Child of Fortune (33 page)

For while the chemically induced perception of the universe as a spiritually daunting void of nullity and ourselves as but illusory perturbations therein passed with the figurative dawn, the memory of the experience did not entirely fade.

In truth, as I knew even then, the weltanschauung which had so consumed my soul with dread under the influence of the psychotropic had been little more than the heightened subjective apprehension of the rudiments of quantum cosmology which we are all taught as children. Vraiment, our cells are composed of molecules, the molecules of atoms, the atoms of particles, and the particles of subparticles which diminish in mass, duration, and probability under dissection until one indeed discovers that the mass-energy cosmos is conjured into being out of theoretical ultimate particles of zero mass, zero duration, and zero probability.

But in the cold clear light of dawn, what of it? If all creation is but a cosmic ruespieler's tale whereby the characters conjure themselves out of their own imagination, then all that should concern the spirit is the art of the story or the lack thereof, ne.

Which is to say that it was the style of the tale the floating cultura chose to live out for itself which now cloyed in the light of my memory of the satoric revelation of the obvious. For had not I stared full-face into the countenance of what all this artifice was meant to deny, and escaped with nothing worse than a certain period of angst and terror? How could I therefore regard these Honored Passengers, who viewed me as callow, as the crown of creation they so obviously considered themselves? How could I regard the pavane from which I was barred by my lack of adult sophistication and urbanity as a vie to which I should aspire?

Or, as Guy would no doubt have put it, where was the amusement to be found therein for a true Child of the spirit's Fortune?

As for the amusements that Guy, Raul, and Imre continued to pursue for the rest of the voyage to Belshazaar, as far as I was concerned, this was more of the same.

The Honored Passengers surrounded themselves with an external environment of illusions crafted of matter and energy, while Guy, Raul, and Imre subsumed the reality of the Void beyond the hull and the Void within the spirit behind a series of illusions crafted of psychotropic alteration of the biochemical matrix containing the consciousness perceiving it. And woe unto that spirit should illusion misfire and reveal the very truth it was meant to deny!

No doubt much of the metaphysical cogency of the foregoing derives from the more mature perceptions of the teller of the tale, rather than from those of the young girl who eschewed further ingestion of psychotropic substances of any puissance for the duration of the voyage through the Void and who spent her time wandering aimlessly through the divertissements of the Grand PaJais in a state of ennui.

I was surfeited with haute cuisine, bored with the passive consumption of art and performance, and certainement, I had had my fill of idle discourse, whether that of the elegant Honored Passengers or that of my so frequently toxicated companions. Only my desire for erotic dalliance with Guy was perforce enhanced, for of all the diversions offered up to pass the idle hours chez Grand Palais, this was the only one in which I might participate as an active agent.

In short, what life aboard the Unicorn Garden, what the vie of the floating cultura, lacked, as far as I was then concerned, was adventure. I did not want to be entertained, I wanted to act. I did not want to perceive, I wanted to do.

As to the nature of the adventure that I sought, as to what acts I imagined I wanted to perform, as to just what it was that I was consumed by the passion to do, this I knew not.

I only knew that I was more than ready to debark from the Unicorn Garden and stand on the real surface of an unknown world once more. And so I spent the remainder of the voyage looking forward to our arrival on Belshazaar, whatever the nature of that planet might be. Having arrived as an ignorant ingenue on Great Edoku, having gained access to the Gypsy Jokers by my own wit, having survived as a Child of Fortune on this most sophisticated of the worlds of men, having at last experienced the floating cultura itself and found it wanting, naturellement I assumed that experience had prepared me for anything.

Alas, once more I was to be proven a naif.

Chapter 14

It may seem strange that I had given so little thought to what might await me on Belshazaar before I embarked on the journey thereto, and stranger still that I did not choose to fill my surfeit of idle hours aboard the Unicorn Garden with more diligent study of the planet which represented the light at the end of my tunnel of ennui.

In the first case, I had cared little about the goal of the journey because my goal was the journey itself, which is to say escape from the penury of Edoku into what I had always imagined to be the fascinating vie of the floating cultura. In a curious way, this state of mind was not unlike that of the instance of the second part, wherein my main passion was to escape the Grand Palais as I had escaped poverty, and that to which I was escaping seemed to matter a good deal less than the change of scene itself.

And of course, if truth be told, diligent study of anything had never struck me as an escape route from boredom at this stage in my evolution. Which is not to say that I was completely without curiosity about Belshazaar as each Jump took us closer to the reality thereof, only that I contented myself with a perusal of the entry therefor in the planetary ephemeris, at the conclusion of which I believed I had sufficiently prepared myself for our arrival.

Belshazaar, I learned from the ephemeris, was basically a water world, with some 83% of its surface given over to ocean, and the bulk of its land area consisting of two widely separated major continents, Pallas and Bloomenwald. The former had been entirely defoliated centuries ago and redone in a human-optimized biosphere based chiefly, as such ersatz ecologies tend to be, on that of Earth. Here resided most of the population of a mere fifteen million, and the majority of that in the vecino of the main city, Ciudad Pallas.

Bloomenwald, the other continent, had been left in its native state, for here grew the mighty Bloomenwald itself, the economic raison d'etre for the entire planetary economy.

Belshazaar's gravity was only .4 standards; this apparently allowed trees to grow to gigantic size. When humans first discovered Belshazaar, they found one relatively sparsely vegetated continent, Pallas, and another in a somewhat wetter and warmer clime covered with an enormous interlocked forest of equally enormous trees. Little grew on the forest floor beneath the dense canopy of branches nearly half a kilometer up, and in fact faunal evolution on Belshazaar had proceeded mainly on the endless rolling skyland of the treetops, known as the Bloomenveldt.

As Guy had told me and as the ephemeris confirmed, the Bloomenveldt was indeed a cornucopia of natural psychotropics. The perfumes, fruits, seeds, saps, and other natural products of the Bloomenveldt were apparently redolent with organic molecules that affected the nervous system, endocrine metabolism, and brain chemistry of our species. Hundreds of such products of the Bloomenveldt were already items of commerce, and the main industry of Belshazaar, and certainement its only contribution to interstellar commerce, was the gathering and synthesis of same.

This, the ephemeris pointed out somewhat peckishly, was the scientific and moral justification for the rude total defoliation of the native vegetation from Pallas; a human settlement surrounded by such a psychotropic flora would hardly be viable. What the ephemeris did not bother to dwell on, and what never occurred to me at the time, but what was later to prove the heart of the matter, was the question of how so many molecules produced by the flora of one world could possibly have so many direct and subtle effects upon the psychochemistry of a sapient species which evolved on another.

Nor did the ephemeris convey anything of the esthetic wretchedness of Ciudad Pallas, surely the most peculiarly repulsive city that I in my modest travels had ever seen.

Assuming, quite erroneously as it turned out, that we would travel to what appeared to be Belshazaar's only real scenic attraction immediately upon debarking from the shuttle, I quite deliberately avoided viewing any holo of the Bloomenwald aboard the Unicorn Garden so that I might apprehend this natural wonder with virgin eyes. As the shuttle spiraled down to the surface of Belshazaar, the vision of the planet as seen from space entirely lacked the grandeur and bizarrite of the similar approach to Great Edoku. I beheld great featureless blue-green seas, a huge continent of almost equally uniform deep green fringed with rather narrow beaches and studded with a few bleak rocky massifs peeking up through the endless treetops, and then we were coming down towards the singularly unappetizing-looking continent of Pallas.

Seen from above, most of Pallas appeared to be a sere desert landscape of bleak grays and dull browns, for apparently those who had sterilized the native biosphere had not bothered to extend the benefits of the ersatz Earth-based biosphere much beyond the extended vecino of Ciudad Pallas. And even there, in the grossest possible contrast to Edoku, esthetic considerations seemed never to have crossed their minds.

Smeared across a wide plain roughly in the middle of the continent was a vast hodge-podge irregular checkerboard of autofarms, vast enough, I was later to learn, to supply the nutritive needs of the entire populace. These huge fields of yellow, dun brown, and subdued green were bordered, one from the other, by irrigation channels, along which grew only enough incongruous fir trees to serve as windbreaks.

In the center of this depressingly functional landscape was the even more depressing aerial vista of Ciudad Pallas, toward which we descended with merciful rapidity. This appeared as a predominantly gray and glassy silver sprawl of human habitation, smudged in the middle of the surrounding farmland like a great greasy thumbprint.

As for the vista which greeted my eyes when first I set foot on Belshazaar, this was enough to make me turn to Guy with a curled lip and wrinkled nose as we stood there on the grim black tarmac between the shuttle and the terminal. "This," I sniffed, "is your notion of an amusing planet?"

The shuttleport was built atop a low hill and consisted of little more than a wide expanse of black tarmac, a large oblong terminal building of plain gray concrete and untinted glass, and a number of large warehouses done up in the same dismal mode. From this vantage, one could gain a general visual impression of the surrounding cityscape, such as it was.

This general visual impression was that of a gray urban wasteland sprawling to the horizon in all directions. Which is not to say that Ciudad Pallas appeared to be in a state of economic rot or physical decay; indeed some ruined buildings, verdigris, or even a fetid favela or two would have at least served to imbue the view with some kind of atmospheric ambiance, and the city itself with a feeling of human history. Au contraire, Ciudad Pallas looked as if it had been fabricated, one arrondissement at a time, by the same doggedly functional mentality which had defoliated the continent and replaced the native flora with nothing more than the hundreds of kilometers of esthetically bleak cropland which surrounded the city.

Judging from the regular rows of buildings, the streets of each arrondissement appeared for the most part to be laid out in relentlessly rectilinear gridworks. Each arrondissement seemed to be given over to a particular function, for the buildings of each were as similar as if they had been fabricated and planted at the same time, like the monocultural fields of the autofarms.

There were arrondissements of modest towers, arrondissements of geodesic domes, arrondissements of undisguised fabriks, arrondissements of low rambling structures which appeared to be residence blocks, und so weiter. As for the architectural styles offered up for the esthetic delectation of the eye, the less said the better, for there appeared to be no attempt at art at all. All forms were simple geometric shapes, the predominant colors were concrete gray, muted aluminial sheen, and pale vitreous green, adornments seemed nonexistent, and as for the art of the landscaper, this was nowhere in evidence. Nor, from this vantage, could I pick out parklands, grand public squares, or indeed anything emblematic of civic pride or public amenity.

The odor of the atmosphere I can only compare to the deadly chemical neutrality of the taste of distilled water. The deepest of breaths could detect no floral perfumes, no aroma of parkland, no stench of decay, not even the subtle smell of urban bustle.

"Quelle chose!" I told Guy. "What a wretched city! When do we depart for Bloomenwald?"

"Bloomenwald?" he exclaimed as if that were the most outre suggestion in this world. "There's nothing there but a few research stations and a vast expanse of forest."

"And what is to be found here but an immense expanse of ugly buildings, if I may ask?" I demanded.

Guy smiled. "Appearances are often deceiving," he assured me. "Once we have secured lodgings, I will show you the manifold opportunities for amusement, not to say profit, concealed within the admittedly banal exteriors of Ciudad Pallas."