Child of Fortune

by Norman Spinrad

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

In the exotic interstellar civilization of the Second Starfaring Age, youthful wanderers are known as Children of Fortune. This is the tale of one such wanderer, who seeks her destiny on an odyssey of self-discovery amid humanity's many worlds.

Release date: October 31, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 389

Sample

I was born on Glade, a planet, like most of the far-flung worlds of men, of no particular fame in starfaring lore, and no economic significance in the transstellar scheme of things. Like most of the worlds of men, Glade is an almost entirely self-contained economic unit, which is to say that its plains, rivers and seas provide sufficient nutriment to support a healthy human population of about 300 million without the need to import significant amounts of trace elements from other stellar systems, and its mineral wealth, supplemented by the occasional asteroid, provides a sufficient raw materials base for its industrial economy.

Verdad, through hindsight’s eye I can thus dryly state that I was born and grew up on a world ordinaire, not unlike hundreds of such worlds warmed by G-type suns. But my girlhood perception of my heimat’s centrality to the larger scheme of things was quite a grander matter, for I was also born and raised as a child of Nouvelle Orlean, considered by all on Glade to be the jewel of our planet, and no more so than by the citizens of the city itself.

Like its legendary Terrestrial namesake, Nouvelle Orlean was built upon the ocean-mouth delta of a great continent-draining river system, but naturellement, in an age of primarily aerial transport, the original settlers had not chosen the site for its geographic significance as an ideal nexus of river and ocean commerce. Rather had the settlers of Glade chosen the venue for our planet’s metropole along esthetic – and indeed perhaps spiritual – parameters from the outset.

Glade, by the standards of human genetic parameters, is a somewhat cool world, capped by mountains of glacial ice at either pole, and dominated by less than simpatico semitundra in its middle latitudes, so that the most favorable zone of human habitation is the tropics, where the bulk of the populace is therefore to be found. Portions of three continents lie within this optimal climatic zone. Of these lands, southern Arbolique is clearly the geographic heimat of the human spirit on the planet.

Arbolique is the mightiest continent of Glade in more ways than one. It extends from the northern ice cap to just short of the equator at its southernmost point at the tip of the Culebra Peninsula, and the Grand Massif begins beneath the polar ice, rises into a towering longitudinal cordillera of snow-capped and moss-crusted rock, then splits into eastern and western chains as it marches down the continent nearly to the shores of the tropical sea.

Between these two mountain chains lies the Great Vale, a broad and fertile central valley veined and subdivided by chains of lesser mountains and hills, the whole more of an enormous mountain meadow than a peneplain, beginning in the north at an elevation of some three thousand meters and reaching sea level only at the delta mouth of the Rio Royale, the mighty central river whose headwaters begin as myriad lesser streams draining the ice cap runoff, and which foams and roars over great falls and wild rapids through the passes of the high cordillera, finally debouching into the sea via its delta as a broad stream of clear blue fresh water visible from the air against the contrasting greener ocean waters many miles from the shoreline.

Nouvelle Orlean lies somewhat upstream from the lowland marshes of the true alluvial delta of the Rio Royale, at a point where the wide and placid river flows through a mild canyon cut through the low coastal mountains. Here there are narrow river flats on both sides of the Royale, and immediately behind them loom hills and river cliffs crusted with the gnarly and intergrown trees of the Bittersweet Jungle and dripping with lianfungi, crawlervines, and saphroflors, like brilliant and varicolored molds festooning huge green mounds of ancient bread. Here, too, there are islands in the stream, most mere sand and mud bars held together by their crowns of jungle growth, but some large enough to hold whole arrondissements of the city.

Nouvelle Orlean spreads itself on both banks of the river, on the islands, both natural and crafted, inbetween, and some folk have chosen to build manses on the jungled heights above. Beneath the palisades on both banks of the river, tall buildings rise, sheathed for the most part in numerous subtle tints of mirror-glass, and between them and the river on either side are tree-shrouded esplanades lined with kiosks, restaurants, and pavilions. Above and behind the east and west bas-corniches, haute-corniches wind among the jungle shaded manses of the Hightowns.

But the heart, and indeed the soul, of the city, for all who style themselves true Orleaners, is Rioville, the magical archipelago spreading across the Royale and uniting what would otherwise be twin cities into one. Here the buildings have been kept low and rambling, in harmony with the jungle and wooded parklands which have been allowed to occupy most of the terrain, both for esthetic effect, and in order to bind the islands together so that the river will not sweep them away. Rioville architecture relies upon wood, brick, and stone, or at least on excellent ersatzes of natural materials, though not to the point of excluding wide expanses of windowglass overlooking every vista. Porches, breezeways, gazebos, open pavilions, and interior rooms that fling open whole walls to the natural realm while inviting vegetation inside are also very much in the Rioville mode. As are the hundreds of footbridges which span the smaller channels and the thousands of small boats of every type and fancy which give the city the ambiance of fabled Venice of ancient lore, and not without deliberate homage to the spirit of the Doges.

By custom with greater moral force than law, the arrondissements of Rioville are given over entirely to the realms of art, leisure, cultural endeavor, pleasure, and tantra, while most of the plyers of these trades have residences within these precincts, as well as those of more prosaic callings who have the desire and wherewithal to live within its ambiance of perpetual fiesta.

My parents had built a rambling house on the low crown of a small island near the north end of Rioville close by the center of the river, and for the first eighteen years of my life, I spent many late afternoons and early evenings on the second story porch, watching the sun set behind the western Hightown, the lights of the manses winking on from between the folds of the deeply shadowed jungle as the stars slowly emerged in the purpling sky above and the mirrored buildings of the eastern bank flashed deep orange as they reflected the sunset like a sheath of flame across the island-studded waters.

From my little aerie, I could look north up the river as it poured through the gorge that reached up into the icebound crown of the continent, and sometimes a fragrant wind, redolent of jungle vegetation and oncoming night, would blow down from what seemed to me at the time the very roof and mystery of the world, and I could inhale deeply and imagine that I was breathing in the very spirit of the planet. On other evenings, a tongue of fog might blow in from the sea, enveloping Rioville in perfumed billows of dream stuff, turning the lights of the city into the faerie fires of a Brigadoon rising ghostly and triumphant from the mists.

And at all times, after night had finally fallen, and the full panoply of stars had come out, and one could scarcely tell where the stellar concourse ended and the lights of the Hightown began, I would walk to the other end of the porch and gaze out over the islands of Rioville itself, a carpet of multicolored jewels flung across the waters, a brilliant spiderwork of illuminated bridges, the running lights of thousands of boats bobbing in the currents, and wafting up on the sea breeze towards me, the faint, far-off music of the magical city, compounded of laughter, and sighs, and myriad voices, and the sounds of instruments, fiestas, and entertainments. At such times, I would grow giddy with the intoxicating aroma of Nouvelle Orlean itself, a heady brew compounded of dozens of cuisinary styles offered up by hundreds of restaurants, the perfumes of lovers, intoxicants, incenses, wood shavings, oil paints, leather, and the overwhelming nighttime effluvia of tropical flowers.

May the young girl that I then was therefore not be forgiven for supposing that she was favored by fate and blessed by fortune, a citizen of Xanadu and destiny’s darling?

Moreover, as I grew from relatively innocent young girlhood into early pubescent flower, as the social relativities of Nouvelle Orlean society began to impinge upon my consciousness, my sense of humility was hardly enhanced by the knowledge that my parents, far from being mere ordinary burghers of this extraordinary city, were figures of some local fame, if not quite the leading luminaries of the haut monde that I portrayed them as to my schoolmates.

My mother, Shasta Suki Davide, had herself been born in Nouvelle Orlean, and after spending her wanderjahr exploring the vie of an erotic adventurer, had studied for two years at the Academie Tantrique on Dravida, where she became an adept of the tantric arts both erotic and healing. Her freenom, Shasta, she had chosen upon completion of her studies homage a Nicole Shasta, a figure of considerable controversy in her day, who had first elucidated the mass-energy phenomena underlying the ancient metaphorical and metaphysical tantric principles and had thus founded the science my mother followed.

My father, Leonardo Vanya Hana, had been born on Flor del Cielo, and had spent only a rather brief period as a wandering Child of Fortune, for he was one of those rare people who seem to have known what they wish to become almost from birth, namely an inventor and fabricator of personal enhancement devices, several of which he had already created as a schoolboy.

Naturellement, the conclusion of his wanderjahr found him on Diana, perhaps the planet most famed for the production of just such personal amplifiers, where he secured employment in one of the leading fabriks as an artisan and sometime designer of same. His freenom, Leonardo, he had chosen, somewhat grandly upon beginning this career in homage a Leonardo Da Vinci, artist and inventor of the ancient Terrestrial Age, and legendary archetype of the fusion of esthetics and technology to which our Second Starfaring Age in general and my father in particular have always aspired.

My parents met on Diana, where my mother had gone as an itinerant tantric artiste and sometime healer, after having sojourned as same on several other planets. Already beginning to think more fondly of home and Nouvelle Orlean at the time, smitten by a pheromonic attraction to Leonardo whose mutuality was mightily enhanced by the puissance of her erotic artistry, and realizing that a marriage of tantric science and electronic personal enhancement might have as much to offer in the way of deepening and enhancing the practice of their respective arts as union in the personal sphere seemed to offer to their spirits, she had little trouble convincing Leonardo that the opportunity to live up to the grandeur of his freenom would be much greater on Glade than on Diana. And most particularly in Nouvelle Orlean, a city whose true charm was exceeded only by its own highly exaggerated sense of its own sophistication, where a personal enhancement mage from Diana would have considerable cachet no matter his modest former position on that planet, and where the relative state of the art would certainly insure his primacy.

So it is written, so it shall be done. Soon after arriving in Nouvelle Orlean, Leonardo was able to display for potential investors three personal enhancement devices entirely novel to Glade, if somewhat reminiscent of theoretical musings that had been current in the designers’ workshops on Diana.

One was called the Voice, and established an electro-physiological loop between relevant cerebral centers and the larynx so that the wearer could by conscious craft and act of will impart subliminal sonics to song or speech that acted directly on the listeners’ consciousness via the auditory apparatus, greatly enhancing the artistic puissance of singer or thespic artist, and not without value to salespersons either. Another was the Eye of Argus, tiny lenses of complexed gels worn over the pupils and electrolinked to the vision centers, so that the wearer could vary their optical properties through a wide range of focuses and wavelengths, and thus view directly microscopic realms, astronomical phenomena, the infrared and ultraviolet spectrum, not to mention the interiors of distant boudoirs of amorous interest. Not the least arcane if perhaps the most fanciful and disreputable of the three was that which Leonardo dubbed the Gourmand’s Delight, whereby glutton or exorbitant imbiber could willfully adjust his metabolism of an evening so that he might feast and drink to enormous excess and pay no consequence in girth or malaise the morning after.

Not only were these devices of immediate obvious marketability, they established the reputation of Leonardo Vanya Hana as an artificer from whom further wonders could be expected, and so my father found no lack of investors willing to finance the establishment of his boutique on favorable terms. Indeed, he would have been easily able to finance the establishment of a fabrik able to flood the planet with replicated wares at modest prices. This he eschewed for reasons of personal esthetics, preferring to remain a craftsman and artist modeling each device to the whim and fancy of individual clients rather than become a magnate of manufacture. Moreover, by maintaining the individuality of his wares and the mystique of personal craft in their production, he was able to keep their prices elevated into the realm of artistic pieces, just as a painter or sculptor who refuses to license reproduction maintains gallery prices for his originals.

My mother, meanwhile, gave occasional tantric performances at palaces of pleasure, but for the most part concentrated her attentions and energies on developing her skills and repute as a tantric healer, aided in this endeavor by my father’s science and his intimate knowledge of the bioelectronics of the human nervous system.

After a time and the accumulation of sufficient funds, my parents decided to consolidate their professional venues and domestic menage by purchasing a small island and erecting upon it the house in which I was to grow up. The first story of this building was given over to Leonardo’s boutique and Shasta’s tantric salon, each presenting a public facade to an opposite side of the little island, but connected within via intermediary storerooms, common service areas, and a hallway. The second story, with its grand viewing porch, was given over to our living quarters, and was entered by a separate stairway which debouched into a garden entirely secluded from the commercial venues by a hedge of Purple Cloud trimmed into different topiary designs according to the mode of the season. On the occasion of my fifth birthday, when the possibility of retreating into my own private realm was deemed necessary to my development, a fanciful playhouse was built for me deep in a patch of Bittersweet Jungle in the nethermost reaches of the garden.

Here as a young girl would I spend many hours with young playmates, and many more with no other companionship than that of the moussas I soon learned to entice from the trees with bits and morsels from the breakfast table. Of all the native creatures of Glade, these cunning little mammals, small enough to fit in a child’s cupped hands, and willing enough to remain there for the pettiest of bribes, have cozened themselves closer to the human heart than any other, for they are the common pets of childhood.

Though in truth, perhaps, it is as much the little human children of Glade who are the pets of the moussas, for these golden-furred, emerald-eyed, monkey-tailed, leaf-eared, primatelike rodents never survive in a cage or as domesticated house pets, sullenly fasting unto death in any form of captivity, Nor, although they abound throughout Nouvelle Orlean and the surrounding environs, thriving amidst the habitats of men, will they ever deign to descend from their trees to frolic with gross and clumsy adults, even to accept the choicest dainty. But put a child in a garden with a few scraps of bread or a berry or two, and the moussas will soon enough come a-calling. Indeed often, when through negligence I appeared empty-handed, the moussas of the garden, though they might chide me in their piping whistles for my thoughtless lack of hospitality, would nonetheless come down to play.

And like a little moussa myself, I would often, in the late afternoon or early evening, emerge from my garden retreat to play the pampered and cunning pet of the clients and friends of my parents. As the children of Glade imagine that the moussas chattered and capered for their amusement, so, no doubt, did the adults of my parents’ salons imagine that the fey creature, whom everyone soon began to call kleine Moussa, herself frequented their precincts to amuse them.

But from the moment their kleine Moussa knew anything of significance at all, I, like the moussas of the garden, knew full well that these huge and marvelous beings, with their extravagant clothes, incomprehensible stories, strange and mysterious perfumes, and secret pockets of sweets, existed, like the garden, and the river, and the myriad wondrous sights and sounds and smells of Nouvelle Orlean, and indeed the world itself, to amuse me.

Thus did the little Moussa frolic through young girlhood with the creatures of the garden and the clients of her parents’ trades and the favored children of these denizens of Nouvelle Orlean’s haut monde. Though naturellement I was not yet capable of appreciating the rarefied and elite ambiance of my parents’ salon until my basic schooling was well under way and I was deemed old enough to travel to the academy on my own and venture forth into the city with my playmates.

Then, of course, my awareness of my favored place in the scheme of things became somewhat keener than the reality itself. As I became interested in the wider world around me, and began first to listen to word crystals and then learned to read them for greater speed, as I was taught the rudiments of esthetics, acquainted with the history of our city and our planet and our species, as my teachers introduced me to the sciences, the mutational sprachs of human Lingo, the basic principles of mathematics, und so weiter, I began to perceive that the discourse that had swirled about my little head like so much moussas’ babble chez mama and papa was in fact in good part an elevated and rarefied version of my various teachers’ discourse at the academy.

This was a somewhat heady satori for a young girl of eight or nine, and not exactly conducive to humility in the schoolroom. While my teachers lectured on various subjects on a level deemed suitable for children by the maestros of developmental theory and commended simple texts thereon to my attention, at home, true maestros of the arts and sciences of which they were mere pedagogs were forever discussing the most esoteric aspects of these very same schoolroom subjects while awaiting my mother’s ministrations or being fitted by my father or taking their ease with my parents and myself over wine and delicacies.

Moreover, as I began to wander the fabulous precincts of Rioville at leisure, alone or with my schoolmates, the concept of fame and renown began to impinge on my hitherto naive and entirely egalitarian weltanschauung. Sauntering into a gallery to idly peruse paintings or holos or worldbubbles, I would often discover that the creator of this one had bounced me on her knee, that Ari Baum Gondor, who had crafted the tiny ecospheres that set all these tongues wagging, was the very same Ari who had always been the source of my favorite sweets, that I had feasted only the night before with the artist whose paintings were deemed the finest of the season. Attending a concert or a songfest or a dance, I would often find myself enjoying performances by artists who had sung and capered for my private amusement since before I could remember. Libraries were well stocked with word crystals written by my tios and tantes, and I could easily enough dine in cuisinary salons presided over by chef maestros who sat at my own parents’ table.

In short, I grew aware that humanity was divided into two subspecies: the famous and the anonymous, the creators of art, music, literature and science, and the mere consumers of same, the elite of the haut monde, and the generality of the vie ordinaire. And I, as my own eyes and ears so amply demonstrated, was a child of the former, one of destiny’s special creatures by right of birth.

Which is not to say I became any more a monster of ego than the average ten-year-old, for the circle of playmates with which I traveled were children of the same ambiance, indeed many of their parents were the very maestros and celebrities whose easy intimacy fed my secret pride, and naturellement within the adult sphere of this haut monde, I was still indulged as a child rather than accepted as an equal power.

Even in the educational realm, this inner perception of my true place in the world was not without both its negative and positive consequences. On the one hand, my respect for the authority of my teachers was eroded by my free and easy congress with their intellectual and social superiors, and I was not above hectoring them from time to time with what I imagined was superior knowledge gleaned from bits and pieces of table talk. On the other hand, I had almost from birth dined on intellectual haute cuisine, and much true learning had actually been absorbed as it were by osmosis; further, what little ambition I then had lay in the direction of acceptance as an equal by the denizens of my parents’ salon, and so I was at least motivated to avoid the public intellectual embarrassment of the unprepared student.

The overall result was that I was a skilled if shallowly motivated and not excessively diligent student, lacking any true passion for scholarly pursuits, content to breeze through my studies with a parsimony of effort, and quite innocent of any perception of the educational process as connected to spiritual, intellectual, or karmic goals.

As such, though at the time I would have been mightily offended at the generalization, I was typical of the pre-adolescent stage of our species, for the biochemical matrix of passion – whether intellectual, artistic, political, spiritual, or sexual – simply cannot be generated by the prepubescent human metabolism. Thus does the wisdom of passing through the wanderjahr before contemplating that deeper education which must be informed by passionate dedication to some true life’s work extend from the social and spiritual clear down into the molecular realm.

Which is also why the onset of puberty effects a tumultuous series of psychic transformations quite literally akin to the effects of ingesting powerful psychoactive drugs. While the earliest and most obvious social and psychological manifestation of this biochemical revolution is the awakening of that most presentient of human passions, sexual lust, once the biochemical matrix of passion itself has evolved in a young girl’s physiology, that molecular hunger for novelty, somatic excitation, and adventure of the spirit seeks its polymorphous fulfillment in every realm.

Biochemically speaking, adolescence is a loss of endocrine innocence in that it opens the human spirit to all the possibilities and dangers of passionate motivation denied to the juvenile metabolism. Yet at the same time, there is no more perfect naif than the newly pubescent creature, who all at once perceives the world through eyes, ears, nostrils, and spirit radically heightened and transformed by this psycho-chemical amplification of the childhood mind.

In many primitive terrestrial cultures, before psychesomics was a developed science or the bioelectronic basis of tantra elucidated, all sorts of bizarre and entirely counterproductive social mechanisms evolved, aimed at either “managing” these adolescent passions from the point of view of adults, suppressing their outward manifestations, or worse still, capturing, channeling, and perverting their energies in the service of theocratic dogmas, territorial aggressions, or the convenience of the adult body politic. Since the earliest, simplest, and somatically strongest of the nascent adolescent passions is of course sexual lust, most of these disastrous social control mechanisms revolved around delaying, transposing, or even entirely suppressing its natural amatory expression.

The results, of course, were exactly what modern psychesomics would predict – polymorphous adolescent rebellion against adult authority, violently separatist adolescent subcultures, excessive random indulgence in psychoactive substances without proper prior study of their effects, neurosis, depression, hysteria, the romanticization of suicide, militarism, cruelty to animals, and a scornful attitude towards scholarly pursuits.

Mercifully our Second Starfaring Age has long since put this torture of the innocent far behind it, and so my earliest experiments with satisfying this new somatic hunger were conducted, as was natural, convenient, and esthetically pleasing, in the playhouse of my parents’ garden.

Of course I hardly considered myself a clumsy young experimenter in the amatory arts even on the occasion of my first passe de deux in that bucolic boudoir. Was I not, after all, the daughter of Shasta Suki Davide, tantric maestra? Had I not grown up steeped in the ambiance of her science? Had I not, out of childish curiosity, ofttimes perused the catalogs of positions long before the illustrations therein were capable of arousing any but theoretical interest?

Indeed I was. Indeed I had. Moreover, I was not so unmindful of the benefits of motivated study that I neglected to delve deeper into the texts when the motivation for such studies grew deliciously immediate. Nor did I neglect to interrogate my mother for anecdotal expertise or to persuade my father to offer up both his lore on human nervous physiology and his more general knowledge of how men might be blissfully transported.

Verdad, I must confess that I had determined to gain the enviable reputation of a fabled femme fatale while still a virgin, for not only would such a mystique among my peers enhance my perception of my own centrality, it would also insure me the amatory services of most any boy who piqued my interest.

For my first granting of favors, I made the perhaps somewhat calculating choice of a handsome boy of fourteen known as Robi; not only did his slim and nearly hairless body and wide blue eyes arouse the proper spirit within my loins, though a year older than I, he was still charmingly tentative with girls, albeit something of a braggart among his male friends by way of compensation.

I was not unaware that a truly impressive tantric performance for Robi – especially if, as I suspected, he was still a virgin would speedily become common lore among the boys of our mutual acquaintance, thereby establishing my mystique as a lover of puissance from my premiere performance.

Enticing Robi into my bower was a simple matter of issuing an unambiguous invitation in the presence of his fellows, though once we retired to my garden playhouse, his tentativeness was all too limply apparent despite his attempts at verbal bravado.

Undaunted by this phenomenon, which was well reported in the word crystals I had perused in preparation, I applied a simple sequence of digital and oral remedies which at first seemed to further discombobulate the pauvre petit with their no-doubt-unexpected level of tantric sophistication, but which soon enough transferred his attention from the uncertainties of the virgin psyche to the naturally firm resolve of the youthful lingam.

Once the natural man in Robi had been properly aroused, he became an enthusiastic if rather hasty and clumsy participant, achieving his own satisfaction in the most basic of tantric configurations with all too much ease, and then satedly supposing that the performance had reached an esthetically satisfying resolution.

When of course it had hardly properly begun, for I was determined to essay certainly no less than a dozen basic positions with several variations of each, to enjoy several tantric cusps of my own in the process, and not to relent until I was entirely satisfied that he was thoroughly, totally, and finally exhausted beyond any hope of further arousal.

Though I lost count somewhere after the first four or five movements of the tantric symphony and probably did not achieve the first of my artistic goals, and though my still barely pubescent physiology left me far short of anything approaching platform orgasm, there was no doubt that the poor boy had been properly exhausted, for I was only persuaded to relent after his moans of pleasure had long since become pleas for surcease and his manhood openly confessed its surrender to the protoplasmic impossibility of rising to further challenge.

To say that Robi was constrained to crawl from our erotic encounter would be to descend to hyperbole, but in truth he staggered from the garden in something less than a triumphant strut, though to judge from subsequent events, his version of the affair would seem to have gained considerably more machismo in the telling.

For I was soon the smug recipient of numerous displays of male courting behavior, from which smorgasb