Child of Fortune (61 page)

"I too left the planet of my birth to follow the camino real that has led us from our ancestral trees to the far-flung worlds of men!" I screamed as loudly as I was able, for when it came to attracting and holding the attention of this audience, volume was no doubt a good deal more critical than a well-crafted tale told with erudition.

"Vraiment, I too fell into the nethermost psychotropic bowels of this loathsome planet! Indeed I found myself besotted, with perfumes and pheromones which make the psychotropics of the laboratories of Ciudad Pallas seem like the cold crystal air of a mountain!"

Whether I had touched at last upon the only subject sufficient to rouse the interest of these zombies, or whether it was only the volume, the rapid rolling cadence, the sheer passion with which I sought to imbue every shouted syllable, every eye now paid me rapt attention. Some of the inmates even rose slowly to their feet and shambled closer to my bench.

"You have become inmates of a mental retreat, but I became a perfectly mindless Bloomenkind, without so much as a spirit to call my own," I shouted most abusively in their faces. "Yet my spirit roused itself to follow once more the song of the Piper that we all once followed from apes into men and so must you all rouse your spirits now!" I bellowed at them, quite enjoying my own tirade by now. But what I craved now was some response.

"Behold the sun which forever arises above the Bloomenveldt of your spirits, my pauvres Bloomenkinder!" I shouted more craftily now. 'Behold the face of the Pied Piper which we have followed from the depths of the forest of unreason!"

Vraiment, I was raving with the best of the teppichfressers now, and yet another part of me observed the proceedings with calculating clarity and no little wry satisfaction and knew quite well what I was going to do next.

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Piper, follow the Yellow Brick Road!"

I began to chant.

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

Most of the inmates in my vecino were on their feet now, and in the middle distance I could see more of them shambling across the lawn to the hubbub.

They began to sway to the rhythm of my words. Like a musical maestra, I began to move my arms to the beat, palms upward, enticing them to join in.

As for the erstwhile catatonics, these were never roused to more than a bobbing of their heads, but those who a few minutes before had been locked into their own hebephrenic sprachs of babble were easily enough cozened by my efforts and the communal reinforcement thereof to take up the chant.

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Piper, follow the Yellow Brick Road!"

At length, when I had whipped up a veritable frenzy of chanting, there seemed nothing for it but to lead my Gypsy Jokers on a Mardi Gras parade about the garden. As to what in troth had moved me to carry this unholy prank to such an extreme, or indeed how far I was prepared to take it, je ne sais pas, for I had no sooner leapt from the bench and danced forward a few steps still chanting, when Urso, with at least half a dozen other functionaries of the mental retreat in train, came puffing and running across the lawn toward me.

"Cease this outrage at once!" he shouted at me, as red-faced with ire as with exertion. "Schnell, schnell, schnell, remove them all to their rooms!" he ordered his minions, gesticulating wildly with one hand, and dragging me away toward the main building with the other. Nor did he address me again until he had succeeded in removing my person well away from the tumult where my baneful influence could no longer make itself felt.

"And who do you suppose you are?" he demanded angrily. "What do you suppose you are doing?"

I pulled away somewhat haughtily from his grasp. I smiled a superior smile at him, filled with self- satisfied contentment, for the answer to his question was wonderfully clear and plain.

"I am Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, ruespieler," I told him with the voice of sweet reason. "Naturellement, I must practice my art."

A most peculiar change came over Urso Moldavia Rashid, for while on the surface his anger appeared unabated, beneath it I sensed some unknown satisfaction which sapped it of a certain credibility. "The Clear Light no public platz ist!" he snapped back with somewhat unconvincing spontaneity. "As perhaps you will notice, bitte, this is a mental retreat! We can hardly permit you to agitate our unfortunate patients in such an unseemly manner!"

"What do you suggest?" I demanded. "That I continue along as I have as an object of endless futile interrogation until I am indistinguishable from the poor wretches you seek to prevent me from addressing?"

"You are free to leave the Clear Light at any time," Urso pointed out fatuously. "And indeed if such an event occurs again, you will be expelled!"

"You would have me expire of starvation?"

We had reached the entrance to the building now, and Urso's demeanor abruptly altered. "You mistake my meaning and my spirit," he said in an almost apologetic tone. "I have only your best interests at heart."

"Well then what are you suggesting, Urso?" I demanded.

"That certainement your therapy has reached a stage where you must direct some thought and effort to your future life, for as you yourself have just so nobly declared, you certainly have no wish to remain an inmate in a mental retreat forever."

I looked at him with new eyes. Mayhap I had mistaken his spirit, for whatever else Urso Moldavia Rashid may have been before or after, in that moment he was a true psychic Healer, for he had spoken the truth that was in my own heart.

"I could not agree more wholeheartedly, Urso," I told him with unconstrained sincerity. "But what am I to do?"

"I may have some wisdom to offer in the practical realm as well," Urso said. "Let us make ourselves comfortable in my office and I will donate the time to elucidate at proper length."

To this I could find no reason to demur, and so what had begun as the hectoring and physical removal of a miscreant became a friendly tete-a-tete, or so at least it seemed.

***

"Neither of us wishes our arrangement to continue indefinitely, nicht wahr," Urso said when we had made ourselves comfortable in his cushioned lair of an office. "So while I am willing to grant you shelter and sustenance in exchange for your continued cooperation in our inquiries for a transitional period, I suggest that you avail yourself of your freedom to come and go and seek out means of gainful employment."

What a roil of emotion arose in me at these words! For while I wanted nothing so much as to regain my liberty, when it came to the economic means of securing same, my mind was utterly vacant. Which is to say that while I could hardly deny the wisdom and veracity of Urso's injunction, the emotions that they summoned up, alas, were frustration, anger, and dread.

"Gainful employment ...?" I muttered unhappily. "I am versed in no marketable skill or lore, and as for earning a wage as a subject for psychotropic experiments, my experiences on the Bloomenveldt have left me entirely unemployable as a psychonaut, even were I mad enough to resort to same."

"Indeed," purred Urso, and now the insinuating tone of his voice became quite evident, "but you are, as you have declared, Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, ruespieler, nicht wahr. Who has also righteously announced the necessity of practicing her art ..."

"In Ciudad Pallas?" I exclaimed. "You may indeed be a maestro of your own art, Urso, but it is evident you know nothing of that of the ruespieler! This wretched city is entirely devoid of the life of the streets! There are no suitable venues, the citizens thereof --"

"-- however unpromising, are certainly more promising in terms of both artistic appreciation and financial largesse than the indigent inmates of a mental retreat, nicht wahr?"

Once more Urso seemed to have earned his keep as a true psychic Healer, for I could hardly deny that it would take little more courage to declaim to the denizens of Ciudad Pallas than it had to stand up for myself in the Luzplatz and seek to entice the lordly attention of the indifferent Edojin.

Urso smiled at me. "What have you to lose by trying?" he said.

"Well spoken, Urso, well spoken indeed!" I declared, smiling back at him for the first time since this discussion had begun.

Would not the old spiels which had worn out their welcome in Edoku nevertheless be novel tales from a greater metropole to the bumpkins of this most culturally provincial of planetary capitals? Indeed did I not now have a grand tale to tell which was entirely my own and mayhap one of piquant local relevance to the inhabitants of this planet? Vraiment, had I not now prevailed by the power of the Word in the very Bloomenveldt itself? Had I not been willing to hector the very dregs of psychic disaster swept up from those self-same unpromising streets as they vegetated in a mental retreat? Did I have anything further to fear in the way of stage fright? Did I have any better alternative?

I shrugged. "Nothing ventured, nothing gained, n'est-ce pas?" I said almost gaily.

"Gut!" exclaimed Urso heartily. "And if you will forgive my anticipation of the decision I knew you would come to in the end, I make practical recompense in the form of this necessary gift."

From his desk he withdrew a portable chip transcriber such as are employed in private games of chance.

"Having researched the subject but scantily, I nevertheless believe I am correct in believing ruespielers, so-called, are traditionally paid in so-called ruegelt, actual physical tokens each representing a unit of credit ..."

My spirits suddenly sank. "I had forgotten that the very concept of ruegelt is unknown in Ciudad Pallas," I groaned. "How may I therefore command the citizens thereof to shower me with coin when none such exists?"

"With this device I have taken the liberty of providing for your use," Urso said. "The donor inserts a chip in one slot, the recipient in another, the amount of the transfer is selected, and the transaction is accomplished."

"It seems a rather unwieldy procedure in comparison to the simple tossing of some coins," I said uncertainly, though of course this was the normal mode of commerce throughout the worlds of men, and ruegelt only a concession to the demimonde on the more sophisticated planets thereof.

"Come, come, this is mere grumbling, is it not?" Urso chided in an avuncular tone. "To those whose spirits hold back from every venture, a less than perfect universe provides abundant excuses for sloth, nicht wahr?"

Once more I could not escape entirely from the feeling that he was serving his own self-interest no less than he was justly advising mine.

"Touche," I agreed nevertheless, for whatever else Urso might be, however I might have been manipulated to get me here, and at whatever profit to whom, Urso Moldavia Rashid, by means fair or foul, had guided me back to my Yellow Brick Road.

***

And so, the next afternoon, under an overcast sky, with my Cloth of Many Colors tied about my neck as a scarf and the chip transcriber in my pocket, I set forth.

Not having set foot on urban streets for months, I found those of Ciudad Pallas both daunting and strangely reassuring. For while I now found myself moving among more people than I had seen in one place for many weeks, and while the regular gridwork of streets, the geometrically rigid forms and unadorned facades of the palisades of buildings, indeed the very gray substance of the concrete beneath my feet seemed grim, lifeless, and ersatz, wandering in this venue was a far cry from the psychic perils of the Bloomenveldt, and Ciudad Pallas certainly seemed modest and quotidian enough in comparison to my memories of Great Edoku.

And while I might have been tempted to regard myself as a bumpkin fresh from the wilderness, or worse, as an inmate of a mental retreat taking her first tremulous steps out into the worlds at large, my perception of the citizens of Ciudad Pallas soon enough disabused me of any excessive humility.

For I saw no throngs of extravagantly clad and tinted Edojin promenading with the lordly and languid grace of folk who considered themselves the sophisticated crown of creation, nor even such haughty urchins as the Gypsy Jokers who had once seemed so daunting when I was a naif of the Public Service Stations.

Rather was I in the midst of modestly clad folk scurrying through the streets with, for the most part, the blank expressions that befitted this pallid venue. The majority of them seemed sober and industrious-minded citizens intent on affairs of business, while others, by the unlaundered look of their clothing and the dishevelment of their persons, could readily enough be identified as what passed in Ciudad Pallas for Children of Fortune, to wit the denizens of the waiting rooms of the laboratories and mental retreats with whom I had become all too familiar on my previous sojourn in the city.