"I suggest nothing, I only follow your noble lead, liebchen," Guy insinuated. "For was it not you, cher Sunshine, who so rightly declared that in the Bloomenveldt we might have the grand destiny to achieve states of consciousness never known before to human brains? And enrich ourselves by marketing the substances which produce them!"
"But no one has ever returned from the depths of the Bloomenveldt, or so it is said."
"Indeed. Imagine therefore what is to be gained by mounting the first successful expedition to the heart of the matter and returning with the fruits thereof."
"Imagine what would be lost by failure!"
"Have you not told me often enough of your mastery of forest survival lore?" Guy said. And indeed, if truth be told, I may have styled myself as more of a Diana of the jungle than a few weekends in the quotidian forests of Glade warranted.
"When all is said and done are we not mystic libertines, you and I," Guy persisted. "True Children of Fortune, adventurers of the spirit, more than willing to risk all to gain all."
What was I to say to such a challenge? On the one hand, I could hardly deny the spirit within me which had insisted on braving Great Edoku, all my parents' sage and pragmatic advice to the contrary, which had sent me in pursuit of the Gypsy Jokers against all the wisdom of the Public Service Stations, which had won the heart of Pater Pan with blarney, and which had brought me hither with this brave and foolhardy lover to the edge of the very adventure he proposed.
On the other hand, there was the part of me that knew with the coolness of intellect divorced from passion that what he proposed was dangerous to the point of insanity.
"Vraiment, my spirit is willing, but my reason whispers that such a spirit is quite mad," I declared in all honesty.
But such dualistic ambiguity had certainly never been Guy's style, nor was he fazed by my indecision. "In such a pass, one must await a sign to synergize reason and spirit," he proclaimed grandly. "And from my present perspective I am cavalierly confident that the same will be forthcoming."
***
And so it was, two days later, of a late afternoon. We were lying on a leaf close by a great carnelian circle of petals surrounding a bright green pistil which branched at its pinnacle into an overhanging canopy of fine windblown filaments dripping a sticky resinous pollen, which is to say far enough from the flower to avoid being dusted, but close enough to lie within its perfumed aura.
The state of being induced by the heavy, languorous scent of this perfume seemed perfectly suited to our mood. The still-bright westering sun bathed our limbs with warmth as it cast ever- shifting and slowly lengthening dappled patterns of shadow over the wind-tossed crowns of the great trees. Our leafy pallet rocked us into hypnagogic somnolence like a great green cradle in the hands of some forest spirit, whose breath we could hear in the susurrus of the breeze passing through the boughs and leaves. Empty of mind and full of spirit, drifting on the edge of sleep where vagrant thoughts transformed themselves into the surreal images of dreams, I gazed up into a clear blue sky which mirrored perfectly the blissful cerulean void of my spirit.
Vraiment, at length I surmised that I had in fact drifted off the exquisite edge of this hypnagogic state into the realm of sleep, for out of the languorous fog there coalesced a visage out of dreams ...
A human face such as is not often seen in our Second Starfaring Age: an old man's face, seamed, and lined, and crowned by a mantle of long, thin white hair. The face of a man in the last year or so of his life, when all at once the Healers arts which have preserved life's vigor for three hundred years and more suddenly fail, and the mask of mortality appears to herald the imminence of death.
Yet strange to say it was the clear tranquility of the spirit and peace of the heart written in the calm set of the withered lips and the limpid brown eyes which convinced me I had left the waking realm.
Then the visage spoke and thereby shattered the illusion of dreamy sleep, though not the languorous drifting mood thereof.
"May I share your leaf a while, mes amis?"
An old man crouched on the leaf beside us, naked not merely of clothing, but of floatbelt and filter mask as well.
"Are you a Bloomenkind of the forest?" Guy asked in a voice wherein avid curiosity was bizarrely softened by the reasonless tranquility of the flowers perfume.
The old man laughed, a happy musical sound, or so it seemed. "Not yet," he said.
"You are not a naked tribesman recently emerged from the depths of the forest?" I said in a similar dreamy state.
"Au contraire," said the old man, "naked do I go to merge my spirit with the Bloomenveldt before it leaves this moribund corpus."
"You are a pilgrim come to the Bloomenveldt to die?"
Once more, the old man laughed sweetly without a trace of irony or angst. "Dying one may accomplish in any venue," he said, "it is only the style of one's passage from the mortal realm and the state of one's spirit in the moment thereof that one may choose. As for me, I choose to die in the Bloomenveldt, for here one may expire not in a state of dread, but in a state of enlightenment, into the loving arms of this great forest."
"You know the Bloomenveldt well?" Guy said sharply, willing up the effort to free himself from his torpor. "You are versed in the secrets of its inner heart?"
"A century ago, I came here to study the forest as a mage in the research domes. But something moved my spirit to doff my atmosphere suit, don filter mask and floatbelt, and trek deep enough into the interior to know that here I would come when my time came to die. As for the secrets of the Bloomenveldt's heart, these will forever remain a mystery to those who fear to become breath of its breath. And in those days, such a one was I."
"You traveled to the interior and survived to tell the tale?" I asked just as sharply as Guy, for if this was so, what clearer sign could destiny have given us?
The old one dismissed the grandeur of this feat with an errant wave of his hand. "If one never truly leaves the worlds of men behind, how can one help but return thereto?" he said. "Which is to say there is nothing to hinder the masked traveler from passing through the wonders and glories of the Bloomenveldt untrammeled thereby. The well-equipped turista will encounter neither physical danger nor spiritual enhancement. To brave either, you must doff the filter mask of civilization, and give yourself over to the flowers."
"But even masked you learned enough to know that your spirit wished to make its final journey here ..." said Guy.
"Indeed, my young friend," the old man said. "For while there may be much for a young spirit to lose by surrendering itself to the forest, for an old spirit about to be forced to vacate its quotidian premises there is only an enlightened ending to be gained."
"And what was it that you learned all those long decades ago that convinced you to essay such a final journey?" I asked softly.
"The Bloomenveldt is alive!"
"Hardly a revelation of astounding proportions," I could not quite refrain from pointing out dryly.
"Alive as you or I, mein kind," the old man said. "Possessed of a genetic intelligence, a sapient spirit which it has received as a gift of man. For millions of years did the forest slumber as mindless trees produced substances to manipulate the mindless pollinators thereof. But then our species came to Belshazaar and sapients over the centuries wandered off into the forest, and so since that time the forest has been evolving in symbiosis with man. Deeper within the Bloomenveldt in the land of the Bloomenkinder, the flowers have evolved pheromones and alkaloids designed not to attract insensate mammals but our own sapient spirit. As we have gifted the forest with the template of consciousness, so does the Bloomenveldt offer us psychotropics crafted by that very chemical sentience to reward us with the highest realms of consciousness it currently knows how to grant. True symbiosis, a just and profitable bargain between our two species."
"The Perfumed Garden ..." breathed Guy. "Where humans and flowers have achieved symbiotic perfection. Where floral and human evolution have contrived to merge. Where nirvanic transcendence arises from the very chemistry of the brain."
"So it is said," declared the ancient one. "And so do I seek this realm of the spirit as the physical matrix thereof expires."
"May you find what you seek," I told him with an open heart.
"Y tu tambien."
And with that, he arose, and with a somewhat feeble though long-legged gait, departed into the depths of the Bloomenveldt, into the rosy mists of dusk, into the deeper mysteries thereof from which no man had returned to tell the tale.
When he had disappeared like a wraith, Guy and I left the flower of his apparition to discuss on a neutral leaf what we had learned within the realm of its perfume.
"Was that not a sign that spoke to both your mind and your spirit, Sunshine?" Guy asked me. "Is there now anything to hold us back from the journey within to the heart of the matter? Will you now not join me in the quest to gain all now that you have been reassured that we do not really risk all? And now that you have spoken with the spirit of all there is to gain?"
And indeed it was. And indeed there wasn't. And indeed I would.
"Let us be gone in the morning, " I said gamely, "lest my resolve vanish in the cold clear light of day. "
Chapter 17
And so as Belshazaar's sun arose over the Bloomenveldt the next morning, so did we -- equipped with floatbelts, filter masks, beacon receivers, kits for collecting floral essences, a full month's worth of concentrates, the assurances of the previous afternoon's apparition, and a plan of action which would seem to be foolproof.
We would proceed due westward into the interior for five days. At the speed we could make bounding across the treetops, this should be long enough to penetrate several hundred kilometers into the Bloomenveldt, so if we spied no humans after five days of this procedure, it could fairly be said that the mystics, libertine or otherwise, were wrong, and the scientists, crabbed of spirit though they be, were right, and no significant human population was to be found.
At which point, we would simply return from whence we came. Even without the beacon receivers, there would seem to be no danger of losing our way, for toward sunrise was the coast, and once the beach was attained, one could not follow it in either direction for more than two or three days without reaching a dome.
The only peril would seem to be that of the spirit, for we knew all too well the state of discombobulation that could be attained by wandering the Bloomenveldt unmasked, courtesy of the object lesson of Meade Ariel Kozuma. Therefore, at my insistence, if not without some resistance, Guy acceded to a further procedural pact. We would both go masked as we traveled inward, and if we paused to sample the offerings of any flower along the way, we would never unmask together -- when one of us played the role of psychonaut, the other would always be there to serve as ground control.
We did not inform Marlene Kona Mendes or her staff of our intentions, but simply gathered up our gear and left, for on the one hand we had already been informed in no uncertain terms that we could expect no rescue mission from that quarter in the event of difficulty, and on the other, Guy's professed goal, or at any rate his pecuniary rationalization for this adventure of the spirit, was to steal a grand commercial march on these selfsame mages by returning from the deep interior with samples of psychotropics which would put their pathetic efforts to shame.
We did, however, bid a fond and secret farewell to Omar Ki Benjamin, for it is difficult to embark on such a grand adventure without a bit of boasting into a sympathetic and reassuring ear, and from the quarter of this self-styled mystic libertine, we knew we could count on a moral support entirely in contrast to the hectoring we no doubt would have been subject to had we broached our intentions to the gnomes of the research dome.
Nor were we disappointed by the spirit with which Omar greeted our announcement. "Ah!" he sighed grandly. "And I style myself the mystic libertine! Vraiment, I am tempted by the song of my spirit to join you ... But no, this is a venture for two young lovers, ne, a romance for a dyad, hardly suitable for the sort of menage a trois we would form together. But know that Omar Ki Benjamin is with you in spirit, and as a bona fide thereof, the following oath: should you safely return, I will compose a paean to your triumph; if such should not be the case, your memory will be honored in a tragic ode. So from a certain perspective, you cannot fail, my brave kinder, for one way or the other, you will live forever as the heroic or tragic protagonists of high art!"
With this supportive if somewhat egoistic benediction, and the bright morning sun at our back, we set out westward across the endless green veldt of the treetops, proceeding quite literally by leaps and bounds toward our unknown destiny deep within the Bloomenveldt, though of just how deep into the mysteries at its heart we would penetrate, and of just how strange our divergent destinies therein would become, we were cruelly and mercifully ignorant.