starve to death if I had to sing for my ruegelt, I have many a tale which I will readily donate, nor am I exactly a naif when it comes to commerce in the tantric arts. So then, let us learn to become Gypsy Jokers once more together, and gather our ruegelt where we may."

"Who would purchase our primitive goods?"

"Why would anyone pay to hear our songs?"

"Florida abounds with entertainers far more amusing than we ..."

"We must compete with palaces of haute cuisine ..."

"... and tantric artists all the way from Lorienne."

"Thus be it ever!" Kim exclaimed with quite another energy. "I would rather forage my fortune in the streets than say I never tried!"

"Well spoken, indeed, Gypsy Joker!" I declared pridefully. "Speak not of the daunting haut monde of this little resort village to one who was an indigent Child of Fortune without even your bountiful parental largesse in Great Edoku! Surely it has always been thus on every world. Yet on every world, if Children of Fortune do not exactly wax wealthy, still do we prevail. For the true patron of our custom is never the jaded connoisseur, but the memory of one's own wanderjahr in every human heart. Fear not, my Gypsy Jokers, that is a largesse the true spirit may always obtain. "

I pointed down the shoulder of our little mountain at the tiny blue and white and rose buildings of the town below, at the minuscule figures on the beach, and the bright sails of boats flitting across the bay.

"Below us lies Florida, a town given over entirely to holiday and frolic," I told them. "I swear to you on my honor as a Gypsy Joker, meine kinder, that no true Child of Fortune could hope for an easier field to gather ruegelt from than such a seaside resort!"

And so did my wanderjahr come full circle round as, with tears in my eyes but not without the true song in my heart, I found myself constrained to become the Pied Piper thereof, the Wendi Shasta Leonardo who transcribes these words, but certainement not the Wendy whose spirit I found so cloying in the Tale of Peter Pan.

For far from seeking to shepherd these lost children back into the parental embrace of the quotidian realm of maya and earnest toil, the spirit of this Wendi sought rather to set their feet upon that Yellow Brick Road which goes ever on, in final homage to the Golden Summer of my own life that once the truest of friends and noblest of lovers had given unto me.

Chapter 30

Florida was no Great Edoku, the urchins of our encampment were far from being Gypsy Jokers, and certainement I possessed not a tenth part of the survival lore of the Yellow Brick Road of such as Pater Pan.

Still, while skill, craft, and artistry might be severely lacking, the spirit was now there, and as I had learned on Edoku, it was tribute to this spirit of one's own fondly remembered days as a Child of Fortune which provoked largesse, rather than informed critical admiration for the crudely manifested artifacts thereof.

So, under my direction and prodding, amusement tents arose, offering tantric tableaus and private performances, as well as rude musical entertainments, and even certain rather brief and clumsy theatrical events. Several craftsmen's stalls were erected, offering naive sculptures, wooden jewelry, wire bijoux, and most lucratively, various pouches on thongs, belts, or even headbands, which soon proved quite popular in such a seaside resort given over to nudity or minimal clothing.

Finger foods of several sorts were prepared in the encampment: baked tarts, steamed dim sum, cuchifritos, and most novel of all, a kind of vegetable lo mein stuffed into a savory baked tuber, which could be eaten without fork or chopsticks as one strolled along. So too did nascent musicians and jongleurs gambol about the encampment, greatly enhancing the carnival ambiance, if not exactly elevating the artistic atmosphere.