Child of Fortune (29 page)

Guy propped himself up against the slope of the dell and softened my anger with a little laugh. "Au contraire," he said. "It takes a great deal to truly amuse me. If you knew me better, you would know to what lengths I am willing to go to be amused, and that I have in fact paid you the highest compliment of which I am capable."

"Well, then," I said, somewhat mollified, "have I sufficiently amused you to convince you that my proposition that we ruespiel together as partners and lovers until we have accumulated sufficient funds to leave Edoku offers enough hope of further amusement for you to consent to give it a try?"

Guy laughed. He regarded me with the strangest unreadable expression. "Oh verdad!" he said. "I can think of no one else I would rather have as a traveling companion. However ... I must confess that thusfar I have been traveling with you under somewhat false pretenses."

"False pretenses?"

"Hai! I fear I have thusfar withheld complete revelation of the full grandeur of my being."

At this modest confession, I was quite literally rendered speechless.

Guy, naturellement, suffered no such aphasia. "All we have told each other is our status as Children of Fortune and our names," he said. "Let us now therefore exchange the tales thereof and I promise you all will be gloriously revealed to your delight. Please begin, Sunshine, for I would not wish your name tale to come as a great anticlimax."

So bemused was I at all this mystery that I scarcely reacted to the implied insult in my haste to get to the bottom of it, which is to say I did as he asked, relating the tales of my maternom and paternom without of course mentioning the Touch, and telling the tale of my nom de rue, Sunshine, and my career as a Gypsy Joker, without needlessly over-emphasizing the degree and depth of my intimacy with Pater Pan.

"Drole," Guy said when I had finished. "A true Child of Fortune of the spirit!" He rose to his feet and tied the arms of his black velvet blouson about his neck so as to accoutre himself with a swirling cloak, more for thespic effect than out of any modest impulse to clothe his nakedness.

"I am Guy Vlad Boca," he declaimed grandly, "and while I too am a true Child of Fortune of the spirit, I hardly need reduce myself to begging in the streets in order to travel from planet to planet as insensate cargo in electrocoma, danke, nor need anyone upon whom I choose to bestow my favor.

"My mother, Boca Morgana Khan, was born to parents of rather formidable wealth on Melloria, her father being Khan Norman Margo, magnate of fabriks on several worlds, and her mother Morgana Desiree Colin, a Void Ship domo of no little repute before meeting her father. Her freenom, Boca, she chose after a wanderjahr amusing herself in the floating cultura homage a La Boca Felicita, a legendary singer and thespian of the First Starfaring Age, for while she never followed that trade, or truth be told any other, she fancied that her great beauty, wit, and sweet voice would surely have served to gain her fortune thereat had not her patrimony felicitously removed the necessity.

"My father, Vlad Dominik Ella, was born into more modest circumstances on Novi Mir. His father, Dominik Ivan Dona, was the proprietor of a palace of pleasure, and his mother, Ella Dane Krasnaya, labored therein as an artiste ordinaire. His freenom, Vlad, he chose after a wanderjahr begun as a freeservant on Void Ships and concluded as an established gambler and tantric performer on same, homage a one Vlad the Impaler, a legendary monster of prehistory, famed, naturellement, for his numerous acts of impalement, though apparently not of the sort of which my father was boasting.

"My parents met aboard the Celestial City, and it was pheromonic congruence at first sight, or at any rate upon first impalement. Boca's parents, naturellement, were somewhat less than enthused when she returned to Melloria with such a swain, marking Vlad as a fortune hunter, which, in a certain sense, he was. In return for his acceptance of a probationary year, Khan Norman Margo gifted him with a substantial sum of credit, with the understanding that only if he returned with this wealth doubled would he be welcomed as a kinsman, expecting, no doubt, that that would be the last he would see of this rake.

"However, to the delight of all concerned, Vlad's instincts as a gambler, and perhaps his penchant for impalement as well, when combined with working capital, served him in good stead as a traveling merchant, trading among the worlds of men in whatever commodities might be bought cheap and sold dear, and when he returned to Melloria, his wealth had in fact quadrupled.

"Today, my father, Vlad Dominik Ella, is the owner and maestro of Interstellar Master Traders, and his wealth exceeds that of my mother's parents by an order of magnitude."

Having concluded his declamation of this extravagant name tale, Guy sat down beside me as if to reestablish our less formal relationship. "And so here you see before you Guy Vlad Boca, Child of Fortune on his wanderjahr vraiment, but no wandering minstrel I!" he said. "Rather I am the scion of Interstellar Master Traders, a Merchant Prince, as it were, traveling at leisure from world to world for my own amusement to be sure, but also absorbing the lore of my future trade."

He reached into a pocket of his blouson and withdrew a chip of credit which he held beneath my nose as if it were a priceless gem, "This little bauble draws without limit upon the coffers of Interstellar Master Traders, a well of plenty without bottom for all practical purposes," he declared. "I am commissioned to do as I will for a period of my own choosing, the only proviso being that I, like my father before me, may never return to Melloria to claim my full patrimony until I have achieved a balance of profit over expenditure in the ratio of two to one. At the rate things are going, this may take some time. But then I am in no particular hurry."

Entirely ignoble emotions coursed through me at the conclusion of all these revelations. Anger at Guy for not having used his magic chip at the Crystal Palace. Anger too at the minginess of my own parents in comparison to the bountiful largesse of Vlad Dominik Ella, which is also to say mean-spirited envy of Guy for his good fortune. Finally, and most painful, despair that my plan to earn ruegelt with his aid had now apparently come to naught.

"You were just ... amusing yourself with me," I finally said in a tone of angry dejection. "You never had any intention of joining me in the ruespieler's trade."

"Indeed," said Guy, with an entirely incongruous grin. "And I must say I still find you most amusing, ma chere. Though of course I must reject your proposal."

But before I could vent my wrath, Guy stayed my words with a finger to my lips. "However, as a Merchant Prince in training, I am constrained to give fair value for value received," he said. "Since the commodity in question is amusement, let me counter with a proposal that I hope you will find amusing, Shortly I will be leaving Edoku for Belshazaar, a planet which I expect will be far more amusing and certainly more remunerative than this one. If you find the notion amusing, why not accompany me thither in the Unicorn Garden, at my expense, of course, or to be more precise, courtesy of Interstellar Master Traders?"

I could scarcely credit my ears. I could hardly believe in such good fortune. Indeed, considering the source, at first blush I was not quite certain that I could trust it. "Belshazaar," I said guardedly. "I've never heard of Belshazaar. What is there to draw us thither?"

"On Belshazaar there is a forest known as the Bloomenwald," Guy told me. "It is reputed to be a veritable cornucopia of psychotropic perfumes, essences, saps, pheromones, und so weiter. While hundreds of them are already on the market, scores more are discovered each year, and a merchant who secures a droit of monopoly for a period in a few of the latest stands to gain a tidy fortune. At the very least, it should be the height of amusement to sample the full panoply of what is available."

My enthusiasm for quitting Great Edoku for such a venue was considerably less total than Guy's, but on the other hand, what were my prospects on Edoku without him save continued indigency and an endless banquet of fressen?

"Gratuit ...?" I asked carefully. "Why should you do such a thing for me?"

"Porque no?" Guy said airily. "From each according to his ability, to each according to her need, as the ancient communards had it, ne. And when it comes to credit, my ability is bottomless, and your need is total. Besides, as I have declared, I find your company amusing."

"We would not travel in electrocoma ...?"

"Quelle chose!" Guy exclaimed in somewhat supercilious outrage. "Do you imagine Guy Vlad Boca would find it amusing to sleep through a voyage when the divertissements of the floating cultura lie readily at hand? Do you account me such a boor that I would offer such passage to a lover? Come, Sunshine, join me as an Honored Passenger in the Grand Palais of the Unicorn Garden!"

"I might be convinced to agree ..." I owned in a tone of mock reluctance. Naturellement, in truth no further inducements were necessary, for it was precisely such access to the haut monde of the floating cultura for which I had so strenuously albeit unsuccessfully campaigned against my parents' refusal. And while Sunshine might have evolved beyond Moussa, she was hardly less determined to live the true vie of the Child of Fortune, which is to say she followed the Yellow Brick Road for sake of the adventure of the journey not the goal of the destination, and in this respect was not Guy Vlad Boca a kindred spirit and the Grand Palais of the floating cultura the true camino real?

"If love is that which would convince you to agree, a demonstration thereof would seem to be once more in order," Guy said. "And I do believe I am once more ready to rise to the occasion."

So he was. So it did.

Chapter 13

And so, in the company of my Merchant Prince, I bade farewell to Great Edoku, my days with Pater Pan, my comrades in the Gypsy Jokers, and my burning ambition to pursue the career of a ruespieler with scarcely a look back once I had gained access to the Grand Palais module of the Unicorn Garden.

Call me fickle mayhap, but consider also that had my parents followed the entirely admirable example of Dominik Vlad Ella and provided me with sufficient largesse to begin my wanderjahr in the style to which I had wished to become accustomed, I would never have chosen Edoku, never suffered the indigency and fressen of the Publics, never met Pater, never become a Gypsy Joker or a would-be ruespieler, and therefore never have met Guy Vlad Boca, who would therefore never have needed to rescue me from penury in the first place.

Which is to say that once we were ushered aboard the Unicorn Garden and conducted to a sumptuous if not quite spacious stateroom by suitably deferential freeservants, once I beheld the departure fete taking place in the grand salon, I was immediately possessed of sufficient sophistic logic to convince myself that one way or the other it had always been my proper destiny to voyage between the worlds in this style.

For what a different style it was from my previous experience at starfaring!

No sooner had our belongings been properly ensconced in our stateroom than the ship's annuciators invited our presence at the departure fete now taking place in the grand salon. The Grand Palais module of the Unicorn Garden was divided into five decks; counting downward from the bow to the stern, which was how the gravity gradient was arranged, these were the vivarium, the grand salon, the cuisinary deck, the entertainment deck, and the deck of dream chambers. Of these, the grand salon was the chief venue of the fetes, or rather the continuous fete that went on throughout the nine-day voyage under one nom de jour or another.

Maria Magda Chan, Domo of the Unicorn Garden, had commissioned a grand salon done up in a style which I can only call organiform, which is not to say that any flora or fauna were in evidence. Upon entering from the spinal passageway of the ship, one stood upon a landing stage from which a semicircle of stairs descended, and from which vantage one could therefore view the grand salon as a work of art entire.

I was first struck by the fact that not a single hard surface, flat plane, angle, or indeed even any simple geometric form, was in evidence. Chaises, banquets, tables, vraiment even the lighting fixtures, were all done up as items of upholstery, stuffed with foam, or fluff, or water, or air, and covered with velvety, furry, or indeed skinlike fabrics. All forms flowed, bulged, and curved, reminiscent in an entirely abstract manner of breasts, derrieres, thighs, phalluses, und so weiter, though none of it descended to the crassly representational. Similarly were the hues thereof derived from the organic realm -- subtle browns and greens, soft floral tints, human skin tones -- though nowhere were colors matched to form in an obvious manner. Even the walls, floor, and ceiling were upholstered in patterns of the same style, and the lighting tended to pinks, roses, and ambers. The total effect was of an abstract sensuousity balanced precariously but successfully on the edge of obscenity.

"Fantastic!" I exclaimed in delight.

"Amusing," owned Guy. "Naturellement, I have seen better."