"Follow yellow, follow Piper, follow yellow, follow Piper!"
Thus did our Mardi Gras parade begin, thus did the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt lead her Children of Fortune, thus did a raving, grimy, rag-clad girl lead four chanting creatures struggling to be human out of the forest of flowers to dance triumphant through the streets of the worlds of men.
Chapter 24
But little did I know that, long before the sun had begun to slide down the sky, the gnomes of the research domes would suddenly bring the worlds of men to us.
Vraiment, though such a perception would never have occurred to me at the time, no doubt the research team that suddenly dropped in on us out of the sky were no more prepared for the bizarre sight we presented than our little tribe was for them!
It happened with just such mutually discombobulating unexpectedness. Four silvery human figures came floating down from the sky to land on a cluster of leaves not ten meters away.
They stood there gesticulating and making incomprehensible sounds to each other, and while it might be safely assumed that they were staring as intently at us as we were at them, this was impossible to verify, for they were sealed in full atmosphere suits -- form-fitting coveralls and hoods of silvery fabric, filter masks, and impenetrable mirrored visors above them.
Moussa, Rollo, Goldenrod, and Dome had fallen silent. They stood there gaping vacantly, incapable of terror, mayhap rediscovering the emotion of surprise.
I myself, naturellement, had seen scientists in atmosphere suits often enough during my sojourn in the research dome to decode the import of these silver beings after a few moments of pure thoughtless shock. I too had once bounded in great weightless leaps across the Bloomenveldt, and while I had never sheathed my body in such alienating armor, certainement, I retained memories of what the Bloomenveldt was like from the other side of a filter mask.
But long before I could formulate any course of action, the research team went into purposeful motion. Two of them skipped with light gingerly steps to the leaf upon which we stood while the other two remained in place and aimed the lenses and antennae of various devices in our direction.
"Sprechen sie Lingo? Are you verbal?"
"In the beginning was the Word, and before the singer was the song," I replied, "which has carried us from our ancestral flowers to the far-flung worlds of men."
"Carramba!" exclaimed a voice from behind the left-hand mirrored visor. "She speaks, she declaims poetry no less, and you will observe no filter mask in evidence, nicht wahr! Ah, many theories will now be in need of revision! Certainement, this is a major find!"
"Who are you, kind, do you remember your name, how long have you been out here on the Bloomenveldt?"
"The Pied Piper of the Bloomenkinder has taken many millennia of diligent study to create that ultimate triumph of the ruespieler's art, our own magnificent sapient selves," I told him.
"What? Que? Was ist los?"
"Bloomenkinder! Wahrlich! Observe these creatures, see their vacant expressions! It's true, we have found ourselves a tribe of the mythical Bloomenkinder!"
Now the two scientists gave over their attempts at discourse with me to peer and prod at my Gypsy Jokers. These, possessed of no sapient mode of reaction to such scientific scrutiny, stood indifferently motionless and mute throughout.
"Indeed! These folk are possessed of neither filter masks, floatbelts, nor full human consciousness. Bloomenkinder! What a treasure house their metabolisms must be! Our fortunes are made!"
"Once we were Bloomenkinder in the Perfumed Garden, but now we are sapient spirits of the Arkie Spark," I told them, for while the full sapience of my charges might be arguable, certainement they were no flower-suckled Bloomenkinder of the Bloomenveldt depths, nor, after all we had gone through to reach this place, was I about to let us be so styled.
"Now you declare these are not Bloomenkinder?" one of the abstract silvery figures said to me quite pettishly. "When a moment ago you declared yourself the Pied Piper thereof?"
"This is hardly a scientific question of such triviality that we can expect to decide it on the basis of anecdotal interrogation in the field!" said the other. "We must forthwith remove these specimens to our facilities for proper study."
"Ja," said his colleague, and then addressed himself to the recording team. "Summon a hover. Have them prepare quarters suitable to feral humans. And apply for a droit of custodianship forthwith."
A scant half hour later, during which the scientists engaged in wild theorizing and even more enthusiastic financial speculation with little apparent regard for the objects thereof, a dull-steel- colored and vaguely ovoid craft came skimming in over the ocean, level with the canopy of the Bloomenveldt.
The ungainly cargo hover slowed to walking speed as it reached the edge of the Bloomenveldt and slowly inched its way toward us about half a meter above the foliage, until it had reached a more or less stationary position above the wind-tossed treetops no more than a few meters from where we all stood. Bivalve doors in the prow of the hover then opened like the maw of some great cetacean inviting entry.
As for me, I regarded this proposition with a good deal less trepidation than had Jonah or Pinocchio, and started forth across the intervening leaves with as much dispatch as the two recording scientists, who were now disappearing inside with their equipment.
When it came to what the scientists styled "Bloomenkinder," however, these remained entirely unresponsive to their urgings and proddings, and the other two were constrained, with something a bit less than good humor, to draw me back and enlist my aid.
"You will be so good as to herd your Bloomenkinder aboard so that we may depart, bitte," said the one.
"Wait!" cried the other. "The method thereof must be recorded, for it may be of some scientific value." Via a transceiver behind his filter mask, he summoned the others to the lip of the entrance to the hover's cargo bay, where they once more set up a variety of instruments and aimed their lenses and antennae in my direction.
"Sehr gut!" said the fellow who seemed to be in charge, when he had gotten the word from the recording team. "Commence, bitte!"
While under more ordinary conditions I would have remonstrated with a good deal of pettishness at being ordered about in this cavalier manner, and indeed, as my career as a subject of scientific inquiry progressed, was to dig in my heels more than once at such rude behavior, at the time I wanted nothing more than to be gone from the Bloomenveldt, and was many weeks away from such consideration of the social niceties.
I therefore did as I was bade, which is to say I confronted Moussa, Rollo, Goldenrod, and Dome, and began to chant. "Follow Piper, follow yellow, follow Piper, follow yellow ..."
In a minute or two, I had them all chanting along with me again, and once this was achieved, the Pied Piper had little trouble leading her Children of Fortune across the last few leafy meters of the Bloomenveldt, if not exactly into the Gold Mountain, then certainement into the eager mouth of scientific scrutiny.
"Follow Piper! Follow yellow! Follow Piper! Follow yellow!"
"Fantastic! Wunderbar!"
"Nothing like it in the literature!"
The two mages brought up the rear, shaking their heads and muttering to each other. Then we were all inside the stark and bare gray-walled cargo bay, the doors snapped shut on this rich meal of unique specimens, and the Bloomenveldt disappeared from my sight forever.
***
The next two days were a disorienting melange of periods of boredom and periods of frenetic activity of which I was an entirely passive object.
Upon reaching the research dome, we were all forthwith stripped of our rags, unceremoniously hosed down outside like so many domestic animals, and reclothed in plain and ill-fitting white smocks, though I adamantly refused to give over my sash of Cloth of Many Colors, which I belted around my waist.
We were then ushered into a large storeroom where crates and canisters had been piled high against the walls to make room for rude cots. We were fed an indifferent meal of overbroiled and unidentifiable cutlets with a soggy assortment of steamed vegetables and then left alone to our own devices.
While my former charges were content to lie on their cots and stare placidly at the harsh lighting fixtures set in the ceiling, I straightaway went to the door and discovered, with little surprise though not without a certain consternation, that it had been locked behind me.
I spent the next several hours alternately pacing about the storeroom and fidgeting on my cot, attempting all the while to marshal my psychic resources to meet the new reality.
Certainement, confinement within this grim bare chamber was a far cry from either the open expanses of the Bloomenveldt or the vision of triumphant return to the far-flung worlds of men that had kept me trekking onward thereon for what seemed like the better part of my young lifetime. I was avid to travel onward, though to where, and how, I no longer quite knew.
Indeed though I soon enough resolved to demand my freedom at the earliest opportunity, when at length a party of scientists entered the storeroom laden with a bewildering profusion of instruments, equipment, and recording devices, I found that I had no form within which to frame such a demand.
For while freedom from the present situation was a concept I could readily enough grasp, the question of freedom to do what seemed entirely unanswerable at the time. Freedom to wander aimlessly around the research dome? Freedom to return to a vie of endlessly wandering the Bloomenveldt? When it came to resuming my life's journey, I had no more concept of how to proceed or what to demand than did Moussa, Rollo, Dome, and Goldenrod.
Therefore, for want of any active goal to pursue or coherent demand to present, there seemed to be nothing for it but to passively submit to the samplings, measurements, and poking about of the scientists, who, au contraire, seemed to lack nothing in the way of purposeful motivation. Electrodes were affixed to various portions of my anatomy, instruments prodded and glided over every centimeter of my body, syringes withdrew blood, urine was demanded and delivered up, even samples of my tears, sweat, nasal mucus, saliva, and vaginal juices found their way into vials.
When these exercises were finally concluded, we were fed another indifferent meal, and then left alone once more. For what must have been several more hours, no event of significance occurred save those taking place within my own skull, and even these were of little note, for the inescapable passivity of my position cloaked my consciousness in a pall of ennui. What was I to do? What was I to even wish to do? Indeed, now that the tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt had reached what should have been its triumphant conclusion, who in fact was I?
After some immeasurable period, the storeroom lights were extinguished, and I lay there on the unfamiliar cot in the darkness longing for an escape into sleep that was a long time in coming, for here the irresistible perfume thereof was of course absent, and my metabolism, long-accustomed to the nightly cycle of same, kept me awake and tossing until --
-- I was rudely shocked into full wakefulness by a sudden blaze of light that had me leaping off the cot and halfway across the room to follow the sun, follow the yellow, before the sight of the bare gray walls and ceiling, the piles of crates and canisters, and the three men who had entered with breakfast, brought me back with a psychic thump to this most unpleasantly quotidian of all the worlds of men.
As far as I was concerned. the second day in the storeroom was no different from the first, though no doubt, from the point of view of science, much novel data must have been accumulated by the new rounds of intimate explorations.
Be such valuable research as it may, from the point of view of the subject thereof, nothing of significance could be said to have happened. I ate, I suffered examination. I lay torpidly on my cot, was fed another meal, was subject to further scientific ministrations, and once more was plunged into the darkness of an ersatz night.
But the next morning, shortly after a breakfast of toasted grains and nuts mixed with dried fruits, a new assortment of mages began to parade in and out of the storeroom. Which is to say that though the traffic of the past few days had been perceived as nothing more coherent than a blur of bodies, apparatus, and faces, I perceived that these were new visitors, for, if nothing else, their actions were quite different.
There were no more samplings of body fluids, no more pokings, proddings, and arcane measurements of protoplasmic functions, for these assorted newcomers were laden with no instruments or apparatus at all.