Child of Fortune Read online

  The Gypsy Jokers, alas, broke into braying laughter. “In that case,” said the beret, “we do know your identity. Vraiment, your name is Legion!”

  Even louder laughter at my expense. “Still,” said the sash, “such outrageousness is at least the right spirit, and deserves its reward, nē?”

  “Porqué no?” said the beret. “Let’s try her wit, eh?”

  “Bon,” said the sash. “Attends, muchacha! Where are the Gypsy Jokers to be found…?”

  “Over the river and through the woods…”

  “Where the sun never sets and the moon never shines…”

  “First star on the left, and straight on till morning…”

  “Somewhere under the rainbow…”

  “The circus is in town!”

  And having performed this duet of doggerel, they pushed past me, fairly doubled over with merriment, and made their exit, leaving me standing there like a fool, with the laughter of the entire Public Service Station ringing in my burning ears.

  Chagrined, outraged, fairly shaking with fury, I stood there transfixed with embarrassment for an endless moment, and then, not quite knowing what I was going to do, but determined that she who laughed last would laugh hardest, I shouldered my pack and followed.

  7

  As I dashed from the Public, my intellect was far too occluded by storm clouds of rage and embarrassment to lay any rational plan; I sought nothing more cunning than to keep the two Gypsy Jokers within range of my sight. Indeed, I did not even think this thought with any clarity until I realized that I was in fact tracking them, up out of the little canyon, through the woods, around the margin of a lake, and then into the narrow streets of a residential arrondissement of rambling wooden houses, This vecino, though not exactly bustling, still was crowded enough to screen the tracker from the sight of the prey, especially since the two Gypsy Jokers simply ambled along with never a look backwards, entirely unaware that I was following.

  The practical task of following the two miscreants at a more or less constant distance of some fifty meters soon assumed a mantric quality which began to calm my spirit and clarify my mind, These two arch urchins were, after all, not quite so clever as they thought, for there they were, no doubt, making their way back to their lair, and I need do nothing more arcane than follow them home to reach my goal.

  Alas, even as I was beginning to congratulate myself on my acumen, my simple plan was laid low by an equally simple flaw that I had entirely failed to consider, a false assumption generated by my own indigency, to wit, that my quarries, like myself, lacked the wherewithal to travel by Rapide.

  But after no more than half an hour of this stealthy pursuit, my quarries, as if they had been tantalizing me all along, strolled quite cavalierly into a Rapide station whose entrance was crafted in the form of a tree, and by the time I had followed them within, were long since gone, somewhere, no doubt, under the rainbow, leaving me once more to play the fool.

  For want of any further course of action, I stood there in the empty Rapide station trying to gather my wits about me. For want of any other coherent cerebral content, my mind’s ear began to cycle through the taunting doggerel with which the Gypsy Jokers had answered my entirely straightforward inquiries. “Where are the Gypsy Jokers to be found? Over the river and through the woods, where the sun never sets and the moon never shines, first star on the left and straight on till morning, somewhere under the rainbow…”

  Could this be something more than meaningless blather? Indeed was this not Edoku, where the only practical means of reciting the lay of the land was just such a skein of imagery? Vraiment, there were as many venues as not where the sun never set and the moon never shone, and as for rivers, woods, ersatz stars, and places of perpetual morning, they were all as common on this planet as Bittersweet Jungle on Glade…

  But the rainbow…Since Edoku was entirely lacking in natural meteorology, such an effect, if it existed here, would be the result of artifice, and, given the penchant of the Edojin for abolishing the natural cycle of the elements, would like as not be a permanent rather than a transient phenomenon. Moreover, given the penchant of the Edojin for novelty, there might be only one such feature on the entire planet…

  It would be easy enough to find out. Merely insert my chip into the slot of the nearest Bubble, order up the list of “Scenic Meteorology,” and—

  Merde!

  For want of the smallest quantum of credit on my chip, or even a few coins of ruegelt to exchange for same, my brilliant chain of deduction led only to the most exquisite state of frustration!

  At this karmic nexus, fate, or may hap mere random chance, chose to cross my path with a catalytic agent sufficient unto transmuting my state of forlorn impotence into a reckless, not to say courageous, determination to at long last become an active agent of my own destiny with the single practical means at my disposal, the ring of tantric power that I wore upon my finger.

  A man with skin tinted pale white and dressed all in green velvet had entered the station and was in the process of seating himself in a nearby Bubble. The specificity of his person, however, was entirely without relevance, for it was the generality of his gender which impelled my action—was this not a male of the species, and had not the time finally come to test the power over same of the ring that my father had placed upon my finger, to see if Moussa was the true daughter of Shasta and Leonardo?

  Thumbing the Touch ring on and screwing up my courage, I accosted the fellow, who greeted the approach of a rather obvious mendicant with a moue of distaste. “Pardon me, good sir, if I may have a—”

  “Ruegelt for Children of Fortune arimasen! Raus, urchin!”

  This reaction had not been exactly unanticipated; au contraire, it allowed me to lay a gentle hand on the juncture of neck and clavicle in the form of a polite gesture of restraint, as I laughed good-naturedly and said: “you mistake my intent. I seek not alms, only your aid in settling a wager, and it will cost you not a single credit.”

  “A…wager…?” he stammered, gazing up at me with an altered expression, which seemed not to be entirely the result of my words, seeing as how a red flush was now clearly visible under his alabaster skin.

  “Just so,” I said, now allowing my thumb to brush upwards and contact a more sensitive point near the juncture of jaw and throat, “the object of the wager is whether or not a rainbow exists in Great Edoku.”

  “Je…je…wakarimasen…know not…” he blithered, not taking his eyes from mine, and beginning to gape somewhat foolishly. I, on the other hand, took a quick sidelong glance at the crotch of his pantaloons, and verified in the firmest terms possible that this first test of my father’s cunning invention was thusfar proceeding nominally.

  “Ah, but this knows, nē?” I said, leaning over his seated figure, removing my hand from his shoulder, and chancing to brush the back of it against his thigh in the process of laying the palm of it on the screen of the Bubble; en passant, I could feel his whole body twitch. “It would cost you nothing to insert your chip and inquire, and I, alas, am suffering, shall we say, a temporary embarrassment of funds…”

  He regarded me with a face upon which I could clearly read the conflict between the cynical intellect and the natural man. On the one hand, he must now realize that he had been accosted by a mendicant of some kind after all, but on the other hand, his lingam was informing him that he had been smitten by an instant and primal lust for same, which, as far as he knew, this innocent young creature had done nothing to provoke. It but required a slight act of boldness to consolidate my position; Leonardo’s puissance as a mage of personal enhancement devices was about to be confirmed.

  I put on the best expression of innocent childish implorement that I could muster under the circumstances. “Oh, please!” I cooed like a babe, touching an imploring palm to his cheek as a child might do in the act of begging a sweet from a favorite uncle.

  I could feel him breaking into a light sweat. He squirmed on the seat of the Bubble. Was it m
y imagining that he stifled an incipient moan? “P-p-porqué no?” he sighed throatily, in a voice entirely inappropriate to converse with a favorite niece. With a somewhat trembling hand, as if all too cognizant of the imagery of the gesture, he inserted his chip into the slot. “Scenic M-meteorology…” he commanded.

  The screen began to scroll. “Alpine mist…blue clouds…fog banks…hurricane…neige…rainbow…”

  Voilà!

  Elated by the tentative confirmation of my deductions, emboldened further by the fruit of my first act of courage, flush with the success of my first employment of the Touch, determined to see how far I could push my luck, and not without a certain honest girlish pleasure, I cried “I win!” and threw my arms around his neck in a hug.

  When he moaned aloud and returned the embrace with a force and passion that had nothing to do with childish glee, the die was cast.

  Much later in life, perusal of certain obscure historical texts revealed to my bemusement that certain ancient Terrestrial cultures held bizarre beliefs concerning the granting of sexual favors which the modern mind must find entirely outré, if not mentally diseased. In these cultures, it was actually held that amatory pleasures were to be withheld by the femme of the species as a commodity to be traded for a contract of marriage under which the homme was required to provide economic sustenance. Naturellement, such artificially created scarcity provided a strong sellers’ market for tantric performance such as present practitioners of the art could not imagine in their wildest dreams, But the paradoxical result was that the tantric performer was held in low esteem, for by and large, these “putains” enjoyed a clientele of such uncritical avidity for simple sexual release that the mere granting of crude sexual favors was sufficient, by and large, to command a living wage, and diligent study and true artistry were almost entirely unnecessary to the successful “whore.”

  While the young girl who then proceeded to finger the vertebrae of the fellow’s neck like a flute, eliciting a music of sighs, groans, and mutters, lacked the benefits of this historical perspective, I did have the instinctual understanding that the electronic enhancement of my tantric energies, combined with the immediacy of his desire, would be sufficient to overcome my lack of serious study and artistic accomplishment relative to what was available in the palaces of pleasure of Edoku, much as the rude finger food of the Sparkies, available on the spot at the moment of impulse, was sufficient to satisfy the whim of sophisticated Edojin, who, under circumstances of more formal and critical consideration, would have eschewed it for haute cuisine.

  “I would love to see the rainbow,” I told him forthrightly to his panting face. “It is, in fact, at present my heart’s desire. A few credits of your largesse would be sufficient to grant it, nē?”

  Under the circumstances, the inquiring cock of his eyebrow was a mere nicety, a formality which I answered in kind. “In return for which, I would be most willing to grant your present heart’s desire,” I said. “Not to say that of your lingam,” I added, lightly Touching the organ in question.

  When, bewitched and bedazzled, and cognizant of same, he still managed a certain expression of niggardly uncertainty, I told him, “I sense that you are a man of honor. Should you look me in the eye afterward and declare in honesty that the experience was not worth the few coins of ruegelt I require, I will cheerfully forgo my fee.”

  With that, mingy uncertainty was reconciled with the natural man. “Well spoken!” he declared. “A secluded bower desu, only short walk away. Vamanos!”

  To this bucolic boudoir we forthwith repaired, doffed only the minimum necessary garments to effect the union of lingam and yoni, and forthrightly consummated our transaction. Once I had him in my full embrace so that I was easily and openly able to finger the full range of his spinal chakras and even more intimate plexes of his kundalinic neuroanatomy, he was speedily transported to and held at such sustained and heightened levels of bliss that I was confident that I would secure the credits I sought unless I was in the arms of an utter villain and churl.

  Moreover, I found myself experiencing pleasures entirely divorced from anticipated pecuniary gain. For one thing, a man who has been granted the ecstasy of such full kundalinic arousal becomes a more tireless and unselfish lover, for another, the premiere performance always has a certain spiritual piquancy for a tantric artist, and perhaps best of all, for the first time in my young life, I could bask in the moral satisfaction of providing fair value given for value received, of doing an actual job of work, and doing it well.

  Vraiment, such sincerity and powerful if not entirely polished craft did not go without its just reward, which is to say that after I had pleasured him to the sweet razor-edge of exhaustion, he readily and in good faith agreed to return to the Rapide station and send me on my way via his largesse.

  And so, thanks to my father’s providence, my own pluck, and the first piece of honest labor I had performed in my life, a few minutes later I emerged from a Rapide station concealed within a large stone statue aping a piece of rude primitive art to stand beneath the rainbow’s grand and palely shining spectral arch.

  The immediate vecino in which I found myself was an arrondissement of fanciful towers set in an alpine meadow between two entirely contrasting ranges of mountains. On my right hand, jagged desert buttes broiled and flashed in the noonday sun while a mighty cataract poured over the edge of the highest cliff to crash against a rocky riverbed in immense billows of mist and foam. On my left hand were green, wooded, rolling hills sprinkled with manses and houses, reminding me, somehow, of the Hightowns of Nouvelle Orlean at early twilight, with the lights of men outshining the sparse stars, and even a bank of fog hovering over the distant ridgeline.

  Overarching the intervening afternoon valley was the immense preternaturally brilliant rainbow, which seemed to arise from the mists at the foot of the cataract and bridge the sky to the fogbank behind the wooded hills.

  The architecture of the large urbanized area beneath the rainbow was in its way no less extravagant than the style of the landscape in which it had been set. The cityscape was dominated by scores of tall, flowing, indeed somehow organically shaped, towers of multicolored glasses, all fusing and melting and whirling into each other, as if the rainbow itself were mirrored in a slick of oil poured over mounds of gelati. The ground floors of these buildings were given over to all manner of restaurants, tavernas, boutiques, cafes, and the like, all open to the vie of the streets, which were paved not with stone nor yet gold, but a mosslike grass that was an arabesque of intermingled greens, reds, blues, and yellows.

  These streets, moreover, were fairly choked with pedestrian traffic, the usual Edojin throngs in their tinted skins, bizarre coiffures, and extravagant garments, but more to the point, a liberal sprinkling of finger-food hawkers, wandering musicians, trinket peddlers, und so weiter, accoutred with items of the Cloth of Many Colors of the Gypsy Jokers.

  Having come this far on impulse and boldness, I was now impelled towards a certain caution, or at any rate it seemed most politic not to call undue attention to myself until I had reconnoitered the territory and formulated a plan of action. Judging from my single experience with the manners of the tribe towards Children of Fortune of my lowly station, it would avail me nothing to simply accost the nearest Gypsy Joker and demand an audience with Pater Pan, nor would I likely gain anything but the rudest rejection if I managed to locate their encampment and grandly announce my availability as a member of the tribe and paramour of its domo. Even fresh from my triumph at the Rapide station, and basking in not-undeserved self-congratulation at my own cleverness, I knew I needed a stratagem somewhat more subtle than that.

  Fortunately, it was not long before the need to visit a Public arose, and upon being reminded of this biological imperative operating with inevitable regularity in my own quotidian existence even when my attention was focused on far weightier and loftier matters, I realized that this Pater Pan, in carnation of the eternal Child of Fortune and perfect master of
the Gypsy Jokers or not, would also sooner or later need to relieve himself even as mortal men.

  My next step, therefore, was first to locate the nearest Public and deal with the biological necessities, and then to utilize the lore and gossip current in the society thereof to locate those Public Service Stations most commonly frequented by the Gypsy Jokers.

  The former required nothing more arcane than inquiring of the first person in a gray smock that I saw, who straightaway directed me to the usual blockhouse, which had been concealed in plain sight all along behind a tall hedge of brilliant blue flowers screening off an alcove set between two nearby buildings. The latter was merely a matter of informing the denizens thereof that I was new to the vecino, planned to tarry awhile, and therefore would be pleased to be informed of the various locations of the Publics therein.

  Vraiment, the matter proved even easier than I had hoped, for the greeners of this vecino, having for the most part been drawn thither by the mystique of the Gypsy Jokers, spoke of little else, for indeed there was little else to speak of.

  For one thing, the Gypsy Jokers were the only organized tribe in the area, a monopoly they enforced not so much by threats of force implied or otherwise as by their puissant mastery of all the arts of gathering ruegelt save thievery; they were simply too good at all they did for competing tribes to survive.

  As for tribes of pickpockets and pilferers such as the Wayfaring Strangers, these avoided the vecino entirely, for the cunning Pater Pan had endeared the Gypsy Jokers to the local Edojin by a lucrative stratagem. Whether engaged in the peddling of food or crafts, street theater, ruespieling, or any of the other main Gypsy Joker enterprises, all members of the tribe kept a sharp watch for thieves and pickpockets at work, and upon spying same, used secret voice and hand signals to form up a posse of apprehension out of their own numbers. Since such a posse was empowered to confiscate everything in the possession of a thief caught in the act down to his clothing, it was the Gypsy Jokers, famed among the locals for honesty, who paradoxically reaped the only gain from what isolated acts of pilferage might occur within their sphere of operation.