Child of Fortune (74 page)

"Thus speaks the voice of astute practicality," I said dryly.

"And now that we have agreed to your condition, mi maestra, you will call forth the spirit of the great Pater Pan for us, ne?" Kim announced slyly.

"Thus speaks the voice of a true Gypsy Joker," I muttered under my breath, for while I could not but admire his guileful way with words, I was not about to encourage more of it with praise.

And so I seated myself on a cushion before the pillow throne for the long haul, attempted to erase the perceptions of my unwholesome surroundings from the forefront of my sensorium, gazed into the empty blue eyes of the frail corpus thereon, and attempted to conjure with the ectoplasmic spirits of the Up and Out.

As to the true psychesomic nature of what I sought to summon forth from this burning electronically amplified brain, je ne sais pas even now, nor have any of the manifold theories proposed by mages of many persuasions ever satisfied me entirely.

Certainement, there is abundant evidence that the genes of nonsapient animals store more than structural templates, for we observe the expression of their data in behaviors as complicated as those of a beehive and in natural sprachs as complex as the species songs of birds. Who is therefore to say what genetic messages may be encoded in the gene pool of our species, to be released, mayhap, only when the higher cerebral centers of the individual consciousness surrender up their sapient sovereignty?

Or contrawise, may not a new electrohologram at length cohere out of the electronically amplified fragments of memories fused together by scientific pouvoir in the vacated brain? For while two long starfaring ages in the Void have long since given the lie to the hoary notion that nature abhors a vacuum of matter and energy, the quantum forces would certainly seem to abhor a vacuum of structure, so that it might be inevitable that whatever psychic fragments remain in a Charge Addict's brain must under sufficient increment of Charge relate to each other once more in a hologrammic pattern of the whole.

Was it in some sense Pater Pan that at length I succeeded in summoning forth? Was it the collective unconscious coded into the genes of his body, at last permitted to speak through the verbal centers of his brain by the power of the Charge? Was it only fragmented memories cohering in a new pattern about a void? A spirit, or only an ersatz electronic simulacrum of same?

Vraiment, it may be justly said that science has banished the deities and demons, the ghosties and ghoulies, of our primeval superstitious past into the realm of metaphor where all such mythical creatures belong, but hola, in our Second Starfaring Age, only to create new and even more arcane ghosts in the civilized machineries, whereby doppelgangers of the spirit arise out of matter and energy themselves!

I sat there for the better part of an hour in silence, feeling entirely the fool. And yet the more the fool I felt myself, the more it seemed to me that the way of the Fool was my only course of action. To wit, I must play the pythoness, and simply say what was in my heart.

"Speak to me as you did in the Dreamtime on the Bloomenveldt, Pater Pan," I said at last. "For if you were a figment out of my Dreamtime then, then I must be a figment of your Dreamtime now."

There was a susurrus of murmurs at this breaking of the hushed silence behind me, but the figure on the pillow throne remained perfectly still and mute.

"Sing me the song of Yellow Brick Road, tell me a tale that will let my spirit leave this place in peace, even as I let go of your own rather than hold it to me in torment."

For what must have been hours, I babbled on thusly, without the mediation of intellect between feeling and words, and for what must have been hours, I might as well have been addressing my increasingly pathetic entreaties to a statue of stone.

"Merde, why have you chosen to end the tale of your noble life as a vegetative hulk in thrall to the Charge, and why have you cursed me with the telling thereof, and why should I not give over attendance at this lugubrious epilogue and flee as far from here as my fortune will take me?" I fairly raged at last. "If there is any geist present in your poor corpus, speak now, or you must forever hold your peace!"

I rose, and made to depart, moving with a thespic slowness, quite unsure, if truth be told, whether or not I would indeed carry through with this bluff.

Be the sincerity thereof what it may, Pater Pan's lips began to move as if something within him were struggling up toward speech, and then a voice spoke with the apparatus of his throat.

"Remember me," it said quite plain.

I froze there in my tracks, and an absolute silence fell in the tent.

"Vraiment, I am here for no other purpose," I whispered at the apparition before me, speaking through an old man's flesh with the voice of he who had departed, and yet, somehow not with the voice of Pater Pan, for though the tones and the rhythms of the music were the same, another spirit was singing the song.

"Remember exploding from nothingness into a trillion fragmentary motes," this voice, whatever it was, began to declaim, even as the eyes of Pater Pan's withered face remained as lifeless as two blue marbles. "Remember coalescing into numberless suns out of less than mists. Remember spheres of rock in the everlasting night ..."

Who or what spoke? Je ne sais pas. The Atman that had witnessed the universe's explosion into existence from a point of nonbeing? A tale the natural man had once told or heard? The genetic memory of the species?

But be that as it may, whatever spoke now could not be taken for what had spoken in random babblement before, for this dybbuk of the Up and Out compelled my attention as fully as the previous oracular avatar had mesmerized its feckless acolytes.

Vraiment, I was hardly aware of sinking back down on my cushion before it, taking my place at its feet with the rest.

"Remember drifting in the sea in long helices of life ... Remember crawling out gasping on the land ... Remember descending from our ancestral trees to gaze at the sunrise above the plain ... Remember your first footsteps on Luna ... Remember your long slow centuries between the stars ... Remember the mysteries of the Jump that has spread your kind among the far-flung worlds of men ... Remember you ... Remember me."

"I am here to remember," I seem to recall myself saying, but I seemed to have been transported once more into the Dreamtime, for once more a spirit that in quotidian terms could not be said to be present had nevertheless contrived to appear before me, even as the Pied Piper of my Golden Summer had been with me in my hour of need on the Bloomenveldt, even as we may readily enough discourse with departed spirits and archetypal images in the realms of quotidian sleep.

"Remember this moment of remembering," Pater Pan said, and now it almost seemed as if it were truly he, for his eyes were turned upon me, and I could not deny that it was a Sunshine that he remembered to whom he now spoke.

"Remember Moussa ... Remember Sunshine ... Remember that you came to tell the tale ..."

"Vraiment, I cannot deny that this task would seem to have fallen on me," I admitted. "But tell me then how I am supposed to make this story sing? Shall I be constrained to declare that I could honor your spirit with nothing better than a denouement of tragic farce? How can I honorably end this tale thusly?"

But the answer was silence, and whatever had spoken would speak to me no more that day.

***

Nor for the next three days could I summon forth so much as a syllable. I allowed Kim to tend to the animal requirements of my existence, and I spent my waking hours speaking to the silent sphinx within the tent.

What did I say to Pater Pan during all these endless hours of one-sided babblement? Vraiment everything that was in my heart and spirit and more and in every conceivable mode of address, from rage to cajolement, from tearful sobbings to dark gravehouse jests, from the tale of my travels across the Bloomenveldt to the tale of The Spark of the Ark and everything and anything between.

All of which availed me nothing. Pater Pan had given up taking nourishment days before my arrival, and now even my attempts to force-feed him nutritive liquids were rejected by his body, as if what remained of the protoplasmic will of the same had determined upon a terminal fast unto death. Day by day, indeed hour by hour, I found myself constrained to watch his body grown gaunter, the webwork seaming his skin withering it to dusty parchment, his golden hair thinning out to a mange of gray straw no longer quite covering the pallid skin of his pate.

This nascent corpse did I find myself hectoring futilely, until at length I had come to loathe the sound of my own foolish voice.

As Kim ushered me into the Tent of Many Colors on the morning of the fourth day, I found I could bear to question the sphinx no longer, nor could I bear any longer the sight of the King of the Gypsies and the Prince of the Jokers expiring thusly, enclosed from the worlds he had so joyfully wandered, and surrounded by this feckless and indolent travesty of the Gypsy Jokers which gave the lie to the true song of both the natural man and the Pied Piper whose spirit was now passing from the worlds.

And if no words of mine could cause the sphinx to speak, then at least let it not be said that I allowed his mortal remains to decay into death in this malodorous tent suffocating with heat and thanatotic vapors.

"Enough of this!" I cried. "Roll up these walls of Cloth of Many Colors and let in the light of morning. Schnell, schnell, schnell, let us breathe more natural air!"

"Come, come," Kim cajoled, "let us break down the walls and let the sunshine in!" So saying, he straightaway began undoing one of the flaps from its stakes, and within a few minutes, enough of the tribe had followed his example to transform the spiritually and odorously stifling tent into an open-roofed pavilion looking out through the encampment on the golden sun rising high above the brilliant mirror of the azure sea.

Upon the newfound breeze wafted the subtle sweetness of the wooded hillsides, and the more insistent tang of the sea, and the organic overripeness of the untidy encampment, and subtle pheromones of holiday essences from the streets of the town far below, and the effluvia of human bodies borne away by the breeze and sublimated by the heat of the tropical sun.

Mayhap all of these random molecules combined to form a new perfume as puissant to the biochemical perception of Pater Pan's corpus as it was to the nostrils of my own spirit, for certainement both the mages of science and my own experience in the depths of the Bloomenveldt would tell us that it is the olfactory senses which most directly connect the stimuli of the exterior realm to the tropic responses of the deep backbrain.

For his nostrils seemed to widen almost imperceptibly upon his first few breaths of this new atmosphere, and it seemed that his eyes looked out over the ocean, and with determination, I could imagine the faintest of smiles on his lips, when he once again, after his long silence, spoke.

"I remember ..." said that preternatural voice which had so captured my attention when last it spoke. "I remember a day like this long ago with the sun shining over San Francisco Bay ... I remember hills in Great Edoku where it was always morning when I was the King of the Gypsies and the Prince of the Jokers ... I remember awakening from a century's sleep to see the sun rise on a new world and breathe once more the living atmosphere of another planet...:

Quelle chose, what new arcana of the Charge was this? For while the first words were spoken in that strangely impersonal voice which alluded in its identity to the genetic spirit of our species' collective genes, the following remembrances were uttered in three successively different voices, that of the Pater Pan I had known and loved and two unknown personas. Yet while each of these voices seemed as humanly specific as the memory-images they rendered up, the total effect was of some singularity of spirit attempting to speak through a multitude.

"I remember the arkology Gold Mountain and the day we pooled our fortunes to purchase our destiny ... I remember Fat Tuesday on the sun-drenched levee ... I remember a Mardi Gras parade ..."

Images continued to pour from the mouth of the old man staring out over the hills at the sunrise above the bay of Florida, each one with the voice of a different fleshly avatar, or so it seemed, each one singing sweetly of a fond memory of the eternal Yellow Brick Road.

Yet somehow all these fragments of different sprachs seemed avatars as well of a single Lingo, as if some spirit deep below the crown of the cortex were firing off far-from-randomly-chosen quanta of memory in an attempt to semaphore its meaning into the realm of conscious speech.

Vraiment, it might just as well be said, as the mages would no doubt contend, that far from being the collective urgeist of the genes speaking through patterns of memory release, what we all in fact perceived was the order our subjectivities persisted in imposing upon the voice of random chaos babbling through a sapiently vacated brain.