Child of Fortune (54 page)

Indeed, such a sophisticated perception of the relationship between space and time might very well be said to be the minimal definition of sapience itself.

So by the time the sun had begun to sink behind the western horizon, it might be fairly said that some semblance of the "I" who tells the tale had returned to inhabit the brain of the protagonist thereof.

I knew that soon I must select a leaf of relative safety upon which to spend the night, for it would not be long before every flower of the Bloomenveldt would begin to exude the irresistible perfume of sleep. And upon selecting same and settling down on it, I had achieved a level of consciousness all-too-able to reflect upon its plight.

I had no concept of how long I had been traveling, how far I had come, or how much more Bloomenveldt lay between me and the succor of the coast. I had only the dimmest notion of how long the human body might continue to function without food, mayhap a matter of weeks for a perfect master of the yogic arts, but certainement a matter of mere days for such as myself. But I knew with only too much certainty that, without my floatbelt to extract me toward the sunrise, to eat of the fruit of the Bloomenveldt, or even approach within smelling distance of the flowers thereof, would mean my sapient doom.

I, who to say the least had never been a devotee of the ascetic disciplines, would have to essay a fast of heroic proportions. Moreover, in order to do so, I must never for a moment allow my conscious will to once more lose sovereignty over the imperatives of the flesh, for the time would inevitably come when my very cells would cry out for nourishment, and if no "I" was present to provide restraint, no "I" would ever return from the mindless realm of the Bloomenkinder.

And while the mantra continued to vibrate in my brain even when my lips were sealed, and the golden face of the sun continued to shine in my mind's eye even as the first stars of night began to appear in the blackening sky, I knew full well that mere tropism would not be sufficient to maintain the conscious awareness which now swore an oath to itself that the body in which it arose would expire before the human spirit therein gave up the ghost.

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road ..."

As I sat there on my leaf, determined that if I must die in this uncaring vastness it would at least be as a sapient being who deserved to call herself human even to the end, the mantra ringing in my brain and the golden mandala filling my mind's eye began to take on new complexities of meaning, or rather the message I had left for myself in the simple tropism which had brought a mindless creature through hundreds of kilometers of Bloomenveldt began to exfoliate its layers of meaning in the reemergent mind of the human spirit who had coded it into her backbrain in the first place.

"Before the singer was the song, which has carried our kind from the trees to the stars," Pater Pan had often enough declaimed, and vraiment, where was I now but cast back into the treetops of presentience from whence long ago our species had begun its gallant march to sapience and the stars?

And what was the Yellow Brick Road I now sought to travel but the recapitulation of our species' phylogeny via my own personal ontogeny? Vraiment, as the most ancient lore of our species has it, in the beginning was the Word, the tale we told ourselves as we wandered from apes into men, the tale the Piper told still.

Tattered, begrimed and besmeared with the juices and pulps of the fruits of forgetfulness and the sweats and stains of literally unspeakable acts, the Cloth of Many Colors still tied about my waist seemed the banner of all that remained of who I had been and who I must now struggle to once more become -- Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, Child of Fortune, Gypsy Joker, ruespieler.

For was it not the Word which had created our humanity in the first place? Might it therefore not carry me back from the forest of unreason once more along the Yellow Brick Road that led homeward to the sapient worlds of men? Out here on the Bloomenveldt there might be no one to hear my tales but myself, but there was something far more precious than ruegelt to be won or lost.

And so there in the treetops, I summoned up my courage as once I had in the Luzplatz in Great Edoku, and into the darkness, into the loneliness, into an utter insensate indifference far deeper and more terrible than that of any audience of Edojin, I raised up my voice and began to spiel for the survival of my soul.

"The Spark of the Ark!" I declared to myself, and launched into a bizarre version indeed of Lance Della Imre's favorite tale, in which my clouded memory and my present concerns combined to rewrite it into a song of myself.

"Say not that the Arkies of the First Starfaring Age meekly gave up the ghost to the flowers when a way of life that had existed since the first Child of Fortune dared climb down from the trees was lost on the Bloomenveldt. For the Spark of the Ark which led us along the Yellow Brick Road out of the forest of unreason when we were wage slaves of the Pentagon is with us today in the Arkie Sparkie heart of the teller of this tale ..."

Short on art, mayhap, and certainement shorter on verbal coherence, it all rolled out in a glorious hebephrenia, as after aeons of naught but the same mantric drone, I reveled in the sound of a sapient human voice spieling the story of my own soul. Never has any ruespieler had a less critical or more appreciative audience than I was for myself!

Nor did the audience jade or the ruespieler tire until the nighttime perfumes of the Bloomenveldt rang down the curtain of sleep on the performance.

***

In the morning, I arose spieling still, declaiming melanges of every tale I knew to myself, and transmogrifying them into my own singular song of the Yellow Brick Road.

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Piper of the Yellow Brick Road, who was born when first I climbed down from our ancestral flowers, and who from that day unto this has taken us leaf by leaf along our Mardi Gras parade to the dawn of the Second Starfaring Age in the long slow centuries between here and the coast ..."

Babbling thusly, I set first one halting step on the Yellow Brick Road eastward, and then another and another, following the command of my own tale.

No doubt any Healer in attendance at this stage of my journey would have judged me mad, for it cannot be denied that what he would have observed was a gaunt and starveling creature exhibiting clear symptoms of hebephrenic cafard.

For hour by hour, day by day, the longer I walked, the more famished I became, and the more I filled my ears with bits and pieces of half-remembered ruespielers' tales, the more the parts of the many became an infinitely recomplicated mantra of the one, of the only tale there presently was to tell.

Indeed if psychosis, as the Healers do claim, is a disjunction between the events of the external realm and the images thereof presented by the sensorium to the brain, if a dissolution of the interface between the journey across the wilderness of the treetops and my spirit's journey via my tale was mere psychic dysfunction, then by such an objective definition, vraiment, I was quite insane.

But those same Healers could not deny that such a malaise may only arise in a sapient brain. Which is to say I was at least still capable of human sanity or its equally human converse. Whereas those whom science could only judge perfectly adapted to the external reality of the Bloomenveldt were the mindless Bloomenkinder thereof.

***

From the point of view of objective scientific reportage, there would be nothing of concrete substance to relate but an endless repetition of the round of any given day.

I arise already spieling. My stomach screams its starvation, and the hollow throbbing of my head sends sparkles of static confetti across my visual sphere. I fill my belly with water collected from the hollow of a leaf.

I turn my face to the golden visage of the rising sun, and I walk, babbling to myself. I walk until the sun has passed its zenith, and I walk until it has set in the west. I walk through the gathering darkness until I am inching along by feel alone. I walk until the perfumes of night slide me into dreamless sleep.

***

Time, the mages have long told us against the evidence of the senses, is not a regularly spaced absolute along which events are strung linearly like beads. Rather it is a relationship among points in a four-dimensional space-time matrix, so that when events vary we perceive an interval of time between them. But within a crystal lattice of space-time wherein events are identical, we perceive them as a simultaneous one.

As without, so within, for the mages tell us too that dreams that seem to last for eternities in the consciousness of the dreamer occur within literal augenblicks when the duration of their electrical discharge is measured by instruments.

So too have gurus, shamans, mystics, sufis, and masters perfect or otherwise, alluded time out of mind, if with less scientific precision, to a state of being in which events are perceived with the transtemporal logic of dreams and quantum cosmology, called variously the Tao, the Ein-Sof, the Einsteinian universe, the Great and Only, the Dreamtime.

The ancient tribe who sought by just such famishment and mantric declaiming as I now employed to take their willed Walkabouts through the Dreamtime named it best for this teller of the tale attempting to recall her passage through it.

For any ordinary Healer will tell you that the consciousness arising in the brain of a starving body will sooner or later begin to blur across the line separating waking awareness from sleep, so, that as the flesh begins to expire, the spirit begins its Walkabout through its final time of dreams.

As to when I could have been said to have passed over into the Dreamtime, je ne sais pas, for we never remember the crossing over from the waking realm into dream, still less so when we continue to set one foot down after the other long afterward, dreaming our Walkabout on our feet.

Certainement, the golden face of the sun in the blue sky above the Bloomenveldt that I perceived would have registered on any astronomical instrument. Certainement, I was not dreaming that I began to direct my spiel toward this solar audience.

But when the corona of light haloing the sun began to coalesce into a nimbus of golden hair, when it seemed to me that there was a pattern of human features on the face thereof, vraiment, when it started to speak, then surely had I long since passed over into the Dreamtime.

Was this hallucination, dream, or true translation into the Great and Only Tao? Who is to say which? Indeed, how is one to even make such distinctions? For are not hallucinations, dreams, and arcane mystic visions all the tales that the spirit somehow contrives to tell to itself?

So if the Pater Pan who spoke to me out of the face of the sun was a conjuration of my dreaming brain, and the words that he spoke were only part of my own tale, had not the song that I sang to myself been learned from the very man who now spoke in the dream? Thus might I have been dreaming it all, but thus too did the true spirit of a lover contrive to frustrate the constraints of space and time to be with me in my hour of need on the Bloomenveldt.

"Follow the Piper of the Yellow Brick Road, follow the Pied Piper of the Bloomenkinder back from our ancestral flowers, muchacha," Pater Pan said as we sat together naked by a crystal pool in a pleasure garden high on a plateau in Great Edoku, even as I was walking across the surface of one more leaf.

For the landscape through which I journeyed had now taken on a nondualistic logic precisely like that of a lucid dream. For while I could perceive a yellow sun shining above an endless green plain with sufficient awareness to maintain an eastward vector, like a lucid dream, the tale 1 was telling myself had the power to at the same time conjure up an overlay of visions in the Dreamtime.

"Once we were all Bloomenkinder in the Perfumed Garden of Eden, Sunshine," Pater told me as he swirled his Cloth of Many Colors around his shoulders and declaimed his name tale. "Now I will lead you to the Gold Mountain even as I led you out of the city of the Pentagon to the long slow centuries between the stars."

And now, even as some part of me knew that my body was still trudging across the Bloomenveldt in a state rapidly approaching total famishment, in the Dreamtime I was wandering the streets of Great Edoku, alone, out of funds, with my bladder demanding protoplasmic relief exactly as my stomach cried out for food in the treetops.

"Remember?" said Pater's voice in my ear. "Remember when you became a free creature living by your wits in the streets of Great Edoku?"

While I threaded my way among the great leaves of the treetops, I was tracking two Gypsy Jokers through the streets and parklands in search of their carnival, and when I stared at the golden face of Belshazaar's sun, it was my first eye to eye meeting with Pater Pan outside our shower stalls.

"It has taken us millennia of diligent tale-telling to create the ultimate triumph of the ruespieler's art, our own magnificent sapient selves," Pater said as we stood there admiring each other. "Have you not noticed your gift of gab?" he said as we lay on the bed in his tent.