Child of Fortune (17 page)

"So now you admit that you knew who I was all along!" I shrugged. "1 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\",f 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.

"Voila, the mystery of the Cloth of Many Colors, the Traje 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 what- ever 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 any- thing 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 voila!"

"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. "Quien 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, ne. 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, ne?" 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, ne. So let not our love be sullied by the passage 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.

Chapter 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.