Child of Fortune (8 page)
Now superimpose upon this whimsically crafted garden an endless city built in a melange of every conceivable architectural style and in a scale completely indifferent to that of any part of the garden from which its buildings grow like so many bizarre fungal blooms. Thus a mountain peak may serve as the centerpiece of a public square, trees may grow taller than a neighboring pagoda tower, while in another arrondissement a forest seemingly of the same species serves as the hedge of a lakeside promenade. A waterfall in one venue roars and foams behind a street of wooden houses, while somewhere else a cascade that seems no less grand is a mere trickle off the side of a low building.
Neither a planetwide city liberally landscaped nor a worldwide garden dotted with buildings, the surface of Edoku combined elements of both sans any separation of realm or any overall concept of scale, save that the geological elements which should have dwarfed the works of man -- mountains and rivers, deserts and lakes -- tended to rather be dwarfed thereby, and contrawise, such floral features as trees or even single blooms might like as not be huger than towers of silver or glass. To further meld the urban and the bucolic and surrealize the nonexistent interface between, great trees might display the windows of a dwelling, spiral stairways rise circling to a snowcapped peak, or forests grow atop a pavilion's roof.
And all spread out before me not under the light of a single foreign sun but illumined in a crazy quilt of day and night, sunrise and noon, wan winter light and blazing summer, the whole beneath an incongruous sky of star-spangled black dominated by the immensity of the mighty gas giant's slow surface boil.
What is more, or mayhap less, this vertiginous vista, alas, is more of an overview of Edoku than one may achieve from most any other vantage, for, as I was to learn, the debarkation site is crafted to afford a relatively easy psychic access to the auslander, whereas the esthetic of the planet as a whole is designed entirely to please the Edojin themselves, and these are of the firm philosophic opinion that any overview is both false and hopelessly jejune, that "reality" itself is no more than a local artistic style, that perpetual immersion in the ever-changing fine detail of chaos is the only proper mode of civilized existence, and that to apprehend Edoku entire would be to achieve both a boredom terminal and an existentially daunting vision of the entirely unnatural and artificial nature of their vie and their world, which the best minds of the species humaine, to wit their own exalted selves, have spent a thousand years and more of history and craft in an effort to transcend.
Naturellement, such an appreciation of the weltanschauung and esprit de vie of the Edojin was entirely foreign to the girl who stood there gaping and entirely overwhelmed by her very first sight of their venue. Nor was her composure exactly enhanced when the ground fell away beneath her feet.
In truth, not quite literally beneath my feet, though the psychic import was not at all dissimilar as a large round hole suddenly appeared in what I had supposed was the solid ground of a mountaintop meadow, and my fellow travelers from the Bird of Night, followed by their luggage-bearing floaters, began to quite blithely step over the edge and disappear into the bowels of the mountain.
"Quelle chose!" I exclaimed, as one by one the people around me leapt off into the abyss as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as indeed, as I was to learn, on this world, it was.
A tall dark man dressed all in red velvet took a moment's pity on me as I stood there afraid to even peer over the lip. "C'est nada," he said, grasping my hand. "Droptube des'. Null-g, like a feather to float. Geronimo!"
So saying, he leapt over the edge, dragging me screaming by the hand.
I found myself not plummeting like a stone down a dark tunnel into the depths of the earth, but floating nearly weightlessly downward through a great light and airy atrium inside this mountain which was not a mountain.
What a profusion of sound and color and people! The great hollow space, through which I and countless others drifted like motes of dust through a golden sunbeam shaft that seemed to rise from the distant floor, was circled round by tier after tier of balconies. Some were garden promenades dripping greenery, others strogats lined with restaurants, tavernas, and boutiques, still others the venues of what might have been impromptu carnivals, thespic displays, concerts, and other entertainments which seemed entirely incomprehensible. A dozen modes of music merged in a not unpleasant discord, the air hummed with the babble of countless voices, and my mouth began to water as I slowly drifted downward through various zones of cuisinary aromas.
As for the Edojin who thronged this inverted tower, a generalization as to their modes of dress, accoutrement, or genetic style can hardly be attempted, for they seemed as dedicated to the outre, idiosyncratic, and surreal in their personal adornment and cosmetic stylizations as in their planet- molding arts. While none seemed to vary significantly from the general range of size and mass of our species, and they all possessed the number and arrangements of limbs and external sense organs appropriate thereto, any finer details seemed entirely a matter of personal whim. Skin hues encompassed the entire visual spectrum, hair colors tambien, coiffures both male and female might be anything from close-cropped fuzz to huge bouffants trimmed and shaped into abstract or even representational topiary hedges of hair, clothing might be no more than body paint or all- encompassing recomplicated robes of a dozen colors and anything and everything between, and ears, noses, limbs, and torsos might be richly bejeweled in any conceivable mode, or just as likely be left entirely unadorned.
I drifted slowly down through this wonderland in the state of ecstatic befuddlement that seemed to have become the basic mode of my consciousness since first I set eyes on Edoku, scarcely aware that my knight in red velvet armor had long since let go my hand and alighted birdlike on one of the intervening balconies, and only became aware that the giddy ride was over when at length I felt the true surface of Edoku gently kiss the soles of my feet.
***
That is, if anything that lay beneath the soles of one's feet on Edoku could be said to be vrai terra firma, for the floor I alighted upon appeared to the eyes as golden, shining, transparent sand, to the kinesthetic senses as thick-pile carpeting, and the gravity gradient thereof as that of a minor asteroid.
What had appeared to be a solid mountain from its meadowed crest and a substantial building as I drifted down its hollow core now seemed to be a floating confection from my present vantage, for the building ended a good twenty meters from the floor, held aloft by the same sort of gravitic machineries which had enabled me to drift down like a speck of dust and which now informed my motor senses that I weighed no more than the moussas which as a babe I had held in the palm of my hand.
I stood there with the enormous mountain of a building floating above my head like an immense parasol while a three hundred sixty-degree panorama of the immediate environs surrounded me, each few points of the compass, moreover, offering their own hour and season, tempting me with the illusion that I stood at the fulcrum of space and time, though in my present psychic circumstances I knew full well that, here in Edoku, nothing could be further from the truth.
On my right hand, I was offered what might have been an arrondissement of small residences piled up the sides of low hills with only a few folk to be seen abroad to welcome the dawn. Some degrees further, an afternoon parkland with a lakeful of small boats, sunbathers on the lawn, more athletic Edojin engaged in arcane sport and al fresco amour. Or I could venture down the narrow midnight streets of some sort of pleasure district, thronged with revelers crowding between tall and garishly lit emporiums. I might wander among the enormous succulents and little gazebos set in sunset desert sands or ascend to the ridgeline of a miniature range of mountains circled by what might have been manses or just as easily fabriks.
In truth, I knew not where to begin, nor what to begin, nor did I have guide or knowledge or the foggiest notion of how to orient myself in this chaotic terrain. Giddy and toxicated already, and growing discomforted by both my indecision and the psychic weight of the mountain floating above my head, I resolved to let fortune decide, and so, closing my eyes, I spun around until I was truly dizzy, then ceased whirling and bounced airily off towards the pleasure streets of midnight, which were the next sight to greet my eyes.
***
How long did I wander through Edoku in a toxicated fog? How may duration be measured where midnight is a few steps from dawn and one may stroll in a minute or two from spring into fall? Naturellement, one may consult one's timepiece, but what sort of spirit resorts to such digital measurement in elf hill? Certainement not the spirit of the virgin Child of Fortune that I was, enraptured by an endless succession of marvelous, chaotic, and upon occasion daunting realities, such as Cort and I had never succeeded in conjuring from quotidian Nouvelle Orlean or our own psyches even during our most prolonged and eclectic seances with the psychoactive pharmacopoeia.
Though in truth, of all the knowledge, skills, and lore that I had acquired in my previous incarnation on Glade, it was precisely my experiences with a plethora of psychochemically altered reality states which stood me in best stead on my initial wanderings in Edoku. While with Cort the perception of an entirely fragmented and disconnected succession of bizarre and unpredictable realities was entirely the result of alteration in the biochemical matrix of the consciousness perceiving them, and on Edoku it was the environment itself which rang the changes, the psychic state induced thereby was subjectively the same, to wit an entirely fractured consciousness wandering through them totally immersed in the immediate moment-to-moment flow of the fine details of chaos sans any overview integrated over space and time.
There were cafe tables of living wood arising from the gilded pavement of midnight streets, mighty towers of glass and stone set in avenues among miniature mountain ranges bustling with urban commerce in the earnest early morning light, a twilit dance pavilion beside a cooling waterfall where naked figures performed an erotic pavane weightlessly in the air, a desert garden under the blaze of noon and the gravity of a massive world, promenades lined with tavernas and cuisinary emporiums on arching bridgeways spanning wild rapids, cafes set high in the boughs of trees, al fresco carnivals on emerald meadows in the centers of public platzes, buildings in the form of mountains, on rocky islands in clear blue lakes, incised into canyon cliffs, and all manner and scale of trees, rivers, waterfalls, und so weiter, festooning towers and pavilions ...
Through all this I wandered like a random animalcule in brownian movement, and vraiment, there was randomness in more than the geographical realm, for noon and midnight, sunrise and sunset, the round of the seasons, were as much a matter of neighborhood caprice as the weight of my body, which, from moment to moment, venue to venue, might be dragged down by heavy mass, light as a moussa in the treetops of home, entirely weightless, or any gradient in between. So too the odors, perfumes, scents and, vraiment, stenches, which alternately tempted, tantalized, seduced, and befouled my nostrils seemed to bear no causal connection to their apparent sources. A floral bouquet might drift from a refectory, blooms might give off the aroma of roasting meat, a beautiful garden might reek of rot, or buildings of glass and steel smell of a mountain dell.
As for the activities, civilized or otherwise, which played themselves out in this chaotic matrix, they were so recomplicated and arcane as to remain largely incomprehensible to a onetime sophisticate from Nouvelle Orlean. I could hardly tell a restaurant from a palace of pleasure, for all manner of emporiums in every sort of architectural mode seemed to purvey both cuisine and tantric performances, as well, for that matter, as vestments, bijoux, machineries and objets d'art. Was the extravagantly gesticulating crowd inside that glass dome engaged in a theatrical performance, was it a mental retreat, or did the tote board signify a commercial bourse?
Each and every Edojin composing en masse the roiling and colorful throngs of the planetary city seemed determined to outdo every other in outrageousness of clothing, artificiality of skin tint and coiffure, floridity of gesticulation, and general aura of breathtaking and self-important sophistication, the Lingo of the Edojin seemed to be a melange of the most exotic and nearly incomprehensible sprachs I had ever encountered, and everyone save myself, or so it appeared to me, seemed to be intently engaged in affairs of cosmic import or baroque decadence or both, far beyond my auslander comprehension.
Vraiment was the state of consciousness in which I wandered in those first few hours all but indistinguishable from that induced by the ingestion of a smorgasbord of psychoactive chemicals. So too, at last, the dissolving of sequential expectation and linear logic as the organizing principle of my psyche's passage through space and time to release that higher yet tambien more primitive being which egolessly merges with the flow of that which is, becoming no more and no less than the moment-to-moment passage of its spirit through realities, as the perfect singer becomes the song.
From this perspective, or rather in truth from this annihilation of separate perspective, I began to dimly apprehend, if not the individual import of the chaotic sights, sounds, smells, and feelings of Edoku, then at least, in a vague and ill-formed manner, the essential spirit of the place, the esthetic weltanschauung of the Edojin, the higher logic behind the random chaos in which they chose to live.