Child of Fortune Read online

  “If you are an inexperienced virgin, then I am the Queen of the May,” Pater said, raising the upper half of his body into a seated position, hunching forward, and regarding me with a certain post-coital skepticism which his hormonal metabolism had not previously permitted. “Jive me not, Moussa Shasta Leonardo, who are you, what is the nature of your game, and what sparks this strange power?”

  Still playing the naif as closely as possible, I took this as a mere suggestion to exchange name tales, a natural nicety under the circumstances, and presented him with a somewhat edited version, which is to say that I styled Leonardo in a general way as a mage of electronic arts, without feeling the need to mention the subject of personal enhancement devices.

  After I had finished, Pater Pan seemed to chew it over in silence for a moment, as if sensing that I had not been entirely forthcoming. “So your mother is a tantric healer and performer?” he finally said. “Then you admit that your profession of naïveté in these matters was less than the whole and nothing but truth?”

  I laughed. I shrugged. “Naturellement, I was jesting,” I owned. “As you have had occasion to experience, I have actually had no little schooling in my mother’s science.”

  “For sure,” said Pater Pan appraisingly, “for a girl of your age and relative unsophistication, you seem to have a decent enough knowledge of the lay of the man.”

  “A decent enough knowledge!” I exclaimed in outrage. “Is that the best you have to say for my tantric performance after what you have just experienced?”

  He laughed, but only briefly. Then he fixed me with those piercing blue eyes and spoke in a tone of voice that somehow convinced me of his veracity despite the absolutely outrageous import of his words.

  “While I am not the sort of creepy-crawlie who scribes a running tally, by conservative estimate, I have granted my favors to some several thousand women on at least a hundred planets over a span of several centuries. Sure, and these have ranged from babes admittedly snatched from their cradles to veritable hagdom, and have included courtesans of great renown, tantric maestras and low putains, bumbling virgins, and every form of feminine life between, and on worlds of every level of sensual sophistication from crabbed puritanism to a hedonic excess that would make Edoku seem like a rest home for celibates. Therefore, while my overwhelming modesty may forbid me to judge my own prowess as a cocksman, when it comes to judging feminine performance, I am The Man, the greatest living connoisseur in all the worlds of men.”

  At this grossly overblown yet somehow sincere and almost believable boast, I was entirely at a loss for words. Pater Pan, au contraire, as I was to learn, never suffered this affliction, and was always more than willing and able to step into a conversational breach.

  “Therefore,” he went on, “I put you not down when I declare that in my expert critical opinion, while your actual level of tantric artistry is comfortably above the mean, your chops and moves can in no way adequately account for what I just experienced, which was probably the numero uno erotic experience of my entire long life.”

  Well how was a girl to take that? On the one hand, this puffed-up creature was relegating my personal performance to a level little above mediocrity, and on the other hand he was declaring that I had pleased him like no other lover! In truth, of course, it was the artistry of Leonardo to which he paid his extravagant homage, but I was hardly in a position or mood to admit to that!

  Once more, however, Pater Pan’s loquacity was more than equal to the task of discounting my silence. “So what I want to know is how in the flaming heart of a million suns such a thing can be possible!” he exclaimed. “What is this magic? How did you do it? And more to the point, perhaps, can you do it again?”

  At this, I found my tongue and regained the composure of a certain mastery of the strategic situation. “As to the latter,” I said slyly, “that is for you to discover if you can charm or bargain me into the attempt. As for the former, surely an innocent naif such as myself, possessed, as you declare, of no overwhelming erotic artistry, is entitled to retain her one poor little secret in the presence of such a puissant mythic personage as the great Pater Pan.”

  “So now you admit that you knew who I was all along!”

  I shrugged. “I have heard some ridiculous and hyperbolic tales which only a fool would credit,” I admitted. “But I would rather hear your name tale from your own noble mouth. Have I not told you mine?”

  Pater Pan smiled, gave a lofty toss of his golden-maned head. “The full tale of my name would take years to recount,” he said grandly.

  “No doubt,” I replied dryly, “but surely a fellow who by his own admission has had congress with several thousand women has in the course of time and necessity evolved a suitably condensed version for just such occasions as this.”

  “Vraiment,” Pater admitted. “If you are willing to content yourself with a pale shadow of the full magnificence…”

  “This I am grudgingly willing to endure,” I told him. “Proceed, kudasai.”

  “I am Pater Pan, famed throughout the worlds of men, or at least wherever Children of Fortune walk the Yellow Brick Road of freedom,” he declared grandly, “and this is both my chosen freenom and my identity entire, for long ago, before the Second Starfaring Age was born, before the Ark’s first Spark, before the Age of Space itself, truth be told before the memory of this avatar who now speaks began, my paternom and maternom I tossed into the void with all the maya-bound ties chaining my eternal spirit to the Great Wheel.

  “So say that my mother was an Arkie and a Rom, a Hippie Queen and a Princess of the Night, and say that my father was an Indian brave or Bodhidharma or Chaka Zulu or the Fliegende Hollander himself, maya, maya, for the spirit of Pater Pan was born before yours truly crawled blinking from some mortal mother’s womb and will live on when this second Starfaring Age is nothing but a dim legend of the prehistoric past.

  “Vraiment, I chose not the freenom Pater Pan in homage to the name of the spirit, rather did the spirit of the name choose me to carry its torch forward into our Age, for Pater Pan was born before the first ape climbed down from our ancestral trees to wander the plains of Earth. I was the very song which drew that dim creature out of the forest of ignorance to take his first halting steps on the Yellow Brick Road to sapience, and thus was born the Child of our species’ Fortune, who from that day unto this has danced the camino real to the Pied Pipes of Pater Pan.

  “Yes, before the singer was the song, to which we wandered from apes into men, and I was the horny billy-goat music leading us onward by the compass of our desires, and the Pied Piper urging the Children onward from the dusty streets of Hamelin town into the Magic Mountain of eternal Oz, and so too was I the Minstrel of Aquarius who slew the timebound rule of chairmen of the board and kings.

  “When the Children’s Crusade of the Ages of the Night set forth in quest of Jerusalem’s Holy Grail, they marched to my spirit’s song. And I was the Piper of Pan in the garden of the Flower Children that bloomed to my music in a golden Summer of Love.

  “When the Arkies embarked upon their wanderings in the endless stellar night, Pater Pan was the Spark that rode their great slow arkologies with them, holding aloft the torch in the darkness of the long light-years and frozen centuries between the stars.

  “And when the mages of our species wrested the secret of the Jump from the forgotten lore of We Who Have Gone Before and our Second Starfaring Age began, then did the King of the Gypsies and the Prince of the Jokers sally forth from his long sleep under the Magic Mountain to carry the Spark of the Ark forward wherever Children of Fortune wander the Yellow Brick Road out among the far-flung worlds of men!”

  Golden, godlike, blue eyes mirroring the azure depths of the sky, declaiming in a mighty voice that seemed to speak not from him but through him, this marvelous creature seized up his patchwork blouson, whirled it over his head, and draped it grandly about his naked shoulders.

  “Voilà, the mystery of the Cloth of Many Colors, the Tra
je de Luces, the Pied banner of the eternal Piper!” he shouted in a leonine roar. “Each ragged patch is a piece of transient cloth! Each fragment of the whole is a moment, a face, a piece of time, a smile, a laugh, a companion along the Way! Each in its turn frays and unravels and is replaced by another! Each single patch adorns the banner which has cloaked the spirit of Pater Pan for a million years for a time and then is gone! Not one single thread of the original garment which never was remains! Yet that which is the Traje de Luces itself lives on and on and on!”

  He crouched down and regarded me face-to-face, and in that moment I knew not whether I regarded a creature out of legend or a man. “C’est moi,” he said in a voice that suddenly seemed a good deal less grand. “This Cloth of Many Colors is me, girl. The eternal spirit and the natural man. An old patch of cloth, and the glorious whole entire, the singer who passes, and the song which goes forever on.”

  He shrugged, he smiled, he seemed to shrink back into himself like a great flower subsiding backwards in time into the modest bud from which it was born.

  “Thus,” he said quite conversationally, “the name tale of Pater Pan.”

  Needless to say, I had never before heard a name tale like that! And certainly not one declaimed in such a thespic manner, as if the quotidian man of flesh and blood whom I had shortly before held in my arms had become an actor upon a stage assuming the mantle of a character far greater than himself, vraiment greater than any mortal man, speaking words that another and at the very least more literarily puissant spirit declaimed through him.

  On the other hand, even in my state of charisma-drunken awe, I could perceive that Pater Pan had told me nothing about the man of flesh and blood at all and had cloaked the nakedness of this obfuscation in a tapestry of grandiose rhetoric and extravagant poetry no less devoted to confusion and flash than the blouson of Cloth of Many Colors now draped around his lordly corpus like a royal robe. Blarney indeed, but what wonderful blarney it was, how grander than whatever the unadorned truth of any merely human pedigree could be!

  Moreover, even then it seemed to me that some spirit great and true did in fact speak through this marvelous mountebank of a man, for while I could hardly credit the words which boasted of a millennial lifespan at the eternal center of history humain entire, my heart was filled with the higher and less coherent truth of the music of the song.

  For as Pater Pan had declared, before the singer was the song, and if the man who sat beside me had long since chosen to subsume his mere pedigree into the higher truth of metaphor, to become the legend of which he sang, who was I to say that mundane veracity was truer to the spirit thereof than literature’s noble lies?

  May hap I speak thusly not as the young girl who was, but as the teller of tales who is, possessed of both the will to declaim the supremacy of my own chosen fictional art over the truth of mere accuracy, and the mature theoretical basis to put such wisdom into the mind of the girl I then was.

  But if this is so, it only serves to speak my meaning the stronger, for the inner truth of the matter is that this was the moment when the heroine of the story took the first step on the road to the becoming of the teller of the tale, which is to say that for the first time in her young life, Moussa Shasta Leonardo had heard the music of a spirit that transported her ambitions beyond the song of self.

  Not that I was any less determined to make this man my patron and my lover, to rescue myself from indigence by gaining entry to his tribe; but now pecuniary calculations had merged with the ding an sich, for now my desire was to truly partake of the spirit of what now seemed a noble and glorious enterprise, to become a true Gypsy Joker with the song of the tribe in my heart.

  As if possessed of the power to read my spirit, or in more likely point of fact, possessed of the long experience to fully comprehend the effect on such as myself of the performance of his name tale, Pater Pan reverted to his earlier, less daunting, and at the same time more practically minded persona.

  “And so,” he said, “now that you have impressed me with your secret powers as a lover, and I have impressed you with my noble name tale, what be the down and dirty, girl, what is it that you really want?”

  “Why to be with you as you surely must know by now!” I declared with an innocent openness of spirit. “To become a Gypsy Joker! With all my heart!”

  Pater laughed. “When it comes to my phallic favors, pas problem, since this much I grant gratuit to all who please me, as you surely must know by now you have,” he said. “When it comes to becoming a Gypsy Joker, this you can achieve by crossing my palm with one hundred pieces of ruegelt.”

  “What?” I shouted, brought crashing down from the clouds of the spirit into the muck of mendacious maya by the outrage of such a demand. “Quelle chose! What kind of man are you to speak thusly to a lover? How dare you—”

  “Peace!” Pater Pan declared, holding up his hand and smiling the entirely inappropriate smile of sweet reason. “Surely for a woman such as yourself, possessed of secret tantric powers sufficient to win the exhausted admiration of even the mighty Pater Pan, a mere hundred pieces of ruegelt is nada, a mere token, the earnings of a lazy afternoon…”

  The thrust, as it were, of this discourse brought back all my previous guile. If he insisted on bringing down our congress to the level of the marketplace, then I too could descend to the logic thereof, and we would see which of us would prevail.

  “It is your considered expert opinion that I could easily enough earn one hundred pieces of ruegelt in the performance of the tantric arts?” I said in a wondering and innocent tone that, au contraire, emanated in this moment from anything but a guileless naif.

  “For sure!” my victim declared. “You need only summon up half the pluck you’ve already shown, and offer up your services on the bourse of the streets. A few discreet caresses gratuit to establish your bona fides and hook the mark, then set your price, and voilà!”

  “Perhaps you are right,” I allowed. “But I am a complete naif in matters of value given for value received. How much ruegelt do you believe I could demand?”

  Pater Pan shrugged. “Quién sabe?” he said. “The horniness of the patron, the fullness of his purse, the generosity of his spirit, these are all as relevant as the absolute value of the wares, nē. But always set an initial price of some extravagance, for never will you receive an offer higher than your own best boast.”

  “Might I ask two hundred?” I inquired.

  “Two hundred!” Pater exclaimed. “You will do no volume trade at such a price. Of course, there are always a few who will be willing to meet it, since your performance is somewhat extraordinaire, as I have just had occasion to learn…”

  “Indeed you have,” I said slyly, coiling for the pounce. “I bow to your wisdom, oh Great Spirit of the Bourse. Henceforth I shall set a price of two hundred pieces of ruegelt…” I paused as if considering the matter. “Henceforth…?” I mused. “Vraiment, why not right now?”

  I held out a demanding palm. “Two hundred pieces of ruegelt, bitte, for the services you have just enjoyed and praised so highly, mon cher!”

  Pater Pan’s eyes widened in astonishment, his jaw fell open. “What?” he exclaimed. “Pay? Me? You demand two hundred pieces of ruegelt for enjoying the embraces of Pater Pan? Which you yourself have schemed to obtain? What kind of woman are you to speak thusly to a lover?”

  And then, hearing his own words mirroring my previous protest of outrage, he broke into raucous and not disapproving laughter.

  “A true Gypsy Joker, nē?” I giggled.

  He regarded me in arch silence for a moment. Then he shook his head ruefully, but not without the warmest of smiles. “A true Gypsy Joker for sure!” he said. “But surely you will not demand two hundred from the domo of your own tribe?”

  “From the domo of my own tribe, I would demand nothing at all,” I told him. “Vraiment, it was not I who intruded pecuniary considerations into any transaction between us, nē. So let not our love be sullied by the pass
age of filthy lucre from hand to hand. Consider that my price, even as yours, is one hundred pieces of ruegelt.”

  I cupped my hands as if to receive just such a sum. “Imagine that you are now counting out the coins…”

  With a laugh, he pantomimed the donation that I required, and with a laugh, I returned the phantom coins to his own outstretched hands.

  We giggled. We kissed. We embraced.

  Thus by this phantom commerce of the bourse and true commerce of kindred spirits was our bargain sealed. Thus did my life as a Gypsy Joker justly and triumphantly begin.

  8

  It was indeed somewhere under the rainbow, Pater Pan did lead me over the river at the base of the waterfall and through some woods, one could spot an ersatz evening star from its precincts, and if the part about straight on till morning proved to be poetic hyperbole, the circus truly was in town.

  Which is to say that despite the prohibition of Child of Fortune favelas on Edoku for understandable esthetic reasons, the Gypsy Jokers had managed to erect and maintain a carnival caravanserei in a choice piece of parkland which lay in perpetual high noon between the arrondissement of glass towers and the rolling residential hills of twilight.

  I will never forget my first sight of the encampment from afar as Pater led me toward it along one of the avenues lined with glass towers, an angle of approach he had chosen, as I was soon to learn, for pedagogic as well as esthetic reasons.

  A few hundred meters before us, afternoon and the arrondissement of bustling streets ended, and in the far distance the twilit hills formed a dark backdrop sprinkled with the lights of men which entirely outshone the few stars visible in the blackish purpling sky above their crestline. Glowing on the margin of lawn between in the bright light of noon as if purposely highlighted by a celestial spotlight (as in point of fact it of course was) flashed what first appeared to be an immense display of multicolored pennants. A few moments later, I realized that what I saw was a veritable city of tents whose fabric roofs and walls were flapping gently in a light breeze, a wonderful chaos of colors and stripes flung across the parkland like a giant Cloth of Many Colors. As we approached closer, I saw that the tents displayed as great a profusion of forms as hues; there were small closed tents such as might shelter a small camping party, large ones with extravagantly striped sides such as might enclose performers and audience alike, tents that were no more than awnings against the sun, round tents, square tents, oblong tents, tents in a pyramidal shape, und so weiter.