"Not in a long while," Willa admitted. "But you do tend to prolixity, so have a care you do not infect our young friend's style with your own vice."
Wendi laughed. "In addition to her skill as a data retriever, Willa fancies herself a literary critique manque," she told me. "When it comes to the former, I bow to her expertise, but as for the latter, she is an amateur at best."
"Be that as it may," Willa rejoined, "it is the taste of we amateurs that you authors of romances must please in order to earn your wage, ne?"
***
At Wendi's suggestion, vraiment at her insistence, we took a light lunch of sushi and sake together in the refectory for, she declared, the evening meal was to be a formal banquet at which many courses would be consumed, and at which I would be required to have my wits about me, for she had arranged for us to be seated at table with those who were to aid in the refinement of my Matrix entry, and Void Captain Dana Gluck Sara as well, who had expressed some interest in hearing the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt from the lips of the heroine thereof.
After lunch we repaired to her stateroom, where she explained the procedure we would follow in our collaboration.
First, I would freely record my tale onto word crystal in my own style, indeed before we were done, I would no doubt record several versions, for the point at this stage was to exhaust the possibilities of my own spontaneous declamation thereof.
Then we would vet this raw material together with various mages so that the imagistic vagaries of my descriptions of events, flora, psychic effects, und so weiter, might be sharpened and when necessary replaced by terms of scientific precision and accuracy, so that the entry would be comprehensible and informative to any hypothetical person who might call it up from the Matrix several centuries from now.
When I protested that such a procedure seemed to me to insure the death of art, she only laughed.
"Indeed, as an author of romances, no one is more in sympathy with such a plaint than I, liebchen," she told me. "But we are charged to produce a Matrix entry, not the romance which you may create when the spirit moves you and which will no doubt earn you fame and fortune. As for the pain of reducing art to dry didacticism, the final stage of our work will be more painful still, for then we must go over every word and syllable with a cold and ruthless heart. For while Willa Embri Janos may be something of a philistine when it comes to literary style, she knows whereof she speaks when it comes to the utter concision required to produce what the Matrix must have."
She patted my knee. "I hope we will still be friends at the conclusion of this unpleasant task," she said.
"We will always be friends, Wendi, come what may!" I declared with an open heart.
Wendi laughed again. "Say that when we have engaged in mortal combat over every word of your own precious prose, liebchen!" she said.
***
"You will find that those of us who honor the floating cultura with our presence and not the other way around will be interested in your unique adventure," Wendi told me sotto voce as we entered the formal dining room. "It is fair entree into serious circles, ma petite, just do not assume that it will yet make you the center of the universe."
The inner wisdom of this caveat eluded me at the time, but by the time the banquet was over I was to be taught this lesson quite well.
There were six other diners at the table Wendi had put together: Void Captain Dana Gluck Sara; Willa Embri Janos, Lazaro Melinda Kuhn, and Dalta Evan Evangeline, all of whom I had already been introduced to; Timothy Ben Bella, psychopharmacologist and yogic adept; and Linda Yee Lech, who was styled one of the foremost mages of evolutionary psychesomics in all the worlds of men.
Which is to say a heady and learned company indeed, and one which Wendi had quite obviously assembled around the subject of my young self. This knowledge was something less than reassuring to the same, for on the one hand it put me in mind of the endless interrogation sessions at the Clear Light, and on the other it made me trepidatious concerning my ability to hold my own at this exalted level of discourse.
Fortunately, as I was soon to learn, the manners of these worthies were a far cry from what I had experienced from the mages at the mental retreat. The first course served was a crepe of fruits de mer enrobed in a thick saffron sauce and accompanied by a rather sweet white wine, after which came a fiery curried vegetable consomme with tiny bits of pickled fish and a powerful anise- flavored vodka. Then came smoked black mushrooms stuffed with pungent forcemeat and served with a bone-dry red vintage.
During these preliminaries, Wendi favored me with an introduction to the Honored Passengers whom I had not yet met, and the table talk concerned the art of our chef maestro, Escoffier Tai Bondi. For my part, I took the opportunity to say little and imbibe a respectful amount, so that by the time we were served Vaco Filets Bordelais, garnished with fried maize noodles and accompanied by a wine so deeply red that it appeared almost black, my trepidations had been entirely dissolved, my tongue was lubricated to a fine loquacity, and I was more than ready to render up my spiel at Wendi's request.
For the next twenty minutes or so, I held this audience of mages and puissant intellects spellbound with a rather extravagant telling of the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt, a version not unlike that which I had developed on the streets of Ciudad Pallas, if somewhat augmented by the noble vintages I had consumed.
I seem to remember that during this spiel we were served a barbecue of assorted vegetables accompanied by a cunningly spiced white wine as well as a goreng embellished with several varieties of charcuterie washed down with a dark-brown beer, though my memory of this stage of the meal was somewhat clouded by both beverages and the exhilarating sight of seven pairs of keenly bright eyes approvingly turned upon my person and seven pairs of intellectually avid ears hanging on my every word, or so it seemed to me.
Suffice it to say that by the time I had concluded over a salad of fruits steeped in a creme of smoked nuts, I felt like the queen of all the worlds.
But just as this sweet course did not prove to be the conclusion to the banquet that I had supposed, so did the conclusion of my declamation lead to two more intellectual courses of which I was to prove something less than the chef maestra. Out came a cold red fruit soup liberally laced with kirschwasser and garnished with tiny croutons of nut flour stuffed with cinnamon jam, and with it the questioning commenced.
"You are quite certain that these true Bloomenkinder were entirely devoid of sapience?" demanded Linda Yee Lech. "Which set of parameters did you apply, the Menzies-Rademacher criteria, which have been around for centuries, or ahem, my own more recent construct?"
"I'm afraid that the differences between the two are presently rather vague in my mind," I bluffed, for of course I had no idea what she was talking about. "S'il vous plait, if you would be so good as to refresh my memory ..."
"The Menzies-Rademacher criteria hinge on the question of whether meaning is carried in a grammatical sequence or whether each cry is an isolate," Linda Yee Lech reminded me. "Whereas my construct, which relies upon a systems analysis of the absence or presence of social interactions, is far less of a blunt instrument."
"As I have said, the Bloomenkinder are perfectly mute," I told her. "As for social interactions, these may have appeared complexly patterned, but no more so than the doings of a beehive."
"You were able to inventory a sufficient number of interactions so that this was confirmed by analysis to a probability of better than fifty percent?" Linda Yee Lech asked sharply.
"I'm afraid not," I admitted. "But if you had seen, as I did, human infants suckling at floral teats, there would have been no --" .
"Con su permiso," Timothy Ben Bella interrupted politely. "If I may, I believe the question Linda is trying to approach is whether we are dealing with innocent animals in which sentience never arises or sapient humans whose higher centers are severed from volitional expression by the exudations of the flowers ..."
"Or indeed whether the Bloomenwald itself may not be deemed sentient," Lazaro Melinda Kuhn declared. "And if so, did such sentience evolve in symbiosis with the devolution of its human pollinators, or was this Perfumed Garden phenomenon preexistent? Did you observe a progression of intermediate floral forms? Did any of the native mammals exhibit such florally coordinated behaviors on a somewhat less complex level?"
"As for a progression of intermediate floral organization from isolated flowers to the complexity of the Perfumed Garden, vraiment, one would have had to have been blind not to observe this," I said. "But as for observing the intimate behaviors of the native mammals, it was entirely impossible to approach them even closely enough to see them very clearly. But surely the suckling of human infants at vegetative teats indicates that the latter must have evolved to service the former, ne?"
"A probable deduction ..." Lazaro admitted. "But did you observe the young of any native species engaged in the same behavior? The presence of same would obviate your puissant logic, kind ..."
"Je ne sais pas," I admitted lamely. "I never thought to inquire at the time ..."
"And what of the vapors you have styled 'pheromones' and 'perfumes'?" asked Timothy Ben Bella. "Is this mere literary license or did you obtain samples for analysis?"
"Vraiment, we obtained samples, but alas they were lost with our packs."
"Merde! Quelle catastrophe!"
"Mayhap all is not lost, Timothy," Lazaro said. "For certainement we know enough of the general botany of Belshazaar to deduce the general biochemical class of its exudates by the morphology of the specific organs secreting same. Describe for us then, bitte, Sunshine, the various floral structure responsible for the vapors producing the several specific psychotropic effects you encountered ..."
"I'm afraid that in my psychic state I was hardly capable of noticing ..."
"But surely you were at least able to differentiate among the substances exuded by stamens, pistils, and perhaps specialized scent organs?"
I could only shrug my admission of perfect ignorance.
"Give over hectoring the poor child on these matters, Lazaro," said Linda Yee Lech. "It is hardly a moral flaw not to be a trained botanical observer! However when it comes to psychic experiences, these at least we all observe with ultimate intimacy. So tell us, Sunshine, in less anecdotal terms than you have thusfar employed, when you were in your deepest thrall to the flowers, was your sapience entirely absent, or merely suppressed by a biochemical overlay? Which is to say, did your higher centers bear witness to their own volitional impotence or was, as it were, no one at home?"
"There appears to be no temporal discontinuity in my memory-track, if that is what you mean ..."
"Hmmm ..." mused Dalta Evan Evangeline. To come at it from a possibly more fruitful angle, would you say that the stimulus of the rising sun which first roused you from this state had sapient mythic meaning to you from the outset, or was it a phylogenically primitive tropism upon which the later more complex structure was retrospectively erected?"
"Que?"
"Ho, ho, sehr gut, Dalta!" exclaimed Linda Yee Lech in forthright admiration. "Indeed it must have been the former, for the revertees who once possessed human consciousness responded to her verbal cues, whereas the Bloomenkinder never did!"
"True," said Lazaro, "but on the other hand if she was responding to a mere visual tropism, then they could just as easily have been responding to a mere auditory tropism."
"But if so, then why did the Bloomenkinder not respond to it?"
"Because it is exactly this lack of response which proves that they lack sapient human consciousness!"
"Phah! What a tautology!"
"Round and round you go," Wendi finally broke in after her long and quite uncharacteristic silence. "Yet you miss the true point entirely!"
"Which is, if I may make so bold?" drawled Lazaro.
"That there were three entirely different responses by members of our own species to the very same chemicals, naturellement!" Wendi declared.
"Well taken"' exclaimed Linda Yee Lech. "Vraiment it is clearly the imprinting of the collective unconscious that the Bloomenkinder lack! Hola, this may indeed settle one of the hoariest disputes of psychesomics!"
"How so?" inquired Dalta Evan Evangeline.
"It would seem to prove quite conclusively that what we style the collective unconscious is culturally and verbally transmitted, rather than being species genetic coding!"